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  ‘As soon as you’ve done that, I want you to take Amy and Bel out the other way, out the way you scouted. Got it?’

  ‘Yes, Doctor.’

  ‘It’s important.’

  ‘Cat A. I understand. Where will you be while this is happening?’ Samewell asked.

  ‘I’ll be right behind you,’ the Doctor said. ‘But I need you to lead the way so you can open the doors with your hand.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Samewell, nodding. ‘Right. Got you.’

  The Doctor left Samewell standing watch at the door and walked back into the hologram field.

  Amy and Rory were face to face, looking at each other.

  ‘I was really worried about you,’ Rory said to her.

  ‘And I was worried about you,’ she replied. ‘You only went back for a coat. How hard is that?’

  ‘Uh, I think you got captured while I was getting a coat,’ said Rory, ‘so this whole series of disasters started with you.’

  ‘It started with the TARDIS missing Christmas by about a bajillion years, actually,’ replied Amy.

  ‘Well, I was really worried anyway,’ said Rory. He raised his hand, palm open, fingers slightly spread, as though he was pressing it against a window pane. Amy echoed the gesture with her left hand, so they could ‘touch’ hands through the holographic medium. An elasticated mitten dangled from her cuff.

  Their hands passed through one another. They both stepped back sharply, shaking their heads.

  ‘I thought that would be, like, really sweet,’ said Rory, disappointed. ‘I thought it would be a proper moment, like in those films when the hero’s in jail, and the girl visits him, and they put their hands up on either side of the glass partition of the visitor’s cubicle? You know, like that?’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said.

  ‘But it was just a bit creepy,’ he said.

  ‘It really was,’ she agreed.

  Rory saw the Doctor reappear.

  ‘What is that noise, Doctor?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing to worry about,’ said the Doctor cheerfully.

  ‘He’s just saying that so you won’t worry,’ said Amy.

  ‘What is that noise?’ asked Rory.

  ‘The Ice Warrior Men are drilling through doors to get at us,’ Amy told him.

  ‘What?’ Rory asked, very alarmed.

  The Doctor looked at Amy. His shoulders drooped and he sighed sadly.

  ‘It’s not even like it’s a difficult name to remember, like Jagrafess or Castrovalva,’ the Doctor said to her. ‘I mean, a friend of mine just made it up on the spot. Ice Warriors. It’s simple. It’s not hard. Why are you having such trouble with it?’

  ‘Probably the stress of the situation,’ Amy snapped.

  ‘Is she telling the truth?’ Rory asked the Doctor.

  ‘Not at all,’ replied the Doctor. ‘The word “men” has never had anything to do with their name. They’re just plain Ice Warriors.’

  ‘God help me… Are they drilling through the door, Doctor?’ asked Rory insistently, trying his best not to shout.

  ‘They are doing that,’ the Doctor admitted.

  ‘Doctor! You’ve got to get out of there!’ said Rory.

  ‘Has Vesta gone to get the council?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Rory.

  ‘Well, we haven’t really got time to wait for them to come back,’ said the Doctor thoughtfully. ‘Listen, Rory, it’s actually all very simple. The Ice Warriors want this planet. They want to conquer it and colonise it. They want to take it from the Morphans. But they need it to be colder. Tons colder. They don’t want the Morphans warming it up to make it all Earth-like. Their idea of Earth-like isn’t like the Morphans’ idea of Earth-like, and—’

  ‘Skip that part, Doctor,’ Amy advised.

  ‘OK, Rory,’ said the Doctor, focusing. ‘The crucial point is that the Ice Warriors have sabotaged the terraformer systems. They’ve reset them to plunge Hereafter into an ice age.’

  ‘Hence the sudden winters,’ said Rory.

  ‘Exactly,’ the Doctor agreed. ‘An ice age will suit the Ice Warriors just fine, but it will wipe the Morphans out. I’m not prepared to allow that. So… I’m going to sabotage the Ice Warriors’ sabotage, Rory. I’m going to undo what they’ve done, and accelerate the global warming processes of the terraformers. I’m going to make Hereafter a very uncomfortable place for any Ice Warriors to be.’

  ‘OK,’ Rory nodded.

  A sudden bang reverberated down the corridor outside.

  ‘They’re through, Doctor!’ Samewell yelled from the door.

