Doctor Who_ Storm Harvest - Mike Tucker [104]
Besides, it was still uncertain that the military were going to let anyone at all stay on Coralee. There were already rumours of more Krill eggs being found out in the ocean.
Q’ilp, R’tk’tk and most of the other cetaceans had been seconded to secret military manoeuvres and were scouring the seabed all over the planet.
Ace pulled a pebble from her pocket, the one she had found on her very first day on Coralee, a day so far away that it scarcely seemed real. She drew her arm back and hurled it with all her might, watching it arc out into the water and vanish with a soft plop.
She suddenly heard her name being called, very faintly, carried down the beach by the wind. She peered through the dazzling sunlight.
A figure was running towards her across the sand, shouting and waving its arms.
She clambered to her feet, straining to hear.
‘Ace!’
It was Rajiid.
‘Ace! They’ve found him! They’ve found him!’
Ace started to run.
Light and sound and feeling returned slowly to the Doctor’s world. He was lying on an operating table. The shiny black carapace lay on either side of him. A human doctor stood over him, laser in hand. He was on Coralee... he was in the medi centre. It had worked...
‘Professor!’
Ace bounded up to his bedside. He smiled weakly.
201
‘Hello, Ace,’ he whispered.
‘What happened to you?’ she asked.
‘I suppose I must have free-fallen back to Coralee. That was my plan, at least.’
‘Q’ilp found you,’ she said. ‘You were floating out at sea.’ She grinned, and nudged at the carapace. ‘He recognised you at once.’
The Doctor looked at the dead black shell. Etched into one side of it was a perfect image of him, eyes tight shut.
‘I might keep that,’ said Ace. ‘Put it on my wall in the TARDIS.’
‘The Krill...’ the Doctor looked around, confused, and suddenly panicked. ‘The Cythosi ship... what happened?’
Ace shrugged.
‘The ship exploded in the asteroid belt,’ said Brenda Mulholland, simply. ‘Your plan, I take it?’
The Doctor’s head slumped back on the pillow, his eyes lightly closed. ‘Then it’s over, he said.
202
Epilogue
Ace lay back on her beach towel and stared across the expanse of gleaming white sand. All around her the colony was slowly returning to normality: even now she could hear the chirp and whir of service robots out in the jungle, repairing the damaged storm shutters.
Everything had taken a severe battering – not least herself. The bruises on her arms were just fading, but every day that she stayed on Coralee the better she felt – and the more of the colony was rebuilt.
Another ship thundered overhead, a gleaming dot in the blue of the sky. The rescue craft had been coming in thick and fast, the colony pad barely coping with the extra demand.
Holly Relf’s sister had arrived on the last transport and there, on the baking tarmac landing pad, Holly had finally broken down into floods of tears. That was the point at which Ace had known that the nightmare was finally over. People had the time to grieve.
Rajiid and Greg were at the old shuttle wreck. They were talking about jacking in the tourist business and transforming the shuttle’s derelict shell into a beachside bar. A huge awning stretched over the cluster of driftwood tables and stools and a crude sign surrounded in gaudy lights projected from the roof. The Beachcomber Bar and Grill.
Ace squinted at it across the glare of the sand. Overnight someone had painted out the G and added a K. One of the kids probably. It never failed to amaze Ace how quickly children could bounce back from tragedy, how quickly they could joke about it.
Ace watched Rajiid’s broad back as he carried out another tray of drinks. Leaving him was going to be the hardest thing. She had nearly asked him to come with them. In the end she hadn’t, and she still wasn’t quite sure why. Was it because she thought he’d say no – or because he might say yes?
She wasn’t sure how she would cope with someone else involved in her life style, with having someone else to look after, someone who wasn’t the Doctor.
She stared down the