by Dan Abnett
She seemed to be intact.
'Oh my god, it worked,' she marvelled.
Another loud clang shook the bridge and almost knocked her off her feet. Samewell had landed beside her. His landing wasn't quite as clean as Amy's. He went sprawling as he hit, and nearly rolled off the walkway under the lowest bar of the guard rail. Amy squeaked and grabbed him, dragging him back.
'Don't fall! Don't fall! Don't fall!' she yelled.
'Am I safe? Have I landed?' Samewell asked, entirely flummoxed by the whole experience.
Amy looked up in time to see Bel falling towards them. Her long skirts billowed out as she dropped, almost like a parachute canopy.
Arabel missed the walkway. She had jumped a little too short.
Amy cried out in horror as Bel bounced off the outside of the guard rail and went over backwards, plunging away into the fiery depths.
She stopped falling with a violent lurch. Her skirts had caught up on the rail. Bel was hanging upside down off the side of the bridge by her winter skirts, her arms thrashing.
'Grab her! Pull her up!' Amy shouted. She and Samewell rushed to the rail and leant over, each of them reaching down with both hands trying to snatch and grasp at Arabel's inverted form.
There was a long, slow and ominous sound of cloth tearing.
'Arabel Flurrish!' Samewell yelled. 'If you fall and die, I'll kill you!'
'Grab my hand!' Amy shrieked. 'Bel, grab my hand!'
Arabel's skirts tore. Unhooked from the brief suspension of the guard rail, she fell.
Amy and Samewell both grunted out air as they took her weight, straining to hold on. Samewell had both his hands wrapped around Bel's right hand. Amy had one hand locked around Bel's left. Arabel was hanging by her arms the right way up.
But Samewell and Amy were leaning out so far, Bel was in danger of pulling them both over the rail.
'Get her up!' Amy bellowed.
'I- can't!' Samewell gasped.
'Get her up now! Now! Before we all go over!' Amy told him, snorting with effort. 'On three! One... two...
three!'
They hauled.
Bel came up in a rush, and all three of them tumbled backwards over the guard rail and ended up piled on the walkway in an untidy heap.
'I am not doing that again,' said Bel.
Amy got up. The thwarted Ice Warriors were glaring down at them from the bridge above.
'Come on!' she urged the two young Morphans. 'Get up and get going!'
Samewell helped Bel to her feet, and they both followed Amy along the span towards the exit hatch.
The metal walkway rang under their feet.
Suddenly, it did more than ring. It shook as though the bridge had been hit by a wrecking ball. The violent shiver made all three of them stumble.
Amy looked back.
An Ice Warrior was slowly getting up out of a crouched position on the walkway behind them. It had jumped from the walkway overhead, and landed roughly where they had landed.
There was something completely terrifying about the giant green thing's unexpected display of agility.
It rose to its full height, and reached its right fist up to its left shoulder to grasp the hilt of the sword secured across its broad back. It drew the sword, raised it, and started to pursue them all over again.
'You know that thing I keep saying?' Amy yelped.
'What, run, you mean?' asked Bel.
'Yeah,' said Amy. 'Can we just save me some time and take it as read from now on?'
A second Ice Warrior plunged like a boulder from the bridge above. It landed behind the first, missing the main platform, but impacting, as Arabel had done, against the guard rail. Pincer clamps snapped shut around the rail to prevent it from toppling backwards into the drop. The metal railing was buckled and twisted by its collision.
Slowly, clumsily, it clambered over the bent guard rail and onto the bridge. There, it unfastened the battleaxe anchored across its back, and set off after the first.
Amy was just a short distance from the safety of the hatch. She reached out her hand so she could touch the palm-checker plate as soon as she arrived and open the door. If they could get through and close the hatch again, the Ice Warriors would have to stop to drill the lock out, and that would buy them a little more time.
The hatch began to open. She hadn't touched the plate. Something on the other side had activated the lock system.
