Doctor Who_ Original Sin - Andy Lane [126]
‘Are we ever?’ she replied snappily, then sighed. She was riding the kid pretty hard. ‘Look, if the Doc’s right, then it takes a frequent exposure plus possibly body-bepple as well to make someone susceptible. So long as we don’t end up living here, we should be all right.’ She looked levelly at him.
‘But if I see your blaster turning my way, I’ll fry your head till your eyeballs pop, understand?’
He swallowed. ‘I understand.’
The door suddenly bulged toward them as one of the bots leaned against it.
Forrester could see its hands, fingers splayed, stretching the thin but resilient flesh. Another pair of hands appeared, then another. For a moment they hesitated, then they pulled in different directions, straining the material almost to transparency. A gap appeared between the folds of the door: small, but growing.
A metal face moved close to the door, gazing through it, its sensors meeting her eyes.
‘There’s no hope for you,’ the bot said, its voice muffled but still comprehensible. She recognized that voice now, although she hadn’t in the flitterpark. It was the same voice that the bot in the hotel had talked in, the bot who had –
even now she had trouble believing it – who had made her kill Martle. ‘Even if you escape this ship,’ it continued smoothly, reasonably, ‘where can you go?
You must know that your Adjudicator Secular is in my pay. You’re criminals now, she’s made sure of that. The Order of Adjudicators will hunt you down like rabid ber hounds. There’s nowhere you can run. There’s nowhere you can go. Why not just give in and let me end it for you now? I’ll make it easy, I promise.’
‘Like you made it easy for Fenn Martle?’ she yelled. ‘Screw you! If you want us so bad, come in here and get us!’
‘So,’ it said, ‘you have regained your memory, Ms Forrester. How very unpleasant it must be, knowing that you killed your friend, your partner and, had he lived, perhaps even your lover.’
Cwej glanced over at Forrester, frowning. She closed her eyes for a moment, remembering, then took a deep breath and consigned her newly recovered memories to the large area of her mind labelled JUST TOO BAD.
‘Not as unpleasant as what I’m going to do to you,’ she snapped.
‘What’s it talking about?’ Cwej asked, looking at her but keeping his blaster trained on the door.
‘Dunno.’ She grimaced. ‘But I think this is the end, kid.’
He smiled. ‘Couldn’t be in better company.’
Didn’t the kid ever give up? Forrester tried to come up with a snappy come-back, but there was nothing left to say. She had run out of words, run out of 215
time, run out of life.
The bot hands pulled at the flesh of the wall. The gap in the door gaped wide. A metal arm reached into the engine room towards them, its hand a multi-barrelled plasma cannon.
She took up first pressure on the trigger. Make every shot count.
A series of explosions rent the air beyond the doorwall, coming so close together that they almost sounded like one long detonation. Quiet reigned for a second or two.
And then the door irised open.
Forrester’s blaster was up and tracking before Cwej could even blink. She had time to take in the entire panorama outside the door – the bots sprawled on the floor with huge, smoking holes in their backs, the group of aliens who looked like Powerless Friendless but wore blast-resistant battle armour and were attached to floor, walls and ceiling, and the guns that were pointed at her and Cwej. Especially the guns.
She saw Cwej’s knuckle whiten on his trigger.
A blue, four-armed shape with big ears moved behind the Hith warriors.
The next thing Forrester knew she was standing beside Cwej and knocking the barrel of his blaster upwards. It discharged into the ceiling, just missing a Hith warrior. Cwej’s expression was confused as he turned towards her.
‘It’s all right,’ Roslyn Forrester and Provost-Major Montmorency Beltempest said in unison to their respective companions, ‘I think they’re on our side.’
The pain in the Doctor’s shoulder suddenly ceased. He gasped great ragged breaths as the butlerbot’s pincers withdrew