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  Lord Ixyldir looked at Ssord.

  ‘Level sssix,’ the Ice Warrior hissed.

  ‘Let’s go!’ the Doctor cried. ‘Lead the way, Ssord. Lord Ixyldir, we’ll walk and talk.’

  Ssord led the way out of the chamber. The other Ice Warriors fell in around the Doctor and Lord Ixyldir as an honour guard escort.

  ‘Walk as fast as you can!’ the Doctor urged. He looked at Ixyldir. ‘I need to know the details of your operation,’ he said. ‘It’s vital. On several other occasions, I’ve known your people to instigate terraforming processes on target worlds. You’re pretty good at it.’

  ‘When our migration fleet entered this quadrant, this planet revealed itself to be the most likely candidate for adjustment,’ replied the Ice Lord. ‘Long-range observation confirmed it met the majority of our colonisation criteria. We resolved to achieve orbit, to commence climate engineering, and then wait for the process to be completed by entering hibernation on our ships.’

  ‘Were you planning to use seed technology to bring about climate alterations?’ asked the Doctor.

  ‘You are familiar with the technique?’ asked Ixyldir, surprised.

  ‘I’ve stopped it more than once, actually,’ the Doctor said. ‘It’s very efficient, though. The destabilisation of carbon dioxide levels is often all it takes to induce a global arctic phase on an M-class world.’

  They left the gloom of the tunnels and followed a broad, railed walkway around the edge of a plunging turbine cavern.

  ‘Once we were in orbit,’ said the Ice Lord, ‘we realised that a human colony was already established on the candidate planet. It had been here for some time and, though comparatively small, it had constructed terraforming processors of significant size and effect. This process had been under way for several generations, and was already beginning to induce change.’

  ‘So you thought, “Why bother setting up our own terraforming programme to work in opposition? Why not just repurpose the one that’s already there?”’

  ‘This was deemed to be the most viable option.’

  The Doctor shook his head sadly. ‘This is where you and I will be forced to disagree, Lord Ixyldir. That was a pretty underhand gambit. You decide to steal a planet out from under these settlers, you co-opt their terraformers to do the hard work for you, and you essentially consign them to a generation or two of long, slow, bitter extinction. You signed their death warrants, Lord Ixyldir, but you let the snow and ice do the actual killing for you. You didn’t have enough respect for your adversary to pull the trigger yourself. Dirty pool, Lord Ixyldir. That’s dirty pool.’

  ‘I do not understand your reference,’ replied the Ice Lord.

  ‘It’s not very honourable, is it?’ replied the Doctor. ‘That’s what I’m saying. Theft, on a planetary scale.’

  ‘This was not the humans’ planet either. They selected it and claimed it. We were merely doing the same.’

  ‘But they were here first, Ixyldir. It’s a bit of a school playground he said, she said argument, I know, but do you know what? Most honour systems are built on very simple, basic concepts of ownership, or respect, or prior claim, or of precedence. The humans were here first, Ixyldir. You decided they were in the way, and you decided to steal their technology to eradicate them. Don’t talk to me about honour.’

  ‘It was a matter of survival,’ objected Ixyldir.

  ‘Ah yes, the famous pragmatism of the Ice Warriors. You didn’t mean to hurt anybody, but you were obliged to in order to survive. Lord Ixyldir, the deliberate and systematic eradication of an entire population is called genocide, and it’s not regarded as especially honourable either. Not where nice people come from.’

  ‘We had to survive! This was a viable planet—’

  ‘You had a fleet of ships, Ice Lord. You could have gone somewhere else. The humans did not have that option.’

  Ixyldir did not reply. For a few minutes, as the group continued to walk, entering a long, metal-lined hallway, the only sound was the tramp of feet and the rumble of the world-building engines.

