Doctor Who_ Last Man Running - Chris Boucher [90]
Leela smiled. For a shaman, she reminded herself, the Doctor could be a very wise and practical person.
Kley stopped laughing finally, and said, ‘So you claim to be an alien, Doctor. We’re hardly in a position to doubt you, are we? Unless we’re all going to wake up with bad headaches.’
She gestured round at the alcoves with their mysterious hints of depth and the occasional glimpses, showing at the surface of the access gaps, of the strange creations and locations within. ‘I can’t imagine what I could’ve taken to produce this effect anyway. So you’re an alien. Are you one of these –
what did you call them – Lentics?’
‘No.’
‘Is Leela?’ Rinandor asked.
‘No.’
‘I can answer for myself,’ Leela said.
‘Are you?’ Rinandor asked.
‘No,’ Leela said, feeling foolish.
‘But you are different,’ Rinandor suggested. ‘From different planets, I mean?’
‘You’d make a good policeman,’ the Doctor said. ‘You should consider taking it up professionally.’
‘If that was meant to be an insult you’ll have to try harder.’
The Doctor beamed. ‘Or you won’t notice you’ve been insulted? Actually it was meant to be a compliment.’
‘You think this belongs to the Lentic then?’ Fermindor asked. ‘Is that what you’re saying?’
‘The Empire of the Lentic,’ the Doctor began, walking slowly away from the pit towards the alcoves, ‘was military.
Quite striking in its way. Particularly striking if you got in its way. All military organisations are aggressive but the Lentic carried aggression to new extremes.’ As he expected the others followed him in an attentive group. ‘Eventually the Lentic became obsessed,’ he went on, ‘with the need to produce the perfect soldier. To that end they developed a semi-sentient, self-refining training facility. What the facility did was to analyse the strengths and weaknesses of the test subjects and then use the data to develop a training-and-selection process. To build the strengths up it exaggerated and fed back the weaknesses as physical threats. Think of it as a machine which created a working example of your own personal nightmare, and then made you fight it in some suitable location. The machine would observe how you reacted and, if it liked what it saw and you were still alive, it would try something more extreme. It was based on some halfwitted notion that whatever doesn’t kill you will make you stronger. It was a cruel and ugly idea and, like all cruel and ugly ideas, it was ultimately self defeating.’
‘It kept on going until it killed you?’ Pertanor asked.
‘Apparently.’
‘What was the point of that?’
The Doctor shrugged. ‘Obsessions tend to lose sight of the point. The idea was that when the machine had defined and discovered the perfect soldier, it would copy it in sufficient numbers to maintain the empire for ever after.’
‘So where is this empire?’ Fermindor asked.
‘Where indeed?’ the Doctor agreed. ‘It seems they tested the subjects in batches. It was a process of elimination which became known as Last Man Running. I think that’s where we are now. I think we are in the barely functioning remains of the control centre of one of the Lentic’s last-man-running facilities.’
Kley stepped in front of the Doctor and stared hard at him.
‘You knew all this from when exactly?’
‘Don’t misunderstand me.’ The Doctor put on his most serious expression and shook his head vigorously to emphasise the denial. ‘I’m not even sure of it now.’
‘Yes we are,’ Leela said. ‘It is remembered in the machine.’
‘A suggestion,’ the Doctor said, ‘no more than that. It confirms some ideas. It fits the hypothesis.’
Fermindor said, ‘You know a lot about it for someone who isn’t sure.’
‘I’ve only heard about the Lentic,’ the Doctor said. ‘I’ve never seen them in action. I’ve never seen them at all.’
‘I think I have,’ Leela said. ‘Somewhere in all this. She gestured round at the alcoves.
They had reached the entrance to an inactive control bay.
Kley and Fermindor peered into it. ‘What’s happened to them then?’ Kley asked. ‘Where are they?’
The Doctor