Doctor Who_ Transit - Ben Aaronovitch [76]
They came to a door marked 'Locker Room - Authorized Personnel Only'. The door had been left slightly ajar.
There was a dead body inside. Some poor dust jockey that had the bad luck to be changing when Benny came through. A blackened gunshot wound in his chest. The Doctor knelt uselessly to check his pulse. He must have been reading a hard copy of Porn Technik when she'd hit him. There were glossy pictures of naked people scattered around his head, high resolution bodies in poses as stiff and lifeless as his own. Some of the pages were charred at the edges.
'Now we know,' said the Doctor.
They ran down the short corridor that led to the hangar. A glance at the status board on the inside of the blast door showed the stolen dustkart moving out on to the Tharsis Plain.
'There she goes,' said the Doctor.
The blast door slid slowly upwards, and the Doctor ducked underneath it before it was completely open. A line of dustkarts were parked inside. The Doctor headed for the vehicle nearest the hangar doors. The dustkart was painted a virulent shade of dayglo orange shot through with triangular silver flashes for satellite identification. The main body was ten metres long and slung between six man-high wheels with independent suspension.
By the time she reached him the Doctor had already undogged the side hatch and was pulling himself inside.
Kadiatu grabbed the side handles and swung up behind him. The underside of the cabin had patches of bare metal where sand had scoured off the paintwork.
Inside the cabin smelt of acetone and old sweat. It had two sprung seats placed in front of the windscreen, their size indicating that it was usual to drive suited up. An airtight door leading back to the main cabin. The Doctor sat down in the right-hand driver's seat and looked over the controls. He flipped up a failsafe flap and punched the button inside. The side hatch slammed shut and Kadiatu felt her ears pop as the cabin pressurized. Servo motors whirred as she lowered herself into the left-hand seat, finding the optimum ergonomic position for her body.
The controls were clumped together in little groups with the kind of backlit push-down buttons and liquid crystal VDUs that Kadiatu associated with immediate post-war design.
There was a sudden vibration through the cabin floor as the Doctor kicked in the engines. He flexed his fingers and put his hand on the negative feedback joystick.
'Get on the radio,' said the Doctor, 'and see if you can get them to open the airlock doors.'
'How?'
'Extemporise,' the Doctor told her.
Kadiatu found a headphone set hanging over the windscreen. Stuck next to it was a flat hologram pin-up from Porn Technik, a leggy blonde with green scales growing out of her perfect skin. Kadiatu got a queasy feeling thinking that the headphones probably belonged to the dead man in the locker room. Sex and death, she thought as she settled them over her hair and adjusted the pin microphone in front of her lips.
'Anybody there?' she asked.
'This is Achebe Rim traffic control,' said a voice in her ears, 'calling Rover three-two. You are without authorization. Shut down your engines and open hatches.'
'Traffic control,' said Kadiatu. 'This is Rover three-two, we are in hot pursuit of a murder suspect, open the airlock hatches.'
The engines roared as the Doctor pushed up the accelerator handle and the dustkart jumped forward.
'Rover three-two,' said traffic control, 'what is your authority?'
The Doctor swerved the dustkart round to face the airlock doors and accelerated. Kadiatu watched horrified through the windscreen as the doors loomed up.
'I'm not going to stop,' said the Doctor.
'Listen, traffic control,' said Kadiatu, 'our authority's lying dead in the locker room and if you don't open the doors we're all going to find out just how strong they really are.'
The airlock's inner doors slid open just in time and the dustkart barrelled through. The seat tightened around Kadiatu's hips and shoulders as the Doctor jammed on the brakes. The dustkart halted