by Mike Tucker
Not that it had stopped others from trying, or course. The potential rewards from making a successful raid on a diamond transport ship were so huge that even seemingly suicidal risks were deemed worth taking. The gangs now working around the gas giants were amongst the best-funded in the solar system. And they were starting to attract the attention of criminals from further afield. Laura wasn’t sure how her meagre security detail would cope with a concerted attack from someone allied to the likes of Rhom-Dutt or Sharaz Jek …
‘Captain Palmer?’
Laura looked up to see Sergeant Lynne Harrison hovering nervously in front of her, a Datapad grasped tightly in her hands.
‘Lynne. Hi. Sorry, I was miles away.’ She gestured at the empty chair on the other side of the desk.
Lynne Harrison sat down. She looked worried.
Laura raised an eyebrow. ‘Problem, Sergeant?’
‘Do you remember during your last tour we discussed the possibility of getting Jenloz to hook up a gravity analyser to the security sensor grid?’
Laura nodded. It had been just after the Zzinbriizi ship had made its failed attempt to board them that they had both come up with the idea. The Cancri required a precise mass reading for the station in order to operate the gravity inverters correctly, and had equipment mounted all over the hull of the mine. It had been Lynne who had pointed out that the same equipment could alert them if someone made an unauthorised landing.
‘Don’t tell me something followed the shuttle in again?’ asked Laura in alarm.
Lynne quickly shook her head. ‘No, I don’t think so.’ She slid the Datapad across the desk. ‘I was just making a routine check of the sensor net and the mass readings changed.’
‘Changed?’
Laura nodded. ‘It’s not by much, but it changed as I was watching, otherwise I might not even have noticed it.’
Laura picked up the pad and scrutinised the figures on the screen. The mass increase was infinitesimal, but it was there. ‘You’re right. About three minutes ago.’ Her frown deepened. ‘It’s not heavy enough to be a ship …’
‘Do you want me to sound the general alarm?’
‘No.’ Laura wasn’t going to upset Delitsky this soon after setting foot back on the station, especially given that he was already in a bad mood thanks to the late arrival of the shuttle. If she interrupted the mining with something that could easily be a sensor fault …
She handed the Datapad back to her sergeant. ‘Get the mainframe to keep an eye on it. Notify me immediately if the readings change again. As soon as Jenloz gets off shift, have him run a full diagnostic.’
‘Yes, sir.’ Harrison rose from her seat.
‘And, Sergeant …’
‘Sir?’
‘Check that the Flying Squad are ready to go.’
Harrison looked at her superior officer with mild surprise.
Laura shrugged, aware that she might be overreacting. ‘Just in case.’
With a nod, Lynne hurried back towards her station. Laura watched her go. Was she overreacting? A nagging suspicion was starting to build in her mind, a suspicion that her return to Saturn wasn’t going to be the quiet homecoming that she wanted.
Bill was starting to get seriously bored now. What was the point of hanging around with a man who had a machine capable of travelling anywhere in time and space if they were just going to end up in some dark cold space warehouse? She hadn’t even found any windows that she could look out of.
‘Saturn …’ she snorted contemptuously, stamping her feet to try to ward off the cold.
If the Doctor was aware of her discomfort, then he didn’t show it. He was still sitting cross-legged in front of the cylinder. He’d put away his sonic sunglasses and was now prodding at the door with his sonic screwdriver instead. The high-pitched warbling that echoed around the room was setting Bill’s teeth on edge.
Patience at an end, Bill stamped over to the Doctor and prodded him in the back with the toe of her boot. ‘Are you going to be much longer?’
‘Careful!’ The Doctor peered up at her reproachfully. ‘You could set it off.’
‘Set what off?’
‘The alarm,’ said the Doctor. ‘And that would be bad!’
‘What alarm?’ cried Bill in exasperation. ‘If you would just let me know what you’re are trying to do!’
‘It’ll be lot easier if I just show you.’
The Doctor scrambled to his feet. Grasping her by the shoulders, he steered her firmly to one side, then turned to the cylinder and raised the sonic screwdriver once more.
The harsh cricket-like warble filled the air again and, slowly, the front of the cylinder started to swing upwards. As it did so, strip lights inside flickered into life, their harsh white glare making Bill squint after so long in the gloom.
The door clunked to a halt and the Doctor reached inside the cylinder, plucking something small and shiny from one of the racks that lined the curved walls. He shut off his sonic screwdriver and held out the object for Bill to see.
She rubbed at her eyes in disbelief.
It was a diamond.
The cylinder was brimming with diamonds!
Chapter
3
Jorgen Delitsky was a happy man. Despite the late start, the shift was going well. They were already back on schedule, and conditions looked extremely promising for a well above average yield. Out of the corner of his eye he could see the broad smiles on the faces of the two Kollo-Zarnista executives as they studied the readouts that scrolled across the screens in the observation gallery.
That was good news. The sooner they realised that everything was running as it should, the sooner they would leave him in peace. He was about to turn back to his instruments when he caught sight of Johanna Teske making her way across the control room towards him.
Delitsky frowned. It was extremely unusual for Teske to leave her station during a shift.
