Doctor Who_ Sleepy - Kate Orman [73]
A face appeared on the screen. Madhanagopal took a deep breath.
Dinner with White
‘What the hell do you mean, you can’t find him?
16 Day Dreams
You could always tell when humans were dreaming: they made little movements and noises. Wolsey sat on the end of Benny’s bed, watching her. She had wandered into the room, looking exhausted and covered in new and interesting smells, and had collapsed into the bed without even pulling up the covers.
Hopefully she was dreaming about opening tins.
In fact, she was dreaming a lot of nonsense full of robots and puppets and being trapped in a classroom, unable to turn her head or open her eyes to see what was written on the blackboard.
Wolsey would have found all of it very boring and silly, except for the part where a computer shining like a messenger angel boomed out, ‘The virus you are carrying is a cure for the virus on Yemaya.’
‘We know that,’ Benny said, putting down the lard muffin she was painting a matt shade of purple. ‘We sequenced a sample as soon as we reached the TARDIS.’
‘Oh,’ said GRUMPY.
‘We’re trying to be a bit more organized, you see.’
‘Ah.’
Chris had guard duty, which meant standing at the edge of the camp holding a branch and glowering.
He peered into the forest, watching for shadows, listening for tiny sounds. Truth was, he hadn’t been trained for this kind of terrain; it all looked like a blur of green to him, the air thick with pollen and tiny insects, rich with the salad and bouquet smell of the forest. Anyway, it was hard even to think over the constant shouting in his head.
The camp consisted of four tents and eight Yemayans.
They had grabbed whatever they could and bolted into the forest, getting lots of distance between them and the habitat dome. They’d run in different directions. They’d all ended up here, following the shouting.
His eyes ached with it. His head rang with it. But, instead of making him want to clap his hands over his ears and curl up into a little ball, he wanted to hear it, wanted to be near it, as though it was a favourite song.
They didn’t talk much, the little group of escapers. Their eyes tended to lose their focus, turning inwards, where the call was loudest. They had brought supplies, but those would last only a few days. The odds were that they’d be missed long before then. And if —
Chris yelled and stumbled backwards. The Doctor was standing at his elbow.
‘Hello, Chris,’ said the little man, walking past him into the camp. A tiny robot buzzed through the air after him.
Cwej looked around bewilderedly. After a few seconds, he dropped the stick and trotted into the clearing behind the Doctor.
‘So what’s happening?’ said the Adjudicator, catching up.
The others were coming out of their tents, startled by his cry.
‘What do we do?’
‘Things are not going well back at the base,’ said the Doctor, addressing the group. ‘We need to find out what’s really happening, and we need to find out straight away.’
‘How?’ said Athaliah. ‘We followed the call all the way here.’
‘This is where it’s loudest?’
‘Yes. Oh, yes,’ said the teenage girl. ‘So this must be where it’s coming from, right?’
Not necessarily,’ said the Doctor. He took a few steps in one direction, then in another, as though listening to something he could hear faintly. ‘This close to its source, the strength of the telepathic signal is so great that it tends to be misleading — the way very loud sounds are difficult to distinguish. But this is certainly the correct vicinity. We just have to find exactly the right spot...’
‘You know what it is, don’t you?’ said Chris, excitedly.
‘Don’t you!’
‘I have a fair idea.’ The Doctor took something out his pocket and held it up. Chris took it and turned it around in his hands. It was a piece of a spacecraft. Judging by the obvious curve in even this small piece, not a very large spacecraft. He passed it to one of the colonists.
‘The explosion spread small pieces of wreckage over a large area,’ said