Doctor Who NA40 - Sky Pirates by Dave Stone

Author:Dave Stone
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2011-07-13T01:05:03+00:00

The Twenty-First Chapter

From orbit Prometheus resembles a vast rock bowl, its dust-strewn concave face directed permanently to the Sun, of which it is the nearest Wanderer, its rim comprising lofty and impassible crags.

Across the deserts, the Promethean nomads range and conduct their sporadic but constant intertribal wars -and above them, intermittently, stalk the petroleum-powered slum stilt-cities -each following some complex pattern of its own, its internally combustive pistons churning, its hydrocarbon smokes belching, alternately wheeling and jostling with the others in an erratic and unending interactive dance.

The progress of the cities might be random, is apparently entirely random save that, at the correct time, all the cities come to rest on the tors at the centre of the Wanderer where, for this instant, the tribes have gathered in uneasy truce.

This is the Raintime, which occurs at an interval of eighteen solar months. The aquifers of Prometheus contain osmotic valves, which lock the water away until it can be pumped, en masse, under pressure, into the atmosphere to precipitate in a matter of hours.

The Raintime comes one every eighteen solar months, and when it comes it changes the world. Flashfloods burst the sides of gullies and stream across the dustbowl, swelling bone-dry oases to the size of lakes, which flow together, and still the waters rise, until fully half the habitable Wanderer is inundated to the height of a man. The fauna of the desert breaks, desperate, for the high ground towards the rim: jackrabbit and coyote and jackal, badger and bullsnake and kangaroo, packrat and gila and bobcat... their vicious private ecologies of predator and prey forgotten in the rush to

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