by Mike Tucker
‘So that’s it, you’re just going to take the diamonds and fly off?’ Delitsky couldn’t keep the disbelief from his voice. ‘Right.’
‘You have assisted the Cancri, and that will not stand without retaliation,’ said the Ba-El Cratt leader menacingly. ‘But I am not so foolish as to embark on a war against an entire species with the remnants of one commando squad and a single assault craft.’
‘So you’re off to get reinforcements,’ said the Doctor grimly.
‘And when we return, we will annihilate this and every other mine.’
‘You cannot do this,’ yelled Delitsky. ‘We are not part of your war.’
‘Oh, but you are.’
‘Then we will fight,’ said Laura coldly.
‘Yes,’ hissed the Ba-El Cratt. ‘I know you will.’ The creature turned, raised an armoured glove and pointed at Bill. ‘Put her into a pressure suit.’
‘What?’ Bill stared in surprise. ‘Me?’
The Doctor caught hold of her arm reassuringly. ‘Why?’
‘As insurance.’
‘Against what?’
‘I am not a fool, Doctor. The moment we leave, you will attempt to stop our ship. Its function requires three of us. Our intention had been to leave two of our number on board this station, but the hostile actions taken against us force us to use different means of dissuasion. If any aggressive action is taken against us, the girl will die.’
‘No.’ The Doctor stepped forward, shielding her. ‘She’s just a child. If you want a hostage take me instead.’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because you wish it.’ The creature pointed its g-Taser at the Doctor’s chest. ‘I have shown leniency towards you once, Doctor. Don’t rely on that happening a second time.’
Face darkening, the Doctor stepped towards the Ba-El Cratt leader. ‘Let me remind you of something. You owe your life to me.’ He stretched out a finger, pointing at the repairs that he had made to the pressure regulator on the armoured suit. ‘Without me, your armour would have depressurised, your mission would have failed and you would be nothing more than dissipated gas. Everything that you are doing here, any glory that you hope to gain, is only possible because I helped you to survive.’
Bill held her breath as the Ba-El Cratt leader regarded the Doctor silently for what seemed like forever, but could only really have been a matter of seconds. Then it lowered its weapon.
‘Put him in a suit instead.’
Delitsky and Jo Teske helped the Doctor clamber into the huge suit of pressure armour and started to hook him into the controls. Bill stood to one side watching them nervously.
‘Are you sure that this is a good idea, Doctor?’ muttered Delitsky. ‘Once you’re on board that ship and it’s undocked, we’ve no way of getting you back.’
‘You let me worry about how to get back, Chief Delitsky. If I’m right, then once that ship undocks you’re going to have more than enough problems of your own.’
Delitsky grunted in agreement. There wasn’t a single member of his crew that believed that the Ba-El Cratt were going to just fly off into the sunset leaving everyone unharmed. They had already shown such a casual disregard for life that it wasn’t a question of if the rig was going to be destroyed; it was a question of when and how.
‘Why is this taking so long?’ boomed the voice of the waiting Ba-El Cratt. ‘We must leave, now.’
‘He’s not getting measured for a dress suit, you know,’ snapped Delitsky. ‘This is a complex piece of survival equipment, and it takes time to prepare.’
‘It is primitive and inefficient,’ hissed the creature. ‘Like so much that the Cancri creates. Now stop delaying and finish your work.’
‘Lovely motivational style they have,’ said the Doctor under his breath.
‘Yeah.’ Delitsky gave a snort of agreement. ‘You’d imagine that they’d get on well with Nettleman.’
The levity faded from the Doctor’s voice. ‘How’s Bill?’
Delitsky shot her a quick glance. Bill returned his gaze with the briefest of nods.
‘She’s good.’
‘Right then. Turn me on.’
Jo Teske keyed in the start-up sequence that would allow the Doctor to activate the armour, and he made a theatrical show of stretching the arms and operating the claws.
‘All connections green.’ Delitsky tried to keep his voice sounding natural. ‘Ready to pressurise.’
