Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book Two - Lawrence Miles [25]
‘Before we can reach Earth?’ queried Tobin.
Fitz risked looking up. The three of them were over by the lander, watching the lifting machines haul hydroponics gear out of the cargo hold. None of the three were looking his way, unless Mathara was doing funny things with her eyes behind her skull-face.
‘The family has other plans, Laura,’ the Mother said, in a voice that was probably supposed to be soothing. ‘We’ll leave you to your own devices, once you’re settled. You have to develop on your own. You have to form a self-sufficient culture, or you’ll be no use to… anybody. We’ll teach you everything you need to know about your new world, don’t worry about that. We think of you as our children.’
‘Or your remote drones,’ said Guest. Mathara didn’t respond to that.
‘What happens when the Time Lords come for us again?’ Tobin asked.
‘They won’t,’ the Mother told her. ‘Trust me, Laura. This place is out of reach of the High Council. Somewhere they won’t be able to risk looking. I’m sure Nathaniel will explain.’
Fitz hated the way Mathara did that. The way she’d casually drop your first name into a conversation, whether she needed to or not. Some kind of low-level brainwashing technique, Guest had told him, designed to make you think that the powers that be were communicating with you on a personal level. Guest was happy – no, wrong word: content – to work with the Faction, just for the sake of the colonists, but he didn’t want the family to get any closer to him than was absolutely necessary. Given the chance, thought Fitz, ‘Nathaniel’ would forget his first name altogether.
‘I suppose we’ve always got the ship,’ Tobin grumbled. ‘We can get away again if anybody comes looking for us. I mean, we’ll take as many of the others as we can. Obviously.’
‘You’re all heart,’ Fitz heard himself say.
Three pairs of eye sockets were suddenly pointing his way, and one of them didn’t even have any eyes in it.
‘Compassion is my middle name,’ Tobin told him, without a great deal of humour. ‘So where are we, anyway?’
* * *
17
Rewired
(it’s bigger on the inside. Aren’t we all?)
There was a prison. It was a place of the lost-beyond‐hope, a wonderland of psychological torture and infallible interrogation machines. The prison was run by robots, who removed prisoners from their cells according to a strict timetable, dragging them into darkened rooms where terrible neural devices would be planted in their heads. It was a nightmare of person-processing, of cold, unfeeling, inhuman efficiency.
And when he woke up, it was much, much worse.
* * *
‘He’s done the place up a bit,’ Sarah said.
She couldn’t really think of anything else to say. The TARDIS console room wasn’t the way she remembered it, even given that her memories of her time with the Doctor weren’t as clear as they should have been, and she kept getting her Krynoids mixed up with her Pescatons. In the good old days, the room had been quite small, for what it was. Intimate. Homely. Now it was a great big Batcave of a place, stuffed with oversized control banks, massive electrical cables, items of mismatched furniture, and (most notably) an S-reg Mini Metro. The car was parked in one of the corners – and the room had far, far too many of those – with a VW badge from an old Volkswagen glued to its bonnet. Someone had left a handwritten note under one of the windscreen wipers, which read, it’s just not the same, doctor. get rid of it.
‘Big,’ Lost Boy said, neatly summing everything up.
Sarah wasn’t sure what had happened outside the ship. The doorway had appeared in the middle of the condemned building, and she’d caught only the briefest glimpse of the armoured men when they’d poured out of the static. She’d thrown herself at the TARDIS, not because she’d expected to get into it, but just for protection.
She’d brought the TARDIS key, of course. One of the TARDIS keys,