Doctor Who_ Trading Futures - Lance Parkin [35]
Then they’d turned it on, and it didn’t hurt at all. They seemed to think it would, so Fitz had played along – he wasn’t stupid. If he pretended it was agony, they’d keep it at that setting, they wouldn’t start going on about how it had ten levels, and this was just level one.
It stimulated the pain centres of his brain. But as such, it was just an intellectual exercise – it was like remembering being in pain, or imagining what it would be like if he was. But the weird thing was it also damped down the pain he was feeling from being strung up. So the net effect was that he was better off.
‘You are weakening, Doctor,’ the nearest Onihr told him. This was the leader, as far as Fitz could make out. He had a spikier horn on his nose, and was slightly shorter than the other one. ‘You will help us.’
‘What do you know so far?’ Fitz asked.
The other one edged forwards. ‘We know we need a dematerialisation code. Many of the fragments speak of it.’
‘Right. And what are you doing for a power source?’
‘We have harnessed mini black holes.’
Fitz nodded. ‘And what do you know about… the Vortex?’
The two of them looked at each other, gleams in their eyes. ‘We have heard the name.’
Fitz rolled his eyes. ‘You’ll need to do better than that.’
‘You will tell us!’ The lead Onihr twisted a dial on the pain inducer, and Fitz’s eyes watered as he remembered the time he’d jumped a bit too hard on to the saddle of a scooter.
‘Let me down, and I’ll tell you everything I know about the Vortex,’ Fitz promised.
‘Everything?’
Fitz smirked. ‘Absolutely every single thing I know. Scout’s honour.’
* * *
Baskerville had been standing, hands on the railings, staring out to sea, for a while now.
Anji and Dee had been watching the news coverage, trying to take it all in. Knowing it would happen just wasn’t the same as seeing it. Dee seemed affected by it, but she’d fobbed off questions about how long she’d stayed in Athens or if she’d known anyone there.
Anji didn’t know what to make of Dee. She wasn’t quite sure why Baskerville had picked her as a confidante, or quite what she did for a living. She wasn’t in much of a position to pry, though – after all, Anji was meant to be a CIA agent posing as a British scientist. She’d be vulnerable if awkward questions were being bandied around.
The television pictures were horrifying. A British rescue team was, by chance, right on the scene. They’d even diverted the royal airliner to just outside Athens to use as a mobile command post. British helicopters were sweeping the area. The pictures concentrated on the airlifts to safety, tried so hard not to focus on the bodies and animal carcasses they could see drifting along in the water.
Baskerville had watched the pictures only once, when the news channel had shown robots picking their way through the ruins. ‘RealWar Teletroops,’ he’d explained. Not true robots, but remote‐controlled machines, operated by soldiers. Cutting edge stuff, but he expressed surprise that ‘Malady’ hadn’t heard of them – the US army was deploying robot legions in North Africa. Anji had changed the subject, and Baskerville had gone back to his contemplation.
Seismologists, oceanographers and just about anyone else a newscaster could loosely describe as ‘a scientist’ were being pulled into TV studios to be asked why they didn’t see it coming. An odd thing that – the TV always talked about ‘scientists’, lumping them all in together. When they were talking about some financial story, they’d distinguish between merchant bankers, investment bankers, fund managers, futures traders, stockbrokers… they didn’t just lump everyone in as ‘financiers’. It was a bit like the Eskimos having five hundred words for snow, she supposed, a reflection of the priorities of a civilisation. Although the Doctor had once told