‘Leela, if this is your way of amusing yourself at my expense I have to tell you I am not impressed. I thought we were... well friends might be too strong a word but I thought at least we’d come to an understanding. I thought we were sort of in this together you know? I mean I’m only transporting you. I’m not part of the kidnap team. I’m not part of the whole conspiracy thing. If it comes to that I’m on your side. I don’t mean you any harm. I just want to take the money and run, that’s all I want to do.’ She could hear it clearly in his voice now. He was talking as much to himself as to her. He had almost decided. He was almost sure she was no longer able to hear him. He was almost ready to come to her. Careful, she thought, careful, this is when the sunbirds were most likely to take fright and run away.
Leela grunted through her nose, a small clenched snore, and set her foot drumming, heel tapping the floor in a continuous spasm.
‘In the names of all the gods,’ the pilot exclaimed, ‘don’t you die on me. I won’t get paid and I will get dead. Don’t you die on me you stupid little scuffler.’
Leela was exultant. She had him. He was coming. He was unlocking the bulkhead doors and the airlock doors, and he was coming. She was going to be free of this prison. Would he come armed she wondered? Would he come armed and angry? She had not really thought much beyond baiting him to within reach. It made no difference, she would disarm him; she would kill him if she had to. No, she must not kill him since she needed him to work the speeder yacht. She had not planned beyond this, she suddenly realised, because she had not really believed that such a simple scheme would succeed.
Keep it simple, her trainer always said. Plans go wrong: complicated plans go wrong complicatedly. This plan would
not go wrong; she would not let it go wrong. She felt a change in the background vibrations. Was that the doors unlocking?
She stopped drumming her heel. She had considered going to wait by the cell door to ambush the pilot once she was sure he was coming to her, but she had discarded that idea. Even after he left the flight deck from where he watched and from where he controlled everything he might still be able to see inside the cell. The only place she was sure he could not see was here, where she was. It was only here she could be sure of the element of surprise. She would have to sacrifice some freedom of movement to get it, but surprise was the essential thing: everything else she could make up for.
She listened. She had not heard the entrance to the cell close in the first place so she was not sure what sound it would make when it opened. Come on, she thought. She was ready. Where was he? He was taking longer than she had expected. Had he given up on her? Did he think she was dead? Had she made a mistake that he had spotted. Was the panic in his voice just pretence? Was it him who was playing games after all? She knew she had failed. Then she heard it: the soft thud of door fastenings being drawn back, a brief sough of air. The door was opening. She waited for a moment and then she began to twitch her foot in single random spasms. She heard his voice: ‘Don’t be scuffling dead. Don’t you be scuffling dead.’ But there was something strange and muffled about it. ‘Even dying you’re a killer, you murderous little scuffler.’ He was coming closer but the voice was not clear: it was dull with an echo that was not quite an echo.
‘My employer doesn’t take disappointment well. Or at all in fact.’ What was it about the voice? It sounded close but distant at the same time. The curtain was snatched back and Leela pushed herself up and kicked herself forward. The pseudo-grav made the move more controllable so that she vaulted over the figure that was bending towards where she had been laying. As she jumped over the pilot she realised that he was wearing some sort of protective suit and a helmet that enclosed his head. She twisted herself round and grabbed at the helmet with both hands. Bouncing her knees high against his back to get as much leverage as possible in the reduced gravity, she pulled as hard as she could.
It would have been a good fighting move against someone who was not wearing an emergency pressure suit. The emergency pressure suit, worn as a precaution against a breach in the integrity of the speeder yacht’s hull, was not intended for fighting in. The helmet’s neck bracing was not designed to be flexible in the direction that Leela was pulling.
It broke immediately and the helmet itself became a lever pulling on the head inside. The lever’s force was concentrated against the pilot’s neck. It would have taken a lot less than Leela’s agile strength to snap the vulnerable column of bone and sever the spinal cord. She knew she had killed him even before she felt the life go out of him.
Leela was angry with herself. She had not intended to do more than overpower this man. She struggled to get his helmet off, wrenching and turning it until she freed it from the joint seals. She looked at the thin dead face of the pilot.
He looked older and more tired than he had sounded. His head had been shaved and the hair that was beginning to grow back was grey like the stubble on his sunken cheeks. It shocked her a little to think that this old man had been her adversary. She felt a pang of guilt. He had been no real threat by the look of him. But he was her jailer and he was involved in kidnapping her and what had happened was as much his fault as it was hers. More his fault. He had chosen to be here, she had not. He had admitted he was greedy and that was why he was doing it. He had claimed not to be stupid but greedy and stupid usually went together. He had been easy to fool and easy to kill. ‘And now I am in real trouble old man,’
she said aloud to the corpse. ‘I do not know how to work this speeder yacht. I do not know where I am or where I am going.’
She looked at the box he had dropped, which had drifted to a stop against the side of the cubicle. ‘Why were you wearing that stupid outfit? Did you think it would protect you from me?’ It reminded her of one of the sacred relics which the shaman had used back in the village and it was about as useful. She retrieved the box and opened it. She recognised the medical kit even though she had no idea what the individual items were for. She checked the corpse. He had not been armed. She shook her head and sighed ruefully.
