Doctor Who_ Sleepy - Kate Orman [76]
She watched that boy who’d broken her arm out of the corner of her eye, as he hovered about nervously, wondering how she’d got it fixed so quickly.
The Doctor stood with his hands clasped behind his back, eyes closed, as though listening to a distant voice. In fact, Roz knew, it was the opposite: he was concentrating hard on blocking out the howling of the telepathic beacon.
Even she felt a weird Undertown pressure in her head, this close.
‘Um,’ said someone behind her. She put down the stick.
Cwej was watching her, hands in the pockets of his borrowed trousers. ‘Justice...’ he muttered.
‘Fairness. Hello, Chris.’
She got up and slapped him on the arm a couple of times. ‘You OK?’ he said. She nodded. He looked a little unfocused, Which wasn’t surprising, with that thing hollering in his head.
For a moment she thought he was going to hug her.
Mercifully, he turned aside, nodded at the Doctor.
‘There isn’t much time,’ said the little man. ‘Especially now you and Benny have let that virus loose.’ Chris looked down at her worriedly as another couple of colonists wandered into the clearing, gawking at the wreckage. ‘We have to get to the bottom of this, right now. We have to know what this signal is.’
‘It’s an alarm clock,’ said Chris.
The Doctor tilted his head.
‘Isn’t it obvious?’ said the Adjudicator. ‘There’s something down there. It’s asleep. We just have to wake it up.’
Roz stood at the edge of the hole in the ground. ‘Great,’
she said. ‘I should’ve stayed in bed.’
17 Techno-Seance
So.
So then.
It’s all about the Doctor, you know. It always has been.
It’s as though he’s a planet, and we’re all satellites. We spin around him, torn between our desire to fly away and the irresistible attraction... to what? We can’t know, because we can never get close enough. Perhaps we’re more like bits of debris floating around a black hole. When we finally cross the line into that mystery, we never come back.
There’s nothing I can do here. No, there’s only one thing I can do. The Company will have taken only a few hours to analyse the records; it took us only half a day. They will have seen what we saw: that our initial report was wrong, that the virus is airborne. We are all infected.
Perhaps the Company even knew that before they sent us here. No, I won’t give in to paranoia, that can’t make sense. If they wanted guinea-pigs, they already had the colonists. We have to wait for their orders.
Waiting and waiting.
The colonists are ploughed but not sown; their new gardens are starting to wither from neglect. Their children are screaming in the hydroponics dome, which is beginning to stink of rotting vegetables, floating unattended in their long tanks of water.
It should have been a simple matter: get in, get on with it, get it over with and get out.
Now there’s only one thing I can do, one project I can complete. Truth is, this was — this would have been — an absolutely standard mission, absolutely ordinary textbook mission. Except for you, Doctor. Except for you.
So it’s all about the Doctor, now. It always has been.
Come back out of your shell, little man, come out where I can see you. Let’s finish this.
Chris leant forward, rested his forehead on the cold shell of the ship. He felt as though he were just on the edge of being drunk, just floating pleasantly.
They were sitting around the wreck. Where pieces of hull jutted above the ground like dinosaur ribs, the colonists pressed their hands to it, out of some sort of common instinct. The shouting had grown so loud they couldn’t even hear it any more.
To Chris’s left, the Doctor was sitting cross-legged on the ground. Roz stood behind him, her arms crossed, watching intently. The Time Lord’s eyes were open, but empty, unseeing, a faint smile crossing his face. Chris had a sudden impression of the little man rummaging beneath the ground, prospecting. A happy medium. Suddenly giddy, Chris laughed out loud.
They were flowing together like...