by Dan Abnett
A man with a pitchfork rushed the green thing, trying to run the tines through its deep torso. He yelled as he charged. The green thing tossed aside the axe, which disappeared through the trees, spinning end over end and making a slow whupping sound like a ceiling fan, and raised its left pincer. The movement was fast and oddly precise for something so stiff and ungainly. The pincer neatly caught the thrusting pitchfork between the tines and blocked it. The man lurched and stumbled as his pitchfork stopped moving. The green thing tightened its clamping grip and snapped the head of the pitch fork off its wooden shaft. The man holding the pitchfork jabbed the broken end repeatedly against the thing’s ridged torso. The green thing pointed its right pincer at him.
There was a small tube attached to its forearm. It was a weapon of some kind. The discharge made a nasty, throbbing sound, and the air seemed to warp and bulge. Caught by this twisting, pressurised force, the man dropped dead.
Rory was running by then. In attacking the green thing, the men had entirely forgotten about him. The sheer, clinical brutality of its response had proved to Rory that his first instincts had been correct. The giant green figures were not to be bargained with. They were lethal and malicious, and they existed only to be avoided at all costs.
Rory’s ears were ringing from the awful sonic discharge of the thing’s weapon. Even though it hadn’t been aimed at him, it had given him an awful headache and, from the blood he could taste on the back of his tongue, a nosebleed.
The other men – those still on their feet – were fleeing too. Rory gasped as he heard the sonic weapon fire a second time. The air shimmered and buckled, and a man fleeing a dozen metres to Rory’s left crumpled into the snow, rolled over, and lay still.
The next one was going to be him.
There was no cover.
The next blast was definitely going to kill him.
They left Beside and followed the North Lane track up past the frozen well and out of what Bel called the Spitablefields. These large, gently sloping areas were blanketed with snow, but the Doctor and Amy could see that they had been carefully cleared and ranged into strips for cultivation like a market garden. Amy noticed lines of planting canes and frames, all edged with snow like ermine, left over from the growing season. The pathway itself, a climbing track, was screened on the settlement side by a box hedge that, snowbound, looked like a giant frosted slice of key lime pie.
Dogs barked in the village below.
‘What was that?’ asked the Doctor, stopping to listen.
‘Dogs,’ said Bel.
Amy looked back. An afternoon whiteness was beginning to hollow out the blue of the sky, and the vapour around the mountains had become more of a haze. There was a smell in the air that she associated with approaching snowfall. It was a smell she had cherished as a little girl.
‘Not dogs,’ said the Doctor.
They continued. Beyond the Spitablefields and the hedged track line, a stand of trees marked the edge of snow-dusted woodland.
The Doctor stopped again. He cocked his head to one side. ‘Did you hear that?’ he asked.
‘What?’ asked Amy.
‘That sound. I know that sound.’
‘What sound?’ asked Amy.
‘Just dogs,’ said Bel.
‘No, the other sound. It’s a long way off, but it’s carrying. It’s distinctive. I know that sound. Where have I heard it before?’
Amy listened. ‘I can’t hear anything,’ she began, and then stopped. ‘Oh, wait,’ she said. ‘I heard something then. A funny noise.’
The Doctor nodded. ‘A funny noise…’ he echoed.
He turned around suddenly and stared at the hedge.
‘I think you should come out,’ he said.
A man stepped out of the shadows.
‘I think you should tell me where you’re going, Arabel,’ said Samewell Crook.
Rory ducked behind a tree. Dread had a grip on him, and he desperately wished that breathing didn’t make so much noise. Exertion combined with panic was making the air suck in and out of his lungs in gasps. The sound was going to give him away.
He’d heard two more of the blasts, the ear-shredding throbs of the green thing’s energy weapon. The second blast had been accompanied by the agonised yelp of a man being felled by lethal, contorting air. The green thing was close. What did it want, apart from to kill them all? Was it trying to eliminate witnesses? Witnesses to what? Was it just out for revenge for getting an axe swung at it?
