Doctor Who_ Original Sin - Andy Lane [137]
‘Out!’ he yelled, ‘and quickly!’
As Bernice passed through the doorway and onto the walkway across hyperspace, she momentarily wondered how Beltempest felt, defending a group of Hith against human-built robots. Perhaps he didn’t see the incongruity. Perhaps he’d go back to hating aliens the minute they were all safe. People, as the prophet said, were strange.
Ahead of them, another ship, presumably the Hith ship, was attached to the walkway by a long boarding tube.
The whine of the Skel’Ske’s engines had spiralled up and out of the range of human hearing, to the point where it was giving Bernice a headache. Casting a glance over her shoulder as she ran, she saw the ship phasing in and out of unreality. She could see the non-stuff of hyperspace through it. They only had seconds.
They passed the point where the boarding tube connected to the walkway.
The Hith troops turned off and slithered along it without any farewells, while Bernice, Cwej, Forrester and Beltempest kept going towards the door out of the void. The Hith obviously knew as well as Bernice that the particular area of hyperspace they were located in was the second most dangerous place in the area at the moment, and that they should vacate it immediately.
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Bernice, on the other hand, was heading straight for the first most dangerous place.
She turned as they reached the doorway. Forrester, Cwej and Beltempest ran past her, but she stayed for a moment, desperately looking at the Skel’Ske.
It had almost vanished, but she thought that she could see a movement at the front, through the transparent screen of the control room. Someone waving.
Someone waving goodbye.
Forrester grabbed her elbow and pulled her through the massive door into the INITEC building, just as the Skel’Ske vanished. The room was full of people and bots, but Bernice had only a split second to register the fact before she was deafened by a huge boom. As they all collapsed to the ground, clutching their ears, she realized that she couldn’t tell whether it was the sound of the door slamming, the Skel’Ske vanishing from hyperspace or the shock wave of its arrival in real space, just outside the INITEC building. Perhaps it was all three.
Kali Derrim and Londi Gay stood face to face on the walkway. Like all the others in the area, it had jammed shortly after the fires started. They didn’t care. They didn’t care about the way the sky glowed orange, either, or the bodies that littered the walkway’s surface. They just stood there, face to face, hatred in their eyes, knives in their hands, each waiting for the other to make a move.
When the Hith ship appeared in the sky above them, the thunderclap of displaced air making the walkway tremble beneath their feet, they didn’t even notice. It hung, poised above them, for a timeless moment, like some ancient god made manifest upon Earth, then began to fall. It fell gracefully, it fell slowly, but it fell.
It took out three walkways, smashing through each one and sending the broken halves curling away like suddenly cut ribbons, before it reached the one that Derrim and Gay were standing on. The blood-tinted, smoke-dappled sky was occluded by its dark and growing bulk, until there was nothing above them but a rounded, spavined expanse of metal. It was only then, when it was too late to do anything but watch in awe and fear, that Derrim’s gaze flickered upwards, and Gav, seeing his chance, sent his knife spinning through the air towards him.
Less than a second later, nothing mattered to either of them.
Vaughn’s face suddenly blanked over again. He’d been doing it every few seconds for as long as the Doctor had been there, but this was different. It was as if whatever he was watching was so dramatic that it absorbed all his attention and kept him elsewhere, out of his own body. The Doctor didn’t 233
know what it was, but he did know that this