Cold Fusion - Lance Parkin [102]
The door clicked open.
‘An insane asylum?’ Nyssa said absently. Such things had long vanished on Traken, and only featured in the most melodramatic literature.
‘That’s not a nice phrase,’ Tegan lectured her. Behind the doors was a large storeroom. Cwej was hurrying down the aisles, checking the plastic bins. ‘The Adjudicators will be swarming around this place. We need to hide the bombs.’
‘In here?’
‘I was hoping to find some of that material that shields stuff from sensors.’ Tegan had no idea what he was talking about.
‘The Doctor has disabled the bombs,’ Nyssa reminded him.
Chris turned. ‘They’ll still show up on scanners. Even if the Doctor’s right and Medford can’t undisable them, we can’t just hand them over to him without a fight, he’d get suspicious.’
Nyssa stopped. ‘My people have a proverb: the best place to hide a light is in the sun.’
‘Are you suggesting that we put the bombs in plain view?’ Tegan said, trying not to sound too exasperated.
Chris was nodding. ‘This facility has a fusion generator.
We put the bombs in there and the fusion signature of the power plant will disguise them.’
‘Then what are we waiting for?’
* * *
The first Adjudicators were sappers, on the rooftop almost before the gravity ladders had finished unfurling. They set up the laserwire that cut the holes in the roof and disabled the satellite dish that relayed radio and transmat signals.
The second wave of Adjudicators were the troops in full armour. They went into the building under strict radio silence, moving swiftly. The suits had the full schematics of the Facility in their archive. The troops spread through the wards, barely noticing the inmates cower from them.
There were twelve crucial points: exits, garages, lifts and stairways, the armoury, environmental control and suchlike. These were to be secured first.
Outside the Battle Platform’s gun batteries came online, sliding smoothly from their housings. Anything, absolutely anything, that came out of the building beneath them would be atomized. There was no room for human error: the procedure was computer-controlled, and would be over before any of the Adjudicators onboard the Platform would even be able to register the target.
The assault team had secured the strategic points. They picked up two prisoners in the ventilation ducts: a male and a female, both unarmed. A sensor sweep showed that the fusion charges had disappeared.
The Doctor and his companion were in a holding area in the vast hangar deck of the Battle Platform. The Provost-General had left the flight deck with two bodyguards to interrogate them. Adjudicators and their equipment filled the hangar. Although there were no windows, there was a sense of movement. Shortly after they had been brought aboard, the Platform had lifted, then began to drift.
Medford imagined the vast structure floating above the ground, oblivious to trivia such as the laws of aerodynamics and gravity.
Bright yellow loader droids were ferrying missiles and power plants to the squadron of sleek fighter aircraft. A technical team were refitting all the hovercopters with particle cannons. At the far end of the room half a dozen hovertanks were jostling for position with. about twice as many large wardroids. The air was filled with the sound of sirens, welding beams and shouted orders. As he and his bodyguards passed through the throng it parted around him. He came to a halt in front of the bars of the cell door.
The Doctor and the Patient were deep in conversation at one end of the cell. She had fully recovered, and stood with a composure that matched the Doctor’s own. It was difficult to believe that this was the wizened corpse that Juno’s team had discovered, almost fossilized, in the rock around the Machine. The Patient had sat in cryogenic suspension in the research dome for a year, doing little more than gather a little more dust. The Scientifica had long run out of tests to conduct on the body – every possible measurement and observation had been made. At the same time, the Imperial Council were