Doctor Who_ Transit - Ben Aaronovitch [77]
'Now they've got us trapped,' said Kadiatu.
'Keep talking,' said the Doctor, sliding out of his seat and vanishing under the dashboard.
'Traffic control decompress and open outer doors.'
'That's a negative Rover three-two," said traffic control. 'Remain where you are. We have police inbound.'
There was an atinic flash under the dash and the Doctor cursed.
'Stop messing us about, traffic control, our suspect is getting away.'
'Be advised Rover three-two that we have the fugitive's vehicle under satellite surveillance. It's not going anywhere and neither are you.'
A klaxon went off somewhere in the airlock and the outer doors began to crank slowly open. The dustkart rocked on its suspension as the pressure differential caused a rapid outrush of air. Kadiatu saw scraps of paper whirl past, something banged along the roof and a tubular metal chair went flying out through the widening gap.
'You should really clean this airlock more often,' Kadiatu told traffic control, but they didn't reply. The pitch of the klaxon scaled up as the attenuated atmosphere shortened its wavelength until it began to sound vaguely hysterical through the bulkhead.
The Doctor climbed back into his seat and started them moving. 'There's nearly always an override somewhere,' he said.
The windscreen polarized by sections as they moved out from the airlock and into the naked sun. The ground sloped gently upwards towards the Tharsis Bulge in the north. There were three distinct tracks leading away from the rim station, each marked by beacons stationed every five hundred metres.
'Which way did she go?' asked the Doctor.
Kadiatu looked over the controls in front of her. They were labelled with icons originally derived from the warspeak vocabulary. She saw one that might have resembled an uplink dish and pressed the button. One of her VDUs changed to display a top-down GIS graphic of the Tharsis region. Kadiatu touched the screen to scale down and centre the image on their dustkart. If traffic control was right, there should be a marker for Benny's position. Sure enough a red cross appeared on the screen to the east of them; touching the cross brought up a side panel that displayed co-ordinates and speed.
'She's on the left-hand track,' said Kadiatu, 'and doing about two hundred klicks.' That kind of speed over rough terrain couldn't be safe.
'You should see her on horseback,' said the Doctor.
Managona Depot (P-87)
The razvedka were packed three deep into the black train, webbed up in a matrix of deacceleration paste. There was the occasional movement as someone used their cramped circumstances to cop a feel.
Snug as bugs in a rug, thought Mariko smugly. Termites have nothing on us.
Naran and she were in the nose, where the controls would be were this a real train, which it wasn't. It was better than a real train. It was made out of folded segments of reality and held together by sheer perversity.
'Right,' said Mariko, 'who's for a sing-song then?'
Tharsis Rim
They were two hours out from Achebe Gorge and twenty klicks behind Benny when the satellite trace vanished from the screen.
'We've lost the trace,' said Kadiatu.
'I noticed,' said the Doctor. 'We should be able to track her by her dust plume. See if you can find it.'
Kadiatu activated the dustkart's HUD and looked forward. A section of the windscreen in front of her cleared to show a composite image from the bow cameras. They were still following a marked trail that traversed the Tharsis Bulge going west. Ahead, the summit of Arsia Mons, the southernmost volcano of the three that crossed the bulge's centre, was visible on the horizon. Kadiatu had to compensate for the sun's glare as it shone directly into the cab.
Even with digital compensation, x100 magnification was still jumpy. Kadiatu did a slow pan left to right and found the top of the plume. The laser rangefinger used yellow light to avoid absorption by the red Martian dust; she used the touch pad to key the data into the navigation console. The