Doctor Who_ Corpse Marker - Chris Boucher [49]
Leela stared into the darkness and listened. The stench from the corpses at the bottom of the steps made it unlikely that she would be able to smell the approach of the other three and standing in the light made the darkness beyond more intense so she concentrated all her effort into hearing them. They must see something was wrong, she decided immediately, because they had stopped the eager chase to join the kill and were hesitating, moving fretfully somewhere out near the bend in the alleyway.
She heard them pause there for a few moments more and then she heard them leave, heading back the way they had come.
Leela sheathed her knife and said, ‘They have gone.’
‘Capel, humanity be in him, really did send you to us, didn’t he?’ Padil said. ‘No matter what you say, I know he did.’
Leela was suddenly very tired. This was an ugly place and this was a woman with no understanding of anything important.
Leela wanted to go back to the TARDIS. She wanted to talk to the Doctor. She wanted to leave.
‘Do you want to go on?’ Padil asked.
‘No,’ Leela said, turning and climbing up the steps towards the next level, ‘but a warrior chooses where there is no choice.’
‘Praise for the words of Capel, humanity be in him,’ Padil intoned softly as Leela climbed past her.
Leela had in fact been quoting what she thought of as one of the sillier sayings she had been made to learn during her training as a warrior. It was the sort of important sounding emptiness that the shaman often used. Now it seemed they might become the words of Taren Capel if the woman remembered them and used them. That would be very silly. ‘Where is the boundary?’
Leela asked.
Padil followed Leela up the steps. ‘You must tell me,’ she said, a note of reverence creeping into her voice.
Leela said with weary patience, ‘Sarl spoke of going to the boundary to call a medVoc?’
‘ That boundary.’ Padil said realising.
‘Where is it?’ Leela repeated.
‘It’s all round the Sewerpits, of course.’
This was something else that she was probably supposed to know because it was obvious but Leela no longer cared. ‘Will you show me it?’
‘It’s an invisible line,’ Padil chuckled uncertainly. ‘No part of it is visible.’
‘Then why is it a boundary?’ Leela asked.
‘Because no robot,’ she was beginning to sound slightly impatient as though she thought Leela might be teasing her, ‘will cross it into the Sewerpits.’
‘Why not?’ Leela asked.
‘I have no idea,’ Padil said.
‘You fight against the robots but you have no idea why they will not cross an invisible line?’
Keeping up with Leela on the long flight of steps was making Padil breathless. ‘The important thing,’ she gasped, ‘is that they won’t.’
‘No,’ Leela said remembering the Doctor’s lectures. ‘The important thing is to know why. It is always important to know why.’ She heard Padil muttering and knew she was praising her shaman for the words.
Chapter Seven
An unlooked-for side effect of the advance in technology was that SASV1 seemed to have the capacity to act as a directed control and modification device for other robots. This in itself was a paradigm shift, the tech team decided excitedly. The machine appeared to be able to transfer its own operational level to the robots around it. Remarkably, it could do this at a distance though the team had yet to test and define the limits of the range and power. It would turn out that the effect was particularly marked with the new and still secret Cyborg-class robots but, by the time the team realised this, it would already be too late. The immediate response was observed in the laboratory Supervocs.
Initially it was not consistent or reliable but the effect was definitely there.
The pattern of power surges displayed during this startling process turned out to be an almost exact but greatly amplified duplication of what had previously been ignored as insignificant measurement inaccuracies. The team believed this was because it was a dormant capacity which existed from the moment SASV1
was activated. Still no one considered the possibility of dreaming.
Its third crisis came