"Eye shadow and special non-stick lipstick, make mouth all slippery and bright-coloured," said the Qink. "Guaranteed to last all night."
"Well," said Roz, "how could I pa.s.s up on that?" She handed over more of her bearer bonds and put explosives, detonator, perfume, eye shadow and lipstick into her carryall. Now she had enough equipment to stage a major terrorist incident. That or open a small brothel.
It was a simple matter to join another tour group, get back into the foundry and then slip away when they reached the main press.
Hidden behind a pitted metal stanchion she listened to the tour guide"s voice echoing in the large, machine-filled s.p.a.ces, talking with synthetic enthusiasm about the economics and gross numbers of mineral rape.
The control box was just where Susanti said it would be. Roz opened it to find a series of cable junctions, their colour coding faded with age. It took her ten minutes to rig the charge and seal it up again.
She was sure Chris would have done the same job in three minutes. But would he have thought of doing it? The Doctor would have just browbeaten the controls into doing what he wanted. Or more likely, revealed that he"d been personally involved in the construction of the press and had left a back door for himself, because you never knew when it might come in handy.
She finished just in time for the second tour to arrive. After cleaning her hands with the wipes she"d brought with her she joined the back of the party.
56.Once again she listened to the robot reeling off the statistics of the top plate and describing how it had once been used to form the mega-ingots. A million tons of ma.s.s, crashing down, unbreakable and unstoppable.
She hoped, if it ever came to that, it would be enough.
The Doctor was waiting for her at a table outside a teashop on the Piazza Jemison. He was leaning back comfortably in his chair, an elbow propped on the arm, a book obscuring his face. A steaming teapot with two cups waited on the table. Roz sat down.
The centre of the plaza was a park with a sculptured playground. Children played, well-cared-for human children in brightly coloured dungarees and T-shirts. Their parents watching over them from the slatted wooden benches on the edge. This was the "respectable" end of Fury, where the original inhabitants attempted to hold back the tide of tawdry exploitation that came with the military. Roz didn"t think much of their chances.
"Any problems?" asked the Doctor.
"None so far," said Roz.
The Doctor put the book down. "Have you got it?"
"Of course." Roz pa.s.sed him the dataslip. The Doctor inspected it for a moment and then slipped it into his pockets.
"Good," he said. "That should make things easier." He reached for the teapot. "Shall I be mother?"
"How"s Chris?"
"Fine. Looking for a suitable s.p.a.cecraft."
The tea came out a delicate colour. Definitely not a local brew.
Roz reached for the sweeteners.
"Don"t do that," said the Doctor. "It spoils the taste."
Roz withdrew her hand, took the cup instead. "When are you leaving?"
"Tomorrow morning."
"Do you want me to come?" She sipped the tea.
"Better that you stay here."
"Why"s that?"
"If I"m right about what"s on Iphigenia, you could be in a considerable amount of danger if you came with us."
"More than Chris?"
57."Much more than Chris," said the Doctor. "His life doesn"t have nearly so many possibilities as yours. And anyway, I don"t intend him to get anywhere near it." The Doctor unwrapped a packet of Sainsbury"s digestives and offered her one. "Have you called your sister yet?"
Roz shook her head. "Too risky," she said. "Sensitive military zone like this, hyperwave traffic is bound to be monitored. We don"t want any complications, do we?"
"No," said the Doctor and grinned at her. "At least none that we don"t create ourselves."
They sipped their tea in silence for a while. The Doctor watched the children playing.
"There"s an N-form operating in this city," said Roz.
"Ah," said the Doctor, "I was afraid of that."
He was just an ordinary-looking man, dressed in last decade"s fashionable cheesecloth suit, with a matching wide-brimmed hat and tooled leather brogues. Just an outsystem businessman idly window shopping across the street from her hotel.
Roz would have missed him completely if she hadn"t taken the precaution of making two pa.s.ses in front of the hotel at ten-minute intervals. Mr Cheesecloth was in front of the same window both times. It couldn"t be coincidence no window display was that interesting.
She"d been blown. The question was: was Mr Cheesecloth official, unofficial or freelance? Animal, criminal or vegetating?
Roz walked past the hotel for the third time; he didn"t react.
Which meant either he didn"t have a description of her, or they were already in her room and he was just there to give them advanced warning she was coming up.
d.a.m.n, the Doctor"s whatsit device was up there along with her emergency ID and the rest of her bearer bonds. She should have stashed them somewhere else but it wasn"t easy walking this side of the street she used to be the one pretending to window shop.
One thing was for certain: she couldn"t keep walking around the block.
She stopped in front of a stall that sold beauty aides. The Qink looked at her and then quickly pulled its braincase halfway into 58 its chest. "Me different Qink, me don"t follow old ways no favours, no guns."
