Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book Two - Lawrence Miles [103]
Mohandas. Mohandas the Geek. It had to be. A geek was someone who ate live animals, according to the Doctor. Was that it, then? Had the freak eaten so many things in his life that he was starting to become something less than human?
She lifted the gun, and aimed it at the geek’s chest, just in case he tried anything. But all he did was turn his head, on his fat cowlike neck, to watch the people in the middle of the show ring. The Doctor was talking to the leader of the Remote now, although Magdelana couldn’t hear what the two of them were saying.
Then the geek turned to face her again. He cocked his big ugly head to one side.
‘Rr,’ he told her. With that, he stepped back into his wagon and closed the door behind him.
* * *
The second the Doctor had stepped out of I.M. Foreman’s wagon, there’d been at least a dozen guns trained on him. That hadn’t worried him, though. From what Magdelana had told him, he guessed that the armoured men wanted – needed – the travelling show, and in one piece. It was their only way off this planet. They couldn’t breach the wagons themselves, not while I.M. Foreman’s defences were in effect, so logically they had to try bargaining first. Unless they were completely mad, of course.
The Doctor stepped out into the middle of the circle with his hands in his pockets, and strolled casually up to the individual whom he took to be the Remote’s leader. The Remote looked like walking nightmares, like the kind of things young children always expected to find hiding under the bed, as if their armour had been designed to remind human beings of all the dark and slippery things in the universe. But the leader’s armour was bulkier than the rest, the headpiece merging with the plating on his shoulders, giving the Doctor the impression that the man had welded himself into the suit instead of simply putting it on.
The Doctor stepped right up to the Remote leader, and cleared his throat. He decided that ‘good evening’ was probably a good opening gambit.
He didn’t even get the chance to say it. All of a sudden there were signals buzzing through the air, transmissions from some sort of device that had been wired into the leader’s outfit, so loud that even the Doctor could hear them. Every nerve in the man’s body was ringing out a warning, you could feel it from here.
The Doctor froze. The other soldiers took a few more steps back.
‘Oh dear,’ said the Doctor. ‘I’ve upset you, haven’t I?’
The leader answered him by punching him full in the face, with a gauntlet that felt like it had been made out of the kind of substance you usually found only in the middle of very old and very dense dwarf stars.
* * *
Sarah pressed her ear up against the door of the wagon, trying to hear what the Doctor was saying to the men outside. The door seemed quite happy to let her do this, even though it was still filtering out the sounds of gunfire and Armageddon from the town. The Doctor had insisted on going out alone, saying that (1) it was incredibly dangerous out there, and (2) he was going to be perfectly safe. Sarah had heard him say ‘oh dear’ to somebody, but she hadn’t been able to interpret the heavy thumping sound that she’d heard shortly afterwards.
There was a pause. Then the Doctor’s voice again.
‘Sheer brutality,’ he said, obviously trying to make the Remote people feel ashamed of themselves. ‘Sheer senseless violence. You’re not going to get anything out of me that way, you know.’
The next thing she heard was a crunching, creaking noise. Someone with tin legs was shuffling his feet.
‘I’m sorry,’ said a voice Sarah hadn’t heard before. The voice felt old, the way antique manuscripts felt old, but with