Doctor Who_ The King of Terror - Keith Topping [38]
Doctor left with Mr Tyrone. He had orders to escort Tegan to headquarters.
They had, he told her, an important job to do.
That job turned out to be spending over an hour trawling through thousands of computer files on InterCom and its subsidiaries. Not that Tegan minded particularly, she wanted to help. It was just that her numerous elementary errors had obviously convinced the dashing young Sergeant Milligan that she was a feeble-minded banana. She could tell that he was thinking what the hell is the Doctor playing at? Doing all his kooky intergalactic stuff with this Australian airhead?
Her computer bleeped at her once more and Tegan blushed. Her eyes, briefly, made contact with Milligan again.
‘OK over there?’
‘Couldn’t be better,’ she said through gritted teeth. He thinks you’re a dun-derhead. ‘Err . . . How do I get out of this page?’ A complete jelly-brained nincompoop!
‘Escape key. Top left-hand side of the keyboard.’
‘Thanks.’ A gormless drongo! ‘Sorry.’ Oh, for God’s sake, get a grip, you prawn! ‘Got it,’ said Tegan, triumphantly as the page scrolled forward on to the next file, a newspaper report on the InterCom subsidiary Gathercole and Truslove PLC.
‘You got a headache yet?’ asked Milligan.
‘Not half. You?’
‘For the last twenty minutes,’ he grinned. ‘Want to take a break?’
There was a canteen on the fourth floor with a view of the Capitol Records building and the Hollywood Bowl beyond.
‘Aren’t you going to ask what a nice English guy like me is doing in a place like this?’ asked David Milligan, lighting a cigarette as Tegan poured milk into her coffee. He was small, but could obviously handle himself. Tegan sensed that his humour was a defensive barrier of some kind, though she couldn’t quite work out what it was protecting. Or why. He seemed to be about the most balanced and sane UNIT person she’d ever met.
‘Any reason why I should?’ she asked.
‘No. I’m just dying for someone to!’ Milligan said. ‘I drive every visitor we get over here and no one ever asks, “So, how’d you end up in LA?”’
‘So how’d you end up in LA?!’
‘Funny story actually,’ began Milligan with a smirk. ‘It involves a woman . . . ’
‘As is usually the case,’ said Tegan. ‘Tell me something, how did InterCom manage to get so powerful so quickly? Didn’t anybody do anything to stop them?’
74
‘That’s a funny story too. It wasn’t in anybody’s interest to get in their way.
They were providing cutting-edge technology for very low prices. InterCom gave everybody what they wanted. Anything that could be viewed, or read, or played with. With the Chinese getting interested in space in such a big way, it was to the West’s advantage to have a company that also had its sights set on outer space. Even if it was just to throw up more satellites that could beam back more of their crappy TV shows to more and more countries. It’s called cultural imperialism and we’ve had a gutfull of it these last few years. It was only once InterCom had a worldwide monopoly that people began to realise the dangers involved in a company that runs everything.’
Tegan was horrified. But she knew her history, however much time travel tried to mess it up for her. ‘What about International Electromatics?’ she asked. ‘You’d think people would have learned lessons from that.’
‘Sadly, some lessons have to be learned twice,’ said Milligan.
The Doctor and Tyrone arrived back at UNIT headquarters moments later.
The building was a nondescript five-storey office block above a video store and a 7-11 and could be entered through little doors hidden behind a metal pull-down shutter in the back alley off Melrose Avenue.
‘We haven’t had to change location in twenty years.’ noted Tyrone. ‘The crack dealers keep any butt-ins away. Nice bit of serendipity that we couldn’t have arranged if we’d tried.’
Inside, a spiral staircase led to an impressively spacious second-floor reception and an implausibly tall young woman