Godengine Page 6

  ‘A Chameleon field?’ Esteban asked. ‘Of course, the Martians used them to pack out their fleets. An advanced form of solid holography,’ he stated for the benefit of the others. Roz had learnt that Esteban was actually quite a Martian enthusiast; what a shame that he wouldn’t get the chance to meet Benny – they would have got along tremendously.

  ‘Indeed they did.’ The Doctor clapped his hands together, cleverly managing to avoid burning himself with the matches as he did so. ‘A very, very deceitful device that mankind will inevitably invent and undoubtedly find a deadly use for, Professor Esteban.’

  Esteban pulled his tablette from within his jacket and pointed it at the nearest boulder. ‘I find it difficult to believe that this is nothing more than a clever simularity.’ He knelt down and felt the rough surface. ‘The tablette registers it as solid rock, even down to the traces of trisilicate and iron.’

  For a second, Roz was confused; in the thirtieth century, solid holograms were an everyday occurrence. She brought up her history lessons, and remembered that solid holography had been invented in 1998 and suppressed soon after; the furthest mankind had reached by 2157 was the simularity, a primitive holographic system. Not for the first time, Roz was amazed that mankind had ever reached the thirtieth century. Survival of the fittest indeed.

  ‘I’m freezing,’ muttered Carmen Santacosta, hugging her metallic blue survival jacket. ‘Can’t we go underground?’

  The Doctor cocked an eyebrow. ‘Carmen is right; it is time that we made our way to the City of the Sad Ones.’ Roz agreed; all of them were wearing some sort of thermal jacket – Carmen and the buggy people were wearing standard issue insulated numbers, while she was in the atmospheric density jacket that the Doctor had flung at them as the TARDIS broke up – but neither type of jacket was designed for long-term use. Unless they found somewhere with a temperature that didn’t have a minus sign in front of it, they would soon become very well acquainted with cryogenics.

  ‘How do we get in?’ asked McGuire. ‘Presuming that this is an entrance and not a scientific curiosity,’ he added pointedly.

  ‘Chameleon fields are, as Professor Esteban pointed out, nothing but clever-dick holograms,’ replied the Doctor. ‘And they can be switched off.’ He reached into the pocket of his silver jacket and pulled out his sonic screwdriver, a twenty- centimetre silver cylinder. ‘It’s times like this when I’m really glad of my sonic screwdriver,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I’m just thankful I sued the Terileptils for criminal damage.’ He aimed it at the cluster of rocks and pressed a contact with his thumb.

  After a few seconds of high-pitched buzzing from the screwdriver, the boulders faded from sand-blasted rock to glitter, and then, finally, to nothing. In their place, a five-metre-wide hole had appeared, with roughly hewn steps leading into the darkness below.

  ‘The City of the Sad Ones awaits, ladies and gentlemen,’ the Doctor announced, waving a theatrical arm towards the hole. The others filed past him, showing various degrees of nervousness. Once they had started to descend, the Doctor turned to Roz. ‘Before we follow, I have a present for you, Adjudicator.’ He reached into his jacket once more and pulled out a filigree bracelet that appeared to have been woven from hundreds of silver-red strands.

  ‘Jewellery?’ she questioned. ‘Not really my style.’ What was the Doctor playing at?

  ‘A gravimetric adjustment device, Roz, courtesy of the Nimons.’ He slipped it over the sleeve of her atmosphere jacket, and she immediately felt herself become three times as heavy. A trifle disconcerting, but a relief when all was said and done. He grinned as she tried to force her face muscles to adjust her mouth from what felt like a desperately sour look into some semblance of normality. ‘Why didn’t you give me this earlier?’ she mumbled through spastic lips.

  ‘A little suffering is good for the soul,’ he said cheerfully, then nodded towards the abyss. ‘Into the underworld, then? Charon awaits.’

  Chris walked into the stunnel room to discover a frantic and frenetic hive of activity, threaded with an atmosphere that was a tangible mixture of terror and panic. About twenty technicians were running around from station to station with all manner of equipment in their hands, while at the centre of the chaos Felice and Rachel were focusing their attention on the main control console. In front of them, the tunnel beyond the oval throbbed and pulsed up and down the visible spectrum in peristaltic waves of jarring light.

