For an anxious moment Ace waited for the suit’s air system to cut in. The indicator light above the visor edged back to a normal reading. Thirty minutes of good air. She’d have to work fast.
The spider-thing was close now. The sensors in the suit’s claw relayed the movements of the creature’s legs along the air tube as a horrible writhing sensation in the palm of Ace’s right hand. She almost dropped the line in disgust, but managed to hold it and started to swing it back and forth like a skipping rope in wider and wider slow arcs.
The creature was only a few metres away now. She could see the viscous juices that lubricated its mandibles. That did it. She released the line, and it and the creature swung away from her, away from the space station, up into space.
The spider-thing reached the end of the air line, turned, and started to run towards the shuttle.
‘Oh no you don’t,’ Ace whispered, and a beam from her blaster sliced through the silvery filament. The creature, marooned on a length of the line, continued to float away. Ace could see movements behind the windows of the shuttle. Defries and Daak were waving to her. She waved her claws in return.
Well done!
Who said that? Ace spun round, but she was alone. Of course. She tried the radio. Nothing but static. Of course. It had been a voice in her mind. Well spooky.
She shrugged, and then giggled in surprise as the rounded shoulders of the spacesuit ascended like blunt-nosed rockets on each side of her helmet.
Get down to work, she told herself. Twenty-eight minutes left.
She set off round the perimeter of the vast doorway, looking for anything that resembled a control panel. Along to the bottom left-hand corner; then up the side, overcompensating for the slight uphill slope until she realized that the suit’s powered legs made her extra effort redundant; along the top; down the other side; back to where she’d started.
Nothing. Seventeen minutes left.
Why did she think to try looking underneath one of the metallic blocks? Why did she choose this particular block? Ace was worrying about these questions even as the suit’s claws were closing round the distorted cube, and lifting it to reveal indicator lights, a display screen, a keypad: a control panel.
No time to think about it now, she thought. Put it down to luck.
She would have liked to be nearer to the panel, but she doubted her ability to kneel or squat in the spacesuit. Leaning forward as far as she dared, with the great torso of the suit at a right angle to its legs, she made the claws unhook her wrist computer and plug it into one of the empty sockets on the panel.
She was about to instruct the device to run one of her extensive library of icebreakers when she noticed that the control panel had an alphabetic keyboard.
Can’t hurt to try? she thought, unjacking her computer with one claw while the other typed four letters. The word OPEN appeared on the screen, and two seconds later a shuddering vibration began beneath her feet.
‘Got it!’ she yelled, and then she carried on yelling as she realized her mistake: if the airlock was pressurized, the rush of air as the doors opened would send her flying across the Arcadian system. The shuttle wouldn’t reach her before the suit’s air supply ran out.
The doors parted. Ace braced herself, but there was no pulse of escaping air. The gap widened, and Ace peered inside.
Lights were coming on. It was a featureless box, big enough to take several shuttles, maybe even a couple of X-Ships. Ace switched on the spacewalk jets and launched herself through the widening yawn of the doors.
There was no sense of up or down: The gravity of the station exerted its pull towards the far end of the bay, the wall opposite the doors. Daak would have to bring in the shuttle backwards, so that the main thrusters would counteract the station’s attraction.
Ace floated back to the doorway. The shuttle was already approaching. Ace stuck out her tongue at Daak who was grinning at her through the shuttle’s front window, but she doubted whether he could see her face inside the suit. He’d see the claw, though: she lifted her arm in a circle, and the great claw rotated above her head in an unmistakeable signal. Daak continued to grin, but he must have noticed: the shuttle started to turn.
Ace dropped back into the empty chamber. Seven minutes left; plus a while longer breathing staler and staler air. She hoped Daak could get the shuttle in at the first attempt.
She located the interior control panel, and as it was inside the doorway she remained next to it, hidden behind the protruding lip of one of the doors. Despite the protection of the suit, she would have to stay clear of the shuttle’s thrusters as it descended through the doorway.
Suddenly she was surrounded by heat and light. The visor darkened almost to black opacity, and the suit’s cooler began audibly to work harder. The shuttle was coming in.
