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.Kortez was nodding his head off.Mr Qixotl was slowly edging his way back out of the room.Homunculette was still snarling.‘You stole everything you know from us.Your whole.grubby little gang.only exists because of our technology.Go on, try and deny it.’‘That’s not –’‘Look.See that? You see it?’ Homunculette was looking around the room for support, his finger shaking as he pointed at the bone mask.‘Tell them what it is,’ he demanded.‘Go on.Tell them.’Cousin Justine looked away, only for a moment.‘It’s a skull,’ she admitted.‘What of? Tell them.What’s it the skull of?’Justine looked uneasy.‘The skull of a Time Lord.’‘Hah!’ Homunculette whirled around, like a lawyer who’d just made a devastating attack on the accused.‘See? That’s my people she’s talking about.My people.’Bregman gawped.The mask was wider than Homunculette’s whole head.She imagined a skull just like it, writhing under the man’s skin, bursting out at the edges.Time Lords had dimensional engineering, according to the UNISYC files.Did they have heads that were bigger on the inside than on the outside, or what?‘The Time Lords fought a great war, many years ago,’ Cousin Justine explained, addressing the other representatives en masse.‘They won.If they’d lost, by the grace of Time, then this is how they would have looked.’ She raised the mask a little.Homunculette snorted again.‘That mask shouldn’t exist in this timeline.You see how dangerous they are? Even their headgear breaks the Laws of Time.Even their headgear.’ He started laughing, for no immediately obvious reason.Bregman wondered if he was getting hysterical.Cousin Justine merely nodded.‘Of course.There’s great power in these totems.The Time Lords would have us destroy things that shouldn’t exist.Only the family understands their value.’‘Oop,’ said Mr Qixotl.Immediately the focus of the situation changed.Mr Qixotl had backed out of the doorway, trying to get as far away from the argument as possible.Unfortunately, he’d backed into someone coming up the passage.Suddenly, all of Bregman’s anxieties, about the ziggurat, about the auction, about the aliens, completely dissipated, only to be replaced with one simple and terrible new sensation.Full-blown body anxiety.Kathleen Bregman was pale-skinned, 163 centimetres tall, and had hair that stuck together in ugly clumps whenever it was exposed to daylight.She wasn’t technically unfit, but whenever UNISYC ran a standard physical QRT her test scores hovered ominously around the 0.6 mark, and she’d never told anyone about the pains in her guts or the needles in her legs when she did the ten-kilometre survival run.Whereas, by contrast, the woman who’d walked into the room was tall, bronzed, and – in a very real sense – perfect.She wasn’t even attractive, as such.The way she moved told the world she didn’t need to be attractive.If supermodels were as cool as they thought they were, Bregman decided, then this was how they’d look.The woman manoeuvred past Mr Qixotl without breaking her stride, brushed past the Faction Paradox representatives without a second glance, and stopped in front of Homunculette.‘There may be a problem,’ she told him.Homunculette dropped the bottle.It bounced.‘Problem? What kind of a problem?’‘An intruder.’Everyone reacted to that, except Kortez.Cousin Justine exchanged glances with her comrade.Mr Qixotl shuffled back into the room, an anxious look on his face.The beermats seemed edgy.Homunculette looked like his head would explode if he heard any more bad news.‘Explain,’ he snapped.‘I found someone wandering around the ziggurat.He didn’t have an invitation.’Mr Qixotl cleared his throat.‘Erm, how do you know he didn’t have.?’‘I scanned him,’ the woman replied, emotionlessly.‘No invitation.’Homunculette’s eyes looked as though they were getting ready to pop out and go walkabout.‘Where is he now?’‘Here,’ said the woman.A black hole blossomed from the front of her head, and something almost two metres tall was vomited out of her skull, landing in a messy heap on the floor of the cocktail lounge.Bregman lost her grip again.Under his breath, Colonel Kortez recited another mantra.The others were making too much noise for them to be able to hear it [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]