Part 28 (2/2)

Teal and Cheryl gazed in surprise at the newcomer.

Bishop sighed. 'I do hope you aren't planning to spend the next few minutes of this escape engaged in a similar lack of motion,' he said calmly.

The Doctor blinked. 'I'm glad you have decided which side you're on, Trau Bishop. Cheryl, you and Teal get up to Operations. I need to find out what's going on there. Try not to get caught. Meet Trau Bishop and myself in the Mushroom Farm as soon as you have any useful information.'

'Sure. What about Miles?' Cheryl said.

'I think it'll be best if we leave him here.'

'If you say so. Come on, Teal.'

After checking the pa.s.sage was clear, Cheryl led Teal from the office, stepping over the guards on the way.

'Trau Bishop?'

'It's a long story. I'll tell you on the way.'

In another moment, the room was empty. A few minutes pa.s.sed with only Miles Engado's shallow breathing to break the silence. Then, with no appreciable change of expression, the Base Administrator clambered stiffly to his feet and moved to his desk. Sliding aside a gla.s.s door, Miles removed the ancient medicine wheel from the desk and, clutching the device to his chest, walked slowly from the office.

Chapter Sixteen.

The troopers in the back of the executive transporter were jabbering away like schoolkids on an outing. They didn't seem to mind that it was cramped, and dirty, and smelled of old sweat. Alex Bannen, Base Coordinator pro tem pro tem, had squeezed himself into a corner and was trying, haughtily and without much success, to ignore their sarcastic jibes.

Ace, sitting up front beside Bernice, could feel hard fingers of tension digging into the muscles of her neck. Jerks and morons: she was surrounded by them.

Jeez, how had she got herself into this?

As she guided the executive transporter towards one of the myriad spiracle airlocks which lined the gothic bulk of the Insider Trading Insider Trading, she remembered her careers master, long ago, asking her what she wanted to be when she left school.

I want to be a racing driver.

If only you could go back and talk to yourself, she thought; sit yourself down in a nice snug bar somewhere, and tell yourself about the rocks ahead, draw a map of life's rosy path as it winds through the swamps and the man*traps, dole out some advice and then get absolutely rat*a.r.s.ed with yourself. Look kid; grab hold of Dave at Ange's party and snog his brains out. He wants you to, and if you don't do it, you'll regret it. Don't go off to Margate with Julian when he asks, 'cos when you come back, your dad'll be in hospital with a stroke, and he'll never wake up, and you'll wish you'd been with him for those last precious moments after all those years apart. If you see a pair of cheetah*spot leggings in a shop in Salisbury, don't buy them, because you'll look like a right pranny wearing them and n.o.body will dare tell you.

If you find yourself serving in a bar on Iceworld, stay there.

If you see a large blue box, don't go in it.

Never wear a uniform.

Never fall in love.

I want to be a racing driver.

'I need to ask you some questions,' Bishop panted as he raced to keep up with the Doctor through the aeons*old, alien*built corridors that led from the Pit into the heart of Belial. He couldn't understand how the Doctor's legs could be so short and yet cover the ground so quickly.

'Ask away, Adjudicator Bishop. Ask away.'

The Doctor turned a corner into another of the dead*s.p.a.ce corridors. Bishop followed, and was aghast to see the Doctor already fifty yards away.

'Federique Moshe*Rabaan!' he yelled, pounding past the dark openings of offshoot corridors.

'Lovely lady. What about her?' a voice floated back.

'You did find her body first, didn't you?'

The Doctor had turned off again, far ahead. Bishop's footsteps clanged on metal grillework, slowing to a halt as he came to the turning, stopping as he found a junction of five dark openings, any one of which the Doctor could have vanished into.

'You found her and you didn't tell me,' he whispered. 'You left it for Shmuel Zehavi. You didn't tell me.'

'I had my reasons.' The words echoed faintly from the left*hand corridor. Bishop took a deep breath and set off in pursuit.

'You kept information from me,' Bishop shouted. 'That's a crime!' He checked himself, and muttered. 'Well, it was was a crime.' a crime.'

The Doctor almost smiled. 'For me, concealing information is a crime. For IMC, obtaining information is a crime. The law moves in mysterious ways, doesn't it, Adjudicator?'

There was a dog*leg turn ahead where the corridor narrowed down and turned back on itself. Bishop slowed, and squeezed through the constriction.

'I wanted you to suspect me and lock me up, so that the real killer would feel more secure and come out into the open,' the Doctor said. His voice was loud and clear, albeit slightly m.u.f.fled by the neutron cannon which was pressing his face against the wall.

'They're all out of breath,' Ardamal said in mock*sympathy.

'Let's make it permanent,' growled Kreig, as her cannon swung to cover Bishop. 'I could do with some new ears.'

Methodology.

Christine stood glaring at the starsuit's virtual screen for a long time after the simularity faded.

Methodology.

A simple word for an appalling crime. A meaningless word; a mask behind which you could hide anything which you didn't want the shareholders to find out about, or didn't want to think about too hard yourself. A label attached to a hidden horror.

A movement outside the executive transporter attracted her attention. She watched as another shuttle penetrated the osmotic field of the bay, slowed to a halt and descended into an open s.p.a.ce. Technicians ran forward with magnetic grapples. The troopers who had been sc.r.a.ping the remains of their friends from the back of Christine's executive transporter moved out to form an honour guard.

Displacement activity, she thought. Typically Freudian. I've got a conflict of desires, because I know I have to act on what I've learned, but I don't want to have to think about it, so instead I concentrate on trivialities like looking out of the window. Come on, Christine! Pull yourself together and get back to the matter in hand.

She called back the simularity and watched, sickened, as the mottled crimson bulk of Lucifer rotated sedately before her. Belial and Moloch swung past, linked by the rainbow filament of the Bridge, distorted by false perspective so that Belial loomed larger than its sibling, and scooted faster across the simularity's field of vision. A slight disturbance in Lucifer's atmosphere was the only sign that something was wrong: a whirlpool centred on a speck of light where, moments before, there had been nothing. And then Lucifer's atmosphere seemed to stretch towards the blazing point. Another spiral of gas, a storm in a teacup, drifted into sight higher up around the planet's horizon. And another, lower down but traversing the face of the planet towards the pole, dragging the atmosphere with it. With a motion of her finger, Christine pulled down an information box containing a skeletal representation of the main picture with the animation accelerated for effect. Eight points danced around Lucifer; their orbits criss*crossing its surface in a complex web. Equations scrolled past; orbital element sets, thermal convectivities, gravitational gradients, Doppler*distorted spectra. It was like trying to fathom Venusian, but the simularity made a good Rosetta stone.

The points were black holes: quantum collapsars...o...b..ting Lucifer, sucking away its atmosphere in a scream of hard gamma*rays. Tamed, and under control. So that was her mother's plan: strip the planet of its atmosphere and clear the way for concentrated robotic mining of the core. Screw the planet, screw the Angels, keep your eyes fixed firmly on the profit margin.

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