Shakedown Page 20

  ‘Sounds like the Doctor all right,’ said Roz.

  ‘So you’re a smuggler?’ said Chris, studying Kurt hungrily. He looked as if he was getting ready to issue a caution, inform Kurt of his rights and make an arrest.

  ‘Ex-smuggler,’ corrected Kurt. ‘And you’re some kind of cop.’

  ‘Ex-cop,’ said Roz.

  ‘Well, there you are,’ said Kurt. ‘It just goes to show anyone can overcome their early disadvantages if they really try.’

  ‘What’s your interest in all this?’ asked Roz.

  Kurt shrugged. ‘When the Doctor and I were in that jail, the Sontarans were going to shoot us at dawn. The Doctor got me out – so I owe him.’

  ‘Honour amongst thieves?’ said Chris.

  Kurt leaned forward. ‘Look, sonny, some crooks are people, believe it or not – just like some cops. Now, if you want to try to take me when this is over, you’re welcome to try your luck. Meanwhile, suppose you try to remember that for the moment we’re on the same side?’

  Chris blushed. ‘Sorry. Old habits –’

  ‘Sure,’ said Kurt easily. ‘How about a game of cards to pass the time?’

  Roz shook her head. ‘Not me. Think I’ll catch up on some sleep.’ She chose one of the many spare bunks and stretched out.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind a game,’ said Chris. ‘We can play two-handed.’

  Kurt took a pack of cards from a shelf. ‘Don’t know much about cards myself. I seem to remember there’s some old game called – poker, is it?’

  ‘I know that,’ said Chris eagerly. ‘We used to play it in recruit school at the Academy.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Kurt. ‘You can teach me how to play.’

  Ah well, thought Roz. Everyone has to learn...

  Business was booming in the morgue on Space Station Beta. Usually it had only one or two occupants: some unfortunate space technician caught in an accident, an overfed cruise passenger who’d paid the price for too many good dinners.

  But now there was a full house. The unfortunate crew of the Tiger Moth. All their Sontaran attackers. And now they’d found this other poor devil on Tiger Moth. Talk about a death ship.

  Kraal, the morgue attendant, found it was getting him down. He was a conscientious soul and it worried him having so many corpses to look after. He found himself checking and rechecking them all the time. Silly really. After all, they weren’t going anywhere.

  Or were they? On his latest check, Kraal seemed to be one dead Sontaran short.

  He counted and recounted, and he just couldn’t make the numbers come out right. He even knew which one was missing. The one in the fancy uniform, the Commander. Kraal counted again. ‘Come on, Commander,’ he muttered. ‘Where are you?’

  A dreadful voice behind him said, ‘I am here.’

  Kraal whirled round and saw a massive form looming over him. He tried to scream but two hands clamped around his throat. He saw two little red eyes glaring into his own.

  It was the last thing he saw.

  Minutes later, Kraal was one of his own customers, neatly laid out on a slab. Steg looked round the room and discovered that the dead Sontarans’ weapons had been neatly stacked on a shelf. Seizing a blaster, Steg was about to set off when something caught his eye. It was a body on a slab – the body of a slight, fair-haired young man. The body had been extensively mutilated in a fashion that Steg found very familiar. His mind flashed back to the body of the engineer on Tiger Moth.

  Like Robar, this human had been killed by a Rutan – a Rutan who was probably now wearing that human’s shape. But where had it come from?

  Steg lurched out into the corridor in search of some answers.

  The first to know of his revival, apart from the unfortunate Kraal, were the communication technicians of Space Station Beta.

  Steg marched into the communications room and barked, ‘Your attention! I am Commander Steg of the Sontaran Space Corps. I need information and a certain amount of assistance. Give me what I require and no one need be harmed.’

  The duty security man tried to draw his blaster. Immediately, Steg shot him dead.

  ‘I said no one need be harmed. That is up to you. If you make it necessary, I will kill you all.’

  ‘You’re one of the Sontarans they brought in on Tiger Moth,’ said Malic shakily. ‘You were dead. They were all dead. We saw the bodies.’

  ‘The report of my death was greatly exaggerated. Where is the Tiger Moth now?’

