The Doctor made one of his screwed-up faces. ‘They were a particularly rapacious and unscrupulous bunch, even for the times,’ he said. ‘But they’re long gone. Like so many of the corporations, they - ah - dramatically downsized during and after the wars. They pulled out of the Mendeb system four hundred years ago. And left the settlers to fend for themselves.’
Ace hoped that, if she waited, the Doctor would get round to telling her what they were doing in the Mendeb system.
But she knew from previous experiences that she couldn’t rely on it. So she had to ask.
‘So,’ she said, we’ve got a two-planet colony that’s had four centuries to learn about self-government. What’s the problem?’
The Doctor looked insufferably smug. ‘Not a two-planet colony, Ace. That’s the point. Two, entirely separate, single-planet colonies. Mendeb Two and Mendeb Three. During the wars the corporations had virtually all their interstellar ships requisitioned, and in any case TAM weren’t in the business of being charitable to settlers - even those who farmed and mined the products that TAM traded in. When TAM left, they took everything they could take with them. They left a space station in orbit between the two planets, but they left no ships on the planets themselves. No manufacturing plant, no robots. No valuable high tech at all.’
‘OK, so there are two separate planets, both with populations who have to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. I get the picture. They’re farmers, miners, hardy frontier types. Not good with computers or representative democracy. They’ve made a mess of it, and we’re here to help out. A good guess? Am I warm?’
‘We’re here to stop a war, Ace.’ The Doctor’s eyes shone with excitement. ‘An interplanetary war. Let me show you.’
He turned to the console again and began to fiddle with dials and switches. Ace had long since given up nagging him to update the systems with voice recognition. She reckoned he had an unhealthy obsession with obsolete technology.
The control room darkened until its corners were full of shadows. The time rotor at its centre rose and fell, its blinking lights casting beams of illumination like a mirror ball in a night club. In the air, between Ace and the Doctor, a hologram coruscated into being, and Ace saw simulations of the two planets, hanging like brilliant Christmas tree baubles in the surrounding darkness.
‘This is Mendeb Two,’ the Doctor said. It was a blue world of water, its surface covered by oceans and swirling white clouds.
‘Pretty,’ Ace commented. ‘Where do the people live?’
‘Two is the closer of the two planets to its sun.’ The Doctor’s voice came from the darkness beyond the hologram.
‘Most of the surface is too hot for human habitation. The colonies were established at the poles, where the conditions are less extreme. If you look closely you can see archipelagos of islands.’
Ace stood on tip-toe and could see the islands scattered across the north polar region: like flakes of dandruff, she thought, on a bald, blue head.
She saw the indistinct shape of the Doctor move across the control room to the other pendant sphere.
‘Three, on the other hand, is a cold planet. It’s more Earth-like than Two, but due to its distance from the sun only the equatorial belt, between the tropics, is habitable. That’s where the large land masses are, though, so the colonised area was substantial.’
The upper and lower thirds of the planet were so brilliantly white that to look at them hurt Ace’s eyes. Between the ice caps, however, was a broad ribbon of green and brown and blue.
‘And here,’ the Doctor said, retracing his steps to stand between the two planets, ‘is the space station. Abandoned centuries ago, but still in its orbit, equidistant between the two worlds.’
Ace studied the rotating, metallic cylinder. It looked like a standard space station. Big, though. Probably had its own half-normal gravity. ‘And the situation now is - what, exactly?’
‘That, Ace,’ the Doctor said, ‘is what we’re here to find out.’
He was smiling just a little too broadly.
‘You don’t know, do you, Professor?’ Ace said. ‘This ought to be in the data store.’ She stepped into the hologram, so that her black jeans and T-shirt came alive with colour, and she peered closely at Mendeb Three. ‘I can’t see any settlements,’ she said. ‘This hologram’s based on the surveys TAM made from the station, before they brought any settlers in. It’s ages old. I’m right, aren’t I? Where’s the up to date information? I thought the TARDIS could just download all this stuff from the Matrix.’
