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  ‘If there are still Martians in Ikk-ett-Saleth – and I very much doubt that there are – we are not going in with all guns blazing, Mr McGuire.’

  ‘They’ll shoot us as soon as look at us, Doctor – don’t you understand that?’

  The Doctor closed his eyes and sighed. ‘I do understand that Earth has been invaded; surely it will not be long before the invaders turn their attention to Mars? A Mars on which the only two sentient species are still at loggerheads would prove far easier to conquer than one on which they pool their resources; do you not agree?’

  McGuire turned away with a look of disgust, and Roz was sure that he had muttered ‘Greenie-lover’ as he did so. ‘You do what you bloody well want to, Doctor.’ With that, he carried on walking down the corridor.

  ‘What was all that about?’ she asked, watching as McGuire carried on alone.

  ‘McGuire is carrying an awful lot of emotional baggage, Roz. I was trying to act as a psychological porter, but it all went a little bit wrong.’ He rubbed his forehead. ‘I’m not the Time Lord I thought I was.’

  Before Roz could comment, a loud cry rang out – it was McGuire. Roz looked round, but the man was nowhere to be seen.

  ‘Damn!’ snapped the Doctor. ‘I thought that the Ga’jurett-Lii’is would be much closer to the city.’ He broke into a run.

  ‘A Ga’jur-ett-Lii’is!’ exclaimed Esteban. ‘I must see this.’ He ran off after the Doctor. With a shrug, Roz followed.

  McGuire was hanging by his fingers over what might as well have been a bottomless ravine; a metre-long chasm had opened up, reaching from wall to wall.

  ‘The Martians call it the Ga’jur-ett-Lii’is – the lure for the unfamiliar,’ explained the Doctor, seemingly unaware of McGuire’s predicament. Roz wondered whether this was some kind of twisted psychological torture on the Doctor’s part, revenge for McGuire’s xenophobia. A little voice inside her reminded her of her own attitudes before she had come on board the TARDIS, but she silenced it.

  ‘Get me out!’ yelled McGuire, but the Doctor carried on as if he had not heard him.

  ‘In Ice Warrior terms, we are approaching the city boundaries. The Ga’jur-ett-Lii’is ensures that only those who are welcome to enter may pass. Somebody familiar with the ways of Ikk-ett-Saleth would have seen the warning signs’ – he pointed at the hieroglyphics on the wall to their left – ‘and known what to do.’

  The Doctor reached over with his umbrella and waved it over the carvings, before finally shoving it at an Ice Warrior figure with its arms outstretched.

  With a low rumble, a slab of amber stone began to slide across the gap.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said the Doctor, as the slab closed in on McGuire’s fingers. ‘I didn’t expect that.’

  With breathtaking speed, the Doctor threw himself forward and grabbed McGuire’s wrist. The slab was about five centimetres away from consigning McGuire to a very long drop as the Doctor dragged him out of the chasm.

  McGuire lay on the floor, looking extremely shaken. But he was still able to look up at the Doctor and smile hesitantly. ‘Thank you.’

  The Doctor didn’t return the smile; instead, his eyes narrowed as he answered, ‘Just remember, Mr McGuire; the Martians should never be underestimated.’

  A simple enough statement; so why did Roz find herself translating ‘underestimated’ as ‘trusted’?

  Rachel knew that she was taking it out on everyone around her, but for once she felt it was justified. Not that the justification was retrospective enough to forgive her for the countless other displays of both general and specific bad temper, but she knew that the time for confession and absolution would be at the other end of the stunnel.

  If she could create the stunnel.

  If it had another end.

  The faint smell of scorched fibre optics assaulted her nose, and she looked around the chamber for the source. It was obvious from the commotion surrounding the tall, thin cylinder to the immediate left of the stunnel mouth that her underlings were quite prepared to turn it into a major crisis. And, given the importance of that particular cylinder, that was a definite possibility. Grunting, she slammed her tablette on the work-station surface and barged over to the three technicians who were doing their best impressions of wastes of space.

  Ignoring their witterings, Rachel examined the tall, grey pillar. A long thin panel had been removed, exposing the delicate circuitry within. The pillar was one of the eight Higgs’s generators arranged along the length of the stunnel generator, equipment which created the elementary particles whose unique properties could open the subspace meniscus and rip the fabric of the continuum apart, granting them the access to subspace that they desperately needed. Losing even one of the generators would make their current predicament a dead end. Very dead for all of them.

