The Final Sanction by Steve Lyons

Author:Steve Lyons [Lyons, Steve]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Science-Fiction - Doctor Who
ISBN: 9780563555841
Publisher: BBC Books
Published: 2000-04-13T22:00:00+00:00

Redfern stalked the carpeted corridors of the Triumph, unable to rest. He didn’t know what to do. It galled him to admit that to himself, so he would never have confessed it to anyone else. But since the Doctor had stormed out of his office Redfern had thought of little else but his harsh parting words.

Only a day earlier, things had been going well. He had contacted Vera Kennedy on Earth, to report that he had taken Kalaya. She had approved. For the first time in their professional acquaintance he had detected a hint of excitement in her normally immobile features. Unless it had just been a glitch in his imaging software.

He couldn’t let it all slip away. This was his first major campaign as head of the TSF. He needed to distinguish himself if it was to be his last one. When this war was over, when he had crushed the enemy, he expected plaudits aplenty. He expected his peers to welcome him back to Earth, to admit they had misjudged him, to scramble to offer him the best positions available.

Why couldn’t the Selachians accept defeat and get it over with?

Vera Kennedy would be expecting an update. She had agreed with Redfern that, if a surrender was not forthcoming, he would request permission to employ the final sanction. But whose idea had it really been? Whose responsibility? He was no longer certain.

Had it not been for the Doctor, he would surely have taken the next step by now. The end of his exile would have been a tangible prospect. Damn the man for shattering his confidence.

But what if the Doctor was right?

Redfern couldn’t trust Kennedy. He couldn’t trust any of them. None of his so-called friends, the old network, had defended him over the Interbank scandal. Oh, there had been plenty of words: how they were working behind the scenes, how they would support him. But he had seen no evidence of such efforts.

Redfern shivered as he remembered the court case, the headlines, doors slamming in his face. The bankruptcy hadn’t been his fault. Incompetent underlings had acted without his authorisation; he had not seen vital papers; the board had schemed against him. But none of it had seemed to matter. He had been accused of fraud; of neglecting his duty, at least.

Bloody-minded officials had wasted millions of dollars in an attempt to ruin him. He too had emptied his account, to employ a lawyer skilful enough to construct a defence around technicalities.

By the end of the year-long trial, the pressure had torn him apart from Annabelle, expelling him from the comfortable world into which he had married. He had always imagined that the urgings of mutual friends had prompted her decision to leave him. Those same friends had been full of grand promises, but had rarely returned his calls.

Redfern had tried to appear pleased about the TSF

assignment. When interviewed, he had talked about cost efficiencies and training schemes, adding jingoistic rhetoric about the need for Earth to have an effective defence for the twenty-third century.

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