Following the second eight’s departure into the maze of a web Messothel had created, Fysus and Arial met every night to toast their mission and every day they made small preparations. As the next lunar cycle loomed, they told Gathen about their plan. He was a politician and afraid of losing his position more than anything. But he was also a realist. He knew that unless something happened to prevent the whole colony being eaten by the Racnoss he would have no head, let alone a position of power. So he acquiesced, reluctantly. He was actually vital, too, as it was he who could organise the repurposing of some buildings they would need.
The day before the new consignment of eggs was due to arrive, Aria took Fysus to one side. She said she had been trying to build a computer model of the Webstar and its labyrinth. She couldn’t be sure, but she thought that if one followed the straightforward path, not deviating left or right – or especially down – it should prove the most direct path to the heart of the Webstar where Messothel would have his lair.
As the noonday sun reached its apex on the third lunar cycle, the remaining colonists gathered before the Webstar as they had twice before. Again, those in reserved positions were separated from the rest and then the lots were drawn. This was a simple process. A large container was hefted into the middle of the group. It contained small, metal nuts harvested from the construction supplies and painted red or green.
The first colonist moved forward and thrust his hand into a small hole on top of the container. There was no way to see the contents and no way of telling what colour the nuts were. He searched around for a short while and then made his choice. He pulled his arm out and held up the hexagonal nut so that everyone could see it. It was bright, metallic green and glinted in the sunlight. The fortunate man moved over to join the reserved members of the colony. So it would continue until eight red nuts had been drawn.
The initial drawing of the lots had been an ordered affair with a queue, but none liked this. Instead, it became a bit of a scramble with those who wanted to get it over and done with, pushing to the front while those scared of their fate hung back. It really made no difference. There were only eight red nuts and the laws of probability dictated although the odds of finding one diminished each time another was found, it could easily be the last nut drawn that sent you into the Webstar.
However, that had never happened; all the red nuts had been found long before all the colonists had drawn. This was the flaw in the system that Fysus was about to exploit. He had positioned himself close to the container and did not force his way through those keener to choose. Already one red nut had been found by the time he got to make his selection. Except, his was not a selection – it was a foregone conclusion. He held in his fist a nut that had been painted red to match those in the container. He thrust his closed fit through the hole and made a show of moving his hand about before drawing it out and showing everyone the colour of his fate.
Red.
Fysus moved over to join the other colonist standing by the entrance to the Webstar. Presently, they were joined by six more and the container was carried away once more. All the other Time Lords then lined up behind them. Fysus saw Gathen staring at him with both pride and fear – possibly more of the latter. And then there was Aria. She smiled at him. It was a brave smile. If she was afraid, she certainly wasn’t going to show him.
As they all stood in silence, Hods approached. He carried his usual tray of eight beakers. He, too, was eyeing Fysus with a mixed look. But his seemed to be that of an amused conspirator, rather than a concerned friend or a fearful politician. As he held out the tray to Fysus he even managed the slightest hint of a wink. Fysus tried not to show any reaction in his face. Messothel would be watching all this on his surveillance system. If anything seemed out of the ordinary, he was bound to investigate.
He didn’t, and instead the doors at the base of the Webstar opened as they had in the past. The eight tributes walked forward as everyone watched in silence. Some faltered in their steps. And then potential disaster struck. One of the tributes, a younger Time Lord, started running away from the door, heading for the far side of the settlement compound.
A jagged bolt of energy struck him down. Fysus thought the mad spider had killed the man, but he was still alive, rolling around on the ground.
‘Retrieve him!’ Messothel ordered over the loudspeakers. The seven remaining tributes looked at each other, and then Fysus set off along with another called Phaedra. Together, they plucked the errant tribute from the sandy earth and dragged him towards the door. He was sobbing, and dragging his feet.
‘Just get inside,’ hissed Fysus. ‘Then we’ll be OK.’
The man shook his head vigorously, but they were soon inside the Webstar with the other five and the door closed behind them. Fysus and Phaedra left the man on the floor, hugging himself.
