Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book Two - Lawrence Miles [9]
Sam detached herself from the scene, letting herself pull away from Llewis’s transmitter. For a moment, she found herself floating on the surface of the media, the skin of the big black sphere rubbing against her thought processes. The touch was familiar. It was the same kind of feeling she got whenever she stepped into the TARDIS after a long time away, the sense of something big and old reaching out to her, trying to wrap her up in the folds of its body-mind.
The Faction had built the sphere. And the Faction had TARDISes of their own, or things that worked like TARDISes. Perhaps the media was alive, thought Sam, the same way the TARDIS was alive. As she pulled away from its touch, she felt a brief twinge of contempt, as if the sphere had judged her, just as it had judged every other human being in Anathema, and found her to be beneath its dignity. The TARDIS never did that, Sam noted.
The next thing she knew, Compassion was waving a hand in front of her eyes.
‘You can wake up now,’ the woman said.
Behind her, Guest was standing on the edge of the platform, his hands behind his back, his eyes fixed on the floor of the building, several hundred metres below. ‘It’s not important,’ he said, softly. ‘There’s nothing she can do. The shipment’s already on Earth.’
‘And what if she’s the one we’re waiting for?’ Compassion asked.
‘Then we’ll be ready. The mission objective won’t be affected. We’ll still be able to reach the Cold.’
‘You’re going to do what Rassilon did, aren’t you?’ said Sam. ‘You’re going to open up the holes into the other universe. Let those things out.’
Guest turned to face Sam. So did Compassion. Sam took a nervous step backwards, then remembered that there weren’t any railings here, and stopped.
‘No,’ Guest told her. ‘We’d have nothing to gain by starting another war. We just want to contact one specific entity. The oldest of our loa. The Cold. Once we’ve done that, we’ll close the pathway again. I doubt the rest of the universe will even notice.’
‘Then what do you want from me?’ Sam asked. ‘You want me to fill in the gaps in your culture, is that it? How?’
‘By becoming part of the media,’ replied Guest. ‘How else?’
Sam glanced up at the sphere again. ‘Will it hurt?’
Guest and Compassion looked at each other.
‘We have no idea,’ said Compassion.
Guest touched his ear. Sam didn’t know whether he was receiving a signal from the media, or sending one, but no sooner had his fingers brushed the implant than the sphere above his head began to move, the skin expanding, the surface rippling and pulsing. As if it were taking a deep breath. Sam started to edge towards the central shaft, but the lift platform wasn’t there any more.
‘Why me?’ she asked, not taking her eyes of the sphere. The ceiling seemed to be shrinking back, giving the sphere room to enlarge itself. ‘You could have taken anyone from Earth for this. Why wait until I showed up?’
‘You have experience with other offworld cultures,’ Guest explained. ‘This gives you a particularly useful perspective.’
‘Twentieth-century culture in the context of a larger environment,’ Compassion added.
‘That doesn’t make sense!’ Sam protested.
Compassion looked disappointed. ‘Doesn’t it? Well, never mind. It sounded good.’
Sam didn’t bother arguing. How were you supposed to fight a race that kept changing its mind, for God’s sake? Aliens were supposed to be fanatical, they were supposed to want to destroy anything that got in their way; they weren’t supposed to alter their invasion plans just because they felt like it. And the sphere was still swelling up, getting bigger with every breath it took, making Sam feel dizzy whenever she tried to focus on it. It was like watching something pushing its way through the sky, eating up the space around her. She wondered whether the thing was making her hallucinate, or whether the altitude was doing funny things to her head.
‘This isn’t what you came here for,’ she said, and talking was hard, now the pressure of the sphere was crushing the air out of