The

Eyeless

LANCE PARKIN

2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

Published in 2008 by BBC Books, an imprint of Ebury Publishing.

Ebury Publishing is a division of the Random House Group Ltd.

© Lance Parkin, 2008

Lance Parkin has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in

accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.

Doctor Who is a BBC Wales production for BBC One Executive Producers: Russell

T Davies and Julie Gardner

Original series broadcast on BBC Television. Format © BBC 1963.

‘Doctor Who’, ‘TARDIS’ and the Doctor Who logo are trademarks of the British

Broadcasting Corporation and are used under licence.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,

photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright

owner.

The Random House Group Ltd Reg. No. 954009.

Addresses for companies within the Random House Group can be found at

www.randomhouse.co.uk.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 846 07562 9

The Random House Group Limited supports the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC),

the leading international forest certification organisation. All our titles that are printed

on Greenpeace approved FSC certified paper carry the FSC logo. Our paper

procurement policy can be found at www.rbooks.co.uk/environment

Series Consultant: Justin Richards

Project Editor: Steve Tribe

Cover design by Lee Binding © BBC 2008

Typeset in Albertina and Deviant Strain

Printed and bound in Germany by GGP Media GmbH

To John, Lesley, Jo, Katie and Brie – the Parkins

Recent titles in the Doctor Who series:

MARTHA IN THE MIRROR

Justin Richards

SNOWGLOBE 7

Mike Tucker

THE MANY HANDS

Dale Smith

GHOSTS OF INDIA

Mark Morris

THE DOCTOR TRAP

Simon Messingham

SHINING DARKNESS

Mark Michalowski

THE STORY OF MARTHA

Dan Abnett

BEAUTIFUL CHAOS

Gary Russell

PART ONE

THE EYES OF A CHILD

The first walkway the Doctor tried almost gave way

beneath his feet. The second creaked disconcertingly, and

he half-ran, half-tiptoed across it. He didn’t even dare put

his foot on the third. He’d got two city blocks closer to his

goal and decided to enter the nearest tower and descend to

ground level – an easier task than he’d dared hope, as the

building had a fantastically carpeted staircase. This place

had been a hotel. The robot porters and janitors were all

gathered by a large recharging station just off the lobby,

puzzled expressions permanently stuck on their

mechanical faces. Like their human masters, who they’d

clearly survived, they’d have taken the power supply for

granted.

There was a garage, full of speeders and flyers and one-

or two-man flying saucers. The Doctor had toyed with the

idea of just fixing an aircar up and driving the rest of the

way but, with each one he found, a lot of the mechanics

had rusted or rotted away, and the power cells were dead.

He’d quickly decided he could walk to the Fortress in half

the time it would take to fix one up. The exercise would

do him good.

The Doctor wished he could have just flown the

TARDIS there, but that would have been a very, very bad

idea. He’d landed as close as he dared.

The ground here was metal, a broken-down moving

pavement. It was littered with rubble, shards of glass and

scrap metal – chunks of material that had fallen from the

surrounding buildings after winter storms or as whatever

held them up there corroded away. There was a raised

monorail line that ran straight and in roughly the direction

of the Fortress. The Doctor clambered up. The line itself

was in a bad way. Metal expanded when it was hot,

contracted when it was cold, and engineers had to allow

for that by leaving gaps at intervals in the rails, or they’d

crack or buckle. When trains ran over those gaps, they

made that ‘clickety-clack’ noise, the whole universe over.

The trick was to keep the gaps clean, or they’d fill up with

leaves and rust.

The city had been carefully designed so that sunlight

streamed over every building and down to every level.

Even at ground level it was still bright. The sun was low

in that green sky now, though. All that light meant weeds

and grass had thrived, poked through holes in the

concrete, making the monorail line a thin strip of green

life that warmed the Doctor’s hearts. There were even a

few scattered saplings that would be great trees, given a

few decades. Something on this planet had survived the

cataclysm, and in the long term that was all that needed to.

Three hundred million years from now, this city would be

a thin, silvery geological layer in the rock, and some

distant descendant of these weeds would have evolved to

puzzle over it. Earth had seen similar turmoil and mass

extinction before humans had come along.

Perhaps tomorrow the Doctor would take the TARDIS

into the far future, have a wander round that civilisation.

Pop in for a chat with a weedy geologist.

The Doctor stopped, turned. Something had caught his

eye as he walked past it. Behind him, in the mud, was a

footprint.

He bent down and put on his glasses. He soon found a

short line of footprints in a thin patch of dirt. Human, near

enough. Whoever had made them had six toes on each

foot, certainly, but they were bipedal, they didn’t have

hooves or paws or caterpillar tracks. The foot was a Size

9, the Doctor estimated. Not that this person had been

wearing shoes. Barefoot. No evidence he – or she – had

cut their feet on the metal or glass, though, as the Doctor

surely would have done if he hadn’t had his trainers on.

Pacing it out, like the page of Good King Wenceslas,

marking the footsteps, the Doctor decided they’d been

made by a person a little shorter than him, who had been

walking, not running. The prints were in thin mud, so it

wasn’t possible to estimate the weight of the person who’d

made them. They were fresh – an hour old, at the most. He

hadn’t anticipated anyone else being here. The

implications of having company were all worrying.

The Doctor took his glasses off and looked around.

There was a figure at ground level, ducking round a

corner, out of sight. Even the Doctor hadn’t had much

time to take it in.

The Doctor clambered down to where the movement

had been, but it wasn’t there now.

A pile of burned-out aircars blocked the other end of

this passage. The Doctor looked straight up at the

perfectly smooth, vertical sides of hundred-storey

buildings. It was hard to see how anyone could have got

away. At ground level, there were small niches and

crevices in the walls, but nothing even he could squeeze

into, and he was notoriously skinny. It must have been a

trick of the light. It wouldn’t even qualify as a particularly

good trick. And he was on edge. The Doctor concluded

that there hadn’t been anyth—

A dark shape leapt out at the Doctor; he turned to face

it and was almost blinded. Belatedly, he realised the

attacker had the sun behind it. By then, the creature was

on him, shoving him over with a plank of wood.

‘Ghost!’ a high-pitched voice yelled out. ‘Don’t let a

ghost touch you!’

The Doctor hadn’t quite been knocked off his feet, and

his vision was quickly returning to normal. Now the walls

were coming alive, with over half a dozen other shapes

rushing out from the cracks and gaps.

