Dela used to get her music player to record the birdsong from outside, pipe it through to her when she was awake. The dawn chorus. She’d not thought about birdsong for years.
Did that mean her life was flashing in front of her eyes?
No. She was squatting down, somehow both terrified and numb. Alive.
Dela remembered the tiny suns hanging below each ship, and imagined them blasting out solid beams of energy, all aimed at the same spot on the side of those thick black Fortress walls.
The light and sound snapped off. She opened her eyes,
discovered she was dazzled anyway, her eyes swimming with afterimages.
Fladon was saying something. Dela’s ears were ringing so much she couldn’t make out the words.
Cozzan was on his feet, looking back over at the Fortress. She tugged at his sleeve, but he was speaking.
‘…ight. Stopped.’
Dela stood and looked. The attack had been so concentrated that none of the Factory’s windows had broken. The air, though, felt like it was hissing. It must have been ionised or… Dela didn’t have the vocabulary.
She looked over at the body lying there on the factory floor. Jeffip would have known the words.
‘We have to leave,’ Fladon said.
‘They said they would kill us.’
‘They’re too busy. We have to… to… take our chances.’
Three of the Eyeless were moving back over to the Fortress. Beyond them, through the window, high above, the alien ships were lined up. It might have been her imagination, but Dela thought the spheres beneath them looked dimmed, diminished. A quick look at the Fortress, and there was no obvious damage from this side, although there was a rusty, smoky smell.
The fourth Eyeless hadn’t moved. Dela was level with it, could see the reflection of her face stretched and mapped onto it.
‘Attack ineffective,’ the Eyeless said. ‘We anticipate a counterattack.’
The Doctor followed the directions the comm gave him: running a hundred metres, sharp right turn, first left. He’d just come to the end of the last corridor, taken his first step into the inner vault. It was almost pitch black, a great, cold, echoing place, bigger than a rocket silo or the biggest cathedral or even the hangar deck of a carrier ship.
The Doctor – who was very good at seeing in the dark –had trouble making out much detail. He was about halfway up it, feet planted on a narrow metal walkway. He could just about make out that the huge space was crisscrossed with other walkways, as well as thick power lines. Below him were more gantries and power lines, and networks of metal pipes, discs and tubes. There were large shapes that were indistinct but loomed in the gloom.
The rumbling noise had stopped. The Fortress was no longer shaking. The Doctor checked the comm, but the map and directions had gone. In their place, the display flashed frantic warning icons over an image of a very small area of the Fortress wall, zoomed in for a second or two. There wasn’t much damage and the image zoomed out again.
Klaxons and sirens started sounding. For three seconds or so, the Doctor assumed that he was the cause of the fuss, tensed and braced for an attack.
Then the Fortress changed.
Starting at the apex, taking about ten seconds, the interior of the Fortress lit up, one section at a time. This soft orange-white light marked out the vast space of the inner vault. A three-sided pyramid. Here were great galleries, staging platforms, empty hangar bays and docking cradles. They sat there in metallic layers, in rainbow steps and ledges of gold and silver and copper and iron and steel and bronze. They were connected by shafts and tunnels, but it was always possible to see at least one sloping black metal wall.
In the centre of the vault was a thick column, the core of the Fortress. It was a building within a building, and looking up and up and up at it, even the Doctor felt a vertiginous rush.
The column was battleship grey, about the same height as ten moon rockets on top of each other. It was thirty metres thick, so really quite slender, reaching from the ground right up to the top. With its hundreds of armoured branches, gantries and pipework, it looked a little like a great and ancient midwinter tree.
Right at the heart of it – and it seemed impossibly far away, now – was the chamber where the weapon was housed, waiting. The weapon chamber was a rough blip halfway down the central column, a pyramid pulled out of shape by the thick tangle of lines and cables. The Doctor could clearly make out a single long, straight walkway leading from the outer walls straight to the weapon chamber. That was about ten storeys above him, and the Doctor suspected it would be the most heavily defended route in the place. The comm was telling him there was a lift in the central column that would take him straight there.
The Doctor could hear sets of new traps snapping into place, all around, whole arsenals warming up.
The Fortress was awake.
There was a fresh hum very close by. A new system had come online. A quick check of the comm, and the Doctor could see that the Eyeless ships had the strategy computer’s full attention. As yet, there was no sign that the internal defences were being ramped up. If elephants are stampeding towards you, it’s not the time to worry about a little cold virus inside you.
‘Bless you,’ said the Doctor.
It was then that a glass arm whipped up and round his neck, so that a smooth elbow was level with the Doctor’s Adam’s apple, crushing the air from him.
The Fortress made its move. The first blue energy bolt hit the middle Eyeless ship. Nothing happened. It fired a second, more powerful shot, which hit exactly the same spot. Nothing happened. The third energy bolt punched right through the hull of the ship.
Instantly, the Fortress brought half a dozen more turrets to bear, and they all fired, seven blue bolts hitting the breach in the hull, all from slightly different angles, at millisecond intervals. The bolts smashed seven different swathes through the interior structure of the ship, cracking open decks, igniting flammable items, rupturing power lines, causing chaos and explosions that quickly became chain reactions.
