Doctor Who_ Original Sin - Andy Lane [73]
‘Welcome to Dis,’ Beltempest said.
‘Not a place I would wish to spend my holidays,’ said the Doctor. ‘I thought I’d been to some unpleasantly hot places in my time, but this one takes the entire packet of biscuits and the factory as well.’
‘You were the one that wanted to come.’
‘I hadn’t seen the travel brochure then. How did this place get built?’
As Beltempest shut the ship’s systems down, and a thick metal iris sealed off the landing pad from the relentless torrent of radiation and heat, he said:
‘The Empire appropriated it from a race called the Greld, centuries ago. They resisted our . . . advances, and so the Empire launched a quark bomb into their sun, forcing it from a white dwarf to a red giant. The outer layers of the sun exploded, sterilizing the solar system and annihilating the Greld. It struck the Empress at the time that the system would make a perfect prison, and so she ordered that one be built. And here it is.’
The dome finally closed above them. Everything was in darkness for a few moments while the Doctor’s eyes adjusted to the lower level of illumination from the red-hot metal of the landing bay. The light altered, darkening and shifting through red down to infrared as the bay cooled, and smaller glow-globes around its edges flickered uncertainly into life. Figures in bulky thermal suits moved cautiously from recessed doorways towards the ship. They were armed, of course.
‘Well,’ said the Doctor, ‘let’s go and see whether Professor Zebulon Pryce is at home to visitors today.’
Light spilled around his body like water around a curved stone in a river bed. Green light, bright as a sun, washing out his thought, his personality, everything that he was, wearing him down, layer by layer, atom by atom, until it found the him he used to be . . .
. . . and Daph Yilli Gar was lying along a padded bench in the navigator’s cubicle, his eyestalks inches above the gnarled, rootlike organic control nexus of the Skel’Ske , the new Hith fighter. His pseudo-limbs caressed the warm surface, leaving trails of light in their wake as he sensed his way through hyperspace. The vibration of the hyperdrive was an almost sexual thrill deep in his stomachs, and 125
he blushed a dirty grey colour as he felt the skin along his flanks pucker into a row of small lumps, ready to fire impregnating darts at any passing female.
Thank the Gods of Hith that Captain Vap Oppat Pol was in a separate cubicle and had recently gone through the Change from female to male. The last thing they needed was an inadvertent coupling right here on the bridge. Even if the two of them were the only crew for this first flight, it would be so shameful that Daph would have to pay a scapegoat to kill itself for him.
In front of him, the simcord screen showed only the deep, featureless grey of hyperspace, but under his hands he could feel, through the nexus, currents and rapids, undertows and reefs, and the occasional slippery touch of something half alive sliding away from his touch. The way this new ship responded to hyperspace was like nothing he had ever experienced before. The tension was making his skin dry out and the underside of his basal foot knot up, but he had never been so proud. To think that a member of the Pir clan had been chosen as navigator of the Skel’Ske !
‘Navigator,’ growled Vap Oppat Pol from the command cubicle. ‘Are we ready to emerge from hyperspace?’ He sounded tense, and Daph Yilli Gar could imagine his eyestalks standing erect upon his flat head and his flanks running with mucus.
Perhaps it was the Change still affecting him, or perhaps it was the honour of being the first captain of this, the Hith’s newest, finest, experimental spaceship.
‘Ready, captain,’ Daph Yilli Gar acknowledged. ‘Captain, may I ask –?’
‘You’ll find out where we are