by Mike Tucker
Realising what he was intimating, Delitsky crossed to his desk and disarmed the Purge control. ‘All right, Doctor? What do you suggest?’
The Doctor pursed his lips, pondering the various options. A sudden thought struck him. ‘The medical bay has a decompression chamber, doesn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, then. If it’s capable of recreating the pressures below us then it would seem to offer our guests an alternative environment to the pressure armour. Let them slip into something more comfortable, so to speak.’
‘That makes sense, Jorgen.’ Jo Teske had been listening to their conversation. ‘If we can persuade even one or two of them to use the pressure chamber then it gives us a chance to recycle the batteries in the suits. We’re not really equipped to keep five suits of armour powered up simultaneously. It gives us a bit of breathing space to come up with some better solutions, plus …’ She paused. ‘It’s secure, easy to put a guard on it, if you still have any worries about them.’
‘Oh, I’ve plenty of worries. About them, about Baines, about the saboteur on this rig …’ He thought for a moment, then made a decision. ‘OK, Jo. Get onto it.’
‘I’ll need Jenloz to help.’
Delitsky shook his head. ‘I need him to repair this.’ He pointed at the wrecked communication console.
‘I can do that,’ said the Doctor.
Delitsky regarded him carefully. ‘Another hidden talent, Doctor?’
‘Oh yes.’ The Doctor nodded. ‘Mine rescue, pressure-suit maintenance, comms systems repairs … Plus I’m also a dab hand with a needle and thread and can whip up a great Spaghetti Bolognese.’
‘I don’t doubt it.’
‘Jenloz is going to be far more use to Dr Teske than I can be, and he can’t be in two places at once.’
‘All right, Doctor, let’s see what you can do. But I want that communications system up and running within the hour.’
‘Yes, Chief!’ The Doctor saluted.
Scowling, Delitsky turned and strode back across the control room, barking orders as he went. ‘Palmer, Harrison. I want you to escort the Ba-El Cratt from the hangar. I’m making their safety your responsibility.’
‘Got yourself a job, then?’
The Doctor turned to see Bill regarding him with an amused smile on her face.
‘Yes. And guess who’s going to be my assistant?’
Delitsky watched as Palmer and her officers escorted the five Ba-El Cratt in their armoured suits across the hangar and into the service lift. He had told Palmer to use the gym as a holding area until they had made the necessary modifications to the pressure chamber. It wasn’t ideal, but at least the gym was on the same deck as the med-bay if any problems arose.
He rubbed his hands across his face. God, they really were not equipped to deal with a situation like this. His people were miners and technicians. This situation needed skilled negotiators, experts. The military couldn’t get here fast enough as far as he was concerned. Still, if the Ba-El Cratt were to be believed then Baines was still alive, although Delitsky still had no idea of how that could be possible.
‘Chief Delitsky.’
Delitsky lowered his hands to see Nettleman standing in front of him. The smile on the man’s face was not a pleasant one.
‘What is it, Nettleman?’ Delitsky had no more energy to even bother at the pretence of being polite. ‘You may not have noticed, but I’ve got rather a lot on my plate at the moment.’
‘Oh, I’ve noticed. I’ve noticed quite a lot of things.’
From the tone of Nettleman’s voice Delitsky knew that he wasn’t going to like what the company official was about to say.
‘Earlier you very helpfully pointed out to me that in an emergency situation the regulations clearly state that all decisions and responsibility for the rig and its crew devolved to the Rig Chief.’
‘That’s right.’ Delitsky’s heart sank as he realised that this was the moment when his earlier blunt dismissal of the man was going to come back and bite him.
‘Well, let me return the favour. Rince has reminded me of another regulation that states just as clearly that where any employee of Kollo-Zarnista Mining encounters evidence of, or has direct contact with, persons or objects of unknown origin that might have direct consequences for the long-term future of the company, then all matters relating to those persons or objects become the responsibility of the senior company official present at the time.’
