Doctor Who: Virgin New Adventures [027] - All-Consuming Fire by Andy Lane

Author:Andy Lane
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Science-Fiction - Doctor Who
ISBN: 9780426204152
Publisher: Doctor Who Books
Published: 1994-07-14T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

In which a new voice takes up the story, and the Doctor is picked up in a hotel.

Extract from the diary of Bernice Summerfield

Bombay smells.

Yes, I know I’ve written the same words every morning for the past two months, but they come from the heart. Bombay smells. It smells like no other place I’ve ever visited. I mean, I’ve lived everywhere from the slums of Avernus, where dead bodies are left to rot where they drop, to a squat above a thoat-gelding shop in the mires of Zellen VIII, but I’ve never come across such an all-pervading, gut-wrenching stench of decay and unwashed flesh. That’s what coming home means, if Earth is really home any more. Unwashed aliens just smell exotic, and more often than not rotting alien food tastes better than it does fresh. What I’m trying to say is that even a nasty alien stink has something extraordinary about it, but sheer human squalor just turns the stomach.

Especially when I’m in a city whose people think that the function of a river is to act as a latrine upstream and a launderette downstream. I’d complain, but I’m too polite. I have to be polite. In 1887, on Earth, everybody is polite.

Well, everybody that matters.

But that’s the general gripe over with. Onto the specific.

The P&O representative told me yesterday that the Matilda Briggs was due in after lunch. Today, after all the usual guff – sleeping in, being woken up by the mamlet who wanted to clean my room, dressing, having lunch – I wandered through town towards the dock. The route was lined with shops, hotels and offices designed to be impressive, in a gothic sort of way. I had to push my way through crowds of workers, soldiers, beggars, lepers, amputees, bullocks and pariah dogs before I could pass across the vast open square to where the ocean rolled greasily against the pylons of the dock. A battalion of British Army soldiers was waiting to embark on one of the ships. Their pennants fluttered limply in the breeze, their brightly coloured uniforms were already soaked in sweat, and one in three was yellow and wasted by malaria. Behind them the Deccan mountains pierced the pure blue membrane of the sky. I could almost believe that the sharp silhouette of their peaks against the sky was actually the coastline poking out into the waters of the Arabian Sea, and I was standing on the mountain tops, looking downwards, far away from where the Doctor would arrive.

Eventually I wandered across to the Ballard Pier, surrounded by eager shipping agents and harassed representatives from P&O, Bibby’s and British India. I was clutching the Doctor’s telegram in my hand. Every few minutes I unfolded it and checked again that I hadn’t got the name of the ship wrong. Odd thoughts kept chasing their tails around my mind. What if there’d been a problem and the Doctor hadn’t boarded in the end? What if I’d misinterpreted his instructions and I was

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