Doctor Who_ Original Sin - Andy Lane [74]
Daph Yilli Gar scrunched himself up in the command chair. The war against the pestilential humans was going badly, but it didn’t do anything for ship’s morale to have a captain who kept things from them.
‘Prepare to emerge,’ Vap Oppat Pol said. Daph Yilli Gar’s tentacular fingers caressed the shivering nexus of the control panel, feeling for the granularity of hyperspace, ready to wrench it apart and drop them into real space.
‘Now!’ Vap Oppat Pol shouted.
Daph Yilli Gar wrenched at the fabric of unreality, and the grey of the simcord screen cleared to reveal a star-strewn black backdrop, against which stood fifteen Earth Empire heavy cruisers, weapons primed and aimed directly at the Skel’Ske .
‘Captain!’ he screamed, ‘shall I . . . ?’
‘No,’ Vap Oppat Pol said calmly. ‘No, you won’t.’
A terrible realization swept over Daph Yilli Gar, but before he could make sense of it his eyes were filled with . . .
. . . Bright green light, washing away the barriers that had been built up, leaving him amid the wreckage of his mind, trying to piece the bits together.
∗ ∗ ∗
126
‘Come on,’ Bernice drawled, ‘you cannot be serious!’ She threw the mind probe down on Cwej’s bed. It hung, suspended in the repulsor field, a few inches above the surface. On the screen, Forrester could make out the frozen images of Bernice and her friend the Doctor. The Doctor’s mouth was open, just as he was about to deliver the words that condemned both of them as murderers.
‘What do you mean?’ Forrester was affronted. Suspects weren’t supposed to talk to investigating officers like that.
Then again, interrogations weren’t supposed to take place in the bedroom of one of the interrogating officers. After Cwej’s mother had more or less forced them to eat some breakfast, she had given them the free run of Cwej’s old room for their ‘meeting’. She and Cwej’s father had apparently left it untouched since he had left home, apart from letting the cleaning bots go over it once a month. The walls were plastered with GALAXY’S MOST WANTED simcords mixed with a smattering of sim-stars and even a couple of semi-naked viy music singers in erotic poses. Models of starships hovered on repulsor fields from the ceiling, some of them with a battery-operated short-distance warp capability.
All very telling, Forrester thought.
On entering the room, Bernice had immediately flung herself on the bed.
Cwej, after a nostalgic and faintly embarrassed look around at the place where his childhood had been spent, had made for an auto-adjust chair beside a work surface. That left Forrester, much to her disgust, with a small floating armchair that fitted around her hips so tightly that it looked like a fashion accessory, and would only take her weight with a good deal of buzzing and quivering.
‘I mean, just look at this!’ Bernice waved the mind probe at Forrester. ‘It makes no sense.’
Forrester cast a sour glance at Cwej, who was lounging around in his chair with his gun in his lap, flicking through a sim-book. ‘Hey, hairball! Pay attention!’
Cwej looked up. ‘Sorry,’ he said, blushing.
‘Yeah, you’d be sorry if she slit my throat while you were buried in kid’s stuff.’
He looked sceptical. ‘You think that’s likely?’
‘Well there’s one way to find out for sure, isn’t there?’
He threw the book onto the desk and picked up his gun. ‘You win, as usual,’
he muttered.
Forrester turned back to Bernice. ‘That’s very patently you in the memories of the underdweller. No ifs. No buts.’
127
‘Look,’ Bernice sighed as she hovered a few inches above the bed, ‘let me get this right. Someone called Waiting For Justice, who lived down in the Undertown, was killed by someone called Annie, who also lived down in the Undertown. It originally looked like one of these motiveless murders that you’ve been getting, which the Doctor reckons are caused by some kind of radiation leak. You, however, think Annie’s memory of the murder was implanted, and that Waiting For Justice was actually killed by the Doctor and me, on the basis that