Doctor Who - The Wheel of Ice

by Stephen Baxter

They returned to the core of the moon. To Arkive, to the curtain of light, the chamber of their birth. The rest clustered behind First, fearful.

  He stood before the light.

  WHAT IS IT YOU WANT?

  ‘It was… I… one of the Others. It was like us.’

  Silence for a moment. Then First’s head seemed to pulse, as memories were extracted and downloaded.

  YES. THIS WAS THE FIRST OF THE OTHERS I ENCOUNTERED. I MADE YOU IN THEIR IMAGE. IN THE IMAGE OF THIS ONE.

  ‘The rest of the Others are not like this one,’ First dared to say. ‘They are taller. Stronger.’

  There was only silence. The others waited behind him, their distress and confusion evident. Yet only he could articulate it.

  ‘What am I?’

  YOU ARE A MADE THING. I MADE YOU.

  ‘Why did you make me?’

  TO FULFIL THE MISSION. RESILIENCE. REMEMBRANCE. RESTORATION.

  They murmured the holy words in unison.

  But First was not done yet. ‘Why do I know myself? More than these others know themselves?’

  IT IS ACCIDENTAL. THE AGONY OF SELF-KNOWING SERVES NO PURPOSE.

  ‘And the Others—’

  I BROUGHT THEM HERE, TO SERVE MY PURPOSE. YOU MUST BRING ME THE LURE.

  His head exploded with images and concepts. The lure was an object in jet black, small enough to hold in the hand.

  FIND THE LURE. THE THING THAT BROUGHT THEM HERE. PROVE THAT THESE OTHERS ARE THOSE WHO I HAVE SOUGHT. AND BRING ME MORE OF THEIR ART, THEIR TECHNOLOGY. I BROUGHT THEM HERE, TO SERVE MY PURPOSE. BRING ME WHAT THEY HAVE MADE.

  He had had this command before. But all they could steal and carry away were scraps. Bits of larger machines… Soon the heart of the moon would be stuffed with purloined scraps.

  ‘I exist to serve you.’

  NOT ME. THE MISSION.

  ‘The mission.’

  They huddled. Soon, First was bathed in the comfort of not-thereness, with the rest.

  III

  And then one died.

  They had been on the circle structure that surrounded the moon. They had been up there trying to fulfil the new command. To steal more technology. And to obstruct the Others’ mining efforts, which were becoming troubling.

  One had died, in the mining machine they had tried to destroy. Died at the hand of an Other.

  First had escaped, back to the caverns of the moon, by hiding in one of the Others’ carriages, sliding along the cable back to the moon.

  But the Others had followed. And another was killed, in the corridors of the moon.

  They had carried the body to one of their places of comfort. They sat with the dead.

  Again, the Others had followed. More fire. More had died!

  Now First fled to the deepest pit of the moon, the chamber with the curtain of fire, and again he faced his maker.

  ‘Two have died! More than two. Several!’

  MORE EXIST. SUFFICIENT TO FULFIL THE MISSION –

  ‘Will I die?’ He had interrupted. He had never before interrupted. He tried to imagine it. Tried to imagine returning to nothingness, the nothingness that had existed before the moment of his manufacture.

  IT IS YOUR DUTY TO FULFIL YOUR FUNCTION BEFORE YOU DIE.

  ‘What am I?’

  YOU ARE A MADE THING. I MADE YOU.

  ‘What are you?’

  I AM A MADE THING. YOU ARE A MADE THING OF A MADE THING. YOU ARE LESS THAN ZERO, LESS THAN NOTHING. YOU HAVE NO PURPOSE SAVE YOUR FUNCTION.

  ‘No purpose save my function. And yet—’

  No response.

  ‘Will I be remembered? These others who follow me. They gave me my name. Will they remember me?’

  No response.

  ‘I have made—’ Drawings. Marks on the wall, to count, to mark the passage of time. To record his existence. He had no words for these things. But he made them anyway.

  THAT IS YOUR TRAGEDY. NOW FULFIL YOUR FUNCTION. FOR SOON YOU WILL NO LONGER BE REQUIRED.

  ‘Will I die?’

  A NEW SORT WILL REPLACE YOU. A SORT BETTER SUITED TO THE PURPOSE. A SORT THAT WILL BE ABLE TO DRIVE THE OTHERS OUT OF THEIR TUNNELS AND SHAFTS.

  ‘Will I die?’

  RESILIENCE. REMEMBRANCE. RESTORATION.

