Doctor Who_ So Vile a Sin - Ben Aaronovitch [47]
‘I wouldn’t do that if I was you,’ said Roz. ‘I told the crew that you were under suspicion of being a subversive oggielover, possibly even a terrorist. Now, you could run to them and tell them who you really are. But who knows how they’d react?’
‘Cassandra,’ said the Doctor in a voice that startled both of them. ‘Now!’
The Wilfred Owen tore through the Agamemnon system as fast as its little engines would carry it. Sekeris stayed on the shuttle’s bridge through three consecutive watches, almost scowling with seriousness. Civilization as he knew it was at stake.
Roz caught a few hours’ sleep and ate most of a rations pack.
The Doctor stayed in one of the scanner rooms, displacing a series of rostered techies, who hovered nervously outside the door. Roz gave the latest one a salute as she squeezed into the room behind the Doctor’s seat. He was watching six screens, apparently simultaneously.
‘How’s our Imperial Intelligence Agent?’ he said.
‘Sulking in her room.’ In the end Roz had taken the hypospray away, and had Iaomnet confined to quarters. ‘I think she’s a spent force.’ The double-eye had that ‘I’ve Seen Too Much, Gibber Gibber’ look that people around the Doctor sometimes got. Roz suspected she’d had that look herself, once or twice. ‘How are your timelines?’
‘Down to seven that I can clearly remember. You’re alive and with me in four of them. The rest are all blurry, like afterimages.
Look,’ said the Doctor.
‘Where?’
He tapped one of the screens. Roz looked where he was pointing, a computer-enhanced sphere labelled Orestes. One of 111
Iphigenia’s sibling moons. Two smudges of light were labelled ISN Victoria and ISN Doran. Green figures and red dotted lines surrounded the two ships.
Roz didn’t have to know how to interpret the military data to realize what she was seeing. ‘They’ve broken from orbit.’
He nodded. ‘They’re following us.’ He put his hand on a control, and the image swivelled in three dimensions. ‘But they can’t catch us.’
There was another ship, tiny, labelled only by a serial number.
Its projected course took it all the way to the outermost planet.
‘The Hopper,’ said Roz. ‘So Chris and the others made it away.’
‘Why there? One of the others must have put two and two together and got the same answer as I did…’
‘Four?’ said Roz.
‘The Victoria and the accompanying frigate, the Michael John Doran, will overtake the Hopper in about ten hours. They’ll take its crew and passengers prisoner. That’ll slow them down a bit, but when we get to Cassandra, they’ll only be a few hours behind us. We won’t be able to waste a moment.’
Roz didn’t ask what they’d be doing. She’d get an explanation as and when the Doctor decided it was appropriate. ‘Wake me up when we get there,’ she said.
She woke up instantly as someone knocked on her cabin door.
‘Ma’am?’ called a voice.
‘Yeah!’
‘We’re in orbit around Cassandra. The Doctor is asking to see you, ma’am.’
Roz opened the door and squinted at the soldier. ‘Two seconds,’ she said.
In the sensor room, the Doctor had ripped wires and cabling from the console. The surviving screen was running a continuous sweep of the comet’s surface. According to the terminal in Roz’s quarters, it was a rogue chunk of rock and ice in an erratic, elliptical orbit, bumbling in and out of the Agamemnon system.
‘There’s a landing pad,’ said the Doctor. ‘Tell your captain to head for these coordinates.’
‘I don’t see it,’ said Roz, peering into the screen.
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‘Right next to the crater.’
‘That’s not a crater,’ she said. ‘That looks like… I don’t know what that looks like. The surface is torn up. Another fake?’
‘Something more than that,’ said the Doctor. ‘Trust me, it’ll be safe to land there. The sooner the better.’
‘Right. I’ll go tell Sekeris and then I’ll suit up. Meet you in the airlock?’
‘Bring Iaomnet.’
Roz let out a long, slow whistle.
‘She can watch our backs. Besides, I want her where I can see her.’
‘Doctor, that doesn’t make any sense.’
His eyes never left the screen. ‘Scenario: we leave Iaomnet in the shuttle.