Doctor Who_ Original Sin - Andy Lane [124]
Another two bots appeared around the curve of the corridor.
Their
greyhound-like snouts jerked from side to side until the multi-spectral sensors on either side pinpointed his position. They raised their lower sets of arms: the ones with the built-in weapons. He might be able to put one of them off its aim with a well-placed blaster bolt, but not all three. He could swear that he could see the red sparks of the nascent beams, deep in the barrels of the bots’ arms. This was it: curtains, finito, s’vetch!
He tried to climb to his feet and run, but there were two bots coming up behind him. No sign of Forrester: looked like she’d got away, thank Goddess.
He’d hate for anything to happen to her.
The bots advanced on him. They moved slowly, enjoying their moment of victory. He tried to raise his blaster for one last, despairing volley, but he couldn’t even decide which of the machines to shoot at. In the end, it didn’t matter. They had him cold. It had never occurred to him that it might end this way, but then, until the flitter crash, it had never occurred to him that it might end at all. Dying in the line of duty was about as good as it could get.
The bots stopped a few metres away, their smooth metal bodies reflecting his drawn face back at him. He sank back against the resilient warmth of the wall and tried to think of something smart to say, something they could etch on his gravestone, but all he could come up with was: ‘Order of Adjudicators!
Freeze, scumsuckers!’
It wasn’t much of an epitaph.
As Vaughn poured tea for himself and the Doctor, the diminutive Time Lord gazed across the office at the comforting yet unreachable form of the TARDIS.
So near, as the phrase went, and yet so far.
From the corner of his eye he saw a movement behind him. Turning slightly, he found that the butlerbot was poised a few feet away, its sensors twitching with his every move.
‘I can’t drink tea myself,’ Vaughn said as he placed the Doctor’s cup on the corner of the desk. Walking around to the other side of the desk with his own cup, he sat and sniffed at the steaming liquid. ‘But there is something about holding a steaming cup that I find therapeutic. The Cybermen conferred so 211
many advantages on me when they gave me the choice of abandoning the flesh, but there are times when I wish I were human again, and could enjoy a lobster thermidor, or a crème brûlée, or a fine Armagnac.’
The Doctor sniffed cautiously at his tea. There was something lurking beneath Vaughn’s words, something worth probing for. ‘Yes, that’s something I was going to ask,’ he said. ‘The body that you had the last time we met could have passed for human. Did pass for human, in fact. This present one –’ He gestured at Vaughn’s gleaming metal form. ‘– is hardly comparable, now is it?
Aren’t you slumming it rather?’
Vaughn smiled slightly, and looked away, but the Doctor could tell from the way his drooping eyelid twitched and the way his hand clenched upon his cup that the question bothered him.
‘The Cybermen are an old race,’ Vaughn said, ‘and, even when I first met them, they had forgotten more about bionic technology than humanity ever knew. Even with all the resources of INITEC and a thousand years of research, it is a source of some regret that I have not been able to build myself as good a body as they did. This is the best I have been able to do, ‘and even this . . .
inadequate . . . simulacrum represents a triumph of engineering, Doctor.’
‘But you can’t eat a crème brûlée.’
Vaughn closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair.
‘No,’ said a voice behind the Doctor’s head, ‘but there are advantages.’
A pair of white-gloved steel pincers bit into the Doctor’s shoulder. Dropping his cup and spilling tea over Vaughn’s deep carpet, he gasped at the agony that spread like wildfire along his nerve fibres.
‘I am every bot built by INITEC,’ Vaughn’s voice said from the butlerbot’s bland face, ‘I am every bot that contains a component built by INITEC. I am every bot that runs software designed by INITEC.