Doctor Who_ Corpse Marker - Chris Boucher [1]
‘I don’t believe it, I’m sorry,’ the young man repeated.
You’ve never been sorry in your life, you inbred half-wit, Carnell thought and said: ‘Perhaps you could be more specific, Firstmaster Roatson?’
‘It could not have happened like that.’
It was a statement of fact, or rather it was a statement of opinion by a man who was too privileged to have to tell the difference. Carnell knew it was pointless to challenge such a person especially in present company but already he was bored.
This could have been a mildly interesting game if it weren’t for these small-minded fools and their limited desires. Where were the decadent, power-mad psychotics when you needed them?
Raising one eyebrow slightly, he smiled a small smile. ‘All evidence to the contrary,’ he suggested. He paused just long enough then went on, ‘It seems you have some intelligence which has obviously been denied to me.’
Several of the representatives of the other founding families and some of the rising stars of the business cartels sniggered openly.
The young aristocrat was not fazed. ‘The family,’ he said,
‘have been in robot development practically from the beginning, and I can tell you that there is no possibility of changing a Voc grade in the way you suggested. No one could do it, not with all the facilities of a fully equipped laboratory at their disposal, and certainly not on a moving storm mine using nothing more elaborate than a standard laserson probe.’
Carnell noted the casual reference to the tool which had been used on the subsystems of the robot brains. It was information so closely restricted that almost no one should have known about it. Certainly this man, a junior member of one of the twenty families, should not have been privy to it. Was it stupidity or simple arrogance, he wondered, which let young Firstmaster Roatson give away how much they already knew of what he was supposedly telling these people for the first time?
He was tempted to challenge him on it but this was no time for self-indulgence. ‘Normally I would agree with you,’ he said mildly. ‘But nothing about Taren Capel was normal, least of all his talent for robotics.’
‘I don’t think Taren Capel ever existed,’ Roatson commented.
Carnell smiled. ‘If he didn’t exist then it would be necessary to invent him.’
‘That’s exactly it.’
‘Yes,’ Carnell agreed, still smiling, ‘it is.’
He dimmed the lights again and released the demonstration images. This time he took the lights down a little further than before and imperceptibly intensified and saturated the colours on the screen. He hoped to get them all to concentrate long enough for him to finish this largely irrelevant presentation.
With all the unmodified robots closed down using the main deactivation circuits, Uvanov and Toos blow up several of the killer robots with bombs they make by magnetising the base plates of Z9 explosive packs. They further devise a feedback loop in the robot communications links which overloads and burns down through the control levels causing catastrophic brain failures, and then by altering voice recognition systems they manage to turn his hellish creations back on Taren Capel himself. The shadowy genius is the final victim of his robots of death.
By the time the rescuers reach Storm Mine Four it is all over.
The survivors - Captain Uvanov, Pilot Toos and the severely disabled Chief Mover Poul - are brought back to civilisation. The mine is abandoned and it sinks into the desert, taking with it the evidence of what happened. A cover story is devised, or perhaps it is just speculated, and because it is what everyone wants to believe it quickly becomes what everyone knows to be the truth.
There is no end of civilisation as we know it.
As a finale Carnell ran news footage from the time: the brief chaotic interviews with the survivors; the