So Vile a Sin (6 page)

She put it on safety and wedged it into her waistband and made sure the hem of her jacket covered the bulge. The spare clip went into the jacket pocket. She considered dumping the frock but changed her mind – it might come in useful later, even if she was buggered if she knew what for.

She bought a pack of Yemayan Strikes and a cheap lighter from a kiosk on the corner where the boulevard met the Via Grissom. She took a moment to shake a cigarette loose and light up. The smoke felt good as she drew it into her lungs. Strikes had been her brand since she’d been a Squire – the closest she’d come while travelling with the Doctor had been the Gauloise she’d bought when they were working the Quadrant. Roz exhaled slowly. Now she knew she was back.

Back in the Empire, but the Empire had changed.

Or maybe it was her.

The hotel foyer was a cool space after the street. Furnished in the early Empire style that Roz had come to associate with Fury, large expanses of neutral colours counterpointed with small baroque details.

Two officers, a man and woman, were arguing with the checkin desk. They were dressed in variations of the same baggy fatigues that Roz had seen on the soldiers outside, not Landsknechte or Navy – not a uniform she recognized. Roz approached the desk and slapped the service panel.

The female officer turned and glared – her pupils the size of pinheads. She and the man wore captain’s insignia on their shoulders above patches that displayed stylized reptile wings.

Pilots, guessed Roz. The woman was narced on something; her companion hovered protectively at her shoulder – nervous. A web of fine lines, like cracks in glass, had been tattooed around his left eye.

‘Hey,’ said the woman. ‘This place is humans only.’

Roz gave her the stare – put thirty years of the street into it.

The woman didn’t seem to notice but the man did. He put a restraining hand on his companion’s shoulder.

46

‘We don’t want any trouble,’ said the man.

‘No,’ said Roz, ‘you don’t.’ The pistol was a cold weight against her spine.

‘We got this place staked, see,’ said the woman. ‘Four oh three Interface Wing. Our place. Go find yourself somewhere else.’

She shrugged the man’s hand off and took a step forward. Roz caught the smell of something sour on the woman’s breath. No point talking to the woman, not when whatever complicated molecule she was narced on was dictating that side of the conversation. Roz caught the man’s eye.

‘I’ve come a long way,’ said Roz. ‘I’m tired, I’m in a bad mood and I don’t need this shit. OK?’

The man got the hint, put both hands on the woman’s shoulders this time and pulled her backwards. ‘No trouble,’ he said. ‘We just got back from pitch over Van Neygen’s armpit. All she needs is a lay-me-down and some P and Q. You understand?’

Roz didn’t but she nodded anyway. ‘Tough break,’ she said on general principles.

The woman must have been coming down the maudlin slope of whatever chemical high she’d been up because the words seemed to mollify her. She let her companion draw her away towards the hotel’s convenience store. Once she was sure the woman was out of lunging range Roz turned back to the desk and got herself checked in.

She’d chosen the hotel because it leased the top three floors of a tower block halfway down the Boulevard Gagarin, under the highest point of the dome. The rest of the block was leased out on a floor-by-floor basis to light industry, commercial service companies and something that advertised itself as a Memory Boutique. WE CAN REMEMBER IT FOR YOU – DISCOUNT! A long time ago, in a previous life, Roz would have paid a place like that a quick visit with a search warrant and a psyche forensic team.

Her room was a two-star Empire Standard kind of place. A wide plastic window with a view of the city, carpet-coloured carpets, and a bed just too small to be an empress and just big enough to get lonely in. She opened a door to find a cupboard-sized fresher.

47

Roz plonked her carryall on the minuscule sideboard, rummaged around for a moment and pulled out her sponge bag.

Inside was a feminine-hygiene kit she’d picked up at duty-free on Aegisthus Station and a lumpy shape wrapped in clear plastic film. She sat down on the bed, unpicked the plastic and turned the lump over in her hands.

There was what looked like the drive coil from a flitter with a layer of oblong chips built up around it. A bundle of wires in primary colours snaked through the other components before terminating in the back end of a small hologram projector, which seemed to have been put in the wrong way round. The whole thing was held together at one end by gaffer tape and with a double-wrapped elastic band at the other.