Was it after something else that Rory couldn’t begin to imagine?
His mind was all over the place. It was hard to focus. That was shock and the panic response. He forced himself to concentrate. He needed to listen. Hiding behind the tree, the only way he could tell how close the green thing was, was to listen, but he couldn’t hear anything over his own panting. He held his breath. It was a considerable effort. He held on, and listened. It felt like his eardrums were going to burst.
After a few seconds, he heard deep, crunching footfalls in the snow, the steady march of the towering monster. It was drawing level with his hiding place.
There was nowhere else to hide. Snow was all around, a white backdrop against which he would stand out, no matter where he went. Trees were no good. Sooner or later, you could walk around a tree. There were no boulders, no bushes, no holes in the ground.
He heard the crunching footsteps again, and a wheeze of respiration to go with them. It reminded him of his own need to exhale. He eased out the breath he had been holding in, trying to do it soundlessly. He so wanted to greedily suck in fresh air.
The green thing appeared about twenty metres to his left, side on to him. It emerged from between two trees and stood still, slowly scanning to left and right.
Rory, gently and ever so slowly, melted himself back around the tree trunk he was sheltering against, putting it between him and the creature.
It turned and looked his way.
How could it have seen him? He was barely moving. The thing looked like a giant, humanoid reptile. Did reptiles have acute sight? Hearing? Did they have other senses? How did they hunt? He had a feeling that he’d once read something about crocodiles having amazing night vision.
Rory realised that terror was flooding his mind with jumbled thoughts. Nothing he was thinking about really mattered. He had to find an escape route. What the Doctor would call a ‘wise exit strategy’. What Amy would call a ‘not at all stupid bit of proper running away’.
Amy.
Rory knew he simply had to see her again. He wasn’t going to let a giant shambling lizard kill him in a snowy wood for no good reason. His wife would never let him hear the end of it.
He broke cover and started to run again, this time in a path perpendicular to his original route. A hasty glance over his shoulder told him that the green thing had spotted him. It had turned to blunder after him. Had it detected movement? Heat?
Heat made a kind of sense. He clung on to the notion.
Why wasn’t it shooting? Why didn’t it fire its horrible gun? It could just bring him down and save itself the effort of chasing.
There seemed to be only three possible answers to that. It had run out of shots, which seemed unlikely. That was one. The second was that he was out of range.
The third was that it wanted him alive.
‘Slow down!’ hissed Amy.
The Doctor was leading the way up the snowy track into the woods with the sort of indefatigable and boundless enthusiasm only he could muster. She scrambled to keep up.
‘Are we taking him with us?’ she asked.
They both glanced back.
Arabel was following them, with the young man in tow. Samewell was a pretty good-looking bloke, Amy had to admit. He was fresh-faced and cheerful. He seemed trustworthy. He was having an argument with Arabel as he pursued them up the lane.
‘It’s a Cat A crime,’ Amy heard him saying. ‘A Cat A crime, Bel! What are you doing with them?’
‘I’m looking for Vesta.
’
‘But you let them out, Bel! What will the Elect say?’
‘I don’t know, Samewell? Are you going to tell him?’
‘I ought to!’ declared Samewell. ‘Come on, stop and talk to me! Think about this! You’re consorting with conjury!’
‘I’m looking for my sister,’ Bel replied. She kept walking, pulling her long skirts up a little so they didn’t get trodden into the snow.
‘The Elect will find Vesta,’ said Samewell. ‘Where is your patience?’
‘Shut up, Samewell.’
‘Those who are patient, they provide for all of the Plantnation,’ he said.
‘Don’t quote Guide’s words at me!’ Bel snapped.
‘I think we’ll let him come with us,’ the Doctor told Amy.
‘Because if he goes back, he’ll tell them where we’ve gone?’ asked Amy.
The Doctor nodded. ‘I don’t think he’s going to overpower us singlehanded,’ he said.
‘I think he’d like to overpower her singlehanded,’ said Amy.
‘What?’ asked the Doctor.
‘He fancies her,’ she replied. ‘It’s obvious.’
