Waters of Mars : Target Collection (9781473533455), page 7
‘Mind-bender,’ Julie gasped with awe when Adelaide got her two friends outside.
Adya started to cry quietly, and Adelaide put her arm around her shoulders. But she didn’t even try to say that everything was going to be all right. Quite apart from whatever had happened over their heads it was evident that things on the ground were looking a long way off orderly. Although there were some leaders trying to comfort and reassure the girls, there were other adults on their knees, holding their heads in their hands hopelessly, or praying.
‘Is it the end of the world?’ Adya asked, her voice hitching with tears.
‘No way,’ Julie whispered. ‘The world’s still here – it’s just … moved.’
‘But how can that happen? It’s not possible!’
‘It doesn’t matter how it’s happened,’ Adelaide insisted. ‘We just have to make sure we don’t lose our heads over it.’
She saw Adya sniff back tearful snot and nod, reassured by the company of her friends, however this turned out.
‘So, what do we do?’ Julie said.
Adelaide took in the scene around them. No one was handling this gearshift in reality with anything like fortitude. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I’m not staying here. If anything else is coming, I want to be under something more than canvas.’
Julie agreed. And Adya wanted her mum and dad. To be honest, so did Adelaide.
They had been driven to the campsite in a coach, but it had left after dropping them off, to return again in five days. There were a couple of cars parked around the site and Julie suggested they find someone to drive one. Adelaide approached some of the adults, but they just told her to sit with the others; the truth was that she didn’t trust any of them in their confused state.
So, Adelaide went into the camp office and found a map. They were about thirty miles from home. That was walkable she reckoned. And with luck they might get a lift part way, there were bound to be police cars on patrol, trying to keep order; she bet the army would be on the roads, too. Maybe even Julie’s UNIT. Getting a lift in an army truck was going to be a heck of a lot safer than trusting one of the Guide leaders to get them back into London, she thought.
There were a couple of high-powered torches in the office. Adelaide took them along with the map. Be Prepared, she thought. She didn’t consider it stealing. This was survival.
Nobody else seemed to notice or try to stop the girls as they packed gear into their backpacks and headed off the campsite. They were all too busy staring at the sky, comforting each other or praying. Adelaide noticed that a couple of the Guide leaders had by now developed their own small congregations of kids in prayer. Her parents weren’t especially religious and so neither was she. She doubted that most of the kids she saw on their knees now with their hands pressed together were, either. But Adelaide still had more faith in herself than any kind of universal caretaker in that strange sky that now covered them all.
Together with Julie and Adya – who had stopped crying now they had a plan – Adelaide walked into the woods that surrounded the camp.
None of them had ever been in a forest at night before, and even if the tree canopy meant they couldn’t see much of the strange new worlds that hung above them now, it was still a disconcerting, alien place. Each rustle of grass and crack of twig was somehow amplified by the darkness. Adelaide tried to remind herself that it was really just a little after nine in the morning, but it didn’t do much good. And, as far as the animals were concerned, it was night-time, and they were letting loose all the cries and screams they usually would after dark.
Briefly Adelaide wondered about the sun – if the Earth wasn’t circling it any more (as those strange planets above suggested) – how long before everything started to get cold? Really cold?
One thing at a time, she told herself. There was already enough to worry about, without freaking out over stuff that hadn’t happened yet.
Eventually they emerged from the woods, found themselves on a bank and carefully descended until, with relief, they came to a minor road. Adelaide identified it on the map, and they started walking west. They walked for a long time with no sign of a car. Over them hung the black sky and the planets that shouldn’t have been there. Out here on the road the world was silent but for the sound of their boots on the tarmac. Alone in the darkness it started to feel like the world really might have ended and all that was left of the human race was three ten-year-old Girl Guides.
They had been walking for a couple of hours, and had seen nobody, when they became aware of new lights in the sky. Not still, like the planets or the unknown stars. These were moving and the girls instinctively hid as they realised what they were. Spaceships. And if evidence had been required – as they had discussed during their hike – that what had happened was of alien origin, it seemed to all three of them that it was on its way.
Maybe they would be safer out in the country, after all. If this was an alien invasion, the ships would be headed for London, along with the other major cities of the world. But London was where their parents would be. That was who they wanted to be with. The lights in the sky became spinning discs, just like people had always claimed they had seen in the papers and those television shows. And, yes, they were headed in the direction of the capital.
The girls came to a main road and there was a sign for London. As they looked, it was lit up by coming headlights. They heard the approach of a big vehicle and Adelaide hoped it was the army trucks she had half promised herself would come. They were caught in its lights, and it rolled to a stop, its engine still running.
‘What the hell are you three doing out here?’ they heard a man yell from the cab with an accent.
It wasn’t the army. It was an articulated truck full of flowers, not guns. THE TULIP EXPRESS. Adelaide saw it written on the cab door as the driver opened it and told then to hurry up and get in.
The girls all knew the rules on strangers, but decided that today the regular conventions no longer applied. Anyway, there were three of them.
