Doctor Who: The Also People (12 page)

'About as authentic as a middle-aged Xhosa virgin,' muttered Roz.

'I was thinking of going as Boudicca,' said Bernice. 'Me and Chris could have been a pair.'

'So who's
Buhdika
when she's at home?'

'A very famous British warrior queen.'

'I thought that was Queen Elizabeth,' said Roz. ' "I may have the body of a weak and feeble woman but I have the heart and stomach –" '

' "– of a concrete elephant",' finished Bernice. 'I should never have shown you Ace's tape collection.' She stepped out of the restricting silk flounces. 'Free at last. Come on, I'll give you a hand with your necklaces.'

'Shouldn't we get downstairs?'

'What's the rush?' asked Bernice. 'They waited for us to get back from the party, they can wait for us to get changed.'

'I don't think they came here for a social visit,' said Roz.

'You think they're
official
?'

'As official as anything can get in this place,' said Roz. 'That woman has cop eyes.'

'She should use ointment for that.' Bernice rummaged for some jeans. Roz said, and Bernice believed her, that people that did the job could always recognize other people that did the job.

She always called it 'the job'. Bernice, who'd often been on the receiving end of people doing 'the job', had never noticed it herself: too busy trying to talk her way out of whatever tricky situation the Doctor had managed to get her into this time. If Roz said the woman had cop eyes then the woman was a cop, which meant that the drone she'd come with was a cop too. 'Oh well, it was a nice holiday while it lasted.'

'They could just be checking us out,' said Roz. 'Can I borrow that muscle-bound top? This blanket's beginning to itch.'

'Help yourself,' Bernice told her. 'There's a pair of leggings that go with it somewhere. I think we can safely leave the pair of them to the Doctor. Besides, I'm starving.'

'Didn't you eat at the party?'

'Eat?' said Bernice. 'I could hardly breathe let alone eat.'

'Hey, stupid,' called Roz. 'We want some food – an unleavened bread base, base fifteen centimetres in radius, with a cheese, mushroom and tomato topping. I want it baked until the cheese is crispy.'

'And some coffee,' said Bernice.

'And some coffee, with milk and sugar in separate containers.'

'If we take our time with the food the Doctor should have them nicely baffled by the time we go down.'

'If they talk to him that long,' said Roz, 'they'll think we're the second coming.'

House took five minutes to fetch the food order, long enough for Roz to get her ankle bracelets off. She left the bracelets on her arms alone. 'I'm getting kind of used to them,' she said. They drank their coffee and ate the close approximation of a pizza. It was hot enough to burn their tongues. Bernice suggested that next time they should ask for anchovies but neither could remember what kind of fish an anchovy actually was.

Roz asked Bernice whether she'd noticed the square nipples.

'Square?' asked Bernice.

'Well,' said Roz, 'diamond-shaped then. You must have seen Dep's, they were pretty hard to miss. All the others I saw were square too, even the men's.'

'Is that significant in some way?' asked Bernice.

'Just that these aliens come in all sorts of shapes and the only thing I noticed they had in common was that they all had square nipples.'

'You,' said Bernice, 'are a deeply weird woman.'

'At least I've got round nipples.'

'Do you think we should tell the Doctor?' asked Bernice.

'He probably knows already,' said Roz.

They heard someone shouting downstairs, loud enough to overcome the villa's soundproofing.

Bernice checked her watch. 'They're early,' she said. 'They shouldn't be on to the threats stage for at least another five minutes. Maybe we should see if they need help.'

'We haven't finished the pizza substitute,' said Roz.

They compromised and took the remains of the pizza with them, padding down the staircase to the lounge, their mouths full of mozzarella analogue and giggling like schoolgirls.

There were two of them, a woman and a drone. They said they were from something called the Interpersonal Dynamics Interest Group.

The drone was the standard oblate spheroid a metre across with a little face ikon, a hologram that changed expression as it spoke; it called itself kiKhali. The woman was thick-set with mottled reddish brown skin and wearing a canary-yellow evening dress; her neck was long and her face somehow too small. Bernice made a point of studying her eyes which were small and slate grey.

