Doctor Who_ Last Man Running - Chris Boucher [95]
‘Yes,’ Kley rasped.
‘Which one of you?’
‘All of us.’
‘We’re all flight-trained,’ Fermindor wheezed. ‘That’s why they pay us the heavy currency.’
‘Out-system Investigation Group,’ Rinandor panted. ‘You don’t get to run to our assignments.’
‘Not until now, anyway,’ gasped Pertanor, leaning against the rock.
‘How many crew do they carry?’
‘Two for the drop usually. The rest transfer to the stand-off,’ Kley said.
‘In that case,’ the Doctor said brightly, ‘you can steal both of them.’
Kley was recovering. ‘Is this another of your plans, Doctor?’ she asked softly. ‘Can I take a look first?’ She moved past him to the curved edge of the eroded rock where the Doctor and Leela had been crouching.
That was when the Doctor realised that Leela had gone.
‘Where’s Belay?’ Fermindor muttered. ‘Anyone notice what happened to him?’
It was SOC – Standard Operational Caution, or Same Old Crap to the time-served sweats – that prevented the pilot of Drop Two from cracking the seals immediately and joining the Drop One jock and his bug-sniffer in the backslapping.
Truth was, he couldn’t see much point in both ships being down, but since those were the orders and since he had brought it in hot and hard and landed it close and cool, he sort of resented not being in on the first contact. Second didn’t count for much, no matter how good you were. Ask any toody. It would be fairly stupid, though, to do the hard stuff right and crap up the details, so they waited on the flight deck
– him and the field medic – for the initial analysis and safety clearance to come in from Lead One out there in orbit.
If he had been less impatient the pilot might have noticed that the clearance when it came was too fast for book-minimum SOC. Nothing could have been checked in that time, and he might have waited and queried the data. If he had been less eager to get his share of the glory he might still have been squinting out of the ground-exposed vision slots, or watching the dust-clogged visuals from the scancam, and he might have seen the danger while there was still time to do something about it.
He was a good pilot. He did the hard stuff right. Crapping up the details was what was about to get him killed.
Leela knew Belay was behind her and there was nothing she could do about it. As she crept along, keeping as close as she could to the cover of the wall of rock, she had slowed down slightly, reasoning that for him slower would be quieter, and she had signalled for him to keep his distance and to tread carefully. After that, she put him out of her mind and concentrated on the group ahead of her. The copies and the rescue team were talking excitedly, and there was a good chance that she could get within attacking distance before they saw her. She drew her knife.
She was almost in position when Monly and Belay brought Sozerdor out of the narrow mouth of the cave on a makeshift stretcher and put him down for one of the men from the ship to examine. It looked to Leela as though Sozerdor had been shot, and she remembered the Doctor’s questions about the gun the Kley copy had. The Belay copy had been squatting by the stretcher helping to make the injured man comfortable.
Now he stood up and Leela could see him more clearly. The closer you got to them the more real they were and that made the horror of them worse. At her back, the original Belay gasped. It was not a loud noise, but it was loud enough. The pilot standing by the stretcher glanced in their direction. Kley saw the look.
‘Where did she come from?’ the pilot said, smiling towards Leela. The smile disappeared as he got a good look at Belay.
He looked from the Belay behind her to the Belay beside him.
‘There’s something wrong here, Boo,’ he cried to the crouching medic and he tried to draw his gun. Kley shot him where he stood.
‘Come on!’ Leela shouted at Belay, and sprinted for the cover of the cave mouth. Belay stood shocked and