Ace had a sudden, ludicrous flashback: a red double-decker backing into Hanwell bus garage. Not that ludicrous, really, she thought. The shuttle wasn’t much like a London bus in shape, but it was about the same size. And made about as much noise.
The thrusters were below her now, The pitted surface plates of the main fuselage slid past her lightening visor. Then the cabin appeared. Through the windows Ace could see Defries and Daak clinging to the controls, disorientated by the conflict between the space station’s gravity and the shuttle’s floor attractors.
Ace moved her fingers. The suit’s claw typed, SHUT.
The doors moved towards each other, shutting out the stars. Enclosing the shuttle in a box.
This is either a trap, Ace thought, or else the Doctor’s found a way to let us in. Or both. Not enough data. Concentrate on getting some air in here.
ATMOSPHERE? she typed.
The word disappeared from the screen to be replaced by a message.
DISTINCTLY GLOOMY, I’M AFRAID.
That was the Doctor, she was sure of it. Unless the message, too, was part of a trap. She sighed.
PRESSURIZE, she typed. The word remained on the screen. She was about to try something else when the outside air pressure indicator above her visor started to move. Within a few minutes the atmosphere in the bay was normal, and Ace was jetting towards the shuttle’s cabin door.
Daak had brought the shuttle in skilfully, she noticed. He had needed only one attempt, and he had manoeuvred the craft neatly into a position, to one side of the bay, exactly as specified in Spacefleet procedure.
Defries was standing diagonally in the open doorway, beckoning Ace inside. She stood aside as Ace floated into the cabin, and without any preliminary checks she started to shut down the spacesuit’s systems.
‘Get me out of this thing!’ were Ace’s first words as the visor slid upwards. With the suit’s power off, her arms were shaking and her legs felt like jelly.
‘Suits fool you, don’t they?’ Defries said, manhandling the claws to help Ace extricate her arms from the sensor webs. ‘Give you so much power, you forget how hard you have to work them. That was good work, trooper,’ she added.
Ace smiled. She hadn’t expected any more extravagant praise. ‘Suspiciously easy,’ she said. ‘If I’m right, and that spider-thing was all force fields and fancy holograms, it could have been made to jump off the line and get me.’
But even as she said it, Ace had had another idea. She remembered the Doctor telling her that the police-box exterior of the TARDIS was, in a sense, a mathematical expression. Block transfer computation, he’d called it. The creation of apparently real, solid objects by means of detailed mathematical modelling. Maybe the spider-thing was a computer-generated construct?
‘And there was no ice on the door system,’ she went on. ‘Not even an entry code. I feel like we’ve parked ourselves in one big rat-trap.’ She pulled herself out of the unsealed suit and peered through the shuttle’s windows at the featureless walls of the landing bay. ‘No doors, see? No way out, no way further in.’
As the spacesuit folded in on itself like one of the Transformers toys that had fascinated the boys in Ace’s
school for a brief season, Defries joined her at the window. ‘We’ve got to get inside the station, Ace. We’ve come through too much to get stopped here.’
Ace smiled, amused that Belle was back to using we instead of I. The OEO Agent was clever and courageous, but not complicated: as long as I’m useful to her, Ace thought, and do what she wants, she’ll be as nice as pie. When I stop being useful, she’ll ignore me. If I get in her way, she’ll kill me, if necessary. That’s OK. You know where you stand with Belle.
The silence was broken by a tortured scream from outside the shuttle.
‘That bloody chainsword,’ Ace muttered, and she and Defries scrambled through the door.
As Ace manoeuvred down the flank of the shuttle, letting her gauntlets scrape against the weld-seams and pock-marks in order to slow her drift towards the base of the craft, she saw that the Dalek Killer was using his weapon to cut through the metallic material of the surface on which he’d parked.
‘What if the other side’s unpressurized?’ she called, her voice echoing in the almost empty bay.
Daak didn’t look up from his work. ‘No problem,’ he grunted. ‘Pressure’ll help. Blow a hole through.’
