Текст книги "Doctor Who- The Silent Stars Go By"

Автор книги: Dan Abnett

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Amy was just a short distance from the safety of the hatch. She reached out her hand so she could touch the palm-checker plate as soon as she arrived and open the door. If they could get through and close the hatch again, the Ice Warriors would have to stop to drill the lock out, and that would buy them a little more time.

The hatch began to open. She hadn’t touched the plate. Something on the other side had activated the lock system.

Amy slid to a stop, and Bel and Samewell cannoned into her from behind. All Amy could think was the Ice Warriors had somehow learned how to work the locks.

Something came through the hatch and out onto the bridge facing them.

It wasn’t an Ice Warrior.

The three of them screamed anyway.

‘Do you know what I’m going to do?’ the Doctor asked Ixyldir. ‘I can’t believe I’m saying this, but do you know what I’m going to do?’

‘What?’ asked the Ice Lord.

‘I’m going to help you,’ the Doctor replied.

‘Help me?’

‘Help you all. There’s a level to this situation that neither of us really anticipated.’

‘I do not believe you can be trusted,’ Ixyldir replied.

The Doctor shook his head, and snatched the communicator pad out of the Ice Lord’s grip. Ssord and two other Ice Warriors reacted to stop him, but the Doctor did a little duck and weave to avoid them as if they were the least of his worries. He was busy examining the pad’s display.

‘You’re taking a pasting, Ixyldir,’ he said, reading data. ‘Your slow, cold war has turned into a fast, hot one. This is not what you were expecting at all, is it?’

He looked at the Ice Lord.

‘Is it?’ he repeated. ‘I’m not saying that you’re not prepared to fight. You’re Ice Warriors, for goodness sake. But this isn’t the scenario you were expecting when you began your offensive ten years ago. Is it?’

‘No,’ said the Ice Lord.

‘Escalation,’ said the Doctor. ‘You said it yourself. I can help you, but only if you start cooperating with me quickly. I mean very quickly. We don’t even have to trust each other completely, but if we don’t get this situation under control, there are going to be an awful lot of deaths. Morphan, Ice Warrior. Unnecessary deaths. This world laid waste, possibly to the point where it is of no use to either colonial effort. Come on, Lord Ixyldir of the Tanssor clan! Be smart!’

The Ice Lord seemed to take an eternity to reply.

‘What form would this cooperation take?’ he asked.

The Ice Warriors behind him swung their heavy heads to glance at one another.

The Doctor grinned.

‘That’s the spirit, Ix! That’s the spirit! You’re starting to thaw, pardon the pun! This could be the start of a beautiful friendship, Ix! Can I call you Ix?’

‘Most certainly not.’

‘Well work on that, then. Here’s what I need first.

We have to find another facility like this, this telepresence communication centre.’ The Doctor gestured to the chamber they were standing in. ‘Ssord’s handy axe-work rather ripped the stuffing out of the systems here,’ he said. ‘I could fix it, but it would frankly take more time than we have at our disposal.

There must be another. You’ve been working your way through this complex for years, cutting open doors.

You must have found another one or two by now.

Preferably, a more significant control room than this.

This is just a secondary station. Do you know of any primary command and control rooms?’

Lord Ixyldir looked at Ssord.

‘Level sssix,’ the Ice Warrior hissed.

‘Let’s go!’ the Doctor cried. ‘Lead the way, Ssord.

Lord Ixyldir, we’ll walk and talk.’

Ssord led the way out of the chamber. The other Ice Warriors fell in around the Doctor and Lord Ixyldir as an honour guard escort.

‘Walk as fast as you can!’ the Doctor urged. He looked at Ixyldir. ‘I need to know the details of your operation,’ he said. ‘It’s vital. On several other occasions, I’ve known your people to instigate terraforming processes on target worlds. You’re pretty good at it.’

‘When our migration fleet entered this quadrant, this planet revealed itself to be the most likely candidate for adjustment,’ replied the Ice Lord. ‘Long-range observation confirmed it met the majority of our colonisation criteria. We resolved to achieve orbit, to commence climate engineering, and then wait for the process to be completed by entering hibernation on our ships.’

