‘Are you looking for specifics or will a general assessment do?’ Sita asked. ‘You do know who and what you’re dealing with here, don’t you? You haven’t mistaken any of us for tourists.’ She smiled coldly. ‘That would be a bad mistake to make.’
‘Fatal,’ Ronick said, his voice still quiet and threatening.
‘Difficult to learn anything from a fatal mistake,’ Sita said and glanced at the Doctor as though expecting him to join in on what he already felt was a rather tired routine.
Finbar obviously felt the same. He yawned. ‘And which one of you three non-tourists is planning to fly this thing, assuming chubby here can handle himself in pseudo-grav, which I doubt?’ He waited briefly. That’s what I thought.’
‘Chubby?’ Ronick growled. He pushed himself out of his seat. ‘You’re making one fatal mistake after another, aren’t you boy?’ He reached towards Finbar, who easily avoided the half-hearted lunge, and he subsided again almost immediately.
It seemed indeed that he couldn’t handle himself in pseudo-grav, the Doctor thought and said matter-of-factly,
‘Strictly speaking you can only make one fatal mistake.
Unless you believe in reincarnation.’ He looked at Finbar and went on without pausing or changing his tone. ‘What is the name of the ship we are going to rendezvous with?’
‘It’s called the Ultraviolet Explorer’, Finbar answered.
The Doctor saw from his expression that the pilot had spoken without thinking but he wasn’t sure how much information he was still holding back. ‘Do they know we’re planning to intercept them on their inward leg to the OTS?’
he asked, impressing himself with his confident use of guessed-at jargon.
Finbar asked, ‘What makes you think they’re on an inward to the Hakai?’ His confidence appeared to be lessening slightly.
The Doctor indicated the control console read-outs ‘Your fuel load and the rate of consumption.’ He hoped it sounded as though he knew what he was talking about. ‘Why are they coming in?’
Finbar shook his head. ‘It’s got to be something major. She hasn’t left the Geewin system...’ He shook his head again and shrugged. ‘She hasn’t ever left it as far as I know.’
The Doctor had hoped he might say more about the approaching ship and when he didn’t he was at something of a loss as to how to prompt him into it. ‘Never?’ was the best he could come up with.
‘Well, it’s not built for it, is it,’ Finbar said. ‘The woman might own the OTS but that doesn’t mean she can bring that monstrous indulgence safely into orbit in any -’
Sita interrupted him, ‘You mean it’s that Ultraviolet Explorer?’ She sounded astounded.
‘There is only one,’ Finbar said. ‘The Lady Hakai’s happy hideaway.’
‘Wait a minute. This lady owns the Hakai Corporation?’ the Doctor asked, knowing that he’d made a mistake with the question as soon as he asked it.
‘Of course she does,’ Finbar said. He shot the Doctor a puzzled look. ‘Where have you been?’
Yes, the Doctor thought, this is obviously someone everybody knows about. Everybody including Keefer presumably. ‘I thought she might have relinquished control by now,’ he said. ‘Wasn’t there a rumour...?’
‘There are always rumours,’ Finbar agreed. ‘But trust me, you don’t stay third richest person in the system by relinquishing control of anything.’
‘She controls worlds,’ Ronick said. ‘Yours for instance.’
‘Mine?’ It was the Doctor’s turn to be puzzled. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said.
‘Especially your world,’ Ronick said.
‘She is a big fan apparently’ Sita said. ‘Did your friend the State Security Minister never mention it?’
‘Not that I recall,’ the Doctor said.
‘She loves the tradition of the duellist,’ Sita said. ‘She is devoted to the noble contest.’
Finbar said, ‘You know she’s got her own martial cult. They call themselves hakai-warriors. We call them the Fat Boys.’
‘What is it with you and fat people?’ Ronick demanded.
‘They’re fat: it’s part of their discipline. I’m sorry if that offends you.’ Finbar didn’t look sorry. ‘Maybe it’s to set them apart from skinny space crew. I’m just a jobbing pilot, what do I know.’
