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  ‘And that’s the interesting part,’ he went on. ‘Shipskin’s the toughest material you’ve got. It’s rare. It’s a precious commodity.’

  ‘So?’ asked Amy.

  ‘So why did the Morphans build a shepherd’s hut out of it?’ asked the Doctor. He stamped his heel again and began to grin.

  ‘What have you found?’ Amy asked.

  ‘As usual, the obvious!’ he announced. He dropped to his hands and knees and started to rake up the earth floor with his fingers. ‘Come on! Help me! Before they knock that door in!’

  They all got down and started to scrape the soil away with him. There was something under the dirt, just a few centimetres down. Something metal.

  ‘It was surprisingly dry in here,’ said the Doctor, working fast. ‘That’s the first thing I noticed. Dry. And made of metal. Well, made of metal was the first thing I noticed. Then I thought, why’s it so dry in here?’

  ‘You’re gabbling,’ Amy said.

  ‘Sorry,’ said the Doctor.

  There was a particularly loud bang from the door. Part of the lip had folded in. They could see a massive green pincer clamping at the frame, trying to prise it open.

  ‘It’s obvious,’ the Doctor said. ‘I was over-thinking it! The Morphans don’t call this a vent because it’s a derivation of a word for wind, they call it a vent… because it’s a vent!’

  They had dug away and exposed a large hatch in the floor. The Doctor brushed dust and dirt out of a latch mechanism.

  ‘Hurry!’ advised Amy looking at the door.

  ‘This is an exhaust outlet,’ said the Doctor, ‘venting warm air from the underground systems. It’s part of the large scale terramorphing mechanisms built under the landscape here. There are probably hundreds of them all over the countryside. The Morphans have come to use them as huts because they’re usually warm and dry. They don’t remember what they were originally.’

  Amy looked at the doorway. Part of the door was bent inwards and a great deal more of it was bulging. Two sets of large green pincers were now visible, trying to shear the bolt away from the frame.

  ‘Really hurry!’ she said.

  The Doctor adjusted his screwdriver, ratcheted around a setting and aimed it at the latch. It made a rather sickly and pathetic noise. He shook it and banged it against his hand.

  ‘I drained so much power noise-cancelling the Ice Warrior weapons,’ he sighed. ‘It’s feeling rather sorry for itself. It just wants to sit in a pocket quietly and recharge. Come on,’ he whispered to the screwdriver. ‘Just do this, and I won’t bother you again all day.’

  ‘Doctor!’ Amy cried.

  Another formidable bash from the doorway had begun to deform the bolt.

  The Doctor aimed the screwdriver carefully again, clicking the base end of it with his thumb as though it was a ballpoint pen. The sonic burbled, flashed, and then maintained a steady, whirring cycle. Three green lights winked on in series across the latch unit, and the hatch released with a clank and a hiss.

  They hoisted it up. It lifted on one heavy-duty hinge like a submarine’s front door. It revealed a vertical metal shaft that descended into darkness. There was a metal ladder fixed down one side.

  ‘Go! Quickly!’ the Doctor urged.

  ‘Where does it lead?’ asked Arabel.

  ‘Away from here,’ replied the Doctor, ‘and that’s probably it’s most appealing quality at the moment. Go!’

  Amy scrambled onto the ladder and started to descend. Arabel followed her, and then Samewell.

  The Doctor held the hatch lid up, and then followed Samewell as soon as the lad had gone down a few rungs.

  Behind him, a final brutal blow broke the door in. It squealed open on mangled hinges and snow swirled into the vent. An Ice Warrior filled the doorway, staring with malevolent yet expressionless red eyes.

  The Doctor clattered down the first few rungs, pulling the hatch lid down after him.

  It had almost engaged in the shut position when a green pincer caught the edge of it and wedged it open.

  With an exclamation of alarm, the Doctor pulled down.

  The Ice Warrior pulled up.

  No contest.

  CHAPTER 9

  THE NIGHT IS DARKER NOW

  The Doctor grabbed the underside handle of the hatch with both hands, teetering on the edge of a rung. He dragged down on it as hard as he could, teeth clenched, eyes closed. Below him, climbing down the ladder as fast as they could go, Amy, Arabel and Samewell looked up and called out in dismay.

