by Mike Tucker
Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also available from BBC Books
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Copyright
About the Book
“Here on Saturn, it literally rains diamonds.”
For over fifteen years the crew of Kollo-Zarnista Mining Facility 27 has been extracting diamonds from deep within the atmosphere of Saturn, diamonds that help to fund the ever-expanding Human Empire. But when a mining operation goes wrong, a rescue mission must be launched to save a worker lost overboard, a worker who claims that he has seen something amongst the swirling clouds. Something that can’t possibly exist.
When the Doctor and Bill arrive, they immediately find themselves caught between hostile miners, suspicious security guards and corrupt company officials as they face accusations of sabotage and diamond theft.
And below them, in the crushing atmosphere of the gas giant, something is starting to rise.
An original novel featuring the Twelfth Doctor and Bill as played by Peter Capaldi and Pearl Mackie.
About the Author
Mike Tucker is an author specialising in books for children and young adults, and has written several original Doctor Who novels, a number of Merlin novelisations, and original fiction for other shared universes. He has also written numerous factual books relating to film and television, including a history of the BBC’s Visual Effects Department, where he used to work.
Alongside his writing, Mike works as a Visual Effects Designer, and his company – The Model Unit – recently won a BAFTA Craft Award for its miniature effects work on the 50th anniversary Doctor Who episode ‘The Day of the Doctor’.
Also available from BBC Books
PLAGUE CITY
by Jonathan Morris
THE SHINING MAN
by Cavan Scott
For Sue and Steve
Prologue
The rings of Saturn were a sight that Laura Palmer would never tire of. She had been 23 when she caught her first glimpse of them, a rookie travelling back from her first off-world assignment. She had been one year into her Federation Security training, seconded to a military pacification battalion to gain what her squad commander had charmingly referred to as ‘nuts on the ground experience’. That had meant dealing with an Ogron incursion into Federation space; a half-hearted attack on the food supply shuttle delivering grain to the Davy Crockett colony in the Sirius-B system. Dealing with it had been so swift and unsophisticated that her fellow recruits seemed to regard it as little more than boisterous recreation. As far as Laura had been concerned it amounted to a total waste of her time, and had almost resulted in her dropping out of the Security Programme altogether. It was what had happened on her way back to Earth that had changed her mind.
The convoy that she was travelling with had made an unscheduled repair and refuelling stop at Titan. Micrometeorites had punctured the outer casing of the plasma disbursement fins of several ships whilst they were traversing the Kuiper Belt, and there had been a very real danger of catastrophic warp derailment if the damage wasn’t dealt with swiftly. When the announcement came from the flight deck that their journey back home was going to be delayed by nearly seven hours, Laura could have screamed with frustration, but when her troopship had dropped out of hyperspace around Saturn, a single glance out of the viewport next to her seat had changed her life for ever.
Laura was familiar with Saturn of course – she had seen enough documentaries and security training films over the years – but nothing had prepared her for the sheer, breathtaking majesty of the planet up close. The gas giant itself had been impressive enough – a vast glowing ball, its surface dimly reflecting the glow of the distant sun, lightning storms crackling and flashing deep in the depths of the monumental cloudscape – but it was the rings that had made the breath catch in her throat.
They soared round the planet like wings – huge, ethereal, impossibly vast. It had only been when the other recruits around her had started to laugh and jeer that she realised that her jaw was literally hanging open with awe.
Seven hours that had initially seemed like a life sentence of boredom went past in a heartbeat. Whilst her crewmates paced the central corridor of the troop carrier, cursing and whining, poking fun and trying to goad her into responding, Laura had sat as if glued to her seat, face pressed to the viewport, watching the kaleidoscopic display of ice crystals and rock tumble and spin with a grace and elegance that she would never have believed possible.
When the repairs were finally complete and the troopship had started to move out of orbit ready to make the warp jump to Earth, the ache of longing that she felt when the rings slid from her view had been almost too much for her to bear. It was at that point she vowed that she would return to Saturn. Return and live there.
Once back on Earth, Laura hurled herself into her training, spectacularly outperforming her fellow recruits over the next three years and ultimately graduating from the Federation Academy with Honours. That gave her the pick of the security assignments that the Federation had to offer, so it had come as something of a surprise to her commanding officer when she requested assignment to Kollo-Zarnista Facility 27.
Laura could still recall the look of bemusement on his face when he had summoned her to his office. Frank Gammadoni had been good to her during her years at the Academy, and it was only fair that she provided him with the explanation that he obviously wanted.
The Datapad sitting on his desk was active with her request for assignment, unsigned but obviously not unread, when she entered his office. As he gestured for her to sit down, he had picked it up and read through it again.
‘Kollo-Zarnista?’ A well-manicured eyebrow had risen slowly in bemused disbelief. ‘Palmer, are you aware of what that facility is?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Well, I’m going to tell you anyway. It’s a dead end. It’s a babysitting job, it is so far beneath your ability that I can’t even—’
‘It’s not what the facility is, sir.’ To this day Laura still couldn’t believe that she’d had the nerve to interrupt him like that. ‘It’s where it is.’
