Doctor Who_ Original Sin - Andy Lane [67]
Cwej smiled sunnily.
‘You don’t know my family,’ he said.
As she swallowed another sizzling piece of food, Voroneh Madillah tried to remember how she came to be sitting cross-legged in a square in the Undertown, overlooked by weathered gargoyles, her fingers and face smeared with hot fat.
‘All right,’ she remembered saying, in time-honoured Adjudicator tradition, as she had turned the corner and approached the knot of underlife, ‘what’s all this, then?’
At the sight of the stocky Adjudicator in her black hooded robes and iri-descent blue and gold body armour, most of the underlife had scuttled away into the shadows on various sets of legs, tentacles and organic castors. She definitely remembered that. Three had remained: a bulky horned creature cowering against the wall and two small rodents with knives almost half their own body size. She recalled settling her hand on the butt of her judicial blaster and thinking that this one looked like trouble.
‘Just a domestic dispute,’ one of the rodents had squealed. No problem remembering that.
‘And what’s your story?’ Madillah had asked the alien with the horns. Was that when her headache started? She tore off another piece of meat and chewed it reflectively. Yes, it probably was.
‘They wanted my money!’ the alien had hissed, nostril flaps flicking back and forth as it spoke. ‘I asked them if . . . ’
Madillah had missed the end of the sentence as a spike of sick pain suddenly blotted everything out. Had she raised a hand to her temple? She thought so.
‘Hey,’ one of the rats had said, ‘the law’s not feeling too well!’
‘Scat,’ the other one said.
Within seconds, they had vanished into the darkness of the Undertown. She could still picture their faces if she needed to pick them up later. So far, so good.
‘Lucky you came along when you did,’ the big alien had hissed. ‘Thanks.’
The headache had intensified round about then, hadn’t it?
‘Aliens,’ Madillah had said as she unholstered her blaster. ‘You’re all the same.’
That’s where things started getting a little fuzzy. Had she fired her blaster?
She seemed to remember playing the beam over something large and motionless. Well, more or less motionless, especially after a while.
115
She pulled another piece of meat off the carcass and licked the juices from it.
Did it matter what had happened, so long as she was happy?
Beltempest and the Doctor were perched on the edge of the trolley upon which Fazakerli’s body lay.
‘Very smart, Doctor,’ Beltempest said. He held a cup of lapsang souchong in his trunk, which muffled his voice slightly. ‘Whether or not you’re right about the effects of icaron radiation – and I’m still reserving judgement on that – the probability that all those people were coincidentally in the same small area of Earth within seven days of the outrages they committed is so small that even the computer can’t calculate it. What made you think of a time-based analysis rather than a space-based one?’
‘I have a different perspective on these things,’ the Doctor murmured, gazing moodily across the room. ‘Of course, you realize that this just magnifies the scale of the problem.’
Beltempest contorted his trunk until he could sip from the cup. Thank God he’d allowed those two Adjudicators to persuade him to keep the Doctor alive. He’d originally thought that the Doctor and Bernice Summerfield were unwitting tools of whoever he was searching for, but it was beginning to look as if the Doctor could be of use after all. ‘How so?’ he said finally, savouring the oddly tarry taste of the liquid.
‘Well, we know where the radiation contamination is occurring, but we still don’t know why.’
‘Why?’
‘Is it an accident, or is there some malign intelligence behind it all?’
Beltempest frowned. ‘An accident, surely. How could. I mean, who . . . ?’
‘Icaron radiation doesn’t come free with packets of cornflakes, you know,’
the Doctor said, still staring at the wall. ‘It’s produced under very special, very deliberate circumstances. Most civilized planets ban all research on icarons because