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.The Doctor kept catching cobwebs in his candle flame.Kadiatu’s time vessel took up most of the basement.It was a cargo shuttle, three-quarters storage space and one-quarter life-support.The surface, painted a drab military green, was marked with streaks of mind-jarring colours, silver and heliotrope and cerulean; iridescent go faster stripes formed where the vortex had licked the paintwork.The hull was pocked with microm-eteoroid strikes.The phrase WHOSE IDEA WAS THIS???? was spraypainted in dripping red across its nose.The life-support section was a flattened bulb at the bottom of the ship, with room for one suited occupant.The Doctor leaned in and flipped a switch, and a panel obligingly opened in the side of the cargo portion of the vehicle, exposing the hold.There was a thick, square patch of something sticky next to the cargo hold door, just above eye level.He scratched at it with a fingernail.Something organic, dried in wet blobs on the spaceship’s hull.Vegetable, not animal.The surface shrugged, shrinking away from his touch.He leaned into the cockpit, brought the computer online, read the flight program most recently entered into it.Read it again.A bit drastic for an anti-theft measure.Or was it?61There was a radiation gauge above the cargo bay door; the Doctor flicked his eyes across it.The interior of the ship was a little hotter than the background, but not enough to stop him.He popped his head inside for a look.The hold was mostly equipment, machinery stitched together into a jury-rigged time-space engine.The main section of it was a modified field regulator from a subspace train, the public transport system of an Earth twenty minutes into Ace’s future.Ace.Covered in frost, lying on the floor an inch from his nose like an enormous fish finger.Watching him bleed to death while Bernice struggled to save them both.A dreadful urgency rose up in him, and he didn’t really care how Kadiatu’s toy TARDIS worked, he just needed to get to Ace.Benny must have dragged them both into the rift.She and Ace could have ended up anywhere that the fractures led.Including several hundred miles above the surface of Mars.His left collarbone suddenly erupted with pain, and he sat down hard against one curving wall of the shuttle, little flashes going off in his field of vision.He blinked hard and pressed his fingers against his chest above the left heart.There was no scar there, no bruise, nothing to indicate an injury.If the welt on his face hadn’t healed, what might be broken on the inside?Ace could take care of herself, and so could Bernice.He pushed the panic down along with the pain and forced himself to concentrate on the machinery.The big gold-coloured things were power baffles, designed to soak up huge amounts of energy.Such as a hydrogen bomb going off in the immediate vicinity.The design was rough and ready – everything was covered in welding lines –but it had a functional elegance.The train engine wrapped the capsule in a self-generating, dimension-warping field.That field protected the physical vehicle from the thermonuclear explosion, shunting the power instantly to the baffles, which sucked it up and pushed it back into the field in a huge positive feedback loop.When the field strength got above a certain level, the whole thing was booted unceremoniously into another part of space and time.No wonder she couldn’t control its flight; it would be like trying to steer a car that ran on dynamite.And it was just as damaging to the road.Kadiatu had managed to invent a whole new form of pollution.Every remaining inch of the hold had been stuffed with useful things: medical supplies, weapons, food preserved in various inedible ways.He flipped open one box and discovered neatly stacked bars of gold.The only empty space had been left by her spare bombs.‘What’d they do to you?’The Doctor jumped, banging his head on the curve of the wall.Kadiatu was a flickering silhouette in the cargo hold doorway, her nightdress hanging 62heavily around her.Her eyes were empty hollows in the feeble light of her candle.‘I am presuming you didn’t beat yourself up.’The Doctor got his breathing back under control.He rolled his shoulder back and forth a couple of times.It seemed to be alright again.‘If you make a hole, something will probably decide to live in it.’‘Like weeds growing in cracks in the road.’‘Even a non-Euclidean theoretical construct is a habitat, if you look at it the right way.Something’s living in the fractures.’‘What’s it up to?’‘Travelling around.Hunting and gathering.Flexing its muscles, making a bit of noise, seeing if anyone notices.’‘And you noticed.’‘Yes.And they noticed I noticed.’‘Who are they? What was their technology like? Advanced? Did you understand it?’‘I don’t – I don’t remember it very – I don’t remember.’ He frowned, as though he’d forgotten where he’d left something.‘I.’Kadiatu hunched back, uncomfortable.‘One thing I can tell you,’ he said, looking her in the face, ‘they don’t treat the people who work for them very well.’‘Do you know how I can get out of here?’‘Oh, that’s easy.Dive your shuttle into the sun.’‘What?’‘When you hit a hot enough section of chronosphere, the temperature should trigger dimensional transference.And you’re on your way.An ef-fectively unlimited power source.You can keep making jumps until you end up somewhere you like.’‘I can’t do that.I’d do more damage.I’ll have to think of something else.’‘That’s better,’ smiled the Doctor.Kadiatu looked like she wanted to hit him.63Chapter 6In TabernaLife is just one damned thing after another.(‘Kin’ Hubbard, A Thousand and One Epigrams) Ace held up her left arm.It was covered in bangles, tight rings of gold glistening dully with lapis lazuli.They didn’t go well with the loop of the force shield generator [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]