by Craig Hinton
The door from the antechamber had led them into a wide, square corridor with mirror-polished stone walls, their amber surfaces engraved with impressive carvings of battles and wars. A vivid reminder of who they were dealing with, as if they needed one. As far as anyone in the twenty-second century was concerned, the Ice Warriors had deserted Mars after losing the war. The seemingly operational base that Chris, Rachel and Felice now found themselves in definitely suggested otherwise.
Chris stopped them as soon as they passed through the door into the corridor. He didn’t want to frighten them, but he knew that he had to give them some warning.
‘I know I might be telling you the obvious, but I don’t think this is an abandoned base,’ he said.
‘Really?’ said Rachel sarcastically. ‘I would never have guessed.’
‘Aren’t you surprised?’ he asked.
‘What, that there are still Martians on Mars?’ She shook her head. ‘I’ve known for a long time. My brother told me.’
‘Your brother?’ said Felice.
Rachel held up her hand. ‘It’s a long story, and I don’t really want to go into it at the moment. But yes, Chris, I knew. So we’d better be on our guard.’
Chris pondered her words. There was some link between her brother and the Ice Warriors – but what sort of link was it? Did she share her time’s hatred of the race, or was it something more complicated? Knowing the way his life was going, Chris guessed that it was something more complicated.
A sudden noise made them all look round; the secret doorway was sliding back in place.
‘Oh shit!’ exclaimed Chris. He’d been so pleased with himself about opening the door, he hadn’t thought of the consequences. If there were still Martians about – and it was best to assume that there were – they would now know that there were intruders in their base.
‘Let’s find that attractor and get out of here,’ he stated. ‘Before we get caught.’
They moved quietly and vigilantly down the corridor, the silence only broken by intermittent chirps and bleeps from Felice’s tablette as it scanned for the emissions characteristic of a subspace attractor. Suddenly it started screeching, a banshee wail that echoed up and down the corridor before she could shut it off.
‘Got something!’ she snapped, ignoring Chris’s urgent ‘shush’. ‘We must be right on top of the attractor to get readings like this.’ She showed the display to Rachel. ‘Wouldn’t you agree?’
Rachel nodded. ‘Somebody is playing around with subspace, all right.’ She gave a low whistle, infuriating Chris even more – didn’t these women have the word ‘stealth’ in their vocabulary? ‘Actually, a damned sight more than playing around,’ Rachel continued. ‘From these readings, I’d say that they could punch a stunnel through the blockade without breaking into a sweat, and probably reach the other side of the galaxy before they ran out of steam.’
Chris exited the conversation as Rachel began to talk about subspace inertia and quantum drag and looked around, hoping to see some way of getting the group out of the corridor where they could be spotted at any moment. He had no intention of being apprehended by whatever was running the base; the Daleks notwithstanding, in the twenty-second century the Ice Warriors were particularly nasty.
And nasty meant nasty; despite the friendly demeanour of the Ice Warriors he had met at Benny and Jason’s wedding, he knew that their forebears were generally some of the most belligerent, unreasonable and downright vicious bastards in the galaxy. The probability of a friendly reception was, at best, remote.
And that was just the Ice Warriors; there was still the chance that this was a Dalek base, one which history had never recorded. Indeed, it was far more likely that they were the culprits, given their advanced technology. Although history gave the date of the Dalek invasion of Mars as much later in 2157, Rachel and her colleagues were living proof that history wasn’t immutable.
‘Rachel,’ he hissed urgently. ‘We’ve got to find a hiding place. The presence of the attractor is a pretty damned big pointer to somebody still being around.’
Rachel nodded. ‘According to the readings, the attractor’s about five hundred metres behind this wall. Then again, the wall’s laced with that peculiar alloy, and that’s distorting the readings.’ And then she chewed her bottom lip. ‘Odd; not even a trace of trisilicate.’
‘Is that important?’ asked Chris.
