Doctor Who - The Wheel of Ice

by Stephen Baxter

  And it was something to do with the colour blue…

  After the shift she went straight home. Her mother’s shift was the same as hers, and with any luck she wouldn’t be back yet. Casey should be away at her nursery. Sam had bunked off work and was getting ready for his jaunt to Enceladus. With gritted teeth Phee had agreed to go too; she hated to skip shifts, but she felt she had to keep an eye on Sam…

  She hoped she’d find the house empty. It was.

  Her heart hammering, her conscience pricking, Phee made straight for her mother’s desk, in the small room she used as a study. She raised a decorative lid to expose a stout steel hatch, with a combination lock in its surface.

  Nobody knew the combination of Mayor Jo Laws’ desk. Nobody but her son Sam. And her daughter Phee.

  Sam knew because he had spied on his mother. Partly that was out of habit, it was the sort of thing Sam did. And partly, Phee suspected, so that he had an option of adjusting or destroying any damaging records held on him in there.

  And he had whispered the combination into Phee’s ear, once, when he was drunk. It was pure spite, to implicate his ‘stuck up, sanctimonious, A-grade snitch of a sister’ in his own grubby affairs. At least she had never before used that bit of knowledge. And now she told herself she was doing this for the good of Casey, maybe the good of the colony as a whole.

  She tapped in the combination. The steel lid swung open, silent and smooth, as cold as her guilt.

  She leaned forward, tucking the amulet that hung from her neck out of the way. Inside the desk was a stack of records and files, mostly handwritten, and a few photographs taken with crude wet-chemistry cameras. Jo Laws had grown up in an age when nobody had imagined that any digital record or image could possibly be secure, so she insisted her most private documents were written out by hand in unique copies like this, very old-fashioned, but quite unhackable… The desk wasn’t very well organised, her mother was no file clerk, but what Phee wanted was very recent and was easy to find, right on top.

  ‘CAMPBELL, JAMES, IDENT C78J987K, PP-SE CLASSIFICATION C7. INJURIES SUSTAINED DURING SHIFT ALPHA-SEVEN…’ It was a medical report, one copy of four, filled out and signed on the cover by Dr Sinbad Omar. Phee flicked through it quickly. There was an account of a routine shift’s work, Campbell’s team had been opening up a new shaft, and Campbell, forty-two years old and very experienced, was in the vanguard.

  Then had come the encounter.

  ‘They just crowded around,’ testified a co-worker. ‘Little creatures. Stunted. Cold. Swarming everywhere. Yeah, blue. There was one that acted like a leader, but they all looked alike. We got away, out of the shaft, all but Jim Campbell. He went down and they dragged him back. Covered him, swarming like big blue maggots. He screamed. I’ll never forget. We went back for him. We couldn’t fire our blasters, we’d have hit Jim. So we just went in with whatever we had to hand, laying into them with bars and struts and blaster butts and our bare fists. We drove them off and got Jim out of there, but the damage had been done…’

  There were images, taken by the medical staff, of Campbell in the hospital. The blue creatures had got him by the legs, and his flesh from the groin down –

  ‘Metamorphosed’ was the word Dr Omar used, but Phee knew the fancy word didn’t imply any greater understanding. Metamorphosed meant changed. Human flesh changed into cold blue seamless – what? Plastic, ceramic? And at the edge between blue and pink, she could see a spreading stain, a fibrous infestation, halted only by death.

  Shuddering, she shut the file. She closed the desk and locked it down, and sat thinking.

  Then she walked through to Casey’s room.

  The empty cot was the usual jumble of blankets and toys. Phee pulled out the blankets one by one. They smelled of Casey, her warm-toast kiddie smell.

  She came to the blue doll, lying there in the nest of blankets.

  She felt oddly reluctant to touch it. Its material looked exactly like the stuff on Campbell’s legs, in the photographs. She bent and picked up the doll. It was neither warm nor cold to the touch, that was eerie in itself, and its synthetic flesh was smooth, seamless. She got it under the armpits and held it up, and looked into that eerie, smoothed-out copy of Casey’s face. ‘What’s going on here? What are you?’

  The eyes snapped open, revealing wells of black.

  The mouth too peeled open, a widening slit, revealing a row of teeth like needles.

