Doctor Who: Transit (5 page)

'Doberman,' said Lambada disgustedly.

Blondie found something protruding from the blue.

'What's this?'

Lambada had a look. 'Portable comms link.'

'Did someone drop it?'

Lambada and Dogface exchanged worried looks. 'Blondie,' said Lambada, 'it's an internal unit. It's implanted and runs parallel to the spinal column.'

Under the skin.

'What is this stuff?' asked Dogface.

'I don't know,' said Lambada.

'Look at the splatter patterns, they all radiated from the gateway.'

'As if something came through and ...' Lambada made
a
sweeping motion with her hands. They ended up looking into the entrance gateway to the Central Line extension.

'Yeah,' said Dogface, 'but why blue?'

'I don't know.'

'I don't get it,' said Blondie. 'Where is everyone, where's the President?'

'I think we're standing in them,' said Dogface.

Translonian

The Worthing-Le Havre branch line was operating close to normal so Kadiatu and the Doctor rode the train to Caen and changed on to the Fracais-Sardegna Feeder. People were riding the long blue commuter trains and Kadiatu began to feel normal again. The Doctor was quiet all the way to Porto Torres, which at least gave her a good ten minutes' thinking time. Not that she thought of anything much.

'Where are we now?' asked the Doctor.

'Sardinia.'

'Really?'

'Yes.'

'How extraordinary,' said the Doctor. 'Where are we going now?'

'We're going to ride the Connection.'

The Translonian should have been a feeder route, shiny blue trains should have shuttled commuters from the sea cities of the Ionian sea, but the floating cities were never built, just the anchor points and the transit stations underneath. Now it was good for nothing except a slow crawl to Athinai. Whatever had swept through Kings Cross wasn't going to travel this line. Only dealers and punters rode the Connection.

An ancient Korean single-carriage train was waiting with its doors open. Green paint peeled off the superstructure, its windows were opaque with dirt, the inside smelt strongly of sweat and urine.

Kadiatu warned the Doctor not to sit down.

At the rear of the compartment a filthy bundle of rags unfolded, and yellow eyes glared at them from under a leather slouch hat.

'Who's that?' asked the Doctor.

'That's the conductor.'

The conductor grunted in their direction before shambling over to the open doorway. When he leaned out Kadiatu caught a glimpse of gunmetal blue slung beneath his jacket.

'Anymore for anymore,' shouted the conductor.

Satisfied that no one else was boarding, the conductor collapsed back into his seat. The doors closed with a wheeze of ageing hydraulics and the train lurched off towards the gateway. There was a jolt as the carriage penetrated the interface, shafts of light strobed through the imperfect shielding. The seats were too sticky to sit on, so Kadiatu and the Doctor hung on to the straps against the train's erratic motion.

'First stop,' called the conductor from the back. 'Women's clothing, lingerie, pharmaceuticals.'

The train slowed as it entered the first station but it didn't stop. Instead the doors cranked open on override as they coasted slowly through. On the platform crowds of people milled around stalls and bundles of merchandise. The smell of cheap perfume wafted inside the carriage. A woman jumped nimbly onboard near the front of the carriage, and somebody on the platform started throwing bundles of cloth which she caught. By the end of the station she had a small pile stacked on the seats beside her. There was another jolt, the doors closed and they were in the tunnel again. The woman looked over at Kadiatu and the Doctor but didn't say anything. That was the cardinal rule of the connection - no business on the train.

'Second stop,' called the conductor. 'Sporting goods and leisurewear.'

Again the train coasted through a station with its doors jammed open. This time two Vriks jumped on, a boy and a giri high-caste Brahmin types with short black hair and grey eyes The girl stacked her long board along the seats, the boy kepi hold of his beatbox, hefting it like a weapon.

'Who are they?' asked the Doctor.

'Free surfers,' said Kadiatu. The Doctor must really be outsystem not to know that. 'What's the matter,' she called to the Vriks, 'cracked board or has the music stopped work ing?'

The girl snarled at Kadiatu who kissed her teeth in return.

'Manners,' said the Doctor to no one in particular.

The Vriks grabbed their straps as the train lurched off into the next tunnel. The Vriks had wild eyes from too muct unshielded transit, the rich kid's lifestyle, live fast and die flat against an oncoming train.