‘Probably not. Anyway, there’s got to be some way of getting through this wall; a door, or something.’ She strode off with the others in tow. Chris just hoped that he wouldn’t have to dredge another Martian song up to get them in. Not for the first time since they had arrived on the planet, he cursed the fact that Benny wasn’t with them. It wasn’t that he resented her wedding; of course he didn’t. But why did the TARDIS’s resident expert on all things Martian have to choose this precise moment to take a temporary leave of departure? Even a copy of her seminal work on Mars – ‘Down Among the Dead Men’ – would have been welcome, but his was sitting on a bookshelf in his bedroom in the TARDIS – not that that was much use to anybody any more.
About three hundred metres down the corridor, the amber rock was interrupted by an inset square of embossed bronze about ten metres across, a doorway – presumably – decorated with a bas-relief of the Ice Lord features of the Martian Sphinx.
‘So how the hell does this one open?’ Rachel complained. ‘More Martian aerobics?’
‘I’m not sure about this,’ said Chris. ‘And this isn’t what I meant about getting out of the corridor. I can’t believe that they’d leave the subspace attractor unguarded.’ Although checking out the attractor was their main purpose, Chris had hoped that they would find a way of investigating it without a frontal assault. Before he could say anything, however, Felice stepped forward and gave the door a hard shove. He tried to stop her, but it was too late; without a sound, the door began to move.
The square opened in exactly the same way as the previous one – backwards and up – but unfortunately revealed very little: the room was dimly lit and details were difficult to make out. At the same time that the doorway had opened, a duet of high squeals issued from Rachel and Felice’s tablettes, confirming their theories about the attractor being shielded.
They stepped into the gloom, and Chris switched on his torch and cast the beam around the room – any Ice Warriors would have been warned of their entrance the moment the door had opened, so he was hardly advertising their presence. The beam caught the far side of the room, and suddenly the chamber was flooded with reflected light.
It was the subspace attractor.
Chris looked at the attractor, frowned, and then shook his head. This was not the sort of thing he would have expected to encounter on Mars. Then again, after the Sphinx, Chris realized that he should have expected anything.
‘From the degree of bone splintering to his spine, I’d say that Professor Esteban was killed by a blow far in excess of that capable by a normal human assailant,’ said the Doctor as he rose from his crouch over the corpse. ‘Mr McGuire; we need to talk.’
No, thought McGuire, we don’t need to talk. Vince had been killed by the Greenies, and that was all there was to it. Ikk-ett-Saleth was probably infested by the reptilian bastards, and they had made the first move. He turned to Madrigal.
‘Madrigal; organize a recce across the city. Arm them with that stash of plasma pistols that you have been hiding in your rucksack.’ Did she really think that he wouldn’t realize that she was packing? ‘Shoot to kill.’
A hand suddenly descended on his shoulder. He looked round to see the Doctor. ‘Aren’t we over-reacting a tad, Mr McGuire? It was indiscriminate bloodshed which led to this current situation; hasn’t the time come for humanity to think first and act a tiny bit later?’
Bleeding-heart liberal! McGuire’s wife and children were dead because the Martians had acted first. A group of Greenies had infiltrated the Montreal monorail company, waiting until rush-hour to detonate a series of small fu
sion bombs on a large number of tracks. Small fusion bombs, but enough to derail three hundred and ten trains. And enough to consign his wife and two children, off to do their Christmas shopping, to their graves. Although the murderers had never been caught, the presence of Martian ideograms carved near the bomb site was definite proof of who was responsible as far as McGuire was concerned – they were inhuman reptile bastards who deserved to die. He suddenly realized that everybody was looking over his shoulder. He followed their gaze.
And saw the four Martians who had just walked out of the grove of twisted blue trees and felt his hatred collapse into a super-dense black hole of sheer, vicious anger and hatred. ‘You -’
Roz’s arm was around his throat, the pressure firm on his Adam’s apple. ‘Make a move and you’ll end up like Vincente here.’ She moved closer and whispered into his ear, ‘Don’t make any rash decisions, Antony; wait and see what’s going on, first.’ He tried to sigh – rather painfully – but realized, not for the first time, that the strength of his dislike of the Martians could sometimes prove to be a hindrance. He forced himself to rein back his anger and wait. If he waited, an opportunity might present itself.
