Doctor Who

by Mike Tucker

  Even now, when everyone should be concentrating on their duties, the two company men were chatting with his extraction team as if they were all at some fancy drinks reception. Claire Robbins, currently on scanning duty, had barely glanced at her screens in the last ten minutes. It was time to put a stop to it.

  ‘Robbins!’ Delitsky’s voice was like a whip-crack across the room.

  Robbins jumped, swinging her chair back to the controls that she had been neglecting with a wince. ‘Sorry, Chief.’

  Delitsky was pleased to see the smiles drop from the faces of Nettleman and Rince. It was time for them to learn who was really in charge around here. ‘I’m still waiting for an ETA on that shuttle docking!’

  ‘On it.’

  She busied herself with the controls. ‘Shuttle locked on beacon. Gravity funnel holding steady. Docking expected at zero plus seven.’

  Delitsky gave a frown of irritation. Seven minutes behind schedule. That wasn’t going to look good for any of them. He turned to the small figure in grey overalls perched at the control console next to him. Jenloz was their designated Cancri liaison for the mine, responsible for the maintenance and operation of all the non-human equipment. He was also currently Acting Chief Engineer.

  ‘Anything we can do to speed them up, Jenloz?’

  The little Cancri looked at him inquisitively. ‘Meaning?’

  ‘You know exactly what I mean,’ Delitsky muttered under his breath. ‘Tweak the settings on the gravity funnel, bring that shuttle in a little bit faster.’

  Jenloz tutted theatrically, amusement making his startling green eyes sparkle like emeralds. ‘Really, Chief? You know how strict the rules are with regard to gravity compensation procedures. Are you sure you want to break them with the company bigwigs watching?’

  Delitsky gave a wry grin. ‘It might be worth it to see their faces when they realise that the shuttle is coming into the docking cradle at maximum speed, but no, you’re probably right.’

  ‘A slight adjustment might be possible, Chief. Let me see what I can do to shave a few minutes off the ETA.’

  ‘That’s great, Jenloz. Let Tobins know what you’re doing.’

  Gerry Tobins was the longstanding pilot of the Glamorgan, and Delitsky knew that he wouldn’t mind bending a few rules if it helped his punctuality figures.

  As the little Cancri busied himself making adjustments to the gravity controls, Delitsky turned to face the rest of his crew. ‘Listen up, people. We’re expecting docking confirmation in the next five to seven minutes. I want all ionisation crews ready to spark up as soon as that confirmation comes in. No excuses!’

  The control room was suddenly alive with activity as the crew settled into a familiar routine. Deliberately ignoring the two company executives, Delitsky made his way down the short stairwell to the command pod, slipping into one of the seats and fitting a comms bud into his ear.

  In the brightly lit hangar below him, the squat grey shape of the mining bell sat in its support cradle, waiting for the hatch below to open, and the long descent into the Saturnian atmosphere to begin. Like the mine itself, the spherical pod featured the pinecone-like inverters that bulged from the metal skin like some strange, alien fungus, glowing with that unhealthy green inner light. Boiler-suited technicians scurried around the sphere like ants, checking fittings, making adjustments.

  Delitsky flicked a switch on the communication console in front of him. ‘You all right in there, Baines?’

  ‘Oh, sure. You know how much I love my pressure armour. That’s why I named it!’

  Delitsky grinned. The two dozen men and women specially trained for the extreme-depth diamond mining all had a peculiar love-hate relationship with the Cancri-designed pressure armour that they had to work in. They referred to themselves as ‘the Diamond Dogs’, and each of them had customised their individual suits of armour with lurid and crude graffiti – much to the disgust of Jenloz. Roger Baines had painted his suit a vivid red, with the words ‘Queen Bitch’ emblazoned across the shoulders. Delitsky was convinced that the Cancri’s insistence that an elevated pressure level was maintained inside the suits was purely because he was unhappy with this disrespect of his equipment.

