Doctor Who_ Corpse Marker - Chris Boucher [21]
Was she buried? Were the robots still reaching for her? What was it that was so wrong?
‘Lights,’ she said automatically and the lights in her sleeping quarters came on and gradually got brighter.
Then Toos remembered what was wrong, what it was that was so different. The tour was over. The mine was docked. The steady background noise and the constant movement, which had gone on more or less unnoticed for months on end, had finally stopped.
With them had gone the tension of command, the fear of failure, the risk of letting anyone, even herself, see how truly terrified she was of robots...All gone, or almost gone. She could finally relax.
‘Lights hold,’ she instructed and the lights settled. She stretched luxuriously and sat up on the bed.
And best of all she was rich. She was finally, hugely and untouchably rich. She checked the time. She had slept longer than she had intended. Not that it mattered, the rich had their own special time standard. She was now in the if-I’m-late-you-wait time zone. The crew wouldn’t see it that way, though. Why should they? They knew her too well to be fooled by the money.
If she was going to give them the party she owed them, the party she owed it to herself to throw, she had better get on with everything or they would get drunk and squabble and go their separate ways and she would have missed the chance to start her new life as a super-rich bitch with a suitably outrageous flourish.
She reached across to the comm unit and punched up an outside link. While she waited for the connection she thought about what she might do then, after all the business was done, after the party had been partied. Maybe she’d do something about the robot problem - join one of those anti-robot groups -
hell, maybe she’d finance one of her own. Being robophobic wasn’t that weird. It could happen to anybody. What was it Uvanov used to say when they were being debriefed way back then? You don’t have to know they’ll kill you, you just have to think they might. Now there was a man who knew how to ride his luck. Maybe she’d give him a call some time. They could talk about the old days. She could see how much he remembered...
The Doctor had worked his way through the airlock isolation doors despite the patient curiosity of the crowd of still chewing people pushing close in behind him The automatically tripped locks were not complicated and as far as he could see had not been designed to do much more than stop routine movements during alarms and emergencies. The outer shell security shutters were a different matter. They were probably blast-proof and they were clearly intended to be tamper-proof. The Doctor knew he would not have had much chance of breaking in from the outside where the threats were expected to come from, but breaking out from the inside was not quite such a major challenge.With a sonic screwdriver and a penknife he located the trigger terminals and reversed their polarity. That done, all he actually needed to spring the locks and raise the heavy shutters was a small electrical charge.
Unfortunately a small electrical charge was something he conspicuously lacked. He searched through his pockets for a length of wire or anything conductive that he might use to link the electricity in the airlock and atmosphere filtration system to the powerless shutters. Finding nothing, he fished out another jelly baby, popped it in his mouth and thought for a moment.
‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘it’s the most obvious solutions that we overlook.’ He put his hands against the shutters and tried to push them upwards. They did not move. ‘But mostly it isn’t.’
He eased his way back through the crowd. They were all quite dry now and the odd smell had disappeared completely.
They looked fairly normal, if a little blank-faced