The artifact was two thirds the height of the cave, and bulged to either side until, at its widest point, it almost touched the sides. From what she could see under the mass of Zamps, Bernice judged it to be vaguely cylindrical. It was metal and irregularly arranged, a random shape that suggested a mindless, purposeless natural growth. There was something of the crystal about the way its metal planes might abruptly jut out to a sharpened point, or flatten and then loop, or taper into small spines. It was decidedly alien.
The Doctor squinted at the image, his face creased with curiosity. ‘What is that?’
The travelling pavement was several hundred meters long, and sloped at a gentle angle from the reception sphere. Forrester allowed herself to be carried along, and used the journey as a chance to orientate herself. The Complex was vast but empty. There were many more such pavements, every one encased in a clear plastic tube, ranged between tall windowless structures.
‘Where are your masters?’ Cwej asked the disc awkwardly. ‘I mean, are there any living beings here? Flesh and blood?’
The disc didn’t answer. Cwej turned to Forrester and shrugged. ‘Not very talkative.’
Forrester waved a hand in front of the disc. It didn’t react. 'It’s a basic function model. Which means there must be a controlling force. More adaptable machines at least.’
‘An automatic shipyard?’ Cwej nodded enthusiastically. ‘But then why do they need an atmosphere? But then who’s to say there was an atmosphere down here before we arrived? It all makes sense. Shame you’ve got it wrong, really.’
‘I’m sorry?’
He pointed through the clear tubing. Across, in the pavement running upwards next to their own, a short, fussy-looking bearded man dressed in a crumpled grey suit was staring at them with a look of sheer terror. That look couldn’t have been reproduced by any android, no matter how sophisticated its innards.
Forrester was rather relieved to be proved wrong on this occasion. She’d had visions of a malevolent blob of green jello at the centre of the Complex, directing its servants with monstrous glee. The Doctor had been through some mementoes of previous adventures with her, and confirmed her long-held suspicion that the most cliched solution was usually the correct one. But no robot-controlling mastermind, this fellow, just very scared and very ordinary. Very human. Cwej scissored his arms over his head in the recognized sign of galactic greeting. The short man disappeared from view, looking even more horror-stricken.
‘Not used to visitors, I suppose,’ said Cwej.
The pavement slid into another section of tubing and juddered upwards a few hundred metres. It stopped before a plain metal door. The disc ushered them forward. ‘Please step forward, friends of the Doctor.’
‘Er, what’s through there?’ asked Cwej.
‘Please step through, friends of the Doctor.’ The door slid apart.
After a few seconds, Forrester slapped her hand on Cwej’s shoulder. ‘Might as well.’
Beyond the door was a short dark passage. Another set of doors slid apart, admitting them to a large room decorated in the Complex’s prevailing style. Bare and white. In the centre of the room was a machine that Forrester recognized immediately. The exact model was unfamiliar, but the flashing multi-coloured lights, whirling spiral displays and winking bars of neon signalled its status as a larger than average fruit machine. A larger than average man in his middle fifties stood before it, dressed in a bright red suit that only just met about his middle. Its colour matched his ruddy cheeks, and there was a kind of jolliness about him that complemented the machine perfectly. He could have walked into any pleasure park in human space and not looked out of place. But there was something false about his welcoming smile, a suppressed anger that Forrester’s experience marked as dangerous.
‘Welcome to Zamper,’ he said, with open insincerity. ‘You’re guests of the Management, I hear. Specialists? Repairmen? I think you might be a little late.’
The frantic rapping on her office door could not have been made by anyone other than Mr Jottipher, thought the Secunda. It was hesitant and insistent at once, nervousness overcome by simple devotion. She admitted him.
He burst into the room. ‘Madam, I’ve just seen strangers!’
It was her task to calm him, as always. ‘Relax, Mr Jottipher. The strangers are guests of the Management.’ She nodded to her Outscreen, which showed the newcomers – from their overheard conversation as they were escorted in, she had gathered their names were Cwej and Forrester – talking to Taal in the gaming centre. ‘They are specialists.’
