by Craig Hinton
‘You’ve never met the Ice Warriors in this time period. Unless the TARDIS databanks were lying to me.’ She had occasionally surfed the TARDIS’s memories, curious of the Doctor’s past actions.
He pouted. ‘They do occasionally, but not about this. Ice Warriors can live for nearly three hundred standard years, but Draan is too young to have been involved in the T-Mat crisis. Anyway, there was only one Ice Lord on the Moon, and that was Slaar. Brutal, sadistic and unpleasant.’
‘A typical specimen, then?’
A momentary frown was replaced by a self-admonishing grin. ‘I am getting a trifle involved, aren’t I? Then again, there was something of a family resemblance... Believe it or not, I do trust Aklaar; he represents a type of Martian I could never have hoped would exist in this time zone. Unless I’m sadly mistaken, he’s the victim of a set-up, and we had better be ready to lend a hand.’
Roz smiled. ‘I’m an Adjudicator; I’m always ready.’
He grinned at her in return. ‘So how did you let Santacosta beat you, then, O old and wise Adjudicator?’
‘Too old, too wise,’ she laughed.
Chris checked his watch. Still over half an hour left before he set off his indoor firework display. The two days he had spent in careful observation meant that he was well aware of the various routines and exercises that the Martians carried out in their oh-so-precise fashion; in just over half an hour, quite a lot of Ice Warriors would come very close to quite a lot of important corridors and intersections as they carried out their duties.
The little boy inside Chris – the one who had stared out of his bedroom window and dreamed about the Hith dogfights going on, far out in space – just couldn’t wait.
Rachel watched as Felice stepped out of the Brain-rack. She smiled and walked over to her, a look of beatitude on her face. ‘Once you’re processed, Rachel, we’ll be able to start work on the final stage of the GodEngine. Oh, Rachel, this is going to be magnificent. Forget the work we were doing on Charon – this is centuries beyond our technology, possibly even millennia. Professor Ketch would give his eye-teeth to see this. The Martians -’ Felice broke off as Yeess came over and gently escorted Rachel over to the metal assembly. She knew that there was no point in struggling – this was it.
Yeess positioned her inside the Brain-rack matrix. ‘I am sure that your brother would have understood the expediency necessary during a wartime situation.’
As the jittering tendrils of the rack reached towards her head, Rachel asked one, final question. ‘Who are you at war with, Yeess?’
The Martian’s head made little circling movements. ‘We are at war with everyone, Professor. Everyone.’
No, Yeess, you’re at war with yourselves, thought Rachel. That had been Michael’s last message, his final realization that the honour that the Martians prized above everything was nothing more than an inherited illusion. And then the Brain-rack began to infiltrate her thoughts, and Michael was replaced by seductive images of a glittering pyramid of Egyptian relics.
The Martians led Aklaar and McGuire’s party to a lower level that seemed less finished than the rest of the base: instead of polished amber walls and decorative murals, Roz noted that the surfaces of the tunnels through which they were currently being taken – they were too crude to be called corridors – were rough and unadorned.
After about ten minutes of silent trudging, the Ice Warriors motioned for them to stop. They had reached a long gallery that was dimly lit from above, a perpendicular space with four archways evenly spaced in front of them.
Behind the archways were plain white walls, an incongruous touch of artificial plastic set into the natural rock.
‘You will rest here until you are sent for,’ hissed one of their escort, before opening each of the doors in turn. There wasn’t much chance of choosing your room-mate either; they were ushered in, two at a time, according to their relative positions in the group.
Roz watched with interest as the members of the expedition-stroke-pilgrimage paired off. Understandably, Esstar was quartered with her mate Cleece, and yet Roz knew that they weren’t going to be playing happy families. Roz herself was quartered with Carmen, a situation which she was less than happy about, to say the least, while McGuire was sharing with timid little Sstaal. Mmmm. That would prove interesting. And as for the Doctor... he and Aklaar were heading into the same room. She smiled; at least the Doctor was with the one Martian whom he came close to liking.
