Part 18 (1/2)

He turned back to the Doctor.

'Now would be a convenient time to go to warp.'

136.

The Doctor looked startled. 'Oh,' he said. 'It's fixed, we can go any time you want.'

137.

Interlude March to April 2982 Dhaulagiri, Nepal 2 March 2982 The mountains made Thandiwe think of home. Mama said they used to be covered in snow, all year round. She tried to imagine it, white Earth snow like fluffy water, covering all the rock.

Thandiwe stood on the bed in her room. They'd be going home tomorrow; Mama was staying up late, talking to the soldiers.

Usually when they went on trips, they stayed at the new place for longer. A week or even two weeks. But these days they went somewhere for just one night and one day, and Mama talked instead of skiing or buying things.

One of the soldiers, Joanna, had put Thandiwe to bed. The Fat Monster Eater was an irregular shape under the covers, keeping the bed warm. It was the only toy Thandiwe had been allowed to bring.

Outside was very dark. Thandiwe could trace the shapes of the mountains by where they poked up into the sky, hiding the stars.

There wasn't anything in her room, not even a terminal, just shelves and shelves of books.

She got back under the blankets with the Fat Monster Eater, which made a deep chuckling noise and cuddled up to her.

After lunch that day, Thandiwe had gone for a walk through the seminary (which was a school for priests), the Eater trailing along behind her like a big balloon. The 138 building was big and cold and quiet, and there weren't many people around.

Most of them were in a big hall she found. They were chanting, sitting cross-legged on the floor, talking very fast. She couldn't make out the words. It sounded like singing, like music. She watched them for a while, peeking over the top of the railing and looking down into the hall.

She tried climbing up on to the railings for a better look, but it made the Eater nervous, rolling around at her feet. It always did that when she did anything dangerous.

She hugged it, whispering. 'Don't worry. Let's go in here.' The Eater wobbled and bounced away across the floor into the new room.

It was a long hall, with a big table and lots of paintings around the walls. There were rooms like this at home. Thandiwe went up to one of the paintings. It showed a soldier from the old days, a woman in very heavy armour. The frame was incredibly fancy, gold and red and covered in squiggles and leaves. Thandiwe reached out to touch it, instinctively looking around.

Too late, she realized there was a woman in the room, getting a book down from a shelf. Thandiwe hid behind a chair, but the Fat Monster Eater was too big and round to hide. The woman looked at it in astonishment, and then her eyes found Thandiwe. 'h.e.l.lo there,' she said. She had coppery hair and wore the same simple green clothes as everyone else here.

'h.e.l.lo.' Thandiwe was aware of the Eater, snuggling up to her.

It was always nervous around new people.

'My name's Joanna. You must be Baroness Forrester's little girl. You've been exploring, have you?'

'Yes.' There was writing under the portrait, a short sentence in a language that Thandiwe didn't recognize. 'What's that?' she asked.

'It's a saying of the first Brigadier,' said Joanna. 'One of the nineteen calls to action.'

'I can't read it.'

'I'm not surprised, it's in British, a sub-dialect of Ancient American.'

'What does it say?'

139.

'”Shoot the winged man with five quick bullets”.'

'What does it mean?'

'Ah,' said Joanna, 'I'm afraid that it rather depends on which school of interpretation you follow.' She held out her hand to Thandiwe. 'Would you like some tisane?'

'Yes please,' said Thandiwe. 'Will there be cakes?'

'I dare say cakes can be arranged.'

Joanna led Thandiwe to a large room she called the mess hall where there were tables and chairs. They chose a seat by a window so that they could look out over the broken grey shapes of the mountains.

Thandiwe took a cake and bit into it. She swallowed and said, 'Where are the priests?'

'We're all priests,' said Joanna.

'I thought you were soldiers.'

'We are. Unitatus soldiers think it's a good idea if we don't just know how to fight we should think about why we're fighting, too, and think about whether fighting's a good idea at all.'

Thandiwe nodded, taking a second cake. 'Mama said you were like an extra army, in case someone tried to attack Earth.'

'That's right. The Empress lets us keep our own fleet of s.h.i.+ps, and sometimes we fight alongside her army. Our mission is to protect Earth from alien invasions. Not that many of those happen these days... it's more likely to be Earth invading someone else's...' She trailed off. 'Good heavens,' she said, softly.

Thandiwe sat up in her seat. It was snowing. 'I thought it wasn't supposed to snow here,' she said.

Joanna looked back at her. Her eyes were big and round. 'It hasn't snowed here for over a century.'

'That's not snow,' said Thandiwe. 'Snow is yellow.'

Joanna looked back out of the window. 'This isn't sulphur snow, or whatever you've got on Io. It's real water snow. It's a miracle,' she breathed.

'No,' said Mama. They both looked around. She'd come into the mess hall while they'd been staring through the window.

There were more of the soldiers with her. 'This is no miracle. The 140 reclamation projects I've funded have the potential to restore this whole planet to its former state.'

Joanna had looked at her the same way she'd looked at the snow. Mama had said, 'Imagine that. The whole Earth, returned to its former splendour.'

It was hours later, and the snow was still coming down.

Thandiwe snuggled up to the Eater. She imagined the snow covering up all the rock like a big white blanket.

s.p.a.ceport Five Undertown 11 March 2982 Look for a garden, he'd been told, a garden in the forest.

The Reserve was a huge stretch of open land in the middle of s.p.a.ceport Five Undertown. Simon had a.s.sumed it was a city park, a patch of countryside restored using low-level terraforming techniques, but the tour guide said it had never been built over.

There weren't even walkways stretching overhead, just blue sky, truncated at the edges by the floating shapes of the city. It was like standing at the bottom of a well.