  ‘Anyway,’ said the Doctor at length. ‘Let’s not dwell on your not-really-very-honourable-at-all decision-making process. You started to tinker with the terraformers. This was ten years ago. You knew it would be a gradual process that would take a long time, but you’ve got plenty of that, haven’t you? Hibernation systems on your starships. Lifetimes that are naturally three or four times those of humans. You could afford to play the long game. The Morphans, you know, they talk about patience a great deal. It’s a fundamental quality of their culture. Not an easy, sleep-through-it-all patience like yours. I’m talking about the patience required to live and work every day, generation after generation, for a future ideal that will benefit your descendants. It’s admirably selfless. Don’t you think so?’

  ‘It is… worthy of respect.’

  ‘It is, isn’t it?’ the Doctor said. ‘They just work towards the future. They make their contribution. They get no reward. They’re just investing the effort of their lives for the good of other people they’re never going to meet.’

  They came out into another turbine hall, and Ssord led them up a broad metal staircase towards an upper level.

  ‘So, your tinkering?’ said the Doctor. ‘You employed seed technology first?’

  ‘Modified seed cultures were introduced to the primary terraformer systems. Initial results were positive.’

  ‘But you reached a tipping point eventually,’ said the Doctor. ‘Eventually, as the winters began to get colder, the automatic monitoring systems governing the terraformer systems began to notice there was a problem. They performed self-diagnostic reviews and identified alien properties in the system. They needed to resolve the problem, so they accessed the DNA libraries, reopened the flesh banks, and grew a brand new batch of transrats to flush out the system.’

  ‘Vermin was our first problem,’ Ixyldir acknowledged.

  ‘Transrats are resilient,’ said the Doctor. ‘The more you killed, the more they made. That must have become a bit of a war. A guerrilla war, going on underground in the mountains, where the Morphans couldn’t see it.’

  ‘We prosecuted the vermin. The problem took about a year to control.’

  ‘You used standard sonic disruptors, and you were forced to destroy some of the DNA banks and flesh farms so that the terraformers simply couldn’t produce as many replacement transrats?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And that still wasn’t enough, was it?’ the Doctor asked. ‘They’re resilient, as I said. Eventually, you must have realised that you couldn’t beat the transrats. You had to find a way around them so they were no longer an impediment to your schemes?’

  ‘We were forced to select alternatives to the processes we had originally put in place,’ replied Ixyldir, ‘the processes that the vermin had disabled. Seed technology was no longer viable, because the vermin simply devoured it.’

  ‘You started to actually convert the terraformers themselves? Recalibrate their systems?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And that’s when things really escalated, isn’t it?’ asked the Doctor.

  ‘In here!’ Ssord said abruptly.

  The Doctor followed the Ice Warriors through a large hatch, noting that the palm-print reader had been drilled through.

  They entered a massive, well-lit control room. There were several banks of consoles like the one in the telepresence chamber, each with a row of high-backed chairs. The chamber itself overlooked one of the secondary sequence prebiotic crucibles through a vast plate-glass wall. The Doctor paused to enjoy the view of the giant chrome tree. Drizzle from the cloud systems swirling the ceiling of the crucible chamber pattered against the glass wall like light summer rain.

  ‘Yes,’ the Doctor nodded. ‘This will do the trick nicely. A central operation nexus. Would have taken me ages to find this, especially with you lot chasing me.’

  ‘What happens now?’ asked Ixyldir. ‘If you have tricked us into revealing t
he location of this facility to you, I will kill you myself.’

  ‘I would expect no less,’ replied the Doctor. He sat down at one of the workstations and began to play with the controls, lighting up banks of indicator functions and small hologram read-outs.

  ‘You see, Ixyldir,’ he said as he worked, ‘what I think has happened is this. You tampered with the terraformers. The system detected you, and manufactured transrats to solve the problem. So you started tampering in a different way to get around the transrat problem, and the system detected that too. It hadn’t got many options left, so it had to do something quite radical.’

  The Doctor turned to look at the Ice Lord.

  ‘It built something else, Ixyldir,’ he said. ‘Something bigger and nastier. With what was left of its flesh farms, it manufactured something else.’

  ‘Like what, cold blue star?’ Ixyldir asked.

  The Doctor shrugged.