  Delitsky recalled that Baines had actually argued that the suits were an unnecessary additional precaution given the extreme safety testing that the mining bells themselves went through, but Federation insurance brokers and Kollo-Zarnista health and safety officers all insisted on the double redundancy feature, and having seen first-hand what the pressures of Saturn were capable of, Delitsky wasn’t about to argue with them.

  Baines’s voice crackled in his ear once more. ‘What’s the holdup, Chief? Shouldn’t we have been under way by now?’

  ‘Shuttle’s late. Blame Tobins.’

  Baines cursed loudly. ‘The sooner Tobins gets that transfer to the outer rim that he keeps banging on about, the better.’

  ‘I hear you.’

  A light on the communications panel started to blink, and Delitsky tapped at the bud in his ear, changing channels. ‘I hope you have good news for me, Robbins,’ he growled.

  ‘The Glamorgan’s just docked, Chief. Shuttle bay crew are locking it down now.’

  ‘That’s what I wanted to hear.’ Delitsky tapped the ear bud again, leaning forward and barking into the microphone in front of him. ‘All crew, this is Delitsky.’ His voice boomed from speakers around the control room. ‘The transport shuttle has already put us behind schedule, so I don’t want any of you giving me reasons that will make that situation any worse. All prep teams clear the hangar. Ionisation teams, commence countdown.’

  He shut off the microphone and leaned back in his seat, watching the crew in the hangar bay below him hurrying to their stations, closing the huge pressure doors behind them. In the background a harsh electronic countdown had started, and telemetry had begun to stream across the screens on the instrument panels hanging above him. At the console across from him he could see Johanna Teske, the medical officer, peering intently at the bio-readouts being relayed from the mining pod, monitoring Baines’s vital signs for any anomalies.

  Delitsky liked Teske. She was the only one on the station remotely close to his age, and one of the few who shared his desire to see that everything was done properly. Not like those two clowns from head office. They were only interested in getting things done cheaply.

  He craned his neck to see where the two managers had got to. Thankfully they had seated themselves in the observation gallery, well out of the way of his crew who were now fully engaged with their duties. Delitsky nodded with satisfaction. Good. With luck that meant they would stay out of his way for the next few hours.

  Turning his attention back to the task in hand, he cast a practised eye over the instruments. From the look of things, the slight delay would only have a minimal impact on their schedule. Jenloz had obviously done a good job speeding up the shuttle arrival. He made a mental note to ensure that the little Cancri got a little extra in his bonus.

  He swiped a hand over the meteorological diagnostic controls. The storm below the mine was really moving. He tapped his ear bud again. ‘I hope you strapped in tight, Baines. Looks like it’s going to be a little lively down there.’

  ‘You know me, Chief. Always up for a challenge.’

  ‘Glad to hear it.’

  Delitsky closed his eyes, listening to the mechanical voice of the station mainframe as it counted down inexorably towards zero. This was where things got real. And dangerous. All levity faded from the Rig Chief’s voice. ‘All right, Baines. Stand by. We’re initiating drop in … Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Drop.’

  Through the armoured glass, Delitsky watched as the hangar doors snapped open and the grey sphere vanished into the boiling clouds of Saturn.

  At the same moment, the entire station shuddered as the ionisation satellites seeded through the planet’s atmosphere flared into life, sending lightning arcing through the clouds.

  A short time later it started
to rain diamonds.

  Chapter

  2

  The upper level of Kollo-Zarnista Mining Facility 27 housed the vault – a vast chamber filled with the diamonds extracted from the crushing atmosphere of the planet below. Here in this huge room there was more wealth than on the rest of the planets in the solar system combined.

  Not that you would guess from its appearance. The floors, the walls, the ceiling of the vault were all a flat, uniform grey. The tube-train-sized cylindrical containers that radiated around the walls seemed unremarkable. Unremarkable save for the huge quantities of Saturnian diamonds that each of them held.

  These stones were the lifeblood on which the ever-expanding empire of the human race depended. Without them the species may not have even survived, trapped for ever in a backwater of the galaxy with ever-diminishing resources. There were no precious metals left on Earth, Homo sapiens had stripped their home planet bare almost before they had taken their first steps into the universe. Mars and Venus had soon followed and, with Mercury offering no discernible benefits to mankind, the masters of Earth had turned their attention to the gas giants instead.

