Doctor Who_ Corpse Marker - Chris Boucher [67]
‘What have you lost?’ Con asked, fighting the controls in another patch of turbulence and tilting the flier’s attitude more steeply upwards.
‘I dropped the disc,’ the Doctor said absently. ‘In all the excitement.’
The flier rattled and juddered upwards and under the seat the corpse marker was dislodged and skittered down the sloping floor to land squarely in front of Poul.
This time the scream and the leap were simultaneous. This time he dived past the Doctor and snatched at the handle of the door. This time he kicked Con in the face, knocking him unconscious.
As the flier went into a spiralling dive Poul wrestled the door open and fell out. At the last moment the Doctor grabbed his legs and clung on to him. Con was slumped over the controls and the flier was beginning to spin as well as spiral. The Doctor was getting distinctly giddy. Hanging upside-down from the plunging flier and screaming at the top of his lungs, Poul was now trying to kick himself free. The Doctor braced his feet on the framework of the door and strained to pull him into the flier.
It was proving impossible to do but then to his brief relief the rush of air across Poufs face and his constant desperate screaming robbed him of breath and he fainted. The Doctor heaved the limp body inside and slammed the sliding door closed.
The g-forces were making it increasingly difficult to move in the falling flier. The Doctor caught little more than glimpses in the whirling confusion but he could see the ground rushing upwards and he knew he was running out of time. He tried to reach the controls or at least to reach Con and lift him off the controls. What he was going to do once he’d managed that he had no real idea. He hadn’t paid enough attention to know how to pilot the machine. He had a rough idea of what you did to keep it in a straight line and an even rougher idea of what was involved in takeoff and landing. But reaching across two unconscious men to bring the stricken flier out of a spinning dive was probably going to be beyond him. He kept trying anyway. ‘Never give up or give in,’ he told himself aloud through gritted teeth.
‘What?’ Con said groggily. ‘What did you say?’ He stirred and started to sit up.
‘We’re crashing, Con,’ the Doctor shouted. ‘Pull us out of the dive!’
Con jerked upright and made an obvious and doomed attempt to understand what was happening. Dazed and uncoordinated, he began to work on the controls automatically.
The Doctor watched in admiration as the young pilot unthinkingly stopped the spin and gradually pulled the flier out of its catastrophic plunge. Perhaps if there had been fractionally more time he might have got away with it. He came close to avoiding the crash altogether. As it was the flier was levelling out and slowing up when it hit. The smash was unlucky but it was survivable.
Con had made strenuous efforts and pushed his flier to the limits to avoid the Sewerpits but in the event he was unlucky there too. The flier went down more or less dead centre.
The distance turned out to be disappointingly limited but the immediate power was impressive. Any of the new Cyborg-class robots that came within the range of the SASV1 was subject to its influence and any number of them could be modified remotely and simultaneously. For the standard Vocs and Supervocs the effective range was more limited and they could be dealt with only in small batches but they could still be bent to the will of SASV1. Fortunately it had no individual will.
Although it was a one-off prototype its knowledge of itself was so fragmented as to be negligible. Its pseudo-awareness was strictly defined as being part of the generality of robots. It was a given that no robot looked completely human, not even the Cyborg class, and no robot had a sense of self like a human had.
The tech team, still working in absolute secrecy and isolation, only now began to contemplate the power that SASV1
represented. SASV1 had no inaccessible fundamental inhibition about killing and it could duplicate this in any