Doctor Who_ Original Sin - Andy Lane [43]
‘Wait,’ Beltempest said calmly.
The bot stopped. Bernice turned around as far as she could in the bot’s grip.
Beltempest had produced a blaster from his desk drawer and was pointing it, oddly enough, not at her, but at the bot.
‘Nice try, Doctor,’ he said. ‘But you haven’t got the walk quite right.’
With a hiss of hydraulics, the top half of the robot swung open to reveal the Doctor’s gnomish face.
‘It’s amazing what you can get in tins these days,’ he said.
The flitter was already inches off the raft when Forrester jumped into the passenger seat.
‘Quick, get out of here,’ she said, throwing the battered mind probe unit over her shoulder and into the back.
‘Already done,’ Cwej said calmly. The flitter jumped into the air, pressing Forrester back in her seat.
‘Head for the Overcity. Find a space in a park somewhere. We’ll access the info there.’
‘Any problems?’ His wide toy-bear eyes never left the control panel.
‘No.’
One of the simcord screens showed the raft receding into the mist. Within moments Forrester could see the whole lodge laid out beneath them, twenty rafts linked by catwalks and bridges. The Undertown encroached on the edges of the screen as they ascended.
‘Sure you got the right one?’
She scowled at him.
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‘Of course you’re sure,’ he continued. ‘Silly of me.’
‘It was connected up to the centcomp input,’ she said. ‘Had to be the right one. They’d downloaded the info, but hadn’t got round to flushing the buffers yet. The underlife’s memories are still in there.’
‘Good thing for us: it’s the only evidence we have. I hope you signed it out properly.’
‘Don’t be stupid,’ she snapped. ‘This is no time for paperwork. I sneaked it out.’
The picture began to fade as the flitter entered the greasy, rolling clouds that separated the Undertown from the Overcity. The bottom levels of a block appeared in one corner.
‘I feel like a kid,’ he said.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said, straight-faced, ‘we’ll stop and pick one up on the way.’
He laughed. ‘You know what I mean. Like we’re playing truant or something. Didn’t you ever do that?’
‘Do what?’
‘Sneak out of school and go off somewhere?’
Forrester thought back to her childhood, so long ago that it almost seemed to belong to someone else. Someone innocent. Long hours in front of a simcord screen, alone. Lessons from centcomp. No friends. No fun.
‘No,’ she said.
Cwej picked up on her tone of voice, and shut up. Forrester closed her eyes and let the acceleration press her back into the seat. She felt sick. She’d disobeyed orders before, but never like this. If Cwej was right – and she’d seen the evidence every step of the way – then they were really on their own.
There was a cover-up going on, and the Order of Adjudicators was implicated.
She cursed under her breath. Eight hundred years of history lay behind the Adjudicators. They prided themselves on being incorruptible. They depended upon it: Adjudicators were the only means of dispensing unbiased, unarguable justice across the whole of human space. One whisper of corrup-tion and the whole fragile edifice would come crumbling down. Planets would develop their own laws: what was legal on one would incur a death sentence on another. The economic basis of the Earth Empire would be thrown into chaos. And all because of one frigging underlife murder. It had almost happened during the Lucifer crisis and it had taken the then Adjudication Service hundreds of years, and a metamorphosis into a quasi-religious organization, to put right the damage.
The flitter lunged up from the clouds into the glittering world of the Overcity. As always, Forrester felt a flash of vertigo. The towers seemed to 75
loom over her, crowding together at the top, threatening to fall and crush her.
As always, it only lasted an instant.
Cwej skimmed close to the side of one of the towers. Mirrored glass reflected Forrester’s face back at her. She felt her hands clench, and tried to relax. He was only a kid. Let him enjoy himself.
In an attempt to relax, she wondered what might be behind the mirrored