Doctor Who - The Wheel of Ice

by Stephen Baxter

  There was silence. He had been cut off.

  ‘A planetbuster,’ Phee said in horror. ‘Do you think he’s right?’

  ‘I fear so, Phee. And we must—’

  The floor shook, shuddered, threw them up in the air. They landed face down, but still the shuddering went on, and now the ice walls of this cavern creaked and cracked.

  Phee stared around wildly. ‘Doctor! Look at the Arkive!’

  The whole of that battered hull was shaking, quivering, as if tremendous detonations were going off within it. The sense of huge energies – and, Phee thought, of huge anger – was palpable.

  The lone Blue Doll stood before the Arkive, motionless, like a child standing before an oncoming tank. A great section of roof cracked off and came loose and fell with a slow-motion crash.

  The Doctor said, ‘It’s heard what we said. It’s reacting. Well, why wouldn’t it? Moments after I promised it we would do it no harm, it’s been threatened with annihilation!’

  Phee tried to stand, grabbing for the Doctor’s hand. ‘We must get out of here!’ She dragged him by main force to the side-shaft out of the chamber, while huge blocks of ice hailed down from the roof and walls.

  And another shudder shook the whole moon.

  44

  SUDDENLY THE MOON ice erupted, all around the equator.

  Though she was sealed up inside a windowless hulk, Zoe saw what was coming through a multitude of sensors. Saw by deep radar and gravitational sensors the churning of the singularities of the Arkive, the huge masses at the core of Mnemosyne. Saw by seismometer networks planted throughout the moon a series of massive, convulsing quakes. Saw by remote cameras mounted on MMAC and other free-flying platforms the cracks form in the surface, and huge chunks of ice breaking away and flying out from the equator of the spinning moon.

  Saw that spray of lethal blocks head straight for the fragile habitats of the Wheel of Ice, which orbited in precisely that equatorial plain.

  And saw a lethal shard, spinning and glittering, come sailing up towards her shuttle from the broken surface of Mnemosyne. A mass of a million tonnes, perhaps, heading straight for her, and the fragile old hulk that cradled her.

  She felt no fear. Perhaps the shock was too great for that. The Doctor and Jamie were both down on the shivering moon, and might already be dead. Was this her own death heading for her, this fist of rock-ice that would swat her more casually than she would brush aside a fly?

  She watched the first of the great blocks reach the Wheel and smash through the wall of a fragile ice bubble. She saw it all quite clearly, across an arc of the Wheel in which she was embedded. Air and water froze in a glittering spray, and people were sent spinning into space. She was too far away to see if they wore skinsuits. It all seemed very abstract.

  Belatedly, alarms sounded in the hull.

  And Casey started crying, scared by the alarm. Sitting on the floor, surrounded by her toys, the little girl’s face was twisted, red. ‘Ma! Ma!’

  Zoe rushed to her, picked her up, clutched her close, rocked her and stroked her hair. ‘There, there. Don’t cry. You’re safe with me. Everything will be all right.’

  To lie was illogical! And yet the little girl calmed, just a bit. So there was a deeper truth than just fact, Zoe thought. A deeper communication, a deeper human truth that they were sharing. The two of them were lost in a lethal universe that might kill them at any second. But at least they had each other.

  Zoe slapped a button to shut down the proximity alarm. There was an instant of calm. Chaos outside, but inside this hull with its clean-carpet smell and humming of electronic fans and air pumps, all was orderly for a moment. Casey’s crying softened to a whimper.

  And the ice rock fragment hit them with a sideswipe, like a mighty fist driving into the hull. Zoe and Casey were thrown against a wall, bounced away.

  Zoe knew immediately it was a glancing blow, since she was not dead. The old Mars shuttle was still intact around her. But the spin gravity was gone, and she and Casey went floating up into the air. The impact must have severed the hull’s connections to the rest of the Wheel, and it had gone whirling off into space.

  Then it got worse. All the screens and sensor displays fritzed and turned a useless blue. The voices from the speakers were cut off. The lights blinked out. For a heartbeat they were in utter darkness, before dim red emergency lamps cut in. And the pumps of the air scrubber system rattled and died.