The driver was a brawny Dutchman with a black and silver beard that reached his chest. He was called Peter and, as he got the truck moving again, he told them he had come off the ferry at Dover that morning loaded with tulips and daffodils before everything went dark. He said he didn’t care what had happened in the sky, he had a truckload of flowers that he was being paid to deliver to florists in London. He was already late, but he was damned if he was going to give anyone an excuse not to pay him. A contract was a contract whether the sky held or fell.
‘Flowers are good for the soul,’ he told them as they headed for the city. ‘From what I see, people could do with some daffodils in their lives right now.’
Adelaide suspected that flowers would the last thing on people’s minds, and guessed he was just trying to comfort three ten-year-olds with something that sounded like regular chit-chat as the truck headlights cut through the darkness ahead of them, and they travelled through a world that no longer made sense.
The cab itself had a pungent floral scent, though Adelaide couldn’t place it. It seemed to cling to Peter himself, as well. He told them he’d not been able to get anything other than static over his radio and CB since the skies had changed. So, he sang to himself. Adelaide tried to work out if it was the kind of thing he would do anyway, or if it was again his way of reassuring them. Whichever, his singing ran out as they travelled through the urban areas that bordered London. It was a disaster zone.
There were broken windows, people looting from shops, they saw a couple of police cars on fire, some fights. They passed houses where people had barricaded themselves in. A supermarket was burning, and they heard no fire sirens signalling anyone was coming to put it out. Peter steered the flower truck through the chaos, and no one spoke. The girls wondered what they would find when they reached home.
They had started to see other vehicles now, mostly on the other side of the road as people tried to escape the city. But they also started to see military vehicles loaded with soldiers. Peter told them it was a good sign – the soldiers would help keep order. Soon after that they got their first proper sighting of one of the spaceships. The shock of it made Peter hit the brakes sharply and they all lurched in the cab.
It was stationary over the city, a huge slowly rotating saucer with lights on its underside that glowed with shifting colours. It was, Adelaide thought, both a terrifying and wonderful thing. Something she had never really dreamed of seeing detached from a movie screen. A part of her – of all of them – still told her that it, and everything else they were seeing, wasn’t actually real. It was all one very weird dream from which soon they would all wake, and Adelaide and her friends would find archery classes and canoeing club waiting for them.
But as they moved on, the roads became quiet and deserted again, and in the distance they began to hear the sound of gunfire. Short, repeated bursts of automatic rifles. And other sounds that they didn’t understand, buzzes that sounded like pulses of energy, and strange electronic voices barking commands that they couldn’t make out.
And screaming.
Adelaide saw Adya and Julie looking at her in the darkness of the cab. Their eyes were wide with fear. She didn’t think her own eyes would look any different to them.
As they rolled toward Chiswick High Road, they saw a column of people, their hands on their heads, being herded along a road by what Adelaide at first thought looked like big metal bins with stalks protruding from them. Peter immediately stopped the truck again and turned off his lights.
‘What in God’s name are those?’ he breathed, leaning forward over the wheel.
As they watched, a second group of people were herded into the street by the metallic beings, and Adelaide could hear those strange voices clearly now.
‘We are the Daleks! You will obey!’
‘Obey or be exterminated!’
Daleks, thought Adelaide. These things were what had come from the spaceships, and they weren’t here to make friends.
‘I’m sorry, girls. I think this is as close to home as I can get you. You should get out now.’ Peter told them quietly. His voice was different now, she thought, there was no reassurance in it. His eyes were fixed on the Daleks ahead and their human captives.
Adelaide calculated that the truck was only a few streets away from their homes. They were small, and if they stuck to the shadows maybe they could avoid any more of the Daleks.
‘What are you going to do?’ she asked Peter.
‘Deliver my daffodils,’ he told her. ‘Be careful, kids. I hope you find your parents OK. Stay safe.’
In the darkness, the girls climbed down from the cab and moved quickly into the cover of shadow. Behind them they heard the flower truck’s engine come to life again. Peter turned his lights on high beam and pulled on the truck’s horn as it lurched forward at speed.
Along the High Road, Adelaide saw the Daleks swing around, lit up brightly by the oncoming flower truck. Their captives ran for it. Peter was delivering his flowers, but not to any florist shop.
She saw bursts of energy spit from the Daleks’ weapon stalks. They hit the truck but didn’t stop it. The truck hit the Daleks, sending some careening in circles to either side of the street and crushing others beneath its ten wheels. Before it exploded.
Adelaide heard Julie and Adya gasp with horror and knew her own hand was planted over her mouth. But they had to move quickly. Maybe the explosion would keep the Daleks distracted long enough for them to get to their homes safely.
If there was such a thing as safe any more.
They moved quickly, keeping to the darkest parts of the streets, and keeping quiet. Distantly, there was still the sound of gunfire, soldiers were taking the fight to the strange invaders, but she heard only human screams. The Daleks, she thought, were like tanks, swiftly gliding tanks. She wasn’t sure how much good bullets would be against tanks.
They got to Julie’s house first. It was dark, but when she tapped on the door and called out nervously, the door opened and she was swallowed up in her mother’s arms. Adya lived only four houses down, and her older sister was keeping watch from an upstairs window. By the time they got there the door was open. Adya’s family begged Adelaide to come in, too, but she was determined to get to her own mum and dad.
