More worrying than the puzzle of the Doctor’s magical money was what he had done with the TARDIS. He had it placed among the decorations in one of the rooms of the office and he showed it off to visitors as if it was an interesting relic that might once have been holy to a powerful shaman such as him but was no longer of importance. Of course Leela had long ago put all superstitious nonsense behind her, but she still felt that it was in some way tempting the unseen power to treat the TARDIS in this way. It may not have been magic, in fact it was not magic, obviously, because there was no such thing as magic, but the TARDIS was beyond understanding and so should be treated with respect otherwise who knows what might happen. The Doctor certainly did not as he had shown more than once.
But there was something worse than the Doctor’s careless attitude to the TARDIS that was making her more uncomfortable. What really bothered her was that the Doctor seemed to have changed his mind and had settled into this world. He was involving himself enthusiastically in the world of duelling, which before he had claimed to despise. He called himself an agent now and he was already representing seven fighters and her. He was always in his office talking through the communications devices, making plans with other agents, making arrangements to stage duels. After all he had said about how uncivilised it was to take pleasure in fighting, he was saying now that she should fight simply to entertain people. She had tried to argue with him, to remind him that she was a warrior not a brawler, or a ‘scuffler’ as these people called them, but he would not listen. He told her not to worry, that he had a plan, that he would explain when he had time only he never seemed to have time. Meanwhile he wanted her to get on with training his other fighters because people liked to watch the training. Some wanted the chance to join in. Warriors did not train so that people could watch them or fight with them. And how could that be part of a plan? The truth was she did not believe he had a plan. She was almost sure he was doing what he always seemed to do: he was enjoying himself finding out about things while he waited to see what would happen. As far as she could see that was as much of a plan as he ever had and it was no plan at all: it was just a way of looking at things. She had even heard the Doctor refer to what he did as ‘casual science’, by which he seemed to mean enjoying himself finding out about things while he waited to see what would happen...
But while Leela was not sure about what it was that the Doctor was doing, she was sure about what he was not doing.
He was not making any attempt to keep his promise to the unpleasant Jerro Fanson and try to find the coward Keefer and warn him of the danger he was in. Well, like the Doctor she had given her word but unlike him she intended to keep it. A warrior, unlike a shaman, was bound by the given word.
She had distrusted Jerro Fanson and, from what she had been told, his fighter was as untrustworthy as he was himself, but it made no difference to the promise. It was who gave their word that mattered, not who they gave their word to. As the warrior trainer had said: character is what you do when nobody is looking.
She had thought long and hard about how she should approach the search for a duellist who had run away and hidden himself in a world she was not familiar with. There was only one way that she could think of. No matter what the world was, no matter what the quarry was, the basics of the chase were always the same in her experience. The ways and places of hiding were limited and there was always a trail that led to them. The most difficult part of any hunt was finding the first spore, the first sign of the trail.
She decided she would have to pretend that, like Keefer, she too was in trouble and afraid. She would then ask the other fighters she was training with what they could do to help her to run away and hide herself. Among the options they gave her it might be possible to spot the first trace of the running man.
For those on the interplanetary grand tour there was little to recommend Piran. It may have been the largest known planetary satellite, but to them it was still just a frozen, featureless, minor curiosity. Most did not bother to go down to the surface, hidden as it was in a dense brown haze and with nothing to offer when you got there but robot mine heads and the crowded and violent pressure-domed work camps. The tourists had not endured the expensive discomforts of long-haul space travel to watch the brutal processes of mineral extraction. They had come to this large but unexciting moon simply to look directly from its orbit at one of the astonishing sights of the system.
So it was that, while the ship off-loaded plant, equipment and replacement workers into a succession of landing shuttles, the rich gawped in idle fascination at the ice-and stone-ringed, hydrogen giant that was the planet Geewin.
For the richest among the rich there was a special shuttle to take them to a geostationary orbit hotel, whose accommodations afforded unparalleled views of the huge planet. The waiting list for the meanest of rooms was five years long and getting longer all the time.
The story was that when this hotel was new and very fashionable the Lady Hakai had stayed there. This they said was why, when she finally withdrew from human society, she came to Geewin. It seemed unlikely to Keefer that the third richest person in all the settled worlds, and the richest woman in the history of the race, would ever have visited a tourist hotel no matter how fashionable it was. Whatever the reason though, her space-yacht, the mighty Ultraviolet Explorer, did wander among the moons of Geewin. And Reefer’s immediate problem was to find it and get on board.
‘What’s your interest in her?’ the shuttle pilot had asked.
‘I’m interested in money,’ Keefer said. ‘And she’s got more than her fair share of it.’
‘She’s got more than your fair share and my fair share and most everyone else’s fair share summed and squared, but that doesn’t answer my question.’ The pilot finished scrolling through the shuttle manifest on his control screen and entered his acknowledgement without bothering to conceal the code.
‘I asked you first,’ Keefer said and gave him another large denomination currency note.
