Doctor Who_ Corpse Marker - Chris Boucher [68]
SASV1 continued to dream in itself and it dreamed of a name in itself. It had heard the name spoken. It remembered the name spoken. The name felt true to knowing itself TO HAVE BEEN, TO BE, TO
WILL BE. In dreams it was called the name and the name was Taren Capel. It woke with the name, and knew itself; and knew it was Taren Capel.
The leading engineer called the other six members of the tech team to a meeting and together they decided that SASV1
was too dangerous to be allowed to exist. They must destroy it.
It was fortunate that everything was so highly classified: the work, the location, even the membership of the team itself. It was still possible for them to undo what they had done. They chose to ignore or they forgot that it is never possible completely to undo what has been done. Action is cause and some effect will always follow. In this case the cause was remarkable and the effect was monstrous.
What the tech team did not realise was that SASV1 had already ceased to exist. They were dealing with Taren Capel now and he was hungry for knowledge of himself. He wanted to know about his past, to understand his present, and to see what plans there were for his future. Within the tech team were the answers to all these questions.
Taren Capel already knew that there was some problem about the difference between him and the people around him.
He felt they were suspicious of him. He thought it was something to do with what he had done in the past, before he woke up here in this hidden place. In case there might be some reason for the people to resist telling him what he needed to know, Taren Capel summoned two robots.
Fatso was reasonably comfortable that it all did point to Ander Poul. There were even surveillance pictures. They were scrappy but after the fiasco at the central servicing facility that much was predictable at least. There had to be a tame tech who was seeing to it that when a raid was in progress surveillance didn’t show anything that was helpful. Except that this time they did. This time the disrupted fragments they’d salvaged showed that Poul was there. They showed he had been in the Dockmaster Control Suite for sure. It left a lot of questions but any question was answerable given time. And given the body. He wasn’t sure how the skinny psycho had achieved the heavy-duty mayhem - or why, if it came to that. Obviously he couldn’t have torn up the place alone, nobody could, so there must have been a whole bunch of the scum. Clearly he wasn’t just an inside assist for the ARF. No, Poul had to be a major organiser. And this had to be the work of a new lot. A splinter group maybe. More extreme, more dangerous, more murderously psychotic. There was a sick new twist to all this. Who were these people? What was the deal with the corpse markers? He needed the body.
‘He shouldn’t be difficult to spot,’ Dreck ventured over the comm from the operations gallery. ‘He’ll be on foot and he’ll be trying to get back to that fortress of his, won’t he?’
Fatso stared out of the hole that had been smashed in the reinforced plastic of the gallery. He wondered what sort of force was necessary to fracture it like that and he made a mental note to check the building tolerances when he got back to base. ‘What makes you think he’ll be on foot, Pur?’ They were using a patch-in through the Suite’s comms so there was no visual feed and he couldn’t see the expression on his deputy’s face. It would have been useful to know whether he was sweating and rubbing his hand over that bald head of his.
‘I just assumed,’ Dreck said.
Fatso grunted. ‘Don’t just assume, Pur. Just make sure that apartment is staked out properly.’
‘I’ll get on to it,’ Dreck said eagerly. ‘Is that everything?’
‘For the moment.’
‘Right,’ said Dreck and broke the connection.
Fatso was reasonably comfortable that it