Doctor Who_ The Also People - Ben Aaronovitch [67]
iv) The High Council will in no wise use temporal transportation in an attempt to alter, negate or undermine this Treaty or any other treaty made between the High Council and The People. Neither shall the High Council seek to alter, negate or undermine this Treaty or any other by use of agents, proxies or renegades, officially sanctioned or otherwise. The High Council shall be made responsible for the enforcement of this clause and any violation shall be regarded as a Treaty Violation. (See Appendix IV, V, VI and VII.) 4. Any act designated as a treaty violation by either the High Council or representatives of The People shall be regarded as a potential act of war and will result in the negation of all other provisions of this treaty.
Appendix VI (six)
The High Council of the Time Lords takes no responsibility for the actions, inactions, deals, schemes, plots or otherwise of the renegade known as the Doctor. Likewise the Doctor will not be deemed under the protection of the High Council while visiting or traversing such territories and time zones within the People's sphere of influence. The High Council will in no way seek to facilitate any action taken by the Doctor and will in no way seek to employ him as an agent of influence within the Home Galaxy. The High Council hereby gives carte blanche to The People, God or any other agent of The People to act in any manner they deem appropriate when dealing with the Doctor, up to and including the use of deadly force.
7
Screaming for Ice Cream
I scream, you scream
We all scream for ice cream
Traditional
It started with the sound of women laughing.
There was sand between her bare toes; it was familiar sand; she had been here before.
She heard the laughter again, floating over the long slow-motion snare drum sound of the waves breaking on the shore. Big ocean waves driven across the Atlantic by the actions of the moon and the wind to crash against the West African seaboard. The laughter was a light and joyful sound that filled her full of dread.
She snapped her head around looking for the source of the sound, the pupils of her eyes contracting to filter out the glare off the bone-white beach. She saw them four hundred metres away, two women, one dressed all in black, the other in white.
Their presence angered and frightened her. This was her place, they had no right to intrude.
She could cover the distance in less than twenty seconds. She felt her body tensing even before her mind made the decision.
It was too late, for the dead were already walking out of the sea.
This too was familiar, she'd had this dream before.
Except this time the dead were not dancing. The family dead always danced, even the first Grandfather, whom she'd always suspected would have mucked up a fox-trot, danced. They should have come dancing, their rotting feet stomping the sand, a subconscious reminder that it was more than genetics that chained her to the past.
The dead were not dancing, they were walking, graveyard fresh, from the waves. She saw the patched uniform of the garde nationale, the spiny carapace of a cake monster, the rotting sailcloth jerkins of the seaman, no one she had known longer than a few moments.
Six of the dead were carrying a long coffin-shaped box on their shoulders and at their head came the man with no name. He was bigger than she remembered or perhaps it was she who had shrunk. He loomed in front of her, his huge eyes like pits of freezing oxygen.
'I'm sorry,' said the man with no face, 'that it took me so long to get around to you. I probably would have let you run free if you hadn't made such a mess of things in Paris.'
The dead pall bearers unshipped the box from their shoulders and set it gently base first into the sand. It was brightly coloured and looked like it had been constructed from reinforced cardboard; indeed it even had the SolGov guaranteed