Plans go wrong: simple plans simply go wrong simply. At least the cell door was unlocked.
She went across to the open airlock. It was a narrow chamber that had to be entered head first or feet first. She peered in. How did you work it, she wondered, when the space inside was so small? She crawled in head first. Behind her the door closed and locked itself automatically. She had never been frightened of tight spaces, claustrophobia the Doctor said such a fear was called, yet for the briefest moment she had to fight the panic that threatened to blot out everything but her desperate need to get out of there. She knew that if she gave way to the feeling she would lash and kick and die like a terrified animal. Fear opens your eyes: panic closes your mind, she heard her trainer say. Say it, he bellowed; fear opens your eyes: panic closes your mind, they had repeated. Say it again, he yelled. ‘Fear opens your eyes: panic closes your mind,’ she said aloud.
Leela opened her eyes. This airlock was a device made to hold in air, she reasoned, that was why it was called an air lock. It was not intended to trap people inside itself. If it was intended to do that it would not have a light. Of course, as the Doctor had told her several times, devices often did what they were not intended to do, but it still seemed unlikely that this airlock would be so badly thought out that it would act as an accidental mantrap. There must be a way of opening it from the inside. She looked for a control panel. It was there by her feet: almost impossible to reach. Obviously you were meant to face the same direction from whichever side you entered. Head first from one side, feet first from the other.
She had got in the wrong way round. Perhaps this was a mantrap. But it was too simple a mistake not to have been thought of and planned for. She craned towards the panel and saw, also by her feet, on the inside of the door itself, there was a lever. Tentatively she pushed it up with her toe.
The door opened. She pulled herself out and back into the cell. Taking the medical kit with her th
is time she climbed back into the airlock feet first, so that she could reach the small control panel with her hand.
It did not occur to Leela to wonder what the airlock was actually there for until she looked closely at the buttons and indicators on the panel. There were several more than were necessary simply to lock and unlock two doors. And if an air lock was intended to keep air in, she thought, and there was air in her cell, did that mean there was no air on the other side of the other door? That was why he was wearing that stupid outfit, she realised abruptly. It was not to protect him from her, it was to help him to breathe. This needed thinking about, she thought and climbed out of the airlock a second time.
The mistake, the Doctor acknowledged to himself, when he finally came to think about it all, was not that he had confused movement with action but that he had allowed movement and action to confuse him. There were questions he should have asked and answers he should have questioned, but he was much too busy chasing and being chased to pay proper attention to what was really going on.
Weightlessness hadn’t helped his concentration much either.
‘He gets a refund in cash,’ Ronick explained, ‘a nice chunky brick of Sumanan dollars, and this he waves around like a brain-dead tourist with “Rob me I’m a tourist” tattooed across his arse. This draws the attention of our dink friend.’
‘Which is where he gets his next change of identity,’ Sita said. ‘We’re assuming deliberately, yes?’
‘Unless you believe in lucky coincidences. And the Doctor doesn’t for one, do you Doctor?’
‘Dink friend?’ the Doctor asked.
‘Western-zone features,’ Sita said.
The Doctor nodded. ‘Not somewhere called Dinkland then.’
Sita half smiled. ‘Ronick is...’
‘A law unto himself,’ the Doctor suggested.
‘You don’t have to apologise for me,’ Ronick put in.
‘I wasn’t going to,’ Sita said. ‘I was going to say you were a fat racist pig.’
‘That’s all right then,’ Ronick said. ‘Never apologise. That is one thing you officer-class types have taught the rest of us.
Never apologise: just repeat yourself, only in a much louder voice.’ He raised his voice. ‘So. Our dink friend, or violent thief and all around scumsucker if you prefer, gets his in the cheap washrooms having seriously underestimated this Keefer character.’
They were sitting in the partial gravity of the otherwise empty Class A lounge of the Hakai Orbital Transfer Station.
Although he was probably the least uncomfortable of the three of them, the Doctor had found to his surprise that prolonged weightlessness was not something he was comfortable with. He had therefore been more than happy to accept the Class A hospitality upgrade that had been offered to him and his companions. He kept expecting to be detained but as yet there was no arrest warrant keyed to his ID. It appeared that his professional status as a Guild agent and his personal fame still made him a registered VIP even in out-of-the-way locations like the notorious Hakai OTS. In passing it did strike him that any reasonable computer system should be updated more quickly. It ought to have been straightforward to flag him up as a wanted fugitive and at the very least cancel the automatic privileges his ID carried. But then this was the same system that had not responded to the escape from custody of the corrupt and murderous Sita Benovides, so perhaps the delay was not that unexpected.
General law enforcement and the formal Rules of Attack were linked but separate, and it was obviously the interpretation and enforcement of the Rules of Attack that took precedence.
‘I’m not sure what we’re doing out here,’ he said to Ronick.
‘Unless we have an actual identity for this person from the Western Zone, this is as for as we can go, isn’t it. We can’t follow Keefer any further if we don’t know who he is.’
