by Dan Abnett
‘It is a lie or a trick,’ said Winnowner. ‘Those others, whom he admits to knowing, said they were from Seeside, and they bore conjury to convince us so—’
‘Maybe there are things we don’t know about!’ snapped Vesta.
The Morphans looked at her.
‘I’m saying, maybe there are,’ she said. ‘Don’t look at me so. I don’t hardly know what Rory is, except that he is nice and kind, and I don’t know about his friends either, but I do know there is something in the woods outside the plantnation that is most angry and dangerous, and I know it is not mentioned anywhere in Guide’s teaching. So what do we do about it? Do we just pretend it does not exist because Guide has not spoken of it?’
‘Guide gives us rules to live by for our own good, Vesta,’ Winnowner said.
‘The thing in the woods proves one matter, Winnowner,’ Vesta told the old woman. ‘It proves there are things in this world Hereafter that are more than are in Guide’s words. The thing is one, Rory may be one too, also his friends and whatever plantnation they come from. I ask you, do we stand there accusing them of being unguidely, or do we do something about them?’
‘We could prove it,’ said Bill Groan quietly.
‘What now?’ asked Winnowner.
‘You know that, Winnowner,’ he said. ‘We have both been taught it. We know Guide’s doctrines, and the schema of words that instructs the Morphans. Our Guide Emanual will recognise and identify those things that belong to Guide. Only the true unguidely will remain strangers and unknown. If… Rory here is truly a Nurse Elect, then Guide will know him. Guide knows his own.’
‘What are you suggesting, Elect?’ asked Winnowner.
‘You know what I’m suggesting,’ said Bill.
Winnowner shook her head. ‘Elect, this is the threshold of the Incrypt, our most precious place. Only the most worthy and maintained of Morphan kind can pass this way and be received of Guide’s words.’
‘My point exactly,’ said Bill Groan. ‘Let Rory prove himself.’
The knocking at the doors and the clamour of voices was not abating. Winnowner looked Rory up and down.
‘This isn’t going to be some kind of… trial by combat, is it?’ Rory asked warily. ‘Or, by sharks or spiders or something? If there’s a pit or a cage involved, or a choice of weapons, I’m really not up for it. Especially if there’s baying and jeering going on too.’
‘Nothing like that,’ said Bill Groan. He walked over to the metal hatch. ‘Come over here, Rory,’ he said, beckoning.
Rory walked up to him in a slightly unwilling manner.
Bill Groan pointed. There was a flat panel of matt silver metal set into the hatch frame on the right-hand side. It was about the size of a hardback book and it was built in at door-handle height.
‘That’s the chequer,’ he said. ‘It knows the touch of those that are worthy and, through it, Guide knows us.’
Bill placed his palm flat on the panel. A neon glow travelled up the metal under his hand. There was a click, and then a hiss, and then the hatch opened. Clean, cool air breathed out at them. Through the open hatch, Rory could see some sort of chamber bathed in a bluish neon illumination.
‘The Incrypt opens to my hand,’ said Bill. He touched the panel again. The hatch closed as gently as it had opened.
‘It’s a palm reader,’ said Rory. ‘It’s biometric. It’s reading your handprint, or maybe your genetic pattern.’
‘You try,’ said Bill.
‘Oh, I don’t think that’s such a good idea,’ said Rory.
‘If you’re a Nurse Elect, Guide will recognise you and let you in,’ said Winnowner.
‘Really, I—’ Rory said.
‘Try,’ ordered Bill Groan.
Rory placed his hand flat on the panel.
CHAPTER 11
THE MAKER OF OUR EARTH
With the Doctor enthusiastically leading the way, they explored the deep chambers and tunnels of the massive terraformer plant.
The simple scale of it silenced Bel and Samewell, and took Amy back a bit too. The machined and engineered cavities inside the artificial mountain were bigger than any machine, factory or structure she’d ever seen on Earth. They also matched or exceeded the scale of structures she’d seen since leaving Earth and travelling aboard the TARDIS.
