Cold Fusion - Lance Parkin [106]
‘The box was sealed with a magnetic clamp,’ she noted.
‘Not when we caught up with the Doctor.’ Chris was trying to piece together what had happened, using his police training to assemble the facts in a logical order.
Nyssa found that all she could remember was hugging Tegan and a feeling of overwhelming relief when she saw the Doctor.
Tegan’s eyes were wide open. ‘Adam!’ she declared.
‘The Doctor mentioned a man called Adam,’ Nyssa said,
‘and someone else: Kent... Clint?’
‘Quint,’ Tegan confirmed. ‘They were people that stood up against the Adjudicators and the Scientifica.’
‘The terrorist leader? The bomber?’ She’d heard the name on the car radio, when they’d been driving to Cwej’s flat.
‘That’s how the newscasts here portray him, To his followers he’s a revolutionary, fighting against the cruelty of the Scientifica and the Adjudicators. My partner, Roz Forrester, has met him, and she’s convinced that he’s really only a small-time crook.’
‘For what it’s worth, he agrees,’ said Tegan. ‘He has bombed civilians?’
Chris nodded. ‘Yeah, those associated with the presence of the peacekeepers: support staff: bars and hotels. The usual stuff.’ Nyssa shuddered at the thought that humans could take such atrocities for granted.
‘So what would he do with a fusion bomb?’ she asked.
‘If you’d met him, you’d know,’ Tegan said quietly. ‘He hates the Scientifica. That bomb would completely annihilate their pyramid, and everything around it.’
Chris shook his head. ‘The Doctor disarmed the bombs, remember?’
‘Adam was right there when the Doctor started to defuse them: Tegan informed them. ‘He wouldn’t have taken one that had already been disarmed. He had the opportunity to palm one before the Doctor could get to it.’
Chris’s face was pale. ‘We have to warn them.’
‘They’ll kill him,’ Nyssa objected. ‘The Adjudicators are the ones that brought the bombs to the planet in the first place.’
Tegan nodded. ‘If we don’t tell them, Adam will kill thousands of people. Now I’ve seen at first hand what the Adjudicators have done here, but no one deserves to die like that. The upper echelons might have made the decisions, but that doesn’t mean that every lab technician, maintenance man and cleaner in the pyramid has to die too.’ Tegan began walking to the door. ‘There isn’t even a choice to make. You had better get away from here. Only one of us has to go.’
Nyssa shook her head. ‘We’re coming with you.’ Chris nodded his agreement.
The squadron of hovertanks rounded the mountainside and came to a halt. The Waystation sat on a raised area of ground. There was evidence of the struggle earlier that day.
The brickwork was streaked with soot in places, unusually pristine in others. A group of workdroids sat well away from the buildings, biding their time.
There were six tanks in the squadron, but only one had a human occupant. It sat at the back of the group, indistinguishable from the teletanks. The Control Tank would co-ordinate the others in the event of an encounter with the enemy. Since the Galactic Wars, a series of arms treaties restricted the capability and sophistication of combat robots: something the size of a tank with full autonomy was banned, but if it was controlled – however tenuously – by an organic operator, that was fine. After half a millennium of enforcing the law, the Bureau of Adjudicators were perhaps the most proficient organization in the quadrant at filling such little loopholes.
Lieutenant Solim, the driver, tried the communicator one more time. However much she altered the settings there was nothing there but white noise. It had been the same for nearly two hours. She sat back, considering her options.
There was a tap on the hatch.
‘Look mate, are you coming out, or what?’ It sounded like one of the robots. Solim activated the periscope. The workdroids had made their way over to her tank and were now gathered in a semicircle around it. They’d left caterpillar tracks, footprints and other imprints and trails in the snow. There were half a dozen droids