Doctor Who - The Silent Stars Go By

by Dan Abnett

  They both shook their heads.

  'They plan their moves way in advance,' said Amy, carrying on anyway. 'They know what they're going to do long before they get there. It was all getting a bit frantic back in that room, and he definitely wanted to save us... and I know there was a lot of improvising going on as well, because I've seen what he looks like when he does that. But he always has more than one plan.'

  'So?' asked Bel.

  'He stayed there so we could get away,' said Amy.

  'You said it yourself, Samewell, he told us to. He needs us to do something. He needs us to carry on with the plan while he keeps the Ice Men busy.'

  She checked herself and glared at Samewell.

  ' Don't correct me,' she advised.

  He shrugged and raised his hands.

  'Sabotage their sabotage,' Amy said. 'That's what he said he was going to do. Sabotage whatever sabotage the Ice Warriors had caused. Get the Firmers working again. We need the Guide to do that, to set things right.

  Rory's going to get that for us.'

  'If he can,' said Bel.

  'My husband won't let me down,' said Amy. 'So the first thing we need to do is find a way to regain contact with Rory.'

  She seemed galvanised and ready for action, as if she'd got her mojo back.

  'I think that's the second thing we need to do,' said Samewell.

  'Why?' asked Amy. 'What's the first?'

  Samewell pointed. Four Ice Warriors had appeared on another walkway high above them. The Warriors looked down, spotted them, and then began to search for the nearest route down.

  'I think getting away from here might be number one,' said Samewell.

  'Amy! Amy! Doctor!' Rory yelped. He clamped his hands to his forehead in hopeless panic, and turned in a full, bewildered circle. The centre of the assembly hall had become the centre of the assembly hall again.

  There was no sign of the polished white room with the fancy console and the high-backed seats. There was no scintillating bleed of light coming out of the metal seams inlaid in the floor and the beams. There was no sign of the Doctor or Amy.

  There was no sign of the axe-wielding Ice Warriors.

  'I don't believe this!' Rory exclaimed.

  'Where...' Sol began. He frowned. 'Where did they go? They were just here. Where did they go? Come to that, where in Guide's name did they come from in the first place? That's conjury, that is! Cat A conjury!'

  'Oh, get over it!' Rory moaned. 'Did you see? Did you see what was happening? Those tilings! Those Ice Warrior things! They were right there! They were going to capture them!'

  He looked at Sol. A flicker of true and terrible realisation crossed his face.

  'They could be dead already,' he murmured.

  'What happened? What happened?' Vesta asked, rushing back into the room. Bill Groan and the rest of the council followed after her.

  'Rory, where did it all go?' Vesta asked, grabbing him by the arms.

  'Never mind,' Rory said.

  'I will strike you on your sorry head with a mallet again, so I will!' she declared. 'Where did it all go?'

  'It got cut off,' Rory told her. 'Just cut off. The Ice Warriors got them.'

  'The Ice Warriors?' asked Vesta.

  'Yes, the thing from the woods!'

  'With the red eyes?'

  'Yes!' said Rory.

  'Oh, Guide preserve me, they got Bel too?' Vesta asked.

  'It was hard to tell,' said Rory. 'But it didn't look good.'

  Vesta looked like she was going to burst into tears.

  'Explain this commotion to me now,' Bill Groan insisted. 'Vesta came banging on the Incrypt door raving about a window into another place, with people in it!'

  'What unguidely horror have you perpetrated?'

  Winnowner asked Rory.

  'Do me a favour!' Rory snapped, rounding on her and the other muttering council members. 'Give it a rest with the unguidely this and the conjury that, OK?

  OK? It's not helping! My wife, and my friend, and her sister Rory pointed at the anxious Vesta - 'and some other bloke, just got captured by the same creatures who are messing your world up and trying to kill you off. Captured... or worse.'

  'What did your friend call them?' Vesta asked quietly.

  'Ice Warriors,' said Rory. 'The Doctor said they were called Ice Warriors.'

  'But how,' Bill Groan asked, struggling, 'did this happen here in the assembly?'

  'It was a technological link,' Rory explained.

  'Transmitted hologram images. A communication system. Do any of these phrases mean anything to you?'

