Doctor Who_ Transit - Ben Aaronovitch [104]
The first shot came out of the smoke and slammed into his chest, knocking him on to his back. The second shot ripped the air over his head. He fired wildly back, the recoil hurting his arms and pushing him along the floor. A wave of grey smoke was rolling over him and through it Blondie could see shadows stalking towards him.
He stayed on his back and changed the rifle clip just in time to shoot a cake monster in the chest as it loomed over him. Then another one running in from his left. Blondie wanted to get up, didn't want to be caught on his back but the cake monsters kept on coming. His world was narrowing down to a one-metre circle of visibility, the shudder of the rifle in his hands and the shapes that came out of the smoke.
A dull roar made Blondie look upwards. Above him an explosion created a bubble of flame in the smoke. He could see half a drone silhouetted by the light. The burning drone seemed to grow larger at an astonishing rate. There was a prickling heat sensation on the exposed skin of his face.
Blondie threw himself to the side, rolling away as the twisted wreck crashed into the floor. A severed manipulator arm gouged a groove just in front of his face and shrapnel clattered off the armour on his back. He felt something take the skin off the back of his left hand.
That was one of Old Sam's, thought Blondie. They shot down one of Old Sam's drones. What are these things?
He realized that he'd lost the pulse rifle and climbed to his knees to look for it but it was useless. The station was completely filled with smoke. To his right the burning drone was a flickering glow; occasionally shadows would flick in front of it. He could hear shots and bangs around him but nothing seemed that close.
Ahead he saw a spinning bronze disk shining through the smoke: the Stunnel gateway. Crouching low to avoid stray bullets Blondie worked his way towards it. That's what they were supposed to be defending.
He came across the X by accident, stumbling over something soft hidden in the smoke. It was formed out of two strips of fluorescent yellow gaffa tape stuck to the floor. It was right in front of the gateway and about five metres out.
Blondie wondered what it was for.
Central Line
The Doctor had a sinking feeling that Kadiatu might be right. At least about the mechanics of freesurfing and the inadvisability of riding a board alone.
The mental discipline wasn't hard, he adapted an old Gallifreyan flying mantra. The trick was in anticipating the gateways, riding the energy wave front as the board broke through the interface. It wasn't that different from sea surfing. The Doctor wished he'd paid attention when he'd been on that Australian beach.
The problem was that the Doctor had just realized what the second person on a freesurfing board did. They ran a contra-mantra to set up feedback harmonies at the emerging tunnel gateway. In short, the second person handled the brakes.
The Doctor estimated that he'd been doing sixty kilometres per hour at the last station. Gaining five kilometres an hour with every stretch of tunnel.
He hoped there was something soft at Acturus Terminal for him to run into, but he wasn't overly optimistic.
The Doctor wasn't happy with his performance so far. Outmanoeuvred, out-thought, shot at, abused and insulted by an enemy which was largely ignoring him. Getting drunk in a dockside taverna in Greece hadn't exactly been a brainwave either.
Too many distractions, he thought, too much introspection and much too much ouzo.
What was on the other side of the gateway?
Life didn't need to think, life was just a coherent pattern in the environment, any environment. The Doctor could imagine an environment that was formed entirely out of interstitial pathways connected to nodes. An infinity of interconnected junctions like the hardwiring of a neural network. Life could evolve there, because life made up its own rules as it went along and never knew when to stop.
It would have to be in another dimension where the rules were different.