Doctor Who_ Corpse Marker - Chris Boucher [64]
‘It was an absolute massacre, a real mess apparently.’ Pur Dreck reported anxiously.
‘There was always that possibility,’ Carnell said. ‘Unfortunate and unnecessary but such things can happen.’ He sighed.
‘Obviously.’ It was what the man wanted to hear, though it wasn’t strictly true. There was more than a possibility that all the witnesses would be killed. Unfortunate and unnecessary? Quite the contrary: it could be seen as fortunate and necessary. ‘But it makes no difference to anything,’ he went on.
‘He wasn’t there.’ Dreck said, ‘Poul wasn’t there.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Carnell murmured. ‘It’s not essential that he’s actually caught in the act.’
‘He wasn’t anywhere. They can’t find him.’
‘He’ll be trying to get back home on foot,’ Carnell explained with as much patience as he could muster. ‘He shouldn’t be too difficult to spot. He’ll be the one talking to himself and screaming from time to time. If Rull can’t work that out unaided I suggest you give him a clue at some point.’ He broke the connection without bothering with any of the ritual politeness and returned to devising long-game strategies.
Carnell needed absolute confidence in his powers as a psycho-strategist. It was his strength. But like most strengths it was also a weakness. He was confident that he had devised a brilliant strategy. He knew he had. He was confident that nothing could prevent his brilliant strategy from succeeding. He knew nothing could. Since the true beauty of a brilliant strategy was that it required no further attention, he did not pay it any.
To do so would be to doubt himself. The design was unravelling faster and faster and the inevitable had disappeared into the changing mass of unfolding probabilities.
Chapter Nine
They had been in the air for several minutes before either of them spoke. ‘Was it ore raiders?’ Con asked. ‘Do you think it was ore raiders?’
‘No,’ the Doctor said, staring down at the ground flashing by below, ‘I don’t think it was ore raiders.’
‘There wasn’t anybody left alive, was there? Why kill every last person?’
The Doctor sighed. ‘I’m not sure,’ he said. That much was true. What he was sure of was that if the young pilot had not recognised for himself that it was robots who killed everyone then he was unlikely to accept the idea at this point. Even from a top undercover agent like the Doctor.
‘That security man was too useless to kill,’ Con was saying. ‘I mean, look how easily I broke his nose.’
They had found the security officer, his nose set and taped, lying by the flier with his neck broken. His death seemed to have affected Con more than all the others had. Perhaps it was because they had met, the Doctor thought. Whatever the circumstances of their acquaintance the security officer was not just another stranger made anonymous by death. While Con had powered up the flier the Doctor had made a cursory examination of the body. As far as he could see, the man had been killed with the same ferocious expertise as all the others. The only obvious difference was that he had no corpse marker on him. The Doctor had assumed the discs were meant to indicate something other than an unpleasantly bizarre sense of humour, and now he found himself wondering whether there was any significance in the absence of one. He felt around in his pocket for the corpse marker he had taken from a body in the tower. He was examining it when he noticed Con was winding up the power on the flier and increasing the altitude.
He peered down at the ground as it dropped away. ‘We seem to be going higher than before?’ he asked as casually as he could,