Part 6 (2/2)

The woman looked at him in some concern, her gaze travelling across his dry, cracked skin, his painfully thin and scarred body. 'Here,' she said, pa.s.sing him the container of food. 'Have some of this.'

The Doctor leaned forward towards Powerless Friendless. 'May I ask a question?' he said.

Powerless Friendless retracted his eyestalks slightly. 'What sort of question?' he asked.44.

'Those scars,' the Doctor began, indicating the gnarled, twisted flesh of Powerless Friendless's upper torso and the nubs of his retracted pseudo-limbs.

Powerless Friendless flinched. He didn't like being reminded of of his scars.

They made him think about . . .

'Scars?' he asked, trying to quell the seething unease in his mind.

'Do you mind telling me where you got them from?'

Powerless Friendless opened and closed his mouth, trying to find the right words, but they were gone, gone wherever the memories had gone. 'I I don't remember,' he said finally.

The Doctor frowned. 'It looks to me,' he said slowly, 'as if you have been tortured. Quite comprehensively tortured. I would be surprised if you could forget something like that.'

Powerless Friendless extruded a pseudo-limb and ran it over the twisted flesh as if he had never really seen it before.

'And that number burned into your tail,' the Doctor continued remorselessly.

'Where did it come from? Who did it to you?'

The knife flashed in the half-light of his cell, drawing a line of agony across his flesh. flesh.

'An old-fas.h.i.+oned device,' a human voice said, 'but then, I am an old-fas.h.i.+oned man. You may find this difficult to believe, but I am over a thousand years old.' man. You may find this difficult to believe, but I am over a thousand years old.'

Powerless Friendless screamed.

Springing up, he backed away from them, pseudo-limbs held up as if to ward them off. Before they could stop him, he had turned and slithered out of the plaza, leaving his hag'jat hag'jat behind, trying to block the words, the memories from his mind A spindly bot with an emblem on its chest tried to stop him, but he slithered under its four outstretched arms and across the plaza. It grabbed for him, its metal feet thumping the ground as it ran, but it only succeeded in grabbing the fedora from his head. The hat caught at his eyestalks, but he pulled away, panic-stricken. behind, trying to block the words, the memories from his mind A spindly bot with an emblem on its chest tried to stop him, but he slithered under its four outstretched arms and across the plaza. It grabbed for him, its metal feet thumping the ground as it ran, but it only succeeded in grabbing the fedora from his head. The hat caught at his eyestalks, but he pulled away, panic-stricken.

Homeless Forsaken Betrayed And Alone. A name that held a.s.sociations for him. Unpleasant a.s.sociations. Things he had done his best to forget. Things that he had paid people to help him forget.

Things that seemed to be bobbing to the surface, whether he wanted them to or not. Ghosts from the past.

The bot was following him. Perhaps the Doctor and Bernice had sent it after him. Or perhaps . . .

No. Not that thought. Not now. He dived into the nearest null-grav shaft, then out at the next junction. Using guile, skill and his knowledge of the myriad levels of the Overcity, he began to make his way towards the best access point to the Undertown. Within moments, the bot was out of sight.45.

Memories flitted through his mind. Faces and places that he thought had been buried. Old times. Painful times. As he exited the shaft and transferred onto a walkway, he tried to suppress them, but they were too strong. His old life was breaking through the patina of conditioning that had formed over it, and there was nothing he could do about it.

It was as if he had two parallel sets of memories: two ident.i.ties. There was Powerless Friendless the anonymous musician and down-and-out whose body was covered in odd scars and who lived in the Undertown. And there was the other, the s.p.a.ce pilot who appeared to him in dreams. The hero. The one who went away.

He made his way back towards the Undertown. It may not have been home, but it was the best he had.

Cwej was still shaking when Forrester led him into the refectory raft. The place was crowded with off-duty and resting Adjudicators. A scent of coffee and frying soy-bacon hung in the air. Simcords of alien forests and seas hung on the walls, making the place look tawdry rather than exotic.

'Hey, Forrester,' yelled a small man with a large moustache, 'who's your friend?'

'He's no friend, Susko,' Forrester shouted back, 'he's a rookie!'

'An' he's shakin' cos he's squired to Forrester,' another voice bellowed.

'Nah, it's the thought of working out of the same station as you, Lubineki,'

Susko rejoined.

The room erupted in laughter. Forrester left them to it. Finding an unoccupied table for two, she sat Cwej down.

'How are you feeling?' she asked.

'I can't believe it,' he said. He'd been repeating the same words ever since they left the interrogation truck. While he had stood by the door, looking back inside with a dazed expression on his golden-furred face, Forrester had called a bot over to guard the truck and sent another one to Adjudicator Secular Ras.h.i.+d with a message.

'Brain embolism,' she said calmly. The best way to bring him out of it was to be calm. 'It happens.'

His face was etched with lines of worry. 'But . . . a suspect, dying in custody.

We'll be slaughtered! The Adjudicator Secular will hang us out to dry!'

'I doubt it,' she said, punching an order for coffee into the tablecomp. 'We've still got the probe evidence. She was guilty, there's no denying that. All we've done is antic.i.p.ate the sentence.'

'That's not the point! We '

She banged the table, shutting him up and sending a tiny ripple of tension around the room. 'That's the way centcomp will see it,' she insisted, holding 46his gaze. 'We're good cops. We've got good records. The underdweller was a murderer. Case closed.'

He seemed to relax slightly. 'Are you sure?'

'Sure? Of course I'm sure.'

A multi-armed bot pa.s.sed by and deposited two steaming coffees on the table. Forrester sipped at hers and put it down again, grimacing at the heat.

Cwej swigged his without apparently noticing. 'I wonder . . . ' he said.

'What? What do you wonder?'

'Well, no. It was probably nothing.'

'If you want.'

'Like you said, I'm not familiar with the equipment.'

'You don't sound convinced.'

He caught his lower lip between sharp little teeth.

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