Doctor Who_ Match of the Day - Chris Boucher [102]
She looked carefully over and around the semicircular desk at which it appeared the pilot must normally sit. She searched for the arrays of buttons and switches and levers that should be there, but she could see nothing much to suggest that flying needed any attention, never mind the great skill and experience .the man had claimed for himself.
There were four buttons and a centrally located lever and that was all. Even the TARDIS had more controls to fiddle with than this ship had.
On a small flat screen set into the middle of the desk a central image of darkness and stars was displayed, and in two long columns on either side of that changing numbers were drifting up and down. The numbers meant nothing to her but they seemed to be altering at a steady rate: rising on one side, falling on the other. It looked routine and automatic. It looked as though the ship was working itself and behaving a lot more reliably than the TARDIS ever seemed to do.
Attached to one side of the desk - not built in, Leela could see - but added on afterwards, was a boxed surveillance screen showing a picture of the cell she had just escaped from. This box and its screen had more controls than the desk itself had. She experimented and found that there were buttons that changed the angle, the viewpoint, and how close up the picture was. There were speaking and listening devices and controls to raise and lower the sound levels of these. It confirmed to her that although he had called himself the pilot the man she had killed was more of a jailer than anything else. He had told Her that if it was not for the flying he would not be needed. He had lied. The ship was flying itself. For the first time since she had sat down to work out her chances Leela allowed herself to be optimistic about her survival. She sat in the pilot‟s seat and relaxed. Before long she was asleep. She was still asleep when the navigation screen showed something bright moving across the background starscape and the ship adjusted its flight coordinates to intercept it.
Keefer woke to find himself in total darkness and it took him a moment or two to realise that he was weightless. It was logical, he thought. If you wanted to keep a prisoner helpless then weightlessness was the obvious way to do it. Like most people he did not understand how pseudo-grav worked but he knew it was a Hakai development so he presumed they had the expertise to leave areas of the Ultraviolet Explorer untouched by its effects.
Without light he had no real idea what sort of a box they‟d got him in, but it didn‟t much matter any more because he‟d lost. He needed to get to the Lady Hakai and confront her and he hadn‟t done it. All he had done was kill a few Fat Boys and walk into the sort of elementary trap that he would once have seen coming without needing to look and would have dodged without needing to think. Whatever else happened now it was over for him. He‟d lost the instinct. He‟d lost the edge. He‟d been decoyed by a machine that looked like a man but wasn‟t one and he‟d gone down like a stumbling amateur. There were no second chances in his profession. He was dead.
He hung in the black and let the feeling of desolation drift across him like tired dust. He was a helpless prisoner with nothing but darkness in his eyes. He had run, he had fought, he had killed, and it had all led him to this pointless place.
He sighed, sucking in a deep involuntary breath. He tasted a faint mixture of stale food on the air: pancakes and vegetables, lecea seed; he smelled a distant hint of sweat and human waste, water and the scalding scent of hot metal.
Somewhere close by was the recycling system. He hadn‟t seen a plan but recycling plants and the like were usually towards the more protected centre of these big ships and his guess was that the Ultraviolet Explorer was no exception. That might explain the weightlessness too. It could be that the pseudo-grav generator was somewhere near. The beginnings