Doctor Who: Virgin New Adventures - Bernice Summerfield [082] - Return To The Fractured Planet by Dave Stone

Author:Dave Stone
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Science-Fiction - Doctor Who
Publisher: Virgin
Published: 1999-08-27T22:00:00+00:00

BACKGROUND 6

I’m going to gloss over our escape from the Sleed Incorporation. I’ve mentioned how my own life doesn’t often contain the sort of things that dramatic convention always seems to require – but I suspect that those exciting running escapes with hails of blaster bolts and suchlike, all to the sound of alarm bells and klaxons, don’t really happen to anybody. We just made our way down, through the passages and spaces, avoiding basically human creatures – who I’m certain were looking for us in their droves – at the first sign of them, backtracking or hiding or waiting them out so that we never came in contact with them directly.

That was just fine by me. Despite Kara’s own enhancements, the last few days had hit her hard and left her severely weakened. If we had encountered said basically human creatures in their droves, it would have been up to me to try to sort it out, and I wasn’t exactly feeling that chipper myself.

Like so much else in this account, the specifics in all their complete and tedious, deep-hypnosis detail can be found in my debriefing transcripts and those of others, complete with blueprints, flowcharts, schematics of the galvanistic wiring conduits and suchlike ultimately unimportant bollocks, put together by AI processors with too much cycle time on their slaved servomanipulators and a liking for complete and tedious detail. I have to mention one thing in particular, though, because it became important later.

We were in a wide corridor that, when the incorporation had been operating at its full capacity, was presumably something of a major thoroughfare. Now it was dimly lit by the ambient light from some blinking light source (an advertising vapour sign for some alien consumable taken from what might have been the window of a bar, as it happened) around the bend of the corridor before us. It was almost too dark even for my own optic nerves, but I was dimly aware that we had passed a large archway with what might have been a stairwell, leading upward, behind it. Going up was of no interest, but as we passed the archway I stuck my hand out quite by chance – or it may have been one of those deep-level flashes of insight I’m always going on about – and felt something.

‘Hang on a minute,’ I said to Kara, and stopped to investigate. It was a metal plaque fixed discreetly to the wall with what appeared to be letters cut into it. I ran my finger over the plaque to feel the shape of them. They read, in Galactic Basic: EXECUTIVE BOARDROOM.

‘Anything interesting?’ the dark shape of Kara said.

‘Nah.’ I shook my head. ‘It’s nothing important.’

We headed downward, following more or less the same route I’d used on my ascent. One of the minor detours took us through a series of chambers far larger than those we’d either of us encountered before. They had conveyor belts in them, and slaughterhouse hooks and racks that seemed to have been designed to fit the basically humanoid body.

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