Doctor Who - The Wheel of Ice

by Stephen Baxter

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Interlude: MMAC

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Interlude: Amulet

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Interlude: Blue Doll

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Interlude: Home

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Interlude: Arkive

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Interlude: Independent Mnemosyne

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Epilogue

  Copyright

  About the Book

  The Wheel. A ring of ice and steel turning around a moon of Saturn, and home to a mining colony supplying a resource-hungry Earth. It’s a bad place to grow up.

  The colony has been plagued by problems. Maybe it’s just gremlins, just back luck. But the equipment failures and thefts of resources have been increasing, and there have been stories among the children of mysterious creatures glimpsed aboard the Wheel. Many of the younger workers refuse to go down the warren-like mines anymore. And then sixteen-year-old Phee Laws, surfing Saturn’s rings, saves an enigmatic blue box from destruction.

  Aboard the Wheel, the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe find a critical situation – and they are suspected by some as the source of the sabotage. They soon find themselves caught in a mystery that goes right back to the creation of the solar system. A mystery that could kill them all.

  About the Author

  Stephen Baxter is recognised as one of the world’s foremost science fiction writers. Since 1987, he has published over forty books, including the Manifold Trilogy, as well as the award-winning The Time Ships and over a hundred short stories. He is President of the British Science Fiction Association, a Vice-President of the H.G. Wells Society, and is also co-author with Terry Pratchett of The Long Earth series.

  Stephen’s books have won the Philip K. Dick Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the British Science Fiction Association Award, and have been nominated for several others, including the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Hugo Award and Locus awards.

  To

  Clare Baines, top Who fan;

  Paul Cornell, top Who writer;

  Paul McAuley and Kim Newman, top Who buddies;

  and the memory of Patrick Troughton, top Who.

  PROLOGUE

  ARKIVE

  Resilience. Remembrance. Restoration.

  One day, in the dusty libraries of Gallifrey, she would be given a name: Arkive. All things are named in the libraries of Gallifrey.

  But she did not need a name. She needed only her mission: Resilience. Remembrance. Restoration.

  All that she was, all that survived of her – and she was all that survived of Home – was embedded in an ice moon. A moon orbiting a planet, a ball of roiling gas, that itself orbited a feeble sun.

  This solar system itself had no value for her, no interest. Nor did the life forms that swarmed and died on the surfaces of its planets. A sculpture of debris and rubbish, the system owed its very existence to the destruction of Home.

  She had survived in this system of garbage for billions of years. Survived though she was damaged. The detonation of the star that had destroyed Home had been too severe. It had caught her, it had overwhelmed the elaborate survival mechanisms given her by her designers.

  She had not demonstrated Resilience. She could not be certain of the veracity of her Remembrance. And she could not be sure she could fulfil her ultimate goal of Restoration. She could not fulfil her mission.

  And so she had formulated a plan. A strategy. If she could not fix herself, if she could not fulfil her mission, then she would return to the arms of those who made her. Who had perished billions of years before. Who had entrusted her with all that they were, all that they could have been. Who would grant her forgiveness.

  She would bathe in the light of a long-dead sun. And she would try again.

  She would reach through time, even though it would take the sacrifice of this pointless little moon to do it.

  She even prepared a fallback. For now, on one of the garbage worlds, a kind of intelligence had arisen, low, cunning, but useful. An intelligence whose destiny would be sacrificed to her purposes, should she awake to find herself still trapped in the ruins of this lump of ice.

  Deep in the heart of the moon, there was a kind of bomb.

  Searing light.

  A detonation visible from Earth, to curious eyes.

  She huddled in the wreckage of the moon, what was left of it.

  Fragments of shattered moonscapes gathered in a gleaming band around the primary planet.

  And through a rift in space and time, branching, cracking, a tiny artefact fell into the deep past…

  1

  IN THE VORTEX that lies beyond time and space tumbled a police box that was not a police box.

  The control room was empty. It was a spacious, brightly lit chamber. It alone was too big to have fitted into the battered exterior of the police box, and doors and passageways leading from it hinted at more inexplicable volumes beyond. Inset multicoloured roundels pleasingly adorned the walls. A central console dominated the room, a hexagonal platform encrusted with switches, dials, monitor screens and levers, with a translucent cylinder standing motionless at the console’s heart. The room was silent save for a hum of unseen engines.

  And on the gleaming floor, in one corner, lay two modest musical instruments, a wooden recorder and a bagpipe’s practice chanter. Beside them was an elderly hardback book, the reader’s place carefully marked with a sliver of plastic. Its title was Brave New World, the author Aldous Huxley.

  Abruptly the console’s central cylinder began to rise and fall, and a strange sound rent the air, a rhythmic metallic wheezing.

  Distracted from their different pursuits, the ship’s three crew hurried towards the control room.

  Zoe Heriot was first to arrive. She was a short, compact young woman with her hair cut in a neat bob. She had an open, pixie-like face and, when she was in the mood, an infectious smile. She wore a jumpsuit from her own era, the latter half of the twenty-first century, comfortable but form-fitting, panelled with pastel colours.