Bill suddenly ran forward, pushing past Jo and throwing herself against the front of the armoured suit. ‘Doctor, please,’ she pleaded. ‘You can’t do this to me. If anything happens to you then I’m stuck here!’
‘I’ve no choice.’ The Doctor wouldn’t meet her gaze.
‘Well, why does it have to be you? Why can’t you let someone else go in your place?’
He looked up, a thin smile on his lips. ‘Because I’m the Doctor. This is what I do.’
Delitsky reached out and caught hold of Bill by the shoulders, pulling her away from the suit. As he did so, the Doctor activated the closing mechanism and there was a whirr of servos as the massive armour closed shut with a clang.
Warning lights started to flash as, under the Doctor’s control, the armour came to life and took a few tentative steps across the hangar floor.
‘Ooh, tricky.’ The Doctor’s voice boomed from the speakers, sounding totally inappropriate for the massive mining machine. ‘But I think I’ll get the hang of it. Right then.’ Two armoured gloves rubbed themselves together making the suit seem comically human. ‘Shall we go?’
The Ba-El Cratt gestured towards the service lift with its gun. The watching crowd parted as the two machines stamped across the hangar and mounted the short ramp to the lift doors.
As the doors opened, the Ba-El Cratt turned with a final warning for the crew. ‘Remember: if an attempt is made to stop our ship from leaving, the Doctor will die.’
The doors slammed shut, and Delitsky gave a massive sigh of relief.
Bill turned to him with a massive grin on her face. ‘And the Oscar for best actress in a supporting role goes to Bill Potts!’
Jo Teske clapped Delitsky on the shoulder. ‘Well done, Jorgen. I wasn’t sure we were going to be able to pull that off.’
Delitsky had to agree. ‘I just hope that the Doctor knows what he is doing.’
The Doctor too was breathing a grateful sigh. Grateful that the Cancri had been forced to abandon any kind of visor in the suits, and to rely on external sensors for guidance instead. Whilst it was true that it gave no option for the wearer to see out, it also had the distinct advantage of not allowing anyone on the outside to see in. And that was a very good thing indeed.
He craned his neck, trying to see the subspace tracker that Bill had dropped inside the suit just before he had closed it up. It had come to rest just in front of him, wedged against the buckle of one of the restraining straps that held him firmly in place. To the Doctor’s immense relief, Bill had done exactly as instructed. Not that what he had asked was that difficult on a device that only had two buttons. The green button was glowing softly in the dim interior of the armour. Whereas before it had functioned as a tracking device, now it was a transmitter, sending out a signal on a very, very specific subspace frequency, a frequency that he was hoping could only be easily be detected by two people: Rince and whoever he was communicating with on board the pirate ship.
The doors to the service lift slid open. Huge mechanised tractors were moving the last of the diamond-packed cylinders from the vault to the airlock of the Ba-El Cratt ship. Empty, the cavernous space seemed even larger than the Doctor remembered from the last time he had stood here.
His suit was jolted sharply as he was pushed roughly out of the lift and directed towards the airlock. Still coming to terms with the complex controls of the pressure armour, the Doctor made his way gingerly forward, making sure each step was grounded before taking the next.
The two Ba-El Cratt in the vault called out in rou
gh guttural tones to their newly arrived comrade. Their words were unintelligible but their meaning was clear. They wanted to leave.
Urged on by the three aliens, the Doctor made his way inside the airlock. Like the rest of the Ba-El Cratt ship, the cargo lock had a disquieting organic quality, the clean lines of the human-designed diamond cylinder looking uncomfortable next to the swirling, black alien shapes.
As the last of the cargo movers retracted back into the vault, the airlock started to close, petal-like doors almost slithering from the wall before locking together and plunging the room into total darkness.
The Doctor activated his searchlights, then watched as the holographic display hovering in the air in front of his face tracked the pressure build-up outside his suit as the airlock equalised.
Another set of organic doors peeled open ahead of him and, as the Doctor stepped out into the bowels of the alien ship, he was aware of the three other suits of pressure armour springing open like jack-in-the-boxes. With a swirl like an angry tide, the Ba-El Cratt surged past him.
