Part 12 (1/2)

'I've been around,' she said neutrally.

'Looks like you've been in some dangerous situations.'

'The Undertown's a dangerous place.'

His gaze was steady, and she couldn't look away.

'Ever thought of a transfer?'

'To where? I'd be bored silly up here in the Overcity. Tried it, didn't like it.'76.

He smelled musky, warm, and she felt her head swim. She wanted to run her hands through his thick, silky pelt. G.o.ddess, this was stupid! He was her squire. Her squire squire, for G.o.ddess' sake!

Like she had been Martle's squire.

He reached out a paw and traced the path of one of the scratches across her breastplate.

'How'd you get this one?' he asked, his fingers lingering at the end of their path.

'Never mind,' she snapped. 'Get on with what we came here for.'

He pulled his hand back. She took a deep breath, hoping he hadn't noticed the shake in her voice.

'Yeah. Right.' Deftly he set up the mind probe, turned it on and angled the screen so that they could both see it. 'Here goes.' He quickly typed instructions into the probe. The screen dimmed, flickered, and went blank.

'You've broken it.'

'I have not not broken it.' broken it.'

'It never does that when I use it.'

'You never went to the lectures.'

She had no answer to that.

The screen began to strobe with scenes too brief for Forrester to identify.

Faces, places, objects . . . all fuzzy and none lasting long enough for her to place them in context. 'What's going on?' she asked.

'Well, we a.s.sume she was drugged, right? So that she couldn't run away from the securitybot.'

'Yeah.'

'And that's why her memories were fuzzy when we reviewed them earlier.'

'I guess.'

'So, if we go back to the latest point where her memories are clear, that's when she was drugged.'

'Uh-huh.'

'And whoever was around at the time is our major suspect for having drugged her.'

'Seems fair. What's your sample rate?'

'I'm taking a memory every ten minutes.'

The strobing continued. Forrester was getting a headache trying to follow it. She squinted, and knelt closer to the screen.

A face, clearer than the rest.

'Stop!' she cried.

Cwej's finger hit the b.u.t.ton. The screen froze on a close-up of a bottle gripped by a gnarled hand. The picture was crystal clear.77.

'Go forward,' Forrester barked, but Cwej was already feeding instructions in. More pictures, slower this time. Grimy, graffiti-laden walls of crumbling brick. Flickering firelight upon an arched roof A group of underlife in the remains of a collapsed church, clouds rolling overhead. Two people, a man and a woman.

A fuzzy image of a securitybot.

'Got it,' Cwej murmured. 'If I increase the sample rate to a memory every ten seconds . . . '

It took five more minutes to focus down upon the last thing the old woman saw before she had been drugged.

'And there they are,' Cwej announced. 'Prime suspects one and two.'

The image was sharp. Sharper than the rest. Forrester had seen the effect before. The low-life's mind had been brought into focus by a powerful emotion. Love could do that, and hate. And fear. Especially fear.

The man in the image was small and dark-haired. He was wearing a crumpled suit and a battered hat. The woman was tall and fine-boned. Her hair was close-cropped. Her clothes were plain except for an embroidered waistcoat.

She was holding a dermal patch towards the old woman. The image was so clear that Forrester could make out the individual pores on the patch, through which the drug would be absorbed into the skin.

'So,' Forrester breathed. 'Our murderers. Run the record on in real time.'

The image jerked into life. The woman's hand disappeared out of sight. The image began to fuzz over.

'Drug's taking effect,' Cwej murmured. 'Must be a fast acting one.'

'Wait,' Forrester said, 'she's going to say something.'

On the probe screen, the woman turned to the man and mouthed something.

'Can we get audio on this thing?'

Cwej frowned. 'Audio's usually difficult. The neural pathways it's stored in are too fiddly to access from the outside. Smell's the easiest, followed by visual. Touch and sound are b.u.g.g.e.rs.' He fiddled with the controls. 'However,'

he said distractedly, 'the memory is so sharp that we might be in luck.'