Doctor Who_ Original Sin - Andy Lane [119]
How to pass a message on without attracting suspicion? Pig Latin, perhaps?
He knew that Bernice was familiar with it. The question was, was Beltempest?
‘Tell her, “Ashtray the ipshay,”’ he said finally.
Beltempest frowned.
‘Ashtray the ipshay? Will she understand that?’
‘It’s vital to us all that she does,’ the Doctor said, and with that he was gone.
Beltempest glanced back along the boarding tube. A solid phalanx of Hith warriors was sliding towards him.
‘Come on, lads,’ he yelled, and ran towards the Skel’Ske.
‘Yes,’ the man behind the desk said. ‘Come to me, Doctor. I’ve opened the way for you. I’ve made it easy. Don’t disappoint me now.’
Through the eyes of a security camera above the door to hyperspace, he watched the Doctor’s hesitant footsteps, and whispered: ‘Come into my par-lour.’
‘Said the spider to the fly,’ the Doctor said and wondered why the thought had popped into his head. Then again, this had all the signs of a classic trap.
Beltempest had wondered why the Hith hadn’t suspected one, and now the Doctor was in a similar quandary. Well, he was there, and that was the only sign he needed. He and traps seemed to have a natural affinity for each other.
The room through the doorway was plain, apart from a desk and a door in the far wall. The Doctor paused for a moment to inspect the dry coffee stain on the floor, then quickly dived behind a desk at the sound of pounding footsteps. In the metal wall he saw the reflections of a horde of sleek, four-armed bots running past. He counted to ten, then climbed to his feet and left the room through the other door.
202
The corridor outside was deserted. Left or right? He closed his eyes and sniffed with his mind. Right. Right, and up a number of levels.
There was a null-grav shaft at the end of the corridor. He climbed into it and let it carry him upwards. Carry the battle to the enemy, that was his motto.
Walk blithely into the arms of danger, that was another one. Sheer stupidity usually carried the day, that was a third.
The shaft kept going up, and so did he. The TARDIS was getting slowly and surely closer. Bernice would be all right for a little while longer. She would understand that his present priority was to ensure that the TARDIS was safe.
Wouldn’t she?
He kept checking up and down the shaft’s length, but nobody else was using it. Was that an ominous sign?
Flashing past one of the upper levels, the Doctor thought he saw a sleek metal form standing watching him from the opening. It made no attempt to step into the shaft after him. Perhaps he had been mistaken. Perhaps it hadn’t noticed him.
Another, standing in an opening. Its head twisted to watch him hurtle past, ever upward. He watched it diminish below him. He was expected: that much was obvious. And he thought he knew by whom. The Interstellar Nanoatomic ITEC – that was an unforgivably obvious clue, a real cock pheasant of a clue, as Holmes would have said.
The null-grav field began to slow him down as he approached the top of the shaft, and the TARDIS. He slowed to a halt, and waited nervously in the shaft, gazing into the shadowed room that lay through the only exit.
The director’s office. Under normal circumstances, there was no way that he should have been allowed to get that far. Ergo, he was expected.
Nothing. No sound. No movement.
Cautiously he stepped into the room.
The carpet was deep and soft. A desk stood over to one side, lights flickering in its depths. His deep-seated empathic connection with the TARDIS told him that his time craft was over to one side, but for the moment he was more concerned with the way the lights from the desk played over a metal shape sitting behind it: a bot whose surface had been formed into the creases and folds of an old fashioned, high-collared suit. He couldn’t quite see the face, but he didn’t need to. He knew who was sitting behind the desk; or rather, who was sitting inside the machine that was sitting behind