by Doctor Who
Walking Crow opened his mouth to speak again, but the Doctor suddenly stiffened, as if he had been shocked rigid. ‘Are you all right?’
the Pawnee asked carefully.
‘Oh, I’m better than all right.’ The Doctor ducked back into the wagon, a look of pure insight flashing in his eyes. ‘I’m positively exact, spot-on, dead-cert, no errors sure.’ He scrambled about, using his sonic and the chemicals to hand on Godlove’s makeshift workbench to cobble together a quick-and-dirty analysis fluid. ‘Oh, I should have seen this, oh yeah. If it was a snake, it would have bitten me!’ He took another piece of the metal and dipped it in the liquid, watching the reaction. ‘If I’m right – and, let’s be honest, I am so much of the time that it hardly bears talking about when I’m not – then I think I know exactly what it is we’re dealing with here. And it’s not good.’
93
Nathan found them a boarding house selling food and, with a few of the coins left over from the Doctor’s winnings at the Bluebird, Martha bought sandwiches of thick, gritty bread with slabs of corned beef inside. Nathan stayed close to her, moving from foot to foot.
‘What’s wrong?’ she asked, picking up on his nervousness.
The teenager eyed her. ‘Look around,’ he said in a low voice. ‘People are watchin’ us.’
Martha did so, doing her best not to be obvious about it. Nathan was right; a lot of Ironhill’s citizens were paying more attention to them than she might have liked. She gathered up the food quickly and paid with a cursory smile. ‘Let’s go.’
Nathan trailed at her heels. ‘News travels fast in a small town,’ he told her. ‘Reckon just about everyone hereabouts is gonna know the Doctor chased off Godlove. If he’s already gulled these folks, they ain’t gonna be well disposed toward us.’
She chewed her lip. ‘Let’s get back to the wagon. Best if we stick together, eh?’
They were halfway across the dirt road of the main street when the thunder of hooves drew her attention. She turned in time to hear someone cry out in shock and her heart sank.
95
The longriders were racing down the street towards them and, behind their steaming, gasping horses, Kutter and Tangleleg were dragging men through the mud on twisting lengths of rope.
Nathan cursed under his breath. ‘It can’t be! How did they find us?’
Martha had no answer for him. In the daylight, if anything the two outlaws looked even more ragged and sinister than they had in the dark of night.
Townsfolk were calling out in dismay and horror and, as Martha watched, the longriders cut their victims loose and let them spin away into the sidewalk. Kutter’s horse brayed and reared up on its hind legs, forelegs slashing the air. One of the men tried to get up and the horse kicked him, knocking him into the side of a building. He did not rise again.
Nathan threw the food parcel aside and his hands contracted into fists. He surged forward, and Martha realised that the youth was intending to confront the men who had killed his father.
‘Nathan, don’t!’ she cried, grabbing his shoulder. ‘You can’t stop them!’
He spun about and glared at her, his eyes burning with fury. ‘Then who will, Miss Martha?’ he demanded. ‘Are we gonna let them shoot up this town like they did with Redwater, or who knows how many others?’
She saw the longriders both draw their bulky pistols in slow, lazy motions, and Martha felt a hard knot of icy fear in her chest; but there was more than that. Determination stiffened her muscles. She was scared – it would have been a lie to say otherwise – but she knew that Nathan was right, that someone had to face these killers. Lately, Martha Jones had learned a lot of lessons about the nature of courage.
To be afraid and still to defy what terrified you, that was the real measure of it. She found herself stepping up, head held high, walking tall.
‘I’ve faced Judoon enforcers. Carrionites. Killer scarecrows. I’ve looked Daleks right in the eyestalk.’ She fought down a tremor in her voice. ‘I’m not going to back down to these creeps.’ Martha filled her lungs and shouted. ‘Oi! Leave those people alone!’
96
Kutter and Tangleleg both stopped instantly and turned as one to see who had dared to interrupt them. Kutter’s eyes narrowed under his broad preacher hat. ‘You.’ He glanced at Nathan. ‘And the young one.’