The medical officer descended the ladder into the control pod with graceful ease and slipped into the chair alongside him. ‘You got a moment, Chief?’
That was enough to get Delitsky worried. She never called him Chief. He shot a nervous glance back at the observation gallery, but Nettleman and Rince were too busy concentrating on the money that they were making to notice anything else that was going on.
‘OK, Doc, what’s the story?’
Teske reached for the control desk, her long, elegant fingers tapping at the keyboard as she transferred the medical readout from her own station to one of Delitsky’s screens.
‘Baines’s reading have been getting increasingly erratic over the last ten minutes.’
Delitsky peered at the readout. He was experienced enough to see that Baines’s heart rate and pulse were slightly elevated, but there was nothing there that he would deem life-threatening.
He turned to tell Teske as much but before he could open his mouth she cut in. ‘Before you tell me that it’s nothing, look at this.’ Her fingers danced over the controls again, and a graph flashed up onto the screen. She pointed at several jagged peaks on an otherwise smoothly undulating line. ‘Three times in the last few minutes there’s been sudden spike in heart rate and adrenalin.’
‘So, it’s been a busy shift. He knows that we were behind schedule and—’
‘It’s more than that, Jorgen.’ Teske interrupted again. ‘These readings are unusual. It’s as if something is periodically making him jump out of his skin.’
Delitsky had known Johanna Teske a long time. If she thought that there was something wrong, she was worth listening to. Her timing though …
He cursed under his breath. ‘Of all the shifts you could have picked …’ He tapped his ear bud. ‘How you doin’ down there, Baines?’
‘Um, I’m good, Chief.’
Delitsky shot Teske a look. Even over the communicator Baines’s voice sounded strained.
‘Are you sure? I know how much you hate that armour …’
‘I … It’s not the armour.’
<
br /> Delitsky swiped at a control, ensuring that the remainder of the conversation couldn’t be overheard by anybody else.
‘Baines, I’m going to pass you over to the Doc …’
The fact that Baines didn’t complain about that was proof enough in Delitsky’s mind that something was definitely wrong.
Teske tapped at her own ear bud. ‘Baines, it’s Dr Teske.’
‘Hi, Doc.’
‘Not too happy with the vitals I’m getting on my screens, big man … Anything going on down there that we should know about?’
There was a pause …
‘Not sure you’re going to believe it.’
Another pause.
‘Not sure I believe it myself.’
‘Try me.’
‘I think … I think I’m hearing something outside the bell.’
Bill turned in a slow circle, looking incredulously at the rows of cylinders radiating around her. In her head she was trying to calculate just how many gemstones the room might hold, and her brain was struggling with the numbers. The quantity of uncut diamonds in the chamber was absolutely staggering.
The Doctor, on the other hand, seemed completely at ease. He had pulled an ancient eyeglass from one of the many pockets in his jacket and was intently studying the diamond that he had plucked from the rack.
A sudden realisation struck Bill. The Doctor had been here before.
‘Do this a lot, do you?’ She cocked her head on one side, one eyebrow raised.
‘Hm?’ said the Doctor absentmindedly.
‘I said, do this a lot, do you?’ repeated Bill. ‘This breaking and entering lark?’
The Doctor let the eyeglass drop into his hand and turned to face her, the diamond held between thumb and forefinger. ‘The trick is to get one exactly the right size. If they’re too large, they tend to arouse suspicion.’
‘Oh, wow, really?’ Bill couldn’t keep the sarcasm from her voice. ‘You do surprise me. What on earth do you need it for?’
‘Housekeeping’.
Bill stared at him incredulously. ‘Housekeeping?’
‘Housekeeping! Nardole seems to go through money at an exorbitant rate. He’s always buying things with it. Tea. Milk. Popcorn. Rhubarb. Toilet paper. The list is endless.’
‘But that diamond must be worth thousands of pounds!’
‘He goes through a lot of toilet paper!’
‘But it’s stealing!’
The Doctor rolled his eyes in exasperation. ‘Hardly! I’m just materialising without being detected, picking the lock of one of the vaults in the most secure facility in the solar system and taking one single diamond from a stash of billions. Where’s the harm in that?’
Bill folded her arms and glared at him accusingly.
‘Look, let me explain,’ the Doctor sighed, his voice taking on the authoritative tone that he always used in his lectures. ‘The diamonds in this room are nothing more than a by-product of Saturn’s atmosphere. In the upper atmosphere, in the thunderstorm alleys, intense lightning turns methane into soot. As the soot falls, the pressure on it increases and it turns into graphite. Get deep enough and the graphite toughens into diamonds.’
Bill couldn’t quite believe it. ‘So you’re saying it literally rains diamonds?’
‘Yup.’ The Doctor nodded. ‘This facility is just like a giant net, scooping them out of the atmosphere.’
‘That easy, huh?’
‘Yes. Well … not exactly easy. Incredibly difficult and dangerous, in fact. But the income from these diamonds is what drives the entire expansion of the human race into space.’
‘And you’re quite happy to break in here and nick some of them.’
‘Not some!’ The Doctor was indignant. ‘One.’
‘On this occasion.’
