Doctor Who_ Just War - Lance Parkin [101]
‘Where is she now?’
The Doctor consulted his watch. ‘Benny is in Canterbury.
We got split up, but she sent me a note to say she was safe.
She’s at the house in Allen Road.’
‘So how did the British sabotage Hugin?’
‘What?’ The Doctor scowled. Something on the ground below had just caught his attention, and he was clearly annoyed to be distracted. ‘The British don’t know anything about Hartung’s little project — that’s one of the reasons I’m here. They couldn’t even see it, let alone sabotage it.’
‘Well, Hugin didn’t blow itself up.’
The Doctor went very pale indeed, and scrabbled for his briefcase.
‘What do I do?’ said Chris, trying to remain calm. There were safer places to be than in an untested jet aircraft with a history of mysteriously exploding.
The Doctor was running his finger along a diagram of the fuel system. ‘I don’t know, it might be nothing. Oh no. Oh my giddy aunt. Oh, great jumping gobstoppers.’
That didn’t sound promising.
‘There’s a design fault in the reserve fuel tank — in an effort to reduce hot emissions, a lot of the heat from the engine is dumped into the fuel. That can be done perfectly safely, as long as you can regulate the temperature of the fuel. Here, though, the temperature keeps building up, and as the tank empties, it reaches flashpoint.’
‘So the plane we’ve stolen, and are now flying over the outskirts of London, is essentially an undetectable, very large, very fast giant bomb and there’s nothing we can do about it?’
The Doctor was banging the palm of his hand against his forehead, as if he might dislodge the solution to their predicament. Finally, he looked up. ‘Essentially, yes.’
Chris regarded himself as a polite person, so the volume and scatalogical precision of the expletive he shrieked out came as quite a surprise to him.
Even the Doctor blushed, and Chris apologized.
‘I think I may have miscalculated,’ said the Doctor, blinking.
The crosshairs appeared right between the cat’s eyes, the gunsight framed his fluffy little face. Oblivious, he padded across the control room towards his basket, completely unaware that he was being tracked across the room by a trained killer.
Roz stopped pointing the stungun at Wolsey and checked the powerpack. Fully charged: enough for about a dozen shots at maximum intensity. She tucked the gun into her uniform jacket. Not even she could miss with a weapon that fired in a fortyfive-degree arc. The lightweight pistol was meant for riot control; it could bring down a small crowd of gravball hooligans with a single shot. ‘Stungun’, of course, was something of a euphemism — the citizens of Spaceport Overcity Five had always been wary of arming their police, and much preferred them to carry ‘stunguns’ than ‘neural paralysis inducers’. This weapon was keyed to her thumbprint, which meant that it had a rather awkward firing position. More awkward for anyone else who tried to use it.
Forrester watched Benny tapping experimentally at the console.
‘Are you sure that you can fly this thing?’ Roz asked nervously. Every time Benny hit a button there was a disconcerting electronic squeak or buzz. They were probably already on the other side of the galaxy. Benny was dressed up now as Ingmar Knopf, or whoever. She was again wearing her sunglasses to disguise the bruising around her eyes, and looked very elegant for someone who ought to be in intensive care.
‘To be honest, no. If I work out how to fly it, that’ll be a bonus. I do know that the Doctor is linked to the TARDIS, somehow. I’m trying to see if the ship can home in on him. If we can’t get to him, at least we’ll know where he is.’
It was a good plan, in theory at least.
‘Could we find Chris the same way?’ Roz asked tentatively, not wanting to get her hopes up.
‘I’ve been thinking about that. It might be possible to search northern France for someone with beppled genetic material. Damn —