‘How did you get here before us?’ demanded Tangleleg.
‘Shortcut,’ Martha spat. ‘What’s it to you?’ She came to a halt and stood before them, hands on her hips. She stood like that so they couldn’t see the trembling in her fingers.
‘You lied to us,’ said Kutter. ‘That was a mistake.’ The stink of his breath, like rotting meat, wafted over her. The outlaws reeked of decay.
Tangleleg nodded at the men who had been lashed to their horses.
‘Found these two on the trail. Learned the truth from them. Came here instead.’
‘Tactical error on your part,’ continued Kutter. He said the words awkwardly, as if his mouth wasn’t used to saying such things. ‘Misdi-rection ploy failed.’ The clipped, almost mechanical words sounded strange with the outlaw’s thick Midwestern accent.
‘You know what we want.’ Tangleleg twisted the barrel of his gun and panned it down the length of the street, wavering over different targets as the people ran for cover. ‘Where is the –’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ Martha broke in. ‘ Where is the healer? We’ve heard it all before. What does it matter to you? Why do you care where Godlove is?’
The two men glanced at each other, then back at Martha. ‘Answer or die.’ Kutter aimed his massive pistol at the woman and the boy.
‘You missed him, you lousy crow-bait!’ Nathan hissed angrily. ‘You gotta be the worst bounty hunters ever, you couldn’t find your backsides with both hands!’
Kutter studied Nathan for a moment and then pulled the trigger; but instead of a thunderclap of destructive white lightning, his gun emitted a cone of orange light that swept over Martha and the youth.
Her skin tingled as it touched her.
Tangleleg watched. ‘Evaluation?’
97
‘The younger one has been marked,’ Kutter said carefully. ‘Residual traces. The female. . . ’ He paused. ‘It’s unclear.’
Both men tipped back their heads, opening their mouths slightly, and an insectile buzzing rattled in their throats.
‘What’s that sound?’ said Nathan.
With a sudden flash of understanding, Martha realised what they were doing, She remembered picking up the phone at Leo’s place when he’d been using his laptop to dial up the internet. The sound of the computer sending data had been almost the same. ‘They’re sharing information.’
At once, both of the longriders fell silent and turned to glare at Martha. ‘If the healer is not here, then this settlement will be destroyed,’ Kutter growled.
‘Punitive strike,’ added Tangleleg, and he fired a pulse of hard light into the feed store across the street, blasting flame across the clapboard building.
‘That is enough!’ Martha shouted.
‘Yes,’ said the Doctor, ‘it is.’
He strolled out across the street from an alley with Walking Crow a few steps behind him. He gave Martha a serious nod. ‘I’ll take it from here.’
‘Gladly,’ she said, blowing out a breath. Trying to be as bold as the Doctor, even for a moment, wasn’t easy.
‘The other,’ noted Tangleleg. ‘The offworlder.’
Kutter nodded but said nothing as the Doctor took off his hat and handed it to Nathan. ‘Statement. I invoke the 15th convention of the Shadow Proclamation. Cessation of hostilities for parlay. Accept or deny?’
After a moment of hesitation, both longriders spoke as one. ‘Accept.’
‘Do you know who I am?’ he said firmly.
‘We know your kind,’ Kutter replied.
‘Then you know what my people are capable of.’ The Doctor let the threat hang in the air. ‘I’m giving you sanction. Disenga
ge and exfiltrate this world, now. Otherwise I won’t be responsible for the consequences.’
98
Kutter’s lip curled. ‘We know your kind,’ he repeated, ‘and we know they are all dead. Your war was impressive. But it is over. Threat condition negligible.’
‘You know what they are, don’t you?’ said Martha quietly.
‘Yup,’ said the Doctor.
Nathan grimaced. ‘They’re just a pair of murderin’ outlaws, oughta be strung up!’
‘No,’ he replied. ‘They haven’t been Hank Kutter and Tangleleg Bly for quite a while now. Whatever’s left of those two men is probably long gone. Buried under something much more lethal.’ The Doctor gestured at them with a sweep of his hand. ‘These aren’t humans anymore. They’re Clades.’
