Doctor Who_ Original Sin - Andy Lane [89]
‘I’ve seen worse,’ she replied, and then, quieter, ‘but not recently.’
‘Not long now.’
The flitter was skimming so close to the surface of the water that it was throwing up arcs of silver spray. Privately Bernice wondered if that wasn’t likely to draw attention to them, but Forrester seemed to know what she was doing. Of course, the Doctor always seemed to know what he was doing, but Bernice knew how deceptive that was.
The flitter slowed, settling onto the water. Forrester coasted up to a metal jetty that projected out from a brick walkway beneath an arched bridge. She opened the canopy. Keeping the engine running, she said, ‘Quick, pull him out. I want to set this thing going as fast as possible.’
‘Look, he’s inju–’
‘I know what he is, but if you don’t get him out fast then we’ll all be dead.
Would that improve his condition?’
‘It couldn’t make it much worse,’ Bernice muttered as she carefully lifted Cwej onto the jetty. Forrester ran her hands quickly over the controls, then leaped out to join Bernice.
‘That should help,’ she said as the flitter’s engines roared, and it rose steadily into the sky. ‘I’ve set it on a random flight plan. With luck, nobody will ever be able to track us back here.’
151
‘Where’s this Dantalion then?’
Forrester glanced around, orienting herself, and then pointed to a small side alley.
‘Right now? Down there.’
Beltempest dreamed.
After entering the unreal realm of hyperspace and setting the controls to automatic, he had darkened the visor of his spacesuit and turned off the external audio sensors. The flickering lights, the little noises, they had all been bothering him. He’d lost count of the number of times he had whirled around, screamer rifle at the ready, just knowing that Pryce was behind him, long fingernails extended towards his eyes. Twice he had only just managed to stop himself blasting a hole in the door. He kept telling himself how stupid he was being – there was no way that Pryce could get through the bulkhead to him –
but it did no good. He was so much on edge he was becoming a safety hazard.
Eventually he had realized that the only answer was to turn off every source of disturbance, and drift. Meditate. Relax.
For a while, as he sat listening to the rasp of his breathing and the inter-mittent beep of the life-support system, he had imagined he could hear a faint giggling in the distance, or feel thuds and crashes transmitted through the bulkhead as Pryce dismembered the Doctor, but gradually his fingers had relaxed their grip on the guns, and his mind had let go.
And he dreamed of a time before his name was Beltempest.
Sunset was a crimson slash across the soft underbelly of the clouds as he approached the cliff-faced rear of the laboratory.
‘Ready?’ he snapped.
‘Ready, sir,’ the under-sergeant said behind him. He turned. The troops were already in attack formation, spread out across the albino lawn with their weapons at the ready. Stunners only, of course. They wanted the professor alive.
He checked his chronometer. Perfect timing. The captain should be on the simcord to Pryce, keeping him occupied while the Landsknechte went in through the back. He didn’t like sneaking around, but nobody knew what sort of weaponry Pryce had been working on in there.
‘Okay, let’s go.’
He had the only destructive weapon: an industrial blaster with a beam focus point six feet from the barrel. Quickly he made four precise cuts in the shape of a door. The adamantium wall glowed, and a rectangular section fell, towards him. Two Landsknechte ran in to catch it before it hit the lawn. A third took the blaster.
He led the way into the darkened building.
That was a mistake.
152
His bepple-enhanced infrared vision scanned the darkness, picking out hot spots. Human-shaped hot spots. He unholstered his stunner, but they weren’t moving. There