'Third stop,' called the conductor. 'Catamites, courtesans and computer processing.'

'Time to get off,' Kadiatu told the Doctor as the doors opened. With a brief wave at the Vriks she jumped from the carriage. She came down harder than she meant and stumbled; behind her the Doctor landed on the platform like a cat.

There were no stalls set up on the station platform, instead flickering holograms above the exits pulled at the eye. Looking at them made Kadiatu feel hot and bothered. Probably packed with subliminals, thought Kadiatu and glanced back to see how the Doctor was doing. He'd stopped to look at one of the holograms. It showed a woman in abbreviated Ice-Warrior armour chained against a wall of folded neon. The thrust of her hips promised aggression and imminent violation. 'Ice Maiden's' famous logo, the iconography of the thousand days war. The Doctor's face was intent as he examined the hologram, not aroused, merely curious as if the writhing figure was an anthropological exhibit.

'What about love?' said the Doctor.

What about love? Love was a black rose and a missing moneypen, a rip off waiting for you to drop your guard.

'Sex and death are pretty close. I guess,' said Kadiatu.

'Only in humans,' said the Doctor.

Ice Maiden's entrance was through the far exit and up a ramp. At the door a joyboy in leather skintights stood in their way. 'Buying or selling?' he asked.

'What do you think?'

The joyboy nodded at the Doctor. 'What about Daddy?'

'Who knows?' said Kadiatu and walked past.

The original Ice Maiden had been an R&R stop in Jacksonville - halfway up Olympus
Mons.
A good place for the grunts to chill out after their duty tours in the chaotic terrain and shrieking winds of the Valles Marineris. And Francine, who'd done two and a half tours with the 31st, had recreated it under the ocean, right down to the puff concrete walls and rusty blast doors.

'Interesting place for a drink,' said the Doctor.

'Not here,' said Kadiatu, 'Drinks later, business first.'

Behind the bar was a big woman, almost as tall as Kadiatu and dressed in the same stylized Ice-Warrior gear as the joyboy outside. 'Tasteless,' said the Doctor.

'Where's Francine?' Kadiatu asked the woman.

'Who wants to know?'

'A friend of the family.'

'I didn't know that Francine had a family.'

'That's why you're working the bar,' said Kadiatu, 'and I'm asking the questions.'

The antechamber round the back had a gun hanging from the ceiling like a chandelier. It was an electric autogun, a cluster of rotating barrels suspended on a gimbled stanchion. An unnecessary mass of pressure leads at the top hissed as the gun tracked Kadiatu and the Doctor around the room. Francine could have installed hidden lasers in the light fittings, but she wanted her visitors to know that they were under her sights. The gun was a fashion statement.

A door opened in the far wall.

Kadiatu told the Doctor to stay where he was and went in. Francine was lying with her eyes closed on a divan in the centre of the room.

'Hallo, Aunty,' said Kadiatu.

The mobile half of Francine's face formed into a smile.

'Kadiatu,' she said, 'you got big.'

Kadiatu knelt down by the divan and put her arms around the old woman. Francine caught hold other braids and playfully shook her head. 'I suppose it was bound to happen,' her hand traced the contours of Kadiatu's face, 'still got your daddy's nose though.'

The angel Francine.

Falling from orbit with the thin Martian air screaming across her wings. Terminal dives into the twisting canyons of the Noctis Labyrinthus with a bellyful of tactical nukes. Knitted into the cockpit, her mind blitzed on Dobennan and Heinkel the air turbulence lit up like neon, doing the missions too dumb for the smart weapons.

Lost it in the east over the Gangis Chasma, shaking apart in the grip of a pop-up cannon - one of those little oversights by military intelligence. Francine fighting all the way down to the dunes, the violet sky whirling around her. Dying amidst her broken wings of carbon fibre.

It was Kadiatu's father that pulled her out, holding the LZ clear for a swift medevac back to the world. Riding up on the running board, so the story went, bagging Greenies all the way.

Francine opened white marble eyes and looked at Kadiatu.

'Who's the man?'

Rumour said that Francine's eyes were coded into the high ultraviolet and low infrared, nothing in the visible spectrum at all. Kadiatu wondered what it was like living in the world of the invisible.

