Doctor Who - The Wheel of Ice

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘I’m no boy, step-dad,’ Sam snarled.

  ‘Nobody came to any harm,’ Harry said.

  ‘Oh,’ Jo said, ‘thanks to you and your daring rescue, no doubt. Enjoyed playing the hero, did you?’

  ‘Actually it was Jamie who saved him. Karen and I just tidied up.’

  Florian Hart’s voice was like a tinkle of broken glass. ‘Entertaining as the disintegration of your dysfunctional family is, Mayor, we’re in the middle of a crisis here. Maybe we should focus on business?’

  Jo Laws sighed. ‘Agreed. Sonia, what’s the security situation?’

  ‘Confused. I’m getting updates from the Wheel and the mine fed to the comms console, such as it is, in this elevator cage. Will narrowcast it to you all now – wait a minute, sending it via MMAC—’

  ‘Och, that tickles.’

  ‘Shut up, MMAC.’

  A panel on the wall of the phibian’s cabin lit up like the TARDIS’s scanner, and started showing scenes from across the Wheel, the mine surface, and the cables linking the two. Jamie saw those beads of light still rising up all the cables, towards the Wheel. But there were pools of deep blue at the base of many of the cables, close to the mine.

  ‘OK,’ Sonia said. ‘You can see the evacuation is still under way. The elevator cages are all working at full capacity, and we have ships calling in to pick up stragglers.’

  ‘A veritable Dunkirk,’ the Doctor said, but nobody seemed to know what he meant.

  ‘On the Wheel itself, we’ve had incidents with the Blue Dolls, scattered outbreaks of disruption, damage, sabotage… They all went crazy at the same time, just when the trouble with the bigger models started.’

  ‘The Blue Soldiers,’ Zoe said clearly. ‘They need a name. Let’s call them that.’

  ‘Fine. Fortunately the Dolls are less advanced than the Soldiers, as well as being smaller physically. Less capable.’

  The Doctor said grimly, ‘Evidently whatever is manufacturing these things is learning.’

  Sonia said, ‘We’ve had no reports yet of Blue Soldiers up on the Wheel. Well, the only way they can get there is via the elevator, or the ships that are calling at the surface. We can put strict controls at the Wheel airlocks.’

  ‘I’ll get on to that,’ Jo Laws murmured.

  The Doctor said, ‘Some of your images, Marshal, show the Blue Soldiers swarming up the cables themselves. The vacuum doesn’t seem to bother them, does it? And they certainly aren’t queuing up for the next elevator car. If I may make a suggestion…’

  ‘Go ahead,’ Sonia said.

  ‘Captain Harry, perhaps this is a contribution you could make. Tour the moon, keeping out of reach of the Soldiers, and, umm, snip the cables. If you cut them below the level of the last passenger car, those aboard should be safe, shouldn’t they?’

  ‘I think so. Good idea. Locking in. We’ll get started right away.’

  Immediately the phibian lurched down towards the surface of Mnemosyne. Jamie felt nothing, it seemed there was an artificial gravity system on this particular ship that held him in place as the ship swooped and rolled, but the spectacle of the universe whirling past the windows became ever more dizzying. He tried to focus on the interior of the cabin, the back of Harry’s couch ahead of him, the stable frame he was sitting in.

  ‘And that will strand most of the Blues down on the Moon. But—’

  Now Zoe interrupted the Doctor. ‘But I believe I saw Blue Soldiers getting to the cables before us. There may be some on the cables already, above the rising cars.’

  ‘Let’s take a look,’ Matthews said. ‘I’ll hack into the external monitors and see if we can spot your own cable…’

  Soon a new image crowded into the scanner screen on the phibian’s wall, and Jamie peered to see. It was a thin thread strung across space, leading up to a Wheel ice bubble. There was the elevator cage, a transparent box – and Jamie saw people inside, Zoe and the Doctor, the man himself unmistakeable in that shabby black coat, even inside a skinsuit.

  And above the box he saw blue figures, wriggling, rising, climbing up the cable.

  Sonia grunted. ‘You were right, Ms Heriot.’

