Doctor Who_ Cat's Cradle_ Times Crucible - Marc Platt [43]
As it was, she hated Shonnzi. No, not hated; she just didn't understand him and didn't consider it worth bothering.
She walked away across the flat bank. It dropped down to a small river, silver in the grey gloom. The city rose up again on the opposite bank. Another jumble of buildings as far as she could see. The bank was a desolate wasteland, without trees or people. The sort of place polystyrene cups go to die. A water wheel like a huge clock cogwheel was turning on the steam with no visible means of support.
The stream moved sluggishly, turning the lazy wheel with a slow tick. The cogs cascaded with silver droplets that spilled and ran in shimmering globules across the dust. The stream was a mercury flow.
A line of oval mounds stretched across the silver surface of the steam. They were stepping stones, but Ace drew back from crossing.
A little way off, a tangled black shape lay in a ditch. She approached it and recognized the Doctor's battered bicycle. It must have been discarded years ago. It was rusty, with grey roots twining through its wheels.
The hat, the scroll, the apparition and now this. So other things had been scattered across this place when the TARDIS exploded.
She pulled the bike out of the ditch and began to tug the roots out of the spokes. It was still serviceable, but the front tyre was flat and its wheel squeaked with age when she spun it.
It took about five minutes to inflate the tyre with the rusty pump. She was screwing back the valve cap, wishing the Doctor had ridden a Harley Davidson, when she heard it again. The noise she had dreaded. The slow wheezing and squelching footfall. There was a loud hiss and the footfall stopped.
The creature stood along the bank about fifty metres away. A massive leech that reared up, swaying to and fro as if it were hunting. A gnarled grey worm, arching up from the single broad mollusc foot of its tail to a flattened cylinder head in whose crater rested a contorted mouth like a lamprey. Lines of rippling clawed fins ran the length of its aged and cracked body.
Ace didn't dare move. The repulsive thing hissed again. Its head sank down to the ground with a squelch. Behind it, the foot in its tail rose in a curving arch until it assumed the position she had first seen. In this foot, there was also a slavering mouth. It wheezed with its effort. But it came steadily on, cartwheeling painfully, footmouth over footmouth, covering its path with a trail of stinking slime.
Ace grabbed the bike and pulled back.
The monster was attracted by the movement. It lurched towards her, hissing like an angry steam train.
There was nothing for it. Ace reached the stream and started to manhandle the bike over the stepping stones. Surges of mercury flooded around her feet, but she managed to keep her balance somehow. When she reached the opposite side, she stared back at the creature.
It must have been half blind, because it was casting about on the far bank, searching for traces of her. She wasn't going to hang about. She clambered on to the bike and began to pedal away. Squeaking and clattering painfully, it carried her towards the next section of the City.
Behind her, the monster heard the protesting bicycle and stopped its search. It raised its latest head, hissing and spluttering its rage as ripples spread across the mirrored stream and out across the land.
12: In Initio, ex Tempore
A ripple spreads across Time.
It disturbs the aged Process as it watches on the bank of the mercury stream. The young Process hears the disruption as it glowers in its Watch Tower, surrounded by the relentless clank of its machinery. As an embryo in its egg it feels the ripple and screams its rage.
The Phazels and their guards sense it like air shunted back and forth around them by the blast of an explosion: Captain Pekkary, as he ponders the anachronisms that ensnare them; the Guard Captain, as it searches the dark arteries of the City.
Vael snares the skinny urchin who scavenges among the City wreckage. Vael drags Shonnzi unconscious to the lair of his monstrous