  ‘The primary trunk shows signs of overloading, Professor,’ mumbled a mouse of a girl called Dortmun. Rachel shook her head in disbelief. Signs of overloading? Couldn’t she be more specific? Rachel tried to be understanding – her research staff was mainly culled from the survivors of the Black Fleet’s attack, and most of their knowledge of subspace engineering came from Rachel and Felice’s informal teach-in sessions – but Erica Dortmun had no excuse for her crass stupidity: she was here as a graduate in subspace mechanics from the University of Greater London, and her father was apparently a renowned scientist back on Earth. Assuming he was still alive, that was.

  A single glance at the insides of the Higgs’s generator told Rachel volumes; one of the minor relays was having trouble handling the increased throughput from the generator and was causing a feedback into the subtrunk – a side-effect of the rewiring that they had been doing to take advantage of the Thornley-Ramsay Effect. Ironically, although they were no longer trying to penetrate the blockade using brute force, they needed even more power to operate that deep in subspace. The answer was simple: the relay needed to be replaced by one of the sturdier models from the depleted stores. And soon. Another five minutes and the entire generator would be slag.

  ‘Rachel!’ She looked round, but she needn’t have; Felice Delacroix was the only person on the Charon base – apart from the newly arrived Chris, of course – who ever addressed her so informally. Quickly ordering Dortmun to replace the relay, she walked over to her deputy. Felice was intelligent, but intelligence was more than a matter of a first-class degree and a doctorate from Cambridge. Given time, the girl would grow and learn, but time was the one thing that Charon didn’t have. Rachel just hoped that Felice could handle the strain that they were all under.

  ‘What’s the problem?’ she asked as she walked over to her deputy.

  Felice smiled. ‘There isn’t a problem, Rachel – everything checks out at this end. Once the Higgs’s generator is back on line we’ll be ready to generate the stunnel.’

  ‘How long have we got?’ Chris loomed up behind Felice, smiling in that ingratiating way of his. Why the frag did he look so much like Michael, she wondered, before registering what Felice had said.

  ‘You’ve installed the feedback sink?’ Her earlier doubts about Felice were quickly evaporating – she was good, when all was said and done; especially since the motley crew helping her were less a help than a hindrance. ‘I’m impressed. We’ve got -’ she glanced at the image from the ‘scope, and saw from the telemetry that they had less than forty minutes before the saucers were in range. Five minutes less than when she had last checked. ‘Forty minutes. If Dortmun over there remembers to put her brain in, the relay will be recalibrated in about five minutes... Bloody hell, after the safety checks, we’ll have less than twenty minutes!’

  ‘Screw the safety checks, Rachel,’ said Felice enthusiastically, ‘let’s just make a stunnel and to hell with it!’

  Rachel threw her head back and roared with laughter. Perhaps Felice had learnt something from her after all. ‘Good thinking. No, excellent thinking. Start the primaries – they don’t need the Higgs’s. And as soon as Dortmun gets her butt in gear,
we’ll get going. Okay?’

  Both Felice and Chris grinned back at her, warmly.

  And for the first time since she had heard the news of Michael’s death, Rachel felt accepted, felt that she belonged. That felt good.

  ‘Welcome to Ikk-ett-Saleth, ladies and gentlemen!’ The Doctor threw his arms open and bellowed his greeting across the entire Red Planet, or so it seemed to Madrigal. ‘The City of the Sad Ones awaits us.’

  Christina Madrigal looked over the Doctor’s shoulder and was grudgingly impressed. She’d seen alien cities before, of course; being in the Colonial Marines had broadened her outlook considerably. Born on Earth, in one of the ghettos that leeched off the Massachusetts Conurb, she had escaped the poverty and depravity as soon as she could. Signing up with the Marines, she had toured the Alliance and the worlds of its neighbours: dawn on Kentaurus one day, nightfall on Arcturus the next. Twin suns setting in a purple sky, followed by a bloated red giant rising over the horizon, while Arcturan cities shrouded in methane gave way to the elegant and oxygenated turrets and pillars of Alpha Centauri.

  Ikk-ett-Saleth was something else.