As she entered the room, pulling off her rucksack, she looked around. The room was very different from the comfortable yet simple habitation in Ikk-ett-Saleth; it was as if a prefabricated cube of some sort of polymer had been assembled inside a medium-sized cave in the rock. There were two basic beds – large enough for the bulking frame of an Ice Warrior – and a table. There was also an object in the corner that Roz eventually recognized as a toilet.
‘Comfortable for a jail cell,’ muttered Santacosta, taking off her jacket. She smiled. ‘Sorry about earlier, Forrester.’
‘What? Trying to kill me? It happens all the time in this job – you should know that. But don’t worry – I’m not one to bear a grudge,’ she replied sardonically.
Santacosta shrugged. ‘The joys of being an Adjudicator; sometimes you have to get down and get dirty because of the bigger picture.’ Then she frowned. ‘What do you mean – this job?’
Before answering, Roz pondered the woman’s words. She remembered her recent career, when being an Adjudicator had been the be-all and end-all of everything – she and her partner, Fenn Martle, fighting for truth, justice and the Imperial way. She then remembered his death – as if she could ever forget it, short of having the memories surgically removed again – at her own hands, when she had discovered the first signs of the cancer that was infesting the Guild and the Empire itself. Now she and Chris were exiles from their own planet, their own time, simply because they had held onto their ideals while everyone else had sold them to the highest bidder.
But Santacosta was an Adjudicator from an earlier, simpler time; the Guild didn’t even exist in the twenty-second century. She belonged to the Adjudication Bureau, an organization which still believed in the outdated ethics for which Chris and Roz had been condemned.
‘What is the bigger picture, then?’
Santacosta shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, Roz, but that’s still confidential – explain what you meant earlier,’ she insisted.
Roz thought for a second, but knew that she only had one course of action if they were to gain some sort of advantage over the Ice Warriors. Reaching into her trousers, she pulled out her Adjudicator ID – the one item that she could guarantee to keep with her at all times. Sometimes, she was even more sentimental than Chris. ‘Does this give me sufficient clearance, Carmen?’ She leant back and waited for the reaction.
Santacosta examined the small black wallet, her face impassive. Roz knew that the formal credentials of an Adjudicator had remained virtually unchanged since the formation of the Bureau; even though the badge was, by her time, purely symbolic – advanced forgery techniques meant that the only true identification was a sub-dermal chip – it should still have some effect on Santacosta.
She wasn’t mistaken.
‘Where did you get this?’ Santacosta asked urgently. ‘Where?’
‘At my graduation ceremony on Ponten IV. I can assure you that it’s genuine.’
‘ “Roslyn Sarah Forrester, Class of 2955”... what is this telling me, Roz? What are you telling me?’
‘That I’m also an Adjudicator from over eight hundred years in your future. The Doctor and I are time travellers; that blue box that appeared just before he cancelled your Transit-web is all that remains of his space-time vehicle.’
Santacosta threw her head back and laughed. ‘A time-travelling Adjudicator? And yet... those moves you tried on me were definitely Raven-training – if a bit on the rusty side.’ She passed the badge back. ‘Okay, okay, suppose I accept what you’re telling me. My God, it�
�s hardly the sort of story you’d come up with to impress me, is it?’
Roz grinned. ‘Hardly – I’m not known for my overactive imagination. Nor am I known for my trusting nature, but we’re going to have to trust one another, Santacosta. Because, unless you’re the most inept Adjudicator in the Bureau, you must have noticed that this situation is spiralling out of control.’
‘If you mean the preponderance of Warriors in a so-called religious nest, then yes. If you mean the way that your friend shut down the Transit-web -’ She frowned. ‘Not very clever.’
Despite the Doctor’s recent aberrant behaviour, she knew that he wouldn’t have done something like that unless there had been a very good reason. She hoped. ‘I told you that the Doctor and I were time travellers?’
Santacosta giggled with a faint trace of her songbird persona. ‘One of the less believable aspects to your story, but yes.’
‘The emphasis is on the were. Our – our time machine blew up three days ago. But that blue box which was floating towards your T-web was some sort of after-effect, I suppose. According to the Doctor, it would have interacted with the subspace field and caused a massive explosion.’
