Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Copyright
To all the Masters – past, present and future
The worst machine in the universe was a marble-grey box no larger than a coffin or shipping trunk. Its base was wider and longer than its lid, so that the sides had a slight cant to them. Three of the sides were blank, save for that marbling. The fourth, one of the two ends, had an angled console jutting out from it. The console’s upper surface was set with a square matrix of white controls, each of which had been embossed with a precise black symbol in an alien alphabet. There were 169 controls, 169 different symbols, and the Red Queen’s people understood about 75 of them. The rest had eluded their best scientists for centuries.
The Red Queen regarded the machine as possessing a quality of intrinsic malevolence. If anything could be said to be evil, it was this device. Yet she could not afford to ignore its transformative power. Of all the potent technologies recovered from the Consolidator, the ghost ship that had fallen into orbit around her adopted world, this was by far the most important and seductive.
The machine was called the Infinite Cocoon.
It was fitting.
‘The volunteers are ready, ma’am.’
The Red Queen – her full title was Her Imperial Majesty Uxury Scuita – nodded at the aide who had scuttled up to her throne to deliver this information. Like all Praxilions – like all the native creatures of this world she ruled – the aide was a furry caterpillar, a pipe-cleaner bent into an upright ‘L’. Its canine head reached the level of her knees when she was on the throne. The little Praxilions had many limbs, differentiated for function, and red and white longitudinally striped fur that made her think of toothpaste and seaside amusements. They smelled like sweet shops and perfume counters.
‘Remind them again that they don’t have to do this.’
‘They know that, ma’am.’
‘Nonetheless, tell them again. Let there be no doubt.’ Without asking for assistance, the Red Queen pushed herself to her feet. She reached for the sceptre she kept clipped to the chair’s side, using it as a walking stick as she made her hobbling way down the set of stone stairs at the throne’s base. Praxilion aides skittered around her anxiously, ready to catch her should she fall. ‘I’ll be all right,’ she muttered. ‘Allow me a moment on my own, then bring the volunteers in.’
The evening air was cool on her private balcony. She waited until the door was shut behind her, then made her way to the ballustrade, sceptre clicking on the hard stone flooring. Her right hand gripped the gold-crusted sphere screwed into the top of the sceptre. She rested the other on the balcony’s rail.
It was a long way down, but she had always had a head for heights. She thought of the sea, roiling far below, on a similar evening. But there was no sea visible from the imperial palace; they were too far inland for that.
Praxilion was a beautiful world, especially at twilight. Gently rolling hills, purple in the gathering gloom, ferried her eye to the pink-hazed horizon. Here and there, like clumps of pale frogspawn, were Praxilion villages and hamlets. She had grown accustomed to their alien architecture over the years, with its blobby preponderance of domes and small, igloo-like dwellings. It almost looked homely. They had been good to her, the Praxilions.
There. Her eye caught the rising spark of the Consolidator, climbing from the west. It was difficult to miss, being the only large thing in orbit. A ship as large as a small country, older than the very world it encircled – and one that her people had barely begun to explore, despite six thousand years of trying.
They had done well, given the difficulties. The technologies and materials they had already extracted from the Consolidator’s less impregnable vaults had accelerated Praxilion’s industrial revolution to a tremendous degree. But there was so much more waiting to be brought down, if only they could get at it. And yet each new item seemed to cost them more than the last. The Axumillary Orb had taken a dozen lives to bring it into her grasp. Dozens more had been lost trying to understand the thing’s safety mechanisms, which had been carefully locked when the fabled weapon was placed aboard the Consolidator. No wonder she kept it close at hand. Twice as many Praxilions had been lost bringing out the Infinite Cocoon – and many, many more had gone to their deaths by volunteering to test the machine itself.
It was late in the evening. The galaxy was old. Its stars had been through many generations of birth, exhaustion and rebirth. Praxilion astronomers had surveyed these ailing, metal-clotted suns and found scant signs of intelligence beyond their own world. But the records extracted from the Consolidator spoke of a different era. A bright, teeming period, when the galaxy held court to countless species, countless cultures. A period when even the ultimate barrier, time itself, had been shattered. The Epoch of Mass Time Travel, or the EMTT.
A time of wonder and miracles.
The Praxilions were haunted by a terrible sense that they had come too late to the party. But the Consolidator offered a glimmer of hope. Somewhere in the ship, so their intelligence led them to believe, was the secret of time travel – a fully functioning time-portal device. The Praxilions dreamed of forging a connection between their world and the distant past – a rejuvenating umbilical.
It was a good and noble ambition, the Red Queen thought. It would have been even better if it had not required the use of the Infinite Cocoon.
She returned inside. The volunteers were assembled next to the waiting machine, together with a small cadre of nervous technicians. The lid of the machine was open – it had slid off to the side, appearing to support itself along one edge. A greenish-yellow glow shone upwards from the open casket, illuminating the high-flung arches of the imperial palace.
The Red Queen walked to the machine’s side. She leaned her weight onto the sceptre.
‘I’m getting old,’ she said. ‘You all know this. I was younger when I came to your world, but that was thousands of years ago. Drugs and stasis have slowed the march of years, but they have not stopped it completely. The Consolidator would probably recognise me as a humanoid, were I to go aboard it. But there is just one of me, and I am far too frail to be much use up there. I am but a weak and feeble woman, as someone once said. That is why we have called for volunteers. That is why you are here, before the Infinite Cocoon. The people of Praxilion thank you for your courage. But you do not have to go through with this. There will always be others willing to take your place, and there will be no shame in turning away now.’
