Doctor Who_ Prime Time - Mike Tucker [7]
The Doctor scurried back and forth, checking readings on his pocket watch, peering through his opera glasses.
The late afternoon sun was beginning to get oppressive, the storm threatening the valley now. Ace felt her eyelids begin to get heavy and, lulled by the low drone of the harvester, started to drift off to sleep.
Seconds later – or so it seemed to her – she was woken by the Doctor gently shaking her shoulder.
‘Ace!’
She peered up at him through bleary eyes. ‘Hmm?’
‘Time for us to get off, I’m afraid. I doubt that the population of Blinni-Gaar, would take kindly to finding bits of Ace in their breakfast cereal.’
Ace scrambled to her feet, rubbing the sleep from her eyes.
The golden fields had been replaced by a harsh suburban landscape. Huge silos towered over them and the smell of cut grass had been replaced by fumes and smoke.
She peered over the side of the railing. The harvester was in a line with dozens of others, all of them manoeuvring into a huge hangar. She could hear the roar of heavy machinery.
‘Aren’t you worried about TARDIS-shaped cereal then?’
Ace asked.
‘No, no no.’ The Doctor ‘shook his head. ‘It will be months before those particular crops are ready to harvest.
Come along.’
The once-blue sky was thick with clouds now and, as Ace struggled into her jacket, she heard another rumble of thunder echo down the valley.
The Doctor was already off down one of the ladders. Ace clambered after him. She landed hard on the tarmac and sprinted over to where the Doctor was struggling with the clasp on his umbrella. Thick drops of rain were beginning to splash around them. The storm that had been threatening to break all afternoon had finally arrived.
Ace ducked under the umbrella, pulling her jacket around her. ‘Where now, Professor?’
The Doctor stuck a finger in the air, testing the wind. ‘This way!’
He set off through the towering machines. Ace clung on to his arm, vainly trying to shelter under the umbrella as, with a crash of thunder, the heavens opened.
As they splashed through ever-growing puddles the warehouses and factories of the industrial sector began to give way to more pleasant surroundings: wide, shop-filled roads, full of people and traffic. The Doctor and Ace ducked out of the way of a multiwheeled juggernaut as it thundered out of town barely dodging the deluge that it created.
The rain was coming down hard now, pouring from gutters and rooftops. The streets were alive with people ducking in and out of shopfronts, crowding under awnings and desperately trying to flag down one of the dozens of different forms of public transport that drove, hovered or flew through the towering city.
Ace craned her neck, peering up through the raindrops.
She could barely see the tops of some of the skyscrapers –
even the smallest tower blocks would have put any American city to shame.
She grinned. It was nice to get somewhere civilised and busy. More often than not they ended up somewhere remote or deserted. Here the air was alive with noise and smells. People jostled past them, collars up, desperate to get somewhere warm. The wide pavements were a sea of umbrellas, some of them traditional like the Doctor’s, others concealing generators for portable force fields that fizzed and crackled in the wet air.
Ace peered out into the road. The streets were a racetrack of different vehicles. Her eyes lit up as an elaborate bike hovered past, the rainwater turning to steam as it passed.
Every street corner seemed to have traffic signals topped with monitor screens. She could hear the babble of a dozen different channels over the sound of the traffic.
Cheesy synthesiser music made her look up. There was a screen in the wall above her. She recognised the rotund face of Roderik Saarl from the TARDIS. The camera held a shot of his grinning face, then the picture changed to a string of lightning-fast adverts. So fast they made her eyes ache. She shook her head.
‘Talk about subliminal advertising...’
The Doctor dragged