The Doctor looked miffed. Good, Ace thought.
‘As I’ve said many times before,’ the Doctor explained, ‘time travel is not an exact science. In fact it’s almost a form of art.
The TARDIS is no mere machine, you know. And neither am I.’
‘Yes, yes, yes,’ Ace interrupted him. ‘Don’t go on. Just tell me what we don’t know.’
‘It’s an area of uncertainty in the continuum,’ the Doctor said with deliberation, as if that explained everything. ‘An area of probabilities, rather than certainties.’
‘What you’re telling me,’ Ace said, ‘is that between your weird, alien, superhuman brain, and the TARDIS’s vast computational power, and the entire resources of the Matrix of all Gallifreyan knowledge, you haven’t got a clue what’s happened to this system since the TAM corporation abandoned it. You’re guessing, right? So what’s your best guess?’
The hologram faded and then abruptly disappeared as the lights in the control room returned to normal.
The Doctor was leaning against the console. When he turned to Ace his face wore a look of anguish. ‘It’s a projection, Ace. Not a guess. That’s all we ever have to go on.
Please don’t be so critical. We’re doing our best.’
Oops. The Doctor really was upset. ‘Sorry, Doctor,’ Ace said. ‘What do the projections tell us?’
He straightened. ‘Mendeb Three had more settlers and had more natural resources. The settlers, left to themselves, would also have benefited from exploiting the large areas of arable land and forests. In time - in fact by now - they should have created a civilization with a level of technology similar to Earth’s in the twentieth century.’
He walked to the hatstand and plucked his hat from it. ‘The settlers on Mendeb Two would have had a comfortable life on the islands,’ he went on, ‘but it would have been difficult for them to organise, particularly as the inhabited parts are at either end of the planet. They would have developed technology more slowly than the people on Mendeb Two - but for one thing. The corporation left on Two a reasonably sophisticated radio system, with a communications centre on the equator to link the two communities.’
‘Oh no,’ Ace said.
She and the Doctor stared for a moment at the column of convoluted wires and metal that Ace had found in storage on the twelfth level and which was now standing incongruously next to the main doors.
‘I just thought we should make sure they hadn’t missed it,’
the Doctor said. His voice was quiet. ‘I feel responsible.’
Suddenly he was once again all smiles. He set his hat on his head at a rakish angle. ‘But that’s the beauty of being a Time Lord,’ he announced. ‘I can just turn up, whenever I choose, and make sure things don’t go awry.’
Ace couldn’t help smiling too. The Doctor’s moods were infectious. Or was that just another of his uncanny, non-human abilities? Good grief, she was getting paranoid. Been around the Doctor too long. ‘And what do you expect to go awry?’ she asked.
‘Well,’ the Doctor said, ‘by about now the peoples of both planets should have reached roughly the same level of scientific knowledge. They’re rediscovering existing texts, so progress will be fast once it gets going. The projections indicate that they will have recently met each other, and in fact the space station is now a busy trading post, with traffic going back and forth to both planets. So this is the time of danger. We have to make sure that they compete without r
ecourse to warfare. That’s probably why the TARDIS took me to Mendeb Two in the first place. But in those days I’m afraid I didn’t always entirely understand the workings of the old girl.’
‘And all we have to do is pop back to a few minutes after you took the communications core, and put it back.’ Ace was disappointed. That didn’t sound like any fun at all.
‘Yes,’ the Doctor said very slowly, and bent to examine the control console. ‘Yes, that’s the idea. Probably.’ He straightened, and looked directly at Ace. ‘The fact is, Ace, the records aren’t as complete as they could be. The TARDIS has been through some damaging experiences since the early days of my travels.’
‘Oh,’ Ace said.
The Doctor tugged at his sleeves. ‘I can’t risk replacing the device before I took it, if you see what I mean. Terrible risk of temporal inversion. I’ve had to choose the latest possible moment before there’s any likelihood of hostilities between the planets.’
