Doctor Who_ The Also People - Ben Aaronovitch [79]
A tension that he hadn't been aware of unkinked in his shoulders. It wasn't Paris, but for this one evening iSanti Jeni would do. Selecting a café at random he took a seat at an outside table near the wall where he could sit and watch the people pass by. He snapped his fingers to summon a tray and ordered a glass of pure water. When it became dark enough to see the sphere's interior he looked for the tiny hexagon shape of the Spaceport. Roz and Chris would be there by now, trying to interrogate a spaceship. The thought made him grin.
On an impulse the Doctor reached into his left pocket and retrieved the three round objects that had floated to the top. He placed them on the table: juggling balls. He felt in the right pocket and a slim oblong shape seemed to slip into his palm of its own volition. He placed it next to the balls: a pack of cards. On a whim he looked up and down the esplanade and found a suitable site, a place where the beams of two public illuminators formed an accidental spotlight.
Humming 'I am the very model of a modern UN General' he walked over into his makeshift spotlight and started to juggle. 'Look,' he heard a child say. Using one hand to keep the balls moving he used the other to take off his hat and place it upside down at his feet. It didn't matter that the only place these people had heard the word money was at school, it was the symbology that counted. When he felt that his audience had reached a critical mass he stopped juggling and faced them.
'Ladies, gentlemen and machine intelligences,' he said, 'I am the Doctor, righter of wrongs, defeater of the dastardly and foe of the phantasmagoric.' He produced the cards, shuffling them as he continued his spiel. 'I am here tonight, all the way from the Hackney Empire in the heart of the scenic East End to render to you such a display of prodigious prestidigitation that you shall doubt the very verisimilitude of your sensory apparatus.'
The Doctor spread the cards into a one handed fan and held them up.
'Now for my first trick I need a volunteer from the audience. Yes, you, sir, float right up. Now have I ever worked with you before? Of course I haven't. What's your name? Ki!Xatati? All right, ki!Xatati, in a moment I want you to pick a card, any card and show it to the audience but not to me. But first I want you to scan this deck of cards. Are they marked, tagged, smell-identified or in any way anything other than a sequential series of designs printed on rectangular paste board?
Would you tell the audience that? Thank you so much.
'Now,' said the Doctor, 'pick a card.'
Hyper-lude
Extract from the external memory datacore (subjective) of vi!Ca-pin-go-ri Omicron 378, mining habitat, built into an asteroid in an unremarkable but strategic system, it had a population of two hundred thousand sentient individuals. An unremarkable people from an adjacent star system built it three hundred years before to burrow out the valuable cores of the surrounding asteroidal material – the remains, according to ship, of a sub-gas giant that had broken up sixty-two billion years previously. The plan was that a couple of the crew would go over and have a little scout round to see if the Insects were using it as a forward base. R-Vene stayed out of sight, hidden in the upper atmosphere of a nearby gas giant during the operation. Nobody asked me to go despite the fact that I was the best qualified drone, word of what had happened on Tipor'oosis having spread as far as the rest of the fleet by then.
I regret not having gone, not that I would have made any difference, but at least I would have ceased to exist.
The infiltration party was made up of two organics and a drone, the standard composition for what had become almost a routine by that time of the war. According to R-Vene the drone was killed first upon entering the airlock, the two organics died a couple of minutes later as they tried to get back to the safety of the shuttle.
Fifteen seconds later R-Vene dumped six kilograms of antimatter into the centre of the Omicron 378: