Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book Two - Lawrence Miles [60]
‘Keep moving,’ said Compassion. ‘We’ll go down into the foundations. We should be safe there.’
* * *
There was a labyrinth under the city, a whole new world of pylons and supporting arches. Sam wasn’t sure why the city had been built on stilts. The ground seemed smooth, totally solid. Too smooth and too solid, actually. But she did notice a few cracks in the surface, so maybe there was some kind of instability down here. Or maybe the Remote needed to get at the cracks for some reason.
Finally, they reached their destination. It was a kind of subterranean quadrangle, where a big square hole had been cut into the ceiling, letting the red light burn down from the sky overhead. Parked in the middle of the quad was one of the fighters, several pieces of silver plating stuck awkwardly to its flanks. Compassion stopped when she saw it.
‘Odd,’ she said. ‘The mechanics should have finished it by now.’
Sam looked around, but she couldn’t see any mechanics. She wondered how people ended up with professions, in a world where there wasn’t any economy.
‘They must have gone off to fight,’ she suggested.
Compassion stepped up to the fighter, and started climbing on to one of its wings. There was a cockpit, Sam saw, although the glass was so dark that you could barely make out the join with the rest of the machine. The cockpit opened when Compassion rested her hands on it, the glass sliding back across the fighter’s body, rippling in a fashion that Sam found horribly reminiscent of skin. Dead skin, being pulled away from a wound.
‘It was a Drahvidian battleskimmer,’ Compassion explained. ‘Even as a zombie, it should be enough to get us to Earth from here.’
With some apprehension, Sam stepped up the vehicle. ‘Where is “here”, exactly?’
‘Right now?’ Compassion looked up at the sky, as if that’d tell her anything. ‘Only a couple of million klicks from Earth. The ship’s nearly reached the end of the journey.’
‘Ship? What ship?’
‘Let’s get strapped in,’ said Compassion.
* * *
Minutes later, they were several kilometres above the surface of Anathema.
There was only space for two people inside the cockpit. The seats were black and leathery, as were the controls, and the substance seemed to wriggle whenever Sam shifted her weight from buttock to buttock. Meanwhile, the seat belt gave her the impression that it could strangle her at any minute, if it felt the need to.
The cockpit was positioned so you could see everything above you, but very little ahead, and almost nothing to either side. Sam guessed that the pilots did their navigating with their receivers, not with their eyes. Even so, the glass seemed much more transparent from the inside than it had from the outside. She watched the sky getting closer as they rose, a solid wall of red, striped with bands of smoke.
Suddenly, they hit that wall. There was a flash of pure scarlet, then blackness. Sam blinked.
They were out in space. The sky was a perfectly ordinary night sky, speckled with stars. If Compassion had been telling the truth, one of the larger points of light was probably Earth.
The sky over Anathema was artificial, Sam reasoned. An engineered layer of gas, the red membrane being some kind of field to keep the air in.
‘Can we see the city?’ Sam asked.
Compassion ground her eyebrows together, but didn’t take her eyes off the view. ‘We’ve just come from the city. Why do you want to look at it?’
‘I want to see it from a distance. If it’s not a problem.’
Compassion paused, then shrugged, and tugged at the control column. Sam felt her stomach do something funny, and all of a sudden the view out of the cockpit was completely different. The blackness was replaced by a stretch of grey, tinted with clouds of red and black. The fighter had turned upside down, she concluded. She was watching Anathema as the fighter moved away from it, seeing the city getting smaller, and smaller, and smaller. She didn’t seem to be falling out of her seat, so they were evidently out of Anathema’s gravity