They were children, the Doctor realised. None of them

looked more than about 12. Boys, mostly, all dressed the

same sort of way, in very smart dark outfits which were all

a bit too baggy, but brightly decorated with bits of

colourful foil and plastic ribbon. The children each carried

two or three small bags which clanked and rattled as they

moved. They looked human, or close enough. They were

all rather pale.

‘He’s a ghost,’ one of the boys called.

‘Looks like we got ourselves a ghost,’ another agreed.

‘I’m not a ghost,’ he laughed. ‘I’m the Doctor and this

is—’ He turned and then looked back, sheepish. ‘No one.’

‘Who were you talking about?’

‘Just force of habit.’

‘You know what I think? I think we are… we is talking

to a ghost.’

‘You were right the first time,’ the Doctor said

helpfully. ‘“You are talking to a ghost”.’

‘He says he’s a ghost!’

‘Ghost. Ghost. Ghost,’ all but one of them started

chanting.

The boldest of the boys was advancing, swinging a

piece of metal pipe. The Doctor blocked it, elbowed the

pipe out of the boy’s hand. The boy was wiry, but he was

also only 10 years old. Strong for his age, but not much of

a threat. Another child – it wasn’t the Doctor’s top priority

to work out if it was a boy or a girl – was already lunging

with a very fancy-looking knife. The Doctor stepped out

of the way, tripped the child up and found himself shoving

over a boy with a piece of brick in his hand.

After that, the children stopped the attack and started

circling. They’d moved around so they’d blocked the only

escape route from the passageway. The boy who’d

attacked first retrieved his metal pipe. They were still

shouting out ‘ghost, ghost, ghost’ over and over. The

Doctor didn’t feel any safer, and the children were clearly

preparing to pounce. Every so often one of them would

step forward, quickly withdrawing. They were testing

him, like a pack of animals would.

A stocky girl was the exception, the only one not

chanting. She’d spent the time standing there looking

thoughtful. The Doctor decided to concentrate on her.

‘A ghost?’ he said, addressing her directly. ‘Ridiculous.

You can see right through that explanation, right? See

through it? Ghost.’

She was glaring at him. The Doctor’s face fell.

‘Loses a bit in translation, probably. Jokes tend to.

Point is: I’m sure you can convince your friends here that

I’m not a ghost.’

‘Ghosts don’t bleed,’ she said. ‘We could see if you

bleed.’

The Doctor nodded slowly, pursed his lips. ‘Well, yes, I

suppose that’s an example of the scientific method.’

‘We should cut you open,’ the boy with the fancy knife

leered.

‘Do you see a lot of ghosts?’ the Doctor asked,

suddenly. A thought had struck him. ‘You don’t happen to

have six toes, do you? Any of you? You’re not barefoot.

All wearing very nice shoes. They look brand new.’ A

brainwave struck him, and he pointed down at his own

feet. ‘Trainers. Look. Teenagers love trainers, right? These

are a bit big for you, of course. But if you’d like them, I’m

sure we can come to some arrangement. If this is a

mugging, that is.’

‘A what?’ the lead one asked.

‘If you’re mugging me for my shoes.’

‘Why would we do that?’

‘Don’t you like my shoes?’ The Doctor felt insulted.

‘Who are you?’ the stocky girl asked. She was tallest,

and she looked stronger than most of the boys. Girls

tended to at that age. The lad with the metal pipe looked

like the leader, though.

The Doctor decided to assert some authority. He gritted

his teeth and pulled out his psychic paper, opening up the

wallet and swinging it round so that he was sure all the

kids could see it.

‘What’s that?’ the leader asked.

‘It’s got writing on it,’ the stocky girl replied.

‘Yes, that’s right,’ the Doctor said patiently.

‘Writing?’ echoed another one of them, a particularly

grubby boy who looked about 12.

The Doctor held it steady, up in front of that child’s

eyes.

‘We don’t read,’ the boy said dismissively. ‘No one

reads.’

‘Ah. Well, it says –’ the Doctor checked it, ‘– that I’m

from the planet Ofsted and… Ofsted. That’s, oh… Well,

take my word for it, that’s funny. You clearly don’t think

so. Fair enough. It’s that joke/translation thing again.’

The kids were all glaring at him.

The Doctor grimaced as he put the wallet back in his

pocket. ‘Anyway, if you could just… How many of you

are there, by the way? Not here in this alley. There are

eight of you here. How many people live here?’

Again, it was only the girl who was listening to him.

The grubby boy was at her side, though, hands in his

pockets, and it really looked like he was waiting for her

lead. This still meant there were half a dozen others to

worry about.

‘Maybe he knows about ghosts,’ the grubby boy

suggested.

‘Oh, I’ve met ghosts in my time,’ the Doctor said

cheerfully.

The wrong thing to say. The others were nervous, now.

‘Ghosts aren’t the spirits of the dead or lost souls,’ he

said firmly, like he was teaching an unruly class. ‘Ghosts

are usually a sign that there’s a discontinuity in the space

time continuum. Nothing to worry about. Just the sort of

thing that happens. Five times out of five. Guaranteed.

Well… unless they’re Gelth. Or time travellers with a

dodgy temporal feedback circuit. Or from the future of an

alternative timeline. Or an osmic projection. Or it might

be because this city was built over a time rift.’

He hesitated, because he’d run out of fingers. ‘Or they

could be holograms. Or waterhive. Or an army of millions

of Cybermen from a parallel universe. OK… that’s eight.

Eight out of, er, five. Let’s call it ten. So… two times out

of ten, a ghost is—’

A brick sailed past him, clattered and clanged against

the metal wall. The Doctor sensed he was losing his

audience.

‘Thing is, there’s always a rational explanation,’ he said

calmly, but quickly. ‘A reason. If you’ve got a ghost

problem… well, I’m your man. Ghosts, I can help with.’

‘He helps ghosts!’ another of the boys shouted.

‘Um… that’s not quite what I—’

‘He said he was the reason for the ghosts.’

‘He called himself the Ghost Doctor.’

‘That he knows eight different types of ghost.’

‘He said five.’

‘He said ten.’

‘He said nine,’ the stocky girl corrected them.

‘You’re right – I said nine,’ said the Doctor. ‘But you’re

missing the nuances—’

‘What’s the ghost talking about now?’ The boy with the

metal pipe was slapping it in the palm of his hand.

‘What’s a new onz, then? Is that the type of ghost you

are?’

‘He’s not a ghost. He helps them and he talks to them,’

the stocky girl reminded the crowd.

The children’s reaction made it clear they didn’t see

this as an improvement.

‘Doesn’t matter what,’ dismissed one of them.

‘I think I saw a ghost here a minute ago,’ the Doctor

told her, almost pleading for calm. ‘Now… I’m new here.