‘I am ready,’ said the first volunteer.
‘Good,’ the Red Queen said, studying the naked creature. They all looked the same to her, Praxilions, and divested of their belts and harnesses and armour were all but impossible to tell apart. Furry, friendly looking tubes of red and white, like draught excluders. ‘And what is your name?’
The Praxilion said: ‘We are Ver.’
They had three sexes, which even now the Red Queen had difficulty in distinguishing. Females, males, and a gender that translated, perhaps imperfectly, as ‘sculptor’.
‘Very well, Ver,’ she said. ‘Whatever happens from now on, you have the thanks of your people, your world, and me. We take none of this lightly. Are you ready for the Infinite Cocoon?’
‘I am ready,’ the brave creature answered.
‘Do you understand the risks? That, even if the transformation is successful, it cannot be guaranteed that the process is reversible? You may have to spend the rest of your existence shaped like me?’
‘I understand.’
‘We will of course do our best. You have that promise.’
‘Thank you, your Imperial Majesty.’
‘Then we shall begin.’ The Red Queen nodded at the technicians. Four of them moved around Ver and lifted the Praxilion from the ground, then deposited their charge in the waiting interior of the Infinite Cocoon.
‘Good luck, Ver,’ she said.
The technicians shuffled back on their many legs. Two of them moved to the console at the end of the machine.
‘We’re ready,’ one of them said.
‘Proceed.’
The technicians did something. The Infinite Cocoon’s lid began to slide shut, squeezing the greenish-yellow light down to a narrow bar, then eclipsing it completely. The box was sealed.
It began to hum and gurgle.
‘Support medium entering the cavity,’ said one of the technicians. ‘All indications nominal.’
The white buttons were lighting up and going dim, in complicated fashion. The technicians responded to these changes calmly, but with great haste and seriousness. It took two of them, and they both needed to use three sets of upper-body manipulators. It was like a cross between brain surgery and speed chess.
‘Commencing metabolic breakdown,’ reported the other technician. ‘Digestion proceeding along normal pathways.’
‘Compensating for variance in absorption equilibrium,’ stated the other. ‘Stabilising… confirmed. Outer tissue and muscle mass now losing coherence.’
‘Skeletal structure growing diffuse. Peripheral nervous system now fully attenuated. Tracking core neural functions.’
There was a question she had always meant to ask at this point. Was the subject conscious? Was the subject aware of what was happening to them, what might yet happen? The relatively few volunteers who had endured the Infinite Cocoon came through with puzzlingly different reports. Some were adamant that there had been a continuity of experience, an unbroken chain from the moment the lid closed to the moment it opened. That they had maintained a thread of narrowing awareness even as they were reduced to a kind of soup. Others spoke of no such continuity. It had been like falling asleep, or drowning, or being smothered in warm wet clay. Then there had been a nothingness, a kind of death, before the emergence, harrowing or otherwise. Sometimes they remembered their past lives. Not always.
Perhaps it was best not to know.
‘Phase one metabolic breakdown complete. All indications normal. Beginning morphic patterning.’
The machine kept up its humming and gurgling. Beneath the lid was now nothing that resembled a Praxilion. A thing, in other words, not unlike the Red Queen herself.
‘Growth symmetries established. Tissue differentiation proceeding normally. Ready to accelerate patterning.’
One of the technicians raised a two-fingered hand. ‘Hold.’
The other technician glanced at the control matrix. ‘Phenotype template’s drifting. Try and lock it down.’
‘What do you think I’m doing, for Praxil’s sake?’
Haste now became panicked urgency. There had been a coordination to their efforts before; now their six pairs of hands threatened to become tangled up, like pianists fighting over a grand piano. The buttons were lighting and dimming at a quickening rate, almost too fast for the Red Queen to track. The Praxilions had speedy reflexes, but even they had their limits.
‘Switch to procedure six!’
‘I have! It didn’t work! We’re on seven now!’
‘Not working either. Switch to eight.’
‘Too risky!’
‘You must! We’re already past the point of no return!’
The Red Queen’s grip on her stick tightened. The knot in her stomach had become a dark coiling horror. She had seen things go wrong before. It was very, very unusual for there to be a good outcome once this point was reached. The Infinite Cocoon was almost maliciously unforgiving.
‘Stabilising,’ one of the technicians reported. ‘I think we can bring it back!’
‘Perhaps.’ The other sounded a cautious note. ‘Re-imposing initial contours.’
The Red Queen whispered at an aide. ‘What are they trying to do?’
‘Trying to bring Ver back, I think. The morphic patterning failed, but if they can re-impose Praxilion anatomy…’
‘I thought they were past the point of no return.’
‘They were. A little. But if they can’t go forward…’
‘We have it!’ called one of the technicians. ‘Partial morphic lock reacquired. Lock firming up! Praxil be blessed! Ver, hold on in there! We’ve got you!’
‘Hold on,’ the Red Queen whispered. And in that moment her eyes met those of the other two volunteers, still waiting near the Infinite Cocoon. She nodded at them, sharing their concern. For an instant the barriers of species and rank were irrelevant. They were all thinking creatures and they wanted Ver to come through this. No matter if the attempt to impose human anatomy had failed; they just wanted brave little Ver to survive.