  Madrigal estimated that the city was approximately seven kilometres across, lying at the bottom of a huge deep bowl smoothed from the Martian rock – the result of the Greenies’ fabled sonic technology, no doubt. She wondered how long it had taken them to excavate a space this large; the engineering effort must have been astronomical. You had to hand it to the Greenies, she thought; when they built cities, they really built cities.

  Realizing that the cavern was even brighter than the corridor, she looked upwards for the source. The illumination was courtesy of a small but concentrated area of what she assumed was the same bio-luminescent fungus from the tunnel, high up in the centre of the roof. But what a roof: the translucent amber rock was inlaid with a darker material like jet, forming a mosaic that must have been over five kilometres across. It was a triangle overlaid with a jagged lightning bolt, with an artificial sun burning in its centre. ‘What is that?’ she whispered.

  ‘Martian planetary identification glyph,’ said the Doctor. ‘Their flag.’

  Shaking her head in amazement, she looked around. She and the others were in the wide gallery that had opened up from the corridor, a circular, three-metre-wide ledge that ran round the entire circumference of the bowl. Other doorways were just visible at regular intervals around the gallery, and Madrigal guessed that they led to other parts of the corridor network. A metre-high lip of a green, onyx-like material, carved with an assortment of angular glyphs, provided a degree of security from the gentle thousand-metre slope of smooth grey rock which led to the city:, Ikk-ett-Saleth, City of the Sad Ones.

  From where they were standing, the entire city was laid out below them, its distance making it look like some town-planner’s model; at its centre – exactly below the false sun – was a thin golden pyramid, about five hundred metres tall, while the other buildings – low, flattened cylinders – were laid out in concentric circles around it. But the main impression was one of space, of room; the majority of the city was devoted to parks and woodland. True, they weren’t made of grass and trees but orange moss and purple bushes, but a park was a park on any planet.

  ‘That is an areothermal geyser, I would wager,’ muttered the Doctor, pointing at the pyramid with his umbrella. ‘The reason that we managed to avoid hypothermia.’

  ‘It is deserted, isn’t it?’ asked Santacosta. ‘If there are Greenies still around...’

  ‘Ikk-ett-Saleth is deserted, Ms Santacosta,’ said the Doctor. ‘I can assure you of that.’

  Madrigal wasn’t convinced. Like the others, she had heard the stories, the rumours. The briefly glimpsed figures lumbering through ruined Martian cities; the travellers who strayed from the recommended routes and never arrived at their destination; the short snatches of radio signals, being broadcast in a language that definitely was not one of Earth’s. Madrigal wouldn’t have bet her wages on Mars being deserted, that was for sure.

  If they encountered Greenies in Ikk-ett-Saleth, they would have to be dealt with. She automatically checked that her plasma pistol was still holstered at her hip; although she didn’t want to enter Ikk-ett-Saleth with all guns blazing, if there was a possibility that the expedition was threatened, she was prepared. The Mayor of Jacksonville had asked her to accompany McGuire’s expedition to provide protection, and, being a Marine, she knew the meaning of duty.

  ‘The main causeway to the city is just over there,’ said the Doctor.

  ‘Can’t we just bed down here?’ asked Roz. ‘It’s warm, protected ...’

  ‘Why do that, when there are beds and blankets down there,’ said the Doctor. ‘Come along, Roz: not long now.’

  As the extremely weary travellers began the last stage of their journey, they were totally unaware of the four shadows observing them from the far side of the city bowl.

  ‘They passed through the Ga’jur-ett-Lii’is!’ whispered Cleece. ‘How?’

  Aklaar reached up and placed a clamp on Cleece’s shoulder. ‘Since the Thousand Day War, some humans have made a detailed study of our ways; of our culture and our customs. The trap of the unfamiliar way was laid wide open for us, since we are pilgrims, and privy to the secret signs. The humans obviously have a man of learning in their party, and he could prove more dangerous than an entire battalion of warriors.’

  Cleece shook his head. ‘The result of the lax security of a civilian nest. If this had been Liis-arrat-Ixx, or another of the military nests, the Xssixss would have been their downfall.’