She noticed that the eyes were constantly in motion, often in two separate directions. Like the eyes of a lizard, thought Bernice; that can't be what Roz meant. She really wasn't that surprised when a slim bifurcated tongue darted out between the woman's thin lips. When she spoke her voice sounded normal enough; Bernice had half expected her to hiss. She said her name was agRaven.

The Doctor was standing with his back to the balcony window. He introduced Roz and Bernice very formally as 'his associates'. Chris and Dep were sitting on one of the sofas. Dep's eyes were wide, but interested, not frightened. A braid of her hair was coiled possessively around Chris's shoulders.

Roz perched on a comfy-field to the right of the visitors making it impossible for the woman to watch her and the Doctor at the same time. Bernice thought this was unnecessary and rude, but Roz was probably doing it automatically. Bernice made a point of sitting opposite the woman and smiling nicely when she was introduced. AgRaven smiled nicely back.

'I think,' said the Doctor, 'that you should recap for my associates.'

AgRaven licked her lips but it was the drone kiKhali who spoke first. 'Thirty hours ago,' it said,

'a drone was struck by lightning and killed. Myself and agRaven here are doing the initial assessment on behalf of IDIG.'

'It's extremely unusual for a drone to die in this manner,' said agRaven, 'especially a drone like vi!Cari who was built to defensive specifications.'

'It was a combat-bot?' asked Roz.

AgRaven looked at the Doctor as if expecting a translation. The Doctor's face was impassive, his eyes guarded. Roz opened her mouth to speak.

'A robot built for combat,' said Bernice.

The 'mouth' of kiKhali's face ikon turned down at the corners.

'We don't like to use the R-word,' said agRaven diplomatically, 'when we're talking about people.'

'Vi!Cari was a drone with full
defensive
capabilities,' said kiKhali. The machine's voice sounded tight, almost angry. 'The same basic configuration as myself. It was capable of levelling a small town and surviving a direct hit from a twenty-kiloton nuclear device.'

Roz yawned. KiKhali's face ikon showed obvious anger.

Could a machine get angry? Bernice wondered. SaRa!qava swore they had genuine emotions.

More to the point, was it really wise to provoke one considering what kiKhali had just said about levelling small towns. Bernice had met her fair share of aggressive machine races. Or perhaps that was
barbarian
thinking?

'Tough enough to survive a lightning strike?' asked Roz.

'Of course,' said kiKhali.

'Then how was it destroyed?'

'We don't know,' said agRaven. 'That's why we're doing an assessment.'

'Have you reconstructed vi!Cari's casing yet?' asked the Doctor.

'Just a moment,' said kiKhali.

What Bernice thought was a hologram appeared in the centre of the lounge. It was the image of a drone but at one-third scale. It was obviously exactly the same design as kiKhali, except that kiKhali didn't have a hole burnt through it from top to bottom. The image rotated so that Bernice could see the inside of the drone through the hole in the top: there were no wires or circuits but she got the distinct impression that the machine had been built up in layers around a small central sphere.

'God assembled this model from the fragments that it recovered from the sea-bed,' said kiKhali. 'As you can see death was caused by a massive intrusion through the upper hemisphere, through the boundary layer of the brain and out through the lower hemisphere.'

'Surely God has a sensor record of the event,' said the Doctor.

'God was only running basic surveillance of the area at the time,' said kiKhali, 'so we only have a data record down to the micrometer level and the storm itself was generating a stupid number of gigawatts. That means we only have a partial sensor record.'

'Maybe it malfunctioned,' said Roz.

'Does that look like a malfunction?' said agRaven. To Bernice's surprise agRaven plucked the model from the air and handed it to Roz. Not a hologram then, something else.

'A solidigram,' said the Doctor.

'Clever,' said Roz in an unimpressed voice.

'May I?' asked the Doctor. Roz casually tossed the solidigram across the room to the Doctor.

Bernice saw agRaven wince.

'So you think
robot
boy here was struck by lightning?' asked Roz.

'Its name was vi!Cari,' said kiKhali angrily. 'We're talking about a person here.'

'No sentient machine has
ever
suffered a catastrophic failure without an external cause in over two thousand years,' said agRaven. There was a tense note to her voice: Roz was beginning to get to her too.

The Doctor turned the solidigram over in his hands, feeling the damaged area with his fingers.

