Doctor Who_ Last Man Running - Chris Boucher [61]
‘Why won’t you speak to me?’
Leela had discovered that counter-attack came naturally to her.
‘I can make you tell me what I want to know.’
Her strength as a warrior had always been based on speed rather than physical power but recently she had come to realise that it was quicker still to wait and see what happened and react to it.
‘Thedoctor has already told me all I need to know, so it’s of no importance. But it is rude not to answer when I speak to you.’
Leela wondered where the Doctor was and whether he was a captive too.
‘I hate rudeness. It’s unnecessary. It makes life so stressful, so graceless.’
If he was, she had no doubt he would be trying to work out where he was being held and what was happening and who was doing all this – and why. He did so much of that sort of thinking that he tended to miss the opportunities when they came because he was not paying attention and he was not ready.
‘I will hurt you again.’
Leela had no intention of making that mistake.
‘I will hurt you very badly.’
Leela waited to see what would happen.
Kley kept her eyes tight shut. She could not move. Spasms of ferocious pain shot through her without warning. She had obviously been injured in the earthquake and now she was trapped in some sort of air pocket. The chances of rescue were zero. She knew that if she opened her eyes she would finally lose her mind and she would scream and she would never be able to stop screaming. The whispering continued.
‘Talk to me... Tell me... Pain...’
If she listened to the whispering – or, worse still, if she spoke to the whispering – she would be lost. She bit her lip again. It didn’t hurt enough to make the whispering go away.
Pertanor had peered about in the darkness and shouted Rinandor’s name a few times but there was no response.
When the reason for that became clear he shut up as he had been trained to do. The psycho toody could rant and threaten as much as he liked, Pertanor was not about to start chatting to a runner who had probably already killed Rinandor and the others. How could a toody do something like that?
Belay kept talking to the runner. Negotiating would have been easier face to face but the important thing was to keep talking. He couldn’t work out what it was the runner actually wanted. Basically he just seemed to want to talk but there had to be more to it than that. If he kept talking he would find out eventually, and besides, the psychology of captor and captive was such that the former found it more difficult to kill you if you kept talking. Belay hardly noticed when the runner stopped prompting him to speak.
Rinandor remained unconscious throughout the first phase of the process. With her brain chemistry already affected, the narcotic gas that had knocked down the others had a massively increased effect on her.
‘Amnesia?’
‘Well, what would you call it?’ Fermindor said reasonably.
The Doctor strode on. They seemed to be getting nowhere. ‘I’d call it odd,’ he said. The passageway felt endless and, since it seemed to curve slightly to the right as they walked, it looked endless too.
‘There are more things in heaven and earth,’ Fermindor said, ‘than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’
‘Horatio,’ the Doctor said absently. ‘“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”’ He was still trying to find a rational explanation for the fact that Fermindor could remember virtually nothing of how he came to be running around loose, so he missed the significance of the casual blasphemy. When he did realise he said, ‘You’re not a devout man then, Fe.’
‘Neither are you, The,’ Fermindor said confidently.
Was this a clumsy attempt at intimacy to boost the Doctor’s confidence, or to divert his attention