Match of the Day

by Chris Boucher

The first warning light, indicating a possible intruder crossing the edge of the outer scan zone in Sector 4 Grid 4 by 3, did not interrupt the Shift Controller’s reverie. Normally this would not have been important. Almost invariably the alarm sequences were triggered by animals, feral dogs and cats mainly, and the computer usually identified and discounted such targets as they moved further into the zone and presented more reliable data. This one was the correct height and moving in the right way to register a high probability that it was just such a false alarm.

  Nevertheless the Shift Controller should have keyed his acknowledgement of the first warning, thus recording his awareness and vigilance. In the subsequent enquiry into the perimeter security procedures at Aerospace Main his failure to do so, the Commission decided quite unfairly, was what caused all the problems that followed.

  Keefer had watched the dog in the distance quartering the firebreaks as it hunted mice and other small prey, and he had immediately added it to his strategy. Security would probably be used to the animals, he realised, and while the system was operating on crude data he could use that familiarity to move closer in and get a better line on the scanners without setting off major alarms.

  Once the shallow trench was finished and he was satisfied with it he set off. He crouched low to the ground and, moving back and forth as he had seen the dog doing, he crossed into the outer zone of the security perimeter.

  When he had penetrated a few metres in he dropped flat and, keeping his movements to a slow, smooth minimum, laid out the weapons in sequence on the ground beside him.

  That done, he carefully checked the sighting for the three rapid bursts of fire he would need to make with the small rapid-fire pistol he carried, but seldom used in the normal run of fights. Finally he set it for tracer, flicked off the safety and began his pre-fight concentration exercise.

  In the surveillance suite the first warning light had cancelled itself, unremarked except by the machine log, which noticed and recorded every variation from the norm. When the second light came up the supervisor spotted it immediately.

  Even using crude data the computer had no difficulty in interpreting the intruder as:

  not-canine:

  subset not-feral

  subset not-domestic

  not-feline:

  subset not-feral

  subset not-domestic

  not-bird:

  subset not-carrion

  and so on through an exhaustive list of possible false alarms.

  It had a small problem resolving the conflict between dog - no alarm/cancel indicator and not-dog - activate indicator/

  prepare alarm sequentially occupying exactly the same space in the scanner map, which reduced the threat probability and delayed the initial alarm. But this was largely academic since Keefer was about to bring the sky down on ‘port security.

  The Court of Attack lock-up was an unusual cell block in many ways, not least because there was never any sign of the jailers. Food and welfare, information, instructions and discipline were all delivered or administered automatically or remotely.

  There was something peculiarly threatening about such a totally impersonal regime, the Doctor thought. There was no point of human contact so there was no point of reference.

  They could have been the boxed playthings of a giant child. If you weren’t concentrating you could lose your hold on reality and never get it back. It was because there was no one to face, no one to confront and to blame, no one to question, if it came to that. They existed at the whim of unseen power.

  They were like uneducated primitives living in superstitious awe of a world they could not understand or begin to control.

  And yet Leela had recognised the danger and resisted it immediately. She had known what he himself was only just beginning to realise: the importance of keeping everything personal. He watched her now as she prowled about trying to spot the directional voice devices that produced the proximity whispers. She had no real idea what it was she was looking for except that it was something physical and man-made rather than a disembodied supernatural force. She had the knife out again and was obviously planning to wreak some sort of symbolic vengeance on any likely-looking device that she came across. It was a pointless exercise if you looked at it logically but how else did you face up to the faceless? How else did you resist the irresistible? Logically you didn’t. But what she lacked in logic she always made up for in sheer determination and simple bloody-mindedness. ‘I wonder what’s happened to our friend Fanson,’ he said.

  ‘He is not my friend,’ Leela said.

  Yes, simple bloody-mindedness was always in evidence, the Doctor thought. ‘A figure of speech,’ he said. ‘He seems to have been gone longer this time. Hard to tell whether that’s a good sign for him.’

  ‘It is hard to care,’ Leela said, poking the knife point into a small gap at the back of the workstation where Fanson had been sitting when he got the whispered summons.

  ‘Maybe I can get some information from the computer,’ the Doctor said. ‘Assuming you’re not planning to attack the terminal next.’ It was likely that all the outcomes of all the cases in all the Courts of Attack would be recorded on the universal computer database, he thought. And presumably the process would be more or less instantaneous. But then he found himself wondering how much he really wanted to know about what had happened to Fanson.

  ‘Do you think they are watching us?’ Leela asked.

  ‘They?’

  ‘Our captors.’

  ‘Oh that they,’ the Doctor said. ‘I imagine so.’ He smiled suddenly and vividly. ‘Smile for the camera. Hold the knife up so that everyone can see it. Perhaps we can order some prints to send home to the tribe.’ There was natural resistance and there was stupidity, and on reflection Leela was straying towards natural stupidity.

  ‘You are talking strangely again, Doctor,’ Leela said frowning at him. ‘Is it as before? Are you feeling sick?’

  Before the Doctor could point out to her that he was merely trying to get her attention away from abusing the fixtures and fittings and back to the reality of their situation, the reality of their situation changed abruptly.

