Doctor Who_ Full Circle - Andrew Smith [0]
FULL CIRCLE
By ANDREW SMITH
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Prologue
Twisting, burning metal screamed at a pitch which challenged the death-yells of the passengers and crew members throughout the massive structure of the starliner as the great space vessel hurtled, out of control, towards the shifting grey mists that enshrouded the surface of the terror planet Alzarius.
Those in areas of the ship where the meteors had damaged the hull insulation died burning, horrible deaths, their corpses dragged out into space to fall towards the planet in the starliner's wake.
On the bridge, ashen-faced Commander Yakob Lorenzil ignored a severe gash in his left arm to view on the master monitor high on the wall before him the mists of Alzarius through which the starliner now cut a red, blazing path.
Aware again of the intolerable heat, and of the pain his arm, Lorenzil clutched at his wound and let himself fall back into his chair.
Sub-Commander Damyen Fenrik had taken the place of the dead Chief Pilot at the central flight console. Blinking the sweat from his eyes, he surveyed the instruments before him with giddy terror, the beat of his own heart pulsing achingly in his ears.
'Impact imminent!' he cried.
Lorenzil yelled, 'Ready yourselves!' and with his good hand secured the double clasp of his chair harness. He wondered if it would be strong enough to hold him. What would happen if - ?
On the master monitor the treetops of an Alzarian forest were visible for one split instant and then the universe exploded inside Lorenzil's head.
The starliner landed hot and heavy on the forest, tearing a huge, burning portion of it away from the surface of the planet.
The noise - greater, he was sure, than any noise that had ever existed in the history of creation - blotted from Lorenzil's mind his thoughts of how many of his crew and passengers were dying in that instant.
The blackness came and Lorenzil's last thoughts in life were that he was going to survive the crash after all.
Fenrik had not expected that his first command would be over what was little more than a scorched chunk of metal. By Terradonian law he was now Commander-Designate of the starliner, but there was no doubting that the shop would never fly again - in his lifetime, at least. In their efforts to evade the meteor cluster the Terradonian space craft had veered wildly from its projected flight path. There was little hope of rescue. Few people ever dared venture to Alzarius.
Fenrik patrolled the ship dutifully, exchanging words with terrified engineers, anxious technicians and - when he could spare the time - the occasional wounded passenger or crewman.
There was a second, slightly less immediate, cause for concern among the crew and passengers who still lived - less immediate, but more frightening than any concerns over food and water supply and the like.
This was Alzarius itself - the fog planet, home of how many unimaginable horrors? No one knew because no one had ever lived to describe them.
Fenrik tried to remember everything he knew of Alzarius. The mists came in cycles of some fifty years or so. And with the mists came death for any living being on the planet. Governmental and academic survey teams had at one time been despatched to Alzarius with great regularity, but not any more, for not one of those groups had ever been seen or heard of again. Unmanned satellites sent back pictures of their empty, lifeless space vessels sitting on the planet's surface, untended, in the process of decay. Any satellites sent in to land on Alzarius during the fog cycles had also been destroyed by whatever lurked under cover of the mists.
What chance did they have of surviving where no one else had managed to?
On the second day, an exploration team consisting of five volunteers was sent out. None of the five returned. The last contact with them was a radio distress call saying they were being attacked. Fenrik, listening to the call, thought he heard animal-like snarling behind the screams of the humans - then contact had been lost.
Fenrik lost another two teams within