The Doctor looked tired, but not exhausted. That odd brown coat of his was darker because it was so wet. His stupid spiky hair had gone flat and stuck to his scalp.
She’d guessed the Doctor would come this way. He knew there was an impassable lake on the other side of the Fortress, and the other ways in had open plazas which would be just as deadly. The Car Factory was one of the half-buildings he’d been so fascinated by, and the one that was the biggest and best landmark.
‘What’s the plan?’ Gar asked.
‘We comm the parents. Let them know we’ve seen the Doctor. Tell them we’ll wait for them to get here.’ The way Alsa smiled made Gar feel very nervous.
The doughnut-shaped factory building was vast. Over a hundred identical floors, each with a high ceiling and its own production line, all stacked on top of each other. Each line ended with its own massive door, just waiting for the finished aircars to fly out of it. The production process had been, as far as the Doctor could tell, entirely automated.
Sunlight streamed through great, wide windows. There were a few gantries and inspection ladders for people, and the Doctor used them where he could, but mainly he just walked along the conveyor belts. The floors were covered in dried-up pools of paints, glues and other liquids which must have escaped from pipes and cans over the years, when their seals had failed. It brought splashes of colour and unpredictability to a sterile white and chrome environment.
The production line, robot workers and all, had frozen in place fifteen years ago. It meant that the Doctor was now a fascinated visitor to a museum featuring tableaux of a state-of-the-art Arcopolis factory. For half an hour, he almost forgot about the Fortress, the villagers who’d be on his trail, Dela and Jall, the ghosts, the glass man and everything else. He put on his glasses to get a closer look at a few things, he tapped and prodded and danced around.
He’d found a device that was basically a sonic screwdriver but was the size and shape of a car wash.
Jeffip had mentioned it. He speculated how quickly a car could have been put together. He marvelled how every stage of the process was so flexible that each car was practically custom-built to order. In a city of 200 million people, there probably weren’t two aircars the same.
Then he’d followed the great curved path along too far, and found himself faced by the sheer black wall of the Fortress.
He did the traditional, dodging behind a great stack of engine blocks to avoid the blue energy bolt that came hurtling past. A window thirty metres behind him shattered and threw down daggers of glass and strips of concrete window frame.
The Doctor peeked through gaps in the stack. The wall was matt black, at an angle almost exactly forty-five degrees to the factory floor. Mounted on the Fortress wall, he could see the gun turret, a thin wisp of smoke curling up from the barrel.
The gnarled black walls of the Fortress looked almost fused with the smooth white concrete of the Factory.
Fifteen years ago, the Fortress would have materialised in the city, like the TARDIS materialised. Unlike the TARDIS, there weren’t all sorts of safety systems, and the things it landed on would have been instantly annihilated.
It was, while horrible, quite an elegant solution. The universe wasn’t designed to have big things like Fortresses suddenly appear from nowhere. The energy created by destroying so much matter was fed back into the transduction corridor, helping to balance the books of cosmic physics.
The Doctor clacked his tongue. He knew what the factory was made of – diamond-reinforced type five space concrete. He didn’t know for sure what the Fortress was made of – it was ugly black stuff that was probably metal or something. He wished there was someone here so he could tell him or her just how much of an expert he was on particle transduction and how all this knowledge meant he understood precisely how the Fortress and factory fitted together.
He fiddled with the sonic screwdriver, adjusting a couple of its settings with the deft touch of a safecracker.
‘There’s a problem with diamond-reinforced type five space concrete…’ began the Doctor, talking to no one in particular.
He pointed the sonic screwdriver at the roof and it squealed for a few seconds.
A crack appeared, right above the Doctor’s head. The crack spread, then started to speed up. It raced in one direction, towards the outer wall. At the last possible moment, it kinked to the left, hit a point where the ceiling met the Fortress.
A tiny piece of concrete, a pebble, fell, pinged against the Fortress wall, skipped and pinged again. The gun turret swivelled until it was pointing straight up, fired and atomised the pebble. The energy bolt kept going, slammed into the cracked ceiling. The roof shattered, and a large chunk of it dropped onto the gun, bending it in half. A moment later, a cascade of smaller pieces of concrete rained down, flattening the remains of the weapon.
‘… and that’s that it’s easy to resonate.’ He looked down at the sonic screwdriver. ‘I’ve never resonated concrete on my own before. That was fun.’
He sauntered over to the Fortress wall, thought about it for a moment, and then slapped it with his hand. It clanged like a bell. Common-or-garden ugly black stuff that was probably metal. He found a seam and opened it up, pulling back a panel that was so thick he needed both hands to hold it. Once he had slid it aside, there was a gap there just wide enough for him to squeeze through. So he did.
The Doctor had entered the Fortress.
Alsa, Gar and a couple of other kids – brothers called Coz and Moz – were running along a rubber and metal pathway that curved along the middle of this level of the Car Factory. It was easier to get around on foot here than on bikes.
‘Where is he?’ Gar moaned.
‘It’s not this floor,’ Alsa said impatiently, ‘it’s the next one up.’
They weren’t that far from where the Fortress bit into the factory. They would have had to slow down anyway.
