Cold Fusion - Lance Parkin [105]
The Protector looked the nearest Adjudicator up and down. ‘You dare to bring weaponry here?’
Neither of the soldiers spoke.
Whitfield took a step back. ‘This is in direct violation of the Imperial Mandate. The Court will hear about this.’ The threat was meaningless for the moment – the weather conditions on the surface meant that the staff at the research dome couldn’t even contact the Scientifica. The Protector wondered how they had managed to beam in: they must have access to some truly state-of-the-art equipment, and even then there must have been risks. The Adjudicators seemed unworried by the thought that they were disobeying their Empress. This disturbed the Protector: the Adjudicators’ Bureau prided itself on its loyalty and impartiality. Now they were acting as if they were a law unto themselves.
The lift door slid smoothly open. Provost-General Tertullian Medford stepped forward.
‘Lian!’ Whitfield exclaimed. It was an open secret among the Scientifica that the Chief Scientist and Provost-General were lovers. This was the first time that the Protector had seen the two of them together. Medford let her approach him, but hardly reacted to acknowledge her.
There were other people in the liftshaft: two hulking Adjudicators with drawn blasters and a couple of oddly dressed civilians, a man and a woman. He wore a cream frock coat lined in a vivid red. If that was not eccentric enough, there was a rather limp plant, one of the Umbelliferae, pinned to his lapel. The woman wore just a thin cotton nightshirt, probably hospital issue. She had flowing blonde hair and exquisitely long legs.
‘Doctor?’ Whitfield said, expressing some surprise, as though it wasn’t quite who she’d expected. ‘We meet again.
‘And this is the lovely Patient?’
The Protector realized he was staring. Instinctively he knew that this was indeed the near-corpse they had discovered at the foot of the Machine. He remembered studying the body. He had been the first to realize that it was still alive. How could such a leathery; sexless thing be transformed into the goddess before him now. She smiled at him, and he found it impossible to ask the question.
‘Why are you here?’ Whitfield asked.
‘The Doctor can repair the time machine,’ Medford said.
‘The security implications of that are obvious. There has to be a military presence here when the Machine is made operational. Besides, the enemy have manifested on the surface. It can only be a matter of time before this cavern is attacked.’
‘You chose not to discuss this with me first?’
‘There is nothing to discuss. Under the terms of the Defence of the Realm Act, this planet is now under Martial Law.’
‘If you are using this planet in some Unitatus power struggle –’
‘It goes far further than that, Juno. The Empire will fall tonight if I don’t do this.’
The fusion reactor door was three inches thick and between them and the Adjudicators. It seemed like an ideal place to dig down, but Cwej knew standard Bureau tactics He had told Nyssa and Tegan that a squad would already have been sent to secure the generator. The three of them would have to move quickly to hide the fusion bombs.
The generator was a stubby glass tube about the size of a kettle sitting in a nest of cables. The container was full of little metal beads in a clear, boiling, liquid. Nyssa opened up the first aid box containing the bombs and began handing them to Chris and Tegan. They found a hiding place for each: the charges were so nondescript that they could easily have been components of the generator.
Nyssa handed the last one over to Chris. Something was wrong. ‘There are only twenty-one charges.’
‘Are you sure?’ Chris checked for himself, but Nyssa was right. There were twenty-two before, weren’t there?’
Nyssa wanted to say that she had miscounted, that really there had only ever been twenty-one, but she knew otherwise. The other one was there when we packed them but after that...’
‘It must have fallen out when the robot fell. I wasn’t really