Doctor Who_ The Room With No Doors - Kate Orman [74]
Gufuu-sama sat on a stool at the centre of his troops. The warlord gazed out across the plain, silently, his face hidden inside his helmet. He had not moved for hours, not even when scouts and messengers rode or ran up and bowed, delivering their observations of the enemy.
Gufuu hadn’t even moved when Umemi’s army had come into view, troops slowly appearing above a ridge at the opposite end of the plain. The soldiers were the same, the marksmen quietly watching the enemy, the samurai absolutely still in their saddles. He envied them their calm. It was almost as though they didn’t care – no, that wasn’t it at all. Their backs were rigid, their bodies poised for instant action. They were focused, so focused they weren’t thinking about anything but here and now, not death or consequences.
Joel’s heart was hammering. He didn’t want to be here. Not in the middle of these soldiers, on the verge of a battle, in Japan, in the sixteenth century.
This wasn’t what he had planned. But then, he hadn’t planned anything, had he? He’d just got this great idea about making his little mark in history, and jumped in feet first.
147
He thought of all those half-finished projects sitting around on his computer. The fanzines that had never got to issue one, the Professor X: The New Adventures submission he’d been mucking around with for two years. All the unanswered e-mail that was never going to be answered.
It was too late to turn back now.
Maybe there wouldn’t be a battle. Maybe there’d be nothing to fight over.
Maybe the pod was already taken care of. Maybe they’d all see sense, that there wasn’t any need to fight, that it would be a senseless waste of human life.
‘Maybe,’ said Joel out loud, ‘monkeys will fly out of my butt.’
The two samurai on either side of him turned to look at him. He shrank down in the saddle and wished he was dead. Figuratively speaking, of course.
Chris waited half an hour to make sure he was alone again.
Penelope had gone to the monastery. He hoped. He’d tried to talk her out of using the time machine, but she’d been so certain she knew how to make it do what she wanted. . . when she’d turned into a Picasso woman, with two surprised eyes on the one side of her face, arms reaching into nothing he could do. Either she had been right, or she was trapped in the fourth dimension, or she was smeared across space-time like a distorted painting, and there he couldn’t help her.
Talker had shrugged, squawked and flown off. It was time for her to bring the Kapteynians back together.
Chris reached into the cart and grabbed the collapsible shovel. He’d had a bad moment when Penelope had started to rummage through her store of adventuring equipment, but she hadn’t noticed the fresh dirt. He’d knocked as much of it off as he could, but you couldn’t disguise that rain-garden soil smell.
He straightened the shovel out, and went to check on the pod. He had dragged it thirty metres through the undergrowth, turning back to try to cover his tracks, sweeping the leaves around with his hands. Then he’d moved the cab to another clearing.
It wasn’t that well disguised, a big mound of dirt and leaves; there hadn’t been time to dig more than a few feet deep. Still, it wouldn’t be visible from above, and you’d have to decide to search the forest to find it. No one knew where the thing was, except him.
He’d done it. He hadn’t got it into the monastery, but it was safe for now, and no one could find it.
Chris followed the trail he’d created in his mind. The big pine, with a chunk missing where he’d whacked it with the shovel. The oddly shaped stone.
The pod was quietly digging its way out of the ground.
148
Chris gawped at it. Little chunks of dirt were leaping up into the air at irregular intervals. There was already a line of dirt around the shape of the pod, like a bath ring.
For a moment he expected something to come clawing up out of the earth, like a vampire out of its coffin, knocking the lid free and digging its way towards the light. Towards him.
He took a few, hesitant steps towards it.