The Eyeless ship listed badly, but its crew was able to right it within moments. While they were doing that, the Fortress aimed all its detectors and peered through the holes it had made in the hull. It analysed the deck plans, weapons systems and engines. Within a second, the Fortress knew more about the Eyeless ship than its designers did.
Its attention turned to one of the other ships, the one on its right. This time, it only needed one shot, which hit at a seemingly random point on the underside. The glowing sphere hanging beneath the ship suddenly dropped like a stone, smashing down into the lake below, mere metres from the shore. It rolled a short distance, and the water beneath it instantly began boiling and steaming, and even caught fire.
The flames were smothered within seconds, as the rest of the Eyeless ship plummeted onto them. As the white hull touched the sphere, there was a flash of light and a huge explosion that blew a great crater into the soft earth.
The shockwave toppled a couple of nearby skyscrapers. A mushroom cloud of pulverised mud, bits of Eyeless ship and steam slowly rose. A great wave in the lake sloshed and slurped against the walls of the Fortress. Tiny pieces of white hull material and what looked like small chunks of glass began showering down over a wide area.
The undamaged Eyeless ship fired seven small pulses of golden light from its sphere, each one hitting and ripping apart a gun turret.
The Fortress fell silent.
The damaged Eyeless ship drifted back a little. For the moment – as long as the surviving Eyeless ships kept where they were – they’d be safe, as the Fortress had no guns facing them.
This situation was unacceptable to the Fortress.
*
The Doctor had broken free of the Eyeless, but it still had a six-fingered handful of his coat and jacket lapel. The Doctor was close in, his arm under the Eyeless’ so that he had it in what he rather hoped was a wrestling hold.
They were about halfway along a
metal gantry made up of thin metal tubes. There was a doorway right at the end, leading into the central column. A little way from there was the lift that would lead straight up to the weapon chamber.
The Eyeless was making all the textbook moves, which made it easy for the Doctor to anticipate them. On the other hand, they were the textbook moves in the first place because they were effective. The net result was that the Doctor and the Eyeless were dragging each other along the gantry, almost waltzing, each trying to trip the other up without losing footing and tumbling off the gantry.
The glass man was clearly trying to calculate a countermove to break free from him. It had just occurred to the Doctor that, in theory, he should be able to communicate with the Eyeless using the psychic paper.
The Doctor couldn’t spare a hand to fish it out, and anyway the Eyeless would take its opportunity to attack him if he released his grip.
They got to the end of the gantry, into the lift and the door hissed shut behind them. The floor began to move.
It was a lift – that was all. It had been on the map, but
from memory the Doctor had thought it had been a little further inside the central column, not right on its side.
He’d be at the weapon when the lift stopped. Taking an Eyeless along for the ride hadn’t been part of the Doctor’s plan.
There were no nozzles or trap doors in the lift car, and it wasn’t wired up to electrocute its passengers, but that didn’t mean it was safe in here.
The glass man shoved the Doctor against the back wall.
It wasn’t any stronger than a human being, although that was strong enough to push the air out of his lungs. He recovered, twisted, managed to trip the Eyeless over. It was relatively light, and now he had it pinned, his knee in its back, although it was hard to keep hold.
The arm the Doctor had hold of was as clean and sharp as crystal, and had what looked like a little metal anchor embedded in it. Like a sailor’s tattoo, the Doctor thought, unable to stop himself gasping out a laugh.
The Eyeless was trying to shake itself free. The Doctor gritted his teeth and kept holding it down. He wondered how brittle an Eyeless was.
There was a grinding sound beneath their feet.
They both looked down, puzzled.
Was the Fortress arming the –The Doctor panicked. When two hearts start racing at once, it isn’t a pleasant sensation. It sets the epinephrine flowing a bit too freely.
– weapon that killed Arcopolis?
‘No,’ he concluded out loud, calming himself down.
‘No. This is something else.’
For a start, the weapon was above him, not below. So what was the noise? Even though he couldn’t hear its thoughts, the Doctor could tell the Eyeless was asking itself the same question. It tugged, tried to stand. The Doctor didn’t let go.
‘If I knew,’ the Doctor announced calmly, ‘I would have been a bit more specific. Like I say, it’s something else.’
The lights dimmed a little.
‘They’re diverting power to the… something else.’ The next creak and clatter was nearer still.
‘Hang on…’
The Eyeless had loosened its grip a little.
‘Let me use the comm,’ the Doctor said. He used his free hand to retrieve it. ‘The comm? See? Comm see, comme ça.’
The Doctor checked the screen as best he could without completely letting go of the Eyeless. To his relief, it clearly showed that the lift was heading up. It was just a few floors away from the weapon chamber, and…
Thing was, if the noises beneath them were getting nearer, that meant the lift was going down. Now the Doctor came to think about it, it did feel like the lift was falling.
‘Oh,’ he said, realising. ‘The comm’s been lying to me.’
He let that sink in for both of them.
