by Craig Hinton
Two more Ice Warriors stepped through. Then Chris corrected himself. These weren’t common or garden grunts; they were members of the Martian aristocracy. The one on the left wore the smaller armour – more of a green tabard, really – and smooth helmet of a Lord. But the other... His armour was considerably more ornate, a light purple in colour inset with gold. And, centred on his chest, was an embossed representation of the face of the Martian Sphinx. The shoulders of the body armour were distinguished by two sets of three gold arches, and a third set of arches graced the metallic violet and gold helmet. The entire ensemble was finished off with a voluminous cloak, so dark a purple that it was almost black.
The ceremonial armour of a Supreme Grand Marshal, one of the eight ultimate rulers of Mars. And, presumably, one of the two Marshals who had escaped execution at the end of the Thousand Day War.
‘Welcome to G’chun duss Ssethiissi,’ said the Grand Marshal. ‘I am Supreme Grand Marshal Falaxyr-Ett-Halat, and this is my adjutant, Supreme Lord Draan-Utt-Slaar.’ He gestured to the other with a clamp. ‘Your arrival here was something of a surprise.’
Chris stepped forward. Given the Grand Marshal’s terms of address, his reply required full name and title to prevent offence. ‘Adjudicator Christopher Rodamonte Cwej, Professor Rachel Jean Anders and Dr Felice Rebecca Delacroix,’ he stated, and then wondered whether he had done the right thing. He had given their full names and titles because Martian culture respected that, and he was trying to ingratiate himself and the two scientists. Too late, he realized that he had admitted that he was an Adjudicator – the bloody skirmishes between the then Bureau of Adjudicators and certain Martian factions in the twenty-first and twenty-second century were required learning on Ponten IV – and betrayed the others’ scientific expertise. Still, tradition – Martian tradition – meant that he had to identify them all. ‘We meant no disrespect at our trespass, Your Excellency.’ A slightly blurry memory of a particular midnight drinking session with Benny came to mind; the topic had been the correct terms of address for Martian rulers. Funny; he never thought it would come in useful. Especially after the hangover. Was he always going to associate Martians with alcohol, he wondered.
‘We are the only survivors of an attack by the invaders,’ Rachel began. ‘We attempted to escape the destruction of Charon in a stunnel.’ Chris barely suppressed a groan – that was one thing he hadn’t intended for them to give away – yet. Still, Rachel had told them, and it was too late now. She continued, and Chris just hoped that she didn’t get them any deeper into it. ‘The stunnel was aimed beyond the blockade, but an equipment malfunction brought us here.’ Chris was slightly relieved; a succinct summing up that hadn’t given away the presence of the other survivors – although Rachel had given virtually everything else away.
Falaxyr nodded gravely. ‘These are desperate times, Adjudicator Cwej. We suspect that the party responsible for the invasion of Earth will soon mount an attack on Mars, and we are currently preparing to leave this planet for the Nova Martia colony. Such an exercise must be carefully planned and executed in order to escape the blockade, and the entire nest is now busy with the preparations. Of course, you are welcome to enjoy our hospitality until we are ready to leave; we will then make arrangements for your safe return to one of the human colonies on Mars.’
Chris wasn’t reassured by the Marshal’s friendly manner in the slightest; the whole thing stank of a trap. But they weren’t exactly in a strong position to argue, were they?
‘That is most... kind of you, Your Excellency.’
‘Professor and... Doctor are terms of scientific expertise, are they not?’ asked Draan. Chris was puzzled; there was a belligerence in the Ice Lord’s voice that was uncalled for. ‘In which fields are you competent?’
‘We’re all subspace engineers, My Lord,’ said Rachel. Chris was impressed by her knowledge of Martian culture. ‘We were members of the Charon subspace research team until the colony was destroyed.’
‘Subspace. Fascinating,’ hissed Falaxyr. ‘Perhaps – after you have rested, of course – you might care to discuss the subject with our own scientists?’ And that sounded more like an order than a request.
Rachel gave Chris a sideways, questioning look, and he nodded slightly, allowing her to continue. She smiled at the Grand Marshal. ‘I’d be more than happy to.’ Not that they had much choice.