  Not sure of the best way to attract attention, Chris fell back on the tried and trusted method. ‘How’s it going?’ he called across the room. When the guard had opened the cell door and told him that he was wanted in the stunnel room, Chris guessed that Felice had persuaded Rachel to check out his prophecy of doom. Under other circumstances, he would have been rather pleased with himself; but the knowledge that a fleet of Dalek saucers was heading his way had a decidedly sobering effect. He realized that Felice was beckoning him over.

  ‘They’re coming, aren’t they?’ he asked rhetorically, dodging technicians as he walked over to the central work-station.

  ‘Too right, Nostradamus,’ snapped Rachel over her shoulder. ‘Telemetry reckons that we’ve got about an hour and a half before the bastards are breathing down our necks. Know anything about subspace engineering, Mr Adjudicator?’

  Chris shook his head; although he had built toy warp engines for the spaceships he had modelled as a boy, subspace drives had been superseded by hyperdrives centuries before he had been born. ‘Sorry -’

  ‘Never mind,’ said Rachel dismissively. And then she looked down at one of the monitors and tutted. Little red LEDs were flickering. ‘Bugger! Higgs’s Generator four is fluctuating outside safe parameters, Mr Khan!’ she yelled across the room. A young Asian jerked his head in surprise, nodded, and began adjusting the controls on his station. Rachel growled. ‘One and a half hours to generate a stable stunnel! We haven’t managed to achieve it in six bloody months, but we’ve got to sort it all out in the next couple of hours or else we burn in our boots.’ She thumped the work-station and elicited an aggrieved bleep. ‘Oh, sod it. I came here to further the cause of science, not to perform miracles.’

  ‘Are you okay?’ Despite Rachel’s generally unpleasant demeanour, Chris couldn’t help but feel sorry for the woman. Unless she could perform a scientific miracle, they would all die.

  Like they were supposed to, a nasty little voice murmured in his mind. By warning the Charon survivors of their imminent demise, Chris was altering history – assuming they succeeded, of course, and the way things seemed to be going, that was far from a certainty. But if they did manage to generate a stunnel, over fifty human beings would live who should have died eight hundred years before Chris’s version of reality. Who knew what effect that would have on the web of time? Chris paused; where had he heard that term before? Then he remembered, and stray thoughts collided and coalesced and gave birth to an even more horrifying idea.

  The TARDIS had been destroyed when it was caught between a subspace infarction and a Vortex rupture, according to the Doctor’s hurried explanations as the time vessel started to break up. The infarction, well, Felice and Rachel’s stunnel experiments – and Chris’s presence on Charon, come to that – probably explained that. But a rupture in the Time Vortex...

  Chris was a learner: he listened, he read, he watched, and he took it all in. He had spent months in the strangely organized TARDIS library, learning about subjects that he had not even heard of. And that included a knowledge of the bizarre dimension through which the TARDIS travelled: the Time Vortex. From what he had gathered from his months in the TARDIS, if the Doctor’s precious web of time were damaged, the feedback could cause anomalies in the Vortex; the greater the damage, the worse the anomaly. What if the survival of the fifty or so Charonites changed history? What if Rachel, or Felice, or any one of the others survived, only to totally change Chris’s past? A seemingly innocent technician, forced to lend his talents to the Daleks’ war effort, could ensure that their aborted attempt
to mine Earth’s magnetic core succeeded and guarantee their sovereignty over the planet. Or five hundred years in the future, the descendant of one of the colonists could become a worse tyrant than Hitler, Green and Williams all rolled into one. Was the survival of Chris and the others worth the risk to history? His theorizing was interrupted by an excited shout.

  ‘The Thornley-Ramsay Ramping Law!’ yelled Rachel. She typed furiously, and nodded as the monitor displayed a complex wave formation. ‘It’s perfect! Why the hell didn’t I think of that before?’

  ‘The effect of adrenalin on the brain, perhaps?’ hissed Felice.

  Chris frowned; despite his basic attraction to Felice – and Rachel’s general belligerence – he found himself on the chief scientist’s side this time. ‘Hey,’ he intervened. ‘We’re all working together here, Felice. What’s the Thorn-Rampling Law, then?’ Time was short, and there definitely wasn’t enough of it to spare on personal rivalries.

