Doctor Who_ Halflife - Mark Michalowski [92]
‘This thing will be on the city in not much more than an hour or so – it’ll take us twenty minutes to get back, and then we have to tell everyone that we were wrong before, and that things are much, much worse than we’d imagined.
Where is everyone going to go?’
Sensimi’s lip trembled as she flinched. Fitz, for once, felt quite embarrassed at the Doctor’s outburst – and, again for once, quite sorry for Sensimi.
‘So what do we do?’ asked Fitz.
165
‘We go on,’ said the Doctor grimly. ‘If we can find the source of it, we might be able to stop it – turn it off. Whatever.’
‘And can we get through it?’ asked Calamee, staring at the wall. The Doctor shrugged.
‘Only one way to find out,’ said Fitz, and the Doctor revved the engine.
The car circled in a tight arc and then they were racing back the way they’d come, the Doctor trying to get a big run-up to the wave Fitz hoped he knew what he was doing. The Doctor reached down to the controls, spread out across the dashboard like an assortment of liquorice allsorts, and began fiddling.
‘I’m trying to boost the repulsor field,’ the Doctor answered his unvoiced question. ‘I’m betting the wave doesn’t vanish where it stops being visible.
But it might be weaker higher up if it’s feeding itself on the energy from the organic dissolution.’
‘Just what I was thinking,’ Fitz said.
The Doctor turned a knob on the dash and Fitz felt the air around them grow calmer, more solid, and realised that even the little breeze that had been blowing through the repulsor field had stopped: the Doctor had turned up the field to maximum.
‘Hopefully,’ said the Doctor as he waggled the steering handles, ‘that should give us some extra lift. Hold on tight for the ride of your lives!’
‘Or our deaths?’ muttered Sensimi.
Everyone glared at her.
One minute they were speeding across the ground – well, thought Fitz, ten feet above it. And the next, the Doctor was steering towards a tree. Straight towards a tree.
Fitz knew instantly what he was doing: he was hoping to angle the car upwards, clip the tree, and skim off the top of it.
Everyone shrieked as the Doctor pulled back on the handles and the levicar’s nose tipped up. Thrown backwards into their seats, they felt the acceleration press them down into the leather as the tree, painted silver by the starlight, hurtled towards them.
There was an almighty crash and the whole car juddered as though they’d hit a wall – but they were still moving, sailing onwards and upwards into the night. Fitz risked a glance over the side and saw the shimmering curtain of the wall just a few tens of yards away. With a wild whoop, the Doctor pulled back on the handles so hard Fitz thought they’d probably snap off in his hands –
and then they were flying. Really flying – up and over and through. The air around them flickered and Fitz felt his skin prickle. And then they were 166
falling, and it was like being in an aeroplane with severe turbulence as the car dropped through the oily darkness like a stone in a well.
Alinti stared out of Trove’s window in silence, her head reeling with all the myriad possibilities with which his offer had presented her. Immortality. Trove had promised her immortality.
She’d laughed, of course, told him that she wasn’t some stupid young girl, her head spinning with ludicrous ideas of what technological gewgaws the rest of the galaxy dangled in their faces, just out of reach. She kept up-to-date
– as well as she could with the pitiful data feeds that Tannalis let her access
– on what was happening offworld. As the next ruler of Saiarossa (however putative the role), it behoved her to stay informed about politics, technology and the progress of the other nearby human colonies: Eden, Paradiso Grande, Eden (another one), Pelucidar and Marselle, particularly. And there had been no announcement that immortality was suddenly on the market, despite the rumours of cloning technology on Heritage. But Trove had just stared at her, and told her that the technologies he had access to were beyond anything she could imagine.