The Doctor frowned at Ronick. ‘When you say controls my world...?’
Ronick said, ‘Agents, fighters, most of the Prime Division, broadcast networks; they say she owns the Senior Umpire and controls the Court of Attack.’
‘You don’t really believe that,’ Sita scoffed. The Senior Umpire and the Court of Attack?’
‘Don’t let your officer-class background do all your thinking for you,’ Ronick growled. ‘Everything’s for sale if you can afford it and she can afford it.’
The Doctor felt a small, momentary excitement, as though he almost had the puzzle sorted out in his mind. ‘We’re going to intercept her ship because,’ he smiled at Finbar,
‘according to you, that’s where Keefer has run to.’ But something vital was not there he knew, or it was in the wrong place, so it was possible that he hadn’t sorted any of it out and the hopeful excitement vanished as quickly as it had come.
‘That’s where he went all right,’ Finbar said. ‘I helped him do it. I helped him to smuggle himself on board.’
And there was the problem, the Doctor realised. Given that he had begun to think this was all about duelling; all about the tradition of the noble contest and some sort of clash of cultures between the old and the new; given all that: Keefer didn’t fit anywhere. Or he was in the wrong place. Keefer could be the cause of what was happening or he could simply be one of the effects. Or he might have nothing to do with any of it.
‘She’s not on it though is she,’ Ronick was saying.
‘Everybody knows that ship’s just a decoy. Nobody knows where she really is. Nobody knows if she’s still alive come to that. There are gods younger than she is.’
‘I don’t suppose he said why, did he?’ the Doctor asked Finbar.
‘Why what?’
‘Why he wanted to get on board.’
‘Money he said.’
‘You didn’t believe him.’
Finbar grimaced. ‘There are easier ways.’
‘Perhaps he was ambitious,’ Sita said.
‘He gave me quite a lot more than I asked for. Didn’t seem to matter to him.’
‘Why would it?’ Ronick said. ‘If he thought he had a chance at a stack of cash you’d get a nosebleed climbing over he’s not going to be bothered about pocket change.’
‘It wasn’t money he was there for.’
‘No,’ the Doctor said. ‘Whatever this is about it’s more important than money.’
‘More important than money?’ Ronick snorted.
Finbar chortled. ‘Wherever she is I’ll bet that fighter of yours is really glad to have you as her agent isn’t she?’
With a small guilty start the Doctor was reminded that he had forgotten about Leela. Again. He had been distracted.
Again. It was getting to be a habit of mind. I must set about finding her, he resolved. Wherever she is I must find her.
Wherever she is? Odd choice of phrase that since he hadn’t told Finbar she was missing. One of the others must have mentioned it, he thought. I mustn’t get paranoid just because I’m on the run from the police. I mustn’t see connections where there are no connections and plots where there are no plots. I must keep an open mind. And I must find Leela.
Wherever she is.
When Leela pushed open the airlock hatch she was holding her breath. She had heard the air pump stop pumping air almost as soon as it had started and she was not sure what that might mean so she held her breath as she slid out of the narrow chamber and into the larger space beyond.
Down a tight, dimly lit passageway she could see what she took to be the two sealed bulkheads the pilot had described: both now unsealed and standing open. Be
yond them was what looked like the other emergency airlock he had spoken of. It was another emergency airlock. The words finally meant something to her. The airlocks were there to keep the loss of air confined to one part of the ship if anything went wrong in another. They were there only for emergencies. When she had faked unconsciousness it made the pilot afraid that something had gone wrong with her part of the ship. That was why he was wearing the breathing suit. She let out the breath she had been holding and inhaled deeply. Knowing too much about what could happen and being too careful as a result is what had got him killed.
