by Craig Hinton
But the dump had not been destroyed by Burkitt’s men: the Martians had sabotaged it themselves. Abrasaar had done the unthinkable: he had lured the humans into a trap by transmitting a false message using an old, broken code that he knew would be intercepted. Such behaviour was irreconcilable with the Martian war ethic, a codex which embodied honesty and honour above all else. Indeed, after the war had ended, many historians concluded that the battle of Viis Claar had so shocked the Martian military that their own edge was subsequently dulled. It would explain why the War ended soon afterwards.
Abrasaar was presumed to have been one of the legions of the dead, one of the twenty-five thousand humans and Martians who had been vaporized when the anti-matter cannons and sonic piledrivers held in the dump had exploded in an all-consuming fireball of plasma and gamma radiation that had washed up and down Viis Claar.
Obviously, that presumption was wrong.
‘So, Abrasaar, you do value the truth,’ said Falaxyr, his reptilian face twisted in a cruel, satisfied smile. ‘After your conduct at Viis Claar, I had begun to doubt it.’
Aklaar looked over at his pilgrims, but neither Esstar nor Sstaal would meet his gaze, preferring to stare at the floor rather than accept their spiritual leader’s true identity. Only Cleece could look the Abbot in the face, but he was wearing an expression of awe and wonder that disgusted McGuire. Disgusted? McGuire realized that his feelings for Aklaar were unchanged; seventy years ago, he may have been a member of the Martian high command, he may have lured fifteen thousand human soldiers to their deaths... but he was now an Abbot of the Holy Order of Oras. Aklaar had embraced his new life, turning his back on a past of blood, and he and his followers had taught McGuire to accept his own pain and move forward.
McGuire knew that Aklaar was a different person from Abrasaar, even if the Abbot’s pilgrims – two of his pilgrims – were having difficulty accepting the fact. He walked over to Aklaar and put his hand on his shoulder.
‘Abbot? Are you all right?’
Before the Abbot could reply, the Grand Marshal stepped forward. ‘Well, well, well, Abrasaar; I see that your pathetic attempt to hide yourself in the spineless Order of Oras has even attracted vermin to your cause.’ Falaxyr sneered. ‘Still, it is of no consequence.’
‘What do you really want, Falaxyr?’ said Aklaar. ‘My pilgrims and I were invited to G’chun duss Ssethiissi to participate in a ceremony of peace. Obviously, that is not to be the case; you and peace should not be mentioned in the same breath.’
‘You mouth the words, but is the belief there, I wonder?’ Falaxyr retreated behind his desk. ‘But fear not; there will be a ceremony.’ He gestured towards one of his guards, who walked over to Sstaal. ‘There is one thing that I need, Abrasaar; one thing that I have searched this planet for. After the war, its location was unknown, but my agents eventually tracked it down; I found it an irony of the highest order that it should be in your possession.’
‘The Sword of Tuburr.’ The Doctor watched as the Ice Warrior took the serrated blade from Sstaal. ‘You engineered the pilgrimage to bring the Sword here.’
Falaxyr gave the Doctor a look of disdain, if the curve of his mouth was any indication. ‘Who is this mammal?’
McGuire had asked himself a similar question on a number of occasions over the last few days, but he wasn’t surprised when the Doctor took up the challenge. At last the Doctor had been proved right about the Martians.
‘I’m the Doctor, Grand Marshal Falaxyr. Is your adjutant around?’
‘Draan?’ His mouth suddenly indicated that a frown was going on under his helmet. ‘What part does he play in this?’
‘I just wondered whether he was as incompetent as his father.’
Falaxyr stepped forward. Even though he was shorter than most Martians, he still towered over the Doctor. ‘You know of Slaar?’
The Doctor grinned. ‘I should do. Thanks to me, his attempt to invade Earth was a complete and utter disaster. Thanks to me, the Third Wing of your mighty space fleet flew straight into the sun.’
Falaxyr laughed. It was a brittle, empty laugh. ‘Mad as well as impudent.’ He turned back to Aklaar, ignoring the Doctor. McGuire suspected that the Marshal had just made a serious mistake. ‘As we were saying, Abrasaar, I brought you here because of the Sword.’ He reached out and took it from his guard, twisting it so the light sparked off the sharp teeth and ornate hilt. ‘I need it.’