‘Welcome!’ Messothel announced. ‘Now you are inside I can reveal what your purpose is and why I have made you drink a delicious Huon shake!’ He laughed annoyingly.
The seven tributes who were standing looked at one another.
‘We Racnoss use Huon particles in the revival of our new-born – especially when they have been in hypersleep. They like to get their dose of Huon particles as part of their first meal. That’s you, my tasty time snacks!’ The laugh again, even more maniacal this time. ‘Now, I would advise you to keep moving through the corridors. There are motivational tools hidden within their construction. See you soon!’
Fysus turned to the others. ‘Listen,’ he whispered. ‘Some of us have been working on a plan. You need to come with me. We need to act as a team, but don’t worry, the Racnoss hatchlings won’t kill us. Not this time.’ He turned and faced the long, dark corridor that twisted away before him.
‘What about Messothel?’ asked Phaedra.
‘I’m going to deal with him. Come on!’
Naturally the man who had run away was not keen on the idea of going further into the maze, but Phaedra proved adept at persuasion. He told them that he worked in the sanitation farm and kept himself to himself. His name was Hellner.
A burly cook called Drandell also helped them. He encouraged the younger man, and eventually they were all ready to move forward.
‘We must stay together,’ Fysus told them. ‘I hope we can find our way to the centre quickly, but that may not be the case.’
They moved forward, always trying not to turn unless the main shaft did. They ignored side corridors and kept to the path that led upwards. As Aria had suggested, this seemed to work for a while, but they soon found themselves walking downhill. The corridor ended in a round hole that led to a sloping tunnel almost like a chute. Other than doubling back, they had no alternative than to follow it. Fysus made Hellner go first. He seemed to have lost some of his fear but had found a whining negativity in its absence. Only Drandell seemed to be able to control him, so he went second. The others followed before finally Phaedra and Fysus himself jumped down the slide.
They were now in a narrowed section of the maze. Fysus tried to climb back up the chute, but it was too well polished and he just slipped down again before he reached even two metres.
‘No way back,’ he said. ‘Not that way, at least.’
He estimated the chute had brought them halfway back to ground level, but he couldn’t be sure. The drop certainly didn’t feel as high as he thought they were. Phaedra and the others agreed. Hellner did not seem to hold an opinion. They continued, following the same plan as before: straight on, always upward.
They had been wandering the maze for hours when Hellner suddenly stopped. ‘What’s the point?’ he asked and slumped to the ground. ‘I won’t go on!’ he shouted at the walls. ‘I won’t, you hear?’
Drandell tried to get him on his feet, but Hellner was afraid and behaving like a tired child. Fysus tried to convince him that he had to if they were all going to make it out of Messothel’s labyrinthine web. He just looked up at the biochemist with red eyes.
‘We’re not going to make i
t out,’ he said. ‘We’re lunch! For the Racnoss.’ Fysus touched his arm, but Hellner yanked it away. ‘No! You go on. You try your plan,’ he sneered. ‘Good luck to you! I’m not going to march to my death like a blind sheep.’
Phaedra stepped up to him and slapped him hard across the face. ‘Just get up,’ she shouted. ‘Get up!
Even then he didn’t move; he just looked at her in total shock before starting to cry.
‘We’ll have to leave you,’ Fysus said. Hellner ignored him.
‘Come on,’ Phaedra said. ‘Leave him.’
However, as they started to move off up the corridor, Hellner leapt up with a shriek. The others all turned to face him. ‘Electric shock,’ he cried by way of explanation.
Phaedra grinned at Fysus. ‘Well, Messothel did say he had methods of persuading us to keep moving!’
Fysus smiled back, nodding. ‘Good old Messothel.’
After that, although he hung back from the rest of the group, Hellner did not complain again or sit down.
When they had been travelling through the impossible maze of corridors and chutes for almost twelve hours, they stopped. Would Messothel permit them a rest? Fysus doubted it. Not a long one, at least. They gave themselves fifteen minutes and then got moving again. Almost immediately they found a ladder.
