Doctor Who_ Deep Blue - Mark Morris [87]
RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT UNIT
STRICTLY LIMITED ACCESS
AUTHORISED PERSONNEL ONLY
Beside the door was a touch-button panel, with numbers from 0 to 9.
‘Pretty snazzy for the seventies,’ Tegan said, back to her old self for the time being, although she sounded tired.
Mike moved forward and banged on the metal doors with the butt of his gun. ‘Hey!’ he shouted. ‘Hey, is anyone in there?’
There was no reply. Mike continued to thump the door and shout for the next half-minute. Tegan watched him anxiously and scratched at her arms. The Doctor slept on despite the noise.
At last a voice on the other side, sounding no more than the thickness of the doors away, said, ‘Who are you?’
Mike raised his eyebrows at Tegan with an expression not quite of triumph and shouted, ‘My name is Captain Michael Yates. I’m an army officer who has been called in to deal with the current crisis. I’m accompanied by two civilians, one of whom is severely injured and in need of medical attention.’
There was a pause, then the voice said fearfully, ‘How did you know we were here?’
‘We worked it out,’ Mike replied slickly. ‘After seeing the carnage on the first three floors we realised that the only way you could have gone to escape was up. It didn’t need a genius to see that this was the only viable option.’
There was an even longer pause this time, then the voice said, ‘Stand back. I want to see you on the cameras.’
Mike glanced up and saw two cameras affixed to the ceiling above his head. He stepped back so he was looking directly into their lenses and smiled.
‘You don’t look like a soldier,’ the voice said suspiciously.
‘I was employed as an advance guard, to check out the terrain. That’s why I’m in civvies,’ Mike explained.
‘Have you got any proof?’ the voice asked.
Mike reached into the back pocket of his cords and located his UNIT pass, which he held up to the right-hand camera.
‘UNIT? What’s that?’
‘United Nations Intelligence Taskforce. Special peace-keeping force. Affiliated to the British Army. All the information’s there if you want to read it.’
The pause was so long this time that Mike thought his credentials had been rejected. Then the voice was back, and saying reluctantly, ‘All right, you can come in.’
Turlough was not sure how long he had been sitting against the bedroom wall when he heard the sound outside in the corridor. He stiffened, clutching his coathanger to him, drawing his knees up tighter under his chin.
The sound had been like the scuff of movement that someone who was trying to be stealthy might make. Turlough tilted his head a little as if that might enable him to hear better - and almost leaped out of his skin when someone rapped loudly on his door.
He cringed, praying that whoever was out there was banging on doors at random and would move on if he failed to respond. There was silence for a moment, then a voice he recognised said, ‘We know you’re in there, son.’
It was the voice of the big, burly soldier, the Doctor’s friend: Sergeant Benton. Still Turlough said nothing, but looked around panic-stricken, wondering where he could hide, how he could possibly escape.
A second voice replaced the first, this one more clipped, authoritative; the voice of the Brigadier.
‘Be reasonable, lad,’ he said, sounding nothing but reasonable himself. ‘It’s not you we want, it’s the Doctor. We just want you to take us to his TARDIS.’
They must have missed it at the fun-fair, Turlough realised.
If his plight hadn’t been so desperate he would have found that funny. He wondered fleetingly whether he might be able to speak to the Brigadier, reason with him. The man might be infected, but he didn’t sound too far gone - though it might well have been the Xaranti themselves who were allowing the Brigadier to sound reasonable.
Yes, perhaps that was it. Perhaps the present approach was simply a ploy to lull him into a false sense of security. Or even to get him to give himself away, because, after all, they couldn’t know for certain he was in here. They could only be guessing that