Ace shook her head. Daak wasn’t stupid, he just didn’t care. She would have admired him for that, once. And even now she knew better, it was getting hard to dislike him. She didn’t exactly like him, either, but he had a kind of integrity that you didn’t find in many people – not even in Belle, really, because Belle’s attitude, although always straightforward, varied according to what she thought about you. Daak was always the same: without reference to the creed, colour, gender or opinions of whoever happened to be around, he was rude, randy, rebellious and always ready for a fight.
He was going to die saving an entire planet from the Daleks. Defries wouldn’t do that, Ace thought. She’d live to fight another day. So would I. You need to be uncomplicated, maybe, to sacrifice yourself willingly.
And I don’t fancy him, despite all the muscles. I suppose I go for the dangerous types – the ones who look almost but not quite entirely wholesome. Some little twist. That’s not so good. Means it’s in me, too, if that’s what I like.
Still, it’s good to know that not everyone’s devious. That there are people alive as straight ahead as Abslom Daak.
‘Daydreaming?’ Defries said, dropping past Ace and landing next to the thruster exhaust pipes.
‘Thinking,’ Ace replied. Her pack slapped against her back as she jumped down beside Defries, reminding her that she was at last running out of supplies: there had been few explosives on the shuttle.
Defries raised a sceptical eyebrow, but said nothing except ‘He’s through.’
All that could be seen of Daak was his chainsword, silent now and held aloft as Daak disappeared through the hole he had cut in the floor.
Ace and Defries ran to the hole and looked down. Daak’s grinning face was only about a metre below their feet. He had dropped through the hole into a corridor that looked typical of every space station Ace had ever been on. It was almost a disappointment.
‘Jump, girlie,’ Daak called. ‘I’ll catch you.’
‘He’ll catch my boots in his face,’ Ace muttered. ‘How about going first, Belle?’
Defries knelt at the edge of the rough-hewn, irregularly-shaped hole. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘this material’s self-sealing. It’s closing up.’
Ace looked. The sharp, sawn edges were already smoother. The stuff looked more like plastic than metal, now, and it was definitely spreading. The hole was becoming smaller.
‘You go first,’ Defries said. ‘Take the medical pack and my blaster, as well as your equipment. I’ll come through travelling light. Daak!’ she yelled. ‘The hole’s closing up. Stand clear!’
Ace hesitated. She didn’t like to leave Defries without weapons on the other side of a diminishing escape route. ‘Jump, trooper!’ Defries ordered. ‘And tell Daak to work on the hole with the chainsword.’
Ace jumped. Defries’s pack snagged, then came free: the hole was barely wide enough. Ace’s boots absorbed most of the impact of landing, but she was glad she remembered to roll as her feet touched the floor.
The corridor was dimly lit, and the hole was a bright disc in the ceiling. As Ace stood she realized it was beyond her reach, but Daak would be able to attack it with his chainsword.
‘Come on, Daak,’ she said, ‘get going with the hedge trimmer. That hole’s getting too small even for a size ten like Belle.’
With a shout, Daak hefted the whirring machine above his head. Ace winced as the teeth bit-into the perimeter of the hole.
She could see that, for all the noise; the chainsword was almost entirely ineffective. Daak could make deep incisions in places round the edge, but he didn’t have enough leverage to cut off slices of the strange metal.
‘Fragging hellfire!’ Daak yelled. ‘Use your blaster!’
Ace shrugged, pulled out her blaster, and changed the beam from targeting to cutting. A blaster’s laser could cut through some metals, but Ace had a nasty feeling that even if the material above her proved, susceptible she might expend her entire powerpack on it without much effect.
She shouted a warning to Defries and fired. The intense thread of light struck the edge of the narrowing hole, and appeared to produce no result. Ace took her finger off the button. The beam disappeared, but a patch of the ceiling next to the hole continued to glow. The patch grew, like a spreading stain, engulfing the hole. Then, with a spasm that looked unpleasantly organic, the ceiling convulsed – and the hole was even smaller.
