Doctor Who_ The Room With No Doors - Kate Orman [45]
‘We have a problem,’ said Chris. ‘The – we call it the pod, all right?’ Talker clacked her beak in a gesture that Chris had worked out was a yes. ‘The villagers don’t want to give up the pod. It’s healed people and it’s making their crops grow much faster than normal.’
Talker plucked an insect from her feathers and chewed on it, thoughtfully.
‘Must be something else,’ she said. ‘That pod couldn’t be doing it.’
‘So you do know what it is?’
‘Of course I know what it is, hairy. I know what it can do, which is nothing, so look somewhere else for your farmerbenefiting thing. Hei. Now listen.
On Kapteyn’s Star 5 there are sixty sentient species, plus. We birds are the negotiators and messengers between all those people. Hei. Talker-class birds the best of the lot. Top negotiators. Would’ve been here earlier except for surveillance drones.’
‘The flying heads,’ said Chris.
‘We don’t want to laserize huts, you don’t want us to be laserizing them, so give up the pod and we give you hairy folks something nice back, hei.’
‘Oh, do stop rabbiting on in that ludicrous pidgin,’ said one of the other birds.
‘Trade tongue is!’
‘You mean you don’t have to talk like that?’ said Chris.
‘Well, of course not,’ said Talker, ‘but the trade tongue’s limited vocabulary and simple structure has proven ideal for most interspecies communication.’
‘It, ah, sounded a little jumbled. My translator is handling this language much better.’
‘Right-oh,’ said Talker. ‘As I was saying, we’re experts in interspecies negotiation. If the villagers aren’t willing to give up the pod, we’ll trade for it. I take it you’re authorized to bargain on their behalf.’
‘Well, not exactly,’ said Chris. ‘But none of them have ever seen an alien before. Besides, I’m the one with the translator.’
90
‘You’re not from around here, are you?’ Talker looked at him sideways with a big crow eye. ‘I concluded as much when you neither attacked us nor ran away screaming.’
‘I don’t think we should start deciding what to do until we know a bit more about each other.’ It’d be nice if we could do our deciding after the Doctor gets back, he thought. Wonder how long I can stall them.
Talker pecked the ground. ‘All right,’ she said, at length. ‘We’ll tell you the whole story, if you’ll –’
They all looked up at the thunder sound. Hooves. Again. ‘Oh, no!’ said Chris, jumping up. ‘Not now!’
‘Don’t worry!’ said Talker, pulling down her helmet. ‘We’ll take care of them.’
‘No!’ said Chris. ‘They shouldn’t see you. We don’t want a fight!’ He grabbed Talker’s weapon as she was aiming it, and they struggled back and forth. She was far too strong for someone who looked like a giant chicken.
The samurai came out of the trees, then. A thousand of them. No, thought Chris, getting his brain back under control, probably about thirty. More than enough to pound the village into the ground.
One of the Kapteynians let loose an energy bolt. It ploughed into the front line of the attacking riders. Horses screamed and reared, and Chris caught a glimpse of a rider spinning wildly, flames shooting up from his banner.
Talker wrestled her gun out of Chris’s hands and bonked him on the head with the butt, not gently. ‘Stand aside, hair boy. We toast these primitives for you, watch and see, hei.’
It didn’t stop them. They came thundering across the fallow fields, roaring.
Towards the Kapteynians and their phased plasma rifles. Towards the village.
‘Oh, shit,’ said Chris.
Aka-san had put his son in charge of keeping an eye on the Doctor. Young Aoi was being very diligent about making sure his charge didn’t suddenly ride off.
Not that he could have slipped away quickly enough to avoid an arrow in the back.
They rode in formation across the plains, at a leisurely pace, banners flapping in the wind.
It wasn’t until they were fording a stream that Aoi got a chance to speak to the Doctor. The man – if he was a man – had been glowering for the entire journey, riding a little apart from the others.
‘Lord Doctor,’ said Aoi, as their horses splashed through the stream side by side, ‘how was it you