  The Ice Warrior simply flipped the hatch up as easily as if he was opening the lid of a wheelie bin. The hatch went up, and the Doctor went with it. He was pulled clean off the rung he’d been standing on. He dangled for a nanosecond from the handle, his legs hanging free and driving the pedals of an invisible bicycle.

  Then he lost his grip.

  The Doctor dropped like a stone. The sudden release of his weight jerked the hatch out of the Ice Warrior’s clamp of a hand, and it fell shut. There was a click as the latch engaged.

  The Doctor was in no position to appreciate that the Ice Warriors had just been shut out. He was simply in a position of falling crazily down the vent shaft with his legs and arms waving. He hit Samewell first, knocking the young man off the wall ladder. Samewell barely had time to grunt in surprise. They were falling together when they hit Arabel, who was immediately below Samewell. The impact took her off the ladder too. She held on by one hand for a second, but couldn’t retain her grip. Then she was falling with them.

  All three of them, a tumbling, yelping bundle of limbs and bodies, collided with Amy, who was the lowest of the four. Her feet slipped off the rungs of the ladder, but she managed to retain her grip. The elastic strap connecting her mittens through the sleeves of her duffel coat caught on the rung for a moment, just long enough for her to plant her grip.

  The Doctor, Samewell and Arabel plunged past her and vanished into the darkness of the shaft below.

  ‘Oh my god! Oh my god!’ Amy babbled, hauling herself back onto the ladder properly, and tilting to gaze down at the drop below. ‘Oh my god! Doctor! Doctor!’

  Her voice echoed back. There was no other sound. There was no reply. There was no reassuring answer, no It’s OK, Amy, we landed safely on this convenient mattress.

  On the positive side, there was no sound of impact either.

  Amy swallowed hard, shocked by the disastrous turn of events. She called out their names again, and clambered down a few rungs. Then she went back up two steps, unhooked her mitten elastic, and started again.

  There was a resounding clang from up above. The Ice Men had started work on the hatch.

  Ice Warriors, she told herself, Ice-stupid-well Warriors.

  She started to climb down as fast as she could. Several times she went too fast and slipped. The shaft seemed to go down for ever. They were going to be so dead when she finally reached them. It was going to be upsetting, and very messy, and then she was going to be alone with only Ice Men for company.

  Warriors. Warriors!

  She carried on down, running out of puff from the exertion. Despite the Doctor’s earlier pledge that the day would be full of Christmas fun, and there’d be an absolute minimum of unnecessary shouting and running about, it had turned out to be the exact opposite. Things really had to stop ending up like this. The universe was a beautiful, amazing and enthralling place, and she wanted to travel widely and enjoy it, preferably in the alive company of her husband and her good friend the Doctor. Amy was beginning to believe that she wasn’t getting the most out of the universe by touring it at speed, and viewing it in passing. There was never any time to look at things. There only ever seemed to be time to glimpse things while running away from other, more pressing, things.

  Amy stopped. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath and blew it out. Her mind was in totally flippant mode because she was trying to block out the idea that she had just seen the Doctor fall to his death, along with two other people she did
n’t know particularly well but had good reason to believe were nice and entirely undeserving of death by high-speed ground.

  She opened her eyes and started to climb down again, breathing hard, trying to bolster her confidence. The steady, brutal clanging from the hatch far above wasn’t helping much.

  They wanted in, and they wanted in now, did those Ice Men. Warriors. Warriors.

  She ignored the banging and scraping, and kept going, one rung at a time, hand-and-foot, hand-and-foot, down and down. How far did this place go?

  Amy became aware that there was something different about the shaft below her. It was hard to tell what at first. She grimaced and really hoped it wasn’t a decorated with splatted bodies type of different.

  Fortunately, it wasn’t.

  The ladder was coming to an end. The rungs ran out at a point where the whole shaft began to gently tilt to the left, like a drainpipe. It went from a straight vertical to a 35-degree drop with a very smoothly engineered bend like a joint in a piece of guttering.