The Martians stopped about five metres away. ‘May the beneficence of Oras rain down upon you,’ hissed the smallest of the four, a slightly stooped figure in the tabard, cloak and pointed helmet of a Martian Lord. He was supporting himself with a thick, gnarled branch – almost a small tree – surmounted with a pearly sphere trapped between the stumps of two truncated branches. ‘I trust that the hospitality of Ikk-ett-Saleth has left you refreshed?’
‘Why did you kill him?’ McGuire growled with some considerable effort. Roz increased the pressure in response.
The Ice Lord walked forward, flanked by the others. They were dressed in the ridged green carapaces and helmets that marked them as Warriors, but something wasn’t right... With a frown of disbelief, McGuire realized that one of them was female, with the slighter body and the characteristic dorsal spine of her gender. As he watched, she moved past him and over to Esteban’s body, kneeling to examine him.
She looked up and stared at McGuire through her glassy visor. ‘We overheard your conversation. This was not of our doing. We are pilgrims, taking the holy path to G’chun duss Ssethiissi. Why would we harm fellow travellers?’ She stood. ‘That would be an affront to our order.’
‘You must admit, though,’ said the Doctor, stepping forward and staring up into the female’s face, half a metre above him, ‘a mysterious death and your sudden appearance would seem to be a remarkable coincidence.’
The largest of the three Ice Warriors waved a clamp at the body. ‘Had he faced us in combat, his head would have been cleaved from his neck. This trifling wound would be an insult.’
‘Be quiet, Cleece,’ snapped the female. ‘Your posturing will not help this situation.’ She turned back to the Doctor. ‘Are you the leader of this group?’
The Doctor shook his head and nodded at McGuire. ‘That honour goes to Antony McGuire over there.’ McGuire gave an inward sigh of relief; given the Doctor’s previous behaviour and knowledge of the Greenies – not to mention his friend’s arm round his neck – McGuire had briefly entertained the possibility of some sort of arranged ambush, engineered by the Doctor to deliver them to his allies.
The Ice Lord executed a deep bow in McGuire’s direction. ‘I am Abbot Aklaar, spiritual guardian of these children.’ Returning to his full height, he pointed his staff at each of the Ice Warriors in turn. ‘Cleece, Esstar and Sstaal.’ McGuire noticed the final Martian, a decidedly small specimen who lurked nervously in the background. A nervous Ice Warrior? That was a first.
‘If you are from a religious nest,’ said the Doctor suspiciously, ‘why are you all wearing Warrior armour?’
‘During our pilgrimage, we have faced many dangers – the wilds of our home planet are brutal and unforgiving. Without the protection of Warrior armour, we would have perished,’ explained Aklaar.
Roz released her grip, and McGuire rubbed his bruised throat. ‘Can you prove this?’ she asked.
Aklaar looked round the group of humans. ‘We have been observing you; your actions – and your success in reaching Ikk-ett-Saleth – suggest that you have an expert in our culture in your party.’
‘He’s the stiff,’ Madrigal pointed out with her usual lack of tact. ‘What are you getting at?’ But McGuire couldn’t help looking at the Doctor; if anyone in the expedition could be considered an expert, it was him.
‘A student of our ways would recognize this.’ Aklaar reached into his hide cloak and pulled out a small silver-blue object, not dissimilar to a melted treble clef symbol. ‘This lies at the heart of our faith.’
The Doctor snatched it from the Abbot’s clamp and held it up to the light of the artificial morning. He raised an eyebrow. ‘Utet-Sak-Oras ... the Divine Sight of Horus. Then again ...’ He leant down and irreverently snatched the tablette from Esteban’s death grip. With a brief tap on its keyboard, he held the symbol up to its sensor port and examined the readings. Clearly satisfied, he pocketed the object and replaced the tablette in Esteban’s unfeeling fingers. ‘The metallurgy readings show it as genuine – hand-drawn from an Osirian star-sapphire. I believe you.’ But McGuire couldn’t help but notice a worried tone in his voice.
The Doctor unexpectedly voiced McGuire’s own concerns. ‘But if you didn’t kill the Professor here... who did?’ Then again, the Doctor couched it in considerably friendlier terms than McGuire would have done.
‘Just because these ones are pacifists, it doesn’t mean that their relatives aren’t around here somewhere,’ said Carmen Santacosta nervously. ‘This horrid vile city could be crawling with them, hissing away with their nasty sinister voices.’