Mr Jottipher’s shoulders slumped with relief. He dabbed at his brow with a handkerchief pulled from an inside pocket. The Secunda gestured for him to sit. ‘I’m deeply sorry, madam, but today has been rather stressful.’
She regarded him with a degree of affection. ‘The Management is in total control.’
‘I am glad.’ He sat up, tried to straighten his collar. ‘What with the new buyers, and the equipment failure, and poor Nula, and the strangers, I was rather worried.’
‘Understandably.’ The Secunda came to a decision. The time had come. She took a sheet of blank paper from the file on her desk, picked up her fountain pen and began to write with the scratchy nib. It was a simple message, four sentences. She passed it over the desk. Puzzled, Mr Jottipher took it.
This is NOT a test. The Management is dying. I intend to leave. Will you join me?
Bernice stood outside the hut, watching Zamper’s purple sun setting between the peaks of a distant mountain range. The beauty of the view made her feel drowsier still, and she yawned and stretched, the muscles in her arms and legs aching with cramps. All at once she realized how tired she was, and she slipped back in to the lab, where the Doctor and Smith remained engrossed in a huddle over the specimen cases. Bernice was surprised to feel an odd pang of envy. She was used to being the Doctor’s confidante on scientific matters, and it felt strange to see him chatting away to somebody else.
‘So, the caverns, the construction yards, are directly beneath the Complex?’ he was asking, tapping a finger on his chin. ‘The sub-herd of Zamps leaves the yards and swarms off to this new cave of theirs.’ He was crackling with energy. ‘You see, I think we really need to see that object or whatever it is, up close. It really is fascinating, fascinating.’
Smith grunted. ‘It’s too dangerous, old chap. Those caverns are treacherous.’
‘I’ve seen a lot of caves in my time,’ the Doctor assured her.
Bernice said, ‘Doctor, I’m tired, and I want to see how Chris and Roz are.’ She turned to Smith. ‘May I borrow your buggy? If you give me directions I’m sure I can find my way to the Complex.’
‘Better than that. You can program it to take you there,’ Smith replied kindly, sliding from her stool and leading Bernice back outside by the arm. Next to the steering wheel of the buggy was a series of colour-coded controls and a mapscreen. Smith pressed a blue button, the map screen crackled and glowed, and the motor started, lifting the chassis of the vehicle a metre off the floor. Warm air blew from twin vents on the dashboard, reassuring Bernice as she climbed up, swung herself in and settled before the wheel. ‘I use it to bring my supplies over from the Complex. It should take you about fifteen minutes to get across.’
Bernice smiled. ‘Thanks. Look after the Doctor, won’t you?’
‘I will.’ Smith patted Bernice on the back, then the nose of the buggy clicked up, and it zipped off across the darkening plain. Bernice turned to wave goodbye to Smith, but the woman was already a tweedy dot. It took a while for Bernice to adjust to the buggy’s speed, and its ability to navigate itself over and around clumps of rock just when it seemed that to crash was unavoidable. As the minutes passed, the tensions in her exhausted body unknotted. Her head fell back against the padded rest, and she slowly fell asleep, lulled by the warm air blowing across her face, her eyelids closing as the buggy carried her smoothly through the twilit landscape.
Smith found the Doctor hunched ov
er her workbench, an inky fountain pen gripped in his right hand, her own stylus gripped equally tightly in his left, both hands writing at a furious pace over sheets of scrap paper. He muttered as he worked, occasionally tapping his temples in exasperation and leaving inky streaks across his brow. From time to time he looked between his work and a series of her specimen slides that he had lined up in an order that to her made no sense. She came closer, looked over his shoulder. In the fading twilight she saw reams of an unfamiliar notation. Gently she said, ‘Bernice has gone off to the Complex.’
He nodded, but said nothing and continued working. Smith turned on the desklamp; in its white glare the Doctor appeared quite mad. She put the kettle on, and as she spooned tea into the strainer, found herself smiling. There was something very reassuring about the Doctor’s presence. Other people tended to make Smith rather uncomfortable. The basic problem was that they weren’t enough like her. The Doctor was. What they shared was dedication to science.