Only just arrived and—’

Another rock flew past.

‘I wish I could see a ghost,’ the Doctor said.

That seemed to shut them up.

‘No!’ the one with the fancy knife shouted.

‘He wished it!’

One of the boys screamed.

‘You heard him! He summoned it. You saw it.’

‘It?’

‘The ghost.’ The grubby boy was jabbing a finger at the

Doctor. No: jabbing it to indicate something behind him.

The Doctor took a deep breath before bowing to the

inevitable and turning to take a look.

The ghost shimmered. Its features were blurred and

difficult to make out. It was a man, or the shape and size

of one. It wore white robes, a toga, and was terrifying

because it looked so terrified. It was an expression that the

Doctor recognised, but could never get used to. His

instinct was to run, and he fought it, beat it down, kept

himself rooted to the spot. He was looking at a man who

knew that he’d lost everything, absolutely everything he

knew and loved, including all the things he thought would

be there for ever, all the things that should have survived

him. And the Doctor could tell that, once, this had been a

man, a confident, proud man, who thought he had

achieved and built and protected those things he valued. A

good man reduced to a lost soul. He stared at the Doctor

with accusing eyes.

‘I know,’ the Doctor said.

The ghost reached out with both hands, trying to grab

at the Doctor, just looking for one last moment of contact,

some way of bridging the gap.

‘I know,’ the Doctor repeated, raising his hand.

‘Don’t let it touch you!’ the boy with the metal pipe

shouted. The ghost swept his arm around, almost casually,

touched the boy, who vanished, his screams abruptly cut

off. The metal pipe clattered to the ground.

‘Frad! No!’ the grubby boy said, grabbing the pipe.

There wasn’t much room between them. The ghost turned

to face him, pleading. The ghost was fading away. It was

already hard to make out where it ended and the air

started.

‘No…’ the boy shouted, but it was too late, and the

ghost swept towards him, looked almost apologetic. The

boy was wild-eyed.

‘Let go of him!’ the Doctor shouted.

This had the intended reaction – the ghost was

distracted, turned away from the boy. The stocky girl

pulled him away.

The kids were all running off, now, out of the alley into

the open. A couple of them were still screaming.

‘Class dismissed,’ the Doctor whispered.

The Doctor looked back at the ghost, unsure whether to

feel anger. The ghost was hardly there, now. It looked

confused. It howled, but didn’t even have the power to

break the silence. And then it dissipated, losing even itself.

The children ran away and kept running until the first

few of them couldn’t run any further. They regrouped,

gathered in a place they knew well, the Metal Room. Big

and square, it was at the base of one of the tallest towers.

It made them feel safe, because it took four of them to

push the door open and closed. It never closed all the way,

because for some reason the sides had great fist-thick

metal rods embedded in them.

The room contained something really valuable: little

strips of paper, printed with pictures of people and

buildings and number symbols. If you held the paper up to

the light, you could see other faces trapped in there. One

of the oldest kids, Joss, had once said those were ghosts,

and everyone laughed at him and called it joss paper from

then on. The paper burned really well, kept them warm.

There were also neat piles of shiny yellow metal bars and

great tubs of bagged-up metal discs. They were no good

for burning and just got in the way.

The older, fitter kids still had some energy, and they

kept watch. They all knew that the ghosts never followed

them, but they were still shaken up. Frad had been

popular. They’d go back to the alley later, and lay a floral.

What none of the kids knew was what had happened to

the skinny grown-up in the odd brown coat. This didn’t

stop them speculating, and opinion ranged from him being

the man that had been summoning up the ghosts all these

years, right through to imagining that the ghost they’d

seen ate the man after they ran off. Soon, everyone was

arguing about the Ghost Doctor.

The stocky girl was clever enough to understand that

she couldn’t explain who the man was. The idea that there

was a person she didn’t know disturbed her. She listened

to the bragging for a few minutes before it began

annoying her so much she had to slip outside.

She got her thoughts straight, tried to separate out what

she’d seen for herself from the confusion and rumour.

They were getting silly in there, treating it like a game.

They were kids. If she was thinking like that – and she’d

been thinking like it for months – it meant she was

growing up. She fought the next thought, tried to keep it

quiet, but still it came: there’s no choice, it’s nearly time to

go back.

The Ghost Doctor was too important for kids to deal

with. Too big for games. Boy games or parent games. She

fished around in her bag, found what she was looking for

right at the bottom.

It had been months since she’d last seen the comm, and

during that time it had got a long, annoying scratch down

its screen.

She swirled one of the controls and it bleeped to let her

know she was being connected. It was a whole minute

before Professor Jeffip answered. A tiny hologram of him

appeared, hovering over the top surface.

‘Alsa… are you in trouble?’ he began.

‘No. Frad was taken by a ghost, but—’

‘This is for emergencies,’ he chided her, turning away.

‘Real emergencies. The batteries, Alsa. The batteries.’

Despite herself, she was guiltily imagining the

electricity seeping away like sand from an hourglass.

‘There’s a… man we don’t know here.’

Jeffip scowled. ‘You must be upset, but that’s no

excuse for making up stories—’

‘I’m not,’ she snapped. ‘It’s true. He’s not a ghost, he’s

a…’

‘Stranger,’ he said, supplying a word that Alsa only

dimly knew and had never spoken.

‘ Stranger.’ She rolled the word around her mouth. ‘Yes.

We cornered him, and then a ghost appeared and we ran

off. I think he might have summoned up the ghost, but I’m

not sure. He asked stupid questions, like whether we had

six toes.’

Professor Jeffip believed her. He knew she wouldn’t

dare waste the comm if she was making up a story. He

wasn’t treating her like a kid. Alsa liked that.

‘Describe him,’ he said.

‘Tall. Thin. He was old, but not as old as you. He said

he was called “the Doctor”, but that’s not a proper name,

is it? His clothes looked… made but not new. Not torn or

dirty or anything, just…’

‘See what he’s up to. See if there’s anyone with him.

Use the comm to take pictures of him and send them

here.’

‘The batteries…’ Alsa said.

‘I know, but this is important.’

Alsa hesitated.

‘Who do you think he is?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know. I might if I see his picture.’

‘Do you think it was him who murdered Jall?’

‘Jall was frightened to death by a ghost.’

‘She wasn’t,’ Alsa hissed. ‘I heard she was—’

‘Don’t start that again, Alsa. Look… this Doctor

sounds dangerous. Stay careful, Alsa. It’s good to hear

from you.’

The hologram faded away, and the tiny device powered

down. That had been the longest comm call Alsa could

remember.

