System Shock Part 21

The Doctor felt like he had been running all his life. He did not tire easily, but neither it seemed did the aliens chasing him.

If anything they were gaining. He could hear them hissing and wheezing as they followed, sounds punctuated by machinegun fire.

He had lost track of quite where he was on the roof somewhere on the flat section over the main staircase, he fancied. What he needed was a way down. A way down sheltered from the possibility of being shot at, so a simple fire-escape was of no use. A skylight would be ideal, but he was away from the section of the building which had an attic and there were no windows in the sloping roof sections he had so far traversed.

Another burst of fire streaked past him, a bullet grazing the back of his hand, another clawing a chunk from the sole of his shoe as he ran. The Doctor was almost over the flat section now, was scrambling up the sloping roof beyond.

He almost made it.

Just as his fingers grasped the top of the ridge, his foot slipped. The damaged sole lost its purchase on the slippery tiles, and he slithered down the side of the roof to land in a crumpled heap at the bottom. Four dark shapes gathered at the apex of the roof opposite, hissing with satisfaction. It was practically dark now, but the Doctor could see the figure in the lead the woman raise her gun.

He closed his eyes and waited for the pain. 'Sorry, Sarah,' he muttered.

186.

The Doctor was aware of the sudden burning light even through his closed eyelids. He kept his eyes shut, realizing at once what had happened. They had turned on the huge searchlights. Still without opening his eyes, the Doctor scrabbled his way up the side of the roof.

Gunfire bit into the night sky as the dazzled aliens tried to find their target. But the Doctor was over the next ridge and away. As he slid down the other side, he opened his eyes a fraction. As he had hoped, he was out of the direct glare here, shadowed by the roof he had just negotiated.

But the light was more than adequate to illuminate the section of roof beyond. The Doctor kept running, aware that the aliens were recovering, were close at his back. But that did not stop him giving a low whistle and a notional pat on the back. Parked across the roof too far away to be of use as a refuge or even for cover, but there nonetheless was the blunt-nosed, grey shape of an alien shuttle craft. The dull metal gleamed in the fading light, the exhaust ports charred and discoloured from use. It sat solidly on four short hydraulic legs, close to the roof like a crouching insect poised to spring into the darkening sky.

The sound of claws sc.r.a.ping at rooftiles behind him galvanized the Doctor into another burst of speed. He ran, but not for the cover of the shuttle or even for the distant shelter of the next raised roof. Unwinding his scarf from his neck, he ran for the outside edge of the building.

The roof was edged with parapets. They stood about two feet high above the lead roofing, a narrow drainage gully running just inside them.

The aliens were over the ridge now. Two of them were clambering down towards the Doctor. The woman sat sideways, straddling the angled roof. Her machinegun was resting across her knee and she twisted to get a better aim.

Bullets dug into the soft lead roof as the Doctor reached the gully. They chipped at the masonry as he looped his scarf over a parapet. A line of uneven holes scattered its way across the roof towards the Doctor's feet as he pushed between two of the parapets.

And jumped out into s.p.a.ce.

187.

The scarf went tight. He could feel it stretching in his grip, and wished he had not crossed so many fingers. Then he felt himself swinging back in towards the building. He lowered his head, hoping his hat would take the brunt of any impact, and crashed through a window.

The gla.s.s exploded around him and the lead of the frames twisted and tore. The Doctor landed heavily amongst the debris and staggered to his feet. The lights were on they had come on as soon as the local sensor detected movement in the room, be it gla.s.s, window frame, or Doctor. But even so it took him a moment to find the door. Then he was running again.

He paused in the doorway, getting his bearings. He had arrived in the Tapestry Room, the walls hanging with intricately woven material with its colour dulled by the years.

The Doctor struggled to remember the safe route round the first floor. The last thing he wanted was to be picked up on the security cameras and chased all over the house. He was out of breath as it was. Still, things could have been a lot worse.

Then a thought struck him. The Doctor clutched at his throat and looked back towards the broken remains of the window.

'My scarf,' he said sadly.

