Doctor Who_ Transit - Ben Aaronovitch [73]
Tinkerbell greeted him with a delighted squeal when he opened his locker. The ten-centimetre girl was on the top shelf of the locker. 'Hi sweetie,' she said. Unless Blondie responded or shut the locker door, Tinkerbell would repeat the greeting every thirty seconds or so until its batteries ran down. He took her out of the locker and held her in the palm of his hand. The cheap hologram faded badly under the crew-room lights. Tinkerbell pouted and put a tiny red-nailed hand against her hip. He'd picked her up during a shopping trip in the Moscow ginza, a non-financial transaction as they used to call them. It took him thirty-six hours to learn how to program it, his unbroken concentration driven on by a turbocharged teenage libido. It had unlocked his talent and his talent had driven him down the Central Line to this place. The day he quit the Stop, Tinkerbell was one of the few things he didn't leave behind.
He considered altering her configuration, darkening the skin tone, changing the hair and face. He'd have to reduce the cartoon breasts, thicken the waist slightly and narrow the hips. The clothes were wrong too; he couldn't imagine Kadiatu in thigh-length boots with decimetre heels, much as he'd like to. He put Tinkerbell back on the top shelf of the locker. 'Sorry,' he said. 'But I don't love you anymore.'
Blondie took out a clean set of coveralls, changed and fixed himself a coffee from the MIG. The tangle of chromed pipes shuddered and ejected a stream of steaming liquid into his mug. Blondie found there was no milk; milk had been Dogface's job this week. He took the drink through to the office and sat down at his desk. Sipping the coffee he punched up two status monitors, the screens forming in the air at head height. The desk booted up a looksee program he'd written during his second day on the job. It checked that all his drones were out doing their jobs.
The older floozies were very attached to their drones, and as a result, Blondie had got the pick of the new Nigerian YI3560s. Dogface said he was welcome to them, he felt that a transfer would degrade the personality templates he had spent years building up.
Five of Blondie's drones were doing routine work in various parts of the system, two were laid up in the shop and one was missing. Blondie took a quick look around on manual while the console scared up a search program. The Central Line was still closed to normal traffic on the approaches to Lowell Depot: yellow emergency icons were scattered all over the Pluto network.
Movement caught his eye amongst the transPluto feeders. He scaled down the map and switched representation over to traffic density. The thickness of the lines now indicated movements per hour. The central passenger and freight lines were double the width of every other line. Lots of emergency service and military stuff.
The Pluto network was fishing line thin. Most of it had been built during the boom of the last decade and was hardly used. However, something nagged at Blondie, a pattern just off the edge of his perception. Working quickly he customized an off-the-shelf pattern-recognition program and applied it to the map.
It looked like a spider web: lines of high density traffic radiating from a central hub centred on the unused depot ai Managona. When he switched to the remote monitors at Managona he found they were non-operational. Blondie tried the signalling subsystems but they were non-responsive, even with the maintenance override.
He thought suddenly of cancer, individual cells rebelling against the body, striking off in new and dysfunctional directions. Subversion of the natural order.
Like a virus, the Doctor had said.
He punched into the floozie comm circuit and got Lambada.
'I've got to talk to the Doctor,' he told her.
'He's gone,' said Lambada. 'Took off with your girlfriend about ten minutes ago. Commandeered Ming's VIP shuttle.'
'Where to?'
'Somewhere in the Canyonlands, I think. Talk to this one, she knows more about it.' Lambada stepped away from the camera to reveal a pale-faced young woman in a ripped-up