Doctor Who by Dave Rudden

Author:Dave Rudden [Rudden, Dave]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781405938648
Publisher: Penguin Random House Children's UK
Published: 2018-09-29T00:00:00+00:00

Now

First, the alarum-globes.

They drift through the atmosphere like jellyfish, a shoal of silver spheres, each one laced with awareness nodes and detection fronds. Deceptively aimless, they gently collide, then drift apart, weapon systems flushing red. They are small and they are delicate, and any one of them is packed with enough firepower to bring down a battlecruiser.

Thirty-two million of them clog the atmosphere, and the trait-pods fall towards them like plummeting sycamore seeds.

The pods look like sycamore seeds too: folded clasps of cartilage, sleek husks as long as a human is tall. They don’t look like much. They certainly don’t look sturdy enough to survive planetfall. But that is why they were grown. That is their design. Their Krillitane tenders call them trait-pods because, like the Krillitane themselves, they evolve to suit and overcome their surroundings. Each pod bristles with sensors, with awareness – a readiness to learn, adapt and change.

If they are even a hair too slow, the heist ends here.

Then

Three thieves met in an unnamed bar on an unnamed world, and Agrakos the Krillitane laid it out over pale Jovian wine.

‘We’re going to rob the Maldovarium.’

‘Waste of time,’ Vertebrae said, resting his feet on a battered stool. ‘Place is untouchable.’

The Silurian wasn’t wrong. The bar they sat in was just a grubby little dive, the kind of run-down bolthole you found on every world: a refuge for those who lived on the wrong side of the law, who stole or sold or made people disappear, who didn’t look up from their drinks on anything less than a three-stabbings night.

But scattered across the universe were those singular establishments, those bars of legend. The Kiasmos, carved into the shell of a living star-whale, or the Cheem bar Lux, where all the drinks were wavelengths of light. There was the Sun Deck on Midnight, the meta-cocktails of the Ruke, the Harbour Bar in Bray …

And not one of them compared to the Maldovarium.

Half-bar, half-bazaar, mostly illegal and always full, the Maldovarium clung like a secret to the side of a deserted, barren moon. You could get anything in the Maldo – a glass of sunfire whiskey infused with the light of a star, diamond daiquiris at a hundred thousand credits a glass … or micro-explosives, stealth-ships or passage to the darkest rim of space.

They’d all been there. Buying rare gear, trading information, hunting targets. Everyone passed through the Maldovarium. That was the saying. And, every time you did, Dorian Maldovar took a cut.

‘I’m not denying,’ the Silurian continued, baring long and back-hooked teeth, ‘that it would be a score. Score of a lifetime, maybe. But there’s a million credits’ worth of alarum-globes in the atmosphere, and that’s just the stuff we know about. The place,’ he repeated, ‘is untouchable.’

Vertebrae the Silurian, a reptile safe-cracker with a brutal streak. Agrakos the Krillitane, who they said had once been a spy, and Kiz Head-Taker, the assassin, anonymous behind armour of dull and featureless black.

‘And what if,’ Agrakos countered, with an oily smile, ‘it

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