Doctor Who_ Last Man Running - Chris Boucher [87]
‘Yes,’ Kley whispered. ‘I can manage that.’
‘Excellent,’ the Doctor said. ‘You’ve got blood on your chin by the way.’ He smiled even more broadly and then he vanished, smile and all, leaving no sign that he was ever there. Without bothering to wipe her chin, Kley stumbled mechanically towards the hole in the floor. So this was death.
It wasn’t so bad...
Pertanor was suspicious and stubbornly silent. Leela had no idea how to persuade him that she was telling him the truth. It was more difficult because she did not entirely trust him anyway. She would not be surprised to find that the whole team were partly involved in whatever Sozerdor was planning.
‘Listen,’ she grated. ‘Stay there if that is what you want to do. I do not care. I do not know why the Doctor is wasting our time with you people. I think you are stupid and treacherous and if the choice was mine I would leave you all to rot.
‘All?’ he asked finally. ‘What’s happened to Rinandor?’
Leela said, ‘The Doctor is releasing her.’ Then she added, not without relish, Pertanor thought: ‘You are weak-willed too.
You cannot even remain silent.’
‘Nice of you to wake me,’ Rinandor yawned. ‘At the risk of sounding obvious, where am I? And where is everybody else?’
‘Meaning Pertanor?’
She stretched and rubbed her eyes. ‘If you like.’
‘I think he’s looking for you,’ the Doctor said.
She yawned again. ‘Let’s go then,’ she said. ‘You lead the way.’
‘I’m afraid I can’t. I’m not here.’
‘You can relax, The. Pe’s not the jealous type. And you’re not my type.’
‘And I’m not here,’ the Doctor said.
Leela found Belay talking in a conversational way about nothing very much to no one at all. His release, the light, her appearance, none of it made any difference; he just kept on talking. He babbled about his plans for the future, about his life in the OIG, about his friends. Leela could not shut him up and he did not seem to be listening to anything she told him.
She tried standing very close to him. She tried shouting at him. She tried threatening him with her knife. Either something was wrong with the system and it was not showing her to him or something was wrong with him and he could not see her. After a while she gave up. The Doctor would have to deal with this one.
Fermindor listened to the Doctor’s brief explanation and his instructions on where to find Belay. When the Doctor asked,
‘Do you understand?’ he simply nodded, and he was moving and on his way out of the cell almost before the Doctor vanished.
Sozerdor was nowhere to be found in any of the file of control bays and the Doctor had reasoned that he must be out on the surface somewhere. Although the Doctor’s attempts to commune with the system all failed no matter what he tried, Leela was able to establish multi-layered links apparently at will. Sozerdor did not show up in any of them. They widened the search and, in the process, the Doctor confirmed that there were no other complexes linked to this one. They detected several heavily shielded power sources deep below them and what looked to the Doctor like a series of space-time anomaly loops which were being used to foreshorten physical perspectives.
‘Shortcuts between places,’ the Doctor explained in response to Leela’s accusation of ‘Shaman’s gibberish.’
‘The civilisation that put all this together,’ he went on, ‘had a rudimentary grasp of transdimensional engineering.’
‘Does that mean your tribe are responsible for what has happened here?’ Leela demanded.
‘My tribe?’
‘You know what I mean. Your civilisation. You told me trans-that engineering was a discovery of your civilisation.’
‘I did. It was. This is not the same.’
‘Then why did you mention it?’
‘I was just thinking that myself.’ He looked around for the way out of the alcove, though he knew before he did it that there would be no way out other than the one he would choose. ‘Shall