Doctor Who_ Corpse Marker - Chris Boucher [25]
He turned round to watch the small crowd of people slowly assembling outside the dome. It was going to take a while for over two hundred of them to crawl, one at a time, out through the gap in the shutters but they were perfectly patient. As each one emerged they all shuffled forward just enough to make room for the newcomer. They reminded the Doctor of insects or of reluctantly leaking liquid forming a gradual puddle.
He couldn’t quite make up his mind what to do about these people. He was beginning to feel small pangs of concern for their welfare despite the fact that he still knew next to nothing about who they were and how they came to be in their present strangely vacant state. It was vexing to find, what with these docile creatures looking for guidance on the one hand and Leela looking for trouble on the other, that he was hemmed in by unlooked-for responsibilities. When he told Leela that he loved surprises this was not what he had expected. Yes, vexing was definitely the word. He decided that Leela must be the first priority. His immediate problem was that there was no way of telling which way she had gone.
‘Stand still,’ the voice behind him snarled, ‘spread your arms, keep your hands out where I can see them.’
Then again, the Doctor thought, that might not be his immediate problem. ‘Is there a problem?’ he asked, smiling his best and most friendly smile to make his tone sound warm and unthreatening.
‘Yes, there’s a problem,’ the voice said. ‘And it’s all yours, you ARFist scum.’
‘Arfist?’ the Doctor said, still smiling. ‘What an interesting word. What does it mean exactly?’
‘It means you’re going to die, exactly,’ the voice said.
The Doctor turned slowly to find four armed men in uniform confronting him. Three of them were standing in a line across the walkway - the fourth man stood in front of them and he was the one who was doing the talking.
‘Is there a reason you want to kill me?’ the Doctor asked. ‘Or is it just a whim?’
‘Max the stun-kills,’ the security platoon leader ordered, turning up the power on his weapon. ‘It’s just a whim,’ he said.
‘Perhaps we should talk about this?’ the Doctor suggested.
‘No,’ the man said and he walked towards the Doctor with the stun-kill extended loosely in front of him like a sword.
Behind him the other three members of the patrol moved forward, adjusting their stun-kills to maximum as they walked.
The raid seemed to be over. Stenton Rull stared at the monitor screens in the operations gallery as they started to come back on-line and the beginnings of a coordinated picture of what was happening on the ground at the central service facility gradually emerged.
‘Now they come back,’ he said to no one in particular.
‘Where were they when we needed them?’
The screens showed platoons of security men remorselessly scouring the complex for stragglers. Here and there the tech teams were still working on damaged relays, trying to restore full security surveillance.
Rull was joined by Pur Dreck, the Deputy Operations Supervisor, who said, ‘Looks to me like they knew exactly where the comm links were.’
‘The ARF were never that organised,’ Rull said. ‘That scum couldn’t find sand in a storm miner.’
‘How do you explain all this then?’ Dreck asked, nodding at the tech teams on the screens. He rubbed his eyes tiredly and then ran a hand backwards and forwards over the top of his bald head. ‘They were pretty effective at cutting us off, wouldn’t you say?’
‘Even psychotic lunatics are going to get lucky sometimes,’
Rull muttered. ‘The alternative’s an ugly problem we don’t need right now.’
Dreck nodded. ‘If they knew beforehand, who was it told them?’
Rull lowered his voice almost to a whisper. ‘Someone on the inside, must be.’
Dreck nodded. ‘So who do you fancy?’
‘You got any friends in the ARF, Pur?’ Rull asked, the joke not quite making it an innocuous question.
‘That’s not