Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book Two - Lawrence Miles [45]
That’d be the floor, wouldn’t it?
Then he made the mistake of looking up. He closed his eyes as soon as he figured out where he was, and lay there for another ten minutes or so, not risking another look.
Finally, he felt he was ready to deal with things. He even managed to get to his feet, somehow.
There were buildings towering over him, gigantic grey and blue buildings, sheer spires that cut into a muddy red sky. There were steeples, and the steeples were linked by walkways, with dark triangular shapes swimming in and out of the spaces between the levels. Like sharks, thought Llewis. Like great black bony sharks.
It was the city he’d seen on his TV in the hotel room, the one that had made him put his hand through the screen. Something was wrong with the perspective, though. When Llewis looked up, he wasn’t seeing the towers from ground level. It was almost as if he were seeing this city from below ground level…
He took a good look around, and figured out exactly where he was standing.
The city, he realised, was built on a series of platforms, huge grey plates of concrete, supported by pylons of steel and cement. The platforms must have stretched across the whole city, judging by what he could see from here. Because he wasn’t standing on any of those platforms: the smooth black surface under his feet was the ground. He didn’t know what kind of planet was smooth and black, but then he wasn’t Patrick Moore, and, besides, it wasn’t the first thing on his mind. He was standing a good five yards beneath the very lowest level of the city, the foundation pylons rising around him on all sides. And, directly overhead, a huge square hole had been cut into one of the platforms, letting him see the sky. The hole had to be at least a hundred feet along each edge.
Llewis concentrated on the underworld around him. As far as the eye could see, there were pylons, the guts of the city. No signs of life down here, no signs of habitation. Nobody had come to welcome him.
But there was one thing of interest. Well, of sheer, stark, stomach-turning horror, anyway. It was one of the fighters, and it was parked just a few yards away, directly under the hole. Llewis guessed the hole was some kind of launch area, allowing the fighters to take off and land at ground level. After a while, he worked out how to work his legs again, and he started to move, heading towards the vehicle. He wasn’t sure why, but then he wasn’t really sure about anything any more. There didn’t seem much point being frustrated, or angry, or confused. He briefly wondered if this was what they called ‘shock’.
As he got closer to the fighter, he saw that it didn’t seem quite finished. The thing that had come out of the sky back at the warehouse (they’d probably all be dead, back there… no, don’t think about that: it’s another world anyway, it’s not your problem) had been perfectly sleek, perfectly functional, as if the craft had been stripped down to its most basic design elements. This one was different. There were bright metallic plates stuck to the fuselage, wires and cables drooping from the undercarriage.
Llewis stopped. Was that a noise he could hear? Not the background hiss of the city, not the drone of the vehicles overhead. More like…
Voices. From the other side of the fighter.
‘…talking about setting up a colony on Earth, once the plan’s been seen through.’
‘You mean a “settlement”. You can’t have a “colony” on the planet your ancestors came from.’
‘I don’t care. I like the word “colony”. It reminds me of insects.’
Llewis froze. His sweat froze, too. There were people working on the fighter. It was probably being repaired.
It was only when he thought about this that Llewis