Doctor Who_ Original Sin - Andy Lane [4]
7
She threw the shell aside and marched out of her room, kicking a pile of dirty laundry to one side as she went. With an incensed ‘Meow’, Wolsey the cat shot out of the pile and past her into the corridor.
The white walls and enigmatic roundels of the corridor walls mocked her.
Wherever she went in the TARDIS, the view was always the same. The swimming pool, the golf course, the rose garden, the art gallery . . . White walls and enigmatic bloody roundels. The outside was supposed to be infinitely re-configurable – at least, it had been until the Doctor sabotaged the chameleon circuit – but the inside never changed its appearance.
It was always the way. You spent a couple of days being chased around some alien planet or robot battleship in fear of your life, desperate to get back to the TARDIS, and five minutes after you did you were climbing the walls to get out again. Frying pan to fire to frying pan in one easy lesson.
She chose a direction at random, and began to walk. The image of Homeless Forsaken’s moist flesh flaring as Karvellis’s blaster beam ate through it followed her. The stink of burning flesh remained in her nostrils. Another friend gone. How old was she? Thirty-three now. Wasn’t it time she did something with her life? Something more than rushing around after the Doctor?
She smiled briefly at the memory of her short sabbatical at the archaeo-logical dig on Menaxus, but scowled as she remembered how the Doctor had managed to poke his sticky little Time Lord fingers into even that.
Pulling herself back from the brink of anger, Bernice found herself outside a door that she didn’t recognize. Intrigued, she pushed it open and poked her head into the shadows within.
And couldn’t believe what she saw.
The dream clung to Roz Forrester even after she was awake and staring at the ceiling.
It was the usual dream. Martle was standing in the empty doorway of the hotel room, half turned towards her. ‘There’s nobody here, Roz,’ he said in his soft and deceptively casual voice. ‘Let’s get a coffee and call it a day.’ As he spoke, Forrester could see the glint of a claw in the shadowed interior, but she couldn’t open her mouth to warn him The brutal thunk as it carved its way up his spine would echo in her ears forever.
Eventually she crawled out of bed and staggered to the wall-wide simcord screen. It was displaying one of the oscillating deserts of Gallipoli V: a newly colonized world out in the Quirillis Sector. A very popular image, apparently.
Very exclusive. Very expensive. Very nauseating.
She reset the screen to its default blankness, and peered at her dim reflection, trying to tell whether she looked as bad as she felt. She sighed as she realized that she did. Worse, if anything. Her dark, grey-speckled hair hung 8
limply, her eyes were bloodshot and her face looked puffy. Hardly surprising: she’d spent the previous night curled up with a three-pack of cheap Martian ale, and felt as if the top of her head had been screwed tighter on while she’d been asleep.
She tapped out the code for the Spaceport Five Undertown Lodge. The screen flickered for a moment before Lodge Warden Lubineki’s face appeared.
The lodge’s simcord had been playing up for some time: the 3D effect was exaggerated, thrusting his moustache out at her and pulling the rest of his face back into a streamlined cone.
‘Justice by your side,’ she croaked in the ritual greeting.
‘And fairness be your friend,’ he said, frowning out of the simcord screen at her. ‘Forrester. You’re not looking too good. Calling in sick?’
‘The Adjudicator Secular would never forgive me,’ she said, trying not to flinch as his moustache waggled in her face. ‘Tell her I’ll be in late this morning.’
‘Will do. She’s been looking for you.’
Forrester groaned. ‘Just my luck. She forgets about me for months on end, then the one morning I’m going to be late, she wants me. Any particular reason?’
‘Dunno.’ He frowned. ‘Some new guy’s turned up, though. Name of Cwej.
Perhaps he’s waiting