Doctor Who: Transit (13 page)

'I can't see you,' he said.

Fu stretched out a long arm and placed a minicam on top of the TV.

'That's better.'

A wedge-shaped portion of Credit Card's hair had been shaved away and a strip of artificial skin ran down from it to above his right eyebrow.

'Can't you stop him?' asked Ming.

'He's putting on his armour, for chrissakes, I didn't even know he had it with him. I'm not crazy enough to try and get in his way.'

'What about Dogface?'

'He's at the local medical centre. The spike was off centre and missed his spine. It's just a kidney, some intestine and a few other bits and bobs they have to replace. He should be out and about in a few days.'

'Is there any more?'

'There's loads more,' said Credit Card. 'Old Sam's taking Blondie with him. Says he needs someone who knows the stop.'

'They know about the riots?'

'It's on TV, ain't it?'

'So why's he going?'

'I think he's got business but the way he's acting I don't know. It's like he's on a mission or something.'

'V Soc,' said Fu from behind the TV.

'What was that?' asked Credit Card.

'Nothing,' said Ming. 'What about the freesurfers that attacked you?'

'I didn't see them till they was dead and believe me that's the best way to see them. Scary stuff. The KGB scraped up the remains and took them away. I don't know where.'

'Probably the Nueva Lubyanka,' said Ming. With Dogface down and Old Sam going up the line with Blondie, Ming was down to just two Special Maintenance. 'There's been some more of those power drains you and Dogface found so fascinating.'

'Christ, Ming, I need a rest.'

You shouldn't have spent twenty years making yourself fucking indispensable then, should you?'

Credit Card terminated the link from his end.

'I may have married you,' said Fu, 'but I'm glad I don't work for you.'

'Management is a hierarchical process,' said Ming. 'You're never going to be comfortable with your boss, however nice she is. Better to give them a proper hate figure in the first place, that way they know where they are. Play your cards right and your employees do the work right just to spite you.'

'Does that mean that underneath that cold hard exterior you're really a warm lovable human being?'

'Fu,' said Ming, 'you never heard a rationalization before?'

She punched a call code into the phone.

A dancer dressed in abbreviated green armour appeared on the screen. It was a classy graphic for a hold signal but the illusion of reality was destroyed by the way the decoder spread random pixels over the image. The dancer was replaced by a joyboy's face that didn't look real even though it probably was.

'Ice Maiden,' said the face.

'I want to talk to Francine,' said Ming.

Stazione Centrale de Rhea

Have you ever used a Vicker's All-Body Combat System before?

The world had become a very simple place for Blondie, an abstract landscape leached of colour, simplified into friends and targets by the helmet's CPU. The data went straight into the auxiliary contact jack on his neck the images forming directly behind his eyes.

Please specify which weapon systems are activated.

The military software had been surprisingly polite, running down a pre-arm checklist before fine-tuning the system to his requirements. It gave him the simplest possible combat environment and divided up the world into discrete zones of evaluated danger. Moving around gave Blondie a profound feeling of unreality, as if he were playing an intricate VR game. Lambada said that the veterans had systems like this chipped into their cortex. Combat software directly integrated into the mind's eye.

Please specify current rules of engagement.

Blondie realised that this was the way Old Sam saw the world all the time.

'Can you hear me ?'
asked Old Sam.

Old Sam was wearing his full rig from the war. It came out of the same bags as the helmet, piece by piece, smelling of grease and liquid Teflon. He must have maintained the equipment over all those years. Blondie had heard somewhere that it had over two thousand separate components. He had a vision of Old Sam, late at night, bent over a workbench. Tools and components laid out in neat rows around the workspace, squinting to hold a jeweller's eyeglass in place as he assembled some microscopic widget. Except he wouldn't be using an eyeglass, not with the eyes he already owned.

'Hey Blondie,'
said Old Sam, louder.
'Can you hear me?'
It was radio communication relayed into the helmet speakers.

'How come we're using radio ?'
asked Blondie.

'ECM,'
said Dogface.
'No direct neural input that can be accessed from outside. You don't want the enemy breaking into the net and scrambling your mind. How do you feel ?'

