Doctor Who_ Cat's Cradle_ Times Crucible - Marc Platt [48]
They watched it disappear into the gloom of its spoiled world. Deathly still with no movement from the land or the silver stream.
Vael watched them. He felt impervious to the shock that the others had undergone. He almost laughed at them and their misery. He was in two worlds. Outside and fascinated by what he had seen, but able to act as well. A new world that he could use. And his head was finally free of other people's thoughts.
"Where are we?" whispered Chesperl as she clung to Reogus.
The big man shook his head, still in trauma, unable to speak.
"We stay together," said Captain Pekkary. "We're still a Chronaut crew."
Amnoni rose out of the smoke. "We must find the Pilot," she said and pointed towards the buildings. "Children are not supposed to be left unsupervised. It's in the rules."
"I'll find him," said Vael and he ran down the ridge.
There was a shout after him, so he turned to the Chronauts and grinned. "Stay there. I'll be back. Trust me."
A bell jangled and the Phazels, searching for the Future amongst the smoke, looked up from their work.
A new shape had emerged from the jumble of distant buildings. A skeletal machine like the one the Doctor had ridden. This vehicle, wobbling unsteadily, was driven by the vigorous but unusually small figure of a young woman.
13: Fragments of Now
Ace thought she was going in circles. Once she had crossed the stream, she pedalled the protesting bike towards the buildings on the far bank. They were newer edifices on this side — no less jumbled in layout or style, but not tumbledown. The empty streets were not filled with rubble.
Yet it was all too familiar. Very grey and frighteningly quiet. As if a new version of the City on the first bank had been constructed when the original wore out.
The silence unnerved her. She'd grown up in a city and never known what real silence was until she went on a school camping trip. She'd woken at four in the morning in a tent in a field and she'd been shaking. The silence had woken her.
A silent city was even worse.
She rode cautiously, fearing every corner and junction in case the clatter of the bike attracted guards or worse. The lurching, squelching gait of the obscene city-grey monster lingered in her head. Its jaws slobbering.
Déjà-vu City. She passed the cloud-covered wall, freshly painted, and the arcade, dappled down its length with a dull mosaic of coloured twilight. The fierce stars cast the patterns through the stained glass roof forming a glade in a crystal woodland below. The place was deserted. The new tenants had not turned up.
She chewed on one of her biscuits and began to plan ahead.
Ace's survival strategy.
But it always turned out as: what would the Doctor do if. . .?
1. What good are empty pockets? Fill your pockets with anything that looks useful. Just like he does . . . did.
But the Doctor's voluminous (dimensionally transcendental, she suspected) pockets were reserved for portable items. The TARDIS had been overflowing with all manner of disparate paraphernalia. Most of it knee deep in dust.
And you can't beat a couple of cans of nitro-nine. She missed that as much as anything.
2. Always give any person you meet the utmost benefit of the doubt and greet them accordingly.
If they're friendly, they'll like you. If not, it confuses them. Oh come on, Professor. They just start shooting sooner. How do you get away with it? Why don't I have the knack?
And do giant slobbering leeches count as people?
Her plan got no further. She was distracted by a cluster of tiny lights that lay in the centre of a street. She dismounted from the bike, anxious to look at something actually living in the dry urban desert.
It was a tight cluster of flowers, its crimson petals velvet soft, but jagged like torn flames. At the heart of each tiny blossom a fierce little light burned, proclaiming the plant's triumphant survival