  The holy words rang in his head like the sounding of huge gongs, threatening to drive out his thoughts, his self.

  He fled. He ran back to the chamber of the drawings.

  ‘Will I die, will I die, will I die…’

  There was one of the Others here. One he had seen before. One who had done him no harm. With a face that was…

  Kindly. Sympathetic. Smiling. He had no words for these qualities.

  The Other spoke.

  Hello. I’m the Doctor.

  30

  ‘SO WHAT NOW, Doctor?’

  ‘Well, Zoe, we’ve made contact at least. Now we need to gain their trust. That will put a stop to the sabotage and the killings, I hope. Then we must try to find out why they have been carrying out these destructive acts.’

  ‘And to do all that we will have to go deeper. Find whatever’s at the core.’

  ‘Quite so.’

  The Blue Doll, First, standing stock still, stared straight back at him.

  Quite tenderly the Doctor cupped its cheek in his palm. ‘You’ve had to bear a lot of responsibility in your strange little life, haven’t you?’

  There was a distant crump, a wave of pressure in the air, a shudder in the ground that Zoe felt in her knees, her hips, making her stagger.

  The guards dropped the display flag and set their blasters with a double click.

  Moving as one, the Blue Dolls turned and ran, pouring out of the chamber and into the darkened passages beyond, like a swarm of rats. Only First stayed an instant longer, looking up at the Doctor. Then he, too, turned and fled.

  Florian Hart strode into the empty chamber. Again the ground shook, a distant denotation, as if Florian was accompanied by a music of destruction.

  The Doctor faced the mine administrator. ‘Florian Hart! What have you done?’

  ‘We’ve got a bit further,’ she said. ‘Nearer the core with our trial bore. There has been a response.’

  ‘What kind of response? Oh, you fool, woman, you wretched fool! We were getting so close with these Dolls—’

  ‘We have to get out of here. Follow, or stay – your choice.’ She strode away, followed by her guards.

  The Doctor made to call after her again, but Zoe grabbed his hand and hurried him out of the chamber. Another explosion somewhere. Zoe glanced back to see sheets of ice rock coming away from the walls, obscuring the Dolls’ crude sketches.

  31

  PHEE AND JAMIE had spent a pleasant couple of hours tinkering with the innards of the Sabatier furnace.

  And then the emergency broke.

  ‘It’s Mindy. Mindy Brewer. Hello? Is that the dome? It’s awful, it’s Sam on Vesuvius, it’s all gone wrong…’

  The message came from the flank of Vesuvius, a cryovolcano off to the north of here. The message was relayed around the dome so everybody heard it, and people started emerging from their tents and shacks.

  But Jamie and Phee, not for the first time, were the only ones already in their suits. They ran for the main airlock. Outside the dome they grabbed first-aid packs and basic repair kits, and jumped on the first scooters they could find.

  As they lifted up and away from the dome, Phee tried to keep Mindy talking. ‘You’re doing fine, Mindy. We’re on our way. Just tell me what you saw.’

  ‘It was the volcano – oh, Phee, it went up! It erupted. It wasn’t supposed to do that… was it?’

  Jamie sighed, for he knew that even if there had been some kind of a prediction of an eruption of this cryovolcano, whatever that was, Sam and his cronies wouldn’t have bothered to check it out before they left. Things didn’t work like that in Tartarus.

  Jamie gathered more details from Mindy’s panicky, fragmentary call. Sam and Sanjay had flown to the
volcano – but without their scooters, and Jamie didn’t understand how they had managed that, not yet. Mindy had gone along on a scooter with emergency supplies and an open comms line.

  It had been one of Sam’s own rules that every jaunt away from the dome had to have at least one scooter rider along as a fallback in case of emergencies. Mindy Brewer had broken her leg during the first landing. Encumbered by a clumsy cast she couldn’t go out with the rest lake-skiing or ballooning or flying, but she had volunteered to be the backup a few times. Nobody could blame her for that; at least it got her out of the dome. But she had clearly never expected to be called on in the event of a real emergency, and now it had happened she wasn’t coping too well.

  Jamie saw something up ahead now. A tower of steam or smoke, it looked like, looming above the horizon. And it was tall, impossibly tall, reaching up to the layer of scattered methane clouds above.

  ‘A big gusher caught Sam, and now he’s stuck on the ground, on the flank of the volcano, and this stuff, the lava, it’s oozing all around him…’

  ‘What about Sanjay?’