‘Were you planning to use seed technology to bring about climate alterations?’ asked the Doctor.

‘You are familiar with the technique?’ asked Ixyldir, surprised.

‘I’ve stopped it more than once, actually,’ the Doctor said. ‘It’s very efficient, though. The destabilisation of carbon dioxide levels is often all it takes to induce a global arctic phase on an M-class world.’

They left the gloom of the tunnels and followed a broad, railed walkway around the edge of a plunging turbine cavern.

‘Once we were in orbit,’ said the Ice Lord, ‘we realised that a human colony was already established on the candidate planet. It had been here for some time and, though comparatively small, it had constructed terraforming processors of significant size and effect.

This process had been under way for several generations, and was already beginning to induce change.’

‘So you thought, “Why bother setting up our own terraforming programme to work in opposition? Why not just repurpose the one that’s already there?’”

‘This was deemed to be the most viable option.’

The Doctor shook his head sadly. ‘This is where you and I will be forced to disagree, Lord Ixyldir. That was a pretty underhand gambit. You decide to steal a planet out from under these settlers, you coopt their terraformers to do the hard work for you, and you essentially consign them to a generation or two of long, slow, bitter extinction. You signed their death warrants, Lord Ixyldir, but you let the snow and ice do the actual killing for you. You didn’t have enough respect for your adversary to pull the trigger yourself.

Dirty pool, Lord Ixyldir. That’s dirty pool.’

‘I do not understand your reference,’ replied the Ice Lord.

‘It’s not very honourable, is it?’ replied the Doctor.

‘That’s what I’m saying. Theft, on a planetary scale.’

‘This was not the humans’ planet either. They selected it and claimed it. We were merely doing the same.’

‘But they were here first, Ixyldir. It’s a bit of a school playground he said, she said argument, I know, but do you know what? Most honour systems are built on very simple, basic concepts of ownership, or respect, or prior claim, or of precedence. The humans were here first, Ixyldir. You decided they were in the way, and you decided to steal their technology to eradicate them. Don’t talk to me about honour.’

‘It was a matter of survival,’ objected Ixyldir.

‘Ah yes, the famous pragmatism of the Ice Warriors.

You didn’t mean to hurt anybody, but you were obliged to in order to survive. Lord Ixyldir, the deliberate and systematic eradication of an entire population is called genocide, and it’s not regarded as especially honourable either. Not where nice people come from.’

‘We had to survive! This was a viable planet—’

‘You had a fleet of ships, Ice Lord. You could have gone somewhere else. The humans did not have that option.’

Ixyldir did not reply. For a few minutes, as the group continued to walk, entering a long, metallined hallway, the only sound was the tramp of feet and the rumble of the world-building engines.

‘Anyway,’ said the Doctor at length. ‘Let’s not dwell on your not-really-very-honourable-at-all decision-making process. You started to tinker with the terraformers. This was ten years ago. You knew it would be a gradual process that would take a long time, but you’ve got plenty of that, haven’t you?

Hibernation systems on your starships. Lifetimes that are naturally three or four times those of humans. You could afford to play the long game. The Morphans, you know, they talk about patience a great deal. It’s a fundamental quality of their culture. Not an easy, sleep-through-it-all patience like yours. I’m talking about the patience required to live and work every day, generation after generation, for a future ideal that will benefit your descendants. It’s admirably selfless. Don’t you think so?’

‘It is… worthy of respect.’

‘It is, isn’t it?’ the Doctor said. ‘They just work towards the future. They make their contribution. They get no reward. They’re just investing the effort of their lives for the good of other people they’re never going to meet.’

They came out into another turbine hall, and Ssord led them up a broad metal staircase towards an upper level.

‘So, your tinkering?’ said the Doctor. ‘You employed seed technology first?’

‘Modified seed cultures were introduced to the primary terraformer systems. Initial results were positive.’

‘But you reached a tipping point eventually,’ said the Doctor. ‘Eventually, as the winters began to get colder, the automatic monitoring systems governing the terraformer systems began to notice there was a problem. They performed self-diagnostic reviews and identified alien properties in the system. They needed to resolve the problem, so they accessed the DNA libraries, reopened the flesh banks, and grew a brand new batch of transrats to flush out the system.’

