Doctor Who_ Original Sin - Andy Lane [88]
Dantalion nodded, unsurprised.
‘I will have to ask you to remain quiescent for the nonce, whilst I perform numerous but painless checks upon your newly restored psyche. However, I 149
would be interested to ascertain what your intentions might be once you leave my humble abode?’
Powerless Friendless lay back, settling into his personality as he might slip on an old but much loved tunic.
‘I have some unfinished business,’ he said.
While Bernice tried to make Cwej more comfortable, Forrester hot-wired another flitter. Bernice could see she didn’t have Cwej’s skill at it, managing to lock the security systems on five of them before she hit on the right combination of wires, keys and brute force. The canopy on a dark grey company rental model sprang open.
‘Come on,’ she said eventually, ‘let’s get him in.’
Finding an area of unburned skin to pick Cwej up by was almost impossible.
In the end Bernice slid her hands under his shoulders and Forrester grasped his half-melted boots. He groaned. His skin was feverishly hot and sticky, and smelled of roast pork. Bernice felt her stomach churn.
‘Do you have any destination in mind?’ she asked as they manoeuvred Cwej across to the flitter’s open door, ‘or are we just winging it from here?’
‘There’s a medic down in the Undertown. Dantalion’s his name. He’s an alien: a Birastrop. I’ve pulled him in on umpteen occasions for unauthorized brainwipes and unlicensed beppling, but he’s under the wing of one of the crime lords so there’s always plenty of witnesses to say he was somewhere other than where we say he was. He used to be Surgeon Imperialis, so the rumour goes, despite the fact that the Empress hates aliens. The rumours don’t say why he’s down here now. He’s a juke addict, but he’s good.’
They laid Cwej down in the back of the vehicle, accidentally smearing the covers with blood and flakes of burned skin.
‘And we’re going to him?’
‘You have a better idea?’
‘Loads,’ Bernice muttered to herself, ‘but this is your century.’
Forrester took the flitter up on a spiral path that would bring them out of the upper entrances. Daylight streamed in like the beam of a searchlight. Bernice shut her eyes against the glare, suddenly realizing how tired she was.
She couldn’t remember the last time she’d slept; even on the Imperial shuttle to Earth she had lain awake, staring at the ceiling, worrying about being separated from the Doctor and the TARDIS. The moment when she knew things were getting on top of her was when she realized she was missing Ace.
Whose stupid idea had it been to come to Earth in this era in the first place?
Oh yeah. Hers.
The flitter emerged into a rainstorm at the bottom of an immense inverted cone. Clouds diffused the sunlight into a pearly glow. Forrester angled their 150
path to hug the block’s sides as they headed downwards. Within moments they were clear of the block and heading down towards the darkness, the canals, bridges, old buildings and perpetual rain of the Undertown.
Forrester took them down as fast as she could, plummeting like a hawk after a mouse until she was barely ten metres from the surface of the canal. Just as Bernice was about to suggest that it might be a good idea if they levelled out NOW! thank you very much, she pulled them out of the dive and screamed left into an alley perpendicular to the one that they had been heading for.
‘Should shake off anybody watching,’ she shouted over her shoulder.
‘Fooled me,’ Bernice yelled back, ‘and I was sitting here.’
The walls of the alleyway were buildings that Bernice dated to the late twenty-first century. It was a shame her first close-up view of the Undertown was under circumstances where she couldn’t really stop to sightsee. A domed church that must have been seventeenth-century at the latest flashed past, followed by a stretch of transparicrete webbed with fine cracks. This place was an architectural archaeologist’s vision of heaven.
‘How’s Chr– Cwej?’
Bernice forced herself to