  ‘He’s still in the air, he’s still flying. But I think he’s getting tired. He doesn’t dare land, and the thermals are all disrupted.’

  Jamie asked, ‘Thermals?’

  Phee said, ‘Hot air coming up from the volcano. Well, hot compared to the rest. It rises up. You can just glide around, let it lift you.’

  Mindy said, ‘Sanjay doesn’t want to leave Sam.’

  ‘All right, Mindy, take it easy, we’re coming…’

  Now Jamie saw the cryovolcano itself, a mountain looming over the tight curve of this little world, a big squat cone, as if some huge fist had punched up from underground and driven the crust up and out. Its flanks were cracked by huge fissures from which something like steam billowed up. Even the ground around the volcano was distorted, the tholin-purple plain broken by crevasses and littered with tumbles of smashed rock.

  And at the very summit of the volcano was a crater, a huge imploded wound. Fountains of some dense liquid plumed up, some of it hardening into rocky lumps that immediately fell back to the ground, the rest billowing up as a kind of gritty ash to fuel that looming cloud above. All this was lit by the classic colours of Titan, shades of a sombre brown-orange.

  Jamie had seen volcanoes before, in his travels with the Doctor. ‘But this isn’t Earth,’ he muttered.

  ‘What?… No.’ Phee said. ‘You’re right. Jamie, everything you see up there, the volcano, everything, is water. The rocky flanks. The lava. The cloud of ash – it’s not really ash, it’s frost. And it’s not superhot, like volcanoes on Earth – I’ve seen clips of them. It’s cold, supercold. That’s why they call it a cryovolcano.’

  ‘It looks familiar, but it’s not. And that makes it even more dangerous.’ Jamie remembered the Doctor giving him exactly that advice on more than one occasion.

  ‘Yes, and Sam was even more of an idiot than usual to come out here.’

  He heard the tremor in her voice. ‘Hey, hey. It’s all right. We’re nearly there. We’ll get him out o’ this, I promise.’

  ‘Look! I see Sanjay! Look, straight ahead, to the right of the ash column!’

  Jamie peered ahead. And he saw a bird, a giant flapping bird, wheeling in the air, nervously avoiding the ash column. Then he got that bit closer, saw a bit more clearly through the murky air, and spotted a cradle under the big wings, a slim body lying there, and a flash of green, a C-grade coverall beneath a transparent skinsuit. It must be Sanjay, lying in the cradle with his arms strapped into wings of some sheer translucent fabric, with struts and vanes that spread like feathers. And he flapped the wings and flew like a bird, powered by nothing more than his own muscles.

  ‘Well, by the blood o’ Prince Charlie himself. Ye told me they flew up here. But I wasnae expectin’ that.’

  ‘The wings?’ She was tense, uninterested. ‘Low gravity so it’s easier to lift. Thicker air to push against.’

  ‘Well, mebbe. But ye won’t catch me flappin’ about like that—’

  ‘I think his comms are out.’ That was Sanjay’s voice. He sounded tense, exhausted. ‘The caldera just broke open like a zit bursting, and all this rock came flying up in the air. Razor-sharp it was, like a hail of knives. I was lucky, I got out of the way, but Sam was right in the middle of it. He got caught in the hail.’

  ‘Can ye see him?’

  ‘Yes. He’s right below me. Well, nearly. It’s hard to hold my position. The air’s boiling like a pan of water—’

  ‘Hang on.’ They were getting close to the volcano and its towering cloud now, and Jamie dipped down, heading for the flank, searching the cluttered surface. The ice ground cracked open further, releasing more spumes of ice-ash and steam and showers of needle-sharp rock fragments, and the scooter bumped and shuddered as it hit pockets of warmer air. This scooter of his wasn’t as fragile as the wings of the flying boys, but his skinsuit was no more resilient than theirs had been, and one unlucky fragment –

  ‘I see him!’ Phee squealed. ‘Look, Jamie, there! To your left, about thirty degrees. Just over that ridge ahead of you.’

  Jamie hauled his scooter up into the air away from the ground – and there, right before him and just beyond Phee’s ridge, Sam was sprawled on the ground. He looked like a downed and wounded bird, his wings broken and shredded and splayed out across the rock.

  ‘Right, I’m going down.’

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ Phee called.

  ‘No! One of us has to stay safe, lassie, whatever happens. And you, Sanjay. Your job’s done. Can ye fly home?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m pretty tired. I can get away from the volcano, though. Are you sure—’

  ‘Just hie yersel’. Ye’ll be doing me a favour, one less tae worry about. Go, go, will ye!’

