09 - Longest Day

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2024-12-24 0 0 429.92KB 153 页 5.9玖币
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DOCTOR WHO
Longest Day
An Eighth Doctor Ebook
By Micheal Collier
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Dark Sky
Chapter 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Abandon
Chapter 3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Split
Chapter 4 . . . . . . . . Confusing Right with Wrong
Chapter 5 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .In a Jam
Chapter 6 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Kusks
Chapter 7 . .Words Without Actions are the Assassins of Idealism
Chapter 8 . . . . . . . . The Sky Could Fall In
Chapter 9 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Fallen Apart
Chapter 10 . . . . . Hopeless and Helpless
Chapter 11 . . . Days Die Out in Dreams
Chapter 12 . . . . . . .Getting Out of Hand
Chapter 13 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Never End
Chapter 14 . . . . . . . . . . The After-Hours
Epilogue
Dedicated to Rebecca Levene for help, understanding and generosity in a Mêlée Confidetial
Prologue
Nineteen years ago
Then time crashes through, like a roaring wave of pale water over the far-off spindly trees, ageing them and
pushing up new saplings in the blink of an eye.
'Run,' he says, but it's instinct, not a practical suggestion.
Taaln runs the wrong way, spins round as the crackling wave breaks on him.
Vost is caught, on a narrow strip that's safe, an eye in the storm -
***
Vost watched him die for hours.
The eyes staring back into his own were dry and wrinkled. Gradually they atrophied until there was only a
steady stream of dust pouring from the empty sockets.
That alone must have taken a good half-hour.
Flakes of skin broke away from the face like tiny petals and fluttered gently to the parched earth below. He
counted them as they fell in the silence.
Vost hadn't known Taaln long, but he'd seen how full of life the man had been, all that careless optimism.
He'd had the best attitude, Vost decided. Take what you can when you can - there's little enough on offer
after all. And you never knew when the payback would come.
***
'There're millions of futures down here, aren't there?'Vost said idly as he watched Taaln carefully connect his
black box to the now secure device.
True,' nodded Taaln, straightening up, 'but they're all borrowed, aren't they? That's no use. The only real
future's the one you make for yourself, isn't it?'
Vost frowned as the younger man's face suddenly crumpled in fear.
'It's not a safe reading.'
'But the remote sensors -'
"They must have got it wrong!'
"Then what do we -'
'I don't know! The readings were safe before. Pick-up's not for seven hours!'
Vost tried to breathe slowly and deeply to fight back the panic. 'Well, it doesn't mean this chunk's going up,
does it? It could just be rumblings. We could have days of safe time yet.'
He looked about him, nervously. It was almost perfect here, untouched. He could picture his own people
starting again in this bright ghetto, safe from outside, the way they always wanted to be. Ignored. Isolated.
***
Little by little Taaln's features were losing their individuality. Eventually, they would lack any trace of humanity
at all. Yost's mind felt numbed. It had to be some kind of side effect of this place. Ever since they'd landed
here he'd felt... well, each memory was so vivid. It was as if his mind was a sponge soaking up every second
that passed as he waited the long hours until the pick-up.
***
'I'd feel safer if we were further from the barrier,' muttered Vost.
'Can't wait to be desk-bound, can you?' laughed Taaln. 'I don't see why I'm needed down here anyway.' 'You've
been recruited from the best of the best, Monitor-to-be, sir!' announced Taaln with a cheerful bow."They think
it's a good idea you experience first hand what you'll be looking at on a screen for the rest of your life.
Besides, not many people know about this place yet, and until our numbers swell -' he ballooned out his
cheeks - 'all hands to the chronal assessor!'
'I suppose it's useful to have some first-hand knowledge of what I'll be looking over,' said Vost, grudgingly.
'Although God knows what I'm meant to do if anything goes wrong. Is it all like this?'
Taaln shook his head. 'There's a good third of the planet that's fit for nothing. The time instability's too great.'