‘Ah …’ A look of understanding had flickered across Colonel Gammadoni’s face. ‘Saturn.’
‘Sir, if you will allow me to explain—’
‘There’s no need.’ This time it was the Colonel’s turn to interrupt. Placing the Datapad back on the desk, he had pushed back his chair, and walked to the huge picture window that looked out across the rain lashed skyscrapers of New York City. Several seconds had passed before he spoke, his Italian-American accent warm and mellow.
‘I must have been about your age when I got my first glimpse of Saturn. I was a volunteer aboard one of the construction tugs assigned to the reconstruction of the Titan refuelling platform after the great fire of 5012. Have you ever been to Titan, Palmer?’
He hadn’t waited for her reply.
‘It’s brown. All of it. The corridors of the bases, the uniforms, the ground, the sky, the very air … brown. The three months I spent there were the closest thing to living in hell that I ever want to experience.’
&
nbsp; He had paused for a second, lost in thirty-year-old memories.
‘My gang boss must have just got fed up with looking at my miserable face for day on end. Crocker was quite a character, bald as a coot, one eye missing and with a jerry-rigged pneumatic arm that went wrong practically on a weekly basis. He’d been out on the frontier his entire adult life. One day he just grabbed me by the collar with that rusty old arm of his, bundled me into a shuttle pod, and took me up to see the rings.’
The Colonel had paused again, then without a further word had turned, lifted the Datapad from his desk and stamped it with his digital signature.
‘Assignment approved.’
That had been four years ago, and Laura was about to start her fourth tour of duty as the Federation Security Liaison Officer to the Kollo-Zarnista Mining Operation. Her fourth year living and working around Saturn. And unfortunately, her fourth visit to Titan. The problem was that in order to get to Saturn, you had to spend time here first. Laura had come in on one of the deep-space transporters late last night. As soon as she had landed she had presented her ID to the base supervisor, handed her kitbag over to the shuttle loading crews, and registered her g-Taser with the base security mainframe. Then she went down to the rec level to kill the hours until the shuttle picked her up for the last leg of her journey …
As Laura stepped through the door of the gloomy company bar, several grizzled heads looked up in hopeful expectation, and then looked away almost as quickly as soon as they caught sight of the Federation Security Service badge on her cap and the dark stubby shape of the g-Taser on her belt. Sometimes the fear of authority was a blessing.
She grabbed a menu off the bar and ordered a salt beef sandwich and a beer. The barman barely made eye contact with her, pouring her beer in silence, and handing over the rather limp-looking sandwich with a look of nervous mistrust. He obviously didn’t like having security personnel in his bar.
Paying for the meal with the chip in her wrist, Laura took a long gulp of her beer. Thirst slated, she crossed to a window seat, pulled off her cap, and shook her hair loose. She glanced around at her surroundings and smiled. Colonel Gammadoni had been dead right about one thing: Titan was indeed brown. The construction teams had tried their best to disguise the prefabricated modules and bare rock walls of the facility, but a corporate lack of imagination permeated everything, from furniture to colour scheme to signage.
Taking another sip of her beer, her gaze drifted to the vista outside the thick, triple-glazed window, watching the thick fog drift sluggishly across the rust-brown dunes of Titan. She craned her neck, peering up past the spinning radar dishes and untidy aerial arrays that ringed the edge of the base. High above those murky, pendulous clouds was Saturn.
She closed her eyes. Only a few hours to go …
It was only when the harsh blaring noise of the embarkation klaxon jolted her upright that Laura realised she had dropped off to sleep. Cursing her lack of discipline, she scrambled from the table, snatching up her cap and pushing the uneaten sandwich to one side. She hurried across the bar and out into the corridor. A dozen or so mining personnel were making their way towards the shuttle bay, amongst them were a couple of familiar figures. She jogged to catch up with them.
‘Jenny! Arcon!’
‘Laura.’ Jenny Flowers gave her a huge hug. ‘I didn’t think you’d be back so soon.’
‘Are you kidding?’ Arcon grinned and tousled her hair with a massive hand. ‘This one would never leave if she could get away with it.’
Laura slapped the big African’s hand away in mock irritation. ‘At least I come back because I want to. Every year you tell me you’re going to leave for something better and every year when I get back, here you are.’
‘Ah, well this year it’s going to be different.’ Arcon tapped at a patch on his overalls.
Laura peered at the badge and raised an eyebrow. ‘Someone was stupid enough to promote you to Supervisor?’
‘A woman of great taste and discretion.’ Arcon flashed a grin at Jenny. Jenny was a senior manager at Kollo-Zarnista Mining, and it was a badly kept secret that she and Arcon had been an item for some time.
Laura gave Arcon a hug. ‘That’s great, I’m pleased for you.’ The significance of the promotion suddenly hit her. ‘So, you really are going to be leaving Saturn?’
Arcon shrugged. ‘No supervisor vacancies here. Not unless Delitsky is planning on retiring sometime soon. There are openings on the Jupiter operation.’
