Doctor Who: Sky Pirates! by Dave Stone

Author:Dave Stone
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Science-Fiction:Doctor Who
ISBN: 9780426204466
Publisher: Doctor Who Books
Published: 1995-09-15T10:00:00+00:00

'We can't,' Roz said. 'The Sloathes make the stuff we need to have to

stay alive. How long are we going to live without it?'

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 escape the deluge. Vulture and thrasher and rubber-shrike

respectively soar and flutter and bounce over these sudden new lakes in

bewilderment, before lighting upon any perch they can find and sticking

their heads under their wings to wait it out. And then the floods subside in

a matter of hours and, briefly, the desert flowers. New-bloated cacti jettison pollen into the clean air, and their too-long-dormant floral cousins,

too long trapped under heatcracked, blistered earth, push forth and ephemerally burn. Dandelions and the delicate, crisp white evening

primrose, purple verbena, mariposa. Fragile jewels with lights inside them,

sprouting from the dust.*

As you progressed towards the mountains, the already wilting desert

* And coruscating.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.