Doctor Who_ Set Piece - Kate Orman [1]
‘No, no, no. This is relevant.
‘When he had finished explaining, Sun Tzu gave the signal for the practice to begin. But as soon as they heard the drums, the courtesans started laughing.
‘Sun Tzu, managing to stay calm, explained everything to them again. Once again the drums began. And once again, the harem fell about laughing.
‘Still calm, Sun Tzu announced that the courtesans had broken the rules of war, and that he would execute the Emperor’s favourite concubines as punishment. He cut off the two princesses’ heads with his own sword.
‘Now, when the drumbeats started, the concubines marched in silence.
‘Yes I have finished.
‘Now tell me: what do you think is the moral of the story?’
1
First Piece
To Break a Butterfly upon a Wheel
Wa-ma yinub al-mukhallis illa taqti’ hidum-uh.
All the intervener gets is torn clothes.
(Arab proverb)
Chapter 1
Initial Conditions
Run! Run! As fast as you can!
You can’t catch me, I’m the Gingerbread Man!
(Traditional)
Ms Cohen remembered.
It began with a hissing sound. It grew louder and louder, penetrating the blackness, a stinging rush of noise pressing on her eyes and ears. Her lips and toes began to feel the cold.
Those were the first things she remembered.
She blinked eyelids still half-glued together with frost, and looked out through a curved wall, made of some translucent, rough-looking material, covered in condensation.
The cold liquid sparkled, blue light refracting through it into icy rainbows. Her eyes locked onto one of the droplets as it fattened, swelled, finally ran down the glass in a chilling flash of light.
And when the muscles in her eyes had thawed, she focused through the droplets, through the wall, and saw the Ant.
Ms Cohen screamed a frozen scream.
Then the door began to open.
The man wore a uniform made of thick dun fabric, topped with a little peaked cap. He had a face you wouldn’t remember, fringed with pale blond hair. He took her out of the capsule, away from cold storage, and into the medical laboratory. He checked her blood pressure, her reflexes, her liver function.
And then he left her, surrounded by glistening green walls which looked like the inside of a huge pepper. He didn’t say a word.
Ms Cohen huddled in a silver heat-reflective blanket, shivering with cold and fright. She wished she had a cup of cocoa. She wished she knew where she was and what was going to happen to her. Marshmallows were all she could think about, white smears of sweetness bobbing to the surface.
Ms Cohen remembered the Cortese.
The starliner had been cruising at eight times the speed of light, the universe bending around its hull. If you wanted to watch the relativistic effects, there was the observation deck, where tourists starbaked and argued arm-chair physics and saw something they wouldn’t be able to describe to their grandchildren.
5
Ms Cohen spent her time reading, playing computer games, brushing up on her zero-gravity squash. One of her opponents teased her that she was missing the whole point of the trip. ‘If you don’t want to see hyperspace,’ he said, ‘you take a cheap fridge ship. Otherwise, why bother?’
But Ms Cohen was as afraid of suspended animation as she was of hyperspace. She had to take this trip, but she didn’t have to enjoy it, and anyway, the corporation was paying. So she stayed below decks for two months, until boredom and peer pressure drove her up to the deck.
The Cortese was the last word in luxury; it had to be, for a trip that could take half a year. The floors were carpeted, the walls studded with video screens and hung with real paintings. Ms Cohen could imagine that she was in an office building, back on Terra Firma (and the firmer the better, ha ha). But