Doctor Who_ So Vile a Sin - Ben Aaronovitch [125]
‘Oh God,’ said Timmins. Night watch’s face lit up, as though he was about to ask for the AI’s autograph.
‘As you were, ladies and gentlemen,’ said FLORANCE. ‘It’s going to take me a little while to settle into place, of course, but I’m here to stay. I do think it’s time that the Empire’s computing systems were run by a real expert. Don’t you?’
Timmins sat down. Luckily, there was a chair between her and the floor.
‘Now then,’ said FLORANCE. ‘What next?’
Mimas
There was a pit dug into the dirty ice, the edges sharp, straight lines. The buggy rolled down a gentle slope. Another airlock irised open ahead.
The hangar was long and narrow. The underground tunnels were pressurized. Chris helped the Doctor out of the buggy as Iaomnet watched. He could feel her eyes moving over him, looking into him as deeply as she wanted.
He deliberately thought of the most lewd sexual fantasy he could. After all, as soon as you met someone you knew could read your mind, all that stuff kind of bubbled up embarrassingly anyway.
Iaomnet laughed. It’s only a little way further, she said.
The floor was smooth, but not so smooth that it was slippery.
Some high-precision excavation devices had been here, slowly boring their way into Mimas. The Doctor stumbled. Chris held on to his arm, tightly, helping him along.
They must have walked for twenty minutes, a path gently leading down. Once, the Doctor fell back against Chris. ‘This wasn’t part of the bargain,’ he murmured. He sounded frightened.
290
Chris wished to the Goddess there was something more he could do than straighten the Time Lord up and help him keep going forward. Towards the Brotherhood.
The tunnel stopped at a lift. Chris recognized it as a mining access elevator, meant for engineers and managers to visit the coalface, or the iceface or whatever. Chris thought of attacking her again, but she just smiled. She watched as they got in.
She didn’t follow them in, operating the controls from outside.
Chris watched as the smile wiped off her face. She sat down against the wall, carefully, and suddenly her head rolled to one side and she slumped down.
Chris leapt forward, but the lift was already moving, sliding smoothly down into the moon.
The Doctor sat on the floor, knees pulled up to his chest. ‘You have to get back,’ he told Chris. ‘You have to stop Roz. Stop her from getting involved.’
Chris laughed, despite the grinding knot in his belly. ‘Yeah, I’ll get between her and what she wants to do, Doctor. She’ll just make a Roz-shaped hole right through me.’
The Doctor smiled, very slightly.
It took them another twenty minutes to fall to the centre.
31st Corps HQ: Olympus Mons, Mars
At 03.15 IST, Dozy Floyd 739 (serial number GPR29827739 –
How May I Be Of Service?) received a coded instruction to destroy the control centre of the Imperial Landsknechte’s 31st Corps. The instruction came as something of a surprise, because up until then Dozy Floyd 739’s most exacting task had been getting a decent shine on the table in the Staff Officers’ Mess (amber access – report all intruders).
Dozy Floyd 739 had been built by Jseda TECH, a subsidiary of ElleryCorp (‘We have the technology’), and sold to the Imperial Landsknechte as part of a batch consignment of two hundred and fifty identical models. Before assignment to duty, all of the robots had been stripped down to their chassis and thoroughly vetted by skilled technicians of the Landsknechte’s Corps Cybernetique. Hardware and software were checked for any indication that the units had been tampered with, kinked or 291
booby-trapped. Once they were cleared, the robots were reassembled and transported to their places of work. It was all done with the Landsknechte’s usual paranoid attention to detail.
The instruction violated sixteen of Dozy Floyd’s operating imperatives, from the most important (‘This unit must never damage a human or by inaction allow a human to be damaged’) to the least (‘This unit will avoid damage to client property’).
Dozy Floyd 739 should have gone into