‘Really?’ replied Santacosta, fixing Roz with her near-black eyes. ‘I heard him say that as clearly as you did, but the important question is: do you believe him?’
Roz opened her mouth to protest, but suddenly realized that she couldn’t. Not any more. Perhaps she needed to trust Carmen Santacosta a lot more than she needed Santacosta to trust her.
‘Rooms designed for human habitation, Aklaar. Doesn’t that strike you as odd?’ The Doctor pointed at the toilet in the corner. ‘Almost as if they expected your pilgrimage to have included others.’
The Abbot continued folding his shimmering cloak in the ritual manner of the winding sheet of Oras. ‘Extremely odd, Doctor.’ He placed the cloak on one of the two beds, laid his thick wooden staff next to it, and then lowered himself into a sitting position, ignoring the jolts of pain which resulted from the movement. Martians were long-lived – on those rare occasions that they failed to die an ‘honourable’ death – and could expect to continue for nearly three centuries. But Aklaar was over two hundred and eighty, and easy prey to all of the vicious ailments of old age. After six months of pilgrimage, his joints burnt as though they were on fire, and his exhaustion was almost tangible.
But he felt no desire to sleep; he knew that he had to talk to this Doctor, this infinite well of secrets that appeared to know each and every facet of Martian life and tradition, and yet could not give his trust freely.
‘But Oras has taught us to relish each diversion from the expected as a fresh challenge to fortify the soul.’ Aklaar gestured around the room with a clamp. ‘This mystery will undoubtedly unfurl in a myriad of wondrous and awesome ways.’
‘Oras? Oras?’ The Doctor hurled his hat at the prefabricated wall with unwarranted anger. ‘Oh, Aklaar; you quote parables and aphorisms and attribute them to an Osirian who died thousands of years ago, an Osirian who considered your race as nothing more than insects, little crawling things which occasionally proved useful when he needed a Sphinx or a pyramid building. The Osirians were all alike, Aklaar: selfish and duplicitous. And if they ever deigned to acknowledge you, it was as their servants and inferiors. Horus never uttered a single word that you attribute to him!’
Aklaar nodded sagely. ‘I know. The Osirians were exactly as you described them, Doctor: callous godlings whose extinction was a blessing for the universe. But know this first, before you condemn our religion so offhandedly: a faction of our race – even then, seven thousand years ago – knew that by committing our entire race to war we were dooming ourselves to the same fate, the same extinction, that befell the Osirians. They took advantage of the race memories and legends that had sprung up around the Osirians, and created a new religion, one based on compassion, on peace. They hoped that even this thread of pacifism could restrain our baser instincts; if not, it could serve as the nucleus of a new age. This is that new age, Doctor.’
But the Doctor’s look of venom didn’t change. ‘In four thousand years’ time, a liar and a criminal called Maximillian Arrestis will create a religion called the Lazarus Intent, preaching exactly the same holy tenets. He wanted power and immortality, Abbot. What do you want?’
Aklaar cast his gaze to the smooth floor as he considered his answer. The Doctor’s intimation that he was a time traveller came as no great surprise; there were quite a few references to time travellers in the all-encompassing history of Mars. Quite apart from the tales of the Osirians – who had discovered time travel but abandoned it as a sterile waste of their talents and a sociological dead-end – there was the mischievous alien called the Monk who had allied himself with a military nest many years ago, and those stories surrounding Grand Marshal Paxaphyr’s disastrous attempt to seize control of the human’s matter transmission control centre on Earth’s moon. On that occasion, the time traveller had called himself... Aklaar looked up sharply and stared the other in the face, almost unable to believe it. Surely this couldn’t be the same Doctor who had thwarted Paxaphyr and Slaar’s conquest? Then he remembered the question.
‘What do I want, Doctor?’ He opened his clamps in supplication. ‘I want what all followers of Oras want. What all followers of Oras have always wanted. Forgiveness for our sins. And peace.’
McGuire threw his rucksack onto the bed and looked around the room. ‘Oh, very cosy. You Gree-, you Martians really know how to treat your guests.’
