Doctor Who_ Original Sin - Andy Lane [39]
67
Metal again, scraping against the walkway. Powerless Friendless tried to locate it, but the hiss of the rain made it almost impossible. He could usually tell when there was a living creature nearby – his skin crawled and his eyestalks itched – but bots were different. They weren’t alive.
He slid back a few metres.
Nothing. Perhaps it couldn’t hear him. Perhaps there was nothing there.
He slid back a little more.
Still nothing. He’d been spooked by a rat, or some kind of scavenger. His nerves were all shot to hell. Not surprising he was scared. Not in a place like the Undertown.
He slid back again, more confident now.
Scrape.
He froze.
What the hell was it? The Undertown was dangerous, no mistake about that, but it was an obvious kind of danger. A danger that came at you screaming with a knife in its hand, not one that hid in shadows. There were gangs, sure – groups of underlife pulled together by hunger, oaths and the threat of violence – but they mainly stuck to raiding the lower levels of the Overcity and fighting each other over territory and imagined insults. Powerless Friendless did his best to keep out of their way as much as possible. Disorganized crime, he always called it, but not to its face. Too many acquaintances of his had laughed at the gangs, and were dead as a result. And then there were the kids who came down from the Overcity, thinking that beating up a few of the underlife was fun. But not this. Nothing like this. Nothing that skulked in shadows, watching, waiting.
Perhaps he could lure it out into the open. Find out what it was, what it wanted. He bent and ran his pseudo-limb along the rain-sodden walkway, checking for loose bits of wood or metal. Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
A stinging squall of rain lashed across Powerless Friendless’s face and slid off the water-repellent mucus that covered his body. He should have been in some dark, empty building, sleeping or practising his hag’jat, not out in the open, playing cat and mouse with something from a nightmare.
Another squall sent splashes skittering across the slats of the walkway. Powerless Friendless extruded his eyestalks to their fullest extent and peered into the darkness, trying to separate black from black.
And then he noticed.
The rain was falling straight down in cold silver lines, with no breath of wind to disturb it, but some of it was bouncing in shallow curves off a tall shape in the shadows. He tried to follow the shape with his eyes, only to lose it amid the rain and the darkness. But it was there.
68
Cautiously he felt in his rucksack for some loose change. His hand re-emerged with a triangular coin. He hefted it for a few moments, then tossed it past where the figure was standing. The coin hit the wooden walkway with a dull thud and the figure stepped forward into the dull light that filtered down through the miasmic clouds.
It glistened in the rain. The rain rebounded hollowly from its metal skin.
A bot. A manual labour bot: the one he had seen outside the plaza and again at Waiting For Justice’s funeral. It had been following him!
It turned its head, trying to determine what had made the noise. ‘Why are you hiding from me?’ the bot said in a rich, fruity voice as it looked around.
‘I know you’re there. Why prolong the agony?’
‘Why are you following me?’ Powerless Friendless yelled, trusting the rain to disguise his location.
‘Ah, you wish to play the innocent lamb? It won’t do you any good, you know. I still have to kill you. I’m afraid you know too much.’
‘I don’t know anything!’
‘If only I could believe you.’ The bot sounded apologetic. ‘This should have been over years ago. You shouldn’t have run. You shouldn’t have escaped.’
Glittering scalpels, cutting his flesh: machines that buzzed inside him, chewing their way along his nerve endings: a sardonic metal face, sneering down at him . . .
‘You tortured me!’ Powerless Friendless yelled