There was the sound of shattering glass, from upstairs.
They all dived behind a nearby machine. It was a white thing, it looked like a miniature crane, with a whole set of sharp tools on the tip of its arm. Looking up at it while she caught her breath, Alsa thought it might be a robot arm.
The thought of robots that were just bits of people had always disturbed her when she was younger.
There was a crack and the sound of a rockslide.
The four of them were covering their faces instinctively. You got used to the buildings crumbling.
‘The floor above,’ Coz said.
‘The Doctor,’ Alsa agreed, not taking her eyes off the ceiling. They had to get to him before he got inside.
‘It was falling on metal, not concrete. He’s set off a bomb that’s blown a hole in the wall of the Fortress.’
‘Nah. Whole point of a Fortress is that you can’t just slap a bomb on the wall. Anything strong enough to damage the Fortress would have ripped this place apart.’
Gar was confused. ‘We have to wait for the parents.’
‘It’ll take them hours to get here,’ Moz complained.
‘They told us to wait.’
‘Wait?’ Coz wailed.
‘It took us two or three hours on bikes,’ Alsa said. ‘And they’ll be walking. We let the Doctor open a way into the Fortress. After that, we grab him. It’s been the plan all along.’
‘Has it? First I’ve heard,’ Gar noted.
‘Yeah, well, it wasn’t your plan. Can you imagine all the incredible stuff there must be in the Fortress?’
The boys all snickered.
‘I can’t, and neither can you,’ Jeffip said.
All four kids sat bolt upright. Professor Jeffip was there. So were Fladon and Dela. Dela was Coz and Moz’s mum.
‘How?’ Moz said.
‘We lived in Arcopolis long before you ever came here, Morren,’ Dela said.
‘I used to be a supervisor at this factory,’ Fladon said, talking to the other adults. ‘I was here four years, and they said the robots were foolproof,
but once, one of them broke down and…’ He hesitated. ‘Another robot had to fix it. Sorry, it seemed a lot more dramatic at the time.’
Dela laughed and put her hand on Fladon’s shoulder. ‘A lot of us worked round here, remember?’
Alsa’s blood was boiling. This wasn’t where the parents came, this was where the kids came.
‘Oh, calm down, Alsa,’ Dela said. It was exactly the same tone of voice she used with the babies.
‘How did you get here?’
‘Think about it. It takes hours to get here from the settlement. We had to get here quickly, not just wait for the call.’
‘So you were right behind us last night?’
Jeffip chuckled. ‘About an hour behind you, yes. We waited until it stopped raining.’
‘If it’s any consolation,’ Fladon said, ‘the walk’s just about worn all three of us out.’
Professor Jeffip coughed, leaning on his walking stick as he bent over. Jeffip was ancient. He was pale and out of breath. He’d just walked something like twenty miles, in the wet. Alsa admired the fact he had it in him.
‘Are you all right?’ she asked.
Fladon looked concerned. ‘If anything was to happen to you, Jeffip, the settlement—’
He waved everyone away. ‘It’s a cough. Come on.
Let’s get up there.’
Fladon knew a quick way to the next floor, and soon they were up there and edging around. All of them felt uneasy so close to the black wall, even when they saw a pile of rubble where a gun should have been.
No one else saw it, and it was a whole minute before even Alsa saw the tiny gap in the wall. The Doctor must have opened it up. There was no sign of him.
‘I don’t think I could squeeze through that,’ Fladon admitted.
‘I could,’ Alsa insisted.
‘We shouldn’t,’ Fladon warned. ‘It’s too risky.’
Alsa was running for the gap.
‘Wait!’ everyone else was calling. They were chickens.
A chicken was an extinct animal that was scared of everything. That’s what Jeffip and Dela were like. Fladon and Gar just did what they were told.
Gar was at Alsa’s side.
‘You coming with me?’ she asked.
‘No,’ he said, trying to block her way.
‘Doesn’t matter,’ she said, pushing him over. She ducked through the slit in the Fortress wall. No one else had the courage to follow her.
It was dark inside the Fortress. Black walls and no
windows, the exact opposite of the Car Factory. It took a moment for Alsa’s eyes to adjust.
She pushed forwards, found she was in a thin crawlspace between two layers of wall. She edged along.
The roof was angled, making it difficult to stand up. Her heart was racing, the blood rushing around her, scared and angry.
Alsa realised that she was already disorientated.
The ceiling sloped, she realised. The higher side was the inside. Alsa knew roughly how big the Fortress was –the outer wall was about a mile long and at the end of it was just a sharp turn then another mile of wall. What if the crawlspace floor didn’t run all that way? It was so dark, she’d just plummet.
‘Stay back!’ the Doctor’s voice hissed, and from about six inches away. ‘Stay exactly where you are, or we’ll both be killed!’
Outside, everyone was so busy worrying about Alsa and debating whether they should go back or stay where they were that it was at least thirty seconds before any of them noticed the glass man. Jeffip was the first. He didn’t say anything, just tapped Dela on the shoulder.
The new arrival was in front of a wide window. With sunlight pouring through its transparent body, it was possible for Dela to see that there were… things inside it.
