Doctor Who_ Original Sin Part 18

Eventually he handed the Doctor a cup of steaming liquid that smelled of tar.

'Thank you,' the Doctor said. 'Now, how does one get these screens working?'

'Tell me what you want,' Beltempest replied, 'and I'll call it up for you.'

The Doctor hesitated for a moment, sipping at his tea. 'Can this computer of yours provide me with some kind of graphic display showing the locations of the various violent incidents that have occurred over the past few years?

Just those with no obvious motive where the perpetrator was easily caught.'

109.'I'm sure it can,' Beltempest replied, and directed a list of instructions to the ever-attentive computer. Within moments, the dome above them lit up with a map of the galaxy. The Empire sectors were displayed in red. Beltempest felt his breathing quicken at the sight of fully half the galaxy under the dominion of the Divine Empress: an Empire upon which several thousand suns never set. He was almost convinced that if he increased the magnification enough he would be able to see the edges creeping forward as inferior races were persuaded of the economic advantages that would occur when they relinquished control of their own sectors to the Empire.

The Doctor turned away. Beltempest was surprised to see a bitter expression cross his face.

'A problem?' Beltempest asked.

'So many cultures,' the Doctor murmured, 'such a diversity of philosophies and ways of living, all lost in subservience to the Empire. Such a terrible waste.'

'You disapprove of the Empire?'

'I disapprove of all empires, anywhere,' the Doctor replied. 'And all federations, confederations, hegemonies, oligarchies, autarchies and whatever other weasel-words are used to disguise the fact that a small group of people have taken it into their heads to treat others as though their opinions weren't important.'

'Touchy, aren't we?' Beltempest said.

The Doctor looked bleakly up at him. 'Doesn't it bother you,' he asked, 'that the wealth of other races is being sucked away to make Earth richer?'

Beltempest frowned, the word 'No' on his lips, but he took a moment to think about the Doctor's question. He had developed a strange sort of respect for the Doctor's intellect, and didn't want to fob him off with an unconsidered answer.

'No,' he said finally, 'I'm sorry but I don't. Look at us. While other races stayed at home honing their philosophies, their religions and their artistic skills, we've spread out, developed and taken the universe by the scruff of the neck and shaken it. Other races are weaker than us: it's a fact of life. That means we have a responsibility to help them. We replace whatever archaic governmental system they have with the enlightened rule of the Empress and we give them education, technology, and protection from invasion.'

'Another invasion, you mean. And all you ask in return is unquestioning loyalty, and the chance to skim the wealth from their economies.'

Beltempest tried to see the Doctor's point of view, but couldn't. 'We impose taxation, of course, but only to pay for the help we give them.'

'Did you ask them whether they wanted your help?'

110.'If someone is ill, you don't ask whether they want to be cured or not,'

Beltempest snorted, 'you cure them. If someone's flitter is malfunctioning, you don't wonder whether they want to keep it broken; you fix it. On a far vaster scale, the Empire is the same. If the Divine Empress sees a planet or a sector wasting its resources, or which could be run better, then she steps in. One of the responsibilities of power is that you should help those who aren't as powerful as yourself. Sometimes, races are too shortsighted, or too primitive, to recognize that they need help. In those cases, the imposition of help is necessary.'

'How right you are,' the Doctor said. 'Now, who was saying the same thing just the last time I saw them?' He put his hand to his forehead and mused theatrically for a moment. 'Oh yes. The Daleks.' Without allowing Beltempest to respond, he turned back to the display across the dome. 'Now, overlay the locations where these inexplicably violent occurrences have taken place,' he said.

The provost-major, smarting from the unwelcome comparison with mankind's oldest enemy, snapped an order to the computer. The display zoomed in on a particular portion of the Empire. One star in the centre of the dome glowed bright blue. 'As you can see,' he said, 'they are cl.u.s.tered heavily on Earth, although there have been a number of them scattered throughout the solar system, and one or two on other planets.'

'Like Purgatory,' the Doctor said brightly.

'Like Purgatory,' Beltempest agreed.

The Doctor thought for a moment. 'I presume that if there was any connection between the times or the places, it would have been noticed.'

'Yes,' Beltempest agreed.

'But we know that these events are caused by people just like poor Fazakerli.' He patted the corpse's leg. 'People who may have been affected by icaron radiation.'

'I'd still like to have proof of this connection between icaron radiation and madness,' Beltempest growled, wondering how the Doctor could refer with such apparent pity to the man who had almost killed him and his companion.