She lived two streets away; it would take her no more than a minute. But as she slipped through the darkness at the end of Adya’s road, a shape came out of nowhere and grabbed her.
‘Adelaide!’
It was her father, tearful and terrified and thanking the god he had never believed in. He held her tight, and she clung to him, the tears she had refused to cry before finally breaking through.
She might have been ten years old, and practically an adult, like Julie had said, but he picked her up and carried her quickly back to their house. Like most of the others it was dark. And empty.
‘Where’s Mum?’
Dad told her he didn’t know. He had been looking for her when he found Adelaide. Saturday mornings she always went to the gym. That was where she had been when things had gone crazy. No phones were working. All he could do was look for her. He had hoped that Adelaide would be safer out in the country, but he was still relieved to see her. Now, though, he was going back out again to find her mum. He told Adelaide to stay there in the house, and he’d be back soon
Adelaide didn’t want him to go, but she wanted her mum back. She wanted them all together. The way they had used to be. Whatever had been the cause of their fighting, her dad still loved her mum, and Adelaide loved them both. But she would never see either one of them again.
Throughout the hours that followed, Adelaide heard sounds of fighting across the town, other explosions like the one that had destroyed the flower truck and, occasionally, the electronic bark of the Daleks. Eventually she had gone to her room and hidden herself without thinking about it in a corner.
Then, through the window across the room, she had seen the Daleks in the air. She’d had no idea that they could fly when she saw them on Chiswick High Road. Yes, they had glided across the ground, but fly?
They moved over the house roofs like big metal bugs without wings. No doubt in search of more humans to round up. She tried not to think about what they might be doing with them – and whether they had already captured her mother and, now, father. But the sight of the aerial Daleks was hard to resist, and she drew closer to the window.
Which, as if it had all been a plan to catch her, was when another Dalek rose up from below the bedroom window. The top of its head swivelled around and the long stalk with what was unmistakably some kind of eye fixed on her. She was powerless to move; exhausted and scared – and fascinated – she watched the Dalek as it watched her.
She had no idea how long they remained like that, and she felt tears gather in her eyes. Not because she thought the Dalek would attack. Somehow, then, it didn’t matter if it did. Amid all that day’s strangeness and fear, and the carnage that the Daleks had now brought with them, Adelaide felt touched by a moment in time.
Then, it stopped looking and flew away over the rooftops.
‘That was it,’ Adelaide told the Doctor. ‘I swear it looked right into me, and then it simply went away.’ With her finger she wiped away the tears that had again gathered in her eyes. ‘And I knew. That night. I knew that I would follow it out there, into space.’
‘But not for revenge,’ the Doctor said.
She almost smiled. ‘What would be the point of that?’
The Doctor’s grin was more certain. ‘That’s what makes you remarkable. That’s how you create history.’
‘You mean Bowie Base One?’ she asked doubtfully. ‘Not a very successful part of history is it, now?’
But he wasn’t done. ‘Imagine it, Adelaide,’ he said quietly. ‘What if you begin a journey that takes the human race all the way out to the stars? Imagine, it begins with you, and then your granddaughter.’
Adelaide listened, watching the fires dance in his dark eyes.
‘You inspire her. So that in thirty years’ time Suzie Fontana-Brooke is the pilot of the first lightspeed ship to Proxima Centauri. And then – everywhere! With her children and her children’s children forging the way to the Dragon Star, the Celestial Belt of the Winter Queen, discovering the Map of the Watersnake Wormholes.
‘One day a Brooke will even fall in love with a Tandoonian prince, and that’s the start of a whole new species! But everything starts with you, Adelaide. From fifty years ago, to right here. Today. Imagine.’
She stared at him, thinking about every word he had just said.
‘Who are you?’ she breathed.
He just looked at her, like he didn’t have an answer she would believe.
‘Why are you telling me this?
He drew in a breath. ‘As consolation.’
Her mouth began to form a question, one that he knew he couldn’t answer. But Adelaide’s computer got there first with a beep that stole her attention.
‘Andy Stone. He logged on yesterday with a report.’
Her fingers worked briefly over the keyboard and the monitor screen lit up with the young professor as he had been before the Flood. A good-looking man who enjoyed a laugh and could shrug off a minor annoyance like this one.
‘Number Three water filter’s up the creek. And guess what? The spares they sent don’t fit. Big surprise! Anyway, no panic. One and Two filters are still working fine.’
Adelaide was checking the time code on the log: 21.20.
‘That means the infection started today in the biodome. It’s a week before water gets cycled out of there. So we’re clear, the rest of the crew can’t be infected.’ She felt relief surge through her and smiled at the Doctor. ‘We can leave!’ She got on her comms. ‘Ed, we’re clear! We can proceed to launch. How are you doing?’
In the control room, Ed worked purposefully at his console to prep the take-off amid borderline chaos as the rest of the crew hurriedly loaded equipment and supplies onto trollies and ferried them to the shuttle launch pad.
