Doctor Who_ Transit - Ben Aaronovitch [88]
The canopy remained closed this time, Francine staying sealed up inside the cockpit.
The side hatch opened and the stirrup ladder unfolded. The Doctor gave Kadiatu a mocking little bow and waved her forward.
'A good rule in this business,' he said, 'is that when you make a plan, plan in depth.'
Olympus Mons West
Benny found herself slapping her pockets in the lift down to the concourse, discovering again that the book was gone. The book was important, she knew that, but the complex code had defeated her interpretation. Now she'd lost it to the Doctor. He was in possession of its secrets.
The impulse that led her to give Zimmy the book was unclear. The deception plan had been of her own devising; even if it didn't understand the danger posed by the Doctor, she had no illusions. Forcing the Doctor out of position had been her priority, not its. Yet the instinct that had propelled the action had come from somewhere outside, like her lapse in the cavern. It had just seemed vital to the deception that the Doctor was shown the book.
That implied that the Doctor knew about the book already.
Benny wished that she had deciphered the book first.
She wished she could stop thinking about it, it was giving her a migraine.
The interior of the lift interested her. Its technology was archaic, not just from her twenty-sixth century perspective but in terms of this century as well. They had force-field elevators elsewhere in the system, so why build a clumsy mechanical device like this? Technology plateaux were a well-known concept amongst historians and archaeologists, even those that had forged their accreditation. Over the millennia a wheel remained a round thing that spun on an axle, the materials with which it was constructed largely irrelevant.
On Terra she could understand it. On Terra the future built over, around and beneath the past. The Kremlin walls still stood in Moskva even in her time, albeit under a geodesic dome. Settlement on Mars couldn't be more than ten, twenty year-old. The lift with its bronze mirror with dragons engraved around the edges belonged to another time.
It was a conscious anachronism.
There was a tendency amongst academics to ignore the pre-expansionist period of terrestrial history. Sandwiched between the nuclear age and the first diaspora. It was a transitional period, difficult to study and so overlooked.
Archaeologists think in centuries, history to them is the slow accretion of dead things in the ground. The rise and fall of civilizations written in the strata of broken pottery. When one design of pot gives way to another the archaeologist says to herself, 'Transitional period,' and starts looking for contemporaneous earthquakes or invasions.
I'm in a transitional phase, thought Benny, and I'm doing things to history. I must remember to take notes.
There was a stab of pain in her left temple.
The doors opened and Benny stepped out on to the concourse. Two of the lifts to the left of her gaped open, the floor in from covered with streaks of crash foam. Air exposure had turned the foam a dirty white colour; here and there the foam showed splashes of pinky red.
Benny saw two plain-clothes policemen and a drone standing over the dead body of a woman. The front of her face had been smashed in with enough force to drive her jawbone through her neck. Benny was surprised; she'd expected the casualties to have been removed by now. Then the body flickered slightly and derezzed. It was only a crime-scene hologram, the detectives must have been using it to take ...
The pain was intense enough to blind her. She staggered and sensed movement towards her, attention turning in her direction, sympathy, concern, questions, paramedics, questions, just sit down here while I fetch someone who wants to ask you some questions.
She managed to pull herself upright by an act of will and walk on. The movement towards her stopped.