Shakedown Read online

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Chris.

  Garshak smiled. ‘There’s another shuttle for Station Alpha leaving late tonight. I imagine you’ll want to be on it. I’ve laid on transport to take you straight to the spaceport. Your luggage is being sent from the hotel.’

  ‘You’re in a great hurry to be rid of us,’ said Chris.

  ‘I’ve a great deal of investigation to do,’ said Garshak blandly. ‘That terrible business at poor Raggor’s club. All his loot stolen by some interplanetary criminal –’

  ‘But Karne didn’t get hold of the money this time,’ protested Chris. ‘We stopped –’ He broke off with a grunt as Roz’s elbow took him in the ribs.

  She stood up. ‘We’ll be on our way, then. I hope you manage to get your hands on those missing credits.’

  Garshak rose as well. ‘I shall do my best,’ he assured her.

  Chris got up too. He opened his mouth, caught Roz’s eye, and then closed it again.

  ‘Goodbye then – and thanks,’ said Roz.

  Garshak bowed. ‘A pleasure to meet you, dear lady,’ he said.

  Roz had a strange feeling that he meant it.

  The Ogron at the door opened it and stood aside.

  Chris and Roz went out, leaving Garshak standing alone in the incongruous luxury of his office.

  Roz and Chris were driven to the spaceport in a sleek police hovercar, presumably the property of Garshak himself.

  The driver was Murkar, the Ogron who had posed as a bodyguard in the club. He parked outside the main entrance and led them into the vast metallic dome of the space terminal, where a port official was waiting with their travelpacks.

  Murkar stood by while they bought shuttle tickets for Station Alpha and saw them to the landing bay. With an Ogron policeman for escort, service was excellent. There were no delays, no customs examinations, no formalities.

  Roz was quite glad of the Ogron’s presence. She’d noticed one or two cloaked figures lurking in the spaceport’s dark shadows.

  Murkar was still with them as they stood by the entry ramp to the shuttle, waiting for the barrier to open.

  ‘I get the impression Garshak ordered him to make sure we really go,’ said Chris.

  ‘Garshak good Chief,’ rumbled Murkar.

  Roz looked up at him in surprise. It was rare to hear an Ogron speak. She wondered if he was one of the partial successes in the experiment that had produced Garshak.

  ‘Not much law in Megacity,’ growled Murkar. ‘What there is – us!’ He tapped his chest. ‘Ogrons do good – get respect. All because of Garshak.’

  ‘Well, they say every city gets the police it deserves,’ said Roz. The barrier rose and she held out her hand. ‘Goodbye. Thanks for saving our lives.’

  Murkar’s great paw took her hand with surprising gentleness.

  Chris held out his hand as well. Murkar took it in a bone-crushing grip that Chris did his best to match.

  Murkar bared long yellow fangs in a grin. ‘Strong!’ he said approvingly. He rubbed his own skull. ‘Hit hard! You get tired of Pinks I give you job with us.’

  ‘There’s a career opportunity,’ said Roz.

  They picked up their packs and filed on board the shuttle. It was bare and functional, half-filled with weary engineers and technicians, going back to work on Station Alpha after a spell of debauchery in Megacity.

  When they were settled in their seats, Roz produced a small crystal cube and spoke quietly into it.

  ‘This is Roz. Positive ID Karne, now heading for Space Station Alpha. In pursuit. Ends.’

  The cube glowed for a second then disappeared from the palm of her hand.

  ‘What the hell was that?’ demanded Chris.

  ‘T-mail. Time Lord technology. The information goes into the space-time continuum and reappears in the TARDIS data-banks.’

  Chris nodded. ‘Let’s hope the Doctor keeps up with his T-mail.’

  Lieutenant Gorsk listened impassively as the Wolverine leader came to the end of his account. ‘Total disaster, in fact. Is it too much to hope that you know where they are now?’

  ‘We have watchers at the spaceport,’ growled the Wolverine. ‘The ones you seek – and the one they seek – took the shuttle for Space Station Alpha.’

