Doctor Who_ Transit - Ben Aaronovitch [67]
'There were some power outages in the peripheral sectors.'
'Peripheral? Like Pluto?'
'Yeah, Pluto, but we thought it was a calibration problem.'
'I knew it,' said the Doctor. 'Penetration, concealment and infiltration, typical virus programming.'
'Except that was before all this happened,' said Blondie.
The Doctor stared at him and Blondie started in his seat. For a second he thought the Doctor's irises turned solid black, the pupils snapping open and shut like tiny mechanical cameras.
'Come on,' he said getting up, 'I've overlooked something.'
'I haven't finished eating,' said Kadiatu.
'The basement extended under the whole house and was lit with more of the illegal low-efficiency bulbs. Foundation walls divided the space into discrete sections and the ceiling was low enough to make Kadiatu stoop. Blondie could smell dust and slow decay. One of the sections was lined with a wooden framework of diamond-shaped slots. Glass snouts poked out from one or two of the slots. One of them had a cardboard label attached to its neck with string. Blondie stopped and brushed away some cobwebs to read it. 'SOMEBODY PLEASE DRINK ME'. He pulled the dusty bottle out of its slot; a beige adhesive patch on the side was labelled 'Stinging nettle wine June 1976' in crabbed handwriting.
Blondie heard his name called from deeper into the basement. He carefully put the bottle back in its place. For Blondie wine came in two-litre cartons.
The next section of the basement was filled with stacks of rotting cardboard boxes, Kadiatu and the Doctor were trying to prise out a box that was so old the cardboard kept on coming apart in their hands. With Blondie's help they managed to pull it free. The Doctor ripped the rest of the cardboard away to reveal a one-metre satellite dish wrapped in polythene. To Blondie's eyes it was an absurdly expensive form of packaging. The dish had the word 'AMSTRAD' written across the inside.
'Does this mean we get to watch some television?' asked Kadiatu.
'No,' said the Doctor.
'Just a thought,' said Kadiatu.
Under the Doctor's direction they carried the dish into the garden and over to the ruined greenhouse. The Doctor had picked up a hundred metres of laminated fibre optics from somewhere and carried it out draped over his shoulder. A three-quarter moon gave off enough light to allow them to fix the dish on to one of the remaining cast iron struts.
'You two go to bed,' said the Doctor. 'You're going to need the rest.'
Blondie and Kadiatu walked back to the house leaving the Doctor uncoiling his cable in the moonlight.
Managona Depot (P-87)
Mariko was stuck with both forearms jammed into a pair of artificers. She could feel the tools inside their enveloping stomachs working as they reassembled her arms from the elbow down. She was glad she was being upgraded: it maintained her status as number one kreweboss and plugged a gap in the razvedka capabilities. The two artificers maintained a non-stop conversation while they worked, most of it incomprehensible, some of it possibly in machine code. They only stopped talking to swallow little bags of raw materials.
Naran lounged halfway up the opposite wall, his tongue snuffling around in the bottom of a cake box. Occasionally he would look at Mariko and roll his eyes. He was still upset at being left out of the last two operations. Since both had resulted in 100 per cent casualties on their side Mariko couldn't see the attraction herself. Perhaps he felt that he could have done better.
'Finished,' chorused the artificers.
Her arms came out of their bellies with a sucking sound, covered in rapidly drying mutagenic gel. One of the artificers politely vomited a stream of clean water so she could wash off.
'The weapon fires a four-millimetre explosive cartridge,' said the left-hand artificer. 'The barrel emerges through the palm."
Mariko flexed her right arm; there was a click followed by a loud bang. The right-hand artificer fell backwards with a half-metre hole in its chest.
'Whoops,' said Mariko.
'The flex impulse acts as the trigger,' said the remaining