'Calls himself the Doctor,' said Kadiatu.

'He the problem?'

'No.'

'Money trouble?'

Kadiatu told Francine about the deal with Max, about the moneypen gone missing in a park outside the Forbidden City. 'You want this Blondie bagged?' asked Francine. Kadiatu hoped she was joking and said no, she'd take care of that herself. Francine offered some walking-around money and promised to put a trace on the moneypen.

As Kadiatu was leaving Francine said one more thing. 'You might ask your friend what he needs two hearts for?'

The Stop

I'm not going to do that again, thought Benny, whatever it was that I did. She was unwilling to move her head just yet, above her a shaft three metres across vanished upwards into the gloom. It was lit by a single strip of xenon lighting that tinted the walls the colour of ancient gunmetal. Half way up, the xenon strip was broken by a rectangular shadow. Facing it on the other side of the shaft was an identical door-shaped hole. Even from where she was lying Benny could see that the edges of both holes were razor clean, the kind of cut a force field makes. They were two, maybe two and half metres tall, about a metre wide and at least twenty metres up the shaft.

It was a long way to fall.

A fall like that would break your back, grind your vertebrae flat, shatter ribs. The absence of pain scared her, it indicated such a massive trauma as to put the whole body into shock. Better to breathe shallow and wait for help.

Waiting for help, like the shelter, packed in with the stink of vomit, urine and fear. The small children screaming in terror as the lights went out. Benny pressed up against the porthole, the silhouette of her mother burnt on to her retina, bright rainbow flashes as the radiation conflicted with the shelter's preservation field. An adult voice behind her called out the survivor statistics on the deep transmitter. 'Shallow breathing exercise, children,' said teacher from somewhere near the back, 'help's coming.'

Benny moved, she didn't believe in teacher no more.

There was no pain as she got up but when she ran a hand down her side to check for broken ribs her skin felt dry and cracked. She picked at a flap just above her hip and a long strip peeled away, an oily purple under the xenon lights. Not her skin then, but something that she'd been coated in, perhaps during the cave in. Her coverall was missing its sleeves and most of the back. What was left was glued to her skin.

Benny looked up the shaft at the rectangular hole above and tried to remember which antique tribe used to paint themselves blue.

She realised that she was standing in an inverted T-junction, horizontal shafts leading off to the left and right. The same concrete walls, inset conduits and xenon strips as the shaft above her.

Concrete walls, she thought. Not a station then, a planet or an asteroid base - the shafts had the look of service tunnels, lighting strips with hard edges, not the diffusion units she was used to. An old-fashioned style, someone had mentioned time travel but how far back?

She remembered a series of boxes within boxes, infinity nesting within the finite, a control room that seemed almost a parody of technology. A figure standing at a console. It too was transdimensional - something monstrous crammed down into a parody of human flesh.

The light came down on her from above, brilliant and ecstatic. The weight of it pressed her down on to her knees. Benny felt as if the light shone right through her like an x-ray laser, heating up her insides and making silhouettes of her bones.

And all the children were there, from the shelter and the long dorm at the academy. Faces as yellowed as the ancient porcelain of the doll that was centrepiece of the trophy cabinet. All those fit young bodies running into the forest, clean limbs and bright eyes waiting for her, waiting for the airburst and the butcher's knife.

Again Benny came out, still standing beneath the shaft, the cold still making the floor vibrate beneath her feet. She felt awfully alone, a deep mammalian need for human contact, for warm skin and the sweet wash of pheremones. Homesick for night-time in the long dorm with the murmur of sleeping children.

Maybe time travel fucks with your mind, thought Benny.

Piraievs

Rain fell on the pitted tarmac of the Akti Miaoulis, it rattled off the rusting steel of the ferries that listed in the grey water of the harbour. A party of archaeologists ran past the tavema, holding sheets of newsfax above their heads to keep the rain off. Kadiatu watched them splashing through the puddles towards the derelict customs house.

'We were talking,' said the Doctor, 'about the meaning of life.' He pushed a square of feta cheese around his plate. They were sitting out on the tavema's veranda which gave them an unequalled view of the crumbling docks. Rain drummed on the thatched roof overhead.