Vost stared around at the sandy landscape stretching out flatly into the horizon. A few spindly trees swaying
in the slight breeze. It was a little like home used to be, before the relentless homogenising of the Outer
Planets began.
The red sky stretched angrily over them, a fat, burning orange disc framed in its centre.
'Is that really the sun, or just some historical record of it?'
Taaln's voice floated through the dry air as he bent to unpack some more sensor equipment. 'Hard to say.
The distortion effect stretches some way beyond the planet surface, so the image of that sun is captured in
time just like its reflection would be in water. There's probably a million days and nights going on as we
speak.'
Vost laughed drily. "The party never stops on Hirath.'
'Won't for us, either, once it's properly exploited.' Taaln was smiling.'Think of the money...'
"That's a young man's dream.'
'I'm young enough to dream it.' Taaln pulled hard at the lead shell of the chronal assessor, exposing the
connections within.
***
The veins seemed to push through the backs of Taaln's tanned hands now, but Vost realised that the skin
was simply paring away layer by layer, fluttering off, tugged by a thin breeze. It ruffled his hair.Yes, things
were returning to normal here. His device was still functioning, the data display reading massive chronal
activity.
Just rumblings.
He stayed watching as Taaln's painted statue continued to peel under the bright light of the sun. In another
few hours the pick-up would surely come, steering its calculated path through the time streams. Perhaps by
then there would be nothing left of Taaln.
You had to take what you could while you could. You had to make your own future. Vost carried on watching
as the sun beat down.
Now
He's still watching over Hirath, way up in space he can see it all. It's given him a good, if meaningless, living
over the years but he's been so distracted of late. He remembers the day Taaln died and the years he
seemed to spend watching him. He's tired, worn out now. He's sick of knowing too little and accepting too
much. He may have made a mistake. He thinks of his future but he's uncertain.
Somewhere in a dark corner things untouched for hundreds of years are stirring, like responding to like.
They're thinking about the future, too.
ONE WEEK LATER
Chapter 1
A Dark Sky
The door slid open with a rasping hum. He wasn't here. Good. The last thing she felt like dealing with right
now was more of Vasid's weird behaviour. Waking up in the middle of sleep break to find him trying out
different entry codes on her bedroom door was bad enough. Finding things had been taken from her wardrobe
rated pretty poorly, too. But enduring him in the rec room, the comments, the snide remarks, the stupid
forced discussions on sexuality and frigidity - well, in the mood she was in now, she felt she would smash his
teeth in and ask him to discuss that with a surgeon. Or a vet, more likely - slimy little rat.
She pictured him with an involuntary shudder. Sharp, pointed nose sniffing the air as she walked by. Wide
eyes just crafty enough to avoid seeming gormless. A smile with no warmth, hovering hopefully like a
premature apology for whatever stupid conversation would follow.
'Come on,' she muttered, looking at her own shadow lying thick and black in the rectangle of light in front of
her, spilling through from the corridor. She slapped a palm to her forehead and watched the shadow do the
same. The lights weren't working. Again.
She moved into the darkness of the room, silent save for a low hum from the drinks machine in the corner and
the soft, comforting whine of the base generators. The emergency lighting usually cut in, but it looked like
that was out too.
She stepped through the doorway. On the far side of the room was the observation window, a huge rectangle
of glass set into the wall. Feeling around the area beside her, she located the window shield control and
turned the ball in its socket. A low grating rattled the shutters back and spilled a little more light into the
shadows. The outside world revealed itself through the glass at a ponderous pace, but she stood patiently by
the door until, with a final, unhealthy clang, the shield was fully retracted.
She stared at the grey brightness of the planetoid's surface -craters, mud flats and mountains vying for a
bored onlooker's attention under the stars and blackness.Why was the sky dark at night? She could
remember asking the question when she was younger, but found it hard to imagine she'd ever actually cared
about the answer.