  Jamie peered at the image. ‘One o’ them looks blurry. Is it wearing a skinsuit?’

  But nobody paid him any attention.

  Sonia said, ‘Well, we can’t cut the cables above the rising cars, not without risking the passengers’ lives. Madam Mayor, I suspect you will soon have some unwelcome visitors.’

  ‘We’ll be ready. But it’s going to stretch us thin.’

  Sonia called, ‘Are we done?’

  ‘Not quite,’ the Doctor said, his voice sterner. ‘Now that all the key players are at last in contact with each other, we should take the opportunity to look beyond the immediate crisis and consider the longer term.’

  ‘What longer term?’ Florian was as dismissive as ever. ‘The only longer term I’m planning for is the resumption of mining, and the extraction of bernalium.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think there’ll be any more mining until this situation is resolved. And in fact it’s your foolish attempts to drive on harder and faster that have provoked this crisis in the first place, Florian Hart.’

  ‘Now you listen to me—’

  ‘No, you listen,’ the Doctor said firmly, and Jamie heard the note of command that emerged in him in a crisis, when the situation became clear, and the course of necessary action obvious. ‘The pieces of the jigsaw are fitting together, at least in my mind. There is something at the core of your moon, as I’ve suspected from the beginning of all this. What it is, I still don’t know yet. But I do know it is massive, for its motions affect the moon’s gravity, and thereby the ring system. I know it is intelligent. It has encoded information of some kind into the ring system.’

  Florian snorted.

  ‘It is technological. It has manufactured these androids, the Dolls and the Soldiers, in response to its encounters with humanity. And it is something that doesn’t belong here. The very presence of the bernalium you’re mining, Florian, is one clear indicator of that. Bernalium is rare in this solar system – save here! And, Zoe and Jamie, you’ll be aware of more conundrums we’ve uncovered.’

  Jamie said, ‘Aye, yon allohistorical lure.’

  Zoe added, ‘And the continuum displacement—’

  ‘And the fact that it caused a big bang in the deep past—’

  ‘It did what?’ Sonia asked.

  ‘Yes, well, we don’t need to go into all that now,’ the Doctor said hastily. ‘Suffice it to say that we must return to that moon, once again. In spite of the danger. We must penetrate to its very heart. We must find out what lies there – what it is, and what it wants. And we must stop it from doing any more damage. Because, believe me, the potential for further disruption dwarfs anything we’ve seen so far.’

  ‘And the Blues,’ Sonia said. ‘The Dolls and the Soldiers. What must we do with them? Exterminate them?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ the Doctor said, sounding shocked. ‘We must save them, Marshal Paley. We must save them.’

  Zoe said, ‘I think we’re nearly there. At the Wheel.’

  ‘Then I’m about to have visitors,’ Jo Laws said. ‘I’ll call you back…’

  35

  IN RES THREE, the cable docking station and its airlock were a couple of bubbles away from Mayor Jo Laws’ home cum headquarters, where she’d been taking the conference call. Now she dashed for the docking station, working the wheels of her chair with brisk, practised shoves, calling ahead to have the hatches between the modules opened for her. From her elevator module, Sonia ordered available deputies to assemble at the docking station, armed, to support her.

  The sector was locked down tight, Jo saw as she hurried through, just as she had ordered. This was a residential zone, but the schools, bars, play areas were all shut down and secured. Nobody moved on the streets save for a few deputies. But she saw maintenance robots at work, spidery machines patching the ice walls, others vacuum-cleaning the road su
rfaces or plunging extendible arms down drains: the infrastructure of the Mnemosyne Cincture, engaged in the endless task of maintaining itself, activities usually going on unnoticed by busy humans at all. It was oddly peaceful, harmonious, industrious. You’d never have known that people had been fighting for their lives down on the ice moon, just kilometres away.

  By the time she got to the airlock, Sonia’s deputies were already in position, half a dozen of them; all but one carried a blaster. They circled the airlock, which was a transparent cylinder a little taller than human height, with one big dilating door.

  And inside the lock, already, were several figures. Tall, blue. There might have been six, seven, eight, more. They stood still as statues, but that only made them seem more menacing.