‘Vermin was our first problem,’ Ixyldir acknowledged.

‘Transrats are resilient,’ said the Doctor. “The more you killed, the more they made. That must have become a bit of a war. A guerrilla war, going on underground in the mountains, where the Morphans couldn’t see it.’

‘We prosecuted the vermin. The problem took about a year to control.’

‘You used standard sonic disruptors, and you were forced to destroy some of the DNA banks and flesh farms so that the terraformers simply couldn’t produce as many replacement transrats?’

‘Yes.’

‘And that still wasn’t enough, was it?’ the Doctor asked. ‘They’re resilient, as I said. Eventually, you must have realised that you couldn’t beat the transrats. You had to find a way around them so they were no longer an impediment to your schemes?’

‘We were forced to select alternatives to the processes we had originally put in place,’ replied Ixyldir, ‘the processes that the vermin had disabled.

Seed technology was no longer viable, because the vermin simply devoured it.’

‘You started to actually convert the terraformers themselves? Recalibrate their systems?’

‘Yes.’

‘And that’s when things really escalated, isn’t it?’

asked the Doctor.

‘In here!’ Ssord said abruptly.

The Doctor followed the Ice Warriors through a large hatch, noting that the palm-print reader had been drilled through.

They entered a massive, well-lit control room.

There were several banks of consoles like the one in the telepresence chamber, each with a row of high-backed chairs. The chamber itself overlooked one of the secondary sequence prebiotic crucibles through a vast plate-glass wall. The Doctor paused to enjoy the view of the giant chrome tree. Drizzle from the cloud systems swirling the ceiling of the crucible chamber pattered against the glass wall like light summer rain.

‘Yes,’ the Doctor nodded. ‘This will do the trick nicely. A central operation nexus. Would have taken me ages to find this, especially with you lot chasing me.’

‘What happens now?’ asked Ixyldir. ‘If you have tricked us into revealing the location of this facility to you, I will kill you myself.’

‘I would expect no less,’ replied the Doctor. He sat down at one of the workstations and began to play with the controls, lighting up banks of indicator functions and small hologram read-outs.

‘You see, Ixyldir,’ he said as he worked, ‘what I think has happened is this. You tampered with the terraformers. The system detected you, and manufactured transrats to solve the problem. So you started tampering in a different way to get around the transrat problem, and the system detected that too. It hadn’t got many options left, so it had to do something quite radical.’

The Doctor turned to look at the Ice Lord.

‘It built something else, Ixyldir,’ he said. ‘Something bigger and nastier. With what was left of its flesh farms, it manufactured something else.’

‘Like what, cold blue star?’ Ixyldir asked.

The Doctor shrugged.

‘The next effective stage beyond transrats.

Something Transhuman, is my guess. And that’s what you’re fighting now.’

Chapter

15

Now in Flesh Appearing

The thing prowled out onto the bridge. It was making a noise in its throat that was part growl, part purr. Its metal claws clinked on the grilled walkway as it took each step.

Amy, Bel and Samewell backed away from it, almost forgetting that a pair of Ice Warriors was closing on them from behind.

It was a monstrous thing. It was almost a man, a huge, lean, well-muscled man, in the same way that a transrat was almost a rat. It had been seriously bio-engineered. Its feet and hands were cybernetic implants that extruded huge steel talons. Amy realised, with rising disgust, that she could see where the bones of the hands were fused into the metal sheathing.

Flexible armoured cables corded its skin like external arteries, and its scarred, baby-pink flesh was puckered with grafting scars, and covered with sockets and surgical plugs. It was moving on all fours like a giant cat. There was a disturbing hint that its human DNA had been blended with that of a major predator, like a leopard or panther, altering its spine, hips and legs so that it could move fluidly and comfortably in quadruped form. It smelled of meat and blood and diseased tissue. Upright, it would have been easily as big as the Ice Warriors, perhaps as much as three metres tall.