  The possibility that the atmosphere of Saturn and Jupiter harboured an untapped source of precious stones had been theorised as far back as the early twenty-first century, but reaching them was an entirely different matter. The initial attempts to extract the wealth from these behemoths of the solar system had not gone well. Mission after mission ended in disaster: hundreds of lives were lost, men, women and equipment vanishing for ever into the swirling clouds, dragged down by the monstrous gravitational forces of the huge planets, and crushed out of existence.

  But, like the gold prospectors of antiquity, the miners were undaunted, spurred on by the promise of untold wealth if they were successful, and the increasing desperation of a planetary elite that sensed their imminent extinction if these new resources could not be exploited.

  Salvation came in the form of the Cancri, an alien race from beyond Cygnus-A, who arrived (unlike so many alien races that stumbled across the Earth) with no threats of destruction or dreams of conquest, but purely with an offer of assistance.

  For a price, of course.

  The Cancri were also expanding into the universe, and they too had started to exhaust their home worlds. What they did have, however, was a mastery of pressure and gravity. To the scientists of Earth, the technology they brought was advanced to the point that they could barely understand it. But it was exactly what they needed if they were going to make any headway in extracting the diamond wealth that the human race so desperately needed.

  And so, a partnership was agreed, a business deal between the two planets, and Saturn was agreed on to be the first test site. The Cancri would provide the knowledge of how to create new alloys that could survive the crushing pressures of the gas giant and the gravitic machinery needed to keep a mine safely in orbit within that atmosphere. They would also give the technical support needed to keep that machinery functioning, whilst Earth would provide the labour force. As payment for their services, the Cancri would take a percentage of the diamonds mined, although only a few people high up in the corridors of power knew exactly what proportion of the wealth the Cancri leaders had managed to negotiate.

  The truth was – as many experts had pointed out over the years, when the question of how much the Cancri were taking became a political sore point – whatever proportion it was, it was worth it. Without the Cancri gravity inverters, there would be no diamonds; without the diamonds, the expansion of the Human Empire would grind to a halt.

  And so the partnership had blossomed. As well as the mines on Saturn there were now diamond extraction facilities on Jupiter and, if the colonies on the rim worlds continued to grow at the current rate, there would soon be the need to start operations on Neptune as well.

  The success of the Human-Cancri partnership did not come without its problems, however. The transportation of such vast wealth from the mines to the home worlds inevitably attracted the attention of those who found it easier to acquire the diamonds without going to the trouble of mining for them. Time and time again, diamond shipments were raided, either on the way to Earth or to Cancri, until finally the losses to jewel thieves became so great that the governments of both planets agreed that a solution had to be found.

  Once again, it was the Cancri gravity inverters that provided a solution to the problem. Initially diamond shipments had been on a weekly schedule, on the assumption that the sooner they were removed from the mine environment, the safer they would be. It was a young Federation security officer called Gammadoni who had pointed out that it was the cargo transporters that were the weak point. Given their locations, the mines themselves were actually the safest places to store the diamonds. Without a gravity inverter, there was no way of reaching them, and given that only the Cancri had the ability to make such machines …

  The new policy was swiftly adopted, and the mines were re-engineered to also act as vaults, storing the diamonds in huge strong rooms, safe from pirates and marauders.

  The vault on Kollo-Zarnista Facility 27 was almost full. Soon the high-security exercise of shipping the diamonds would begin, but for the moment the chamber was quiet and empty, the only noise in the cavernous chamber a slight vibration caused by the Cancri gravity inverters: a vibration that caused the diamonds to give off a faint, almost musical tinkle as they shifted inside their cold, metal containers.

