CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FOUR

Whilst Ace indulged in eating and gossip, the Doctor faced a far harder audience: Roger Cormelle, and his selected group of colony leaders.

For all that they had disbelieved him at first, they did at least accord him the courtesy of an uninterrupted hearing. Painstakingly, he described his arrival on Hargreave's Fall, the idyll of a relaxing, unspoilt wilderness to mentally unwind in. Then the intrusion of the colonists, and the belated realisation that IMC were there, too. The actual details of travel in the TARDIS he left deliberately vague – a time-travelling alien humanoid from the far-future would be egging the pudding a bit too much.

After that, he described how IMC would begin Phase Two, the despatch of mobile factory-creating factories before moving onto Phase Three, construction of robotic mining equipment, and Phase Four – total hemispheric devastation.

'You seem very well acquainted with how the Planet Shafters operate,' remarked a Chinese woman, coolly.

Sitting comfortably cross-legged on the decking, the Doctor made a tch of annoyance.

'By the same token your medical staff are familiar with how diseases work, madam? Such a familiarity doesn't mean they intend to spread epidemics. First, know your enemy.'

That created a stir.

' "Enemy"?' asked a tall, balding man perched on the edge of a suspension unit. He looked sideways at Roger Cormelle. 'How are IMC your enemy?'

A sneer played at the corners of the little Time Lord's mouth.

'I'm a professional monster-slayer. That includes institutional ones. I've met IMC twice before: won one, lost one.'

At that he could tell their attention was more involved on his story than his presence or intent, especially at the question Cormelle threw at him.

'Where and when?'

'First time on Uxarieus, year Two Four Seven Two. Their operation was considerably smaller then, merely a single ship, which still required armed force from the colonists to repel. Second time, Two Four Eight Two on Gedovitz' World. They won that time, by using the factory-make-factory tactic for the first time at the expense of the entire native population. Needless to add, that process is a lot faster and more efficient now.'

Several faces expressed surprise at the mention of "Uxarieus", Cormelle most of all.

Roger felt his cheeks flush in surprise. Uxarieus!

As part of the long, expensive consultation process the UN demanded, he'd read extensively about Uxarieus. Too far away and too expensive and too time-consuming to travel there, so he'd been forced to be satisfied with ultra-light communications with them. Yes, they told him, their initial years had been barren and on the borderline of disaster. Failing crops, hostile natives, then to cap it all the arrival of IMC. All those problems had been solved with the help of – with the help of –

'Good God above!' he blurted. ' "A mysterious stranger called The Doctor with his young female assistant".

'Er – yes?' replied the Doctor, slightly worried at the extreme response.

'Why didn't you say you'd helped the colonists on Uxarieus!'

'You never asked,' shrugged the Doctor, secretly pleased at the direction this inquisition was taking.

A keen-eyed woman sitting next to Cormelle stared hard at the Doctor, who smiled and nodded politely back.

'That Doctor? From Uxarieus?' and she squinted at him. 'That was over thirty years ago.' Left unsaid was the fact that he didn't look old enough to have been there, done that, and be here.

'Hair dye,' sighed the Doctor. 'Vanity, I know.' The twinkle in his eye left the watcher unsure whether he was joking or not. 'And a different companion, too,' he added.

Colonel Hawkwood rubbed the scar over his left eye, a relic of his days in the ANZAC Solar Expeditionary Corps. It tended to throb a little in humid weather, or when he felt stressed, or both simultaneously.

The men, he decided, were not getting stretched enough. Setting up Camp Bassinette had taken time and energy and diverted their attention to the task in hand, for only as long as it had taken to complete. Now there had been a rash of senseless fights, drug intoxications and sentries asleep at posts.

Action! He raged silently. Action would automatically and instantly bond the merc brigade together like nothing else would.

Yet here they were, sitting in a giant scar in the landscape, babysitting IMC's spaceships and excavation equipment, going nowhere, slowly suffering terminal loss of morale. The only people who stayed sharp were the frigate crews, who'd have to launch at a moment's notice in order to mount an interception.

IMC didn't want any overt action against the civilians here unless they gave the word. "Political expediency", their chief negotiator smarmed. "Gutless dithering" was how the mercenary's commanders described it.

Standing up and pushing his chair back, the officer strode across the spartan steel building to examine a topographical survey map that displayed their own landing site and that of the civvies. His skeleton staff, playing cards at the radio station, abruptly cocked their heads and watched their leader.

