Cold Fusion - Lance Parkin [37]
‘I can’t stay,’ she told him, burying her head in his chest. ‘There’s been a development at the research dome.
I’m going to pack, then beam straight over.’
He was disappointed. She could feel him pull back.
After forty years he still wanted to spend every possible night with her. ‘What sort of development?’
Whitfield clutched his hand, then let go of it.
‘Something that the Protector won’t tell me over a commlink.’
She walked through into the bedroom. The walls in here were sloped, making the double bed look even larger than it actually was. Lian’s armour stood in one corner. Without its occupant, the armour was hunched and the helmet sat at a twisted angle. Had she a less logical mind, Whitfield might have imagined it watching her, or even moving. As it was, she still found its presence disturbing.
Whitfield packed a spare tunic and a couple of simchips into a travel case. That done, she walked back out into the living area. Medford was sitting, half-slumped in the easy chair, a drink in his hand. Whitfield walked past him to the food dispenser alcove, pulled the lever and the hatch dilated open. Her food pill and glass of artificial winterberry juice were sitting in the middle of the tray. As the plastic cover pulled back into place over the drip tray, there was a sound just behind her ear.
The Chief Scientist turned, but the alcove was empty.
‘Is anything the matter?’ Medford asked her. He hadn’t heard it.
It hadn’t been the heating system: when the hypocaust was warming through, the panels expanded slightly, but the heating had been on for hours. It wasn’t a water pipe.
The pyramid was fully soundproofed, so it wasn’t coming from outside. For a second, before dismissing the thought as ridiculous, she considered the possibility that it was a burglar. She chose not to ask Lian whether he had heard it.
Whitfield swallowed the pill and washed it down with her drink. The winterberry juice tasted as it always did: cold and bitter.
The noise had been very quiet. But she hadn’t imagined it.
‘Shall we explore?’
Adric forced his eyes open, he didn’t want to move.
‘What, now?’
‘No time like the present,’ the Doctor declared cheerfully. He was fully dressed, of course. He’d even found a fresh stick of celery from somewhere.
Adric slipped out of the bunk and stood. He looked around, furtively. ‘I thought you said we were being watched,’ he said softly.
‘Oh, we were,’ the Doctor continued, in his normal voice. He held up the wreckage of the surveillance camera.
‘But after a quick look at this, it was pretty easy to find out how the security around here works. The security grid receives and processes information from a camera in every room in the building, and can holographically reproduce every point in the building in microscopic detail.
Meanwhile, interpretative software analyses everything that is said and warns the operators if it hears anything worrying. The system can be set to recognize key phrases or to follow an individual around. It’s all very sophisticated, but that just makes it all the more easy to fool it. I’ve hacked into the grid, and told it to ignore us.
We’ll be invisible.’
‘There are bound to be guards. We won’t be invisible to them.’
‘The Scientifica trust their instruments and their computers. No doubt if we drew attention to ourselves then they’d send a squad of Adjudicators after us, quick sharp, but as it is, they won’t realize that they need to. The system encourages complacency. We’ll have to be quiet, of course, but it’s the middle of the night.’ He was already pacing towards the door. Adric followed.
‘So where are we going?’ Adric said.
The Doctor raised a finger to his mouth. Adric asked him the same question again, in a slightly