Chapter 6:
"All must eat and drink to survive."
-Proverb
Phix meant to keep an eye on their odd little stranger, but he momentarily let it slide as he moved out of the anxious press of the crowd. His species tended to be easily distracted when nervous.
He had a lot to be nervous about; Captain's newer programming was still in the realm of "unsalvageable" and he still had no idea if the data could even be fully extrapolated. If not, the consequences would manifest in a software "audit" as soon as they docked and reported to Third Zone Authorities for Space Travel. Reporting that pinhole wouldn't be the half the headache; they would have to prove all of the physical damage to the Feathered Sun actually came not from a pinhole, but the same pinhole.
And then there was also the little matter of the missing communications between one of the better-paying Contractors and the 'Sun. Phix wasn't completely certain what he should be doing about the matter because a late, positively stale message isn't the same as a message marked as "urgent" and ignored. No, this was a lot worse.
Being an Ancel'ak meant he was going to worry about some things more than others. It came naturally with his biology.
But regardless of his species, the basic fact remained: The Contractors were not the sort of people one betrayed. One dared not even make a mistake in their presence. They did not tolerate mistakes from outsiders, and they were all too quick to see an insult in the slightest of cultural collisions.
So it was with some trepidation that he remembered he was wanting to keep an eye on their ersatz guest; he turned and peered about the dissipating crowd only to be dismayed by the absolute lack of an odd, tiny little, dark-haired humanoid in odd, large and dark clothing. It seemed unbelievable that someone to obtrusive could have vanished so effectively…but there was the comforting proposal that he was away from the Intersection now…
Perhaps he was simply hanging back and waiting for the others to leave?
Not a bad thought.
Phix ducked inside a shadowy shelter set into the wall of over-reaching leaves and branches. One of the nicer things about the Third Zone was the use of artificial plants to create atmosphere for the living residents, and he far preferred their refined touch against the rough and cantankerously efficient breathing-pumps kept between the floors and walls. No, he concluded after much peering throught he screen of leaves, no sign of the little fellow…
"What is wrong, friend?"
Phix jumped from the deep voice at his forearm, and glanced to Tokish. "You can be very quiet when you want to be!" He complained—again.
The Perelaccan blushed. "I am sorry." The big alien apologized. "I never mean to frighten you."
"Ah, it's nothing." Phix brushed it aside. "I'm just worried about our last Customers."
"You mean the latest of our customers?" Tokish was beautifully literal when it came to business. "The ones that spoke to Captain after the Colonists failed to show?" He was specific too.
"Yes. We don't want to make them unhappy."
Tokish didn't understand. His big, stupid eyes reflected his lack of understanding and lack of vision. Why would they want to make anyone unhappy? Sometimes Phix had his fill of dialog with those people.
The Ancel'ak breathed for calm. "They're the people of Heed, friend." He said bluntly. "And you know how they hate to wait."
Tokish was a dark-skinned alien, but he did a fair imitation of turning as pale as his work-partner.
"Yes." He agreed quietly. "Yes, they do."
"I missed their communications by a few tells, Tokish. A few tells!"
"But…what do they want from us?" Tokish tried to think as swiftly as his lighter-gravity-impaired brain allowed. "I thought they were just wanting to bid off the Colony's supplies…"
Phix looked both ways, and ushered Tokish to the side of the hall so the rest of the crew could keep going about their business without staying in range long enough to listen. "I used the Fourth Article for Captain." He said under his breath.
Tokish breathed. "But that's—"
"Perfectly legal, friend. I have the authority and it saves so much time and lost property damage, plus it would get us our pay faster than just waiting for the usual slower routes and channels."
"But if the Colonists ask for their property—"
"It's not likely they ever will, Tokish. They're missing. Vanished. There's not a trace of them." Phix made a swiveling hand-motion.
Tokish stiffened. "Do you think the pinhole found them?" He whispered softly.
"It's more than likely, isn't it? They were on the other side of the Kirkwood Gap—well so was the pinhole!"
"Oh, my E'Efre!" Tokish invoked the God of Mercy. "It makes sense." He swallowed sadly. "Oh, those poor people! How many—almost a thousand?"
"Yes. But at least we don't have to explain to Colony Council where their people are."
"Small favors, but all those lives lost..." Tokish shook his head as they walked away from the comforting cluster of hydroponic trees.