  She glanced around the control room and spotted the book on the floor, the latest she had borrowed from the ship’s chaotic library. Once she had worked as a librarian, and had fallen in love with books. Since joining the crew of the TARDIS she had become fascinated by history – or rather, she had joined the crew to discover history, and the wider universe. And she was intrigued
by books like this, speculations about the future by a man who had become a historical figure in his own right.

  Jamie hurried in moments later. ‘Och. What now?’ James Robert McCrimmon, brawny, strong-featured, wore the kilt and shirt with lace-up throat and cuffs that characterised his own origins in the Scotland of the eighteenth century. The effect was spoiled only a little by the pair of roomy carpet slippers on his feet.

  They both knew what the column’s motion signified, the robotic grinding. ‘This boat’s landing,’ said Jamie.

  As Zoe opened her mouth to reply, the Doctor bustled in, pulling a battered old frock coat over a shabby white shirt. ‘Well, I’m glad I arrived in time to hear you two remark on the utterly obvious,’ he said rather grumpily as he hurried to the console. He was a small man with a mop of black hair cut to a fringe, and somewhat ragged sideburns. He wore a grubby red cravat, clumsily tied, and loud check trousers. And he wore no shoes, only worn-looking socks, and Zoe realised where Jamie had got the slippers from. The Doctor might have been in his late forties, had he been human. His rather lined face showed only impatience now, but it was capable, Zoe knew, of looks of deep wisdom, as well as childlike smiles of delight.

  Zoe said, ‘The issue is where we are landing. And why.’

  The Doctor hurried around the console, snapping switches, peering at dials, and he stared at the rising column as if in disbelief. ‘Well, the “why” is rather obvious. One of you must have been meddling again. How many times have I told you two to leave the controls alone? She is a rather temperamental old bird, you know.’

  ‘Dinna look at me,’ Jamie protested. ‘I wasna even here.’

  ‘And you needn’t blame me either,’ Zoe snapped. ‘The TARDIS was in landing mode before I left my room. And as for “meddling”, Doctor, let me remind you of the rather large number of times you’ve relied on me to help you get this “temperamental old bird” under control.’

  ‘Aye, and me,’ put in Jamie. ‘Like that time ye had me hit yon button with the handle of ma dirk—’

  ‘All right, all right,’ the Doctor said. ‘If you’d both stop your chittering and give me a moment to think, I might have a chance to work out what’s going on.’

  As she so often did when annoyed, Zoe retreated into the logic which had been the bedrock of her education. ‘I think it’s perfectly obvious what’s going on. The TARDIS is landing. And as none of us were here to set the controls to land—’

  ‘She’s made the decision for herself,’ the Doctor muttered. ‘Yes, thank you, Zoe.’

  Jamie, concerned, crossed to the console. ‘Can she do that?’

  ‘Well, evidently she can, yes. The TARDIS is capable of a great many things you’ve yet to witness. Or, indeed, I,’ he said ruefully. ‘But I can tell you why she’s suddenly taken things into her own hands. Not that she has hands…’ He tapped a small monitor screen which flared red. ‘She’s detected a Relative Continuum Displacement Zone.’

  ‘Has she now? And what’s that when it’s not got its fur coat on?’

  ‘That, Jamie, is a hole in time!’

  Zoe frowned. ‘That sounds rather dangerous.’

  ‘Indeed it is, Zoe. Such a thing in the wrong hands can cause a great deal of damage, for it can lead to destabilisation. What is known as a direct continuum implosion.’

  ‘How much damage would that cause?’

  He shrugged. ‘Whole worlds, perhaps.’ He cupped his hands together, making a globe, spread his fingers. ‘Poom!’

  ‘That’s aye verra well,’ said Jamie, ‘but wha’s it got tae do with the TARDIS?’

  ‘Well, it is a fact, Jamie, that the TARDIS was not really designed for, umm, the purposes to which I put her. My people, who have mastered the technologies of time themselves, rather frown on mucking about with time by anybody else. And so, you see, the TARDIS is specifically designed to react when she detects evidence of any such, ah—’

  ‘Mucking about.’

  ‘Quite so.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Jamie. ‘So she’s taking us in for a look-see.’

  ‘That’s the idea.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound very safe,’ Zoe said, trying to sound sensible rather than wary.

  ‘Oh, we should be fine. According to the read-outs we’re heading for a landing on a perfectly ordinary moon of the planet Saturn.’

  ‘Saturn? My Saturn? I mean—’

  ‘Yes, Zoe. And not so terribly far away from your own time, in fact.’

  Jamie was listening to the TARDIS’s groaning. ‘I think we’ll land soon.’ Jamie came from a technologically primitive culture, relatively, but he had had a lot more experience of the TARDIS and her whims than Zoe. The wheezing engine noise ended with a thump, and the ship shuddered. Jamie flicked on the external scanner, a wall screen filled with grey static that slowly cleared. ‘Doctor…’

  The Doctor was still at the console. He patted a row of switches. ‘You really are a clever old girl, aren’t you?’

