‘I have done your bidding, oh, great perennial. I sent the signal the moment the visitors arrived.’
Willow and Oak exchanged a look. The traitor had been among them all along.
Nightshade’s voice was cool. ‘You let them escape.’
‘I did everything I could,’ Parsley said, with a tremble of fear in his voice.
‘And, yet, you failed me.’ Nightshade paused. ‘Take him to the compost heap.’
‘No!’ Parsley desperately grasped Nightshade’s hand. ‘By all that’s herbaceous, please, no!’
Two Grave Diggers grabbed Parsley’s arms, wresting his hands free from where he still clung to Nightshade, before dragging him away to his fate.
As Parsley’s shrieks receded, Nightshade turned to Oak and Willow. ‘You should not have involved the Time Lord.’
‘Her role was predestined,’ replied Willow.
‘Ah, yes. The Rose Garden of Eternity.’ Nightshade looked past her to the flowering display. ‘A thorn in my side.’ He nodded curtly to the Grave Digger nearest to him.
Unlike the black-ash blasters wielded by his comrades, this soldier wore a backpack connected by a long stem to a fat sunflower. He stepped towards the edge of the rose garden and levelled the yellow flower at the blooming roses.
‘No!’ Willow stepped forward to meet him. ‘You cannot do this!’
But the surrounding Grave Diggers pinned both her and Oak’s arms, holding them back. There was nothing they could do but watch as a flame leaped from the broad sunflower, and the soldier swept the spitting bloom from side to side, setting the entire garden ablaze. The eternal roses crackled and burned.
Nightshade surveyed the flames in quiet satisfaction. ‘After the harvest comes the fire. All will be renewed in time. The soil must be turned.’
Snapping to attention, the Grave Diggers echoed him. ‘The soil must be turned.’
‘A little R and R, you said.’ Using his thumb and forefinger, Graham prised a large thorn from his jumper. ‘Remind me never to go on holiday with you again.’
The Doctor, meanwhile, was consulting the TARDIS database. ‘Planet of Calufrax Major, polar region,’ she said, entering the co-ordinates of the Galactic Seed Vault into the navigation computer. ‘Narnia, here we come.’
Graham winced. ‘Tell me we’re not haring halfway across the galaxy because of a best-kept-village floral display.’
‘The Rose Garden of Eternity doesn’t make mistakes,’ said the Doctor. ‘It accurately predicted the great Mars ash dieback of 3004, the first and second Venus flytrap massacres, and the bee invasion of earth in 2151 AD.’
The console room filled with the familiar wheezing that indicated the TARDIS was on the move.
‘And, c’mon, if I ignored an ancient mystical prophecy written in flowers, what kind of Time Lord would that make me?’
‘As much as I hate to agree with Graham –’ Ryan began.
‘Cheers for that,’ his granddad interrupted.
‘This is pretty much the opposite of a holiday,’ he finished. ‘Anyway, what about that Nightshade character? Did you see those attack craft? They looked a bit like flying trowels, but they were packing some serious firepower. We’re not equipped to go up against someone like that.’
‘Trust me,’ said the Doctor, ‘they weren’t as well armed as the seed vault is.’ An alarm went off and she silenced it with the slap of a switch. ‘We can’t get too close, or we’ll risk triggering ground-to-air defences –’
‘What does a glorified garden centre need anti-aircraft blasters for?’ Graham muttered.
‘So we’ll have to park and ride.’ The Doctor pulled a lever and her fingers fluttered over the console, keying a sequence of buttons.
‘Oh, come on,’ Ryan complained, watching her. ‘It’s different every time.’
‘There! That should set us down outside the danger zone. Calufrax Major isn’t far from Tellus, so we’ll arrive shortly.’ She looked round at the others. ‘But it is one of the coldest spots in the universe. I suggest you all wrap up warm.’
They set about preparing for their excursion. Graham decided to leave his begonia in the TARDIS, figuring that an ice planet was no place for a houseplant. He felt bad at first, worried it would get lonely without anyone to talk to, but the plant reassured him it would be just fine.
