Doctor Who_ St. Anthony's Fire - Mark Gatiss [52]
He stood up, breathed in and then gasped as he felt a sharp kick in the small of his back. The ladder shot past his startled eyes as he fell heavily through the hole and into the corridor below, the box of explosives shattering and spilling out over the floor.
Grek lay on his back, winded, and looked upwards.
Silhouetted in the hole crouched an ample, brown‐uniformed figure, his pistol trained on Grek’s completely vulnerable body.
‘At last, Commander,’ said Imalgahite with relish. ‘I’ve been so looking forward to this.’
* * *
10
Attack from the Unknown
The Doctor was already at the console when Ran slipped into the TARDIS.
The brilliant white glare of the room and its baffling dimensions achieved something which long years in the trenches could not: it temporarily stopped Ran’s twitch. His gaze swept around the chamber in undisguised awe.
The Doctor looked up but didn’t smile. ‘I’m afraid there’s no time for explanations, Portrone. We’ve got work to do.’ He fussed around the console, rapidly punching a course into the navigation circuits. The time rotor shushed steadily up and down as the TARDIS dematerialized.
Ran looked hard into the Doctor’s face. ‘Are we moving?’
‘Oh yes.’
Ran let his claws brush lightly over the instrumentation. ‘Now, Doctor. You said you had something important to tell me about my planet’s future?’
The Doctor swallowed, looked at his muddied fingernails and then took a very deep breath. This was going to be difficult.
* * *
The great black ship ploughed remorselessly forward, the booming of its engines sending waves of nausea through Bernice. It was all she could do to hang on to the outer skin of the dirigible as the ground seemed to jump up at her from hundreds of feet below. She cast an anxious glance at the alien ship and then looked over to Liso who was slowly coming round. He blinked twice and cried out in pain, the copper mesh cutting through his sleeve and into his arm. He flexed his muscles and managed to shove his other arm through the mesh.
‘Are you all right?’ called Bernice over the throbbing of the engines.
Liso’s blue eye clenched tightly shut, his breath hissing between his teeth. ‘I think so.’
He looked down into the great empty darkness, felt his stomach lurch and then jerked his crested head towards the position of the escape craft.
‘No,’ said Bernice softly, the wind making her hair stream in a short black column behind her. ‘We lost it.’
The immense shape above them continued to hover menacingly nearby.
Liso looked down once again. The second of the descending dirigibles was now less than twenty feet below them. He bent forward, his entwined arms straining on the mesh and then turned to Bernice, his scrawny neck taut like bunched rope. ‘We’ve got to jump for it.’
Bernice’s eyes widened. ‘What?’
Liso winced as wind buffeted his face, and soot and smoke blasted into his eye. ‘There’s no other way. This ship’s finished. If we can get to the other dirigible…’
Bernice shook her head. ‘You’re mad. We’ll never make it.’
Liso eased himself forward. ‘No choice. If we stay here, we die.’ He slid his arms out of the mesh, took a deep breath and fell into empty air.
Bernice, clinging tightly to the airship, held out a hand in a gesture of mute horror. ‘No!’
She closed her eyes and then tentatively looked down.
Just visible thanks to the fire‐light from Porsim, Liso was sprawled on the broad back of the lower dirigible, scrabbling desperately at the mesh with his claws and booted feet.
He looked up. ‘Come on! Come on!’
Bernice’s face fell into shadow as the black ship descended still lower, as though taunting her. This close up she could make out the polished metal plates of its hull, the gargantuan engine flues and the masses of spiky proturberances which covered almost the whole surface. It