Doctor Who_ So Vile a Sin - Ben Aaronovitch [129]
Callisto
Two of the DropShips died on the way to Callisto’s surface.
Roz could still see the afterimage of the explosions as she climbed out of the vehicle, safely wrapped in her lightweight combat suit.
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She’d wondered why the others were all staring at the floor, instead of out of the windows. She’d assumed it was to avoid nausea, though it wasn’t bothering her. It wasn’t until she’d seen one of the other ships burst apart in a hail of fire that she’d got the idea.
‘Get clear of the vehicles!’ Vincenzi was shouting. ‘Well clear, well clear! Do not assemble!’
They’d rehearsed this, but he wasn’t giving anyone the chance to screw up. She ran, following him, taking long, loping strides in the low gravity, trying hard not to stumble. The Ogrons were having a hard time, clumsy, but determined. The long-legged soldier making graceful, easy leaps must be a Lacaillan.
The surface was rough, pockmarked with thousands of craters, huge and small. Even without the dome, Valhalla Crater would have been unmissable, the only feature from horizon to horizon.
They’d run a klick across the flat, rough plain when the first of the DropShips exploded. ‘Hit the deck!’ screamed Vincenzi. His voice echoed inside her helmet and right through her skull. She was hugging rock with everyone else before she had time to think about it.
She rolled over on the dark ice, looked up at the sky. The Victoria and the T’ai Tsung looked as big as her hand. She could see the fire they were exchanging, cutters buzzing back and forth like fireflies, flaring and dying. The Ojibwa was even lower in the sky, ignoring the Victoria. It was much more interested in them.
Shrapnel spun over head in lazy patterns. Vincenzi waited for the big pieces to settle and yelled, ‘Move on! Move on!’
They leapt up and ran like hell. There was an hour’s worth of running to do before they got to the rim. Sixty minutes, any of them could see you dead. The dome was like Paradise beyond it, you could see the blue sky and the greenery inside it.
The first strafing run came twenty minutes later. ‘Eat dirt!’ she screamed as the proximity detector on her back came on, even before Vincenzi could yell out the order.
A cutter flew in low, its targets tiny specks among the rocks. It waved X-ray lasers over them in random patterns. Roz heard 299
screams as the beam crossed legs and arms, unprotected outside the laser-reflective tunics and helmets.
She tongued a radio control and shouted at Vincenzi,
‘Shouldn’t we run?’
‘Its computer targets movement,’ he hissed back. ‘We’d all be dead if we were moving. Hold on.’
There was a sudden pressure and heat on her back. She rolled into the shadow of a tilted rock, instinctively, her arms coming up to protect her face.
The cutter was gone, pieces of the ship raining down maybe a klick ahead of them. She saw one of their ships pulling into a steep climb.
‘Up! Up!’ Vincenzi was screaming. ‘Leave the wounded – the cutter will come back and pick them up. Who’ve we lost?’
‘Me, sir,’ came the voices, weak. One just screamed and screamed.
‘That’s six,’ Vincenzi told Roz, as they kept running.
‘Is that bad?’
‘We were lucky,’ he said. ‘If our cutters can stay in position, we won’t have to worry about any more of theirs. All we’ll have to worry about are the Rim defences.’
‘Oh great,’ said Roz.
Mimas
In a human life, there are an enormous number of possibilities that didn’t happen, paths not taken. Theoretically, that number is infinite. Practically, the number is finite, though enormous. Some possibilities, such as spontaneously turning into a fish, are so unlikely as to have a negligible probability.
Take that number, and multiply it by seven lives and an uncountable number of times and places.
Chris didn’t bother to try to protect himself. He let the lives strike him, slide over him, fly away.
One of the – the other Doctors had picked up the glass he needed for his reticular vector gauge at a market on Heaven, and had never visited Androzani. One had ruled the Earth with a tyrant’s hand for centuries, posters