‘Well… to us, really,’ he added. ‘The Fortress hacked into the comm, fed me what I wanted to see, gave me a route that only said it was to the weapon chamber. All the time it was leading me here.’
The comm went dead.
Another grinding, puttering sound, which echoed like a cackle, inches beneath them, making the floor of the lift car thrum and vibrate.
‘If we’re going to survive, we need to cooperate,’ the Doctor suggested. ‘It’s the rational thing to do.’
The Eyeless hesitated, then nodded. Slowly, the Doctor let go of it.
The Eyeless held out its hand, which the Doctor shook.
Then the door opened, the lift car tipped itself right over, and the Doctor and the Eyeless fell out.
They dropped, hands clasped, straight down through five metres of darkness, before crashing onto a metal surface. The Eyeless hit it chest first, with a sound like someone dropping a crate of beer bottles. The Doctor let go of its hand and it flipped over and slid away, lifeless, torso dashed to bits, down into the gloom.
The Doctor didn’t shatter, but he did slide off, falling only a metre or so, but then going on to hit a ledge, rolling over that for a while, and then down another five metres, landing flat on his back on solid rock.
‘Ow,’ he noted.
There was a new sound. Metal against metal, a vast mechanism creaking into life. A great ratcheting noise, clanks and what sounded like bolts clacking back.
The Doctor had heard a sound like this before, and tried to place it. It rang a bell… and that phrase reminded him of the other day, the thing he’d been telling Gar and Alsa about. Being up in St Stephen’s Tower, chasing the last of the Steggosians round the workings of Big Ben, dodging that spiky tail of his.
Concentrate. Concentrate on identifying the noise, the Doctor told himself.
And don’t black out.
He’d heard this sound in London, but on a different occasion. Ages ago. Where and when?
‘Tower Bridge!’ he exclaimed, wincing at the effort. ‘It sounds like Tower Bridge getting ready to open up.’
The Doctor, still flat on his back, soaked up the scene.
He had an ideal vantage point. He was lying in a three-metre deep, ten-metre wide trench cut into what looked and felt like bedrock. The trench was very slightly curved.
Above, all around, horizontal and vertical, was a great mesh of cogwheels, made of the same black metal as the walls, marked out with silver and grey rivets. There were drive shafts and pistons like redwood trees. There were flywheels the size of houses, drive belts you could have used as bus lanes.
Peering down past his feet, the Doctor could see an enormous drum, like the front of a steam roller. It was about a hundred metres away, so partially obscured by the curve of the trench. It was ten metres tall and just as wide, so rested perfectly snugly in the groove the Doctor was lying in. Above and to each side were vast numbers of cogwheels, belts and gears, all – eventually – connected up to the axle of the roller.
‘Ah,’ said the Doctor, who’d just worked out what it all did.
There was a creak, then a clank. A deep rumbling note, and the roller started edging forwards, towards him. It was
moving at walking pace, so would reach him in about a minute.
All in all, this wasn’t the best time to realise he couldn’t quite get his legs to move. He’d just fallen about ten metres and landed spine-first on solid rock. The fact that he didn’t feel any pain was not encouraging.
‘This is a really inefficient and melodramatic way of killing one person,’ the Doctor complained loudly. ‘Even if that person is me.’
He looked back over at the roller, now fifty metres or so away from his feet. The grinding was deafening. The roller must have weighed hundreds of tons, easily.
‘Although I have to hand it to you… it does look like it’ll work.’
The Doctor could wiggle his toes. Using all his concentration and willpower, he knew he’d be able to move in another thirty seconds.
His main problem now was that the roller would reach him in twenty.
Hydraulics and great gears hissed and clanked around.
Every cogwheel was turning. It sounded like the engine room of an ocean liner going full steam ahead. The heavy roller was a wall of metal, turning so very slowly, scraping and sparking against the bare rock, its rotation as unstoppable as a planet’s. The Doctor had nothing but admiration for the engineers who’d designed and built such an incredible machine.
The edge of the roller brushed the tips of his trainers.
The Doctor forced his feet to move, but they only twitched. He tried to throw them back over his head to flip
himself upright. They only got halfway.
With a mighty hiss, the roller came to a dead stop.
The Doctor was bent into an L shape. His legs – had he noticed before quite how long and skinny they were? –pointed straight up in the air, the backs of them resting on the cold metal roller.
He was not only bent at a right angle, he was at exactly the right angle to see what had happened. By comparing the new position of all the mechanisms, he was able to work out what all that mechanical activity had been in aid of.
All this vast machinery at the base of the pyramid was dedicated to one purpose. It hadn’t been to kill him. The Doctor now knew what the roller had been doing and why it had stopped.
‘You’re kidding,’ the Doctor whispered.
The Eyeless ships had disabled the guns on the side of the Fortress facing them. The fighting was over, at least until the Eyeless attacked again. Barely controlled thoughts and concern about the many, many Eyeless casualties flitted between the four glass men out here.
Likewise, Dela and Fladon were over at Jeffip’s body.
There was a terrible truth about the future. Neither of them was ready to confront it so soon.
‘What do we do with it?’ Fladon asked, ever practical.
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