Doctor Who_ Last Man Running - Chris Boucher [25]
‘What did you have against him especially?’ Sozerdor asked.
‘He was routinely over-privileged, ambitious, greedy and ruthless, but apart from that not a thing,’ Fermindor said.
‘The young man is dead.’
‘Might change how you see him, it doesn’t change how he was.’
‘I liked him,’ Sozerdor said. ‘He had a lot of charm.’
‘He was good-looking too.’ Fermindor’s tone was still flat and expressionless.
‘Always helps,’ agreed Belay. ‘Charm, confidence and good looks will take you a long way in this job.’
Fermindor threw his empty ration pack into the fire. ‘I’ll settle for a good, charmless, ugly professional who knows what needs to be done and gets on with it.’
‘Like you, Fe, is that what you mean?’ Sozerdor asked.
Fermindor smiled. ‘At least I can shoot straight, So.’
‘I was unsighted.’
‘Had your eyes closed more like.’
‘You’d all better try to get some sleep,’ Kley said tiredly. ‘I’ll take the first watch, then you Fermindor, then Belay, then Sozerdor. One-tenth rotation each.’
They piled more wood on the fire, and the other three unrolled sleep bags and stretched out on their self-inflating relaxers. Kley, meanwhile, moved to the edge of the darkness and huddled down to listen, peering towards the crash site. She wasn’t sure why she expected any attack to come from that direction. Perhaps it was the corpses. That amount of dead flesh must attract scavengers eventually.
She strained to hear, though to hear what she wasn’t sure.
Chewing and crunching, perhaps, or the vomiting of digestive acid and the slurping up of the dissolving flesh? Before long, the stealthy sounds came shuffling through the dark and there were shadows moving wherever she looked. It took a conscious effort to keep her imagination from hearing and seeing all that she expected to hear and see. At least by the time it came to Sozerdor’s turn on watch it would be getting light again. She couldn’t trust his nerve to hold. In fact she wouldn’t even have trusted a firster if they were coming up to full contract completion and a no-penalty discharge on twenty-five work bonuses. It was every career Investigator’s ambition to retire with that sort of benefit package. So who was it who thought she could rely on someone like him for a mission such as this?
The Doctor offered his broadest and most beguiling grin to the woman Leela had introduced as Ri-rinandor. He thought that might in fact be two names, one personal, and the other perhaps patronymic or maybe tribal, given the similarity with the man’s name and the physical characteristics the two of them seemed to share. Of all the culturally determined sensitivities names were among the most dangerous, he had found, with endless possibilities for misunderstanding and insult. He would have to wait until he heard how Ri-rinandor and Pe-pertanor addressed each other before he risked using a name, so in the meantime general charm was the best he could do.
The woman was clearly already suspicious of him and was not inclined to give away any useful information. The fact that she was suspicious was information of a sort, of course.
‘Don’t you find it fascinating,’ he said, smiling widely into the firelight. ‘that even the refusal to say anything must say something. If communication is possible then we may tell each other lies, but we can’t tell each other nothing.’
‘You sound like an Investigator,’ Rinandor said, sounding very suspicious now.
‘You’re doing it again, Ri,’ Pertanor muttered.
‘Shut up, Pe, this is important,