Doctor Who - The Wheel of Ice

by Stephen Baxter

  Now they came to the heart of the colony’s trouble. The sabotaged tractor was just as Zoe had seen it in the images shown her by Jo Laws on her kitchen table. Another big, muscular piece of equipment, brand shiny new, but with its heart ripped out by an explosion. The wreck had been cordoned off, by Bootstrap guards and some of Sonia Paley’s citizen deputies. In a clear area around the wreck, Zoe saw that technicians were retrieving fragments blown away from the hulk, and were laying them out on the bubble’s floor like a diagram of the shattered machine, a first step to understanding what had happened here. More technicians were crawling over the machine itself, and inside it. Zoe spotted small wheeled machines probing further in, equipped with grabber arms and spotlights: bomb disposal robots, perhaps, checking for more explosives.

  Without hesitation the Doctor led the way under the cordon rope and picked his way through the litter of twisted parts to the tractor. Zoe followed, and was surprised to find Luis Reyes here. He stood by the hulk of the machine, with earphones connected to a lead plugged into an access socket in the engine’s hull.

  The Doctor bent down, stuck his head in the hole in the hull, and sniffed. ‘Methane, or traces of it. I think it’s pretty clear what’s happened here—’

  ‘Oh, is it?’ Here was Florian Hart, dressed in a protective coverall and hard hat, striding vigorously towards them. She was angry, urgent, determined, and yet she still looked impossibly beautiful, Zoe thought.

  The Doctor straightened up. ‘Oh, it’s you. Well, I suppose we could hardly expect to avoid you.’

  Florian looked down on his shabby form, not bothering to conceal her contempt. ‘Just remember that my authority here is absolute.’

  Sonia Paley coughed. ‘Now, just hang on, Florian. This colony is still under the jurisdiction of the ISC—’

  Florian said, cutting over her, ‘After an incident like this – and you can check the terms of the corporate contract under which this whole facility is run – absolute. I could have you thrown into detention in an instant, you ridiculous little man.’

  ‘I’m sure you could. And what good would that do, pray? Oh, I don’t have time for this.’ And he bent again and began to crawl into the splayed-open interior of the machine.

  ‘That isn’t safe,’ Florian snapped. ‘And you’re not authorised.’

  On his hands and knees, he sighed. ‘Well, no, I’m not authorised, I’ll give you that. But I suspect I’m perfectly safe, short of cricking my back in here.’

  ‘There may be more explosive devices—’

  ‘Oh, of course not. Can’t you smell the methane? It seems quite obvious the detonation was caused simply by tampering with the machine’s fuel and oxidiser feeds. Quite enough explosive power in that; no need for anything more tricky…’ As he spoke his shabby checked trousers were receding into the shadows of the machine.

  ‘Let him be,’ Sonia said to Florian. ‘I’m sure he knows what he’s doing. And your precious security isn’t going to help if it gets in the way of finding out what is going on here, is it?’

  But Florian, bristling, aggressive, shot back, ‘As for security, suppose you give me a briefing on whatever inadequate measures you’ve put in place so far in response to this outrage?’

  Sonia, visibly suppressing her own irritation, began to go through a litany of the steps she’d taken: a general lockdown, monitoring of weapons, guards posted on explosive stores and inter-module hatchways, the kettling of the children in the Trinity bubble. Florian aggressively cross-questioned her on every point.

  Zoe, dismayed, pulled away from the confrontation. For all Florian’s righteous rage it seemed to Zoe that the Bootstrap administrator was enjoying this incident. Well, if the accident handed her the power over the colony she had evidently been angling for all along, she had a good deal to be happy about.

  Luis Reyes was still here. Listening to his earphones, he was murmuring into a microphone attached to his cheek. As Zoe watched, he patted the flank of the damaged machine, as if trying to comfort it.

  She approached him. ‘I wasn’t expecting to find Planetary Ethics here.’

  He smiled at Zoe. Luis was slim, dark, good-looking, earnest, and when he spoke he had a trace of a Spanish accent. ‘Well, there is another victim here.’ He tapped the flank of the machine. ‘The tractor itself. Or rather the artificial intelligence that drives it.’