She moved quickly along the passageway, more comfortable now with the partial weightlessness of pseudo-grav. She was satisfied that, with time and a small amount of practice, she could cope with any sort of gravity from normal to none at all. If she needed to fight in any of those conditions she was confident that she would be able to. It did not seem likely that she would need to though, which was a pity. She would have preferred to die fighting if she was going to die. As she clambered into the other emergency airlock she found herself wondering if the Doctor had any idea what had happened to her.
As she expected, the airlock opened easily with a minimum of air pumped in and a soft hiss as it was released. She pulled herself out onto the flight deck and was surprised at how small and squalid it was. The pilot had said his living conditions were worse than hers and he had not been exaggerating. Hating, sleeping, bodily waste elimination: everything was crammed into this one tiny, bad-smelling space. But if he had not exaggerated about that, he certainly had about his part in flying the ship. From the way he had talked she had imagined there must be a complicated arrangement of controls that needed constant work and great skill to keep the ship functioning.
She looked carefully over and around the semicircular desk at which it appeared the pilot must normally sit. She searched for the arrays of buttons and switches and levers that should be there, but she could see nothing much to suggest that flying needed any attention, never mind the great skill and experience .the man had claimed for himself.
There were four buttons and a centrally located lever and that was all. Even the TARDIS had more controls to fiddle with than this ship had.
On a small flat screen set into the middle of the desk a central image of darkness and stars was displayed, and in two long columns on either side of that changing numbers were drifting up and down. The numbers meant nothing to her but they seemed to be altering at a steady rate: rising on one side, falling on the other. It looked routine and automatic. It looked as though the ship was working itself and behaving a lot more reliably than the TARDIS ever seemed to do.
Attached to one side of the desk - not built in, Leela could see - but added on afterwards, was a boxed surveillance screen showing a picture of the cell she had just escaped from. This box and its screen had more controls than the desk itself had. She experimented and found that there were buttons that changed the angle, the viewpoint, and how close up the picture was. There were speaking and listening devices and controls to raise and lower the sound levels of these. It confirmed to her that although he had called himself the pilot the man she had killed was more of a jailer than anything else. He had told Her that if it was not for the flying he would not be needed. He had lied. The ship was flying itself. For the first time since she had sat down to work out her chances Leela allowed herself to be optimistic about her survival. She sat in the pilot’s seat and relaxed. Before long she was asleep. She was still asleep when the navigation screen showed something bright moving across the background starscape and the ship adjusted its flight coordinates to intercept it.
Keefer woke to find himself in total darkness and it took him a moment or two to realise that he was weightless. It was logical, he thought. If you wanted to keep a prisoner helpless then weightlessness was the obvious way to do it. Like most people he did not understand how pseudo-grav worked but he knew it was a Hakai development so he presumed they had the expertise to leave areas of the Ultraviolet Explorer untouched by its effects.
Without light he had no real idea what sort of a box they’d got him in, but it didn’t much matter any more because he’d lost. He needed to get to the Lady Hakai and confront her and he hadn’t done it. All he had done was kill a few Fat Boys and walk into the sort of elementary trap that he would once have seen coming without needing to look and would have dodged without needing to think. Whatever else happened now it was over for him. He’d lost the instinct. He’d lost the edge. He’d been decoyed by a machine that looked like a man but wasn’t one and he’d gone down like a stumbling amateur. There were no second chances in his profession. He was dead.
He hung in the black and let the feeling of desolation drift across him like tired dust. He was a helpless prisoner with nothing but darkness in his eyes. He had run, he had fought, he had killed, and it had all led him to this pointless place.
He sighed, sucking in a deep involuntary breath. He tasted a faint mixture of stale food on the air: pancakes and vegetables, lecea seed; he smelled a distant hint of sweat and human waste, water and the scalding scent of hot metal.
