Doctor Who_ Trading Futures - Lance Parkin [68]
It was quite crude as robots went – a simplified skeletal frame, with primitive hydraulics passing for muscles. It had two camera eyes, and a heavily armoured chest section, which was presumably where it kept its radio relay and on‐board processors.
The hands were little more than clamps.
Clamps were enough, of course.
It was hurting his leg, now, increasing the pressure.
There was heavy gunfire from outside the truck – all bullets, no energy blasts. So, Malady wasn’t getting a chance to shoot… but she was still alive, and avoiding the robots.
The Doctor’s robot was planning to arm the device. You could do that with an arming key, but you could also do it with a direct interface. Looking for it, the Doctor could see just the right sort of port on the machine’s wrist. Normally used to connect it to diagnostic computers, he supposed.
The Doctor released one hand, reached down with the sonic screwdriver, unscrewed the robot’s wrist, and prised the clamp off his leg.
The robot withdrew the stump, looked at it, mirroring the operator’s surprise.
The Doctor returned to the nuclear device, found the wire and the wirecutter.
The robot raised its other arm, the machinegun slid from its housing.
The Doctor scooped up the detached hand, and bowled it at the robot.
Instinctively, the operator tried to catch it, or bat it away, or something, but misjudged the ability of the robot to balance. It toppled over, like a toddler who’d just forgotten how to walk.
The Doctor was about to snip the wire, when he had a better idea.
Outside, there was a single laser blast, a small explosion, and the sound of a robot crashing to the ground. Followed immediately by a burst of gunfire from the other one.
The Doctor got to the back of the truck, kept low, out of his robot’s field of vision. It was getting back to its feet – a task made more difficult by the loss of its hand.
Malady had got lucky with that first shot – blasted the robot right in the transmitter, cut the signal to whoever was controlling it. The Doctor bent over the dead robot, reached into the cavity formed by the blast.
He unclipped a couple of circuit boards, slipped them inside his jacket.
‘Malady!’ he shouted. ‘Get over here!’
Malady broke cover. She now had an energy pistol in each hand. She ran towards the truck, pointing the guns behind her, firing at the robot. She sprang into the container, just as the nearest robot got itself upright.
Together, they got the doors of the truck closed.
‘Now what?’ she asked, clearly irritated. ‘They’ll just open the doors, and –’
‘We’ll be gone,’ the Doctor said, pulling Roja’s time machine from his pocket. ‘What’s more, I can couple it up to these circuits I got from the robot. We’ll be able to teleport straight along the carrier wave to whoever’s operating those robots.’
‘Er…’
The Doctor was puzzled – why wasn’t it activating, like it had before?
‘It ran out of juice, remember?’ Malady asked.
The robots opened fire. The bullets clattered against the truck, punching little dents.
‘So… we’re trapped, aren’t we?’
A bullet whizzed past the Doctor’s ear. The walls of the container weren’t going to last much longer.
The Doctor looked around. There was Malady, the nuclear device and him.
‘I need a power source. Hand me one of those guns.’
He took it, but quickly ascertained that he had no idea how to get to the power cell.
‘You disarmed the bomb?’
‘Uh‐huh.’
‘Well, at least we won’t be dying in vain.’
The Doctor leaned in to the nuclear device. ‘Of course.’ He opened up the time machine, then handed it to Malady. ‘Hold that,’ he ordered. Then grabbed into the heart of the nuclear device and pulled out a metal hemisphere.
‘Doctor, that’s the plutonium core.’
‘It’s half of it. Not enough to trigger an explosion. Plenty for our purposes.’
He took the time machine from Malady, plunged it into the heart of the core. The time machine was a sophisticated piece of nanotech, its ubertronics were quite capable of automatically adjusting to the new source of energy. The display unfurled, as before.
Malady