Doctor Who: Transit (12 page)

'I'll bet.'

'And I doubt they understood more than one word in ten. Which is just as well.'

'Why?'

'Because what I actually said was "Make way! For I am the official keeper of the Emperor's penguins and I must hurry because his majesty's laundry basket is on fire." '

The platform was spotless. The few waiting passengers were clustered around a public-service TV at one end. It was tuned to one of the 24-hour Kabuki soap channels. It looked like a historical drama, Kadiatu caught glimpses of businessmen in black single-breasted suits striking attitudes in front of vast windows.

The indicator board at the far end of the station gave waiting times in Japanese characters, the regulation alphanumeric display was tucked away underneath. The next train was scheduled in five minutes.

They sat down to wait and Kadiatu opened up the paper bag and gouged out a handful of fufu. She offered the bag to the Doctor but he shook his head. Kadiatu kneaded the cassava dough into a sausage shape and dunked it in her fish soup. It was a bit too bland for her taste but you didn't expect that much from Kwik-Kurry.

The Doctor watched the TV, apparently absorbed in the unfolding drama of corporate infighting. A woman had entered the scene wearing heavy eye make-up, to identify herself as gaijin.

'What do you see in that?' asked Kadiatu.

'The principle of
Kanzen-choaku,'
said the Doctor, 'the reward of the virtuous and the punishment of the wicked.'

'Your eyesight must be better than mine.' Kadiatu pulled another lump of fufu from the bag.

'You eat a lot,' said the Doctor turning back to the TV.

'I get hungry a lot,' said Kadiatu, 'I suppose I've got a fast metabolism.' She reflexively glanced at the indicator board -the arrival time seemed to be stuck at five minutes. 'Why are we going to Pluto?'

'We have to rescue someone.'

'What makes you think they need rescuing?'

'Trust me.'

The Stop

Roberta was dead and the neighbourhood was on fire. The power grid had failed and with it the skylights. Main Street was coloured red and yellow by the light of burning shops.

Zamina stayed low, trying to pull Roberta's body to shelter A thick strata of black smoke had formed under the ceiling panels and visibility at street level was less than ten metres. She wondered how long it would take before the Stop's life support went into terminal crisis.

Zamina caught occasional glimpses of figures stalking through the haze. She didn't know if they were rioters or cops. There had been rumours earlier that troops were being sent but she hadn't seen any yet. She could hear the firecracker sound of gunfire in the distance.

Across the street was the bolthole Zamina had picked out.' It was the entrance to a Baptist orphanage. She dragged Roberta by the leg towards it. She couldn't bring herself to touch the woman anywhere near the chest. Who'd have thought that Roberta would be so heavy. Zamina had always envied that narrow waist and the thin legs. Elegant, Roberta said, not thin. Stupid to be trying to drag her off the street with that great sucking wound between her breasts. Plenty of others lying on the concrete, gangbangers, catfood monsters, looters, people dumb enough to be out when the cops opened fire.

Zamina flung herself down as something whispered overhead.

A three-metre-long drone painted red and yellow was swooping into position in front of a burning shop. A vent popped open at the rear and there was a rushing sound as air was sucked in. The smoke haze made Mandelbrot patterns behind the drone as it closed to lay bursts of freezing CO2 on the fire.

Zamina started to crawl again, pulling Roberta behind her. The first fire-drones to respond had been shot down by the gangs, if they were active in this area it meant that the riot had moved on. She was four metres from the orphanage when the second drone went overhead. This one was slightly larger and blue-coloured with Chinese characters painted on its underside. Like the first it arrived from the opposite direction to Lowell Station; their controllers must have been routing them in from the service tunnels that honeycombed the crust beneath the projects. The second drone took up a sentry position above and behind the first.

More drones swept into Main Street. Another firefighter took up position in front of a burning building. The blue police-drone shifted position to cover both. Some of the drones were difficult to see, their chassis blending into the background. Mimetic polycarbon, Zamina sensed rather than saw them moving. Random dips and swerves designed to complicate hostile target resolutions. Their weapons would be hidden under jack turrets, waiting to pop out and return fire.