Nettleman leaned uncomfortably close.
‘That’s me, Delitsky,’ he hissed. ‘So from this moment on you will take no decision relating to the Ba-El Cratt without checking with me first. Do I make myself clear?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘No one gets access to them except me. Make sure your security grunts are aware of that.’
Without waiting for any acknowledgment, Nettleman turned and strode from the control room. As Delitsky watched him go, he became aware that his decision to put the man in his place earlier might just have had serious implications for everyone working on the rig.
‘Military? What do you mean, military?’
‘It’s fine. Trust me.’
‘Trust you? You said we’d have to deal with local security forces, not Federation gunships.’
‘And you won’t have to. I disabled the long-range comms before they could send the message.’
‘You disabled the … You stupid idiot. That wasn’t part of the plan!’
‘I had no choice! I told you, we’ve had problems here.’
‘Well, now you’ve got another problem, haven’t you? How exactly are you going to call in the freighter if the long-range comms are disabled?’
‘I … I’ll think of something.’
‘Oh, you’ll think of something.’
‘I will!’
‘You better had. Or I might just come up with a plan of my own. One that you’re not going to like very much. Raptor out.’
Bill watched as the Doctor buried his head in the back of the communications console, reattaching broken connectors with his sonic screwdriver, replacing shattered circuit boards. Every now and then he would lean back to hand Bill some charred and broken piece of electronics, or ask her to pass him some complex-looking tool. She was more of a general dogsbody than an assistant. She was surprised that he hadn’t asked her to mop his brow or fetch him some tea.
‘Are you nearly finished?’
‘I’m nearly finished, here,’ came the muffled voice, ‘but I’ve still got to find whatever it was that caused this.’
Bill was puzzled. ‘Eh?’
The Doctor pulled his head out of the console. Bill had to stop herself from laughing, his hair was sticking up wildly and there were black smudges on his nose and chin.
‘Think about it,’ said the Doctor, using his sonic screwdriver to reattach the back of the console. ‘There’s a duty officer in here twenty-four hours a day, so there’s no way that anyone could get in there to do this without being noticed.’
‘Unless it’s the duty officer who did it,’ Bill pointed out smugly.
‘Robbins has been the duty officer since the accident with Baines.’
‘Oh.’ Given that it was Robbins who’d nearly had her hands blown off, Bill had to admit that it seemed unlikely that she was the saboteur.
The Doctor clambered to his feet, brushing soot and dirt from his jacket. ‘There are hundreds of miles of cables running all over this station. Pick the right point and someone could easily blow the circuits in the control room without having to go anywhere near it.’
Bill groaned. ‘You’re not suggesting that we check hundreds of miles …’
‘Come on.’
With that the Doctor turned and vanished out through the door of the control room. Bill scrambled to her feet and hurried after him. The Doctor was already a long way down the corridor.
‘Hey, slow down.’ She had to jog to catch up with him. ‘Where are we going?’
‘Not sure yet. Let�
�s just follow the trail and see.’
Peering at the readings that he was getting on his sonic screwdriver, the Doctor made his way along the corridor, obviously following the trail of some hidden cable buried deep in the walls. The crew of the rig gave him a wide berth. Bill could hardly blame them. Hunched over, with his wild hair and soot-smudged face, the Doctor was quite a sight. Not that he ever seemed to care what other people thought of him.
Still following the invisible trail, the Doctor turned off from the main corridor, making his way along a narrow service passageway.
He stopped abruptly, Bill almost crashing into the back of him.
‘This is the spot.’
Changing the settings in the screwdriver, he started to unfasten a wall panel. With Bill’s help, they pulled it free and lowered it to the floor.
‘Yes,’ said the Doctor, pointing into the cavity. ‘There’s the problem.’
Bill looked. Several cables had been bundled together, and what looked like a wrench of some kind had been crudely taped to the infrastructure so that it bridged two metal conduits. The inside of the cavity was blackened and charred. There had obviously been some kind of fire or electrical discharge.
