Doctor Who_ Match of the Day - Chris Boucher [28]
Although she had probably worked out what was happening almost as soon as the Doctor had himself, and well before he decided to explain it to her anyway, Leela of course stubbornly resisted the system. The Doctor had expected this, though that didn‟t make it any less irritating as he stood waiting at one of the junctions in the corridors, while she pressed on down what was obviously the wrong route. „It would be sensible,‟ he said, trying to keep the annoyance out of his voice and thus avoid provoking her into further self-destructive defiance, „to save pushing the limits of the system until we need an escape plan. And we won‟t need one of those until after the court has ruled.‟
„That may be too late,‟ Leela called back from the bend in the corridor she had reached. She peered round it, took a half step forward, hesitated for a moment and then turned and came trotting back to where the Doctor was waiting with his hands stuck in his trouser pockets and his face set in an expression of casual unconcern, which he certainly didn‟t feel. At this moment he couldn‟t see much purpose in all the tutoring he planned to give her when there was time; not to mention all the casual good sense she could pick up in passing from the accumulated wisdom of his many experiences and incarnations if she would only stop behaving like a rampaging primitive with all the calculating self-discipline of a mindlessly violent savage. „We should be getting on,‟ he said. „We are working to a deadline.‟
He started to walk on towards the court, responding now to quite small guide prompts from his wrist bands. It almost felt as if he was being led by the hand, he thought, though Leela clearly regarded it as being dragged by the scruff of the neck.
„There is a door round that corner that leads to the outside,‟ Leela said. „I thought the bands might not work if you could reach the outside.‟
„Unlikely,‟ the Doctor grunted, lengthening his stride.
Leela jogged along beside him. „It was a theory,‟ she said.
„And you told me that a theory is useless unless it can be tested.‟
„Did I say that?‟
„But I could not reach the outside so I could not test it.‟ She rubbed her wrist and held her hand up so that he could see the blood on it.
The Doctor stopped and took her hands in his and examined the wrists. There were trickles of blood from under the edges of the bands but the injuries did not look to him to be too serious. Her ankles did not seem to be bleeding. He sighed resignedly. „Is there any chance you might stop doing things like this?‟ he asked. He took out a large white handkerchief from the pocket of his coat and wiped the blood from her wrists. „At least until it‟s absolutely necessary.‟
„I thought it was absolutely necessary.‟
„You were mistaken.‟ The Doctor pocketed the bloody handkerchief and walked on more slowly. Reaching another anonymous fork in the corridor he felt the slightest of twitches in the wrist and ankle bands as he moved to take the left folk and so turned instead into the right-hand corridor. There he paused and waited for Leela to take the wrong direction again. This time, however, she followed his lead. For some reason he couldn‟t quite justify he found this even more irritating than what she had been doing. Why couldn‟t she have simply followed his lead from the beginning? Was she deliberately setting out to annoy him? Of course she was. He sighed again. Of course she wasn‟t. It seemed he was more nervous about the approaching trial than he had realised. The trouble was he didn‟t know enough about what he was doing to be confident doing it...
Keefer was calm and sharp and ready to set his plan in motion.
The first and briefest burst of tracers burnt out the scanner that was registering his presence. A second, slightly longer burst hosed across the faces of four