Doctor Who_ Corpse Marker - Chris Boucher [98]
‘I said shut up.’
‘I have ID,’ Tani offered.
‘Reach for it or move in any way and I’ll burn you down where you stand.’
‘We do not have time to waste with this fool,’ Leela said, drawing her knife and moving towards the platoon leader. ‘You talk like a fighter. Do you fight like one?’ She dropped into a half-crouch, the knife held low and flat in front of her.
The platoon leader looked less certain than he had. He reached into his tunic for his panic alert.
The Doctor stepped in between them. ‘Put the knife away, Leela,’ he said quietly. ‘We want them on our side.’
Leela sheathed the blade and the platoon leader visibly relaxed.
The Doctor looked towards a pair of scanners mounted above the walkway. ‘There’s a problem with the robots here,’ he said loudly, hoping the security relay was linked to someone who would know what he meant. ‘Tell whoever is working on it that I know what’s wrong and that I can help.’
‘You can trust me to do that.’ The platoon leader had recovered his composure. ‘I carry messages for weirdos all the time. It’s what I live for.’
Poul said, ‘Doctor, they’re security scanners. They’re not even monitored on site.’
‘I told you to shut up,’ the platoon leader said.
Two squads of stopDums arrived at the trot.
‘What took you so long?’ the platoon leader demanded.
‘Round this scum up,’ he ordered his men as the robots waited in a loose circle, ‘and let’s get them disarmed and locked down.
Their attitude to authority needs work.’ He glared at Leela.
‘Especially hers.’
‘When this is over I am going to pay to have your legs broken,’ Toos said. ‘Regularly.’
‘And hers,’ he said.
Padil said, ‘If you touch Taren Capel, humanity be in him, you will pay.’
When she spoke the Doctor was suddenly reminded of the robot’s reaction to the name. This wasn’t a search for a rational being, he remembered. Perhaps the name itself would produce a reaction. If the man was here somewhere perhaps he could flush him out. Feeling slightly absurd, he said, ‘I am Taren Capel.’
Then he said it louder. ‘I am Taren Capel.’ Then he shouted it. ‘I am Taren Capel.’
There was no reaction except from the platoon leader who shook his head in mock amazement and said, ‘Why me? Am I wearing a sign: loonies line up?’
The security men were checking them for other weapons apart from the knife, which Leela grudgingly surrendered at the Doctor’s insistence, when the Supervoc approached and moving through the ring of Dums, said, ‘Where is Taren Capel?’
‘Here,’ the Doctor said. ‘I am Taren Capel.’
The robot thrust its way past the security men, shoving everyone aside until it reached him. It dragged him roughly to one side as the stopDums marched forward in formation, tightening their cordon and trapping everyone else. The Doctor saw the Supervoc raise its fist and then everything went black.
The Doctor woke up lying on a workbench in a laboratory, or what had been a laboratory at some time but was now a charnel house. He thought he must be dreaming still, stuck in the garish horror of a particularly vivid nightmare. Lying about among the assemblies of technical equipment were rotting body parts. On work surfaces and walls there were dark patches and splatters of what looked like blood. On another bench he could see there was a partially dismembered corpse inserted into which were metal sections like the frame of a robot. The sickly sweet, sour smell of putrefying flesh was not entirely neutralised by the air filtration system that he could hear murmuring and whispering in the background. It was this smell which finally convinced him that he was not trapped by some horrified imagining, but was caught up in something real which might be worse.
He sat up slowly. He felt giddy and slightly nauseous but that was reasonable in the circumstances, he thought. Now he could see everything it was even more horrifying than he had feared.
At one end of the long, brightly lit room there were corpses stacked up and he thought he could see that this pile continued into an anteroom. There were two more benches with