They followed winding tunnels lined in galvanised metal plates or slightly tarnished sheets of shipskin. They entered chambers that had been hollowed out of the hill so that the face of the rock was cut perfectly smooth and straight-edged, like set and polished concrete. Colossal machines that Amy thought of as turbines dominated these chambers, feeding whatever energies or processes they output into vast networks of gleaming metal pipes and condensers. Some of these pipes, large enough in cross-section to take two trains on parallel lines, exited into vent stacks, or swept down into stone floors, connected to other, deeper chambers and larger, stranger machines.
Sometimes, the Doctor and his companions came out of tunnels onto mesh walkways of welded shipskin that crossed, precipitously, the middle of vast subterranean spaces, delicate bridges suspended hundreds of metres above the chamber floors from which they could look up at dim ceilings thousands of metres above, or peer down into heat-exchange trenches or energy sinks or other abyssal clefts that pulsed with distant glimmers of energy, and dropped away into the planet’s crust for miles. Warm updrafts touched their faces and billowed their hair.
‘I’ve run out of words for big,’ said Amy.
‘None of them seem adequate, do they?’ the Doctor agreed.
Everywhere they went, they could hear the whirr and hum of the giant mechanisms. Occasionally, they could also hear the scratch and scurry of transrats emanating from blind tunnels or side vents.
They entered one chamber on the level of the rock floor and found it to be the largest they had seen yet. Its dizzying space was dominated by a massive column of silvery metal that was fed by a cobweb of tubes and ducts. It looked like a huge chrome oak tree. High up, the roof of the titanic chamber was hazed by clouds of vapour, so that the branches of the giant metal tree appeared to be swathed in ghostly foliage.
‘Are those clouds?’ Amy asked, looking up.
The Doctor nodded.
It was drizzling slightly, like a wet autumnal day. The chamber was so big, it had its own weather system.
‘That’s a secondary sequence prebiotic crucible,’ said the Doctor, with the appreciative tone of a twitcher who has just spotted a very rare species. ‘What a beauty.’
‘What does it do?’ asked Bel.
‘It makes the world a better place,’ said the Doctor. ‘In human terms, anyway. It makes life. It’s gently sculpting and shaping the ecosystem of Hereafter.’
‘You said secondary,’ said Amy.
‘What?’
‘You said it was a secondary sequence something or other.’
‘Yes,’ said the Doctor, matter-of-factly. ‘There’ll be about a hundred of these, all supporting the main sequence crucibles. I hope we get a look at one of those, because they’re really big.’
Amy grinned at him. ‘I don’t often get to see you actually impressed,’ she said.
‘How could you fail to be?’ he replied. ‘This is human engineering at pretty much its peak. This is the point at which those little apes from Earth actually advanced so far they could rebuild and redesign whole planets. That’s the mark of a great species. To be fair, it’s a slow old process. It takes hundreds of years, and the people who start the process don’t live anything like long enough to see the end, but still they do it. That’s what I love about people. They have dreams and grand ambitions, and they start building towards them, even though they know they won’t live to see them finished. That’s how the pyramids were built. And the great cathedrals of the middle ages. People were prepared to invest in the future. They were prepared to donate the labour of their entire lives to a greater whole that other lives, future lives, would benefit from.’
Amy glance
d across at Samewell and Arabel, who were standing in reserved awe, gazing up at the vast machine, rain speckling their faces.
‘What happens if it takes so long they start to forget what it’s all for?’ she asked.
‘The Morphans haven’t forgotten, Pond,’ said the Doctor. ‘They know what they’re doing with their Terra Formers. They’re committed to the process. They’re sticking to the great plan.’
‘Yeah, but even so,’ said Amy. ‘It’s taken so long, they’ve started to misremember. It’s taken so long… What did Bel say? Twenty-seven generations? They don’t even understand the technology any more. It’s all automatic. They’re like the transrats living in the shadow of a machine that works all by itself. Sure, they know their routines and their jobs, and I’m sure they understand what they’re part of, it’s just…’
‘What?’
‘What happens when it ends?’ she asked. ‘I mean, when the job’s done? Will they be ready for that?’
‘It won’t happen for several more generations,’ said the Doctor.