  And it came alive in her hands. Squirming, strong. Those black eyes fixed on the pendant on her chest, and made a grab for it.

  She screamed, spun around and hurled the Doll away from her. It slammed against the wall on the far side of the room. For a heartbeat it was still again, lying there, head down.

  Then the creature turned, swarmed up the wall, and squirmed out of the window, and it was gone in a blue flash.

  The air went out of Phee in a rush, and she folded her arms over her amulet, safe on its chain. She couldn’t tell her mother about this, she realised immediately. Jo would never forgive Sam for bringing a murderous, monstrous – thing – into her child’s bedroom. So what was she to do?

  ‘I rather think we need to talk, Miss Laws. Don’t you?’

  The voice startled her. She whirled around. It was the Doctor.

  11

  THE NEXT DAY, with Sam and Phee Laws and a bunch of their similarly aged friends, Jamie found himself on a rocket scooter, plummeting across the Saturn system. They were on their way to one of the bigger moons, a ball of ice called Enceladus. Jamie had had to write the name down on the back of his hand to remember it at all. Then the challenge had been to find a way to wear a kilt inside a pressure suit…

  Unlike Zoe, Jamie didn’t mind riding his little scooter. He found it exhilarating. In his day there had been no mechanical beasties like this to ride around on, but Jamie had been a good horse-rider, not that he’d often had the chance. You twisted the handles to turn or go faster, just as you’d haul a rein or spur a horse. On such a light craft the way you distributed your bodyweight was important, and you had to lean this way and that in the turn, and that was just like horsemanship too. He’d been told that the ride would get easier on the way back when the scooters would be less laden with fuel pods and ration packs, lumpy containers that were attached to the main upright.

  Of course, he thought at first, you could never love a scooter, a thing of ceramic and metal and squirty rocket nozzles, the way you learned to love a horse. But maybe he was wrong about that. He looked at the youngsters scattered around the sky about him, riding vehicles jazzed up with gaudy colours and flashing lights, even fanciful, entirely useless fins and wings. They were all bunking off from school or mine work, which added spice to the adventure, he supposed. They played endlessly, chattering on their comms links, running races and performing stunts, swooping and barrel-rolling – and mounting mock collisions, tricks that made Jamie’s heart race. He felt tired just watching them.

  It would take a full twenty-four hours to reach Enceladus, he was told. That was all right for these kids, but Jamie was old enough to admit that he needed his kip. He’d just have to hang on.

  Only Phee Laws hung back from the antics of the rest. She swept down out of the sky to ride alongside Jamie. ‘Don’t worry about them,’ she said.

  ‘I’m tryin’ not to.’

  ‘We’ve all been flying these scooters since before we could walk. And besides, accidents in space happen in kind of slow motion. If you survive the initial impact you just drift away, until somebody retrieves you.’

  ‘That’s reassuring.’ It wasn’t. ‘But I notice ye’re not chucking yersel’ around the sky, Phee.’

  ‘Well, it’s not my cup of tea.’ She laughed. ‘I heard the Doctor say that. Cup of tea!’

  ‘Then,’ Jamie asked gently, ‘why are you here? You’re not a daredevil. And you don’t strike me as a slacker either.’

  She sounded defensive now. ‘Well, why are you here?’

  He didn’t want to answer t
hat. Didn’t want to tell her that the Doctor had asked him to stay close to Phee herself, to find out more about the time anomaly she seemed somehow to be associated with. Time enough for that, Jamie.

  ‘Look, Phee – I think ye’re here because o’ that big lummox up there.’ Jamie pointed to an electric blue scooter spinning in the sky up ahead. ‘Sam. Yer big brother. I know it’s difficult for ye. He’s older. He should be lookin’ after you. Instead he’s the one needs his bumps felt.’

  That made her laugh. ‘What does that mean? Oh, never mind. All right, yes. He’s always getting into trouble. He always has. But he’s nineteen now, Jamie. They can’t keep turning a blind eye for ever. If he was to get prosecuted for something or other—’

  ‘I imagine it’d break yer ma’s heart, to see him locked up.’

