"Yeah, transferred to s.p.a.ceport Five Undertown," Forrester snapped. "Keep up with the news. Where"s the body?"
The bot swung one of its four arms the one equipped with the blaster towards a damp grey ma.s.s about eight feet long. She strode over. Cwej followed. Forrester bent down beside the body.
"Hith," she said. "Don"t find many of them on Earth since we terraformed their planet." The offworlder"s chest was a mess. It looked as if it"d been carved like a turkey, and its eyestalks had been severed close to the head.
Forrester looked back to the woman in the grip of the robot. She was so bundled up against the rain and the cold that she could hardly bend her limbs.
Her face peered out from a beehive of towels and scarves like a monkey from 26a forest, and her eyes had a dull, unfocused look, as if she had been drugged.
A sharp spike of metal dangled loosely from her left hand.
"What happened?" Cwej asked the bot.
"Start report. Body was discovered during routine patrol. Suspect was standing over body. Suspect was apprehended. Suspect offered no resistance.
Suspect identified as Falvoriss, Annie Thelma, based upon subdermal biochip.
Victim unidentified. Local station supervisor was notified. End report."
Forrester glanced across at Cwej. He shrugged.
"Record," she said to the securitybot, then, to the woman: "I am obliged to inform you that your words, gestures and postures are being recorded and may form part of any legal action taken against you. Under the terms of the data protection act 2820, as amended 2945, I am also obliged to inform you that you and any appointed legal representative will be able to purchase a copy of all recordings upon payment of the standard fee."
The woman just stared at her. A thin string of drool hung from her lower lip.
"Drugs?" Cwej ventured uncertainly.
"Not now," said Forrester. "I"m on duty."
Cwej"s pointed ears p.r.i.c.ked up.
"Joke," she added. He smiled uncertainly, revealing small, pointed teeth.
"Okay," she said to the robot. "Disarm her, tag the weapon and put her in the back. Then notify the clear-up squad."
It was just an accident.
Archer McElwee was practising his t"ai chi in the park. Every morning, as soon as the sun rose, he took the null-grav shaft up from his apartment to the roof of the tower and went through the whole set of exercises in the warm, golden glow. Repulsing the Monkey. The Heron Flying West. The Crane at Sunset. One hundred and thirty-five, he was, and he still felt like a ninety-year-old!
He took a deep breath and gazed around the park. The azaleas and sheckt bushes were in full bloom and, close by, a number of friends from the tower were also practising their exercises. It all looked so beautiful. He was a lucky man.
Beside him, Kan Nbaro turned to smile. She was a hundred and ten, and beautiful with it. He waved back. Perhaps after they finished, he could offer her a cup of coffee.
He raised his hands above his head in the Crane position and turned slowly to one side. His hand brushed accidentally against hers.
He caught her eye again, but she was frowning.
"What the h.e.l.l do you think you"re doing?" she snapped.27.
"I"m . . . I"m sorry," he stammered, shocked. "I didn"t "
"Pervert!"
Her hand lashed out, catching him across the nose. He fell backwards, hot blood gushing into his mouth. He tried to apologize, cry out, anything, but her hands were flailing at him, scratching his cheeks and neck, catching at his forehead. His arms were trapped beneath her knees as she straddled his chest, her fingers gouging into his eyes.
Warm, salty blood bubbling in the back of his throat.
Obscenities screamed in his ear.
Fingers thrust deep into his eyes.
It was just an accident.
Powerless Friendless And Scattered Through s.p.a.ce woke up shivering as a pang of pain shot through his tail. Absently, he scratched the old scar just beneath the vestigial sh.e.l.l at the base of his tail, taking stock of the situation.
His battered fedora hat had slipped off and he had managed to shrug off the monofil thermo-blankets in his sleep. He pulled his eyes back inside his body, extruded a pseudo-limb to pull the hat back over his head, rolled himself up in the blankets and settled back to sleep.
His basal foot was cold. He tried to shift himself so that the blankets wrapped around his column-like body, but by the time he"d done that a stone was pressing into his back. He wriggled sideways, but the blankets rucked up around him.
Every morning this happened. He hated it. He hated it all.
As his mind gradually crept back to consciousness, he became more aware of his surroundings. Bright light. Lapping water. Hard floor.
Earth.
He extended his eyestalks, and withdrew them quickly, wincing at the weak sunlight that filtered down from between the towers of the Overcity, reflected from the water outside the window and made patterns on the ceiling.