  She felt a distant breeze, cool and fresh coming up from below. The shaft seemed to be full of sound, sound just waiting for a chance to echo.

  She stepped off the last rung and steadied herself on a sloping floor that, three metres higher up, had been wall.

  ‘Doctor?’ she called.

  The echo came back to her. She edged forward.

  It was quite tricky to walk on the angled floor. She struggled to keep her balance. The Ice Warriors continued to hammer and gouge at the hatch high above her.

  The tube reminded her of something. She realised what it was. It was like a giant version of those water slides they had at big leisure centres, those great big, slaloming tube rides that Rory loved so much. It was just like that.

  Or it was like an oversized version of those hamster playpens people bought from pet shops on the assumption that hamsters liked that sort of thing.

  She wasn’t convinced they did. If this was typical of the experience, it wasn’t much fun and she could begin to appreciate the generally surly demeanour evinced by many hamsters.

  She edged her way along. There was still no sign of the Doctor or Arabel or Samewell. They must have come all the way down and then shot off around the bend like Rory on a monster waterslide. Or a surly hamster doing hard time in a transparent plastic penitentiary.

  ‘Doctor?’ she called again, leaning forward to peer into the darkness, combing her hair out of her eyes with her fingers. ‘Doctor? Give us a shout if you’re OK, yeah? Doctor?’

  Behind and above her, the Ice Warriors turned their sonic blasters on the unyielding latch and blew it to pieces. The awful noise of the blast reverberated down the shaft to her and made her jump. Her foot slipped. She kept her balance.

  She looked back the way she had come. She heard the ruptured hatch shriek open and saw shadows move in the light shining down the vent shaft.

  The Ice Warriors were in. They were Ice Warriors, and they had opened the hatch, and they were inside the shaft, and they were coming after her. There was not a single part of that summary that didn’t utterly terrify her.

  She had to hurry. She took another step, another, moving faster.

  Her foot slipped. She steadied herself again. Then both feet slipped at once, and this time she did not keep her balance.

  Amy went over on her backside.

  ‘Ouch!’ she cried. Then she realised that falling on her bum was not going to be the worst of it.

  She was moving. She was sliding. She was travelling down the shaft.

  She protested aloud, to no one in particular, and started to paddle and scrabble with her hands and feet. To no avail. She was picking up speed. She was sliding down the shaft as if it was a chute, on her bottom, like Rory on a monster stupid waterslide. She couldn’t stop herself. She couldn’t get up.

  Gaining speed with every passing second, Amy rode the slide, helplessly, deeper and deeper underground.

  Snow was falling. It was the blackest kind of night Rory had seen in a long while, cold and enclosing, giving nothing back. Big flakes of snow just seemed to hurtle blindly out of the darkness, zooming at him.

  He was following Vesta through the snowy woods. She had brought her little solamp, but they had agreed to try travelling without it on for as long as they could. A light could attract the wrong kind of attention. Vesta had assured Rory that she knew which way to go. She knew the woods. She knew how to get them to Beside.

  Rory believed she meant it, but he was still worried. They had left the comforting heat of the autumn mills – automills, surely? – behind them and set out into a frozen night. There was a very good chance they would die of cold before they got anywhere, and that was without factoring in the it with red eyes that was out to get them.

  His clothes had dried out during their stay in the warmth of the mill. He was glad of his coat. He wasn’t convinced it had been worth going back to the TARDIS for it. Maybe the day would have turned out to be rather less energetic if he’d stayed with Amy and the Doctor. Then again, he had no way of telling what sort of adventures they’d been getting up to. He had a fond notion that they would arrive at Vesta’s village, Beside, and find the Doctor and Amy already there, already firm friends with everybody, telling stories, sitting by a hearth, eating hot food. His fond notion had a giant Christmas tree in it too, so he knew some of the details were completely fanciful, but he had hopes.