  That musical tinkling was slowly drowned out by a new sound – a harsh, elephantine trumpeting – and a new container joined the others in the vault, slowly materialising in the exact centre of the massive circular chamber. The new addition was small, blue and rectangular and had the words ‘POLICE PUBLIC CALL BOX’ emblazoned on a sign above its doors. An Earth historian might have recognised it as a primitive communication artefact from the planet’s pre-space-age era, but they would have been wrong. Behind those rickety-looking wooden doors was one of the most sophisticated time-space machines ever constructed – a TARDIS, a time ship from the planet Gallifrey, capable of travelling to any world in any point in history. This particular TARDIS was the property of a Time Lord known simply as the Doctor and, a few seconds after it had appeared, one of the doors was snatched open and the face of the Doctor peered out into the gloom.

  In this incarnation (the first of his brand new life cycle), the Doctor was tall, thin and gangly-limbed, with unruly grey hair and vast, endlessly expressive eyebrows. Satisfied that he had landed in the correct location, he stepped out of the TARDIS and calling back over his shoulder.

  ‘Come on, out you come. The quicker we get this over with, the quicker we can get back.’

  Another figure appeared in the doorway. Bill was tall and slim, with a shock of jet-black curly hair and a bright, inquisitive expression. She looked around the darkened room warily. She had started to get used to the fact that travelling in the TARDIS with the Doctor inevitably meant landing in the middle of something dangerous. Only recently she had been stalked by emoticon robots on a distant planet in the far future and nearly eaten by an alien fish in Victorian London.

  She stepped nervously from the TARDIS. ‘Where are we?’

  ‘Saturn.’ The Doctor didn’t look up.

  ‘Saturn. Right.’ Bill rolled her eyes. ‘Nardole is going to give you a right ticking off when he finds out.’

  ‘Well, he’s not going to find out if you don’t tell him.’

  Bill gave a snort. ‘He’s going to realise eventually. You can’t keep sneaking off without him noticing.’

  The Doctor extended a bony finger towards the TARDIS. ‘Time machine, remember? We can be back before he knows we’ve gone.’

  ‘Yeah, and he knows that too. He’s not stupid.’

  ‘No, but he is easily distracted, and I’ve left him a copy of this month’s Good Food magazine with a pull-out section on things you can make with Rice Krispies.’

  Bill shrugged, admitting defeat. ‘Yeah, that’ll do the trick.’ Shiv
ering in the cold air, she zipped up her denim jacket, thrusting her hands into the pockets and looking around the room. ‘Not impressed by Saturn,’ she sniffed.

  ‘Ah, but you should be.’ The Doctor turned, spinning on his heel, throwing his arms wide. ‘If you only knew what most people would give to be standing where you are standing right now.’

  Bill looked around in bemusement. ‘In a big empty room?’

  ‘Ah, but the room isn’t empty, is it?’

  Bill shrugged. ‘OK, a room full of big cylinders. Still not getting my pulse racing.’

  ‘Well then, maybe you should be asking yourself what’s inside the cylinders.’

  With that the Doctor made a beeline for one of the huge containers, squatted down in front of it and slipped on his sonic sunglasses. Bill sighed. He was obviously not going to give her a straight answer as to why they were here, so she might as well just sit tight and let him get on with it.

  The sooner they got whatever they were after, the sooner they could get out of here.

  Several floors below them, in the Main Security Control room, Laura Palmer was slowly making her way through the dozens of reports and memos that had built up since her last tour of duty. As usual, most of them were fairly routine, but Laura was concerned to note that there had been an increase in the number of reports of unscheduled craft in the area.

  She sipped at her coffee, a frown creasing her brow. That was cause for concern. Piracy was a very real worry amongst her superiors. Initially they had had a problem with the diamonds being targeted when they were in transit to Earth, usually just as the cargo shuttles were coming out of warp, but the increasing volume of security ships in that sector had forced the pirates to start looking for other options. Two years ago, the transport shuttle from Titan had been shadowed by a Zzinbriizi stealth ship that had tried to follow it to the Kollo-Zarnista facility itself. They might have made it too, if the pilot hadn’t been careless and slipped out of the gravity funnel. That had resulted in them taking a very fast one-way trip into the centre of Saturn.