‘It’s no good, Belle,’ Ace shouted. ‘We can’t fix it. Stay where you are. We’ll find another way through.’
But Defries had already jumped into the shrinking gap.
Ace ducked, certain that Defries would land on top of her and then equally sure that nothing of the sort was about to happen. She looked up to see that Belle hadn’t made it: her legs were dangling into the corridor. The hole had tightened around her waist.
Ace and Daak looked at each other.
‘I can’t use the blaster again,’ Ace said, aware of an edge of hysteria in her voice.
‘Sure as hell can’t use my chainsword. The Agent’s tough, but not as tough as this metal.’
Defries was still kicking but, Ace thought, less strongly.
‘Combat tunic’ll take some of the pressure,’ Daak said.
‘For how long?’ Ace said.
Daak looked at her, and shrugged. As one, they raised their eyes to the ceiling. Ace thought she could hear Defries shouting. She had never felt so helpless.
‘We’ve got to do something,’ she said. ‘Daak, try cutting into the ceiling further along. Do it! You can’t make things worse.’
Daak’s reply was drowned in the roar of his chainsword. He thrust the blades upwards, but before they touched the ceiling Ace grabbed his arm and pointed.
Defries was wriggling downwards into the corridor. The hole was expanding, slowly at first, and then suddenly releasing Defries, who fell to the floor of the corridor with a shriek of pain.
Ace crouched next to her. Defries was alive, and conscious. Ace glanced up: the hole had sealed itself, leaving only a discoloured ring like a water stain on the ceiling.
‘Belle, are you OK?’
Defries sat up with a groan. ‘Broken rib or two, I think. The tunic’ll hold me straight. Suit’s pumped me full of painkillers, but nothing else. So I guess I’ll survive. Help me up, will you.’
‘Belle, you should rest awhile. We could all do with a break.’
Daak swore, suddenly. ‘We ain’t getting a break,’ he said. ‘Look.’
He gestured with the chainsword. At the end of the corridor was a pair of doors. They were slowly sliding open.
The tall woman was shaking with rage. Francis couldn’t remember ever having seen anyone so angry. Clutching Elaine’s hand, as much to comfort himself as to protect her, he retreated by stepping backwards as unobtrusively as h
e could. If only there were something substantial to hide behind!
Lacuna’s face, white-lipped, foam-flecked and trembling, almost held him entranced. But he spared a glance for the very pretty girl in the daring clothes, and was surprised to see Britta covering her mouth to stifle a giggle. The Doctor was standing with his hands behind his back. His lips were pursed, as if with impatience. He was deliberately looking at anything except Lacuna.
‘You are interfering with the operation of this station!’ Lacuna said, not for the first time. She stopped in front of the Doctor and lowered her face to his. ‘Aren’t you? Admit it!’
The Doctor caught Francis’s eyes, and beckoned him with a nod of the head. Francis considered whether he could pretend to have missed or misunderstood the gesture, and came to the conclusion that the Doctor wouldn’t be fooled. He pulled Elaine towards the confrontation.
‘Yes!’ the Doctor snapped, thrusting his nose between Lacuna’s wild eyes. ‘Of course I am. I prefer people intact.’
‘The woman is of no importance. You have an ulterior motive. You are pitting yourself against Pool. Trying your strength against Pool’s.’
‘And I won, Lacuna.’ The Doctor waved a hand towards the video screens. ‘I stopped Pool crushing that woman to death.’
‘But at what cost, I wonder?’ Lacuna’s anger had disappeared as suddenly as it had arrived. ‘Pool controls the operation of this station, the planet-based droids, the various structures we have built in and around’ the star system. And the experiment, of course. You have so far succeeded in preventing the closure of a small area of self-sealing partition. Pool cannot read how much of your mental power you devoted to that one, small task. But we suspect that you have revealed the total extent of your ability.’
Francis decided that Lacuna angry was almost preferable to Lacuna gloating. Could she be right? Had the Doctor engaged in mental combat to save the woman from Earth ? And had he thus revealed that he was no match for the being called Pool?
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