  ‘On the way to Sentarion.’

  ‘Sentarion?’

  ‘Yes, you know the Library Planet –’

  ‘I know of Sentarion. Why is Tiger Moth going there?’ ‘She’s under charter –’

  ‘To whom?’

  ‘To a Doctor John Smith.’

  ‘Describe this Doctor.’

  ‘There’s nothing special about him –’

  ‘Describe him!’

  ‘Smallish, grey eyes, rumpled clothes – very ordinary looking. Got a way with him though –’

  Steg held up his hand. ‘Enough!’

  Doctor John Smith. General Smith! The one who had deceived and defeated him on Jekkar. The Doctor. The old enemy of the Sontaran people, interfering once more. Interfering, it seemed, in the most important operation in Sontaran history. Then there was the Rutan. He resumed his questioning.

  ‘There is the mutilated body of a young human in your mortuary. Where did it come from?’

  ‘It was found on board Tiger Moth...’

  Prodded by Steg’s urgent questions, Malic told the strange story of Rye’s death – and of the fact that the crew of Hyperion seemed to think he was still on board after his death.

  ‘This spaceliner – where is it bound?’

  ‘Sentarion.’

  So the Rutan was heading for Sentarion – with the Doctor in close pursuit. How much did they know?

  Watched by the handful of terrified technicians, Steg thought for a moment.

  ‘To an extent, our interests are the same. I wish to leave here. You, I am sure, wish to see me gone. You will send a message for me to our War Wheel, and it will come and remove me. Here is the message.’

  Steg dictated a stream of guttural syllables, the secret battle-code of the Sontarans, only employed in the greatest military emergencies.

  Obediently Malic transmitted the message.

  ‘What now?’

  ‘We wait,’ said Steg. ‘Continue with your normal duties, making no reference to my presence. Conceal the body of your colleague. And I warn you, do not copy his rashness. It will do you no good to attack me. Even if you succeed, you will die. Now that the message has been sent, the War Wheel will come. If I am not here, waiting, when it arrives, this space station will be destroyed.’

  Hunched into a corner, blaster in hand, Steg settled down to wait.

  19

  Sanctuary

  Bernice Summerfield was going mad.

  It wasn’t that the conditions of her imprisonment were so unbearable, especially for an archaeologist. The Temple, after all, was an outstandingly beautiful place, filled with fascinating works of art. She had free access to all sorts of historical material that no scholar outside of the Sentarrii themselves had ever been allowed to see.

  ‘Your name’s made if you manage to survive and publish, Benny,’ she said to herself. (She was talking to herself quite a lot these days.) But of course, she was never going to publish. It was by no means certain that she was going to survive.

  Physically she was comfortable enough. Her room in the inner part of the Temple was much like her room at the University.

  Three times a day a university servant brought her simple nourishing food, with unlimited fresh water and fruit juice to wash it down. No alcohol of course. Her requests for a bottle of Eridanean brandy had simply been ignored.

  Bernice Summerfield had never felt so disgustingly fit and healthy in her life. She hated it.

  The trouble was that imprisonment, however comfortable, was still imprisonment.


  At first Bernice had thought that the Lord Chancellor himself was condemning her to death. ‘You can never leave here alive,’ he had said. Then she realized that, as so often with the Sentarrii, his words were to be taken absolutely literally.

  Here in the Temple she was safe. If she left, she was dead.

  It was a sentence of life imprisonment – with no remission.

  Once she realized what he really meant, Bernice had pleaded with the Lord Chancellor to let her go. She had sworn perpetual secrecy, she had reminded him of his friendship with the Doctor, she had appealed to every moral principle in the cosmos, from common decency to the inalienable rights of sentient life-forms.

  The Lord Chancellor had been polite, courteous and implacable.

  ‘No doubt there is much in what you say, Domina, but the facts cannot be altered. By entering the Temple you have incurred the sentence of death. I could not lift that sentence, even if I wished to do so. All I can do is what I have done. For the Doctor’s sake, and yours, I commanded the Harrubtii that blood may not be spilled in the sacred temple precincts. I think they will obey my authority in that – but in that alone. If you leave the Temple, they will kill you. Even if you succeed in evading them here and escape from the Temple they will follow you and kill you – anywhere on the planet. Even if you manage to leave Sentarion, their emissaries will follow you and track you down. Only one place in the cosmos is safe for you – and that is here.’