Sighing, she padded softly over to the window, groping her way past chairs and tables, piles of news
printouts, empty cups. A pink-hued planet sat in the dark, so far away, but still so big. She felt almost guilty,
not actually having seen it with her own eyes for so long. Monitoring endless lines of checking reports in the
control room had become quite enough to remind her Hirath was still out there, so why bother looking at it
herself? Two seasons she'd been here now. One more to go and it was back to tuition, praise the deity. Back
to a desiccated, academic environment with culture, study, chatter and gossip, enough tools to hold back the
real world, and hopefully enough money to make the reprieve more enjoyable.
Two seasons... She thought of Vasid again. He hadn't been here half the time she had, yet his indolence
suggested he'd never been anywhere else. Yost's company wasn't much better: he'd been so withdrawn of
late. Perhaps her snipes about the way things seemed to keep breaking down round here had got him down
so much he wasn't leaving his quarters. Well, he was Chief Monitor. He'd take the blame for what happened
here, not she.
Anstaar sighed again. Full of omplaints in an empty base, with two losers and no one to take her seriously.
And out there, shining a soft pink in the why-is-it-dark and the twinkling stars, the only reason any of this was
there at all. 'Water,' she muttered, tiring of the silence.'I said, "water"!' There was a rattle and a loud clang as
a tin cylinder was dispensed from the drinks machine. She winced as the noise reverberated round the room,
then again as the lights abruptly switched on. A brilliant white bathed the metal walls, the rubbish-strewn
counter top, the cleaning drone on its side in the corner and the abandoned chairs and tables. The room was
suddenly as bright and bland as everywhere else on the base. She opened the canister of water. It was frozen
solid.
***
Sam looked in the mirror. 'I never wanted to be the fairest of them all, but... well, in the top million would do.'
She sneered at her reflection and blew up at the tousle of fringe she had spent the last hour sculpting for
herself. She still wasn't convinced longer hair was for her, but had become bored with the short crop that had
seen her through her final years at school. It didn't feel like her now; she'd been back in London a while ago
with this length hair, and it had made her realise that the Sam of Coal Hill School was long, long gone.
She dreamed of them all sometimes - schoolfriends, teachers, bullies, fumbling boyfriends... Sometimes she
was recounting her adventures to them, other times asking about people she used to know. But they would
get bored listening to her - they'd leave the room without a sound. She found herself shouting at them to
come back, not to be so... so rude . Sometimes she woke to find she was shouting.
Like last night. She'd sat bolt upright in bed. 'Stop being so bloody rude!' she'd shouted - typically just as the
Doctor had been passing by her closed door.
'I wasn't being rude!' he'd said, earnestly, as he'd flung the door open, the very picture of fatherly
bemusement. It drove her mad that, after all the adventures they had shared, he still felt she was a child. She
could see it in those anxious blue-green eyes beneath the brow crumpled in concern, peering right into hers.
'Don't you ever go to sleep?' she'd grumbled, rubbing her eyes.
The Doctor had mused a little on this, as if considering it a genuine and pertinent question.'Sometimes,' he'd
said, smiling at her and nodding his head. 'Yes, certainly sometimes.' Before she'd had a chance to give a
world-weary sigh at yet another of her friend's self-conscious forays into eccentricity, his face was hanging in
a sympathetic grimace.'Bad dreams again?'
'I'm fine, I told you.' Then she'd looked down, and realised the white T-shirt she'd worn to bed was practically
see-through with perspiration. She'd looked up in almost comic alarm at the Doctor, but he'd already breezed
off up the corridor towards the food machine.'Hot chocolate's what you need! Just the thing for nightmares.'
So, a cup of hot chocolate from Daddy and a tousle of the hair was all she'd get to see her through the night.
How could he be so like a man and yet... so alien? He'd shown her so many, many things, and she knew
he'd shown hundreds of others a thousand other sights besides over the centuries he'd been around -
Centuries, right. The eyes gave it away sometimes - the bright burning of intelligence underneath, the
sadness they could convey, and the strength. He looked so young, his skin felt so smooth, but there was a
resilience there, a strength she could feel the ages had imbued him with. She wondered how he carried on,
how he always carried on, when he'd seen and done so much.
