Doctor Who_ Match of the Day - Chris Boucher [96]
The breathing suit would be cumbersome to wear and difficult to move in and it would leak air, so the chances were it would be more trouble than it was worth. And it would have to be worth quite a lot to persuade her to put it on anyway. When the pilot had died his body, as usually happens, had voided itself of waste matter. The suit was in a disgusting mess. Only in an emergency would she have considered wearing it and even then the emergency would have to have been immediate and severe. Of course this was an immediate and severe emergency.
She left the body and the soiled and broken breathing suit and went to the feeding station dispenser at the other end of the cell. She helped herself to some food tablets and some of the brackish-tasting recycled water. The pilot had thought she would be shocked to be told that they were drinking their own urine and she had enjoyed spoiling his fun by not being.
She glanced across at his narrow body, abruptly aged and shrunk by death, and thought how petty and pointless their sparring had been as it turned out.
She munched on the tablets. The choices she could see were limited and not what she would have chosen given a choice. Her best chance was to stay where she was: but there was no one controlling the speeder yacht; the food tablets and the water were bound to run out sooner or later; sharing a small space with a decomposing body would be very unpleasant; and she was probably going to die no matter what. Her other choice was to open the airlock: but there was no one controlling the speeder yacht; the food tablets and the water were bound to run out sooner or later; and she was probably going to die no matter what, only more quickly that way.
Her choices came down to: sit and wait and die or get up and do something and die. She had been thinking about this for too long, she decided. She took a final drink and headed for the airlock.
As she lay in the cramped chamber and pressed the switches in the order the control panel indicated she remembered someone saying - was it her trainer, or her father perhaps - someone saying: never hurry to death; you might want to change your mind before you get there. Too late she thought as she pressed the final switch and the air pump whispered into life.
Keefer held the short sabre low against his side and ducked through the automatic doors before they were fully open. As he stepped out onto the wide, circular flight deck he drew the handgun and raised the sabre slightly so that it was obvious and threatening. He paused without stopping, seeing without looking, waiting for a cue to action: a flicker of movement, the leading edge of a sound, the first taste of a smell. There was nothing. He stopped and looked around him in disbelief.
There was nobody there. The flight deck was completely deserted. The back brace leaners were empty. In front of them the neat arrays of primary control boards and main system read-outs flickered and muttered unattended as though the giant ship was routinely making conversation, unaware that no one was paying any attention to it. Above the main level a second level gallery ran round the edge of the deck. It too was deserted.
It looked like a big, elaborate set-up to Keefer; not one designed to be programmed and left to get on with it. Either these people were lax to the point of negligence or something else was going on. He tucked the gun back in his belt. His plan had been to threaten the safety of the ship by taking over the flight deck and forcing its working crew to do what he wanted. Without the crew he needed to find some more direct leverage and he needed to find it quickly. He went to look at the nearest control console. It would take time to work out exactly what he could damage to get everyone‟s attention