Doctor Who_ Wetworld - Mark Michalowski [5]
Get some perspective, he told himself firmly.
And within seconds he’d managed to clamber up one of the nearby trees. Like cupped hands reaching skywards, the branches spread out, thin and silvery, forming a loose, circular cage. Numerous shoots provided plenty of footholds, and soon he was perched precariously in the tree’s upper reaches, swaying from side to side as he shifted his weight. A small, grey and red bird twittered and took to the sky, clearly outraged at his intrusion, ignoring his apology.
Clinging on for dear life, he scanned the forest: green, green and more green, broken only by the occasional silver-grey trunk of a taller tree. And, like cracks in crazy paving, zigzags of open darkness where he suspected more rivers or lakes lay.
He narrowed his eyes, and raised his free hand to shelter them from the sun, now just touching the tops of the trees along the horizon.
Wherever he was, it was obviously a planet that spun quickly on its axis. A quick bit of guesstimation put the day’s length at no more than twelve hours. So definitely not Arkon.
Just a couple of kilometres away, a lazy drift of smoke snaked up into the sky out of the green.
‘Seek,’ he whispered with a smile, ‘and ye shall find. . . ’
Whatever it was, thought the Doctor, wavering unsteadily, it was certainly worth a second look. Overhead, clouds were beginning to gather, obscuring the orangey disc of the moon. Rain was on its way.
‘Candy’ Kane hated her nickname. Really, really hated it. But like sticky-out ears or goofy teeth, she’d found it impossible to get rid of without some sort of drastic surgery. Born Candice Margaret Kane to parents who hadn’t had the common sense to think ahead and thus save their only daughter from years of torment at the hands of the other kids, Candy had made a fatal mistake. On her first day at school she’d lied that her name was actually Kathryn. A lie she’d been caught out in straight away, which only served to signal to everyone that there was something wrong with ‘Candice’. And within days they’d started calling her ‘Candy’.
Coming to Sunday had seemed like a good idea – not only would she be starting an exciting, brand-new life, but she’d have the chance to ditch the ‘Candy’ once and forever. And all at just sixteen! The arrival, three days after planetfall, of a hypermail from her aunt –
addressed to ‘Candy Kane’ – trashed those hopes good and proper.
All of which might well have accounted for the fact that, whenever she could, Candy chose to work on her own. Whether it was scouting along the banks of the lakes and rivers that had drowned the first settlement, looking for washed-up debris, or out hunting for water pigeon eggs, Candy preferred to go it alone. She didn’t care that the other settlers thought she was aloof. She was aloof. And that was the way she liked it. It was easier to get around quietly on her own.
Professor Benson was about the only one she felt happy going out into Sunday’s swamps with. Even though she was old enough, Ty Benson didn’t pretend to be a mother figure to Candy; she didn’t keep asking her ‘how she was finding it’, or ‘how she was fitting in’. She didn’t go on about how Candy should make ‘more of an effort’ to be friendly with the other teenagers. She just let her be, and trusted her to know what she was doing.
Candy adjusted the straps on her backpack, feeling the well-padded water pigeon eggs (all three of ’em!) shift around inside. The size of Earth ostrich eggs, they weren’t just a delicacy, but each one could feed a family of four for a day. Food wasn’t short for the settlers – the bewildering variety of plants that grew in and around the swamps saw to that. And before the flood they’d had fish galore from the nets that they’d strung up across the river mouths. But it was always a treat