Alsa stood, ready to go. Gar had come out. He was

always so dirty. They were the same age, and he’d always

been taller than her until this year. He hadn’t grown for

ages, and she’d done nothing but. It felt like she was twice

his size. He never took his hands out of his pockets. That

had never bothered Alsa before – these days it did nothing

but bother her.

‘Where are you going?’ he said, his voice a little whiny.

‘I’ve commed Professor Jeffip. Told him about the

stranger. He wants me to follow.’ She started walking,

soon passing the Blue Pyramid.

Gar looked confused, and trailed after her. ‘You told on

us? You told them where we are?’

‘No. I told Professor Jeffip about the Doctor and his

ghost. It’s important, Gar.’

‘So’s not telling.’

‘This is more important. Bigger.’

‘Is he part of your plan?’ he asked, half-cheekily, half-

respectfully.

‘How could he be? I didn’t know about him.’

‘Thought you knew everything.’

‘I’ll hit you in a minute.’

They picked their way over a large pile of metal slabs.

They had obviously once all fitted together to make a

building. It must have blown over. Or perhaps some other

kids had vandalised it. There was no better route round,

but climbing over the metal involved a lot of sliding, and

every time they put a foot down it made a clanging sound.

At the top of the pile, Alsa took the opportunity of a good

vantage point to take a look around. Then she skidded

down, back to ground level, Gar close behind, almost

losing his footing – and his foot – in the attempt.

‘The Ghost Doctor was good at fighting,’ he said when

he was back on level ground.

Alsa frowned. ‘He wasn’t. He was nearly killed by a

bunch of kids.’

‘That’s not what happened, is it? Everyone tried to get

him, but no one even touched him.’

She hadn’t thought of it like that. ‘If he was good at

fighting, he’d have hit back,’ she said, finally, unsure of

her argument.

There was a mid-level golden walkway close by, and

they took the pedestrian ramp about a dozen levels up to

it.

Alsa was already drawing up a plan. ‘We know he was

by Car Wall, but not where he’s heading. Stay up here and

we’ll get a good view of him.’

‘If he’s still on ground level.’

‘If the Ghost Doctor doesn’t live here, he won’t know

the best routes.’

‘I don’t get it. Only kids explore. He’s a parent.’

‘He’s not, he just looks like one. All we need to worry

about is that he’s dangerous.’

‘We need to make sure he doesn’t see us.’

‘Oh, I saw you when you were by that blue pyramid,’ a

man’s voice said.

Alsa and Gar whirled round. The Doctor was standing

there.

For a while, the Doctor had stood in the alleyway, staring

at where the ghost had been. He’d tried waving the sonic

screwdriver around to see if it could detect anything. He

knew the ghost was dead and gone. Even more dead and

gone than normal for a ghost. In the end, he’d concluded

there just weren’t any clues there for him. The Doctor had

his suspicions, but he’d decided not to worry about it for

the time being.

The three hours he’d estimated it would take to get to

the Fortress looked absurdly optimistic. He’d barely got

half a mile in the first hour. He knew he’d be hard pushed

to get to the Fortress before dark. Added to that was the

fact that Arcopolis was busier than he’d anticipated. With

ghosts and feral – if very well-dressed – kids around, the

sooner he could get to the Fortress and concentrate on the

job at hand the better.

The Doctor passed another gang of children, or perhaps

two gangs, playing with a cylindrical ball that players

would occasionally just grab and use as a club. Most of

them were boys; they were all in their early teens. He gave

them a wide berth, and they were too busy with their game

to spot him.

Soon after, he’d seen two of the children who’d

attacked him – the grubby boy and the stocky girl. They

were looking for him, and after a little while, he’d decided

to show himself.

‘Hello again.’ He was grinning. ‘If you’re going to back

away from me, watch out for that drop behind you. No

handrail. Common design problem in megacities across

the universe, I’ve found. I’m the Doctor, by the way.

Didn’t catch your names before.’

If he set a ghost on her, Alsa knew she wouldn’t be able

to get away. She’d already decided she would throw

herself from the walkway instead.

‘Gar,’ said Gar.

‘Alsa,’ Alsa found herself answering. ‘How did you get

up here so quickly?’

‘Ah, well, trick of the trade. I’ve been doing this sort of

thing a very, very long time.’

‘You a doctor?’

‘Yes, that’s right.’

‘An ossticktrishian?’

‘Obstetrician?’

‘Yeah.’

‘No. Well, not really. I dabble.’

‘Did you kill Jall?’

‘No.’

Alsa knew he was telling the truth, because he hadn’t

hesitated, hadn’t pretended, he’d just answered. He looked

a little sad, added he didn’t know about Jall and asked

them to tell him about her.

Alsa was wary, but Gar had already started. ‘She was a

girl. Fair hair. They found her body a couple of days ago.

The parents say she died of fright because she went where

she wasn’t meant to.’

Alsa narrowed her eyes. ‘What are you doing here?’

The Doctor pointed. ‘Heading to the Fortress.’

Alsa gasped. Beside her, she swore Gar was swaying.

Perhaps it was her.

‘You can’t,’ Gar said firmly. ‘No one’s allowed there.

Kids or the parents. No one would want to go there.’

‘So… it’s a forbidden zone,’ he said.

Alsa frowned. ‘A what? It’s just the Fortress, that’s all.

It’s the way it is.’ She crossed her arms over her chest.

‘We’ve told you everything we know,’ she said curtly.

‘Even those of us who come to the city don’t go to… that

place. We just don’t.’

‘You didn’t build it, did you?’

‘Of course I didn’t build it, I’m just a kid.’

The Doctor laughed. ‘Not you personally. Your people.

Your parents’ people.’

‘No,’ admitted Alsa. ‘It happened before we was born.

Fifteen years ago. It just appeared one morning. If you go

to one of the towers nearby or the Car Factory you can see

the half-buildings.’

The Doctor nodded thoughtfully. ‘Everything in the

space the Fortress materialised into would have been

destroyed. Anything that wasn’t would have been

unaffected. So there are buildings that were sliced in two.

The half-buildings. Fascinating.’

‘No one knew what the Fortress was or where it was

from or why. They tried investigating, but still didn’t

know. Then three days later everyone vanished. Everyone

but the parents. They were all in the same travel tube. It

broke down, and they dug their way out and when they

got there everyone was gone. Just vanished, and

something had been done to the jennraters and puters and

fabs so they didn’t work any more.’

‘All the birds and fish and animals went, too,’ Gar said.

‘I’ve seen pictures of them, though.’

‘The plants survived,’ the Doctor said.

