‘You’re a natural.’
‘So I’ve been told.’
‘All we need is your official ID and we’re very much in business,’ the Enforcer said. ‘And I may say it’s going to be profitable business. Profitable for us and profitable for you.
Mostly profitable for you, of course.’
‘Of course,’ the Doctor said. ‘I’ll see what I can do and I’ll get back to you shall I?’
‘There isn’t a problem with that is there?’ the Enforcer asked politely.
‘With what?’ the Doctor asked.
The Enforcer looked slightly embarrassed. He leaned forward so that his face filled the viewscreen. ‘With asking for your official ID?’ he murmured delicately.
It was obvious to the Doctor that the Enforcer already knew the answer to that question. He must have done some background checks and naturally he had drawn a blank. ‘My official ID? There is a slight problem with that, yes. I haven’t got one at the moment.’ The Doctor contrived to smile and look depressed both at the same time.
The Enforcer shook his head and tutted sympathetically.
‘Another bureaucratic foul-up. I tell you if we ran the Guild the way they run state security...’ He shook his head again.
‘There was some sort of mix-up,’ the Doctor said, ‘when Leela and I were first arrested. Now no one seems to know who I really am. It’s potentially very embarrassing.’
‘And potentially very expensive,’ the Enforcer agreed. ‘Hard to enforce contract terms if you don’t officially exist. And if you’re not a member of the Guild.’
‘Exactly,’ the Doctor said. ‘So if...’
‘So, if you have a talk with your friend the minister, presumably he can sort that out sharper than sparks from a wet skullcap.’
‘My friend the minister?’ The Doctor wracked his brains as to who that might be.
‘I saw you with him at the Baloch debacle,’ the Enforcer said. ‘The State Security Minister?’
‘The minister,’ the Doctor said. ‘Of course. My friend the minister.’
‘A charming man, I’ve always liked him,’ the Enforcer said, clearly lying through his teeth.
‘He and I are going to be very good friends,’ the Doctor said and beamed delightedly. ‘He admires my ambition and I admire his taste in very good friends.’
‘No problem getting your ID sorted out then.’
‘Go straight to the top,’ the Doctor said. ‘Always a good plan.’
‘I’ll expect to hear from you soon,’ the Enforcer said.
‘You will,’ the Doctor agreed, ‘you will,’ and thought: you will expect to hear from me soon, I mean. That’s not a lie is it, not technically? Or am I lying to myself, he thought. I must get on with finding Keefer so that we can leave soon, he decided. This place is probably not good for Leela...
When finally he felt he had wasted enough time, Keefer paid the bribe and made his way through the freight-control galleries and out into the rest-and-recreation domes. It was obvious whoever had named these the Pleasure Pits was a PR
talent with a sour sense of humour. A poorly lit network of narrow
link-tubes
connected
half
a
dozen
basic
containments. No attempt had been made to disguise the crude prefabricated structures or differentiate them much except for colour-coding the entrance bulkheads. There was a communal eating area serviced by automatic food synthesisers old enough to qualify for a nostalgia park back home; an association room boasted little more than seating and off-focus tri-dee; in the sports hall there were a few hand-eye games tables and some broken down exercise stimulators; sleep and washrooms looked like the worst kind of low-maintenance public provision. As he wandered around loosening and flexing his joints and trying to look like an aimless tourist at the same time, Keefer could understand why the only area that was doing any business was a makeshift lasersound saloon. He stood outside it watching the light patterns for a moment, blinking slowly to make his vision sharp, and then he drifted in among the jostling customers.
Despite regulations, alcohol was freely on sale, and judging by the expressions on a few of the faces even some of the more expensively manufactured alternatives were available.
Keefer got himself a pale beer from the cash pump and sat down at a corner table.
‘You rich boys can’t drink worth a scuffle either.’ The shuttle pilot swayed slightly and grinned down at him. ‘Or do you hire people to do your drinking for you?’
‘What’s your problem with us rich boys?’ Keefer asked.