  The prisoner Leela and her contract-registered agent will report to the Court of Attack in one hour for open pleading and judgement before the High Referee of Duel and the Panel of Fight Replay,’ a voice whispered with eerie clarity, as though the words had been breathed closely and directly into the Doctor’s ear.

  ‘Open pleading?’ Leela said suspiciously. ‘I will not plead for my life. I will not plead with these skulking cowards.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ the Doctor said. ‘I think that’s what I’m supposed to do.’

  With a show of defiance Leela said loudly, ‘The judgement of these people means nothing.’

  ‘Unless it’s in our favour of course,’ the Doctor said.

  ‘Guilty? What guilty? What are you talking about?’ Fanson recognised a joke when he saw one but this was no time for humour. ‘That is not funny! This is not right, you know. This is not what’s supposed to happen.’

  ‘You have the right to review the relevant sections of the examination record,’ said the Interrogation Controller, who showed no sign of smiling but was clearly pleased with himself.

  Maybe not a joke then, Fanson thought. So what? Another shakedown? Yeah, could be another shakedown. Aloud he said: ‘I’m not what you’d call a rich man, gods I’m not what anybody’d call a rich man, but I do have access to a little money. A little cash money...?’

  ‘You’re not offering me a bribe are you?’

  Fanson tried for a wry smile. ‘Not necessarily,’ he said and found that for some reason he couldn’t quite set his face in the desired expression.

  The Interrogation Controller shook his head slightly. ‘It’s a pity this is such an uncomplicated case,’ he said. ‘I could have made a full subroutine out of a bribe offer. Classic first-level corroboration.’

  Classic computer service ratcrud thought Fanson, w
ho was now at a loss to know what his next move should be. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. Wait and see looked like his only option. One thing was for sure though: whatever this was all about it was going to get obvious pretty scuffling fast.

  Gods if it had been for real it would be over and done in double-quick time.

  The possibility that it was for real still did not really occur to him, not for a moment. It was too unreal to contemplate...

  Once again the Doctor was almost impressed. He and Leela had set out walking into the bright white corridors of the lock-up complex with no idea where the courtroom they had been summoned to might actually be situated. The whole place seemed deserted. There was still no sign of any jailers and the occasional prisoner they did glimpse on the way through disappeared into their private quarters at the first hint that the Doctor might be planning to speak to them.

  There were no signposts or map boards, no directional arrows, no whispered instructions from proximity speakers; there was nothing to show them where they were supposed to go. What there was, however, was a clear indication of where they were not supposed to go. Each time they moved away from the correct direction their wrist and ankle bands began to tighten. The longer and further they strayed the tighter the bands became and the only way they could ease them was to go back into the permitted area of movement. Within this unrestricted zone the Doctor reasoned must be the courtroom they were seeking and to find it all they had to do was to keep moving. It was a process of trial and error not unlike the ones he had seen used by simple maze-solving automata.

  Although she had probably worked out what was happening almost as soon as the Doctor had himself, and well before he decided to explain it to her anyway, Leela of course stubbornly resisted the system. The Doctor had expected this, though that didn’t make it any less irritating as he stood waiting at one of the junctions in the corridors, while she pressed on down what was obviously the wrong route. ‘It would be sensible,’ he said, trying to keep the annoyance out of his voice and thus avoid provoking her into further self-destructive defiance, ‘to save pushing the limits of the system until we need an escape plan. And we won’t need one of those until after the court has ruled.’

  ‘That may be too late,’ Leela called back from the bend in the corridor she had reached. She peered round it, took a half step forward, hesitated for a moment and then turned and came trotting back to where the Doctor was waiting with his hands stuck in his trouser pockets and his face set in an expression of casual unconcern, which he certainly didn’t feel. At this moment he couldn’t see much purpose in all the tutoring he planned to give her when there was time; not to mention all the casual good sense she could pick up in passing from the accumulated wisdom of his many experiences and incarnations if she would only stop behaving like a rampaging primitive with all the calculating self-discipline of a mindlessly violent savage. ‘We should be getting on,’ he said. ‘We are working to a deadline.’

  He started to walk on towards the court, responding now to quite small guide prompts from his wrist bands. It almost felt as if he was being led by the hand, he thought, though Leela clearly regarded it as being dragged by the scruff of the neck.

  ‘There is a door round that corner that leads to the outside,’ Leela said. ‘I thought the bands might not work if you could reach the outside.’

  ‘Unlikely,’ the Doctor grunted, lengthening his stride.

  Leela jogged along beside him. ‘It was a theory,’ she said.

  ‘And you told me that a theory is useless unless it can be tested.’

  ‘Did I say that?’

  ‘But I could not reach the outside so I could not test it.’ She rubbed her wrist and held her hand up so that he could see the blood on it.

  The Doctor stopped and took her hands in his and examined the wrists. There were trickles of blood from under the edges of the bands but the injuries did not look to him to be too serious. Her ankles did not seem to be bleeding. He sighed resignedly. ‘Is there any chance you might stop doing things like this?’ he asked. He took out a large white handkerchief from the pocket of his coat and wiped the blood from her wrists. ‘At least until it’s absolutely necessary.’