Amy slid to a stop, and Bel and Samewell cannoned into her from behind. All Amy could think was the Ice Warriors had somehow learned how to work the locks.
Something came through the hatch and out onto the bridge facing them.
It wasn't an Ice Warrior.
The three of them screamed anyway.
'Do you know what I'm going to do?' the Doctor asked Ixyldir. 'I can't believe I'm saying this, but do you know what I'm going to do?'
'What?' asked the Ice Lord.
'I'm going to help you,' the Doctor replied.
'Help me?'
'Help you all. There's a level to this situation that neither of us really anticipated.'
'I do not believe you can be trusted,' Ixyldir replied.
The Doctor shook his head, and snatched the communicator pad out of the Ice Lord's grip. Ssord and two other Ice Warriors reacted to stop him, but the Doctor did a little duck and weave to avoid them as if they were the least of his worries. He was busy examining the pad's display.
'You're taking a pasting, Ixyldir,' he said, reading data. 'Your slow, cold war has turned into a fast, hot one. This is not what you were expecting at all, is it?'
He looked at the Ice Lord.
'Is it?' he repeated. 'I'm not saying that you're not prepared to fight. You're Ice Warriors, for goodness sake. But this isn't the scenario you were expecting when you began your offensive ten years ago. Is it?'
'No,' said the Ice Lord.
'Escalation,' said the Doctor. 'You said it yourself. I can help you, but only if you start cooperating with me quickly. I mean very quickly. We don't even have to trust each other completely, but if we don't get this situation under control, there are going to be an awful lot of deaths. Morphan, Ice Warrior. Unnecessary deaths. This world laid waste, possibly to the point where it is of no use to either colonial effort. Come on, Lord Ixyldir of the Tanssor clan! Be smart!'
The Ice Lord seemed to take an eternity to reply.
'What form would this cooperation take?' he asked.
The Ice Warriors behind him swung their heavy heads to glance at one another.
The Doctor grinned.
'That's the spirit, Ix! That's the spirit! You're starting to thaw, pardon the pun! This could be the start of a beautiful friendship, Ix! Can I call you Ix?'
'Most certainly not.'
'Well work on that, then. Here's what I need first.
We have to find another facility like this, this telepresence communication centre.' The Doctor gestured to the chamber they were standing in. 'Ssord's handy axe-work rather ripped the stuffing out of the systems here,' he said. 'I could fix it, but it would frankly take more time than we have at our disposal.
There must be another. You've been working your way through this complex for years, cutting open doors.
You must have found another one or two by now.
Preferably, a more significant control room than this.
This is just a secondary station. Do you know of any primary command and control rooms?'
Lord Ixyldir looked at Ssord.
'Level sssix,' the Ice Warrior hissed.
'Let's go!' the Doctor cried. 'Lead the way, Ssord.
Lord Ixyldir, we'll walk and talk.'
Ssord led the way out of the chamber. The other Ice Warriors fell in around the Doctor and Lord Ixyldir as an honour guard escort.
'Walk as fast as you can!' the Doctor urged. He looked at Ixyldir. 'I need to know the details of your operation,' he said. 'It's vital. On several other occasions, I've known your people to instigate terraforming pro
cesses on target worlds. You're pretty good at it.'
'When our migration fleet entered this quadrant, this planet revealed itself to be the most likely candidate for adjustment,' replied the Ice Lord. 'Long-range observation confirmed it met the majority of our colonisation criteria. We resolved to achieve orbit, to commence climate engineering, and then wait for the process to be completed by entering hibernation on our ships.'
'Were you planning to use seed technology to bring about climate alterations?' asked the Doctor.
'You are familiar with the technique?' asked Ixyldir, surprised.
'I've stopped it more than once, actually,' the Doctor said. 'It's very efficient, though. The destabilisation of carbon dioxide levels is often all it takes to induce a global arctic phase on an M-class world.'