  Esstar sighed. Cleece’s obsession with military history was wearing. An Xssixss – the path of easy virtue – was a false entrance corridor into a Warriors’ nest, one which ensured that any intruders were picked off well before reaching the Queen’s chamber. In essence, it was exactly the same as a Ga’jur-ett-Lii’is, the unfamiliar way. But to Cleece, a Ga’jurett-Lii’is was naturally inferior to his Warrior traps. Anything the Warriors did, anything the Warriors built, was superior. The fact that the Warriors’ actions had cost them their home planet did not seem to worry him.

  ‘This city is abandoned, Abbot,’ added Sstaal. ‘What harm would there be in the humans enjoying its comforts, when there are comforts to be spared?’ Esstar had to agree with him; Oras had always welcomed all comers to his table, even his treacherous brother Ssethiis and his sister-wife Netysss.

  ‘They are vermin!’ spat Cleece. ‘Vermin who dare to infest Ikk-ett-Saleth! This city is disgraced, that is true; but they will bring an even greater disgrace upon it by desecrating it with their presence.’

  As always, Sstaal tried to be conciliatory. ‘But Oras says -’

  Cleece smashed his clamps together. ‘Oras be damned!’

  The shocked silence was electric. Cleece’s outbursts were habitual, but this time he had gone too far. Far too far. This was blasphemy of the first order, and Esstar could not help but feel the shame that her accursed mate brought upon her.

  Cleece obviously realized the magnitude of his insult. Then again, he would have been an even bigger fool to remain silent. ‘Abbot, I beg forgiveness,’ he murmured, bowing his head.

  Sstaal stepped forward. ‘Oras says -’

  ‘Peace, Pilgrim Sstaal,’ hissed Aklaar, holding up a clamp. ‘Pilgrim Cleece speaks from concern for the memories that are buried in Ikk-ett-Saleth. Such concern provokes deep passions, and his outburst must be forgiven. I suggest that we spend some time meditating over the Ninth Book of Oras: the Rebirth of the Father.’ He reached into his thick hide belt and retrieved a small book, bound in green leather. ‘Be seated,’ he gestured, ‘and let us pray.’

  Aklaar and his pilgrims sat down in a circle, cross-legged, their copies of the Book of Oras in their clamps. ‘Let us repledge our souls to Oras.’

  Speaking as one, the Martians began. ‘Through your teachings, sacred Oras, may we find the path to heaven.’

  Meanwhile, on Charon, all hell was breaking loose.
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  ‘Check the software!’ screamed Rachel over the even louder screaming which bellowed from the stunnel mouth. According to the master work-station, the Higgs’s generators were doing their job; indeed, the swirling vortex in the stunnel mouth was proof that the subspace meniscus had been penetrated. But the stunnel itself simply refused to obey the laws of physics and resolve at the other end.

  Although none of their previous attempts had been any more successful, this situation was different. They were taking a radically different approach, and all the indications were that they should have managed it this time; indeed, from the readouts in front of Rachel, there should have been a stable subspace tunnel between Charon and the Ultima relay, sixteen million kilometres beyond Cassius and well outside the blockade – their escape route. But there wasn’t. There wasn’t anything apart from a bit of ineffectual subspace penetration.

  Felice looked up from her own station. ‘I’ve checked the Matterbase program; it’s running okay.’ She shook her head. ‘Damn it, Rachel, it should be working!’ She tapped on her work-station keyboard and frowned. ‘The glitch must be coming from somewhere, but where?’ She glanced over at the telemetry relay from the telescope. Rachel followed her gaze and froze.

  The three saucers were assuming orbit around Charon, ebony disks that bristled with gun-ports. Chris had been right so far: the ships had set off from where he said, and had arrived when he said. So his prophecy of ion cannons, photon impellers and anti-matter drills bombing them into oblivion was a very real threat. Rachel estimated that they had about ten minutes before the surface of Charon began boiling into space.

  ‘Got it!’ yelled Dortmun. ‘The quantum resonators need recalibrating – they’re not working properly this deep into subspace. It’ll take about five minutes.’ Rachel was relieved; even Dortmun was living up to her responsibilities.

  ‘We haven’t got five minutes,’ said Felice, hurrying over to the other woman’s station to give her a helping hand. Rachel re-evaluated Felice yet again; she really did know what she was doing. It just needed the right circumstances to bring it out of her. It was a shame that those circumstances involved death raining down on them from the sky.