‘That’s my point. Will the great-great-great-grandchildren of these Morphans know any better? Will they be ready? Isn’t there a danger they won’t know what to do with the world they’ve built, because all they’ve ever learned to do is survive during the process of building?’
‘I’m sure they’ll take to it,’ said the Doctor.
‘What did the stonemasons of Europe do when there were no cathedrals left to build?’ she asked. ‘What did the slaves do when the pyramids were finished? How did they feel?’
The Doctor thought about it and frowned.
‘These Morphans are really good people, what I’ve seen of them,’ said Amy. ‘They’re hardworking and selfless and totally serious about their lives. But it really feels to me like they only understand this, the work in progress. I don’t know what they’ll do when the job’s finished.’
‘Well,’ replied the Doctor, ‘that’s what life and evolution is all about. The Morphans are adapting a world to fit their biology. When it’s ready, when it’s properly Earth-like, they’ll have to adapt their minds and attitudes to make the most of living in it.’
He fell silent for a moment.
‘What’s the matter?’ asked Amy.
‘There’s always the question of if they’re actually going to get a chance to make a go of it anyway, of course,’ said the Doctor. ‘A problem that starts with Ice…’
‘And ends with Warriors,’ Amy said, and nodded.
‘This sightseeing is all very interesting and rather uplifting,’ the Doctor told her, ‘but I need to work out exactly what the Ice Warriors are doing to the Firmer systems.’
‘And stop them?’
‘Yes,’ he nodded. ‘I actually have a lot of time and respect for the Martian culture, but in this instance, I’m on the Morphans’ side. They have the claim here, and the Ice Warriors are essentially trying to wipe them out. We have to put things right for the Morphans.’
They started walking again, and crossed through another tunnel link into a chamber cavity that opened a giddying drop beneath their narrow shipskin walkway. Far below, magmatic forces rumbled and glowed.
‘Not being funny, but how are we going to win this?’ asked Amy quietly. ‘The Ice Warriors are very big, very strong, and very hench. And they’ve got sound guns and spaceships and all kinds of freaky nastiness. On our side, we’ve got a bunch of farmers whose idea of a weapon is a garden rake. If it comes to a fight, it’s going to be really one-sided.’
‘Then we have to be clever and not let it come to a fight,’ said the Doctor. ‘We take on the Ice Warriors by outsmarting them.’
‘Are they stupid, then?’
‘No, not at all,’ said the Doctor. ‘They’re really very intelligent. But I’m me.’
‘OK,’ she said, ‘hit me with your clever.’
‘We find out how they’re sabotaging things, and we sabotage their sabotage. That’s how we beat them.’
‘It’s that easy?’ asked Amy.
‘No, that’s going to be ridiculously hard,’ the Doctor said with a sigh.
‘I thought you were super-smart?’
‘Have you seen the scale and size and complexity of this system? It’s going to take me a while to identify exactly what the Ice Warriors are doing, and then I’ve got to work out how to repair or reverse it. And I have to do all of that without mucking up any of the other systems. This is a very finely balanced process. Plus, these terraformers are automated systems. A lot of the component units are sealed because there’s supposed to be no need for manual repair. A lot of them are physically inaccessible. How would you get down there if that needed fixing, for instance?’
She peered over the rail and shuddered.
‘Not to mention,’ said the Doctor, mentioning it, ‘that I’m temporarily without a working sonic screwdriver, which makes everything a gazillion times harder.’
‘It’ll recharge,’ Amy reassured him.
‘I know,’ he said, ‘but we haven’t got a lot of time. And my biggest concern is not to damage the terraforming systems. My normal approach, as you well know, is to fiddle and improvise, but if I attempt too much of that, I could end up doing more damage than the Ice Warriors. You know what I could really do with?’
‘The Big Book of Terraforming For Beginners?’ she asked.
‘Yes, actually,’ he replied. ‘What I could really do with is the instruction manual that came with this planet cruncher.’
‘It’ll be in the glove box,’ grinned Amy.
Bel came over to them, followed by Samewell. She was wrinkling her nose. ‘What’s that smell?’ she asked.