Delitsky watched the monitor screen in subdued awe as the Ba-El Cratt ship swung away from the airlock, looking more like some denizen of the deep ocean than any spacecraft he had ever seen.
‘It almost seems alive,’ said Bill, echoing his thoughts.
Jo Teske’s observation was far more morbid. ‘It’s horrible. It looks … cancerous, like a tumour.’
Delitsky wished that she could have chosen her words with a little more care. ‘It could prove to be just as fatal,’ he said grimly, ‘if Mr Rince’s friends aren’t punctual …’
Under the watchful eye of Captain Palmer and Sergeant Harrison, Rince was sitting at the far side of the control room, hunched over the subspace transmitter that had been recovered from his quarters, talking urgently into the microphone.
‘Ringbearer to Raptor. The package is moving. I repeat, the package is moving. Target tracer frequency encoded in this transmission. Acknowledge, please.’
As with all the previous attempts he had made, there was still no reply from his unseen collaborators. Rince looked up helplessly.
‘Try again,’ ordered Delitsky.
‘But they’re not responding.’
‘Try again,’ the Rig Chief repeated. ‘You got anywhere else to be?’
Rince turned back to the transmitter, repeating the same thing over and over. ‘Ringbearer to Raptor. The package is moving. Acknowledge please.’
The Ba-El Cratt ship was starting to accelerate away from them, banking slightly as it started to manoeuvre.
‘They’re not going to arrive in time, are they?’ said Jo, her eyes glued to the screen.
Bill grabbed her hand and squeezed it. ‘Trust me. The Doctor can do this.’
Delitsky said nothing. He had no doubts about the Doctor’s abilities. Unfortunately, their lives now also relied on the actions of a manager from the Kollo-Zarnista Mining Corporation and his ‘friends’, and that gave him little comfort.
The Doctor watched with interest as the Ba-El Cratt swirled around him, clearly luxuriating in their freedom after so long confined to their borrowed suits of pressure armour. In their natural form, the aliens were beautiful – fluid and black, their skin rippling with iridescent colour, like a skin of oil on a pool of water.
As they twisted and writhed, it became clear why they had discarded the need for individual names: there were points in this strange dance where it became impossible to separate one creature from the other, the thick viscous gel of their bodies merging and blending, before separating again in a burst of movement. The Ba-El Cratt had obviously developed a complex method of communicating with each other that went well beyond the restrictions of their spoken language.
The frantic dance started to subside, and the creatures began to move around the control room in an intricate pattern, sliding in and out of the holes and fissures in the walls, operating the ship in exactly the manner that the Doctor had supposed. He could feel the tilt of the vessel as it started to bank.
‘So, now that you’ve had a chance to stretch your legs, do you mind telling me where you are taking me?’
One of the Ba-El Cratt oozed from a hole in the floor and drifted towards him. Somehow the Doctor knew that this was the creature that had inhabited Baines’s suit.
‘Count yourself lucky, Doctor. Your selfless act of bravery has saved your life. For the moment, at least.’
‘You intend to destroy the mine,’ said the Doctor matter-of-factly.
‘Of course we do! It will take a few moments to power up the necessary systems, then we shall target the gravity inverters and the mine will be drawn into the planet’s atmosphere and destroyed.’ The creature’s voice hardened. ‘A taste of what will come when we return in force.’
‘Yes … Yes, that’s what I thought you would do.’
The creature was still for a moment. ‘So, your act of bravery was in fact an act of self-preservation? You suspected our intentions and took the child’s place simply to save your own life?’ The gelatinous form started to quiver in a manner that could only be interpreted as amusement. ‘I have been underestimating you, Doctor. Perhaps I will keep you alive just long enough to show the Collective just how duplicitous and unpredictable the people of your planet can be!’
As the Ba-El Cratt curled back towards its fellows the Doctor glanced down at the green light blinking steadily on the front of the tracking device.
‘Oh, yes,’ he murmured. ‘Unpredictable is my middle name.’
