Doctor Who: Virgin New Adventures - Bernice Summerfield [080] - Dead Romance by Lawrence Miles

Author:Lawrence Miles
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Science-Fiction - Doctor Who
Publisher: Virgin
Published: 1999-03-27T23:00:00+00:00

NOTES ON AFTERWARDS

60

I don’t know what it was that filled up the sky over Simia KK98. At the time I thought it was the sphinxes, coming down to the fortress in their billions – like the locusts in that book at the end of the Bible where God freaks out and everybody dies. But the sphinxes weren’t expecting it, I don’t think. So it must have been Cwej’s employers.

That worries me, and I’ll tell you why. It’s because I’ve seen the time travellers’ warships, and they’re gold and spiky, not fat and black. Which means one of two things.

Either the warships were just an escort, bringing something even worse to Simia KK98 to face down the sphinxes, which is a bad enough thought in itself. Or… or the warships had already fired up their weapons by the time they got to the planet. That’s how the ships work, I’ve heard. Everything goes black, and then the world ends.

Which means that Cwej’s employers, who were supposed to be the good guys in this face-off, were ready to let their warships wipe out everything on the planet, us included.

They’ve apparently done that before, sterilized (or do I mean cauterized?) whole satellites if they think there’s some kind of threat to the grand order of things.

Would they have done that? Killed all of their agents, and even sacrificed the bottle? It makes sense, in a kind of if-we-can’t-have-it-nobody-can way. Or am I getting paranoid again?

61

It was only the next day, when the world I knew about had come back again and I was sitting drinking chocolate in the flat, that I asked Cwej about the deal he’d done.

‘If the sphinxes get time machines, won’t they mess everything up?’ I asked him. ‘You know. Do damage to the space-time continuum, or whatever.’ (I always used to say ‘or whatever’ at the end of sentences like that, just so I didn’t sound like I was taking the whole time-travel thing seriously.

Even if it was supposed to be real.) He sipped at his chocolate, although he must have known it was too hot for him. ‘Doesn’t make much difference,’ he said, once he’d finished making slurping noises. His voice was quiet, maybe even a bit on the broody side. ‘I think the universe is finished. I mean, my universe. I think that’s the bottom line here. Pretty soon, nowhere’s going to be safe. If the sphinx-gods get their hands on time travel, it’s not going to change much. They’re not interested in the rest of the universe anyway. Just their patch.’

‘And your people go along with this, do they?’ I asked.

Another shrug. ‘They okayed the deal. I’ll be putting my name on the treaty, pretty soon.’

‘Cynical,’ I said. I was stirring my own drink with a teaspoon, watching the chocolate flakes dissolve on the surface and wondering if it was supposed to be a metaphor for something.

‘Maybe I’m just starting to think in four dimensions,’ Cwej told me. Back then, of course, I didn’t know what he meant.

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