Doctor Who_ Last Man Running - Chris Boucher [53]
‘Why are there so few of you?’ Leela asked.
‘We’re chasing one man,’ Kley said. She had eaten some of the concentrate as Leela had suggested, and was already looking better. ‘It’s the sort of job where you send in a small fast group to grab him before he knows you’re there; or you send in an army. There’s no middle ground.’
‘It looks as though an army might have been a better choice,’ Leela said.
‘What’s wrong with your team?’ the Doctor asked.
‘Nothing’s wrong with it.’ Kley glared at him.
‘Two dead, one drunk, no communications, no functioning weapons, no ship. A well-oiled machine is not the metaphor that leaps immediately to mind,’ the Doctor said, hoping to provoke her into openness.
‘Whereas you have no ship, no communications and a functioning knife,’ she said. ‘Or have I missed your point?’
‘The point is we are not chasing anybody,’ Leela said.
‘You shouldn’t be here at all,’ Fermindor commented.
‘Why have you been given such poor weapons and equipment?’ the Doctor asked. ‘I thought OIG was an elite force.’
‘It’s all I could afford,’ Kley said. ‘It took me a long time to get this chance and I needed to score here. Are you satisfied?’
‘I’m not sure I quite understand,’ the Doctor said, at a complete loss.
‘I needed to make a success of this mission. So I had to keep the budget as low as I possibly could.’
‘Is that why none of your equipment is rechargeable?’
‘It is rechargeable,’ she said. ‘It’s mostly reconditioned but it’s not complete rubbish. Anyway, without the ship what are we supposed to do?’
‘That would be the cheapest way, I suppose,’ the Doctor agreed tentatively. ‘To use the ship’s power plant.’
‘Even top-of-the-range energy converters don’t give you a gun that charges in the field so if you’re relying on the ship’s power plant for them –’ she shrugged – ‘why not for everything else? It seemed like a good cheap idea at the time. Turned out to be just a cheap idea.’
Fermindor grunted. ‘We all stood to benefit. Extra bonus credits, better career prospects, stuff like that. We all had our reasons.’
‘Maybe it would be useful if we examined what those reasons were,’ the Doctor said, making an effort to sound detached and objective and avoid the obvious reaction.
It came anyway. ‘You first,’ Kley said.
Which was it, the Doctor wondered: did the suspicious become policemen or did policemen become suspicious? He didn’t want to waste time on the wrong end of an interrogation, particularly when there was a reasonable possibility that they were all being closely monitored. He decided to let them go on believing what they thought they already knew. ‘Ah, well, Leela is going to be a very important duellist,’ he said. ‘I was looking for a place to sharpen her skills.’
‘Why contravene the rules?’
‘Ambition.’
‘Isn’t that unusual in a toody?’
‘I don’t think so. And under the circumstances I wonder that you still do.’
Kley fell silent. He was right of course. Weird but right. How could she have said that? They were chasing a toody.
Fermindor was a better investigator than any firster she had ever worked with. Pertanor was ambitious. Rinandor was brighter than she was herself. How could she have said that?
Was she really that stupid? ‘Am I really that stupid?’
‘I don’t know,’ the Doctor said. ‘Only you can tell really. It’s a difficult concept I think. As far as I can see it’s memory that makes intelligence. Short-term behaviour modification built up by trial and error or pain and pleasure stimuli can look like intelligence but it isn’t.’
Kley said, ‘It was a rhetorical question. I was just thinking aloud.’
‘I apologise,’ the Doctor said, and smiled. ‘The subject interests me.
‘Why did you come to this planet?’ Fermindor asked.