Doctor Who_ Corpse Marker - Chris Boucher [4]
The Doctor continued to climb.
She called a little more loudly: ‘Doctor, did you hear that?’
The Doctor paused and looked down. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t hear that. What did you say?’
‘Somewhere close by -’ Leela tilted her head slightly and listened intently.
‘Yes?’ The Doctor appeared to be trying to be patient and only partially succeeding.
‘Fighting,’ Leela said. ‘People are fighting.’
The Doctor started to climb again. ‘Even if they are,’ he said over his shoulder, ‘it still doesn’t justify the knife.’ He reached the narrow gantry and looked down again. Leela had not moved.
‘Are you coming up?’
‘I think I will go and see who is fighting and why,’ she said and turned towards a large pair of double doors set in the metal wall behind the ladders.
‘Not a good idea,’ the Doctor said. ‘But I imagine you’re going to tell me it’s part of the warrior code?’
‘I only want to find out what is happening.’
‘Try not to get involved. Or lost. Lost travelling companions are disappointingly familiar too.’
She smiled up at him. ‘I will try to surprise you,’ she said.
Leela crossed to the door and looked for the operating mechanism. On the walkway high above her the Doctor approached the first of the green-lit chambers and peered through the observation port.
Storm Mine Seven was grinding its way slowly towards the giant docking bay. Banks of multiple caterpillar tracks, offset, individually driven and capable of tilting through fifteen degrees on either side of the horizontal, were now on fully linked automatics and flat trim. These final operations were the simplest and most basic. The terminal approach manoeuvres would hardly have taxed the powers of a Voc, never mind a Supervoc, but Captain Lish Toos still liked to handle such things herself.
Seven’s ore hoppers were full, in most cases with high-grade lucanol. Toos had run a couple of trial assays and she knew the stuff would separate out at somewhere around the 70 per cent mark which was pure enough to guarantee the crew a profit share to make every last one of them seriously wealthy. This had been a very successful trip, even by her exceptionally high standards.
There were not many captains who had demonstrated Toos’s consistent talent for finding, time and again over the years, the richest ore streams. That was why she never had a problem, despite her growing reputation for eccentricity, in getting people to sign on for the eighteen-month tours of duty. Her odd obsessions meant that her crews worked a lot harder than normal but they got a lot richer than normal too so with her as captain there were no more than the routine bickerings and resentments common to all long-range mines.
Her strict ban on robots entering the control deck for any reason whatsoever made the shift system brutal by comparison with other mine crews. Her insistence that any job a human being was capable of doing must be done by a human being left time free for eating and sleeping and not much else. Things were further complicated by a requirement that robots be confined to those parts of the mine where Toos herself would not be working. There was also a rule that no robot be permitted in the crew’s living quarters unless specifically tasked and never in her personal quarters under any circumstances. As each of her tours progressed the tally of deactivated robots would rise steadily until by docking there was hardly a functioning unit on the mine.
On one of her early tours as a captain they had actually run out of the iridescent red discs used to mark the function-terminated robots. It became a sort of standing joke in the Company that Toos was not robophobic - it was simply that she liked the look of those corpse markers, especially on robots.
Of course, if Toos had been morbidly terrified of the highly polished, highly stylised, highly necessary androids, a medical discharge would have been inevitable and the Company would have lost one of its most profitable storm mine captains. There would have been questions