  ‘Oh, we don’t lock up people here,’ she said bleakly. ‘We just have holding cells like the one you three were kept in. We haven’t got the resources to support a prison population. Everybody has to be productive. You get busted down to a D-grade, and sentenced to a work detail, or worse.’

  ‘A work detail? But ye’re all working yer backsides off as it is, as far as I can see.’

  ‘Yes, but there are jobs nobody much wants to do. Humiliating. Dangerous. Well, Sam hasn’t got that far yet. But this latest stunt doesn’t help. I don’t know why Sam is the way he is. I mean, there’s no bad in him. My dad died when I was very small. I don’t remember him. It was an accident, they were opening up the first shafts on Mnemosyne. Sam was there. You know the way they like to take us up as little kids to familiarise us with the mine?’

  ‘He saw it,’ Jamie guessed. ‘Sam saw your father die.’

  ‘Later, Mum got married again, to a man called Harry Matthews, and the result was Casey, before they broke up. He moved out, went off to the methane extraction plant on Titan… It’s all been a mess. And Mum’s always busy being mayor. But none of that is any excuse. Luis tries to help.’

  ‘Who? Oh, the chap from Earth.’

  ‘Luis Reyes, from Planetary Ethics. I think Sam likes him – thinks he’s exotic. Anybody’s who’s not from the Wheel is interesting to Sam. Even you.’

  ‘Oh, thanks.’

  ‘But it doesn’t do any good. Nothing ever does, not with Sam.’

  Jamie felt intensely sorry for this serious, responsible young girl, in this place of hard work and regulations, and the unruly elder brother she couldn’t protect or control. And he felt even worse that in a way he, Jamie, was only here to spy on her. ‘Och, try not to worry, lass. Look, I’m here to help bail him out on this jaunt anyhow.’

  ‘Well, it isn’t your problem. But thanks anyway. Oh, by the way you need to change your comms setting.’

  ‘What, my little radio? Why?’

  ‘You’re allowed to speak scooter to scooter but you have to shut down your links back to the Wheel.’

  ‘What? That’s daft. If somethin’ goes wrong—’

  ‘I know. But that’s the gang rule. Sam’s rule.’ She spoke with a kind of weary contempt. ‘It makes no difference. They track us on radar anyhow. But—’

  ‘Boys will be boys. All right, Phee, I’ll take care of it.’

  Phee, riding alongside Jamie, seemed to hesitate, as if there was more she wanted to say. But she just nodded, and her scooter swooped away.

  12

  JO SUMMONED SONIA Paley to talk about the latest bit of bad news.

  There had been another incident in the mined moon. Another fatality. The third in twenty-four hours, beginning with the Campbell incident.

  When Sonia walked in, Jo had the medics’ reports spread out over her kitchen table. And there was the Doctor, sipping tea, calmly studying the gruesome images on the tabletop before him.

  ‘What’s he doing here?’

  Jo sighed. ‘Sonia, he is rather persistent. You try keeping him away.’

  ‘That wouldn’t be hard. You are technically still under arrest, Doctor.’

  ‘Oh, am I? Well, technically arrested or not, as I’ve been trying to persuade your mayor here, I have rather a lot to offer you in this difficult situation. A lot of relevant experience.’

  ‘Experience of what?’

  ‘Alien life. And extraterrestrial intelligence. Which may be causative factors in this situation. Aha! I see you’re not dismissing that out of hand. You may deny the conclusion, but the mounting evidence—’

  ‘Yes, well, whatever you’re an expert in, I’m just a copper. So let’s stick to the evidence for now, shall we?’ She poured herself tea from the pot and sat at the table.

  Jo showed her the latest images. It had been another attack, another case of the strange blue metamorphosis. This time the changes had spread over the victim’s torso, from her neck to her hips.

  ‘The heart gives out, you know,’ Jo said. ‘That’s what kills them. Arteries and veins are severed, capillaries too, as this transformation turns human tissue into – well, whatever this is.’

  ‘Do the medics have any theories?’

  ‘Sinbad Omar suggests it might be some kind of disease. A plague. Some life form from a biosphere inimical to ours.’

  The Doctor sniffed.

  ‘I take it you don’t agree,’ Sonia said dryly.

