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The city was amazing. London may have seemed alive to Alf when she had returned there a few months ago, but this was awe-inspiring. Impressive angular skyscrapers towered in to the star-studded night, most with a distinctive sphere at their apex. Smaller, whitewashed buildings clustered in the shadows of the taller buildings, offering a cornucopia of shopping, dining and drinking experiences. Most alien to the environment were the wide canals that criss-crossed the city in grids, connected by narrow streets. Considering the inhospitable nature of the desert, Dar-Es-Buraq felt like it was on a different planet. It was also a lot cooler since the sun had set. Alf would have been very happy to explore the city with Nick if they hadn't lost the Doctor. He had vanished the moment they made their escape from Officer Brakis. Somehow the crowds had swallowed him up and given his odd behaviour, Alf had to confess that she was deeply worried about him. Nick didn't seem that bothered. Not because of any enmity he held for the clone. That was all but gone. No, Nick had assured Alf that the Doctor could take care of himself, probably had some masterplan and would turn up sooner or later. Instead, her boyfriend had gone about taking in the sights, sounds and smells of the alien city with the glee of a thirsty man presented with a waterfall. Even his sprained ankle did little to dent his enthusiasm. Apart from finding the errant clone, she was worried about one other major thing. They had no money. Soon hunger and fatigue would overtake them and before that Alf wanted to be sorted. She was used to living on her wits, but a meal and a bed would be good; a base of operations from which they could begin their search for the Doctor. Alf had noticed a considerable amount of Yahanan's begging. For some reason they had left Alf and Nick alone, but the beggars approached almost every goblin-like alien that looked wealthy. In most cases they were given something, too. Cultural differences, thought Alf. A bit different from the 'don't give to tramps on the tube' messages you got in London. Here and there were large notice boards, giving information about vagrant shelters and what Alf assumed were soup kitchens called Mataabix. She must have seen a hundred of these as she and Nick had moved sluggishly through the city, but she suddenly realised something. 'Nick,' she said, calling him over from a crowd of people watching a scantily clad Yahanan (not a pretty sight) doing something weird with what looked like a winged snake. Nick drew away from the throng, still watching the street performer, cane in hand. 'Mmm?' he asked not yet looking at his girlfriend. 'Nick!' He finally turned round and gazed at Alf, grinning. 'Sorry. All this is very interesting,' he said. 'Well I've got something maybe a bit more interesting for you,' she said with a twinkle in her eye. 'Oh yeah.' 'Not that,' Alf smiled coyly. 'I've worked out how we can get some grub and somewhere to kip.' Nick looked puzzled. 'We were rounded up as vagrants, weren't we?' 'So?' He asked. 'So… How many shelters and Mataabix do you think we've passed today?' 'Bloody hell,' Nick said, slapping his forehead with his free hand. 'Thick or what?' 'This one looks promising.' She pointed at one of the posters that had been plastered all over the whitewashed walls. '"Tixliss Shelter. Offers food and lodging for the destitute and the homeless. Also help with finding lost relatives".' 'I'd like to see 'em find my lost relatives,' commented Nick. Alf memorised the sketch map on the poster and led him away by the hand. It would be quite a walk. Maret Kovalis looked out at the night skyline from the window of his 21st storey office. It was of a size suitable to his position with furnishings to match. As a commander in the Buliseye, he was second in rank only to Arat Jara himself and as the officer in charge of the Nemo murders, he was viewed as the best detective in the security services. Somehow, though, he didn't feel that important. Impotent more like. Despite the freshness of the last corpse, neither he nor the lab techs had been able to discover anything new about the killer or his method. Soon, Kovalis mused, he would be removed from the case for lack of results and one of the junior commanders would get a crack at it. Hell, they might even give it to Satav Sontaris, Jara's 2IC. Kovalis snorted. The only thing Sontaris was good at was currying favour and consolidating his position. He was the sort of Yahanan that would make Marshall. Kovalis wasn't. He was a plodder - something to which he would readily admit. Plodding got results. You didn't solve crimes by sudden leaps of logic or miracles. Although right now he could have done with one. His internal communicator buzzed. Kovalis turned from the window and answered. The receptionist on the ground floor told him that a citizen was insisting on seeing him urgently with regard to the Nemo killings. Kovalis shook his head. Another crazy. 'Tell him to go to the Surti. They'll take a statement from him.' As he finished speaking he heard the receptionist remonstrating with the citizen before coming back online. 'He says he knows about the crystals.' Kovalis felt his heart miss a beat. 