The Doctor located some kind of emergency power supply and soon a soft fluorescence filled the grisly reception area. As they walked through into the next section some sort of vast, open-plan windowless laboratory they 85 could see more mauled bodies, piled in groups of three or four, the limbs intertwined, or scattered under metal desks.
"Did " The sound of her own voice crackling through her suit"s speakers made Trix jump "Did that alien fish-thing do this?"
The Doctor was crouching over a huddle of bodies. "If it did, it didn"t use its gun."
"Then what?"
"Anything that came to hand.
Equipment stands.
Table legs.
Gla.s.s beakers. . . " He rose up, and she saw him shake his head sadly through his helmet. "From the position of these corpses, they were herded into groups."
"By what?"
"Killers," he said simply. "Either something got in. . . "
"Or something got out? Out of control." A shiver tingled along Trix"s spine as she stared around at the carnage. "An experiment, maybe? What is this place? I mean, I can see it"s a lab, but. . . "
"Let"s find out." The Doctor crossed to a desk crowded with clutter and unearthed a keyboard.
"Can I take off this helmet?"
"Safest to leave it on. This place clearly generates its own gravity, and there"s probably still air, but I don"t know if the shields are functional." He called up a bubblescreen, but its light was sickly, the sphere couldn"t seem to form fully.
He tried another keyboard close by. The sphere formed weakly, but leaked colour in a hazy vortex and then died. "Clearly, the computer systems aren"t."
"Perhaps they were damaged when this place ripped away?" suggested Trix.
"No. Central data store"s been wiped. And judging by the damage to these terminals, in a distinct hurry."
"Falsh?"
"Well, I suppose he"d stand to benefit."
He wandered off, casually inspecting bits of equipment, pressing things, peering at readouts, like this was Vegas and he was playing the slots. Trix sighed. "You just fart around like there"s all the time in the world," she muttered, wishing she could take off her helmet and rub her temples. "I"ve got a splitting headache."
"Falsh has some painkillers on board the ship."
"I"m not in a hurry to make that that journey again." Trix saw a doorway in the far wall at the end of a long gangway between workstations and headed off to investigate. Her s.p.a.ce boots crunched in icy puddles of blood as she stepped over more bodies, frozen together into sick sculptures. journey again." Trix saw a doorway in the far wall at the end of a long gangway between workstations and headed off to investigate. Her s.p.a.ce boots crunched in icy puddles of blood as she stepped over more bodies, frozen together into sick sculptures.
There was a nameplate on the locked door. "Arnauld Klimt," she read, "Inst.i.tute Director. Hey, Doctor! I need a lockbreaker, can you oblige?"
86.He crossed the big room to join her, and went to work on the door with the sonic screwdriver. It proved stubborn. Trix looked around as she waited, uneasy and apprehensive in the charnel atmosphere.
"Finally." the Doctor grunted as the door slid petulantly open.
It was just another drab office: bare white plastic walls, a desk scattered with little white tablets, a computer and a corpse in one corner, sprawled on its front. Above it hung a large gla.s.s cylinder which, like a futuristic flue, stretched into the ceiling.
"I wonder what that"s that"s for," said the Doctor staring up at it. "A kind of rungless ladder? Cushioned air?" for," said the Doctor staring up at it. "A kind of rungless ladder? Cushioned air?"
Trix gingerly approached the corpse. "Do you think this guy locked himself in? Or was he shut inside by the others?"
"How should I know?" The Doctor patted her on the helmet. "But that"s good a.n.a.lytical thinking."
"Gee, thanks!" she said with exaggerated pleasure, but the sarcasm was lost on him as he wandered over to inspect the computer. This one had a little more life to it, its bubble pale but holding its form.
"I wonder. . . " He started muttering under his breath as he fiddled about, but Trix could hear every single word loud in her ears. That was the trouble with these s.p.a.cesuits: the microphones were so sensitive it was a wonder they didn"t transmit your inner monologues to everyone in the area.