‘Reconsolidating,’ one of the technicians said, the dance of lights on the console beginning to ease.
‘Biochemistry approaching Praxilion norms,’ said the other. ‘Ver is coming back!’
The Red Queen let out a sigh of thanks. So the Infinite Cocoon had chosen to be merciful today. It was nothing that could ever be counted on, but she was grateful. Even if her hatred of the thing only deepened, that it could be so viciously unpredictable.
‘Support medium draining away. Subject has regained full biological integrity.’
‘Get the lid open,’ she called. ‘Now!’
Reluctantly, perhaps, the technicians hastened the process to completion. The machine stopped humming and gurgling. The lid began to slide aside. Yellow light flooded out of the widening gap. The Red Queen risked a step closer to the open machine. The technicians were peering in over the sides, straining their pipe-cleaner bodies to their maximum extension. She caught a flash of red and white within the box, a moving mass of bright coloured fur. A living, breathing form.
Ver was back.
Something sprang out of the box. It was a thin, tapering tentacle, striped like a barber’s pole. It curled itself around one of the technicians and hauled them into the air, over the lip of the Infinite Cocoon, into the box. The technician screamed. The others, for a moment, were too shocked to move. Then another tentacle shot out, and a third, and the Red Queen halted, knowing that something had gone appallingly wrong, as it so often did.
Whatever had come back, it wasn’t Ver.
A second technician was in the grip of the monster now, emitting a shrill note of pure terror, like a boiling kettle, even as its colleagues tried to grab onto it. And then a detachment of armed guards arrived, carrying gold stun rods that crackled with purple and lilac electrical discharges, and they looked to the Red Queen for her orders.
‘Kill it,’ she said.
And so they did, plunging their stun rods down into the machine, poking and prodding, the thing in the machine making its own terrible sounds, a kind of protracted slurping, and after a few seconds of that the technician that had been caught was hurled out, visibly dead, and the second was released, sprawling back, its body twitching like an accordion, legs and arms thrashing in the air.
It did not take long to kill the monster; it usually didn’t. Confined within the machine, disorientated, they were seldom able to put up much of a fight. But even now, the Red Queen could not say for certain which were the worse sort: the monsters that wanted to break out and kill everyone, like this one, or the ones that wanted only to die.
‘That was a bad one,’ she said, when the technicians had finished recording the remains and cleaned what had once been Ver out of the machine. ‘Almost the worst we’ve seen. I want a full report as to what went wrong, of course.’ Then she added, though it hardly needed to be said: ‘Poor Ver.’
‘It will take some time to compile the report,’ one of the technicians said. ‘And even then, there probably won’t be much we can say for certain.’
‘Do what you can. In the meantime, all volunteers are to be released from their obligations. No one should have to go through that.’
‘And the time machine project?’ asked the other technician.
‘Suspended, until we can be sure of not doing that to anyone again.’
‘We’ll never have that certainty,’ the first technician said glumly.
‘Your Majesty?’
It was one of the other volunteers speaking, one of the two that had been waiting.
‘You are excused,’ she said, with a generous sweep of her hand. ‘You’ve proven your courage by coming this far. Go, return to your families. You owe Praxilion nothing.’
‘We’d still like to go through with it,’ said the other. ‘We’ve been studying the statistics, and…’
‘Technically, there’s an improved chance of success after a major failure,’ said the first volunteer.
‘And by anyone’s reckoning,’ the second said, ‘that has to count as a pretty major failure.’
‘Did you know Ver?’ the Red Queen asked.
‘Ver was our friend. Ver would not have wanted Ver’s death to dissuade us,’ said the first. ‘Ver understood what a difference the time machine could make to Praxilion. We must have that technology. No matter the costs.’
‘Ver’s bravery mustn’t be wasted,’ said the second forcefully. ‘The technicians aren’t to blame. We trust them. We are ready to take our chances with the Infinite Cocoon. We are ready to become like you.’
‘And risk becoming something worse?’ she asked.
‘For Praxilion,’ they said in unison.
The Red Queen looked down. Her instinct was to turn them away. They were courageous, it was true. But they also craved the glory that would come to anyone who managed to get far enough into the Consolidator to find the fabled time equipment. Fame, fortune, prestige beyond measure.
For now, she suspected glory had the upper hand.
The inescapable fact, though, was that sooner or later someone was going to have to get into the box again.
‘Your names?’ she asked.
‘We are Hox and we are Loi,’ they answered in unison.
‘Very well then, Hox and Loi. I commend your dedication. Which one of you wants to go first?’
After billions of years of imprisonment, the vicious Sild have broken out of confinement. From a ruined world at the end of time, they make preparations to conquer the past, with the ultimate goal of rewriting history. But to achieve their aims they will need to enslave an intellect greater than their own…
On Earth, UNIT is called in to investigate a mysterious incident on a North Sea drilling platform. The Doctor believes something is afoot, and no sooner has the investigation begun when something even stranger takes hold: The Brigadier is starting to forget about UNIT’s highest-profile prisoner. And he is not alone in his amnesia.
As the Sild invasion begins, The Doctor faces a terrible dilemma. To save the universe, he must save his arch-nemesis… The Master.