Sstaal tried to view his surroundings charitably, but he knew that he could never have described it as being cosy. But that didn’t explain McGuire’s outburst – the room had clearly been tailored for humans, and he should have been pleased. ‘I do not understand your displeasure, Antony. Steps have been taken to make this room suitable for human habitation.’ He pointed a clamp towards the object to his right. ‘That is a latrine, is it not?’
McGuire had taken off his thick jacket and thrown himself onto one of the beds. ‘What’s the difference? Or do you crap in the corner like most lizards?’
Sstaal removed his rucksack, making sure that the Sword of Tuburr lay flat on the quilted fabric of the bedding, and then sat on the other bed. Crap meant defecate, and that was something that Martians did rarely. So rarely that their dwellings didn’t even need separate areas for it. ‘No, Mr McGuire. Millions of years ago, our race was migratory, and we evolved so that almost all of our waste products were recycled. This armour boosts even that efficiency – nothing is wasted.’
‘What a perfect life you must have, Sstaal,’ McGuire sneered. ‘You don’t even have to go to the toilet. All the qualities of a galactic master-race.’
Sstaal understood the reference, but still didn’t understand McGuire’s belligerence. ‘We are pilgrims -’
‘Cut the crap, Sstaal.’
Sstaal was puzzled by yet another scatological reference. ‘But I have already told you that we do not need to defecate.’
McGuire sat up on the bed, his eyes narrowed. ‘That’s not what I meant. You may be a typical Martian pilgrim – short and stunted and unable to talk without falling over yourself – but your big Warrior friends killed my wife and children. And you expect me to sit here and listen to a dwarf bastard like you stuttering away about your spiritual leanings?’
Stunned by the ferocity of the verbal attack, Sstaal coldly considered McGuire’s words. As Martians went, he was small. From his earliest days in the seminary, he had been ridiculed about his stature, and he could only assume that the constant, cruel ridicule of his peers had led to his general nervousness and his unfortunate stammer.
Sstaal was still only a teenager in human terms, but he would happily have given up the hundreds of years of life that lay ahead of him to be built like Cleece. Despite McGuire’s theories, all Martians should possess the stature and bulk that characterized their race across the solar system, whether they be pilgrims, warriors, artificers or farmers. Sstaal was a
deformed runt, he knew that only too well; and that insecurity was always there, a furious sandstorm barely held at bay, always ready to overwhelm him and plunge him into depression. Growing up, he had stared at his larger brethren with all-consuming envy, never fully accepting that he might possibly have gifts – such as his intellect – which they might have coveted.
Which made his feelings for Esstar all the more puzzling. What could he offer the proud Esstar that she couldn’t get from Cleece? Why had she even deigned to look at him? He looked at McGuire, a strange feeling shooting through him like a burning stomach cramp, as if he had eaten too many hot okk-tet leaves. With a sudden flash of realization, he knew that it was anger. Without thinking, he stepped forward, bearing down over the small human being.
‘Neither of us has a choice in this, McGuire,’ he whispered. ‘We must stay here until Lord Draan is ready for the ceremony. So we can either sit here in silence, or attempt to have a civil conversation. If you cannot conduct the latter, I would prefer the former, since I find your constant xenophobia offensive. Your race has no reason to be proud of its barbaric behaviour either.’ There, he had said it. As the green haze that had flickered around his field of vision faded, he wondered whether Esstar would have been proud of him, before remembering with another sickening feeling that she was quartered with her mate. The anger continued. ‘Thanks to your people, Mars is a lifeless, soulless world -’
‘I’m sorry, Sstaal.’ McGuire’s voice was quiet, lost. Soulless.
The Martian was momentarily lost for words. His outburst had simply been a means of shutting up the human. Sstaal had never expected that it would invite an apology. He gathered his thoughts before replying.
‘Silence or civility?’
McGuire forced a smile. ‘I just don’t feel comfortable here. After talking to Aklaar over the last few days, I thought that I was beginning to come to terms with your race, but this ...’ He patted the bald spot on the top of his head. ‘And I shouldn’t have been rude about your size; I’m not exactly the tallest man on Earth, am I?’
