Doctor Who_ Original Sin - Andy Lane [99]
‘His voice is familiar. Perhaps he was one of the other Landsknechte with whom I had . . . contact on Purgatory.’
The Doctor frowned. ‘But why would –’ As he spoke, a section of the wall irised open, revealing a stretch of pristine corridor beyond. Three heavily armed creatures stood in the doorway. The Doctor recognized the columnar form, the stalked eyes, the boneless limbs, the vestigial shells. They were Hith, just like Homeless Forsaken and Powerless Friendless. ‘Oops,’ he said. ‘I think we have company.’
‘Hey, slug!’
Powerless Friendless kept slithering along the corridor. ‘I’m talking to you, mucus brain.’
He stopped and turned around. The uniformed man standing at the door of the room he had just passed was glaring at him.
‘Yes, sir?’ he said.
‘I got a mess in here. Come and clean it up. That’s your job, isn’t it?’
Powerless Friendless glanced down at the mop and bucket in his pseudo-limb as if he had never seen them before. He had only taken them from the janitorbot as protective coloration, enabling him to slip along the corridors of the INITEC building without being spotted, but it looked as if he should have chosen something else. Something less demeaning for a Hith warrior.
‘Yes, sir,’ he sighed, dreaming momentarily of ripping the man’s head off.
Instead he swallowed his pride and followed the man into the room. There was nothing in it except for a desk and chair on one side, a metal vault door set into the far wall, a window beside the door that looked out across the void of the next Overcity block, and a coffee stain on the floor.
‘Where’s the janitorbot?’ the man said, slumping into the chair and putting on a set of centcomp goggles. The desk in front of him was clear, apart from a keypad which probably controlled access to whatever was behind the door.
The INITEC building was full of sealed doors and security guards. It was making Powerless Friendless’s search hell. It was lucky he already knew a way into the building.
‘Malfunction,’ Powerless Friendless said. It was true. The janitorbot had malfunctioned quite dramatically when Powerless Friendless had pushed it out of the window. ‘I’m filling in for it.’
‘Goddessdamned slugs,’ the man muttered, ‘taking up good bot jobs. Well, clean the spill up if you’re going to.’ He pointed to it, as if he didn’t expect Powerless Friendless to spot it without his help.
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‘Yes sir.’ Powerless Friendless quickly ran the mop over it, hoping that the man wouldn’t look too closely at the mop itself. He hadn’t been able to wrench it out of the bot’s shoulder without leaving trailing wires and a bulbous universal joint at the end. ‘Is that okay, sir?’
The man grunted, absorbed in his centcomp goggles, and Powerless Friendless quickly slid out of the room, making an insulting gesture as he went. He added the room to his list of places to investigate if he couldn’t find any trace of the man he was looking for. The man who had tortured him.
As he slithered along the corridor, he heard the door open behind him. Powerless Friendless angled an eyestalk to check whether the guard had followed him. Perhaps the mop had attracted his suspicion. There was something emerging from the room, a bot of a design that Powerless Friendless hadn’t seen before: small and multi-legged. It must have been in the room behind the sealed door.
As the bot scuttled off down the corridor away from him, Powerless Friendless suddenly came to a halt. There was something bothering him. Something about that room. Something about its position. His mind had been mucked around with so much, he wasn’t absolutely sure of any of his thoughts any more, but alarm bells were definitely ringing. He ran his pseudo-limbs along the corridor walls. They vibrated slightly, as if there was a power source behind them. Odd. Very odd.
He started moving again, making for the little cupboard he had discovered earlier on. Looking both ways along the corridor to check that the bot had gone, he slipped inside. He consulted the map he had detached from