The Doctor reached inside the wall, pulling the tape from the wrench and tugging it free.
‘It’s exactly as I thought: someone has rigged this so that when the comms unit was brought up to full power it short-circuited.’
‘It looks very crude.’
‘Crude, but effective.’ The Doctor started unravelling the knotted cables.
Bill frowned; there was something not quite right here. ‘Hang on a minute. In the med-bay, the damage that was done to the pressure armour, that was delicate, complicated work, right? I mean, something that had to be done by someone who really knew what they were doing. This …’ She pointed at the tangled mess. ‘Well, this is the sort of thing that I would do. No finesse, just chuck a spanner in the works and see what breaks.’
‘Oh …’ The Doctor stopped, suddenly coming to the same conclusion that she had.
‘This wasn’t done by the same person.’
‘No.’ The Doctor looked at her with something that was almost approaching admiration. ‘There are two saboteurs on this rig.’
Chapter
13
Standing in the lift alongside the Doctor, Bill was feeling particularly pleased with herself. It wasn’t often that she was able to reach a conclusion ahead of him, so the moment needed to be savoured.
Given the unsophisticated nature of the damage, the Doctor had made swift work of the repairs, and they were now on their way to the central communication server to restart the system. The tinny, authoritative voice in the lift had announced that they were not ‘authorised personnel’, and that the floor they had requested was ‘off limits’, but the Doctor had resolved that problem fairly swiftly too.
Having finally caught sight of his reflection in the shiny aluminium door of the lift, the Doctor had tried to push his tousled grey hair into some kind of order and was now using a large, grubby paisley handkerchief to rub the soot from his face.
As the lift came to a halt and the doors slid open, Bill stepped out and looked at her surroundings in surprise. Unlike the rest of the station, which to Bill’s eyes seemed like a strange amalgam of oil rig and power station, this corridor was white, virtually featureless and very, very clean.
‘This way.’ Stuffing the handkerchief back into his jacket pocket, the Doctor headed off down the corridor before coming to a halt in front of a large, heavy-looking door.
‘Another vault?’ asked Bill curiously.
‘Of a kind.’
Opening a panel next to the door, the Doctor activated his sonic screwdriver once more, and the door slid upwards with a soft ‘whoosh’ of compressed air.
The room beyond reeked of high-end, expensive technology. Bill gave a chuckle as she remembered how impressed she had been when she had been shown inside the server room at the university. Compared to this, however, it now seemed pitiful. Row upon row of racks stretched back into the darkness, lights glowing on the fronts of the servers that they contained, the air conditioning humming gently as it pumped cool air into the room. Sitting in front of the racks, almost like some kind of altar, was a desk with a single chair and three large monitor screens.
The Doctor slid into the seat, cracking his knuckles and bringing the interface to life. Bill just tucked herself against the back wall and watched as he busied himself at the controls, looking totally at ease amongst the technology. She guessed that as far as he was concerned, this was just some children’s toy, an abacus compared to the machinery in the TARDIS. She wondered if he had ever been truly awestruck by anything …
The Doctor worked in silence for several minutes then, with a sigh of satisfaction, sat back and stretched. ‘There … That should do it.’
‘Fixed?’
‘It’ll take a little while for the systems to calibrate, but yes. Fixed.’
Bill pulled herself from the wall, starting towards the door. ‘We’d better get back to the control room, then. Tell Delitsky.’
‘Hmm? The Doctor leaned forward once more, the light from the monitor screens giving his face a harsh bluish tint.
‘I said we should tell Delitsky that you’ve fixed it.’
‘Delitsky is going to call in the military as soon as he knows this is fixed, and I’m not sure that’s necessarily the best idea, so it might be better to wait for a bit before we tell him. Besides, I want to look for something else whilst we’re here.’
‘Great.’ Bill slumped back against the wall, watching as the Doctor started to bring page after page of text and schematics onto the three screens, occasionally stopping to examine something, then moving on to the next set of data.
