Doctor Who - The Wheel of Ice

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘The only threat to safety is you,’ Jo Laws snapped back. ‘You and your threats of mutilation.’

  ‘Mutilation?’ The Doctor, standing up, brushing down his ruined coat, sounded outraged. ‘What in heaven’s name are you planning now, Florian Hart?’

  ‘The logic is simple,’ Florian said. ‘Doctor, this is a space colony on the edge of survival.’

  Jo snorted. ‘The edge of profitability, more like.’

  ‘And we are faced with law-breaking on a mass scale. There is no room, we don’t have the resources to lock up so many miscreants. Everybody on this Wheel needs to work productively. And so I am proposing a more portable punishment regime.’

  ‘Portable, eh? Oh, I see. Like Saxon England, I suppose. They couldn’t afford to carry passengers either. So they would lop off a hand or a foot! Is that what you’re suggesting?’

  ‘Nothing quite so crude… but that’s the idea. A toe, maybe. Who needs toes in fractional gravity? Of course this would all be carried out under medical supervision.’

  Jo said, ‘I’ll tell you flat that Dr Omar and his team would have nothing to do with this.’

  ‘So,’ the Doctor said, ‘you thought it wise to bring this up now, did you, Florian Hart? In an already inflamed atmosphere, to let a few hundred falsely imprisoned teenagers know that unless they behave you’re going to start mutilating them? You could hardly be more provocative, could you? You know, I’m beginning to suspect you’ve manipulated this whole situation.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be absurd—’

  ‘Are you making your move, Ms Hart? Are you using this incident with the tractor to mount some kind of quasi-legal coup?’

  ‘Doctor.’ Jo Laws held out her comms slate. ‘I have Jamie. He wants to speak to you.’

  ‘Give me that.’ The Doctor grabbed the slate; there was no image on it, and he held it up to his ear. ‘Jamie?’

  ‘Doctor? I’m speaking on my skinsuit communicator…’ Zoe could hear shouting in the background, the sound of running footsteps – cracks, shattering glass, the sounds of destruction.

  ‘What are you up to now?’

  ‘It’s the kids. They were steamin’ anyhow, and when the announcements started being shouted about in here about gettin’ yer toes cut off—’

  Jo Laws crossed her fingers and muttered, ‘Let Sam not be involved. Let Sam not be involved.’

  ‘Young Sam’s the ringleader! Poor old Phee is bein’ swept up wi’ it all too.’

  ‘With her amulet,’ muttered the Doctor.

  ‘They’re breaking through the ice wall, Doctor! But they’re organised, ye’ve got tae give them that. Everybody in here’s got a skinsuit. And somebody on the outside has come around with a big mess o’ them wee space scooters. They ken wha’ they’re doin’.’

  ‘But even if they do break out, Jamie – what can they hope to achieve? Where will they go?’

  ‘Ah, they’ve got a plan for that! Titan, Doctor! We’re all goin’ tae Titan! Wherever that is! Wait – I think yon wall’s givin’ way at last—’

  Zoe heard a crack, like a vast eggshell shattering. There was a roar of wind, a few last shouts – a scream. The sound dwindled quickly, as the air escaped from the bubble.

  And then silence.

  The Doctor looked around, at Jo, Sonia, Florian, Luis, Zoe. ‘I rather think we need to talk. Don’t you?’

  21

  A DAY AFTER the sabotage, and with sixteen colony youngsters, plus Jamie, on their way to Titan, the leaders of what the Doctor insisted on calling his Doll-hunting expedition rode up to the mine on the moon, crammed into a single elevator module: the Doctor and Zoe, Florian Hart, Marshal Sonia Paley, Mayor Jo Laws, and Dr Sinbad Omar. Some of Sonia’s deputies and Florian’s guards rode other modules. Of Zoe’s group, only Florian and Sonia were armed, with ugly-looking blasters. Florian had been adamantly opposed to letting the Doctor set foot on ‘her moon’. But the others had opposed her in turn, and when she couldn’t keep him out she insisted on coming along herself.

