Doctor Who_ So Vile a Sin - Ben Aaronovitch [45]
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Iaomnet nodded her head.
‘Trust me,’ said the Doctor. ‘There’s madness in my method.
And now we have to get going.’ He pointed down one of the corridors. ‘This way I think.’
Iaomnet blinked. They had stopped.
‘How long have I just been standing here?’ she asked the Doctor.
‘About five minutes,’ he said. He was leaning against the wall of the chamber, a six-sided room. There were bits of scored metal embedded in the dark stuff of the floor, as though some kind of machinery had been ripped free, long ago. ‘You’re all right, it’s just that your brain switched off and let your legs get on with it.
Einstein said you only needed the spine for marching.’
‘Where are we? Do you – do you know where we’re going?’
‘We’re somewhere close to the surface. Don’t give up hope.’
‘They’ve gone. They’ve left us here. They think we’re dead, and even if they didn’t, after that, after that happened, who’d stay here? You’d leave as fast as you could.’
Iaomnet sat down on the floor, cross-legged. After a moment, the Doctor came up and stood over her.
‘What did you see?’ he said.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Come on, Iaomnet. You’re an operative, a trained observer.
You must have seen something.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Never mind that. Tell me what you saw in there.’
‘Zatopek had a gun,’ she said. ‘And he said we were going on no matter what you said, and…’ Iaomnet shook her head. She had a weird urge to curl up in a ball, a bulky, awkward ball with fat arms and legs and a head shaped like an, er, ball. ‘Oh God,’
she said. ‘I’m not making sense.’
The Doctor put his faceplate close to hers. His eyebrows were drawn together in a worried frown. ‘Never mind,’ he said.
‘Are we going to get out of here?’ she said.
The Doctor paused. ‘Do you feel that?’ he said.
Iaomnet said, ‘No.’ The Doctor knelt, took her gloved hand, and pressed it, palm down, against the floor.
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She felt the distant vibration. ‘What is it?’ she said. Almost.
Almost but not quite remembering. Remembering the machinery in the central chamber, the way it. Moved. ‘Oh God.’ She snatched her hand away from the floor.
‘It’s our rescue ship landing,’ said the Doctor. ‘Unless I’m very much mistaken.’ She looked up at him. ‘Are you ready for one last stint of walking?’
‘Yes!’ She bounced to her feet. ‘They’ll go without us. We have to move – now!’
Roz was already pulling on her suit as the ISN Wilfred Owen, Sassoon Class, touched down on the ugly surface of Iphigenia. It was a state-of-the-art All Hostile Environments Garment, skin-tight, elastic and light as a feather, the helmet made of the same stuff as the bodysuit but turned hard and transparent. It was more comfortable than her street clothes.
She felt the big engines shut down, the tremble in the walls quietening, a feeling of weight as the rock gave slightly beneath the shuttle. The two troopers with her, wearing their own AHEGs, waited patiently.
A few moments later, Captain Sekeris’s voice came through the suit radio. ‘All right, ma’am,’ he said. ‘Go ahead when you’re ready.’ The poor man had been acting like a servant ever since she’d managed to convince him she was on a secret mission for the Empress. A real Forrester, right there on his ship, probably working for one of the intelligence agencies to boot. He was young for a captain, eager to do the right thing.
The troopers followed her out of the airlock, a ramp unfolding to take them down to the rocky surface. Each of them carried heavy sensor equipment, the output appearing on a palmtop Roz carried on a strap over her shoulder. ‘Still nothing on the ship’s sensors, ma’am,’ Sekeris told her.
‘Stand by,’ she said. ‘We’ll spread out and search the area between the ship and the mountain.’
‘What if they went… inside, ma’am?’
‘I want to avoid entering the mountain if at all possible. We don’t know how deep those structures go. All right, let’s go.’
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