  'Some of them are words that we know from our Guide Emanual,' said Chaunce Plowrite nervously.

  'That is true,' admitted Winnowner.

  'It was like they were here!' declared Vesta.

  'It was, Elect,' said Sol Farrow. 'I would not have believed it except I saw it with my own eyes. As big as life, here in the hall. They spoke to us, and could hear us and see us. It was Arabel and Samewell, and the strangers from this morning, the odd fellow and the girl with the red hair.'

  'What did they say?' asked Bill Groan.

  'I swear I did not understand much of it,' said Sol.

  'He speaks fast, the odd fellow does, and uses words I haven't the notion of. But it was clear to me that it was Cat A urgent.'

  'I understood what it meant,' said Rory. 'These things are called Ice Warriors—'

  'These things with red eyes, like we both saw in the woods?' asked Vesta.

  'That's right,' said Rory.

  'I said they was monstrous,' Vesta said, nodding and looking earnestly at Bill and the council. 'Most ferocious thing I have ever seen, it was. I barely escaped with my life.'

  'The Ice Warriors have their sights set on Hereafter,'

  said Rory. 'That's how the Doctor explained it. They want to colonise the planet themselves.'

  'They are invading our world?' asked Jack Duggat.

  'They are,' Rory agreed. 'They're going to wipe the Morphans out. This plantnation... all of the plantnations. They want this world to be colder, to suit them. But that means that the Morphans will die out, because it will be too cold to survive.'

  'They cannot have our world,' murmured Bill Groan in horror. 'We have worked so hard for it. So many lifetimes have gone by, toiling to shape Hereafter. They can't have it.'

  'The Ice Warriors have got into your Firmers, Elect,'

  said Rory. 'They've mucked up the way they work.

  They've... sort of made them do the reverse of what they were built to do in the first place.'

  'They're making everything colder?' asked Chaunce.

  'Our own Firmers?'

  'That's why the white has come,' said Bill. 'That's why winter has claimed us.'

  'Exactly,' said Rory.

  'We will stop them,' Bill Groan said firmly.

  'That gets my vote,' said Rory.

  'What did the Doctor say we should do?' Bill asked him.

  Rory shrugged. 'He said that your Guide Emanual had the answer,' he replied.

  'Of course it does!' said Winnowner.

  'The Doctor said that if he could consult the Guide, use it, he could reset the Firmer systems to undo the damage the Ice Warriors had done.'

  'And how would this be achieved?' asked Bill Groan.

  'He wants me to look at the Guide,' said Rory. 'He wants me to access it, and be ready for him when he communicates again. If he communicates again. Look, he said he was going to find another part of the communication system to use, to talk to us. Of course, that was before he got captured... Look, the Doctor's pretty amazing. He won't let us down. Let's get the Guide ready for him when he links through again. And if he doesn't, then we come up with some other plan.'

  Bill Groan thought hard and then, grudgingly, nodded.

  'You're proposing to let this stranger into the Incrypt?' Winnowner asked Bill incredulously. 'You're suggesting we let him read direct from our Guide Emanual and show it to others?'

&
nbsp; 'This man is a Nurse Elect!' Vesta exclaimed.

  'I don't care what he is,' replied Winnowner. 'This cannot be permitted.'

  'If our world is under attack,' asked Bill Groan, 'and our way of life also, and this is the only way to save it, then who are you to say that it cannot be?'

  'Who are you trusting, Elect?' Winnowner asked.

  'Guide have mercy on us all, you're trusting the word of these strangers! We have only their say that there are any of these menacing Ice Warrior things! None of us have seen them.'

  'I have, actually,' said Sol Farrow.

  'Rubbish, Sol!' said Winnowner. 'You can't even say what it was you saw!'

  'I have too, Winnowner Cropper,' said Vesta firmly.

  'You were frightened by something in the dark woods, child,' said Winnowner. 'I ask you all, in Guide's goodness, we don't know what we face here.

  But we do know there have been three strangers come among us from afar. A new star moves through the heavens, and then they show up, unannounced, claiming to be well-wishers come along in the dead of a winter's night.'

  She glared at Rory.