The army had arrived.

She remembered the confrontation on Williamsberg Avenue. Hatred rolling out like an Atlantic wave to break over the single line of blue uniforms. You came from the Stop, from bad housing, bad schools, from meals made out of pet food, from a place where recession was status quo and the one thing that was clear was that you never got out. You got to see out, watching
Systemwide!
on English-5, riding the trains to all the places that you'd glimpsed. You learnt quick that visiting wasn't living, that the Stop clung to you wherever you went.

So you went back because the job evaporated and without the job you couldn't raise the key money for a pad. Back to the catfood monsters, the urine-smelling stairways and the shitty flights that were always broken. Back because it suited the Powers-that-be that you stay there.

They cracked the paving stones and threw them at the cops.

Pulled fixtures out of shops, filled bottles full of industrial alcohol and made rag fuses from the strips they tore from their clothes. The missiles arched overhead to rain down on the policemen who stood their ground, dodging the firebombs, letting the stones bang off their armour. You could see the fear in the set of their mouths under their helmet visors. Fear overtaken by anger and hate.

Zamina recognized the sergeant in charge. The same tired-looking face and masai haircut, the detective from the murder scene two days ago. His hair was scraped back and plastered down with red mud. It came in little enamel tins, she'd seen them in a Mombasa fashion boutique. He paced up and down behind the line of policemen calmly giving orders, keeping them steady. It could have gone on like that for hours if it hadn't been for the kid in the white T-shirt.

The boy came running through the crowd. He was maybe ten years old, thin white legs sticking out of baggy khaki shorts. He was cradling something close to his belly, masking it with both arms, making his gait awkward as he ran. The cops shifted as he ran towards them, the shock-rods nervous in their hands, but no one wanted to beat a kid. Catch him if he comes closer, they were thinking, throw him in the tank until he cools off and Social Services bails him out.

The grenade was a thousand metres of monofilament wrapped around two hundred milligrams of cyclotol chipped to detonate one metre above ground level. Only the sergeant saw it coming, had just enough time to yell a warning and dive away.

Zamina stopped again as a white drone the size of a beachball hovered over Roberta's corpse. It had been methodically working itself up the street, pausing to check each body in turn She knew that somewhere behind it larger medical drones would be moving up and sorting out the injured. The drone pinged twice and pinned a microtransmitter to Roberta's face, marking her as dead.

The drones worked in silence except for the imperceptible hum of their lifting fields, each of them acting in accordance with their programming and bound together by an invisible web of microwave communications. It was like watching an invasion by alien insects. Zamina hadn't seen a live human being for hours.

The authorities were leaving the Stop to the ministration of the machines.

The cuts and abrasions Zamina had collected began to sting. There was a line of pain running down her left thigh, and she could feel a spreading wetness soaking into her leggings. Zamina didn't look, she knew if you looked it always hurt more. Her throat was sore from the smoke even though it was beginning to clear. She should have forgotten about Roberta but she couldn't leave her lying on the street. Zamina had been her friend.

Benny was waiting for them in the orphanage, leaning against the wall just back from the door by a large poster that said 'JESUS SAVES' in blood-red letters. She didn't move to help Zamina as she dragged Roberta inside. Benny seemed untouched by the violence; she looked down at Zamina from a great distance.

'She's dead,' said Zamina.

Benny shrugged her shoulders, bone and muscle moving under Roberta's second-best leather jacket. 'Underclasses,' she said vaguely, 'poverty, insensitive policing.' The words were slurred, sing-song, like the recitation of a junkie. 'Happens all the time.'

'Hey, Benny,' said Zamina, 'you wired or something?'

Her eyes snapped into focus. 'I studied history so I know. Did I tell you that?'

'You never told us nothing,' said Zamina, 'nothing at all.'

'No I didn't did I?'

What had she said to the boy in the white T-shirt? Did he know it was a grenade or had she just handed it to him and said, Hey kid, here's something for you to throw. Mind you get in good and close. He had to get in close, he was just a small boy not strong enough to throw beyond the grenade's lethal range. The cops had their armour but the boy was cut in two.

