Doctor Who: The Blood Cell Read Free Page B

him.
    I wondered when 428 would grow tired of pacing. They all did eventually. When I was a child, we still had zoos. My prisoners were the same as zoo animals, treading out the limits of their confinement, as if somehow they could wear away the floor and the bars, before they finally accepted defeat.
    Prisoner 428 had not yet given in. Had not yet realised that he would never leave The Prison.
    I zoomed in on his face, trying to read his crimes on it. We were about the same age, but his features looked stretched under the effort of containing his guilt, as though trying to keep several lifetimes of tiredness and anger at bay. It was a face that was commanding. Not exactly handsome, but certainly unforgettable. It chilled me to think that that wasthe very last thing so many of his victims had seen. Not a sunset, not the faces of loved ones smiling a sad goodbye, but just that angry face boiling away like a dying star. I shuddered.
    Whatever it takes, I vowed to myself, I will make you pay for what you have done.
    The alarms roused me. I’d wandered away into my thoughts, which was always a mistake. There’s so much to do on The Prison, and it doesn’t do for a Governor to daydream. Even when things are running smoothly.
    I glanced back at the cell-cam and started. It was almost as though 428 was staring through the lens, right at me. Those eyes. The terrible things they’d seen.
    Hastily I cut the feed. And then the alarms blarted.
    On The Prison we have a lot of alarms. None of them are good news and all of them sound like lost souls shrieking. This wasn’t the particular agony of the ‘Prisoner Escape’ alarm, but it was still fairly shrill. We’d been hearing it a lot recently.
    Bentley knocked abruptly on my office door and then entered. ‘Systems Failure,’ she announced in capital letters. We both knew this already, but Prison Procedure stated that the Governor had to be informed. I nodded, and stood.
    We both walked swiftly through to the Control Station, where Custodians slid silently between terminals. Screens showed every cell, every corridor, every area of The Prison. A giant map of the whole asteroid glowed. In theory it should be showing where the systems failure was, but instead it was partially obscured by an icon that read ‘UPDATING … UPDATING …’ Most unhelpful.
    The Prison diagnostic system had been put in by a separate contractor to the one who had provided the tablets and the TransNet. By all accounts they hadn’t got on well with each other, and had done an equally shoddy job.
    I looked at Bentley moving swiftly between the Custodians and accessing verbal updates from her fellow human Guardians. If only everything in life could be as efficient as Bentley, I thought. Perhaps a little warmer. Just a shade. But she was everything you could hope for in a crisis.
    The truth was there was very little we could do. These systems outages were growing increasingly regular and there was no explanation. If this latest one proved true to form, they’d pass in anything between three and five minutes and then it would be business as usual. But while the alarms sounded, it was up to Bentley and her team to ensure that no core systems were affected. She’d tasked some Custodians to try and work out the root cause, but so far they’dreported nothing. Instead, they’d become expert at riding these emergencies, reallocating resources on the fly to ensure the locks did not fail, the containment grid was maintained and the environment system stabilised. This sometimes meant the evening meal was undercooked, the gravity a little light or the air slightly stale. So far we’d not had to make any huge sacrifices.
    Late one evening, Bentley and I had sketched out some Emergency Protocols. Or rather, I’d made some suggestions, and she’d listened and then said ‘If I may …’ and corrected them all. But we were prepared. Just in case it got worse and the power drains couldn’t be switched easily