Doctor Who_ Wetworld - Mark Michalowski [25]
‘So why haven’t we seen anything of these tentacled things before?’
she asked, getting back on track,
The Doctor could only shrug.
‘Maybe they’ve been hiding. Maybe they only live in the otter nests.
Maybe the meteorite disturbed them. . . ’ His voice tailed off. ‘Now there’s a thought. . . ’
‘What?’ asked Ty. ‘That the meteorite disturbed them?’
The Doctor didn’t answer but strode out ahead. Ty sighed exasperatedly. Fascinating and charismatic the Doctor might be; but he could also be very irritating.
The late-morning air was pleasantly warm and filled with the scents of an alien world. The Doctor breathed deeply, savouring every breath.
The rain had washed the air clean, left it citrusy, piney. They said that travel broadened the mind – they never mentioned how it broadened the senses too. Maybe if he hadn’t been so worried about Martha and the TARDIS he’d have used one of his own senses – his common sense –
and put two and two together. Sometimes, he thought, he could just be too clever.
Ty had said she’d never seen the tentacled things that had attacked Martha before. Yet she was a zoologist and she’d spent a good few months studying the animal life in this area of Sunday. How likely was it that she could have missed them – or at least missed clues to their existence? So if the creatures hadn’t been around before the flood, and now they were. . .
Two and two, he thought worriedly. Two and two. . .
The three travellers reached the peak of a small hill overlooking the lake where the first Sunday City had drowned that night. Strange how the site of such a tragedy could look so peaceful – almost idyllic.
He could almost imagine rowing boats drifting gently across it. He remembered the map that Ty had shown him: like Earth, Sunday was mainly ocean. Unlike Earth, however, it was almost entirely ocean, with a speckle of islands, large and small, girdling its equator. He imagined that the planet had been chosen as a good colony world precisely because of all that water. And, ironically, it had been that very water that had nearly wiped the colony out. But humanity would prevail. It usually did. They were tough old sticks. Even if they had hoiked a great big old mucky nuclear power plant light years across space.
Orlo had been right – sticking up out of the placid water, like the prows of capsized ships, were the tops of at least a dozen buildings.
Now they were grey and green, matted with silt and algae. Even the night’s rain hadn’t washed them clean. The Doctor tried to imagine them, shining and new, as they must have been before the meteorite struck.
He scanned the forest for any sign of the One Small Step – but it was a couple of kilometres out of sight beyond the trees.
‘The water’s dropped even further,’ said Orlo in disbelief, discarding his backpack by the side of the otter cage that he’d abandoned earlier.
‘At this rate it’ll be dry in a couple of days!’
The Doctor shielded his eyes from the rays of the orange sun, now almost directly overhead, and gazed out along the river. It curved around a chunk of green headland and disappeared towards the sea.
Ty was at his side, and he could have sworn she’d read his mind. ‘Take us at least an hour,’ she said. ‘To walk out to where the river silted up. That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?’
‘If the water level’s dropping this quickly,’ the Doctor said, lowering his hand from his eyes, ‘then it must be going somewhere. And short of someone pulling a plug out of the bottom of the river, the only sensible place is back to the sea.’ He looked her in the eye. ‘Yes.
That’s what I’m thinking about. Up for it?’
Candy was puzzled – not to mention worried – about Col. He’d disappeared.
She searched all over, asking