  And the Harrubtii, Bernice soon realized, were all around, watching and waiting. She caught glimpses of their shining carapaces in the gardens around the Temple. She felt their fierce black eyes following her every movement.

  Day followed day, until she began to feel herself losing track of time. She saw herself growing old here, going mad from boredom and finally fading away.

  Of course, the Doctor would eventually turn up to look for her. No doubt they would have a cover story ready to explain her disappearance, just as they had with poor old Lazio. There would be a faked message for the Doctor saying she’d had no luck with her researches and had gone off to another university on some distant planet. The Doctor would be disappointed. When she didn’t reappear he’d assume she’d just got bored or chickened out. Never very reliable, poor old Benny. No doubt he’d miss her – for a while.

  No, she told herself fiercely. The Doctor trusted her. He wouldn’t be fobbed off, he’d know they were lying. He’d come looking for her. Determinedly, she hung on to the thought. At the moment it appeared to be her only hope.

  Meanwhile, she did the only other thing she could. In her pocket was a silver sphere with an inset button. It was called a SPATAB. A Spatio-Temporal Alarm Beacon – otherwise known as a Panic Button. It would tell the Doctor she was in trouble and guide him to her when he came to find her.

  She took it out of her pocket, and pressed the button.

  Meanwhile, so as to have something to tell him when he arrived and to help pass the endless hours, Bernice carried on with her researches. She studied the murals and frescos in the Temple itself and scanned its archives. She began forming a theory about the beginnings of Sentarrii civilization.

  Luckily for Bernice, she wasn’t entirely confined to the interior of the Temple. On the far side was a huge formal garden. It was filled with beds of exotic alien plants, fountains and ornamental pools, and overgrown with lush green vegetation. At its centre was a huge statue of a shapeless, shrouded form, before which myriad different insectoid life-forms bowed down in worship.

  The Lord Chancellor had assured Bernice that the Inner Garden was sacred, a part of the Temple itself. Here too she was safe – at least, so she thought.

  She was strolling past a bank of flowering bushes, brooding over her theory, when dark shapes sprang out at her, bearing her to the ground. A filthy cloth was jammed over her face, covering her nose and mouth. Within seconds she was fighting for breath.

  Bernice struggled wildly, thrashing about with her arms and legs. With a desperate heave she managed to break free of her attackers and scramble to her feet. She found herself surrounded by a circle of Harrubtii, several of them clutching cloaks.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ gasped Bernice. ‘This garden is part of the Temple. Don’t you obey your Chancellor any more?’

  ‘We do not disobey,’ hissed one of the Harrubtii.

  ‘You were told it was forbidden to spill blood.’

  ‘We spill no blood,’ said another Harrubti. ‘We mean only to stop your breath.’

  ‘It’s the same thing,’ yelled Bernice indignantly. ‘I’ll be just as dead, won’t I?’

  ‘We spill no blood,’ repeated the Harrubti obstinately and the circle closed in on her.

  Bernice struggled to break free of the grasping claws. She was helped by the fact that the Harrubtii could not use their blood-sucking spikes, but she was still badly outnumbered. The Harrubtii bore her to the ground by sheer weight of numbers and soon the choking cloth was over her face once more.

  Weakened by lack of oxygen, Bernice felt her struggles becoming feebler. There was a roaring in her ears, a red mist before her eyes...

  ‘Stop!’

  The deep voice penetrated the roaring. Suddenly the pressure was released, the cloth fell away. Bernice drew in great sobbing gasps of the warm scented air.

  Gasping, she struggled to her feet and saw the tall robed form of the Lord Chancellor towering over the Harrubtii, his entourage hovering around him.

  He looked sternly down at the Harrubtii.

  ‘Did I not command you to spill no blood here?’

  ‘We spill no blood, Lord. We seek only to stop the blasphemer’s breath.’