The Doctor sniffed. ‘Sulphur, from the mantle vents,’ he said.
‘No, there’s something else,’ said Amy.
The Doctor sniffed again. ‘You’re right, Pond,’ he said. ‘I impaired your hearing so your sense of smell has compensated. That’s… decay. That’s something rotten.’
‘Whatever, it’s not very nice,’ said Arabel.
The Doctor was already moving. They followed him along the walkway, through a rock-cut tunnel, and down a metal-lined corridor that opened out into a broad, domed room that looked like some kind of store. By the time they entered it, the smell of putrefaction had become very strong.
‘Ugh,’ said Amy, covering her nose and mouth. ‘That’s rank.’
‘Decaying organic matter,’ the Doctor mused. ‘But why down here?’
The walls of the domed room were lined with rows of plastic-fronted cupboards, each one containing a bio-hazard suit and mask, made for a human.
‘This was a prep area,’ said the Doctor. ‘Scientists or technicians came in here to suit up. See overhead?’ He pointed at banks of blue lights built into the domed roof. ‘UV decontamination lamps,’ he mused. ‘They came in here, suited up and sterilised themselves…’
He went back to the doorway they had entered through. It was a sliding hatch, but it had already been open when they arrived.
‘Look,’ he said. There was a panel of silver metal in the frame to the right-hand side of the hatch. Something very hot had cut through it, fusing it. The edges of the metal cut looked like melted butter. They were blackened.
‘That’s a palm-scan checker,’ said the Doctor. ‘It operates the lock. Something cut through it from outside to get in here.’
‘Something hot,’ said Amy.
‘I think focused sonics, actually,’ the Doctor replied. He crossed to the open hatchway on the other side of the domed prep-room. That was open too. Similar damage had been done to the palm-scanner. The smell of rot and decay was much stronger on that side of the room.
‘Let’s see, shall we?’ the Doctor suggested. He went through the open hatchway. They followed him.
On the other side, they found themselves at one end of a gallery space.
The gallery was large and very long. Very, very long. At least a mile long. It was immense. It reminded Amy of an industrial nursery, a m
assive greenhouse, except that it was underground. Banks of bright, artificial sun lamps ran along the roof, and the galvanised metal floor was lined with rows of deep metal tanks and glass vats. It seemed like something had been growing in here, a considerable crop of things.
The smell in the gallery was awful, like bins left out on a summer’s day, six weeks into a garbage strike.
‘What is this? Are they growing plants?’ asked Amy.
‘Certainly cultivation of some sort,’ the Doctor agreed. ‘I didn’t expect this. Unless…’
He peered into one of the vats.
‘Unless what?’ asked Samewell.
‘These cultivator units have broken down,’ said the Doctor. ‘There’s been a malfunction and they’ve failed. Perhaps a deliberate malfunction. The reason they smell so bad is that it’s not plant matter they’re nurturing here. These were in-vitro nutrient banks for organic tissue.’
‘Why?’ asked Amy. She climbed up beside the Doctor and peered over into the vat. The stink that wafted up at her was frankly appalling. The vat was basically empty, but from a tide mark on the side, she could see where it had previously been full. The bottom of the tank was filled with a slimy, foul-smelling residue, like something gruesome and decomposing from a horror movie. ‘Oh, that is properly disgusting,’ she announced.
‘Yes, but why?’ the Doctor pondered, tapping a finger to his lips. ‘Why tissue? I suppose this could have been some kind of storage system for organic samples. Maybe the DNA used to build the transrats was kept in suspension in this sort of thing. This may have been a genetic stockpile, a library of animal DNA, so that the Morphans could grow all sorts of strains of creature once the world was ready.’
‘Really?’ asked Amy. ‘So this was… this muck… this was living tissue? Like flesh and blood?’
The Doctor nodded. ‘But the vital support system has failed or been sabotaged. Sabotaged is my guess, from the way the hatches were forced. Now it’s beginning to rot,’ he said. ‘So the genetic database is corrupted.’
He looked at Amy.
‘Or,’ he said, drawing out the word.
‘Or what?’ she asked.