  For now they still had air to breathe. Blinded, it seemed, the hull’s comms systems and sensors wrecked. Helpless. But still alive. They were drifting in the air, the little girl still hugged close to Zoe’s chest. The hull turned slowly around them, a slow rotation imparted by that glancing blow. Casey had stopped crying. She pointed, over Zoe’s shoulder. ‘Oo.’

  Zoe turned to see the child’s blue rag doll floating in the air, cartwheeling slowly.

  When the moonquakes began, Jamie, Sam, Dai and Sanjay were still at the outer shell of the Doctor’s neutrino detector. They’d stayed in place to tend to any leaks or malfunctions.

  Now Jamie felt the huge convulsions, the very walls shuddering around him, and he heard distant thunderclaps, it sounded like, in the thin air of the shafts. Suddenly this whole wretched moon, a big chunk of ice riddled with tunnels and shafts, felt very fragile to Jamie, as if it all might fall in on him at any minute. And that was even before this wretched Z-bomb they’d all heard Luis Reyes blab about went up.

  But, as he saw with a quick glance, by some miracle the Doctor’s detector was still intact, the thin remnant ice shell still holding, and containing the sloshing fluid within.

  It was Sam, of the four of them, who recovered first. ‘Seal up your skinsuits. There are going to be breaches, the air could be lost. And we should keep together. Come to me.’

  ‘Good idea.’ Jamie hurried towards Sam’s position, through tunnels that shook, the walls cracking, huge sheets of ice flaking away. He sealed up his skinsuit as he moved, and called, ‘Is everybody all right? Sanjay, Dai—’

  ‘I’m here.’

  ‘Me too.’

  And the tunnel ahead of Jamie was about to close up, with a huge fall of ice coming down in slow motion from the ceiling. He didn’t know a way around it – didn’t even know if there was a way – he dived forward, wriggled under the fall, snatched his legs out of the way just as thousands of tonnes of ice closed up like a huge mouth.

  Jamie, breathing hard, found himself looking at Sam and the others, in a short corridor.

  ‘Nice move, granddad,’ Sam said.

  For a moment the four of them, reunited, wide-eyed, put their arms around each other’s shoulders. Like a band of soldiers, Jamie thought, about to go into battle.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Dai asked. ‘Has anybody got a comms signal?’

  None of them did.

  Sanjay said, ‘And the shaking – it’s like the whole moon is having a huge fit.’

  ‘We’ve got to get out of here,’ Jamie said.

  ‘Right,’ Sam said. ‘But how? Look.’ He pointed to the side-shaft that had brought them here. It was blocked by huge fallen masses.

  Jamie thought hard. ‘So we can’t go that way. But when one shaft closes up another must open. Stands to reason, doesn’t it?’ He wasn’t sure how true that was – what did he know about shuddering moons of ice? – but he glanced around at their faces behind their visors, and they nodded. ‘So we find another way. All we have to do is keep moving up. Right? Get to the surface. Then find some way off this thing and back to yon Wheel.’

  Dai nodded. ‘Lead the way, granddad.’

  ‘Och, less of that,’ Jamie grumbled under his breath. He glanced around, saw what looked like a passable way, and set off.

  Well, it was never going to be easy. The old passages had been chosen by the miners for their wideness and straightness, or else had been cut through the ice purposefully. The chasms opened up by these bizarre quakes were random and they felt like it, with jagged sections of wall read
y to rip through your flimsy skinsuit at the slightest misstep, and passages where they narrowed and blocked your way entirely, and you had to double back. There were no lights here, none of the handy light globes that had been scattered through the mine workings, and they only had their suit lamps. And, after a time, when they passed through a seal, no air either. But Jamie tried to take encouragement from that, because, he reasoned, if the passages were open to space there might be a way up to the surface.

  The hardest thing of all, though, was telling which way up he was. The gravity was so low that there was no strong sense of up or down, and he fretted he had lost his way, like a drowning man swimming down into the depths rather than up into the air.

  But he wasn’t alone. The boys worked together, watching out for each other, muttering advice. They were calm, brave, sensible, even though he could detect the fear in their voices. Jamie felt obscurely proud of them. Not that he was going to tell them so, for fear of being called granddad again.

  He had no idea how long they blundered through the broken carcass of the moon. He deliberately tried not to track the time. So he was oddly surprised when he pushed his way out of a crevasse, and suddenly there was black space above him.