‘Nothing money wouldn’t cure.’
‘Buy you a drink?’ Keefer suggested.
‘Got one.’
‘You want to sit down then?’
‘Prefer to stand,’ the pilot said, swaying more violently.
‘You might prefer it,’ Keefer said, ‘but can you do it?’
The pilot leaned down close and slurred, ‘How much would you pay me to get you onto the Ultraviolet Explorer?’
Keefer could smell the drink on the man’s breath but not as strongly as he had expected, and the half-closed eyes were clear. ‘Why would I want to?’ he asked.
The pilot sat down, leaned his elbows on the table and peered at him owlishly. The whispering flutes of the laser columns blared suddenly and the light shattered into plasma bubbles, which danced across the room. ‘None of my business,’ he shouted above the music. ‘I can get you on board, for a price. What you do once you’re there is up to you.’
Keefer waited for the sound to die down again and murmured, ‘I could be an assassin for all you know.’
‘Or care,’ the pilot said. ‘Like I say, what you do once you’re there is up to you.’
Keefer shook his head. ‘Not interested.’
‘Cost you a thousand,’ the pilot persisted. ‘Special price.
Because I like you.’
‘And you’d want cash of course.’
‘Dollars. Sumanan preferably. Same as before.’
‘No.’
‘Or you could just hand over the money anyway.’ The pilot opened his tunic slightly so that the small handgun in his shoulder holster was clearly visible. ‘What do you say?’
It was a speculative threat, little more than a fishing expedition, and it produced no combat response in Keefer, only a tired sort of contempt. ‘I thought they were illegal out here,’ he said. Unless the man’s reactions were very fast indeed he knew he could disarm him easily, kill him more easily still. He let a little of his contempt show as he remarked matter-of-factly: ‘Leave it where it is and you won’t have a problem.’
A flicker of doubt showed on the pilot’s face. ‘A man with a gun doesn’t have a problem,’ he said, his speech abruptly more slurred, ‘in my experience.’
‘What experience is that?’
He shrugged. ‘Stuff happens. You need to be careful.’
‘Is that a threat?’ Keefer asked, knowing that it no longer was.
The pilot shook his head and held up his hands in mock supplication. ‘Dangerous place is all,’ he said. ‘You know that crew you came in with is dead? Did you know that?’
Keefer thought the man must be talking metaphorically, statistically maybe. ‘How do you mean?’
‘Transporter failure.’ The pilot slapped his hands together, palms flat. ‘Implosion. Pressure smashed them to smears.’
Oddly unsurprised Keefer found himself thinking that the redheaded duellist had been wasted because she had died without anyone earning. ‘Doesn’t sound like a gun would have helped,’ he said. Now the image of the android assassin came vividly back and it reminded him of the urgency of what he was about. It had taken him a long, slow time to get this far. His strength was the counterattack but this one had lost its edge, and he realised with a sickening thrill that he had let himself relax. It might already be too late. He might already be dead.
‘You can’t fight a comput
er malfunction,’ the pilot was saying. ‘Makes it more important to protect yourself when you can protect yourself.’
‘How soon can you get me on board the Ultraviolet Explorer?’ Keefer asked.
The driver who had kidnapped her and the Doctor when they first left the Court of Attack lock-up was called Nenron, and Leela had found him to be eager to do anything she asked of him. He could not be persuaded that, as she was a warrior, she would never have killed him just because he offended her dignity, and so he clearly felt he owed her his life. He was also grateful, so he said, for the training she was giving his son, Benron. As far as he was concerned she had spared his own life and was protecting the life of Benron, and whatever he could do for her was small by comparison and was never enough.
‘I could buy you an open cash ticket to anywhere in the high deep,’ he said. ‘No eyes, no whys. And you wouldn’t need to go near ‘Space Main unless you needed to use it. Let me at least go and do that for you?’
‘No eyes, no whys?’ Leela asked, puzzled.