‘There’s nothing very secret about it.’ The young man tucked the cash away and grinned smugly. ‘UVX runs a more or less routine series of orbits. She’ll be somewhere around Dreen or thereabouts right now.’ He flicked on his navigation plot. ‘Yeah, there you go,’ he confirmed and pointed at the display. ‘You could have had that information for nothing.’
Keefer didn’t smile. ‘It was information about you I was buying,’ he said and turned back towards the passenger section.
The pilot could not resist it. ‘How do you mean?’ he asked.
Keefer looked back at him. ‘It was a test. You scuffled it up.
It’s going to cost you big.’
The pilot was not fazed. ‘You rich boys never could take a joke.’
Keefer smiled now. ‘We rich boys don’t have to.’
As he went back through the cabin and took his seat he wondered if he had overplayed his fist, but then he remembered what Jerro had told him that time he almost set up the fight with Razorback Turner: ‘An empty fist can’t be overplayed, kid, it’s impossible. That’s like bad publicity: a contradiction in terms.’
Keefer tightened the seat straps and waited for the motors to kick in and punch the shuttle sub-orbital. He had watched earlier ones leave the deep-space transport so he knew that the trip down was unlikely to be smooth. He was not the only one. He could smell the fear-sweat on the other six people crammed into the cramped pressurised section. On five of them at least. Perhaps the woman had not bothered to find out what to expect, or perhaps she was tougher than the men. Pale skinned, with her red hair cropped close to the skull, she was as hard faced and whiplash lean as the rest of the contract work crew, but there was something else about her, a cold watchfulness, that was different. For a moment Keefer felt he should know her, that they had met somewhere. They couldn’t have done of course. He had been told that the six were an established team scheduled to replace a full crew killed in an airlock failure. Such losses were routine it seemed since that acc
ident had happened during the time the transport had been en route. Either someone was a lucky guesser, or they always shipped out plenty of replacement workers because that would be cheaper than heavy-duty safety systems.
There was no warning from the flight deck before the shuttle disengaged. The noises from the hydraulic rams and the abrupt slamming of airtight hatches vibrated through the fabric of the craft, murmuring into the air of the compartment as faint, disorientating echoes.
‘Last scuffling time I fly with this outfit,’ one of the men said. ‘The in-flight service stinks. No bastard tells you what’s happening. And where’s the finger snacks and drinkies?’
‘I’d give up a bollock for a drink right now,’ another said.
‘You couldn’t spare one.’ This from the woman.
‘You could,’ the man guffawed at her.
‘She could spare two,’ another of the men said, ‘both of them yours. That’s after she rips your lungs out.’
The man had stopped laughing. ‘She knows I didn’t mean anything by it. You know that don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ the woman said without looking at him. ‘I know that.’
‘I mean I’m not stupid,’ he said. ‘I’d have to be seriously stupid wouldn’t I!’
‘All right you’ve made your point,’ she said and shot him a look that silenced him.
‘I blame the tourist for all this,’ one of the others said and glanced across at Keefer.
‘What for?’
‘He’s rich, I don’t scuffling need a reason.’
It was a joke but there was a challenge in the tone that Keefer recognised and without looking at the man he said flatly, ‘Yes you scuffling do, scuffwit.’
Everyone fell silent for a moment and looked at him.
Everyone except the watchful woman, who carefully showed no interest: who showed unmoved and watchfully unmoving.
And that was it. That was what was different about her, why he had thought he knew her. It was not who she was he recognised, it was what she was. The woman was a duellist, small-time maybe, local spot challenges or next-day Guild agreements, but formal: a contract duellist rather than some kick-arse psycho scuffler.
The shuttle motors cut in suddenly, carrying the tense silence away. The abrupt humming in the fuselage quickly leapt to a howling and a bone-scratching rattle as the shuttle plunged through the upper levels of Piran’s thickly poisonous atmosphere. The noise built and the rattle became wrenching and both kept increasing until everything was overwhelmed and there was one pulverising sensation of sound and movement. Still the shuttle fell on, and bucked and shuddered and roared crashing through the fiercely freezing pressures crushing down towards the surface.
When the vertical thrusters finally dropped the heaving craft into the dome, none of the passengers moved or made a sound. The sprung landing deck absorbed the last of the shuttle’s energy in a series of sickening lurches, the dome above it clanged closed and the recycling pumps clattered into action.
‘Scuffling scufflers,’ someone said eventually. ‘I’ll need a liftload of money before I do that again.’
‘If you’ve lost your nerve there’s nowhere safe to go,’ Meta said and pressed his attack, slashing the blunted training sabre against Leela’s marginally weaker left side. ‘Nowhere safe to hide.’
She parried the hit and he pivoted, aiming a full strength forearm smash at her face. She avoided the blow easily enough but Leela was abruptly conscious that the young fighter was suddenly much more aggressive. He dropped low, and using both hands, swung the sabre at the back of her knees. Meta was not one of the strongest of the trainees, too timid to be a natural duellist, but just the suggestion that she might be weakened in some way and he had turned into a pale version of the dead butcher Baloch.