  The four of them stood open-mouthed under a sky full of the fragments of the shattered Wheel, ice bubbles and rocket hulls and severed cables, drifting apart.

  Sam swore. ‘It must have been the quakes… My mum’s up there. No wonder the comms are down.’

  Jamie could see the fear and anxiety in his face. In all their faces. All of their families were in peril. As were Zoe, he realised, and the Doctor. But he put those thoughts aside.

  ‘We have to think about ourselves,’ he said urgently. ‘That’s all we can do for now. Any idea where we are?’

  Sam looked around and pointed. ‘There.’ A low building, visible over the moon’s close horizon. ‘That looks like the Quad Four facility where we landed in the phibian. We haven’t come far, after all that. But where’s the phibian itself?’

  Dai wordlessly pointed upwards. The craft hovered in space, maybe a kilometre above the surface, a toy.

  Given the moon seemed to be shaking itself to pieces, Jamie wondered why Harry hadn’t brought the ship down in search of Sam and the others. And there was no movement at the surface facility.

  Some instinct made him peel the blaster from his back. ‘We don’t know what we’re walking into here.’

  ‘We’ve got no choice,’ Sam said reasonably. ‘It’s either go to that building or wait out here until our skinsuits pack up.’

  ‘Fair enough. But be ready for trouble, lads.’

  Sanjay wielded his own blaster and checked it. ‘You do realise these are fixed to a baby setting, Sam.’

  ‘Yeah, well, at least they look scary.’

  ‘One thing at a time,’ Jamie said gently. ‘Come on.’

  He led the way to the facility, loping over the surface. It was a relief to be in the open, to be able to move relatively freely, despite the strangeness of the low gravity conditions, the constriction of the skinsuit. But still the moon shuddered and jolted.

  They found that most of the facility was open to vacuum, but a small section was still airtight, beyond an inner airlock. Inside, in an otherwise deserted personnel room with a kitchen, bathroom and a couple of fold-down beds, they found Harry Matthews and Karen Madl sitting on the floor, back to back, bound together with lengths of cable. Jamie ran over, opened his suit, pulled out his dirk and sawed at their bindings.

  Harry’s relief at seeing Sam was deep and obviously genuine. ‘Thank heavens you’re safe, Sam.’

  ‘If not, Mum would have killed you.’

  ‘Tell me about it.’

  ‘What happened here?’ Jamie snapped.

  ‘Florian Hart,’ said Karen savagely, rubbing her wrists. ‘We were relaxing in here. Drinking coffee! She and her Bootstrap goons just jumped us. She stole our ship! Left us to our chances down here and took off to safety.’

  ‘Just after Luis Reyes sent out that message about the Z-bomb,’ Harry said. ‘She must have suspected there would be a reaction.’

  ‘So she’s up in the ship now?’ Jamie asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What about Luis?’

  Harry shrugged. ‘He was in the next building. Presumably trussed up just as we are.’

  Sanjay said, ‘I’ll go and find him.’ He hurried off, sealing up his suit.

  ‘The ship’s safe enough,’ Jamie said. ‘And Florian inside it, I shouldn’t wonder. But the Wheel—’

  Harry nodded grimly. ‘We saw some of it. But Florian shut down our audio communications before she took off. Oh, Jamie, your friend the Doctor was trying to reach you.’

  Jamie hurried over to a comms console. ‘Which switch?’

  ‘Just press the big green button.’

  ‘– calling Jamie. Or anybody else who can hear me. This is the Doctor, with Phee Laws, we’re both fine, but I need to speak to somebody, anybody—’

  ‘Doctor!’

  ‘This is the Doctor. If you can hear me—’

  Harry called, ‘Press the yellow button to transmit, Jamie.’

  ‘Och, these gadgets – Doctor! Doctor, can ye hear me?’

  ‘Jamie! Oh, what a relief to hear your voice. Are you all right?’

  ‘Aye, fine. A bit shook up. And you?’

  ‘Still in one piece, but I fear we’re trapped here, near the chamber of the Arkive; its shuddering did rather a lot of damage to our escape routes, though I hope we’re calming it now.’

  ‘What about Zoe?’

  ‘Well, she’s up on the Wheel… I’m afraid I’ve no idea what’s become of her. But I will need to speak to her in a minute if you can find a way – and MMAC, come to that.’