  Zoe hadn’t been up to Mnemosyne before, and nor had the Doctor. Zoe had no real idea what she would find up there on the moon, and she felt only dread as the elevator module began to ascend. The sense of gravity faded fast as they moved inwards along the Wheel’s radius, and Zoe was glad of the harness she wore, strapped to rails bolted to the walls; at least she wouldn’t float away. As she rose, the details of the moon’s surface, inverted in the sky above, started to become clearer: roofs painted bright green, shafts like black punctures, roadways and paths cut through the ice. There was continual motion, huge vehicles like beetles crawling everywhere. The Wheel rotated at a different rate from the moon itself, and the elevator cables terminated on a complicated raised roadway that ran around the moon’s rough equator.

  ‘A remarkable scene of industry, isn’t it?’ the Doctor murmured now, looking up. His skinsuit was rucked up uncomfortably over his hastily repaired frock coat. ‘They have a power plant at each pole – two for redundancy, of course. Fusion power, and the fuel is an isotope of hydrogen mined from the atmosphere of Saturn itself. Mined by giant scoopships operated by another bit of Bootstrap, Inc., no doubt.’ When she didn’t reply he glanced at her. ‘Are you all right, Zoe? You’re very quiet.’

  ‘Jamie would say I should be used to all this. Living in space, as I did. But it’s all so rickety, Doctor.’

  ‘Well, this is the frontier in this age, Zoe,’ he said softly, so the rest could not hear. ‘They are having to work things out as they go. Invent, improvise. Yes, it is rickety. But I suspect that will be the least of our fears once we start descending into that mine in the sky up there…’

  The sense of gravity had all but faded away now. There was a brief warning chime, and the module flipped over, so that wheel and moon rotated around Zoe’s head.

  She shut her eyes and swallowed hard. What would Leo Ryan and Gemma Corwyn and the rest of them on Station Three have said if they saw her throw up like an earthling on a sub-orbital hop? She would not be weak, she would not.

  The module landed on the equatorial rail with a judder, and there was a sharp sense of braking as the module slowed to match the moon’s rotation rate. Then it rolled off towards a kind of airlock, one of a dozen protruding from the sides of a broad, flat building. The world had turned upside down. Now the moon was ‘down’, under Zoe’s feet, and the Wheel was a great arch in the sky, crammed with detail, its ice bubbles and metal tanks rolling over her head.

  Everybody unbuckled, and Zoe followed suit. The Doctor, taking an experimental step, floated up to the ceiling. ‘Oh, no!’

  Jo Laws, laughing, reached up and grabbed the seat of his skinsuit and hauled him down. ‘The moon’s gravity is barely there at all,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry. There are handholds and foot anchors everywhere; just hold yourself down. Now – orientation, Doctor, Zoe. This building is at the head of one of the main shafts we’ve drilled into the moon. The shafts are pretty extensive now, and there are natural cavities in the body of the moon itself – Mnemosyne is becoming something of a honeycomb.’ She looked at Florian challengingly. ‘We’ve come to this particular facility because the shafts beneath us have been the scene of the most recent sightings of Blue Dolls. No more denials, Florian.’

  Florian snorted. ‘Just to restate my position, one last time. This is a fool’s errand. There is no alien phenomenon here. Our problems are human in origin. And all our efforts should be focused on that.’

  ‘There’s none so blind as they that won’t see,’ the Doctor muttered. ‘Jonathan Swift said that to me once, and he was a smarter human being than you’ll ever be, Florian Hart.’

  Jo sighed. ‘Whatever you say, Florian. Let’s all just keep our eyes open and our mouths shut.’ The module reached the airlock and docked. ‘Now follow me…’

  She pushed forward on a light wheelchair and led the way into the building’s brightly lit interior, where huge machines hulked, and workers, mostly in C-grade green, watched the newcomers inc
uriously.

  Jo pointed. ‘We’ve got power distributors, matter printers, raw materials processors, air scrubbers. There’s also a dormitory, refectory, infirmary, though most of the workers’ human needs are taken care of up on the Wheel. We try to keep the shafts pressurised throughout, with breathable air that we manufacture up here, extracting oxygen and nitrogen from moon ice. Much easier to work that way. In fact we’re pumping air into shafts and natural channels and chambers we haven’t even explored yet; we send down robot carriers to fix lights and perform preliminary maps and assays, to see what’s worth opening up properly. So come on. Let’s go exploring.’