  ‘Oh! Just like MMAC.’

  ‘This body of metal and ceramics has suffered a traumatic injury, and though there are subroutines to suppress what to you or I would be pain sensations, still the loss of function is distressing. And then there is the uncertainty over the future. Can this carcass be repaired? If not, what becomes of the mind inside it? What’s more, Bootstrap, or the IntelligeX subsidiary that handles their robotics, endows all its artificial intelligences with strong drives, to fulfil company goals. Right now the mind in here is suffering from guilt, because it can’t fulfil its objectives. Call it an engineered conscience.’

  ‘I didn’t realise PEC tries to protect artificial minds.’

  ‘Oh, we do. On Earth, some nation states have laws protecting artificial sentience. Giving them rights equivalent to humans’. The moral issue is whether it is right to create a mind for a specific purpose. PEC tries to be ahead of the curve, ethically. That’s why we’re here. It won’t surprise you to learn that the further you get from Earth the more prevalent those abuses are. We have had some successes. I suspect MMAC would already have been shut down if not for pressure from us…’

  Zoe found herself hugely admiring this clever, capable, even charismatic young man, though not really understanding him. He had devoted his whole life to a difficult, complex, perhaps even impossible cause. He might never live to see his goals fulfilled. And yet here he was, in the thick of it – doing good, as he saw it, bit by bit.

  ‘But,’ he said now, ‘progress is slow. And that leads to some people taking more drastic action.’

  Florian Hart overheard this, and turned on him. ‘“Drastic action”. That’s a nice euphemism for terrorism, isn’t it? What is it your militant wing calls itself?’

  ‘Pull Back to Earth is not my anything—’

  ‘Who’s to say this stunt hadn’t been arranged by one of that lot? The colony wouldn’t be hard to infiltrate, would it?’

  ‘Look, Florian, you can’t just chuck around insinuations like that. There’s not a shred of evidence—’

  A muted cough.

  The Doctor emerged from the machine, his coat scuffed, his trouser leg glistening with what looked like leaked lubricant fluid. ‘Evidently you’ve made no progress while I’ve been gone. Well, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. But, Zoe, I have found something on which I’d like your opinion. Ah, you too, Mr Reyes, if you would.’

  Zoe couldn’t help but glance at Florian, as if asking permission.

  ‘Oh, go ahead,’ she said sarcastically. ‘The more the merrier, crawling around my crime scene.’ She put on a mockery of the Doctor’s very English accent. ‘Shall I send in some tea and crumpets?’

  Disappearing back into the machine, the Doctor called back, ‘Oh, yes, please. Strawberry jam if you’ve got some!’

  Zoe and Luis exchanged a look, got down on their hands and knees, and followed.

  ‘The thing with the Doctor,’ Zoe said, ‘is that he might actually think she’s being serious…’

  18

  THE KETTLING WAS designed to keep people out of the bubble. It wasn’t hard for Phee to go the other way, and break in.

  It was all a rush; she was still in her skinsuit from her own flight back from Enceladus. She had got back earlier than the rest – she hadn’t mucked about on the way home – and she had got home before the kettling had been imposed. Sam, of course, had been swept up.

  Inside Trinity Bubble, she found chaos. Hundreds of people milling about, few of them much older than her, and most of them in the bright green uniforms of C-grades. If there was anybody in authority in here, she couldn’t spot them.
There was nervous laughter. Music playing somewhere. Even a game of soccer going on in a field of rubble, between burned-out buildings. But under it all was fear; you could smell it in the air.

  It didn’t take her long to find Sam. He was with a bunch of his usual buddies, with Dai and Sanjay and Mindy Brewer, hanging around. And here was Jamie McCrimmon, with his skinsuit on and, comically, his bagpipe still in a pack on his back. He looked lost, concerned. But he smiled at Phee.

  Sam, though, glared at her. ‘What are you doing in here?’

  ‘Finding you.’

  ‘They wouldn’t have picked you up. You’re an A.’

  ‘Look, Sam. We have to say something.’