  ‘Close that hatch, Samewell,’ the Doctor shouted back, ‘and get everybody through into the next room like I told you to!’

  ‘Yes, Doctor!’ Samewell replied. He put his hand on the palm-checker and the hatch slammed shut.

  ‘Sorry. Really running short on time,’ the Doctor said, turning back to Rory. ‘Like I said, I need to reset the terraformers, but they’re a huge and very complicated set of systems. I don’t want to cause a global disaster by, you know, fiddling around. I need plans or schematics to work from. Rory, all the Morphans I’ve met keep mentioning “Guide”. Guide, as I understand it, has principles that they live by. Instructions. I think they’re actually referring to a real guide, to codified information that the original colonists left behind to cover all the details of operating and maintaining the systems.’

  ‘I reckoned that too,’ Rory agreed. ‘It’s such an important part of their lives, they treat it as a sort of holy text. I’ve heard them calling it “Guide Emanual”.’

  ‘Emanual, or e-hyphen-manual?’ the Doctor asked, intrigued.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Rory. ‘E-manual. An electronic manual. I think it’s stored digitally. There’s a place adjoining the hall called the Incrypt. That’s where they keep it.’

  ‘I need a copy,’ the Doctor said.

  ‘Well, they won’t let me in there,’ Rory replied.

  The high-pitched dentist’s drill whine had started howling on the other side of the hatch. The Ice Warriors were right outside.

  ‘Come on!’ Samewell said to Amy and Bel. ‘We’ve got to go! Right now! Doctor says so!’

  ‘Doctor?’ Amy said to the Doctor.

  ‘Rory, I need the e-manual,’ the Doctor said.

  ‘I understand that,’ Rory replied, ‘but they won’t let me near the Incrypt.’

  ‘You’ve got to try, Rory,’ said the Doctor.

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Rory, I mean it,’ the Doctor said. ‘We can’t stay here. It’s not safe any more. We’ve got to go. I’m going to try to find another telepresence terminal like this one. Soon as I can, I’ll contact you again. Please, have the e-manual ready for me then!’

  ‘I’ll do my best, Doctor!’

  ‘I know you will,’ the Doctor said.

  ‘Doctor, we’ve got to go now!’ Amy yelled.

  ‘Amy!’ Rory called out, trying to see her past the Doctor. ‘Please be careful! Just be careful!’

  ‘You know me,’ she called back, waving to him as she tried to pull the Doctor away. She hoped he couldn’t see the tears in her eyes. It wasn’t fair she could see him but not touch him. It wasn’t fair that they were going to have to say goodbye and start running. It wasn’t fair that she might not actually get to see him properly ever again.

  ‘Go! Go!’ the Doctor told Amy. ‘Get Samewell and Arabel out of here and run!’

  ‘Not without you!’ Amy protested.

  ‘Oh my god!’ cried Rory, utterly powerless to act. ‘It’s not a choice. All of you run!’

  ‘I’ve got to disable this terminal so the Ice Warriors can’t access it,’ the Doctor said. ‘Amy, go!’

  Reluctantly, Amy ran across to the far door where Samewell and Arabel, both trembling with fear, were waiting. ‘Come on, Doctor!’ she yelled.

  The Doctor was adjusting the remote control, resetting the systems of the main console. ‘See you later, Rory Williams Pond,’ he said, grinning at Rory’s holographic i
mage.

  ‘Please, Doctor, go!’ Rory said to him, looking anguished and helpless.

  Something exploded. It made a loud noise like a gunshot. A sudden stench of burning metal filled the chamber. The drill had bored all the way through the lock.

  The hatch shunted open and two Ice Warriors shoved their way into the telepresence chamber. One had a broadsword. The other had an ornate battle-axe, the haft and blade all forged from one gleaming piece of metal.

  Arabel screamed.

  ‘Doctor, run!’ Rory and Amy both yelled at the same time.

  The Doctor turned, and saw the Ice Warriors bearing down on him. Two more had come into the room behind the first pair. The Doctor threw the remote-control handset at the Ice Warriors in an attempt to distract them, and then made to dart away sideways to reach Amy and the two Morphans.

  The Ice Warrior with the axe hurled his weapon with extraordinary strength and grace. Superb martial skill sent the gleaming axe spinning through the air, making a chopping, swishing sound as it flew. It was thrown wide, not to kill the Doctor, but to force him back and cut off his escape.