  Zoe could swear the TARDIS was leaning. She glanced around, and saw her Huxley book slide silently across the polished floor. ‘I say, Doctor—’

  ‘Let’s take a look at this mysterious moon, shall we?’

  But Jamie pointed to the screen. ‘That doesnae look like any moon to me.’

  In the monitor Zoe saw darkness. Empty space, spattered with stars. And a band of gleaming particles lying slantways across the image.

  Jamie walked up to the screen and pointed to one bright fleck. ‘I’ve my eye on that beastie yon. I think – whoa!’ He slithered sideways.

  Zoe grabbed a corner of the console. ‘We’re tilting, Doctor!’

  Holding on to the tipping console to anchor himself, the Doctor peered at his instruments. ‘That’s not supposed to happen. Ah! The inertial lock has destabilised. The TARDIS is confused.’

  ‘By what?’

  ‘Well, she should have landed on a solid surface. That’s what her space-time sensors told her to expect. But there’s no solid surface here.’

  Jamie said, ‘Doctor, that speck o’ light there—’

  ‘In fact, you’re right, there’s no wretched moon at all! Ah.’ He snapped his fingers. ‘Of course! The Relative Continuum Displacement Zone. That’s where the moon has gone. Down the hole in time – or more likely, blown up by it—’

  ‘Doctor!’ Jamie, waving his arms for balance, was shouting now.

  And Zoe could see why. Over his shoulder the scanner showed a speck emerging from the background band. A speck becoming larger, more solid, a three-dimensional object. White. Gleaming.

  Spinning.

  Growing.

  Heading straight for the ship.

  ‘Duck!’ cried Jamie.

  As one Zoe and Jamie leapt for the Doctor, and the three of them huddled under the console, clinging to hatch handles. The control room filled with the noise of a blaring klaxon.

  And the object hit.

  2

  HIGH ABOVE THE plane of Saturn’s rings, a girl and a robot watched the drama unfold.

  From the point of view of Phee Laws, the sun was a bright star, off to the left. Saturn itself was half full, a misty globe banded with subtle browns. Phee could see lightning crackle at the north pole – there were permanent depressions, like unending hurricanes, at both poles – and, deep in the night of the dark side, more lightning flared purple, each strike a sheet of energy bigger than the Earth. The ring system was like a tremendous roadway stretching around the planet, barely tilted away from the horizontal from Phee’s point of view. She could see detail, ringlets as fine as if drawn by the pen of a careful artist. There were moons embedded in the ring system itself, small shapeless objects. The larger, perfectly spherical moons hung further out, like lanterns: silver Enceladus, burnt-orange Titan.

  The sun was so far away that it cast its light across this system of moons and rings like a distant spotlight, making razor-sharp shadows. The shade of Saturn itself lay across the rings, etching straight-line edges thousands of kilomet
res long. The longest straight lines in the solar system, Phee’s mother Jo liked to boast to the occasional visitors that came out to the Wheel.

  And, right in the middle of the ring system, clearly visible if Phee worked the magnifiers in her skinsuit visor, was a tumbling blue box. There seemed to be some attempts at piloting it, but she saw ring fragments whack into it like stones thrown by unruly children.

  Another big chunk came spinning in to clout the box. ‘Ouch,’ she murmured.

  ‘Aye, that’s gannae sting in the mornin’,’ said the robot.

  Hovering over her scooter, MMAC was something like a fat spider, with a battered main body ten metres across, crusted with sensors and access hatches, and arms branching away around the rim, some terminating in tools, others brachiating into finer and finer manipulators. Rocket nozzles stuck out of the hull in every direction. ‘MMAC’ stood for ‘Malenfant-IntelligeX Modular Autonomous Component’. MMAC had begun the construction of the Wheel of Ice, where Phee lived. But ‘it’ was a ‘him’ to those who found him good company, and they all called him MMAC – ‘Mac’.

  ‘Yon box is unlucky,’ MMAC said now. ‘Turned up right in the midst of a B belt, where the frags is as big as hooses.’

  He was right. ‘And they seem to be in the middle of a spoke.’

  The rings of Saturn were made up of billions of ice fragments, all following their own orbits around the planet, shepherded by the subtle gravities of Saturn’s many moons. The rings further out were composed of dust grains almost too fine to see. But the big rings towards the centre of the complex, labelled A, B and C by long-dead astronomers on Earth, contained fragments that could indeed be as big as houses. Across much of its tremendous area the ring system was no more than ten or fifteen metres deep. That blue box, if it had any manoeuvrability at all, could easily have ducked out of that. But as MMAC said it was right in the middle of a spoke. The ring system was full of complexities, waves and ridges and even spokes that turned with the planet. And in such places the rings could be kilometres deep.

  ‘I wonder who they are.’