‘Excellent,’ said Falaxyr, folding his arms across his armoured chest plate. ‘Then my personal guard will escort the four of you to somewhere more comfortable. I look forward to talking further when time permits. Meanwhile, please enjoy your resting place.’
With that, the Ice Warrior guards led them from the chamber. Chris was even more concerned than ever; the Martians were in possession of a subspace manipulator beyond anything his resident experts had ever seen, and Falaxyr seemed rather too keen to talk about subspace with Rachel and Felice.
They were being set up, Chris decided grimly. He just hoped that he could put them all in a better position to fight back before the jaws of the trap sprang shut. Not for the first time, he wished that the Doctor was around.
The abandoned city of Ikk-ett-Saleth was now many kilometres behind them, its secrets safe once more. The party of humans and Martians had left the city through a hidden passage revealed to them by the Abbot, who had warned them that the more obvious exit that the party probably would have taken would have sent them on a one-way trip to the molten core of the planet – Roz wasn’t impressed by Martian hospitality, given the trap they had faced upon reaching the city as well. They were currently passing through a cramped service tunnel heading north; Aklaar claimed that this was the most direct route to the next city they would need to enter on their journey to the Pole.
The atmosphere was one of nervous co-operation; two species, held apart by mutual distrust, forced together by a common need. So it wasn’t any surprise that the level of conversation between Martian and human – or Martian and Time Lord, come to that – was restrained to the odd platitude and grunt.
After about four hours of this irritating, unbroken uneasiness, Santacosta decided to throw another meaningless question onto the fire in her normal annoying manner. ‘How long before we reach the North Pole?’
Roz shrugged. Although her tolerance level was now strong enough to allow her to stomach the woman, she had no intention of getting pally. Unfortunately, it looked like the nightclub singer had singled her out as her special friend on the trek. ‘About two days, according to the Doctor. One more city, and then a direct route straight to the Pole.’ And she had stopped just short of thumbscrews to get that information out of the increasingly taciturn Doctor. His attitude just seemed to be getting worse and worse. He was currently walking at the head of the party, but there didn’t seem to be very much inconsequential chit-chat going on between him and Aklaar. As far as Roz was concerned, they looked like two ancient old Guild Interlocutors, leading the Adjudicator acolytes to prayer.
For one horrible moment, Roz wondered whether the strain of recent events was actually getting to the Doctor. Despite all that she knew he was capable of – manipulating entire cultures before breakfast, that kind of thing – she found it hard to reconcile that Doctor with the almost paranoid one at the head of the party. Had the destruction of the TARDIS been the final straw; was he cracking up on them? She sighed; even if he was, there was absolutely nothing that she could do about it.
‘Two days,’ Santacosta whined. ‘This is the most exercise I’ve done in years, Roslyn. I could have been relaxing in a jacuzzi in a private suite in Jacksonville if that blasted shuttle hadn’t come down.’
I don’t doubt it, thought Roz. Then again, I could have been sunbathing in the arboretum if the TARDIS hadn’t blown up.
‘Fascinating,’ muttered the Doctor suddenly from up ahead, giving Roz the perfect excuse to increase her stride and catch up with him. And escape from Santacosta.
‘What is?’ She had decided to seize any chance to engage him in co
nversation; anything was better than his furious silence.
He waved his hands at the tunnel walls. They were grey, and lacked the sonically carved smoothness of everywhere else. Indeed, the surface looked gouged. Not that she would have noticed; geology was not her strong point. ‘This rock should be rich with trisilicate,’ he explained.
‘And it’s not?’ Geology was definitely not her strong point. She knew of trisilicate, but that was about all.
‘Look at the irregularities; the veins have been mined.’ He turned to the Abbot. ‘Any idea why, Abbot Aklaar?’
The Abbot shook his head. ‘Something to do with the war effort, perhaps?’ But his voice was hesitant, unsure... From the look on the Doctor’s face, he obviously thought so as well.
‘Whatever the reason,’ he said with an arched eyebrow aimed towards the Abbot, ‘it’s a fascinating discovery, Roz; it looks like somebody has strip-mined all of the trisilicate from these tunnels.’
