Cold Fusion - Lance Parkin [69]
Suddenly the train was travelling twice as fast as the hovercopter.
‘How did–’
‘I detached the carriages we were pulling. Without that weight dragging us we’ve bought ourselves a little time.’
The hovercopter was bearing down on them again.
‘Not very much time, Doctor.’ The Adjudicator aircraft was level with them again. The gun mounted on the side of the hovercopter swivelled. Tegan was staring down the muzzle. The cannon fired once. Tegan braced herself, but the gunner was aiming too high. Tegan heard a reverberation as the shot hit the rockface above them.
Rather than dying away, the noise was growing louder.
‘They’ve triggered an avalanche,’ the Doctor shouted.
‘Of all the irresponsible–’
‘We’ll lecture him when we see him, eh, Doctor?’
Outside, the hovercopter had peeled away. It took up position a safe distance away.
‘Of course. Brace yourselves!’
The engine lurched, throwing them all against the door.
‘Hold on!’ the Doctor shouted, but it was too late.
The engine had been swept off the skiblade, and now it tumbled over. Flung against the ceiling, the Doctor’s knee pressed into her chest, Tegan saw the tops of the trees roll past the window. They were in freefall, floating like astronauts.
‘Gravity brakes,’ the Doctor coughed, straining to get to the controls. Tegan shifted across, freeing him.
The Doctor yanked one of the controls.
‘The lever you have pulled – “Brakes” – is not in service,’ the synthesized voice informed him ‘Please make a note of it.’
The train bounced off a prominent rock and they were tossed across the cabin The Doctor cracked his head against the windscreen and his head slumped. Patience screamed. The wind was knocked out of Tegan They hit the trees which splintered as the train ground against them. Great jarring noises surged through the cabin. The train was falling, the branches were getting thicker, but were still cracking and tearing under the momentum of the engine. They were still travelling fast, but much slower than they had been. The train hit the bottom, turned over onto its back and pitched until the cabin was pointing uphill. They had come to a halt.
Tegan and Patience looked at each other. They broke into smiles. They had survived. Patience moved over to tend to the Doctor.
Something blotted out the sunlight
Tegan cricked her neck, looking up and out of the windscreen.
Ten tonnes of rock and ice were surging down the mountainside towards the skitrain
11
Fusion
Ten tonnes of rock and ice were surging down the mountainside towards the skitrain.
The targeting computer onboard adjudicator hovercopter Justice Kappa had tracked the trajectory of the engine as it fell down the hillside, through the trees. The avalanche was only a fraction slower, and the gunner watched as the wave of snow ploughed through the trees, pulling them from their roots. The tsunami hit the skitrain engine, carrying it away. The gunner looked up, satisfied that the target had been destroyed, but the targeting computer wasn’t sure. It flagged up its concern, raised the definition on the sensors and began searching the area for lifesigns. The gunner frowned: when he’d fired, the computer had registered three lifesigns onboard the train.
Assuming that those three people had survived the fall –
and he doubted that – they would be in no state to get up and out of the cabin. Even if they had, they’d have been swept away by the avalanche. Targeting computers were always pedantic about these things. If they hadn’t seen the bodies themselves they were always reluctant to declare a
‘kill’. It used to be easy to trick a computer into thinking you were dead, and if you managed to do that, it would take you out of the tactical equations. Battlefields were complicated places, and the fewer variables the better.
There was no point wasting processing time worrying about planes that had been shot down, dead troops or write-off wardrobe. Viewed electronically, the combat zone started off complicated and got simpler and simpler as more pieces were removed from the