Doctor Who_ Match of the Day - Chris Boucher [93]
The door opened. She pulled herself out and back into the cell. Taking the medical kit with her this time she climbed back into the airlock feet first, so that she could reach the small control panel with her hand.
It did not occur to Leela to wonder what the airlock was actually there for until she looked closely at the buttons and indicators on the panel. There were several more than were necessary simply to lock and unlock two doors. And if an air lock was intended to keep air in, she thought, and there was air in her cell, did that mean there was no air on the other side of the other door? That was why he was wearing that stupid outfit, she realised abruptly. It was not to protect him from her, it was to help him to breathe. This needed thinking about, she thought and climbed out of the airlock a second time.
The mistake, the Doctor acknowledged to himself, when he finally came to think about it all, was not that he had confused movement with action but that he had allowed movement and action to confuse him. There were questions he should have asked and answers he should have questioned, but he was much too busy chasing and being chased to pay proper attention to what was really going on.
Weightlessness hadn‟t helped his concentration much either.
„He gets a refund in cash,‟ Ronick explained, „a nice chunky brick of Sumanan dollars, and this he waves around like a brain-dead tourist with “Rob me I‟m a tourist” tattooed across his arse. This draws the attention of our dink friend.‟
„Which is where he gets his next change of identity,‟ Sita said. „We‟re assuming deliberately, yes?‟
„Unless you believe in lucky coincidences. And the Doctor doesn‟t for one, do you Doctor?‟
„Dink friend?‟ the Doctor asked.
„Western-zone features,‟ Sita said.
The Doctor nodded. „Not somewhere called Dinkland then.‟
Sita half smiled. „Ronick is...‟
„A law unto himself,‟ the Doctor suggested.
„You don‟t have to apologise for me,‟ Ronick put in.
„I wasn‟t going to,‟ Sita said. „I was going to say you were a fat racist pig.‟
„That‟s all right then,‟ Ronick said. „Never apologise. That is one thing you officer-class types have taught the rest of us.
Never apologise: just repeat yourself, only in a much louder voice.‟ He raised his voice. „So. Our dink friend, or violent thief and all around scumsucker if you prefer, gets his in the cheap washrooms having seriously underestimated this Keefer character.‟
They were sitting in the partial gravity of the otherwise empty Class A lounge of the Hakai Orbital Transfer Station.
Although he was probably the least uncomfortable of the three of them, the Doctor had found to his surprise that prolonged weightlessness was not something he was comfortable with. He had therefore been more than happy to accept the Class A hospitality upgrade that had been offered to him and his companions. He kept expecting to be detained but as yet there was no arrest warrant keyed to his ID. It appeared that his professional status as a Guild agent and his personal fame still made him a registered VIP even in out-of-the-way locations like the notorious Hakai OTS. In passing it did strike him that any reasonable computer system should be updated more quickly. It ought to have been straightforward to flag him up as a wanted fugitive and at the very least cancel the automatic privileges his ID carried. But then this was the same system that had not responded to the escape from custody of the corrupt and murderous Sita Benovides, so perhaps the delay was not that unexpected.
General law enforcement and the formal Rules of Attack were linked but separate, and it was obviously the interpretation and enforcement of the Rules of Attack that took precedence.
„I‟m not sure what we‟re doing out here,‟ he said to Ronick.
„Unless we have an actual identity for