Doctor Who_ Set Piece - Kate Orman [52]
We’ll sit with our backs turned when someone kills another. The land dies, no matter how many laws you make to stop it.’
The priests had returned from the secret cave, carrying a platter of food, bowls and cloths. Their daily duty was done.
‘If we move against Pharaoh,’ Sesehset said, ‘we could be starting that civil war.’
(a) The drawing room was on fire, and (b) there was an Ant in the corner, which was (c) doing something to the Doctor. Therefore (d) Kadiatu, who had come bolting in clutching a weapon, yelled (e) ‘Oh shit!’
The Ant didn’t appear to notice her sudden entry. Its front pair of legs were pressed against the Time Lord’s chest. He lay against the floor and wall at a peculiar angle, ragdoll-limp. The Ant’s face was dipped to his, three of its antennae fixed to his forehead and cheek in a delicate steel kiss.
His eyes were open, his enraged blue gaze reflected in the robot’s metal face. One of his hands spasmed, again and again.
Kadiatu had raised her gun, taken a bead on the Ant. Now her conscious mind kicked in and told her she was holding a percussion rifle that would blow a three-metre hole in the wall. The shrapnel would’ve shredded the Doctor, and probably her too, at this range.
There was an industrial laser taped to the top of the rifle. She slapped a hand over it, sliced down delicately. The red point burned a black graffito down the wall and bit into the back of the Ant’s neck.
99
It reared up, squealing – no, the sound was its antennae, whirring and twitching wildly as they detached from the Doctor’s face. Its head hung at an odd angle. The little man raised a hand between him and the monster, rolling limply to one side.
Kadiatu fired the laser a second time, the red beam cutting through greasy smoke, slicing through one of the Ant’s legs. It wobbled, trying to turn its head to find the source of the attack. She fired a third time, and the Ant’s head rolled onto the wooden floor with a dull clang.
The body collapsed. For a moment Kadiatu thought it had fallen onto him.
But the little man was clear of the metal corpse, trembling in the corner, one hand pressed to his temple where an antenna had drawn blood.
Kadiatu gripped her gun in one hand as she beat out the flames with a rug, urgently. ‘Christ, you idiot!’ she snarled, ‘you might’ve burned the house down!’ He didn’t say anything.
She thumped out the last of the fire, still clutching the gun in one hand.
‘Why didn’t you cry out?’ she yelled, striding towards him.
In a single, fluid movement, he pulled his whole body into foetal position, arms thrown over his head.
Kadiatu stopped where she was. ‘Christ,’ she said again.
Most of the scars, it appeared, were on the inside.
Ace sat in the main hall of Sedjet’s house, alone.
Despite Sesehset’s words, the Setites were local boys, without much of an idea about history. For them, the world just started with the gods’ war and then kept going indefinitely. Egypt’s fortunes might wax and wane over the centuries, but the country hadn’t changed in any major way for thousands of years.
But for Ace, who’d ridden the back of time, history was more like a series of circles. Empires rose and fell, old religions died and new ones took their place, elections and coups and wars and fashions flowed like the tide. To the Egyptians, Akhenaten’s changes were shattering. To her, he was just another fascist.
Ace drank black beer from a bowl, slowly, wishing for a vodka and Coke.
She was drinking a lot. Maybe she was drinking too much. It was something to do instead of making up her mind.
Her own home time in the late eighties had seemed like a little pocket of eternity, as though it had always been two minutes past the Industrial Revolution and The Farm had always been the best band out. But turn the page, and you had the Berlin Wall coming down, and the Gulf War, and Nirvana.
Ace closed her eyes, but she couldn’t stop the tumbling imagery in her head.
Was this the way the Doctor had seen time? Not a straight line, obviously, but 100
a circle,