Doctor Who_ Trading Futures Part 25

The Doctor and Malady swirled into existence in a small office in a mezzanine level in the warehouse.

It was some sort of foreman's place full of paperwork, requisition orders, maps and invoices. The light was off, so was the computer. The room smelt of pickle, clearly a favourite of the man who worked here.

There was a small safe.

'How big is the bomb?' the Doctor asked.

'The size of a small car,' Malady told him.

'It's not in the safe, then.' He checked under a pile of paperwork, before realising it wasn't likely to be under there, either.

Malady peered out of the office window, out over the warehouse. 'It's down there.'

From here, they got a good vantage point. Behind a screen, there was a large articulated lorry, corrugated silver sides, but with no markings. Three human guards and four humanoid RealWar robots stood guard.

'Ready to move out,' the Doctor said softly.

'There's no way of confirming it's in there,' Malady told him.

'We could go and look,' the Doctor suggested.

'It looks well*guarded.'

'Yes, it does, but '

One of the RealWar robots raised an arm and fired its machine gun. None of the three human guards had time even to register the attack. They fell where they stood.

The sound of the shots echoed around the warehouse. The other RealWar robots stood motionless, apparently oblivious. The robot that had fired raised its arm and advanced towards the truck.

'That's our cue, I think,' the Doctor said, heading for the door.

Malady drew one of the energy pistols, and followed him out.

The robot was opening the door at the back of the lorry. Its hands were a little too large for the delicate operation.

Malady and the Doctor hurried along the gantry. RealWar robots had their place, but Malady knew they weren't perfect their cameras and microphones were notoriously poor. Operators had a narrow field of vision and were almost deaf, particularly when the heavy hydraulic limbs were moving. It meant that they could only concentrate on one task at a time.

The robot had manage to grab the door handle.

'It's remote*controlled, isn't it?' the Doctor asked. 'Is there any way of telling who's operating it, where they are?'

Malady shook her head. 'Absolutely impossible. It could be from anywhere in the world.'

'Judging by what they're planning to do, it's someone a long way away.'

They'd made their way down narrow metal steps to the warehouse floor. In that time, the robot had got the door of the lorry open.

They could see into the trailer. The atomic device sat in the middle of the container, looking fairly innocuous.

Malady raised her arm, pointed the energy pistol at the robot, and fired.

The shot hit it square in the back, and the robot went down, its limbs sprawling.

'No!' the Doctor shouted.

Malady shrugged. He must have been worried she'd hit the nuke. 'I didn't miss,' she told him.

The other three RealWar robots stood to attention.

'Ah.'

The robots raised their arms in unison, the sound of the machine guns loading up filled the air.

The Doctor started running for the lorry.

'Keep them busy!' he called back, over his shoulder.

Malady dived for cover, as the robots started firing at her.

Out of the corner of her eye, she could see the Doctor clambering up over the fallen robot to get into the truck.

One of the machines was heading that way, the other two were heading for her.

She ducked behind the metal screen that hid the truck from view, deciding it was the best cover. It was half*inch steel plate. As the robots started firing, she was relieved that it could stop the bullets.

They were marching towards her position another drawback of the robots was that they weren't built for covert ops: they hissed and clanked. No more than a tank or armoured car, according to the manufacturers, who had a point.

And the fact robots couldn't do everything kept her in a job, so who was she to complain?

She straightened up, raised her gun, spun round the corner to face the robots.

Then dived back for cover as they opened fire.

The bullets streaked past her, scorching the air.

The Doctor climbed into the trailer of the articulated lorry, and hurried over to the bomb. The gunfire outside echoed and echoed off the corrugated metal walls of the container, and it was almost enough to deafen someone.

The bomb, though, looked refres.h.i.+ngly simple to defuse.

He took the sonic screwdriver from his pocket, and removed a piece of the casing.

The Doctor was always faintly disappointed that real nuclear bombs didn't have digital countdown clocks on them. It would add to the sense of urgency if numbers were ticking down.

This bomb wasn't even armed. That must have been what the robot or rather its operator was trying to do. At the moment, this was just a metal box with a quant.i.ty of plutonium in it. His job was to make sure it stayed that way.

'Ten... nine...' the Doctor began, trying to inject some tension. 'Eight... seven...' The casing was off, now, revealing the arming mechanism surrounded by the usual scribble of wiring.

'Six... five...' Now, what would he the best way of doing this?

'Four... three...'

