They were a long way from the settlement. It would be hard enough just getting the body down to ground level to bury it out here.
Dela knew the sensible thing to do was to leave. There
was nothing they could do here, on the front line of some interplanetary war. She’d stayed because she hadn’t wanted the Eyeless to cut up Jeffip’s body just so they could add a red eye and a blue eye to their collection.
Fladon took her hand, but she shook him away. Dela felt numb, detached from events.
An Eyeless swept past her, agitated. As she stepped out of its way, not wanting to antagonise it, a wave of anxiety passed over her. She had every reason to be worried, of course, but this didn’t feel like it had come from within her. The emotions of the Eyeless were infectious. Was that why she had been feeling so angry before? She’d caught it from the Eyeless?
There was a crunch.
‘What was that?’ she asked.
The other humans were coming over, wary. The Eyeless closest to them was looking equally lost.
‘It sounded like ice breaking,’ Fladon said, aware it wasn’t a helpful answer.
Another crunch.
‘Where’s it coming from?’ Gar asked. They were all looking down at the floor.
‘The attack must have weakened the Factory’s foundations,’ Fladon offered.
‘Without even cracking the windows?’ Gar sneered.
The kids who came out into the city were all experts on the ways buildings collapsed.
Cozzan was looking around. ‘That’s weird,’ he said.
‘It’s possible,’ Fladon said, not hearing. ‘When that ship hit the ground, it would have fractured the subterranean travel tunnels. The cracks could have spread.’
Morren was close, almost huddling. It was disconcerting for her son to treat her in this way, Dela realised, more than a little guiltily.
‘Are we moving?’ he asked.
‘No…’ Dela said quietly.
But they did seem to be turning, angling away from the solid mass of the Fortress. A memory. For the first time in fifteen years, Dela remembered what it was like to sit in a monorail carriage when it set off. It would look, for the first few seconds, like you were sitting still and the station was reversing away.
They all realised in the same moment it was the Fortress that was moving, not them.
The immense black wall was shifting. The whole Fortress was rotating on its central axis, as though it was mounted on gimbals. It was slow, about walking pace. It was unnerving, like watching a mountain turning to get a better look at something.
‘The Factory is in its way,’ Cozzan said.
Now the Fortress was twisting, grinding away the concrete and metal superstructure of the native building. It moved clockwise, exposing the side that had been buried in the Factory to the Eyeless ships.
The ceiling above them was creaking.
And now it was definitely time to get back to the village.
Dela, her children and Gar all ran, as the big window finally shattered and the floor beneath them began to
ripple and moan. Sparks flew from the machines of the Factory production lines, giving up the final ergs of power they’d hoarded for fifteen years.
A minute later, with a triumphant, echoing slam, the Fortress stopped moving. Almost round the corner, now, Dela and her sons turned to see a black wall identical to the one that had been there before.
The Eyeless had stayed rooted to the same spot. They had been showered with debris from the shattered window and the wreckage that had fallen from the ceiling. Dela could see three of the four, and they didn’t seem injured or damaged, or whatever the right word was, but the other was gone. Dead. Jeffip’s body had been completely buried, possibly even crushed, and the other Eyeless must be under the rubble, too.
Fladon hadn’t run, but had been thrown over as the Factory convulsed. Now he was getting up, coughing.
Stay still, Dela heard herself think. It was another warning from the Eyeless.
It came too late.
Fladon was blasted to pieces by a blue energy bolt.
The Doctor had buried the automatic gun, but on a wall that was now facing away from them. The new wall had a new turret.
Dela heard three Eyeless voices screaming warnings.
Not to her, to their ships. She was already running, pulling all the children along with her.
The Fortress had turned itself 120 degrees and locked into place with a new side facing the Eyeless ships. The lake
sloshed around its base, trying to settle down.
Fresh guns now faced the Eyeless. Ten of them fired, the energy bolts converging on the same spot on the sphere hanging below the undamaged ship. They punctured it, let it explode in mid-air.
The fireball enveloped the vessel above, burst it and then dispersed the remains on a shockwave that broke every window within a ten-mile radius but bounced harmlessly off the Fortress itself.
The last surviving Eyeless ship, the first to be hit, fired little golden pulses, intending each one to hit a turret on the Fortress. It had worked before, but now the Fortress was ready for the attack and it fired seven shots, each hitting an energy pulse, popping them. Then the guns fired a third time.
By now, the Eyeless ship had thrown up a force field, which absorbed most of the energy but couldn’t stop the ship being flicked miles into the heart of the city, right into and among a cluster of skyscrapers.
The Fortress took no pleasure watching the Eyeless ship slamming into a tall tower, its masts toppling and the hull corkscrewing down to the ground. The ship flipped over as it fell, bounced off other structures, carved great gouges into the buildings, scooped out blocks of masonry.
The Fortress was keeping a tally of alien life signs, and that fell to zero during this process, even before the bulk of the ship hit ground level.
The Fortress updated its records to register it had neutralised a threat.
