Doctor Who_ Corpse Marker - Chris Boucher [36]
Ugly stuff. They didn’t look like robots, did they, they looked like...they looked like a memory of something that shouldn’t be in his head...Ugly look. Where did looks like that come from? he wondered. Who was it started such ugly fashions?
He waited, half-listening and beginning to feel sleepy, knowing that the news stories would soon move on to something calming and real, the latest tragedies and disasters, the business torments and the failures. He snapped awake again -
had he really been asleep? The story on the screen was the report of the unsuccessful attempt to break into the central service facility and disrupt the work of robot refurbishment. A senior representative of the Company was on hand to denounce the fanatics who had been responsible for the deaths of five brave members of the security force. Poul recognised the spokesman immediately though he had not seen or spoken to him since the original debriefing.
He knew at once that it was Captain Kiy Uvanov. He had known the fact of him, the name of him and that he had been the captain of Storm Mine Four and that he was a Company topmaster now, but he couldn’t actually remember him at all. He could never put a place to him or a face to him.
And now here he was. Now here he was in the reality Poul had relied on to be somewhere else, somewhere separate, somewhere not remembered. ‘Teech Bolon,’ Uvanov was saying,
‘the head of site security, was tragically killed in the mopping-up operations on the nearby flier field which was used by the terrorists to make their escape.’
But Poul was not listening. Poul was terrified that he couldn’t shake it. He couldn’t clean it from his mind.
The harsh strip lights in the room did nothing to make the contents of her small metal bowl look more wholesome but Leela was hungry so she determined to eat some of the food despite its smell and the remote possibility that it could have been deliberately poisoned. She had not seen it served but some of her kidnappers were eating the same unappetising stew and she thought it was unlikely that they would go to that much trouble to disguise an attempt on her life. She had been given a short metal spike with which to skewer the pieces of vegetable and stringy meat floating in the oily gravy. She speared a chunk of something grey. The taste turned out to be better than the smell, which made her cautious. Odour and flavour were closely linked and when they were so different it was usually a bad sign.
Poisoning was not necessarily deliberate.
‘It’s seasoned with cascade berries,’ Padil said, seeing her hesitate. ‘It’s a speciality here in the Sewerpits.’
‘Stimulates your sense of taste and suppresses your sense of smell,’ Sarl said, drinking gravy from a bowl held awkwardly in his one good hand. His broken arm was strapped inexpertly across his chest in a temporary sling. ‘It has healing properties too.’ He did not smile: ‘Useful under the circumstances.’
The two guards, whom Leda now knew to be Letarb and Denek, were sitting on the other side of the room trying not to make it obvious that they were watching her. Denek was nursing his knee and, from the way he kept flexing it, Letarb’s arm was obviously stiff. The names, like Padil and Sarl too, were what they called fighting names. People chose them to hide who they were and where they came from. It seemed that they were nothing to do with warrior status - which was just as well, she