Alastair Reynolds was born in Barry, South Wales. He gained a PhD in astronomy and worked as an astrophysicist for the European Space Agency before becoming a full-time writer. His books include Revelation Space (shortlisted for the BSFA and Arthur C. Clarke Award), Chasm City (winner of the BSFA Award), House of Suns (shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award), Terminal World, and Blue Remembered Earth. He lives in Wales.
‘Cromarty. Wind: variable three or four, becoming west or north west five or six. Sea state: smooth or slight, occasional moderate later. Weather: fair. Visibility: moderate or good, occasional poor. Fair Isle. Wind: variable five…’
The upper-class BBC-accented voice on the wireless was delivering the shipping news. It was an old battery-operated set, sheathed in imitation red leather with a circular plastic dial, perched between bottles and fishing weights on a makeshift plywood shelf.
Listening to the shipping news was one of the few pleasures Pat McGinty allowed himself. He imagined the man in a hut, much like his own – the shipping forecast passed to him under the door. Perhaps it was all this man did, delivering the forecasts. There was a practical component to McGinty’s enjoyment, too. His livelihood depended on the weather, the storms and high tides.
Right now, though, what McGinty most needed was new batteries for the wireless. It was turned up to the maximum and still the voice was scratchy. He would turn if off in a little while, save the power a little longer. He looked at the toy crab he had found out on the beach after the last tide. The strange, nasty-looking thing was still skewered on the end of the harpoon McGinty took when he went out with his wheelbarrow. It was funny the way he’d found the crab, out on the beach, the seagulls picking at it.
He examined it again now, pulling it off the harpoon’s spike, wondering what kind of toy it was meant to be, and if he could get at the batteries. Some kind of science fiction nonsense, probably. The main part of it, the crab body, its legs and feelers (or were they tentacles?) was made of a brittle silver. On its back, the size of a miniature whisky flask, was a glass cylinder. The body had broken easily under the harpoon, but the glass part had already been shattered when he found it.
McGinty turned the toy over and over, looking for screws, a hatch that he could open and get at the insides. There had to be batteries in it somewhere, didn’t there? The thing still twitched every now and then.
‘Forties. Wind: variable three, becoming east or north east four. Sea state: moderate. Weather: fair. Visibility: moderate or good. Forth. Wind: variable four…’
McGinty was just moving to turn off the wireless when there was a knock at the door.
Not exactly a knock, more a sharp but deliberate tapping, as if a seagull were pecking at the base of the door. McGinty frowned and rose from his chair. It might be one of the children from the village, come down to the beach to taunt him. Perhaps the same ones who’d sprayed ‘nutter’ on his hut.
The tapping came again.
McGinty fetched his harpoon. He crept to the door, unlatched and opened it in one easy movement. It was dark, but there was a moon out. A soft, salt-laden breeze drifted off the sea. The beach was colourless, receding to the water’s margin where a phalanx of low waves broke into foam.
But on the ground was another metal crab. McGinty recognised it for what it was, and in that instant he recognised also that this crab was not broken; that the glass and metal canister on its back was as yet undamaged. Green light spilled from the container and the neat little joints in the crab’s mechanical anatomy.
The crab looked as if it was squashed down, pressed into the sand by an invisible force. But the crab was only waiting.
McGinty raised an arm in a reflex defence, but it was too late. The crab sprang onto him, clutching its legs around his sleeve, and then – almost too quickly to believe – it was scuttling up the sleeve, up to his shoulder. The legs gripped hard enough to make him yelp. He dropped the hook and tried to paw the crab off him. Screaming now, he felt it scuttle around his neck. The crab’s grip tightened. Those metal legs were tipped like talons… McGinty felt two stabs of pain and coldness. The crab had sunk its fangs into the back of his neck, beneath the base of his skull.
And then there was a pain beyond pain, a pain that smothered and consumed like the sea, rinsing away the last human trace of the man he had been. His body thrashed and whirled as if in the throes of some terrible electric shock.
And was then still. McGinty stood, his arms at his side. There was something not quite right about his stance, as if his entire body now hung from an invisible thread. A long line of drool spilled from his mouth.
‘I am Sild,’ McGinty said, his voice slurred and slow, as if talking to himself in his sleep. ‘I am Sild and I must find the one. Find the one called the Master.’
An iron and concrete fist rammed its way out of grey waters, like the great gauntlet of some vast drowning knight. It was a production platform, an oil rig, located 200 kilometres from the Aberdeenshire coast.
A helicopter, much the same grey as the sea below, chugged its way toward the platform beneath an ominous cloud ceiling. The bulky craft had a military look to it: matte paint, various bulges and bumps suggesting weapons, sensors or countermeasures. But in the way of markings it was remarkably devoid of obvious affiliation to any of the regular branches of the British armed forces. Only a small circular logo betrayed the helicopter’s current operational assignment. In truth, few people would have been any the wiser even if they had been close enough to read the letters and words on that logo.
UNIT: the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce.
Whatever that meant.
Certainly the young woman pressing her face to the helicopter’s window had not had much of a clue about what she was getting into when she was first assigned to UNIT. Time travellers, ancient enemies from beneath the Earth, forces and factors beyond the planet – elements both benevolent and hostile and just as often imponderable in their motives. Even now, years into her career as civilian scientific liaison, she was only just beginning to grasp the sheer scope of what her job with UNIT might yet entail. Literally, the fate of the Earth and human civilisation.