The ceiling was low and cracked. Fungus had crept across it, one step behind the patches of damp. Once it had been an office, before the Overcity had been built. He had been living there for a few months now, and he was beginning to get twitchy. More and more people knew where he was. He didn"t know why, but that made him nervous. Jumpy. Perhaps it was time to be moving on.
His back and his joints protested as he climbed laboriously to his feet. He couldn"t see Krohg, but that wasn"t unusual. The little glih glih would be around somewhere. would be around somewhere.
He knew that he had to find somewhere to wash the mucus from his body before he wandered up to the lower levels of the Overcity and started work.28.
It would leave his skin dry and sore, but it was worth the sacrifice. The bulk of the workers would be heading for their offices in an hour or so. Like all Hith he hated crowds, but they were used to seeing him hunched over his old, battered Earth Reptile hag"jat hag"jat, same spot every day, performing rock "n" roll cla.s.sics or some of the more playable Martian and Earth Reptile pieces. A few regulars always sh.e.l.led out for him, probably more because of the incongruity of a Hith playing an Earth tune than because he was any good, but if he didn"t wash some of the mucus off his body then the day"s take would be down. He knew: he"d tried it before. Humans were intolerant of alien beauty. Humans were intolerant of anything that wasn"t human.
He thought for a moment. At this time in the morning it was just possible that the sports facilities and showers in the bas.e.m.e.nt of the INITEC tower would be open. It was worth a try. The worst that would happen was that he"d get a little more exercise than usual.
With his backpack full, no longer fulfilling the role of pillow, he extended a pseudo-limb to swing it over his shoulder and bent down again to retrieve his hag"jat hag"jat case. For a moment the moist skin of his pseudo-limb looked strange to him gnarled, grey and twisted, like an old tree root, instead of young and smooth. Sighing, he placed the fedora over his head, poking his eyestalks through the holes, and set off. case. For a moment the moist skin of his pseudo-limb looked strange to him gnarled, grey and twisted, like an old tree root, instead of young and smooth. Sighing, he placed the fedora over his head, poking his eyestalks through the holes, and set off.
As he walked, he scratched at his skin. There were new cracks there alongside the old scars the ones that he couldn"t remember ever getting, but which covered his body and he could feel the bites over his tail and mid-torso. Pests, creeping in from the s.p.a.ceport. Terrestrial pests were like humans themselves; they tended to avoid coming into contact with offworld flesh. Unfortunately it seemed to him that, ever since the end of the Wars of Acquisition, during which the Earth Empire had grabbed whatever it wanted as quickly as it could, there were more and more multi-legged, multicoloured things taking up residence in his skin, and he was spending more and more of his hard-earned money at the autodoc trying to get rid of them. He knew of one old woman who dossed down a few streets away, and who"d been infested with some sort of protoplasmic parasite picked up from a pa.s.sing alien tourist. By the time she"d got to old Doc Dantalion well, by the time Powerless Friendless had taken her to him it was too late. The things had been radioactive, and she only had a few weeks left.
Powerless Friendless had never asked what happened to the body. With Doc Dantalion, you never could tell.
The rest of the underdwellers had looked upon Powerless Friendless with some sort of respect after that. Looking after their own, that was the first rule of the streets, offworld or not. He hadn"t liked to say that he"d been worried about her ruining his trade with her weeping sores and her moaning. If he"d 29known the things were radioactive he"d have been halfway across the city.
So preoccupied was he with his usual early morning litany of complaints that he hardly noticed the journey across the roofs and along ledges, alongside the flooded alleys and the sunken squares with the heavy weight of the Overcity forever pressing down. It was only when an Adjudication flitter droned across the sky above him, angling for a landing on the roof of a nearby building, that he realized where he was. Humans! He slid quickly into the lee of a tumbledown shack. He mustn"t let them see him! He wasn"t entirely sure why they mustn"t see him, but he hid anyway.
Powerless Friendless extended his eyestalks around the edge of the shack.
The flitter had landed next to a group of street life, and two black-robed Adjudicators had got out. One of them was a short-haired, sour-faced woman; the other was a tall, furry creature that moved like a human, not an offworlder. There was a securitybot as well. He cursed. How could he have been so careless? He had almost walked into them!