They left the gloom of the tunnels and followed a broad, railed walkway around the edge of a plunging turbine cavern.
'Once we were in orbit,' said the Ice Lord, 'we realised that a human colony was already established on the candidate planet. It had been here for some time and, though comparatively small, it had constructed terraforming processors of significant size and effect.
This process had been under way for several generations, and was already beginning to induce change.'
'So you thought, "Why bother setting up our own terraforming programme to work in opposition? Why not just repurpose the one that's already there?'"
'This was deemed to be the most viable option.'
The Doctor shook his head sadly. 'This is where you and I will be forced to disagree, Lord Ixyldir. That was a pretty underhand gambit. You decide to steal a planet out from under these settlers, you coopt their terraformers to do the hard work for you, and you essentially consign them to a generation or two of long, slow, bitter extinction. You signed their death warrants, Lord Ixyldir, but you let the snow and ice do the actual killing for you. You didn't have enough respect for your adversary to pull the trigger yourself.
Dirty pool, Lord Ixyldir. That's dirty pool.'
'I do not understand your reference,' replied the Ice Lord.
'It's not very honourable, is it?' replied the Doctor.
'That's what I'm saying. Theft, on a planetary scale.'
'This was not the humans' planet either. They selected it and claimed it. We were merely doing the same.'
'But they were here first, Ixyldir. It's a bit of a school playground he said, she said argument, I know, but do you know what? Most honour systems are built on very simple, basic concepts of ownership, or respect, or prior claim, or of precedence. The humans were here first, Ixyldir. You decided they were in the way, and you decided to steal their technology to eradicate them. Don't talk to me about honour.'
'It was a matter of survival,' objected Ixyldir.
'Ah yes, the famous pragmatism of the Ice Warriors.
You didn't mean to hurt anybody, but you were obliged to in order to survive. Lord Ixyldir, the deliberate and systematic eradication of an entire population is called genocide, and it's not regarded as especially honourable either. Not where nice people come from.'
'We had to survive! This was a viable planet—'
'You had a fleet of ships, Ice Lord. You could have gone somewhere else. The humans did not have that option.'
Ixyldir did not reply. For a few minutes, as the group continued to walk, entering a long, metallined hallway, the only sound was the tramp of feet and the rumble of the world-building engines.
'Anyway,' said the Doctor at length. 'Let's not dwell on your not-really-very-honourable-at-all decision-making process. You started to tinker with the terraformers. This was ten years ago. You knew it would be a gradual process that would take a long time, but you've got plenty of that, haven't you?
Hibernation systems on your starships. Lifetimes that are naturally three or four times those of humans. You could afford to play the long game. The Morphans, you know, they talk about patience a great deal. It's a fundamental quality of their culture. Not an easy, sleep-through-it-all patience like yours. I'm talking about the patience required to live and work every day, generation after generation, for a future ideal that will benefit your descendants. It's admirably selfless. Don't you think so?'
'It is... worthy of respect.'
'It is, isn't it?' the Doctor said. 'They just work towards the future. They make their contribution. They get no reward. They're just investing the effort of their lives for the good of other people they're never going to meet.'
They came out into another turbine hall, and Ssord led them up a broad metal staircase towards an upper level.
'So, your tinkering?' said the Doctor. 'You employed seed technology first?'
'Modified seed cultures were introduced to the primary terraformer systems. Initial results were positive.'
'But you reached a tipping point eventually,' said the Doctor. 'Eventually, as the winters began to get colder, the automatic monitoring systems governing the terraformer systems began to notice there was a problem. They performed self-diagnostic reviews and identified alien properties in the system. They needed to resolve the problem, so they accessed the DNA libraries, reopened the flesh banks, and grew a brand new batch of transrats to flush out the system.'
'Vermin was our first problem,' Ixyldir acknowledged.
'Transrats are resilient,' said the Doctor. "The more you killed, the more they made. That must have become a bit of a war. A guerrilla war, going on underground in the mountains, where the Morphans couldn't see it.'
