Doctor Who - The Wheel of Ice

by Stephen Baxter

  Soon they were out of sight entirely, to Zoe’s alarm. ‘Wait! Wait for us!’

  ‘I don’t think that will do any good, Zoe,’ the Doctor said grimly. ‘I rather think we’ve been abandoned to our fate. Mind you, I suspect we’re better off without them. The fewer guns the better is always my motto… Never mind that. Jamie? Are you still there? Now listen to me. How’s Sam?’

  ‘He’s fading fast, Doctor. I cannae read these dials on his chest. I think his suit might run out of energy before whatever Mister Reyes is plannin’ comes off.’

  ‘The problem is the temperature difference, Jamie. Between the interior of his suit, which is at a comfortable temperature for a human, and the outside, Titan, which is two hundred degrees below. The greater the temperature difference the faster the heat flows out. Now, if there was some way of reducing that difference the heat loss would diminish, and the suit’s power cells would stretch that bit further.’

  ‘Ye want me to warm him up somehow. But how?’ Jamie looked down at his own gloved hands. ‘I ken that if a man gets too cold ye cuddle him, to give him your body warmth. We learned that in the Highlands, in winter. I cannae even do that. I’m stuck in my own suit, and that’s gonna be as cold as Titan on the outside too.’

  ‘Look around, Jamie. Think. Is there nowhere you could put him to keep him warmer, even by just a few degrees? It could make all the difference…’

  The lights flickered, all the globes embedded in the walls dimming as one, before they slowly recovered.

  Zoe, still running, started to feel panicky. ‘Doctor, it will be unbearable in here if the lights fail. We’ll never get out!’

  ‘Don’t worry, Zoe, I think I have some matches. And besides, won’t your marvellous memory continue to work in the dark?’

  ‘Hush.’

  ‘What?’

  She stumbled to a halt. She heard a sound like the beating of a great drum. Rhythmic. Heavy. Relentless. ‘Can you hear that?’

  He listened intently. ‘Yes, I’m afraid I can.’

  That metronomic thumping was coming from the tunnels just behind them. It was like a march, she thought now. Like the inhuman, machine-like stomping of the Cybermen. Relentless. Untiring. Overwhelmingly powerful.

  And in pursuit.

  ‘Do you think it’s getting louder?’

  ‘Yes,’ the Doctor breathed.

  ‘Well, then – run!’

  ‘Yes, yes, Zoe. Jamie, are you still there? I can’t see you, I don’t know what’s around you. I’m going to have to run rather rapidly! You’ll have to work it out for yourself…’

  Just then the lava flow surged, busily shifting its course again, a dense plastic flow with a crust of ice that formed and broke continually. A spray of droplets settled over Jamie and Sam, freezing instantly on their skinsuits, a patina of ice.

  Ice!

  This was molten lava. If Jamie was on Earth, this close to a lava flow, he’d be fried by now. But this was Titan, where the rock was ice. And the lava was molten ice.

  Water. Just flowing water.

  Jamie got to his feet. ‘I’m gonna try to move ye, Sam. Just lie still.’ Judging it best to keep Sam strapped tight into his flying cradle, for fear of doing any more damage to his injuries, he crouched, got his arms underneath the cradle, and lifted. The gravity was low, but the mass of cradle and inert boy was just as hard to shift as on Earth. Then he dragged the cradle through the air back towards the lava stream.

  ‘I dinna ken how cold yon stream is,’ he said, grunting with the effort. ‘It’s no Scottish burn; I bet there’s all sorts of funnies in there. But it’s running water. Stands to reason it’s gonna be warmer than the rest. Right? Just a few degrees, the Doctor said, just a few degrees…’ But Sam didn’t reply, and anyhow Jamie was only talking to reassure himself.

  He strode backwards into the lava stream. It didn’t feel like water flowing around his legs; it was heavy, sticky, dense, and difficult to wade through. But he got to the middle of the stream, and carefully pressed Sam and his cradle down into the flow, through the shifting crust of ice, until the boy was immersed. ‘If this was an Earth volcano,’ he muttered, ‘we’d both be burnt cakes by now, Sam. But it’s not Earth. It’s not Earth…’

  That was how they were standing when, only minutes later, a big bruised-purple craft came swooping through the air, a bulbous shell with thick windows and four fat rotor blades mounted in pods. On its flank was a Bootstrap logo, a vehicle registration number, and a station assignment: NORTH POLE METHANE EXTRACTION PLANT.