Its face was a human skull that had been reinforced with chromed steel and adjusted, like a regular road car customised as a hot-rod. The jaw was huge, and the chin pointed and prominent, in order to accommodate the gleaming set of monstrous fangs. The teeth, twice the size of even adult human dentition, were coated in steel like precise medical instruments. It had a grin full of scalpels. Lip-less, cheek-less, the teeth formed a permanent smile. The crown of the skull was covered in wires, cables and tubes that formed a long, straggly mane of thick strands.

Its eyes glowed red.

It pounced.

Amy, Bel and Samewell ducked instinctively. The thing went clear over them anyway. Leaving a deep, throbbing growl in the air behind it, it crashed into the Ice Warriors.

Still cowering low, Amy turned to see what was happening. The red-eyed monster was taking both of the Ice Warriors on. The glinting steel claws of one forepaw ripped around and tore a deep gouge through the scaled chest plate of one of the Ice Warriors, driving him backwards. The Warrior hissed in pain.

His companion swung in, wielding the ornate broadsword with both pincers. The first stroke missed.

The red-eyed monster was ridiculously agile and fast.

It somehow slipped under the Ice Warrior’s next stroke, and turned as it rose behind him, burying both sets of front claws in the Martian’s back. Green battle armour shredded. Individual scales twinkled like stars as they showered into the air. Amy flinched as the red-eyed monster lunged its huge jaws forward and ripped into the back of the stricken Ice Warrior’s neck.

The other Warrior had regained its footing. As the red-eyed thing savaged his comrade’s throat, he swung the axe. It struck the monster squarely in the right shoulder. Ugly, unhealthy-looking blood sprayed from the wound. The monumental impact smashed the redeyed thing off its prey and clean through the guard rail.

It fell.

It did not fall far.

With extraordinary gymnastic skill, it snagged the struts on the underside of the walkway, and swung under the bridge, somersaulting up, free, on the other side. It landed on the Ice Warrior with the axe from behind, knocking him over, face-first, into the half-broken guard rail. Entangled, they fought brutally with each other, each one trying to break the other’s grip.

The red-eyed monster tore away first, but only so it could pull back and put all its inhuman strength into a driving hook that ripped across the Ice Warrior’s face, shredding his visor.

The Ice Warrior, mortally hurt, staggered backwards, hissing like a punctured tyre, and toppled over the torn rail. He dropped away into the flaming abyss below.

The other Ice Warrior, bleeding from his jagged wounds and ruptured scale-armour, came at the redeyed thing, swinging his sword. The thing evaded the first two strokes, and then drove at the Ice Warrior, catching the side of the razor-sharp blade with its cybernetic hand. It plucked the sword out of the Ice Warrior’s grip and threw it away. Then it went for the Ice Warrior’s throat. The Ice Warrior clawed at it, grabbing it by the neck and shoulder with his powerful clamps. Locked together, they wrestled ferociously for a few seconds.

The Ice Warrior, understanding that he was weakening and bleeding out, understanding that he was up against an adversary who was stronger, faster and essentially superior, understanding that he was effectively beaten, did what all dedicated warriors do as a last resort. Gripping the red-eyed thing that was busy killing him, so tightly that it couldn’t break free, he lurched off the walkway too. He took his redeyed tormentor to its doom alongside him.

They vanished from view in the fires far below.

Amy, trembling, looked at the two young Morphans.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ she said. ‘You know, before something else really, stupid well insane happens.’

But it was too late. There were more of them, more of the red-eyed things.

They were stalking out of the hatch and onto the bridge, advancing towards the three, defenceless humans.

Rory, Vesta, Winnowner and Jack Duggat backed into the assembly hall, trying not to make any hasty movements. Jack still had hold of his hoe, but not in any way that suggested he was likely to wield it.

The red-eyed It that Vesta had seen in the woods prowled in after them. Gazing at them, it padded through the snow like a leopard on all fours, frost glinting on its matted mane of tubes and wires. It smiled an eternal, unintentional steel smile.

It entered the wood-panelled hall, and looked around, as though sensing something familiar. It returned its crimson gaze to the four terrified humans and stared at them. Then it rose on its hind legs and stood upright like a man, an adjustment that was somehow even more distressing.