  The Doctor recoiled with a cry of alarm as the axe whooshed past him. It struck the console and buried itself, blade first, in the control bank. The impact blew out the power systems. The holographic image of the assembly hall, of the frantic Rory and the speechless Sol, blinked, flickered and vanished. A hot shower of sparks blew out of the console in a small explosion that knocked the Doctor to his knees.

  Amy wailed, ‘Doctor!’

  The Doctor tried to get up. A massive green pincer clamped his right wrist. He cried out in pain.

  ‘Go! Amy, go!’ he yelled, struggling to pull free.

  She was in the hatchway, staring at him in utter horror. Samewell and Arabel were trying to pull her out of the room, but she was fighting them off.

  ‘Doctor!’

  ‘Get out of here!’ the Doctor bellowed back.

  ‘Not without you!’

  ‘Lock the door and get away! Save Bel and Samewell! Run!’

  The other Ice Warriors were advancing on the doorway. In another few seconds, they would have her, and the door would be wedged, and they’d all be prisoners of one of the Doctor’s most implacable adversaries.

  ‘Please, Amy,’ the Doctor cried. ‘Please.’

  His eyes met hers. One last look.

  One last communication that was beyond words.

  Amy cried out in despair, and finally allowed herself to be dragged back through the hatchway by the two young Morphans. She rammed her hand against the palm-checker, and the hatch slammed shut in the faces of the Ice Warriors.

  It closed with such force, a single woolly mitten on a severed strand of elastic fell onto the deck.

  CHAPTER 13

  BRIGHTLY SHONE THE MOON THAT NIGHT

  The Doctor got to his feet. This was not an entirely voluntarily action. The Ice Warrior holding him by the wrist raised its arm, and the Doctor had no choice but to follow. It was either that or have one of his four favourite limbs snapped off.

  The Ice Warrior that had hurled the axe plodded over to the smouldering console and wrenched the weapon out. A spatter of sparks, like the spill of a foundry bucket, followed it and fizzled on the deck. The other Warriors formed a loose and menacing semicircle around their prisoner.

  ‘Hello, everyone,’ the Doctor said, trying to seem friendly and open to any options. ‘Why don’t we go around the room so that everyone can introduce themselves? You start.’

  The Warrior with the axe returned and faced the Doctor. He raised a large pincer fist and shoved the Doctor in the chest. With a grunt of surprise, the Doctor was driven backwards into one of the padded chairs.

  ‘Sit?’ the Doctor gasped, the air having been rather compressed out of his lungs. ‘Excellent idea. Excellent. I’ve been on my feet all day.’

  The Ice Warrior brought the axe down across the Doctor’s middle. It came so close to cutting him in half, the Doctor yelped and breathed in hard. The axe blade bit into one of the chair’s arms so that the handle was fixed across the Doctor’s body, like a solid metal seat belt. The Doctor was pinned behind it. He wriggled his arms back behind the haft so he could press his palms against it and keep it at bay. There wasn’t much room for movement.

  ‘What, um, happens now?’ asked the Doctor, looking up at his towering captors. Impassive red-lensed eyes glared down at him.

  ‘Oh dear. I have this horrible hunch that it’s going to involve killing me, or lopping bits of me off,’ said the Doctor, ‘and if that’s the case, I just want to say, you know, that’s not necessary. Or cool. I’m a reasonable sort. I’m sure we can talk about this—’

  ‘Wordsssss!’ hissed the Ice Warrior who had pinned him in place with the axe. The pronouncement was arctic. It was as though every single letter had been chipped out of glacial ice and then forced from the Warrior’s downturned slit of a mouth by a blast of polar air.

  ‘W-words?’ asked the Doctor.

  ‘Your elimination isss inevitable,’ said the Ice Warrior, ‘but firssst, there will be an exchange of wordsss.’

  Each syllable of the statement could not have been any colder if the Warrior had personally fetched them from a walk-in freezer. They seemed to smoke in the air like dry ice. The sibilant lizard-hiss of the Warrior’s voice sounded like the scrape of a blade being worked on an oiled whetstone.

  ‘You’re… proposing to have a conversation with me?’ asked the Doctor.

  ‘The conversssation will not be conducted by me,’ hissed the giant.

  ‘Oh, interesting! Who do I get to talk to, then?’ asked the Doctor.