  ‘And is that all you have for me?’ said Gorsk angrily. ‘One small nugget of information in all the dross of failure!’

  Actually Gorsk was quite pleased. This one piece of vital information was all that he needed.

  ‘Now it is finished for us,’ growled the Wolverine leader. ‘You must pay.’

  ‘Pay for what? I ordered you to kill these people and they still live. I asked you to follow them, and they got away. You’ve done nothing, achieved nothing.’

  ‘You must pay as you promised,’ said the Wolverine menacingly. ‘I have lost many pack-brothers. The failure was not our fault. The police interfered.’

  ‘The police interfered!’

  Although he was quite adequately funded, Gorsk was proceeding according to another aspect of Sontaran policy. Not only did you employ alien species to do your dirty work, you cheated them, lied to them and betrayed them whenever possible. Just because the necessities of Intelligence work forced you to associate with inferior species, there was no need to treat them fairly.

  ‘We made a contract,’ growled the Wolverine. ‘Do not try to cheat us. If you do, you will not leave this planet alive.’

  In Gorsk’s mind the threat justified the course of action he planned to follow anyway.

  ‘Of course I won’t cheat you,’ said Gorsk indignantly. ‘I am a Sontaran officer. I give you my word of honour. You shall have everything you deserve. I have your payment here.’

  He turned to a fieldpack in the corner of the cellar, straightened up with a blaster in his hand and shot the Wolverine dead.

  Booting the still-twitching body into a corner, Gorsk powered up the generator and sent a brief message via sub-space radio.

  ‘All Targets currently in transit Space Station Alpha. Mission here finished. Request pick-up soonest. Gorsk out.’

  Taking advantage of the fact that the generator was operational, Gorsk plugged the feeder-hose into his probic vent and allowed himself the exquisite pleasure-pain of an energy burn. Dreamily he wondered if he had been rash in killing the Wolverine leader. Perhaps. But what did it matter, after all? If he ever returned to this miserably polluted planet it would be as part of a conquering Sontaran army – once the Rutans had been destroyed.

  It is during the brief period of an energy-burn that a Sontaran is at his most vulnerable.

  It was extremely unfortunate for Gorsk that in the middle of his dreams of conquest a pack of Wolverines swarmed into his cellar. They saw the body of their dead leader and ripped Gorsk to pieces and ate him before he could disconnect himself.

  But at least he died happy.

  8

  Discovery

  Bernice Summerfield glared at the oval screen set into the crystal panel before her.

  Fizzing with rage and frustration, she sat back in her chair and tried to think calmly.

  She had been working in the Great Library for several days now, researching the Rutan-Sontaran war.

  The library itself was a vast, cool, circular chamber, ringed with tier upon tier of stone galleries, each gallery divided into innumerable booths, each booth holding a computer terminal.

  Bernice’s research was running into problems. Considering how long the Rutan-Sontaran conflict had been going on, she’d expected the files to be loaded with information. Up to a point, they were. But the coverage was curiously one-sided.

  There was an enormous amount of information about the Sontarans.

  By now Bernice knew all their complex clan structure and their early history of internecine warfare.

  She had studied the period in which the battle-hardened survivors of the endless civil wars had at last united, turning their now ingrained aggression onto other species.

  She knew about thei
r discovery and eventual adoption of clone reproduction, about the incubation complexes that could reproduce a million hatchlings in a matter of minutes.

  She knew of their weapons, their tactics, their endless drive for conquest, the civilizations they had destroyed, the planets they had overrun.

  Even their involvement with the Doctor was documented, the attacks on Earth, the abortive invasion of Gallifrey.

  As far as the Sontarans were concerned, Bernice felt like the little boy who complained that his book about penguins told him more than he wanted to know.

  About the Rutans, on the other hand, there was almost no information at all.

  Very little about their culture – though it was recorded that all Rutans were united, bonded almost, to an incredibly high degree. So much so that they saw themselves not only as one race but as one personality.

