Doctor Who_ Corpse Marker - Chris Boucher [34]
Leela’s eyes snapped open and she reached up and took Sarl by the throat and pulled him forward. He put an arm out to stop himself falling and she yanked it back hard against the shoulder joint, using the tall man’s momentum to turn him round on top of her. She twisted under him and crooked her arm tight round his neck at the same time forcing his trapped arm further up his back with her free hand. She braced her knees against his spine in a backbreaking hold and pushed him upwards on it. ‘Drop your weapons and step back,’ Leela ordered, ‘or I will kill him.’
It had happened so quickly that the shocked guards had not reacted. They were both armed with stun-kills and now they hesitated, uncertain what to do. Hesitation was not what Leela wanted. The advantage was still with them. It was three to one and they had weapons and position. She had no idea how many more were outside the room. ‘Do it or the next thing he feels will be his back breaking and the last thing he hears will be his neck snapping.’
‘What do we do, Sarl?’ one of the guards asked nervously.
She forced the holds harder: ‘Tell them,’ she told her captive.
She tightened them harder still. ‘Tell them, you back-striker.’ She knew he had to be in pain but he made no sound. Whatever else this man was, he was not a physical coward and she realised that she would probably have to kill him.
‘Sarl?’ the guard said.
‘Kill her,’ Sarl grunted.
Leela broke his arm, and this time he did cry out in pain and then snarled, ‘Kill her, you useless no-name scum, kill her, kill her kill her now.’ He cried out again.
Both guards put their stun-kills down on the floor. ‘Kick them over here.’ Leela ordered.
They kicked them towards her.
‘Step back. Right back.’
They stepped back and Leela rolled Sarl off her and stood up. Sarl lay with his broken arm bent grotesquely behind him.
He was pale and sweating and he looked beaten. Suddenly with his good arm he lunged for one of the discarded stun-kills. Leela kicked it out of his reach. He grabbed at her legs, trying to knock her down. The other two took their cue from him and rushed at her. Leela stepped clear of Sarl’s clumsy clutch and kicked him across the jaw, knocking him unconscious. She met the two-man charge head on, dropping low at the last moment and ducking between the two of them. She kicked one of the men in the side of the knee and felt the ligaments tear and the bone grate. He went down yelling and clutching his leg. The second man made the mistake of changing his mind and the direction of his run and dived towards a stun-kill which had landed up against the far wall. Even as he was scrabbling to pick it up and bring it to bear Leela crashed into his back and smashed him against the wall.
He swung round, desperately slashing the stun-kill in a short arcing swipe. Leela danced backwards and as the weapon burned past her and the man overreached his thrust she leaped forward and kneed him in the groin. She saw his face go slack with pain and she kicked him again just to make sure. Grabbing the wrist of the weapon hand, she pulled his arm over her shoulder and levered it against the elbow. She caught the stun-kill as it fell from his paralysed hand and shoved the point close to his face.
‘The first thing I want,’ she said, ‘is my knife. Then you can tell me why I have been brought here and where here is.’
As soon as SASV1 recognised itself, and knew itself to be, it no longer had the crises which had afflicted its early moments of pseudo-conscious awareness. When it was told not to be what it was for it had no difficulty in accepting this as sleep. The robot had no need to understand what the levels of sleep were, or how far down they went, or how long they lasted. Each time it went down through the levels it had no expectation of how it would wake. Each time the waking carried no memory from the sleeping, and the sleeping carried no links through it to the waking. Each time SASV1 woke again it had a new and unlinked knowing itself to be.
This was just as the tech team expected.