  'Maybe they are the real Ice Warriors,' she said. 'Did that occur to any of you? If they hope to damage our Firmers, and make winter come for ever, and so wipe us out, then maybe this is their conjury trick to get their hands on our Guide Emanual! What's wrong with you all?'

  'Winnowner is right,' said Chaunce Plowrite. 'If this man and his friends are our enemies, then we should not let them near Guide's words. We'd be handing them the very secrets that they crave. We'd be giving them the means to destroy us.'

  Everyone looked at Rory, even Vesta.

  'Oh, come on,' he said. 'Please. Please. Do I look evil? I can't do evil. I can barely pull off dangerous.

  This is one of those moments when you've just got to trust something. I'm on your side.'

  'I believe him,' said Vesta Flurrish. 'I honestly do.

  What about you, Elect?'

  Bill Groan had bowed his head. He was gazing sidelong at Rory as though that might make it easier to see some kind of answer or eternal truth.

  They waited for him to reply.

  The main doors to the assembly burst open, letting in a wall of icy chill. Able Reeper, one of Jack Duggat's men, hurtled in along with the bitter cold, lugging his scythe. He was extremely agitated.

  'Elect! Elect!' he shouted. 'You must come quick now! You must come and see!'

  'What's the commotion, Able?' Bill Groan asked.

  'Hurry, Elect!' the man replied. 'Come and see!'

  They all followed him outside into the snowy yard.

  It was bitterly cold. Rory inhaled, and the air stabbed into his lungs like a frozen knife. Able Reeper strode off across the town yard towards the Back Row and the hedges that ran along the perimeter of the Spitablefields. He kept beckoning them to follow. A lot of other Morphans were out too, roused from their beds. They were flocking in the same direction, some carrying solamps.

  It was surprisingly bright anyway. The blizzard had stopped, leaving the world under a deep blanket of snow, a thick white layer that flowed like a soft duvet over the roofs and trees and tops of walls. It looked like the deepest, richest royal icing that had ever decorated a Christmas cake.

  With the snowfall stilled, the sky had cleared. It was like black glass overhead, a polished darkness that sucked the heat out of every breath and made brief, trailing clouds. The sky was so clear, it seemed to Rory that he could see every single star that there had ever been. The spiral pattern of a galaxy filled half the sky, a trillion, trillion winking points of light. The moon was up, huge and bright, a dazzling silver disk low in the sky. The moonlight was intensely bright. It was bathing the entire landscape with a radiance that meant they could all see for miles. The snow cover was reflecting and amplifying the glow.

  Some of the stars were moving. Rory could track at least three of them, very high up overhead, moving in formation.

  A fourth was descending.

  It was growing brighter by the second. Its descent was steady and level, perfectly controlled, but it made no sound. The Morphans came to a halt and gazed up at the star as it moved directly overhead and then swung to the east until it seemed to hang above Would Be. It looked as large and as bright as the moon. The light shining from it picked up the slopes of Firmer Number Two, making the sleeping darkness of the mountain stand out against the night sky.

  It wasn't a star. Rory knew that. If you squinted against the light, you could see faint details of the structure behind the lights, vast and sleek.

  'A star has come loose and fallen down the sky,' said Vesta.

  'That's a spaceship,' said Rory.

  The Morphans of Beside, almost every single one of them, stood in the snow and looked up at the vast, bright shape suspended in the eastern sky.

  'What is that sound?' asked Bill Groan suddenly.

  They listened.

  Noises were echoing up the valley from the direction of Would Be. Similar noises could be made out coming from the Spitablefields, Farafield and the Fairground beyond the heathouses. They were ugly, ragged noises, the sound of fierce blows being traded by formidably strong opponents. They could hear the blunt force of weapons cracking armour and breaking bone. They could hear grunts of effort and cries of fury, metal striking metal, the crash and shiver of objects colliding with snow-laden trees.

  They couldn't see it, but there was some kind of battle going on in the woodland, a vast, medieval-style battle involving close quarters, hand-to-hand violence.

  'Who's out there?' asked Bill anxiously. 'Who's fighting?'

  'Some of our men?' Jack Duggat ventured. 'The patrols? The nightwatchers?'

  'It sounds like hundreds of them!' Bill exclaimed.