‘This city is under the Interdict of Oras,’ intoned the Abbot, ignoring the singer’s insult. ‘No Martian, be they pilgrim or warrior, builder or serf, would dare to transgress its holy boundaries.’
‘But you’re here,’ Roz pointed out.
Sstaal raised his clamp. ‘The – the importance of our holy mission is such that the Abbot was able to obtain permission from the Parliament of Seers,’ he stammered. ‘No interdict can prevent our holy passage.’
McGuire suddenly noticed the Doctor’s expression. He was staring at Sstaal, or rather, at Sstaal’s backpack. Sstaal and Cleece were both carrying large backpacks, fastened across their chests with two black leather straps. But Sstaal’s was different: a large serrated sword with an ornate hilt was strapped to the top.
‘So what is a group of pilgrims doing with the Sword of Tuburr?’ the Doctor whispered. ‘Unless I’ve mistaken Pilgrim Sstaal’s sword for the legendary symbol of the Martian military ethic.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘Or has the law forbidding the forging of copies been revoked in the last few years?’
The chamber was about five hundred metres across, with a circular floor enclosed by a hemispherical bowl of similarly polished light brown rock, brightly lit by a knot of fluorescent fungus at its summit. To the left and the right of the doorway, banks of controls were set into the smooth walls; and, from the preponderance of translucent amber inlaid into the metal surface, Rachel immediately recognized the technology responsible – Michael had gone on about it in his letters frequently enough.
Martian.
But the identity of the agency behind the subspace attractor itself wasn’t quite as clear as that. The attractor took up an entire quarter of the floor space, a pyramid half-buried in the farthest wall. A pyramid of ancient Egyptian relics.
‘Tell me I’m seeing things,’ muttered Chris, mirroring her own thoughts. He had walked up to the attractor and was staring at the incongruity. ‘Tell me this isn’t what it looks like.’
Felice shrugged. ‘Come on, is it that unexpected? We know that the Martians had a Sphinx; it’s obvious that whatever influenced the ancient Egyptians also influenced the Martians. This is just another example.’
The attractor was basically a glas
s pyramid with a polished golden frame inscribed with tiny glyphs, although the top third was a solid block of gold. Within the glass walls, there were three levels; like some bizarre museum exhibit, each of the levels was packed with Egyptian artefacts. Rachel recognized statues of the jackal-headed god Anubis, and guessed that some of the others were gods such as Isis and related members of the Egyptian pantheon. There were smaller pyramids, canopic jars, scarab beetles and carvings of hounds, as well as needle-shaped pillars like the one that stood on the banks of the Thames. Rachel doubted that a better collection of Egyptian relics existed outside of the British Museum or the exhibition on the Moon.
‘Incredible!’ Felice exclaimed, waving a hand around the chamber. ‘In subspace terms, this place is so hot you could fry an egg. I never picked up any of this outside. The readings are off the scale – and that’s the recalibrated scale.’ She turned to Rachel. ‘Scratch what you were saying about this having the power to reach across the galaxy, Rachel; this beauty could drop someone off in Andromeda before paying a visit to the next Local Group.’
‘But what exactly is it?’ asked Chris. ‘Is it like your stunnel projector on Charon?’
‘Not exactly,’ Felice replied. ‘On Charon, we could only weaken the boundaries between our dimension and subspace, create an entry and an exit point, and project matter through the tunnel we had created. This is far beyond anything mankind is capable of.’ Her voice was reverential, and Rachel didn’t blame her. The technology in front of her was at least two centuries beyond their own researches on Charon, and that had been a state of the art installation. The only scientist in the Alliance who ranked above Rachel was her old mentor, Doctor Ketch, the Emeritus Professor at Alpha Centauri; and Gregory had vanished from the scientific arena about the time of the Black Fleet’s first attacks on the outer planets.
She nodded. ‘From the readings it’s giving out, I’d say that it could manipulate the fabric of subspace itself.’ She thrust a finger into the simularity that Felice had brought up. ‘Look at the level of Higgs’s radiation. Creating a stunnel would be child’s play to apparatus like this.’
