So Vile a Sin (8 page)

There was a limit to how many devices a single person could operate – which explained why he was taking a risk of being obvious outside. He’d known where Roz was staying, but up until she’d walked in the room, not what she looked like. Now he could track her when she left the hotel.

Roz stepped into the fresher. She normally hated steam baths, but the steam would mask her visual and IR signature while the reflective tiles would clutter up the short- and long-wave radar.

Cheesecloth would be relying on UV alone and that, Roz knew from experience, was next to useless.

Still, she was careful to act natural, washing her hair first before moving on down. Only when she bent down to wash her legs did she retrieve the Doctor’s whatsit and the medical scanner from beneath the drain filter. Feeling terribly undignified bent over in that position she quickly thumbed the scanner to maximum gain and pushed the power output into the red. She hoped Cheesecloth was enjoying the view – it was the last he was going to get.

She straightened up and listened in satisfaction to the sound of frying bugs.

It was a slightly too short and remarkably bad-tempered Skagette that walked into the Yellow Oasis later that afternoon. The wig was styled with a swept fringe that almost completely covered her right eye. It was hot, and she kept having to spit out hair, but it did change the shape of her face. The slip dress was a nightmare.

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Mei Feng didn’t recognize her right away. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said,

‘we’ve got enough Skag ladies here right now – good grief! Hey,

‘Jude.’

‘Hey, boss. Can you use an extra gun?’ said Roz.

‘Always,’ said Mei Feng. She wore a pants suit, businesslike after last night’s gown. Her black hair was tied in an elaborate bun. ‘You start immediately. Mother of Nobody will show you the cleaning work. It’s pretty basic. Your real job is to keep an eye on things.’

‘Any things in particular?’

‘Anything. Everything. We average four serious injuries a week and one fatality a month, and that’s just the staff. Brawls, mostly, but also a lot of petty theft accompanied by exaggerated violence.’

‘After all those years in the undertown,’ said Roz, ‘this should be a piece of cake.’

‘Tell me that again after you’ve been cleaning floors for twelve hours,’ said Mei Feng. ‘Your timing’s good: one of my Skag ladies just left for her homeworld, so there’s a bed available.’

‘I’ve got somewhere,’ said Roz. ‘Thanks though.’

‘Mother of Nobody’s out the back, shelling Arcuturan prawns.

You won’t miss her. Go on. And take off that ring – anyone can tell it’s genuine.’

‘Thanks,’ said Roz. She walked through the door marked STAFF ONLY.

Walking through the brightly lit, dingy hallway, she wondered why Mei Feng needed more security. It wasn’t as though her staff would be expensive to replace. And there was a steady supply of customers who wouldn’t know or care if the place had a reputation for fights (or would know, and made a beeline for the place with their fists itching). Maybe too many glasses and chairs got broken.

She came to a big kitchen. A breeze was blowing in from an open door, smelling like the sea. She put her head around the door, looking out into the alley behind the Oasis.

An Ogron woman sat on the plasticrete steps out back, twisting the heads off three-foot-long prawns. She sang a soft, rumbling 61

song as she worked, in time with the twist-crack-pull. There was a huge pile of shells next to her.

She looked up at Roz. ‘You the new girl?’ she said.

Roz got back to her hotel room at four a.m. According to Mother of Nobody, she was now fully trained in the complexities of cleaning bar, not making mess and keeping nose clean.

She pulled off the wig and fell on to the bed, pushing her face into the soft coverlet and groaning. The bar staff were all on stims, of course; she’d taken just the one so as not to arouse suspicion, and it felt like her eyelids had been sewn open. How did they get to sleep at night? Bash their heads on the wall until they fell unconscious?

At least the customers couldn’t tell she wasn’t a Skag. Like the Qinks, they just figured she’d had some of the usual cosmetic surgery. After a few hours in the Oasis, some of them probably couldn’t tell she wasn’t a wall.

Roz waited half an hour, snapped on the bedside light, lifted the mattress, and took out her file on Mei Feng. The envelope contained a few diskettes and a single hard copy. The scan she’d done of Mei Feng’s head when they’d first met, rummaging in her handbag for the miniature medical scanner the Doctor had given her.

There was the N-gram, showing up as a thick black line in the tissue of the woman’s brain. Like a tiny mouth, waiting to open.

Waiting to let something in.

