Doctor Who: Ship of Fools by Dave Stone

Author:Dave Stone
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Science-Fiction:Doctor Who
ISBN: 9780426205104
Publisher: Virgin
Published: 1997-06-15T10:00:00+00:00

13 THE PURÉE OF THE PLOT NOTICEABLY THICKENS

Page 84

‘Hm.’ Khaarli turned back to Benny. ‘Probably some kind of sonic device, thou hell-hated hasty-witted maggot pie. Pulse-pumped sound waves at a frequency fit to turn his brains to turbid mush.’

Benny nodded. ‘Sounds reasonable.’ She groped through her mind to try to locate half-remembered physics lessons from school, similar information picked up via osmosis from the environs of St Oscar’s and practical experience of weaponry picked up from a lifetime of coming into contact with it, mostly on the wrong end. ‘Something like that could be the size of a handgun. I don’t think there’s any way we could find the person who did it by now, without a top-to-tail search of the ship.’

‘Dupont, Groke and the rest aren’t going to do that for this base-court clapper-clawed lewdster.’ Khaarli gestured downward to the wretched if shocked stiff remains of Nerode. ‘I’ll see if I can persuade ’em to add a sonic gun to the list if and when they do.’

Mrs Nerode chose that moment to swoon, fortuitously into the arms of the member of the bar staff. ‘Oh my poor husband!’ she cried theatrically. ‘Life without him will never be the same!’

Benny looked at her again. ‘I’m quite sure it won’t.’

‘One of you take her back to her cabin, thou dismal-dreaming ill-nurtured bum-baileys,’ Khaarli said to one of the constables. He gestured to the steward. ‘The other take a statement from him.’

Left alone with Khaarli and the body of Nerode, with nothing directly pertinent to contribute, Benny decided that now was as good a time as any to acquaint the detective with her own discoveries. Glossing over the fact of how she had come to be there and why, she told him of how she had witnessed what had seemed to be the murder of Krugor, and that the body seemed to have remained undiscovered; told him of the whispered conversation in the dark with Mr Jonathan A. Sheen; and showed him the folded card.

‘I mean, it’s probably unrelated to anything, and it’s incredibly dubious in any case,’ she concluded, ‘but at the very least it’s something concrete to go on, even if it doesn’t lead anywhere.’

Khaarli pondered this for a while. ‘You’re right, thou mammering idle-headed measle. “Clues”, as such, are always highly doubtful. But it never hurts to take a look.’

Outside the hatch that led to the cabin of Jonathan A. Sheen, they found the captain and two others, a man and a woman, both in the uniforms of ship’s officers.

The captain had, by now, changed from his Dowager-befouled uniform and wore the worn and grubby overalls, donkey jacket and greasy Fassbinder leather cap more suited to the skipper of a spacegoing tug than a cruise liner. Up close, he seemed haggard, and haggard in a more genuine sense than the wife of the late Nathanael C. Nerode. His slightly twitchy bearing suggested rather too many coffees and one or two stims too many; far too many sleepless, worried nights.

The

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.