The bot was holding a woman he"d seen around in its metal paw. Annie She usually slept over beneath the INITEC Building, in the remains of a crashed Sc.u.mble ship. It was a well known doss Powerless Friendless had used it himself, once upon a time. She was looking dazed, and she held a metal spike in her hand. There was blood on the spike, and . . .
Oh.
Powerless Friendless poked his head out, risking detection. He had to be sure.
It was Waiting For Justice. Waiting For Justice And Dreaming of Home, who, despite the notorious. .h.i.th dislike of company, he had sat up with on occasion, drinking voxnik they"d stolen from the warehouses at the s.p.a.ceport.
Waiting For Justice, who had served on the Gex Gex, flagship of the Hith Navy, during the Great Patriotic War against the Humans, and lived now amongst their filth in the Undertown. Waiting For Justice, who had earned the Red Stripe of Courage during the defence of Hithis. Waiting For Justice, the only other Hith that Powerless Friendless knew on Earth.
Dead.
Ripped to shreds.
The bot was leading Annie towards the flitter. The two Adjudicators were looking around for witnesses. Powerless Friendless slipped back into the shadow of the shack.
Perhaps it was was time to be moving on again. time to be moving on again.
In the darkened room, a plump hand slowly pa.s.sed across a desktop. Lights glowed deep within its translucent surface, responding to the touch. Money 30moved from one non-existent place to another, growing as it did so. Policies changed, jobs were created and destroyed, planets changed ownership.
Something was wrong.
The man behind the desk didn"t believe in coincidence, and that meant that the sudden reappearance of both the long-lost Hith navigator and the Doctor must be regarded as probable enemy action. The Doctor was notoriously devious: this had the appearance of a cla.s.sic opening gambit. However, the opportunity to obtain the Doctor"s time and s.p.a.ce machine and rip it apart for its technological secrets was one that could not be missed.
The man thought for a moment, and smiled slightly. He didn"t need the Doctor, after all. The time machine"s secrets should be easy enough to crack.
Having the Doctor around might only prove embarra.s.sing later on, given the man"s propensity for sudden escapes and amazing reversals of fortune.
The hands moved rapidly across the desk. His safest course of action would be to get the Doctor and his companion arrested on some trumped-up charge on the basis of faked evidence. That way his tame Adjudicator could safely brainwipe the two of them. The records would be straight, and there would be nothing to point the finger of blame on him. Not that he was worried, but it was best to be sure.
And he was always sure.
Some sort of scuffle appeared to be going on in the distance; a crowd was gathering around a fight. After a cautious initial look life with the Doctor had taught her to be wary of anything out of the ordinary Bernice ignored it. Instead, she let the walkway carry her to a point midway between two buildings, then walked across to its stationary edge and leaned against the semi-transparent bulwark.
"Progress moves fast," she said as the Doctor caught up with her. "How do they keep it all up in the air?"
He took his hat off and fanned at his face with it.
"Cheap and effective null gravity. One of the key discoveries that keeps the Earth Empire ahead of the opposition. Null-grav had been around for centuries, of course, but this particular variant was based on a completely novel principle. It caused a minor technological revolution, and a major demo-graphic one."
He flipped the hat back up his arm and onto his head.
"Everybody lives in the towers of the Overcity now," he continued. "Well, everybody who is anybody. Some levels are accommodation, some are shops, some offices and some are a mixture. Status depends on how high up you live. Implanted identification chips limit access to the levels you are allowed to visit, and no others."31.
Bernice craned her neck and gazed down towards the ground and the shadows too deep for the sun to penetrate. Tiny lights seemed to flicker within the darkness.
"Are those fires?" she said.
"Hmm? Yes, indeed. That will be the Undertown."
"The what?"
"The slum area. The bit that got left behind when all this " He waved a hand at the surrounding towers. " was built."
"Slums?" she asked, disbelievingly. "Haven"t they done away with slums by now?"
"It"s always like this," rejoined the Doctor. "The rich build upon the backs of the poor."
He peered over the edge. "No doubt Ace would have said it was like Hong Kong hanging over Venice," he added. "Very pithy, was Ace."
The Doctor broke off as a deep rumble shook the walkway. Looking up, Bernice saw the dark, irregular shape of a s.p.a.cecraft descending through the atmosphere.
"Is there a s.p.a.ceport around here?" she asked.
