Doctor Who_ Original Sin - Andy Lane [24]
And there was a number burned into the flesh of his tail.
Something cried out in the back of his mind. His head suddenly jerked away so that he couldn’t see it.
There was a number.
He tried to turn his head back, but it fought him. Something deep inside him didn’t want to look.
A number.
He didn’t recognize his body; it didn’t match with his memories. The scarring, the nu– the nu– the thing on his tail: it wasn’t the way he remembered 41
himself. What had happened to him? There had been better days, days when he had been handsome, and respected, and well fed, but there was a gap, and now there was here, and he didn’t know how to bridge that gap. He didn’t like to dwell on the memories. There were other things lurking down there, and it was best not to expose them to the light.
He was just about to leave when he heard someone coming down the stairs. Quickly he bundled all his things into a cubicle and slid halfway up the wall before the robot janitor entered and began to wash the floor. Powerless Friendless listened for the tell-tale series of clicks and whirs as the mop and bucket appendages disappeared back into the robot’s body, then gave it another few minutes to leave.
Time to hit the walkways.
Fillip almost gave up when she told him that her name was Laverne, but she had curly blonde hair and legs that rose, stockinged and impossibly long, into tight black shorts, so he kept at it. She’d been working a twelve-hour shift in a bar in Spaceport Eight Seacity. She told him that she came from the Helvetian colony, and was slogging her way through a degree in Artistic Terraforming.
Fillip hadn’t known that anybody could do degrees in Artistic Terraforming.
Things had changed since his day.
It was the noise of several of the regular Earth Reptile bands who played there that had first attracted Fillip. He’d been sitting at his desk in the Transit Authority Tower, processing the paperwork for a party of Hith ambassadors who had been granted an audience with the Empress, when the sounds of loud music and people having fun had drifted through the suppressor field of his window. He felt he deserved a drink: he hated aliens at the best of times, and this particular group of slugs seemed to be going out of their way to be irritating. They were all travelling to the Imperial Palace in orbit around Saturn from different planets, for a start, meaning that he had to complete a different set of forms for each one, and they insisted on putting their home world as Hithis, even though everybody knew that Hithis was occupied entirely by humans. They all wanted separate rooms, preferably on separate levels, and he’d never come across a set of names as stupid in his life! Working late to impress the boss was one thing, but this was carrying dedication too far. He saved the forms in centcomp’s memory under a TRANSIT AUTHORITY ONLY PASSWORD
and followed the noise.
The bouncers were exchanging banter with their counterparts across the plaza when he arrived. He told them that he wanted a bar where he could sit and drink without having a menu thrust in front of him. Rather than lead him through the maze of corridors and stairways one of them took him round the side of the building, unlocked a door and gestured him in. He walked 42
uncertainly up three flights of stairs and found a half-empty bar waiting for him. And Laverne.
There were two young Earth Reptiles squeezed into a corner of the room, each one wielding a hag’jat and trying to sing further off-key than the other.
They weren’t really aliens; in fact, some of his best friends were Earth Reptiles.
Fillip talked to Laverne, he talked to the Reptiles during their breaks, they all drank Martian ale out of huge bowls that looked like space helmets, and pretty soon they were all squeezed in the corner trying to sing ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’ by The Rolling Stones. The Reptiles with the hag’jats only had an approximate idea of the lyrics but they made up what they