Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book Two - Lawrence Miles [12]
It was only when he started scooping the receivers out of the case that he noticed something was wrong. He stared at the contents for a while, trying to pin the feeling down.
The suitcase looked empty. Emptier, anyway. There’d been more hardware than that in it yesterday, when they’d driven back from the warehouse and Guest had gone to see the man Llewis. The case was divided into several dozen small compartments, each holding one component, but they hadn’t all been full to begin with, so Kode couldn’t say for sure how much material was missing.
Then it hit him. The receivers were all there. It was the other hardware, Guest’s surveillance gear, that had gone. For a start, he couldn’t see the thing Guest had said was used to detect tachyon traces. The TARDIS tracker. And there were other things missing, too: pieces of bric-a‐brac that were apparently vital to the success of the mission, but that nobody had ever bothered explaining to him.
Guest had taken the equipment, Kode reasoned. He hadn’t seen the man go anywhere near the case recently, but it was the only explanation.
But why would Guest take the TARDIS tracker back to Anathema?
Kode felt the buzz building up behind his ear, his lobe missing the close presence of the receiver. He tried to remember if the room had been empty at any point in the last day or so, or if anyone had touched the case. Even when Kode had popped downstairs to use the cigarette machine, he’d left one of the Ogrons on guard…
Buzz, buzz.
Kode snatched up his receiver, plugged it back into his ear. It cast its sensors around for a few moments, then threw a telepathic hook into his hypothalamus.
Moments later, Kode was seeing the world through the eyes of one of the Ogrons. The Remote had put transmitters into the guards’ heads when they’d been purchased, as a standard security precaution. Guest had hoped to link the Ogrons to the media, to let the Remote experience the perspectives of a whole new alien species, but the Ogrons’ thoughts had turned out to be messy and confused, and had largely revolved around rocks.
Suddenly, Kode was in a room he’d never seen before. A cosy, soft-edged room, full of flowery cushions, bouncy sofas and dim electric lamps. The Ogron was looking down at his enormous feet, where some kind of heavy-duty hardware was rolling backward and forward across the carpet. Kode tried to squint at the device, but the guard’s eyes didn’t respond. All he could say for sure was that the machine looked uncannily like a medium-sized dog.
* * *
20 August, 17:18
Sarah turned the object over in her hands. It didn’t look like a real piece of technology to her. There were no buttons, no switches, no endearingly messy wires sticking out of the back of the casing. There was just a single electronic display, a perfect circle covered in bright-green curves, like contour lines on an OS map.
‘And it finds TARDISes?’ she asked. ‘You’re sure that’s what Guest said?’
The Ogron looked up. Lost Boy had been staring at K9 again, presumably still not knowing whether to trust what was, in his view, a talking rock with a blaster in its snout. ‘I’m sure,’ Lost Boy said. ‘Guest wants to know if there’s a TARDIS here. Don’t know what a TARDIS is. But Guest thinks it’s important.’
The alien’s syntax was still slightly out of synch, however hard K9 tried to translate its tummy rumbles. Sarah tried not to dwell on it, although, being a writer, she did have a terrible desire to teach the thing about proper verb conjugation. ‘Well, it’s something to go on. If K9’s right about the range of this thing, it should be even better at sniffing out the ship than he is. Now we just have to work out where to start looking.’ She put the device down on the nearest bookshelf, next to her prized collection of Puffin originals. ‘Let’s look at this logically. Wherever the Doctor is, the TARDIS should be nearby. If we can get to the TARDIS, we can use it to rescue the Doctor. True?’
‘Affirmative,’ said K9. ‘Theoretically.’
Sarah ignored that. ‘So