Match of the Day

by Chris Boucher

  For a moment he seemed genuinely irritated. ‘Oh come now, the evidence against you isn’t just substantial, it’s overwhelming.’ Then, as quickly, his expression changed and he sighed with professional regret. ‘I can save your father: you I can do nothing for.’

  ‘I’m facing a demotion...?’ Sita suggested.

  ‘I think the matter is rather more serious than that, Major Benovides,’ the minister said coldly.

  ‘Is it?’ How serious could it be? What was she facing here?

  The minister said, ‘Corruption and murder? I think so don’t you?’

  Corruption and murder? She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Corruption and murder? That was way out of proportion. They couldn’t make that stick. Not even the best interrogation controller could make her guilty of corruption and murder. She was almost relieved. She had been stupid, truly career-endingly stupid. But what mattered now was that whoever was behind this frame-up had been stupider and one day soon she was going to find them and make them eat it...

  ‘Have you nothing to say for yourself?’ the minister asked.

  ‘Would you listen?’ she asked.

  The minister touched the antique button on his desk. ‘No,’

  he said as two uniformed guards came into the office and stood behind her chair. ‘There is nothing you can say that I would wish to hear.’

  ‘Then I have nothing to say,’ Sita said and stood up. While the guards were binding her hands behind her she found herself wondering whether there would ever come a time when she would regret not saying: you’re a vain and stupid man with hideous taste in everything, especially wine and decor. She had nothing much to lose now. But, then again, she had indulged herself once before when a man had irritated her and look where that had got her...

  Chapter Eleven

  ‘Where is she?’ When he got back the Doctor had gone to look for Leela on the training ground only to find that she had left it earlier in the day. Soon afterwards it seemed she had left the compound altogether, driven away in a chauffeured runner. The security man on the gate had neither the authority nor the nerve to try and stop her. ‘Doesn’t anybody know where she went?’

  The trainees glanced at one another and shrugged and shook their heads. Outside the weapons and therapy annexe where they were assembled, the Doctor could hear the crowd in the viewing stand beginning to slow handclap and boo and raise the occasional desultory chant of Leela, Leela, Leela.

  ‘She must have said something to someone,’ he pressed.

  ‘Don’t you ever talk to each other when you’re training?

  Surely you do.’ The young duellists looked sheepish and vaguely guilty, which rather puzzled him, so he waited without speaking. Silence he knew could be a very effective interrogation technique. Oh dear, he thought, am I interrogating these people? It was not my intention to become an oppressive authority figure. But you can’t pretend to be an authority figure without behaving oppressively, like an authority figure. And that was the trouble with pretending: do it well enough and nobody can tell you are, not even you, eventually...

  It was Meta who finally broke the silence. ‘I think she was having second thoughts about...’ He waved his hand vaguely.

  ‘About what?’ the Doctor prompted.

  ‘The New Way,’ he said. ‘She asked me what a fighter could do if they wanted to run away and hide.’

  ‘She asked me that too,’ one of the others piped up.

  ‘And me,’ another said.

  ‘I think she was losing her nerve,’ Meta said. ‘I think -’

  ‘I think that is such crap,’ Benron interrupted angrily. ‘She was not losing her nerve. She is brighter and tougher and braver than any two fighters you can name.’

  ‘I can’t name two fighters who’ve run for it,’ Meta said.

  ‘Step out onto the practice ground and I’ll name you one,’

  Benron challenged. ‘Right here, right now.’

  So that was it, the Doctor thought. She got tired of waiting for me to do it and she’s set out to find Keefer herself. As Meta and Benron squared up to one another he stepped between them. Paying neither of them any attention he deliberately made the move look almost absent-minded. ‘So what did you all tell her?’ he asked.

  Keefer thought it could still be some half-cocked scam to part him from the wad of cash he had flashed around, but somehow he doubted it. If the pilot intended to make a move his best chance had been while they were actually sneaking aboard the supply freighter. Even a scuffwit would realise that. Besides which, the man had finally introduced himself, as Melly Finbar, and it was Keefer’s experience that chancers didn’t offer names before they stepped up and tried for it.