‘I wonder if this is it,’ Fysus said.
‘Let’s see!’ Drandell moved forward to take the first rung. Then he stopped. ‘Where’s that rat, Hellner?’ Sure enough the cowardly Time Lord was lurking further down the corridor, almost in darkness. ‘Get over here,’ bellowed Drandell. Reluctantly, Hellner came forward. ‘Start climbing!’
This time Phaedra went last and, as Fysus helped her up the last few feet to the top, they saw that they had indeed completed their journey.
In front of them was a huge, dark red spider form at least eight metres across. Its legs twitched on control panels ranged before it that in turn operated the wall of screens that showed images from the maze and the settlement compound.
‘You made it!’ Messothel said. ‘Although one of you needed a little persuasion!’ He turned to face them now, and they got their first proper look at a Racnoss.
He was indeed mostly spider in appearance: blood red in colour with eight legs and one pair of arms or even mandibles, it was impossible to tell. His face was humanoid with six eyes on a crested head. They were all black except one, which was white and had an old war scar on it. His mouth was constantly open, his head turning from side to side as if to catch the air.
‘Behold your young charges!’ He laughed as he pointed one of his razor-tipped arms at a row of eight roundish, yellow balls the size of boulders. They were lined up between where Messothel was standing on his raised command platform and the eight Time Lords. ‘The maze was the hard part,’ he continued, eyeing each of the tributes in turn. ‘Dying will be easy because our young are born starving! Now, get into position: one in front of each egg.’
As they took their positions by the yellowy eggs, they saw that the young within them were starting to wriggle slowly, becoming more agitated by the second. Suddenly, the egg nearest to Drandell burst with a plume of tiny white filaments that filled the air and covered the tribute. A small, red leg appeared over the side of the broken casing. Then another, and another, until the Racnoss hatchling was balanced on the remains of its egg.
Straight away Drandell began to glow – almost as if he were regenerating – but this was a different, more sparkling effect. Fysus realised this was the Huon particles being drawn from the tribute by the Racnoss. His own egg then shattered and a third and then two at once until all the eggs were broken and all the hatchlings were drawing the Huon feast from those who had carried it to them.
Cob-Commander Messothel cackled away as this happened. He thought his mission for another month was done. But Fysus knew he was very wrong. One by one, starting with the hatchling feeding from Drandell, the baby Racnoss vanished.
‘What’s going on?’ Messothel asked, coming closer, dabbing with his forelegs at where the nearest hatchling had been moments before. ‘How have you don’t this? Where are the hatchlings?’
Messothel rounded on the eight Time Lords now, bearing his pointed teeth and dribbling with saliva. It stopped before Hellner and roared in his face. ‘Tell me!’
‘He said it would be OK,’ Hellner whined, pointing at Fysus.
The Cob-Commander rounded on his new target and bore down on him. Fysus stood his ground.
‘You are the ringleader, my little Time Lord?’ Messothel demanded.
‘I am,’ Fysus said. ‘Shall I tell you what I’ve done?’ He didn’t wait for the giant spider creature to give him leave; he just ploughed straight on. ‘We re-engineered the Huon particles you yourself wanted to feed us.’
‘Re-engineered?’
‘They’re poisonous to Time Lords,’ Fysus said. ‘Well, most living beings really. They should be destroyed. But we re-engineered them to reverse the poisoning effects.’
‘Reverse … So you are not dying?’ He reared up on his back four legs and went to strike Fysus with the razor tips of his forelegs. The Time Lord quickly rolled away to one side, knocking into Phaedra. She helped him up as the Racnoss scuttled across the chamber to attack again. But then Messothel faltered. Now he, too, was glowing. He reared up, bellowing in anger.
But then Messothel laughed: a gurgling sound more than a cackle. ‘A brave move, Time Lord,’ he said. ‘But ultimately … a foolish one …’ He gasped for breath as he faded in and out of view. ‘You will never … be able escape my web.’ The warbling laugh again. ‘You will be … trapped here … and starve to death.’