While Yaz filled a thermos flask with tea, Ryan headed off to the cavernous wardrobe, where he searched the racks for suitable outerwear. Spotting a multicoloured scarf, he plucked it off its hanger. This will be perfect, he thought – but, as he started to uncoil it, he found it just kept on coming. The scarf was endless, as if it had been knitted by some possessed grandma. An obvious trip hazard. He returned it to the rack.
Once he’d collected enough suitable kit, he returned to the console room and found Graham waiting there. The two of them rigged themselves out in polarised goggles, gloves, warm coats with furry hoods, windproof trousers and insulated boots. They were ready.
‘Where are Yaz and the Doc?’ asked Graham, his voice slightly muffled by the high fur collar of his coat.
He was answered by a slithering sound that came from just beyond the wardrobe door. In unison, he and Ryan looked nervously towards the door…
A moment later, the two women appeared, each hauling a wooden sledge and carrying what looked like a set of reins. Graham and Ryan breathed a sigh of relief.
Yaz stopped and stared at the two of them, swaddled in their snow gear. ‘You look like a couple of yetis.’
‘You never told me that you’d met the Yetis!’ The Doctor was beaming at Yaz. ‘I remember them well. Cuddly, but fierce. Robots, of course…’
While the Doctor finished her Yeti story, she and Yaz also donned cold-weather outfits, just in time for the TARDIS to land. With an enormous mitten-clad hand, the Doctor pawed the door-control lever. The mechanism whined, but the doors remained shut.
‘Must be frozen,’ she said.
‘But we just got here a second ago,’ said Graham. ‘How cold is this planet?’
‘This should help.’ The Doctor hit a switch. ‘De-icer.’ She tried the doors again.
This time they opened smoothly, but Graham immediately wished they hadn’t. A blast of freezing air hit him, collecting around his hood and turning the fake fur into icicles. Already shivering, he followed the Doctor, Yaz and Ryan as they dragged the sledges out of the TARDIS.
They found themselves on a wide, snowy plateau. For a moment, Ryan wondered if they’d been turned into fish fingers and materialised inside a freezer cabinet. As his eyes adjusted to the glare, he was able to see beyond their immediate surroundings. The white plateau stretched for miles in every direction, an unbroken, featureless expanse that eventually met a distant range of mountains, rows of jagged peaks gnawing at the indigo sky. He could see something at the base of the tallest mountain. From this distance it was no more than a smudge, but Ryan could fix that. He lifted a small pair of binoculars he’d found in the TARDIS wardrobe to his eyes. They were made of brass, with an odd handle and poor magnification, but they’d do.
‘I wondered where those’d got to,’ said the Doctor. ‘Haven’t seen them since the premiere of The Magic Flute. Wolfgang gave them to me.’
‘Wolfgang?’ said Graham. ‘As in Mozart?’
‘A thank-you gift.’ She shrugged. ‘I helped him with a little haunted-mask problem.’
Ryan pointed out the distant object to the others. Through the binoculars, he could see it was a black, angular building that jutted from the bottom of the mountain like a giant’s step. ‘If that’s where we’re headed,’ he said. ‘It’s going to be a long walk.’
‘Who said anything about walking?’ The Doctor held up her sonic screwdriver.
As with the TARDIS, Ryan was fascinated by the sonic. From what he’d observed, the Doctor used it mostly to open doors. But, while it was sophisticated enough to unlock or
manipulate most kinds of technology, for some reason it had no effect whatsoever on wood. Ryan couldn’t believe no one had come up with a setting for that. He suspected that it was only called a sonic screwdriver for the – whatchamacallit? – alliteration.
‘Hear that?’ said the Doctor.
Ryan shook his head.
‘That’s because you’re not a Frost Lepus. I’m using the sonic to send out a high-frequency signal. Bit like a dog whistle.’
Aha! So, it does use sound energy, Ryan mentally noted with interest.
‘Uh, what’s that?’ Graham was squinting at a trail of tracks that stretched across the white landscape. ‘Shouldn’t we get back to the TARDIS?’ he asked nervously.