"Relax," said Roz. "I want to buy a wig."
The Qink"s braincase emerged cautiously. "Just a wig?"
"That"s right," she said. "And while you"re at it, you can tell me where I can get some depilatory cream."
She knew as soon as she stepped inside that her room had been turned over. It was a good job, a frighteningly professional job, with everything replaced exactly as it had been found. Too exactly that"s what gave it away. They didn"t know who she was, then. If they had known she was an Adjudicator they would never have risked searching her room.
Roz put down her bag and checked the wardrobe door. The single hair she"d stuck across the bottom was intact. A very slick search indeed.
How had they tracked her? Not through the bearer bonds: they were untraceable. Not through the Qinks: they never squealed and you couldn"t use a mind probe on them. Private Susanti, a.s.suming that Mei Feng had kept her word, would remember nothing more suspicious than a failed date. Besides, she"d given Susanti the wrong name. The last security check point she"d pa.s.sed through, the last definite visual image of her, would have been the automatic simcord taken when she used the transmat to get down from Aegisthus Station. Two days ago.
Why had they taken so long to find her? It suggested that they were following an electronic trail. No matter how careful you were, no one moved through the Empire without leaving a trace.
The Order then? No, they would have just grabbed her at the first opportunity.
h.e.l.l, grabbed nothing she"d have been shot while trying to escape. To the corrupt hierarchy of the Adjudicators she was a threat because she knew too much, and the honest ones thought she was bent. Either way you sliced it, she"d have been toast by now.
Roz stripped off her clothes and put the fresher on STEAM BATH + OPTIONS. She wrapped herself in a bath towel. The room had 59 undoubtedly been kinked for full EM spectrum visuals as well as audio. It was what she would have done.
Imperial Intelligence was too slick and well resourced to leave an operative exposed the way Mr Cheesecloth had been. Standard operating procedure dictated a team of at least six watchers with heavy electronic backup. So it wasn"t double-eye. Cheesecloth had to be a freelance working on his own all his bugs were monitoring her room and probably the hotel"s own security systems.
There was a limit to how many devices a single person could operate which explained why he was taking a risk of being obvious outside. He"d known where Roz was staying, but up until she"d walked in the room, not what she looked like. Now he could track her when she left the hotel.
Roz stepped into the fresher. She normally hated steam baths, but the steam would mask her visual and IR signature while the reflective tiles would clutter up the short-and long-wave radar.
Cheesecloth would be relying on UV alone and that, Roz knew from experience, was next to useless.
Still, she was careful to act natural, washing her hair first before moving on down. Only when she bent down to wash her legs did she retrieve the Doctor"s whatsit and the medical scanner from beneath the drain filter. Feeling terribly undignified bent over in that position she quickly thumbed the scanner to maximum gain and pushed the power output into the red. She hoped Cheesecloth was enjoying the view it was the last he was going to get.
She straightened up and listened in satisfaction to the sound of frying bugs.
It was a slightly too short and remarkably bad-tempered Skagette that walked into the Yellow Oasis later that afternoon. The wig was styled with a swept fringe that almost completely covered her right eye. It was hot, and she kept having to spit out hair, but it did change the shape of her face. The slip dress was a nightmare.
60.Mei Feng didn"t recognize her right away. "I"m sorry," she said, "we"ve got enough Skag ladies here right now good grief! Hey, "Jude."
"Hey, boss. Can you use an extra gun?" said Roz.
"Always," said Mei Feng. She wore a pants suit, businesslike after last night"s gown. Her black hair was tied in an elaborate bun. "You start immediately. Mother of n.o.body will show you the cleaning work. It"s pretty basic. Your real job is to keep an eye on things."
"Any things in particular?"
"Anything. Everything. We average four serious injuries a week and one fatality a month, and that"s just the staff. Brawls, mostly, but also a lot of petty theft accompanied by exaggerated violence."
"After all those years in the undertown," said Roz, "this should be a piece of cake."
"Tell me that again after you"ve been cleaning floors for twelve hours," said Mei Feng. "Your timing"s good: one of my Skag ladies just left for her homeworld, so there"s a bed available."
"I"ve got somewhere," said Roz. "Thanks though."
"Mother of n.o.body"s out the back, sh.e.l.ling Arcuturan prawns.
You won"t miss her. Go on. And take off that ring anyone can tell it"s genuine."
"Thanks," said Roz. She walked through the door marked STAFF ONLY.
Walking through the brightly lit, dingy hallway, she wondered why Mei Feng needed more security. It wasn"t as though her staff would be expensive to replace. And there was a steady supply of customers who wouldn"t know or care if the place had a reputation for fights (or would know, and made a beeline for the place with their fists itching). Maybe too many gla.s.ses and chairs got broken.