  Sam stirred. ‘Oh, no. It’s Pop.’ His eyes drifted closed.

  And only minutes after the rotorcraft had lifted, with Jamie, Sam and Phee aboard, the volcano erupted again. The ground on which Jamie had been standing was smashed open, the fragments wheeling in the thick air, and ice needles hailing harmlessly.

  33

  STILL ZOE AND the Doctor ran as best they could, away from the marching noise, flapping and floundering along the corridors. It was like a nightmare, Zoe thought, a nightmare of flight, as she tried to build up speed but could gain no traction in the soft gravity field of this treacherous moon. She tried to think, to recall the map of the moon she had built up in her head. She thought they were heading the right way, to the shafts to the surface facilities. But in the uncertain light, stumbling around as they were, it was difficult to be sure.

  Then they turned a corner, and suddenly the marching noise was coming from ahead of them too. They skidded to a halt.

  Blue shapes, emerging from the dark.

  Not child-sized mannequins this time. These were tall, taller than Zoe, heavy, powerful. Adult sized. Their naked Blue skins were as seamless and smooth as the Dolls’. And, yes, their blank, almost featureless faces had something of the cold inhuman chill of the Cyberman.

  Not Dolls, Zoe thought. Soldiers. These were Blue Soldiers.

  And they were purposeful. They walked in ranks of three, stomping and slamming.

  The Doctor said dryly, ‘Evidently the matter printer in the core has got a new pattern.’

  ‘Sinbad,’ she said grimly.

  ‘Sinbad?’

  ‘The Dolls captured him. He’s been used as a template. You can see they’ve a similar build. Look at their faces, their features are just sketches, but can’t you see a little of Sinbad in them, the set of the jaw, those bumps that are sculpted like cheekbones?’

  ‘You did like Dr Omar, didn’t you?’ he asked gently.

  ‘Sinbad was warm, generous… How can there be anything of him left in these things? They are so inhuman. Engine-like.’

  ‘Perhaps. But clearly intelligent – or at least there’s an intelligence behind them.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, they have managed to cut us off,’ the Doctor said grimly.

  And she saw that the Soldiers were closing on them from ahead and behind. She grabbed the Doctor’s arm, and he hugged her. She could feel the rattling of his twin hearts. ‘Will they kill us?’

  ‘We may not be so lucky, Zoe—’

  ‘Och, now that’s no’ a verra Scottish attitude.’

  Zoe called wildly, ‘MMAC?’

  ‘Duck.’

  ‘What?’

  The Doctor cried, ‘He said, “Duck”!’ And he put his big hand on the crown of Zoe’s head and pulled her down.

  The tunnel wall to their right exploded.

  Zoe and the Doctor, still clinging to each other, were hurled across the corridor to collide with the far wall. Big ice blocks wheeled down the shaft, and light globes scattered like fireflies. Zoe was deafened, her head filled with an odd ringing noise.

  She saw that the blast had shoved the Blue Soldiers back down the passages from which they’d been emerging, a tangle of heavy bodies, arms and legs bent at unnatural angles. But as Zoe watched they immediately began to recover. The more badly damaged were pulled aside, and the rest started forming up in their ranks. In just seconds they would be on the march again, Zoe realised.


  And she and the Doctor still lay here against the ice wall, flopping like stranded fish. She struggled to rise.

  But now the debris was clearing, and troops came pouring in through the breach. They were civilian deputies, Zoe saw, Sonia’s police force, rather than Bootstrap guards. The leaders turned immediately to face the oncoming ranks of Blue Soldiers, blasters raised.

  Sonia Paley herself, in a robust-looking armoured skinsuit, followed the leaders. She looked around briskly, and hurried over to the Doctor and Zoe. ‘Out, you two.’

  ‘You’ve saved us, Sonia,’ the Doctor said.

  ‘Well, that’s the general idea.’

  Zoe was picturing the map of shafts and tunnels in her head. ‘You broke through from a neighbouring shaft. The ice wall was fairly thin…’

  ‘Too thin to resist a few blaster shots.’

  ‘But how did you find us?’

  ‘There’s gratitude for ye.’