Dizzying, really.
Would she have accepted, had she known? It was a question Jo Grant came back to time and again. And always, upon due reflection, the answer was the same. Yes, and yes, and yes. Despite all the terrors, all the sleepless nights, it was better to know than not to know.
And sometimes, just occasionally, on the very good days, she had to admit that it could be quite good fun.
Today was not shaping up to be one of those days.
She wasn’t overly fond of helicopters to start with, noisy, cramped things that they were. Helicopters and rough weather was a bad combination. Helicopters, rough weather, a long flight, an early start and a greasy canteen breakfast was about as bad as it could get. Jo doubted that she had seen anything less inviting than the production platform. But right now all she wanted to do was get down onto it, onto what passed as the nearest thing to dry land.
Above the four thick cylindrical concrete pillars that supported the platform from the waves – and vanished into the dark, roiling waters below – was a rectangular structure about the size of an office building or large multi-storey car park. Various extra rectangles had been stuck on the side of the main one, cantilevered out over the sea. The whole blocky mass was wrapped in a dense dark tracery of pipes and walkways and ladders, giving the unnerving impression that it was still some way from being finished, or indeed even safe. Rising above the main mass was a tapering skeletal tower, as tall again as the whole part of the rig below it, and off to another side, leaning at an angle, was a long crane-like boom with a dirty yellow flame burning at its tip. Near the base of the boom, Jo caught sight of a pair of tiny orange-suited oil workers. The scale of the platform kept tricking her: it was far too big a thing to be out here, surrounded by all this churning grey water. Even the fully enclosed lifeboats, perched far off the water on their drop platforms, looked tiny.
A big ‘M’ was painted on the side of the main rectangle, stylised to look like an oil rig itself.
‘A dreadful waste, of course,’ the Doctor observed, from the passenger seat next to hers. ‘Burning fossil fuels – whatever will you think of next?’
‘Don’t approve, do you?’ she asked, folding her arms.
‘Hydrocarbons are no way to generate energy,’ the Doctor said, in his best sanctimonious voice. ‘Most mature civilisations realised that a very long time ago.’
‘Petroleum’s made up of hydrocarbons, isn’t it?’ Jo asked brightly.
The Doctor looked pleased. He had a dim opinion of Jo’s grasp of scientific matters and was always glad when she displayed even the most rudimentary knowledge.
‘Most certainly.’
Now it was Jo’s turn to smile. ‘Then I’ll remind you of that the next time you take Bessie out for a spin!’
‘That’s different!’
‘Oh, right. One rule for you, another for the rest of us.’
‘It isn’t like that at all!’ the Doctor said. ‘Anyway, when I’ve a spare afternoon, I fully intend to convert Bessie to run on pure hydrogen.’
‘You had a spare afternoon yesterday – you spent it with your head stuck under the TARDIS console, driving everyone mad with your inane humming.’
‘There was an excellent reason for that.’ The Doctor left a weighty pause, which Jo resisted the temptation to fill. ‘Time disturbances,’ he went on. ‘Someone seems to be opening up localised time ruptures. I thought I might see if I could pinpoint their origin.’
‘And?’
‘Didn’t get very far. In hindsight I’d have been better off with my head stuck under Bessie’s bonnet. Oh – and by the way – that inane humming happens to be a rendition of one of the greatest tragic operas in the history of the Venusian arts.’
‘You’re right about one thing,’ Jo said. ‘It was definitely tragic.’
They were coming in to land. On the top of the platform’s main structure, cantilevered out over the sea, was the white square of a helicopter landing pad. The helicopter hovered over it and began to descend, pitching uncomfortably as it did so.
‘You don’t think those disturbances are anything to do with…?’ Captain Mike Yates nodded out the window, at the nearing platform. ‘This business? The thing that man said over the short wave?’
‘I’m inclined to doubt it. It’s well enough of Lethbridge-Stewart to send us out here, but I’m sure it’ll turn out to be a fuss over nothing. Things do go missing at sea, after all.’ The Doctor paused. ‘Even quite big things.’
‘Entire oil rigs?’ Jo asked.
The Doctor offered one of his most infuriatingly inscrutable smiles. ‘We’ll just have to see, won’t we?’
Jo felt the helicopter settle down onto the helipad. The rotors whirred down and at a signal from the crew Yates opened the passenger door. They stepped out into biting salty wind that pushed Jo’s hair against her face. She wished she hadn’t worn such a short skirt now. The Doctor tightened his cape, wrinkles cutting into his skin as he narrowed his eyes against the gale. Yates reached up and jammed his UNIT beret down firmly. ‘Lovely day for it!’ he muttered. ‘Wish I’d brought my suntan lotion!’
A big man in an orange anorak was already on the pad. He walked over, raising his voice over the dying whine of the helicopter. ‘Tom Irwin,’ he said brusquely. ‘Deputy operations, Mike Oscar Six.’
‘This is Josephine Grant,’ the Doctor said. ‘This is Captain Mike Yates, and I’m the Doctor.’
Irwin nodded at the helicopter. ‘You’ll no be staying long, I take it?’
‘I see Scottish hospitality’s all it’s cracked up to be,’ Yates said.
