Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book Two - Lawrence Miles [59]
‘And what about you? What do you believe in?’
‘I believe in getting out of here,’ Compassion said. ‘Freeing the Cold, fine, but my principles aren’t telling me it’s worth dying for. The city’s falling apart. Guest’s vanished. Nobody knows what’s going on. By the end of today, either Anathema’s going to be in ruins, or the Cold’s going to be loose and it won’t really matter. So I’m leaving. And you’re coming with me.’
The lift reached the ground floor, where people in multicoloured uniforms were scurrying between the white domes, joining their comrades under the entrance arches. Sam could see whole lines of armed figures arranged around the building, pointing their weapons at the city outside, occasionally firing at passers-by. She wondered how they knew which of the passers-by were friends and which were enemies. Perhaps they didn’t. Perhaps it wasn’t important.
Compassion started to head off across the floor, but Sam grabbed her arm, and pulled her to a stop. ‘Wait a minute. Where is it we’re supposed to be going?’
‘Earth. That’s why I want you with me. If I’m going to have to live there, I want to know as much about the culture as possible.’
‘So what makes you think I’ll help you?’ Sam asked, noticing slightly too late that she was actually arguing against going back to her homeworld.
Compassion shrugged. ‘I haven’t got any better ideas,’ she admitted. ‘Come on. I know where we can find a long-range fighter. Just keep your head down once we’re outside, that’s all.’
She headed towards one of the archways, and Sam hurried after her. ‘I thought you had to use one of those window things to get to Earth,’ Sam said, as she jogged.
And it was at this precise moment that something large and entirely horrible lunged at them from the doorway of one of the domes.
Once Sam had finished taking a few giant steps backward, she realised it was humanoid. Or vaguely humanoid. But it seemed to be in several places at once, its body made larger than normal size by three ghost images of itself, which hung around its silhouette in a halo of red, blue and green. The thing was blurred, its details fuzzy, as if slightly out of tune with the world around it. Sam could make out a face – lots of faces, if you counted the ghost images – the jaw hanging open, the eyes nothing more than smudges of black.
The thing shambled forward, and raised its arm, its fingers flickering as it reached out for her.
Sam gawped.
There was the sound of hi-tech gunfire.
The thing fell to the ground, clearly not dead, its body flashing in every colour of the TV spectrum. Sam could hear it screaming, but the scream was made up of several hundred other sounds, split-second clips from the transmissions of Anathema, chopped together to make one long shriek of noise. The Remote people who’d shot at the thing began to gather around it, still brandishing their weapons, not sure whether they should give it another blast.
Sam felt Compassion tugging at her sleeve. Not taking her eyes off the creature, she let herself be pulled across the floor.
‘Too much interference in the transmitters,’ Compassion said, her voice barely audible against the background murmur. ‘Anybody tries using the windows now, that’s what’s likely to happen to them.’
‘That was a person?’ asked Sam.
‘It was a glitch.’
‘But… they shot it…’
‘Of course they shot it,’ snapped Compassion. ‘The enemy faction are sending people through the windows to get into the tower. They’re trying to sabotage it from the inside. They must know they’re likely to come through scrambled, but it’s not going to stop them, is it?’
The ‘glitch’ vanished from Sam’s view, hidden behind the people and the domes as she was manoeuvred across the floor. The next thing she knew, Compassion was steering her through a line of armed guards, and suddenly they were outside, under the dirty red sky. Sam looked up, to see the fighters swirling overhead, swimming between the tops of the other high buildings around the