  ‘Say what? To who?’

  ‘About the Blue Dolls. Come on, Sam. You know as well as I do that all this sabotage is the Blue Dolls, not us. We have to get out of here, and confess it all to Mum, and confront Florian Hart and the rest, and tell them. Make them listen.’

  He looked at her pityingly. ‘Phee, Phee. You could hardly be more naive, could you? They already know. About the Blues.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh, of course they do. But they’re going to keep on hiding it so they can get at us. Look, Phee, you shouldn’t have come here. Get back out if you can. Just flash that nice grey A-colour at them and they will let you go.’

  ‘I’m not leaving you.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ He glanced around. ‘In a minute, some of us are going to try something.’

  ‘Try what?’

  He said softly, ‘Break out.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We don’t have to stay here. We’ve still got the stuff from the Enceladus trip. And we’ve other caches. Now will you get out of here?’

  She felt chilled, and she clutched her skinsuit close around her. ‘I’m not leaving you,’ she said firmly.

  Jamie took her hand, and squeezed it. But she noticed that, oddly, he was looking at the amulet she wore around her neck.

  19

  ZOE FOUND HERSELF crawling through a crude passageway cut pretty efficiently right through the tractor carcass by the explosion. There were sharp metal shards under her hands and knees, and fluid dripping from split ducts, and what looked like live electrical cables dangling. Progress had to be slow and careful, though she was helped by torches held by Luis behind her and the Doctor up ahead.

  ‘Ouch!’

  ‘Doctor?’ Zoe called. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Oh, fine, fine. I was fed up with this coat anyway. Now keep up, you two, keep up.’

  He led them to the heart of the machine, to a large ripped-open tank and a stink of methane. Here the damage was obvious, the surfaces scorched, metal bulkheads melted by intense heat. The Doctor got to his haunches and faced them sombrely, the lines of his face deepened in the torchlight.

  Luis glanced around. ‘I guess this is the centre of the explosion.’

  ‘Quite so, my boy. The fuel tanks. I found the rigged-up crossfeed from the oxidiser tank. The ignition was a simple shorted wire. Elementary, really, just as I tried to explain to Ms Hart. But that’s not what I brought you in here to see. Look at that.’ And he pointed to a huddled shape on the floor, just outside the cone of his torchlight.

  Zoe glimpsed blue.

  Luis leaned over for a look and turned away instantly, hand over his mouth, retching.

  Zoe crept forward, her heart hammering, dread gathering. But she made herself look long and hard at what the Doctor had found.

  It was a body. Human – or at least human-like, she corrected herself. That was evident from its basic layout, the head, the four limbs. Even though, she saw with real horror, the blast had torn it apart. One arm was actually detached and lying away from the body, with some kind of tool in its closed fingers. A human body, no larger than a child – no bigger than Casey Laws. And its skin, what was left of it, what hadn’t been shredded by the blast, was bright blue.

  The Doctor put a hand on her shoulder. ‘It’s all right, Zoe. You’re doing very well. Tell me what you see – what you deduce.’

  ‘This is our perpetrator.’

  ‘I’m afraid so. Those are wire cutters in its hand, the hand on the detached arm. It was caught in the blast it created. As I suspected, no bomb was necessary; the sabotage was easy to carry out – if you were small enough to have crawled in here in the first place.’

  ‘It is blue. The flesh. You can see it isn’t just some surface treatment, not paint or make-up. Where the skin is broken you can see that beneath the surface—’ She gagged.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he repeated. ‘I think it’s clear what we’re dealing with here, isn’t it? This is one of the creatures the youngsters here have been sighting, and calling “Blue Dolls”. We’ve seen them for ourselves, haven’t we? It’s impossible to believe that the advanced surveillance systems that must saturate this place and its mine have not picked up these creatures. And yet the official adult line remains one of denial, that the children are deluded or malicious. Ha! Well, Zoe, even the mild-mannered Phee Laws knew about the Dolls, and tried to keep them secret, perhaps in a rather misguided attempt to protect her brother. I had to inform Jo about that, but I don’t think the mayor has decided how to handle that yet, and I don’t blame her. It’s rather hard to keep track of who knows what, isn’t it? But that’s the product of a system of distrust and lies.