'Strange.'

'You'll get used to it. Has the CPU asked for rules of engagement yet?'

'Yes.'

'Tell it Melbourne Protocols.'

Blondie formed the words in his mind and pushed them towards the interface. It wasn't that different from the work he'd been doing in system maintenance.

'You won't notice any difference at the moment but the CPU won't let you fire unless it detects a weapon,'
said Old Sam
'Now a few things to remember. You're wearing what's called "low threat" armour. Support troops used to wear it, medics, base personnel and the like. The breastplate, codpiece and greaves can take a direct hit from most projectile or energy weapons, the rest of it cannot. I'm not expecting real trouble but if we get into a firefight get your face in the dirt and I'll handle it.'

'What if you can't handle it?'

'I wouldn 't think about that contingency, my lad,'
said Old Sam.
'I really wouldn't.'

Credit Card came over to join them. Blondie watched the silver kill icon hovering over his chest. As Credit Card got closer the icon refined its position until it was neatly aligned slightly to the left of his breastbone.

Bang, thought Blondie, straight through the heart.

He broke into a sudden sweat when he realized what he'd nearly done. No wonder Old Sam had him on failsafe.

'Visors up,' said Credit Card testily, 'or I'm not talking to either of you.'

Lowell Depot

The dead were waiting for them at the station. They lined the platform in four neat rows, tricked out in their best black bodybags for the special occasion. Pinned to the foot end of each bag was a white smart card, little robotic forget-me-nots to carry the dead into the inactive files of the system database. Some of the bags were far too short to contain adults.

The Doctor and Kadiatu had to step over them to reach the exit.

Kadiatu waited in the archway, watching as the Doctor unsealed one of the smaller bags. Caught a glimpse of the child's pale face and the puckered hole above its left eye. The Doctor looked up from the body and straight into her eyes. Kadiatu turned away, trying to catch her breath. The Doctor took her arm, leading her away from the platform, but she stumbled over nothing and fell against the wall.

'Cry,' said the Doctor.

Kadiatu cried for the first time since her parents' funeral. Her face buried in the Doctor's shoulder awkwardly bent over to reach his level. He didn't move, no arm put around her shoulders, no words of comfort. He just waited until she'd finished.

'Better?' he asked when she'd straightened up.

Kadiatu nodded.

'Lesson number one,' said the Doctor. 'Those that travel this road, walk alone.' Then he smiled and, reaching up, patted her cheek. 'But backup is always useful.'

It made her feel better but she was damned if she knew why.

For passengers a transit station consists of an entrance, the platforms and the concourses. For an engineer like Kadiatu they're much larger. Even the smallest branch station had a network of conduits, maintenance shafts, niches for cleaning robots, not to mention the parallel freight station with its handlers and cargo lifts.

Lowell Depot had been built during the post-war boom years. Pluto had been expected to soak up the population overspill from the more crowded worlds and the depot had massive overcapacity built in. That was before the Australian Famine and the Martian terraforming project, before the stop became the Stop. Like Kings Cross, it was a labyrinth of passageways and open space, only here mostly empty.

Finding their way to the main Central Line platform was going to be a problem.

An autokart raced towards them when they emerged on to a concourse, stopped suddenly a metre from their feet and beeped twice. Kadiatu looked at the Doctor, who shrugged. The kart beeped again and performed a neat three-point turn.

'Down boy,' said the Doctor. 'Sit, beg, roll over, play dead.'

'It's an autokart,' said Kadiatu.

'I think it wants us to get in.'

'That's not necessarily a good reason to do it, though. Is it?'

'More use than a ball of string,' said the Doctor and climbed aboard. Kadiatu followed him on and tried to find a comfortable position for her legs.

They sat there for a minute or two, feeling a bit foolish. The Doctor nudged Kadiatu in the ribs and pointed to the dashboard. There was a small microphone inset above the station name-plate.

'Central Line platform,' she said, 'please.'

The kart moved off down the concourse.