As the ship’s force field had failed, however, the ship’s
artificial sun had broken off – or been deliberately ejected – and was now hurtling towards the Fortress. The strategy computer detected this and had the automatic guns blast at it, but it had been caught off-guard, and wasn’t able to get a good aim. It scored ten near misses. Ten energy bolts shot off in different directions, far into the morning sky.
The ball of energy continued on its course.
The Fortress had no strategies to prevent the impact, and switched to damage limitation.
Alsa could read the mind of the two Eyeless, an ocean of resentment, rage and frustration.
‘What’s going on?’ she asked.
‘So many dead.’
‘What? Who’s dead?’ Was it talking about Eyeless or real people?
‘We are now in the line of fire,’ it told her. ‘The side facing the –-’
That last word hadn’t come out at all. ‘The what?’
The shockwave from the blast had already knocked them off their feet when the front wall shattered and hurled itself at them, so quickly Alsa didn’t even have time to close her eyes. She saw the two Eyeless lifted off their feet and slammed into the back wall like dolls. Then all she could see was the slab of black metal that reared up off the floor and was about to hit her right in the face. A wave of heat washed over her, but everything was dark now.
The Doctor finally managed to summon the willpower to
stand up. He hopped to his feet, trying not to cry out as he realised just how many bruises he had.
He knew there was no way he could scale the sheer side of the trench, and the metal of the roller was far too smooth to get a handhold.
He checked the comm. The three Eyeless ships had been destroyed. He could believe that, but he couldn’t trust the comm with much else. So he tossed it up onto the ledge, stepped back, and used the sonic screwdriver to detonate its battery. That blew a metre-thick chunk of rock out, which fell into the trench, forming a rough set of steps. He clambered out, on
to the floor at the base of the Fortress.
He pulled himself upright, twisting his aching shoulder round to see if that helped the pain. It didn’t. He looked up. The weapon chamber appeared to be impossibly high above him. He was at ground level and virtually at the outer wall. He’d have to get across the whole of the floor to the central column, then climb up, somehow. The Fortress was awake now, all the defence systems online.
The Doctor could feel it peering down at him, waiting for the moment to pounce. That little trick with the comm and the lift car demonstrated that the Fortress was far more than just a machine designed to kill an intruder, it was a machine designed to enjoy killing an intruder. Not because it liked being vicious, almost the opposite: it liked solving puzzles. Murdering him would satisfy the Fortress in the same way as it was satisfying to solve a crossword.
His foot scuffed against something solid. A glass head, with a great crack in it. The Doctor picked it up. It was
light. Decapitated heads tended to be heavier than they looked, in his experience. This one was utterly inert, nothing to indicate it had ever been alive.
‘One down,’ the Doctor noted, carefully laying the head back on the rock floor.
He was trying to work out what to do next when a streak of golden light punched its way through the wall behind him, about a hundred storeys up. It looked like a small, squashed sun.
The Doctor made a run for it. This wasn’t just to avoid the debris, which was already beginning to crash down around where he had been standing. It was also because the ball of energy was so bright, so powerful and such an immediate threat that it would both blind and occupy every sensor in here – for the next few precious seconds, at least.
Its light had seared an afterimage into the air itself, but almost all of its force had been spent getting through the walls. It managed to bore a hole in the tangle of walkways and cables, but all the sphere could do after that was splash feebly into the central column, like a blob of lava.
It left a congealed splash of metal, like a sore, on the side of the column, and that was already cooling rapidly.
It posed no further danger to the Fortress. Which meant that the only remaining threat was the Doctor himself.
He gulped.
The winding corridor Alsa had come along with the Doctor to get this far into the Fortress was all gone, replaced by a sloping tunnel of jagged black metal. The explosion had burrowed hundreds of metres deep into the thick double walls. Sunlight streamed in through the gap, down past the stumps of sliced pipework and cables and through the five glass men standing there.
Alsa was already up. Her nose was a bloody mash, like someone had punched it. She was dabbing it with her sleeve. Apart from that, she was fine.
She felt the anger of the two Eyeless who’d been with her all this time, burning hotter than ever and hotter than her own. The three newcomers were offering to share their calm, simply paste over the negative emotions. The one with the green eyes was refusing, suggesting that they have his rage instead.
‘Are you the only survivors?’ Alsa asked.
There should be others – scouts and other patrols. None of them were close enough for telepathic contact, though.
They ought to be regrouping. It was known that many hundreds, all of the Eyeless on the ships and two down here, had died. There might only be these five.
Human beings had the expression ‘their memory lived on’, but it wasn’t true, not really, it just meant that people remembered the dead. And it wasn’t like the parents remembered everyone. The thirty-seven parents were just ordinary people. They had had friends and relatives – very small families back then from what they always said, ones with less than a handful of kids. Say they knew a thousand people, being really generous – this was a dizzying number of people for Alsa. Say, for sake of argument, they each ‘knew’ a different thousand people. They ‘knew’ a woman they passed in the street, or a neighbour they’d never talked to, or some shop assistant. That would mean that between all of them, they only remembered 37,000
people, out of all the people in Arcopolis.
