Part 4 (2/2)

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 s.h.i.+p. 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, flags.h.i.+p 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 owners.h.i.+p.

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.ces.h.i.+ps 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.

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