  She led them to a shaft, brightly lit, a big round hole in the workshop’s thin ceramic floor. It was walled with smooth ice, grey-white but laced with purples and greens: traces of some complex chemistry, Zoe imagined.

  ‘We have to climb down,’ Jo said. To demonstrate, she just pulled herself over the lip of the shaft, alarming Zoe, but she drifted slowly down, balloon-like, until she could grab hold of a rung sticking out of the wall surface. With her lightweight wheelchair folded up on her back, grabbing one rung after another, she was remarkably graceful, her lack of legs no hindrance. ‘You work your way down the rungs. There are also hand- and foot-holds dug into the ice itself. Even if you fall, your descent is so slow you are easily recoverable. We can give you safety ropes. We don’t usually recommend them.’

  Ropes please, Zoe silently pleaded.

  ‘That won’t be necessary,’ said the Doctor briskly. ‘Shall we get on with it?’

  They formed up in a line to follow Jo down into the hole.

  Sinbad Omar quietly stood beside Zoe. ‘Don’t worry,’ he murmured. ‘I’ll go ahead of you. Catch you if you fall. Not that you will.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, embarrassed.

  When it was his turn, Sinbad drifted easily and without hesitation over the edge, and caught himself with one hand.

  Zoe forced herself to follow. Her fall through the air was dreamlike. There was plenty of time to grab a rung, and it was easy to support herself with one hand, to balance with one foothold. They descended steadily, in their line. They passed breaks in the wall, horizontal corridors that led off to either side. Sometimes Zoe heard rumblings of machinery, echoing human voices, coming from the side-shafts. She would have felt quite safe, if not for the shaft below her, straight-walled, lit up all the way, that looked as if it reached down to infinity.

  ‘I think we’re all on edge,’ Sinbad called up to her. ‘I know Jo is cut up about the trouble with the kids, and worried about Phee and Sam, of course. I suspect she’s on this expedition partly just to keep herself occupied.’

  ‘Why are you here, Dr Omar?’

  ‘Call me Sinbad. I didn’t start out in life as a medic. I majored in human biology, anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, all of that. But the first cadres to come to the Wheel had to have multiple specialities. There weren’t many of us, and we all had at least two jobs. We A-grades anyhow. So I cross-trained in medicine.’

  ‘And today—’

  ‘Well, the injuries that directly relate to this Blue-Doll phenomenon are biochemical in nature. A reworking of human tissue at the molecular level to produce that strange, inhuman – carapace. So I’m here with my old scientist’s hat on today. But I have to say I think of myself more as a doctor nowadays. Found I rather enjoyed it.’

  And he was evidently good, Zoe thought, at least with the bedside manner. For with his gentle conversation he had distracted her from the fact that she had already descended so far that the shaft opening was receding to a bright coin far above her head, but the bottom of the shaft was still out of sight, far below –

  ‘There!’ Sonia’s voice.

  Zoe heard the crisp rasp of blaster fire, smelled ozone in the scorched air. Startled, she looked down.

  Sonia dangled one-handed before the opening of a side-shaft, her blaster in her hand. ‘I saw one, I swear it! Large as life, blue, the size of a kid!’

  The Doctor cried, ‘And you shot it! Oh, Marshal, what have you done?’ With surprising grace he pulled himself one-handed into the side-shaft, a leap like a salmon. ‘We’re here to study these creatures, not to shoot them! But try to explain away this sighting, Florian Hart!’ He was scrambling into the tunnel, and soon his checked trousers and booted feet, all contained inside the skinsuit, had disappeared from view.

  Jo called, ‘Doctor, come back!’

  But Zoe knew he wouldn’t do that, not until he had found what he was looking for. Without hesitation she swung herself into the shaft. ‘We must follow him. Come on, Sinbad!’

  The medic laughed, and squirmed after her.

  22

  THE SIDE-SHAFT WAS just tall enough for Zoe to run upright, though it was narrower and rougher cut than the main vertical shaft, and the lights, globes stuck in the ice wall, were wider spaced, leaving ominous pools of shadow. It was colder here too. She wasn’t so much running, of course, as driving herself along, yanking on widely spaced handholds in the walls, paddling with her booted feet at the floor. Still she was making good time. When she glanced back she saw they were all following, led by Sinbad, then with Jo and the rest behind.