The Doctor waved a dismissive mitten. ‘Relax. They’re perfectly friendly. Just so long as you don’t act like a carrot.’
Before he could question the Doctor, Graham saw four rabbit-like creatures bounding across the snow towards them. They came to a stop in front of the Doctor, panting in the cold air. Sitting on their haunches they were as tall as Graham, and had white furry coats, two black button eyes and a small pink nose that never stopped twitching, as if it was always on the point of sneezing.
The Doctor looped her makeshift harness round two of them, then tethered it to one of the sledges. Yaz did the same, and then sat down at the back of her sledge. She beckoned to Ryan to join her, while the Doctor shared her sledge with Graham.
‘So this is what you meant by park and ride?’ said Ryan.
‘More like park and leap,’ said Yaz, as the Frost Lepuses pawed impatiently at the ground.
‘Are you sure this is safe?’ Graham looked uncertain.
‘Statistically speaking, there’s no safer way to travel,’ the Doctor reassured him. ‘I mean, how many people do you know who’ve been injured or killed travelling on a sledge pulled by giant bunnies?’ Before Graham could answer, she snapped the reins. ‘Hold on!’
Yaz followed suit. Sitting behind the loping creatures as they hauled the sledge along, she felt filled with happiness. As a kid, she’d begged for a pet rabbit but, her dad being allergic to animal fur, she hadn’t been allowed one.
‘Mister Hoppy,’ she said aloud, remembering the cuddly toy she’d made do with instead.
Ryan frowned. ‘Come again?’
‘Nothing.’ Yaz was grateful for the hood, which hid her blush.
‘Can I drive?’ asked Ryan.
‘No.’
Flattening their ears, the Lepuses picked up speed across the snowy plain. With sure-footed ease, they dodged deep drifts and leaped crevasses, bearing their exhilarated passengers towards their destination.
After some time, they came within the long shadow of the mountains. Through the reins, Yaz could feel the Lepuses begin to slow and grow skittish the nearer they drew to the vault, until eventually the creatures refused to go any further. Thankfully, the vault was near enough to proceed on foot, so the Doctor released the Lepuses from their harnesses, and they set out on the final leg of their journey. By the time they reached the outskirts of the vault, night was falling and, with it, the temperature. Yaz found it hard to believe the place could get any colder.
Before them lay the Galactic Seed Vault: a bluff, wedge-shaped building constructed of some kind of light-sucking material, approximately fifty metres across and rising 200 metres straight up into the darkening sky – and who knew how deep it reached into the mountain itself. Freezing winds shrieked across its blank face, complaining at the angular obstruction.
‘Strange,’ said the Doctor. ‘I would have expected a welcoming committee by now. A warning laser-shot, a sonic blast, a pack of robot guard dogs…’
But avoiding the vault’s active defences was the least of Ryan’s concerns. With growing anxiety, he saw that in order to reach the building they would have to cross a chasm on a narrow metal bridge with no guardrail. A challenge for most people, this would be doubly difficult for him, as he suffered from dyspraxia – a disorder that meant he often struggled with movement and co-ordination, which could make physical tasks extra challenging. He looked at the bridge. A mere stumble would prove fatal. Then, assuming he could even make it across, another obstacle remained on the opposite side: there was no door.
The lack of an entrance didn’t seem to bother the Doctor, though. ‘We must tread carefully from here,’ she was saying. ‘Visitors aren’t permitted in case of contamination, so we will be the first people to enter the seed vault since its construction.’ She thought for a moment. ‘Actually, that’s not strictly accurate. I did hear of an attempt to rob the vault of some of its rarer specimens several thousand years ago. Four plant-hunters were hired by a collector to source the seeds for his private garden. They apparently made it past the first level of security, but no further.’
‘What happened to them?’ asked Yaz.
‘Several months later, four pots of compost were delivered to their home worlds. Upon analysis, the contents were identified as the remains of the plant-hunters.’ She paused. ‘It’s what they would’ve wanted.’
‘It’s not what I want!’ Graham objected.
‘Any idea how they got in?’ asked Yaz. ‘Before they were, um, composted.’
