Doctor Who_ Corpse Marker - Chris Boucher [9]
‘This cannot be happening!’ Kiy Uvanov bellowed at the top of his lungs. ‘This cannot be happening now, and if it is, if it is, I will have that site security chief fired - no, no I won’t, I will have his guts torn out first and then I will have what’s left of him fired! And I will see to it that his children will never work, and his children’s children will never work and his children’s children’s children will never work. His family line will not rise out of the Sewerpits for as long as his name can be vaguely remembered.’ He glared at his executive assistant. ‘What is his name, by the way?’
Cailio Techlan shrugged her narrow shoulders and shook her shaved head. ‘I’ll check,’ she said in that flat disinterested monotone he found so very irritating. ‘In the meantime you should calm down, Kiy. You’ll have a stroke.’
Despite the urgency of the crisis Uvanov found himself watching the young woman as she walked to the door, her outfit and her movements, as dictated by the current fashion, a ridiculous parody of a Voc robot. What was it about these aristo children that made them so unconcerned about everything important? How was it that people who were so stupid and basically so pointless were still first in line for the best of everything? Nothing ever changed. You couldn’t beat them, you couldn’t join them. The twenty founding families were the past, the present and the future. That was it. As far as they were concerned. As far as most people were concerned. That was all there was. That was all. And the joke - the really good joke, he thought, because you couldn’t be sure who it was being played on - was that it never even crossed their minds that what can’t be changed might have to be destroyed.
He switched his attention back to the small bank of screens on his workdesk. The output from the security scanners at the central service facility was patchy. Whoever the saboteurs were, they obviously knew the positions of the key surveillance cameras. But then they would, wouldn’t they? This wasn’t some random effort by loonies from the ARF. This was an organised attack. This was aimed directly at the Project. And that meant it was aimed directly at him. He flicked through the available visual feeds looking for images, no matter how indirect or distorted, which might give him some grasp of how bad things were. They had breached the outer security zone, it seemed. Well, obviously they had otherwise they wouldn’t be there, he thought, irritated with himself. And there was fighting. He was getting glimpses of sporadic fighting but they were tantalisingly indistinct glimpses.
People running. Squads of stopDums waiting for instructions.
Security operatives using stun-kills. Where had they got those from? They weren’t Company issue. It was chaos over there.
There was nothing else for it - he’d have to go in person. He punched through the feeds just once more, hoping that switching might kick something back into life. Had they reached the Hatchling Dome? The main priority was to protect that first production run. That first ultra-secret production run. Ultra-secret, he thought bitterly, that seems likely. There was too much riding on it for all this to be coincidental.
Suddenly he got a picture up of the outside of the HD. It looked like any other maintenance block. Its real designation was known only to him, the Production Director who had as much to lose as he did, and a handful of trusted technicians. Members of the Company Board knew what, but not when, not where and not how. Somebody had to have tipped these people off.
Somebody was plotting against him.
That was when he saw her. It was the weird girl from Storm Mine Four. It couldn’t be. She didn’t look any different. She wasn’t any older. She hadn’t changed her