Doctor Who_ Original Sin - Andy Lane [1]
A cold wind blew orange dust across the landing strip and into Homeless Forsaken’s stalked eyes. He blinked slowly.
‘I’m dying,’ he hissed, surprised.
‘Not if I can help it,’ Bernice said, but she knew that it was too late. His sluglike Hith body was turning grey and the mucus that coated his skin was drying out as she watched. The laser blast had caught him just above the base of the vestigial shell on his tail, damaging him beyond even the legendary Hith capacity for survival.
‘I’m dying,’ Homeless Forsaken repeated, this time in resignation. ‘Bernice, there’s something I need to ask you . . . ’
Bernice knelt beside him, listening to him talk. He spoke for a few minutes, then his voice abruptly stopped. Bernice ran a hand over the moist skin between his eyestalks, checking for a pulse, but it was too late.
She heard tracks churning up the plastic surface of the strip behind her.
If there was one thing that Bernice had learned about during her time with the Doctor, it was death. She had seen too much of it. She had come to recognize the cold brush of its wing as it passed her by and selected some friend, colleague or innocent bystander. This time it had taken Homeless Forsaken Betrayed And Alone, but it could so easily have been her.
Next time, perhaps.
She ran a finger around the base of one of his stalked eyes. Apart from a bubble of blue blood at the corner of his mouth he could have been asleep.
‘Don’t move!’
She flinched at the harsh, amplified Oolian voice.
‘Get up slowly, hands behind your head.’
‘You didn’t have to kill him,’ she shouted, obeying the shouted instructions.
Her voice echoed off the hangars and the slab sides of rusted manipulator robots.
‘Take five steps backwards.’
‘I said you didn’t –’
‘ Do it! ’
She stumbled over the uneven plastic as she backed away. With a rush of feet, two winged and mech-suited Oolians rushed past her and grabbed the Hith warrior’s head.
‘Turn around!’
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She stayed where she was, watching as the Oolians hauled her friend away.
His columnar body left a single furrow in the dust. The sight looked strangely like two sparrows fighting over a worm, and she laughed a short, harsh laugh.
‘I said –’
‘Yeah. I heard.’
She turned slowly, and found herself face to face with Karvellis. The Oolian militia commander had thrown her helmet back across her shoulders, and she was carrying a weapon whose barrel still glowed red from the single shot that had brought Homeless Forsaken down. Her beaked face reminded Bernice of a dodo.
The tracked militia tank behind her had clipped part of a hangar on its way round the corner. She gestured towards it with one suited wing. ‘In the back,’
she snarled. ‘Now!’
Bernice gazed levelly at her, and nodded towards the weapon. ‘If you didn’t outnumber and outgun me,’ she said quietly, ‘I’d make you eat that thing.’
‘Yeah,’ Karvellis sneered, ‘and humans might learn to fly like us, rather than slink through the dust like the Hith.’ She gestured to one of her troops. ‘Throw her inside and drive her back to town.’
The Oolian pushed Bernice towards the back of the tank and threw her into a darkened holding cell which smelled of alien sweat, alien dirt and alien things she didn’t even want to think about.
‘That’s you crossed off my Christmas card list!’ Bernice yelled as the hatch slammed shut. Score one for the birds. It wasn’t going to be easy, getting out of a metal box on tracks while driving through a desert. She couldn’t even rely on the Doctor to help; when the warehouse exploded, he’d been inside.
She’d seen him escape from tighter corners before, but one day his luck was going to run out. Perhaps it already had.
Light from outside shone through a grille high up in the wall, casting a patchwork glow across the ceiling but illuminating nothing of the cell. She climbed to her feet and began running her hands along the metal walls, searching for seams, hatches or weak spots.
The floor vibrated as the tank’s gravimetric engines revved up. A sudden lurch threw her sideways. She stumbled, trying to regain