Doctor Who_ Trading Futures - Lance Parkin [50]
This hall was full of enormous sculpture. Malady was no expert, and all the signs describing the exhibits had been washed away, but she recognised Greek gods when she saw them.
‘I guess these must have stood in the temples,’ she said.
The Doctor looked back at her. ‘Yes. Don’t worry, they’ll survive a bit of water. They’ve survived worse than that over the centuries.’
Most were sitting. They’d have been twenty feet tall standing up, Malady guessed. What was knee‐high water to her barely lapped their ankles. They were perfectly white, perfectly proportioned – idealised forms of beauty. It wouldn’t be difficult to worship them, she thought, particularly before they’d been dwarfed by the office blocks outside, and had stood taller than a house.
‘They aren’t going to stop coming after us,’ Malady said.
‘No.’
They could already hear more helicopters overhead.
‘Normally we could make an escape through the sewers,’ the Doctor said. ‘Out of the question for the moment, of course.’
‘We’re cornered.’
‘We’re alive, and as soon as we step outside we won’t be.’ They’d reached the stairs. Seven steps up, and they were on dry land again. It felt odd not to feel the water dragging against her shins.
The Doctor paused for breath. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘it’s been quite a busy day. Let’s get up to the galleries upstairs, we’ll come up with a plan there.’
* * *
‘So who are you?’ Anji asked Baskerville.
‘I was surprised you hadn’t heard of RealWar. That is my little empire. I’m sixty years old, Anji. Too young to have lived through the Second World War. My parents could remember it. And we were the first two generations in human history where the young men didn’t expect to be called up to fight. Yes, there were wars – Afghanistan, the Gulf, Mexico – but they were fought by specialists. Professional soldiers, not conscripts.’
‘You joined up.’
‘I did. And I did because I wanted to fight. Somewhere, deep inside all of us we all want to fight – all men anyway, perhaps it’s different for girls. But you know what American and European kids did? They didn’t join the army, they still wanted to fight, but they didn’t want to die. So you know what they did?’
‘Er… became football hooligans?’
Baskerville nodded. ‘Some of them. Many became footballers – or took part in other competitive sports. Some took up shooting, or martial arts.’
‘God, all the teenage boys I knew spent all their time watching television.’
Baskerville grinned. ‘Precisely. Most of them just did that – sat in front of the television, watching wars, or kung fu movies, or contact sports. And playing computer games – shooting people, beating them up, infiltrating enemy bases and stealing secret plans. They played at being precisely the sort of soldiers they would never dream of becoming in real life. You know why?’
Anji laughed. ‘Because when you’re killed in Half-Life you don’t actually die.’
Baskerville nodded. ‘Exactly. A very simple, yet also very intelligent reason. The best reason in the world, in fact… but it did make fighting wars increasingly difficult, because governments were expected to run wars like computer games, with no one really dying. At first, they just pretended no one was dying – just didn’t show those bits in their briefings. But that didn’t fool anyone.’
‘So you came up with the solution?’
‘Oh yes. RealWar. Teletroops – robot soldiers, controlled from a distance. Cheap, completely expendable – but the bullets they fire are just as real as if there was a real squaddie firing them.’
Anji gave her best ‘everyone knows that’ look. 'You invented them?’
‘Yes. Invented them, marketed them. But I assumed… I’m a Russian, Ms Kapoor. We still haven’t got the hang of capitalism. We have… well, capitalism in Russia is exactly what the Soviets used to tell us it was – gangsters and faceless international financiers screwing us out of all our money. I assumed the robots would be driven