Doctor Who_ The Gallifrey Chronicles - Lance Parkin [77]
‘Thought you’d be busy,’ Cartwright said.
‘Twiddling my thumbs. This is my first injury.’
As the medic tended to the girl the sergeant took another look around.
‘Where are the bodies?’ he asked.
‘What’s her name?’ the medic was asking the other girl.
‘Janine.’
There were no bodies. Not of people. There were dozens of Vore, almost heaped up in some places.
159
‘Probable compression,’ the medic was saying into his radio. ‘Request ambulance. Victim having convulsions.’
The girl’s arms and legs were twitching.
‘You got the one that did this?’ the medic asked.
Sergeant Cartwright nodded, a dull sensation filling him.
‘Good.’
‘What are the creatures doing with the bodies?’ Cartwright asked.
All flights to Europe had been grounded, but it was amazing what someone as resourceful as Trix could manage with £150 million in her bank account.
It was getting dark by the time they arrived in British airspace in a courier firm’s plane, heading for a landing strip outside Bristol. Virtually the whole of the aircraft was given over to the hold, which was full of relief supplies. There was a small passenger compartment at the front, right by the cockpit. Eight seats, but Trix and Fitz were apparently the only two people in any rush to get back to Europe and they had the plane to themselves.
They’d been virtually out of touch with the rest of the world during the flight, with only scattered pieces of news from the pilots who were monitoring the radio and getting updates from air-traffic control. There was a single mass of giant insects that had looked like a cloud formation about the size of the British Isles on the satellite pictures, before the satellites went offline. Radar still had them, down on the western seaboard of Africa, travelling at hundreds of miles an hour.
If it was a military attack it wasn’t very well researched. Mali and Liberia weren’t Trix’s idea of high-value targets. She was ashamed to admit she’d never even heard of Guinea-Bissau. She searched her laptop’s database for the natural resources the insects might be after. Guinea-Bissau’s were rice, coconuts, peanuts, fish and timber. Sierra Leone had diamonds and bauxite, but its chief export was palm kernels.
‘They’re following the light,’ Fitz told her, and he was right. Evening in –
she looked it up – Mansoa on Guinea-Bissau’s west coast, night all points east.
‘So next, they’ll hop the Atlantic.’ She had no idea where they’d make landfall. It looked like Brazil, but she made a mental note to ask the pilot about wind direction.
‘We should be safe, then.’
‘For a while.’ It all seemed so abstract from 35,000 feet.
‘What’s the plan?’ Fitz asked.
‘We find the Doctor.’
Fitz didn’t look happy.
‘Come on,’ Trix said. ‘I’m hoping he’s already at the centre of things. We’ll probably arrive in time to see him saving the day without us, like he does 160
every time.’
‘Not every time,’ Fitz said darkly.
Trix shifted in her seat. ‘He didn’t save Sam, I know, but –’
‘Or Miranda.’
‘You’ve known him longer than anyone.’
‘I’ve known him longer than he knows himself.’
‘Fitz, he’ll sort this out. He won’t have left,’ Trix told him.
She glanced down at the laptop, which was showing the swarm over the Atlantic on course for the Caribbean, unstoppable and unstopped.
‘He can’t have. . . ’
As night fell the second moon became visible again. Twenty-four hours after its first appearance tidal waves and abnormally high tides were the least of Earth’s problems.
Publicly, the United Kingdom authorities were putting the number of British dead at seventy thousand, but they suspected the total would be between three and four times that. With whole families wiped out, and few corpses, it was hard to come to any meaningful estimate. The government was still functioning, every minister was accounted for.
There was chaos across Europe and North Africa. Millions dead from all walks of life, so nothing at all was working as it should. For the moment the survivors were all too shocked to be angry or scared.