She came to a big kitchen. A breeze was blowing in from an open door, smelling like the sea. She put her head around the door, looking out into the alley behind the Oasis.
An Ogron woman sat on the plasticrete steps out back, twisting the heads off three-foot-long prawns. She sang a soft, rumbling 61 song as she worked, in time with the twist-crack-pull. There was a huge pile of sh.e.l.ls next to her.
She looked up at Roz. "You the new girl?" she said.
Roz got back to her hotel room at four a.m. According to Mother of n.o.body, she was now fully trained in the complexities of cleaning bar, not making mess and keeping nose clean.
She pulled off the wig and fell on to the bed, pushing her face into the soft coverlet and groaning. The bar staff were all on stims, of course; she"d taken just the one so as not to arouse suspicion, and it felt like her eyelids had been sewn open. How did they get to sleep at night? Bash their heads on the wall until they fell unconscious?
At least the customers couldn"t tell she wasn"t a Skag. Like the Qinks, they just figured she"d had some of the usual cosmetic surgery. After a few hours in the Oasis, some of them probably couldn"t tell she wasn"t a wall.
Roz waited half an hour, snapped on the bedside light, lifted the mattress, and took out her file on Mei Feng. The envelope contained a few diskettes and a single hard copy. The scan she"d done of Mei Feng"s head when they"d first met, rummaging in her handbag for the miniature medical scanner the Doctor had given her.
There was the N-gram, showing up as a thick black line in the tissue of the woman"s brain. Like a tiny mouth, waiting to open.
Waiting to let something in.
Presumably the N-gram had been created when Mei Feng was on Iphigenia. Something she ate, or something she snorted, or some kind of weird dimensional effect. Only half a dozen members of the expedition had survived. Roz bet that Mei Feng had been allowed to live.
Roz wondered for a moment if she should tell the woman she was carrying a multidimensional time bomb in her head. But that would only alert the waiting N-form. So long as Mei Feng didn"t know who she was, Roz was safe and Mei Feng"s brain wouldn"t do anything it oughtn"t.
62.She switched the light off again, pulled the pillow over her head, and prayed to the G.o.ddess of Justice and Mercy that she would get some sleep before work tomorrow.
Although the Yellow Oasis never closed, there was a period around noon when no customers were expected and things were relaxed enough for Roz to sit at the bar in peace.
Her engagement ring clinked against the shot gla.s.s of Wakeywakey as she downed the viciously bitter stuff. Mei Feng was right: she should have taken it off real emeralds, real gold, real conspicuous.
She"d had only about three hours" sleep for the last four nights.
Twelve hours of combined security and domestic work, half an hour back to the hotel. Trying to fall asleep with the thumping music and herbal stench of the bar still in her head, wondering when Mr Cheesecloth was going to pick the lock on her door and come visiting.
Mother of n.o.body was lurking behind the bar, washing gla.s.ses and peering out across the main room with her tiny eyes. They were almost hidden beneath the shelf of bone that protected her low forehead. Her skull was mostly bald, except for a fringe of dirty hair at the back and a few wiry hairs sticking out on top.
Practical Xenoculture had barely mentioned the Ogrons. There wasn"t much to know about them, the course designers figured: sub-Neanderthals who didn"t have much to say, useful for manual labour and as grunt infantry. So long as one wasn"t pointing a weapon at you or trying to eat your leg, they were safely ignored.
That"s what the course designers thought, anyway. Roz had had some run-ins with the oggies in her time that had made her wonder just what was going on inside those inch-thick skulls.
Besides, Mother of n.o.body didn"t just wash gla.s.ses. She owned a third share in the bar.
The Ogron matron had been alternately bossing her around and making sure she was all right all week. She"d seen the Ogron stop a customer beating up one of the Skagettes, while Roz was still struggling through the dancing crowd. Mother of n.o.body had 63 picked up the slender alien as though she was a baby, staring down at the drunken lout until he whimpered and crawled away.
"Penny for them," said Mother of n.o.body.
Roz snapped back into awareness. She"d been staring out across the room, looking as though she"d been working, but the exhaustion had worn her edge right down.
"I was just wondering how Genai was doing," she said. "That was a pretty nasty cut over her eye."
"She fine. Lying down. Not working today," rumbled the Ogron. "Give me someone to look after."
"Someone to boss round," said Roz.
Mother of n.o.body rumbled again. "Lie down, Genai, stay lying down, no drink anything or shoot up today. Lie down, lie down.
Now, Ogron boy," said Mother of n.o.body, "he easy to lead, not like girl with splitting head and bad temper. You act like he stupid and he follow: he act stupid. Got mind like mud."
"You mean clay," said Roz.