Presumably the N-gram had been created when Mei Feng was on Iphigenia. Something she ate, or something she snorted, or some kind of weird dimensional effect. Only half a dozen members of the expedition had survived. Roz bet that Mei Feng had been allowed to live.

Roz wondered for a moment if she should tell the woman she was carrying a multidimensional time bomb in her head. But that would only alert the waiting N-form. So long as Mei Feng didn’t know who she was, Roz was safe and Mei Feng’s brain wouldn’t do anything it oughtn’t.

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She switched the light off again, pulled the pillow over her head, and prayed to the Goddess of Justice and Mercy that she would get some sleep before work tomorrow.

Although the Yellow Oasis never closed, there was a period around noon when no customers were expected and things were relaxed enough for Roz to sit at the bar in peace.

Her engagement ring clinked against the shot glass of Wakeywakey as she downed the viciously bitter stuff. Mei Feng was right: she should have taken it off – real emeralds, real gold, real conspicuous.

She’d had only about three hours’ sleep for the last four nights.

Twelve hours of combined security and domestic work, half an hour back to the hotel. Trying to fall asleep with the thumping music and herbal stench of the bar still in her head, wondering when Mr Cheesecloth was going to pick the lock on her door and come visiting.

Mother of Nobody was lurking behind the bar, washing glasses and peering out across the main room with her tiny eyes. They were almost hidden beneath the shelf of bone that protected her low forehead. Her skull was mostly bald, except for a fringe of dirty hair at the back and a few wiry hairs sticking out on top.

Practical Xenoculture had barely mentioned the Ogrons. There wasn’t much to know about them, the course designers figured: sub-Neanderthals who didn’t have much to say, useful for manual labour and as grunt infantry. So long as one wasn’t pointing a weapon at you or trying to eat your leg, they were safely ignored.

That’s what the course designers thought, anyway. Roz had had some run-ins with the oggies in her time that had made her wonder just what was going on inside those inch-thick skulls.

Besides, Mother of Nobody didn’t just wash glasses. She owned a third share in the bar.

The Ogron matron had been alternately bossing her around and making sure she was all right all week. She’d seen the Ogron stop a customer beating up one of the Skagettes, while Roz was still struggling through the dancing crowd. Mother of Nobody had 63

picked up the slender alien as though she was a baby, staring down at the drunken lout until he whimpered and crawled away.

‘Penny for them,’ said Mother of Nobody.

Roz snapped back into awareness. She’d been staring out across the room, looking as though she’d been working, but the exhaustion had worn her edge right down.

‘I was just wondering how Genai was doing,’ she said. ‘That was a pretty nasty cut over her eye.’

‘She fine. Lying down. Not working today,’ rumbled the Ogron. ‘Give me someone to look after.’

‘Someone to boss round,’ said Roz.

Mother of Nobody rumbled again. ‘Lie down, Genai, stay lying down, no drink anything or shoot up today. Lie down, lie down.

Now, Ogron boy,’ said Mother of Nobody, ‘he easy to lead, not like girl with splitting head and bad temper. You act like he stupid and he follow: he act stupid. Got mind like mud.’

‘You mean clay,’ said Roz.

‘I mean mud,’ said Mother of Nobody, emphatically. ‘Slippery, slip through fingers, out of ears and make mess on floor. His mother or mother-sister clean up mud, put back in head. Ogron boy with no mother is lost boy. He get notion to work for metal gods or human or any damn thing that tell him what to do. You understand?’

‘Yeah,’ said Roz, thinking suddenly of Chris. ‘I understand.’

‘Show you something.’ Mother of Nobody reached down behind the counter and brought out a stone, which she placed on the bar. ‘This good rock,’ she said. Then she put a second stone next to the first. ‘This bad rock. You see difference?’

Roz looked. Both rocks were of the same size and, as far as she could tell, of the same grainy blue-grey stone. ‘I’m no geologist,’

she said.

Mother of Nobody’s chest rumbled again. ‘You can’t tell difference between good rock and bad rock, no human can,’ she said. ‘And you call we stupid. Human come to our place and break up rocks to make soil to grow green things. Mix rocks together, mix good rocks and bad rocks together so that land is confused. Human kill all orange monster things – Ogrons have nothing to fear and worship. Planet confused – Ogron confused.

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Only humans happy.’ Mother of Nobody shook her massive head. ‘Still we mother and mother-sister do nothing. We wait for humans to go away.’