'It was murdered.' He looked sharply at agRaven. 'But of course you knew that.'

There was a pause.

'Yes,' said agRaven. 'That is the most likely explanation.'

'In that case,' said the Doctor, 'we accept.'

There was another pause.

'Accept what?' asked agRaven cautiously.

'The assignment of course,' said the Doctor. He jumped to his feet and beamed at the pair from IDIG. 'It's lucky for you that we happened to be here enjoying our hols when this foul deed took place, otherwise you could have been in real trouble. I and my associates have had simply masses of experience in dealing with this sort of thing. Isn't that right, Professor Summerfield?'

'Masses,' said Bernice.

'And I might add that Adjudicator Forrester has had twenty-five years' street-level experience handling suspects of all shapes and sizes. Some of them even turned out to be guilty.'

'But –' started agRaven.

The Doctor cut her off with the wave of his hand. 'How can we sacrifice our free time like this?'

he asked. 'Think nothing of it. A small repayment for the excellent hospitality we have enjoyed so far.'

'But –' started agRaven again. Bernice had to feel sorry for her.

'Now that's all settled.' The Doctor rubbed his hands together. 'Why don't you tell us more about this vi!Cari.'

Vi!Cari was, or rather had been, one of the older defensive model drones, designed and built for operation in hostile environments. It had been manufactured on the TSH J-!Xin!ca three hundred years ago, had served on a GPS (with distinction) and on the VAS S-Lioness during the war. Towards the end of the war it had opted out of active duty with XR(N)IG. 'Just like that?'

asked Roz. 'Just like that,' said kiKhali. 'We're not slaves.' Records were patchy after that, drones don't need somewhere to sleep and there was no indication that it had joined an association or an Interest Group. A year and a half ago it had registered that it considered itself resident in iSanti Jeni.

'It wasn't exactly popular around here,' said Bernice.

'How do you know that?' asked agRaven.

'Oh,' said Bernice, 'I have my sources.'

'She talked to people,' said Roz. 'It's more efficient than scanning.'

'Excellent,' said the Doctor. 'You see what a difference a bit of experience makes.'

A lightning bolt couldn't damage a drone, not even the twenty thousand plus ampere flashes that were recorded at the heart of last night's storm. Bernice knew from experience that you could fly a flitter right through a thunderstorm; it attracted the lightning but the charge went in one side and out the other. To get yourself fried you had to be grounded first. Vi!Cari hadn't been grounded. According to the partial data record it had been cruising at an altitude of eight hundred metres and a velocity of one kilometre per second, heading straight for the epicentre of the storm.

'Why?' asked Bernice.

AgRaven shrugged. 'God says it's been running behaviour models but the parameters are so broad that even it can't say what was going through vi!Cari's mind at the time.'

'About twenty thousand amperes,' said Roz.

'You,' said kiKhali, 'are a truly sick individual.'

Bernice wondered why Roz seemed to enjoy winding people up. It was getting on her nerves.

She could live with agRaven or kiKhali's bad opinion but Dep was watching the whole sorry scene.

She wished Roz would lay off, just this once; it was embarrassing.

'Assuming,' said the Doctor, 'that for some reason the lightning discharged directly against vi!Cari, how much damage should it have done?'

The answer was none at all. Even assuming that vi!Cari was out of defensive posture it still had three layers of shields in the terrawatt range and underneath that was the drone's outer shell, constructed of restructured crystalline carbon hybrids. They were, Bernice thought, tougher than Daleks, more like miniature battle cruisers than any robot or droid she'd ever heard of. She also noticed that neither kiKhali nor agRaven had said anything further about the drone's
offensive
capabilities. In her experience civilizations rarely let their offensive weapon systems fall far behind their defensive ones. 'Could another drone have done it?' she asked.

'It would have to have been another defensive drone,' said kiKhali. 'And at very close range –

God would have seen it.'

'The drone,' asked the Doctor, 'or the attack?'

'Either,' said kiKhali.

'How many defensive drones are there in the sphere?' asked Bernice.

'Sixty-eight million,' said kiKhali, 'nine hundred and twenty thousand, four hundred and thirty-eight.'

'Including you?' asked Roz.