  But there was nothing about their shape-shifting abilities, their military capacity, their total ruthlessness when threatened. Nor was there any hint that they bore any share of responsibility for the long conflict with the Sontarans.

  The Rutans appeared only as the pacific, almost saintly victims of Sontaran aggression.

  Bernice Summerfield didn’t believe a word of it. She knew she was reading a thoroughly slanted version of history. But why?

  Her mind went back to her conversation with the Doctor.

  ‘The Rutans have a secret weakness,’ he’d said. ‘Something the Sontarans could use to destroy them. But they either don’t know, or won’t admit, that the weakness exists – and until I know what it is, I can’t help them. There may be some kind of clue buried in the history of the Rutan-Sontaran war. Go and find it for me!’ So far Bernice had found nothing. But suppose the Doctor was wrong? Suppose there was nothing to be found – at least, not where she was looking.

  What if the clue was to be found, not in the history of the Rutans’ war with the Sontarans, but in that of the Sentarrii? What if Lazio Zemar had stumbled on the secret the Doctor sought?

  Her mind went back to Zemar’s horrifying death. Sobered by shock, she had hurried back to the University to report it. Nobody wanted to know. Neither officials nor faculty members were available at such a late hour, and she could get no sense out of the beetle-like servants.

  Next morning she’d kept her appointment with Hapiir in the Great Library and reported it to him.

  Hapiir didn’t want to know either.

  ‘Please, Domina,’ he hissed agitatedly. ‘Such matters are not to be discussed!’

  ‘Oh yes they are!’ said Bernice. ‘The Harrubtii tried to kill me as soon as I arrived, and now they’ve actually murdered a visiting scholar. You can’t expect to be allowed to ignore something like that.’

  But that was exactly what Hapiir did expect.

  Bernice told him of Zemar’s ramblings just before his death. Hapiir quivered with horror. ‘Do not speak of such things, Domina,’ he begged. ‘Do not even think of them. Otherwise Lazio Zemar’s fate will be yours.’

  He told her that on Sentarion all religious matters were utterly taboo. The Harrubtii, religious zealots, as well as assassins, had constituted themselves the guardians of the true faith. They dealt ruthlessly with blasphemers – and apparently any stranger showing interest in the secrets of Sentarion religion was automatically a blasphemer.

  Hapiir’s long green body was quivering with nervousness.

  ‘I beg of you, Domina, do not pursue this matter. Speak no more of it – to me or to anyone else.’

  ‘But it was murder, Hapiir. Cold-blooded assassination. Is there no law and order on Sentarion?’

  ‘There is no crime here, Domina,’ said Hapiir. ‘Everyone knows that.’

  ‘No crime? What do you call Lazlo’s death, then?’

  ‘This is a religious matter, Domina, such things are not discussed on Sentarion.’

  Bernice felt she was losing her grip on reality.

  ‘Terrific! So if there’s a murder you deal with it by refusing to discuss it and then it never happened?’

  ‘Yes, Domina. I mean, no, Domina,’ said Hapiir miserably.

  Bernice, of course, had refused to let things lie. She stormed out of the Great Library and found her way back to the café on the edge of the desert where Zemar had died, demanding to know what had been done with his body.

  Nobody would admit that there had ever been a body.

  The grasshopper-like manager said nervously, ‘I remember your visit, Domina. You and your companion left us just before we closed. It was almost dawn.’

  ‘What do you mean, we both left? I left. Lazio stayed here in a pool of his own blood, what was left of it. Are you denying he was murdered?’

  ‘I have no such recollection of any such event, Domina, nor have any of my staff.’

  ‘You’ve already asked them about this non-event?’

  ‘No, Domina, not yet. But I know what they will say if I do.’

  And so do I, thought Bernice grimly. She marched onto the terrace and found the table where they had been sitting.

  ‘And what about this?’

  She pointed to a faint pink stain in the wood of the terrace floor. Somebody had tried very hard to mop up Lazlo’s blood, but so much had been spilled that faint traces remained.