'And I'd still like to know how you come to recognize the name of a very rare sub-subatomic particle,' the Doctor murmured. 'Can you arrange this so that the display shows us where the people who caused the events were at the time?'

'But the display will be almost exactly the same!' Beltempest protested, 'at this level of resolution, anyway.'

'Humour me,' said the Doctor.

Another command. The display flickered slightly, and one or two of the dots seemed to move sideways by a fraction, but otherwise it remained unchanged.

111.'As I said, if this is the sort of help you are supposed to be providing us with, Doctor, then '

'And what I want now,' the Doctor interrupted, 'is to see the time-histories of all those people for . . . well, let's say the week before the events took place.'

'You what?'

The Doctor turned and raised an eyebrow. 'Don't tell me that your much-vaunted Landsknecht computer can't work out where these people have been?

Surely you can tap into security files, or s.h.i.+ps' records, or something?'

'If you think it will help,' Beltempest said with heavy-handed sarcasm. He snapped another set of orders. The blue dots were replaced with a set of wormlike lines. All of the lines converged on the Earth.

'Zoom in on the Earth,' the Doctor instructed.

Beltempest complied. The image on the dome blurred, s.h.i.+fted giddily, and became a globe of the Earth, cloud-covered and rotating as if seen from orbit.

The globe was covered with blue lines, some coming from outside the screen, others starting from various points on the Earth's surface, but all of them pa.s.sing at some stage through a particular area.

'That's where the answer lies,' the Doctor said. 'That's the source of all your problems. Zoom in again.'

They dropped through the atmosphere on a curving course, simulated clouds flas.h.i.+ng past, until they were descending towards a cityscape.

'And where is this?' the Doctor asked.

Beltempest was about to give an instruction when the computer, as if tired of waiting for him to continually pa.s.s on instructions, flashed up a caption.

s.p.a.cEPORT FIVE OVERCITY.

It was early morning in s.p.a.ceport Five Overcity, but Bernice had lost all track of time. Ahead of her, the eerily empty moving walkway pa.s.sed through a hole in the centre of a ma.s.sive building. Other towers loomed all around like ma.s.sive tree-trunks. She watched, while trying to overhear Forrester and Cwej's conversation behind her, as the three of them moved slowly towards the hole.

'Don't be so stupid,' Forrester was saying. 'We can't take her back to the lodge! Not after you know.'

'So what's your suggestion?' Cwej asked. Bernice could hear the nervous-ness in his voice.

'I dunno,' Forrester sighed resignedly after a moment's thought. 'If you've got any bright ideas, don't keep them to yourself.'

There was silence for a moment, and Bernice watched the building slide over them. She didn't want to be back on Earth. She wanted to be with the 112Doctor, and she wanted both the Doctor and herself to be in the TARDIS, and she wanted the TARDIS to be somewhere nice and peaceful.

If wishes were fishes . . .

'Look,' Cwej said finally, 'if, and I repeat, if the Adjudicator Secular is involved in some kind of cover-up, then we go above her head. Talk to her boss, the Adjudicator Spiritual.'

'And tell her what?' Forrester snapped. 'We need proof. All we've got at the moment is suspicion.'

'We've got the mind probe recording.'

'Yeah, and what does it prove? That somebody tampered with it. We've got no real evidence that Adjudicators are involved. There's nothing to say that she and her friend didn't do it themselves.'

Bernice could almost feel the thumb being jabbed towards her back. 'Who's "she"?' she called back over her shoulder, 'the cat's mother?' It was a phrase she'd heard Ace use before, and she quite liked the sound of. G.o.d knew what it meant, but it seemed apt.

'Shut it,' Forrester growled.

'Yeah, shut it,' Cwej repeated dutifully.

Or not, as the case may be.

She turned to face them. The elliptical shape of the s.p.a.ceport loomed behind them, set atop five spindly towers and surrounded by a cloud of small s.h.i.+ps arriving and departing. Somewhere on its upper surface, the Imperial Landsknecht scout s.h.i.+p that Beltempest had lent them would be preparing to leap into the clear blue sky. Good luck to it. Bernice's journey from Purgatory to Earth, locked in the s.h.i.+p's hold, had been uncomfortable, but mercifully short, and if she never saw the inside of a military vessel again between now and the end of time it would be too soon.

The sun was in Bernice's eyes, and all she could see of the two Adjudicators was their silhouettes. Both of them were holding weapons. She wouldn't be able to make it more than a few steps without getting shot, and that wouldn't help her or the Doctor in the slightest.

