Doctor Who_ The Room With No Doors - Kate Orman [54]
The page brought me to one of the gardens – a dry garden, he said. It was just raked sand and rocks and moss. We waited there.
They’d tied the poor guy up and packed sandbags around him, with just his head sticking out. Thank God he had his back to us. I really don’t think I could’ve handled seeing his face.
Out comes Lord Gufuu with his brand-new sword, at which point I tried to make a hasty exit, only the page put his hand on my arm. Just firmly enough to let me know I wasn’t going anywhere.
Gufuu took the guy’s head off with one swing. No noise, just one swing, and I saw the guy’s head disappear off into a flower bed. Someone ran to get it before it could bleed on the irises. Which was bad enough. But then they 108
pulled what was left of him out of the sandbags, pegged it on a mound of dirt, and Gufuu chopped him into little bits.
When he was done, he wiped off the edge of the blade and checked it, turning it so it would catch the sunshine. At first, I thought he must really hate the guy. Then I realized he was just testing the sword some more, seeing if it could get through bone without getting nicked or scratched.
(It was a bit obvious, really – they wanted to impress on me the importance of loyalty, the punishment for failure, etc., etc. Dear diary, it bloody worked!!!) Thing is, I didn’t throw up. I was expecting to. I kept waiting to. When we first stopped in the garden, and it suddenly hit me – like a ton of bricks – what I was seeing, I felt my lunch heading in the general direction of my head.
But I didn’t throw up. I kept telling myself that I was back in history now, they did things differently here, that I had to get used to it. And it worked.
It’s getting too dark to see properly. I’m going to catch some Zs. More tomorrow.
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12
Alienation
Te Yene Rana couldn’t be bothered with holograms. As far as the Caxtarid was concerned, she looked close enough to human to pass for one, and if the primitives didn’t like her metallic red hair and eyes, that was their problem.
So she told herself. The truth was that she wasn’t properly equipped for a first-contact situation. So far she’d been mistaken for a foreigner, a demon and some kind of sex worker. Thanks. She was in a foul mood.
So she sulked in her room at the inn in Toshi town, using remote drones to gather information. Without the right equipment or reinforcements, with a suspected alien involvement, she had to play this very carefully.
One of her drones had been following the little expedition from Hekison village. She’d watched them all day, bored to death, eating raw fish – whole fish, not this sashimi nonsense – and waiting for them to arrive. Bring the damned thing to her. Thanks.
She was damned worried about those aliens now. The damned damned drones did not have damned translators built in; she had been trying to play back their recordings through her single translator unit, but the damned sound wasn’t good enough.
Besides, the drones were incredibly conspicuous. She had one open now, ripping its guts out, finding the essential bits so she could make a small, in-conspicuous, sound-only version, filtered through her translator.
She looked at the bug she’d created. Looked like a damned enormous fly.
She chucked it out of the window. The miniature drive cut in a moment before it hit the ground, and it bumbled off down the street, swatted at by a peasant as it buzzed past.
She’d left the thing enough vision to steer by. She sat at the unrolled moni-tor screen, directing it with one finger on a palm-sized, flat pad.
Soon enough she found them, conspicuous with their white skin and (foreign?) vehicle. She flew the clumsy bug along the wall of the building, trying not to bounce the little drone off the wooden planks, and parked it outside the 111
window of their room. On the second try. The first time, she eavesdropped on a conversation about Noh masks for ten minutes until she realized she had the wrong room.
The fly settled into place on the