Doctor Who_ So Vile a Sin - Ben Aaronovitch [59]
Too late, she realized there was a woman in the room, getting a book down from a shelf. Thandiwe hid behind a chair, but the Fat Monster Eater was too big and round to hide. The woman looked at it in astonishment, and then her eyes found Thandiwe. ‘Hello there,’ she said. She had coppery hair and wore the same simple green clothes as everyone else here.
‘Hello.’ Thandiwe was aware of the Eater, snuggling up to her.
It was always nervous around new people.
‘My name’s Joanna. You must be Baroness Forrester’s little girl. You’ve been exploring, have you?’
‘Yes.’ There was writing under the portrait, a short sentence in a language that Thandiwe didn’t recognize. ‘What’s that?’ she asked.
‘It’s a saying of the first Brigadier,’ said Joanna. ‘One of the nineteen calls to action.’
‘I can’t read it.’
‘I’m not surprised, it’s in British, a sub-dialect of Ancient American.’
‘What does it say?’
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‘“Shoot the winged man with five quick bullets”.’
‘What does it mean?’
‘Ah,’ said Joanna, ‘I’m afraid that it rather depends on which school of interpretation you follow.’ She held out her hand to Thandiwe. ‘Would you like some tisane?’
‘Yes please,’ said Thandiwe. 'Will there be cakes?’
‘I dare say cakes can be arranged.’
Joanna led Thandiwe to a large room she called the mess hall where there were tables and chairs. They chose a seat by a window so that they could look out over the broken grey shapes of the mountains.
Thandiwe took a cake and bit into it. She swallowed and said,
‘Where are the priests?’
‘We’re all priests,’ said Joanna.
‘I thought you were soldiers.’
‘We are. Unitatus soldiers think it’s a good idea if we don’t just know how to fight – we should think about why we’re fighting, too, and think about whether fighting’s a good idea at all.’
Thandiwe nodded, taking a second cake. ‘Mama said you were like an extra army, in case someone tried to attack Earth.’
‘That’s right. The Empress lets us keep our own fleet of ships, and sometimes we fight alongside her army. Our mission is to protect Earth from alien invasions. Not that many of those happen these days… it’s more likely to be Earth invading someone else’s…’ She trailed off. ‘Good heavens,’ she said, softly.
Thandiwe sat up in her seat. It was snowing. ‘I thought it wasn’t supposed to snow here,’ she said.
Joanna looked back at her. Her eyes were big and round. ‘It hasn’t snowed here for over a century.’
‘That’s not snow,’ said Thandiwe. ‘Snow is yellow.’
Joanna looked back out of the window. ‘This isn’t sulphur snow, or whatever you’ve got on Io. It’s real water snow. It’s a miracle,’ she breathed.
‘No,’ said Mama. They both looked around. She’d come into the mess hall while they’d been staring through the window.
There were more of the soldiers with her. ‘This is no miracle. The 140
reclamation projects I’ve funded have the potential to restore this whole planet to its former state.’
Joanna had looked at her the same way she’d looked at the snow. Mama had said, ‘Imagine that. The whole Earth, returned to its former splendour.’
It was hours later, and the snow was still coming down.
Thandiwe snuggled up to the Eater. She imagined the snow covering up all the rock like a big white blanket.
Spaceport Five Undertown – 11 March 2982
Look for a garden, he’d been told, a garden in the forest.
The Reserve was a huge stretch of open land in the middle of Spaceport Five Undertown. Simon had assumed it was a city park, a patch of countryside restored using low-level terraforming techniques, but the tour guide said it had never been built over.
There weren’t even walkways stretching overhead, just blue sky, truncated at the edges by the floating shapes of the city. It was like standing at the bottom of a well.
Simon wondered how many strings had been pulled over the last millennium or so to keep