Doctor Who_ Beyond the Sun - Matthew Jones [31]
Emile swore suddenly.
‘Say again?’ she demanded as she stumbled down the bank created by the crash to where he lay inside the capsule, a ’puter on his lap. He was leaning on the console in front of him, turning one of his earrings with his fingers.
‘We’ve got trouble.’
She looked from his anxious brown eyes to the ’puter screen, which was scrolling through tech-nical data. The ship’s logo winked on and off in the corner of the screen. It didn’t mean anything to her. ‘What?’
‘Other lifeboat didn’t launch.’ Emile’s chubby face shone sickly green with the light from the small screen. Beads of sweat lined his upper lip.
Tameka swallowed. The implication of what he was saying was too terrible to contemplate.
‘What? Are you psychic? We left before them, so how could you know what happened?’
He gave a small shrug. ‘Our capsule’s still linked to the ship. Or at least was while the ship was in one piece. The second capsule was, too. Never launched. It couldn’t – there was a malfunction in the locking device. It was still attached to the ship when the communication systems went off line, which is probably when the rest of the ship disintegrated.’
Out of the corner of her eye, Tameka could see that Emile was staring at her, waiting for her to say something. Tameka didn’t want to meet his gaze, so she locked her eyes on to the scrolling screen. Finally she turned away from him and sank down on to her haunches. She felt giddy and needed to steady herself on the edge of the open escape hatch. Bernice wasn’t going to get here before the farmer chased them away. Bernice wasn’t going to get here at all. Ever.
‘What do we do now?’ Emile asked.
Tameka realized that she had no idea at all.
CONVERSATIONS WITH THE ENEMY
Kitzinger had learnt the meaning of ‘prisoner’ in the year that she had spent among the ashen-faced aliens. It had been a difficult and brutal lesson.
For the first few weeks she had been repeatedly beaten for failing to understand or follow her captors’ instructions. She was so unused to people attempting to dominate others by means of threats that it had taken her several days to realize that there was a connection between the orders, her refusal to comply and the following violence.
Slowly, over the long months that she had been kept ‘prisoner’, she had learnt to follow orders.
She was all too aware of the process of conditioning that was taking place. It felt as if her very personhood was being whittled away along with her autonomy and self-esteem. In trying to predict the actions of her violent captors and then placate them she was turning herself into their servant. She was turning herself into a slave.
By her own calculations it had been eleven and a half months since she had woken on the floor of the ice cavern surrounded by the grey-suited figures. Her head had been affected by the drugs they had given her but she had still felt the intense cold. She had known immediately that she was no longer on her own world. There was nowhere on the dusty, orange bulk of Ursu that was as cold as the cavern. Someone had strapped a respirator mask on her face. She could hear the small compressor inside it wheezing as it made the hostile atmosphere more tolerable to her frail human body.
She had been outraged that she had been fed drugs against her will, that she had been lifted from her home and carried off into space. And when she had clambered to her feet and given voice to her outrage, one of the grey-suited figures had walked over to her and broken two of her ribs and three of the fingers on her left hand.
‘Don’t speak,’ it had said. But Kitzinger hadn