Doctor Who_ Set Piece - Kate Orman [11]
‘It’s alright,’ said Ms Cohen, kneeling beside 24. ‘It’s alright. He’ll be alright.
I’ve saved him.’
Meijer was nodding sagely, as though he knew something about medicine. Ms Cohen said, ‘His vital signs are stable now. Double cardiac arrest. Vicious. But I don’t think it’s done any damage that can’t be healed.’
‘I’m not worried,’ said the hired hand. ‘He can take anything.’
They were hunched over her lap-top, looking at a map of the ship. They’d pieced together the data from the sensors and from the hired hands’ reports.
Now she was slowly superimposing the routes of 24’s escape attempts, looking for what they had in common.
22
‘He’s tried everything you can think of,’ Meijer was reminiscing. ‘He imper-sonated one of us once – only worked that one time, there aren’t that many of us. He’s jemmied four different kinds of door-locks, including a padlock. He’s fought a few of us – he used some kind of nerve pinch on Groenewegen once.
That’s why we carry him around on the trolley. Once, he deactivated a force shield with a spoon. And there were other things.’
‘Like what he did to me.’
‘Stuff from his bag of tricks. You never know what he’s going to come up with next.’ Meijer wiped his forehead with his hat. ‘It’s so dumb. He can’t get away. He’s been in that shuttle bay half a dozen times, and he’s never managed to get away. We just keep catching him and processing him, over and over. Twenty crukking times. I mean, is he enjoying it? Why doesn’t he just give up and get it over with?’
Twenty times, without ever getting the result they wanted. Completely single-minded, doing the same thing over and over –
‘I’ll need more time to, to study this,’ said Ms Cohen. It came out as a gasp.
Because she knew. She knew.
Was her breathing really as loud as it sounded?
She shifted, stretching
cramped muscles, trying to not make any noise.
It was what the escapes did not have in common that made her realise.
Fourteen times, he had been caught in the kitchen or one of its storage areas.
Ten times, in starboard engineering. Eight times in the corridors between the two. Three times in the shuttle bay.
Almost every escape had taken him through the shuttle bay, slung beneath the hub of the ship. Not once had he tried to take one of the shuttles.
He must know how to pilot a shuttle. Same as he knew how to use the guns – he just wasn’t going to murder anybody. He wasn’t trying to get to the bay.
He was trying to come here. Here. Cold storage.
The cryogenic capsules were terrifying in the pale blue light – tall, fleshy sarcophagi, their inner surfaces coated with frost, the shapes behind the doors barely suggesting faces, limbs. She tried to imagine her own face behind that glass, her own heart beating once per minute as she slept the sleep of the dead.
Cold storage was a circle at the very centre of the ship’s doughnut shape.
The capsules curved away in a long wall, circling around a great shaft that stabbed through the middle of the Ants’ vessel. In the centre of that shaft was a hideous, actinic light, hanging in the air, a long line of energy threaded through the centre of the craft. Whatever the hell it was, it made the Ants’
ship go.
23
Somewhere, a door slid open.
She checked her lap-top again. The sensors in the immediate area were still shut off. Good. She wondered how much longer it would be before the Ants noticed.
Number 24 came into her line of sight. He was moving slowly, one hand pressed against his chest, his other hand holding some small piece of machinery. At every tube he paused. She could hear his ragged breathing in the frozen silence, see the cold plumes of steam coming out of his mouth.
At last he found the tube he wanted. He knelt down at its base, activated the control panel there. A great puff of steam erupted from the capsule. Machines hissed into life as he manipulated the controls.
He lay down on the floor in front of the tube, waiting. A greenish light was beginning to glow inside the capsule, and fluid was dripping behind the glass.
As the light grew brighter, Ms Cohen recognised