Unmistakably one of the Doctor’s creations.

She teased out a fibre-optic cable that was bundled into a depression in the lump’s side. The free end terminated in a universal media jack.

There was a panel below the room’s simcord screen. Roz prodded it twice until it hinged open and a standard keyboard unfolded. A slot in the side of the keyboard was the right size to take the jack. She plugged in and hit the power stud. The screen lit up and displayed the standard media-feed menu of options.

Not quite standard. In between EmpireGold and FuryLocal was an option marked only with a single question mark; Roz selected it by touching the screen.

At first there was chaos, multiple layers of colours and shapes as the Doctor’s box of tricks accessed every single municipal sensing system from thermal probes to Kirlian scanners. Then slowly the picture resolved itself as the machine condensed the input into a single coherent schematic of the city.

A query box appeared in the upper left-hand corner. Roz used the keyboard to type in: TSANG MEI FENG. The answer came immediately, the schematic expanding to show the street and architectural blueprints of the buildings along it. She made a mental note of both.

She typed in another search parameter. The answer was positive.

48

Damn, she thought. She’d discussed this possibility with the Doctor.
You won’t get a precise fix, probably only down to six or
seven kilometres.
She hadn’t thought much of that.
It’s the best I
can do, sorry. You’ll just have to take precautions.

In the morning, she thought. I’ll set up in the morning.

She woke up in the middle of the night, fumbling for her cigarettes. The lights came on at her voice command. She stared at the pack. At the picture of the Yemayan ziggurat on the front.

At the words printed underneath: PRODUCE OF YEMAYA 4.

Her favourite brand, the cigarettes she’d been smoking since she was a squire, even though it added six per cent to the cost of her medical coverage. Except they couldn’t have been Yemayan Strikes because the colony on Yemaya 4 had collapsed in the twenty-third century and been eradicated by the Dione-Kisumu Company.

Not that I cared or even knew, she thought – ancient history at the time I was born. But she remembered buying cigarettes as a young woman –
packet of Strikes please, the Yemayan ones
.

Sense memory of the packet with the ziggurat on the front, the smiling Turtle logo of the Yemaya Tobacco Cooperative.

There was no colony on Yemaya 4 until the Doctor stopped it from going under, fought off DKC, unpicked the mystery of GRUMPY the telepathic supercomputer and yet she
remembered
.

She wrapped herself in a sheet and stood in front of the window. Fury was a thicket of blocks and towers crammed into the circumference of the dome. Beyond that she could see the low rectangular shadows of the old foundry. On the horizon was the dull, almost imperceptible, red glow of Clytemnestra. Too big to be a mere planet, too small to be a sun.

She shivered. How much of what she remembered had changed since she had started her travels with the Doctor? Maybe they’d always shifted, adjusting to all those changes made in the timeline and she was only aware of it because she travelled out of time. And if the shift was so catastrophic that you ceased to exist, would you know you’d ever lived?

49

One of these days she’d ask the Doctor about that.

She stepped back from the window and turned on the simcord.

The Doctor’s device hummed to itself, perched atop the screen.

‘Give me a likeness of Tsang Mei Feng,’ she told it.

Agamemnon lifted his burning orange face over the limb of Clytemnestra to gaze down on the city of Fury. His light cut the city like a razor, driving away the boldest of the rats and fading the cheap holographic signs of the bars and comfort houses.

On the Via Grissom the dregs of the previous night’s clientele staggered into the daylight to stand blinking among the rubbish and the sleeping bodies of the street children, curled like so many shrimps against the plasticrete and breezeblock walls of the bars and shops. The soldiers moved away in packs, like dogs that had lost a scent, back towards the service embarkation points on the Piazza Tereshkova and the transmat to orbit.

Some of the soldiers looked around them, confused and deaf from a night of loud music, nasty vodka and industrial-strength narcotics. They stared at the fading colours of the holograms as if wondering if these were the same signs as had blazed so gorgeously the previous evening, enticing them into the hot smoking interiors of the bars that promised a few hours’ pleasure and a chance to forget. PINK FLOWER, TORPEDO LOUNGE, LADY

GREY, DK’S and below the names of the bars their attractions, SKAGS FOR RENT, NAKED SERVICE, REAL BEER, LIVE WRESTLING

and the ever-popular lie HUMANS ON STAGE.

