Death's Head (audio story)

Death's Head is the second audio play in the Kaldor City series, written by Chris Boucher. It features an investigation into the attempted murder of Chairholder Uvanov.

Publisher's summary
"Taren Capel? The mad god of the robots. He was famous, briefly, but then, weren't we all?"

Someone is spinning a web. Links are forming between one man's need for violence and another's desire for power; a desert ore processing station and a long dead enemy of the state. Someone, maybe everyone, is being manipulated.

Carnell is the obvious culprit, but who is the psychostrategist working for, and what could their motive possibly be?

Kaldor City - Death's Head uses the characters, situations and settings that appear in Chris Boucher's Doctor Who novel Corpse Marker, to tell a complex tale of sex, money and death.

Cast
(in order of appearance)
 * Carnell - Scott Fredericks
 * Sheen - Nicholas Briggs
 * Rov - Robert Lock
 * Rull - Trevor Cooper
 * Cotton - Brian Croucher
 * Landerchild - Peter Miles
 * Strecker - Peter Tuddenham
 * Attendant - David Bickerstaff
 * Uvanov - Russell Hunter
 * Hume - Alistair Lock
 * Iago - Paul Darrow
 * Justina - Patricia Merrick
 * Blayes - Tracy Russell
 * Voice 1 - Fiona Moore
 * Voice 2 - Bruce McGilligan

Continuity

 * The play sets up several ideas that only receive some kind of resolution later in the series, such as the existence of Taren Capel's skull (although the one seen here is a fake) and several clashing schemes and plots that the Topmasters, Carnell and Iago are attempting to put into action.
 * The origin of the skull presented to Uvanov is seemingly explained in the story PROSE: Skullduggery where Rull kills a technician who ends up in a morgue where Cotton has an undue influence over the Head of Forensics: the plan is articulated that Cotton should and probably has stripped the flesh from the technician's head and used his skull as the one that Uvanov is presented with.
 * Carnell muses about the existence of an alien grand manipulator whose goals and methods would be unknowable, foreshadowing the emergence of the Fendahl in AUDIO: Checkmate.
 * The attendant whom Rull 'helps' is later revealed, in AUDIO: Hidden Persuaders, to be an agent for the Church of Taren Capel.