Doctor Who_ Hope - Mark Clapham [30]
Powlin awoke at his desk, yet again. The yellow, sickly light of an Endpoint dawn seeped in through the small window in his office, tinting his vision a ghastly sepia. The whole place looked how he felt aged, crumpled, worn out and about to split apart. He groaned at recollection of the previous nights events another victim, and still nowhere near catching the creature that was perpetrating these bizarre, pointless crimes. Powlin couldnt even be sure of a human assailant, he now had a potentially bugeyed killer who might even be able to survive in Endpoints foul seas. Anything that survived swimming through that corrosive filth would probably be near unstoppable.
And what if he couldnt stop it? The Hope Militia was an independent body of law enforcement, funded through tax and sustained democratically. Powlin was ostensibly only answerable to the people of Hope as a mass, to a council of the citys leaders of an elected assembly, should one be called. In reality none of that was at all relevant to the daytoday reality of this case. Powlin was required to answer to one man who, in spite of being officially a lone citizen, would be quite capable of removing Powlin from his post, from the city and from life itself. And no one would ever stop him.
Powlin imagined those eyes staring at him across the room. One eye expressing harsh disapproval, the other an unmoving red light, pointing at Powlins head like a laser sight. When that red eye stared out of Silvers head Powlin imagined himself as a target, lined up in some headsup display inside the cyborgs semicomputerised brain, a cross hair floating over his forehead. How much further could he displease Silver before he put that targeting to use, shooting Powlin through the head with a flick of his wrist cannon, one gesture firing an armourpiercing round straight through Powlins skull? An appropriate end to his glittering career.
This was getting him nowhere. Powlin dragged himself out from the narrow space behind his desk, back and neck aching from sleeping sitting up. He sniffed his shirt he smelt worse than last weeks victim. Seizing a pile of fairly clean clothes from the corner of the room, he staggered up the rickety watchtower stairs, mumbling exhausted greetings to a colleague he passed awkwardly on the narrow stairwell. One floor up there was a shower room, based around a decontamination cubicle salvaged from a mining ship. Fifteen minutes later he emerged, scoured and wearing fresh clothing, a bundle of dirty clothes over his arm. With a slight spring in his step he descended the stairs three at a time, heading down into the depths of the tower. Past the office levels, past the holding and processing areas at ground levels 13, and down into the subsurface level. Next to the mortuary and infirmary, in dim underground regions lit only by flickering gas light, were a number of small rooms where militiamen could perform any necessary domestic tasks. Powlin stuffed his dirty clothes into a cleaning machine, programmed it to blitz the filthy rags then proceeded to the small kitchen area. It was airless and dark, what air there was tainted by slightly stale food, but it was the nearest thing to a homely, domestic place the tower had.
Powlin found some stodgy but edible rations in the refrigerator, and prepared himself a fresh mug of caffy, then sat down at a chipped wooden table. It was an unsociably early hour, and the only other person in the room was an overweight militia woman unconscious across a couple of chairs, still halfstrapped into her riot armour. Powlin ate quietly, trying not to wake her.
He was halfway through breakfast, eyes vacantly staring at the lurid greenpainted walls, when the throwback witness from the night before burst into the room, ducking around the furniture to drop into a seat opposite Powlin. The Doctor, that was his name.
Chief Powlin, said the Doctor, grinning broadly. The mans eyes seemed bright green