‘Is that important?’ Obviously it was, but given the Doctor’s current reticence to engage in conversation, such questions were necessary, just to keep him talking.
The Doctor shrugged. ‘All Martian technology is based on trisilicate, in the same way that twenty-first-century Earth relied almost exclusively on silicon and germanium. I suppose that it could have been something to do with the war, and yet...’ He frowned. ‘To remove this amount of trisilicate would take well over a thousand days. Although some of the surface degradation of the rock is consistent with the time of the Thousand Day War, the rest suggests that it was mined much more recently. Why would the Martians need so much trisilicate in the last few years?’
‘The exodus?’
‘No, Roz; the majority of the population would have left well before most of this mining took place.’ He tapped his nose. ‘Oh well, a mystery for another time. Eh, Abbot?’ he finished pointedly.
The Martian’s expression was inscrutable, but that wasn’t surprising given that most of his face was covered by his helmet. Even so, Roz felt certain that the Doctor had touched a raw nerve.
A sudden groan made Roz turn round. Esstar had stopped, and was leaning against the rough wall, doubled up in pain. Her clamps were pressed against her lower stomach. Surprisingly, Santacosta was next to her, offering support by putting her arm around the shoulders of Esstar’s green carapace.
‘What’s wrong back there?’ asked McGuire, stopping the party.
‘It is nothing,’ wheezed Esstar. ‘I am experiencing a little... discomfort. It will pass in a few minutes,’ she hissed, clearly in agony.
‘Well, make sure it does,’ snapped McGuire without sympathy. ‘We haven’t got time to waste on sick Greenies.’ Suddenly, Cleece’s clamp was on the human’s shoulder.
‘She is my intended mate and the future mother of my clutch, McGuire. If she is in pain, then we should wait.’
McGuire ran a hand through his thinning grey hair. ‘Mother of your clutch?’ he said softly, shaking his head. ‘You’re saying that she’s pregnant?’ He grunted. ‘That’s all we need. Little Greenie sprogs.’
Uh oh, thought Roz. She glanced at the Doctor, but his face was impassive. McGuire blamed the Ice Warriors for the death of his wife and children; discovering that one of the party was preparing to give birth to a new generation of Martians probably wasn’t the best news that he could have received.
Cleece raised his voice in pride. ‘Our clutch will be born in G’chun duss Ssethiissi – the first of a new era for our race, the first of many. The few of us who remain on Mars seek a new direction, and they shall be the vanguard.’ Noble words, but Roz just didn’t believe them. Cleece lacked the – the spirituality, for want of a better word, that the other three pilgrims virtually radiated. In its place was the barely caged belligerence that she associated with the Warrior caste.
‘Then we’ll leave her here,’ snapped McGuire. ‘If she wants to lay her eggs, then let her. We’re not running a bloody nursemaid service.’ McGuire looked at Cleece. ‘And if you want to stay with your brood mare, then that’s fine by me.’
The Pilgrim’s reaction was immediate: he grabbed McGuire round the throat with his other clamp. ‘Your disrespect is becoming irritating, vermin. I should tear your spindly carcass apart and leave the pieces here as an example.’ As McGuire’s flashlight clattered to the floor, the Doctor and the Abbot moved in to separate them. As far as Roz was concerned, it was nothing more than a display of machismo, and she actually found it rather amusing.
She turned her attention from the macho posturing and looked at the female Ice Warrior. Esstar was clearly feeling a lot better, but what she was saying to Santacosta was extremely interesting. And worrying.
‘Your assistance is most welcome, Carmen. Far more welcome than the misdirected concern of others.’ And then she stared at Cleece. ‘I need no assistance to continue the holy pilgrimage.’
Perhaps Cleece and Esstar weren’t exactly a match made in heaven. And then Roz caught the subsequent exchange between Esstar and little Sstaal. Oh dear, she realized, a Martian love triangle; just the sort of thing to make the expedition go with a bang. Literally.
Looking around, she was pleased to see that Aklaar and the Doctor had somehow managed to persuade Cleece to release McGuire, but the result was going to be an atmosphere that could only get worse. Could they manage another two days without tearing one another apart?