  ‘And here we have the undeniable physical proof – but we haven’t done with our analysis. Not yet. Go on, Zoe. What else do you see?’

  She took a deep breath. ‘It isn’t remotely human. Look at it, Doctor. There is no sign of internal organs. Nothing like a person’s anyhow…’ Under a formless mass of tissue, broken open, she saw a gleam of metal, deep inside the body.

  ‘No, indeed. It seems to have been created to look human, or at least using the human body as a model. But it is not human.’

  ‘Why do you say “created”? Rather than “born”, or “evolved”?’

  The Doctor pointed. ‘That metallic shine in there. I suspect its skeleton, or the equivalent, is made of a bernalium compound. It seems very unlikely that could arise naturally. What else? Come now, Zoe. There’s one more thing you’re missing.’

  Zoe, bewildered, looked down at the strange carcass. Her head felt empty, her blood pounded in her ears. What else? What could the Doctor mean?

  It was Luis who spoke first. ‘It wasn’t the methane explosion that killed it.’

  ‘Ah. Good. And how do you know that?’

  Luis pointed. ‘Because that big chest wound looks like a blaster shot to me. I’ve seen too many of those in my line of work, I’m afraid. He – it – was shot by a blaster, from the front. And then the methane tank went up, catching the creature from the left side. Look, you can see the burning on the surviving flesh. That must have thrown it aside, detached the – the limb…’

  ‘Yes. Precisely. Well done, Mr Reyes, well done.’

  Zoe said slowly, ‘So this creature, after setting up its explosion, was detected—’

  ‘By a human being, with a blaster. Who shot the Blue Doll without mercy. And then allowed the explosion to go ahead.’

  Luis said, ‘It’s a miracle anything of the Blue Doll survived the explosion.’ He glanced around at the wreckage. ‘A chance bit of shelter from some bulkhead, perhaps…’

  ‘Yes. Our killer must have been hoping there would be no trace left of the Blue Doll at all. For it’s not the Blue Dolls who are the most useful suspects for an incident like this, is it? Not if you’re trying to get control of the Wheel for your own purposes. And furthermore, Mr Reyes, tell me this – what would happen to the mining operations on Mnemosyne if an indigenous, and apparently intelligent, native species like this were to be discovered there?’

  ‘The operations would be shut down immediately,’ Luis said without hesitation. ‘Life comes first. Interplanetary law is clear about that.’

  ‘There you are. Another reason why certain vested interests would not want this creature, and
its kind, to be exposed. Let them commit their convenient sabotage, but keep them hidden, and blame it all on somebody else.’

  Zoe asked, ‘Are you accusing Florian Hart, Doctor?’

  ‘The glove does fit, doesn’t it? But I’m not in the business of accusing anybody, Zoe. Not yet. Not until we’ve assembled a good deal more evidence. And there’s the whole business of the allohistorical lure to think about. Where does that fit in?’

  ‘The what?’ Luis asked.

  ‘What I really must do,’ the Doctor said gravely, ‘as I keep saying, is to get up to that mine and see for myself. And then perhaps—’

  A monitor at Luis’s waist bleeped urgently. He glanced down at it. ‘We have a more urgent problem,’ he said. ‘It’s the youngsters, in the Trinity bubble.’

  Zoe grabbed the Doctor’s arm. ‘That’s Jamie. What’s happening?’

  ‘They’re breaking out!’

  20

  THEY EMERGED FROM the wrecked machine to find a full-scale standoff going on between Sonia Paley, Jo Laws and Florian Hart. Jo was distracted by a flow of messages coming into a pad she held in her hand.

  ‘No!’ Sonia said firmly to Florian. ‘You will not use lethal force against children! If your goons attempt it, I’ll arrest you and have my own deputies shoot back!’

  Florian stood taller than the others, arms folded, smiling coldly. ‘But they are trying to break out of the bubble. Smashing through the ice wall! They are not only defying the kettling orders but are threatening the safety of the colony itself.’