Doctor Who_ Original Sin - Andy Lane [123]
‘Ah,’ said Vaughn. ‘Shall I be mother?’
Doc Dantalion passed a comblike front limb through his antennae. If he didn’t get out of there soon, he was going to boil in his exoskeleton. The Spaceport Nineteen departure lounge was so full of humans that the air above them was rippling in the heat, and their exuded sweat was condensing on the walls and ceiling. The place stank of them: a greasy, dirty, meaty stench that, most offworld races agreed, was one of those things that distinguished humanity from most other bipedal humanoids.
Queues were snaking across the room, crossing and recrossing each other, joining ticket booths to baggage checkin areas, drinks dispensers to insurance bots, quick-sleep booths to fastline booths. Dantalion could have sworn that the front ends of some of the queues had joined up to their own rear ends, 209
and that the people standing so patiently in them had been shuffling in circles for hours.
Not that it seemed to matter. Nobody was going anywhere.
Olias was standing some twenty metres ahead of Dantalion, in front of the offworld ticket booth. Behind her, her retinue of mainly offworld, mainly Undertown friends, colleagues and servants was attracting glowers and barbed comments from the mass. Her Ogron bodyguards had created a space around her which moved through the fetid atmosphere like a bubble of air through the stagnant waters of the Undertown canals. The bodyguards loomed over the harassed ticket clerk like a mountain range of grey flesh. His face was drenched in sweat, and it wasn’t just from the heat.
‘I keep tellin’ you, they’re all booked solid for the next six months. Every scheduled flight is full!’
Olias’s skin rippled in barely concealed anger. ‘I don’t care what it costs,’
she boomed, her voice cutting through conversations across the other side of the cavernous hall and echoing back like thunder. ‘I am leaving this miserable planet, and I am leaving it now!’
‘On what?’ the clerk suddenly screamed, his eyes bulging and his face flushed. Dantalion took a step backwards. He recognized the signs of sudden, irrational anger. ‘’Less you offworlders can fly through hard vacuum by yourselves, you ain’t goin’ nowhere!’
The Ogrons also recognized the man’s state. Their hands swung to their weapons: battered blasters as long as their arms and almost as thick.
The clerk’s fists clenched. Slowly, he stood up, face to chest with the leading Ogron. Shaking with anger, he gazed up into its small, bloodshot eyes for a long, silent moment.
And then he reached up and hit it on the nose so hard that Dantalion could hear the sound of cartilage grind against bone.
The Ogrons didn’t shoot him. They just pulled him to pieces and watched him bleed to death.
‘Forrester?’
Cwej looked around, but the dead-end corridor was empty. Forrester had vanished. Ahead of him the corridor twisted to the left and rose slightly before disappearing. As far as Cwej and Forrester had been able to ascertain, it corkscrewed around the backbone of the ship for about five hundred yards, providing access to the weapons rooms, which were now stripped voids open to hyperspace. The corridor linked the forward compartments and the control room to the engine room in the rear. Except that the engine room was presumably behind this veined, spongy dead end.
210
‘Stop playing games!’ he yelled, his voice slightly shriller than he would have liked. This cat and mouse game was getting on his nerves.
The wall beside Cwej suddenly screamed and flinched. Instinctively he dived to the ground as the blaster bolt seared its way across the fleshy substance toward him, blistering and burning as it went. The beam passed over his head; he rolled sideways and returned fire. The beam from his judicial weapon hit the spindly four-armed bot squarely