Read Doctor Who: Keeping Up With the Joneses for Free Online Page A

I’ve known Jalabite Hegemon ships give up conquest and start little farmsteads just so they can have happy dachshunds. Everyone likes dachshunds, everywhere in the universe. Well, except on Bithmorency. People there got into a war with a refugee column of evolutionarily advanced dachshund supersoldiers fleeing the destruction of their homeworld. The wire-haired marines took out an entire town – two hundred thousand dead. And it was a tragic misunderstanding. The dachshunds only stopped to ask for some biscuits, automated defence systems fired on them. There’s a lesson: never give control of your space weapons to an unsupervised machine.’ He shrugged, and she found herself nodding:
schoolboy error.
    She reclaimed control of her head, and they sat and ate scones. The pub began to empty out.
    ‘That’s interesting,’ he said.
    ‘What is?’
    ‘Well, it’s a pub, isn’t it? Steak and kidney pie, ploughman’s lunch, pint of your finest. The evening crowd should be coming in. But they’re not. They’re staying home.’
    She felt a prickle between her shoulder blades, as if she was being watched by an unfamiliar cat. ‘What, everyone?’
    ‘Even him.’ He pointed. There was no one behind the bar. ‘Popped upstairs and never came back down. It was like this last time, as well.’
    ‘Last time?’ She glared at him.
    ‘Yes. I came here just before your house burned down.’
    She glared at him. ‘You mean this is where the cloud monster limited combat thing found you? Are you looking for trouble?’
    ‘No. Yes.’ She kept glaring until he explained. ‘No, the cloud thing was in the street. Yes, I am slightly looking for trouble because that’s always where the answers are. Aaaand I’ve found it.’ He pointed.
    She looked over towards the fireplace. There was a weathervane on the mantle, old and made of iron. It must have been there since the village was built. Town. City. Whatever. She wondered what a weathervane could possibly tell you in a tiny suburb of a great city, surrounded by tall buildings. ‘What about it?’
    ‘Well, it’s moving, which is what it did before.’
    ‘When you burned my house down.’
    ‘That was the cloud.’
    ‘Which was chasing you.’
    ‘Shsh! Watch!’
    ‘It’s a weathervane. There must be a top bit on the roof.’
    ‘Yeah. But before it was just a weathervane. Now it’s got that little man on top of it.’
    She peered at the wrought iron. Sure enough, one end of the arrow was topped by a tiny, running figure making a gangling escape.
    ‘Doctor,’ she said.
    ‘And the question is, what’s he running from? What’s at the other end of the arrow?’
    She couldn’t see. The far end of the vane was still in shadow. But she knew something he apparently didn’t.
    ‘Doctor—’
    ‘Because if we knew that, we might know what’s about to happen. Mind you, where would be the fun in—’
    She heard the wind sigh, felt the change in the air. He must have felt it just before somehow. The weathervane twitched, creaked.
    ‘Doctor!’ she slammed her hand down on the table.
    ‘What?’ he looked startled that she’d interrupted.
    ‘The little man!’
    ‘What about him?’
    The weathervane swung sharply around, and at the far end of the arrow was a vast, hulking shape in black iron, a silhouette from a bad dream, twisted and horrible. Then it swivelled back again, and the little man stood out against the light of a candle.
    ‘It’s you!’ she told him, and saw, halfway along the length of the vane at the hinge point, the tiny figure of a woman caught between, and knew it was herself.
    The first footstep shuddered through the silence, heavy enough to shake the floor and the walls.
    Pah pah POM.
    The Doctor gave a cry and buckled sharply over his stomach, then gritted his teeth and surged to his feet, pulled her along with him. ‘Christina, run!’
    The footsteps were impossibly enormous. They seemed to shake everything, even the sky. She didn’t move.
    Pah pah