'You can use that pack of cards to good purpose,' he snapped, businesslike as usual. 'Allocate a suite to each company. Allocate even numbers to even-numbered platoons, odd numbers to odd-numbered platoons.'

B Company's 3 and 5 platoons emerged as those selected.

'Officially, they're on a long-range recon. Cut orders to that effect. Have their lieutenants see me face-to-face in five.'

One assistant began laboriously inputting march orders, supplies, transciever codes and personnel into a computer, that printed the end result on two flexible metallic rolls. Sergeant Hines, the unofficial liaison with IMC, would run over with it later on and take a copy to each of the heads of the excavation department and the Security Force, IMC's private army.

A pair of junior officers, clad in disruptive pattern camouflage uniforms and sporting the trademark grey fatigue cap of The Hawks, came into the command shack and saluted.

'What's your platoon status?' asked Hawkwood.

'Five under-strength, sir,' replied the first officer.

'Two under-strength, sir,' added the second. 'Plus one banged-up in the cells for being drunk and disobedient.'

Hawkwood frowned. In the army, they had tradition and history to maintain morale. In his merc force, they had either action or diversions, and out in this giant planet-wide jungle there were no diversions.

'Right. You two saddle up a light armour detachment, a couple of gun trucks and APC's, with a spare APC carrying zero passengers.'

He showed them the wall-mounted map.

'Officially you are on a long-range recon, working outwards in a spiral pattern from the site, which is what IMC have been told.' Turning back to the two young officers, he looked directly at them. 'In reality, I want you to get up to the colonist's landing site. Kidnap about a dozen of them. Live ones.'

Neither officer looked bothered by this instruction. In their time, they'd killed unarmed civilians with no compunction at all. Kidnapping worried them even less.

'Do we have accurate satellite coverage of the ground in between, sir?' asked one. 'We'll need a couple of hours to plot a route across rivers and gorges and suchlike.' The other officer looked at the map closely, measuring off distance with his fingers.

'About two days there, two days back. Do you want to leave a trace at their landing zone, sir?'

The Colonel twisted his mouth and thought.

'No. Don't want to lose the element of surprise. Low body count, if possible, and concealed at all costs.'

'Then add another day for covert observation and infiltration, sir. Five days overall.'

'See to it. Dismissed.'

With a pair of smart salutes, the officers left in a hurry to get their planning done, excited at the prospect of action, even if it was against a bunch of witless farmers.

The colonel sat down to go over the lack of equipment they were currently suffering from. Nothing heavier than a wheeled combat car, damn it! Artillery still restricted to tubes, no particle beam weapons, and no crew skilled in their use even if they did get the up to date stuff.

Damn that last campaign on Vita Brevis! Heavy casualties and being on the losing side meant The Hawks were back where they were five years ago.

'Yo. Boss,' greeted a lanky man wearing combat fatigues and major's insignia. He pulled the privacy screen around the table and sat down without being invited. 'I bring news from IMC.'

'Which is?'

'Good to go in forty-eight hours. They're still levelling and grading so the mobile factories can get out of this valley.'

'Two days! Yakov, don't they have any sense of urgency? I told them – landing here may make you harder to spot, but it's harder to get out of.'

The major shrugged.

'I know, boss. Another two days with the men kicking their heels at lack of action.'

Hawkwood regarded the other officer with his usual mix of appraisal and realism. Yakov was no more than competent, and, like every other merc officer in the formation, not to be fully trusted.

'Anything else?'

'Only the same sneering dislike from Security Force. Seem to think they could do our job better.'

Hawkwood snorted in silent amusement.

'Hardly the reason for hiring us!' He became serious and leaned closer to the Russian. 'I've put a little information-acquisition project in motion, something to allow us to get information at first hand, instead of having it filtered via the Planet Shafters.'

The major leaned in closer to reply.

'Good! I don't trust them at all. Not at all. I firmly believe they want to set us up to take any blame that comes out of this op.'

Quite right, too. Hawkwood hated these "deniable" operations. Nothing to incriminate either side, and equally, nothing to oblige the employer to pay up, either. You could guarantee, one hundred and ten per cent, that there were a dozen different factions within IMC, all competing for power. Any combination of those would gladly use the mercenaries to embarrass any of the other factions, whatever that meant happening to the mercs in the process.