He was suddenly at the divider of the kitchenette, waving his notes at her. ‘My admiration for the builders of Zamper grows ever greater. The brain has been enlarged, either through selective breeding, or hormone stimulation.’
‘Or both,’ she said, attending to the whistling kettle.
‘Yes, yes. Now,’ he consulted his notes, ‘a series of thick ganglions connect the cortex to the section of the brain that regulates the creatures’ psychic powers.’
Smith nodded, pouring the boiling water.
‘So. What we have here is a custom-built component. Part of the construction process. An essential part. Alone, a Zamp would be helpless.’
‘Isolate them and they die in only a few hours.’
‘I thought so. But in a herd, their concentrated powers are put to use.’ He took one of the slides from his pocket. Taped to it was a tiny silver strand. ‘Do you know what that is?’
‘Each Zamp has one, coiled around its cortex. I can’t be sure, but I think it’s what links them to their herds, what keeps them together. A sort of transistor, you might say.’ She led the Doctor back into the lab, put down the tea tray, and fished out some holo-pictures from her desk. Handing them to the Doctor, she said, ‘At almost each hatching, there are a couple of runts. They’re left to die. The others move away from them, start to orientate, and then form a herd.’ She pointed to a detail on one of the shots, the halved section of a brain. ‘Every runt that I’ve examined has a lesser developed or malformed transistor strand, see. I don’t think the healthy Zamps regard the runts as part of the species.’
The Doctor nodded. ‘The strand is essential, because it’s the supreme addition to the original creature. A magnificent feat of genetic adaptation. It keeps the herds together, yes, but that’s not its only purpose.’
Smith felt like jumping up and down and punching the air. It was such a joy to discuss these matters, freely, with somebody who understood. The Doctor’s dropping from the skies was like an answer to a prayer. ‘Go on.’
He smoothed out his notes on the bench again, and ran his finger down to a particular section. ‘A Zamp’s motivation is to form a herd. To form a group of components. When enough are gathered, there is sufficient shared telekinetic power to proceed. That could be when the ship designs come through.’
‘A telepathic image, a telepathic instruction, conveyed by electronic means?’
‘I would say that’s almost impossible, even for the miraculous level of technology behind this place. There would have to be an organic component, a thinking component, in there somewhere.’ He leant closer, and whispered, ‘It’s not what that tells us about the Zamps that’s important, really. But it reveals quite a lot about the Management.’
‘It’s organic?’
‘Part of it has to be.’
As Taal assigned the two new specialists to quarters, he was aware of a long-dormant instinct reviving. Whenever one of them was behind him he felt a tension in his back and an itch between his shoulder-blades. He strained to identify this almost forgotten feeling.
‘I can give you a place in apartment thirteen,’ he told them, consulting the room roster. ‘It’s ready for occupation, fortunately. Running water, breakfast facilities.’
The male, the boyish Cwej, was examining the gaming network. ‘And you play games on this?’
‘There is an in-house facility for visitors, yes.’
‘Can you switch it on? I’d like to try.’ The lad was bursting with youthful enthusiasm. He nipped quickly between the input stations, examining the differing attractions of each console with a knowledgeable air.
‘Unfortunately,’ said Taal, steering him towards the door, where his colleague was waiting, ‘the network’s gone off-line for the day. We’ll be opening up again at nine tomorrow morning. If your schedule permits I’ll be glad to show you about the system.’
The woman, Forrester, spoke. Her diction was clipped, and Taal couldn’t imagine her without her frown. ‘Every day you run this casino?’
‘Every day.’ Taal wondered why she made him feel guilty, as if he was being interrogated. The woman had a powerful air of authority. ‘Here on Zamper we’re neutral, you see. Outside the revenue laws.’
Laws. The word prodded his searching subconscious, and he realized. These two were police. The way they looked everything up and down should have made it obvious. When Forrester had walked in, the first thing she’d done was run her eyes over him for concealed weapons. It couldn’t have been more obvious. Taal felt a little disappointed with himself.
They weren’t technicians, then, as he’d assumed. But why would the Management give access to police?’