  ‘I thought it was absolutely necessary.’

  ‘You were mistaken.’ The Doctor pocketed the bloody handkerchief and walked on more slowly. Reaching another anonymous fork in the corridor he felt the slightest of twitches in the wrist and ankle bands as he moved to take the left folk and so turned instead into the right-hand corridor. There he paused and waited for Leela to take the wrong direction again. This time, however, she followed his lead. For some reason he couldn’t quite justify he found this even more irritating than what she had been doing. Why couldn’t she have simply followed his lead from the beginning? Was she deliberately setting out to annoy him? Of course she was. He sighed again. Of course she wasn’t. It seemed he was more nervous about the approaching trial than he had realised. The trouble was he didn’t know enough about what he was doing to be confident doing it...

  Keefer was calm and sharp and ready to set his plan in motion.

  The first and briefest burst of tracers burnt out the scanner that was registering his presence. A second, slightly longer burst hosed across the faces of four scanners ranged down the perimeter to his left. The overloads on the delicate detectors were immediate and devastating. That section of the perimeter was instantly blind, deaf and registering the possibility of major terrorist infiltration.

  He emptied the rest of the magazine in a sustained burst down the perimeter to his right. This took out two scanners directly and crippled another five. The possibility of terrorist attack was uprated to probability.

  Keefer reloaded the pistol with explosive shells each set on a delay. He fired these in a random pattern through the perimeter and then matched the pattern with smoke shells.

  As he ran back towards his prepared trench he fired a final clip of incendiary pellets into the shrub, setting as many separate fires as possible. By the time he lay down in the trench and began to cover himself he had transformed the area into the beginnings of a fairly convincing battlefield.

  The Court of Attack was a semicircular chamber under a lofty, opaque-glass half dome. In the tall-backed centre chair of an elevated curved tier of nine seats the High Referee and Senior Umpire of Duel sat flanked on either side by the eight members of the Panel of Fight Replay. All nine were dressed in black uniforms with high, soft grey collars buttoned tightly under the chin. The Doctor recognised the High Referee as the small, dapper man who had had them arrested, and the courtroom itself as a symbolic version of the sacred arena sliced precisely in half.

  Presumably bisecting it had some deeply symbolic significance, but for the moment the Doctor couldn’t work out what that might be. He also couldn’t work out how Jerro Fanson’s imaginative and imaginary scenario was supposed to have worked in this place. The defence’s case, his insufficiently reasoned and not-very-practised argument, depended for its effect on the claim that there would have been a surge of amazed and horrified interest among the duelling aficionados, which in its turn would have generated a tidal wave of worldwide publicity, which in its turn would have made the Doctor and Leela rich and famous. But there were only eleven people present, counting them. There were no observers, no court stenographers, no prosecuting counsel, no members of any sort of press corps that he could see... To the Doctor this looked a lot more like a secret military tribunal than a public trial. And secret military tribunals did not, in his experience, lend themselves readily to tidal waves of publicity. It looked as though his uncertain grasp of the finer points of legal argument might not be as important as he had thought.

  ‘You have fought only half your fight,’ the High Referee announced when Leela and the Doctor had made their way to the two empty chairs in the centre of the floor and were standing behind them looking up at the members of the court. ‘You have been brought before us solemnly to face the second half of your duel.’


  ‘Ah,’ the Doctor murmured. So that’s the significance of the half arena, he thought. Either that or it was a routine rationalisation of a poor piece of architectural design.

  ‘The Rules of Attack,’ the High Referee went on, ‘have been brought into doubt and question by your moves and by your reactions. Here in this Court of Attack we must seek to identify the rule, to understand the rule, to make firm the rule, so that the death that is sought for and is fought for is not cruel nor is it arbitrary nor is it unlawful but is according to the universal rule. You may be seated.’

  ‘I will stand,’ Leela said immediately.

  ‘My client would prefer to stand if that’s all right with you,’

  the Doctor said, smiling in what he hoped was a friendly and non-challenging way. Legal arguments might be a waste of time but there was no point in deliberately stirring up the senior psychopath and all the assistant psychopaths. On the other hand it was important to look relaxed. ‘I on the other hand,’ he said, still smiling warmly, ‘would prefer to sit down if that’s acceptable to the court.’ Sitting he knew would of course put him in an even weaker position than standing looking upwards, which was in itself intended to give the members of the court dominance over accused prisoners.

  Sometimes though, the Doctor had found, the only way to avoid an unavoidable manoeuvre was to accept and exaggerate it. He sat down in one of the chairs and stretched out his legs and crossed his ankles. As an afterthought he put his hands behind his head and leaned back slightly.

  ‘That’s better,’ he said. ‘It’s difficult to look up constantly without getting a crick in the neck, I find.’ He widened his smile until it was at its most vividly beaming. ‘If everybody’s comfortable why don’t we begin?’

  ‘The Fight Replay Panel will present the record of its findings,’ the High Referee said.