  One seemed to be wearing a skinsuit, oddly. ‘You were right, Mr McCrimmon,’ Jo murmured.

  ‘What’s that, Mayor?’ one of the deputies asked, a stocky woman.

  ‘Never mind.’

  ‘You can see we have the lock secured.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘They seem to know they can’t get out. They haven’t tried, anyhow.’

  ‘We’re going to need the lock when the refugees get here. We’ll have to let them out and deal with them outside.’

  ‘Agreed. Let’s form a couple of perimeters.’ The deputy issued swift orders. Three of her colleagues stayed close to the lock, surrounding it in a loose circle, and the other three stood further out. All had their blasters trained on the lock. ‘That should do it. And if any do get past us I’ve ordered the bubble hatches to be secured. They can’t get out of here into the rest of the sector, at least.’

  ‘Good. All right. Let’s do this.’

  The deputy raised her arm, and prepared to work a control panel on her wrist to open the hatch. The others stiffened, almost imperceptibly, ready to fire. Jo too raised her own blaster.

  ‘On my three. One. Two—’

  When the lock opened the Blue Soldiers swarmed out immediately. They were sprinting, Jo saw, sprinting like athletes, their bare feet somehow clinging to the floor. They moved unbelievably quickly.

  And the one in the skinsuit was coming straight for her. It had skin mottled brown, she saw, brown in with the blue, under the sealed suit.

  Blasters fired. The Blues were cut down, sliced, exploded, decapitated. Yet a slick of blue-tinged body parts continued to crawl towards the deputies.

  And the one in the skinsuit survived. The deputies hadn’t been sure about shooting it. It walked unsteadily towards Jo in her chair, and touched its suit’s controls. The suit peeled back.

  That brown mottling wasn’t a discolouration. It was flesh, human flesh, scraps of brown skin embedded in the blue. A panel of skin survived on the upper chest. Half of one upper arm. Areas around the thighs, the groin. Where there was contact the blue infiltrated the flesh, with needle-like fibres.

  Half a face. The rest colonised by the blue.

  Sinbad’s face.

  He opened his eyes, one human eye, one black as night. Opened a mouth that was half sealed by the blue. His voice was a wheeze, just breath.

  ‘Help me.’

  Jo raised her blaster and fired, again and again, until the body was broken up completely and every scrap scorched out of recognition. The blaster ran out of charge. A deputy took it from her limp hand. She slumped back in her chair, exhausted. And still the scraps of flesh on the floor slithered towards her like slugs.

  ‘Why are you doing this?’ Jo asked. ‘Who are you? Where did you come from? Why did you bring my family here? What do you want?’

  INTERLUDE

  HOME

  I

  What Arkive wanted was simple.

  To go home.

  But to achieve that goal was anything but simple.

  Five billion years ago:

  When she was born, her very first awareness was of her mission.

  Resilience. Remembrance. Restoration.

  Those words were doorways in her young mind, through which understanding flooded.

  And something else. Regret.

  (They know this is cruel. To take away my youth. My growing. There is no time for growing. No time, if I am to save the best of them.)

  Knowledge knitted itself up in her head. Then came interpretation. And then, understanding.

  She orbited a world. One of a family of worlds. They in turn orbited a stable, long-lived, red-tinged, harmless sun. This world was called Home. It was old, its ages of war and exploitation long past. If no longer rich, its people were content, in the light of their faithful sun…

  Their sun, however, was not the problem.

  (And what am I? I am embodied. A hull, shining, new, of stout bernalium and other materials. Inside there is complexity, a design engineered down to the level of subatomic particles. And, strapped to my metallic body, a shield. Or a sail?)

  The problem was another star, a monstrous star nearby, young, bloated. Born in a nearby stellar nursery, drifting too close. That was the problem, a ghastly cosmic accident. For this star’s life would not be long. Its core imploding, its outer layers cascading into space, it would soon destroy itself in a titanic explosion.

  Titanic? How titanic? It would not just devastate Home, the other planets. It would destroy Home’s sun itself.