‘The parents would have starved otherwise,’ Alsa said.

‘How many parents are there?’

‘All of them,’ Gar replied, puzzled.

‘Thirty-seven,’ Alsa told the Doctor.

‘Why do you think it happened?’ he asked.

‘The parents argue about that. No one knows.

Especially the ones who say they do know.’

The Doctor was looking at Alsa, intently, but when she

faced him, he looked away suddenly and guiltily.

‘We did something wrong, didn’t we?’ Gar said. ‘We

was punished.’

‘You were punished all right,’ the Doctor said quietly.

‘But not for anything you did. You certainly didn’t do

anything wrong. You weren’t even born.’

‘You know what happened?’ Alsa asked him.

The Doctor smiled gently and got up. ‘I’m going to the

Fortress. It’s going to be very dangerous.

‘You can’t get inside. There’s no doors.’

‘There are if you know where to look.’

‘People who go there get struck by lightning.’

‘Bet they do. That’s why your parents are right, and

you have to stay away.’

‘Can I take your picture with my comm?’ Alsa said

suddenly.

‘Um… yes. I suppose.’

The Doctor quickly ran his fingers through his hair and

then watched – with a rather fixed grin the whole time –

as Alsa took the device out, waggled the control and made

a hologram of him.

‘You said there was no power after everyone

vanished,’he said through his teeth. ‘How does that run?’

‘Batteries,’ she said simply. ‘You can’t waste them.’

‘May I?’ She handed it him. He’d finally stopped

grinning. ‘And this is a “comm”, so – what? – that’s short

for communicator? You can talk to people with this, too?

So your parents have managed to set up a telephone

network?’

‘It’s my mum, Olva, that keeps it running,’ Gar said

proudly. ‘There’s big batteries and one aerial in town. It’s

for emergencies.’

‘Good for her,’ the Doctor said cheerfully. He stood up

from the bench then looked over the edge. ‘Ooh! What’s

that?’ he asked.

Gar and Alsa ran past him to take a look. They didn’t

see anything, and when they turned back to challenge the

Doctor he’d vanished.

‘We need to call Professor Jeffip again,’ Alsa said. She

didn’t like to admit it.

‘What with?’ Gar said. ‘He’s nicked your comm.’

The sonic screwdriver had its limits. Not many, but it

wasn’t just a magic wand. Using it, the Doctor could

fiddle around and make a piece of equipment run a little

faster or give it more range, but it couldn’t easily turn a

toaster into a CD player or a lawnmower into an electric

toothbrush.

Take Alsa’s comm (as, indeed, the Doctor just had). It

was a mobile phone. There came a point where there was

no point making a phone any smaller or lighter, or its

memory any bigger, or giving its camera any more

megapixels. There were only so many human emotions in

need of emoticons to express them. This was a nice piece

of technology. It was easy to use, with all sorts of

foldyouty, 3D, pluggy-inny things down the sides. Once it

had topped up the comm’s battery and buffed out the

scratch on the screen, there wasn’t all that much else that

the sonic screwdriver could add or enhance.

The Doctor had been more interested in what it could

tell him. There had been a slim hope that the city datanet

was still around, or that bits of it were. But, no, there was

nothing but that one mast that Gar’s mum was in charge

of. You could have the most brilliant device for accessing

the internet going, but if there was no internet it wasn’t

much use.

He had thought all that through without slowing his

pace. He was now back on target, and the Fortress was so

close that it had started to loom. The evening light seemed

to fall into the Fortress, unable to escape. He’d be at those

black metal walls in half an hour.

The terrain had changed. A sewer main or railway

tunnel had caved in, leaving a wide, tile-lined river. Plants

had thrived, and all sorts of reeds and mosses proliferated

in, beside and along the banks. The air was thick with

pollen. The water was slow-flowing, and really rather a

pleasant surprise, like finding a nice canal path while

walking around a busy city centre. Everything was clean,

as you’d expect it to be after fifteen years of cleansing

rains. The ground was nicely squishy under his feet.

The Doctor passed through an archway formed by two

small buildings, one on each bank, that had toppled and

half-collapsed into each other—

—and suddenly there was nothing between him and the

Fortress.

It felt as if it had jumped out at him, and the Doctor

edged back under the concrete arch, keen to get out of its

sight. He peeked round the corner and – careful to give

himself as much cover as possible – got a good view. He

quickly understood how the Fortress had managed to

sneak up. The collapsed and sunken buildings had formed

a series of dams and terraces, and, over the years, the

water had collected, overflowed, built up, until a large

artificial lake had formed. It was a clearing in the forest of

skyscrapers, space needles, pylons and towers.

One side of the Fortress was facing full on to the lake,

the other two were swept back and partially embedded in

a huge, curving white building. Smaller towers and

needles– each one as large as any that had ever been built

on Earth – lay around the Fortress, like felled redwood

trees. The lines of the Fortress were broken up with

buttresses, battlements, odd jutting features that might

have been watchtowers. Plates of metal seemed to have

been bolted on, carelessly at times, to reinforce the

structure. There weren’t any obvious windows or hatches.

The lake was a mile wide, easily. Every so often,

nowhere near enough to provide a set of stepping stones,

masonry and metal fins broke the surface of the water. The

far shore was lapping against the solid black Fortress wall.

An accidental moat. The Doctor hadn’t thought to bring a

canoe with him. He stood quietly on the shore, looking for

a route across.

About halfway across the water, a glass man stood. The

figure was small and transparent, difficult to see. Ghostly.

The Doctor thought it might be a statue – an Antony

Gormley, not a Michelangelo. Some instinct, though, told

him it was alive.

He spent a second or two trying to work out if it had its

feet on a ruin, or simply on the surface of the lake. It was

facing away from him, best as he could tell.

This ghost didn’t look anything like the other one.

‘Two types of ghost?’ he whispered. Then, waving his

arms, he called, ‘Hey! You there! Hello! I’m the Doctor!’

A bolt of blue energy streaked low across the water,

right at him.

This sort of thing had happened plenty of times to the

Doctor before in his travels around time and space. One of

the reasons he had lasted as long as 900 years was that he

was always half-expecting something to start shooting at

him. He was back behind cover before the ray was hitting

the concrete and making a very credible attempt at

shattering it.

The Doctor knelt with his back to the wall, which was

warm now and still ringing from the impact. Had the glass

man fired at him, or had something from the Fortress fired

at the glass man and missed?

There was screaming and shouting from back the way

he’d come. Children screaming. Alsa and Gar.

