Doctor Who_ Transit - Ben Aaronovitch [45]
The grenade was a thousand metres of monofilament wrapped around two hundred milligrams of cyclotol chipped to detonate one metre above ground level. Only the sergeant saw it coming, had just enough time to yell a warning and dive away.
Zamina stopped again as a white drone the size of a beachball hovered over Roberta's corpse. It had been methodically working itself up the street, pausing to check each body in turn She knew that somewhere behind it larger medical drones would be moving up and sorting out the injured. The drone pinged twice and pinned a microtransmitter to Roberta's face, marking her as dead.
The drones worked in silence except for the imperceptible hum of their lifting fields, each of them acting in accordance with their programming and bound together by an invisible web of microwave communications. It was like watching an invasion by alien insects. Zamina hadn't seen a live human being for hours.
The authorities were leaving the Stop to the ministration of the machines.
The cuts and abrasions Zamina had collected began to sting. There was a line of pain running down her left thigh, and she could feel a spreading wetness soaking into her leggings. Zamina didn't look, she knew if you looked it always hurt more. Her throat was sore from the smoke even though it was beginning to clear. She should have forgotten about Roberta but she couldn't leave her lying on the street. Zamina had been her friend.
Benny was waiting for them in the orphanage, leaning against the wall just back from the door by a large poster that said 'JESUS SAVES' in blood-red letters. She didn't move to help Zamina as she dragged Roberta inside. Benny seemed untouched by the violence; she looked down at Zamina from a great distance.
'She's dead,' said Zamina.
Benny shrugged her shoulders, bone and muscle moving under Roberta's second-best leather jacket. 'Underclasses,' she said vaguely, 'poverty, insensitive policing.' The words were slurred, sing-song, like the recitation of a junkie. 'Happens all the time.'
'Hey, Benny,' said Zamina, 'you wired or something?'
Her eyes snapped into focus. 'I studied history so I know. Did I tell you that?'
'You never told us nothing,' said Zamina, 'nothing at all.'
'No I didn't did I?'
What had she said to the boy in the white T-shirt? Did he know it was a grenade or had she just handed it to him and said, Hey kid, here's something for you to throw. Mind you get in good and close. He had to get in close, he was just a small boy not strong enough to throw beyond the grenade's lethal range. The cops had their armour but the boy was cut in two.
'Come on, girl,' said Benny, 'she's dead and we've got things to do, people to see.'
West Triton Feeder/Pluto ninety-five
Memories chased the Doctor up the non-existent tunnels of the transit system. Kadiatu assured him that this was the last but one leg of the trip to Lowell Depot, for which he was grateful. Since leaving Mitsubishi there had been a lot of empty trains and deserted stations. Each transition through a tunnel disturbed him; he had spent far too much time in unreal environments recently, the inside of his own mind being the worst. Perhaps he should have done some reordering while he was in there, a bit of DIY amongst the old grey cells. He could have recatalogued his memory into things he knew, things he might know and things that thought he knew them.
The train raced ahead of his mind's own event horizon with his memories howling behind.
Intuition, the data-processing of his unconscious mind that he had learnt to follow but never trusted, drove him on. In his darker moments he often considered the possibility that his subconscious was in some respect not his own. That it belonged to some other, vaster, more complex personality. As if he was just a dream in the mind of a god. Sometimes he posited a theory of reverse-existentialism in which he existed only because other people