‘I was talking about the weather, Captain,’ Irwin answered. He was a burly, bearded Scot, who looked strong enough to have swum his way out from Aberdeen. His anorak had a fur-lined hood and the same ‘M’ stitched onto the shoulder that Jo had already seen on the side of the rig. ‘Nasty bit of work coming in from Norway,’ he went on. ‘You lot want to be back home in time for your Ovaltine, you’d best not dawdle.’
‘We were asked out here, you know!’ Jo said.
‘That’s between you and Eddie McCrimmon.’
‘McCrimmon?’ the Doctor said, raising his eyebrows. ‘I used to know a McCrimmon once – awfully decent fellow.’
‘Not Eddie’s father, by any chance?’
‘I doubt it – not unless Eddie’s father was involved in the Jacobite rebellion.’
Irwin’s eyes sharpened. ‘I thought this was a military delegation, not a visit from the local nuthouse.’
Yates was making an obvious effort to sound civil. ‘Actually, we are a military delegation.’
‘You maybe, but your pals look like a pair of civvies.’
‘We are,’ Jo said. ‘But we’re on attachment to UNIT. And if that’s a problem, you can take it up with Geneva.’
Irwin eyed her hand dubiously, but after a moment he offered his own gloved hand by way of reciprocation. Jo shook, but only maintained contact for an instant.
‘I asked for that. First time on a rig, is it?’
‘Last too, if I’ve got any say in it.’
This seemed to win her a flicker of grudging respect, judging by the twitch that creased the corner of Irwin’s mouth.
‘Aye, it’s no picnic out here. You’d best come with me. Your boys on the helicopter need a brew?’
‘They’ll be fine,’ Mike Yates said. He had told the pilot and co-pilot to remain aboard, so that they could make a quick getaway if the weather worsened. ‘I suppose you know what this is all about?’
‘Any reason I should?’
‘Your boss was the one who called us in.’
‘I can guess.’ Irwin was leading them along a gridded metal catwalk, into a corrugated metal shed. ‘That business two days ago?’
Yates continued: ‘Your man sent a short-wave distress call which was picked up by every wireless station between here and Stavanger. Why was he so worked up?’
Irwin paused on a landing between two sections of staircase. ‘He was on an oil rig that was collapsing into the sea. In his shoes, you’d be a bit “worked up”.’
‘This was another one of your rigs, was it?’ Jo asked.
‘Half the rigs out here belong to the company.’
‘And was there anything special about this rig, the one that collapsed?’ the Doctor asked, as they began to descend a clattering metal staircase.
‘The boss’ll tell you what we all know. Mike Oscar Four was ready to fall over. That’s why it was being scrapped.’
‘You don’t sound as if anything unusual happened,’ Jo said. They were on Mike Oscar Six now; Mike Oscar Four was the one that had had the accident. ‘But rigs don’t just collapse, do they? And there was that thing the man was supposed to have said, about the sea…’
‘Pete Lomax was scared witless,’ said Irwin. ‘Not really cut out for this line of work. What he said he saw, and what he really saw, are two different things.’
At the bottom of the stairwell was a pair of double doors, with round windows in them, like the doors into an operating theatre. Beyond was a short corridor, metal doors on either side. The floor and walls were also metal, painted over in various uninspiring greys and greens. Other than the occasional equipment locker, fire extinguisher, first-aid box, safety notice or framed photograph of an oil rig or refinery, there was little in the way of comforting décor. No flowers or potted plants or delicate watercolours of trees and meadows. Compared to this place, UNIT headquarters was like the Ideal Home Show.
Irwin halted them at one of the metal doors. This one had a small white nameplate fixed above it, with stencilled black letters. He took off his glove, knocked twice on the door, then waited for an answer.
Jo heard an indistinct: ‘Come in.’
Irwin opened the door, and beckoned the UNIT party to enter. The room was small, with a single large window overlooking part of the platform, and then out to the restless grey sea. A tough-looking grey-haired man in a chequered shirt was sitting at the desk, with a bulky computer positioned at an angle before him. He was tapping keys with blunt hairy fingers, while referring to a spiral-bound folder opened out next to the computer.
‘Your guests,’ Irwin said.
The computer the man was working on was a modern one, no larger than a television set, housed in a grey case with an integral keyboard built into it. Jo angled herself to get a better look at the data on the screen, the rows of flickering green characters. Computers were beginning to creep into UNIT operations but it was still fairly unusual to see one in an office.
‘That’s about all I can do for now,’ the man said, with a defeated air.
‘You did your best, Hopgood. Have them fly in a replacement circuit board as soon as possible. I can’t manage without this thing now I’ve got used to it.’
The speaker was a woman. She had been standing at a row of filing cabinets off to the left of the door, so that Jo had barely noticed her presence when they entered. The woman slid a folder back into a gap in one of the cabinets, then closed the metal door.
‘Computers,’ she said, as the technician left the room. ‘A year ago, I barely knew how to switch one on. Now I’m beginning to think they might actually make a difference. Maintenance schedules, parts procurement, shift management, real-time weather updates and sea conditions – it’s all here. We even have a data link back to the mainland.’
She slid into the seat recently vacated by the computer man, then tapped away at the keys for a few moments. The rows of characters faded away, replaced by a diagram representing some kind of complicated flow system, rendered in wiggling green lines. Jo presumed it had something to do with the rig’s functioning.
