• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 973 0

best ones for the work had disappeared. It took Tel and Ging only a short time to recognise that someone had already put together the robotics tech team they wanted to assemble. They had used the achievement records from the Company database and found the top six robotics engineers were flagged up as unavailable: reason classified which usually meant the Sewerpits. They referred back to Uvanov. Was it possible that some moron had simply pit-dumped the six best brains around? Uvanov knew that it was entirely possible but he did not care to admit it and instead he used his rank and checked. It was not the Sewerpits and it was not an officially classified Company project. The six men and women had simply vanished. Since time was short and Cyborg-class robots were reportedly not returning from test assignments, he told his project leaders to settle for the next six on the listings and get on with it. It was not important and it was not what they were looking for so no one noticed that one of the missing engineers bore a passing resemblance to Tel.

Uvanov wasted no time in setting a confidential security team to finding out what had happened to the missing robotics engineers. He appointed Stenton Rull to head it. He made sure the disgraced Operations Supervisor was aware that he owed his reinstatement to the job, and his reprieve from the Sewerpits, entirely to Firstmaster Uvanov’s personal intervention. The Firstmaster had insisted on putting right an injustice that had only recently been brought to his attention. Fatso Rull wasn’t bright but he was an experienced investigator and now, Uvanov calculated, he would be a loyal and highly motivated one.

Uvanov had theories but someone somewhere knew for certain where those six people were. Rull was the man to find them. And what’s more he would be Uvanov’s man.

Uvanov set his man to checking on Cailio Techlan as a priority.

The survivors fled upwards to the Roof over the World. It was instinctive. Up there it was lighter and there was a direct route across the Sewerpits away from the groups of robots, more and more of them all the time, which were sweeping through the lower alleys, rampaging through the gloom, tirelessly hunting down and slaughtering. The killer robots were tearing holes in walls and smashing to bloody and broken pieces whatever they found still moving inside the buildings. They were working their way from one end of the ’pits to the other leaving nothing alive just as SASV1, the Serial Access Supervoc prototype now calling itself Taren Capel, had modified and sent them out to do.

The Doctor had given up trying to convince the fleeing people that their best chance of survival was simply to go to ground level and cross the nearest boundary, leaving the robots trapped. They didn’t have time to listen. They wouldn’t have believed him if they had. A lot of them still didn’t believe that it was robots that were attacking them. Not even the Tarenist group could come to grips with it. They wouldn’t listen to him either and most of them had charged off to fight what they insisted must be Company security agents.

‘They’ve got this whole thing the wrong way round,’ the Doctor said, angrily frustrated. ‘In instead of out, up instead of down. The triumph of instinct over rationality.’

Leela was in the side room rummaging through the remains of the Tarenists’ arms cache which had been hidden until the earlier fracas and which was now more or less stripped clean.

‘You did your best, Doctor,’ she said.

‘That’s all right then,’ the Doctor said testily.

‘You told me that is all anyone can do,’ Leela said, coming out of the room holding several small square packages. ‘You cannot force people to let you help them.’ She proffered one of the packages. ‘What is this, do you think?’

The Doctor examined it. He turned it over and examined the back. ‘As near as I can tell it’s a Z9a explosive pack,’ he said.

‘How can you tell that?’ Leela asked, looking impressed.

‘It says so on the back here.’

Leela frowned. ‘Does it say how to make it work?’

‘No.’ The Doctor turned it over