Doctor Who_ The Gallifrey Chronicles - Lance Parkin [22]
The Doctor whirled round. ‘I think I heard something. Hang on a second.’
He disappeared over a nearby ridge, but was back within a minute.
‘There’s only about six hundred of them. You two, get back inside. You know the plan?’
‘Yes,’ they both chorused.
The Doctor had already hurried away, and the shooting had started
‘“When you’re tired of Mars, you’re tired of life”,’ Trix reminded Fitz.
‘Perhaps I am.’
‘Tired of life?’ she looked suddenly, gratifyingly, concerned. A flying disc screamed overhead, its pilot on fire.
‘No. Not life. This life. My life.’
‘You’re ready to settle down, you mean?’ Trix’s laugh almost drowned out the sound of the explosion.
‘Why not? The two of us.’
She stopped in her tracks. ‘Fitz. . . ’
The ground shook like an earthquake, breaking an awkward silence.
‘I don’t mean straight away.’
She looked at him. ‘When do you mean, then?’
He had meant straight away, but even as he’d spoken he’d realised it was too much. ‘Next time we’re on Earth.’
‘You think that next time we’re back on Earth, we should. . . what?’
A great patch of the night’s sky was white, the stars points of black, for a second.
‘I don’t know,’ Fitz admitted. ‘We should be normal for a bit. Together.
Make a go of it.’
Trix giggled. ‘Settle down on Earth?’
‘Earth in the twentieth century,’ Fitz clarified. ‘I’m not getting stuck in the olden days, or after they drop the Bomb or whatever.’
They laughed.
There was a grating metallic scream, loud but a long way off.
‘Early twenty-first. That’s where I’ve got my credit cards.’
‘Either way, it’s got to be England.’
Bits of metal started raining down.
‘The United Kingdom,’ Trix said, stepping aside to avoid a falling hemisphere of bonded polycarbide the size of a car.
‘It won’t happen,’ Fitz said. ‘We’ll spend our whole time in alien galaxies or in the far future.’
They grinned at each other. In the distance, there was a low rumbling explosion.
48
‘Did that sound like a flying saucer kerploding to you?’ Fitz asked.
Trix checked her watch. ‘Four minutes. I think that’s a new record.’
‘Have you found him again?’ Rachel asked. She’d brought Marnal his first coffee of the morning.
A month had passed since she’d seen the old Marnal die and the young one take his place. The agency was still paying her to look after him, and it wasn’t as though she had anything better to go to. So she came round every day, still in her carer’s uniform, to make sure he was all right. He seemed grateful for the company, in his way, especially after she managed to fob off his relatives.
His family weren’t interested in Marnal, they were interested in his money, and when she’d told them he’d recovered and looked better they stayed away.
Which was probably just as well.
Marnal had spent the last month piecing together episodes in the Doctor’s life, using the universe in a bottle. Rachel had seen some of this – the Doctor speeding around San Francisco on a motorbike, confronting a bulky reptilian creature at the Tower of London, attending an arms bazaar on the moon, punting down the Cam. Marnal had documented hundreds of landings. The Doctor’s was a long life, and he was trying to review everything he could.
At the moment, he was poised over his bottle universe, peering into it.
The Doctor was looking up at a flying saucer exploding over a red desert, an expression of quiet satisfaction on his face. Marnal had scribbled notes on pad after pad of paper. He’d asked Rachel to stop off at Smith’s on her way over to him to pick up some more, but Rachel had forgotten. He still had a few spare sheets.
One of the ones he was working on caught her eye.
‘What’s this list?’ She read from part of it. ‘“Lorenzo, Delilah, Frank, Clau-dia, Deborah, Jemima-Katy, Miranda, Nina, Anji, Beatrice”.’
‘His companions, in the order he first met them.’
‘A lot of people.’
‘Indeed. He’s dragged them all into his criminal lifestyle. It should be possible to trace at least some of these people.’
‘Using that device?’
‘No, the telephone directory.