  ‘Pick a silo,’ Finbar said, indicating the series of circular maintenance access plates in the floor of the freighter’s bulk cargo bay.

  Keefer nodded at one in the centre and Finbar opened it using a hand-held remote override. They peered down into the wide-bodied tube. It was three-quarters full of some sort of light-coloured grains. Keefer reached down and scooped some up in his hand. ‘It’s lecea seed,’ he said disbelievingly.

  Finbar grinned. ‘All the way from the wet-fields of home,’ he said, ‘in case the Lady Hakai gets nostalgic. And to feed the Fat Boys.’

  ‘You mean it’s real? It’s grown organically back home and shipped out?’

  ‘If you were the richest woman in the settled worlds would you settle for less than the real deal?’

  Keefer rubbed the soft seeds in the palm of his hand. The genuine article was expensive back home; gods alone knew what it was worth out here. Wealth was an abstract, meaningless sort of idea, and then occasionally you got a glimpse of what it could do.

  ‘It’s a good choice,’ Finbar was saying. ‘If you work your way into it it’ll help cushion you during lift-off.’ He took an inhaler from the medical supply locker and gave it to Keefer together with the remote. ‘Ship runs fully pressurised okay?

  So the breather’s only for emergencies. Gives you thirty minutes if you don’t panic.’

  ‘What about the altered mass?’ Keefer asked. ‘It’ll show on the launch check.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll amend the cargo manifest. I’ll stick you in as a couple of cases of freeze-dried driftfeeders.’

  Keefer pulled out the rest of the cash he was carrying. ‘Just so long as that’s not how I end up,’ he said and handed the money to Finbar.

  ‘This is more than we agreed.’

  Keefer stepped down into the lecea. ‘Any last words of advice?’

  ‘Watch out for the Fat Boys. They’re faster than they look,’

  Finbar said and pulled the gun.

  The suddenness of the move and the speed of the draw took Keefer completely by surprise. He stayed perfectly still, cold and ready to kill when the chance to counterattack was offered.

  Finbar grinned. ‘I practised that a lot,’ he said. ‘I’ve never actually fired the thing, of course.’ Still pointing the pistol in Keefer’s direction he checked it quickly and then flipped it over and handed it across butt first. ‘I think it works but take care where you use it. Don’t go punching holes in pressure walls. You don’t gain much of an advantage that way.’

  It was a problem of his own making, but one of the Doctor’s difficulties was that he had developed feelings of responsibility towards his duellists. While they were in his imaginary school and he was their phoney agent they were safe enough, but what was he going to do with them? He had come to realise that his quixotic notion that he could effect a change in attitudes towards duelling and then bring about a change in the Rules of Attack was just that: quixotic, he was tilting at windmills. What had he been thinking of? This world was not the way it was because of the efforts of one person, and it wasn’t going to be changed by the efforts of one Time Lord, not even a brilliant one like him. In the meantime, Leela did not seem to be planning to report back -

  why did that not surprise him - and he was responsible for her too. Wh
en did he take on all these responsibilities, he wondered? Why did he take on all these responsibilities? He looked at the TARDIS standing ready in the corner of his ridiculous office. Perhaps he should go inside and relax for a while; give himself a chance to think. Once there he might even try a very small temporal adjustment, just the tiniest non-parallel non-fluxed shift, so he could start again. Given a second chance he might not get it right but he could get Leela and they could get out. Of course if it went wrong and he spun off into who-knows-where it wouldn’t be his fault: he would just have been doing his best to put things right and...

  He smiled to himself: too late, he thought. ‘If you’re going to lie to yourself,’ he said aloud, ‘you do at least have to be convincing.’

  He turned away from the TARDIS as Benron burst into the office and announced loudly, ‘It was my father. I cannot believe it was my scuffling father.’

  ‘What was your scuffling father?’ the Doctor bellowed back.