  Bernice expected the argument to be dismissed at once. But to her horror, she heard the Lord Chancellor say, ‘The point is an interesting one. I must consider.’

  The tall insectoid form was frozen in thought. The Harrubtii gathered round, waiting eagerly for a decision. The more optimistic ones were already folding their cloaks into pads.

  ‘Hang on,’ yelled Bernice. ‘I refuse to be murdered on a technicality.’

  The Lord Chancellor’s great head with its glowing eyes swung round to face her. ‘You wish to contribute to this debate, Domina?’

  Suddenly Bernice realized she was talking for her life. It’s not easy to be calm when the question under discussion is whether or not you are to be killed. Nevertheless, she forced herself to speak calmly, as if discussing some abstract point of philosophical jurisprudence.

  ‘Surely, Lord Chancellor, your ruling was expressed metaphorically? You spoke of blood to the Harrubtii because they deal in blood. The true meaning of your order was that I was not to be killed in the precincts of the Temple. That meaning must not be evaded by trickery. Laws must be obeyed in spirit as well as in letter.’

  There was another long silence. Then the Lord Chancellor’s voice boomed, ‘Such was my meaning. The Domina Bernice has attained sanctuary in the Temple. Within its precincts, she may not be harmed – in any way!’

  Disappointed, the Harrubtii moved away, disappearing into the bushes. The Lord Chancellor turned to Bernice.

  ‘You argue well, Domina. It was an interesting point of doctrine, was it not?’

  ‘Fascinating,’ said Bernice. ‘Glad we got it cleared up.’

  They began strolling through the gardens, his entourage following at a respectful distance.

  The Lord Chancellor’s regular visits were one of the high spots of Bernice’s captivity. Having condemned her to spend the rest of her life as his unwilling guest, he seemed to feel a responsibility for her. Despite the rather strange nature of their relationship, a curious kind of friendship had grown up between them.

  Bernice felt faintly ashamed of the fact that she was abusing it. There were still some Sentarrii secrets known only to the Lord Chancellor himself.

  ‘Lord Chancellor,’ she began, ‘we were talking on your last visit of the Sacred Texts. I asked if I might see them.’

  ‘
I fear it is not possible, Domina. Doctrine states that only the eyes of the Sentarrii may behold them.’

  ‘Does it say anything about their hearing them?’

  ‘I do not understand.’

  ‘I’m sure you know the Sacred Texts well, Lord Chancellor. Suppose you were to tell me what’s in them – recite them to me – would that be forbidden?’

  By now they had come to the statue in the centre of the gardens. The Lord Chancellor bowed his head, considering. ‘Nowhere is it written that this is forbidden.’

  ‘To hear you recite the Sacred Texts would be a great honour, Lord Chancellor,’ said Bernice, blessing the literal nature of the Sentarrii mind.

  The Lord Chancellor began to speak in a low, chanting voice.

  ‘In the dark time the Sentarrii, the Harrubtii and all the other species that dwelt upon Sentarion were as savage beasts, thinking only of war and slaughter...’

  There followed a long recital of generations of Sentarrii warfare, of soldiers slaughtered and nests destroyed. Bernice could feel her head nodding, but she made herself listen with an air of keen attention. Then, at last, came the bit she’d been waiting for.

  ‘But then, upon the Sacred Day of Revelation, the sky darkened above the Holy Place. The vessels of the Shining Ones appeared, great glistening nests in which burned sacred fires. The ships landed and the Shining Ones emerged. They were shapeless yet they were all shapes, they were formless yet masters of every form.

  ‘The Shining Ones dwelt amongst the Sentarrii for a time, altering their bodies and their minds, and giving them great knowledge. The cruel and ferocious Harrubtii they changed also, and from this time the Harrubtii became the fiercest and most loyal of their servants, the appointed Guardians of the Faith.

  ‘But it came to pass that the work of the Shining Ones was done, and they returned to their own place. Before they left they made the Great Compact with the Sentarrii. If the Compact is upheld, a day will come when the Shining Ones return, bringing all power and all knowledge to their servants, the Sentarrii. And the Temple was built upon this holy place, against that day.’