Doctor Who_ Storm Harvest - Mike Tucker [103]
legs. The numbness was creeping towards his body and head.
He had no idea whether this process would kill him – or whether the Krill egg would afford him the protection he sought. A hard black carapace was advancing lumpily over him. He closed his eyes as it moved up his chest and neck and folded over his face.
The last thing he was aware of was movement as the launch pad activated and carried him towards the airlock, and cold, empty space.
Out in the cold blackness, the Cythosi ship began to tumble as its navigational systems went offline. It span in an elegant arc towards the rings, dwarfed by them.
Its nose ploughed into the mass of rock and ice crystals and the first explosion tore through the hull. Seconds later, the entire ship was ripped into blazing fragments as the chain reaction swept through it, lighting up the rings like a small sun.
In moments the blaze had died and the ship was gone.
199
Chapter Twenty-Two
Ace sat on a rock far out on the peninsula watching the cool blue waters of Coralee lap at her feet. It had been two days since the hurricane, two days since the news that the Cythosi ship had broken up in the asteroid belt. She peered up at the sky. You could see nothing in the day, but at night there was always a spectacular display of shooting stars as objects burnt up in the atmosphere.
They had found out from Huttle and the others. The nervous humans had landed on the beach and weathered the storm there. They had told of the Doctor’s manic battle to save the planet from the Krill, of everything that had happened since the reactor explosion.
Ace had found it difficult to accept that the Doctor was dead.
After Holly had rescued her from the hurricane she had been told that he had been at the reactor when it blew, but even then she hadn’t believed that he was gone. It was only when Huttle and the other humans told her about the battle on the ship that she started to give up hope. Now, two days later, the truth was finally beginning to sink in.
She spent much of her time in the TARDIS, wandering its long corridors, finding things the Doctor had left half done. Rajiid was worried about her, she knew that, but keeping out of everyone’s way was for the best. The colony had its own wounds to heal.
When the hurricane had finally subsided the full extent of the damage had been revealed. Most of the harbour quarter was gone, ragged concrete jetties sticking out into the water and buildings piled like matchwood.
The coastguard had been out every day searching for survivors, responding to emergency signals from all over the planet. A huge military cruiser had arrived from the neighbouring system and now it dominated the bay, a huge grey island of metal. Marines marched everywhere, helping to get the emergency reactor online.
Brenda was still compiling a list of the dead, a list that seemed to include the entire colony. It was difficult to comprehend so many bodies; the number was too big. It made her grief for one person seem so... selfish.
200
Q’ilp had taken the death of MacKenzie – of Alex – hard. He felt responsible for him. Ace knew how he felt. She had been responsible for the Doctor. She had watched as the skimmer returned from the mountain and Q’ilp took the professor’s body to the morgue. The funeral was tomorrow, with hundreds of other funerals. Burial at sea.
The cultists were long gone, vanished into the obscurity of their everyday jobs. The commander of the military cruiser had asked her to try and identify them but it was an impossible task. You could have put paint on the faces of any of the Dreekans and they would have looked like the cultists. She had found herself thinking they all look the same.
The cry of the racist. She had hated herself for it. In the end she had sworn at the commander and run back to the TARDIS.
Now she spent her time on the rock, watching the sea and trying to work out what the hell she was going to do. She couldn’t fly the TARDIS, that much was certain. She could stay here, but it was so far from her home and, beautiful as