Match of the Day

by Chris Boucher

  Sita frowned. Some kind of slope?

  Catching the reaction Driftkiller elaborated: ‘He looked like a dink seemingly; well what they said was: Western-zone features.’

  Sita felt the hook bite hard again. It wasn’t him. It wasn’t her man. The corpse wasn’t him. The bastard was still out there. She was very cold now. ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘I owe you one.’

  Driftkiller was not impressed. ‘Unhuh, like you plan to pay me back,’ he said.

  ‘Maybe I already have.’

  ‘How’s that?’ Several ornamental waterfowl stomped up from the lake demanding to be fed and he tossed them some crumbs too.

  Major Sita Benovides smiled thinly and said: ‘By deciding not to pay you back?’

  Sergeant Lars Driftkiller Ronick looked at her for a long moment then he laughed. ‘You officer-class types talk a good fight, girlie,’ he said, cramming a second burger into his mouth.

  Leela had never seen anything quite like the Aerospace Main spaceport.

  Nenron had used an official Court of Attack lock-up authorisation, which he was not supposed to have, to drive the runner directly into one of the more discreet access areas. He could have taken her through the normal entrance concourse, he explained, and because of who she was she would have been given the full VIP, as in Very Important Person, treatment, but with that would have gone the full crowd of curious onlookers. So he was pretending she was a VIP, as in Very Insignificant Prisoner, and was taking her in through the rule violators and minor lawbreakers holding cells. Leela was dressed as a cleaner, her disposable coveralls successfully concealing her Sevateem warrior garb, a protective hood and breathing filters bunched at her neck, already partially obscuring her face and available to hide it fully should the need arise.

  Clearly Nenron was a familiar figure around the cells since he and the cleaner he was escorting were not challenged by any of the security guards as they made their way through the dingy corridors to one of the constantly descending elevator platforms that would take them down to the main public concourse.

  When Leela stepped off the platform and into the huge, brightly lit underground complex, the first thing she was conscious of was the throng of seemingly lost and aimless people drifting backwards and forwards between shining information screens. People stared long and hard at these screens before reacting to what they were seeing. Eventually they responded singly, in pairs, in groups, and here and there in sudden small stampedes. Leela watched as they hurried up and down the moving pathways that linked floors on different levels. Each floor had its own identification screen at the point where the pathway reached it and some people hesitated there and caused small knots of confused congestion. It struck Leela that it was not a sensible way to arrange things. She felt a nudge in the back and tensed for an attack. She was surprised at how quickly she found herself primed and ready to fight. It was not how she had originally been trained. It was not warrior-like at all. It was as if she was looking for any excuse to fight. It must have been the latest training she had been doing with the other duellists. When she had trained as a warrior with other warriors it had not been like this. And yet the new training had not been so different. Perhaps it was the way she had been watched and cheered on by uninvolved people. Perhaps it was something to do with the way that made her feel.

  Nenron nudged her in the back again. ‘Come on,’ he muttered.

  ‘Cleansing staff are not supposed to stand around gawping.

  You’re supposed to look as though you’re here to work. We don’t want to draw attention to ourselves.’

  ‘You lead the way,’ Leela said.

  ‘The OTS concourse first?’ he asked.

  She nodded and they stepped out into the drifting crowd.

  Probably because Nenron had been apprehensive about it, Leela found she was immediately uncomfortable getting so close to large numbers of people. Whenever she caught someone’s eye she expected them to call out her name; she even half expected one of them might want to fight her.

  Ahead of her Nenron was hurrying towards one of the moving pathways. He was walking far too fast, she thought, dodging and swerving through the crowd, and if she kept up with him it was bound to make her conspicuous. Someone would look closely at her. Someone would recognise her. Someone would call her name. There would be crowds and chaos and terror.

  She slowed her pace to what she felt would look determined rather than frantic and panicky, determined and inconspicuous. She was confident that she could keep Nenron in sight without any problems. But as her warrior trainer had frequently told her there is a dangerous difference between being confident and being sure, and by the time she reached the moving pathway she thought he had taken, Nenron was nowhere to be seen.

  Leela knew that confused hesitation is as conspicuous as headlong rush and so she stepped calmly onto the moving pathway and let it carry her down towards what she assumed must be the Orbital Transfer Station concourse. She had seen that most people stood still on the moving pathways and she was doing the same, when she was unsettled to find that a man had walked down and was standing beside her. For a moment she thought it might be Nenron but when she glanced at him she realised it was a stranger and that the glance had been a mistake.

  He glanced back at her and then he stared more pointedly.

  Trying to make it look casual, as if she was getting herself ready to start work when she reached the end of the pathway, Leela pulled the hood of her coveralls up onto her head and settled the breathing mask and filters into place over her mouth and nose. Out of the corner of her eye she could see that the man continued to look at her and too late she noticed that the breathing filters in the mask were giving off a faint and peculiar smell. She reached up to try and pull the mask away from her face but nothing happened. It was as though her hand was feeble and weak and the mask was stuck to her. And then she realised that her arm had not moved from her side. She had not reached for the mask at all. She reached again using her other arm and found that it too had not moved. Furious with herself she tried with both hands to pull the mask away from her face only to realise that both arms had remained unmoving at her sides.

