Doctor Who_ The Infinity Doctors - Lance Parkin [15]
Peltroc slumped, grasping the back of the chair to stay upright. ‘Why are you so interested? There was nothing. Just a knife, some discs and some keys,’ he heard himself say.
Peltroc was watching the two Outsiders out of the comer of his eye. After all that trouble taken to conceal his face, the masked figure had made an obvious mistake: he’d hired two people whose expressions could be read like a book. No reaction to the first two words, but when he’d said ‘keys’…
the way they had looked at each other, they might as well have shouted that it was the keys they were after.
‘I won’t tell you,’ Peltroc said, tensing, straightening.
The man in the mask hadn’t noticed. It occurred to Peltroc that the mask might be quite restrictive – his opponent might not have much peripheral vision. The figure reached into the folds of his cloak, producing the force knife. ‘You will tell me, Constable, one way or the other.’
He aimed the device, making a rather clumsy show of adjusting the settings.
Peltroc lifted the chair up, swung it around, smashed it into the side of the masked man. Caught unawares and off-balance, he collapsed with a gurgling gasp, the knife rolling from his hand.
The female Outsider was running for him, screeching.
Peltroc scooped up the knife and brought it to bear on her.
The power setting dial must have been twisted as it rolled along the floor. The blade that shot from the hilt was the length of a lance, enough not only to impale the Outsider’s chest, but to lift her off her feet and slam her into the rear wall with such violence that the plaster cracked. Her body slid down, legs and neck twisted, eyes rolled up.
Both Peltroc and the remaining Outsider were too shocked to react for a moment. Then the man – Huran – bore down on him. It was easy enough to dodge him, let him crash into the floorboards. Peltroc knew that his priority was the leader, not the hired muscle.
The masked figure had run to the door. Now he smashed it down with a single kick. He was wearing heavy boots that looked almost metallic.
Peltroc aimed the sword at the doorway, but the masked figure was already out of sight, and he could be heard clambering down a flight of stairs.
Huran punched Peltroc, bringing him to his knees. A couple of kicks in the ribs and he was sagging on the floor.
The knife was still in his hand, still set to hit someone with the force of a moving train.
‘Don’t make me do this,’ Peltroc whimpered.
‘You killed Yiri, Do you know how long we’ve been together?’ Each word was punctuated with a flailing punch or a jabbing knee.
‘I don’t want to kill you,’ Peltroc said.
But Huran couldn’t hear him, he was pinning Peltroc down, pounding away at him, not caring whether he was hitting his face, his chest, his genitals. Peltroc felt a rib break, he wanted to be sick. The Outsider wasn’t thinking, he wasn’t combat trained. If he was, Peltroc would be dead by now.
That was something to hold onto as blow after blow connected with him. Something to hold on to. The knife.
Mustn’t lose hold of the knife.
And then the Outsider was on the other side of the room, cradling the body of his lover. She was so small next to him, she looked like his doll.
Peltroc must have blacked out, just for a moment. The Outsider had left him for dead. The world was… muddier…
its sounds and sights less well defined than they should be.
He was deaf, and blind in one eye. He cried out in shock, but didn’t hear it. It was just the blood in his eyes and ears, he told himself after a moment of panic. And he was so weak now that what Peltroc had thought was a scream to wake the dead hadn’t even reached the other side of the room. Huran didn’t know he was awake… alive.
There was one thing he could do, except let himself die.
He pulled himself up, lunged at Huran, the blade sword-sized, stabbed him in the back, through his heart, twisted the blade and pulled it to the left and through the other heart. It was the way he’d been trained to kill a Gallifreyan with a sword,