Warily, she crouched beside the corpse, half afraid it might roll over and bite her. It was a man, but his body wasn"t rolling anywhere. Blood had pooled from the head, freezing it to the floor like glue.
Giving up on trying to turn him, Trix tugged at his cream jacket for signs of ID. Once she"d wrestled it off she found a name branded on to the chest like a logo. "It"s the director, Klimt," she reported.
"Is it now?" The Doctor seemed intent on something in his bubble.
"He"s not been gouged to bits like the people out there, though. From the look of things, he fell."
"Mmm."
"Fell quite a way. But from where?" She stood up underneath the cylinder.
Then, with a yelp, she was sucked up it like dirt at the business end of a Dyson.
"Trix!" The Doctor"s yell almost deafened her through the helmet"s loud-speakers.
But she had already come to a sudden yet gentle halt. She stepped out, shaking, through a hatch in the gla.s.s cylinder and stumbled on to a darkened gantry. "Doctor?" she called. "I"m all right, it"s just an express lift. I"m in some sort of viewing gallery. Quite a view."
Once it must have been a vast lab, far bigger than the one they"d just crossed through. Now it was a burnt-out sh.e.l.l. The silver discs sat in familiar cl.u.s.ters 87 up near the flat ceiling, giving Trix the creeps and a touch of deja vu. All they needed now was for old fish-face to come striding through, gun at the ready. . .
The Doctor appeared at the top of the tube. "Compressed air chute," he said thoughtfully, squeezing through the hatch in his bulky s.p.a.cesuit to join her.
"Must be a reason for the speed of ascent. . . Dampening particles in the air, perhaps? Effective decontamination in moments. . . "
"Makes sense," she said distantly. From the futuristic facemasks on the piled-high corpses, this was clearly once a sterile area. Half the lights were broken or flickering, so it was hard to see where charring stopped and shadows began. Up near the ceiling were patches of warm, unearthly colour, glowing like embers fibreoptics, she supposed, leaking energy like the holospheres as the lab slowly froze over.
"This must be a testing area," said the Doctor.
"For what? What do they do do here?" here?"
A long pause, a heavy sigh. "From some of the key topic names I unearthed range, focus, yield. . . "
"They were testing weapons?"
"Destructive capability. . . "
"They were testing weapons."
"It seems probable." The Doctor gestured to what looked like miniature bank vaults lining the room. "You see those secure chambers? For containing something unspeakably hazardous, I shouldn"t wonder." A succession of holospheres feebly inflated as he waved a hand over some sensors in the gantry wall. "And there you go. Camera links. These must have offered the inside view to any observers."
"Dead now," Trix noted. "Like everyone else."
"I imagine Mr Arnauld Klimt would come up here to oversee his staffs efforts. Perhaps with VIP guests, anxious to know how the work was going."
"And what happened something went wrong? The weapon went off early and they all died?"
"Perhaps," agreed the Doctor. "Or perhaps the weapon, once perfected, was removed, and everyone connected with it killed so the work could never be replicated."
"But we"ll never know for sure," sighed Trix, "because all the evidence has been completely trashed."
"Well. . . not completely completely." He smiled slyly. "A data bomb in the network wiped the files far more effectively than Tinya managed on the Polar Lights Polar Lights, but there were a few sc.r.a.ps extant. And in the absence of any other leads I trawled through for any mention of Falsh, and bingo."
"Oh? And how many mentions of bingo were there?"
88.He looked at her gravely.
"Sorry. Well?"
"Falsh"s name was a match. He must have involvement here."
"That"s all you know?"
The Doctor shrugged. "I could only restore fragments, and most of those seem to be encrypted. But he seems somewhat anxious about an "investment"
in one memorandum. . . "
"Ha!" said Trix. This was more like it. "So he"s funding this place!"
