Doctor Who_ Peacemaker - James Swallow [36]
Martha blinked as a puff of purple flame coughed out of the dish.
‘What did that tell you?’
‘Nothing,’ quipped the Doctor, ‘I just did that for fun.’ He poked at the residue and went back to the boxes of fragments. ‘OK. A picture is forming. Would you like to know what it is a picture of?’
‘Something nice?’ Martha said lamely.
The Doctor gave a dry chuckle. ‘With our track record, do you really think so? ’Course not!’ He gestured with two pieces of the grey metal.
‘This is very definitely an artificially manufactured material, probably spun from an atomic lattice loom in a zero-gravity environment –’
Behind Martha, Nathan and Walking Crow listened to him speak, clearly nonplussed.
The Doctor went on, without pausing for breath: ‘– and there’s a bio-organic component, cultured metastatic cellular membranes for electro-chemical data transfer and energy flux regulation. I’ve seen a similar kind of structure on Gagrant Necro-Harvesters and Earth Empire bio-colony transporters.’ He blew out his cheeks. ‘The thing is, I think I’ve seen this exact fractal construction before. I just can’t place it.’
89
‘You’re talking about spaceships,’ said Martha. ‘That metal’s from a spaceship?’
‘Another gold star,’ he nodded. ‘A-plus-plus-plus, like they say on eBay.’ He rapped his knuckles on the metal. ‘This is, without a doubt, part of the hull plating from a vessel capable of transgalactic hyperspace travel. A bit of an anachronism on a planet where people have only just started using steam engines.’ The Doctor scrambled forward and leapt out of the wagon to land next to the Pawnee.
Walking Crow backed off a step, a flicker of nervousness in his eyes.
‘I tell you, this planet, there’s enough non-terrestrial junk scattered around on its surface that you could start your own alien scrap yard.’
The Doctor advanced on the man. ‘Dalek pods in Utah, saucers under the Arctic, the mess left over from that UFO fender-bender in Roswell. . . Some species are like lazy picnickers, leaving their rubbish instead of taking it home with them.’ He halted and held up the fragment. ‘And this. I wonder where it came from.’ Walking Crow wilted under his hard gaze. ‘Care to tell us?’
At first, Walking Crow wouldn’t speak of it. The Doctor pressed and cajoled, finally dispatching Martha and the boy Nathan on an errand to find them some food. The Doctor seemed to understand his reticence. What he had encountered, what he had witnessed out there all those months ago. . . it was not something he could simply talk about openly, even now.
They had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time; or, as Godlove had later retorted, in the right place at the right time.
Their luck was waning, and after several poorly paying attempts to make money off the settlements along the line of the Smoky Hill Trail from Kansas, Godlove had first argued with the Pawnee, and then blamed him for their predicament. Godlove then decided that they should strike out for new territories and fresh opportunities, perhaps heading toward Dakota and the Black Hills, or else down south where the weather was more balmy.
They were low on food and water, and game was sparse. Matters were made worse when the dappled mare pulling the wagon put 90
a foot in a gopher hole and took an injury. The wagon tipped and righted itself, but not before Godlove was tossed from the driver’s seat and thrown into the dirt. He landed on his hand and Walking Crow heard the twig-like snap as he broke a pair of fingers. The man howled for a while, his hand swelling