Doctor Who_ Longest Day - Michael Collier [8]
There was no way off this base. Nowhere to hide.
Which meant Vost and Anstaar must be up to something.
What?
He swigged more of the sickly narcomilk, and turned off the emergency buzzer. No Vost, no Anstaar. They probably were lovers. No wonder she was so uptight, so dismissive of him. If she was with Vost, well...
So that really was it. Vost wasn't answering the call because he was in Anstaar's bed, and they were still keeping it secret from him. That was why she treated him like -
Depression seemed to flood into his mind. He felt it like a fluid, pouring into every crease and fold of his brain until his head was bursting. His nose dribbled and his eyes streamed salty tears, which he wiped and licked at.
He felt like a small child, left out and ignored. It was the drink doing this -
no, it was Anstaar. It was drink and Anstaar. It was -
A calmness descended on him. The shuddering breaths stopped.
Something approaching rationality called him from the shadows.
If you're right, then you're right and you can get them. But make sure you are right. You don't want them laughing at you any more.
Making sure he was wrong entailed a long walk to the reception bay to find Vost drunk. He knew Vost wouldn't be there, and it seemed like such a pointless waste of energy.
But the vindication gained would make the long blurry walk back worthwhile. You've got to make your own future, take what you can when you can - that was what Vost had always said.
***
Tanhith rubbed frantically at his eyes as the ship careered and spun through Hirath's lower atmosphere. He knew below him were parts of the planet distanced by hundreds, thousands of years, cut off by dangerous forces of incalculable power. Would anything notice their passing, a bright scratch against the sky? Below him were forgotten things: waste, prisoners, exiles, people written off for scrap and stored out of sight and out of mind.
Felbaac had to be out of his mind himself to make them do this. The ship struggled against him as he tried to keep it on course, until a deafening bang numbed his senses and the ship was pitched into a moment of total blackness.
When the emergency lighting came on in caustic grey brilliance it was as if his sight had become a worn-out holovid, jump cuts and scratches all over it. The coordinate corrections were coming too fast; the jumping of his vision was disorientating him. Blink and he'd miss the all-important signal to alter course or speed, and he couldn't keep - this -up-It was always at that point he woke from the delirium that passed for sleep on Hirath.
Felbaac's mocking words floated back to him: 'You always were a dreamer, Tanhith.'
'It's no dream,' Tanhith whispered to himself, realising how infantile he sounded. 'It's just this place.' Some kind of time slip, he was sure of it. The poison of this planet was in the air, the water, in every ruined molecule. It was ruining him, too. Every moment since the flight down, he could remember it in such detail that it exhausted him. Stealing his sleep.
'If only you could wake and find it'd all been a dream,'Yast had once said, looking out of the window of the support hut at the blackened hull of their ship in the distance, silhouetted against the bright pink sky like a desecrated statue. It was a ridiculous cliche, but then cliches were only cliches because they were so often accurate. The dead ship outside the window was like some monstrous memorial to their attempt at revolution.
Over now, forgotten like everything else on this ludicrous patchwork planet.
Yet the curse was that this place wouldn't let you forget anything. His senses had never been so acute. Everything lingered, particularly soon after sleep. Then every blink seemed to be taking hours. He could remember each fleeting thought, then remember remembering. His thoughts chased their own tails and they had too much time in which to do so. It could never be over.
A fact Felbaac, apparently immune to such feelings, seemed determined to capitalise on.
***
'Travel the universe,'