The Doctor extricated himself, darting back through the

archway, along the riverbank. He almost collided with Gar

and, by dodging him, managed to slam right into Alsa. For

a moment both he and she tottered on the edge of the

river, but they managed to pull back from the brink.

‘Ghosts!’ Gar shouted. He was powering off, under the

arch, his friend already almost overtaking him. ‘Don’t let

a ghost touch you!’

Even now, the Doctor noted admiringly, the boy still

had his hands in his pockets.

Behind them, three ghosts were floating towards the

Doctor. The first type of ghost. Children, this time, who

didn’t look much older than Gar or Alsa. All girls, with

long white hair twisted in elaborate dreadlocks. Their

faces were blue-grey, their whole forms translucent. They

looked surprised, more than anything. Shaken. One was

holding up her hand, apparently bemused she could see

through it. She had five fingers.

The Doctor was about to reach out to her when he

remembered not to. He remembered something else, too.

He whirled on his heel, pounded after Alsa and Gar.

‘Stop!’ he shouted.

Gar did; Alsa either hadn’t heard or pretended she

hadn’t. As she reached the other side of the archway and

entered the clearing, the Doctor leapt, wrapped both of his

arms above her knees and pushed her and himself over, in

a rough approximation of a rugby tackle.

Alsa’s arms flailed out, her hands actually splashing

into the water.

‘Gerroff…’ she spat, trying to kick free.

A bolt of blue energy sailed less than a metre over their

heads, silencing Alsa’s protest. The Doctor let go and they

crawled behind a low brick wall half-submerged on the

edge of the water.

Gar was safe in the archway, and the Doctor called over

to him to stay where he was.

‘Were the ghosts following you?’ the boy asked, his

voice trembling.

‘No,’ the Doctor said, hoping he wasn’t lying.

He poked his head over the wall, brought it down again

very rapidly indeed, and another blue ray slammed past.

Alsa was wide-eyed, out of breath. ‘No one survives

this. We shouldn’t be here. Right from the start we’re told

that. No one comes here and lives.’

The Doctor looked right at her. She looked so much

younger than before.

‘How old are you, Alsa?’ he asked. Get her to think

about something else.

‘Thirteen.’ She was defensive again, her old self. Good.

She was so young. Too young to be part of this.

‘Don’t worry,’ the Doctor said, looking her straight in

the eye. ‘You can trust me.’

‘You stole my comm.’

The Doctor couldn’t meet her eye for a moment.

‘True,’he noted. He fished into his pocket and handed it

back.

‘You better not have broken it.’

‘The opposite actually.’ The Doctor was toying with the

idea of poking his head up again.

Alsa examined the comm, then looked up at him,

suspicious.

‘It’s got a full battery. That’s… you can’t do that.’

‘I can, you know,’ the Doctor said, glad of an excuse to

stay put for a moment. ‘It’s rechargeable. The problem

you have is you’ve got nowhere to recharge it. Arcopolis

got past all the primitive power sources, like coal and oil

and nuclear and solar. Cosmic energy collected by

satellites and beamed down. That’s what those aerials on

top of all the buildings were for. No pollution, plenty for

everyone. Well, cut a long story short, the satellites have

gone.’

Alsa was staring up at him. This was the Doctor’s first

opportunity to study her strange outfit up close. Post-

apocalyptic societies were meant to go all Mad Max, with

studded leather straps holding up rags and animal skins. It

was the rules. Alsa had roughly cut hair, like her mate had

done it, but it was almost too clean and moussed. She was

wearing perfume. Too much, and he could make out at

least three different types. Not only that, she was also

modelling a pinstripe trouser suit – not unlike his own,

although baggier, crisper and fancier. Then she’d ruined

the effect by sewing patches on it, attached ribbons, poked

through badges and other adornments. Her mum must

have gone spare. Alsa was wearing the sort of trainers you

only get for Christmas. Nothing really fitted her all that

well – she was wearing half a dozen pairs of socks so that

her feet filled out the shoes. It didn’t add up.

Or did it? The Doctor beamed as another piece fell into

place. ‘Oh, oh – yes! I see. You stole what you’re wearing.

Well, not stole – took from the shops.’

He thought about the vast city. All those shops with

shelves full of… well, everything. They’d be full of stuff.

Lots of things would fade or rot or perish – how quickly

would depend on what they were made of, what they were

packaged in, how much sunlight hit them, whether the

roof leaked. Some things would last a lifetime. One of

Alsa’s gang had had that fancy knife. All of them had

clothes and bags and stuff like that. Loads of loot.

‘The parents disapprove,’ Alsa said defiantly.

‘Well, not to be critical, but you do overdo the

perfume.’

‘They say the city is dangerous.’

‘On balance, I tend to agree.’

‘They say we should learn to make things ourselves.

They’re stupid – there’s plenty of everything in the city.’

The Doctor nodded. ‘It must be very difficult for them.

You and Gar and the other kids, you’ve never known a

different life. They did. It must haunt them. Losing

everything.’

There was a flash as bright as the sun for the merest

moment, annihilation so profound it stretched deep into

the past and far into the future. Then Gallifrey was gone.

‘They don’t like to talk about what happened before,’

Alsa was saying, a sneer in her voice. ‘They always

change the subject.’

‘Well, they must have lost loved ones. I know how

they… well, talking of which: how are you getting on

over there, Gar?’

‘I’m all right.’

The Doctor could see him, and gave him the thumbs

up. That made Gar smile, and copy the gesture.

‘Got your hands out of those pockets. Excellent. Right,’

said the Doctor. ‘Gar. Alsa. The Fortress is able to defend

itself. No one’s alive in there. It’s all automatic. It was a

place built for war, designed to function even after a

massive assault. The… lightning… that’s just a common

or garden directed energy ray. Motion sensitive,

unfortunately for us. It fires at anything that moves. There

will be other guns like that, at intervals, along the walls.

The ghosts are another defence mechanism. You’re not

going to want to go anywhere haunted, are you? So the

Fortress projects scary images to frighten you away. Kills

you if you stay too long. That’s all the ghosts – both

types… um, I think – are: holograms like your comm

makes. And, if you remember, “holograms” were on my

list of rational explanations for ghosts. I was right.’

‘So… you do this all the time?’ Alsa asked.

‘Oh yes. Fight monsters, right wrongs, boldly go where

no one has gone before.’

‘Like every day?’ Gar wondered.

‘Most days,’ the Doctor sighed. ‘Too many adventures

to tell in just one place. I forget half of them myself.’

‘Tell us a secret one.’

‘One no one else knows about? Um… yes.’ The Doctor

thought about that for a moment. ‘All right, here’s a good

one: a couple of days ago, I was in a city called London.