'Yakov, see if IMC are going to be mining and refining power metals. We could do with a few pocket nukes, after losing our stockpile on Brevis.'

The major regarded his superior with mild alarm.

'Boss, they aren't going to give us anything fissile! That costs them profits.'

Hawkwood shrugged.

'We might have to defray a percentage of our end-of-contract bonus in payment.'

Yakov gave an ahh of comprehension – the end-of-contract bonus was frequently reneged on, and it was a wise commander who mortgaged it against immediate needs.

Whilst his subordinate was realising this, Hawkwood's thoughts turned to other potential sources of income – eighty-thousand of them.

Having partly won over the Cormelle mission's leading lights, the Doctor attempted to capitalise on their grudging acceptance, only to encounter a human quality he found infuriating and inspiring in equal amounts: stubbornness.

These colonists weren't going home.

'It's simply impossible,' stated the tall, balding man who was known as "Beauclaire". 'These spaceships are one-way craft. They are engineered to make one planetfall and not to lift off again.'

'You still have the cargo hauliers,' reminded the Doctor, gently, to a snort from the Chinese woman.

'Unpressurised hulls with no life support! They aren't built to carry human passengers, thank you very much. Trying to get rid of us again?'

'Insurance,' reassured the Doctor. 'Just in case.'

Dean, the troubleshooter, brandished a rifle.

'Hey, we're not helpless. We've got five hundred of these. We can fight them!'

'No!' snapped the Doctor, and everyone present felt the cold, hard power underneath the word. 'I counted three thousand mercenaries, with helicopter gunships and wheeled armoured vehicles. They'd massacre you in short order. You can't face either them or IMC's internal security alone, never mind together, and the moment you start waging open warfare they'll both act against you.'

Roger Cormelle took charge at that point.

'Brainstorm session,' he said, loudly and clearly. 'I want all of you to put your heads together and come up with a solution, or solutions. Ones that don't involve large numbers of us dying.'

Having set them up, he strolled over to the Time Lord and wordlessly indicated a side passage off to one side of the passenger hall.

OBSERVATION PORT stated the legend over the entranceway, repeated in Chinese below.

'I used to come and look out of here when we were travelling,' confided the mission leader in a low voice. 'Oh, you couldn't actually see much out there – faster-than-light travel distorts everything into a kind of grey blur – yet it helped me to keep a perspective. Why we were travelling here.'

The Doctor recognised a man about to declare an epiphany. They reached a computer screen that transmitted the view from outside via piezo-electric crystals.

A sweeping expanse of grassland, now overlaid with tent cities, marking tapes and robust plastic sheeting laid by the robot machinery, greeted them when the screen was turned on.

Cormelle looked to the limit of the screen, left, right, up and down.

'Beautiful. Back home you had to travel for an hour and a half to see anything green and growing.' He darted a look at his sole listener. 'I'm quite the hypocrite, you know. "IMC the evil enemy".'

'You were a major shareholder?' guessed the Doctor, making Cormelle wince a little.

'Yes. Three and a half per cent preferential stock. Sold long ago to help fund this mission. Anyway – as I said, Doctor, quite the hypocrite. I never bothered about IMC until my son died. That single event made me take stock of my life, my family, where we were going, to what end I was working.'

'One of the first toxic smogs to come off the Great Lakes?' guessed the Doctor, again accurately. This time Cormelle's eyes widened.

'You can't read minds, can you! Yes. The Lake Ontario Shroud. It killed him and twenty thousand others. How did you know? It's something I've never made public.'

'By accent you're Canadian, so there's a good chance you lived near one of the Great Lakes. Only a sudden and shocking event would make you question your life and lifestyle. Those first poisonous smogs took everyone by surprise, without masks. Quite logical.'

Cormelle eyed the little, strangely-dressed man with growing respect. A sharp and functional intellect lay beneath that deceptive exterior!

'Yesss. Well, that was the catalyst for Cally and myself. We toured the globe, getting together like-minded people who could afford to help fund this mission, for seven years. We have literally nothing left on Earth to return to – no money, no homes, no property. Given what we've come from, which my colonists can now see for what it is – an overcrowded, polluted hellhole – there's no way we're going back.' He took a deep breath. 'We're not out to recreate Earth. We intend to create something better. Our guiding principle all along has been that we will not destroy this world.'

