Cold Fusion - Lance Parkin [64]
Nyssa nodded her approval. They stepped into the apartment.
It was neat, with a white leather sofa and thick carpet. A holofire raged in the middle of the room. It was the first place she had been on this planet that wasn’t in urgent need of repair. Everything looked new, and expensive. It was also warm. Chris was standing over a matt-black holographic entertainment console in one comer. After a minute changing channels and consulting holotext Chris turned his attention back to her.
‘The action at Pryanishnikov Station takes up most of the coverage. There are no reports that they’ve found Tegan,’ he concluded. ‘You can sit down, if you want to.’
‘Thank you.’ Nyssa knelt on the plush rug by the fire.
Chris hesitated before sitting down on the sofa.
‘If you’ve got this apartment why did you need to book into the hotel?’
‘I was meeting someone. Haven’t your clothes dried out yet?’ They had been soaked through when they’d landed in the pile of snow.
‘Very nearly.’
‘You can take them off if you want,’ he told her. She stared at him. ‘There are more clothes in the spare room,’
he explained hurriedly.
Nyssa smiled and stood.
The ski train had slowed as the gradient increased. Now it was travelling no faster than thirty or forty miles an hour.
The views more than made up for it. Patience had spent much of the last three hours asleep. Tegan and the Doctor had sat and talked as the plantations had given way to foothills and finally jagged mountains that would put the Alps to shame. Tegan had only been travelling with the Doctor for a few days, and they’d had few chances to sit and talk like this. She told him about her ambitions, her career plans. Then he’d told her a little about himself and his people, the Time Lords. He still hadn’t explained about the celery, though. The train track clung to the mountainsides, about halfway up. The blizzard was worse now, but the sunlight reflected from the snow and ice on the ground, giving them a good view of their surroundings.
Below there was a steep drop into a rocky valley. Above them the mountain peaks were shrouded in blue fog which the Doctor thought might be condensing oxygen. He had turned the thermostat up three times in the last twenty minutes
As the train cleared the corner, Tegan saw a settlement ahead. There were dark grey shapes clinging to the mountainside, standing out against the snow. They were just above the treeline. Pine trees. Tegan wondered about that for a moment, finally deciding that they must have been planted by the colonists. There was a thick column of smoke rising from the centre of the buildings and drifting over the valley. It must be a factory or refinery, Perhaps a power station. They were a couple of miles away.
How could anyone live out here?’ Tegan asked.
The tram was beginning to slow down.
‘We are approaching Pryanishnikov Waystation,’ the computer voice announced, making them all jump. ‘Please prepare for unloading.’
‘Something has happened here,’ the Doctor announced.
He peered out of the window. They were inching through the outskirts of the settlement. The first outbuilding they saw was blackened: there had been a fire. The next structure resembled a shipwreck – the skeleton of a fishing boat with all its windows smashed. The next twenty or thirty feet were just a rubble-filled crater. Some of the great pine trees at the edge of the forest had been felled, some had been splintered. ‘
As they made their way into the centre of town, Tegan could see that whole streets had been levelled. Thick gashes had been cut into a narrow roadway, even into the underlying rock. There was a vast crater, and Tegan saw that there had once been an underground building there, the hole punched through it allowing her to see it in cross-section. That’s how people lived here: by burrowing into the ground to keep out of the snow. It was at least