Doctor Who_ Set Piece - Kate Orman [77]
There was nothing left of her vessel but a large empty space. She rubbed the back of her neck, absently. Ship should have been destroyed. But it wasn’t.
Why not?
The Doctor probably had a good idea.
He was part of her family’s stories. Her great-great-grandmother had written a book about him – well, about UNIT, but the two were difficult to separate. She had heard all about him as a child, read all about him as an adult.
But she’d never expected to run into him on King’s Cross Station.
Just imagine. If the transit system hadn’t decided to get the two of them together, she wouldn’t be sitting here eating this horse.
She put the hunk of meat down, closed her eyes. It had been Aunt Francine who’d made her realize who the little man was, Aunt Francine and her X-ray eyes, seeing past the human facade into his alien physiology – the physiology she had read about in the Stone Mountain archives, using a borrowed ice-breaker to access the classified files stored from the first grandfather’s time.
And there had been more.
A second Time Lord had been on Earth in those days, but he wasn’t stranded the way they were stranded without her prototype vessel. He was coming and going freely, just to spite his old rival. UNIT’s priority A1 order had been to watch for him.
She had read the surviving parts of her ancestor’s diary entries, snaffled by the Official Secrets Act over the protests of his widow. A lot of it was lost or destroyed, but she’d even found yellowing, two-dimensional photographs, 151
and tried to imagine the people moving and speaking, as though she were the projector that turned them into holograms.
It had been in the empty gym, with all the soldiers down in the mess for a drink, their voices echoing across a rainy concrete courtyard. In those days the Doctor had been very different-looking, taller, with a taste for impractical fashion and terrible army tea.
‘Just in case we run into him again,’ the Doctor had said, ‘there’s something I want to show you.’
He had caught hold of the Brigadier’s hand – Kadiatu imagined the man being a little taken aback by the unfamiliar touch – and had run the Brigadier’s fingers along his left collarbone. ‘There’s a nerve cluster here,’ he said. ‘If you’re going to hit him, hit him there. It should render him unconscious with a minimum of fuss.’
The Brigadier must have nodded, seriously. ‘I take it you want me to keep that piece of information to myself.’
‘I’d prefer it weren’t generally known.’
And Alistair had kept it a secret, and so had his descendants. Until his great-grand-daughter broke into his records.
But she wasn’t his descendant at all. Was she?
Someone had to look after Earth, to match the Doctor’s ability to drop in whenever he pleased. That was what Project Butterfly Wing had been all about. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. The Doctor had poked and prodded the human race until it had hit back. With her.
It was possible that in the patchwork of her genes was something of her adoptive father’s. He’d been a Thousand Days’ War supersoldier, body and mind edited to fight the Martians. It was from the augmented soldiers that her DNA had come. If one of Brigadier Yembe’s chromosomes was present in the mix, it would be the only information he had left her, keeping her in the dark for so long. Her parents had kept her away from doctors, which hadn’t been hard – she never got sick – never needed a vaccination. Never got into a fight with other kids, never ran a race.
If it hadn’t been for the Doctor, she might never have known what she was.
She could give it up, tell him everything, let him sort it out. But then, he was probably the one who had mucked it up.
She had dismissed her gens de maison. Better that they didn’t get caught in any extraterrestrial cross-fire. And yet, without her salary, were they going to be worse off? It was so hard to know what to do.
Kadiatu picked up the horse’s leg and sank her teeth into it. ‘Time for Plan B,’ she said.
∗ ∗ ∗
152
After a while she realized