by Dan Abnett
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 th
e 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.
Chapter
16
Guide Us to Thy Perfect Light
'Oh well,' said the Doctor, 'if you're going to be like that. I think it's time to act with a little honour.'
'What?' asked the upright Transhuman.
'He was talking to me,' hissed Lord Ixyldir.
The Ice Lord leapt out of hiding and swung his war sword at the towering cyborg beast. The stupendous blow hit it in the neck and it lurched sideways. The Transhuman uttered a strangled, drawn-out gurgle of pain and outrage as it toppled.
Bel screamed.
Before Ixyldir's blow had even landed, his squad of Warriors had joined the assault, lumbering like tanks from their concealment behind pipework and workstations. Ssord led the charge, swinging his barbed axe wide.
The Transhumans howled and sprang forward to meet the attack, claws and fangs bared.
'Amy!' the Doctor yelled, beckoning to Amy, Samewell and Bel. 'Get out of the way!'
The cyborg monsters were too busy with the Martian assault to bother about the three humans. Amy, Samewell and Bel rushed over to the Doctor at the workstation.
'Get down!' the Doctor cried. 'Get into cover!'
'I thought we were dead in all sorts of different ways then!' Amy cried.
'We still could be!' the Doctor replied. 'Get behind the console! This is going to get nasty!'
The battle was already a savage and hideously brutal melee. The Ice Warriors put all their cold-blooded fury into every strike and hack of their blades.
The Transhumans ripped back with claws that sliced through scaled plating. They possessed extraordinarily robust physiques. They had been built to be proof against the lethal sonic disruptors that the Ice Warriors had used against the transrats. They shrugged off all but the deepest and most savage cuts of the wicked Martian blades.
Ixyldir withdrew his sword after his first blistering attack to find that his target was already back up and attacking him. Talons lacerated his cape and punctured his pectoral and shoulder guards. Fangs bared, the Transhuman went for his face. Ixyldir smashed the creature in the side of its reinforced skull with his war sword and knocked it onto the floor. It rolled, rising again.
One of the Ice Warriors was already down, dead or dying on the floor. Another was torn and wounded.
Despite being driven, determined and possessing greater numbers, the Ice Warriors were still not going to win the fight.
The Doctor turned back to the hologram.
'Rory Williams Pond!' he yelled. 'Do it now if you're going to do it at all!'
In the assembly hall, the Transhuman turned with a snarl. One of the humans, the smaller male, had slipped away while it had been occupied with the holographic interloper.
It sniffed, tracking him.
'Run, R
ory!' Vesta screamed.
Rory was doing more than running. The key that Winnowner had slipped him while the Doctor was distracting the red-eyed beast had opened the padlock of the rear doors. He rushed towards the Incrypt hatch and pressed his palm on the checker.
The hatch opened. He ran into a vault lit by blue neon light. It reminded him of a really naff nightclub.
There was a raised console in the centre of the floor, a white dais.
He ran to it. His palm-print woke it up.
The Guide opened. A column of digitised information erupted like a fountain from the middle of the dais. It just kept going, generating layer after layer of shimmering holograms: diagrams, data blocks, code sequences, text and picture information.
'Oh my god,' Rory mumbled, pressing keys and buttons at random. 'There's so much stuff! There's too much stuff! I don't even begin to know where to look!'
He thought hard, frantically. The hologram of the Doctor was back in the hall, too far away to consult.
How was he going to find anything? How was he—
He thought hard. He tried to stay calm. How hard could it be? Though the Morphans had forgotten the technical aspects of the system, it was probably designed to be a user-friendly, multi-purpose device. It shouldn't be any more tricky than figuring out the basic functions of a new laptop, or the apps on a smartphone.
He had a fundamental advantage over all the Morphans: he was accustomed to basic interactive technology.
He looked at the streams of overlapping data pouring out in front of him. Amongst it all, he saw a single, small icon:
?
He touched it.
It dissolved. Virtually incomprehensible 3D data continued to blossom around him, but the ? Was replaced by two more simple icons: a human hand and a human mouth.
Did he want to enter his question manually, or by voice?
He touched the mouth.
'Speak request,' said the voice of Guide.
'I need you to open access to the entire Guide database via...' Rory hesitated. Where the hell was it?
What had the red-eyed thing said?
'... Terraformer Two, operations management command C, level six!' he yelled, remembering.