  ‘The next effective stage beyond transrats. Something Transhuman, is my guess. And that’s what you’re fighting now.’

  CHAPTER 15

  NOW IN FLESH APPEARING

  The thing prowled out onto the bridge. It was making a noise in its throat that was part growl, part purr. Its metal claws clinked on the grilled walkway as it took each step.

  Amy, Bel and Samewell backed away from it, almost forgetting that a pair of Ice Warriors was closing on them from behind.

  It was a monstrous thing. It was almost a man, a huge, lean, well-muscled man, in the same way that a transrat was almost a rat. It had been seriously bio-engineered. Its feet and hands were cybernetic implants that extruded huge steel talons. Amy realised, with rising disgust, that she could see where the bones of the hands were fused into the metal sheathing. Flexible armoured cables corded its skin like external arteries, and its scarred, baby-pink flesh was puckered with grafting scars, and covered with sockets and surgical plugs. It was moving on all fours like a giant cat. There was a disturbing hint that its human DNA had been blended with that of a major predator, like a leopard or panther, altering its spine, hips and legs so that it could move fluidly and comfortably in quadruped form. It smelled of meat and blood and diseased tissue. Upright, it would have been easily as big as the Ice Warriors, perhaps as much as three metres tall.

  Its face was a human skull that had been reinforced with chromed steel and adjusted, like a regular road car customised as a hot-rod. The jaw was huge, and the chin pointed and prominent, in order to accommodate the gleaming set of monstrous fangs. The teeth, twice the size of even adult human dentition, were coated in steel like precise medical instruments. It had a grin full of scalpels. Lip-less, cheek-less, the teeth formed a permanent smile. The crown of the skull was covered in wires, cables and tubes that formed a long, straggly mane of thick strands.

  Its eyes glowed red.

  It pounced.

  Amy, Bel and Samewell ducked instinctively. The thing went clear over them anyway. Leaving a deep, throbbing growl in the air behind it, it crashed into the Ice Warriors.

  Still cowering low, Amy turned to see what was happening. The red-eyed monster was taking both of the Ice Warriors on. The glinting steel claws of one forepaw ripped around and tore a deep gouge through the scaled chest plate of one of the Ice Warriors, driving him backwards. The Warrior hissed in pain. His companion swung in, wielding the ornate broadsword with both pincers. The first stroke missed. The red-eyed monster was ridiculously agile and fast. It somehow slipped under the Ice Warrior’s next stroke, and turned as it rose behind him, burying both sets of front claws in the Martian’s back. Green battle armour shredded. Individual scales twinkled like stars as they showered into the air. Amy flinched as the red-eyed monster lunged its huge jaws forward and ripped into the back of the stricken Ice Warrior’s neck.

  The other Warrior had regained its footing. As the red-eyed thing savaged his comrade’s throat, he swung the axe. It struck the monster squarely in the right shoulder. Ugly, unhealthy-looking blood sprayed from the wound. The monumental impact smashed the red-eyed thing off its prey and clean through the guard rail. It fell.

  It did not fall far.

  With extraordinary gymnastic skill, it snagged the struts on the underside of the walkway, and swung under the bridge, somersaulting up, free, on the other side. It landed on the Ice Warrior with the axe from behind, knocking him over, face-first, into the half-broken guard rail. Entangled, they fought brutally with each other, each one trying to break the other’s grip. The red-eyed monster tore away first, but only so it could pull back and put all its inhuman strength into a driving hook that ripped across the Ice Warrior’s face, shredding his visor.

  The Ice Warrior, mortally hurt, staggered backwards, hissing like a punctured tyre, and toppled over the torn rail. He dropped away into the flaming abyss below.

  The other Ice Warrior, bleeding from his jagged wounds and ruptured scale-armour, came at the red-eyed thing, swinging his sword. The thing evaded the first two strokes, and then drove at the Ice Warrior, catching the side of the razor-sharp blade with its cybernetic hand. It plucked the sword out of the Ice Warrior’s grip and threw it away. Then it went for the Ice Warrior’s throat. The Ice Warrior clawed at it, grabbing it by the neck and shoulder with his powerful clamps. Locked together, they wrestled ferociously for a few seconds.