Abruptly, the Doctor's mood changed, in one of his swings from gloom to glee. He made the mental switch from wishing to avoid a confrontation to seeing that one was inevitable, and he'd better be along to make sure the damage was limited to the minimum. To Roger this volte-face was shown in the little man pacing up and down the short Observation Port corridor, hands clutched together behind his back, frowning in concentration.

'IMC aren't invincible,' he began.

'No,' agreed Roger. 'Just extremely hard to beat!'

'They didn't win on Uxarieus.'

'You said there was only one ship.'

'And only one ship of colonists. Ever heard of Herwald?'

Taken aback at the abrupt shift, Roger shook his head. In fact he had, in passing. The details escaped him.

'IMC were fought to a standstill there by the Dragoman settlers.'

Roger's UN briefings of many years ago came back to him.

'Oh – yes, I recall now. Hey, the Dracks were militaristic loons armed to the teeth! And they still suffered half the planet turned into a slag-heap.'

Coming to a stop, the Doctor looked directly into Roger's eyes, a gaze that hinted at wisdom acquired over time. A long time. A very, very long time.

'They still had half the planet to themselves, without IMC. And a planet will heal if left alone.'

'Mister Cormelle? Captain Husak's here,' shouted one of the elect from the passenger hall. Roger sighed and made to leave, coming to a stop as a grip like iron fastened around a bicep.

'There is a window of weakness for IMC,' said the Doctor quietly. 'If you are willing to follow my lead, we can get rid of them without bloodshed. If you are serious about settling here permanently. If!'

Captain Husak rarely looked happy. Today his normal stern expression had softened to the extent of merely looking sombre. He further brightened when Roger came back into the echoing steel hall.

'Mister Cormelle. Good news. We have completed the deployment of your plant equipment.'

'Excellent!' declared Roger, and the other leading staff looked satisfied, too.

The Doctor kept his own counsel. He felt pretty sure he knew what would happen now, one of only two options, neither of which were exactly appealing.

The Captain's aide offered an electronic writing pad to Roger, who signed-off on the contract and shook hands.

'May I interrupt?' asked the Doctor, in a tone that brooked no discussion and laying his umbrella handle over the officer's arm. The starchy, proper Czech looked the small man up and down with puzzlement.

'For what reason? We are now departing.'

'Could you please only take off one at a time?'

Husak looked at Roger, who smiled ruefully and shrugged.

'Humour him, Captain. He's helped us already.'

With a twitch of the eyebrow, Captain Husak agreed. Lofting to orbit in such an inefficient manner would add at least ninety minutes to their total departure time. However, they didn't have another contract to service yet – and ninety minutes was small beer compared to the months they'd spend travelling back to a near-Earth orbit.

Ace had found a novel entertainment – teasing the heavy mechanical plant that plodded, rolled or drove across the landing zone. No matter how large the equipment, if you spoke to it in a sufficiently loud voice, it would divert to pay attention to you. If you stood in front of it, then it would patiently go round you. If you asked questions, then the robots would try to answer as best they could. Since their on-board intelligence was formatted for agriculture, mining, drilling, surveying, roadlaying or quarrying, any philosophical questions caused them problems.

'Can you imagine the sound of one hand clapping?' she tried on a flat, tracked vehicle that included a mass of vanes and antennae.

"THIS UNIT IS NOT CAPABLE OF ABSTRACT CONCEPTIONS. PLEASE STEP ASIDE YOUNG FEM" boomed the unit, causing Ace to bounce pebbles off it's matte black exterior.

Young fem! A shame her NitroNine had been confiscated or she'd show this mobile box of bolts how fem she was!

'Can you not abuse the machines, please?' asked one of the colonists, walking past carrying scaffolding. 'They're expensive.'

'And I'm bored!' she replied. Evan had left her to go and fiddle with his radio gear, trying to break the jamming. So far without success, she guessed, since he still wasn't around.

The colonist, a brawny, dark-skinned man, stopped and turned to look at Ace.

'Bored? Oh – you're that stranger. Do you want something productive to do?'

'Sure!' chirped the young woman.

'Grab the end of these scaffolding poles and help me carry them. We're heading for the prepped space over there,' and he indicated a hectare of plastic sheeting. Other scaffolding already lay on the groundsheet, looking for all the world like giant grey strands of spaghetti.

'What are we building?' asked Ace. The man chuckled.

