Doctor Who_ Original Sin - Andy Lane [54]
Bernice closed her eyes and rested her head against the trunk of the tree.
‘So,’ he continued, regardless, ‘our first priority is to get off-planet without help.’
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‘You make it sound so easy,’ she sighed.
‘So we need to confuse things enough around here that they forget about us long enough for us to steal transport of some sort.’
‘Of course. How?’
‘We sabotage the barrier between this segment and the next. They’re bound to send out a repair team. With luck, we can hijack whatever vehicle they have.’
She opened her eyes and gazed at him in wonderment.
‘Never say die?’
He grinned. ‘Never say die.’
She led the way down the nearest vine towards the ground. There was a heart-stopping moment halfway down when a moss-covered creature with a mouthful of needle-like teeth slid from a hole in the tree-trunk as she was passing by, but it ignored her and moved off up the tree.
‘Can I breathe now?’ she whispered.
‘I told you the leaves would work,’ he hissed back.
She shook her head. He was always so irritatingly sure of himself ‘You remember that restaurant on Feiss Haven?’ she hissed.
‘Yes. What about it.’
‘You told me that the spiny hairballs in sour blood sauce were perfectly edible. I spent three days trying to bring up everything that I had ever eaten.’
There was silence for a few moments.
‘I think the sauce may have been slightly undercooked,’ he admitted finally.
It took ten minutes to get down to the ground. Bernice stood there for a moment, regaining her equilibrium. A dartlike predator flickered past her ear.
‘How did you know about the leaves?’ she said as the Doctor dropped lightly to the ground beside her.
‘Experience,’ he said. ‘I’ve spent several lifetimes escaping through forests.
I’ve learned all the tricks.’
‘All of them?’
‘Well, most of them.’ He walked off ‘Some of them, at least,’ he added.
Bernice shrugged, looked around, and followed.
His voice came floating back over his shoulder.
‘All right then, one or two.’
It took them half an hour of mind-numbing, bone-wearying slog to get to the next segment of Purgatory. By the time they pushed their way past the last fleshy purple leaf and found themselves in a defoliated zone some hundred metres wide, Bernice was soaked in condensation, perspiration and the foul-smelling sap of various types of leaf So tired was she that the sight before her failed to register for at least a minute. When it did, she suddenly forgot everything.
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The defoliated zone ended in a straight line which continued in either direction for as far as she could see. Past the line, the translucent blue ground shone with reflected light. Deep within it, Bernice could just make out a web-work of curling white lines. Mountains rose in the distance: jagged mon-strosities that loomed over the barren landscape like a whole collection of Gothic castles. The sky was a greenish-black in colour, and the stars showed up as tiny haloed points of light.
‘The acid ice-cap of Throssa?’ she asked, awed.
The Doctor nodded. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s not the ruined emerald cities of Dargol, that’s for sure.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Who do you think ruined them?’
She looked sideways at him, only to find that he was smiling. ‘You didn’t?’
‘No, I didn’t,’ he said.
‘Good.’
‘But I know the man who did.’
‘Sometimes I don’t know whether you’re serious or not,’ she confided.
‘Sometimes,’ he admitted, ‘neither do I.’
A flurry of activity within the ice attracted their attention.
‘The acid fish?’
He nodded. ‘The acid fish.’
A shoal of thin, flexible creatures was moving rapidly through the hard ground: wheeling, rising and diving almost as one. They left white lines behind them, like the contour trails of jets. Bernice realized with a slight shock that the lines were the tunnels left in the ice after the creatures had passed.
‘And you want us to go in there?’ she said.
‘No.’ The Doctor picked up a branch and threw it towards the line where the ice started. The branch never made it: rebounding instead from an invisible