  The Ice Warrior, understanding that he was weakening and bleeding out, understanding that he was up against an adversary who was stronger, faster and essentially superior, understanding that he was effectively beaten, did what all dedicated warriors do as a last resort. Gripping the red-eyed thing that was busy killing him, so tightly that it couldn’t break free, he lurched off the walkway too. He took his red-eyed tormentor to its doom alongside him.

  They vanished from view in the fires far below.

  Amy, trembling, looked at the two young Morphans.

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ she said. ‘You know, before something else really, stupid well insane happens.’

  But it was too late. There were more of them, more of the red-eyed things.

  They were stalking out of the hatch and onto the bridge, advancing towards the three, defenceless humans.

  Rory, Vesta, Winnowner and Jack Duggat backed into the assembly hall, trying not to make any hasty movements. Jack still had hold of his hoe, but not in any way that suggested he was likely to wield it.

  The red-eyed It that Vesta had seen in the woods prowled in after them. Gazing at them, it padded through the snow like a leopard on all fours, frost glinting on its matted mane of tubes and wires. It smiled an eternal, unintentional steel smile.

  It entered the wood-panelled hall, and looked around, as though sensing something familiar. It returned its crimson gaze to the four terrified humans and stared at them. Then it rose on its hind legs and stood upright like a man, an adjustment that was somehow even more distressing.

  ‘Oh, save us,’ whispered Winnowner. ‘What has Guide wrought?’

  ‘Guide,’ the thing echoed. It was a horrid, sticky sound, a rumble that was part growl and part phlegm. Its fearsome teeth made normal speech impossible, but it gurgled the word out of a small, cybernetic vocal implant that they could see in its throat, now that it was standing upright.

  It was so frighteningly tall.

  ‘Guide…’ it repeated. ‘I… am assigned to secure and protect… the Guide system.’

  ‘The Guide?’ asked Winnowner.

  ‘The Guide system… must not fall… into enemy hands. Aggressors have been detected… tampering has been detected… purge now under way.’

  It raised one gnarled, part-metal fist and wiped droplets of blood off its awful teeth.

  ‘I… am assigned to secure and protect… the Guide system. It is… here.’

  ‘What are you?’ asked Rory.

  ‘Transhuman sixty-eight of one hundred fifty… woken and refitted for this Category A emergency…’

  ‘Woken?’ asked Rory.

  ‘From… the cryo-store,’ it replied. �
��Stand aside… I am assigned… to secure and protect… the Guide system.’

  They wavered.

  ‘I am… sanctioned to slay… anything that stands in opposition to my task…’ it said.

  They got out of its way. It dropped back onto all fours and padded past them.

  ‘I never asked for this!’ Winnowner said. ‘I just asked for help! I never expected that any of the patients would be woken!’

  Rory looked at her sharply. ‘Wait, you said “woken” too! What do you know?’

  ‘Only what I must know!’ Winnowner snapped. ‘The secret that passes from one generation to the next, through the last in each line. The secret that I must pass to Elect Groan before the end of my time.’

  ‘I think you should share it with the room,’ said Rory, ‘because your time could be up any second now.’

  ‘No!’ Winnowner said.

  ‘What is this?’ asked Vesta. ‘Winnowner Cropper, what is this?’

  ‘Winnowner?’ Jack urged.

  ‘I will keep Guide’s secret. It is not my place to tell.’ Winnowner’s voice dropped low. ‘I will keep it to the end, for the good of all Morphans.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s anything like good enough right now,’ said Rory.

  ‘Tell us what this thing is and what it wants!’ Vesta demanded.

  ‘Be silent!’ the red-eyed thing growled, turning back to them and rising up again. ‘Or I will… silence you.’

  ‘I don’t think that would be very friendly at all,’ said the Doctor. ‘Especially not as you’re all supposed to be on the same side.’