‘Oh, save us,’ whispered Winnowner. ‘What has Guide wrought?’

‘Guide,’ the thing echoed. It was a horrid, sticky sound, a rumble that was part growl and part phlegm.

Its fearsome teeth made normal speech impossible, but it gurgled the word out of a small, cybernetic vocal implant that they could see in its throat, now that it was standing upright.

It was so frighteningly tall.

‘Guide…’ it repeated. ‘I… am assigned to secure and protect… the Guide system.’

‘The Guide?’ asked Winnowner.

‘The Guide system… must not fall… into enemy hands. Aggressors have been detected… tampering has been detected… purge now under way.’

It raised one gnarled, part-metal fist and wiped droplets of blood off its awful teeth.

‘I… am assigned to secure and protect… the Guide system. It is… here.’

‘What are you?’ asked Rory.

‘Transhuman sixty-eight of one hundred fifty…

woken and refitted for this Category A emergency…’

‘Woken?’ asked Rory.

‘From… the cryo-store,’ it replied. ‘Stand aside… I am assigned… to secure and protect… the Guide system.’

They wavered.

‘I am… sanctioned to slay… anything that stands in opposition to my task…’ it said.

They got out of its way. It dropped back onto all fours and padded past them.

‘I never asked for this!’ Winnowner said. ‘I just asked for help! I never expected that any of the patients would be woken!’

Rory looked at her sharply. ‘Wait, you said “woken”

too! What do you know?’

‘Only what I must know!’ Winnowner snapped. ‘The secret that passes from one generation to the next, through the last in each line. The secret that I must pass to Elect Groan before the end of my time.’

‘I think you should share it with the room,’ said Rory, ‘because your time could be up any second now.’

‘No!’ Winnowner said.

‘What is this?’ asked Vesta. ‘Winnowner Cropper, what is this?’

‘Winnowner?’ Jack urged.

‘I will keep Guide’s secret. It is not my place to tell.’

Winnowner’s voice dropped low. ‘I will keep it to the end, for the good of all Morphans.’

‘I don’t think that’s anything like good enough right now,’ said Rory.

‘Tell us what this thing is and what it wants!’ Vesta demanded.

‘Be silent!’ the red-eyed thing growled, turning back to them and rising up again. ‘Or I will… silence you.’

‘I don’t think that would be very friendly at all,’ said the Doctor. ‘Especially not as you’re all supposed to be on the same side.’

Light levels in the assembly had shifted. The shimmering effect of the holographic telepresence field was rising like mist from the metal circle patterns inlaid in the old wooden floor. The Doctor was in their midst, sitting in a high-backed chair, facing a white control console. He got up and walked over to face the beast.

‘Sorry I couldn’t get here earlier. I was trying to tune in,’ he said. ‘Very difficult, when you haven’t got a reliable Guide.’ He glanced at Rory. ‘Everything OK, Rory?’ he asked.

‘Oh, you know, Doctor,’ Rory shrugged. ‘Apart from the Ice Warriors, and the spaceship shooting the place up, and that thing there, everything’s dandy.’

The Doctor nodded and looked back at ‘that thing there’. It growled softly.

‘A Transhuman construct,’ he said. ‘Advanced martial model. Part of an emergency protocol. A last resort. If the terraformers are threatened. The plantnations don’t have any actual weapons. They don’t have guns or anything. This is what the system manufactures if a weapon’s really needed.’

‘If the Morphans are threatened,’ said Winnowner.

The Doctor shook his head. ‘Sorry, no, actually.

They don’t really care about you. You’re just… the help.

In the long run, you’re expendable.’

‘Winnowner said she had a secret,’ said Rory.

‘I’m sure she does. Last of her generation. The dark and murky legacy. The sort of secret that would make life unbearable for the Morphans if they knew about it.

The sort of secret that makes you oh-so protective of your Guide Emanual. You had to pass the secret on eventually. Who were you going to tell, Winnowner?

Bill Groan?’

‘Mind your own business, you unguidely—’

‘Listen to me, Winnowner Cropper,’ said the Doctor,

‘I’ve figured it out. It took me a while, because I didn’t have a Guide to show me the shortcuts, but I figured it out.’

