Doctor Who_ Original Sin Part 21

'How does your mother feel about long distance calls?' she asked.

'Terg Albert McConnel,' intoned the sombre voice of the judicial cyborg, 'I find you guilty of the murder of Anil Lymaner.'

The room was empty but for the two of them McConnel standing at one end and the cyborg suspended in a null-grav harness at the other. A statue-like security bot stood between them, it's heavy weaponry directed towards McConnel. A desk, piled high with flimsy sheets of plastic, was set behind the hovering cyborg. The walls were a neutral grey.

'This judgement, in full accordance with Imperial Law, is at a confidence level of point nine nine eight three six, to five decimal places,' the cyborg continued. 'Do you have anything to say in mitigation before I pa.s.s sentence?'

Terg McConnel had to close his eyes and to replay the words in his head before he understood their true significance. Guilty? Yes, of course he was guilty. He could still feel the metal of the knife dig into the heel of his hand as it ground against the back of Lymaner's skull. He could still hear the ripples of shocked silence spread out around the Undertown restaurant. He could still 129see the blood well up like tears in Lymaner's eye, just before the student fell forward into his plate of food. Guilty, but but blameless. He didn't know why he'd done it. He could remember everything except the reason for his actions.

How could he put that into words? Would it change anything? He knew he was guilty.

He took a deep breath, and gazed into the judicial cyborg's face. Beneath the burnished metal dome of the cyborg's head receptacle for the billions of laws, bylaws, precedents, rules and regulations that governed the Empire, as well as every single judgement ever made by a judicial cyborg or an Adjudicator, on Earth or off, pertinent or not a wizened face stared compa.s.sionately down at him. The soft, fleshy cog in the legal machine. The conscience. The remnants of an Adjudicator, too old now to impose justice by force, content to sit and add a pinch of humanity to cold, unyielding logic.

'No,' he said firmly, 'no, I have nothing to say.'

The judicial cyborg nodded, and took a sheet of plastic from the pile, as it had done throughout the hearing, referring to details of the case for and against McConnel. Judicial cyborgs couldn't download their data from centcomp. No external links were allowed the risk of undue influence, computer viruses and hacking were too high. All data had to be fed to them as hardcopy.

'Under normal circ.u.mstances,' the cyborg said, 'the penalty for your crime is mandatory brainwipe and indenture to a corporation for ten years. However ' It looked up at McConnel with something approaching pity. ' as a result of an increasing number of apparently motiveless crimes of violence, the Adjudicator In Extremis has introduced a new penalty, specifically for cases such as yours.'

It waved the piece of paper at him. Even before the words were spoken, McConnel felt his heart turn to ice.

'I withdraw your humanity,' the cyborg intoned, 'and recla.s.sify you as alien.

And, as alien, I sentence you to vivisection within the laboratories of the Surgeon Imperialis, so that your last moments may aid our understanding of this scourge of violence.' The wizened face beneath the metal grimaced. 'And may the G.o.ddess have mercy upon your soul.'

As soon as they had landed, the Doctor and Provost-Major Beltempest had been escorted from their ship to a reception office whose walls were shielded with matt-white ceramic tiles.

Refrigeration units were humming at full capacity just to keep the room at a temperature where the Doctor could have fried an egg on the desk. A uniformed captain named Rhodd, whose dull, uncaring eyes looked over the authorizations that Beltempest had filled in before they left Purgatory, seemed 130to waver in the heat haze like a mirage. After checking the doc.u.ments against the security clearances that Beltempest had also forwarded from Purgatory he stamped the authorizations and gestured them towards a null-grav shaft in a corner of the office. All of this was accomplished without a word being said.

The shaft also lined with tiles and dripping with condensation took them down into the bowels of the planet, down to a point where the reduced heat from the sun balanced out the increasing heat from the planet's core. The corridors sloshed with a thin layer of liquid, and grey, patchy fungus clung to the ceramic tiles.

Even thirty levels below the surface of Dis, the appalling heat was like a weight pressing the Doctor down. The stench of rot, mould and body odour was nauseating. Beltempest's blue skin had turned a dirty grey colour, and his ears flapped incessantly. The faces of the guards that accompanied them along the corridor, past the infinity of numbered metal doors, were glossy with sweat, probably because they were forced by regulations to wear their full uniforms at all times. And, of course, they were all human. Typical Imperial thinking, the Doctor mused. He knew that there were ten or eleven alien races subsumed within the Empire to whom this sort of environment was like a cold spring morning, but would it even occur to the Empire to use them as guards?

Certainly not: aliens couldn't be trusted, so humans had to wreck their health doing the job.

'What sort of people are held here?' the Doctor asked as they walked past yet another heavy metal door.

'Two groups,' Beltempest said. The Doctor could hear the strain in his voice.

With his bulk, it was amazing that he had made it this far without collapsing.

Military training, no doubt. It left you perfectly equipped to carry out all sorts of tasks you wouldn't dream of doing if you were in your right mind.

'Firstly there are the criminals who can't be brainwiped and recharactered.