  She came to a kind of crossroads, a rough chamber from which three more shafts led off sideways. The Doctor was out of sight.

  Sinbad came up to her. ‘Which way now?’

  ‘If I know the Doctor, he’ll have left a sign.’

  Sinbad tapped his shoulder, and a small torch fixed to an epaulette on his suit lit up. He quickly found a yellow arrow, hastily scrawled, pointing towards one rough-walled corridor. He touched the wall; his fingers came away coated with yellow dust. ‘What’s this, chalk?’

  Zoe grinned. ‘That’s the Doctor, all right. Come on!’ She plunged on that way.

  ‘What’s he doing with a bit of yellow chalk? This is Saturn!’

  ‘Those pockets of his – you don’t want to know what’s in them… Look, is that another arrow?’

  This time the shaft they followed led to a wider chamber, roughly spherical. The lights were sparse, the chamber full of shadows.

  With Sinbad at her side, Zoe hurried across the floor. ‘Is this a natural chamber?’

  ‘No. It’s been worked.’ He pointed. ‘See the scoring in the walls? The miners have been working their way through the moon, looking for concentrations of biochemicals and minerals – mostly bernalium. And when they find a lode they dig it out until it’s exhausted.’

  On the far side of the chamber there was another chalk scrawl. They hurried through more passages, following more arrows… Behind her she heard the voices of the others, still following.

  ‘Don’t worry about getting lost,’ Sinbad said. ‘It is a bit of a maze down here. And it does change all the time as the work evolves and they cut more shafts. But your skinsuit has a telltale, a beacon so you can be found again. And besides you could just follow the Doctor’s arrows back the way we came.’

  ‘Oh, I never get lost,’ Zoe said. ‘I’ve an eidetic memory. Perfect recall.’ When she closed her eyes she could visualise the interior of the moon, filling up with a three-dimensional map of the shafts she’d followed, or glimpsed.

  ‘Eidetic, eh? I’m impressed. Quite a capability.’

  ‘It’s just a matter of training.’

  ‘Makes you feel like you’re in control, I imagine – did you see that?’ He was looking back down the passageway they were following.

  ‘What?’

  ‘A flash – something blue – it came out into the light, into this passage, and disappeared again. Must have been from a side cut.’

  ‘I didn’t see it. But the others are following it. Look!’

  Jo, Sonia, Florian, their torches visible, were cutting off into a shadowy passageway.

  ‘We should follow them.’

  ‘No! We have to find the Doctor.’

  Sinbad was uneasy, but nodded. ‘All right. Come on.’ They hurried ahead, along the passage, leaving t
he others behind.

  So three had gone one way, three the other, Zoe realised. It was almost as if they had been intentionally split up…

  The passage abruptly opened out into a wider chamber, this one irregular and rough-hewn, evidently natural. Sinbad stuck out his arm to stop Zoe going any further.

  Zoe stood still, breathing hard. The lights here were even sparser, the shadows pooled wider, and her eyes slowly adapted to the dark. The chamber was no more than a great bubble in the ice, perhaps the result of a pocket of gases released when the moon was first formed. Ice formations stuck out of the walls, like randomly fixed sculptures, fantastic low-gravity shapes, crystalline and vesicular. It was almost beautiful in the scattered light.

  Beautiful, and reflecting royal blue highlights.

  And then she saw them. Blue Dolls, two, five, ten, a dozen. All identical, as far as she could see. All inert, their arms at their sides, their eyes and mouths sealed shut. Like dolls, like child-sized mannequins, littering the chamber, laying or standing or leaning on the walls, as if placed at random. None of them moving, none of them apparently aware of the intruders.

  Sinbad took Zoe’s hand. His palm was dry, and she could feel his steady pulse. He was a reassuring presence. He whispered, ‘I think we should—’

  The Dolls came alive.

  All at once. Eyes and mouths dilating open. Limbs sheer and flexible, bending at unnatural angles.

  The Dolls swarmed through the air and over the chamber walls, in utter silence. They made soft, sliding, plastic-slithering noises as they touched the ice walls of the cavern.

  And they came from all angles, above, below, to the sides. Converging on Zoe and Sinbad, who dared not move.

  ‘Keep still,’ Sinbad murmured, the tension in his voice obvious. ‘If we don’t move, maybe they’ll leave us alone…’