Doctor Who_ Corpse Marker - Chris Boucher [61]
Fatso lived alone. His career in Security made that no hardship and he felt it gave him the opportunity to focus.
Dressing quickly while grabbing a snack and calling up a Company flier to get him to the scene, there was no time for him to think much about why they called him in to deal with the situation. They needed an experienced OpSuper and he was familiar with the man. Hell, he was more than familiar with the man and he was ready to deal with him.
He slotted the short baton stun-kill into his equipment belt.
He never had liked the lazy, sarcastic weirdo. If ever anybody was primed for a weird-out it was Poul. He had got some seriously heavyweight connections. That would take watching.
Why he’d been hanging about the docking bays was a question too. Feeling like he did about robots it had to be telling. Fatso hadn’t found anything yet but he was warming to the notion that Poul really was linked to the terrorists. Whatever it was that had happened, holing up in Dockmaster Control made sense though, feeling like he did about robots. One thing was for sure, assuming it wasn’t necessary to kill him immediately Fatso would get the information out of him, everything he knew and some things he didn’t know he knew. If it was necessary to kill him then it wouldn’t matter anyway.
Central confirmed the flier was on its way. Fatso crammed the rest of the food into his mouth and left his apartment at the trot.
It was lighter and Toos could see more of what was happening. None of it was promising. As they got closer to the Sewerpits proper the streets were becoming narrower, the buildings more dilapidated and the surface of the roads more rutted and potholed. The Voc was pulling flat out but behind the jolting buggy she could see the tirelessly running killer robot was slowly but steadily gaining ground on them.
‘No one’s really sure,’ Tani said when she glanced back at it again, ‘whether the boundary’s natural or artificial but it scrambles their control systems or something.’
Toos looked ahead, trying to ignore the close proximity of the Voc and be positive. ‘Where is it?’
‘It varies,’ Tani said vaguely.
So much for being positive. ‘From day to day?’ she asked witheringly. ‘What?’
‘From place to place, Captain,’ Tani said, smiling his wide, sour smile. ‘It’s not a straight line, that’s all.’
Toos was still scathing. ‘So we have to guess when this thing’s going to stop chasing us, is that it?’
Tani nodded at the Voc. ‘It’ll be obvious when we reach the boundary, don’t you think?’
Toos was annoyed with herself for being stupid and more importantly for looking stupid. ‘You think it’s a good idea to scramble the control systems on that?’ she demanded. The buggy was bouncing over a series of particularly deep cracks in the road and the Voc was struggling to keep it balanced and upright.
‘We’re going to lose the wheels at any moment as it is.’
Behind them the killer robot had no such problems with the uneven surface and gained more ground.
‘It’s gaining on us,’ Toos said.
‘Faster,’ Tani instructed the Voc.
‘This is the maximum of which I am capable,’ the Voc said loudly but without emotion and with almost no inflection. Toos realised that avoiding them for so long she had forgotten how oddly like founding family aristocrats the things actually sounded.
‘Try to go faster!’ Tani shouted.
‘I cannot go faster,’ the Voc shouted back in its polite monotone.
Toos looked behind at the killer robot and thought how strange it was that the fact of it was so much less frightening than the possibility of the fact of it.
‘It looks a lot like a man, doesn’t it?’ Tani said through teeth gritted against the jarring and juddering of the buggy.
It struck Toos that Tani didn’t seem very shocked by the idea that there was a killer robot tracking them. ‘Is that why you’re not scared of it?’
‘Who said I wasn’t scared of it?