Doctor Who_ Corpse Marker - Chris Boucher [90]
The delegation was no surprise at all - Carnell had been expecting it for some time. What had come as a shock was recognising that everything had gone so wrong that it was too late to do anything about it. How could he have missed at least two pivotal options and failed to neutralise their effects? Was he a burnout? He was mortified - well, he was embarrassed at least.
He didn’t show it, naturally. He didn’t show anything. Yet. It seemed beneath him to make excuses, pointless indeed, but all the same he wanted to know which of these people had been stupid enough to keep at least two major variables from him.
‘Where are all these killer robots originating?’ he asked quietly.
‘Who is sending them out?’
‘We agreed to their use,’ Landerchild blustered, ‘at your suggestion.’
‘Two robots is what we agreed. Two carefully controlled robot killers. Their actions were circumscribed, their targets specified. It was not part of the strategy to have who knows how many of the things rampaging across the countryside killing as they go.’
Roatson said, ‘These are rather more than things, I’m afraid.’
The young aristocrat looked a lot less confident than he had at that first meeting, Carnell noted. ‘They’ve evolved or something.’
‘Not by themselves,’ Carnell remarked. ‘Evolution is an unfailingly logical response to system changes. It is not magic.
The robots are being tampered with and that’s not the same thing. I repeat, who is sending them out?’
‘You tell us,’ Bibo Mechman snapped. She was a small bald woman whose shaved head had been fashionable until robochic suddenly lost its appeal. ‘I thought the reason we paid you so handsomely was because you were able to anticipate every eventuality.’
‘You’re thinking of fortune-tellers,’ Carnell said coolly. ‘I’m a psycho-strategist. I work with what I’m given and with what I’m not given. If what I’m not given is more relevant than what I’m given, I fail.’
‘You’re a charlatan.’ Landerchild sounded resigned as though he was confessing to some guilty secret of his own. Carnell could see that in a way that was exactly what was happening. He nodded. ‘You’re bound to think that.’
‘Ah, so that’s one eventuality you could anticipate then,’
Bibo sneered. ‘The psycho-strategist at work. Worth every penny in my book.’
Carnell looked round the select group of aristocrats and wealthy would-be rulers who were gathered in the small meeting room of his office apartment. The fact that they had come to him rather than summoning him to them had obvious significance and served to confirm the two things he could see quite clearly. None of them knew who was sending out the robots. All of them knew that he himself was to die, by the hand of young Roatson probably, at the behest of Layly Landerchild almost certainly. He sighed inwardly. It was such a minor world.
Such a small, unambitious, unimaginative population. What was he doing here? It had been a waste of his talents from the beginning of course. But then how reliable were his talents now?
How had he got it so wrong?
‘I think I can prove to you that I’m not a charlatan,’ he said, looking directly at Landerchild and keeping just enough humility in his voice and demeanour to appeal to the man’s arrogance.
‘First, I’m going to give you back the money you paid me.’ This he directed at Mechman - the money was clearly important to her. ‘A gesture of good faith.’ Then he smiled at Roatson. ‘I’ll come up with a new strategy,’ innocent friendliness for the assassin, ‘and all this can finally be put right.’ He turned towards the door and then he turned back again. ‘If you can bear with me for a moment I’ll get you the money.’
‘This is not about money,’ Landerchild said. ‘The money means nothing.’
‘Humour me, Firstmaster Landerchild. I would feel better about things. I’ll just be a moment.’ He went to the door quite slowly and smiled over his shoulder at them before he went out.
It