'Ah,' said the Doctor, 'the magic word.'

Entering the next concourse was like driving on to a building site. A line of yellow and black-striped drones were parked against one wall. Streaks of dirty black soot ran along their flanks, some of them showed extensive damage and signs of small arms fire.

'Fire-fighters,' said Kadiatu.

Small crablike robots scuttled over the drones, slipping in and out of open inspection panels. There were painful flashes of blue light as they electrowelded patches over damaged bodywork.

'This must be the forward workshop,' said the Doctor, 'where the walking wounded are patched up and sent back to the front.'

'No wonder the line was closed to passengers,' said Kadiatu. 'They must have been moving all this up.'

A blue police-drone buzzed the kart and scanned them with bursts of pink laser light.

'Oh shit,' said Kadiatu. 'We're going to get busted.'

The drone kept pace with the kart for a moment before becoming suddenly uninterested in them and gliding away.

'Did you do that?' asked Kadiatu.

'No,' said the Doctor, 'did you?'

'No.'

There was a knot of technicians at the end of the concourse. They were clustered around a projected map of the area. Kadiatu noticed that a lot of it was marked red for danger. The Doctor doffed his hat at them as the kart buzzed past.

'Hey,' shouted a voice behind them, 'who the hell are you?'

'As soon as we find out,' Kadiatu shouted back, 'we'll let you know.'

There were more drones in the next concourse and the next. They passed an assault model doing downtime, surrounded by worried-looking soldiers dressed in dirty olive green. Some malfunction must have popped all its jack turrets; lethal weapons sprung out at full extension like a busted puzzle box.

They heard the people before they saw them - a low restless muttering cut through with the sound of crying babies. The noise was funnelled down the passageway, slowly growing to overwhelm the hum of the kart's electric motor.

The living were more unruly than the dead. They did not lie quietly in ordered ranks. Instead they were spread out in chaotic patterns, whirls and loops that formed around family units. Some were standing, some sat crosslegged or leant against the walls. Some lay on the floor, curled up tight in fetal positions. Relief workers moved amongst them, wearing fluorescent donkey jackets with agency names on their backs - OXFAM, MEDAID, HIGGINS TRUST. They looked like a species of bright yellow wading bird picking over a beach.

'How many, do you think?'

'In here?' asked the Doctor. 'About a thousand.'

It was like the archive footage of the Australian famine. Worse, because Kadiatu was here amongst it, riding down the narrow corridor between the refugees. Only a few bothered to watch them pass.

'They must be evacuating the whole project,' said Kadiatu.

A line of refugees wound out of the concourse. A relief worker and a soldier were stationed every ten metres or so down the line. Periodically the refugees would silently shuffle a few steps forward and stop again. On the straight stretches you could see the shuffle working itself up the line like a sine wave.

The autokart followed the line down a long curved ramp that terminated on the platform. A tall Ethiopian was standing at the bottom; he waved his clipboard in front of the kart's motion sensor until it stopped.

'There's no room for this,' he said banging the bonnet. 'It'll have to go back.'

The Doctor and Kadiatu clambered out of the kart. A big sleek InterWorld train was waiting in the station. Refugees were being herded on board by sweating STS staff.

'Home boy,' said the Doctor to the kart. It beeped one last time and reversed back up the ramp.

Kadiatu watched as an old man was lifted into the train. He was slack mouthed and his eyes were deeply disinterested Tranquillized, guessed Kadiatu, or senile. How many people lived in the projects, she wondered. Ten thousand, twenty thousand?

'Where are you going to put them?' she asked the Ethiopian.

'Poland, Brazil, the Noctis Labyrinthus. Anywhere that's got facilities, army-training bases mainly.' He looked over at the Doctor. 'Who are you with?'

'Bomb disposal,' said the Doctor.

The man shot Kadiatu a very worried look. 'Really?'

'If you've got a bomb,' said Kadiatu, 'we dispose of it.'

His voice cracked. 'Here?' he asked.

'We're looking for a box,' said the Doctor, 'about two and half metres tall, one and a half wide, with a blue light mounted on top.'