And then she caught a movement some fifty metres in front of them, in a direction in which only she was looking. In the distant dimness of the tunnel, she could have sworn that the familiar shape of a blue police box, its roof light blinking, was caught in the light of McGuire’s discarded torch. As she watched, the hovering TARDIS floated through the wall and vanished.
Another ghostly TARDIS? The first she had dismissed as fevered imaginings on the verge of sleep, but this one? Did dead TARDISes rise like the phoenix, or was this connected with the Martian North Pole?
With such concerns nagging at her, she and Carmen helped a recovering Esstar to her feet. Roz knew that she ought to ask the Doctor about it, but she decided to wait until he was in a better mood. If ever.
Chris’s eyes carefully scanned the route from the Grand Marshal’s chambers to their ‘resting place’ – couldn’t Falaxyr have chosen his words more carefully? – with all of his fledgling Adjudicator skills, creating a vivid mental map of the Martian base. If they were walking into a trap, he needed to know every last hiding place and possible chance of concealment; he wanted to memorize the layout so that he could later determine the best location to draw the Ice Warriors into an ambush. He also wanted to work out the relative positions of the rooms he had seen so that he stood the best chance of leading them back to the others in the abandoned parliament.
He was relieved that the other two were making his task easier by staying quiet, giving him a chance to think things out before they arrived. But arrived where? Chris didn’t trust Falaxyr or Draan in the slightest; underneath their almost philanthropic words lay the battle-hardened Martian psyche that Chris had learnt about in school history lessons and – more entertainingly – from Benny. Because, despite his friendliness, Falaxyr was a Grand Marshal, which meant that they were in a military nest.
The idea that a military nest would offer them shelter out of the goodness of their hearts was as alien as the Ice Warriors themselves. And just as dangerous.
Chris noted that they had descended a sloping walkway to a lower level. The corridors were narrower, the lighting less intense, and he got the feeling that they were approaching their ‘resting place’. That made him uneasy. Even the knowledge that Rachel and Felice might prove useful to the Ice Warriors wasn’t that reassuring; with their skills in subspace engineering, they might be, but Chris – an admitted Adjudicator – couldn’t be anything but a threat. He needed time to formulate a plan of action, but he doubted that the Ice Warriors would be so accommodating.
They came to a halt. ‘Here,’ hissed the lead Ice Warrior, pointing a clamp a
t a grey square door set in the rock. ‘You will rest here until the Grand Marshal demands to see you.’ Bashing the door with his forearm, the Martian stepped back as the door swung inwards. Shrugging, Chris took the lead.
The room was well lit and – in contrast with the rest of the rock-carved base – artificial. The walls, floor and ceiling were interlocking white sheets of some kind of heavy-duty polymer, and strangely lacking in the usual illustrations of war and conquest. Eight low cots were arranged against the farthest wall, but there was something not quite right about them...
As the Ice Warrior pulled the door closed, Chris walked over to the row of beds and threw his backpack down. ‘Everybody all right?’
‘They don’t seem so bad,’ added Felice, slipping out of the thick jacket that she had been wearing over her jump-suit. ‘I was expecting... well, I don’t know what I was expecting. I definitely wasn’t expecting to be treated like a houseguest.’
Chris put a finger to his lips before reaching into his pocket and retrieving a small grey orb. Standard Adjudicator kit – a bug-catcher. He aimed it around the room in wide, sweeping arcs, listening for the bleeps that would reveal that their hosts were watching their every move, listening to every word. A sudden chime from the orb confirmed what he had already suspected: they were being bugged. He pressed another contact on the device, and placed it on the table.
‘There, that should jam the surveillance devices, although I suggest that we still watch what we say.’
‘What do you think we’ve been doing?’ said Rachel, sitting down on the edge of one of the cots.
‘You let slip about the stunnel,’ said Chris.
Felice frowned. ‘Is that important?’
‘It’s obvious now that the Ice Warriors are the ones behind the subspace manipulator. How coincidental that a couple of subspace engineers just drop in.’
‘You think that they deliberately brought us here?’ Then she groaned. ‘Of course they did. They must have been waiting for us to generate a stunnel; as soon as we did they grabbed it.’
