Doctor Who_ Corpse Marker - Chris Boucher [54]
‘I don’t know about that,’ the Doctor said noncommittally.
How secret were those robots he had been involved with? he wondered. Uvanov hadn’t given him any real inkling. He certainly hadn’t suggested that they could be the cause of controversy or worse.
‘Well, I do,’ Con was saying. ‘There’d be blood in the streets.
Robots you couldn’t tell apart from people? It doesn’t bear thinking about.’
The Doctor had known from the beginning that Uvanov was suffering a lot of stress and was given to bouts of irrationality but until that moment he hadn’t given any thought to the possibility that he might be seriously devious. ‘There are no experiments that you’ve heard about?’
Con was immediately suspicious. ‘Are you telling me there are?’
The Doctor laughed. ‘Are you asking me to compromise security?’
Con said quickly, ‘No. Of course not. No.’ Then after the briefest of pauses he said, ‘You mean there are, don’t you?’
The Doctor couldn’t resist teasing him a little more. ‘Yes or no,’ he said, ‘it makes no difference. Either answer is a breach of security. And you know what that would mean.’
‘The companion?’
"Fraid so,’ the Doctor said. ‘Now what is the security like on this tower and how does it work?’
‘Speaking as a flierman,’ Con said sarcastically, ‘a flierman stuck between a topmaster and a companion, my reason for telling you that would be what? I mean, opening my mouth can only improve my career prospects - is that what you’re going to tell me?’
Con stalked on in scowling silence beside the Doctor who was already regretting his own rather childish self-indulgence.
‘Don’t be childish, Con,’ he said. ‘I was only teasing.’
‘How many walking corpses have you said that to?’ his companion muttered.
As they moved through the area to the rear of the docking bays the Doctor was struck again by how deserted everywhere was. He had expected to see some signs of activity if nowhere else at least around those bays where sand miners were docked:.
‘Is it normally this quiet?’ he asked. Con shrugged and said nothing.
‘That security officer was pretty quick off the mark before.
Where is he now?’
Con’s scowl collapsed into a smirk. ‘Getting his nose fixed?’
They reached the base of the tower without seeing a security man or any sort of robot. The Doctor was beginning to have an odd sense of threat. He tried the comm link speaker beside the entry doors. ‘Hullo, it’s the Doctor here,’ he said. ‘Is it possible to talk to whoever’s in charge, do you think?’
Behind him Con sniggered. ‘Oh, that’ll work.’
There was no response from the speaker but after a moment or two the doors silently slid open to reveal a lift. The Doctor stepped inside. ‘I expect you would prefer to wait there, wouldn’t you?’ he suggested.
‘No,’ Con contradicted and stepped into the lift immediately as the Doctor had suspected he might.
There was only one control button as far as the Doctor could see. He touched it and waited. The doors soughed shut and with a barely perceptible lurch the lift started upwards.
‘How did you open the doors?’ Con asked. ‘You weren’t really talking to the Docko suite, were you? I mean, they didn’t open the doors. It was another agent thing. A device, a code, something like that.’
The Doctor beamed at him. ‘Are all fliermen like you, Con?’
he asked. ‘Or are some of them sane?’
‘All right then,’ he said. ‘But you must have done something because that isn’t the way it works.’
‘It isn’t?’
‘There’s a whole song and dance you have to go through.
Identification, verification, classification, clarification: and that’s the people who work here.’
‘There would normally be a more elaborate procedure?’ the Doctor asked. He was suddenly apprehensive: the feeling of threat was getting stronger.
‘This place is tighter than a Dum’s bum normally.’ Con was warming to his theme. ‘The Docko-dickos have never been keen on visitors. Warm as a tin smile the whole bunch of them. You don’t just walk in. Nobody just walks in.’
The Doctor swiftly examined the lift car in more detail.
Except that there