He squeezed the sonic screwdriver, releasing the arming mechanism. He caught it, drew it out, gently.

'Two...' All he had to do was snip the wire, now. No chance of setting it off accidentally not unless it had been armed first.

He reached into his pocket for his wirecutters.

'One...' He slid the wirecutters around the cable. Oh Doctor, he told himself, you've done it, and with less than a second to A robot arm grabbed his leg, pulled him off his feet and dragged him halfway to the back of the truck.

The Doctor grabbed the bomb's casing. It was securely attached to the floor of the trailer, and holding on would keep him inside, close to the bomb.

The robot kept pulling, unconcerned by the prospect of tearing the Doctor in half.

The Doctor glanced back over his shoulder. The robot was hunching in the doorway, almost too big to get in.

It was quite crude as robots went a simplified skeletal frame, with primitive hydraulics pa.s.sing for muscles. It had two camera eyes, and a heavily armoured chest section, which was presumably where it kept its radio relay and on*board processors.

The hands were little more than clamps.

Clamps were enough, of course.

It was hurting his leg, now, increasing the pressure.

There was heavy gunfire from outside the truck all bullets, no energy blasts. So, Malady wasn't getting a chance to shoot... but she was still alive, and avoiding the robots.

The Doctor's robot was planning to arm the device. You could do that with an arming key, but you could also do it with a direct interface. Looking for it, the Doctor could see just the right sort of port on the machine's wrist. Normally used to connect it to diagnostic computers, he supposed.

The Doctor released one hand, reached down with the sonic screwdriver, unscrewed the robot's wrist, and prised the clamp off his leg.

The robot withdrew the stump, looked at it, mirroring the operator's surprise.

The Doctor returned to the nuclear device, found the wire and the wirecutter.

The robot raised its other arm, the machinegun slid from its housing.

The Doctor scooped up the detached hand, and bowled it at the robot.

Instinctively, the operator tried to catch it, or bat it away, or something something, but misjudged the ability of the robot to balance. It toppled over, like a toddler who'd just forgotten how to walk.

The Doctor was about to snip the wire, when he had a better idea.

Outside, there was a single laser blast, a small explosion, and the sound of a robot cras.h.i.+ng to the ground. Followed immediately by a burst of gunfire from the other one.

The Doctor got to the back of the truck, kept low, out of his robot's field of vision. It was getting back to its feet a task made more difficult by the loss of its hand.

Malady had got lucky with that first shot blasted the robot right in the transmitter, cut the signal to whoever was controlling it. The Doctor bent over the dead robot, reached into the cavity formed by the blast.

He unclipped a couple of circuit boards, slipped them inside his jacket.

'Malady!' he shouted. 'Get over here!'

Malady broke cover. She now had an energy pistol in each hand. She ran towards the truck, pointing the guns behind her, firing at the robot. She sprang into the container, just as the nearest robot got itself upright.

Together, they got the doors of the truck closed.

'Now what?' she asked, clearly irritated. 'They'll just open the doors, and '

'We'll be gone,' the Doctor said, pulling Roja's time machine from his pocket. 'What's more, I can couple it up to these circuits I got from the robot. We'll be able to teleport straight along the carrier wave to whoever's operating those robots.'

'Er...'

The Doctor was puzzled why wasn't it activating, like it had before?

'It ran out of juice, remember?' Malady asked.

The robots opened fire. The bullets clattered against the truck, punching little dents.

'So... we're trapped, aren't we?'

A bullet whizzed past the Doctor's ear. The walls of the container weren't going to last much longer.

The Doctor looked around. There was Malady, the nuclear device and him.

'I need a power source. Hand me one of those guns.'

He took it, but quickly ascertained that he had no idea how to get to the power cell.

'You disarmed the bomb?'

'Uh*huh.'

'Well, at least we won't be dying in vain.'

The Doctor leaned in to the nuclear device. 'Of course.' He opened up the time machine, then handed it to Malady. 'Hold that,' he ordered. Then grabbed into the heart of the nuclear device and pulled out a metal hemisphere.

'Doctor, that's the plutonium core.'

'It's half of it. Not enough to trigger an explosion. Plenty for our purposes.'

He took the time machine from Malady, plunged it into the heart of the core. The time machine was a sophisticated piece of nanotech, its ubertronics were quite capable of automatically adjusting to the new source of energy. The display unfurled, as before.

Malady still looked nervous. 'We're going to the lion's den? Right to where the operator of those robots is?'

'No. I didn't have time to track the radio signal.'