Big Bang Generation by Gary Russell Read Free Book Online Page B

guarding Globb and Jaanson’s Glamour. A challenge.’
    Ruth frowned. ‘And we’re a challenge?’
    ‘I am. Not sure she knows you guys are here. That might work in our favour. I need to go in with them. Once we’re inside, follow.’ She looked at Ruth and Jack. ‘This is dangerous – I doubt she’s called Kik the Assassin because she’s cute to babies and cuddles kittens. Do exactly what Peter says at all times.’
    ‘We could just stay outside,’ Jack suggested. ‘You know what I’m like!’
    Bernice shrugged again. ‘Something else I didn’t tell you. All four of us are trapped in that time eddy-bubble-catastrophe-thing in there. So we all need to be in there to break our future selves out of it.’
    Ruth and Jack stared open-mouthed. ‘And you kept that from us because?’ Ruth asked.
    Bernice smiled apologetically. ‘It never came up.’
    ‘Peter?’ Jack turned to the teenager. ‘You knew?’
    ‘Nope,’ he said. ‘But I guessed.’
    ‘How?’
    ‘By using my brain. Mum goes on lots of missions alone. Why bring us when it’s about time travel unless we’re involved. Made sense.’
    ‘Thanks, darling,’ Bernice said.
    ‘Oh, don’t get me wrong, Mum. I think you’re daft for not actually telling us, but that’s life.’ Peter smiled back at her, just baring his fangs enough. ‘Don’t mess it up, Mum, and we’ll have your back.’
    Bernice nodded and moved out.
    —
    Bernice moved carefully across the slippery surface, from boulder to boulder, trying to stay hidden. Yes, Kik the Assassin knew she was around, but if she could come from a different place it might cut through the blue woman’s confidence or something.
    Or probably not.
    At one point, Bernice flopped down behind a largeboulder, unable to see either where she was going or where she had been. And wondered, not for the first time, if she was getting a bit old for all this.
    When she had first met the Doctor, she had been significantly younger. Sig. Nif. I. Cantly. She’d had no ties to anything or anyone; she was starting out her life as a professor, as a teacher to students. She had discovered the Doctor and his friend Ace on a cemetery world called Heaven, where they had defeated a weird spore-like life form called the Hoothi, which was trying to expand itself by reanimating the corpses. Bernice had ended up travelling with the Doctor a while after that and, although she eventually moved away from the TARDIS, the two would continue to keep coming into each other’s lives (quite literally in the Doctor’s case, as she had seen him with more than one face). And, to some extent, Bernice envied him. He had the TARDIS, he could come and go wherever he pleased. Yes, Bernice had possessed for a short period of time a couple of Time Rings that gave her limited access to the past and future but they were unreliable and, if she was quite honest, it scared her a little to use them. It became obvious to her a few years after leaving the Doctor that her body had changed in small subtle ways that people can only notice because they are
their
bodies; they live in them from day to day; they sense things.
    Bernice could already see that she aged differently to other people. She was probably in her mid-fifties now, but she looked and felt maybe fifteen years younger than that. She had an 18-year-old son, a dead husband, and atone point had had her body stolen away from her and occupied by a less-than-charming life form.
    But at the back of her mind was the feeling that one day, probably soon, this was all going to come back and bite her. It was like her life was a piece of elastic; charmed, ageless, lucky and brilliant, but eventually that elastic would spring back and she’d age thirty years in a week. Whatever those Time Rings (and maybe even the TARDIS itself) had done to her would pop up and say, ‘You had a good laugh, Benny, but here’s where you pay the piper.’ She’d once had a vision of a possible future, seeing herself dying