Doctor Who NA46 - Just War by Lance Parkin

Author:Lance Parkin
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2011-07-13T01:08:07+00:00

9 Thought and Memory

They were meant to be looking for von Wer, the spymaster, but the search was proving fruitless. This didn’t surprise Roz, of course, because she knew that the Doctor wasn’t a German spy. What had surprised her was how easy British Intelligence had found it to pin the blame on the Doctor: they only had three sightings of him. The surveillance reports were astonishingly mundane: the Doctor walked down Oxford Street, the Doctor bought a cup of tea and an iced bun, the Doctor caught a train at Paddington Station. He had never been seen with anyone else, he had never dropped anything suspicious into a litter bin, something that might have been a dead-letter drop. Despite that, and without any apparent reason, they had linked him with a dozen known German agents and three break-ins at defence establishments. The Doctor was an enigma, and successive analysts had decided that he was their problem. The more she looked at the

‘evidence’, the more Roz was convinced that there wasn’t a spymaster at all. She continued to work on the ‘problem’, diligently plotting his movements.

Watching Reed across the desk, as the afternoon wore on, Forrester noticed that he was taking her for granted now, something Roz found flattering. While he had never behaved with anything other than impeccably good manners, there had always been a distance between them. She had been his Xosa Maiden, a dusky archetype from a schoolbook deep in his unconscious mind; someone he’d worshipped from afar from an early age, and had now come face to face with. Roz was uncomfortable being idolized. That gulf seemed to be narrowing. He accepted her on her own terms now, saw her as a person, a woman, a fellow officer.

Was she beginning to accept him, too? It had gone well beyond that. Looking at him now, as he jotted something down on a notepad, Roz realized that she could actually picture herself staying here with this man. The idea that she might live here with anyone — especially Reed — shocked her. Settling down had never occurred to her before, not with feLixi, not even with Fenn. She would turn a few heads, Roz mused, at a time when most English people had never seen a black woman. They could never have children, of course.

How could she bring half-caste babies into this time? They would be true aliens: mottled hybrids formed by the grafting together of two genetic strains kept pure for centuries.

What on earth was so attractive about this rather dull Englishman? Roz had an innate distrust of psychoanalysis.

She had let the undergrowth grow up around her own unconscious, actively discouraged missionary expeditions, and stuck up a few shrunken heads to warn off the more persistent explorers. Judge a person by their actions, not their potty training, that was her motto. She had been there too many times when the Freudroid at the Lodge had confidentially announced that the serial killer they were looking for was a

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