Fysus smiled. ‘Huon particles attract each other – even over large distances,’ he told the Racnoss. ‘Don’t you know?’ Of course, Messothel knew. Fysus was goading him. ‘My friend, Aria, has been dosing herself with the re-engineered particles. That is where the hatchlings have been sent. She is waiting in a specially built cell. That is where you’re being sent!’
‘Noooo!’ The Racnoss roared and moved to kill Fysus but, before he could reach the Time Lord, he disappeared. Deep in the complex of the colony, the holding facilities that Gathen had okayed now contained nine Racnoss: prisoners who would be handed over to the Gallifreyan authorities as soon as the rescue ship arrived.
Hellner was the first to speak. He seemed a different person. ‘Did you say we can get out of here easily?’
‘Yes,’ Fysus said with a smile of relief. ‘All I need to do is activate this.’ He fished in the pocket of his robe and produced a pen-like metallic rod. ‘A sonic control device … We’ll be back wherever Aria is in a matter of seconds. Might be best to wait a moment for her to leave the cells otherwise we’ll simply be facing Messothel once more!’
‘Although I’m sure he’s tempted to leave you to find your own way out,’ Phaedra said. But she patted Hellner’s shoulder to confirm it was a joke.
‘Ready?’ Fysus asked and they all gathered around him. He pressed the operating switch on the sonic rod and they vanished from the Webstar’s control chamber just as their captors had done minutes before. The only difference being that the Time Lords would now be free.
THE ANGELS OF VENGEANCE
WHEN LECTYNO OPENED the door to be confronted by his mother, he was shocked to see how much she had aged since she had been executed seven years previously. There was an uncomfortable silence as he stood, staring at her.
Nestyra had been quite the beauty back in the day. A few times he had even seen her image in the chatter bulletins on the arm of his father, Memyno. She was always demure yet glamorous, the perfect companion to an Evaluator – one of the judges who were untouchable by the law other than in their own courts. Lectyno had seen his father depicted on the page as the guest of honour at legal balls or the headline speaker at law symposiums many times.
Lectyno remembered how his mother always came to say goodnight to him when she was going out. Her dark blue hair always looked am
azing and her amber eyes twinkled with such allure. But it was her jet-black skin that he always reached for. It had such lustre in the glow from this bedside light, she almost looked like a holy herald.
Then there had been the other images, the ones on the information bulletins. Lectyno recalled one in particular: the body of his father on a hover-stretcher covered in a white shroud. Behind this his mother, in nightclothes – not demure at all – having her arms pulled behind her back by two Proctors.
The awkward silence ended as his once beautiful mother – now a gaunt old hag – spoke to him.
‘Lex,’ she said.
Lectyno flinched as if she had slapped him. How dare she speak his name? How dare she come to his threshold? Rage swelled in his chest and made his body shake.
‘Murderer,’ he said. Slow and deliberate. Then again: ‘Murderer!’ Louder now, the unbridled aggression spilling into his voice.
Now it was Nestyra who recoiled. ‘So many years have passed …’ She trailed off as her voice cracked.
‘For you, Mother. Not for me.’
Lectyno was becoming angrier, but now with himself. He should just slam the door but something made him hesitate. She was his mother, his ‘Mitty’.
‘I need your help,’ she said.
That was the impetus he needed.
‘I am a Guardian of the Rock! How can you do this? You kill my father – your husband – and now you backslide your family?’
He shoved the door back at her with all his might, and the crash of the door in its frame reverberated through the house.
The courtroom was triangular, stark and white with the defendant at the centre. At one point of the triangle, elevated above proceedings was the Evaluator. Behind him were the Advisory – the 15 members of the junior judiciary whose job it was to counsel him. To the left and right of the Evaluator, elevated but on a lower level to him, sat the Advocate and the Indictor – defence and prosecution – the former to the left, the latter to the right.
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