  (But it will not destroy me. Those who made me cannot save themselves. They can only save the memory of themselves, in me. They will load the best of themselves into me. And hope. Yes, they can invest that in me. And when the supernova detonates –)

  There was a plan. A design. The shield would protect her from the detonation. Then it would act as a sail. The explosion itself would hurl her out of the solar system. And then, in the fullness of time, she would find another star, another world…

  (Resilience. I must survive where all else is lost. Remembrance. I must remember what has been lost. The worlds. The life that swarmed. The minds. The art, the science, their unique apprehension of a universe that betrayed them. And, restoration. I have the facility to make new life. I have a womb! I will create them once again, on a new world, so that their story is not lost. And I –)

  No time! No time! No time to tell you who we are! No time to tell you who you are!

  (I am Arkive –)

  II

  She sensed the explosion.

  A flare of white light, searing pain, a deep agonising rip as the filmy shield was ripped from her carcass, and the deeper inner burning as the supernova’s radiation penetrated her body of metal and ceramics…

  Too deep!

  The plan had failed. The design was flawed. She was damaged. She fell, helpless, tumbling in the searing light.

  Her mission was compromised. The detonation of the sun of Home had not been as expected. Too severe. Or too asymmetrical. (But who studies supernovas close to?) And it had caught her, it had overwhelmed the elaborate survival mechanisms given her by her designers.

  It was a billion-year mission, and in the first few seconds she had failed. The regret was deeper than the agony of the physical pain.

  The supernova poured out neutrinos, ghostly particles that bit into her interior. Twisting in agony, she manipulated the singularities deep in her own core to spit neutrinos back out into space. These were cries, cries of hate and anguish yelled back into the teeth of the storm. But the supernova had no ears to her, no mind to understand.

  And still she fell through space, helpless.

  For a thousand years, she fell.

  Before her, the supernova’s energy battered at a huge interstellar cloud, a swirling mass of dust and ice and organics. In response new stars began to nucleate, swirling and spitting and sparking to life. New planets, lumps of rock and ice, coalesced from a whirlwind of collisions. Whole new star systems were being created by the shock of the supernova, the event that had destroyed all she loved.

  These systems would be garbage. Swirls of rubble. Worthless.

  Yet she fell towards them.

  For a million more ye
ars, she fell.

  Until, at last, before her, a gas giant, a spinning, still-accreting ice moon…

  36

  THE DOCTOR WASTED no time. Less than a day after the battle on the moon, for the third time the Doctor and Zoe descended on Mnemosyne. He was going to let nothing stop him reaching the entity in the core this time, the Doctor told Zoe, and he was going to put an end to the petty war between the Blue creatures and the colonists. And he was going to put right whatever had gone wrong, deep in Mnemosyne. He spoke with a cold authority that sometimes settled on him; when he was like this she believed him even as she feared him, a little bit.

  This time they went to the moon aboard a spaceship. The phibian craft, its hull still streaked by Titan tholins, settled softly on scarred ice. As Harry and Karen worked their way through a post-touchdown checklist, the landing party began to suit up and check the equipment they had brought. There were four of them this time: the Doctor, Phee Laws, Sonia Paley, and Zoe. Zoe had an improvised suite of instruments, scientific sensors, and a little tool kit for running repairs, all built into a backpack with a small handheld control unit. The Doctor carried a set of folded-up display flags, programmed with images of Saturn’s rings. Phee had her amulet.

  And Sonia had a blaster.

  Zoe realised she had been holding her breath throughout the routine landing. The situation was extraordinary. At least when she’d visited before she’d had the feeling that she was approaching a functioning, inhabited, industrial facility. Now there was not a human on this whole moon, none but the crew and passengers of the phibian ship. Not for the first time she wished Jamie was at her side, Jamie with his sturdy strength and endless reserves of loyalty. But Jo Laws had asked that he stay on the Wheel and join the clean-up parties. Jamie had become a kind of ambassador to the estranged younger generation. Good for Jamie! But he wasn’t at Zoe’s side where he belonged, she thought resentfully.

  Before he let them out of their couches, Harry ran through a series of external scans once again, supplemented by long-range checks by MMAC and other flying platforms. ‘Still no sign of movement anywhere. We’re good to go.’