'Don't remember inviting you to join in!'

'I'm Ace,' she said, by way of an introduction, holding out a hand. The stranger gave a firm handshake.

'Colin Apaha. We are building a temporary hospital here. More like an emergency clinic, really, until the permanent version gets erected.'

Looking from side to side, Ace saw only herself and Colin.

'Shift lunch. They'll be along shortly,' he explained. 'Any good with scaffolding?'

Ace was; she had an AVCE in scaffolding, acquired because it was such a useful skill, not to mention being as utterly unladylike a course as she could imagine.

Colin eyed her up and down, making Ace worry that he was going to make a pass.

'That's not really suitable clothing for the kind of work we'll be doing,' he said, before scribbling instructions on a sheet of paper. 'Take this over to New New York - ' pointing at a tent city 'ask for the seamstress and you'll get an issue suit.'

Ten minutes later, after changing behind a canvas screen, a sleek young lady in a flattering boilersuit rejoined Colin and his newly-arrived helpers at the soon-to-be hospital site.

'Yes?' said Colin, before slapping his forehead. 'Didn't recognise you! Nice togs!'

Ace gave a twirl, grinning.

'She resewed a suit off-the-peg. I wish I'd had someone that clever with a needle back home!'

That was all the levity suffered for a good hour at the site whilst the dozen workers struggled with a framework of poles and connectors, collars and bolts. By that time the skeleton of the infirmary had been erected, and Ace had satisfied her curiosity – as much as it could ever be – by chatting to the variegated workers.

She had noticed an absence amongst the camps. Not at first, and not quickly. It slowly dawned on her, whilst clamping connections onto poles, that there were no children in view. No creche, no mention of children amongst the people working with her, no kids running around, no toys, no ructions or squabbles or crying. If Earth was an overcrowded, pollution-ridden slum, you'd expect kids to be running absolutely wild out here. Yet – nothing.

Another stocky, dark-skinned man who looked like Charlie's cousin explained.

'No children under sixteen allowed along. Too risky for the first ten years or so for nippers. That's not to say we won't start having sprogs left, right and centre if it all pans out here.'

Ace was taken with his idiom, and his accent.

'Australian, right?'

He looked mock offended.

'Maori, fem, Maori!' he winked. 'I can show you me tattoos …'

Finally, they began to drag huge sheets of heavy-duty plastic sheeting over the scaffolding frame, using heat guns to weld the plastic to the metal skeleton, a process that generated acrid smoke and smells.

A vantage point of fifty metres above ground level gives one a certain perspective. Lofty, refined, whilst not completely losing touch with the earth beneath one's feet.

Of course, also being in a staff position that meant not having to get hands dirty or clothing rumpled also helped to maintain a degree of separation from the hoi polloi, the lumpen-proletariat blue collars who constituted most of the IMC personnel on-site.

Thus ran the musings of Senior Comptroller Rickenhaus, standing at the vast picture window in his personal suite, looking out at the extensively prepared valley outside.

It ran counter to intuition, waiting like this. For a prospective major project, however, he had to put up with the delays. The four initial mobile factories needed gentle gradients, well-bedded, without surface water or significant obstructions in order to actually make it out of the valley, which meant a great deal of grading the jungle and underlying soils.

A swirl of activity in the mercenary camp caught his eye. Figures were running from the hardstands where one of the dangerous-looking atmosphere combat craft was firing up it's engines. With a window-rattling bang the aircraft shot off the gravel and into the air.

Rickenhaus squinted his eyes and pursed his lips in disapproval. They – "The Hawks" – hadn't bothered to inform him what they were up to. He distrusted them quite as much as they no doubt distrusted him, and they divulged as little information to IMC as they could get away with.

Freelancers! He scorned them, silently. Expediency demanded their presence. An idea came fully-formed to his mind and he called his personal assistant.

'Hetty. How much do we have in the, uh, Allocatable Discretionary Fund?' Which sounded so much better than "The Bribe Money Fund".

A single second's check was all his highly efficient PA needed.

'One hundred and forty five thousand nemmies, sir.'

'Draw five hundred, mark it down as "staff expenses".'

Ha! Mercenaries. Only interested in mayhem and money. Well, he'd see what information he could obtain with a bit of judicious bribery. He needed an inside man who would pass on more data than the bland announcements Hawkwood delivered when prodded. That Yakov chap seemed pliable enough.