  ‘There’s no point in fighting it,’ the man beside her said. He moved in closer and gripped her upper arm.

  ‘Let go of me,’ Leela snarled. ‘Get away from me or I will break both your arms and then both your legs.’

  ‘I know you can see and you can hear me,’ the man said,

  ‘but that’s all you can do. Anything else is just an illusion.

  Trust me I know about these things. I’m a professional.’

  Leela could hear the self-satisfied smile in his voice but for some reason she found she could not turn her head to look at him. ‘You are a dead professional!’ she shouted at the top of her lungs.

  ‘Well that’s impressive,’ the man murmured. ‘I almost heard that. Whispering is better than most can manage at this stage. Stop fighting it you psycho-bitch scuffler or I will up the concentration and leave you to die right here, right now.’ He tugged on her arm and she pulled away from him with all her strength and furious anger. ‘I am Leela of the Sevateem and you will be sorry you laid a hand on me,’ she raged. As he pulled her against him, another man stepped into the gap on her other side and between the two of them they braced her into a standing position. ‘You know,’ she heard the first man say. ‘If the deal goes sour -’

  ‘Why should it go sour?’ the second man said.

  Leela could not feel anything much now or move at all but just as the one with the self-satisfied smile in his voice had said, she could still see and she could still hear. It was like a bad dream.

  ‘I’m only saying if it does; if it does go sour for some reason.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  The two men were talking as if she was not there and Leela recognised that she must be truly helpless. These men had no fear of her. These men knew she was completely in their power. For a gasping
moment she was breathless with terror.

  Helpless was not something she had been trained for.

  Helpless was the same as dead. It was worse than dead.

  Helpless was chaos and terror. But the moment passed and she drew breath again.

  ‘So why bring it up?’

  ‘I don’t know; I’m just saying if it does we could probably sell her on the open market and still come out ahead on the deal.’

  The moment passed and Leela realised that while she could still see and hear and, most important of all according to the Doctor, while she could still think she was not helpless.

  Confident was not the same as sure, her warrior trainer had said, but in the same way captured was not the same as helpless. Had he said that? She could not remember, but if he had not said it he should have done.

  ‘She’s too high profile.’

  The moving pathway had reached the floor it was linked to and the men stepped off with Leela between them. The three of them chatted amiably as they strolled on towards the far end of the concourse where the freight elevators were situated.

  ‘I still say she’s worth money either way.’

  ‘Leela? As seen on every scuffling screen in the entire scuffling system. What am I bid? You don’t think we might draw attention to ourselves?’

  If anyone noticed that the cleaner was not contributing much to the conversation and that her feet were hardly touching the floor, they gave no indication of it.

  ‘I wasn’t suggesting an auction.’

  ‘So a one-off sale then. Available as slave or practice dummy, one Leela? Same problems.’

  Leela stared ahead trying to pick up clues from her limited field of vision and listened to her kidnappers for any information that might turn out to be useful.

  ‘We don’t want to draw attention to ourselves.’

  It seemed, Leela thought, the two men were professional enough not to give up any information accidentally. But there was something about those words: we do not want to draw attention to ourselves, that should remind her... It was only then that she remembered him and wondered what had happened to Nenron.

  Since he had mocked up one of his own, the Doctor had become something of a connoisseur of offices and this, he felt, was a particularly fine example of the ostentatiously unostentatious. He assumed the few duelling artefacts that adorned the walls of the antechamber were authentically old and valuable, and the simple carpets and furniture were originals and the most perfect of their kind.

  When he was eventually shown into the minister’s personal office it was similarly aching with good taste. The one apparent concession to the man, since it was an obvious expression of his power, was the heavy, ornately carved desk behind which he sat. The State Security Minister did not rise to greet the Doctor, but he smiled affably enough and gestured to a chair in front of the desk. ‘What can I do for you?’ he asked without preamble.

  ‘You have a wonderful office,’ the Doctor said smiling.

  ‘It’s not to everyone’s taste,’ the minister said modestly, ‘but I like it .’

  ‘The daughter of your friend, what was her name... you introduced her that night, Sita Benovides, yes that was it, she said you had excellent taste, but I had no idea.’ The minister’s expression darkened and the Doctor wondered if he had sounded insincere, but then he realised that it must have been the mention of the girl’s name that had caused the change.

  The minister confirmed it when he said, ‘You would be wise to forget you ever met that young woman.’

  ‘I’ll do my best,’ the Doctor said. ‘If that is your best advice.’

  The minister nodded. ‘It is. Now what can I do for you exactly?’

  ‘The development of my business is being hampered by the fact that I have no official ID. It was suggested that this might be as a result of an administrative error in the Ministry of State Security, though I know this is not the case.’

  Interpreted in one way, that sounded like a vote of confidence in the minister’s department or at the very least an expression of friendly solidarity with the minister himself.

