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.During the year-long pilgrimage, she had held her tongue and put up with his foul attacks; Abbot Aklaar wouldn’t have stood for such behaviour.But here, now.Her own insult had been honed and polished over the last year, and she loaded, aimed and fired it with relish.‘At least he is true to his caste, Cleece, and not a changeling like you.’Totally prepared for his reaction, she moved to one side as Cleece lunged at her, but she had the advantage; although he was male, and naturally stronger, she was still dressed in her armour.With her cybernetically amplified musculature, she grabbed his arm and flung him to the floor.As he lay there, dazed and prone, she grasped his neck with her clamp; for a second, she wondered whether the slight effort needed to snap his neck would be worth it, but decided that there were other, less final ways of teaching her mate a lesson.Cleece looked up at her, his expression one of disbelief mixed with confusion.But he was powerless, and Esstar liked that.She smiled down at him.‘It is time we talked of the future, Cleece.’Chris checked his watch.Only seconds remained before his preparations came to fruition, and he knew that he had to be ready.He had planned the route from his cubby-hole to the manipulator chamber with calculated precision over and over again in his mind; he could get there in a matter of minutes.He just hoped that that was where Felice and Rachel had been stationed by the Ice Warriors.He had already decided that searching for them was fruitless; they could be anywhere in the base.If they weren’t where he expected them to be, his only option was to make a break for it and get back to the survivors.Assuming that they hadn’t been slaughtered by the Ice Warriors, of course.Falaxyr had been expecting them to arrive; was it too much to hope that he wouldn’t have sent a search party to the parliament building? Chris’s watch suddenly bleeped at him.And sent a blanket pulse across the complex.His little hidy-hole shuddered as fifty separate explosions rocked the Martian base, each of them carefully placed to cause the maximum amount of confusion.And that was only the start.Chris smiled.It was time to begin.Chapter 10Falaxyr looked up from Hoorg’s latest report on the status of the GodEngine, aware that he had been disturbed, but not quite sure by what.But the next disturbance was clearly recognizable: it was an explosion, just outside the doors of Falaxyr’s chambers.Through the circuitry built into his helmet, he patched into the base communications suite.‘Report!’ he demanded.The reply was distorted by static and barely decipherable.‘.multip.explos.througho.complex.casualties.’Falaxyr closed the useless connection and stood up.He attempted to summon Draan, but there was even more interference across that channel.He had no choice: he would have to find out what was going on for himself.Hissing with anger at the situation, he strode over to the main doors of his room and pulled the handle.Nothing happened.He examined the doors and immediately saw the reason why: the door frame was buckled at the top, jamming the doors and making them totally immovable, despite Falaxyr’s enhanced strength.Without hesitation, he raised his arm, aimed his clamp at the line where the doors met, and then sent the necessary signals to his inbuilt weapon.The sonic disruptor mounted on his wrist gave a sustained, shrill warble, and the surface of the metal began to ripple as if seen through a heat haze.Unfortunately for Falaxyr, the doors were heavily reinforced, a legacy of an earlier time where even a base commander had to protect himself from ambitious underlings and internecine struggles.It would take at least ten minutes at full force for the doors to give way under the sonic barrage.Trying to feel the patience that had kept him sane over his long years of isolation, Falaxyr started waiting for the rippling metal to melt.Chris hauled his backside out of the cubby-hole and dropped to the ground two metres below.The string of explosions was still continuing, and should carry on for another two minutes if he’d wired everything up properly.Some of the bombs had been nothing more than smoke and noise, akin to the ones he had used to elude the Ice Warriors earlier.But the others had been far more destructive.The Doctor had thoughtfully included a handwritten inventory in the kit, including instructions on the usage of the various phials and bottles that it contained – like the late, lamented TARDIS, the kit seemed to be bigger on the inside than out.Two of the phials contained chemicals called nitro-twelve and nitro-thirteen, which the Doctor’s spidery handwriting described as ‘rich, full-bodied and fruity vintages a thousand times as powerful as nitro-glycerine’; sadly, Chris hadn’t ever heard of nitro-glycerine, but he had used the chemicals sparingly.From the sound of the continued explosions, even those single drops had been overkill [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]