Part 6 (1/2)

Sam adjusted her scowl by a millimetre or two, then followed the Doctor. She threw the book over her shoulder as she walked, leaving it lying in the middle of the pa.s.sageway. She had a suspicion that the Doctor's pockets would be able to grow another copy at a moment's notice, if they needed to.

Homunculette poured himself another gla.s.s of whatever it was in the bottle. He wasn't sure how much of the stuff he'd drunk, but he was still in control of all his facilities. Predictably.

'Can't get drunk,' he said. 'I'm d.a.m.ned if I'm not going to try, though.' He turned to the woman sitting at the bar next to him. 'Have you been to Simia KK98, ever?'

Sheepishly, the woman shook her head.

'No. And you know why, don't you? Because you're human, that's why. Too stupid to go anywhere.' He started sloos.h.i.+ng the stuff around in his gla.s.s, trying to make the clots of green go away. On KK98, his House had spent whole months like this. Sealed into the silos under the permafrost, waiting for the enemy probes to finish scanning the surface. His entire House. Doing their best to get drunk, or to go mad, or to do anything that'd stop them thinking for a while. Other species had it easy. Other species weren't alcohol-immune. Humans would have been able to drink themselves blind in the darkness, singing songs of affectionate comrades.h.i.+p and making jokes that wouldn't have been funny to anyone on this side of the consciousness threshold.

The human woman wrinkled her nose. Homunculette wondered if she was sniffing at the stuff in the gla.s.s, or at the stuff on his suit. He didn't much care. Her problem, not his.

Unless you counted the s.h.i.+ft, which Homuculette didn't, there was only one other person in the c.o.c.ktail lounge. The male human, Colonel something. Homunculette thought about the officers in the Time Lord Last Wave, the old men who'd force-regenerated themselves until their skins had been covered in black organic blast-proofing. Then he thought about the fat idiot in the green s.h.i.+rt, sitting at a table at the back of the lounge, staring into s.p.a.ce. The contrast was almost laughable.

The c.o.c.ktail lounge was yet another stone-walled room near the heart of the ziggurat, this one fitted with a bar and more drinks cabinets than Homunculette could be bothered counting. The furnis.h.i.+ngs didn't match the style of the architecture, here. Even if you were in the middle of the Unthinkable City, Qixotl had said, a c.o.c.ktail lounge had to look like a c.o.c.ktail lounge. There were some laws of the universe that just couldn't be broken.

The human woman nervously s.h.i.+fted her backside around on her fake wooden bar stool. 'It's kind of interesting,' she said, obviously forcing herself to make polite conversation. 'The way you drink. You look very... human. Uhh. Or is that an insult where you come from?'

'What do you you think?' Homunculette slurred. think?' Homunculette slurred.

'No, but really, what I meant was... oh, G.o.d G.o.d.'

Something had distracted the woman, had made her look towards the doorway. Homunculette thought about turning to see what she was gawping at. He spent a few moments wondering if it was worth the bother. In the end, he decided that even if it wasn't worth the bother, he'd enjoy complaining about having to make the effort. So he turned.

And spilled his drink.

There were two people standing in the doorway. Something moved around in Homunculette's bowels, the result of a deep-rooted atavistic terror as old as civilisation itself. He felt a wave of interest ripple across the chamber, the s.h.i.+ft's way of p.r.i.c.king up its ears.

The female newcomer lifted her veil, and removed the mask she wore beneath the fabric. It was real bone, Homunculette realised, the front half of a genuine skull. The face under the mask was young, unquestionably human. The woman was in her twenties, her cheekbones sharp triangles under a layer of pale white skin. Red hair was drawn back across her forehead and tied behind her neck. Her eyes were soft, wide, green. Her features weren't as harsh as you'd expect for someone who walked around dressed as a dead bat. To Homunculette, she looked more like a child than anything else. Ready to believe whatever fairy stories she liked the sound of.

'Good afternoon,' she said, politely. Her voice was soft. Cultured. 'My family name is Cousin Justine. This is Little Brother Manjuele. The Spirits are with us, and we hope you'll behave accordingly.'

The security centre was, logically, the best-defended part of the ziggurat; from here, you could shut off all the City's defences, including the ones around the Relic. Mr Qixotl knew hoped, anyway the systems would be homing in on him as he shuffled towards the chamber, taking the appropriate biological samples. As always, he experienced a moment of pure paranoia at the doorway of the room, and thought about what might happen if the defences didn't recognise him for some reason. Nothing tried to rip his head off as he stepped through the doorway, though, so he calmed down a bit.

He'd been in Trask's room when the alarms had sounded. He'd been able to hear the toucans, even from the depths of the ziggurat, screeching their parson's noses off out in the forest. Trask had kept talking, regardless.

Mr Qixotl. I have an offer. A personal offer. To make. To you.

Qixotl should have broken off the conversation right there and then, should have scurried off to check the defences. But it was hard, getting away from Trask. Yeah, sure, he made you feel like every living cell in your body wanted to be on the other side of the planet, but when it came to making your muscles move... when you were around Trask, the atmosphere always felt kind of sticky, like the air had died and putrefied in his presence.

