Doctor Who_ The Infinity Doctors - Lance Parkin [57]
The Doctor was left holding the orange ball between his finger and thumb, and feeling rather foolish. Now it was in his hand he recognised it as an encoded key – if he held this up to the right son of reader, then the Chancellery Watch would receive the signal to go to Orange Alert, This would happen if an unauthorised intruder entered an area he shouldn’t have.
Say, for example, that they discovered someone in the Castellan’s office, tampering with sensitive security equipment.
The Doctor quickly collected up all the balls he could find and slotted them back together with the struts. Once he finished, he looked at his handiwork. There was something wrong with it, the shape was somewhat irregular. The Doctor realised he was still holding the orange ball, and so a strut must have been missing. Gingerly; he pocketed the orange ball and left the display well alone…
He sat down on the Castellan’s chair, the servos adjusting for his weight and height before he could stop them. He looked over to the portrait again.
The control panel for the scanner must be on the desk somewhere. He ran his fingers along, trying to feel for the seam. After a few seconds he gave up and pulled out the sonic screwdriver. A quick squirt from that, and a section of the desk paned and a retinal scanner flipped out.
With its pantograph and pivots it looked like a shaving mirror. It began extending, swivelling itself, looking for something. The Doctor leant forward, letting it find his face.
The round lens duly located itself over his right eye. The Doctor screwed up his left eye and stared into the blue light.
This was an eyeboard, a control panel that automatically ran a security check every time you gave a command by checking your retina print. Like a keyboard that scanned your fingerprints. There was a knack to fooling these things, and the Doctor had it. He stared deep into the scanner, tried to focus on something in the morass of faint blue. And then there was the illusion of movement, his eye trying to tell him that he was zooming forwards. Instinctively he grabbed the arms of the chair. Information was squirting straight down his optic nerve to his brain, and it wasn’t a very pleasant sensation. He blinked, activating a new subset of options. He blinked again. He started humming to himself. It started out as a Gounod aria, but soon drifted off into Lennon.
There was a click, and he heard the keyboard plopping out of the surface of the desk. He broke away from the retinal scanner to check, then returned, squinting at the scanner until the keyboard morphed, changed to a configuration the Doctor was happier with. One final correction to the layout of the keys and the Doctor was ready. He dismissed the eye board, which slid back into the depths of the desk, and tapped at a couple of the keys.
The picture of Castellan Fordfarding vanished, replaced by a series of menus and status displays. The Doctor hesitated over the keyboard for a moment before punching in a short code sequence. A number of the menu entries erased themselves, a couple of the status displays switched places.
Transferring a handful of command functions and over-rides took a couple more seconds.
The door at the far end of the room swung open.
It would be a few seconds before the new arrival found him. The Doctor’s work was done. He typed one last instruction and the keyboard reset to its default configuration before slipping back into the desk. The images on the scanner faded out, the picture of Fordfarding reappearing in their place.
The Doctor leant back in the chair, his hands behind his head, to welcome the new arrival.
It was Castellan Voran, the Magistrate close behind him.
‘I took that promotion I was offered,’ the Doctor joked.
The Castellan didn’t smile. ‘Is the Conference over?’
‘For the day,’ the Doctor said warily. ‘I was looking for you, but you weren’t around. What’s going on?’
‘We have a problem,’ the Magistrate told him, folding his arms.
‘A big one?’
The Magistrate smiled. ‘Oh yes.’
The Castellan squeezed around