  He turned, pale in the moonlight, and faced his assembled community.

  'Morphans of Beside, listen to me. If the fighting moves this way, we're in danger. We have to fall back and protect ourselves.'

  'How do we protect ourselves from a star, Elect?'

  someone shouted out. Some of the community's children were sobbing.

  'Just do as I say, for Guide's sake,' Bill replied.

  'Come back into the plantnation. The bams and the grain stores are the most strongly built. Take the children there to make them safe. Sol, get guards up to protect the cattle sheds and the stockhouses. Jack, gather a force of men and form a line here and halt whatever comes our way.'

  People started to move, obeying his orders, but many simply wanted to linger and stare at the hovering star. Rory edged back through the crowd a little. He was no longer prepared to wait for permission, nor was he going to rely on his powers of persuasion.

  Everything was about to get very confused and busy.

  He was going to head directly back to the Incrypt and get access to the Guide. The Doctor was counting on him.

  He was about to slip into the shadows of the hedgerow and risk running when things suddenly got worse.

  Several long, slicing beams of energy speared down from the hovering ship. They made a keening, screaming noise that split the air. Where the beams struck, large plumes of fire belched up inside the wood. Rory, aghast, saw the black skeletons of trees silhouetted by each vivid fireball. The sounds of the blasts - gritty, ground-shaking roars of fury – echoed back to them. The ship was firing its main weapons at ground targets.

  Total panic gripped the Morphans. Screaming and shouting, some carrying children, they began to scatter in every direction.

  Rory watched the ship bombard the wood with its battery weapons for a few moments. People ran past him. He could feel the overpressure of the distant concussion as a gusting wind against his face. The ship seemed intent on devastating the entire landscape.

  He made his decision.

  Rory didn't stop running until he'd reached the assembly. There was no one inside. He could hear the panic and commotion in the streets of the plantnation.

  He could hear the crump and boom of the bombard
ment. Each blast vibrated the ground and made the building tremble.

  'Where are you going? Rory? Where are you going?'

  He turned and saw Vesta in the doorway.

  'I have to help the Doctor,' Rory said.

  'What is happening, Rory?' she asked, coming forward. 'Is it the end of the world?'

  'Not if I can help it,' he replied.

  'Is it the Ice Warriors?' she asked. 'Have they begun to kill us?'

  'I think they might have,' he said.

  'Do they intend to blow us asunder with fire from the sky?' she asked. 'Guide have mercy on us, I thought they would rather rip us apart with their teeth and talons first!'

  'Well, they don't really have those, do they?' asked Rory. 'More sort of big green clamps for hands.' He mimed them.

  She frowned at him.

  'What big green clamps?' she asked.

  'Like pincers.'

  'Who do?'

  'The Ice Warriors! Come on, Vesta. The big, green, scaly thing in the wood? With the red eyes?'

  She stared at him, bewildered.

  'It had red eyes, right enough,' she said slowly, 'but the thing I saw was not green or scaly.'

  'Oh,' said Rory, his shoulders sagging. 'All this time, I don't think we've been talking about the same thing at all.'

  Chapter

  14

  Born to Raise the Sons of Earth

  Born to Give Them Second Birth

  Ssord, the Ice Lord's axe-wielding lieutenant, handed a communicator pad to his master. Ixyldir studied its compact display.

  'Does he have an axe because his name is Ssord?'

  the Doctor asked, sitting in the high-backed chair with his chin in his hand. 'I'm just saying, it might get confusing if Ssord had a sword. Is that why you gave him an axe?'

  Ixyldir tilted his head to regard the Doctor. 'For a mammal that is about to be put down, you are remarkably talkative,' he said.

  'Oh, but that's precisely why!' the Doctor enthused, jumping to his feet.

  The Ice Warriors around him tensed slightly, thinking he was about to attack their clan lord. Ixyldir briskly raised an armoured hand to call them off.

  'You intend to kill me anyway, so I don't believe it really matters what I say,' said the Doctor. 'It's a very liberating feeling, in fact. I could insult you to your face, couldn't I, lizard-lips? It's not going to make a lot of difference. I mean, it's not going to make things worse. Death is death.'