  ‘Well, does this look like any kind of plague to you? The pattern differs every time. For this poor victim it was the torso that was attacked. Last time it was the back. Before that, the legs. The most horrific of all is what happens to the face. There is an image here—’

  ‘I don’t need to see it, thanks.’

  ‘You’re squeamish for a copper, aren’t you? Can’t you see the pattern? It’s almost as if these poor miners are being experimented on. As if they are being trialled, their bodies tested.’

  Sonia frowned. ‘And you think this is intentional. As if driven by some intelligence.’

  ‘Isn’t that at least possible? And now look, don’t you play the sceptic with me, Marshal. I’m well aware that the International Space Command has full access to UNIT’s records, which bulge with evidence of alien incursions of various kinds into the solar system and on Earth itself going back centuries. You must surely be at least open to the possibility that that’s what we’re dealing with here.’

  ‘Well, what would you have us do?’

  ‘Speak to your medical people again. Get them to look again at these cases, perhaps with slightly more open minds. And talk to Florian Hart, or if necessary her bosses.’

  Jo said, ‘Florian? She just denies it all. Calls it human error – or human criminality.’

  The Doctor snorted. ‘Well, then she’s mistaken – or lying. There must be wider evidence than this; I’m quite sure that mined moon is full of surveillance systems.’

  ‘Yes,’ Sonia said, ‘but that data is proprietary to Bootstrap and Florian won’t let us near it.’

  Jo said, ‘But what she is doing is threatening all sorts of reprisals for the sabotage, and now these murders – her word, not mine. She’s talking about lockdowns. Sometimes I think there’s a danger she’ll use this as an excuse to take some kind of control here, in the Wheel as a whole.’

  ‘Not while I’m around,’ Sonia said coldly.

  Jo went on, ‘It is true that each of these incidents generates eye-witness accounts of attacks. Swarming, by some kind of creature. Blue-skinned.’

  The Doctor said, ‘But there’s no photographic evidence, I take it.’

  ‘No. Well, the workers are too busy fighting for their lives to take holiday snaps.’

  Sonia put in, ‘And the testimony of C-grades is regarded as unreliable anyhow.’

  The Doctor protested, ‘This isn’t a court of law, Marshal! Evidence is evidence.’

  Sonia sighed. ‘Yes, but – look, Doctor, I’ve been to a number of off-Earth outposts before. On planets, on moons, in deep space. People cooped up too close together in entirely alien environments. They see things that aren’t there – or misinterpret what they do see.’

  ‘It’s a
ll cosmic ray flashes in the eyeballs!’

  ‘Well, yes. And they gossip. Rumours spread like a cold virus.’

  ‘But we are dealing with deaths here,’ Jo said firmly. ‘They can’t be denied. And unexplained, so far.’

  ‘Yes. Of course. But we’re working in a fog.’ Sonia stood. ‘Look, let me go make some further enquiries. And I’ll contact Geneva. Maybe I’ll ask them about warrants to search the Bootstrap facilities. We’ll talk later.’

  When she had gone the Doctor leaned towards Jo. ‘And what about the sightings away from the mine, Jo – in the Wheel itself? I’m sure you can’t deny such things have occurred. Flashes of blue. Creatures scurrying out of sight. Why, I’ve seen it myself.’

  Jo shrugged. ‘The kids keep it to themselves because they think nobody believes them. But even I hear the rumours. Nothing’s been substantiated. Again there’s no photography, no visual evidence.’

  ‘That could mean that whatever’s here is too smart to be picked up by your routine surveillance systems. Or again, that somebody is deliberately hiding evidence. Perhaps under your very nose.’

  ‘What do you mean by that? Look, what would you have me do? Start hauling children in at random for questioning?’

  ‘No,’ the Doctor said. ‘Though I imagine Florian Hart would enjoy that. This is a community so riven with mutual suspicion – there’s no trust even between parents and children! Let’s sort this out before Florian sorts it out for us.

  ‘I want you to help me get to some of this evidence directly, Mayor Laws. If I’m to help, I need to see what we’re dealing with. Perhaps run some tests of my own. I do have a fairly wide expertise. And we need to find out whatever Florian Hart is covering up – for I’m increasingly sure that’s what she’s doing. If possible, I must go up to that moon myself and find out what’s really behind all this.’