Doctor Who_ Match of the Day - Chris Boucher [48]
The driver raised his voice. ‘Everyone knows that.’
‘Pretend for the sake of argument,’ the Doctor bellowed in his ear, ‘that I’ve been in the Court of Attack lock-up. You know: the place where they keep you cut off from any outside contact.’
‘Not for that long,’ the driver shouted. ‘It’s still the same as when you went in.’
‘The Maidenly-Baloch match,’ the Doctor suggested, keeping the guesswork out of his tone.
‘Still the biggest thing since spaceplanes,’ the driver agreed.
‘Can we get tickets do you think?’ the Doctor asked loudly, smiling to allow the possibility that he was making an outrageous joke.
The fight was a sell-out.
Maidenly had been ducking a confrontation with Baloch for months, so they said. According to the publicity, Swordmaster Maidenly knew that he was no match for the only other sabre specialist in the Prime Division. Baloch was one of the new breed of fighters. Unorthodox and spectacular, he was a flashy psychopath who took risks to inflict agony and humiliation because that was what he enjoyed. Maidenly on the other hand was old school. He killed for money and for pride. There was nothing else in it for him: no pleasure, no sick kick.
This time the money was reputed to be huge. The purse was the biggest ever fought for, and that took no account of the Guild-negotiated share of the gate. For the remote planet-wide and interplanetary audience there were an unprecedented fifteen levels of viewing: the most expensive covering every available angle and every possible close-up, every bead of sweat and every drop of blood, guaranteeing to miss nothing. More unusually, it was possible for thousands of spectators to be physically present at the fight and invitations for the best seats were changing hands for the sort of sums that only expertly hysterical hype can produce.
Everything was right about this one. The venue was a large and famous arena, perhaps the most famous of all the arenas apart from the first, simple and most sacred one. The publicity claimed that not since the days of the first fights had a duel been more significant and a setting been more noble...
And then on the night, with it all in place and an audience in the hundreds of millions waiting, Maidenly was a no-show.
He simply disappeared. It was assumed that he had lost his nerve and run.
In a desperate attempt to salvage something from the situation the fight was immediately thrown open to spot challenges. Five young men came forward and were dispatched by Baloch in a series of spectacularly vicious kills. In his sixth fight he was decapitated on the first pass by a pale woman with short-cropped red hair. Nobody knew who she was or why, in the confusion that followed the victory, she slipped away without claiming the purse. If it occurred to anyone apart from their agents that two more of the Prime Division’s star performers had been eliminated in bizarre circumstances, there was no real sign of it in the newscasts.
A brief press campaign to find the ‘Killer Queen of the Dreamdrome’ reached a shrill crescendo, produced nothing and lasted only until the next top-item sensation.
The Doctor and Leela had been present in the Dreamdrome, in one of the executive viewing suites, on the night of the Maidenly-Baloch non-match. They had been the last-minute guests of the Hakai Corporation, one of the main sponsors of the duel that never was, and to begin with the Doctor had found the experience quite agreeable. To be fawned upon and to have your every word listened to and given more weight than it probably deserved was not something he was used to, and he found it seductive. In this corporate environment Leela was treated as a star in the making. While she was not regarded with the same respect as the Doctor, the business strategist behind her rise, she was still feted as a Prime Division prospect, a potential object of popular adoration and a source of major earnings. They listened to him, they admired her: the evening was going splendidly and the Doctor had enjoyed it all, right up until the spot challenges