Doctor Who_ Match of the Day - Chris Boucher [29]
He emptied the rest of the magazine in a sustained burst down the perimeter to his right. This took out two scanners directly and crippled another five. The possibility of terrorist attack was uprated to probability.
Keefer reloaded the pistol with explosive shells each set on a delay. He fired these in a random pattern through the perimeter and then matched the pattern with smoke shells.
As he ran back towards his prepared trench he fired a final clip of incendiary pellets into the shrub, setting as many separate fires as possible. By the time he lay down in the trench and began to cover himself he had transformed the area into the beginnings of a fairly convincing battlefield.
The Court of Attack was a semicircular chamber under a lofty, opaque-glass half dome. In the tall-backed centre chair of an elevated curved tier of nine seats the High Referee and Senior Umpire of Duel sat flanked on either side by the eight members of the Panel of Fight Replay. All nine were dressed in black uniforms with high, soft grey collars buttoned tightly under the chin. The Doctor recognised the High Referee as the small, dapper man who had had them arrested, and the courtroom itself as a symbolic version of the sacred arena sliced precisely in half.
Presumably bisecting it had some deeply symbolic significance, but for the moment the Doctor couldn‟t work out what that might be. He also couldn‟t work out how Jerro Fanson‟s imaginative and imaginary scenario was supposed to have worked in this place. The defence‟s case, his insufficiently reasoned and not-very-practised argument, depended for its effect on the claim that there would have been a surge of amazed and horrified interest among the duelling aficionados, which in its turn would have generated a tidal wave of worldwide publicity, which in its turn would have made the Doctor and Leela rich and famous. But there were only eleven people present, counting them. There were no observers, no court stenographers, no prosecuting counsel, no members of any sort of press corps that he could see... To the Doctor this looked a lot more like a secret military tribunal than a public trial. And secret military tribunals did not, in his experience, lend themselves readily to tidal waves of publicity. It looked as though his uncertain grasp of the finer points of legal argument might not be as important as he had thought.
„You have fought only half your fight,‟ the High Referee announced when Leela and the Doctor had made their way to the two empty chairs in the centre of the floor and were standing behind them looking up at the members of the court. „You have been brought before us solemnly to face the second half of your duel.‟
„Ah,‟ the Doctor murmured. So that‟s the significance of the half arena, he thought. Either that or it was a routine rationalisation of a poor piece of architectural design.
„The Rules of Attack,‟ the High Referee went on, „have been brought into doubt and question by your moves and by your reactions. Here in this Court of Attack we must seek to identify the rule, to understand the rule, to make firm the rule, so that the death that is sought for and is fought for is not cruel nor is it arbitrary nor is it unlawful but is according to the universal rule. You may be seated.‟
„I will stand,‟ Leela said immediately.
„My client would prefer to stand if that‟s all right with you,‟
the Doctor said, smiling in what he hoped was a friendly and non-challenging way. Legal arguments might be a waste of time but there was no point in deliberately stirring up the senior psychopath and all the assistant psychopaths. On the other hand it was important to look relaxed. „I on the other hand,‟ he said, still smiling warmly, „would prefer to sit down if that‟s acceptable to the court.‟ Sitting he knew would of course put him in an even weaker