Part 17 (2/2)

He frowns. 'I need to find my TARDIS first. The equipment I'll need is inside. My s.p.a.ce-time s.h.i.+p. She's gone...' He's blinking, trying to stay awake. 'Can you help me find her?'

'Yes,' I say. 'I know what to look for. Go to sleep.'

'No,' he says. Suddenly he makes a sound, a sort of moan, as my fingertips brush down over his left shoulder.

Ghost pain. I take my hand away.

'Was that the past or the future?' he asks, breathlessly.

'You should sleep off that drug,' I tell him. 'When you wake up, you'll be fine.'

'No,' he says. He can't keep his eyes open. 'I don't want any dreams, no dreams.'

So I run the fingernail of my ring finger over his forehead, and the blackness and the silence wrap him up. No dreams.

13 Abduction Greys

Chris and Tony had been sent to ask at the police stations around the place, looking for their slightly odd 'foreign' friend, who might have lost her way while camping.

After three different lots of mildly bored police, they stumped glumly back to the car. The disguised Tzun sat in the pa.s.senger seat, hands primly folded in his lap, letting Chris drive.

'It's weird,' said the Adjudicator, as he pulled out onto the road with much more than his usual caution. 'You're better at faking the twentieth century than I am.'

'I still find the police intimidating,' admitted Tony. 'A bit hard to hurdle.'

'I didn't know whether to threaten violence or offer a bribe.'

'Sometimes I think it would be more straightforward if I switched off the hologram.' Tony's voice changed into a ridiculous buzz. 'Bow before me, Earthling sc.u.m, or I'll eat your heads!'

Chris broke up laughing. 'Don't do that in front of Roz,'

he said. The Tzun made a m.u.f.fled noise like a phone ringing.

'Hey, how'd you do that?'

Tony took out his communicator. 'h.e.l.lo? Yes?'

The voice at the other end was so faint they could barely hear it. 'It's Joel. I think I have an emergency here.'

'Where are you?' said Tony, speaking softly. The answer was indistinct. Chris spun the wheel, pulling over. Cars flashed past them in the murky afternoon as they strained to hear.

'Woods near Greenham.' Joel was whispering. Tony was operating controls on the communicator to try to get a fix on him. 'Two soldiers. Helicopter. I'm hiding.'

'Stay there,' said Tony. 'We'll come and get you.'

'Should we get reinforcements?' said Chris.

Tony pulled the map out of the glovebox. 'He's right about here here. We have to beat them to him.'

'Right you are,' said Chris, turning the key. Gravel sprayed out from the tyres as they pulled back out onto the road. The Adjudicator floored it.

'Oh dear,' said Tony.

Roz sat on a folding stool, irked.

There were a number of irksome things in her immediate vicinity. She kept herself amused by listing them. Firstly, there was the miserable weather. Secondly, there was the appalling cheerfulness of the women who were trying to live in a bunch of tents in said weather. Thirdly, there was said women's gruesome dedication to peace, non-violence, colourful artwork, a better world, and smiling when they were up to their ankles in freezing mud.

This was the third camp they'd visited. A woman and her young daughter were making a banner. They laughed, splas.h.i.+ng paint over the long strip of cloth. Jacqui and Ms Randrianasolo were chatting with a couple of women. It was all women. Roz supposed there was a sort of strange balance there. Women outside the fence with the tents, men inside with the guns.

A car drove up to the camp. Two women emerged and sloshed through the mud to where Jacqui and Ms Randrianasolo were talking to the others. Roz hoped that in between the chitchat they remembered to ask about Ia Jareshth.

Plus ca change. She'd arrested protesters at Subport Eight who had sat down around polaric VTOL craft so they couldn't take off without killing the crowd. She'd held back crowds of Undercity rabble who'd been protesting the genetic damage they said was done by the city's gravity beams.

Shame she couldn't tell the cheerful women that ten centuries from now it'd still be the same, with the state doing whatever it liked and nearly everyone going along with it.

That ought to take the rosiness out of their cheeks.

'Hey, Roz,' said Ms Randrianasolo. 'You ought to hear this.'

Roz got up and walked carefully through the muddy gra.s.s. 'We just had a right scare,' said one of the newcomers, a little old lady with huge gla.s.ses, starting her anecdote over again. 'We were in the Cooked Goose, trying to get some service, when a couple of soldiers marched in and asked where the ”troublemakers” were. We just about fainted. Anyway, it wasn't us they were after. It was a couple of punks who'd been running around yelling.'

'Punks,' said Roz.

'You should have seen one of them. He'd done something to his eyes. All sparkly they were, like red tinsel.'

Ms Randrianasolo gave Roz a meaningful look. 'Anyway, the soldiers took them away, but they gave them a terrible knocking around first. I've never seen people panic like that in my seventy-two years.'

'I think I might make a phone call,' said Roz.

'There's no phone box,' said the old woman. 'Unless you want to pop round and borrow the phone in the sentry box.'

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