‘As it happens,’ Ronick said grinning smugly, ‘I do know who he is and I think I know where he’s gone.’
The Doctor was vaguely disappointed. Wherever Ronick thought Keefer had gone it was unlikely to be back to the planet’s surface and he was almost sure that it was there that the answers must lie. It was there, too, that he should be investigating the mystery of Leela’s disappearance.
Although she was last sighted in Aerospace Main it did not necessarily follow that she had left the planet and it certainly did not indicate that she had come here. If you believed the myths most fugitives came to the Hakai OTS, and it did handle a lot of passenger and freight transits, but that was not evidence of anything. It didn’t justify him being here pursuing a phantom. His promise to Jerro Fanson had become meaningless, if indeed it had ever meant anything.
What would be the point of warning Keefer to keep his head down: the man seemed to be doing that without any prompting from anyone. Finding Leela, that was what was important and that was what he was in clanger of forgetting.
Or was it, he wondered, merely that he was trying to justify going back to full gravity? ‘Have you known this all along?’ he asked. ‘Or is it something you’ve found out since we got here?’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Ronick asked. ‘Are you suggesting I’ve been holding out on you?’
The Doctor shrugged. ‘It’s a question,’ he said, ‘not a suggestion.’ He smiled brightly. ‘But as a matter of interest have you been holding out on us?’
‘Why would I do that?’
‘Why would you answer a question with a question?’
Ronick’s eyes disappeared behind a smile. ‘Because I’m being evasive of course.’
‘Of course,’ the Doctor agreed.
‘That would be my theory too,’ Sita said. ‘And confessing doesn’t make it more appealing.’ Her voice was suddenly cold. ‘Or less suspicious, Driftkiller. Sorry, you prefer Sergeant Ronick, don’t you.’
The Doctor recognised the abrupt change of tone as a universal interrogator’s trick and was fairly sure that Ronick did too, but for some reason the fat detective played along as though he was affected by such a simple technique.
‘All right.’ Ronick had stopped smiling. ‘All right,’ he said, sounding contrite, ‘let’s not get our tits in a tangle. We’re all on the same side, remember?’
‘Are you sure about that?’ she said. ‘I’m beginning to have my doubts.’
‘And here was I,’ Ronick said, ‘thinking that saving your life would set your mind at rest on that score. Imagine my surprise... I didn’t have the information when we set out. It was waiting for me when we got here.’
‘Pointless to ask who from and how?’ the Doctor suggested.
‘Yes,’ Ronick said flatly.
‘But we’re supposed to trust it anyway,’ Sita said.
Ronick shrugged. ‘Your choice. Finding Keefer isn’t my main priority.’
That being?’ she said.
The Doctor said, ‘He’s waiting around for the price on us to go up.’
Ronick smiled his agreement. ‘You keep running: it keeps rising. I can’t lose.’
Sita sighed. ‘Who is he and where’s he gone?’ she asked.
‘His name’s Melly Finbar,’ Ronick said.
Sita looked unimpressed. ‘Doesn’t sound very Western Zone. Are you sure your informant is reliable?’
‘Not Keefer,’ Ronick said. ‘Him.’ He nodded in the direction of the entrance to the lounge.
The Doctor turned to see a slight young man drifting in a controlled stride towards them. He was obviously more used to the environment than any of them were.
‘Gentlemen,’ Finbar said as he landed neatly beside them,
‘and lady. I’m told you’re looking for this man.’ He proffered a small likeness of Keefer to the Doctor.
‘This is the infamous Keefer is it,’ the Doctor said, handing the holographic picture on to Sita.
‘Not the name he was using when I met him,’ Finbar said.
Sita said, ‘You’ve met him then. You actually met this man.’
‘I actually
helped this man to get where he wanted to go. I can do the same for you. I can do better for you: I can take you where he went. I have a small, fast ship fuelling up on bay twenty-five even as we speak. Guide, pilot and ship are at your disposal. At a price naturally.’
‘A scuffling big price,’ Ronick growled.
Finbar grinned. ‘The Doctor’s bound to be good for it. Am I right Doctor?’
‘I don’t normally carry cash I’m afraid,’ the Doctor said.
‘Apart from jelly babies, which I usually trade for, I don’t have much use for it.’
‘You could buy me ten times over with what that girl of yours would get for one fight.’
The Doctor shook his head. ‘We have no immediate plans for a big money fight; he said and wondered why he was bothering to tell this young man technical truths.
‘You’re a man of your word,’ Finbar said. ‘I know you’ll pay me.’
The Doctor looked at Ronick and at Sita. ‘It appears this is to be my treat,’ he said. ‘So what do you want to do?’
‘As long as you’re paying,’ Ronick said. ‘I always fancied a trip to the high deep.’
‘There has to be an end to all this,’ Sita said. ‘Reefer’s the key. Find him and it all falls into place. I badly want it all to fall into place. I want to know who it is I’m going to...’ She paused as though searching for the precise word and then said finally, ‘punish.’
Match of the Day Page 22