Silence.
After a few minutes of neglect, the trees rustled. Had anyone remained at this point, they would have thought the plants were sighing in relief, free from the presence of overly-complex and emotional meat-based life forms.
A moment later a small, dark shape dropped from above.
The Doctor heaved a deep breath of relief. It hadn't been easy to stay in the tops of the lung-trees, much less stay still and quiet. But as he'd calculated/hoped, the crewmen hadn't stayed there forever. All the better for him. Thank goodness.
Fourth Article. Hmnn…now that was interesting…
Aiy, but what is a Fourth Article anyway? Jamie's imagined voice asked impatiently as he nipped down the corridors.
It's very simple, Jamie. It's a law held to the Intergalactic Merchants regarding unclaimed goods. To make it a very short story, think of it as preparing to set sail to another country. If you don't show up to claim your luggage when you promise you will, the captain will sell it or do whatever he wants with it.
The devoutly honest Jamie had a problem with this shifty arrangement.
Imaginary Zoe chipped in, as usual the infuriating voice of logic. She asked Jamie what one should do if the goods in question were perishable—like the honeycakes he liked so much? Or what if they were alive—like a skep of bees? You couldn't keep bees in storage for long without killing them, could you? Or how about a chest of medicines that would expire in a short period of time?
Imaginary Jamie groaned and gave in, protesting Zoe's ability to give a solid gold answer to a groat of a question.
The Doctor smiled sadly to himself and hurried on. And if, in his mind, there were two shadows flitting after his, he did not think it unusual.
The Doctor quickly shut the door after himself and glanced furtively about his surroundings. Nothing. Good. He primed the lock and whirled popping a small plastic triangle out of the wall at head-level. Wires, conduits, circuits and not a few messy bits of Third-Zone technology winked back at him in the light.
"Oh, bother." The Doctor muttered under his breath. He fished a small light out of his pocket, clasped it in his teeth, and stuck both hands into the guts of the wall, dowsing by fingertips for the elements he needed. "Hah!" He gloated, and pressed a few test-combinations with the felt-tipped conduits.
The lights went out.
"Oh, bother," said the darkness.
Tap-tap-tap.
SHOOM.
The lights resumed.
"Hmph. Back to Base 8 I see…" He chose to take the higher path of evolution, and kept the remainder of uncomplimentary opinions to himself. A handful of lovely red sparks flowed from the panel.
A dull blue-white glow lit from the desk-mounted pyramid on the guest's desk.
"Excellent!" The little renegade rubbed his ion-itchy hands together and carefully recovered the panel before dashing to the hijacked computer. Off the "guest" lanes of computerized traffic, he ought to find many more interesting answers. Not to mention "guest" lanes were always under strict supervision.
Not that the Doctor disagreed with supervision…it just tended to be overdone. Especially when a mature and competent person such as himself was the one being supervised.
He settled into the desk and pulled out the small keypad. Within seconds he was typing merrily away.
Gallifrey:
"Do contain your enthusiasm, my good Patrex." Goth said dryly. "Our Sardon did mention the Visualizer was an older model."
"Older model—yes. But that isn't an older model." The other shuddered. "That's the last of its kind, surely!"
Sardon did not quite sigh. He steepled his fingers together and smiled. "It is in full working order, I assure you." He kept his smile. "Unlike the newer holographic models, this one carries the two-dimensional representation typical of the Vampire War Era technology."
"So it doesn't even proclaim images in color." Jokul was resigned to the dark fate of their Committee's success. His school was like that.
"Of course it doesn't proclaim images in color. It can't. Vampires slipped completely around the frequencies in color. A color-scanning visualizer would have been a liability and a hazard back in those days."
"Thank YOU, my dear, dear fellow, for the lesson in Obscure History."
Sardon cleared his throat delicately. "Once our model finds the Doctor's, it will be but a few minutes' work in opening a channel between the two. From there we will be able to see what is happening, but the connection may not occur in a convenient moment. With the age of the machines in question, it could be days or hours away from the pertinent Event." It was really too much to hope that the Committee would get to watch the fellow die in the line of duty. Sardon knew for a fact that Time Lords were a noble and privileged race—and luck was not a requirement of either quality.
