Doctor Who_ Return of the Living Dad - Kate Orman [3]
‘Is it really bothering you? I didn’t realize.’
‘Our ghost?’ She laughed softly. ‘That’s just a running gag, meant to scare the newbie students. The atmosphere is full of exotic charged particles. That’s bound to produce all sorts of weird effects. Problem is, some of the students take the ghost stories too seriously.’
‘Oh,’ said Jason, clutching her interestingly. ‘I was rather hoping it was the spirit of an ancient Youkalian, come to terrify the grave-robbers desecrating its world.’
Benny rolled over, kissing his stubbly chin. ‘Very funny.’
‘I don’t want to see your future messed up by something from your past. That’s all.’
Behind her, the candle flared again, giving her a soft blue halo. ‘I keep thinking about Groenewegen. About Dad, retired instead of vanished, wandering about in a rickety spaceship and pitching his tent in holiday resorts.’
Jason stroked her hair, working his fingers down her scalp and right to her shoulders, over and over, wanting to get at the tension inside her. ‘Maybe Groenewegen is a Dalek agent,’ he whispered. ‘Come to lure the last of the Summerfields to her doom.’
‘Can’t you take this seriously even for a moment?’
muttered Benny.
‘Hey, shh, I’m sorry... I thought you needed cheering up.’
Benny hugged him back. ‘I’m sorry. I’m frightened, I think. Look, let’s go to sleep. I’ll work out what to do in the morning.’
The second time Jason woke up, Benny was sitting at the foldup table in the dark. Rain was spattering down on the roof of the tent — a soothing, drumming sound.
Benny was watching a hologram floating above the table.
A loop of maybe ten seconds kept repeating itself, the glowing outlines of the tiny ships making the same manoeuvres over and over.
Three big orange shapes must be the planet-rippers. Six small blue ships blipped into existence at the edge of the hologram, made desperate turns as their brave attack became a rout, exploded into symbolic blue puffs as they were destroyed. The timescale must be hugely compressed, maybe a second for every real minute.
Each time, a tiny blue ship at the front of the fleet veered suddenly, turned completely around, and sped out of the hologram’s field of reference.
‘What were you doing, Daddy?’ Benny whispered.
‘Maybe it doesn’t tell you the whole story.’ Her face snapped to him, one cheekbone an orange crescent of light.
‘Maybe there’s something out of the frame which we can’t see.’
Benny reached down and snapped off the hologram. ‘I can’t work it out,’ she said, suddenly invisible again. ‘What am I going to do?’
‘Whatever you decide,’ said Jason, ‘I’ll be right there; I’ll back you up.’
‘I really want to get this degree. I want to be able to point at a piece of paper and say, see, I really do have a PhD.’
‘You do that anyway.’
‘Cheeky.’ She picked up a cushion from the floor of the tent and threw it at him. ‘I’ve really enjoyed the last couple of months, you know. Despite the ghost and the wet weather.
Just staying in one place and really working on something...
tidying up one of the loose ends of my life.’
‘And then along comes another one.’
‘He’s dead,’ said Benny. ‘Occam’s razor. Surely he’s just dead.’
Jason didn’t know what to say.
Benny got back into bed. ‘I want to talk to Groenewegen again in the morning,’ she said. ‘Assuming we don’t sleep in until lunchtime.’
Noon.
Benny put down her brush. The hieroglyphs were emerging slowly and surely from the dirt, speaking to her a little at a time. The past slowly coming back into the light.
The Admiral was distracting a bunch of the trainees.
They were supposed to be cleaning up one of the staircases so a translation team could move in, but they’d ended up sitting on them instead, listening to her talk about fighting Daleks.
Benny had been around that age when she had gone AWOL from Spacefleet. Crammed into an escape pod, praying her computer modifications would hide her hasty exit from the troop transport. And that if they didn’t, the captain wouldn’t just have the deserter shot out of