He indicated the inner door. ‘Yes, now you want to go through there, along the hall, and through to apartment thirteen.’
Forrester sneered, as if she could see right into his mind. ‘Thanks, Taal.’ She left. Cwej smiled and shrugged, an apology for her behaviour, and followed.
Mr Jottipher’s bearded mouth twitched and he rubbed the back of his neck. The Secunda’s suggestion had startled him. He was certain that her desire to leave was genuine, because over the years of their acquaintance he had learnt that she was resourceful and determined and usually right. If he had thought to consider the situation and her response, he might have predicted this. What he couldn’t understand was her eagerness to involve him, and her apparent disregard for her own safety. The eyes of the Management could be on them, even now.
‘Madam,’ he said quietly. ‘Is it wise to discuss these matters so openly?’
She smiled confidently. ‘Do you trust me?’
‘Of course, madam.’
‘My loyalty to Zamper is beyond question?’
‘Yes.’
‘As is yours. If you were the Management, then, would you think to spy on a meeting between your two most trusted employees?’
Mr Jottipher shook his head. ‘But, madam, our loyalty is to the Management. We cannot plot against him, he is our employer. It is his duty to protect us.’
She reached across her desk and held his hand tightly. ‘In the normal run of things, indubitably. But how far are we prepared to extend our allegiance? Nothing lasts for ever. The Management is dying; the power losses, the equipment failures, the arrival of these strangers.’ Her large eyes stared directly into his. Mr Jottipher thought she had never looked so impressive, so inspirational. ‘How much longer can this last? We have a duty to the Management, yes, but also a duty to ourselves. Ask yourself what will happen when he dies.’
Her words perturbed him. For the last few weeks, he had been deliberately attempting not to think about that. ‘But there isn’t anything we can do, surely?
The Secunda withdrew her hand and passed over a sheet of paper. ‘This is the hard copy of a routine technical report on the strength of the defence outposts.’ Printed on the paper was a continuous wave form that weaved smoothly up and down in a sine pattern. The Secunda pointed to certain irregularities in the formation. ‘These breaks occurred during the power losses. On
both occasions they lasted for several hours after the power here in the Complex was restored.
Mr Jottipher shook his head. ‘I’ve no technical training.’
‘For a few hours after each power loss here, the defence outposts are off-line. The Management’s first priority is to restore power to the Complex. It’s only later that the defences come back on-line. Don’t you see what that means?’
‘It means that for a few hours Zamper is defenceless.’
‘More than that.’ She took back the report and tapped it for emphasis with a finger-nail. ‘If we time it correctly, come the next power loss we can fly a ship away from here, wait until the system breaks down totally, and then go right through the gateway.’
‘But we have no ship, madam.’ Mr Jottipher could hardly believe he was involved in such treachery. ‘Only the cruiser under construction, and that is inaccessible until its completion.’
The Secunda folded the technical report and returned it to its file. ‘There is the Chelonian shuttle,’ she said. ‘Now, are you with me?’
He considered. ‘The Management might find a way to continue.’
‘Do you really think so? When strangers can breach our defences?’ Her voice demanded respect. Mr Jottipher realized how much she terrified him. Perhaps more than the Management. In that moment, he decided. It was always better to follow the strongest party.
‘I’m with you,’ he said.
Ivzid stared at the wall and let his thoughts go where they would. Behind him, up on the resting-bed, the General’s shell shifted slightly to the steady tempo of its occupant’s snores. That sound, like the suck of a breaking tide, offended Ivzid. It typified Hezzka’s spinelessness in the face of the enemy. It was Ivzid’s opinion that Hezzka should have been retired from the service years ago. The patience of the younger officers could not be extended indefinitely. All this talk of caution, of long-term planning, was so much manure. That was not the way the Chelonian empire had risen. It was insanity to talk of compromise with parasites, in any circumstances. The creatures stank of curdling milk, for Buf’s sake. Ivzid’s nostrils had been clogged by the unhealthy mammalian stench since his arrival on Zamper. How could Hezzka withdraw in such a place? He was unfit for command. Hafril would not have stood for this nonsense.
Doctor Who. Zamper Page 10
