Cold Fusion - Lance Parkin [66]
The Doctor pulled her back round the corner. ‘That hovercopter has motion sensors. Stay still.’ A searchlight probed the area, but it hadn’t seen them. It returned its attention to the other target.
‘What if the train leaves without us?’ Tegan whispered.
‘The unloading will take ten minutes,’ he assured her.
‘Plenty of time.’
There was another burst of fire, then a different sound.
‘He’s got away!’ the Doctor exclaimed. ‘That was a transmat activating. That copter will start to come this way now, we’ll have to find better cover.’ The circle of light was getting nearer again. The Doctor edged back, and Tegan was forced to crab along the wall. There was a gaping hole a few metres away in the direction they were travelling.
Tegan gingerly stepped inside over the rubble, her pace quickening when she realized that inside she would be sheltered from the wind. The Doctor strode in after her, and together they moved to one side of the hole out of the range of the searchlight.
It looked like the ruins of a restaurant or service station.
It was dark, cold. The tables and bar had been splintered in a frenzied attack. Tegan’s throat was sore. It was all that cold, thin air that she had been breathing. She wiped her toes and stamped her feet, trying to get her circulation going.
The floor was piled with bodies..
‘Oh god,’ Tegan murmured, unable to say anything else.
There were dozens of them. They could have died recently, but they might just have been well-preserved in the cold, thin air. Food and dried blood were smeared over the walls and floor in equal measure. It looked like a scene from the TV images from Belfast or El Salvador.
In the centre of the room there was a vast statue, a humanoid form that looked like the result of an unholy union between a suit of Samurai armour and a Chieftain tank. The Doctor examined it briefly, then he began moving about the room, covering the bodies: closing their eyes. All the time he was checking for lifesigns, even though it was fruitless. Tegan saw him remove something from around the neck of one of the corpses, but couldn’t see what, as the body was in the shadows. Tegan realized that she was staring, and looked away.
She found herself face to face with a head impaled on a silver spike.
It was a young Asian man. His eyes were staring, pleading with her. The pole had been thrust into the man’s neck Blood was still dripping down, but it wasn’t fresh.
She opened her mouth, but no sound came out.
There was a plaque hanging from the spike. Tegan strained to read it.
ZIYOU WANLE
EXECUTED BY ORDER OF THE ADJUDICATION
SERVICE
FELLOW TRAITORS TAKE HEED
A hand planted itself on her shoulder. She jumped, even though intellectually she knew it could only be the Doctor.
The massacre took place six or seven hours ago, judging by the state of the bodies. There are a lot of blaster flashes and bulletholes, and many of the dead people were armed.
They managed to deactivate that MechInf, but then the reinforcements arrived and sprayed the room with bullets.’
Tegan was sobbing.
‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have brought you here.’
‘No,’ she said quietly, ‘If this is happening I need to know about it.’ She looked into the face of the dead man.
‘The Adjudicators are generally good men. If they did this, they must have been scared.’
‘And what could this man possibly have done to deserve this?’
‘Nothing.’
‘I thought this was the future, I thought that we’d be civilized by now.’ My god, Tegan thought, humanity has spread across the universe. Trillions of us, with flying cars and laser guns and nuclear fusion and videophones and space rockets and solar power and robot servants and colonies in space. But despite all the Tomorrow’s World technology we haven’t really progressed since the days when the Aborigines were shot for sport and children could be hung for stealing a loaf of bread.
Tegan looked up at the Doctor, and she saw something in his eyes that she would never forget: an expression of an emotion more deep and intricate than any human could possibly