  Jamie stared at the console, baffled. ‘Aye – whatever ye want –’

  ‘I’ll take care of it,’ Karen said, at his side.

  ‘Thank you, Ms Madl,’ the Doctor called. ‘Now listen to me, Jamie, this is urgent. We must defuse that Z-bomb. If it goes up – well, it may or may not destroy the Arkive, the entity at the heart of the moon, but the wider damage it will do is incalculable. It must be stopped.’

  ‘Leave it tae me.’

  ‘If you get through to the bomb, we’ll work out what you have to do with it. But you must expect trouble on the way, Jamie. Florian Hart is bound to have left it defended, even though she must know she is sacrificing her guards to do it – but that’s Florian for you.’

  Jamie wielded his blaster, and looked around at the young men with him. ‘Trouble, eh? Who’s wi’ me?’

  Sam and Dai, all sealed up their skinsuits.

  Harry quickly printed off a map from one of the consoles. ‘This is a map of the moon, the interior, a recent radar scan. The quakes are continuing, and shafts might still open or close. But look at this.’ Harry pointed to a hard purple dot, deep in the moon. ‘That is the Z-bomb. You can tell by the radiation signature.’

  Sam snatched the map out of his hands. ‘Thanks, Harry.’

  But Harry was now pulling on his own Bootstrap-issue skinsuit. ‘Oh, I’m coming with you. You kids can’t have all the fun.’

  ‘Good,’ said Jamie. ‘The more the better. Time for a wee rebellion, lads.’ He raised his blaster over his head. ‘Creag an tuire!’

  They lifted their spacesuited arms and roared.

  45

  ‘F’IGHTENED!’

  ‘I know, dear. I know you’re frightened. But I’m not. See? Look, I’m smiling. And dolly’s smiling too.’

  ‘Wan’ Mum.’

  ‘I know you do. But all we can do is wait until somebody picks up the shuttle.’

  ‘Wan’ Phee. Wan’ Sam!’

  ‘I know. I know! And I want Jamie and the Doctor, you silly little girl. But I’m all you’ve got! Oh no, no, don’t cry, I didn’t mean to be sharp – oh, why are children such a mystery? I really am so unprepared for this—’

  ‘Story.’

  ‘What�
�s that?’

  ‘Tell me story.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know any stories. I didn’t grow up with stories. I read stories now. Brave New World is a good story but I don’t think it’s suitable for a little girl… Oh, I know.’

  ‘Story?’

  ‘We used to read this funny old strip cartoon in the Hourly Telepress. When we were supposed to be swotting up on dull stuff like export figures… Oh, I’m doing this all wrong, aren’t I? Look, come here. I’ll strap myself in this chair, and you sit in my lap. Now then – once upon a time there was a hero. He was a big strong fellow, and his name was the Karkus.’

  ‘Karku’?’

  ‘Karkus! That’s right, like “carcass”, I suppose. He was big and strong, and his skin was bright green – I think – and he wore purple tights and silver boots, and a mask and a big black cape. Like a display flag. I say he was a hero, but he wasn’t very clever. Not really… Now there was a little girl, called, umm—’

  ‘Phee!’

  ‘Yes, all right – Phee! Now one day Phee was being a good girl, she was helping her mummy and playing with her toys. And Mummy was making, umm, an apple pie. When suddenly the Karkus burst in! Why, he just kicked the door down, and he walked in, and he had this great big gun. It was an antimolecular ray disintegrator! And he said, “Obey… or… I… fire!”

  ‘Well, Phee wasn’t afraid, but Mummy said, “What do you want?” And the Karkus, he was always a bit greedy, he said, “Apple… pie!” Because he always talked like that, you see.’

  ‘App-oo… pie!’

  ‘Yes, that’s it! Well, Mummy was shocked. “What, all of it? But what will there be for Sam’s tea if you eat all of it?” But all the Karkus would say was, “Apple… pie!”’

  ‘App-oo… pie!’

  ‘“Oh, well,” Mummy said, “you’d better have it then.” So the Karkus came lumbering across the kitchen, like this – he always walked like this – heading straight for the apple pie. But Phee was a very brave little girl, and do you know what she did? She stuck her leg out, and she tripped up the Karkus so he went splat! – on the floor. And she got hold of his gun, and said, “Now you’re my prisoner!”’