Doctor Who_ Trading Futures - Lance Parkin [3]
‘Stay where you are,’ Cosgrove ordered.
The intruder did as he was told.
‘Are you armed?’ The helmet’s display had already given him the answer, but he liked to hear it from the intruder himself.
‘I have a glass of water. Well, not a glass. Plastic. I have a plastic of water.’
‘Hardly a weapon.’
‘Well… no. But it’s enough to overpower you. If that’s all right.’
Cosgrove laughed. ‘Turn around.’
The civilian did as he said.
‘If you’re going to overpower me, you have –’
‘Forty seconds,’ the computer supplied.
‘Forty seconds. You’d better hurry.’
The civilian smiled. ‘I thought you’d never ask.’
He tipped the water over Cosgrove’s shoulder, and ducked out the way as the lifejacket automatically inflated, splaying his arms, lodging him in the doorway.
‘Who sent you?’ Cosgrove shouted, trying to wriggle free.
The intruder looked at him thoughtfully, slipping some sort of tool from his pocket. ‘Who do you think?’
‘How did –’ he asked as the handcuff fell away from the briefcase handle.
The control panel started buzzing. The intruder stepped over to it, sat down in one of the remaining chairs, rested the briefcase in his lap.
‘Appalling layout,’ he said. ‘Nothing’s where you need it to be.’
‘You have to deactivate the self‐destruct. We’ll be killed.’
‘You’ll be safe in that lifejacket of yours.’
‘You won’t. You’ll be killed.’
The intruder shook his head.
He tugged at the control that fired his ejector seat, and launched into the night sky.
And he was waving goodbye, with a grin on his face, as he went.
* * *
A couple of grey‐haired lesbians were telling the people on the next table that they’d come to San Antonio every year since they were teenagers back in the nineties. An hour before, the cabaret singer had started singing Smack My Bitch Up and the other diners started cooing about the golden oldies and asking if anyone else remembered Compact Discs.
Welcome to the future, Anji Kapoor.
Before she had met the Doctor and she’d become a time traveller, Anji had been starting to feel a little old – she was twenty‐seven, she had a real career, her student loan was all but paid off, she was in a steady relationship, and Friday nights had come to mean Changing Rooms and Frasier. Now she was surrounded by people pushing pensionable age who she could have been to school with. People who still came to Ibiza on holiday, but who only popped vitamin pills. Or would do, if the EZ hadn’t banned them. Ecstasy, on the other hand, wasn’t just legal, it was on the restaurant’s dessert menu.
Before, when they’d landed in the future, it had almost always been the far future – on space colonies with flying cars and cyborgs. That was easy to cope with, it was just like being a character in a science‐fiction novel. But this was weird – she just had no idea if she was meant to feel very, very old or very, very young.
It was strange to think that her dinner companion was only a couple of years older than her, but also almost too old to be her dad. Fitz had been born before the Second World War, and the Doctor had picked him up in the nineteen‐sixties. His sense of time lag must be even more acute, he must find this place even more disturbing.
Anji looked up to see Fitz giggling at the menu.
Three hours or so ago, Anji had been impressed, too. After sitting them down, the waiter had handed them both what looked like a small piece of laminated card, but which had turned out to be some sort of liquid crystal screen with an interactive menu. If you tapped at it, it showed you pictures of the dishes, it gave you a detailed description, it showed you the ingredients and nutritional information, it even gave you a restaurant critic’s opinion. You could scroll off in any direction, and it never seemed to end.
A logical extension of technology. Anji was starting to piece together a bit of future history. She was a futures trader. It had been – still was? – her job to spot trends, see patterns. So, this menu was a step up from the Psion organiser