‘But they didn’t,’ said Roz.

‘No, they say we part of Empire now and we pleased. We see Empress and we think, “Ah, human have mother too.” We truly stupid race to believe so. Then they break birth taboo, take genes and make pygmy like she there.’ Mother of Nobody stabbed a finger at one of the pygmy Ogron maidens working the booths.

‘Sons and sister-sons come to us and say, “Humans want to make we small people, say small is better.” But pygmy has no voice.’

The glasses on the bar rattled. All the pygmy maidens in the bar turned to look at Mother of Nobody. Again the glasses rattled and the maidens turned away. ‘Still hear we though,’ she said with a certain amount of satisfaction. ‘Sons and sister-sons say fight but we say fight clever. We remember that metal gods leave many things in their spaces in the earth. We send mother-sister-daughters out to find lost boys and fetch them back to we. Lost boys know many machine things, many weapon things. We tell them they are sons now and must teach other sons to use the things left by the metal gods. When we sure we can win we fight.

We smart now.’

‘You’ve been fighting for six years,’ said Roz. ‘And you control, what, six per cent of the surface. You haven’t taken a town yet, let alone one of the cities. Doesn’t sound too smart to me.’

Mother of Nobody smiled. ‘We not fight to win yet. Fight only to cause trouble, to bring many human soldier here. If they here then they not where they needed later.’

‘You are working for someone,’ said Roz. ‘Who is it this time, the Sontarans? Or have you gone back to your old masters again?’

‘Not masters,’ said Mother of Nobody. ‘Not all-the-sames or metal gods. We have friend now, human friend to help us fight humans.’ She slammed her palm down on the bar and grinned at Roz. ‘Who is truly stupid race now?’

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Five minutes later, Mei Feng walked up to the bar and said,

‘Roslyn Forrester.’

Roz didn’t react. ‘What about her?’ she said, not looking up.

Mei Feng said, ‘It took longer than we had expected to trace you. You are difficult to trace. Something has gouged you out of puterspace. Almost entirely. Not quite entirely.’

‘It’s a fair cop,’ said Roz. ‘You going to throw me out, boss?’

Mei Feng didn’t answer. Mother of Nobody was watching, silently. Roz looked up at Mei Feng, saw the glint of gold behind the blue eyes. Imagined the black line inside her brain, opening wide.

‘We were going to ignore you,’ said Mei Feng. ‘You are, after all, hugely unimportant in the scheme of things. However, we cannot allow interference in the war plan, especially by operatives affiliated to the renegade Prydonian.’

‘What’s with the “we”?’ said Roz. ‘Doesn’t anyone in this place ever use a singular pronoun? Is being a gestalt in fashion or what? All right, you and the Ogrons I understand, but even the humans can’t seem to refer to themselves without reference to their unit or regiment…’

With the wet sound of soft tissue rupturing, golden spikes erupted from Mei Feng’s eye sockets. Something small and round flashed past Roz’s head and squelched against the wall.

The spikes drilled through the seat back, but Roz had stepped to the side, the pistol already in her hand. It made a high-pitched ripping sound on full auto. The air was suddenly full of concrete dust and broken glass. Mei Feng staggered backward as her chest exploded into ribbons of bloody flesh.

Roz was out of the doors and sprinting down the street before anyone in the bar had a chance to start screaming. She hoped that Mother of Nobody had sense enough not to get involved. Turning the corner on to the Boulevard Sharman, she ejected the spent clip from the pistol on the run. Fumbled in her pocket for the spare as she dodged around pedestrians and electric carts, slammed it into the pistol butt.

She had no illusions about how much damage she might have done to the N-form. The one in the Quadrant had been bloody indestructible. What couldn’t be outfought had to be outsmarted.

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What couldn’t be outsmarted had to be outrun. The Rift Valley rap. An adrenaline response evolved a million years ago when a bunch of hairless apes found themselves walking upright in a universe of claws and teeth.

There was a sucking noise, like the sound air makes when it rushes into a vacuum. A vegetable stall ahead of Roz grew an intense point of light at its centre. The air shimmered. She heard the sound of wood and metal groaning under stress. Then the stall exploded. Roz threw her arm across her face, protecting her eyes.

There was no heat, but the blast staggered her. Debris whined past her head. Blindly she struggled to keep her footing, slipped, and ricocheted off something warm and alive, banged into something hard and metallic. She pulled her arm down.