You won’t have heard of it. It’s on one of my favourite

planets. You won’t have heard of the Steggosians, either.

Luckily, they haven’t heard of you. A particularly nasty

race of fascist dinosaur people.’

‘What’s a dinosaur?’ asked Gar.

‘What’s a fascist?’ asked Alsa.

‘Well… imagine something as wide as I am tall, with

scaly skin and a flat head. Big plates running down its

back, spiky tail.’ The Doctor did a helpful mime.

‘And that’s a fascist?’

‘This particular one, yes. What matters is that the

universe won’t miss them. Twenty years ago, relatively

speaking, the Steggosian home quadrant was hit by a

terrible plague that destroyed their immune systems and

left no survivors. The one I met had been the captain of a

starship out on deep-space patrol when it happened. It

drove him mad. They’d caught the plague from rats, and

the captain decided to rid the universe of all mammals.’

‘What’s a mammal?’ the children both asked.

‘You are,’ the Doctor assured them. ‘The rest of his

crew perished over the years. He ended up inside a clock

tower, planning to release poison that was so lethal a

single drop would have killed everyone in the country. A

clock tower is—’

‘We know what a clock tower is,’ Alsa complained.

‘There’s one in the Car Factory,’ Gar added.

‘There’s also a famous one in London.’ The Doctor

smiled. ‘St Stephen’s Tower, or the Clock Tower, but most

people call it Big Ben. They’d only just finished

rebuilding it, so I wasn’t about to let anyone smash it up

again.’

‘What did you do to him?’ Alsa asked.

‘I tried talking to him,’ the Doctor said quietly. ‘He

wasn’t keen on the idea. We fought. He ended up losing

his balance, falling sixty metres. Hit the pavement.’

‘Splat!’ Alsa squealed.

The Doctor’s expression flickered. ‘He had a very

tough hide. But, yes, he died.’

Gar looked away, Alsa was thinking it through.

‘Did you keep the poison?’

‘No.’ It was time to risk it. Very slowly, the Doctor

stood up.

‘Doctor!’ Alsa shouted, grabbing at his sleeve.

‘It’s fine,’ the Doctor reassured her. ‘There’s a trick to

it. Move slowly. Motion sensitive, like I said, following a

set of instructions. It’s programmed to fire at things only if

they move above a certain speed.’

‘How fast?’ said Alsa, standing up so slowly she’d have

been shoved out the way by an impatient glacier.

‘Faster than that,’ the Doctor chided. He was literally

inching backwards to the archway. ‘Although I’m not sure

how much faster. It’s trial and error, really. Think of it as a

game.’

‘If we lose the game?’

‘We’ll be, er, blasted to pieces.’

The good thing about moving so slowly was that the

Doctor had a chance to look back over the lake, see if he

could spot the glass man again. He couldn’t, but it was

getting dark, and it had been hard enough to spot him

before. He might be inching across the water towards the

Fortress, not away from it. The thought was disturbing.

Now the Doctor was getting a good view of the

Fortress, he could see the gun turret. It was a tube

mounted low on a buttress, only a metre or so over the

water. It was still pointing in their direction, twitching

from time to time, impatiently. No ivy dared grow up the

walls of the Fortress, he noted.

‘Don’t give in to the temptation to run the last bit,’ the

Doctor warned, as much for his own benefit as Alsa’s.

The ground squelched beneath his left foot, sank away

suddenly, and the Doctor almost – almost – fell over. He

righted himself, sighed with relief, and with his next step

was behind the concrete wall with Gar.

Alsa’s wide shoulders were high, tense. She was like a

cat with an arched back. She’d been facing away from the

Fortress the whole time. Since the Doctor had nearly

slipped, she’d become so cautious with her feet she was in

danger of tripping over them.

‘Relax a little, Alsa. Nearly there.’

Three more steps and she was safe, and as soon as she

was safe her legs gave way and she sat down on the wet

ground. The Doctor double-checked the other direction for

ghosts. Alsa and Gar were talking amongst themselves,

glancing his way from time to time.

‘You’re coming with us,’ the girl announced as she got

up.

‘Where are we going?’ Gar asked, before the Doctor

could.

‘Back to the parents.’

The Doctor bit his lip. ‘I really have to get into that

Fortress,’ he said finally.

‘You can get inside?’

‘Yes.’

‘Tell me what you’re going to do.’

‘There is a weapon in there, a terrible weapon. Not that

ray gun, but something that’s – and here comes a word

that is overused, but not by me – infinitely more powerful.

That weapon was used once, fifteen years ago. Do you

understand what I mean?’

Alsa thought about it, but only for a second or two. ‘It’s

what killed everyone.’

The Doctor nodded. He glanced at the sky and then

looked back over at the Fortress.

‘Go home to your parents, show them you’re safe. Get

some sleep, and tomorrow morning, I promise, the

Fortress will no longer be a danger to anyone. I am going

in there, I’m going to get past all the traps and I’m going

to destroy that weapon once and for all. Then I’ll go. Like

I’d never been here.’

Night had fallen. The Fortress stood there, black

against a too-black night’s sky. It was a dark mountain,

and seemed almost as large as the city it had imposed

itself upon.

He could defeat it.

There was the faint whiff of perfume.

The Doctor turned, a smile on his face – just in time to

see Alsa, arms aloft, bringing half a concrete block down

on the side of his head. His knees buckled, he raised a

useless hand, opened his mouth and splashed down into

the muddy ground, the one-syllable question he was about

to ask still on his lips.

‘No,’ said Alsa.

The Doctor’s eyes snapped open, and the sudden light

made his very sore head even more sore. His hand

explored his temple, discovered it was tightly bandaged.

‘He’s up,’ a girl’s voice – too young to be Alsa’s –

called out.

He was lying on something like a camp bed, wearing

loose pyjama bottoms. Without moving, he established he

was in a large room with walls made of translucent plastic,

like a marquee. The light was sunlight, so he’d been

unconscious all night. Risking a turn of the head, he

couldn’t be sure if this was a hospital ward, a machine

shop or a laboratory.

The room seemed equally unclear on that point. There

were cabinets along the walls, full of glass and plastic

bottles, as well as various tools and scientific instruments.

There were four other beds, all empty. Two large metal

workbenches were packed with hand-lathes, drills, saws

and so on. There were large packing crates dotted around

the floor, stuffed with what looked like rolled-up posters

or scrolls.

There were six girls in the room, all 7 or 8 years old, all

in smart little lab coats. They were occupied cleaning

bottles, writing up notes and other menial scientific tasks.

