Doctor Who_ Original Sin - Andy Lane [19]
‘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. Goddess 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.
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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 PASS: 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 damned underdwellers from removing the scanners and selling the parts as scrap. A sign saying PLEASE DO NOT PASS: 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 scum 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 canals 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-33
ments.
The restaurant was basic: a stone-clad room with a canal 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