‘Or Neptune, if the rumours are to be believed,’ said Jenny with worried sigh, obviously not thrilled about the prospect.
Arcon’s cheery manner evaporated. ‘Neptune is never going to happen,’ he snapped.
There was an awkward pause. Laura said nothing. The truth was she had seen the security assessments for a potential diamond mine on Neptune and it was a far more likely proposition than Arcon realised. It was also predicted to be the most dangerous assignment in the solar system, and Federation officials were already balking at the potential costs of maintaining a security presence then. If it went ahead, Jenny would have every right to be worried about his safety.
Any further conversation on the topic was halted as a warning siren sounded and, with a hiss of hydraulics, the huge pressure doors in front of them started to slide open, revealing the shuttle beyond. The ship was ancient; its once pristine hull pitted with the scars from dozens of meteorite hits and caked with the dark brown mud that covered the surface of Titan.
The massive doors hit their stops with a thump that shook the floor. The little crowd of impatient passengers bustled forward, making their way through the tangle of umbilical cables that snaked across the hangar and up the steep loading ramp that jutted from the belly of the shuttle.
Promising to catch up with Jenny and Arcon once she had reported in, Laura hurried to her assigned seat and strapped herself in. The pilot was obviously on a tight schedule, because no sooner had the ground crew checked the last person on board than the cabin lights dimmed and the loading ramp started to retract. The second that it locked into place, a harsh electronic voice echoed around the shuttle interior.
‘All ground personnel please vacate immediately. Depressurisation countdown in progress. Repeat. Depressurisation countdown in progress.’
A few moments later, the shuttle vibrated violently as the last traces of breathable atmosphere in the hangar were vented into space, and Laura felt the familiar lurch in her stomach as the launch pad started its climb towards the airlock doors that separated the hangar from the toxic atmosphere of Titan.
Reaching into her jacket pocket, she removed her comms unit and slipped the tiny bud into her right ear, tuning the frequency to that of flight control. Immediately the chatter between the shuttle pilot and the traffic control team filled her ears, drowning out all other noise. Laura adjusted the volume so that it was a little more background. Monitoring traffic control was by no means part of her duties, but it had become something of a prelaunch ritual for her. A perk of the job, she liked to think.
‘Transport shuttle Glamorgan, this is Titan flight control. All lights green on my board. Launch window is clear. Kollo-Zarnista guidance beacon is activated.’
‘Thank you, Titan. Umbilicals retracted. Raising radiation flare shields now.’
‘Roger that, Glamorgan. Retracting main hangar doors in five. Four. Three. Two. One. You are clear for launch. Have a good flight.’
With a deafening roar that drowned out the voices in Laura’s ear, the shuttle’s main engines ignited and she was pressed back into the padding of her seat as the little spacecraft launched itself into the thick Titan clouds.
Laura shifted her attention to the tiny porthole alongside her. Clouds of vapour and streams of liquid methane streaked across the window as the shuttlecraft tore itself free of the atmosphere. Gradually the choking clouds started to thin out and then, abruptly, the clouds were gone and there was nothing but blackness and stars beyond the window.
The
star-scape started to slide across her field of view as the shuttle banked, and Laura held her breath, waiting for the sight that she had been dreaming of for the last three months.
Slowly the planet came into view. Vast. Beautiful. Like nothing else in the solar system. Saturn and its rings.
Laura let out her breath with a deep, contented sigh.
She was home.
Chapter
1
Kollo-Zarnista Mining Facility 27 hung ugly and motionless amongst the swirling clouds of Saturn. Nearly a quarter of a mile across, it was home to over three hundred miners and support personnel and had now been in almost constant operation for over fifteen years.
In design it was little more than a vast, thick disc, twenty storeys high, the smooth, featureless hull broken only by the four chunky gravity inverters set at equidistant points along its circumference. Pinecone-like in appearance, the strange, bulbous shapes of the huge machines were totally at odds with the construction of the rest of the station, the unfamiliar lines betraying the non-human origins of their design. Each inverter was made up of a series of overlapping plates that constantly tilted and turned as they compensated for the immense gravitational grip of the planet below, their ceaseless movement occasionally revealing a sickly yellow/green light glowing deep within the alien machines.
Tucked in tight beneath the main disc was the mine-head itself, an untidy tangle of command and support modules, dominated by the four vast winches that formed the core of the facility.
Inside the main control room, Rig Chief Jorgen Delitsky glanced impatiently at his watch as the seconds ticked down relentlessly towards the start of mining operations for the day. The shuttle was running behind schedule, and that would result in the mine starting its first shift behind schedule too. Today was not a good day for that to happen.
He glanced across to where Nettleman and Rince were standing at the main control bank. The two Kollo-Zarnista senior executives had arrived the day before yesterday to conduct what they kept referring to as an ‘urgent investigation’, but as far as Delitsky was concerned they had done nothing but get in the way and waste everyone’s time since they got here. They had demanded a tour of the facility, had called dozens of meetings with senior managers to go through figures and review security arrangements, and spent the rest of the time asking for coffee every five minutes and generally distracting his people from their work.