‘Very sorry,’ Yates said. ‘But we were hoping to speak to Eddie McCrimmon?’
The woman slid a folder across the desk, studied the flow diagram, made a couple of felt-tip entries into the paperwork. ‘You are.’
‘Edwina McCrimmon?’ Jo asked, glad that she had thought to do her research before arriving. ‘I didn’t know you were based out at sea.’
‘Most of the time I’m not,’ McCrimmon said. ‘But I get out here as often as I can. It’s the only way to get a real sense for what’s going on. Feel the whirr of the drill under my feet, as my father says. And you’d be?’
‘Jo Grant. This is the Doctor, and this is Captain Mike Yates.’
‘I was about to introduce them,’ Irwin said.
Edwina ‘Eddie’ McCrimmon was about twenty years older than Jo, although she still looked fit and able for her years. She was a tall woman, with ginger hair only just beginning to turn grey in places. She had tied the hair back with an elastic band, exposing a strong forehead. She wore work-stained trousers, a black knitted sweater. Over the sweater she wore a laboratory coat with the McCrimmon ‘M’ beginning to come unstitched from the fabric. She was missing a couple of fingers from her left hand, the one that she used to hold the felt-tip pen.
‘Miss McCrimmon,’ the Doctor said gently. ‘Forgive my rudeness, but we do have rather a short weather window. Unless you’d rather have five additional guests for the next couple of days?’
‘I’m afraid I’ve rather wasted your time,’ McCrimmon said, continuing to tick things off. ‘I had some concerns, I’ll admit, after what happened with the decommissioned platform. Reason I got in touch with your Brigadier chappie.’
‘Just like that?’ Yates asked, unable to hide his scepticism. ‘You just happened to have the Brig’s phone number?’
‘No,’ McCrimmon said calmly. ‘I have a friend I used to go to school with, who’s now pretty high up in the Ministry. I mean, the MOD. I spoke to my friend, and my friend, who knows your Brigadier indirectly – they go shooting grouse together or something – thought it might not hurt to have a wee chat with him. But after I’d had time to think things over, and have a proper talk with Pete Lomax, I realised this wasn’t a matter for UNIT.’
‘Well, you could have called the Brigadier again!’ Jo said.
‘I did, actually. Twice. Told him not to bother sending anyone out. And despite that, here you are.’ Like Irwin, McCrimmon spoke with a Scottish accent, but hers was softer and more mellifluous – Kirkcaldy rather than Glasgow. McCrimmon paused to look at Irwin. ‘Tom, I want that blow-off valve replaced by the end of the second shift, if at all possible.’
‘Already in hand.’
‘The centrifugal separator?’
‘Fixed and running.’
‘And the thrust bearing on the number two drill?’
‘It’ll hold until spares arrive from shore. We’ll get that draughty window of yours sorted, too.’
‘Very good. I think that’ll be all for the moment. You’ve got your pager on? I’ll buzz when our guests decide they’re not going to get much out of this visit.’
‘Thank you,’ Irwin said.
He closed the door behind him. McCrimmon continued writing in her file for a few seconds, then pushed it away, placing the felt-tip pen next to the file. The desk was very neat, with everything except the computer arranged at strict right angles. The computer had been given a dispensation to sit at forty five degrees, but even then Jo suspected that it was an exact forty five degrees, measured with one of those plastic protractors you got in geometry sets.
McCrimmon looked at her guests in turn.
‘I don’t want to be rude, but what I said to Tom Irwin was the truth: you really are wasting your time. What happened at Mike Oscar Four was deeply regrettable, I won’t deny that. Lives were lost, as well as valuable equipment.’
‘But you must have had some reason to contact the Brigadier,’ Yates said.
McCrimmon tapped the tapped the index finger of her injured hand against the file: she’d lost the ring and little fingers at the knuckle. ‘I was mistaken. I’ve got good men working for me, and I trust their judgement. When my extraction specialists say that the likely cause was a rupturing gas cell, why should I doubt them?’
‘The Brigadier must have still thought there was something worth looking into,’ Jo said.
‘I’ll answer your questions, let you speak to Pete Lomax – if that’s what you insist on. But that still won’t alter the fact that you’ve come out here for nothing. This was an industrial accident, nothing more.’
‘A gas cell?’ the Doctor enquired.
McCrimmon picked up her pen from either end and held it between her hands. ‘I’ll spare you the technical details. It’s pretty complicated and unless you’ve a doctorate in geophysics I’m afraid it won’t mean an awful lot to you.’
‘Very considerate of you,’ the Doctor said.
‘An accumulation of gases has been known to build up under the seabed, especially in proximity to complex multi-penetration drilling sites. When one of these cells ruptures – breaks through to the water – it acts like a huge bubble. If that bubble rises directly under an already compromised structure, like Mike Oscar Four… well, I’m sure you can imagine the consequences.’
‘The rig collapses,’ the Doctor said.
‘Or suffers severe damage. Either way, it’s not the kind of trouble we go looking for.’
‘If there’s a threat to British maritime operations,’ Yates said, ‘we need to know about it. Even if it is just gas cells. The sooner we have a word with this Lomax chappie, the better. Then we can all clear out and go back home to our Ovaltine.’
‘Ovaltine, Captain?’
