Doctor Who_ Original Sin - Andy Lane [93]
‘Somebody did. Somebody that owed Olias a favour, and I work for Olias.
Sometimes.’
‘But why?’ Forrester smashed her fist into her palm. ‘Why was an underdweller killed by an assassination robot? It just doesn’t make sense.’
‘Another assassination robot attacked an alien of my acquaintance: a member of the Hith race, named Powerless Friendless. The robot babbled about secret missions. My acquaintance didn’t know what it was talking about –
unsurprising, since I had wiped his mind of certain facts, some years ago. I spent a long while putting them back again today.’
‘Putting them back?’ Bernice raised an eyebrow. ‘You make it sound so simple.’
‘It is,’ he said. ‘Memories are often simple things to find. And hide.’
‘Where is this alien now?’ Forrester snapped.
‘He left. He looked like a being with a mission. He had been tortured at some stage in the past, quite comprehensively tortured. He left here seeking vengeance for the sins that had been visited upon his body.’ He sighed. ‘I advised him not to, but he was insistent. I told him the memory viruses I inserted into his mind were delicate things. They were still uncovering memories when he left. Whatever he remembers is muddled, mixed up. He ought 158
to allow it time to settle.’ He looked up at Forrester with his good eye. ‘As you should, later.’
‘What’s this about me?’ Forrester’s hand slipped unobtrusively onto the butt of her blaster.
If he had noticed the threatening gesture, Dantalion was ignoring it. ‘There we come onto the second thing I require from you in payment.’
‘And that is?’
‘Do you remember coming here three years ago?’
She thought back. Three years. Shortly after Martle had been – Martle had died. Killed by the Falardi. There had been a raid . . .
‘Yeah, we raided you for unlicensed gland removal from a Barrarian mating pair,’ she said. ‘Olias got you off the charge, as usual.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘four weeks before that.’
She shook her head.
‘No,’ she said firmly, ‘that was the first time I had seen you for almost a year.’
‘You were here the month before.’
No, something in the back of her mind said, no, you were somewhere else.
You were somewhere else.
‘No,’ she said, ‘I was . . . I was . . . ’ That was odd. She couldn’t remember.
Where had she been? Martle’s funeral was fresh in her mind, as was the raid, but the time in between was a blur.
‘You were here,’ Dantalion repeated. ‘You were brought here. I was paid to remove a memory from your conscious mind and hide it where you would never find it.’
She shook her head wildly. ‘No, it’s not true.’
‘It is true. And now I want to put it back again. That’s the payment.’
The alien ship was closing rapidly on the Moorglade. A vast maw had opened up in its prow, ready to catch the ship. Beltempest guessed that the fringe of blunt appendages surrounding it like tentacles were part of whatever device had located them in hyperspace and pulled them back into the real universe.
‘Better fasten your safety belts,’ Provost-Major Beltempest called back to the compartment behind him. ‘We’re in for a bumpy ride!’
Beltempest uncoupled the controls from the autopilot and threw the shuttle hard to port, then dived beneath the approaching monster. The feel of the responsive controls beneath his fingers brought back memories of training sessions, many years ago. No simulators for the Landsknechte; they used and abused real ships. He’d stripped the spatial synchronets from more engines than he could count, pulling sharp turns in mock dog fights. It was all coming back to him now.
‘What’s happening?’ a voice wailed from the loudspeakers in his suit.
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‘Doctor, glad to see you’re still alive. We’ve been hijacked out of hyperspace.’
‘By whom?’
‘If I knew, I would tell you. But they appear to be aliens.’
‘Well, try evasive manoeuvres!’
‘Yes, thank you, Doctor. I’ll do that.’
He shut off the connection in exasperation. Civilians! he thought, and concentrated on his screens. They appeared to be in clear space – no suns, no planets, no rogues – nothing but stars and the odd hydrogen