Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book Two - Lawrence Miles [10]
‘No,’ admitted Guest. His voice seemed light years away, unaffected by the pressure. ‘It’s just a bonus.’
Sam tried to respond to that. Really, she tried. But the darkness was already pressing against her face, wrapping itself around her skin, crackling with disdain as it took her into its body.
* * *
Travels with Fitz (VII)
The Justinian, 2596
‘There’s nobody left, Nathaniel,’ said Mother Mathara. She said it softly, but without much sympathy. She sounded bored, more than anything. Fitz got the feeling she was at least trying.
Three hundred years earlier, the Justinian had been the ship that had carried the first of the settlers to the colony. It had been a wreck since then, a relic, buried in the vaults of the planet’s Cultural Experience complex. Typically, it had been the craft the Faction had chosen to spirit its ‘followers’ away from the place. The engineers had patched the ship up, turning it into a corpse-vessel, fit for the living dead. Plus anyone who felt like they ought to be dead, thought Fitz. The walls of the cockpit were the same dirty grey they had been since the twenty-third century, although most of the interior lighting had gone, so you had to find your way around by the blinking of the warning lights. And there were always warning lights. The Justinian still thought it was dead; the fact that it was in flight didn’t change the computer’s mind.
There were four of them in the cockpit now, breathing recycled air that tasted of dust and old churches. Guest sat in the chair that had once belonged to the chief pilot, with Fitz and Tobin at the coding controls behind him. Of the two thousand people the Faction had ‘rescued’ – a couple of hundred from each of the planet’s major cities – Mathara had insisted that Fitz and Tobin were the best suited for navigational duties, unlikely as it sounded. Fitz had a terrible paranoid feeling that she just wanted to keep him in her sights.
The Mother was right, of course, about there being no people left on the planet. But Guest had insisted on piloting the ship back into orbit, once the Time Lord weapons systems had been and gone. Just to see if anyone else had managed to tear themselves away from the medianet for long enough to find a ship and get off the surface.
Guest ordered Fitz to run a scan anyway. Fitz didn’t argue. He tapped the relevant instructions into the coding panel.
‘Nothing,’ he mumbled, once the results came up.
Tobin leaned over him, and checked the results for herself, the stroppy cow. ‘No people, no transmissions,’ she said. ‘It’s just a sphere. Totally smooth. Nothing on the surface.’
Everyone could see that for themselves, though. The planet hovered in the middle of the central viewing screen, a circle of pure black, lit only by the ship’s visual enhancement systems. It was looking a damn sight smaller now as well.
‘Some kind of matter compression?’ Tobin asked.
Fitz scowled, but he tried not to let her see it. Tobin had only been on the colony for the last two years, having been shipped there by her family back on Earth, who’d apparently felt her to be some kind of social embarrassment. Fitz wondered if they’d still have sent her if they’d known what was happening on the planet.
Probably. After all, the colonies were going to be war zones soon anyway, if Earth Central had anything to do with it.
‘No,’ said Mother Mathara. ‘We’re looking at a shell. That’s all. A shell around what’s left of the colony.’
Fitz felt compelled to ask what was left of the colony. Somebody had to, surely?
‘Nothing,’ Mathara told him. ‘That’s why they had to put the shell around it. To make the nothing safe. The High Council used to have a ban on this kind of weaponry. Not now. Not since the start of their war.’
‘So they’re testing their weapons on us,’ said Guest.
‘Yes. We must be more of a threat to them than we thought, Nathaniel.’ Mathara reached out and touched Guest on the shoulder, and Fitz could tell he was trying not to squirm. ‘We can leave now. I’ll give Laura and Fitz our new course.