Chapter
19
‘Ah!’ Rince gave a cry of surprise as the subspace transmitter suddenly chirped into life. ‘They’re responding!’
Bill hurried with the others to the console.
‘Let’s hear it,’ snapped Delitsky.
Sergeant Harrison opened up the monitor channel that she and Robbins had hooked up, and an angry female voice filled the control room.
‘Ringbearer, this is Raptor, what the hell are you playing at? The plan was that you give us fair warning, not wait until the package was on its way.’
‘It’s not my fault,’ stammered Rince. ‘They moved the schedule forward.’
‘And you couldn’t give us any more notice than this?’ There was a harsh expletive. ‘When this is over, we are going to have a long talk about what this means for your percentage.’
There was a long pause. Delitsky shot a concerned glance across at Palmer. The security captain was obviously thinking the same way. Was the short notice enough of a problem for them to abandon their plans?
‘Why can’t we get a sensor lock on the freighter?’
Delitsky looked pointedly at Rince, reminding the nervous junior executive of what they had agreed he should say.
‘They … um …’ Rince was starting to sweat. ‘They’re testing a new sensor dampener.’
There was another expletive. ‘Something else that you just forgot to mention?’
‘The homing sensor is in place, though!’ gabbled Rince. ‘You can still target on that.’
‘You had better be right or, I swear to God, when I see you, I’m going to kill you. Raptor out.’
Rince collapsed back in his seat, face in his hands.
Delitsky felt a brief pang of sympathy for the man. Even if by some miracle this worked and he avoided being blown up with the rest of them, Rince’s choices were a lifetime on a Federation penal colony or a lifetime trying to hide from the pirates that he had just double crossed. Tough call.
‘They’re coming.’ Claire Robbins had been waiting at the sensor console, scanning for any sign of the raiders’ ship.
All eyes turned to stare at the main screen.
‘Good luck, Doctor,’ Delitsky murmured.
The spacecraft was no product of the shipyards of Mars or Ganymede. It had not been designed to be beautiful, or fuel-efficient, or user-friendly. It had been thrown together from the scavenged remains of dozens of other ships with just one purpose: to be fast and deadly.
<
br /> It swept into the orbit of Saturn at speeds that the engineers at the commercial shipyards would scarcely have believed possible, its engines configured to ignore all the safety parameters that most ordinary people would consider vital to their wellbeing.
But the crew of the spacecraft were not ordinary people. Like the ship itself, they had been thrown together piecemeal, their lives intersecting in dozens of different ways, on trajectories from dozens of different planets, but all leading to this moment.
Guided by the subspace beacon, the raiders’ ship bore down on the twisted black shape of the Ba-El Cratt spacecraft. There was no expert pilot at the controls, no Academy graduate with years of Federation flight training behind them. But what did that matter when you could rely on the automatics to do the hard work for you?
The crew inside might have raised an eyebrow at the strange design of the ship they were approaching, but any doubts they might have had vanished with thoughts of the diamonds that lay within. Swooping low over the rings of Saturn, they fired a shot across the bows.
The Ba-El Cratt spacecraft lurched violently as blaster fire glanced off its hull. The Doctor staggered, barely keeping his balance inside the pressure armour as the floor bucked beneath his feet.
To their credit, the Ba-El Cratt reacted instantly, abandoning their planned attack run on the Kollo-Zarnista mine to respond to this new threat. The ship banked alarmingly, and the Doctor was flung against a wall. He hauled himself upright, watching the readings on the pressure suit’s HUD as energy discharges coming from the ship spiked again and again. With each spike on the readout the floor shook with a deep, booming vibration. As he’d hoped, the Ba-El Cratt were returning fire.
The Doctor gave a nod of satisfaction, then turned the settings on his gravity inverters to maximum, crossed his fingers, and took a deep breath.
The raiders’ spacecraft twisted and span as fire spat from the weapons of the Ba-El Cratt ship, energy tearing through space and smashing into the rings, erupting into vast boiling fireballs as rocks and icebergs were shattered into fragments.