A dozen or so tiny, indistinct shapes.
The humans all just looked around at each other, baffled. No one was sure what they were looking at.
‘We need to leave,’ Fladon suggested.
‘No…’ Jeffip said, his voice trailing away.
Then they all heard it, even though it was only in their heads.
‘Here.’
‘Was he talking to us?’ Dela whispered.
Dela was looking past the glass man and out of the window. A structure was pushing down through the green sky. It was bone-white, and looked like a number of flat shapes slotted together. It was difficult to judge the size, but it was immense, as large as a city block, at least. A central disc with three or four long flat pieces at a right angle to it, with smaller triangles and dozens of squares fitted at different angles to those long pieces, a little like sails on the mast of an ancient galleon. There was a glowing golden sphere beneath the disc, just hanging there.
Two others, the same size and shape, were behind it.
They were too strange to be entirely beautiful.
‘Spacecraft,’ Jeffip said. He’d joined Dela. She hadn’t even noticed him alongside her until he spoke.
‘Is that one of the people that built the Fortress?’ Dela asked, indicating the glass man.
‘The Doctor said they were all dead. He could be wrong, but… those ships don’t look anything like the Fortress.’
‘Does a spaceship have to look like a skyscraper?’
Jeffip, of course, had anticipated the question. ‘It doesn’t look like it shares anything. No materials, no design elements. No… philosophy.’
Jeffip took a step forward, and everyone else tensed up.
‘I know what I’m doing,’ he told them. ‘I have to contact these people. Warn them.’
‘I was being careful,’ Alsa complained.
The Doctor appeared in a circle of white light. Alsa realised that he’d taken the torch from her bag, which meant it had occurred to him she might have it and taken it before she’d even remembered it was there. ‘Good. Not slowly enough, though. Think of this place as a giant unexploded bomb. The slightest wrong move and there’s no negotiating or tricks, the machines running this place will kill us.’
‘I got past the defences.’
The Doctor laughed, and there was more than a hint of disdain. ‘There are thousands of defence systems and they don’t stop at the outer wall. They’re almost all on standby at the moment.’
‘Standby?’
‘You know. Like a TV that’s on but not really on… ah, I see the problem. You don’t watch enough television. You should. Five hours a day, minimum, and sit really close to the screen. OK… what’s the best way to explain? Oh…
easy. Easy-peasy: this Fortress is asleep. It will wake up if we disturb it.’
‘How do you disturb a building? It’s just, well, a building isn’t it?’
The Doctor shook his head, thought about it, then nodded.
‘That’s not much help.’
‘I don’t know the answer to your question. Inside here
are loads of detectors. They send data to a battle computer, a sort of machine with a brain—’
‘I know what a computer was,’ Alsa told him.
‘—which works out if there’s anything worth bothering with. I don’t know precisely how it makes that calculation.’
‘So we don’t know the rules.’
‘The monsters that designed this place didn’t tell anyone the rules, because they didn’t want anyone winning the game.’
The Doctor swung the torch back the way Alsa had come. ‘Right. You’ve got just as much chance of setting everything off if you go back. So stick with me. Don’t do anything unless you’ve seen me do it, don’t step anywhere I haven’t stepped, don’t touch anything unless I’ve touched it. No, scratch that: don’t touch anything. If you see a rock, don’t hit me over the head with it, if you can manage that.’
‘No promises.’ But the Doctor knew what he was doing, and she needed him around, at least for the moment.
The Doctor handed her back the torch and took out something from his pocket. The same device he’d recharged her comm with. The end lit up, there was a b
uzzing sound and a hatch on the inner wall popped open.
The Doctor smiled. ‘As long as you are the only distraction, we’ll be fine. Five times out of five. Well…
two times out of… erm… I’m sure we’ll be fine. As long as no one does anything stupid.’
Jeffip walked over to the glass man. He paused,
probably considering what to say.
It was strange. Dela felt a connection with this creature, like it knew her. She regretted that it wasn’t mutual. She wasn’t totally convinced it was alive – not even partially, like robots. Through the window, she could see the three alien spaceships. They were miles away but, between them, they filled the air. White against the green sky, they could have been freak, sculpted storm clouds with rays of sunlight peeking out from underneath them. Just about.
‘I am Jeffip,’ the old man said, so quietly that Dela and the others could barely hear him. ‘I am a native of this world. I welcome you to Arcopolis.’
But the glass man walked straight past him. Now it was walking towards Dela. It moved with such grace. The light sparkled off it. Behind it, through the window, the beautiful, pristine spaceships were such a contrast to the dilapidated towers and fallen spires of Arcopolis.
Dela was now shoulder to shoulder with the glass man.
It turned its head. For the first time, she could see its face. Dela was so close she couldn’t see anything else.
‘We are the Eyeless,’ it announced.
‘But you…’ Dela began.
It had eyes. Just the eyeballs, one above the other, not side-by-side. They looked just like a human being’s eyes, just little blobs of white jelly, but they were suspended in the transparent form of its head. With no eyelids or eye sockets, the eyes looked too large, and all they did – all they could do – was stare wildly at her.
The irises were bright green.
She recognised the eyes and so she knew where the
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