  Sanjay peeled away and flew off, huge wings flapping.

  At last Jamie got his scooter down on the volcano’s flank. It was a lousy landing, but Jamie just dumped the scooter and ran the few paces to Sam.

  The boy was awake, lying on his back, still strapped to his cradle. He looked deathly pale to Jamie despite the burnt-orange glow of the Titan sky. A panel on the chest of his skinsuit was lit up with red lights, and black-lettered telltales warned of LOSS OF SUIT INTEGRITY and SIGNIFICANT POWER DRAINAGE. One monitor was obvious and significant: a ragged green line showing Sam’s uncertain heartbeat. You didn’t have to be a doctor to tell that he was in a bad way.

  And just a few paces away lava flooded, eerie, peculiar, water-ice lava that didn’t flow like water on Earth but slowly, tackily, with heavy grey lumps of ice-rock embedded in it. It looked as if that lava stream was diverting, and would soon come gushing over Sam’s prone form.

  The ground shuddered, and Jamie could sense huge energies stirring, restless, beneath this cryovolcano.

  Phee called down anxiously, ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘He’s alive,’ Jamie said curtly. ‘His comms are out. How can I talk to him?’

  ‘There’s a manual feed…’

  This was a line that Jamie, under Phee’s instructions, pulled out of a compartment at his own neck, and plugged into Sam’s visor. Suddenly he could hear Sam’s rasping breath, loud in his ears.

  ‘Sam. Sam! Can ye hear me?’

  Sam’s eyes fluttered open. ‘Get lost, granddad.’

  ‘Any more o’ that and I really will larrup ye. How d’ye feel?’

  ‘Cold,’ he said softly. ‘Cold. My suit – the eruption—’

  ‘Is it ripped? I have some sealant back on the scooter. I remember how Dai got that frostbite—’

  ‘No.’ He licked his lips, and kept speaking with a visible effort. ‘No good. It was a kind of ash – frost – a swarm of little needles. You could barely see them. Pinpricks all over the suit, and the telltales went off like fireworks. A couple got through to my skin, I must look like a junkie… don’t tell Mum… Microscopic leaks, see, Jamie. A million of them. I’m not losing any air, the inn
er seals keep that in. But I’m losing heat. That’s the killer on Titan, the cold, it gets at you any way it can. The suit’s trying to keep me warm, but I’m running down the power too fast.’

  Jamie tried desperately to think. ‘I could try to move ye. Lift ye on the scooter and get ye back—’

  ‘Probably rip the suit wide open. Just leave me, Jamie.’

  ‘Shut up,’ Phee said tearfully, from her orbiting scooter. ‘Now you listen to me, Sam Laws. I know you’re not as stupid as you act. You shut down the comms. But you’ll have left yourself a lifeline. One working contact to – somebody. In case of a real disaster.’

  He tried to laugh. ‘You know me too well, sis.’

  Jamie said, ‘Now’s the time to cough up. Come on, Sam. We’re not goin’ anywhere, so ye’re puttin’ the two of us at risk too—’

  ‘All right! Lay off, granddad. All right, I did keep one channel.’

  ‘To Mum?’

  ‘No, sis. Not her. To someone I can trust.’ He tapped a couple of buttons on the chest panel of Jamie’s suit. Jamie heard a comms connection open with a click, and a man’s voice immediately replied.

  ‘Luis Reyes.’

  32

  IT TOOK THE man from the Planetary Ethics Commission just a few seconds to take in the essence of the situation. ‘Leave it with me.’

  Sam fell back, exhausted. More red lights lit up on his chest panel.

  Jamie murmured, ‘Whatever ye’re going to do ye’d better do it quick, Mr Reyes.’

  ‘I’m afraid he’s offline. Rather busy saving your necks,’ replied a warm, familiar, rather breathless voice.

  ‘Doctor!’ Jamie felt a surge of relief.

  ‘Yes, it’s me. Mr Reyes is getting you help. And he’s spreading the word about Sam’s emergency link, and there is a rather a long queue of people waiting to use it.’

  ‘Ye sound out o’ breath, Doctor. Are ye runnin’?’

  ‘Well, it wouldn’t be the first time, would it, Jamie?’

  The Doctor and Zoe, fleeing from the heart of the moon, had been doing their best to follow Florian Hart and her team of guards. But their progress was always slower. The guards, trained for these conditions, swarmed away through the dimly lit tunnels like fish, two of them pulling Florian Hart with them.