'Send him up immediately.' The villa was perched on a small promontory overlooking lake Tisriin, beneath the high cliffs of the crater in which Dar-Es-Buraq had been built. High walls and Xerxes-Sykes monitoring devices, capable of all manner of surveillance and defensive action, protected the house and grounds from intruders. The gardens were immaculately kept; wide lawns separated exotic flowerbeds and clumps of palms with neat gravel paths leading to various outbuildings. One annex of the villa was used as a communications centre, replete with radio transceivers and monitoring equipment, screens and cameras for teleconferencing. Multiple workstations presented up-to-the-minute information from Pan-Yahanan Network PYNsites and televisual display units showed business and broadcast news stations. The message from the "Leel Elma" had been received on hour ago and had been passed to the Bezerker officer on duty at the time. He in turn had relayed the sensitive transmission to Askaris, personal assistant to Jeret Seth. The squat Yahanan had the unpleasant task of delivering the bad news to his master and he knew that Seth would not take it well. Emphazine was a project that Seth had been working on for years. A planetary survey had been undertaken to locate the constituent ingredients necessary to the drug's completion. Security had been so tight that the Formansi had been moving the drug in small quantities with the regular runs. Seth himself had worked on the final stages, as none of his chemists at Karbala possessed the skill or the knowledge for its completion. Even Askaris did not know what the drug actually did. Now the Yahanan stood beside Seth in the communications centre as his master marshalled its staff in a search for information that might give some clue as to what had happened to the "Leel Elma" and, more importantly, the emphazine. 'Perhaps it was another Formanasi, Effendi,' suggested Askaris. 'You know none would dare,' said Seth quietly. 'Only the security services would have the wherewithal to carry out this raid...' Seth trailed off as if something were nagging at him 'And if it weren't the Buliseye, they would have unscrambled the message by now and launched an investigation.' He sighed. 'I should have gone to Karbala myself.' 'It was safer to move the emphazine with a regular delivery, Si'id,' Askaris reminded him. 'As well as the Buliseye and the other Formanasi, we have the Wasi to consider and…' Seth snapped his head round top look at his assistant. 'The Wasi,' he breathed. 'Brilliant, Askaris.' The Buliseye have been turning a blind eye to Wasi activity since they had blasted their way on to the world scene with the destruction of a penal complex some months before. Seth's crime syndicate had ignored the new organisation… 'I want everything we know about the Wasi,' Seth ordered. 'Operatives, methods, targets, weaponry - everything! Askaris, I want a detailed report within the hour. And get a skimmer out to the last position of the "Leel Elma".' He turned a swept from the room with new resolve. A Kindly old Yahanan female called Orsah had greeted Nick and Alf upon their arrival at the Mataabix and had given them a timetable of meal times. Then she'd shown them to the shelter, which proved to be nothing more than a swathe of cloth covering a wooden frame forming a primitive marquee. Nick was not impressed, but - quite literally - beggars could not be choosers. While Alf slept, Nick had propped himself up on some cushions covered in sackcloth at the entrance to their tent for a view of the Tixliss compound. It was something of a shantytown, with marquees similar to the one Alf and he had been given, standing shoulder to shoulder with more sturdy looking wooden huts and lean-tos. Washing lines zigzagged the compound like bunting at a street party and rubbish had been blown into drifts against most vertical surfaces. Every now and then a rat would sneak out from its hole to investigate them. All the dwellings were focused on a central fire that gave warmth and the opportunity to cook what food the vagrants had scrounged or stolen. Some were also bartering clothes and trinkets while others shared a pipe and a laugh. What interested Nick the most was the Yahanan that was moving from person to person, distributing syringes. Some of those who received the hypodermics moved inside their marquees for privacy, while others remained outside, carefully rolling up their sleeves to jack up. A third group persuaded their friends or relations to administer the injection at the base of the neck. This seemed to be the preferred practice. The Yahanan approached Nick and asked how he felt. After a brief conversation, Nick had learnt a lot. 'Cufic', Lynis had told him, meant 'small coins' and was a derogatory reference to the impoverished who could not afford the purification drugs necessary to their survival. Nick had played the innocent idiot well and had further established that somehow the Yahanan gene pool had been infected with an incurable virus that steadily degraded their DNA. The government's cloning of pure Yahanan DNA was the only thing holding the disease back. Another clone out to save the world, mused Nick. This technology - and its resultant drugs - did not come cheap. As their conversation continued, the Yahanan produced a pipe and loaded it with what looked like dried out stinging nettles, manipulating the weed deftly with his three stubby fingers. He lit the pipe and inhaled deeply. 'You were foolish to come to Dar,' Lynis said, exhaling a steady stream of smoke from his wide mouth. 'The begging may be better, but there are factions round here that believe in social cleansing.' 'Social cleansing?' This was an idea new to Nick. He reminded himself that he'd only been human a relatively short time and couldn't be expected to know everything. Not like when he'd been one of the Millennium People. 'The Wasi are the worst,' explained Lynis. 'It is said they will take any vagrant they find. No one knows what happens to their victims. Apparently they come for you while you sleep, but you'll be safe here. Even the Wasi wouldn't enter a charitable compound.' Lynis drew on his pipe once more and offered it to Nick. 'I have never seen them, but they are rumoured to wear the maroon robes of Styx himself.' Nick nodded sagely. Sticks? Nick wondered what was he on about, but accepted the pipe proffered by Lynis and took a big toke. It would have been rude not to.
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