DW PDA [027] - Corpse Marker by Chris Boucher

Author:Chris Boucher
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Mystery & Detective, Space Opera, Robots, General, Science Fiction, Adventure, Doctor Who (Fictitious Character), Fiction, Media Tie-In
ISBN: 9780563555759
Publisher: BBC Worldwide Americas
Published: 1999-05-14T07:00:00+00:00

‘Research.’

‘There’s nothing in there but the Docko-dickos,’ Con protested. ‘You said we were lifting out of here.’ He jumped in front of the Doctor and put a hand on his chest. ‘You’ve been misleading me.’

‘Settle down, Flierman Con Bartel,’ the Doctor said.

‘Remember Uvanov and the Sewerpits.’

Aggressively, as though spoiling for a fight, Con stood his ground and pushed his face close to the Doctor’s. ‘There’s someone watching us,’ he whispered. ‘I don’t like the look of him. I think he might be one of yours.’

‘One of mine?’

‘An agent or something.’

‘Where?’ The Doctor looked around.

‘Don’t look,’ Con hissed.

The Doctor couldn’t see anybody. ‘I can’t see anybody,’ he said. ‘He was over there,’ Con insisted, pointing at the base of a nearby gantry.

‘There’s nobody there now,’ the Doctor said. ‘Are you sure you didn’t imagine it? What did he look like?’

‘He was like you.’

‘Then you did imagine it.’ The Doctor set off for the tower again. ‘I am unique,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Uniquely unthreatening and unthreateningly unique. There is no one else who looks like me. Not even me actually.’

‘I don’t mean he looked like you,’ Con said. ‘I mean he was out of place like you are.’

The Doctor strode on. ‘In what way out of place exactly?’

Con was glancing round nervously. ‘He looked prosperous.

Plain smock and leggings. You know, tasteful? Wealthy maybe.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Not really. He was sort of average height, brown hair.

Ordinary. But he shouldn’t have been there and he was watching us.’ ‘It is remarkably quiet and deserted round here,’ the Doctor said thoughtfully. ‘It can play tricks on the perception. Perhaps what you saw was a robot working.’

‘It wasn’t a robot,’ Con scoffed. ‘You can’t mistake a robot for a man. Robots can’t look like people.’

‘Are you sure?’ Ahead of them the Doctor could see now they were closer that the tower was a remarkable feat of engineering. The flimsy-seeming metal column was not buttressed in any way but rose straight from the ground. Six hundred feet up in the air, the enclosed observation platform at the top of the tower looked delicate, and the connection to the column was also unreinforced.

‘It’s not allowed. It’s never been allowed. I can’t see that ever changing, can you?’

‘I don’t know about that,’ the Doctor said noncommittally.

How secret were those robots he had been involved with? he wondered. Uvanov hadn’t given him any real inkling. He certainly hadn’t suggested that they could be the cause of controversy or worse.

‘Well, I do,’ Con was saying. ‘There’d be blood in the streets.

Robots you couldn’t tell apart from people? It doesn’t bear thinking about.’

The Doctor had known from the beginning that Uvanov was suffering a lot of stress and was given to bouts of irrationality but until that moment he hadn’t given any thought to the possibility that he might be seriously devious. ‘There are no experiments that you’ve heard about?’

Con was immediately suspicious. ‘Are you telling me there are?’

The Doctor laughed. ‘Are you asking me to compromise security?’

Con said quickly, ‘No. Of course not. No.

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