Look at him on Earth. He'd been there so often that in any one year there were probably half a dozen of his
selves wandering round the place righting wrongs or meeting people to name-drop about later. Probably in
every year. Every year, right from the start. She felt almost afraid to be with him when she thought like that.
Was a life that long a blessing or a curse? Her seventeen years must seem like a deep breath to someone
like him. She was surprised - and so very, very proud - that she'd even warranted a place in his odd
affections. She knew he'd give his life for hers without hesitation - the life of a misfit schoolgirl, with no idea
what she ever wanted to be, was worth more to him than his own.
She told herself it was just the way he was. He'd probably sacrifice himself for a ladybird: all life was sacred
to him. She was nothing special. Even so...
One day the Doctor might just take the time to look into her less and at her a little more. Hopefully when she
had this hopeless sodding fringe right.
***
'So the lights aren't working properly?' Vasid looked at Anstaar as if she'd announced the end of the world.
'Again. Just tell me it's not you doing it, all right?'
'Why would I bother?'Vasid spun round in the swivel chair, turning his back to her.
'Why would you bother sticking my underwear in the eating-room sink? It's the sort of pathetic thing you do.'
'I'll remember you want them back unwashed next time.'
I'm not going to rise to it, she thought, breathing deeply. I'm not.
'Anyway,'he added,'go and tell Vost if you're that worried.'
'I would if I could find him,' rejoined Anstaar, frostily. 'He might give me some sense.'
'He certainly wants to give you something.'
That machine in the rec room gave me ice instead of water.'
'It knows your nature.'
'It isn't working.'
Vasid gave a gesture that unpleasantly suggested Anstaar was lying. 'I know you're trying to freak me out
with this "everything's going wrong" stuff. I know you put the rust in my water.'
'You think I've got nothing better to do -' 'And the scalding-hot shower, that was a good one, wasn't it?'
'Why would I want to risk the sight of you, naked, running out of a -' She stopped, and closed her eyes,
smiling coldly. "This is so pathetic, Vasid. You're like a child.'
'And Yost's like a man? Is that why he won't answer his call-out signal, you've worn him out?' 'What are you
talking about?'
'Don't try to deny it,' muttered Vasid.'You think I'm stupid?' 'Yes. I meant, what about the call-out signal?' "The
monitor's been flickering again so I tried to summon him.' She realised there was fear in his pale eyes. 'He
didn't answer.' Suddenly he raised his voice. 'But then he wouldn't, would he? Because you two are just trying
to freak me out.'
Anstaar turned and walked away in exasperation, thinking hard. The base wasn't that big, so if Vost wasn't
answering his call-out tone he wasn't in his room or his office. As Monitor, he shouldn't really be anywhere
else for any significant period of time, and he'd not said a word to either of them.
She heard a glugging noise, and turned to see Vasid pouring narcomilk down his thick throat.
'That's not allowed and you know it. You're meant to be on duty, Vasid. If Vost finds you -'
'If Vost finds me he's not likely to do much, is he? 'Cause if he tries anything, well, I'll just tell his family how
he's been monitoring the aptitude of certain members of his staff. You
know. The special services.'
Anstaar turned and walked out without another word. She heard his voice.'And don't think I don't know it's you
who's been mucking up the maintenance programs on the computer!' he yelled after her.'I know it's you!'
***
In the rec room, the lights flickered on, and then off.
Liquid flowed from the drinks machine, forming a huge dark puddle on the floor.
The bulk of Hirath sat resolutely in the dark of the observation bay.
***
'I'm losing control.'
摘要：

DOCTORWHOLongestDayAnEighthDoctorEbookByMichealCollierContentsPrologueChapter1.................ADarkSkyChapter2....................AbandonChapter3........................SplitChapter4........ConfusingRightwithWrongChapter5....................InaJamChapter6..................TheKusksChapter7..WordsWit...

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