Doctor Who_ Last Man Running - Chris Boucher [91]
Pertanor and Rinandor were hanging back warily. They looked less than convinced. ‘When did all this happen exactly?’ Rinandor asked, not bothering to keep the scepticism out of her voice.
Pertanor said, ‘As far as we know you could be making this up.’
‘The Doctor does not make things up,’ Leela said angrily.
‘He is a powerful shaman who has saved your lives and you should show him proper respect.’
‘So you are a contract duellist after all, then?’ Rinandor said wryly.
‘I agree with Leela,’ Belay said. ‘The Doctor may be crazy but that doesn’t mean we can’t trust him.’ Belay was still fascinated by Leela and he had been rather clumsily trying to disguise it by glancing at her surreptitiously and then looking away quickly and feigning interest in the general surroundings.
‘Do you trust me enough to go out on the surface and hunt for Sozerdor?’
‘This would be the same Sozerdor we left in a seek-bag tagged for autolift? The dead one?’ Rinandor asked.
‘No. This is the live one,’ the Doctor said. ‘This is the runner you’ve been chasing all along.’ He stared at each of the OIG crew in turn. ‘This is what you came for.’
Chapter Eleven
As soon as they reached the planet, they went into the preset search-and-retrieval routines. One of the ships made a series of powered suborbital sweeps at the edge of the atmosphere, beginning at the equator and working an overlapping search pattern towards the northern pole. A second ship did the same in the southern hemisphere. Coordination, analysis of ground-scan radar mapping and the identification of the distress beacon signals was carried out by Lead One from a stationary orbit. The absence of a fully experienced senior navigation coordinator seemed to make no difference to the efficiency of the operation, which went without a major hitch.
The beacon was still sending powerfully when they pinpointed it in an area of desert in the northern hemisphere.
The urgency of the mission was obvious, a three-ship’er was a new experience for everyone involved, so no one had time to remark on the odd topography of that region of the planet.
Since most of the ordinary crew members had no real idea what the special urgency was all about, and the captain of Lead One was generally accepted to be an uncommunicative type whose briefings were notably brief, there was already an unreality about the whole enterprise, which meant that anything strange would have fitted in with what was happening.
Voice communication from the group of survivors sheltering in a cave in the desert was faint and slightly garbled, but it seemed that the entire patrol lead by Chief Investigator Serian Kley had survived and were waiting to be picked up. The loss of their ship due to a failure of the main power plant had apparently left them without the bulk of their supplies, but they had managed to eke out what they had so that they were all in reasonable health, with the exception of the oldest member of the team, Senior Investigator Sozerdor, who was seriously injured and in need of urgent medical attention.
When the news was relayed from Lead One to the other two ships it was greeted with relief and excitement. It was not their job to worry about the runner or to look for the remains of the pursuit team’s crashed ship. So none of them did.
The Doctor could see that they were not convinced. It was a pity. He had not wanted to risk their fragile mental equilibrium by showing them a control bay in action, especially not the one that presently contained an index of all the other control bays. It would be too disorientating for them; he wasn’t that comfortable with it himself. He didn’t know what the shock might do to them. The last thing he needed was for them to retreat into the defensive explanations they had made for themselves, which seemed to run the full spectrum from death to prisoner mind games. He had hoped they would take his word for things and allow themselves