The Feathered Sun:
The Doctor had no idea that hours—and so many of them—had passed in the Realtime of Gallifrey. Realtime tended to bother him because he tended to get a little bored and tired with keeping shifting and backwards-winding clocks in his head. It was doubtless one of the problems with spending so much of his life as a Renegade without the close presence of Gallifreyan Time in his head.
He leaned back in his chair and rubbed tired eyes, wishing for a cup of something—he'd even drink the Brigadier's horrendous AAFI tea! With a yawn he stretched and rolled his shoulders before returning to the small screen.
The information inside the ship's databanks was quite bare and that was to be expected after a pinhole's havoc. The Doctor was pleasantly assured at what the banks were not saying—and that was conflicting data. A pinhole was capable of inflicting almost any damage. Thank goodness it had kept mostly to the structural.
"Still too bare," he muttered to himself. A ship this large, with intelligent programs guiding the upkeep and maintenance of the ship's manifold? Nonsense. There were large portions of data simply missing, and he suspected the pinhole had given someone—perhaps several someones—an opportunity to indulge in some computerized skulduggery.
There was nothing as useful as the excuse of collateral damage in which to make things "go hiding." A clever technician could even pre-program for such an event if they were resourceful. All they would need is an opportunity to have the desired object (in this case data) transmit itself to a pre-arranged bolthole as soon as the computer's maintenance scans fluctuated. Rather like giving the horse permission to run out the barn as soon as the door was left open. The timing would make the casual scan and report look as though the data was destroyed by the pinhole, not spirited away.
"The problem is," he continued to murmur to himself, "what data would go missing...and why? For what purpose?" Data was, when you came down to it, a most precious commodity.
He leaned his chin on his hand and watched glyphs roll across his gaze. The pinhole's data was still in the process of collating when his bottom left pocket vibrated against his knee.
"?" He jumped slightly and looked down. "Good heavens." With a frown the little Time Lord reached in and pulled out a squat little device. It was disclike, hung on a looping chain, and could have passed for pretentious jewelry in just about any corner of Mutter's Spiral—but was in fact considered conservative and stated Gallifreyan office badge-ering.
"Bother," he said under his breath. The vacation was officially over. With a resigned shrug he held the device inside his palms and tapped the center. A small hologram bloomed from the tip. His eyebrows slipped straight up in mild surprise to see the Time Lord sculpted in virtual light was…
"You look surprised to see me, Doctor."
"Somewhat, Sardon." The Doctor was able to bring one brow back to earth, but the other was stubbornly stuck up. "Normally I'm talking with your clean-up crew at this point; not you."
"This last mission, as you may be aware, has some marked differences from our usual design." The Grey Man folded his lean fingers over his waist, the pose of calm. The Doctor wasn't fooled—he'd decided long ago that no one could be that calm outside the borders of sociopathy or Orion-grade acting.
"Did you get that rotten little pinhole?" He interrupted before his Keeper could begin a really good lecture.
"Oh, we 'got it' I assure you, Doctor." Sardon said wearily. "What possessed you to mail it to us in a message cube?"
"It's calcium paper!" The Doctor yelped indignantly. "What else could I use? Dwarf star alloy?"
"Even more than usual, I fear you're making no sense."
Oh, Daleks. Cybermen. Cyber-daleks. There. That was a worthy explicative. The Doctor narrowed his eyes. "That pinhole is dangerous, Sardon. You'll know that if you got the message I put in there with it."
"Oh, we have your message, Doctor." Sardon's holographic expression was reproachful. "You managed to break the telepathic circuits for the entire mail room. Have you ever thought of…not shouting when you're sending a message?"
"Ridiculous! I was not shouting!"
"Doctor…" Sardon was closing his eyes. "You were shouting."
"I do not shout! We are not exactly the most telepathically gifted species, you know!"
"No, not as a rule. You, however," Sardon said with the over-bloated dignity of GREAT patience, as he spoke very slowly and carefully as if to a small child merrily holding Omega's Hand, "have been living amongst more primitive minds for centuries and your brain has been inevitably…contaminated with the presence of more telepathically communicative species. You may not be aware of it, but you were shouting. Quite loudly."
"Oh."
"Yes, Oh."
Pause.
The Doctor admitted to a prickle of dread as a terrible suspicion crept into his mind.
