Doctor Who_ The Also People - Ben Aaronovitch [81]
There were bottles on the table, mostly empty. Her hands clattered amongst them as she searched for something to ease her thirst. Goddess, she thought, I want a cigar. I want to be back on Earth, in my own apartment on level 505. I want bitching messages on my service from my sister about how I don't call. 'I want my life back!' She knocked over a bottle, watched it with gormless fascination as it rolled off the edge of the table and landed with a hollow thud on the carpet. The room tilted alarmingly to the left and she leant heavily on the table until it righted itself. Stupid alien-loving, machine-buggering bastards couldn't even maintain an even G field.
Now, I was over here for a reason.
One of the bottles was still full. Roz squinted at it, thinking: pink, why is it pink? She remembered vaguely that she wasn't supposed to drink the pink stuff – something about it affecting the memory. All the better; doing something about her memory seemed like a damn good idea right now.
The room started shifting like the cabin of a maglev, no, like iStimela, a steam train. Clattering on iron rails through the drizzle grey landscape of France. Chris trying to explain to all those backward primitives that he wasn't her master. Getting bits of hot burnt stuff in your face if you were stupid enough to stick your head out of the window.
Little boy making monkey gestures when she walked past. People's eyes sliding past her face as if she were some crukking BEM.
She got the bottle, turned, caught her balance and made it as far as the sofa before falling over. She had a bit of trouble getting the bottle of pink stuff open. Must be drunk proof. Now what was the point of a drunk-proof bottle? You are under arrest for resisting an adjudicator in the execution of her duty.
Bastards.
She got the bottle open and drank.
'Respect,' she mumbled. 'And if sumovabitch didn't give it, I damn well made them.'
She was crying and she hated herself for it.
Forrester?
'Yessir.' Light in her eyes, dust in her mouth. Dust that got everywhere, in your eyes, in the equipment, down the back of your armour. Caked the sides of the bodged-up flitter, turned the sky pink.
Finding the face in the water, the little girl's face, little girl's body. One part of her mind remembering her training enough to see that the parasites hadn't got to the corpse yet so it had to be fresh. Novice Adjudicator Roslyn Forrester, naked and shivering because she has skived off from her duties to bathe in this sheltered pool of water and didn't expect to find an alien corpse waiting for her amongst the yellow rushes.
'And just what were you doing in the pool in the first place, Forrester?'
Oh Goddess. Adjudicator 'I am the right arm of Justice' Konstantine. A face etched by wearing the same frown for sixty years. An ugly man. Ugly gone bone deep and into his soul. You better hope you don't get squired to Konstantine – they say he eats novices for breakfast.
And behind him the flat lopsided face of the plantation manager, Edward Shuster, murder suspect but never proved.
They'd found a bar in Spaceport Facility, near where the S-Lioness was berthed. Roz had wanted to track down some of the ship's crew and get Chris to charm some facts out of them. Look for the words that are unspoken, so sayeth the Codex Adjudicatas, for therein shalt thou find the truth. Everybody lies to an adjudicator, so sayeth Roz Forrester, even people with nothing to hide.
Chris was good at charming people, not like her. She was good only for intimidation. People talked to him, told him about a place called Omicron 378 and a planet called Tipor'oosis. They activated terminals and called up holograms of friends and family. Roz asked about feLixi and they showed her a hologram.
Shortly after that she tried to break the man's nose.
The little alien girl had too many fingers. It was practically the cause of death.
In her bedroom at the villa Roz Forrester clutched the bottle of flashback to her chest and began to moan. Outside a grey landscape of stratocumulus