Doctor Who_ Original Sin - Andy Lane [121]
A bot.
Its outstretched gun arms were aimed at her head.
‘Ms Summerfield,’ it drawled, ‘I believe we have already met.’
She slammed the door shut again and leaned against it. ‘Then again,’ she said, ‘perhaps there’s a couple of nooks and crannies here we overlooked.’
A section of the door suddenly bulged inwards in the shape of a large fist.
She ducked as the flesh-covered arm punched through the air next to her head.
‘Is this the only door?’ she shouted at Powerless Friendless.
The Hith nodded. ‘I’m afraid so,’ it said.
The flesh of the door stretched and distorted as the bot outside pushed against it. Bernice could make out the seams and rivets in its surface. Its blind, blank head swivelled to face her, a bizarre parody of humanity.
‘I’m going to kill you, my dear,’ it said, voice muffled by the skin of the door.
‘I am going to kill you.’
Vaughn’s attention appeared to be momentarily distracted; his eyes, despite being metal, had a dreamy, abstracted quality, and his lips were moving. The Doctor thought he caught Bernice’s name being mentioned, but he couldn’t be sure. He took the opportunity to study the figure standing behind the desk, its skin gleaming in the reddish light of the window. Vaughn’s body was obviously robotic, more robotic than the last time they had met, but designed more as 206
an acknowledgement that he had once been human than as a facsimile of one.
How long had it been since they had last stood facing one another: another office, another time? A thousand years for Vaughn; five hundred or so for the Doctor. They were both older, but were they any wiser?
Vaughn’s attention suddenly focused back on the Doctor. He was frowning slightly, as if he had received some unwelcome news.
‘Tea?’ he offered in that hatefully familiar voice. Even half a millennium couldn’t erase the Doctor’s instinctive reaction to Vaughn’s patronizing tone.
‘Forgive me, but I can’t remember whether you take sugar and milk.’ Vaughn smiled sleepily. ‘Tell me, Doctor, do your tastes change when your body does, or do your likes and dislikes remain constant?’
‘I still abhor evil,’ the Doctor snarled, filing away for the moment the fact that Vaughn knew about his regenerative ability. How had he found that out?
From the Cybermen, perhaps? ‘I still fight the guilty on behalf of the innocent.’
He felt rather petty, reacting so extravagantly to Vaughn’s hospitality, but the man had always brought out the worst in the Doctor. That smooth, cultured façade concealed a mind as amoral and as calculating as any machine. The only difference between Vaughn in the twentieth century and Vaughn now was that his outside was now as hard as his inside.
‘Doctor, I wouldn’t have you any other way,’ Vaughn said, and ran a gleaming finger across the surface of the desk. Lights rippled in response. ‘It will take my butlerbot a few moments to prepare the tea; I hope you don’t object.’
The glow from the window flickered, making his shadow shimmer across the desk.
Despite himself, the Doctor remembered.
He stood beside Vaughn, watching with horror as the flimsy double doors at the International Electromatics factory burst open, and three Cybermen strode forward. The sunlight glinted off skin like mercury. Vaughn – once their ally but now their enemy – struggled with the ungainly shape of Professor Watkins’ cere-brotron mentor, dropping two of the invaders to the concrete floor, but the third Cyberman fired its X-ray laser and Vaughn’s chest exploded. He fell forwards onto an iron railing, trailing smoke behind him . . .
Soon after that, UNIT had arrived. The Doctor hadn’t bothered looking for Vaughn’s body after the battle had ended, and before long he and his companions had moved on to the Collection and that nasty business with the Bookworms. Obviously UNIT hadn’t bothered either, and the question of the precise whereabouts of Vaughn’s cadaver had got lost in the overall cover-up.
‘It’s been a long time,’ he said.
For a second, Vaughn did not react, as if his attention was elsewhere. The Doctor had noticed