Doctor Who_ Original Sin - Andy Lane [95]
‘If we screw up, this tower drops all the way down to the Undertown,’ he snapped. ‘They won’t be able to find enough of our butts to put in a nutshell, let alone a sling.’
‘No chance of that,’ Chan said. ‘These things are built with so much redun-dancy, you wouldn’t believe.’
The pounding in Chirell’s head was making it difficult to think. He turned to look at Chan, but something was wrong with his eyes. All he could see was a red blur.
‘Screw it,’ he snarled. ‘I just want out!’
161
He stood up, but a sudden wave of nausea made him stagger. Something flashed into his mind: a picture of Chan’s hands wandering across his wife’s breasts and buttocks.
‘Hey, you okay, man?’ Chan asked in concern.
Chirell’s head was pounding. He wanted to lash out, to smash something, to hear somebody scream. In his mind, Chan was holding his wife down while she bucked and moaned in pleasure. Chan was screwing his wife! How could he have been so stupid?
Chan caught hold of his shoulders. ‘Hey, you want we should –’
His words were cut off as Chirell smashed the sharp corner of the diagnostic unit into his forehead.
Green light. Bright light.
Forrester crept closer to the doorway of the hotel room, vibroknife held tightly in her hand. From inside, Fenn Martle’s voice snapped something short. He sounded angry. No, he sounded furious.
What in Goddess’ name was the moron doing here, especially without backup?
It had been obvious back at the lodge that he was on edge about something. It had also been obvious for some time that he was following up leads on a case but wasn’t sure enough of himself to make it official – meetings at odd hours, mysterious actions while on cases, a general air of preoccupation. The big idiot.
Couldn’t he ever leave the job alone? He had to be the most dedicated Adjudicator that Forrester had ever come across.
Knowing how he could go off half-cocked sometimes, Forrester had followed him from the lodge in an unmarked flitter. She’d had to leave her judicial blaster behind; their use was tightly controlled, and Adjudicators weren’t allowed to sign them out after work. Spiralling up in the wake of his expensive sportster model towards the Overcity, she had felt an unaccustomed excitement blossom within her. If Martle had discovered some kind of connection between the Undertown gangs and the Overcity crime bosses, this could make their careers. Even better, they might at last be able to get a handle on Olias and her sordid little dealings.
Martle’s flitter had been heading for an access point halfway up one of the hotel towers in the eastern sector. This one was near the spaceport and overlooked the hole left in the Overcity by the Scumble ship that had crashed some years beforehand. She had recognized the one he was aiming for; it maintained suites of rooms with variable environmental controls for the various alien diplomatic delegations that regularly came, cap in hand, to the Empress. Forrester had a hard time keeping up with him; his flitter had a higher power rating than any she’d seen. Must have cost him a bomb.
Martle had brought his vehicle in for a smooth landing on the shelflike access point, and paid a valet bot to park it for him. It hadn’t been hard to spot him: 162
out of his robes he usually wore an expensive five piece shrivenzale-skin suit and boots woven out of ditz hair. Circling high above like a hawk, Forrester had watched him enter the hotel, then swooped down and dashed in towards a slot just ahead of a large, black diplomatic flitter. The bot had tried to wave her away, but she had flashed her forearm at it. A laser had tickled her flesh, and the bot had backed away humbly.
‘Park it!’ she had snapped, jerking her thumb at her unmarked flitter, and then she had run into the hotel sub-lobby. The walls were lined with orange fur, and the floor was a mosaic of the shells of small turtle-like creatures. Opulent.
Opulent to the point where it made Forrester feel physically sick. It reminded her too much of her family’s mansion on Io: the same careless