Lewis had not remained in the great hall. He had checked everything was in order, then gone to one of the ground floor offices. He had managed to find a workstation complete with a locally attached laser printer, and was now waiting for the hardcopy results of his work.

An A4 sheet slid out of the printer and curled warmly in the output tray. Lewis picked it up. It was the cover sheet for the short doc.u.ment he had produced. Another sheet eased its way out of the printer as Lewis read quickly through the cover sheet.

Voractyll Project Plan versus Actual a.n.a.lysis and a.s.sessment by Marc Lewis 188.

Note: This doc.u.ment is cla.s.sified confidential and should not be divulged to any Voracian without a need to know, or to any third party Lewis smiled with satisfaction. The last of the pages emerged from the printer and Lewis gathered the papers together, shuffling them into a tidy pile. He needed some objective review comments before he distributed the a.n.a.lysis too widely. Particularly, he wanted to see Johanna's reaction to the Executive Summary on the third page. He was especially pleased with its brevity and lucidity. This doc.u.ment is cla.s.sified confidential and should not be divulged to any Voracian without a need to know, or to any third party Lewis smiled with satisfaction. The last of the pages emerged from the printer and Lewis gathered the papers together, shuffling them into a tidy pile. He needed some objective review comments before he distributed the a.n.a.lysis too widely. Particularly, he wanted to see Johanna's reaction to the Executive Summary on the third page. He was especially pleased with its brevity and lucidity.

This doc.u.ment a.n.a.lyses performance and tracking data pertaining to the Hubway Project.

From the plan versus actual schedules and the objectives versus achievements quotas, certain conclusions are drawn.

These are included as Appendix A Appendix A, which also contains the p p and and pn pn quality control charts showing out of line and beyond control conditions arising in the data. Quant.i.tative and qualitative a.n.a.lyses are embedded in the main body of the doc.u.ment, the reader's attention being drawn especially to quality control charts showing out of line and beyond control conditions arising in the data. Quant.i.tative and qualitative a.n.a.lyses are embedded in the main body of the doc.u.ment, the reader's attention being drawn especially to Section 7 Section 7 which includes the Gantt chart output and risk a.s.sessment (over 1000 iterations of the plan projections). This section also predicts the most likely which includes the Gantt chart output and risk a.s.sessment (over 1000 iterations of the plan projections). This section also predicts the most likely what-if what-if scenarios given current trends. scenarios given current trends.

The conclusions of this paper are unequivocal. Director Stabfield's plan is flawed in several key aspects. While still achievable within target parameters, the plan gains a three per cent (3.00%) increase in probability of success if Director Stabfield is replaced as controlling unit before Voractyll is let run. This rises to almost five per cent (4.97%) if the Director is replaced immediately.

Lewis rolled the doc.u.ment in his hand, switched off the printer, and went to find Johanna.

Johanna knew she should not get emotional. But that made little difference. She was back inside the building now, and had 189 been searching again from room to room on the first floor. But there was no sign of the intruder.

Stabfield had been typically unsympathetic as close to anger as he ever admitted to getting. He seemed slightly relieved that the intruder seemed to be the Doctor the same strange individual who had infiltrated I2 and then escaped from Stabfield in the storeroom.

The Voracians at Security Control seemed unable to a.s.sist.

Their camera alarms had so far provided no useful data. But even that did not seem to mean Johanna and her team could restrict their search to the areas not alarmed. Short of running a complete diagnostics program on the security systems, they would have to live with their unreliability.

So she had to rely on her own initiative (she refused to consider that instinct might be a help). Which was why they had stopped searching. They were in one of the computer suites, at the north-east corner of the building. One of the Voracians had established a local network connection and was checking the OffNet linkages.

'All set,' the Voracian technician reported. 'All the local systems are OffNet enabled.'

Johanna nodded with satisfaction. 'Then let's fly the ice and get back to our normal stations.'

The other two Voracians watched as she handed a diskette to the technician at the terminal. One of them flicked a thin bloodless tongue over its lips. They both leaned forward a little, glistening heads swaying slightly as their colleague copied the OffNet instructions into the Hubway network.

'That should closed-loop his processes.'

