Free Doctor Who: Terminus by John Lydecker Page B

stretched away into the depths of the Terminus. He wasn’t the first to walk off into the zone, and he probably wouldn’t be the last. For a moment Valgard saw another figure in place of Bor, and its face was his own.
    Perhaps it wasn’t too late. Perhaps something could be done before Bor was overpowered by the fast-acting sickness that gave the forbidden zone its name, and he could be brought back... back to suffer the slow, creeping deterioration that no amount of armour or drug control could fully prevent.
    All of the Vanir were dead men – Bor, Valgard, Eirak, all of them. Perhaps a walk into the forbidden zone was the most that they could look forward to, release from the endless workload of Lazars that arrived in increasing numbers and went... well, nobody really knew where they went. It was the Vanir’s job to ensure that they got from the liners and into the Terminus. Once they’d been taken into the zone, that job ended.
    For as long as it took these thoughts to go through his mind, Valgard hesitated. Letting Bor go the way of his choice might, in the end, be the kindest thing to do. Except that Valgard couldn’t bring himself to do it.
    He went to speak to Eirak.
    The watch-commander of the Vanir was to be found in the corner of a converted storage tank that he used as an administrative office. Here he would sit and puzzle over worksheets and shift allocations as he did his best to handle the inflow of Lazars with an ailing labour force. If the throughput was slowed, Lazars died on his hands; and Terminus Incorporated had its own way of punishing such inefficiency.
    Eirak hadn’t long returned from giving the sterilisation order to the current liner’s drones – and at the same time, although he couldn’t know it, he’d given Tegan one of the biggest scares of her life –
    when Valgard burst in.
    ‘Eirak,’ he said, even before he’d removed his radiation helmet in the comparative safety of the tank,
    ‘We’ve got a problem.’
     
    Eirak rubbed his eyes wearily. Without his helmet he was nothing like the monster that Tegan might have expected. He was simply a tired bureaucrat, and problems tended to form long queues for his attention.
    ‘Really?’ he said.
    Valgard advanced on the desk, and set his helmet down with a thump. It partly covered the chart that Eirak had been studying, but Valgard didn’t seem to notice. ‘It’s Bor. He just turned around and walked off the job. He went straight into the forbidden zone.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘No reason. Nothing obvious, anyway.’
    Eirak frowned. ‘That’s all we need,’ he said, part-way lifting Valgard’s helmet and pulling the chart free.
    ‘I’ll have to revise the entire roster.’
    Valgard waited for a moment, but Eirak was already reabsorbed in the graph. He couldn’t stay silent for long. ‘Is that all you’re going to say?’
    ‘I’ve got a shipload of Lazars just arrived, we’re under-strength and most of the men are too sick to work more than a half-shift. What do you expect me to say?’
    ‘There must be something you can do.’
    Eirak sighed. ‘Like what? Grow up, Valgard.’
    Valgard took an angry step around the makeshift table. ‘You’ve got a responsibility...’ he began, but Eirak suddenly thrust a handful of the papers before him, almost crumpling them before Valgard’s eyes.
    ‘ This is my responsibility,’ he snapped. ‘To keep the Terminus running so that we all get some chance of staying alive. What Bor does is Bor’s problem. The rosters and the work schedules are mine.’
    ‘So you’ll just let him go?’
     
    Eirak’s expression changed. The anger went, and the real Eirak was uncovered – the ruthless, calculating personality that had fitted him so well for his self-appointed job in the Terminus. He said, smooth as a snake and twice as dangerous, ‘Do you want to bring him back? I could give you the order.’
    For one moment, Valgard was revisited by the fleeting glimpse that he’d had in the