  Felice glared, and Chris tried very hard to fight off his embarrassment.

  ‘The Thornley-Ramsay Law concerns the penetration of subspace,’ she stated coldly. ‘It’s never been applied, because we’ve never needed to use it. It applies to situations when the subspace boundaries are non-aligned.’ She nodded towards one of the monitor displays, which showed an oscillating web of purple lines.

  ‘What is that supposed to be, then?’ he asked.

  ‘The matrix which lies beneath subspace,’ Felice explained. ‘The invaders’ jamming field works by shifting the boundaries of that matrix slightly out of phase, making it impossible to shift between the real universe and subspace. Explanation enough, or should I repeat it in words of less than one syllable?’

  His ears just short of ignition point, Chris nodded. ‘Sort of. Will this law help?’

  Rachel answered as Felice picked up her tablette and started keying in data. ‘We’ve been looking at this the wrong way, Mr Cwej. We’ve been trying to counter the invaders’ field with brute force. They’ve flooded subspace with strange icarons, and we’ve been trying to punch through the interference – force our way through the non-aligned boundaries – by ramping up the strength of the stunnel carrier wave.’ She looked over towards a ruddy-faced man and beckoned him over. ‘Oi, Whiteley, get your arse over here.’ And then she busied herself at the keyboard.

  Felice continued the explanation, pulling Chris over to one side as she did so, mainly to prevent him from being run over by a technician with a trolley. ‘With the subspace boundaries out of phase, we can recalibrate the stunnel transjector and go underneath the jamming field. And the data that we got when you entered our earlier stunnel attempt will tell us exactly what energy levels to use. At least, that’s the plan.’ She grabbed his hand. ‘I’m sorry about that, Chris. Rachel and I, well, we don’t really get on.’

  ‘I’d gathered. But we haven’t got much time.’ Another twinge as Felice’s words sank in; his arrival on this base might be the direct cause of their escape. What the hell was he going to tell the Doctor if he ever saw him again?

  She sighed. ‘I know. And I know that you know a hell of a lot more about what’s going on than you’re telling me.’ She gave him a pleading look.

  What was he supposed to say? ‘Felice -’

  She held up her hands in mock surrender. ‘Okay, okay; you’re an Adjudicator. Loose talk costs lives and all that.’ Chris felt like throwing up; deceit wasn’t his strong suit. But the truth – that he was a stranded time traveller from the thirtieth century – wasn’t really the best way to gain the scientists’ trust, was it?

  ‘Felice?’ It was Rachel, head down, reading a monitor. ‘Can you work on the transjector arrays with Appleby? If we’re going to use Thomley-Ramsay, we need to carry out quite a bit of recalibration.’

  Felice shot Chris a smile, and he felt a quiver that he really didn’t want to feel: he liked her, but their lives were on the line. ‘Time to go to work, Chris. Make yourself useful and get me some coffee.’ She nodded towards the door. ‘There’s a replimat just down the corridor. White, no sugar, please.’

  Chris walked off with a mixture of emotions; he managed to identify them as lust, guilt and impatience. But not necessarily in that order. As he reached the door, he turned round, but Felice was deep in conversation with a thin, nervous man with a beard.

  He felt jealous.

  Roz suppressed a yawn as she continued trudging down the seemingly endless carved steps. Although the temperature had risen noticeably as they descended further below the surface, Roz was well aware that she was in danger of falling prey to another problem – exhaustion. Still, at least they weren’t going to freeze to death.

  But she also had other concerns. The Doctor’s blithe decision to travel to the North Pole using the Ice Warriors’ own cities and tunnels might have seemed a sound idea, but what if those cities and tunnels weren’t as abandoned as the Doctor thought? According to Benny, there had never been any absolute proof that all of the Martians had left for Nova Martia; for over a century after their exodus, there had been stories and tales that suggested that Man was still sharing the planet with his old foe. What if this Ikk-ett-Saleth was actually inhabited; would the Ice Warriors take kindly to a group of humans simply walking in as if they owned the place? The Ice Warriors hardly owed mankind any favours, did they?