Better this way. In private. A private meeting.

So Qixotl had stood there, like a great fat dead thing, watching Trask's jaw bobbing up and down until he'd finished his spiel. He still hadn't got to grips with the deal Trask had suggested. Most of the bidders would be offering technology, weapons data, information, but Trask...

Qixotl. Think. Think about this. Very carefully.

The security centre was, like every other room in the ziggurat, made out of mathematically replicated stone. But the other areas were built for the comfort and convenience of the guests, whereas the security centre was designed to be as repulsive as possible. Currents of cold air swept around the walls, pumped into the chamber through hidden ventilation shafts, the oxygen laced with negative ions, so you felt like there were things crawling over your skin all the time. Bronze gargoyles squatted in the corners, making disgusting rasping noises and breathing out noxious fumes. The room was hung with tapestries, too, depicting various scenes of degradation, mutilation, and humanoid sacrifice. Mr Qixotl had programmed the fibres to move about when they knew no one was looking, so the eyes didn't so much follow you around the room as keep looking over your shoulder in a ”behind you!” kind of way.

In the centre of the chamber was the master console. It looked seriously out of place here, 100 per cent state-of-the-art designer hardware, too complex to disguise as a chunk of stone. Mr Qixotl shambled across to the controls, and tapped his foot impatiently as a customised pixscreen began to rise from the surface of the console. The pixscreen gave him the low-down. Something had materialised near the City wall, in resonance with the Brigadoon circuit. Two biological units had left the capsule, and they'd been pursued by the leopards for several minutes before...

Before they'd simply stopped registering. According to the pixscreen, they no longer showed up on the security scan. At least, not as intruders. Mr Qixotl's toes stopped tapping. Outside, the toucans weren't screaming any more. If the intruders had been killed, their bodies would still have registered as alien biodata. Even if the leopards had eaten them, there'd be some kind of trace.

The pixscreen was non-reflective, which was a pity, as Mr Qixotl was quite interested in knowing whether he'd actually gone pale.

His fingers flew across the console, coaxing and cajoling the controls until the pixscreen gave him a visual representation of the biodata inside the security system. The invite cards had been designed to take surface traces from the bidders and transmit the information back to the City's datacore, so the biodata of all those who should have been attending the auction was kept in memory. Qixotl watched the information waltz across the screen. Most of the biodata was human. The two UNISYC reps, the Faction Paradox people (human-plus), Homunculette (human-plus-plus-plus-plus)...

There were two unfamiliar traces on the screen. Mr Qixotl felt his body temperature drop by a good ten degrees. n.o.body should have been able to insert new data into the works, not that quickly. To do something like that, you'd need to be biodata ultra-aware. Even a Time Lord wouldn't have been able to manage it. Well, a Time Lord President, maybe, someone who'd worn the Sash of Ra.s.silon and fingered the Great Key, but apart from that...

Oh no.

Not him. Please.

One of the two alien biodata readings was human. Qixotl knew this only because it was so similar to the UNISYC readings. The second trace was different.

He knew that trace. He'd seen it before. The last time he'd seen it, it had been more erratic, a more complex pattern, but there was no mistaking it.

'Him,' Qixotl said, and his voice echoed around the walls of the chamber, becoming a series of hideous slippery noises. 'It's him. It's him him.'

Faction Paradox shouldn't have been on Earth. Come to think of it, Faction Paradox shouldn't have been anywhere, really.

Somewhere in the back of the Doctor's cerebellum, automatic processes were listening out for Sam's footsteps. She was still there, somewhere behind him in the corridor. Nothing to worry about, then, not yet. The rest of his mind could concentrate on more important...

No.

...on more critical matters.

Back on Gallifrey, in the days when the skies had been the kind of orange you only ever seem to get in childhood memories, the Spirits of the Faction had been numbered among Time's bogeymen, like Ra.s.silon's Mimic or the Great Vampires. Now he'd run into them, twice, within a couple of decades. Twice in two regenerations.

Perhaps it was sheer chance. Or perhaps something had happened to the universe, something so large you couldn't spot it from down here at ground level. Some great cataclysmic event, scattering the Faction's agents across the continuum. The Doctor imagined them infiltrating the whole of history, even infiltrating his own past. Reshaping the timelines so that he kept running into them, time and time again.

Did he have the same history he woke up with, he wondered? Had he ever met the General, before today, or had the man been slotted into his life while he'd been asleep?

Had Sam been here, yesterday?

Had he he been here? been here?

Maybe fourdimensional voodoo-cults were like buses. You waited all eternity for one, and then... the Doctor shook his head, forced himself to concentrate on the matter in hand. No time for flippancy. He still had to work out what was happening here in the twenty-first century. The City wasn't the Faction's work. If the cult had designed the ziggurat, it would have been covered in dried blood and screaming skulls.

The Doctor's automatic processes told him to stop walking. He did as the processes told him, and listened. Consciously, this time. Sam was still trotting along behind him, so obviously, something else had alerted his senses. What?

The Doctor turned. To the left. Acting on instinct.