‘To further your petty ambitions, no doubt,’ countered Aklaar. ‘In the seventy years since the end of the war, have you brooded and festered in this nest of evil, Falaxyr? If so, it would not surprise me to learn that it has addled your mind.’
‘My mind is as keen as this Sword, Abrasaar. And my plans are far from petty. Once I have succeeded, Mars will once more be our sovereign territory. We will be masters of Mars.’
‘And this plan has something to do with establishing a monopolar magnetic field around the North Pole?’ asked the Doctor quietly.
‘Your mammal is inquisitive, Abrasaar.’ But Falaxyr sounded irritated rather than impressed. ‘Yet perhaps it is time to show you our great work. Indeed, it would only be right and fitting, since you were one of the architects.’
Despite the obscured face, McGuire knew the expression under Aklaar’s helmet. Pure, unrefined horror.
The journey to the manipulator chamber was quiet, and Chris could only assume that most of the Ice Warriors who had survived his delightfully noisy firework display were busy trying to sort out the mess.
‘Here.’ He indicated the ten-metre-wide metal door.
Roz turned to Santacosta. ‘This is it, Carmen. The reason why you came to the North Pole.’
‘A fat lot of good it’s going to be without backup,’ she complained. ‘Still, I can’t deny being curious. From what Professor Ketch was saying, it’s far beyond anything he could come up with.’ She frowned. ‘Not that it’ll mean a lot to me – I’m hardly a subspace engineer.’
Chris pushed the centre of the door, and waited as it swung open. As soon as the gap was wide enough, he gingerly poked his head into the chamber, alert for Ice Warriors. But, to his relief, the only people in the room were Rachel and Felice. He beckoned Roz and Santacosta to follow him in
‘Felice! Rachel!’ he called out, trotting over to them.
They didn’t turn round. One side of the glass pyramid had been removed, and some of the artefacts had been taken out and placed on the cold stone floor, glittering cables still attaching them to barely visible power sources, buried deep in the heart of the pyramid. The two women were working on the artefacts: Felice was examining the base of a canopic jar, while Rachel was sitting on the floor, holding the head of a statue of Anubis, but they were totally oblivious to Chris’s cries.
Chris tapped Felice on the shoulder. She turned and looked up. ‘Hello, Christopher,’ she said cheerfully, before returning her attention to her stone head and carrying on working away with a probe as if nothing had happened.
‘I don’t like this,’ said Chris to the others. ‘It’s as if they’ve been hypnotized or drugged.’
‘Brain-rack,’ stated Santacosta. ‘Nasty technique – introduces alien thought patterns into the human mind. It wears off, but while they’re under the influence, they’re completely susceptible.’
‘Can we break the conditioning?’ asked Roz. Chris knew she was thinking about the mind control used in their own time, which could only be broken using psychotropic drugs. The fact that the end result was a person free of mind control but clinically insane was another matter.
Santacosta chewed her bottom lip. ‘There’s not been much research, although I do remember something about ECT ...’
‘ECT?’ asked Chris.
‘Electro-convulsive therapy – applying controlled electric shocks to the brain. Although the Martian neural pathways are dominant, they’re not stable. ECT causes them to break down prematurely.’
Chris was horrified. This ECT sounded barbaric, but if it was the
only way to free Felice and Rachel from Martian control... He looked around the chamber for some source of electricity, but realized that he knew so little about Martian technology that a power-point could be staring him in the face and he wouldn’t have spotted it.
But Roz must have been reading his mind. ‘Try this.’ She held out a pencil torch, and Chris recognized it as the twin of the one he had found in his first-aid kit. The one that had provided some added kick to the jamming device which was still interfering with the Ice Warriors’ communications.
‘Perfect!’ He pulled it apart, revealing the small yet incredibly powerful battery within. He then reached into his pocket and pulled out his last reserves of filament.
‘Where did you get that from?’ asked Roz.
He grinned. ‘Leaving present from the Doctor.’ Pulling off two twenty-centimetre strands, he attached one to each terminal of the battery, and then stripped the insulation from the last centimetre of the wire. ‘What sort of voltage do we need, Santacosta?’ Not that he knew any way of regulating the output from the battery with the equipment available, but at least it made him sound as if he knew what he was talking about.