  Rory was also a realist. He tried to count the number of times they had arrived anywhere, by accident or design, and not stumbled into some predicament or other. The only answer he could come up with was zero. It was inevitable, as inevitable as the wheeze of the TARDIS’s console, as inevitable as the Doctor’s sudden grin of insight. These predicaments, Rory believed, naturally attached themselves to Time Lords. In fact, with only one Time Lord left, there was probably a serious backlog of predicaments waiting to be attached. Danger, problems, plight, peril… He wouldn’t be particularly surprised to learn there was some sort of detector circuit aboard the TARDIS that automatically drew them towards trouble. The Doctor would probably admit it one day, casually, as though he thought they already knew. ‘You mean I didn’t tell you about the Predicament Seek-O-Matic Module? I didn’t? I could have sworn… Should I switch it off for a change? Yes, why not? I’ll switch it off.’

  Snowflakes continued to stream out of the darkness, become suddenly visible, and hit him in the face. They were like stars. It was like rushing through the cosmos. It was piercingly cold and blindingly dark, and all he could see were little bright white objects speeding by. It was like travelling through the universe in the TARDIS and, like the TARDIS, there was no way of knowing exactly where you were going, or how safe it would be when you got there.

  Amy was travelling at speeds in excess of anything she was comfortable with, especially given the fact that she wasn’t riding aboard anything like a bike or a skateboard or a luge or a rocket ship, and she wasn’t in any way in control at all.

  The lining of the tube felt frictionless, and resisted her frantic attempts to grab hold of something or stop herself. The pitch was also increasing, dropping her down a raked slide even steeper and more alarming than before. Eyes wide, hair flying out behind her, she zoomed down the tube. She realised it was the sort of ride that she might have enjoyed under other circumstances, none of which were presently operating. She also realised she was making desperate, strangled noises like ‘agh’ and ‘eek’ and ‘yrk’.

  Then she flew out of the mouth of a tube and landed on a bed of soft, dusty material. She bounced and came to a halt. Coughing, she slowly got to her feet. Her impact had puffed a huge cloud of dusty fibres out of the mass. She was in a small metal chamber, and the dusty material was a thick mass of leaf mould and vegetable fibres that had been sucked into the vent system and had accumulated there to rot. It had probably saved her from serious injury.

  Still coughing, she glanced back up the dark tube of the vent system.

  ‘I am not doing that aga
in,’ she said.

  Her feet, striving for some autonomy, chose that moment to skid out from under her and prove her wrong. She slipped, fell down on her rear end again, and shot away down the next extension of the tube system, ‘eek’-ing helplessly.

  ‘Not fun!’ she yelled at the top of her voice, experiencing an even sharper, steeper, faster ride than before. The tube twisted at one point and almost inverted her, before finally ejecting her into another chamber lined with deep, springy and slightly musty leaf matter.

  Amy got to her feet a great deal more carefully than she had after her previous landing. She thought for a moment that she might have damaged her shoulder or back, because it was difficult to straighten up, but then discovered that this had less to do with a sprain or dislocation, and more to do with the fact that she was standing on one of her elasticated mittens.

  She let the mitten ping out from under her foot, straightened up properly, and stared into the gloom around her whilst combing bits of dead leaf out of her hair with her fingers.

  ‘Doctor?’ she called. ‘Doctor?’

  The metal chamber, plain and grey and boxy, had several exits, all of which were further tube mouths. She edged around, making sure not to slip and plunge off on another escapade.

  ‘Doctor?’

  One of the vent tubes ran for a horizontal section, and there was a kind of fluted duct to one side that she clambered through. She was now in a hallway. It was long, metallic and dark. The air was cool but dry. A small amount of ambient light was issuing from recessed lamps in the wall. The lamps looked like smaller and more sophisticated versions of the lights the Morphans used, the devices they called solamps. The glow reminded Amy of the output of solar garden lights that had been on all night and were beginning to tire.

  ‘Doctor? Hello?’

  There hadn’t been much opportunity to argue with where the tube was taking her, so she wondered how the Doctor, Bel and Samewell could have ended up anywhere else.

  Amy listened hard to see if a faraway voice might be answering her calls, and realised she could hear something. It was a humming, a deep resonance. She could feel it more than she could hear it. It was the sound immense machinery made, the steady industrial purr of automation, heard from a distance. It felt as if she was inside a huge factory, the biggest factory ever built, and all the machinery, whirring and chugging away, was hidden from view behind the metal skin of the walls around her.