Doctor Who_ Original Sin - Andy Lane [7]
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Five minutes on the crowded moving belt got her to Block Eighty-Nine.
Another null-grav shaft took her downwards, past level after level, towards the bottom of the building. There was nobody about: the lowest levels were reserved for the environmental controls and the massive null-grav engines.
As Forrester approached the end of the shaft, she pressed the override button on her comm-unit. The bottom of the shaft opened like a flower, and she slowly dropped out of the building entirely.
The old and mouldy carpet of Spaceport Five Undertown spread out a kilometre or so beneath her, illuminated only by the light filtering down from between the towers. As usual, the stench of rot and decay rising from moss-strewn buildings, fungus-coated walls and water-filled alleys made her eyes itch and her stomach heave. Moisture dripped constantly from the bottoms of the buildings. Fires burned in the distance, as did strings of fluorescent lamps, bio-lights and rad-globes. Anything that the underdwellers could beg, steal or borrow. Especially steal.
Tiny rafts and boats navigated the canals that once, before the Overcity was built, had been broad thoroughfares and ornately decorated streets. Their navigators punted past gaping windows and carved ledges, past the walkways that had been strung alongside the canals and the precarious bridges that linked rooftops and windows, past the heads of drowned statues and the ruined architecture of a once proud city. How quickly things could change.
Forrester had been a child when the most recent Wars of Acquisition started and the first of the floating buildings was constructed above the battle-torn cities of the Earth. Within ten years, the battle lines had been pushed so far away from Earth that humanity had almost forgotten the Wars were still taking place, and half the population lived in the Overcities, heedless of the havoc they were wreaking on the climate. Now, twenty years further down the line, the surface was neglected. Except by the underdwellers.
The underdwellers: a fermenting scum of outcasts, criminals, malcontents and offworlders. Forrester shivered just thinking about the offworlders. Despite the fact that the Earth Empire extended its welcoming arms to beings of all races so long as they abandoned their offworld ways and lived in a civilized manner, with only the minimum amount of paperwork between them and a position as a second-class subject of the Empress, most immigrants seemed to end up down in the Undertown. As far as Forrester was concerned, they were untrustworthy and unsanitary, and deserved everything that happened to them.
Forrester cast her eyes heavenward as she descended. A thick miasma hid all but the lowest levels of the towers. Supported by intangible beams of gravity, they hovered like regular, pendulous clouds over the water-sodden landscape beneath. Somewhere, thousands of feet above her head, there were 13
parks and playgrounds, and a rose-hued sky. Down here it was always dark and it was always raining.
She could feel a dull pressure building up behind her eyes. All Adjudicators in the Undertown lodges got it. Presumably the underdwellers did too, except that nobody had ever bothered asking them. The medics suggested that it was something to do with the harmonics of the null-grav units that kept the Overcity up where it belonged, but they couldn’t find anything physical to treat. Wasn’t it always the way?
The null-grav beam deposited her on the roof of an irregular complex of plasticrete buildings. Offworld scavengers moved