The Eyeless did the maths: the parents only remembered around 1 person in 5,405. It was total oblivion for everyone else. Not even their names survived.
They didn’t even count as strangers.
It was different for the Eyeless. Their memories literally lived on, copied into the minds of the other Eyeless.
The Eyeless shared everything. There was no privacy, and Alsa didn’t like that idea. She’d never liked people looking at her. She dressed in layers and layers of clothing, never went swimming when the others did, never told anyone else how she was feeling about stuff. That was for babies.
The Eyeless were better than people. Alsa had worked that out ages ago. They could do so much she couldn’t.
But it wasn’t just that – they were so much more ambitious. All of the glass men here had done so many things. Wanting privacy felt silly. Childish. Still, a part of Alsa needed it. She felt a lot more comfortable thinking of their communication as a conversation, not a mingling of thoughts.
She wondered if they could still give her the engine they’d promised her. She hadn’t said anything, but they knew she was thinking about that, and hadn’t answered.
The Eyeless felt trapped now, alone, but they were practical, they were looking for a solution. Their telepathy only worked over a short distance. They couldn’t call for a rescue ship with it. They needed a beacon.
Like the comm mast in the middle of the village, Alsa thought. She hadn’t meant to volunteer that thought, but the Eyeless were already agreeing to commandeer it. As one, the five of them turned to go.
‘Hang on! Don’t you want this weapon?’ she asked.
The Eyeless hesitated.
‘Of course,’ they said finally, in unison. ‘It is also in our interest to ensure no one else has it.’
‘The Doctor won’t trade for it.’
‘We cannot read his mind, so cannot say that for certain. You think we have to use force.’ It wasn’t a question, of course, as the Eyeless knew exactly what Alsa thought.
She pictured the scene: armies of Eyeless, surrounding the Doctor, arms raised, about to tear him to pieces. She asked them if the Eyeless would do that.
‘Yes, if the stakes were high enough.’
‘Well – are they?’
‘If the Doctor is describing the weapon accurately, there is a dominating strategy: the weapon should be acquired at any cost up to, but not including, our total annihilation.’
Now the Eyeless were picturing the interior of the Fortress. Before the ships had been destroyed, they’d scanned the building. The five glass men and Alsa contemplated the results. Alsa could see where the weapon was – right at the heart of the pyramid – and she could see how to get to it. One walkway led straight there.
Simple.
Except that she could also see the defences. Automatic guns and other systems that Alsa struggled to understand.
There was a flutter of excitement.
‘What?’ Alsa asked.
The impact of the miniature sun that had powered the last Eyeless ship had smashed a long, straight route through the interior of the Fortress. This had disrupted the defences. The Fortress had compensated – realigned various turrets and so on – but coverage wasn’t perfect.
There were a few blind spots.
It took Alsa a moment to interpret the images.
‘There’s a safe route through, now?’
No… but there was an area close to the weapon
chamber with only one gun. It would be possible to follow a route along pipes and gantries, then drop down and run the last fifty metres.
‘That’s not so far,’ Alsa thought. ‘And that one gun?’
Could fire five times in that time, maintaining eighty per cent accuracy.
‘If someone stepped onto that walkway, four times out of five they’d be killed?’ Alsa asked, aghast.
No, they expla
ined patiently. That would be true if it could only fire once. It could fire five times. If someone stepped onto the walkway, they’d be killed 3,124 times out of 3,125.
She didn’t believe them, so they patiently talked her through the probabilities. They were right.
‘That’s the same as saying there’s no way across!’ she cried out.
There was always a solution, the Eyeless assured her. It was simply a matter of finding it. This was something to work with. Their best chance.
The Doctor and the Fortress were not locked in an epic struggle.
This would be over quickly. The Doctor would get to the weapon or the Fortress would kill him. This wouldn’t be a game of chess; it would be more like a shoot-out. It felt to the Doctor like he was fighting a volcano… no, an ogre. A mechanical giant.
This thought heartened him a little, as he’d fought ogres and giant robots plenty of times in the past, and hadn’t been beaten by one yet.
Then again, the bad guys only had to win once.
The Doctor had concluded that if he stuck close to the exposed mechanisms that had moved the Fortress around, it wouldn’t be able to attack him with the really nasty stuff like high explosives or acids or even energy blasts. It meant he was running a very convoluted course to the central pillar, darting from one delicate piece of equipment to another, always careful to leave plenty of options for himself. He was still alive, obviously. So far, the defences had consisted of nothing but bursts of radiation that he could literally just shake off and little blasts of poison gas that were relatively slow and so easy to see coming.
A tiny dart nicked his hand as it whizzed past.
The Doctor didn’t slow down, but had a quick look at the damage: a very light scratch that stung like a paper cut. He didn’t like this. Not to say that he’d have preferred to have his hand sliced off, but… well, why just poke at him?
On instinct, he dived and rolled. A mini-missile shot straight over him. It was moving fast, but the Doctor could tell it was only about the size of a bottle of wine. It bobbed around making the distinctive buzzy, dopplered sound of an antigravity generator.
Dr. Who - BBC New Series 29 Page 13