Doctor Who_ The Also People - Ben Aaronovitch [19]
Bernice retreated back into the hard sunlight on the esplanade, uncomfortable with the idea of spending more time in the company of machines. She looked around for some other sign of life.
All the windows she could see were closed up with slated wooden shutters. Along the esplanade the wind from the sea caught the awnings making them snap and rustle like horizontal flags.
A noise made her look up: the unmistakable rifle-crack sound of something small breaking the sound barrier. Sunlight flashed off something shooting out over the sea at a height of two hundred metres. There were two more cracks overhead. This time Bernice got a better look. Size was difficult to judge but she thought they might be a metre to two metres long, too small to be piloted that was for sure, ovoid in shape, flying on parallel courses to the first flying thing. They reminded her of the space-to-ground torpedoes used by orbiting ships during planetary assaults.
She shuddered, watching as both objects began zigzagging over the sea. Bernice recognized the movement as a search pattern. Within moments they were out of sight, lost in the hazy distance over the ocean.
She was halfway up one of the narrow little streets when she smelt the aroma of baking bread.
Perhaps she had been following it all along, unconsciously picking this particular street from all the others under the smell's subliminal influence. The street jinked unevenly between the whitewashed buildings and was paved with irregular slabs of some smooth white stone. Shuttered doorways were randomly placed along both sides, some of them below the level of the street, while others could only be reached via stone staircases built up against the walls. Occasionally there was no door, just the steps, as if someone had built the staircase and then gone away and forgotten why. There was even one door three storeys up with no staircase at all.
Of course, once Bernice had decided she was following the smell it became far more difficult.
She found herself standing at junctions absurdly sniffing the air before deciding which direction to go. After a couple of false trails she had almost given up when she stumbled on the source.
The street was near the rear of the town rising steeply up the base of the hill. On one side the tops of trees were just visible over a high wall, on the other was a terrace that rose in line with the street in a series of stepped levels. The shutters on one of the nearer ground-floor windows had been thrown open. Bernice could hear an arythmic thumping sound from inside. As she drew level with the open window the aroma of baking bread grew strong enough to make her salivate.
She looked inside.
A woman was stooped over a work surface kneading dough. She was very slim with narrow shoulders and her skin had the delicate yellow tint of ancient ivory. Her short hair was a strange silvery blue and the shapeless smock she was wearing had a V-shaped neckline at the back to accommodate a hairline that tapered to a point between her shoulder blades. Bernice watched her shaping the dough with long elegant fingers, noticing that the woman's elbow and shoulder joints seemed to move in a subtly non-human way.
Once she was satisfied with the consistency of the dough the woman shaped it into a rough oblong and with a single fluid motion tossed it into the air. An invisible force caught the dough a metre above the woman's head and it began to float around the room surrounded by a globe of heated air. Bernice realized that what she'd taken for light fittings were in fact other loaves at various stages of baking, bobbing around near the ceiling in individual spheres of oven-hot air.
When Bernice glanced back down from the loaves she realized with a slight shock that the woman had turned to look at her.
'Hello,' said the woman.
'Hello,'