Doctor Who_ Beyond the Sun - Matthew Jones [90]
Little friends? Bernice cursed to herself. Iranda had actually referred to Emile and Tameka in those patronizing terms at the collaborators’ party and Bernice hadn’t picked up on it. Iranda had no reason to know that Bernice hadn’t come to Ursu alone. Bernice kicked herself for being so stupid.
‘Actually,’ Iranda began smugly, ‘it was quite an effort on our part to stop several loyal spaceport personnel from raising the alarm.’
Har bloody har. All the woman needed was a one-piece Lycra catsuit.
Bernice watched Iranda nod to a Sunless seated at the helm. The expressionless humanoid began to prepare the craft for takeoff and a few moments later Bernice felt the ship tremble beneath her as it lifted gently away from the planet.
‘Going somewhere, are we?’ Bernice remarked.
Iranda deliberately ignored her question. It was such an obvious display of power that Bernice almost laughed out loud. In that moment she realized that Iranda was much younger than she first thought. No more than nineteen or twenty.
‘Oh good, I do like a mystery tour.’ She turned to Michael. ‘I presume that Scott isn’t really on board. Is he dead too?’
‘No, he’s safe,’ Iranda said before Michael got the chance. ‘He wouldn’t tell us where the visionary was, said he didn’t know. But you know, don’t you, Benny?’
‘You did all of this – killed people – for that bloody lump of rock?’
‘Please don’t change the subject.’
Bernice gave Iranda a withering look. ‘Just tell me about Jason. What have you done with him?’
CONVERSATIONS WITH THE ENEMY
‘Don’t argue, Kitzinger. Just do it!’
‘It won’t make any difference. What do think is going to happen? Someone appear out of the floor and hand you this doomsday weapon?’
‘Do it!’ He was really angry with her now.
She had felt some of her old strength returning since she realized that he was never going to let her go home. She had begun to accept the inevitability of her death and with that came a curious release.
The stone disc was built into the very centre of the large crystal chamber, directly between the two domed shapes of the Blooms. It hadn’t taken them long to find the small recess just below the centre of the circle.
‘Oh well . . .’ She shrugged and placed the small figurine into the small indentation in the floor of the chamber.
Above her the crystal lattice which made up the roof of the cavern lit up like a chandelier. It was dazzling. One half of the chamber, the other side from where they stood, remained in shadow. Beside them, close to the centre of the circle of symbols, the floor dropped away to reveal a large rectangular indentation. Kitzinger took a few steps backward. For a second she imagined a figure rising up with some ghastly gun in its hands. But no one did appear.
Nikolas raised an eyebrow. He tugged his respirator away from his face for a moment. ‘Would you like to revise your theories now, Kitzinger?’ he said. His voice sounded thin and insubstantial in the rarefied atmosphere.
Kitzinger ignored him. She moved over to the rectangular hole which had appeared in the ground. There was a humanoid-shaped indentation in the base of the pit.
‘It really is a grave!’ Nikolas gasped from beside her. His voice was muffled by his mask. ‘But
. . . but who for?’
Kitzinger shrugged, feeling too far out of her depth even to speculate. The walls of the ‘grave’ –
if that’s what it really was – were covered in more of the spiky symbols. The translation software in the hut would make swift work of it. Kitzinger began to make a copy of it. Some of the symbols were already familiar to her from her work over the last year. Translating the images had been fairly straightforward. Vision. Light. Future. Power. Sun. Linking these concepts into a coherent sentence was an entirely different task. Placing the symbols in a structure involved entering into a relationship with the images. It was impossible to discover how they related to one another without applying her own frame of reference. It was just