Read Online Doctor Who: The Also People by Ben Aaronovitch - Free Book Online

her trouble. She slapped it hard with the heel of her hand, an automatic movement perfected over twenty years, and it sprang open. The cuirass cracked apart down its side seam, giving Roz access to the catches that anchored the pauldrons to her shoulders. The cuirass and pauldrons eased off as one unit. Roz reached inside the cuirass and switched off the battery pack before placing the pieces carefully on the folded cloak. There was a discoloration on the cuirass where it had been caught by a Kithrian fifty-megawatt laser and then relaminated by the Adjudicator's artificers. Roz idly scratched at the corresponding point on her chest, a patch of skin under her left breast that always itched in hot weather. Purely psychosomatic, the medics said, all the nerve endings having regenerated seamlessly. It's all in your mind.
    She knew better; the body always remembered.
    With the top half of her armour off it was easy to free her legs from the tasset, cuisse and greaves. She piled them neatly next to the cuirass making sure all the buckles, straps and studs were tucked away in the recesses provided. Then she unsealed the padded undertunic and slipped it off her shoulders and over her hips. Roz folded the tunic in the prescribed manner and placed it on top of the cuirass. She reached awkwardly behind her back to unclip her sensible goretex bra top and shrugged out of the straps. They'd been a present from an admirer, the manager at the local branch of Drop Dead Gorgeous on Overcity Five. He'd showered Roz with underwear for two months until she'd gone round to the boutique and threatened to arrest him for attempted bribery. Most of his gifts went unworn, slight items of silk and Martian lace that spent their days wrapped in tissue at the bottom of Roz's wardrobe. Mind you, there had been a swimsuit made of skin-sensitive micropore that would have come in useful right now. She considered leaving her briefs on but changed her mind and slipped them off, figuring that she'd only have to dry them out later.
    Roz walked naked down to the edge of the pool. Cautiously she tested the water with her toe; it was cooler than she'd expected.
    Roz had once read of a ritual like this. An adjudicator would strip themselves of their armour and bathe themselves in a pool of clear water. Afterwards one of the Untouched would clothe the adjudicator in a surplice of pure white lamb's-wool. The ritual's purpose was to cleanse the supplicant of the taint of sin following a line-of-duty killing. The custom had been discontinued at least fifty years before Roz had joined the service. Instead, every seventh day of duty an adjudicator got sprinkled with holy water, usually during the morning briefing. It made sense to Roz; if she'd had to do that every time someone got killed she'd have spent half her life washing the blood off. They'd have had to organize a shift system. Besides, she had a sneaking suspicion that the lamb's-wool must have itched horribly.
    Roz waded in up to her thighs and ducked under the water. Coming up fast again she shook the water from her hair. Felt the hot sun quickly drying her skin. Caught sight of her reflection. A second Roslyn Forrester, rippling and foreshortened across the surface of the water. She stretched her arms out and looked at them. She realized it was a long time since she'd really looked at herself. How fragile her fingers were, long and delicate. Pity that the nails were ragged and bitten down to the quick. The skin below the wrists was pale, a long time since they'd seen the sun. A dark line of scar tissue cut diagonally across her left forearm: vibroknife wound. She touched herself on the shoulder, feeling along her collarbone until she came to the tiny ridge that marked where the fracture had been reset. She traced the outline of her breasts, too small for her mother's liking, and down to her belly. Feeling the ridges of the muscle under her fingertips, the barely perceptible line where some nameless BEM had made a