The Doctor grimaced. "There"s a s.p.a.ceport everywhere," he said. "Hundreds of thousands of s.p.a.ceships dock here every day. Trade and transport are so important to the Empire that the cities have been renamed for the s.p.a.ceports.
This, for instance, is s.p.a.ceport Five Overcity, although it used to be known as Central City, and before that as London. According to your friend Homeless Forsaken, this is where the danger will start. Any ideas as to how we go about identifying it?"
Bernice puffed her cheeks out. "Nothing springs to mind," she murmured.
"Unless . . . "
The Doctor"s face was expectant. "Yes?"
"Unless we find another Hith on Earth who can tell us what"s going on."
The Doctor"s face fell again. "It"s a long shot," he said.
"But it might just work," Bernice replied.
An Eirtj Knight asked the way to the market as Terg McConnel walked into the alley. It was crouching in the shadows, mist swirling around its sleek body, eyes glinting faintly in the twilight. He ignored it. The Eirtj probably knew the Undertown better than he did; they only requested directions in order to start a conversation, but once you"d spoken to one of them for any length of time you"d exhausted all possible topics of conversation with the entire race. And besides, aliens made his skin crawl. G.o.ddess alone knew why he"d agreed to head the research team. He should have stayed back in his comfortable office in the university block, up in the Overcity. Amongst his fellow humans.32.
McConnel headed down the alley, water sleeting down from the half-hidden bases of the Towers that hung high above the Undertown. Behind him he heard the Knight sigh faintly, and stalk off in search of somebody more garru-lous.
A warning notice hung in the air a few feet into the alley. Static blurred the faint red letters. DANGER, it said, DO NOT Pa.s.s: RADIATION HAZARD. McConnel walked through the notice, raising a hand to brush at his forehead as the letters curved around him with a brief caress of light, and halted as he came to the end of the alley. The scanners were still there, attached to the stonework like little metal snails. The radiation leak story wasn"t true, of course, but it was the only way to keep the d.a.m.ned underdwellers from removing the scanners and selling the parts as sc.r.a.p. A sign saying PLEASE DO NOT Pa.s.s: SCIENTIFIC MEASUREMENTS IN PROGRESS just didn"t carry the same weight.
The fact that McConnel"s team of students were trying to help the ungrateful sc.u.m by measuring the effects on the Undertown of the Overcity"s null-grav generators wouldn"t cut any ice at all.
The devices were damp with condensing mist. His fingers slipped as he checked them, and he grazed his knuckles upon the rough stonework. The water stung in the wound. He cursed and held his wrist up to the scanners, waiting for the information to download into his processor. When he got the readings back to the university he would pore over them for hours, pulling every morsel he could out of them, but he could already see from the figures scrolling across the screen that the levels of ultrasonic vibration were well above safe limits.
He turned away and headed back towards the mouth of the alley. The restaurant where he had arranged to meet the team was nearby, according to the centcomp map, but "nearby" was a flexible concept in the Undertown. It took McConnel fifteen minutes to get there through alleys and streets thronged with stinking aliens and degenerate humans. He made sure that his stunner was visible to all as he walked. He had to double back on himself five times, and twice miscalculated and found himself in blind alleys or up against the banks of one of the infinity of ca.n.a.ls that were the arteries of the Undertown. His path took him across bridges, through dog-leg bends, down narrow alleys, up corkscrew stairways and through concealed entrances. Finally he recognized a flight of stone steps which had been smoothed into curves by generations of feet. Bodies sprawled on the steps, some of them asleep, others muttering obscurely to themselves. Humans with heavily lined faces and long, matted hair were side by side with various alien races whose features were combinations of beaks, antennae, horns, eyes hooded, stalked and slit-ted, ears small and pointed or large and leathery, and whose arms ended in claws, or tentacles, or strange mixtures of flesh and bone like surgical instru-33ments.
The restaurant was basic: a stone-clad room with a ca.n.a.l cutting off one corner, near to the toilets, forming an entrance for the various amphibian races that patronized it. The ambience made his skin crawl. He"d made the mistake of leaving it up to the students to find a place to eat. He should have guessed that they would choose an alien restaurant in the Undertown instead of heading back up to the Overcity, and some decent human food.
McConnel"s team was already waiting: a mismatched group of eager young people drawn together by the excitement of research. He pulled up an empty chair, squeezing in between two postgrads. His head was beginning to throb.
This hadn"t been a good idea.