Doctor Who_ The Infinity Doctors - Lance Parkin [14]
He went over to the window, wiped away a finger’s length of dust and peered out, trying to see if he recognised the area.
Some parts of Low Town were almost respectable. In places rich merchants had found and refurbished the ruins of old villas, and restored the old roads, parts of the ancient city that the Dome hadn’t enclosed when it had been erected by the generation after Rassilon. There was genuine civic pride there, not to mention a flourishing economy. Other parts of Low Town were filthy, temporary structures made from packing materials and wreckage. There was no disease, of course, no starvation, and the lifespans here were as long as the Time Lords’ – once you’d taken into account that the accident rate was several orders higher than the controlled environment of the Capitol and Citadel. But in Low Town the gift of immortality simply meant that the poor lived in squalor for ten thousand years more than they otherwise would.
This was an area somewhere between the two extremes, like most places were. It was dark outside, so this was either a subterranean part of the Town, or it was night outside. No way of telling which from in here. No way of telling exactly which street it was.
There was a creak on the stair. Someone was coming.
Peltroc tensed, unable to get into a better position. Another few seconds and he could have been behind the door, ready to attack. The door unbolted and a man and a woman stepped in.
They wore the cloth smocks preferred by the Outsiders, those Gallifreyans who had rejected the civilised life in favour of the wilderness beyond the walls and domes. Their tanned faces and the muscles of their arms suggested that they were genuine outcasts, and that they would know how to use the metal blades sheathed at their waists. The modem-looking communicators and utility capsules clipped to their belts suggested that they hadn’t abandoned all technology. The male was a bear of a man, she was lithe, her hair tied in braids.
‘Huran, he’s up!’ the woman cried out.
‘Of course he’s up,’ a calm voice said from behind Peltroc.
‘Hurry! It s nearly dawn.’
He had been standing behind him the whole time. Still wearing the hooded robes, and still with that blank, metal face. Peltroc wondered whether it might be a robot, or an artificially generated form of some kind. Perhaps even something as sophisticated as a shayde. But the more he thought about it, the more Peltroc became certain that there was a man under all that. A man wearing a mask and a voice distorter. There was an unsteadiness there that would have been programmed out of a robot. But it was impossible to guess what he looked like, or even his physical build. The male Outsider was preparing a syringe that he’d produced from his belt.
‘Now, Constable Peltroc, you will tell me what I want to know,’ the masked man said. The Outsider handed the syringe to his master, who brandished it like a knife.
The blank face loomed a little closer. ‘Ask me politely,’
Peltroc told him. ‘I might tell you anyway without the need for any of this.’
The masked man lunged at him, stabbing the syringe clumsily but brutally into Peltroc’s side.
Peltroc cried out with pain, and in that moment of weakness he felt a mind brush against his. It felt as if he was trapped in a room with a tiger. Asking about the box.
Whatever had been in the syringe was eating its way through his mental defences. He could feel it, warm in his veins, spreading like acid. He wouldn’t be able to rely on his conditioning