He wandered back to the console.

‘The Morphans don’t matter,’ he said sadly. ‘They are not building Hereafter for their descendants. They’re building it for their ancestors. There are around a thousand human beings sleeping here in the mountain, in suspended animation.’

‘What?’ asked Vesta.

‘It’s been misremembered over the years,’ said the Doctor. ‘Patience is such an important virtue to you Morphans. “Those who are patient will provide for all of the plantnation.” Well, “the patient” are right here.

Patients. Lined up in hibemetic capsules under the Firmer. I’m pretty sure they represent the elite of Earth before. The most powerful and influential people.

People who were convinced that they deserved to live.

People who believed they were so special they had to have a brand new world made just for them.’

He looked at the lurking shadow of the Transhuman.

‘People, in fact, who weren’t prepared to toil away their lives building a new world. They just expected the boring work to be done for them by common and disposable labourers.’

‘Th-that’s not how Guide explains it!’ cried Winnowner.

‘I’m sure Guide puts it a great deal more delicately,’

said the Doctor. ‘But that’s the size of it. And only this, only the interference of the Ice Warriors, rival colonists, is a crisis major enough to force the system to wake some of them up. A Catagory A crisis. It was enough to wake them up, and arm them for war.’

He stared at the Transhuman.

‘You’re a frightening thing,’ he said. ‘And I thought Ice Warriors were dangerous. It takes a lot of fuel to keep a metabolism like that going, doesn’t it? You’re essentially a carnivore. I thought the transrat swarms were getting out and killing the livestock, but it was you lot, wasn’t it? The first of you to be woken and released?’

‘There was… a fuel requirement,’ it growled.

‘Because the Ice Warriors had disabled most of the flesh farms that were designed to feed you during their cull of the transrats,’ replied the Doctor. ‘You and your kind needed huge hits of high calorific intake to get going.’

The Transhuman walked back into the light of the hologram field and faced the Doctor.

‘You have… no authority,’ it said. ‘The system… does not recognise you. This crisis… is almost resolved. The alien enemy… is virtually routed. Equilibrium will be…

restored.’

‘Good, good,’ said the Doctor. ‘But why don’t you tell the nice Morphans what will happen to them when you finally wake up for good? Even Winnowner doesn’t know that, does she? Tell them. In a few years’

time, another generation or two, when the terraforming is finally finished, and Hereafter is properly Earth-like, the Patients will finally wake up.’

‘This is… the plan,’ the Transhuman said. ‘The colonial scheme.’

The Doctor looked at Vesta and Jack and Winnowner. ‘When the Pilgrim Fathers went across to the New World, they took livestock with them. That’s all you are. Livestock. Doing all the hard work in the meantime, so they don’t have to. And when they wake up in Eden, you know what? They’re going to be really hungry. Really, really hungry.’

‘No!’ cried Winnowner.

‘Meat is meat,’ said the Doctor. ‘Isn’t that right, Mr Transhuman?’

‘Survival requires… certain practicalities,’ it growled.

‘Oh, everyone’s saying that today!’ the Doctor grinned.

The Transhuman lashed out. Its claws passed through the holographic Doctor.

‘Temper, temper,’ the Doctor chided. ‘You can’t touch me. I’m not really there at all.’

‘You have spoken… too much and for too long,’ said the Transhuman. It purred a grotesque approximation of a laugh. ‘Your location has been traced and identified. Terraformer Two, operations management command C, level six.’

The Doctor turned from his console in the gleaming command chamber, ignoring the hologram figures being generated around him. He’d seen something reflecting in the vast plate-glass viewport in front of him.

Behind him, three Transhuman killers were padding towards him from the hatchway on all fours, smiling their eternal smiles. A fourth followed, walking upright, herding three, rigidly frightened captives ahead of it.

Amy, Samewell and Bel.

‘You will cease… your interference,’ it snarled.

‘Ah,’ said the Doctor.

‘Don’t do it!’ Amy said, as bravely as she could manage.

‘If I don’t, Pond, it will kill you,’ replied the Doctor sadly.

‘It’s going… to kill you all anyway,’ it growled.