Doctor Who - New Adventures - 49 - Death and Diplomacy by Dave Stone

Author:Dave Stone
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Science Fiction, General, Mystery & Detective, Fiction
ISBN: 9780426204688
Publisher: London Bridge
Published: 1996-05-14T07:00:00+00:00

They walked out of the tunnel and into the flashing lights and crowds and music of a Las Vegas with a lid on.

Outside an edifice that looked like an animated cybernetic octopus with fifteen arms and a severe case of rhinestone boils, Jason unclasped the fasten-ings on his holdall. He strapped a little hotwired electronic unit to his forearm and connected it via cabling to an electrostatic band on his wrist. He strapped a unit of some other design to his right ankle. He unzipped his leather jacket and secured a clockwork computing unit to his midriff with a roll of tape. He took a small item like a pocket calculator ergonomically designed for someone with eleven fingers and slipped it into a pocket. He popped a rather suspiciously chunky pair of eyeglasses with a switch on them over his eyes.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Let’s make some money.’

With Benny trailing behind he strolled jauntily into the gaming establishment – where several large, armed and armoured security-things ran detectors over them, took hold of them and immediately frogmarched them into the seclusion and privacy of a secure and soundproofed cell.

There were little sluice-channels in the floor and every surface was specifically designed to be hosed clean.

‘What,’ said Benny, a couple of hours later, ‘was all that about?’

Jason shrugged and snapped his fingers for the waiter-thing, who arrived immediately with a globular flask of something chilled and green. ‘That,’

he said, tipping the waiter-thing expansively with a handful of plaques, ‘was business.’

After they had waited fifteen minutes in the cell – more than long enough for Benny to decide that there was no way out except possibly feet first and in bits – a very small, very neat, very assured humanoid had appeared. The guard-things left them alone with him – and when Benny looked into his insect eyes she decided that, on the whole, she would rather the guard-things had stayed.

Jason, however, who had spent the time leaning back on one of the hard-backed chair-equivalents and whistling, had promptly bounced to his feet and begun proudly showing off all the devices strapped to him – showing the humanoid precisely how they operated, dealing out dominoes and throwing tesseroidal die onto the sharp-edged metal table.

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He had then stripped the items off and laid them out on the table. There then followed an involved conversation of which Benny couldn’t catch a word – and then the little humanoid had put a hand inside his glittery suit and pulled out a large stack of money-plaques.

Then Benny and Jason had simply walked out, at which point Jason had opined that a drink would not at this point go amiss after all that en-trepreneurial effort, and preferably one he could metabolize; so they had repaired to a cavern-like chamber filled with happy revellers, in which naked people of a variety of species swung energetically from the ceiling.

Now Jason took a swallow of the green stuff and Benny did likewise. It tasted like jet-propelled melon juice.

‘Places like Makrath,’ Jason explained, ‘are owned by the seriously big boys.

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