Cold Fusion - Lance Parkin [92]
A green dot appeared on the man’s chest. Instinctively, Messawi fired. The energy bolt hit the target just below the ribcage.
The young man pitched over, falling awkwardly. The front of his suit was red. He still had that laser pistol, but now he was firing wildly and the bolts were falling short of the interceptor’s feet. Not one of them hit the craft, and even if they had they would have bounced of the armour.
Chris was on his back. The energy bolt had clipped his side, removing it, Blood poured from the wound. Nyssa tried to help him, but Chris held firm. He fired his pistol again, before losing his grip on it.
‘We’ll be killed,’ she cried, close to tears.
‘You’ll be all right. Watch this,’ he croaked.
The war machine took another step forward...
... and fell crashing into a hole in the ground, Its gun arms flailing and firing.
Its weight had been too much for the unstable rock, especially when Chris’s shot had weakened it further.
Chris made a disconcerting whooping noise which subsided into a cough.
‘How did you know the ground was going to subside?
He managed a smile. ‘When the freighter landed there was that lurch, remember?’
‘The weight of the ship caused the ground to shift slightly?’
‘Strip-mining has weakened the, underlying rock.’
‘Don’t talk,’ she warned. ‘Don’t move. And don’t look down.’
‘I’m a mess. I feel cold.’
‘You would: the suit’s ripped.’
‘Not that sort of cold.’
‘Here.’ Nyssa piled snow into the wound, causing Chris to squeal with pain. The cold would force the blood vessels to contract, slow the loss of blood. ‘Keep, it covered with snow. I’ll get the first aid kit from the ship. The one that came in that container.’ Nyssa pointed to the box containing the fusion charges.
It wasn’t there.
The tunnel was wide and, as Quint had said, the rocky floor hadn’t proved an obstacle for the hoversled carrying the unconscious woman. After ten minutes, the Doctor had insisted that they stop to check-her vital signs. Quint had joined him. They reported that according to the diagnostic computer the woman was still in a deep coma. Adam was glad for them.
‘No change,’ the Doctor said cheerfully.
‘That’s the trouble with this planet: nothing ever changes.’
‘A very pessimistic view from one so young,’ the Doctor admonished him from behind his half-moon spectacles.
‘You’re no older than I am, Doctor.’
The Doctor was thirty at the most, but was clearly annoyed by that observation. ‘Appearances can be deceptive... people change.’
Tegan grimaced. ‘The Doctor’s living proof of that, if nothing else.’ The Doctor’s companion wasn’t so selfconscious about her survival suit now, and seemed happy to be doing something other than sitting around and waiting. Adam realized that she didn’t like him, which made him a little regretful, but he’d live.
‘What’s the future for this colony, then? All the minerals have gone, there’s no money. Everyone who could afford to go has gone, the rest of us are stuck here. The mines are closed, we import virtually every manufactured item. Meanwhile, the Scientifica tell us that everything’s going smoothly but we can’t have any cucumbers to eat this year because they’ve used them all up trying to extract sunbeams.’
‘They’ve what?’ Tegan asked.
‘It’s a literary reference,’ the Doctor explained.
‘ Gulliver’s Travels. Our friend here thinks that the Scientifica are involved in worthless scientific investigation.’
Adam smiled. ‘They are magicians, trying to prove that magic doesn’t exist.’
‘Very poetic. What’s it supposed to mean?’
‘How’s a transmat work, Tegan?’
‘I don’t know,’ she growled. ‘I’m still trying to work out why it’s so light in this cave.’
‘No one knows how a transmat works. They just sort of do – you ask a Scientifica technician and he’ll talk about subspace, the space-time vortex