'We prosecuted the vermin. The problem took about a year to control.'
'You used standard sonic disruptors, and you were forced to destroy some of the DNA banks and flesh farms so that the terraformers simply couldn't produce as many replacement transrats?'
'Yes.'
'And that still wasn't enough, was it?' the Doctor asked. 'They're resilient, as I said. Eventually, you must have realised that you couldn't beat the transrats. You had to find a way around them so they were no longer an impediment to your schemes?'
'We were forced to select alternatives to the processes we had originally put in place,' replied Ixyldir, 'the processes that the vermin had disabled.
Seed technology was no longer viable, because the vermin simply devoured it.'
'You started to actually convert the terraformers themselves? Recalibrate their systems?'
'Yes.'
'And that's when things really escalated, isn't it?'
asked the Doctor.
'In here!' Ssord said abruptly.
The Doctor followed the Ice Warriors through a large hatch, noting that the palm-print reader had been drilled through.
They entered a massive, well-lit control room.
There were several banks of consoles like the one in the telepresence chamber, each with a row of high-backed chairs. The chamber itself overlooked one of the secondary sequence prebiotic crucibles through a vast plate-glass wall. The Doctor paused to enjoy the view of the giant chrome tree. Drizzle from the cloud systems swirling the ceiling of the crucible chamber pattered against the glass wall like light summer rain.
'Yes,' the Doctor nodded. 'This will do the trick nicely. A central operation nexus. Would have taken me ages to find this, especially with you lot chasing me.'
'What happens now?' asked Ixyldir. 'If you have tricked us into revealing the location of this facility to you, I will kill you myself.'
'I would expect no less,' replied the Doctor. He sat down at one of the workstations and began to play with the controls, lighting up banks of indicator functions and small hologram read-outs.
'You see, Ixyldir,' he said as he worked, 'what I think has happened is this. You tampered with the terraformers. The system detected you, and manufactured transrats to solve the problem. So you started tampering in a different way to get around the transrat problem, and the system detected that too. It hadn't got many options left, so it had to do something quite radical.'
The Doctor turned to look at the Ice Lord.
'Like what, cold blue star?' Ixyldir asked.
The Doctor shrugged.
'The next effective stage beyond transrats.
Something Transhuman, is my guess. And that's what you're fighting now.'
Chapter
15
Now in Flesh Appearing
The thing prowled out onto the bridge. It was making a noise in its throat that was part growl, part purr. Its metal claws clinked on the grilled walkway as it took each step.
Amy, Bel and Samewell backed away from it, almost forgetting that a pair of Ice Warriors was closing on them from behind.
It was a monstrous thing. It was almost a man, a huge, lean, well-muscled man, in the same way that a transrat was almost a rat. It had been seriously bio-engineered. Its feet and hands were cybernetic implants that extruded huge steel talons. Amy realised, with rising disgust, that she could see where the bones of the hands were fused into the metal sheathing.
Flexible armoured cables corded its skin like external arteries, and its scarred, baby-pink flesh was puckered with grafting scars, and covered with sockets and surgical plugs. It was moving on all fours like a giant cat. There was a disturbing hint that its human DNA had been blended with that of a major predator, like a leopard or panther, altering its spine, hips and legs so that it could move fluidly and comfortably in quadruped form. It smelled of meat and blood and diseased tissue. Upright, it would have been easily as big as the Ice Warriors, perhaps as much as three metres tall.
Its face was a human skull that had been reinforced with chromed steel and adjusted, like a regular road car customised as a hot-rod. The jaw was huge, and the chin pointed and prominent, in order to accommodate the gleaming set of monstrous fangs. The teeth, twice the size of even adult human dentition, were coated in steel like precise medical instruments. It had a grin full of scalpels. Lip-less, cheek-less, the teeth formed a permanent smile. The crown of the skull was covered in wires, cables and tubes that formed a long, straggly mane of thick strands.