‘You could use your sonic,’ Ryan suggested.
‘No need,’ said the Doctor. ‘If I’ve timed it correctly – which I have – then…’
She looked up into the sky just as what appeared to be a comet entered the planet’s atmosphere. It was low on the horizon and burned brightly in the darkness. Changing direction, it angled towards them.
‘Uh, what is that?’ asked Graham.
‘A seed-collecting drone,’ said the Doctor. ‘I asked the TARDIS to locate one as soon as we left Tellus IV. This one’s been out in the universe for a thousand years, searching for a single seed, and now it’s coming home.’
There was a series of dull, metallic clunks, then a horizontal seam appeared in the face of the vault at the end of the bridge. It split in two, each half rolling back. As the gap widened, the seed-collecting drone shot over their heads. It was moving slowly now, on its final approach, and they could see that it was the size of a bird. Retrorockets engaged as the vessel manoeuvred itself through the gap.
‘Quickly now, before the doors close again. We can’t afford to hang around for another thousand years.’
The Doctor hurried across the bridge, and the others dashed after her.
Ryan reached the middle of the bridge before he froze. The wind wailed up from the depths of the chasm and swirled around the flimsy bridge, causing it to buck and creak. He watched the others reach the opposite side. Yaz and the Doctor kept going, but Graham paused, noticing Ryan’s absence. He turned round and saw his grandson.
‘It’s okay,’ he called through the wind. ‘Looks more dangerous than it is. I’ll help you.’
He began to make his way back towards Ryan, but no sooner had he set foot on the bridge than his feet went out from under him. He hit the slick metal surface and, with a yell, slid towards the edge.
There was nothing else for it. Ryan dived full length across the bridge.
‘Got you!’ He grabbed Graham by the sleeve of his puffy coat and hauled him up, and together they made their way safely to the other side. Up ahead, the Doctor and Yaz stood at the entrance to the vault, peering back through the snow for their friends. Ryan gave them a wave, and the two women disappeared inside.
‘Couldn’t have been dyslexia, could it?’ grumbled Graham.
Ryan gave his granddad a wry smile. To think that just a few months ago they’d been at home on earth worrying about him catching a bus or passing an exam, and now here they were, dicing with death over an alien abyss. They looked at one another, silently marvelling at the sheer improbability of their new life, but their relief at this latest narrow escape was cut short by a clang that split the wind.
The doors of the seed vault had ground shut.<
br />
They were alone in the frozen night.
* * *
—
‘We have to get the doors open again!’ Yaz hammered her gloved fists against the unyielding surface. ‘They’ll freeze to death out there.’
The Doctor had already raised her sonic screwdriver. ‘We’ll get them back. Don’t worry.’ The device glowed as she passed it back and forth across the space where the doors had been.
‘They’re not opening,’ said Yaz, trying to quell her rising panic.
‘Must be wood in the structure. Y’know what? I don’t think this building was constructed. It was grown. How fascinating.’
‘Not the time, Doctor.’ Yaz looked around desperately for some sort of control panel. She figured that the two men would be okay for a while, but there was no way they could last the night outside, and it was too far for them to make it back to the TARDIS on foot – even if they could have found their way in the dark. Yaz’s breath plumed in front of her. The temperature in here was barely higher than outside, but at least she and the Doctor were out of that wind and they were dry – which was more than she could say for Ryan and Graham.
Yaz scoured every surface in her search. As she moved round the room, she guessed this must be the drone hangar. A launch-and-retrieval bay from which the seed-collecting drones were sent out into the galaxy to return months, years – thousands of years – later with their precious cargo.
The retrieval section was at the far end, a covered conveyor belt loaded with glass spheres. They were small enough to fit in a human palm, and on closer inspection Yaz saw that each contained a single tiny seed. The conveyor belt was clearly intended to shuttle the seeds to another part of the vault. However, the belt was still, gathering dust. Strange. More importantly, given the current urgency of their situation, the bay appeared to be sealed off from the rest of the vault. The only way to pass deeper into the vault seemed to be along the conveyor belt, but that was enclosed in a sealed transparent tunnel.
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