Doctor Who_ Match of the Day - Chris Boucher [34]
The man was standing maybe a metre away peering through the smoke. He was swinging a stun-gun uncertainly from side to side, waiting for something to move in front of him. Keefer rose to his feet behind him and stepped forward.
As the man began to turn Keefer hit him below the edge of the helmet just where the neck and the side point of the jaw were unprotected. He fell heavily. Quickly Keefer stripped him of his uniform and body armour and put them on over his own clothes. They were on the large side and he was making adjustments to the equipment harness and checking over the stun-gun when the man began to regain consciousness. Keefer unjammed the maximum setting on the gun and fed him a couple of minimum jolts: enough to keep him out of it for a while. Then he strode on through the smoke, heading for where he estimated the others would have stumbled to by now.
The instruction to regroup and fall back to the „copters came over his helmet speaker almost immediately. The squad leader choked off the inevitable questions and grumbles with an abrupt: „Get your arse back or you‟re on your own!‟
On Keefer‟s helmet visor the „copter‟s homing signal activated a guidance grid. He turned and followed its directions, moving slowly enough to allow the others to catch up with him. As soon as figures began to trot out of the smoke around him he picked up his pace.
„Scuffling move it!‟
„There‟s a crap-storm coming!‟
„Carry One, where‟s the scuffling beacon?‟
The command circuits, boosted by the jet-copters‟ power units as the squad leaders got closer to them, were beginning to overlap. Keefer noted with grim satisfaction that Jerro‟s estimate of their behaviour under pressure was not far wrong. Even their communications discipline was shot.
So it was that in the scramble to load up and get out, all that mattered to anyone was that each „copter had a full squad on board. No one cared much whether the right squad members were on the right vehicles, let alone whether the right squad members were in the uniforms.
Sita was hugely relieved when she heard the confirmation that all the squads were airborne and accounted for. She even enjoyed the passes the gun-ship made across the area, strafing methodically, laying down an unsurvivable patchwork of fire.
She shouted: „Eat blast and die screaming you murderous scum,‟ and grinned at the gun-ship pilot, who did not appreciate the joke.
The Shift Controller was less relieved to hear that the squads had found no one while they were on the ground. „Maintain operational readiness!‟ he yelled over the command control net. „Return to base on full stand-by!‟ He knew now that it had been a feint, or an exercise, but either way he needed those squads back and ready to scramble.
„I have ignored the fact that the de facto referee had called for a halt,‟ the Doctor said, now that he had finally been given the floor. „Nobody move was, I think, the phrase he used.‟
In the wall behind him the sacred arena reappeared and the replay of the moment he referred to began its multiversion sequence. „Nobody move!‟ the voice on the PA ordered. „I‟m coming to sort this out.‟ „Do you accept the challenge?‟ Jarvis muttered to the Doctor who picked out a green jelly baby, put the bag back into his coat pocket and said round a mouthful of sweet, „Aren‟t we supposed to wait?‟
The Doctor did not look at the wall as the next version and the next ground on and on. Even Leela had become tired of watching herself. She had sat down in one of the chairs and was staring up at the nine members of the court with undisguised hostility. It had been bothering the Doctor that if her pride got the better of her she might do something suicidally aggressive, like trying to leap up onto the high bench and attack them. He wasn‟t sure whether her obvious boredom would make this more or less likely. He was