‘Because they’re arguing?’
‘Why else did he follow us? He could have just raised the alarm.’
The Doctor frowned thoughtfully and nodded. ‘Keen insight, Pond. The mysterious operation of the human heart. Good job.’
He came to a halt. They had climbed quite a way into the skirts of the woods. Would Be, Bel had called it. The Spitablefields fell away behind them. They could see the village of Beside and, south of that, the glint of sunlight on the glass roofs of the heathouses.
‘Would Be,’ said the Doctor, looking at the shadowed trees and their bright mantles of snow. ‘The original Morphans looked at this world, and imagined how it would be. Like a declaration of intent.’
‘I thought she was saying “Wood B”,’ said Amy.
‘She probably is,’ replied the Doctor. ‘That’s probably all it was originally. A territorial designation. Wood B. The hospitable fields. Even the name of the settlement. Hmmm. What’s the betting?’
He turned to Bel.
‘Is the third plantnation called Aside?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ she replied.
‘How did you know?’ asked Amy.
‘Oh, a wild guess. Aside, Beside and Seeside. Sites A, B and C.’
‘Ah,’ Amy smiled. ‘So Seeside isn’t beside the sea, then?’
‘I imagine not, though I do like to be beside it,’ said the Doctor.
They walked on for a moment, not talking, listening to the breathless hush of the wood and the crunch of their footsteps and the half-audible bickering coming from behind them again.
‘What is Hereafter?’ Amy asked.
‘It’s a colony world, a human colony world,’ said the Doctor. ‘Late expansion, Diaspora Era. Think of the name, Morphan?’
‘Like orphan?’
‘Yes, but also referencing the terraforming or terramorphing processes these settlers were supposed to perform. To colonise a suitable, Earth-like distant world and make it more Earth-like.’
‘Earth-ish?’
‘Indeed.’
‘Where’s the real Earth?’ Amy asked.
The Doctor shrugged. ‘Somewhere in the past. I think the Earth and the solar system are gone. The end of their natural lifespan. Humans had to find somewhere else. Think about the name Morphan again.’
‘How long have they been here?’ asked Amy. She had been to times when the Earth had been abandoned before, but the idea that the world no longer existed seemed especially melancholy.
‘Generations,’ replied the Doctor. ‘Many generations. Twenty-seven, she said. Lifetimes of backbreaking toil and hard living. It takes a long time to shape and tame a world, even an Earth-ish one. All their labour, all their effort – the Morphans will never get to enjoy it or benefit from it. It’s simply for the benefit of the future generations.’
‘So what exactly is the problem?’ asked Amy. ‘You’re worried about the snow.’
‘The process has gone wrong,’ said the Doctor, quietly enough that neither Bel nor Samewell could overhear. ‘For some reason, the terraforming programme has abruptly failed. Hereafter is becoming less and less Earth-like. The Morphans came here to plant a nation, but now they’re simply going to die out.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know,’ said the Doctor.
‘You’ve got a hunch, though.’
‘It could be that it was never meant to be,’ said the Doctor. ‘It could be that Hereafter was too difficult a world to convert. Or a fault might have developed in the main atmospheric processors. Or…’
‘Or?’
‘Nothing,’ he said quietly.
‘Or what?’ she snapped.
‘Really, nothing.’
She gave him one of her looks.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘It could be… that there’s some kind of influence at work here. I’ve seen… something like it before, once or twice.’
‘What sort of influence?’ asked Amy.
‘Let’s not worry about it until I’m sure,’ said the Doctor. He began to stride along the snowy path between the trees with great purpose. ‘Let’s hope it’s a glitch. A processing glitch that I can fix.’
‘A glitch?’ asked Amy, narrowing her eyes to look at him.
‘Not even a glitch.’
‘No?’
‘Less than a glitch. Smaller than a glitch.’
‘Glitch-ish?’ she asked
‘Exactly!’ declared the Doctor. He looked back at Bel. ‘Which way from here?’ he called brightly.