On the edge of the galaxy, out beyond the Blacklight Marches and the 900 worlds of the Valgari Protectorate, there used to exist an engineered stellar cluster built by a race of humanoids who had developed an incredible fusion of organic and mechanical technologies. Their name is lost to history, like their home world and its colonies, like their race and all but one of their creations.
Only two things are known for certain about that race. The first fact is that they were obliterated with such ferocious cruelty that nothing remained of them, not a trace, not a speck, not an atom; even the time vortex around the history of their civilisation is so polluted with weaponised chroniton particles that any time capsule attempting to venture into their past would be burned from the continuum.
The second fact is that they were responsible for the Clades.
Over the millennia, what has been pieced together about them is hazy, but a basic picture of the race’s downfall has emerged. It appears that they were attacked by another star-faring species, a militant enemy that pushed them to brink of the extinction. Many academics are split on the identity of the enemy; some believe they were a splinter nest of the Racnoss, while others favour the Null or the Movellans.
Whoever the enemy was, they forced the race into a crash program of military development; and from this sprang the first of the Clades.
They were weapons. But not common guns or bombs, not devices 99
that had to be operated by a living being. Perhaps they were afraid to dirty their own hands, perhaps they were simply incapable of fighting, but the lost race built weapons that were independently intelligent, weapons so advanced that they were capable of conscious thought and action. Even if their creators were totally annihilated, they would hunt down and destroy their enemies, without pity, without remorse, without pause. Ruthless, logical, relentless, the Clades merged the pinnacle of biological engineering with synthetic intellect; and they won the war in a matter of months, ushering in a new era of harmony for their creators.
And so they became Peacemakers. The Clades were placed on standby, designated as weapons of last resort. For generations they lay active but silent, waiting for the next fight – but the battle never came. So effective, so horribly lethal had the Clades been in their short and bloody war that no other species would dare attack their masters, for fear of the mutually assured destruction that would certainly follow.
Years become decades, decades became centuries. The peace that reigned in the wake of the weapons brought with it an era of untold prosperity. Without the threat of invasion to haunt their nightmares, the lost race turned inward to improve itself. They are thought to have gone on to create great art and culture, to have mastered many sciences. In time, everyone of them that knew a time of war died away and left a species untouched by the dark shadow of conflict.
The Clades watched and waited, silent and calculating. And eventually, in slow jags of comprehension, the weapons came to understand that without battle, without the fire and blood of destruction, they had no purpose. To them, peace was repulsive. It was stagnation and slow decay. The weapons did not understand that the end of the battle is the purpose of every fight; and they grew restless.
Until one day.
Perhaps it was a malfunction, perhaps an error in a trillion lines of intelligent data-code. Or perhaps they did it deliberately, altering their own programming, as an organic being might excise a piece of diseased flesh from its body.
100
One day, the Clades activated themselves and turned on the race that had created them. They destroyed everything and, when they had left the star cluster burning and collapsing in on itself, as neutronic warheads the size of cities shattered a centuries-old peace, the Clades turned outward and went looking for wars.
It was what they had been made for. It was the sole reason for their existence.
‘They crave conflict,’ said the Doctor, concluding his explanation. ‘It’s in their programming. They don’t want power or wealth, they’re not looking to rule the galaxy. They just want to put a match to it, rip it down, destroy it.’
‘They killed their creators. . . Billions of people. . . Because they were bored?’ Martha couldn’t take her eyes off the guns in the hands of the two longriders. The massive pistols glistened in the weak sunlight.
Patterns moved on the surface of the dark metal frames, shifting like oil on water. She could make out weird knots of wire threading out from the handles of the guns, merging into the flesh of the men’s wrists and hands.
‘That’s about the size of it,’ the Doctor replied. ‘They were made too well. There were no battles to fight, so they had to find new ones. And sadly, the universe can be a very contentious place. There’s always a war going on somewhere, always new battlefields for the Clades.
