Doctor Who_ So Vile a Sin - Ben Aaronovitch [67]
‘Who were the Listeners?’ asked Roz.
‘No one knows,’ said the bot. ‘They fled their planet before the Empire reached it, leaving three unfinished colony ships in orbit.
Landing parties found numerous radio and hyperwave telescope 155
arrays. Apparently the Listeners had been listening to the human emission sphere, and they didn’t like what they heard. The Listeners’ planet was terraformed shortly after its discovery, but the remaining structures and artefacts were preserved for study.
The aliens left little information about themselves, or where they had fled to.’
‘And the colony ship got turned into a tourist attraction,’ said Roz.
‘Humans like to appropriate bits of other people’s cultures,’
said the Doctor. ‘The Draconians say it’s because humans like to be reminded of who they’ve dispossessed.’
‘Just between you and me,’ murmured the bot, ‘the word is that the Listeners grabbed the Victoria.’
‘The news reports said it was the Ogrons,’ said Roz.
‘Come on,’ said the bot. ‘Do you really think they could pull something like that off? Welcome to the JC’s main street, folks.’
Roz and the Doctor paused for a moment, looking around. It was like Fury, only a lot more upmarket; in fact, if you didn’t know you were on a ship, you might think you were under any old dome. ‘Why would anyone spend the money to come here?’
the Doctor wondered.
‘The ship’s technically not under the jurisdiction of any solar system,’ said Roz. 'It’s hard to enforce Imperial law here. People come here for cheap duty-free and for peculiar drugs, or to get their faces and fingertips modified.’
‘Does it rain?’ the Doctor asked their guide.
‘Only on special occasions,’ said the bagbot. ‘The metaship’s food is produced hydroponically, with no need for precipitation.’
‘So it’s sunny all the time?’
The bagbot said, ‘The tourists seem to like it. Except the Lacaillans. Apparently on their homeworld it rains all the time.’
‘How bright are you?’ the Doctor asked.
‘I haven’t been formally rated,’ said the bagbot. ‘I flunked the Turing – no human talks about luggage all the time.’
The Doctor crouched down by the robot again. Roz glared at anyone who gave him a funny look, sending them on their way.
‘Can you run an errand for me?’
156
‘Sure,’ said the bagbot hesitantly. ‘What did you have in mind?’
Chris looked at his watch. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘let’s go.’
The Doctor and Iaomnet followed him down the ramp, looking around. They were almost the last ones off the liner – there were only a few other passengers trailing off the ship, and some uniformed staff.
Customs was miles away, down a long grey hallway. They trudged along, past holograms for the Heart of Darkness Discothèque and the Lord Jim Shopping Centre.
Iaomnet looked pissed off, but she’d looked pissed off for a month. It had stopped being a do-something-violent kind of pissed off about a week ago, gradually changing into a who-cares-anyway pissed off. They were all in this together now, the Doctor kept telling her. Maybe she was starting to believe it.
She’d even stopped trying to contact Imperial Intelligence every chance she got.
‘Why’d we have to wait?’ she said. ‘Why didn’t we just tell customs they were twins?’
‘That was wearing pretty thin aboard the liner,’ said Chris. ‘It would have been a bit easier if you didn’t both insist on wearing the same clothes.’
The Doctor straightened his lapels. ‘I need some way of hanging on to my identity,’ he protested.
It had been a hell of a trip. They could have got here in a week, but the Doctor had insisted on travelling slowly. He was too spread out, he said – he didn’t know what would happen.
‘So,’ Chris asked the Doctor, ‘is this going to work all right, then?’
‘I hope so,’ said the Doctor. ‘We need to work out exactly how that copy was created. I can’t do it without the TARDIS.’ He smiled. ‘It’ll be good to see her again, but I’m glad I left her here.
Goodness knows what proximity to… what’s on Iphigenia would have