‘No name. No ID. Nothing on the ticket to identify you in advance.’
They were sitting in the runner that Nenron had borrowed for the day but he made no move to start it and take Leela to the spaceport as she had asked.
‘I wish to visit Aerospace Main myself,’ Leela said. ‘There are other things I want to find out about. It is not just the Hakai Orbital Station.’
‘I can find out about them for you,’ he urged. ‘What are these things? I’ll find out whatever you want to know. Just tell me. Give me a list.’
Leela still did not entirely trust Nenron despite his eagerness to please. Or maybe it was because of that. ‘They are private matters,’ she said flatly.
‘Well they won’t be private for long,’ Nenron said. ‘Not if you turn up at ‘Space Main asking about one-way tickets out and whatever else it is you think you can keep to yourself in front of a scuffling great crowd.’
‘Did you get me the likeness you promised?’ Leela asked.
‘The likeness?’
‘You said it would be no problem for you with your connections at the Court of Attack.’
‘The likeness. Yes. Yes I got it for you.’ He fished around in one of the runner’s utility boxes. ‘It was harder than I expected,’ he said. ‘For an up-and-comer, there was nothing much about him. It was almost like he didn’t exist.’ He finally found what he was looking for and handed the small holographic picture back to her. ‘I had to call in a few favours and I finally got it from the First Kill Archive. He was registered, but that was the only place. What was he, a friend or something?’
Leela looked at the picture of Keefer. He was half smiling and his eyes were watchful, even as he posed for what was obviously some sort of official picture. ‘You speak of him as if he was a dead man,’ she said, as she put the picture in her combat pouch.
‘Something’s happened to him,’ Nenron said. ‘You know what they say: register your first win and there’s no going back. Sooner or later someone’s going to come for you. Looks to me like someone came for him.’ He started the runner’s drive and began to program the inboard links. ‘This is such a bad idea,’ he muttered, ‘but if it’s what you want then I’ll get you there some way...’
‘Why should there be a crowd?’ Leela asked.
‘Because you’re Leela.’
‘I know who I am,’ Leela said.
Nenron nodded. ‘So does everyone else.’
‘That does not mean there will be a crowd,’ Leela said. She looked out through the runner window at the empty street. ‘I am here. There is no crowd out there.’
Nenron turned to look at her. ‘You’re not serious.’
Leela frowned. ‘There is no crowd out there,’ she repeated.
She opened the runner door and got out. She walked round the runner, pausing a couple of times to wave in all directions and then she got back in again. ‘You see,’ she said.
‘There is no crowd out there.’
‘You don’t know about it do you?’ Nenron said. ‘Your agent hasn’t told you. This whole area has been cordoned off. He hired security and set up checkpoints. You’ve been living in a gated compound for a while now. Nobody in or out without clearance.’
‘Nobody in or out? You are saying I am a prisoner?’ Leela was shocked and then immediately angry. ‘I am a prisoner again?’
‘Not a prisoner,’ Nenron said hastily. ‘Not exactly a prisoner.’
‘You mean not technically,’ Leela snapped, conscious of how often those words, those truthless words were cropping up.
‘It’s working like a charm.’
‘What is working like a charm?’ Leela demanded. ‘I do not understand this.’
‘The Doctor does.’
‘The Doctor has no use for charms,’ Leela said. ‘He says they are not rational and without rationality there is only chaos and terror. I have not been allowed to keep any charms.’
Nenron stared at her intently. Eventually he smiled a small hopeful smile. ‘I can never tell whether you’re serious or not.
I suppose that comes from your fighting technique doesn’t it?
You keep your opponents guessing. Keep them off balance?’
Leela almost smiled at his clumsy attempt to divert her attention. ‘What is happening?’ she said very slowly and deliberately.
‘It’s classic showmanship,’ he said. ‘You whip up the public’s interest in something: in this case you. And then you cut them off from it. And then you tease them a bit with tantalising glimpses of what they think they want.’
‘The Doctor is tantalising them with glimpses of me?’