As Agamemnon rose higher, the doors and windows of the bars and apts banged open. Ogron servants or Skagettes, too old at twenty-five for ceiling work, walked down from their quarter-room shares in the tenements above the bars to mop up the spilt drinks, the vomit and the occasional pool of blood.

The streets of Fury had their own way of talking, a lingua franca that had pushed itself through the cracks in the pavement like a troublesome weed. The humans called it
gobble
, 50

thinking, as always, to ridicule that which they couldn’t understand. The Skagettes sang in it as they worked, arrhythmic, off-key harmonies that spoke of half-forgotten oases among the high deserts of home. The Ogron matrons chanted sadly for their poor lost boys, the sons and sister sons that vanished long ago with the metal gods. Such songs were strictly illegal throughout the Empire, but the matrons sang them all the same.

The street children slept on, comfortable among the familiar rubbish of the streets. They knew that the long ten-hour morning was the time for sleeping. Work would come later in the afternoon or evening when the high-capacity transmats disgorged their cargoes of soldiers. Occasionally one of them twitched in his or her sleep, dreaming, like an animal, of the chase or some other bloody encounter in an alleyway or cul-de-sac.

Roz parked herself at one of the food stalls that encrusted the pavement. Opposite was the entrance to the Yellow Oasis, registered owner Tsang Mei Feng. The woman had obviously paid money to someone, because there was no trace in the records of her ever being a commander in the Exploration Arm of the Imperial Space Navy.

A cheap and nasty job, but very thorough. The Doctor’s machine had a hard time tracking her through the layers of cutouts and missing data, but even erased data leaves a trace.

Born on Spaceport Six Overcity, graduate in geophysics at SP5

University. Sponsored by the local baron for the officer corps of the ISN. The sponsorship spoke of political connections. Officer training at the Tethys deep-space school, first assignment, the exploratory cruiser
Redoubtable
. A fast-track but otherwise unremarkable career until she arrived in the Agamemnon system two years previously, just as the war on Orestes got going in earnest.

The inner moons of Clytemnestra had been largely ignored after colonization, but the ISN and Landsknechte couldn’t believe that the Ogrons, of all races, could mount a serious challenge to Imperial authority without outside help. Tsang was given command of an in-system cutter and sent off to look for secret bases.

51

On 4 June 2980 the cutter dedocked from the ISN carrier
Catherine the Great
and set off for Iphigenia at ten gees. And that was where the official record ended.

Except that a Tsang Mei Feng was the registered owner of a bar called the Yellow Oasis, city of Fury, Aegisthus. Roz’s job was to find out whether it was the same woman, get a medical scan of her head, and give it to the Doctor.

At noon the whores emerged to do their shopping. Slender Skagettes with skins as black as coal dust, their faces modified by surgery or make-up. Riban boys with hormone-retarded bodies, pygmy Ogron Maidens with grafted hair, elegant Argolins and bad-tempered girls from Segonax.

They set off to spend their two-per-cent cut of the previous night’s ceiling work on new working clothes, or perfume, or a gram or two of bliss to make it all go away. Or even, though this was rare, to take their money to the IMC bank on the Piazza Tereshkova to be zapped by hyperwave back to their families.

All of them were dressed up and made over in human fashion because looking human was back in style these days, especially among the humans themselves.

None of them matched her hard-copy likeness of Tsang Mei Feng.

Roz checked her watch – it was time for the ten-cent tour.

‘And this is the main press,’ said the robot tour guide. ‘Here, the molybdenum was compressed into blocks of two hundred thousand tons, prior to being shipped to orbit.’

The tour of the old foundry complex cost six schillings. Roz was amazed that some of the tour party were civilians carrying simcord recording gear. There were a smattering of ISN officers in pristine white uniforms with ship flashes on their shoulders.

The rest were enlisted soldiers, mostly young, with that well-scrubbed and innocent agro-colonist look. No doubt they had taken the tour in order to avoid the temptations of the wicked city. Their parents would be proud of them.