'How will the networked devices know where he is?' one of the Voracians asked. 'The security systems couldn't find him.'

The technician checked the program was running. Then he disconnected and switched off the screen. 'I've linked the triggers to the lighting systems. They are pretty dumb, but they do detect movement in each room and provide power and light to non-essential facilities when the room is deemed not to be empty.'

Johanna led them out of the room. 'If he's in a location, the immediately local systems will know. And they will react 190 accordingly.' Parts of her face, the areas that were organic below the mask, stretched into a parody of a smile.

She was still smiling as Lewis met her at the bottom of the stairs. He was carrying a printed doc.u.ment. 'Can you take an interrupt right now?' he asked.

The Doctor had managed more by luck than planning to keep out of the way of the aliens as they searched through the first floor rooms. The trick seemed to be to find a hiding place, and then keep very still so the lights went out. It did not seem to occur to the aliens to search too carefully in rooms where the movement sensor had detected nothing recently.

'Technology, I love it,' the Doctor muttered as the aliens left the Blue Drawing-room where he had hidden behind the back wall of a table consisting of a wooden top bolted to a three-sided base.

He had seen from across the gallery as the woman who was called Johanna left the group to report to Stabfield. He had watched from a store cupboard as she returned and they all made their way to the room where he had initially been working.

The Doctor made his careful way back to the top of the main staircase. While he knew where they were, he could consult the electronic map again. His first few minutes, examining the floor plans and consulting the diagrams of wiring and cabling, were uneventful. Then he tried to trace the fibre optic network connections.

At first he thought the device was faulty. It was showing him a plan which looked suspiciously like the Hubway plumbing diagram. He refused to believe, for example, that the main network router was somewhere behind the vegetable peeler in the kitchen.

But then things got more dangerous.

First, the map failed completely. The display closed down and the standby light flickered to life. The Doctor stepped back, wondering what was happening. He almost tripped over his own feet as the lights went out.

His eyes adjusted inhumanly quickly to the gloom. He could see the map device in front of him quite clearly after only a 191 few moments. And he could see the whispy trail of smoke emanating from it. He had seen a similar thing recently, and dived out of the way as the gla.s.s front of the machine exploded.

The Doctor jumped to his feet before the last crystals of gla.s.s had stopped bouncing on the carpet. He turned to get his bearings, coughing with the smell of the explosion. Through the darkness and the smoke he could make out the shape of the photocopier standing just inside the long gallery, its lid open.

He staggered towards it, hastening into a run.

As he reached the copier, the platen lit up. A band of light lazily traversed the gla.s.s surface, copying a nonexistent doc.u.ment. The sudden brightness caught the Doctor by surprise, dazzled his eyes as they still tried to see through the darkness. He pitched forward at full tilt, catching his head against the corridor wall and sc.r.a.ping along it for a few yards.

His momentum kept him going, and as his eyes recovered, he raced for the other end of the gallery.

Johanna had sent Lewis back to the great hall. She had read the doc.u.ment, and he had barely been able to conceal his interest in her reaction. He had phrased it as if he was interested in her views as input to an ongoing a.s.sessment. But Johanna had no illusions about what he was really after.

'Will I back you against Stabfield that's what you really want to know, isn't it?'

Lewis did not reply.

'And at least as important, where will the others stand if you make a powerplay?'

'Well?' He seemed surprised at her immediate grasp of the scenario, but he recovered quickly.

'I don't know. We'll see. There's not enough data there, not yet.'

Lewis glanced round furtively. 'How much do you want?

He's losing it, Johanna.'

She shook her head. 'You're after it, that's the real motive here.' She twisted a smile. 'Ambition, Marc?'

'You know that's impossible,' he said, and neither would admit he was wrong.

192.

'So you think Stabfield's one chip short of a parallel-processor?'

'Don't you? This covers it all.' He took the doc.u.ment back from her and brandished it. 'And that's without factoring in this latest fiasco this Doctor incident.'

'I'll give it some cycles,' Johanna said. Then she sent him back to the hostages.