‘As high as possible, and as brief as possible. The pathways are extremely delicate; a short burst at high voltage should be enough to shake them loose. She’ll have a headache, but she’ll be free of the Greenies’ mind control.’
Chris chewed his bottom lip. ‘I don’t like this. I don’t like it at all. But if there’s a chance, well, we’ve got to take it.’ Of course, the chance was that he would burn out Rachel’s mind, and the woman hadn’t exactly given her consent. He made a quick adjustment to the circuitry around the battery with a small probe that had been lying next to Rachel, making sure that the current was discharged through the wires rather than the bulb. He nodded at the scientist. ‘You’d better grab her.’
As Santacosta and Roz laid gentle but ready hands on Rachel’s shoulders, Chris switched on the torch. The two filaments were now live. He hesitated, but it was the only option. He brought his hands together, touching the bare ends of the filaments to Rachel’s temples as briefly as he could.
The result was immediate: she went rigid, her back arching before she collapsed. Santacosta supported her, and laid her on the floor. ‘She should come round in a few moments and be in full possession of her faculties.’
On cue, Rachel started groaning. Chris knelt down beside her. ‘Easy, Rachel.’
Rachel’s eyes managed to focus on him. ‘Oh, Chris,’ she whispered. ‘I tried to fight it, but I couldn’t. Their thoughts were in my head, telling me what to do...’ Her eyes were misty as she fought back tears and tried to regain her normal self-assured composure.
‘It’s all right, Rachel,’ he said, trying to comfort her. She was suffering from the typical reaction to mind control: feelings of impotence and degradation. He looked over at Felice, and found himself dreading her release from mental slavery; the thought of her elfin features twisted in guilt and self-disgust was not one he was looking forward to.
‘No, it’s not all right. You don’t know what they’re doing here. It’s monstrous.’ She glanced at the partly dismantled gold and glass pyramid. ‘We’ve got to destroy that thing before it comes on-line. If they get that working...’ She shuddered. ‘You don’t know the consequences.’
‘Then you’d better tell us,’ said Santacosta curtly. ‘I’ve come a long way to find out what this is, and I’m rather impatient.’
‘It’s called the GodEngine,’ Rachel replied quietly. ‘And it’s a weapon. An enormous weapon.’ She nodded towards Felice. ‘Please; free Felice.’
‘That’s not an option, I’m afraid,’ said Roz. She was examining the interior of the torch. ‘You’ve fused the battery, Chris.’
‘Damn!’ Chris snapped. ‘All right, we’ll take her with us. We’re sure to find another electrical source.’
Rachel shook her head emphatically. ‘She won’t go. The GodEngine is her life now. Take her with us, and she’ll turn hysterical; the Martians will find us straight away.’
‘We should go,’ said Santacosta. ‘The longer we stay here, the more chance of being discovered. At least we’ve got Rachel. If we survive this, she might know enough to explain this GodEngine to Ketch.’ Chris frowned, but said nothing; this woman was hard.
Roz put a hand on Chris’s arm. ‘She’s right, Chris. We have to retrench. Once Rachel tells us about this GodEngine, we might have a better chance of saving the Doctor and the others.’
Throwing a regretful backwards glance at Felice, Chris shrugged. ‘We’ll go back to the service tunnels below the complex. We’ll be safe there.’ And then he looked at Rachel. The horror that lurked behind her eyes indicated that the GodEngine was her biggest nightmare. Would any of them be safe if it was as bad as she seemed to believe?
Leaving Felice with her canopic jars, Chris and the others left the GodEngine chamber. But as he walked through the doorway a terrifying thought occurred to him.
If the GodEngine had to be destroyed, would he have to kill Felice in the process? More importantly, could he kill Felice?
Aklaar had known that Falaxyr was obsessed. Obsessed with power, obsessed with glory, and obsessed with the Martians reclaiming Mars. He just hadn’t expected his fellow Grand Marshal to dedicate himself to a plan that was both insane and unworkable.
‘The Ssor-arr duss Ssethissi?’ he said. ‘You are telling me that you have built the Ssor-arr duss Ssethissi?’ It had been a longshot even then, a last, desperate idea from an Eight-Point Table bereft of choices.
