Doctor Who_ Match of the Day - Chris Boucher [22]
Leela shook her head. „I was going to ask why you do not use the ritual form of words which is politeness and good manners? Is it that you are not afraid because there can be no violence here?‟ She held up her hands to show the wrist bands.
Fanson looked genuinely puzzled. „I‟m a fully accredited, guild-registered agent. You‟re a contract duellist.‟ He shrugged and held his hands palms up in a dumb-show of blank bewilderment. He looked at the Doctor. „You‟ll need to be careful with that one. One of these fine days she‟s going to forget who she‟s supposed to be fighting and why.‟
„Tell me who that is again?‟ the Doctor asked, hoping Fanson might launch into another vaguely informative rant.
He took care to keep his tone casual though, so that the question could be treated as a joke. „And the reasons?‟
„Very funny,‟ Fanson said dryly. „Still not an acceptable defence.‟
Since the traffic computer paid no more attention to pedestrians than it did to vehicles it was not controlling, Keefer‟s decision to walk along the edge of the road as far as Aerospace Main offered no problems. Once there though the spaceport perimeter would present him with precisely the opposite situation. The security computers had very clear directives. Nobody crossed the „port boundaries on foot.
A kilometre from the first of the vehicle checks Keefer left the motorway shoulder and once more headed out across country. This time there were no woods or fields, only wide expanses of scrub criss-crossed with firebreaks.
It was an unusual and bleak landscape, which was why Jerro Fanson had proposed it as a killing ground for one of Keefer‟s early fights. He had even got sponsorship deals out of a couple of low-orbit freight companies that lifted out of Aerospace Main but then the „port authorities had vetoed the idea. They claimed to be concerned about public safety in a designated
launch-and-recovery
crash
zone.
Keefer
remembered Fanson‟s furious reaction. „Public safety my backside!‟ he had yelled. „Their poxy security circuits couldn‟t tell a contract duellist from a sandy fort, that‟s why! Couple of shots in the vicinity of a scanner and we‟d be knee-deep in snatch squads rushing about shoving stun-guns up each other‟s arses!‟ I must thank Jerro for this idea, Keefer thought, as he pinpointed a scanner, squatted just beyond its range and reviewed what was left in his weapons belt.
He might have added: if it works, but one of his fighting strengths was that doubt had no part in his preparations. If it came at all the thought of failure followed a long way behind the action. Age and experience would gradually narrow that gap until doubt and movement happened together. A talented fighter might survive long enough to anticipate the moment and retire, but to date very few had managed it. A fight too far brought that slightest of hesitations that lost them contests with younger, less knowledgeable duellists.
Satisfied that he had the necessary firepower, Keefer looked around for a reference marker. He chose the Lunar-Express control tower and quizzed the Ginko Navsat about his position. It took a moment or two for it to locate him within a circle of about a metre radius. That was the trouble with cheap mass-produced wrist compasses: their satellite beacons were always overloaded so the computing was slow and the accuracy less than pinpoint.
He keyed the wrist unit to record the coordinates then wrapped his duelling handgun in sprayfilm and carefully buried it. There was no way he could think of to get it onto a ship without a carrying prompt and he couldn‟t get one of those now. When this was all sorted out he‟d come back and pick up the gun along with his career. If this was all sorted out. For just a moment this time the thought did come into his mind, but it made no difference to his plans and it certainly did not affect what he was about to do.
* * *
When Fanson came back from his scheduled court session there were dark shadows round his eyes and his mouth was