Johanna did not endorse Lewis's a.s.sessment at all. The data was fine, but interpretation was the key. And Lewis's interpretation and a.n.a.lysis was flawed in several ways. But it was worth checking what progress Stabfield had made.

He was still in the main suite. Together with a couple of technicians he was watching the network access spread across a map of the world. The outline maps of the countries were slowly filling in with red as the nodes went on-line to Hubway.

Stabfield looked up as Johanna stood behind him. 'A magnificent sight, don't you think? Soon we will have complete access. Soon the gateways of this world will stand open before us. Soon Voractyll will feed.'

The Doctor was in the Hubway Director's office. It was in a corner of the main house on the first floor. Probably, the Doctor decided, it had a magnificent view of the grounds and the Wilts.h.i.+re countryside. But now it was dark and there was nothing to see.

He was staring at his reflection in the window when two things happened. The first was that it occurred to him that the lights were out. The second was that a klaxon went off close by.

The sound was an insistent throbbing wail. It was incredibly loud. In between the loudest peaks of the noise, the Doctor could hear another sound. A hissing sound. Like gas being forced through a nozzle.

The klaxon was the fire alarm, he realized in a moment. And a second later he connected the hissing sound. The Doctor fell to his knees, choking and gasping as the automatic firefighting system continued to spray halon gas into the room.

A human would have collapsed from oxygen starvation almost at once as the inert gas filled the room. The Doctor was 193 rather more robust. He could survive without oxygen for a comparatively long period of time much longer if he went into a trance. But it was essential he keep conscious and aware of what was happening. Events were moving too rapidly for him already. He staggered to the door, hoping that the effects were localized.

A few moments later he found himself staring at the ceiling of the gallery. He had managed to stagger or crawl from the room. The fact that he was gulping in raspy lungfuls of air meant that the fire systems had only been activated in that one room.

He pulled himself to his feet. The klaxon had stopped, but someone would have heard it. Soon they would investigate.

The Doctor leaned against the wall for support and continued round the building. It seemed like wherever he went, any technological device or system was turning against him. He had to find somewhere to hide, somewhere safe to recoup his strength and plan his next move.

Somewhere where the digital age had not yet arrived no cameras, no computers, no photocopiers. Somewhere he could get to quickly and easily before another homicidal piece of machinery had a go.

He could think of one place that fitted the bill almost exactly. Or at least, he suspected it did, he had little experience to draw on in this area. 'Technology, I hate it,' the Doctor said to himself as he warily headed along the corridor.

'I think we can safely leave the systems to sort themselves out.' Stabfield rubbed his hands together as the red shading continued to fill the map. He stood up and gestured for Johanna to follow him. 'Time, I think, to move the hostages.

Doesn't do to let them get too familiar with the surroundings.

And we need to keep Lewis and the others on their toes.' He paused as if struck by his own metaphor. 'Well, whatever.'

Lewis was back in the great hall. He was pacing up and down behind the ring of Voracians still pointing their Heckler and Kochs at the hostages. The hostages were sitting on the floor seemingly oblivious to the aliens. Just about everyone was chattering. Several were actually laughing.

194.

They fell silent as Stabfield motioned for Lewis to come over to where he and Johanna were waiting. Stabfield explained what he wanted, and Lewis went back over to the hostages.

'Right, on your feet.'

'Why?' Sarah asked before anyone moved.

Lewis glared and raised his gun.

'Can't you shoot us sitting down?' Amba.s.sador Anderson asked without making any move to stand. 'h.e.l.l, what is this?

Honour amongst aliens?'

'For your information, Miss Smith,' Stabfield said as he approached the hostages, 'we would like to move you to another room. You must be bored with this one by now. And for your information, Mr Amba.s.sador, if you don't stand up and do as we ask then I shall be happy to demonstrate that you or some of you, at any rate can be shot in any position at all.' He looked round the faces of the humans, all attentive and silent. 'Now, are there any more questions?'

Stabfield had already started to turn away when he saw the d.u.c.h.ess tentatively raise a hand.

'Er, I do actually have a small request,' she said nervously.

'It's something of a personal nature.'

Stabfield stared. Impa.s.sive.