Doctor Who_ Match of the Day - Chris Boucher [75]
Her confidence was back now. She could cope now.
Strangely, though, she was feeling giddy again. She squatted down onto her haunches and put her hands flat on the ground. But there was no ground. She put both hands on top of her feet and then with one hand felt round and then under her feet. There was no ground. She must still be asleep.
There was no ground under her feet. She felt the panic spasm paralyse her breathing. There was no ground under her feet. Think. A warrior did not panic; a thinker did not panic; she was Leela of the Sevateem and she did not panic. She sucked in a deep shuddering breath. Think. If there was no ground under her feet then she must be hanging above the ground. She felt around herself and above herself but she could not find the means by which she was suspended. And again she was giddy and feeling sick. Could she be felling? No that was not possible. She could not have been falling for all the time she had been awake. She had no idea how long she had been asleep, but however long it was she could not have been falling for all that time as well. She must still be asleep.
„This is not happening,‟ she said aloud. „I must wake up.‟
„Good, you‟re awake finally,‟ a voice said somewhere close by, and light filled her eyes and blinded her for a moment.
„Thought they might have overdone the dosage after all. What a scuffling nuisance that would have been.‟
Leela‟s eyes adjusted quickly and she found she was in a small room with curves where you might expect the edges to be. The walls, floor and the inside of the roof were all covered with the same smooth, grey cloth. At least it looked to her like cloth, and it looked like there were walls, floor and roof.
It was hard to tell for sure though because she could not reach the cloth to feel it and she could not be certain which was the floor and which was the roof because she was floating helplessly in the air. Her eyes and her sense of balance were both suddenly unreliable. She could not be sure which way was up and which way was down. It was like being submerged in totally clear water without knowing where the surface was. She struggled to get control of her movement and direction in the same way she would if she was swimming, by pulling with her arms and kicking with her legs, but all that happened she found was that she made jerky swimming movements and stayed in the same place.
She felt giddy again and slightly sick.
„From your reaction I gather weightlessness is not something you‟re used to,‟ the voice said. There was amusement in its tone. „The first thing you need to do is relax, stop fighting it. Trust me that‟s one fight even you can‟t win.‟
Leela recognised this as another of those... what did the Doctor say they were? Proximity speakers, yes that was it, they were called proximity speakers. She knew them to be a way for cowards to give orders without needing to show their faces. The owner of this voice was in a control room somewhere. When she found him she would teach him that a coward could never hide. Her anger stopped her feeling sick.
„Just so you know,‟ the voice went on, „this is a stripped-down speeder yacht and we‟re on a flat-out, one-way burn-it-down. Bad news is the living conditions are pretty basic. No, let‟s be honest, the living conditions are total crud. Mine are anyway. Good news is it won‟t be for that long, comparatively speaking it won‟t be for that long, and there‟ll be a useful touch of pseudo-grav for practically half the flight. It‟s not a full-scale drive-integrated generator or anything fancy like that but it should help a bit. The engines will kick in again soon, at which time you can sort yourself out, explore your quarters, that sort of thing. You‟ll find the ablutions compartment at one end and the feeding station at the other.
Sort of appropriate really when you think about it.‟
Leela had stopped struggling and was listening and waiting. This man, she realised, liked to talk. That was good.
Most of what he was saying meant