Doctor Who: Transit Read Online Free

was probably now illegal to breathe deeply while standing upright, and probably dangerous as well. A noise box was pumping the latest subsonic backbeat into the floor. The vibrations were making Blondie feel queasy and a little sad. Credit Card bounced past, arms flailing out of time to the beat. The dance style had been obsolete for twenty years but Credit Card didn't care. His manic grin was locked into the memory of parties past as he slammed off people, walls and furniture. Dogface was sitting on one of the room's terminals, telling one of his sick stories to a group of young accountants. He described how two trains on the Millfield Branch line had been switched on to the same station by mistake. When he got to the punchline about the man who ended up with two heads and three buttocks the accountants laughed guiltily. Old Sam was dancing rub-a-dub-dub with the head of data processing, so close together that they looked like one of Dogface's accidents, a single mass of dreadlocks on top and two bodies welded together at the hips.
    Blondie's head felt too heavy for his neck. He closed his eyes and let it drop towards his knees. Beyond the darkness of his lids the room started its ethanol spin around him. Silently he willed it to go faster, a vertiginous tumble that obliterated all sense of the outside world and then, just as he felt that his mind was dissolving away, he pulled himself out. When his eyes opened she was standing in the doorway.
    From the doorway the woman gazed around the room. When she turned her face towards him Blondie saw that her eyes were pointed at the comers giving them an almond shape. The irises were coal black. He wondered who she was looking for.
    She was wearing a leather jacket over a cut-down sweatshirt with 'Lunarversity' in faded letters across the chest. Memory crystals and silver thread were plaited into cotton hair extensions that were braided into a rope down her back. Blondie had an insane urge to grab hold of her hair and pull himself upright, but he didn't think it was a good idea.
    She came over and stood in front of Blondie. He found himself staring at a strip of brown skin between her belt and the frayed bottom edge of her sweatshirt. When she spoke it seemed to float down from a long way above.
    'I'm looking for Old Sam,' she said. 'Seen him?'

    STS Central - Olympus Mons
    At 01:00 GMT, one hour after the start of Constitution Day, Ming the Merciless started a phased reduction in services. It started with the branch lines in Western Europe, West Africa, Luna, Martian Plains, Mercury and all the other planets in the solar system except Triton, whose time, for historical reasons, ran at GMT + 5. Under instructions from the controllers, trains were taken out of service and shunted to their depots. All over the system passengers spat on the platforms as empty carriages cruised serenely past them. The big mainframe that handled customer complaints recorded 634 negative calls in the first ten minutes.
    Ming set up one of her terminals to show the power saving as a percentage; as a laugh she put the total number of customer complaints next to it and told the computer to look for correlations. Down in the pit the controllers were passing around a bottle of Ganymede Vodka. This was one operation they didn't want to handle sober.
    As midnight rushed across the globe the all-day parties started and one hour behind, the arteries that pumped life through the solar system quietly shut themselves down.
    At 02:00 GMT they shut down the freight services on the parallel tunnels. The physical mail was going to be a day late. Branch lines were down to VIP shuttles and emergency services only; feeder lines were running one train in five. According to Ming's terminal they now had a thirty per cent power surplus ready for the Stunnel initiation. Verhoevan wanted seventy per cent - Ming had twelve hours left. Customer complaints were up to one and a half million negative calls and rising at a rate of a