  ‘Spilt wine,’ said the manager, his antennae quivering with terror. ‘Your friend knocked over the bottle.’

  On most planets it would have been easy to prove him wrong, but Bernice had little faith in the state of forensic science on Sentarion. Something told her that if she ever came back to the café the stain would have disappeared – even if they had to put in a new terrace floor to get rid of it.

  Back at the University, Bernice had insisted, against all protocol, on an interview with the Bursar, a high Sentarrii official responsible for university administration.

  He had listened to her story with puzzled amusement.

  ‘There must be some error, Domina. Professor Zemar was summoned home on urgent professional business. Some crisis in the administration of his department.’

  ‘He was murdered,’ said Bernice. ‘I saw him die.’

  ‘Forgive me,’ said the Bursar courteously. ‘You had been drinking rekkar, had you not? It is known to produce nightmares, hallucinations even, in those unused to it.’

  ‘Are you telling me I dreamed Zemar’s murder?’

  ‘You both returned to the University, together, in the early hours of the morning,’ said the Bursar coldly. ‘Apparently it was necessary to ask you to make less noise. There are several witnesses. Very early next morning Professor Zemar received an urgent message from his home university. He left by the next available shuttle. You, I understand, slept late.’

  ‘Maybe I did, but the rest of it’s just not true. I came back alone last night and tried to report his death but no one would listen to me.’

  ‘There are many witnesses to the truth of what I say, Domina. Servants, officials, even a member of the faculty.’

  ‘What about fellow students? Off-worlders, like me? Did any of them see Lazio alive here last night?’

  ‘Fortunately for your reputation, Domina, they were all asleep.’ The Bursar paused. ‘This matter has already reached the ears of the Lord Chancellor. He has asked me to deal leniently with you, for the sake of your connection with some old friend of his. Otherwise I should have been forced to ask you to leave us – and to send a formal report to the University of Antares.’ And that had been that. After all, she’d get nowhere with her mission if she was expelled from the planet.

  Quietly furious, Bernice thanked the Bursar for his help and went back to find Hapiir. He had taken her to her work-station and she had begun her research.

  There just didn’t seem anything more she could do. She was already branded as an unreliable drunk, prone to seeing things.

  Over the next few days, she had asked one or two of her fellow scholars about Zemar. They all seemed to believe he’d been summoned home. One had hinted he’d been suddenly fired for exc
essive boozing, another had heard that he’d collapsed and been sent home ill.

  Classic disinformation, thought Bernice – and a conspiracy that ran from top to bottom, from the Bursar’s office to a boozer’s bar.

  She was willing to bet that some equally convincing story had reached Zemar’s home university to explain his non-arrival. A drunken accident, or a bar-room brawl, all best hushed up.

  Sentarion was a place where you could just disappear.

  Bernice imagined the Doctor arriving to look for her, only to be met with polite surprise and a convincing story of her unexpected departure.

  He wouldn’t believe it, of course. But there would be nothing he could do.

  Her mind came full circle, back to her mission.

  She was convinced that if Sentarion did have a secret history it was all on record – somewhere. It was implicit in the nature of the Sentarrii – they were scholars, historians, archivists. Somewhere the information she wanted existed.

  But it wouldn’t be found anywhere she was allowed to look.

  So logically –

  ‘Computer – provide general map of University complex.’ The map appeared on the screen.

  ‘Indicate areas forbidden to visiting scholars.’

  Several areas became shaded in.

  ‘Focus on area with highest security rating.’

  The screen went blank. Words appeared: ‘PLEASE STATE PURPOSE OF ENQUIRY.’

  ‘So that high-security area can be avoided,’ said Bernice. She waited. No human would fall for it of course. But computers were literal-minded – and trusting.

  The map reappeared and then closed in on a large circular area close to the centre of the University. The area was completely blanked out.

  ‘State official designation of high-security area.’

  Lettering appeared across the blank area: ‘ACCESS DENIED.’

  Bernice thought hard. Computers can deny you information, but they don’t lie. Zemar’s drunken ramblings came back to her.