"If I was shouting, what was I saying?"
"Oh, I'm sure it was quite fascinating, thought-provoking and very pertinent to the situation at hand." Sardon assured him with enough leveled-out sarcasm to replace a cyberplanner's mercury levels with rusted filings. "But we couldn't really hear it over your psychic volume."
The Doctor winced. "Hopefully, that will be the last such time." He prayed. "But you do understand that pinhole is more than typically dangerous."
"Yes. Your note was extremely definite. Once we had it translated." Another pause. Sardon held his gaze, neither man blinking. "But right now our little problem is sitting with suspicious meekness in its holding-box."
"Dormant, you mean."
"Is there a difference?"
"Very much. That thing behaved with intent, I'm telling you! The fact that it is not moving: doesn't it suggest that it needs stimulus?"
Sardon sighed. "I am officially on break from the meeting, you know." He said darkly. "I had hoped to use my stolen time as the very last TSS-owned TSV was linked with yours, in a conversation with intelligence and collect some information away from the chatter of the other members of the Committee without either of us having to put up with the static of their irrelevant questions and condemnations."
"Goth, eh?"
"You're very amusing, Doctor." The Grey Man did not look amused. He was good at that.
The Doctor bit his lip, looking like a child for a moment. It tended to disarm his opponents, but in Sardon the mannerism only compelled him to hold down the ever-rising urge to find a corner in which to sit him.
"There's something very wrong with this ship, Sardon." The Renegade said at last, his voice quiet. "I can feel it, and it has something to do with this pinhole. Now I agree my mission was to either collect that thing, or die trying...but as dangerous as it is, I don't like knowing this ship full of INTELLIGENT Third-Zone technology has managed to record and then "make disappear" nearly thirty pareks' worth of scanning data about it."
"Thirty pareks!" Sardon exclaimed. "Why would an intelligent program find a rouge pinhole so interesting!"
"Any possible answers to that mean it's worth investigating." The Doctor reminded him. "You know as well as I do there's civic unrest over here. The Minyans-"
"Yes, yes, yes." Sardon lifted his hands as he shouted, but the Doctor knew fake anger when he saw it; Sardon was alarmed.
"And eventually they'll realize their monitoring equipment isn't working in my room." The Doctor glanced about him out of habit. "So I suggest we make this quick. I'm going to have to go exploring on my own." He grimaced and tugged on the Time Ring wrapped around his wrist, safely buried under sleeves. "You can use the time to get the TSV online, but you may want to get the Committee to earn its chops and investigate any recent developments in the Information Market."
"You mean the Trated Collective. And those Voraxxian traders."
"Slavers you mean."
Sardon's gaze abruptly went coldly shrewd—never a good sign for the Doctor. "Or something worse. What are the odds the Players are involved, do you think?"
The Doctor froze.
Sardon mistook this for something else.
"Yes...it ought to be investigated." The Grey Man continued. His grey eyes narrowed to glittering slits of gunmetal. "Continue your investigation, Doctor, but I want you to Recall if you get too deeply into the trouble that follows your inevitable path."
"Sardon, I-!"
The Doctor was talking to empty air.
"...think...we should...think carefully on this..."
The little Time Lord groaned out loud, rolling his eyes to the ceiling. As usual, the barest mention of that rouge race of Immortals made him run through a complicated range of reactions. Running was the preferred response, and he prided himself on having the most excellent flight-or-fight trigger of any Time Lord in the Galaxies.
But when running wasn't the response, that left the other choice, which was alas the ONLY way of dealing with Players:
Subterfuge, trickery, camouflage, betrayal, Byzantine plots, politics, and staying far, far away from prisons, carnivorous beats, projectiles, implements of death and torture, tiresome speeches, and firing squads.
Sardon was suddenly very certain that Players were involved in this somehow—certain or needed to make certain that they weren't. That in itself confirmed a long-nurtured suspicion in the Doctor's already-healthy paranoia.
Sardon knew more about the Players than he wanted anyone to know, and something about this case made him access information the Doctor wasn't privy to.
And if the Doctor died or met with one of the many interesting fates the Players (particularly a smiling Countess) had planned for him...Sardon would shrug sadly at the waste of life and continue on.
The little Time Lord sat without moving for one very long minute.
He'd liked this mission much better when he didn't know what was happening.