Doctor Who_ Beyond the Sun - Matthew Jones [97]
The outer hatch opened and I gasped as the cold hit us. A swirl of icy snow was blown in on a wave of arctic air that was so cold that it literally ripped the breath from my lungs. The air was painfully thin. I gratefully pulled the respirator over my head under the dark watchful eye of the Sunless. I realized then why I find them so unsettling: they have the stares of corpses. Flat and unfocused. If it was amused by my distress it didn’t show it. I don’t think that they can feel amusement. I waited to hear the tiny compressor inside the respirator begin to whine before I stepped out of the ship.
Cold was not the word for it. I would have needed a three-inch-thick thesaurus committed exclusively to describing low temperatures to even begin to describe the planetary conditions. The Sunless didn’t seem to be affected by either the low temperature or the rarefied atmosphere, striding calmly out into the blizzard, not even blinking against the hail. I tucked my hands into my armpits and cringed from the attack of scarlet hailstones as I made my way down the ramp and on to the rocky surface.
And then I knew why the Ursulans called them the Sunless. Above the barren landscape hung a bloated pale-pink sun that just about ate up the whole bloody sky. Its outer layers were already beginning to peel away to form a gritty cloud of planetary nebula. Despite its size and the scarlet light which invested the arctic landscape, it gave out little heat. It was dying. Puffing itself up before it collapsed for ever, like a patient with a terminal condition taking one last deep breath before the end.
I stared up at it for a few moments, and I remember thinking that it didn’t look real. Its pinkness made it seem almost magical. I was reminded of pantomime and cute students, and all those other things that are best enjoyed from a certain distance. I had just enough time to see a line of ugly black ships resting on pincer-shaped legs, stretching away into the storm, before I was pushed back into line. I meekly followed my captors down through a dark portal in the rocky surface and into blackness. Into their subterranean home.
I wasn’t surprised to learn that the Sunless lived beneath the ground. Their home was dark and cold, and it smelt bad.
Reptile-house bad.
Extract ends
They were led through a series of long spiralling tunnels, and on to ramps which sloped sharply downward. The walls were made of some dark rock, supported by a network of thick metal girders. Rust streaks bled on to the surface of the rock. Low orange glow lamps had been installed along the metal scaffolding. Small vermin scurried in between the lights or dropped down, oily coats glistening, to skid and skitter on the icy floors.
No one in the party screamed at this or did any more than soberly avoid stepping directly on to the ratlike creatures.
We have greater fears to face, Bernice thought.
There were niches cut into the wall, what looked like living quarters of some kind. Bernice thought it curious that while there was much evidence of high-level technology, the actual standards of living were pitiful. She pondered whether they might have been deliberately arranged this way. Like some faiths which require their followers to abandon the comforts of life. It didn’t feel deliberate. Their guides moved through the abandoned warren of tunnels, oblivious to their surroundings. She began to suspect that it just never occurred to them that there might be better ways to live.
The underground maze was almost completely abandoned. Only occasionally did Bernice spot human-shaped shadows in the darkness. They didn’t approach. How many Sunless were left on this world? Was the invasion complete? Or was this underground nightmare far away from where most of the Sunless on the planet lived?
The journey came wordlessly to an end by a series of black pits in the