Nenron said, ‘And it’s working like a charm. Interest in you is higher than it ever was.’
‘You are right. He has told me nothing of this,’ Leela said.
Was this the plan the Doctor had promised to tell her about when he had time? Was this the plan he was never going to tell her about because he knew she would not agree to it?
How could this be a plan?
‘You’re going to make a killing. In a manner of speaking.’
Nenron was starting to babble. ‘I mean I know the New Way is not really about killing but there has to be an element -’
Leela interrupted him. ‘Stop babbling old man and take me to Aerospace Main.’
Nenron sighed and nodded. ‘Can I at least get you a less recognisable outfit?’ he asked as he set the runner in motion.
‘A bit of a disguise maybe?’
‘Yes,’ Leela said. ‘I think so. If I do not wish to be recognised, a disguise would be sensible.’
Nenron said, ‘If you do not wish to be recognised, not leaving the compound would be sensible.’
‘I will let nobody make me a prisoner,’ Leela said. ‘No matter who they are or what their plan is.’
Chapter Ten
They found him in a crapper on the Hakai OTS,’ he said.
‘Dollar to a dip he was a hauler who got himself spotted.’
Driftkiller Ronick was a crude, fat, sexist pig, Sita thought, but there were worse cops. He had a long memory for incidents and he made the links when they showed. She paid for the gutburgers and joined him on the bench by the lake.
‘How did you get hold of this?’ she asked, running the ID
he had given her through the fast-reader.
Driftkiller spoke round a mouth stuffed with most of a burger. ‘Friends in low places.’
She shrugged to show her indifference. ‘If you don’t want to tell me...’
‘Turned up in a currency bounce. Counterfeit crew. Good gear. They were working from plates stolen to order on the Hakai.’
She stopped the reader: it was the same routine stuff she’d got from central registry and it merely confirmed what she already knew. Norbert Lung was not the man who blew through ‘Space Main security. ‘None of this detail matched him at all?’
‘All they had in common was your friend Norbert is dead and so was this one.’<
br />
‘How dead?’ she asked.
‘Pro hit to the spine, then a coup to the brain.’ Still chewing he pushed a chubby finger against the underside of his jaw.
‘Neat blade.’
A dovetailed plover landed on the grass in front of them and Driftkiller tossed it some crumbs.
‘Who was the dead man?’ Sita asked.
‘I asked that.’
‘And?’
‘They don’t scuffling know. The body, all the forensics, all the samples, all the details - all disposed of.’
‘How could that happen?’
‘I asked that.’
‘And?’
‘Computer glitch,’ he said dismissively. ‘That’s their story and they’re sticking with it.’
A chilly breeze swirled across the lake. Sita suddenly shivered. ‘You don’t buy that?’
He snorted. ‘Smells like Hakai public relations to me. Usual scam. No evidence, no investigation - no crime. Anybody asks: blame the computer. Killings are bad for the image, am I right?’
It sounded reasonable to Sita. So that was it then. Probably a courier: currency, drugs, biologicals, who knew? Serious hauler anyway. And they caught up with him in the low-rent public washrooms on the Hakai Orbital Transfer Station.
Someone caught up with him there. Someone heavy and professional. And he’s dead. Fitting sort of end for someone like him. End of trail. End of story. Did it sound reasonable?
It sounded reasonable. There were holes... Forget the holes, she thought. Be grateful to Driftblubber here for getting her off an increasingly sharp-feeling hook. ‘How did you make the connection?’
‘Routine booking check. Norbert arrived on the OTS but he didn’t leave. There was an unidentified corpse around that time.’
‘Two and two,’ Sita said.
Driftkiller nodded. ‘Elementary police work.’
It was elementary police work Sita had already done, only there’d been no mention of a corpse when she checked. How could that have happened? She shivered again. ‘And we’ve got nothing on the dead man at all?’
Driftkiller shrugged. ‘Witness statement has him as some kind of slope.’
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