Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book Two - Lawrence Miles [102]
Yes, a well-aimed shot from here could probably blow open the armour at the back of his neck. Yes, she could probably kill him off with one pull of the trigger. Yes, the Remote would probably cut her to pieces a couple of seconds later. Yes, that was her job. Yes, but…
Magdelana raised the gun. She wasn’t thinking of firing it, not yet, but she wanted to know how it felt to have the leader in her sights. Whatever happened, she knew the gun was going to be fired only once today; it was one of those things you were just sure of, like it had been scratched in stone instead of written in sand. One shot, and that was all she’d get. She wanted to know if this felt like the one.
The back of the leader’s head appeared in the sights of the shotgun. A fat black rubbery target, easy to hit from this distance. No problem at all.
Would it really change anything?
Would it really matter if it didn’t?
Then there was movement. The leader was turning, and quickly. Magdelana felt herself lose her grip on the gun. Someone had seen her, and warned the Remote leader about the sniper risk, and suddenly she had no idea which way she was supposed to be aiming or whether she was supposed to be running. She tried to concentrate, squinting past the crack in her dust visor, searching for a decent target.
She found one. Suddenly, there was a new face in the middle of the sights. An old, craggy, carved-in‐rock kind of face, surrounded by white hair that looped and curled all over the place but never really went anywhere.
The gun was aimed right at the Doctor’s head. Because the Doctor had simply stepped out of one of the wagons, and now he was strolling across the square, towards the little group of Remote men who were clustering around their leader. It was the Doctor who’d made the leader turn, Magdelana realised, not her. The soldiers still didn’t know she was watching them. The Remote raised their weapons as the Doctor sauntered up to them, but they stepped back at the same time, not quite sure how to react to the man. Only their leader stayed firm, probably because his legs were too heavy to let him go anywhere in a hurry.
The Doctor’s face was right in her sights. For some reason, Magdelana felt the overwhelming urge to pull the trigger.
‘Rrr,’ said a voice. Right in her ear.
Magdelana stumbled, and fell into the dust, banging her head against the side of one of the wagons. The Remote would almost certainly have noticed her then, if their attention hadn’t been focused on the Doctor. Luckily, the shotgun didn’t go off when she hit the ground.
She’d been standing next to one of the wagon doors, and the door had opened while she’d been fixing her sights on the offworlders. She hadn’t seen the man until he’d grunted in her ear, but standing there in the doorway was one of the most repulsive human beings Magdelana had ever seen. He seemed to fill up the entire frame, like a heap of badly moulded flesh rather than a living thing, towering over her while she squirmed in the dirt.
The man wore trousers and an old threadbare shirt, but the shirt was hanging open at the front, letting Magdelana see every inch of muscle on his torso. His head was huge and bloated, his eyes so far apart that she couldn’t think of him as being anything other than dumb, while his thinning hair was pulled behind his head in a dirty ponytail. He looked a lot like one of the offworlders the Remote had crucified out in the desert, but his skin was a blotchy pink instead of corpse-grey. One of the freaks, thought Magdelana. Every inch the carnival worker, and as for the smell…
The smell he gave off wasn’t human. Simple as that. A whole wave of animal hormones rushed over her as she looked up at him, triggering chemical reactions in her body that she wasn’t sure she recognised. She remembered being trapped in an old mine tunnel when she was fifteen, forcing herself to eat a pitrat just to stay alive, snapping its little neck with a rock and peeling the hair away from its body. She remembered shooting at birds in the sky