  The chances were that would be the way the man would hear it because that would be the way he wanted to hear it. Once again the Doctor was uncomfortably aware of the way truth and lies could simply be a matter of tone and phrasing. I’m not lying, the Doctor thought. I am not technically lying. I am not lying technically. And the man is a politician so he should know about these things. He is a professional...

  The minister sighed. ‘I wish I had your confidence. You can’t get the staff you know. They just don’t seem to be out there any more.’ He pressed a button on his desk and two assistants, one male and one female, bustled in. ‘Arrange to have the Doctor rescanned and reissued with a full ID will you,’ he said to the man, and to the woman he said, ‘Is she waiting?’

  ‘Yes minister,’ she said.

  ‘Is everything in place?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I want her kept waiting. But everything else is ready?’

  ‘Ready on full stand-by.’

  ‘Very well.’ The minister dismissed them with an imperious wave of his hand. ‘What were we saying?’ he said to the Doctor.

  ‘No staff out there?’ the Doctor suggested.

  The minister nodded. ‘A changing world. Dark forces at work...’ His voice trailed off.

  ‘Dark forces?’ the Doctor prompted.

  ‘How’s the fighting school coming along?’ the minister said, ignoring the question as if it had never been spoken.

  The Doctor resisted the urge to ask again what the minister had meant and instead smiled cheerily and said, ‘Training and recruiting. Early days yet.’

  ‘Speaking as a traditionalist,’ the minister said, ‘I’m still not sure I hold with these new-fangled ideas of yours.’

  The Doctor contrived to look crestfallen. ‘Oh dear. And I was hoping you could help me with a duellist I wanted to recruit. I’m having trouble contacting him.’

  The minister smiled indulgently. ‘I’m not running a communications network, Doctor. What’s this fighter’s name?’

  ‘Keefer,’ the Doctor said. ‘I understand he’s a well-thought-of young duellist who has no agent at the present time.’

  The minister’s expression did not change. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I can’t help you with that.’ His expression still did not change as he stood up, thus obliging the Doctor to do the same. ‘If you see my assistant on the way out he’ll deal with the ID for you.’

  ‘I’m obliged to you, Minister,’ the Doctor said, wondering what it was about the name Keefer that had caused the State Security Minister to react with such a determined show of not reacting. Curious that, and rather a pity. He had started to think that the whole Jerro Fanson mystery was not a mystery after all and now here it was again.

  By way of farewell the minister said, ‘I shall expect tickets to Leela’s first formal match.’ And the fixed, indulgent smile never left his face.

  As he came out of the office the Doctor was surprised to find Sita Benovides waiting in the anteroom. ‘Sita Benovides,’

  he said beaming at her widely, ‘how nice to see you.’ He leaned in closer to her and said in a theatrical whisper.

  ‘Though I have been told to forget I ever met you. Why is that do you think?’

  Sita drew back slightly and smiled a carefully cool smile.

  ‘Perhaps whoever said it thinks I don’t like you,’ she said.

  ‘What would give them that idea?’

  She shrugged. ‘Me?’

  The Doctor laughed. ‘I’m very charming when you get to know me,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll try not to then,’ Sita said.

  The Doctor laughed again. ‘Where is that nice young man who is arranging my new ID?’ he said, looking around, and as if on cue both the assistants came into the anteroom.

  ‘If you’d follow me, Doctor,’ the man said.

  As he followed the man out of the anteroom the Doctor
heard the woman say to Sita Benovides. ‘The minister apologises. He’ll try not to keep you waiting much longer.’

  Sita sat in front of the desk, keeping her expression neutral.

  She was furious with herself. It had been a mistake. Not the fact of it but mentioning the fact of it, especially to the State Security Minister. Sita couldn’t believe she had been naive enough to trust the man.

  ‘Your father has been at pains to point out,’ he was saying,

  ‘that there is no substantial evidence against you.’

  It was that word ‘substantial’ that was the killer. It was a politician’s word. Shifting and shifty: nothing real to confront, nothing substantial. Sita knew there was no evidence against her at all but that wasn’t going to matter. Somebody didn’t like her asking questions about the ‘Space Main incident. It was the only explanation; there was nothing else. She was too ambitious to have taken any stupid risks: any other stupid risks. And now she’d blown everything on a whim. The brief official inquiry, remarkably brief as it turned out, had reached its conclusion, blame had been apportioned and the matter was closed. It was no concern of hers that the conclusion was incorrect. What did it matter? What mattered was that she had come out of the whole sorry mess with her career intact. She knew how the game was played: she’d been born to it. The youngest major in the security services, an undercover expert. Keeping quiet was like breathing. She stared at the minister, wondering whether letting him sleep with her would make any difference now. ‘My father shouldn’t have become involved,’ she said.

  The minister nodded. ‘I’ll do my best to protect him. I owe him that. It would have been better if he hadn’t tried to lie but I suppose that was to be expected.’

  Her father had lied? About what? And when? When had he been interrogated exactly? ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘It’s too late for apologies I’m afraid. Far too late.’

  ‘When you say my father tried to lie... about what?’