‘But you’re still going to Mendeb Two?’ Ace said. ‘I come in peace, here’s the vital piece of your communications network I borrowed, hope you didn’t miss it, and by the way don’t start a war with the other lot. That the idea?’
The Doctor scratched his head, nearly dislodging his hat as he did so. ‘Well, yes. That’s about it. Shall we go?’
‘No,’ Ace said, and waited until she was sure the Doctor had heard and understood. She grinned at the look of surprise on his face. ‘You go and do that. It sounds fine, honest. I’m sure it’ll go all right. But I like the sound of that space station. The trading post. It’ll be buzzing with people, and things happening. I’ll scout around, get talking to some of the traders, suss out what’s going on.’
Got him! He obviously couldn’t think of any reason not to let her visit the space station.
‘We don’t know exactly what the situation is,’ he said at last. ‘It could be dangerous.’
What wasn’t, Ace thought. She brandished her backpack -
the one in which she kept the explosive devices the Doctor forbade her from carrying. ‘Danger is my middle name,’ she said, ‘or it would be if I had more than one. I can look after myself these days, you know. Besides, what can happen to me on a space station?’
There were four palace guards, mounted on camelopes. They remained about fifty metres behind Madok, making no attempt to keep out of sight or to overtake him.
They had been there while Madok’s steed was picking its way down the forested slopes that surrounded the Citadel; they had accelerated to a trot, but no more so than Madok, when the road descended into the vineyards and orchards that had been the basis of Gonfallon’s prosperity in earlier, simpler times.
Like Madok, the guards were armed with swords. He suspected that they also had firearms concealed within their uniforms, but he doubted whether they had guns that could fire as accurately or as rapidly as the machine pistol that he had in a holster slung round the pommel of his saddle. He hoped he wouldn’t have to find out.
Hunger, the urgency of his mission, and an overwhelming desire to quit Vethran’s domain all tempted Madok to spur his mount onwards and outrun his pursuers. He resisted the urge. He had been to the King’s court on his lord’s business; now he was returning to one of his lord’s estates. It was perhaps surprising that he was alone, but it was not of itself unlawful. He had to do nothing that would arouse suspicion.
The palace guards had not intercepted him while he was on the woodland tracks close to the Citadel, and they were hardly likely to now that he had joined a main highway.
He let the camelope use the broad sward at the side of the road: now that self-propelled vehicles were increasingly common, at least among the aristocracy, more and more roads were being surfaced with the mixture of gravel and tar that made them suitable for motorised vehicles but hard on animals’ hooves.
The four guards were still behind him.
They were still there four hours later. The clouds had dispersed, and the rays of the midday sun seemed to have a physical weight, flattening the landscape and bearing down on Madok’s shoulders. He was out of Vethran’s fief at last: the fields on his left were still Gonfallon, but those on his right were in the manor of Horax.
The camelope plodded on. To Madok’s left, the ground rose towards the hills that were owned by the Count of Orthalon.
Later, as the shadows lengthened and a welcome breeze stirred the dust beside the road, Horax’s neat fields gave way to ridges of scrub: the hinterland of County Harragon.
Still the palace guards were fifty metres behind him.
As dusk was falling he nudged the flank of his mount: the camelope turned off the road and trotted, home at last, through the open gates at the edge of Garthal Manor, one of Kedin Ashar’s more modest estates.
Half a dozen of the household troops were waiting for him.
Their camelopes were tethered under a stand of trees; the men and women were sitting in the long grass. Madok heard their voices before he saw them.
They sprang up when they heard the sound of his camelope’s hooves. Madok reined in his mount and sat in the saddle, stretching his weary limbs, as the troopers brushed down their tunics and donned their helmets.
‘Sire,’ the captain shouted as he ran towards Madok, still adjusting his chinstrap, ‘felicitations on your safe return. You had a fruitful journey, I trust?’
Madok slid from his saddle. ‘I’ve had a bellyful of courtly manners, Gared,’ he said. ‘I’m as stiff as a board and as hungry as a marsh hog. So if I hear one more genteel phrase I’ll give you a kicking. Understood?’
