Doctor Who_ Sleepy - Kate Orman [13]
Zaniwe laughed, as Jenny rummaged in her backpack.
‘Really, it’s only another hour,’ she said. ‘It’s a very nice walk in the morning light.’
Benny shut her eyes, listened to the roar of the water, feeling its distant rhythm through the soil beneath her.
They’d set out from the domes in the morning. There had been four more infections reported during the night. But the Doctor had had a glint in his eye, which meant he was onto the solution. He hoped to have confirmed the source of the bug by the time they got back. Maybe even to have found a cure.
In the meantime, he’d suggested she investigate the local ruins. Jenny was the colony’s xenobiologist; they would have made it to the waterfall more quickly, if she hadn’t insisted on rushing off into the trees every half-hour to take photos of the wildlife.
Benny couldn’t even see the wildlife, but Jenny would point excitedly to some tiny creature half hidden in a tree while snapping a dozen holograms of it. The biggest creature they’d seen since entering the forest was the size of a cat, a slender-necked, dappled thing grazing on the undergrowth. It had blinked its single eye at them and bolted before she could take its picture.
The couple were pulling bedding and equipment out of their packs. They never seemed to do anything if it wasn’t together. They were Africans, like most of the colonists —
people who could afford to break away from Earth and look for a new life. Originally they were from whatever country South Africa was part of these days, the United African Confederacy or something or other.
They’d been flying a hoverskimmer over the forest on a survey run when they’d discovered the temple. Benny dragged her backpack over and pulled out the sheaf of photos. They were slightly distorted without the hologram viewer, but they were still striking — the forest like an ocean of trees, different shades of green and yellow. And the clearing in the centre, the ruins stark silvery grey against the green of the undergrowth.
They were clearer in the later photos, Jenny holding the skimmer in place while Zaniwe hung out of the window, snapping away. At first glance, they could be mistaken for recent dwellings; Jenny said she’d nearly crashed the skimmer when she saw them. But the closer shots showed weather-worn stone, huts open to the sky, thick growth around and on the buildings.
Benny rolled over, holding the best picture in a stray beam of late-afternoon sunlight. The central building dwarfed the others. It reminded her of a Mayan temple, a steep ziggurat with a flat top. The other buildings were clustered around it at a respectful distance.
It was a shame they couldn’t have flown the skimmer here, but there simply wasn’t anywhere to land it. The trees came right up to the edge of the huts and stopped there, as if they were just as timid as the little buildings about getting close to the temple.
If it was a temple. Benny knew only too well how dangerous it was to play guessing-games about alien cultures. Make no assumptions, that was the rule; avoid the just-like’ fallacy.
But in this case the only danger was of being roasted in the archaeological journals. These aliens were long, long gone.
Benny wasn’t sure whether the Doctor had sent her out here because he wanted her safely out of the way, because he thought she was feeling bored and useless, or because he thought the ruins might actually have something to do with what was happening to the colonists. From what he’d been saying this morning about the inoculation programme, that didn’t seem likely.
Zaniwe and Jenny had got their tent together already.
Benny scrambled up, knocking twigs and dirt off her denim gear.
‘So what did you find on the last couple of tries?’ she asked, dragging stuff out of her pack.
‘Very little,’ said Jenny. ‘We do not have the equipment to date the buildings, but they may have been there more than a thousand years. We didn’t want to damage the site by digging. If there are tools or potsherds or other artifacts,