Doctor Who_ Corpse Marker - Chris Boucher [37]
‘I can set that arm for you,’ she said to Sarl. ‘Splinting and binding will work better than rat stew.’
Sarl smiled this time but the expression was without warmth.
‘Thanks, but I’ll get a medVoc to fix it.’
Leela was not sure what a medVoc was but she noticed several people in the room, Padil among them, stiffen and scowl.
One or two looked angry enough to protest but Sarl stared them down.
Padil was not so easily cowed. ‘Capel, humanity be in him, specifically criticises such dependence on non-human help,’ she said.
Sarl tossed his empty bowl down on to a small table beside him and said, ‘He criticises. He doesn’t forbid.’ His tone was flat and dismissive.
There was something strangely familiar about Sarl, Leela thought. There had been a warrior on the tribal council who was like him. A cold man who had little interest in the opinions of the rest and made no secret of it. An angry and impatient man.
She had admired his honesty and had never doubted his courage but she would not have followed him into a fight. A leader had to care about the people he led, not just about the reason why he led them.
‘We are struggling to liberate ourselves from the power they hold over us,’ Padil was saying. ‘Tarenist brothers and sisters were killed today fighting for that. Using a medVoc makes a mockery of their sacrifice.’
There were murmurs of assent throughout the room. Padil’s self-righteous preaching had a familiarity too. It struck Leela that you could find the same sorts of people more or less anywhere.
fleetingly she remembered the Doctor: Of course when you’ve been around for as long as I have almost everything does look disappointingly familiar and wondered if that time-weary feeling could have come to her this quickly.
Sarl had barely raised his voice. ‘You still don’t understand, do you? If you’d grown up here in the ’pits you’d understand.
You’d know without needing to have it explained that you use whatever’s to hand.’ He rubbed the hand in the sling. ‘Assuming you’ve got a hand that works.’ If he meant it as a joke he gave no sign of it, going on without pause. ‘This is a war and you don’t win a war because you want to. You don’t win a war because you deserve to. You don’t win a war because you never compromise your principles. You win a war because you’re prepared to do whatever it takes to win it. Whatever - it - takes.’
‘If Taren Capel, humanity be in him, can turn his back on his own creations,’ Padil said, ‘his own life’s work, and call for their destruction, then.. ’
Leela stopped eating and then started again quickly to cover her surprise. Taren Capel? Taren Capel and robots? There could not be another place where they had the creepy metal men and someone called Taren Capel. The TARDIS had brought them back to the same place, the place where she and the Doctor had fought the madman and his metal men.
‘...how can we do less and call ourselves his followers?’ His followers? Leela suddenly realised that the leader they talked of with such awe and respect was the madman himself. The madman who had been killed by his own metal men because they did not recognise his voice because of what the Doctor had told her to do. It was the Doctor’s idea but it was she who had released the helium gas.
‘Capel, humanity be in him,’ Sarl said, ‘calls us to win in order to sacrifice, not to sacrifice in order to win.’
Even Sarl, Leela thought, worshipped that dead murderer who tried to be a metal man.
Padil said, ‘Without beliefs you’re no better than a robot.’
‘Without winning,’ Sarl retorted, ‘you’re worse off than a robot. Take a look around you. Anywhere here. Anywhere in the Sewerpits where they’ve left us to rot.’
Leela wondered how much longer these two were going to argue about tactics, and what would happen if they knew she had been responsible for the death of Taren Capel...
Padil was nothing if not persistent. ‘Perhaps we should ask him for a ruling in his next communique.’
This time Leela could not contain her surprise. ‘Ask him?’
she asked