'Come on, girl,' said Benny, 'she's dead and we've got things to do, people to see.'

West Triton Feeder/Pluto ninety-five

Memories chased the Doctor up the non-existent tunnels of the transit system. Kadiatu assured him that this was the last but one leg of the trip to Lowell Depot, for which he was grateful. Since leaving Mitsubishi there had been a lot of empty trains and deserted stations. Each transition through a tunnel disturbed him; he had spent far too much time in unreal environments recently, the inside of his own mind being the worst. Perhaps he should have done some reordering while he was in there, a bit of DIY amongst the old grey cells. He could have recatalogued his memory into things he knew, things he might know and things that thought he knew them.

The train raced ahead of his mind's own event horizon with his memories howling behind.

Intuition, the data-processing of his unconscious mind that he had learnt to follow but never trusted, drove him on. In his darker moments he often considered the possibility that his subconscious was in some respect not his own. That it belonged to some other, vaster, more complex personality. As if he was just a dream in the mind of a god. Sometimes he posited a theory of reverse-existentialism in which he existed only because other people thought he existed. Kadiatu's phase-space model worried him. Tracing him as a series of gaps in the sequence of human history was a bit too much like empirical confirmation of his worst nightmares.

I am thought of therefore I am.

You could go mad thinking like that.

Kadiatu didn't help his peace of mind either. Too many coincidences piled one on top of each other. It was like walking around with a club sandwich made by fate.

Travelling on the underground always made him morbid.

We are all lost luggage in the Victoria Station of life.

Kadiatu was stretched out on the seat opposite, ankles crossed, hands folded across her stomach, eyes half closed Perfectly relaxed.

He kept on looking for traces of his old friend in his great-great-grand-daughter. Some characteristic gesture or tick that would link them over five generations. There was nothing, of course; human genetics didn't run to that sort of thing. especially after what had been done to hers.

The train pulled into another station. Kadiatu rolled to her feet.

What would the Brigadier have said if he knew?

'All change,' said Kadiatu.

She led him through deserted galleries paved with red slate and lined with unused shops. The air was frosty and undisturbed. It was like walking across a field of virgin snow.

'This must be one of the unfinished developments,' said Kadiatu. 'They were supposed to revitalize this whole end of the system.'

'What happened?'

'The money ran out.'

The entrance leading to the platform they wanted was blocked by a sliding metal cage gate. A red No Entry sign was stencilled on a plywood sheet attached to the gate with gaffa tape. The Doctor let Kadiatu have first go at the lock. He wanted to see what she did.

Kadiatu carefully examined the point where the locking mechanism joined the wall, took a step back and kicked it hard twice. She took another look and, satisfied, yanked open the gate. The entire locking mechanism came out of the wall with a puff of cement powder. The gate rattled open and slammed into the opposite wall with a crash.

'Nemo me impine lacessit,'
said the Doctor.

'What?'

'No one attacks me with impunity,' said the Doctor, walking through the open gate. 'The family motto of the Stewarts.'

Kadiatu poked her finger into the hole made by the lock. Chunks of cement crumbled and fell out. 'Graft above all things,' said Kadiatu. 'Motto of the building contractor.'

It got colder as they got closer to the platforms. There was no tiling here, just a scored floor of unfinished puff concrete. When they stepped out on to the platform Kadiatu automatically looked down the platform for the indicator hologram. It was blank. Her breath steamed as they waited.

'I hope there are trains running on this line,' she said.

The Doctor watched somewhat smugly as Kadiatu began bouncing up and down on her toes to keep warm. A low musical chime sounded from somewhere and the indicator lit up.

'At last,' said Kadiatu.

'NEXT TRAIN: STRAIGHT TO HELL 5 mins.'

'Someone's got a sick sense of humour,' said Kadiatu.

'No,' said the Doctor quietly. 'Somebody's trying to tell us something.'

Isle of Dogs

Ming took the call in Fu's office: Credit Card staring out of the Philips HDTV. Another of her Number One Husband's many antiques. The analog decoder wasn't really compatible with the scrambler's signal protocol, so Credit Card's face was spread out to twice its normal width.