'Can I ask a question?' she said, shading her eyes with her hand. 'Does the concept "innocent until proven guilty" mean anything to you?'

Cwej looked at Forrester. 'Does it?' he asked her.

'Not to me,' she replied. 'Far as I'm concerned, some people are innocent and others are guilty. Innocent until proven guilty sounds like a dangerous philosophical concept. I hate ambiguity.'

The walkway had emerged from the other side of the building by now, and its edge sliced across the sun, casting a shadow over all of them. Bernice s.h.i.+vered at the sudden chill. 'So, where now?' she said.

Forrester hesitated for a moment. 'We have a problem,' she said finally.

113.'You surprise me.'

'Your friends in high places '

'My supposed supposed friends in high places. For the record, I haven't got a clue what you're talking about.' friends in high places. For the record, I haven't got a clue what you're talking about.'

'Your supposed supposed friends in high places want us off this case. Unfortunately for you, we're not going to let ourselves be taken off. That means we can't go back to our lodge, so we're going to have to find somewhere else to interrogate you.' friends in high places want us off this case. Unfortunately for you, we're not going to let ourselves be taken off. That means we can't go back to our lodge, so we're going to have to find somewhere else to interrogate you.'

'Interrogate? Do you have to use that word? Can't we just have a chat?'

'Whatever you want to call it, we're going to have to do it somewhere quiet and private.'

Bernice thought for a second. Something about what Forrester had said bothered her. 'Hang on a second. Am I right in thinking that you suspect your own superior officer this Adjudicator Secular person is implicated in this plot?'

Forrester grimaced. 'Yes,' she admitted.

'So does that mean that you went all the way to Purgatory to collect the Doctor and me without actually having official permission?'

'Er . . . yes,' Forrester said, abashed.

'Wow,' Bernice said. 'I'm impressed.'

The walkway began to curve to the left. Looking over her shoulder, Bernice could see that it diverged in a smooth arc around a spiky building another of those oddities of architecture that Earth seemed to go in for in the thirtieth century.

'Hey!' Cwej said suddenly. Bernice turned back to face him and Forrester.

'I've got an idea!'

'Treat it gently,' Forrester murmured, 'it's in a strange place.'

Bernice tried to suppress a smile, but failed. Her eye caught Forrester's. The Adjudicator's lips twitched slightly, and she looked away. Bernice suddenly felt a laugh welling up within her. Great, she thought, here I am, sentenced to death for murder, light-years away from the Doctor, and I'm sharing private jokes with one of my captors. Life's odd sometimes.

Cwej looked from Forrester to Bernice, aware that something was going on but uncertain what it was. 'What's the big laugh?' he asked plaintively.

'Forget it, golden boy,' Forrester growled. 'What's your great idea then?'

'My family!' he said proudly.

'Your what what?'

'We can hide out with my family. They'll be glad to see me.'

Forrester gazed at him.

'There's no way of breaking it to you gently, Cwej, but if I was your family and you turned up on my doorstep on the run from the Adjudicators with a 114prisoner you wanted to interrogate, I wouldn't be glad to see you.'

Cwej smiled sunnily.

'You don't know my family,' he said.

As she swallowed another sizzling piece of food, Voroneh Madillah tried to remember how she came to be sitting cross-legged in a square in the Undertown, overlooked by weathered gargoyles, her fingers and face smeared with hot fat.

'All right,' she remembered saying, in time-honoured Adjudicator tradition, as she had turned the corner and approached the knot of underlife, 'what's all this, then?'

At the sight of the stocky Adjudicator in her black hooded robes and iri-descent blue and gold body armour, most of the underlife had scuttled away into the shadows on various sets of legs, tentacles and organic castors. She definitely remembered that. Three had remained: a bulky horned creature cowering against the wall and two small rodents with knives almost half their own body size. She recalled settling her hand on the b.u.t.t of her judicial blaster and thinking that this one looked like trouble.

'Just a domestic dispute,' one of the rodents had squealed. No problem remembering that.

'And what's your story?' Madillah had asked the alien with the horns. Was that when her headache started? She tore off another piece of meat and chewed it reflectively. Yes, it probably was.

'They wanted my money!' the alien had hissed, nostril flaps flicking back and forth as it spoke. 'I asked them if . . . '

Madillah had missed the end of the sentence as a spike of sick pain suddenly blotted everything out. Had she raised a hand to her temple? She thought so.

'Hey,' one of the rats had said, 'the law's not feeling too well!'