Gared laughed. ‘Understood. We’ve food and wine with us, if you can’t hold out until we reach the manor house. It’s good to have you back, Madok. Everything went all right?’
Madok shrugged. He couldn’t easily explain the remorse and revulsion he felt every time he visited the court. ‘I’ve got the cargo,’ he said, indicating his saddlebag. ‘And the money.’
The troopers had lit lanterns: their burnished helmets and buttons glittered like fireflies. They were pulling flasks of wine and loaves of bread from their animals’ packs. Madok would be able to relax soon, for a brief while.
‘Gared,’ he said, ‘tell your troopers they’re not on parade.
They must be uncomfortable in full dress uniform. I don’t need a guard of honour, you know. I’ve had an escort all the way from the Citadel.’
He pointed out to Gared the four stationary palace guards, as indistinct as shadows on the darkening highway. As he watched, they turned their mounts and began to retrace their many steps to the King’s domain.
Madok breathed out a long sigh of relief. Another mission accomplished. There would not be many more. Perhaps none: events were reaching a critical point.
He would have a few hours’ sleep in the safety of the manor house, and Gared’s troopers for protection and company on the short journey to the landing strip. He would have to be airborne before daybreak, even though it was perilous to launch a scout ship in the dark.
The evening air was rich with scents: the honey aroma of pollen, the clean tang of cut hay. Madok took in lungfuls of it, and wondered when he’d next have the chance to breathe air that wasn’t filtered. He’d had enough of skulking and hiding and planning. It was time to act. Kedin must make his move soon. Things would be settled, one way or the other.
‘I thought so,’ Ace said. ‘The gravity’s not too bad.’ She jumped into the air and experienced a momentary sensation of floating before her booted feet were pulled down to the floor.
The Doctor’s head and shoulders tilted through the TARDIS’s outer doorway. He looked to and fro, like a nervous bird.
Ace gestured with her hands. ‘To my right, standard-issue space station corridor. Metal bulkheads, some sort of man-made material as cladding, heavy-duty rubberised flooring.
Low-energy lighting. No people. To my left: exactly the same.
The air’s breathable, the place is obviously inhabited. You see? It’s
perfectly safe.’
The Doctor cocked his head, as if listening. Ace could hear nothing apart from the background hum of the life-support system and the echoing, distant clangs and squeaks that she’d heard every time she was in a space-going metal object.
‘I’d rather you were with me, Ace,’ the Doctor said.
Ace was aware of how small and crumpled he was. He always looked like that, of course: a short, slight man in dishevelled clothes. But usually he was being powerful and knowledgeable and mysterious, so you didn’t notice his appearance.
She almost walked back into the TARDIS. ‘All right,’ she said, and then stopped when she glimpsed the satisfied smile that flitted across his face. Was he manipulating her again?
‘I’ll do my stuff here,’ she said, ‘and then you come and collect me. I’ll know when the TARDIS gets back here.’ She tapped the side of her head. I’m getting used to this time-travelling lark.’
‘But, Ace -’
‘Not another word, Doctor. You go and sort out the communications network on Mendeb Two. I’m OK here.’
She stood and watched as the big blue box shimmered and faded out of existence. The flashing blue light on the roof remained visible for a few moments, then with a rush of air it too was gone.
‘At last,’ Ace said to herself, ‘I’m my own boss. So which way now?’
She looked both ways along the corridor. Either way it was gloomy and deserted. The metallic creaks and groans seemed louder now that she was alone. She thought that she could hear voices, too: distant, indistinct. It was impossible to tell from which direction the sounds came.
So this is the thriving hub of interplanetary trade, is it? Ace asked herself as she set off along the corridor. I hope the whole place isn’t this lively and thrilling.
She spied a security camera set into the ceiling ahead of her. As she approached it she gave it a cheeky grin. She waved. Her smile faded as she realised that the camera wasn’t moving to track her progress. It wasn’t working.
Independence Day Page 3