Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book Two - Lawrence Miles [46]
The thought was interrupted by the sudden appearance of a head. It was a woman’s head, her face sharp and angular, dark hair pulled back behind her skull. The head had popped over the wing of the fighter, the eyes wide open and curious.
Llewis screamed. The woman just blinked at him.
‘Is there a problem?’ she asked.
‘No,’ squeaked Llewis.
‘Oh. Good.’
Then the head disappeared again. The muttering went on from the other side of the fighter.
‘Anyway, if Earth’s where we started out, won’t living there cause some kind of paradox or something?’
‘Maybe. Does it matter?’
* * *
Alan had been told something in a history lesson once, something he’d thought might have explained his fear of the darkened windows. In olden times, the teacher had said, people had believed that flies came from rotting food. They’d thought that, when the food decomposed, it actually turned into maggots. The teacher had said this was a ridiculous idea, but it had made a kind of sense to Alan. Perhaps that was what happened to darkness, he’d thought. Perhaps, when the darkness got particularly old and thick, things started hatching out of it. Gas-mask‐faced things.
What other reason would he have had to be scared?
* * *
Llewis didn’t move. He spent a few moments quite deliberately not moving, in case his body did anything rash and stupid. The woman hadn’t cared about him. She’d sounded just like the uniformed men in the warehouse, not giving a toss about what anyone else thought of them.
If these people were as dependent on TV signals as Guest had said, they probably had remote controls for each other’s heads. They could probably change from being friendly to being hostile at the touch of a button. So it was pointless trying to second-guess them, wasn’t it?
Slowly, Llewis began to circle the fighter, until he could see the woman in full. She and her companion were standing on a raised platform, working on the right flank of the craft. The man was holding some tool or other, maybe a spanner, prising away a piece of grey plastic plating from the fighter’s skin. When it was free, the woman grasped it with both hands, and lowered it to the ground. She caught Llewis’s eye as she did it.
‘It was a Drahvidian battleskimmer,’ she said, with a slight smile. As if that explained everything.
‘What was?’ Llewis heard himself say.
The woman nodded at the fighter. ‘This. But we’re almost finished with it now.’
Llewis looked at the side of the craft. Where the panel had been removed, various electronic components had been revealed, the wires sprouting from the surface of the fighter like a tuft of unwanted facial hair. As Llewis watched, the male mechanic reached down and picked up what looked like a small fire extinguisher. He aimed it at the electronics, and pushed down the trigger.
The spray didn’t look like foam to Llewis. It was black, for a start, the same kind of black as the fighter itself. And the substance slithered as it covered the systems. Not Cold, but something like Cold. Something wrong. Something alien.
Seconds later, the wires had gone, eaten away by the goo. The substance began to smooth out across the side of the fighter, until it had blended in with the skin of the craft, becoming totally smooth, totally featureless.
‘What…’ said Llewis. He wasn’t sure how he could finish the question.
The woman looked at him. ‘Sorry?’
‘The fighter… the Drahvidian… battleskimmer… ’
The woman slapped the side of the fighter. ‘Oh, it crashed a couple of klicks away. On the edge of the city. The Drahvidians are always doing that. There’s something about this ship that attracts their probe systems. Probably the way the Time Lords built it. We keep having to scrape the wreckage off the ground.’
Ship? What ship? ‘The Drahvidian skimmer… crashed here?’ Llewis asked. ‘In the city?’
‘Well, yes.’
‘And you’re… you’re turning it into… one of yours?