Doctor Who: BBC Eighth Doctor Adventures [011] - Dreamstone Moon by Paul Leonard & Paul Hinder

Author:Paul Leonard & Paul Hinder
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Science-Fiction - Doctor Who
ISBN: 9780563405856
Publisher: BBC Books
Published: 1998-05-03T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

In contrast to Tiydon’s office, Isobella Cleomides occupied a tiny, neat room, with a tiny, neat desk. It reminded Daniel of his own quarters, except that the holovid on the wall was moving, and showed a husband and three sons instead of a wife and two daughters. The smiles were the same, though. The smiles of home, of safety. The boys were throwing a blue-and-white beachball from one to the other, endlessly, a seamless loop of childish happiness.

Cleomides saw Daniel looking, met his eye coolly. ‘I’m hoping to get back to them alive,’ she said. ‘And you’re not helping me.’ She touched a key on the computer in front of her. ‘Now, tell me. This Doctor – if he was the UNIT Scientific Adviser working with Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, from my information he’d be about two hundred and fifty years old.’

Daniel shrugged. ‘Well, he’s lying, then. But he seemed OK to me.’

‘Obviously he did.’ Cleomides drummed her fingers on the desk, just once, a funeral roll. ‘Why did you trust him? Why did you go along with him to Shaft Four, even though it was a restricted area?’

‘He seemed to know what he was doing.’

‘So when someone seems to know what they’re doing, you defy company regulations and military law and follow them about like an idiot. He could have done anything – and you would have been his accomplice!’

Daniel felt himself getting angry. ‘My friend had died. The company wasn’t doing anything about it. I thought I’d take a look, and the Doctor offered to help. I’m sorry if that was against military law, but I thought I was working for a private company.’

‘You’re still working for Earth!’ snapped Cleomides. She hesitated. ‘You were looking at the holovid. My husband is very much older than me, you know. I know he doesn’t look it, but he takes antiagathics and –’ she smiled ‘– he dyes his hair.’ A pause. ‘He was married before. He had a whole life before he met me, but he lost it. His first wife was a Dalek Killer, you see. It was the only way out, in those times. And so he lost her, and then he lost their child, to one of the plagues. I bore his children, you see them there. Three fine sons. Then the time came to build the space force, they were asking for volunteers who had fought in the resistance. People they could trust. And my husband wanted to go! At sixty-nine! To defend his children, he said. To make sure it never happened again. The only way to make him stay was to say that I would go instead, even though I was only a child in the war. I would defend them. Now I’m here on this rock, defending my people and people like you are consorting with aliens! Do you know what they have done to us? Have you seen what they have done? Or was your country spared, perhaps? Was your country not turned into a wasteland?’

Daniel had met people like Cleomides before.

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