Doctor Who_ Corpse Marker - Chris Boucher [43]
‘I’m sure you feel an apology is in order,’ Toos said to the manager as they sat in the office and watched the main room on the surveillance screen. The rolling brawl, which was actually more roll than brawl but which did involve a lot of fixtures and fittings and food being thrown about, was reaching a messy conclusion.
The manager was clearly furious and barely managing to control herself. ‘Don’t you?’ she asked coldly.
Toos sighed. She was sorry the party had gone the way it had. She wasn’t surprised but she was sorry. ‘Money means never having to say you’re sorry,’ Toos said. ‘Who was it who said that?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ the manager snapped. ‘I expect it was someone like you.’
‘I’ll pay or I’ll apologise,’ Toos said. ‘Which would you prefer?’
‘From anyone with breeding I’d expect both.’
Toos smiled. ‘No you wouldn’t,’ she said. ‘You’d only expect an apology from someone like me. Someone without breeding.
Anyone else you’d be fawning over.’ She looked into the scanner so that her identity could be confirmed and the signature on the bond validated and then she countersigned the agreement and committed herself to the restoration of the Robot Lounge and to the maintenance of its profits in the meantime.
‘Why bother to come to a place like this and behave like that?’ the young woman demanded, nodding at the screen. Toos watched Simbion ripping the clothes off a no longer elegant young man and attempting to anoint his genitals with sweet wine. ‘That’s going to sting,’ she commented. ‘Not that my Chief Mover cares. Look at her. She hasn’t had this much fun in over a year.’
‘I don’t imagine he’ll be accepting any more invitations from you,’ the manager remarked frostily.
‘I thought it would never happen,’ Toos said straight faced.
‘But he’s finally justifying his fee.’
‘Not everything can be bought and sold, you know,’ the manager said, examining and verifying the bond, the optional terms of which were very much more generous than was normal.
‘Thank you for this,’ she said grudgingly.
Toos said, ‘I can afford it. And there’s no need to thank me.
I don’t apologise, you don’t say thank you. That’s how I plan to do things from now on.’ She smiled. ‘If you can bring yourself to relax a little, I recommend we continue watching the show.’ She was starting to laugh. ‘Simbion is just warming up, I promise you.’ The manager stared up at the big screen. ‘That woman is appalling,’ she said. ‘An absolute monster.’
‘She does have one saving grace,’ Toos said.
‘What’s that?’
Toos shrugged. ‘I have no idea. But everyone’s got one saving grace, haven’t they?’
‘Would you like a drink?’ the manager asked.
‘I would,’ said Toos. ‘Thank you.’
Outside in the dark the robot waited for its target to emerge from the Robot Lounge. It was almost indistinguishable from a human, standing about average height with brown hair and the plain smock and leggings of a man of taste and moderate wealth.
To someone paying attention, what might have set it apart was its stillness, its unnatural patience. Human patience can be understood because of what it suppresses: boredom and irritation, excitement, the urge to move, to leave, to make something happen. Small signs of all these are discernible in even the most focused and single-minded of the professionally patient like hunters, therapists, games-players of all kinds. The patience of the killer robot was of an altogether different order. The machine simply waited because waiting was required. It had nothing to suppress. It was not bored or excited. It was simply death waiting in the blackness.
The sand miners didn’t seem to have changed any more than the robots had, the Doctor reflected as the flier banked over the floodlit docking bays and he got a good look at the three machines currently being offloaded and serviced. Their size was certainly impressive. The smallest of the three was at least a thousand yards long and perhaps three hundred feet high.
‘The big one’s Storm Mine Seven,’ the pilot said. ‘They say the last tour broke all the records.