Doctor Who_ Last Man Running - Chris Boucher [81]
‘Be quiet Leela. Leave this to me.’
‘We are not even from your planet, Monly!’ Leela shouted angrily.
There was a silence. This was not exactly how the Doctor had planned to allay Monly’s suspicions and find a way to get himself and Leela out of this mess in one piece.
‘You think I don’t know that?’ Monly said contemptuously.
‘I know you’re not from my planet. I know that. But coming from First Planet is not going to be the advantage it once was. In fact it’s going to be a distinct problem for some of you people.’
‘That is not what I meant. Tell him who we are, Doctor.’
Leela prowled round the inner edge of the brightly lit pit. She had worked out the significance of the light, and was making no attempt to cross the boundary at any point.
‘You’ve said enough, Leela,’ the Doctor warned.
‘You are not afraid of him, are you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well I am not! Get me out of here and I will deal with him for you.’ For a moment it looked as though she was going to bang her fist against the force field.
‘As you said,’ the Doctor murmured to Monly, ‘she has taken a few blows to the head. She’s still a very effective fighter though. Very profitable.’ The Doctor was aware that his grasp of how such things were organised back in the system where these people came from remained sketchy at best, but he knew he had to take the opportunity to elaborate on his story. ‘I bought the TARDIS with the proceeds from a couple of her bouts.’
‘Bouts?’
‘Duels?’ the Doctor suggested, remembering too late the advice of a successful politician he had once met. ‘Keep the lies simple unless you’ve got a good memory and a high staff turnover. ‘Fights,’ he added.
Monly nodded. ‘Private contracts, you mean.’
‘That’s right,’ the Doctor agreed.
‘Disgraceful,’ Monly remarked disgustedly. ‘Aren’t you ashamed to be involved in such perversions?’
The Doctor was ready to laugh but he restrained himself.
‘What is it you’re doing here?’ he asked. ‘Remind me about that again?’
‘It’s not the same.’
‘It never is.’
‘What I’m doing is not for personal profit.’
‘And that justifies hijacking my fighter, does it? Perversions indeed.’ The Doctor was beginning to warm to his role as the outraged agent-manager of a promising contract duellist. He seemed to be making Monly slightly uncomfortable. ‘You are planning to use her to kill people, aren’t you? She is the basis of your new weapon, isn’t she?’
Monly was definitely embarrassed now. ‘I was hoping to make some useful developments in non-organic weapons,’
he said.
‘Weapons you’re not allowed to develop back...’ The Doctor was not sure whether ‘home’ was an appropriate word so he gestured vaguely over his shoulder.
‘I had a cheap recharging handgun ready for testing,’
Monly said. ‘It was a beautiful device. Everybody could have had one.’ He appeared to have forgotten everything else as he began to remember and rehearse his grievances.
‘Imagine what that would have meant for the freedom of the individual.’
‘Imagine that,’ the Doctor said. ‘What a sensible idea.’
Monly was already preoccupied enough for the Doctor to risk a look away in the direction of the darkness. The control mechanism that would free Leela from the force field had to be in there somewhere. Monly was standing there when he’d been released. Unless...
‘You know what happened?’ Monly demanded.
‘They banned it?’ Unless Monly had it on him.
‘They banned me. I had the design for a bomb which was small and cheap and powerful.’
‘And illegal,’ the Doctor said. There was one other possibility...
‘And illegal,’ Monly agreed. ‘I was working on a whole new approach to killing. A self-replicating protein fragment.
Infectious but only under certain conditions. You can pick who dies and how long it takes them. They said the concept was immoral.’
‘I have always been impressed by innovation.’ the Doctor said peering round the gallery of alcoves again. Was that what he was looking for?
‘You think that’s impressive,’ Monly was babbling, ‘I have a device that uses radiation to addle