  ‘MMAC! I’m sorry – I’d forgotten – when the wall caved in—’

  ‘Aye, nae matter. Just be thankful I didnae forget ye, Zoe Heriot. I’ve been tracking ye since ye went on yer fool’s errand down in yon corridors. So when I saw ye were in a pickle I copied your position doon tae the Marshal—’

  ‘And we did the rest,’ Sonia said.

  ‘Well, we’re jolly glad you did,’ the Doctor said. ‘No sign of Florian Hart and her stormtroopers, then?’

  Sonia grunted. ‘At times like these the Bootstrap people tend to take care of themselves, I’m afraid—’

  The Blue Soldiers were on the march again. The deputies were forced to fall back, firing as they went. One deputy cried out, fell, and would have been overwhelmed if the others hadn’t pulled him back. There was a crackle of blaster fire, concussions in the air.

  The Doctor snapped, exasperated, ‘This is needless slaughter!’

  Sonia took his arm. ‘We can debate this later. Follow me – now!’

  Zoe followed Sonia through the breach in the wall, emerging into a wider, brightly lit tunnel that was, Zoe saw with relief, only a short distance from a vertical access shaft to the surface. But to get there they would have to pass through a crude airlock and go out into vacuum. She fumbled with her skinsuit hood.

  The Doctor stumbled behind, followed by the troops. Still the blasters fired with electrical crackles, and still Zoe heard that jump-push rhythmic noise of the Blue Soldiers. It sounded as if the whole moon vibrated with it.

  They pushed through the lock into the evacuated shaft, and began a climb that seemed to take for ever. Zoe was already exhausted, her head and chest ached from the explosion in the side-shaft, and now here she was once more swimming through this irritating microgravity.

  At last the disc of black sky above her opened up. A beefy gloved hand reached down, grabbed her by her suit’s scruff, and dragged her up and out of the shaft mouth, leaving her sprawling on her belly. She felt like a fish she had once seen Jamie land, a big salmon he had hauled out of a Scottish lake, many centuries away.

  Struggling to regain her breath, she scrambled to her feet. Over her head she saw the big, gangly, clumsy, hugely reassuring form of MMAC swimming through space. And not a hundred metres away, a cable dangled with a clear-walled elevator cage standing open at its base. Her way off this moon and back to the Wheel!

  The last of Sonia’s troops came pouring out of the shaft. Zoe and the Doctor were waved back. Then, to a snapped command from Sonia, deputies pushed forward to make a cordon around the mouth of the shaft, blasters raised.

  The first Blue Soldiers emerged only seconds after the last of the humans. Naked to the vacuum, they moved much faster than the humans had, swarming up ice walls that had seemed sheer to Zoe.

  Sonia’s troops opened fire.

  Zoe saw heads sliced away, torsos cut in half, fragments of limbs and heads wheeling away. But they still came on, despite their injuries. Legless torsos pulling themselves over the ice. A headless creature stumbling blindly, arms outstretched. An arm, detached, crawling with its fingerless sketch of a hand.

  The Doctor rushed forward, among the troops, risking the blaster fire. ‘Aim for the walls! Block the shaft to contain them! It’s the only way!’

  One of the deputies, a C-grade woman, grabbed the Doctor and hauled him back out of harm’s way.

  The rest began to hose their blaster fire at the walls of the shaft, which cracked and crumbled, huge sections splitting away from the walls’ faces. Most of the Blue Soldiers were knocked back and went tumbling back into the shaft in low gravity slow motion.

  But one group made it to the surface, and rushed the Doctor and the deputy who was trying to save him. In the last moment the deputy shoved the Doctor away.

  And the Blue Soldiers closed on her, swarming. Pulling her to the ground. Dragging her back towards the shaft. Zoe heard her scream over the skinsuit comms system, piercing. Then a Soldier dug its blade-like hand through the woman’s suit, and the screams cut off with a drowning gurgle. Limp, she was dragged down into the shaft.

  Sonia hauled the Doctor to his feet. She was breathing hard, her eyes wide. ‘Her name was Bella Kage. She was a volunteer. Her main job was as a midwife. She had two children of her own.’

  ‘I’m sorry – I’m so sorry—’

  ‘She saved your life. Don’t ever forget her name.’

  ‘Oh, I won’t,’ the Doctor said grimly.

  ‘We have to get out of here. They’re coming up out of the other shafts, and out of natural chimneys, crevasses. Boiling up everywhere. We’re evacuating the moon. Come on, let’s get to that elevator.’

