Doctor Who: BBC Eighth Doctor Adventures [017] - Beltempest by Jim Mortimore

Author:Jim Mortimore
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Science-Fiction - Doctor Who
ISBN: 9780563405931
Publisher: BBC Books
Published: 1998-10-31T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter Five

Screams. All Sam could hear were screams.

They came from the radio, punching through the radiation shoals with difficulty, intermittently penetrating the ice crust and ocean slurry which now held them trapped like a fly in a particularly blank and icy amber.

Screams of the dying.

Sam huddled herself into a ball in the observation lounge and tried not to think about. It wasn’t as if she could do anything, right?

The captain of Saketh’s ship had directed his vessel as Saketh had ordered. The speed with which they had fallen from orbit would have ruined a ship had it been through any atmosphere less than a near vacuum. The ice would have wrecked them if it had been anything other than the thinnest of crusts; the ocean would have crushed them if it had been any deeper than it was when their momentum had finally expired.

They were lucky. Others were not. Ignoring Saketh’s radio calls, other ships had elected to leave the orbit of Belannia XII.

The radiation against which they had been warned, flaring suddenly, had caught them all.

Sam did not know how many of the refugees, the crews, were dead, or how many more were dying. All she knew was that she couldn’t do anything about it.

Only Saketh could do that.

He had responded to the calls of help. Taking the captain’s launch he had left the ship. They had felt the Shockwave as his engines had burned through the ice crust, then nothing.

Sam watched the glow of boiling ice and steam fade far above the observation gallery windows, fade into the slushy grey mass of semiliquid ice through which they drifted.

It wasn’t her fault. There was nothing she could do. She had saved as many as she could.

Powerless, she found comfort with the refugees huddled together in the observation deck; with them, she watched the ocean of ice that lay beyond the windows.

The ocean was unnamed; so too was the moon lacking any designation but a number. As a moon it wasn’t huge. Three thousand-odd kilometres in diameter. Fifteen hundred or so to the rocky core. From low orbit its surface had looked like wet hair – the ropy stains of ice crevasses staining the smooth, mottled, blue-white surface. Volcanic ice boiled in places from the interior, bursting the crust, to erupt in white shining fountains, to lay a smooth new skin across the old. Of course, Sam had had very little opportunity to study the exterior of the moon before the ship smashed through the ice crust with a concussion she felt sure would open the hull.

Again they had been lucky. There had been time to search out a thin layer – an area of geological weakness, one further weakened by their jets as they had made their approach.

Now they were beneath the surface. Ice cradled them, a freezing womb pressing close against the windows, mottled a brilliant blue-white in the light from the ship, fading rapidly into a greenish murk beyond the range of the lights.

Shapes drifted within it, curious, sleek, moving at speed through the chill slurry.

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