  Benron took the hint and lowered his voice slightly. ‘It was my father driving the runner that Leela left in. That scuffling old scuffwit cannot keep out of my face.’

  ‘At least he can tell us where he took her,’ the Doctor said.

  Benron shook his head. ‘Not yet he can’t. The runner’s back but there’s no sign of him anywhere.’

  ‘Is that normal for him?’

  ‘What would be normal for him? You saw him in action, waving empty guns about, taking you and Leela prisoner.

  Man’s not the full dollar, never has been.’

  Was that true, the Doctor wondered, was he unbalanced?

  He knew Benron and his father were not on the best of terms but was it possible that Nenron could have been some sort of threat to Leela? And would she recognise the threat if there were one?

  ‘If he’s done something to cause her problems,’ Benron went on, ‘or put her in any sort of danger you can forget the New Way: I’ll kill him.’

  ‘Leela can take care of herself,’ the Doctor said, but the truth was he wasn’t sure that she could. He knew she didn’t really understand that she was a major celebrity, and the sort of clanger that might put her in. ‘Is there any indication in the runner where they might have gone?’

  Benron looked puzzled. ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Distance travelled? Route still in the computer?’

  ‘You don’t know much about runners do you?’

  ‘Not my area of expertise,’ the Doctor agreed.

  ‘If it’s a legal unit everything blanks when you park up.

  Unrecorded monitored movement: it’s a basic freedom.’

  ‘And if it’s not a legal unit?’

  ‘This one is,’ Benron said. ‘My father only uses legal runners. His authorisations might not stand up to scrutiny sometimes but his runners always do.’

  ‘Are you saying he’s a crook?’ the Doctor asked.

  Benron shrugged. ‘He’ll do until one comes along.’

  ‘They spoke very highly of him at the Court of Attack lockup,’ the Doctor said.

  Benron shrugged again. ‘Lock-up administrators are not the brightest, and they’re not even the brightest lock-up administrators.’

  ‘What would you normally do if you wanted to find your father?’ the Doctor asked, and thought that without anything else to go on he would simply have to assume that Leela took the general advice of her fellow fighters and went to the spaceport to see if that was what Keefer had done. But he had already checked with the Aerospace Main authorities and if she had been there at all she certainly wasn’t there now. So where did they go next?

  ‘I wouldn’t,’ Benron was saying. ‘Normally I’d be glad to see the back of him. This time I’ve done everything I can think of and there’s nothing. It’s like he’s fallen off the world.’

  Lift-off and the climb towards orbit was a harsh and howling horror, as rough as anything Keefer could have imagined.

  The flight down had been smooth by comparison. The elderly freighter heaved and surged as it screamed upwards, piggybacked on its rattling jump-booster. In the pitch-darkness of the silo the brutal G forces crushed Keefer down into the lecea seed, squeezing and deforming the makeshift acceleration couch that he had scooped out of it for himself.

  As the bracing moved, his spine was wracked and his joints were twisted and wrenched. He chest was squeezed, making breathing a relentless struggle to inflate his lungs. As consciousness collapsed the thought came to him that if this was what Finbar called a good choice, what in the names of all the gods would a bad choice have been like?

  When weightlessness finally released him back to awareness and he sucked at a deep, shuddering breath he found himself abruptly enveloped in a gritty, suffocating cloud. Like him the individual grains of lecea had gone into free-fall. A fog of them filled his throat and he began to choke. He needed to get out of the silo quickly. He groped for the control remote. In the stinging blackness he fumbled with it. Suddenly it was gone. He tried to hold his breath as he searched around desperately. There was no sign of it. There was nothing, nothing except the thickening, suffocating lecea seed. He was close to panic now. It was impossible to fight his way out of this, there was no counterattack, there was no possible way to survive. He was dead.

  He made a conscious effort and stopped moving. He struggled for the will to control himself. If he was going to die it wasn’t going to be like this, hopelessly trapped and helplessly terrified.

  Now he remembered the inhaler. This time he was careful.