‘The Engine of Ssethiss,’ muttered the Doctor. ‘What an intriguing name. Of course, a less mythical translation would be GodEngine. Been playing around with Osirian technology, have we?’ And then he tapped himself on the forehead with his hat. ‘Of course; the WarScarab. From warriors to scrap dealers in one easy move. How are the mighty fallen.’
Falaxyr squeezed his clamps together. ‘It was left here, Doctor. It is our legacy.’
‘You don’t know what you’re doing, Falaxyr; Osirian technology is far beyond your comprehension. You’re like clutchlings playing with sonic disruptors,’ he said desperately.
Falaxyr laughed unpleasantly. ‘You don’t know what we’re doing, Doctor. The GodEngine is our greatest triumph. With the GodEngine, we can reaffirm our supremacy and take our rightful place in the galaxy.’
‘What is the GodEngine?’ asked Esstar.
Falaxyr stared at the ceiling in supplication. ‘Nothing short of our apotheosis.’
‘It’s a weapon,’ explained Rachel. ‘The Osirians – they’re some ancient race of aliens who influenced both Egyptian and Martian civilization – left a lot of technology on Mars. For thousands of years, the Martians ignored it, partly because it belonged to their gods, and partly because they didn’t understand it. But when Earth retaliated against the attack on Paris, the Martians knew that they had to match our own technology to stand any chance of winning. They knew that the Osirians’ technology was based on subspace manipulation, and they knew that the Martian Sphinx was something to do with that. For the last seventy years, they’ve been trying to turn the contents of the Sphinx – and the crashed wreckage of an Osirian starship – into a weapon.’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘They’ve almost succeeded.’
Roz was both fascinated and worried. ‘But what is it?’
‘When it’s finished, the GodEngine will be able to manipulate the electromagnetic, gravitational and subspace fields of stars. It causes stars to emit coherent, superluminal beams of plasma. It’s an FTL plasma cannon!’
Santacosta shook her head, snorting. ‘A giant death ray? Oh, come on.’
Chris raised his hand. ‘Hear her out, Santacosta. She’s the scientist around here.’
Rachel smiled, but it didn’t touch the fear in her eyes. ‘The technology they’re using is so far beyond anything we’ve even dreamed of. The whole assembly is powered by a nano-accretion disk and a magnetic monopole, and we can’t even
solve the equations for that yet.’
‘But does it work?’ asked Roz.
‘It will do, once Felice has finished. She’s the genius around here.’ Chris was amazed; Rachel’s feelings towards her assistant had definitely changed, and he briefly wondered whether it was a side-effect of the Brain-rack. But she dismissed his apparent look of disbelief. ‘No, I mean it. The reason that the Martians have been working on the God-Engine for seventy years without success is that they didn’t know what they were doing. They had a rough idea of the equipment they were using – the Martians are far more intelligent than a lot of people believe – but not the information that would allow them to bring the GodEngine completely on-line. But Felice knew – God knows how, but she knew. After they – they took us over, she was able to understand the inscriptions round the base of the GodEngine. The Martians thought they were nothing but prayers to the cult of Oras – they were written in an archaic and virtually unknown Martian dialect – but they weren’t. They were the instruction manual. Don’t ask me how, but Felice was able to decipher the language and see where the problem was. They were so very close, but without Felice’s knowledge...’ She obviously remembered Santacosta and Roz’s questions.
‘If Felice finishes what she’s doing, the GodEngine will be ready to come on-line. They still need something which appears to be an ignition key, but once they’ve got that, the GodEngine will be able to fold the subspace manifold around stellar cores. It can create polarized funnels of subspace and accelerate coherent plasma down them. Imagine it: a plasma gun powerful enough to incinerate planets, to ignite superJovians, to turn stars nova.’
‘Well, that settles it,’ stated Roz. ‘We’ve got to put a stop to it.’
‘And that’s the Ssor-arr duss Ssethissi?’ asked Sstaal quietly after Falaxyr’s explanation. ‘A bringer of death?’
Esstar was equally horrified. The fact of this abomination’s existence was appalling enough; the intimation that their beloved Abbot was something to do with it was blasphemy itself.