‘Never mind,’ Yates said. ‘It’s not really my tipple anyway.’
The wind stiffening, Inspector Archie Hawes breasted the highest point of the dunes and began his descent to the beach. The sand was getting into his shoes. He squinted, shielding his eyes from the sting of the wind. He could see the hut now, tucked against the fence line where the beach ended and the dunes began. He came here quite often, on his beat. Now and then he’d knock on the door and there’d be no answer. He’d peer through the window just in case, but if McGinty was out there with his wheelbarrow, off gathering scrap, it was just too bad. Hawes would retreat to his panda car safe in the knowledge that he’d made an effort, while not having to put up with any of that vile-tasting tea.
Not today, though. He could see a gentle glow coming from the hut’s window. The gas lamp was on.
McGinty was home.
Hawes completed his descent of the footpath, onto the beach proper. The tide had already gone out and where it had reached its highest point was a sketchy margin of deposited items. Lengths of rope. Old bottles. Fishing net. Wood and plastic. Flotsam and jetsam, Hawes thought. He had the idea that there was some boring technical difference between the two, that the one was very specifically something and the other very specifically something else, not that it mattered. The main thing was a nagging suspicion that McGinty would normally have cleared away this muck by now. He couldn’t be ill, could he? That would be a turn-up for the books. District nurse, GP, even the giddy prospect of an ambulance… It would almost be more drama than Hawes could take.
He passed by the window on his way to the door, registering an impression of McGinty sitting at his table with a clean dinner plate before him. The yellow glow of the gas lamp almost made it look cosy in there, like a Dickensian Christmas card. Hawes wasn’t fooled. He’d been in that hut often enough to know it was about as cosy as a public urinal.
Hawes stood at the door. He noticed that the word ‘nutter’ had been sprayed onto the wall to the right of it. Strange that McGinty hadn’t painted over it, or at least tried to clean it off.
He knocked on the rough wooden door.
‘Pat. It’s me, Archie. Come for my brew.’ No avoiding that particular obligation, Hawes thought.
There was no answer. He didn’t think McGinty was deaf, but perhaps he’d nodded off at the table after consuming a lavish banquet of cold sardines.
He knocked again, spoke louder this time. ‘Pat! It’s Archie Hawes! Let me in.’
He heard the scrape of a chair, as of someone rising. There was a shuffling sound, the scuff of shoes on rough floorboards. The door was unlatched and opened.
McGinty stood in the doorway, still wearing his heavy oilskin coat. He was looking at Hawes, but also looking through him, out to the waves.
There was a long moment when Hawes expected the other man to say something.
‘Pat?’ he asked doubtfully.
‘Hello, Archie.’ McGinty extended a welcoming hand. ‘Why don’t you come in? I’ve got something to show you.’
‘I see the kids have had a go at you again.’
McGinty closed the door behind them. It muffled the draught, rather than excluding it completely. ‘Oh, don’t worry about the children. They don’t matter now.’
Something was off key, out of tune. Hawes would never have called the beachcomber a friend. But he knew McGinty well enough to sense that something was amiss. He thought of the way he’d been sitting at the table, bolt upright with the plate in front of him. Like a man with nothing to do but wait.
‘Are you feeling all right, Pat?’
‘I’ve never felt better, Archie. Please, have a seat.’
There were only two chairs in the hut. Hawes took the one opposite McGinty’s seat. He studied the clean dinner plate as he lowered himself down onto the rickety platform. ‘There’s been a good tide,’ he offered.
‘And there’ll be many more, while this planet still has oceans and a moon. But that’s all behind us now.’ McGinty had his back to Hawes now, as if he was preparing the tea. ‘Here. I’d like to show you something.’
‘What, Pat?’
McGinty reached up to relieve himself of his coat, freeing first the left sleeve and then the right. For a moment the coat hung on his frame like a cloak. Then he shrugged it the ground and remained standing with his back to the policeman.
Hawes stared, at first unable to process what he was seeing. Something was stuck to Pat McGinty. It was clamped onto him, fixed with prehensile metal legs to the lower part of his neck. It was a thing of silver metal and glass, sterile-looking, like some strange surgical attachment. Green light came from different parts of it. Fluid bubbled around in the glass part, and there was something in that fluid, a thumb-sized blob of indeterminate form.
‘Pat…’ he said falteringly. ‘What’s that thing?’
‘Me, Archie.’ McGinty turned around slowly and smiled. ‘I am not Pat McGinty now. I am Sild.’
Hawes’s mind flashed through the possibilities, but he could think of nothing that made sense of this. His only conviction was that it was wrong, dreadfully wrong, and that McGinty needed urgent help.
‘We need to get you to hospital, Pat. Someone’s done this to you.’
‘Not someone, Archie. Sild. I am Sild; we are Sild. And now you will become Sild as well, and then we will find him. Find the man called the Master. And bring him to join the others on the Consolidator.’
‘Consolidator? What are you talking about?’
‘It’s a spaceship, in the future. Orbiting a planet called Praxilion.’
‘Pat, have you been on the funny tea again? I told—’
‘Never mind, Archie. In a moment it will all be clear. Please stand by.’
‘Stand by for what?’
That was when Hawes heard the scuttling behind him. He twitched around, just in time to see another of those things on the shelf behind him, crouched next to the red leather wireless set.