Doctor Who_ Storm Harvest - Mike Tucker [13]
Can’t say I recognise the design. Curious...’
‘Well, curious or not, it can wait for the moment... Now where’s this hotel?’
The Doctor pointed across the square. Ace turned. Ahead of her the hotel stretched elegantly up the side of the hill, each balcony fringed with tropical plants. One side of the building faced a broad, open garden, terraced as it climbed the hillside, beyond which lay a square surrounded on three sides by imposing buildings. On its other side, the hotel stretched into a huge terrace overlooking the bay. Ace could see people seated around clusters of tables, sipping at drinks.
She turned back to the Doctor with a huge grin on her face. The Doctor extended an arm to his friend.
‘Shall we check in?’
‘Peck?’
Bovril’s voice echoed around the hold of the Cythosi ship. ‘Peck, where are you?’
There was a movement in the shadows and a thin-faced man shuffled forward.
‘What are you doing here, Bavril?’ Peck didn’t disguise his contempt. ‘It’s dangerous.’
‘And sneaking around restricted areas isn’t? What the hell were you doing?’
‘I needed to check the layout of the lower decks.’ Peck thrust his jaw out defiantly. ‘It was necessary.’
‘Really?’ Bavril grasped the front of Peck’s tunic. ‘The Cythosi have put all the service robots on hostile settings. Hostile! Do you know what that means?’
Peck angrily shook himself free, but his face went pale.
‘How do you know that?’
24
‘Because I work on the bridge! I hear things. You are going to get us all killed, Peck!’
‘Well at least we will have tried!’
There was a muffled clang from the other side of the hold and the two men scurried into the shadows, pressing themselves against the wall.
The noise faded.
‘I’ve got to go, I’ll be missed.’ Bavril glanced around the bay. ‘No more stupid risks.’
He scurried off. Peck watched him go.
He shook his head. He was tired of waiting.
In the service tunnels beneath Coralee Control, Roz Walsh cursed as the torch slipped from her headband for the millionth time. Snatching it off the damp floor she thrust it back into position, and turned back to the power relay.
Roz was not in the best of moods. She liked the sea, she liked the sun and she had thought that Coralee was the best posting she was ever likely to be offered. What she hadn’t counted on was spending most of her first month underground. What was the point of a posting to an ocean planet if you never saw the sun? But she was a senior engineer with a specialisation in Power relays. The power relays were all underground and therefore so was she.
She poked a sonic probe into the coupling housing in disgust. The Coralee power grid was a mess. In her opinion the design team, headed by Phillip Garrett, should have been shot, or hung, or at the very least poked with cattle-prods. Not that the colonists shared her view. Oh no.
Garrett was God as far as they were concerned. The man who, almost single-handed, had designed and built the most advanced colony in the frontier.
The engineering corps had a different opinion of him. They thought he was a jumped-up nobody who had appeared from nowhere and brown-nosed his way into a senior position. Sure, his organisational skills were impressive – he’d got the place up and running in record time – but Roz and all her colleagues knew what a rush job it had been.
If any credit was due, it was due to the engineering teams who’d coped with his unreasonable schedules, who’d struggled to make his vision a reality, who regularly plugged the gaps when something went down.
Only last week a major heating conduit in central admire had blown itself apart. The police, at Garrett’s suggestion, had put it down to vandalism. Roz knew this was impossible – the conduit was far too sturdy for someone to just walk in and wreck it – and besides, it was in a restricted area. Only the engineers and senior administrative staff had 25
access.
She snorted. The police always took Garrett’s line. He spent more time across the square in police HQ than he did in his own offices.
Garrett was a politician at heart, not an engineer.