Ten minutes went past. Then another ten. Bill yawned. Whilst they had been racing around actually doing something, she hadn’t really had a chance to notice how tired she was. But now that she had stopped … The combination of the hum from the air conditioning and the pattern of blinking lights on the servers was starting to make her eyelids feel heavy.
‘Gotcha!’
The Doctor’s cry of triumph snatched her from the brink of sleep. Rubbing at her eyes Bill wandered over to him, looking over his shoulder as information flashing across the screens at a dizzying rate.
‘Found something?’
‘The Ba-El Cratt spacecraft.’
Bill cast her mind back to what the aliens had told them. ‘I thought they said that it was too deep in the atmosphere. That it couldn’t be detected by these sensors.’
‘That’s what they said. But if that’s the case …’ The Doctor brought up an image on the centre screen. ‘Then what is that?’
Bill leaned forward to scrutinise the image. It certainly ‘could’ be a spacecraft of some kind, but … ‘Hang on a minute. That’s not in the atmosphere, that’s in the rings.’
‘Yes, it is, isn’t it?’ The Doctor’s eyes had that twinkle in them that meant that he was onto something. ‘So that either means that it’s not the Ba-El Cratt spacecraft, it’s something else, or it is their spacecraft and they’re lying to us. Whichever it is, I think it needs investigation, don’t you?’
‘Absolutely.’ Bill grinned. ‘What are we waiting for?’
‘Because I’ve found something else.’
‘Get you. You’re on fire!’
The Doctor frowned at her. ‘When I was rebooting the communications network I needed to scan though subspace transmissions from the rig so that I could recalibrate the system correctly.’
‘If you say so.’
‘This is the information the computer gave me.’ He brought up another page of data onto the screen.
Bill stared at it blankly. It was just code. She shrugged. ‘I really don’t have any idea of what it is you think I should be able to see.’
‘This,’ the Doctor pointed at a line, ‘is a subspace transmission that registered exactly eleven minutes ago
. Think about that.’
Bill thought about it. ‘You were still repairing the communications system, at that point!’
‘Exactly.’ He began to scroll through the data on the screen. ‘And once you have that unique subspace signature, then it’s easy enough to see another transmission here, and here, and here …’
‘The saboteur?’
‘That would be a fair guess.’
‘With a transmitter of their own?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well then, let’s find out who’s been using it!’ said Bill excitedly. ‘Tell Delitsky that we’ve found his saboteur.’
‘One of his saboteurs,’ the Doctor reminded her. ‘Besides, whoever is doing this is using some very sophisticated equipment to cover their tracks. The mainframe can’t tell what the transmission says, where it’s being sent or who is sending it. It’s taken a great deal of persuasion on my part, and a promise of marriage, for it to even acknowledge that the data I’ve found exists.’
‘So basically, Computer Says No.’
‘And Delitsky strikes me as a man who likes facts, not suppositions.’
‘So …’ Bill shrugged. ‘What next?’
‘We get some slightly more sophisticated equipment than this.’ He patted the console affectionately. ‘No offence.’
‘Back to the TARDIS?’
The Doctor nodded. ‘Back to the TARDIS.’
The Doctor slid open the doors of the equipment bay and strode across the darkened room towards the TARDIS. ‘Wait there a minute.’ He pushed open the doors and vanished inside leaving Bill standing in the gloom.
She peered curiously at the shapes looming around her. Delitsky’s crew had moved the TARDIS here after the Doctor’s successful rescue of Baines, or rather, his successful rescue of the creature that was now wearing Baines’s suit. The room was a mix of storage room and workshop. A long bench ran along one wall, the surface littered with complex-looking tools. Vehicles of various sizes lined the other wall: forklifts and loaders of some kind, their purpose instantly recognisable even if the individual designs were unfamiliar. Dotted here and there were pieces of pressure armour, presumably in for repair.
