Doctor Who_ Longest Day - Michael Collier [2]
Two seasons... She thought of Vasid again. He hadn't been here half the time she had, yet his indolence suggested he'd never been anywhere else.
Yost's company wasn't much better: he'd been so withdrawn of late.
Perhaps her snipes about the way things seemed to keep breaking down round here had got him down so much he wasn't leaving his quarters. Well, he was Chief Monitor. He'd take the blame for what happened here, not she.
Anstaar sighed again. Full of omplaints in an empty base, with two losers and no one to take her seriously. And out there, shining a soft pink in the why-is-it-dark and the twinkling stars, the only reason any of this was there at all. 'Water,' she muttered, tiring of the silence.'I said, "water"!' There was a rattle and a loud clang as a tin cylinder was dispensed from the drinks machine. She winced as the noise reverberated round the room, then again as the lights abruptly switched on. A brilliant white bathed the metal walls, the rubbish-strewn counter top, the cleaning drone on its side in the corner and the abandoned chairs and tables. The room was suddenly as bright and bland as everywhere else on the base. She opened the canister of water. It was frozen solid.
***
Sam looked in the mirror. 'I never wanted to be the fairest of them all, but...
well, in the top million would do.' She sneered at her reflection and blew up at the tousle of fringe she had spent the last hour sculpting for herself. She still wasn't convinced longer hair was for her, but had become bored with the short crop that had seen her through her final years at school. It didn't feel like her now; she'd been back in London a while ago with this length hair, and it had made her realise that the Sam of Coal Hill School was long, long gone.
She dreamed of them all sometimes - schoolfriends, teachers, bullies, fumbling boyfriends... Sometimes she was recounting her adventures to them, other times asking about people she used to know. But they would get bored listening to her - they'd leave the room without a sound. She found herself shouting at them to come back, not to be so... so rude .
Sometimes she woke to find she was shouting.
Like last night. She'd sat bolt upright in bed. 'Stop being so bloody rude!'
she'd shouted - typically just as the Doctor had been passing by her closed door.
'I wasn't being rude!' he'd said, earnestly, as he'd flung the door open, the very picture of fatherly bemusement. It drove her mad that, after all the adventures they had shared, he still felt she was a child. She could see it in those anxious blue-green eyes beneath the brow crumpled in concern, peering right into hers.
'Don't you ever go to sleep?' she'd grumbled, rubbing her eyes.
The Doctor had mused a little on this, as if considering it a genuine and pertinent question.'Sometimes,' he'd said, smiling at her and nodding his head. 'Yes, certainly sometimes.' Before she'd had a chance to give a world-weary sigh at yet another of her friend's self-conscious forays into eccentricity, his face was hanging in a sympathetic grimace.'Bad dreams again?'
'I'm fine, I told you.' Then she'd looked down, and realised the white T-shirt she'd worn to bed was practically see-through with perspiration. She'd looked up in almost comic alarm at the Doctor, but he'd already breezed off up the corridor towards the food machine.'Hot chocolate's what