Doctor Who_ Sleepy - Kate Orman [15]
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Then why is your daughter wearing an air-filter mask?’
‘There’s nothing the matter with taking additional precautions,’ said Mr SmithSmith.
‘I understand you have religious concerns,’ said Roz.
‘But the masks and the forcefield aren’t going to help you.
You ought to come back to the habitat dome for tests.’
‘“Religious concerns?”’ said SmithSmith. ‘We’re pretty tired of people making us out to be weirdos.’
‘Mr SmithSmith,’ said Roz, with infinite patience, ‘your Personal beliefs are none of my business. I’ve been asked to Come here to make sure you understand the medical facts of the situation. You obviously do. Now it’s up to you.’
She snapped off the comm screen. ‘Weirdo,’ she muttered.
Chris was staring off into the forest. She tugged on his arm until he looked down at her. ‘Let’s leave them to it,’ she said. ‘They’re the last ones who haven’t been tested.’
Chris said, ‘Except us.’
‘We don’t need to be tested,’ said Roz. ‘No inoculations, remember?’
‘Oh, come on, it’s just a little pinprick.’ He held up a finger in front of her face. ‘Right here. You’ll hardly feel it.’
‘Chris, what’re you talking about?’
He shrugged. ‘I just thought... well, there’s no sense in taking chances...’
Sometimes you’re such an idiot, she thought irritably. He turned away, his brow wrinkling. She punched him on the arm.
‘We’ll see what the Doctor says. Come on.’
‘The Doctor says,’ said the Doctor, ‘that he’s busy right now, and you ought to let Cinnabar take you home and feed you.’
The Doctor and Byerley had been muttering and clattering in the small lab for hours. Now it was getting crowded. Cinnabar had turned up, her shift in cybernetics complete. And Cwej and Forrester always took up a lot of room when they were wearing their armour. Chris had folded his arms tightly, as though worried that he would be asked to buy anything he broke.
‘Begone,’ said the Doctor. ‘This is going to take hours.’
‘What is it you’re doing?’ Roz insisted, as Byerley clattered past with an incubator tray full of blood samples.
‘We’re sequencing ten different strains of the virus.’
‘Sequencing?’ said Cinnabar.
Byerley said, ‘Working out the sequence of base pairs in the DNA. Decoding the genes.’
‘You’re decompiling it?’
‘Yes,’ said the Doctor. ‘Or we would be if it weren’t for all these sightseers. Scat.’
‘Once we have the sequence, we can work out what each of the genes is supposed to do,’ said Byerley. ‘There’s a lot more to this bug than just the powers.’
‘Crackers sometimes hide their names in the code of their computer viruses,’ said Cinnabar. Will the sequence give you some idea of where the virus came from?’
‘Very probably,’ said the Doctor. ‘ Exeunt.’
Cinnabar sighed. ‘Ration cubes?’ she asked the Adjudicators.
Byerley and Cinnabar lived in a single room at the edge of the habitat dome. Chris had to fold himself up to get under the door lintel, and sit on the single piece of furniture that doubled as bed and lounger. He tugged at the catches on his armour, awkwardly, yawning. Roz leaned back against the wall, shutting her eyes, pretending to be comfortable, even when he kept banging her breastplate with his elbow.
‘We’re both hopeless in the kitchen.’ Cinnabar grinned.
‘Such as it is. I think we’re lucky to be stuck with ration cubes, for a while at least.’ She started heating up some of the ubiquitous slabs of processed food. ‘Though we’re not going to lure anyone else to Yemaya on a diet like this.’
‘I’m surprised there are so few of you to start with,’ said Roz.
Cinnabar sat cross-legged on the floor, next to the low stove unit. ‘We’re the pioneers, the ground-breakers. Well, really, we’re a sort of test.’ She tugged absently on a loose thread in her jumper. ‘The idea is that a few hundred highly skilled people and their families are planted here. If we make a success of the place, if we manage to raise a crop and we don’t get eaten by alien monsters, then more colonists are sent.’
‘What happens if it goes wrong?’ said Chris.
‘We get taken home again.