Doctor Who_ Original Sin - Andy Lane [59]
‘There’s something wrong with you,’ she said. ‘Look inside! Is this really what you want?’
He looked inside, and found nothing but a dark, capering figure with his face screaming, ‘Kill, kill’ at him.
‘Yes,’ he whispered. ‘It’s exactly what I want.’
And pulled the trigger.
Powerless Friendless stood in the shadows, opposite the building he lived in, and wondered. Did he dare go in? Something was looking for him. Something dangerous. The place was almost certainly being watched. Chances were, if he went in, the bot would be waiting for him. If it had survived the fall into the canal.
He went through the conversation with the bot again. It knew he was Powerless Friendless And Scattered Through Space, that much was certain, and it had killed Waiting For Justice by mistake, thinking Waiting For Justice was him.
He shook his head. If he shook it hard enough, he could almost hear things rattling around inside. Sometimes he couldn’t remember who he was or how 101
he’d ended up living in the Undertown. Other times he remembered with frightening detail, despite . . . despite . . .
A glowing light, and a complex mechanism unfolding from a doctor’s eye socket. A wrenching pain. A voice. ‘You won’t feel a thing.’
Sometimes, remembering hurt.
He took a last look up at the window, and turned away. Doc Dantalion could help him. Doc Dantalion had done this to him in the first place.
Sometimes, you just had to let it hurt, and remember anyway.
Bernice closed her eyes, waiting for death.
Even through her eyelids, she could see the flash of light. She counted heartbeats. Two, three, four. She was still alive!
A feeling of relief washed over her and receded, leaving her weak and shaking. She took a deep breath, eyes still closed, and caught the tang of burning on the air. For a moment she was back on Oolis, sharp stones gouging into the flesh of her knees, watching sparks fly up from Homeless Forsaken’s singed flesh. Just for a moment, but her heart cried out.
She opened her eyes, half expecting to see a purple sky and orange dust, but she was still standing on the fringes of the fleshy pink jungle of Ybarraculos Epsilon. The Landsknecht was standing in front of her, still holding the blaster with which he had killed his comrades. Smoke was issuing from a small hole in the centre of his battle armour, just beneath the name tag that read FAZAKERLI.
He fell untidily to the blood-soaked ground, still grinning.
Behind him, three people were leaving the shelter of the jungle. Provost-Major Beltempest was one of them. The others – a dark-skinned woman with a lined face, and a tall teddy bear – were dressed in the blue-gold armour of Adjudicators. The teddy bear was holding a gun.
‘Well,’ the Doctor murmured, ‘that was a close-run thing.’
‘Can we leave a larger margin next time?’ she asked, still not quite believing that the short explosion of violence was over.
‘If the choice was up to me,’ he replied, ‘I would happily accede to your wishes. However . . . ’
Seeing Beltempest approaching, stepping over the bodies of the Landsknechte without even a glance downwards, Bernice was suddenly filled with a rush of fury.
‘Oi, four arms!’ she yelled. ‘Something go wrong, did it? Or were your troops supposed to shoot one another and leave the targets intact?’
Beltempest stomped over and stopped by her side. ‘This wasn’t supposed to happen,’ he said. ‘My apologies.’
‘Your apologies aren’t enough. What the hell happened?’
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His trunk swung from side to side with barely suppressed anger. ‘These are trained men,’ he seethed. ‘They don’t fire without orders. They don’t fly off the handle. They don’t go off the deep end. They don’t –’
‘Enough with the metaphors. What happened?’
‘I don’t know!’ he trumpeted.
‘Would you have been so worried if he’d killed us and left them alive?’
He had no answer to that.
The female Adjudicator walked over and