  So they fled across the ice, with the Doctor and Zoe at the centre of a knot of deputies. Around the blocked shaft behind them, stumps and limbs and smashed body parts continued their grotesque shuffling over the ice.

  And Zoe thought she saw shadows racing across the broken ice surface, heading for the cables to the Wheel.

  Blue shadows.

  34

  ‘THEY’RE SETTING UP a conference call,’ Harry Matthews called back to Jamie.

  ‘A what-now?’

  Jamie and Sam Laws sat in the two rear seats of the ship’s small control cabin. Harry and his co-pilot, a woman called Karen Madl, sat up front, before a bank of glimmering controls. Phee and the rest of the sixteen youngsters from Titan were in a roomy rear compartment, a cargo chamber designed to transport methane from Titan, hastily fitted out with rows of emergency acceleration couches.

  And beyond the pilots was a huge curved window showing an unbelievably complex sky. They were flying inside the circle of the Wheel, so that the gleaming blown-ice bubbles and the chunkier metal-walled hulks turned steadily in space around them. Cables dangled down to the central moon from all around the Wheel, and lights crawled steadily up every one of those cables, elevator cars carrying people up from the moon’s surface – including, Jamie hoped, the Doctor and Zoe. Meanwhile ships of various kinds whizzed around like shining insects, descending to the moon and rising again. It was a full-scale evacuation, Jamie saw.

  And on the moon itself what looked like a blue stain was spreading from cracks and holes in the ground. A stain that resolved, if you looked at it through special bits of the window that magnified like a telescope, into swarming human-like bodies.

  The sheer swarming fast-changing complexity of it all overwhelmed Jamie. And not only that, the atmosphere in the ship’s cabin couldn’t have been stiffer.

  Harry Matthews, the man Sam Laws called ‘Pop’, was Sam’s mother’s second husband, now divorced, and father of his half-sister Casey. As far as Jamie could tell, Harry’s co-pilot Karen was also Harry’s current partner. Jamie felt as if he had walked into a huge family row.

  ‘We’re about to be patched in.’ Harry glanced at a display. ‘I’ve got Florian Hart in the ops centre in the Industrial sector.’

  ‘Here.’ Florian’s voice was a brisk snap.

  ‘And Mayor Laws in Res Three—’

  ‘Less of the Mayor. I’m
your ex-wife, Harry, not your boss.’

  ‘All right, all right.’

  ‘I suppose you’re patching in that Madl woman too.’

  Karen glanced at Harry, and squeezed his hand. Beside Jamie, Sam mimed a silent vomit. Karen called, ‘Actually, Jo, I’m right here.’

  ‘Thank God we don’t have the bandwidth for visual.’

  ‘Now, ladies,’ Harry said. ‘I hope we also have Marshal Paley. Sonia, are you there?’

  Sonia’s voice was the scratchiest. ‘We’re here – just. I’m in an elevator, coming up to Res Three. My party took some losses down on Mnemosyne, but most of us got out. We have the travellers—’

  Jamie sat forward sharply. ‘Ye mean the Doctor and Zoe?’

  ‘Oh, give me that thing.’ Despite a crackle of static it was the Doctor’s unmistakeable voice. ‘Hello? Hello? Jamie? Is this still on?’

  ‘Doctor! Aye, I’m here, right as rain. Is Zoe there?’

  ‘She’s fine, Jamie. But we’ve had some adventures, I don’t mind admitting it.’

  Now Zoe cut in. ‘Jamie – where exactly are you?’

  Jamie looked around helplessly. ‘Up in the sky. I’d have to let Captain Matthews tell ye more particularly. Zoe, I’m in this fantastic beastie of a spaceship. It’s called a, a phib—’

  ‘A phibian,’ Karen called over her shoulder.

  ‘How interesting! Like an amphibian?’

  ‘Aye! It can fly around in space but it can duck into the air as well, on Titan anyhow.’

  ‘Actually,’ Harry said, ‘it can go swimming in the methane lakes too.’

  ‘It has these rotor pods in the air, that fold away when ye’re in space, and these panels slide back and it has rocket vents. It came to rescue us when Sam got stuck on yon volcano down there.’

  Now Jo Laws’ voice was thunderous. ‘What volcano?’

  ‘Oh, mother—’

  ‘Jo,’ Harry Matthews put in, ‘cut the kid some slack. Boys will be boys.’