Doctor Who_ Transit - Ben Aaronovitch [75]
The escarpment vanished upwards into the atmospheric haze. Kadiatu thought she saw the glint of sunlight on glass at the top.
'There's a lift up the wall,' said Kadiatu.
The lifts rode up inside a box-girder shaft bolted on to the rockface. The Doctor shaded his eyes and looked towards the foot of the canyon wall.
'Do you think she went there?' he asked.
'Must have done,' said Kadiatu.
There was a hole ripped in the chain-link fence near the gate. The Doctor held it open as Kadiatu ducked through. There was a squat windowless building at the base of the lifts and they made for that. The front door was open. Inside was a single large room stacked with storage pallets. The lift shafts, four of them, were placed against the far wall. The black iron framework had been riveted together. Kadiatu was reminded of the antique train they'd ridden to the house in Kent. There was a High Voltage warning sign above each of the lifts. She guessed they ran by linear induction. The shafts vanished downwards as well as up.
'There must be a transit station down there,' said Kadiatu.
The Doctor checked the indicator lights. 'She went up,' he said.
The lift doors opened with the unmistakeable whump sound of pressure seals.
'Pressurized,' said the Doctor. 'It must go all the way to the top.' He pressed a button and the lift accelerated smoothly upwards. 'How much time does she have on us do you think?' he asked.
'Twenty minutes,' said Kadiatu. 'Why's she going up to the rim rather than down to the transit station? She could be well away by now.'
'Perhaps she thought we'd have the station covered.'
'Perhaps we should have,' said Kadiatu. 'Why didn't we?'
'That would have involved the security forces,' said the Doctor. 'They're very nervous right now and that makes then trigger happy. They might have shot her.'
The lift indicator showed them one kilometre up the cliff Outside the small window the girders had become a flickering blur. Through them Kadiatu could see the sky growing visibly darker.
'Would that be such a bad thing?' asked Kadiatu.
'Bernice is my friend,' said the Doctor.
'She's killed a lot of people.'
'She's killed nobody,' said the Doctor. 'The real murderer is whatever it is that's using her. That's your killer.'
'She could at least try to resist it.'
'She is resisting it, that's why we're here,' said the Doctor 'I'm not even sure that I could resist it myself.'
'I'd have resisted it,' said Kadiatu.
'You,' said the Doctor, 'have a lot to learn.'
The lift started decelerating at around the two-kilometre mark and finally eased itself up into an airlock. A double set of doors opened to reveal a rough concrete corridor lined with portholes.
'Any ideas?' asked the Doctor.
'This is one of those rim stations,' said Kadiatu. 'They run ground transports out on to the Tharsis Bulge from here.'
'You're sure?'
'Yeah,' said Kadiatu. She was sure because Gaelic Five did a pretty good drama series called Dustkart which ran in perpetual syndication dubbed into thirty-six languages.
The corridor turned a ninety-degree comer and then split in two. One branch went up a ramp to the left, the other carried straight on.
'Left,' said the Doctor.
The ramp opened up into a deserted gallery thirty metres long, a teak bar ran the length of one wall opposite a single gigantic picture window. Chairs covered in treated zebra hide were scattered in front of the window, which overlooked the Thaisis Plain.
'Sunset Bar,' said the Doctor.
Kadiatu checked out the view. They were at least a hundred metres above the plain. A beetle-like dustkart was pulling out from underneath the gallery, red dust kicking up beneath its fat tyres.
'Look,' she told the Doctor, 'we must be above the hangar.'
'We came the wrong way,' said the Doctor.
They scrambled back down the ramp and followed the straight corridor until it too split two ways.
'Let