Somewhere close by was the recycling system. He hadn’t seen a plan but recycling plants and the like were usually towards the more protected centre of these big ships and his guess was that the Ultraviolet Explorer was no exception. That might explain the weightlessness too. It could be that the pseudo-grav generator was somewhere near. The beginnings of a possible counterattack began to suggest themselves. If he could find a way out of this box and sabotage the pseudo-grav he might have a whole new killing ground on which to face his opponent. He patted himself down. If they’d left him something he could throw he should be able to work out the size of his prison and what it was made of. Once he knew that, he could get on with things.
‘I see what you meant,’ the Doctor said. It was not the biggest ship he had ever seen anywhere but it was certainly the biggest he’d seen recently. And it was clearly not designed for close planetary orbits or intricate docking manoeuvres, no matter how large the satellite. ‘Fragile and cumbersome by the look of it. There would have to be a very good reason to bring that anywhere near the OTS.’
‘Gods in a runner, I heard it was big,’ Ronick muttered,
‘but that scuffling thing’s enormous.’
‘All that for one old woman?’ Sita said.
‘You’re missing the point,’ Finbar said. ‘The Lady Hakai’s not one old woman: she’s one old woman who can have whatever she wants, whenever she wants it.’
‘It must be difficult to decide what that might be,’ the Doctor said and found himself wondering again how much of what was happening was actually by design.
‘This is where you realise why you hired me,’ Finbar said cheerfully, ‘and why I don’t come cheap.’ He started punching instructions into the navigation computer.
Watching closely, it was apparent to the Doctor that most of what the pilot was doing was nothing more than showmanship, smoke and mirrors for the uninitiated and the gullible. The core procedure was very simple and the skill required looked to be minimal. Top of the range did seem to mean ease of operation. Before the piloting charade had been completed the main drive responded and the ship, tiny in comparison to its weirdly florid and unwieldy target, began a gracefully elliptical closing manoeuvre.
As they watched on the screens Finbar crowed, ‘Would you look at that.’ He continued to tap elaborate key combinations into what the Doctor could see was an obviously locked down and non-responsive navigation program. ‘That course is a thing of beauty is it not? And all it takes is a lifetime of practice.’
The Doctor smiled to himself. And two key strokes, he thought, and a coin for the metre. ‘I imagine they are expecting us, aren’t they,’ he said.
‘Expecting us?’ Finbar stopped what he was doing and looked up.
‘What makes you say that?’ Ronick said. ‘Why would you think they’d be expecting us?’
‘Because he’s too relaxed,’
Sita said, nodding at the pilot.
‘He’s not worried. No concerns at all about getting us on board, so unless he thinks we can overwhelm them with our superior size and power...’
‘Trust me I can dock this thing on that monstrosity without anyone noticing,’ Finbar said, but the Doctor noticed he did not go back to his showy key work.
‘You’d better,’ Ronick growled. ‘If you want to get paid.’
On the screens the two ships converged.
The two huge, more or less naked men stood on either side of Leela holding her firmly by the arms. In her short life she had fought warriors of all shapes and sizes but these were a new experience for her. Their strength she could have expected but because they were so fat she had totally underestimated their speed and agility. Too late she realised that what she had learned and practised in the various stages between normal weight and weightlessness might not be the same for other fighters. These squat, very heavy men would clearly gain more advantage from the reduced weight conditions than she had and she was annoyed with herself for not waking up to this until it was too late.
She had woken to find the small ship she was on was approaching a much larger one and she had made a hurried search of the flight deck for a weapon of some kind but she had found nothing of use. She felt vulnerable and only half-dressed going into a dangerous situation without her knife and her combat pouch, but wasting time worrying about what she could not change would only add to the danger, she knew, so she put it from her mind. She was unarmed but she was rested and she was ready. And more important than that: she was Leela of the Sevateem, the only representative of her tribe in this place. The dead pilot had said that was why they wanted her. Well this was where they found out that ambushing her was a bad mistake and holding her captive was a worse one.
By the time the ship finished its automatic docking procedures Leela was already inside the outside airlock and when everything finally fell silent she pressed the standard key sequence and listened to the air pump’s brief fluttering.
Match of the Day Page 24