  After a couple of deep breaths he was calm and ready for the discipline that focused his senses. It took longer than normal but when he finished he had suppressed all but hearing and touch. Within the scraping whisper of the seeds he reached for the difference and plucked the remote from its small, noisy orbit.

  Once the plate was opened a slight reverse airflow kicked in and pulled the lecea back, allowing Keefer to drift out of the silo without taking half the contents with him. It seemed the in-flight inspection of bulk cargo was allowed for in the freighter’s design: he only hoped it wasn’t allowed for in the crew’s routine as well.

  ‘Corruption and murder?’ Sergeant Lars Driftkiller Ronick narrowed his piggy little eyes so that they almost disappeared, and snorted contemptuously. ‘Yeah very scuffling probable.’

  Sita felt her wrist and ankle bands start to tighten and placed one of the wrist bands against a wall-mounted scanner plate. ‘I’m touched by your good opinion of me,’ she said.

  Ronick grunted contemptuously. ‘Don’t be. Takes talent and balls to get away with heavy stuff like corruption and murder. You’re short on both, girlie.’

  ‘Get away with it?’ Sita brandished one of the electronic restraints at him. They were all beginning to loosen now.

  Before very long they would routinely start to tighten again and failure to key in would keep them tightening until they amputated hands and feet. While she was awake they were time and space sensitive. ‘I face the interrogation controllers tomorrow. How does that shape up as getting away with it?’

  ‘And you’re supposed to have committed these offences when?’

  They started walking again, setting out across the exercise gardens that bordered the cell precinct.

  ‘While I was undercover.’

  ‘Investigating corruption at ‘Space Main?’

  Sita hesitated. He wasn’t supposed to know that. Had he worked it out for himself or had he been told? Maybe he had been sent in as part of the frame. But what would be the point. They could hardly expect her to incriminate herself, especially as she was innocent of all the official charges.

  Maybe they were looking for charges that would stick: breach of security for instance. ‘While I was undercover,’ she repeated.

  Driftkiller spotted a surveillance stalk in one of the ornamental flower bushes, hawked copiously and spat in front of it. ‘As I said, very scuffling probable.’

  ‘Must you do that?’ Sita asked with obvious distaste.

&nbs
p; ‘P’raps the administrator doing the monitoring is an officer-class girlie too,’ he said and laughed loudly. ‘I’ll take a crap on the next one, make her really earn her money.’

  Sita had been surprised by Ronick’s unscheduled visit to the police lock-up. Apparently he had bulled his way in using his naturally intimidating presence and his detective credentials. She still had no real idea why, and she was getting tired of waiting for him to get to the point. She certainly wasn’t looking for sympathy or moral support, if that’s what this was about, and if she had been, Driftblubber Ronick was the last person she would go to.

  ‘What are you doing here, Driftkiller?’ she asked ungraciously. ‘What do you want from me?’

  His chubby face clenched itself into a smile that once again hid his eyes almost completely. ‘I came to help.’

  ‘As you said, very scuffling probable.’

  He stopped smiling and his eyes came back out. They showed his irritation. ‘Listen, girlie, you made me look untrustworthy. I can’t afford to look untrustworthy, it’s bad for business.’

  ‘I did? When was this?’

  ‘You ask questions, I get answers. We have a meet, you get lifted.’

  ‘Not immediately.’

  ‘Close enough. You’re not taking me down with you.’

  ‘Don’t flatter yourself. You’ve got no place in this. This frame took organising and some serious power. I doubt whether you’ve got the first idea what’s involved here.’

  ‘You still don’t get it do you?’ There was contempt in the eyes now. ‘I don’t give a curly crap what’s involved here. You officer-class types can scuffle each other over or scuff yourselves I don’t care. What I care about is my good name.’

  ‘Driftkiller is a good name?’ Sita said wryly.

  ‘As it happens it is,’ he said. ‘And where it matters it is.

  And if you’d ever had to make your own way in the world, girlie, you’d know without having to be told that when challenge comes to fight it’s all you’ve got. And it’s all you’re ever going to have.’