"It"s possible." The Doctor sighed. "I"ll take copies and see if the ship"s computers can make anything of them." He flicked off the sickly holospheres. "It"s probably the usual thing: Falsh secretly creating the ultimate weapon, breaking a thousand military treaties, blah blah blah. . . "
"You know," said Trix, "I can understand Falsh wanting to nuke this place to hide the evidence, especially if he"s got what he wanted and it"s all very naughty. . . But why would Falsh go to the trouble of wiping out everyone here before before he blows them up along with the rest of Carme?" he blows them up along with the rest of Carme?"
The Doctor considered. "Certainly he made no mention to his executives of taking action prior to Carme"s "accidental" demolition."
"Then again," Trix realised, "if he was was funding this place, he"d know about the way it could hit the ejector seat if it came under attack, wouldn"t he? So if he wanted to make off with the weapon and cover all tracks, he"d funding this place, he"d know about the way it could hit the ejector seat if it came under attack, wouldn"t he? So if he wanted to make off with the weapon and cover all tracks, he"d have have to be certain everyone was dead before he blew up Carme. You know, to be sure no one got away to blab about it." to be certain everyone was dead before he blew up Carme. You know, to be sure no one got away to blab about it."
"Except. . . "
"Except what?"
The Doctor smiled faintly. "He did did blow up Carme and this place blow up Carme and this place did did take off, whether or not everyone was dead at the time." take off, whether or not everyone was dead at the time."
"We saw its rockets start up just ahead of the explosion," Trix remembered.
"Could that have been an automatic defence thingie? You know, triggered by the shockwaves of those heat p.r.o.ngs being fired into the heart of Carme?"
"It could well have been," said the Doctor. "Either that or someone saw what was coming and hit the eject just ahead of the big explosion."
"In which case, where is that someone now?" Trix looked around, a little spooked. "And did they survive whatever happened here?"
"Or did they cause it?"
They mused on this in silence for a few seconds before they heard the noise.
A metallic scuffling and sc.r.a.ping.
They both turned. It sounded like someone, or something, was dragging itself along the shadowy far side of the gantry.
The Doctor placed himself in front of Trix. "Who"s there?"
89.Trix indignantly stepped out from behind him and took a few bold steps into the halflight. "Yes, who"s there?"
The Doctor squeezed past her, squaring up to the shadows himself. "Show yourself!"
The scuffling and sc.r.a.ping grew faster, more urgent, as whatever it was scuttled out from the freezing darkness.
It was six o"clock in the morning, and the station lights would soon be rising in simulation of the old Earth dawn. Falsh still sat at his desk, unhappy and alone. He didn"t like missing his sleep. It was a sign of age, but he didn"t care.
As a kid he"d always imagined that when he was really stinking rich, he would never sleep at night, only play. But he had come to prize sleep now as one of life"s luxuries.
Getting old, yes. And he"d like to get older.
While the rest of his executives retired to their luxury podules and slept in comfort, he had been awake here. Because the location of his own luxury podule was known to the Agent. And Falsh didn"t want a face-to-face meeting.
Not until he was properly prepared. The boys at the lab had prepared what he needed. It was being installed today. Later, he would test it.
He jumped at the sound of the computer chime. d.a.m.n it, why so nervous?
"I am bigger than this situation," he said quietly. "I am in control of my fear."
Falsh remembered the golden days when spouting that motivational c.r.a.p to his reflection had actually made a difference.
The computer chimed again.
"What is it?"
"Incoming vessel detected," the computer declared in its supposedly slinky cybernetic drawl. "Transmitting recognition codes. Codes Falsh personal.
Codes accepted."
Falsh whirled around, stared accusingly at his magnificent king-of-the-castle view. But, as ever, he couldn"t tell stars from ships from distant moons.
He couldn"t have that stinking thing dock here and come aboard. With security increased, someone might see this time. . . And this business was messy enough already.
He ran from his office. He wasn"t unfit, he worked out a little. Panting, he called for the elevator. It took him down and down and down to the lowest level, where he headed for the dock.
There were two guards posted at the boarding hatch. Falsh composed himself, dried his clammy hands on his tunic, and marched up to the doors of his new ship. They stood aside without question.