  A figure had entered the chamber behind the half-ring of Warriors. He was not as tall or as broad as any of them, but he was just as imposing.

  The Ice Lord wore a regal, form-fitting body suit of titanium mesh. It was the colour of verdigrised brass pipework or pellucid green sea-ice. His armoured mantle and long storm cloak were of a darker green, as though they had been woven from the needles of an evergreen tree. His sharply domed helm was like the nose of a burnished artillery shell. It was made of gleaming white steel with a faint threadwork of pale green. It looked as though it could have been sculpted out of the finest Pentelic marble. The eye slots were lensed with jade glass.

  The Ice Lord came and stood in front of the Doctor.

  ‘You talk to me,’ he said. His voice was deeper than the wheezing, hissing tones of the bulky Ice Warriors. It reminded the Doctor of a distant rumble of thunder, like a ferocious ice storm lurking below the horizon of a bleak antarctic waste.

  ‘Great!’ declared the Doctor. ‘Let’s start! What shall we talk about? I think the weather’s always a polite topic of conversation. Shall we discuss the weather? Been a bit chilly of late, hasn’t it? Real overcoat weather. What do you think?’

  ‘Tell me about the new weapons you have arrayed against us,’ said the Ice Lord.

  ‘I don’t know anything about any weapons,’ answered the Doctor, ‘new or otherwise.’

  ‘Disinformation is not a good strategy to employ,’ said the Ice Lord. ‘New weapons have been produced and used. Account for them. Explain them.’

  ‘I can assure you,’ replied the Doctor firmly, ‘I have no knowledge of any weapons deployed against you. My only participation in your business today has been trying to prevent you from killing me and my friends.’

  The Ice Lord stared down at the Doctor for a long time, longer than any human would have held a silence. He didn’t seem to be having any difficulty comprehending the remark. It was more as though the Ice Lord believed that, if he waited long enough, he would get the answer he was waiting for.

  This, the Doctor knew, was entirely typical of Martian psychology. As a result, he did not respond. He fixed his gaze directly on the jade eye slits and waited. You didn’t win an argument with an Ice Warrior by arguing. You won it by staying silent for longer.

  Behind the jade lenses, black eyes gleamed like oiled obsidia
n.

  ‘This is disinformation,’ the Ice Lord said at last. ‘In the surface woodland earlier tonight, you evaded one of my combat echelons. You, and three other mammals.’

  ‘That could have been anyone,’ replied the Doctor.

  ‘It was you. Heatprints do not lie. It is verified.’

  ‘They were chasing us,’ said the Doctor. ‘They didn’t seem all that friendly. We were obliged to run.’

  The Ice Lord remained silent for another over-long moment.

  ‘When you refused to surrender,’ he said eventually, ‘they fired upon you. You withstood their sonic disruptors. I return to my original question. Tell me about the new weapons that have been arrayed against us. New weapons that can repel sonic attack.’

  ‘Oh, that?’ said the Doctor. He tried to appear relaxed, leaning back and attempting to casually cross his legs. The axe wedged across his chest rather cramped his style. After a couple of tries, he was forced to put his leg back down and pretend he’d only been trying to pick lint off his coat. ‘I wouldn’t characterise that as a weapon. It was an improvised defence against your unprovoked and lethal assault.’

  ‘Make an account of it,’ the Ice Lord growled.

  The Doctor sighed. ‘I can show you,’ he said. He shrugged helplessly against the axe that caged him in the chair. ‘Can I get to a pocket?’

  The Ice Lord looked at the attending Warrior and nodded. The Warrior reached forward, grasped the axe and plucked it out of the chair.

  The Doctor breathed out, smiled, and fished around in his coat for his sonic screwdriver. He took it out and showed it to the Ice Lord.

  ‘A simple multifunction tool,’ he said. ‘Not a weapon. Attacked by your cohort, I adjusted it to generate a noise-cancelling field that blocked the effects of their disruptors. Passive resistance. Do you understand me? Not a weapon.’

  ‘Demonstrate.’

  ‘I can’t. Fending your warriors off pretty much exhausted this device. It is non-functional.’

  There was another long pause.

  ‘On the other occasions,’ said the Ice Lord, ‘were devices such as this employed?’

  ‘What other occasions?’ asked the Doctor.

  ‘Do not evade.’