Rory doubted he could run much further. His legs and lungs were hurting from the effort, and his heart was pounding. He could barely draw a deep enough breath. There was cold sweat on his spine under his clothes. This was certainly not the way he’d have chosen to spend Christmas.
He smelled something suddenly. It wasn’t a strong smell at all, but against the clear, pure atmosphere of the woodland it stood out sharply. It was a warm smell, wet and metallic, like the linty steam of a laundrette, or the outflow of the industrial washing machines at the back of Leadworth hospital. What was that? What could possibly be warm and wet in a place so locked in by ice and snow?
He came through a stand of trees to a lip of rock. A bank fell away below him, thick with slithered snow. Below him was a river. It was quite broad, falling steeply down the rocky throat of a gorge to his right into the steep cut basin below him. The far side, steeper than the one he stood on, was densely packed with trees.
The river, once it had cleared the jumbled, snow-covered undergrowth of the gorge, was ten or twelve metres across. It had frozen over with a thick crust of ice that had been overlaid with the previous night’s snow. It looked like a broad stretch of pale concrete. The gorge clearly trapped cold air over the open stretch of water.
Rory glanced over his shoulder. The green thing was still in pursuit, trudging through the trees, occasionally raising a clamp-hand to snap branches out of its way. It was thirty metres behind him and closing. Rory had speed on his side, but not stamina. The thing just kept going. Rory knew he’d have to rest soon. He was exhausted, as if he’d run a marathon only to find there was no one waiting for him with a tinfoil blanket and a bottle of orange squash.
He made a snap decision. The density of trees on the far side of the river looked as though it offered the best chance of hiding he’d seen all day. The river was an added plus too. The green thing was big and evidently heavy. Rory doubted the ice, even though it looked like bullet-proof plate glass, would support a weight like that.
He hurtled down the bank, almost falling and rolling. He kept his footing, skidding down the snow like a downhill skier. He picked his way through the snowy rocks and boulders by the river’s edge, sliding on small, trapped puddles of ice, and reached the river.
Rory knelt down, reached out, and tested the ice with his hand. He applied firm p
ressure. It felt rock solid. As a nurse, he’d seen plenty of people brought into casualty with hypothermia and worse after falling through ice into ponds and lakes. Going out on ice was a stupid, stupid risk to take. Then again, none of the accident victims he’d seen being wheeled in on stretchers had taken to the ice because they were being chased by a two-metre-tall, bipedal crocodile with baleful red eyes and a ray gun.
On cue, the green thing appeared at the top of the slope behind him. The afternoon sunlight flared off its pie-segment red lenses as it turned its ridged head to look at him.
Rory got up. He put a foot out onto the ice, let it take his weight, and then gingerly stepped clear of the bank. It was slippery, despite the dusting of snow. It felt like a window lubricated with washing up liquid under his feet. He took one step, and then another, arms wide for balance, teetering. The ice beneath him creaked. It made the sorts of popping, squealing protests that polystyrene packing made when you got a new TV or microwave out of its box.
He wobbled. He took another step. Another. Another.
He glanced back. The green thing was coming down the slope after him, surefootedly negotiating the deep snow. It had a clear view of him. It could shoot him now. He was an open target.
He took another step. He took another. He was almost halfway across.
The ice gave out under him.
He plunged straight down into the river as though a trapdoor had slammed open underneath him. The moment he went, he knew he was done for. Even if the shock of the freezing water didn’t actually kill him stone dead, he was miles from help and medical attention. His body temperature would drop sharply, and never recover. He would seize up and die.
He went under, right under the water. He was braced for the terrible cold. It was so cold, it seemed to burn him. Then he realised it wasn’t cold at all.
The water under the crust of ice, fast-flowing and brisk, was warm. The water was warm.
Rory floundered, baffled. He struggled for the surface. Above him, he saw daylight. The ice had given way in several places, its disintegration prompted by the hole he had caused. The warm water was eating away at the edges of the plunge-hole, like a corrosive agent at work, broadening it and creating a channel.