Leela leapt the blade and as its momentum carried through and unbalanced the swivelling Meta she kicked him hard on the upper thigh. He went sprawling and she was fairly sure his leg would already be numb and would soon start to ache badly.
The crowd watching from the specially erected viewing stand applauded enthusiastically and a chant of ‘Leela, Leela, Leela’ broke out.
Leela ignored them and went to help Meta to his feet.
‘Ouch,’ he said, smiling apologetically. ‘That’ll teach me to get carried away.’
‘You will get carried away feet first,’ Leela said, ‘if you want to kill more than you want to win.’
Meta was trying to rub the feeling back into his leg. ‘I’m still not convinced that they’ll let us do one without the other,’ he said. ‘The Rules of Attack haven’t changed.’
‘That is why I am making plans to run and hide,’ Leela said quickly. ‘It may be that I will not need to go but if the New Way fails I do not intend to be put on trial again.’
‘Then it’s the Hakai or nothing,’ Meta said.
‘The Hakai?’ Leela asked.
Meta groaned and began hobbling around in a small circle.
‘What did you do to my leg?’
‘The pain will pass,’ Leela said.
He continued to hobble about. Some of the crowd began to clap derisively and there were some whistles and boos. ‘If you want to invite one or two of them down and give them a kicking I’m ready to watch and learn.’
Leela said, ‘It will pass more quickly if you stand still and act as if it has already passed.’
‘Be a man, Meta? You sound like my mother.’ The crowd were clapping and booing more loudly now. ‘Actually they sound like my whole family. Let’s have them all down one at a time, you can kick their arses and I’ll clap and boo.’
‘What is this Hakai you speak of?’ Leela asked.
‘The Hakai OTS,’ Meta said. ‘You know what they say: no matter what you do, if you can reach the Hakai OTS you’re home free.’
‘You mean you would be safe there?’
‘If you’re going to book, better get me a ticket too. I’m never going to be a crowd-pleaser am I?’ He smiled and did a couple of practice swings with the training sabre. ‘I don’t suppose you’d let me win the next one?’ he asked hopefully.
The return to gravity would be a relief eventually, but for the moment it was painful, it dragged on you and it made your joints ache. It took time, too, to get used to the damp, brackish smell that the industrial-size air scrubbers always gave off. Keefer stood waiting, trying not to let discomfort distract him. He couldn’t afford to be careless now.
The cargo clerk processed his temporary landing permit slowly and with a maximum show of bureaucratic reluctance.
‘How long you planning to stay?’
‘Like I said,’ Keefer said. ‘I don’t know.’
‘I can’t enter that.’
‘What can you enter?’
‘How long you’re planning to stay.’
Cash would have speeded things up but Keefer was in no hurry. He wanted his travelling companions to be long gone by the time he was allowed to follow them out of Baseport One and into the Pleasure Pits. A couple of the men had been looking for a fight and the whole team was ready to see the woman humiliate him.
‘It depends on what there is to see,’ Keefer said.
The clerk scratched himself. ‘Nothing,’ he said, ‘if all you want to do is look. We’re not running a zoo here.’
‘Not long then.’
‘I can’t enter that.’
The Doctor hadn’t told Leela of his plan in any detail because, if he was honest, he didn’t really have much of a plan. Not in any detail. Not what you could call a fully formed plan, anyway. In fact what he was actually doing was rather enjoying himself while he was finding out about things and more or less waiting to see what happened. There was nothing wrong with that approach of course, but it did require patience, which was not one of Leela’s more obvious virtues.
The Doctor did feel a little guilty about some aspects of what he was doing. Or rather what he wasn’t doing. It wasn’t that he was distorting the truth exactly, and he certainly wa
sn’t lying. He was, however, allowing various people to draw their own conclusions about things without correcting them when they were wrong. Technically they were lying to themselves and he was letting them. That did not make him a liar as such, did it? Not a liar as such. After all there were worlds that he had visited where it would have made him a perfectly respectable lawyer, or a politician or an entertainer.
On this world it was obviously a useful skill if you wanted to be an agent representing a stable of young duellists: particularly if you had no intention of letting any of them fight.
He smiled at the man on the communicator viewscreen and said, ‘I’d be honoured to be a member of the Guild, of course I would, but I understood that I was not qualified to join.’
The Enforcer of the Guild of Agents smiled back at him. His smooth, round face glowed with friendly good-fellowship. ‘If anything you’re overqualified,’ he said. ‘The way you’ve been promoting that girl of yours is nothing short of inspired.
She’s going to be system-wide, bigger than Coodar ever was.
Leela is going to be a brand to be proud of.’
The Doctor was slightly taken aback. ‘Yes, I’ve always found her quite challenging,’ he said, and wondered whether he had let his enthusiasm get the better of him.
‘There you go, you see,’ the Enforcer chortled. ‘“I’ve always found her quite challenging.” Brilliant! What can I say.’
‘Brilliant’s fine,’ the Doctor said.
Match of the Day Page 13