Some races just don't respond to wipes, for instance, and genetic criminals will reoffend no matter how many times you erase their personalities. Then there's the beings who have gone through a couple of wipes already, but still commit crimes due to circ.u.mstance. There's a limit to how many times personalities can be erased, and if another one would leave them mindless, they get sent here instead. And then there's Professor Pryce, who has managed to tie the legal system up for years in semantic and philosophical discussions.'

'There's no such thing as a genetic criminal,' the Doctor growled, but Beltempest had fallen silent, brooding. 'And what about the second group?' he asked, trying to break through Beltempest's depression.

'Sorry? Oh, well there's those criminals who would be figureheads and foci for discontent if we let them back out into their own societies. Terrorists, primarily, although there's a fair number of discontented despots of one sort 131of another in here.' He mopped at his brow with his trunk. 'As you can appreciate, if the Empire takes over a planet against the wishes of the populace and after resistance from the rulers, we can't leave those rulers as a focus for bad feeling against us. Even if we wipe their minds and set them to work as street cleaners on Earth, they'll still be symbols of rebellion. No, the best thing to do is to incarcerate them here for the rest of their lives.'

The Doctor was speechless for a moment at the sheer inhumanity of the solution. 'Why not just kill them and get it over with?' he said eventually.

'We can't do that,' Beltempest said, missing the irony entirely. 'We're not barbarians, you know.'

The Doctor was still searching around for a reply when the guards stopped beside a metal door, no different from the rest apart from the number. One of them tapped out a security code on a keypad while another placed his forearm in the cavity of a biochip reader.

Beltempest took a deep, shuddering breath. 'There have been fifty-eight deaths here since Pryce arrived,' he said, his voice unsteady. 'Even though he's locked in a high security cell. They're listed as suicides in the official records, but n.o.body can explain how suicides could eat their own hearts.'

'Don't worry,' the Doctor said. 'We'll be safe.'

Beltempest nodded. 'And yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,' he quoted softly, 'I shall fear no evil.'

'That's all very well, but I doubt that Rhodd and his staff will do much comforting,' the Doctor said doubtfully, as the door slid slowly up into the ceiling.

The guards indicated that Beltempest and the Doctor should enter the shadowed doorway. They did so, and the door dropped behind them so fast that the floor shook with the impact.

A cold, harsh light burst into life, illuminating a small room lined with the omnipresent damp white ceramic tiles and containing a bunk without a mattress and a rudimentary toilet.

And a naked man.

He stood a few feet from them, his eyes closed against the sudden glare. He was over seven feet tall, and painfully thin. His skull was hairless, his fingers long and thin. He looked like an animated skeleton.

Beltempest took an involuntary step back. The Doctor wondered whether he should join him, but there was something about the tiles on the walls that made him pause.

Of course. There was a barrier a few feet into the room. It was invisible, but there was a dry line on the tiles that marked its edges. Physical or energy?

Almost certainly physical: probably transparicrete. The radiation from the 132sun even this far underground would mess up a force field to the point of uselessness.

One of the tiles on their side projected slightly from the wall, and the Doctor guessed the controls for the barrier were beneath it.

The Doctor looked back at the man, and this time he did take a step back.

The man's eyelids were open, revealing matt-black eyes with no distinguish-able pupil. An effect of the icaron radiation, or another example of genetic meddling? Whatever the reason, it was as if Pryce's eyes were just pits in his face, windows into the heart of a black hole. There was no feeling, no emotion, no character at all.

'Professor Zebulon Pryce?' asked the Doctor.

'I've been waiting for you,' Pryce said. His voice was oddly warm and comforting, like a favourite uncle.

'You knew we were coming?' the Doctor said.

'Of course. News filters through, even here. Even this far from grace. When I heard your ship land, I knew it was you.'

The Doctor raised his eyebrows sceptically. There was no way a human could have heard the ship, not that far beneath the surface.

'Then you know why we're here,' he said.

The Professor slowly extended his hand towards the Doctor's face. His nails were almost as long as the fingers themselves.

'You want my help,' he said simply. 'You want my knowledge.'

'Very clever,' the Doctor said.

Pryce turned slowly towards Beltempest and took a step forwards.

'I don't believe we've been introduced,' he said, and extended his hand. Beltempest automatically reached out, then s.n.a.t.c.hed his hand back, shuddering.

Pryce smiled, and skittered his nails against the barrier, making a noise like a horde of c.o.c.kroaches spilling down the walls. Beltempest flinched.

'Provost-Major Beltempest,' he said. 'I was . . . I was one of the Landsknechte who arrested you on Dis.'

Pryce's dark eyes examined Beltempest from the top of his head to his large, circular feet.

'I remember Provost-Major Beltempest,' he said, frowning. 'You're not him.'

'Body-bepple,' Beltempest said, his voice trailing off as he looked away.

