Doctor Who_ Set Piece - Kate Orman [22]
43
They searched through the writings from Sumer. Any record of their visit had become so intermixed with the general muddle of half-truths about Gil-gamesh that it was lost to time. They searched through stories from Punt and from Syria. There were hints from time to time, stories of gods or heroes that made her think of him, or imagine Benny.
– trying to drag both of them at once, cursing with frustration –
Smiling as she read about her own adventures on a fragment of pottery five thousand years her senior.
But there were no messages, no hints as to what she was supposed to be doing. So she sat on a cliff overlooking the place she’d woken up, every night she could, the personal force shield generator tight around her wrist.
It was shaped like a wristwatch, a tough elastic band with a small, solid disc of machinery attached. One evening, working by the light of a smoky lamp, she’d used a sliver of wood to peel open the casing. Then she’d stared blankly at the insides for half an hour. Sorry, Captain, but I can’t bypass the warp phase dilithium diagnostic coils. Without the proper tools, all she’d be able to do was break the thing.
The boiling light in the organic ship must have been part of the space-time fracture. She’d seen spatiotemporal anomalies, knew the headachey geometry that surrounded them. Benny must have travelled through it, breaking the glass wall inwards as she arrived, spat out of the rift like an irritation in reality’s mouth.
She must have planned to escape the same way, and had been expecting them to be ready to leave.
So the desert outside Akhetaten was one of the rift’s endpoints – one of the places it bit through space-time, creating a sort of gateway. It made sense that the Zargoids were using one of those gateways to steal the passengers off spaceships. And then freeze them.
Why?
And was there anything for them to steal in the desert?
So Ace sat on the cliff watching the blackness.
There was a sound behind her, and she was turning before she thought about it, the bow coming instantly into her hand. She’d nocked and aimed an arrow before she realised it was Sesehaten the scribe.
‘Jesus in a rocking chair,’ she said. ‘I could have perforated you.’
Bad, bad, bad. She should’ve heard him coming, should’ve seen the dim flicker of torchlight coming up over the ridge behind her. She gingerly pointed the arrow at the ground, letting her cramping hands relax, feeling the crick in her back from sitting still for too long. She had goosebumps. Sesehaten did that to her sometimes, for whatever reason.
‘I’m sorry I frightened you, Tepy,’ said Sesehaten.
44
‘You didn’t. What the hell are you doing here?’
‘I wanted to be sure you were alright.’
‘You should know that I can take care of myself.’
Sesehaten nodded, the torch bobbing up and down slightly. ‘I hadn’t realised you were coming out here at night.’
He didn’t ask why. Ace sat back down again, holding her bow across her lap.
‘The Red Land is very beautiful, especially at sunset and sunrise,’ Sesehaten said behind her. ‘It’s so different to the Black Land around the Nile. So untouched. It seems so simple, but it’s so complex. All those ripples in the stony cliffs, all those particles of sand . . . ’ His voice trailed off into the night air. Ace had never heard him speak like that, all he ever talked about was bills and receipts.
She turned her head to look at him, half-expecting yet another proposition.
She knew by now that foreign women were fair game. On the other hand, being a foreigner meant being able to bend the rules – at least, a little more than a native Egyptian woman might have been able to bend them. She still had to prove herself nearly every day, demonstrating over and over that she could wield the weapons and that she wouldn’t shrink with fear.
She and the Assyrian had been boozing one night when he’d decided she had to get married