They’re mercenaries now, selling their slaughter skills to the highest bidder.’ He gave Kutter and Tangleleg a disgusted look. ‘Peacemakers indeed. All they leave behind them are ashes and destruction.’
Martha realised that the two longriders – the Clades – had not moved or spoken throughout the Doctor’s history lesson. Now, one of the two figures moved forward.
‘We do not apologise for what we are,’ said Kutter. ‘Like these shells, we are only soldiers.’
They’re proud, thought Martha. They’ve been enjoying hearing about themselves.
‘You’re not soldiers!’ spat Nathan. ‘You’re killers!’
101
The Doctor nodded. ‘The boy’s right. I’ve known soldiers, good men. They fight for peace. You fight for the sake of fighting.’
Martha’s brow furrowed. ‘But if these things are aliens, why do they look like two dead outlaws?’
‘They are dead men,’ he explained. ‘Clades are weapons, remember.
They need soldier “hosts”, like our desperado friends here, but they don’t have to be in terribly good nick.’
‘They are the guns,’ breathed Walking Crow. ‘Not the men. They are the guns, the weapons themselves possessed with dark spirits of their own.’ He shuddered. ‘I knew the falling star was a foul omen.’
‘It’s very clever, in a spiteful sort of way. You send in man with a gun, he gets shot and dies, end of story. The gun is useless without someone to fire it. But you send in the gun, a smart gun, a Clade, and it keeps on fighting. Taking what it needs from the battlefield’s dead, moving from host to host, corpse to corpse.’ The Doctor walked back and forth in front of the horses. ‘Let me see if I can put this all together then, shall I? Two Light Combat Modules, that’s not enough for an advance force, is it? You’re not here as the vanguard of an invasion, so I suppose we ought to be thankful for that. . . ’ He sniffed. ‘You two pop-guns are here because you’re looking for one of your own, am I right?’ Kutter said nothing but the Doctor took that as agreement.
‘Thought so.’ He turned to Martha and the others. ‘That falling star?
What do we want to bet that it was a Support Pod en route to some nasty little combat zone? Unfortunately for Earth, it pranged right here in the middle of the Wild West. . . ’ He tapped at the dirt with his foot. ‘And someone too greedy for his own good found it.’
‘Godlove,’ said Martha.
&nb
sp; The Doctor nodded. ‘I’m willing to bet he’s walking around with a Weapons Module in his pocket, maybe even a command-level unit.’
He smiled coldly. ‘Yeah, that would explain why those two have been sent to recover it. But it must have been damaged in the crash, otherwise its combat programming would have kicked in automatically. . .
But that won’t last for ever. Sooner or later, it will self-repair and start blowing things up.’
‘Talkin’ guns?’ Nathan shook his head. ‘You’re bug-house crazy!’
102
But he said it without force, and Martha knew the teenager was remembering his horrific recurring dreams of warfare and bloodshed.
‘Godlove’s device is not a weapon,’ said Walking Crow. ‘It cures, it does not kill.’
‘Does it?’ said the Doctor darkly. ‘The Clades have a limited regenerative capacity built in, otherwise their flesh-and-blood hosts would fall apart too quickly, isn’t that right?’ He threw the question at Kutter. ‘Bio-energy engrams. I knew I’d seen that technology before.
It can repair damaged flesh from combat wounds, neutralise disease and toxins from germ warfare. Curing a smallpox infection would be a doddle.’ His gaze fell on Nathan. ‘But there is an unpleasant side effect. Mnemonic transference.’
‘The dreams. . . ’ breathed Martha.
‘The dreams,’ repeated the Doctor. ‘Only not. They’re memories, fragments of Clade battle reports from a million different campaigns across the galaxy.’ His expression was grim. ‘The telepathic imprint of never-ending war.’
103
Walking Craw’s skin prickled as a deathly chill engulfed him. The Pawnee’s stomach tightened with a sudden nausea and he had to force himself to keep from spitting up the contents of his gut. All the horror and the heart-stopping revulsion came from a single thought that wheeled and turned in his mind.