'No,' Pryce said, ' You You are not Provost-Major Beltempest. The you within the bepple.' He shrugged: a slow, almost balletic motion. 'Or perhaps you are. It doesn't matter. Memories escape in the darkness. I can hear them sometimes, laughing at me from the corners of this cell, breeding in the cracks in the walls.' are not Provost-Major Beltempest. The you within the bepple.' He shrugged: a slow, almost balletic motion. 'Or perhaps you are. It doesn't matter. Memories escape in the darkness. I can hear them sometimes, laughing at me from the corners of this cell, breeding in the cracks in the walls.'

'They keep you in darkness?' The Doctor was scandalized.

'Only metaphorically. I don't believe we've met.'

133.'I am the Doctor.'

Pryce giggled. 'I don't need a doctor,' he said. 'There's nothing wrong with me.'

'I need your knowledge of icaron physics.'

Pryce frowned suddenly, and looked away. He wasn't completely hairless, the Doctor realized. A pure white pony-tail hung down his back like an elec-trical cable.

'There are some things,' Pryce whispered, 'that man was not meant to know.

My mind has been opened to higher feelings, Doctor: the pure ethic of suffering, the clean absolution of death. The stunted subhumans that surrounded me didn't understand, of course. Transcendence is always stifled; prophets are never honoured in their own land. They could not see that I had been blessed by a vision of higher things. I tried to cleanse their minds with exquisite suffering, but they stopped me.'

His barren gaze swept across the Doctor and Beltempest.

'You want to know about icarons?' he said softly. 'But how much can you bear to understand?'

The figure in the darkened office was standing by the large blue box when the desk bleeped. It ran a hand lovingly over the box's surface: so rough to the eye, so smooth to the hand.

'Soon,' the figure said, 'soon I shall tease your secrets from you.'

It crossed to the desk and sat behind it, scanning the ceaseless flow of information. Ah! Yes, there! A fastline call placed from Earth to Purgatory, to Provost-Major Beltempest of the Imperial Landsknechte. Beltempest hadn't been present, so the message had been stored, awaiting his return. The figure pa.s.sed a gloved hand across the sensitive surface of the desk, calling up the text of the transmission.

'd.a.m.n!'

Its hand slammed down on the translucent surface, sending ripples of disturbance across the information net. Certain blocks of shares were inadvertently sold for well below their face value, causing a handful of minor companies to go bankrupt and the economies of several distant planets to fluctuate alarmingly.

'd.a.m.n and blast!'

The figure considered for a moment. Things were slipping out of control.

The fact that the Doctor's face had changed had been unexpected, but not completely beyond the realms of possibility. After all, had he not changed his own appearance? The voice, now . . . that was unforgivable. He really should have antic.i.p.ated that the Doctor's voice had also altered.

134.A deep breath, and a reconsideration. Was it such an avoidable mistake?

After all, when the Doctor's marvellous travelling device had appeared on the walkway, the valet bot had been too far away to pick up his voice. The woman Bernice had spoken to the pursuer bot on the Arachnae Arachnae when the figure was controlling it, so it had a record of her voice, but the Doctor . . . when the figure was controlling it, so it had a record of her voice, but the Doctor . . .

Hmm.

Time to bring this chapter to a close. Beltempest was unavailable Landsknecht business, presumably and so other methods would have to be employed. The figure's hands moved across the desk, placing a simcord call to the other end of the fastline transmission. An apartment somewhere in the local Overcity. Where the rats had gone to ground, so to speak.

Time to flush them out.

The null-grav lift deposited them in a cavernous flitterpark which took up the bottom five levels of a block some fifteen minutes by walkway from the apartment where Cwej's parents lived.

Looking around, Bernice was amazed how little multistorey car parks had changed over the centuries. Call them what you liked, park whatever sort of vehicle you wanted in them, they were always drab, grey, urine-smelling affairs supported by stained pillars, flickering lights fitfully illuminating their depths, the sound of dripping water echoing through them. As an archaeolog-ical side visit on Earth back in the 1970s, while the Doctor had been trying to prevent the Vardan invasion, Bernice had visited one of the first of the species.

Apart from the fact that the vehicles in this one floated a few feet above the ground, and the dates on the tax discs were different, she could have been back there again.

Near Ace.

Unwelcome memories tightened the back of her throat. Ace was gone. Like her or loathe her, and Bernice had done both in her time, she had left an Ace-shaped hole that would take a long time to fill. She supposed that the Doctor felt that way too, although typically he never showed it.

'So,' she said, her voice rebounding from the distant walls, 'what's the plan?'

'Whoever it was that simcorded told us to meet them here,' Forrester said.

She had moved to one side, and her blaster was in her hand.

'And they didn't say who they were?' Cwej asked.

Forrester snapped, 'All they said was, if we wanted to know more about the murder of Waiting For Justice, we should meet them here. That's it. Nothing else. Zip. Zilch. Nada Nada. Echt Echt.'

'Okay, okay,' he protested, 'just checking.'

'I don't like the feel of this,' Bernice murmured. 'I've seen too many old films in the TARDIS cinema where the intrepid heroes are attacked in a car park.'

135.'What's a TARDIS?' Forrester asked.

'What's a car?' said Cwej.

Metal crunched on concrete.

The three froze, waiting for the noise to be repeated.

'Where did that come from?' Forrester hissed.