Doctor Who_ Lungbarrow - Marc Platt [7]
The gendarme stared, taking in her black leather trousers and-jacket over her delicate Chantil y lace blouse.
'Come on. I said you gotta stop them. Parley... voo... Onglaze?' -
He stayed calm. Maybe he'd seen her arrive.
'Cette moto, madame?' (Not even mam'zelle!) 'Elle est très sophistiquée pour une Lambretta, n'est ce pas?' He pointed to the digital speedo. 'Où est Monsieur Schwarzenegger? Dans la sacoche? Avez-vous un permis de conduire?'
You must be joking, she thought. With the amount of time-hopping I do?
Now he was eyeing her shopping bags too. 'Look,' she said, plonking them down on the ground. 'Voilà. Bulk buy of ciabattas and tea bags, OK? Rien du crack. Rien de la contrabande.'
He put a restraining hand on her arm. In a fit of anger, she caught him with a throw that should have floored him.
Instead, he simply twisted her arm and knocked her off her own feet with a sharp kick.
Can't be on the scrap heap yet, she thought as the ciabattas broke her fall.
He gave three shrill blasts on his whistle and started to bark instructions into his radio. People began appearing at the entrance to the alley.
This time she was up, no messing. She made a club of her hands and thunked them down on the back of his head. He went sprawling into a pyramid of binbags. -
That was more like it.
A couple of hefty workmen were advancing. She scooped up her bags, kicked the bike on its flank and let the alarm scream. The men fell back, hands over their ears. She'd been expecting it and it stil hurt, despite the screening plugs.
Dorothée slid on to the pinion and the engine burnt into life. She turned the wheel and headed back along the alley, scattering onlookers. Zero to minus a hundred and twelve years in ten seconds.
Time exploded in a gold ball around her. A vortex tunnel stretched ahead. Soon back in time for tea and she would be at home to Georges Seurat and to any attentions he wanted to pay her.
12
She angled a wing mirror to look at her face. Her eyes sparked back at her, cold and accusing. Not how she felt at all. And her hair was all wrong. The look she was giving herself set her all on edge.
The engine juddered and the steering jerked against her hands. The tunnel was going faster and wider. It was curving upward. The undefinable golden shapes that always rushed past her on these jumps darkened and were lost. She lifted her hands off the steering and watched the bike making its own adjustments.
Thin streaks of light began coursing along the tunnel boundaries. Red to come, blue behind.
The air was freezing in her lungs. They were stars that were - passing her. As the grip on her senses slipped away, she remembered the effects of a Time Storm that had snatched her off the world before.
***
The datacube was still glowing green.
The Matrix was unusually slow in its responses today.
While he waited, Hofwinter ran a sideline scan of the cube's classified instructions, certain that the young captain would not appreciate its illicit significance. If Hofwinter was party to the implementation of top-secret orders, he wanted to know what was going on.
All this unusual activity Downstairs was probably nothing more than the new Castellan flexing his muscles; Hofwinter found it hard to remember a time when the venerable old Castellan Spandrell had not been in charge of security in the Citadel. The periods in between Spandrel 's two previous retirements, when the old chap had not been in office, felt like inconsequential blips in the span of a celebrated career. This time he had insisted that he was not coming back. 'Some people never know when to stop,' he had confided at his third and final retirement ceremony. 'I'm getting a bit too stout for al this exercise, so I'm handing over to someone with less experience.'
Rumour had it that Spandrel found it difficult to keep up with the exhaustive reforms of President