Doctor Who_ Match of the Day - Chris Boucher [26]
Once the shallow trench was finished and he was satisfied with it he set off. He crouched low to the ground and, moving back and forth as he had seen the dog doing, he crossed into the outer zone of the security perimeter.
When he had penetrated a few metres in he dropped flat and, keeping his movements to a slow, smooth minimum, laid out the weapons in sequence on the ground beside him.
That done, he carefully checked the sighting for the three rapid bursts of fire he would need to make with the small rapid-fire pistol he carried, but seldom used in the normal run of fights. Finally he set it for tracer, flicked off the safety and began his pre-fight concentration exercise.
In the surveillance suite the first warning light had cancelled itself, unremarked except by the machine log, which noticed and recorded every variation from the norm. When the second light came up the supervisor spotted it immediately.
Even using crude data the computer had no difficulty in interpreting the intruder as:
not-canine:
subset not-feral
subset not-domestic
not-feline:
subset not-feral
subset not-domestic
not-bird:
subset not-carrion
and so on through an exhaustive list of possible false alarms.
It had a small problem resolving the conflict between dog - no alarm/cancel indicator and not-dog - activate indicator/
prepare alarm sequentially occupying exactly the same space in the scanner map, which reduced the threat probability and delayed the initial alarm. But this was largely academic since Keefer was about to bring the sky down on „port security.
The Court of Attack lock-up was an unusual cell block in many ways, not least because there was never any sign of the jailers. Food and welfare, information, instructions and discipline were all delivered or administered automatically or remotely.
There was something peculiarly threatening about such a totally impersonal regime, the Doctor thought. There was no point of human contact so there was no point of reference.
They could have been the boxed playthings of a giant child. If you weren‟t concentrating you could lose your hold on reality and never get it back. It was because there was no one to face, no one to confront and to blame, no one to question, if it came to that. They existed at the whim of unseen power.
They were like uneducated primitives living in superstitious awe of a world they could not understand or begin to control.
And yet Leela had recognised the danger and resisted it immediately. She had known what he himself was only just beginning to realise: the importance of keeping everything personal. He watched her now as she prowled about trying to spot the directional voice devices that produced the proximity whispers. She had no real idea what it was she was looking for except that it was something physical and man-made rather than a disembodied supernatural force. She had the knife out again and was obviously planning to wreak some sort of symbolic vengeance on any likely-looking device that she came across. It was a pointless exercise if you looked at it logically but how else did you face up to the faceless? How else did you resist the irresistible? Logically you didn‟t. But what she lacked in logic she always made up for in sheer determination and simple bloody-mindedness. „I wonder what‟s happened to our friend Fanson,‟ he said.
„He is not my friend,‟ Leela said.
Yes, simple bloody-mindedness was always in evidence, the Doctor thought. „A figure of speech,‟ he said. „He seems to have been gone longer this time. Hard to tell whether that‟s a good sign for him.‟
„It is hard to care,‟ Leela said, poking the knife point into a small gap at the back of the workstation where Fanson had been sitting when he got the whispered summons.
„Maybe I can get some information from the computer,‟ the Doctor said. „Assuming you‟re not planning to attack the terminal next.‟ It was likely that all the outcomes of all the cases in all the Courts of Attack would be recorded on the universal computer database, he thought. And presumably the process