‘All right! One every now and then.’ A sheepish look flickered momentarily across his thin face. ‘I suppose I could materialise the TARDIS in the lower atmosphere and grab one myself …’ The look vanished as quickly as it had arrived. ‘But I’m a busy man! Besides, look …’ He gestured at the dozens of cylinders ranged around the room. ‘Do you seriously think they’re going to miss one?’
Bill opened her mouth to argue with him, but immediately thought better of it. Nothing she could say would do anything to change his opinion, so she might as well just save her breath. As far as he was concerned taking the diamond was no different from if she had gone scrumping for apples.
‘Fine, whatever.’
Satisfied that he had won the argument, the Doctor slipped the jeweller’s glass back into his eye and resumed his examination of the diamond.
Shaking her head, Bill wandered back across the vault until she was standing back in front of the cylinder that the Doctor had opened. She had begun to realise that the Doctor had his own peculiar moral code. A very alien moral code, in fact. When it was something big, like saving a planet or defeating some monstrous enemy, then his rules were very clearly defined, but present him with something that he considered small or insignificant …
She took a deep breath, wondering exactly where she sat on that scale of importance. Was she, in fact, just like one of these diamonds, plucked at random from billions?
Billions.
She was still struggling to get her head around the numbers. Diamonds dropping from the sky like rain whilst she was struggling to get by on the wages of a canteen assistant. Just a few of these diamonds would be enough to set her up for life. She’d be able to move out of that room at Moira’s, get a place of her own, get a car, get a better job, find a nice girl …
The light was glinting off the surface of the diamonds, and it was making her head swim. Just one diamond would change everything. Perhaps the Doctor was right. Perhaps it didn’t really matter. No one would ever notice. Just one out of billions.
Before she could properly think about what she was doing, Bill found herself stepping forward, reaching out for one of the glittering stones.
‘Bill! No!’
The Doctor’s strangled cry echoed like a thunderclap around the chamber, but it was too late. As she shook herself from her daydream, her foot crossed the threshold of the cylinder.
And the world exploded into a cacophony of screeching alarms.
Laura froze in disbelief as the intruder alarm went off. A fraction of a second later, four years of Federation training took over and she launched herself from her chair, snatching the g-Taser from her belt.
‘I want two men covering the south lift. Move!’ she barked, sending officers scrambling across the room. ‘Sergeant Harrison, I want priority override on the main entry locks. Nothing gets in or out of here. You hear me? Nothing.’
‘Yes, sir!’
‘You two.’ She pointed at her two remaining officers. ‘With me.’
As Laura raced towards the lift, she reached out and punched a control on a console in the centre of the room. There was a hiss of compressed gas, and four gleaming metal shapes launched themselves upwards through chutes in the ceiling.
The Flying Squad had been dispatched.
The Doctor was staring at Bill. His expression was a mixture of horror and disappointment, and it was that disappointment that she found the hardest to bear.
‘I’m sorry,’ she cried, stepping away from the cylinder, hands held out in apology. ‘I wasn’t thinking.’
‘Looked to me as though you were thinking a little bit too much.’ The Doctor bounded across the room, his sonic screwdriver already in his hand and pointing at the open cylinder. He grabbed Bill by the hand and hauled her out of the way of the door as it slammed shut with a deafening clang. ‘I think we should get out of here,’ he said, stuffing the screwdriver into his pocket.
Bill nodded. If there were to be any recriminations then the Doctor was obviously going to save them until later.
Still holding on to her hand, the Doctor dragged her towards the TARDIS. They had barely made it six metres when four metal shapes burst through concealed hatches in the floor. The
Doctor skidded to a halt.
‘Oh …’
Bill stared at the objects. They were spherical, about the size of a football, half a dozen jet-black camera eyes dotted across their polished metal skins. Each of them was emblazoned with a badge and a number, and even though Bill didn’t recognise the design, the general appearance left no doubt as to the spheres’ function. Bill swallowed hard. ‘Police?’
‘Security Orbs.’ The Doctor, still holding Bill’s hand, was backing away from the TARDIS, eyes darting from sphere to sphere as they slowly started to surround them.
‘Dangerous?’
‘Only if you’ve broken the law.’
‘So only if you’ve done something incredibly stupid like – oh, I don’t know – tried to steal one of the diamonds in this vault?’
‘Yes, something like that could make them very unfriendly.’
Out of the corner of her eye, Bill could see that the Doctor was trying to extract his sonic screwdriver from his pocket again, using her body to try and hide what his was doing from the advancing spheres.
‘Now listen to me very carefully.’ The Doctor released her hand, his voice low and urgent. ‘When I tell you to run, you—’
He never finished the sentence.
With lightning speed, one of the spheres darted forward, a thin metal probe whipping from its casing. There was a sharp crack, a blaze of electric blue light, and the Doctor gave a cry of pain, the sonic screwdriver dropping from his numbed fingers and clattering to the floor.
Moments later, there was the noise of booted feet on the metal floor and half a dozen uniformed officers stormed into the vault, each of them holding a snub-nosed blaster pointing unwaveringly at the Doctor and Bill. Wincing at the pain from his singed fingers, the Doctor slowly raised his hands. Bill did the same.
