• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

He caught it with some alien technique she didn’t recognize, the blast of sound swirling around him like lightning and earthing into the carpet.

‘This could easily become tediously lengthy and symbolic,’ he said, ‘so let’s not mess about.’

Kuleya had had training to deal with this sort of thing. She thought hard of the desert, the place where she’d grown up, the water reclamation plant where her father had worked.

‘Tch, tch, tch,’ said the Doctor. ‘You don’t define the environment. I do.’ He walked towards her.

‘Stay away from me!’ said Kuleya. She didn’t like the pitch of her voice. ‘I’m just a kid, you leave me alone!’

‘Just a kid,’ said the Doctor, ‘fourteen years old, sold to the Brotherhood…’ He tipped his head to one side. ‘When you were seven. You manifested psi powers early. Or did they track you down through a genetic database, and pick you up before you even began to read minds?’

Kuleya screamed and ran up the stairs.

‘Got her,’ said Iaomnet, looking at her DataStream. She paused. ‘Got her twice.’

‘With a retina pattern?’ said Chris.

‘Zanape Kuleya,’ said Iaomnet. ‘Deceased. Died seven years ago, at the age of seven, in an industrial accident. And Tsitsi Kuleya, indentured colonist.’

‘Identical twins?’ said Chris.

‘No. Not with a retina pattern. Guess who Ms Kuleya is indentured to.’

The Doctor strolled through the corridor. ‘I don’t plan to spend long here,’ he called out. ‘It’ll be faster if you show me the door I want.’

He wrenched open a door. Inside, a young girl with light-brown skin was playing with a doll, on the barren floor of a standard worker’s apt. He shut the door and pulled open another.

234

Inside, the same girl, older, was crying while her father talked to a man she didn’t know who had come to take her away.

Kuleya was standing next to him, looking into her memory.

‘How can you do this so easily?’ she said. ‘I’ve tried warding, I’ve tried backoff, and I can’t stop you accessing my memories.’

‘You’re young and inexperienced,’ said the Doctor, ‘and you weren’t completely trained, were you?’ He closed the door. ‘I think the word I’m looking for is expendable.’

‘Get out of here,’ said Kuleya.

‘To tell you the truth, the reason I’m interrogating you now is that I don’t expect you to survive long enough to be interrogated by the good Ms Wszola.’

Kuleya bit her lip to stop herself from crying. ‘They wouldn’t do that. They’ve looked after me, half of my life.’

‘Come on,’ said the Doctor. ‘We both know that once you were captured, you put the conspiracy into terrible danger. You’ll have to be killed before they can find out anything from you.’

‘I’ve been trained to resist the mindprobe,’ said Kuleya.

‘That’s for ordinary citizens,’ said the Doctor. ‘I imagine you’ll shortly be a guest of the Imperial Intelligence’s psi division. Or at least, they’ll be the ones who claim your corpse.’ He strolled down the corridor, knocking on each of the doors as he passed. ‘I expect they’ll try to use induction to pick up memories in your brain. They’ll have to be quick, though.’

One of the doors knocked back.

The Doctor hesitated. He looked back at Kuleya. She hated him, hard, but it didn’t kill him.

He opened the door.

Inside, she was talking to Duke Geoffrey Armand, Lord High Sheriff of Earth.

‘Armand,’ said Roz.

Chris shook his head. ‘I still say he’s too obvious. Especially since he’s Walid’s main competition for the throne.’

‘Assuming it is Armand,’ said Roz, ‘and may I remind you you’re going to owe me ten credits if it is, what are we going to do? We can’t just march up and arrest a duke.’

‘One law for the rich,’ said the Doctor.

235

‘In any case,’ said Iaomnet, tucking away her DataStream, ‘this is a matter for Imperial security, not two renegade Adjudicators and an alien with no official standing.’

‘And we can’t expose him,’ Roz went on, ignoring her. ‘The political situation is delicate enough as it is.’

‘Look,’ said Chris.

The shutterfly lifted from the sleeping girl’s neck. It stretched and