Doctor Who_ All-Consuming Fire - Andy Lane [90]
Base camp's only a rucksack anyway, so moving isn't too much hassle.
Time to get back to the plain, l guess Hope the Professor makes it through okay. If not, I guess it's chocolate flavour animal for tea forever.
DISABLE.
2757/3/FF43 PIP.
Chapter 13
In which our intrepid heroes arrive in the New World and Watson takes up scouting.
Extract from the diary of Bernice Summerfield
I suspect that midnight has passed by, back in India, so distinguish this entry with a new date. I've been awake for almost forty-eight hours and I feel ready to drop. In fact, I keep falling asleep in the middle of writing this diary entry. Four times I've tried to start it now, but each time I get a few words in and suddenly my pen will start sliding down the page. When I snap back to wakefulness a few moments later, I don't know where I am and I've only got a sketchy idea of who. So: if you've just woken up, Bernice Summerfield, and you're reading this for some clue as to what's happened, the Doctor's made some coffee and I think I can cover the past few hours before the big black bag goes over my head again.
First question: where am I? Well, it's an alien planet. Not just any alien planet, either. This one's stranger than most. Stranger than Moloch, the hollow moon of Lucifer that's linked by a bridge to its sister Belial. Stranger than Eusapia and Zeta Minor, half in this universe and half in another.
Stranger than Tersurus, with its clone banks and its singing stones.
Stranger even than Magla, whose crust is a shell covering a vast, dreaming, creature. No, Ry'leh is the strangest planet I've ever seen. I'm not a geologist, but I suspect that it's an old world. At some point in its past the local star must have gone nova, blasting much of its matter away into space to leave a colder, smaller core. Soon after that Ry'leh's atmosphere must have frozen, leaving it looking like a great cue-ball hanging in space.
The frozen jacket doesn't fit tightly though: the heat from the planet's core has melted the interior layers of ice back into an atmosphere, leaving valleys, fissures, channels and plains with an oppressively solid sky hanging above them, supported upon the pillars of the mountains. And that's where you are, girl: sandwiched between rock and a hard place.
The wind whistles through the canyons like a demon. It plucks at your clothes and whips your hair into your eyes. It snatches things from your hands and whirls them gleefully away from you. It hates you.
The plants hate you too. Only the strongest and most stubborn life-forms survived the sun going nova. Their razor-sharp bruise-coloured vanes catch at your clothing as you clamber past them, and make rents for the wind to get in and sap the warmth from your bones. Some of them hiss and thrust their roots between your feet as you pass. High above, up where the sky is hard and cold, small black specks wheel. Rakshassi? I wouldn't be at all surprised.
You get the picture? Ry'leh is not a nice place to be.
As we emerged from the gateway the wind snatched the words from our mouths, and it collapsed behind us. When we turned, India had vanished.
We were just a step away from Earth in one direction, a million light-years in another.
We were standing at the foot of a mountain range. The dusky purple ground rose gently for a few miles, then jabbed sharply upwards into a set of harsh peaks, all of them truncated by the ice sky. The sun was a lighter spot through the ice, too weak to cast any shadows. Turning, I could see that we were surrounded by the mountains. Valleys led away in three directions. It was as if we had been dumped in the middle of a giant's maze.
Gravity seemed to be about Earth normal. I find it difficult to tell - I've been on so many worlds that I forget what my body was designed for sometimes
- but neither Watson nor Holmes were falling down or falling up. The Doctor walked around