  Any further speculation was cut short by a sharp increase in illumination from just below her. From what she could see, the stairwell had, thankfully, come to an end. Even with the comfort provided by the gravity bracelet, it had still been an uncomfortable slog.

  ‘Where are we now? The city?’ asked McGuire, peering over the Doctor’s shoulder.

  ‘Not quite, no; the staircase was basically a service shaft, Mr McGuire; this is the corridor proper.’ The Doctor stepped forward, beckoning them all to follow. As he did so, he blew out the everlasting matches. Walking out from the base of the stairwell, they found themselves in a wide corridor, hexagonal in cross-section. Each side was about ten metres in length, and each side was made from an almost translucent amber rock, polished to almost mirror smoothness apart from the decoration on the two upper walls.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ hissed Santacosta. ‘I didn’t realize that the Greenies lived like this.’

  ‘The Ice Warriors pride beauty and aesthetics above everything – apart from war, of course,’ said the Doctor. ‘This is one of what was an extensive network of tunnels which run under the surface. Of course, the Thousand Day War destroyed most of them.’

  ‘And a good thing too,’ muttered McGuire.

  ‘Mr McGuire,’ stated the Doctor coldly. ‘The Ice Warriors may be many things, but might I remind you that we are reliant on their hospitality to survive this current ordeal. Your prejudices are not welcome.’

  McGuire fell silent, but his face displayed his anger. It was clear to Roz that the man had some unfinished business with the Ice Warriors, something which was fuelling his hatred. She decided that it might prove wise to keep a close eye on Antony McGuire.

  ‘Ikk-ett-Saleth is a couple of kilometres in that direction,’ said the Doctor, nodding towards the left. ‘We should reach it in just over an hour.’

  ‘Why so long?’ asked Madrigal.

  The Doctor pursed his lips. ‘Because the Ice Warriors do not take kindly to unexpected guests,’ he said mysteriously. ‘Keep together – and do not touch anything,’ he warned.

  As they set off, Roz looked around at the corridor, agreeing with Santacosta’s earlier comment. It really was quite breathtakingly beautiful, and the fact that it was only one of thousands of similar corridors, a network that circumnavigated the whole of Mars, was a humbling thought.

  The lower three sides of the hexagonal tunnel were smooth and featureless, but the other three were anything but. Illumination was courtesy of the thick cables of brilliant yellow that threaded above them on the ceiling, complex interwoven patterns that covered the high surface and stretched the entire length of the corridor. Roz guessed that it
was some sort of bio-engineered fungus; she had seen something similar – but far less ornate – on the planet Igrillius 6. Such a light-source had the advantage of being both low-maintenance and long-lasting, ideal for a tunnel such as this one which would presumably have been busy when the Martian civilization had been at its height.

  Then there were the walls. As they proceeded down the tunnel to whatever reception awaited them in Ikk-ett-Saleth, Roz realized that the patterns that she had initially thought were merely decoration were in fact carvings; an endless line of engraved Martians, no two the same. Some wore the standard reptilian body armour that marked them as Warriors; others the smoother, more dignified costumes of Lords, and the odd one or two were in an ornate version of the Ice Lord armour. Roz guessed that they must be the Grand Marshals, the rulers of Mars when they had been a warrior race. The poses in which they were depicted were formal and stiff, and Roz racked her brain to work out why they looked so familiar. In her time, the new Martian homeworld – the inventively named Nova Martia – was still off limits to everyone; the Martians of the thirtieth century valued their privacy above everything, especially war. So what did this frieze of carvings remind her of?

  After minutes of irritating blankness, it finally occurred to her. The unrealistic poses, the angular symbols carved underneath each Martian – they were the Martian equivalent of Egyptian hieroglyphics. Each figure or collection of figures probably told some complicated and detailed epic that Roz would never understand, stories of an ancient culture that had fascinated so many archaeologists. Thinking of archaeologists, she really wished that she had some sort of recording device handy; Benny would have killed to see what Roz was seeing.

  She stopped her examination of the carvings at the sound of raised voices. The Doctor and McGuire were arguing, and she walked faster to catch up with them.