The Doctor swung his legs round, planted his feet on

the rough stone floor.

‘Professor Jeffip will want to know,’ one girl said, to

general agreement from the others. She slid open a door

made of plastic sheeting and stepped through it.

From the quality of the light, they were going deeper into

the building, not leaving it. The corridors the Doctor was

led through reminded him of a traditional Japanese house,

but while those were built in harmony with nature using

local materials, the people here had made do with pieces

of metal scaffolding instead of wood, and sheets of

polythene instead of paper.

The girl who was leading him was so young and so

self-consciously prim that the Doctor was unsure if she

was playing or not.

‘In here.’

The girl stepped aside and closed the door after the

Doctor. It was a smaller room. A man in a mostly blue

patchwork toga was hunched over a great wooden desk.

The Doctor’s coat, suit, shirt and tie were all hanging up

on a rail beside the desk. The contents of his many and

various pockets had been collected in a plastic tray. The

man at the workbench had clamped the sonic screwdriver

into a small vice, prised the case open and was peering at

it.

‘Be careful,’ the Doctor said, intensely annoyed. ‘You

don’t know what—’

‘It’s a sonic tool… a screwdriver,’ the man told him

airily, without looking up. ‘I was just examining its

acoustic accelerators.’

The man turned, belatedly removing the jeweller’s

eyeglass he’d had fixed into his eye. He looked like he

was in his late sixties, with an aquiline noise and a high

forehead. His hair was a mane that started as a quiff, ran

halfway down his back and had grey streaks so dramatic

they were practically stripes. His irises were different

colours, one was a pale blue dot, the other a vivid red.

Cinnabar, the colour of mercury oxide, thought the

Doctor.

The man was toying idly with the piece of casing he’d

taken off. ‘We had devices like this,’ he said as he did so.

‘Much, much larger. The size of this room.’

The Doctor had reached the desk. He glanced down at

the tray with his stuff in and, as nonchalantly as he could,

confirmed the TARDIS key was there.

‘Your scientific credentials are certainly impressive,’

the man said, indicating the wallet containing the psychic

paper. ‘My name is Jeffip.’

‘Professor Jeffip?’

‘The children call me that, yes.’

‘I’m the Doctor.’

‘Yes. So Alsa’s told us.’ He raised his left hand, clearly

the local greeting.

‘Alsa…’ Just hearing the name made the Doctor’s head

throb more.

‘She and Gar brought you here.’

‘She’s a smart child.’ The Doctor said. He’d pulled his

shirt from its hanger and was slipping it back on.

‘Yes. One of mine, I think. She’s smart and angry. Not

a terribly appealing combination.’

‘No. So where’s Alsa now?’

‘She’s not yet risen.’

‘Teenagers, eh?’

‘She and Gar were very tired. They brought you a long

way in a wheelbarrow.’

‘Did they? Did they? A wheelbarrow. Fancy that.’ The

Doctor whistled as he buttoned up his jacket.

‘Alsa couldn’t begin to explain where you had come

from.’

‘You’ve already gathered that I’m not from Arcopolis?’

the Doctor ventured.

‘The two hearts and pockets full of items which aren’t

from this planet gave it away,’ Jeffip confirmed, reaching

for a walking stick made from a sawn-off piece of

aluminium pole. ‘Would you like some breakfast?’

Jeffip’s laboratory was in just one of about a dozen similar

structures of various sizes and shapes. This settlement was

a shanty town, albeit a rather posh one. It had been laid

out in a large flat expanse of parkland at the heart of the

city. It reminded the Doctor a little of Hooverville.

There were a lot of children around. A lot of them. A

remarkable number. Like a dozen school trips had shown

up at the same time. They were all under 10, as best he

could make out. The only adult the Doctor had seen so far

was Jeffip.

The pathways were festooned in bunting, paper

lanterns and sculptures made of scrap metal and bits of

dead robots. Anything to brighten up the place.

‘Are you all right, Doctor?’

The Doctor turned to Jeffip. ‘I’m sure it’s nothing.’

‘You look worried those robots are going to come back

to life.’

The Doctor tried to sound casual. ‘Stranger things have

happened.’

‘I wish they would. We could do with the help.’

They passed the comm mast, which stood in the middle

of the settlement like a totem pole. Everyone was stopping

or at least looking up as they passed. The Doctor smiled a

lot, tried to look friendly.

‘We always knew there must be extraterrestrial

civilisations,’ Jeffip was saying. ‘We never made contact

with any. Until the Fortress appeared. And now you, of

course. How’s the head?’

‘It feels like something made contact with it,’ the

Doctor said lightly.

Jeffip nodded, smiling. ‘I have many questions, of

course. A few practical ones. You’re here alone? Why

have you come to Arcopolis? How did you know we were

here and learn our language? Is that your natural form?’

‘What’s wrong with my form?’

‘Oh, nothing. Much. It’s just that it so closely

resembles our own. I wondered if you’d adopted it to

blend in. Like a chameleon.’

‘I’m from a world that was almost identical to this one.

Same size, so same gravity. Same atmosphere, just about.

Orange sky, not green. I like your sky, by the way. Don’t

see many green ones. Our superficial physical similarity is

down to natural selection and coincidence. The same

patterns repeat themselves across the universe. I’m here

alone. I travel, and I’ve learned millions of languages on

my travels. Never bothered with Welsh – didn’t think I’d

ever need it. Just goes to show.’

‘Was?’

‘I’m sorry?’ The Doctor had just looked down and

noticed his shoelaces were undone.

‘“A world that was”. Past tense.’

‘You’re a very perceptive man, Professor Jeffip.’ The

Doctor was bending down, tying his laces.

‘What do you know about this world, Doctor?’

‘Well…’ the Doctor began, ‘I know that I saw a boy

killed yesterday. Touched by a ghost. I tried to save him,

but couldn’t. I’m sorry.’

Jeffip grunted. ‘A shame. But at least it wasn’t a girl.’

The Doctor let that remark go for the moment.

They were approaching running water – the Doctor could

hear it. They passed through the gap between two tents

and then they were on the paved bank of a very narrow,

fast-flowing river. Upstream, there was a large

waterwheel, fixed to the side of a brick building that had

probably once only been ornamental. From the crashing

and clattering coming from inside, the Doctor guessed the

wheel was powering a drive shaft that, in turn, must have

been running things like a small milling wheel, a loom

and a lathe. Jeffip confirmed that and added that there

wasn’t room in there for much industry. Its main purpose

was to irrigate the fields.

‘You don’t generate electricity?’

‘Not yet. We’ve had other priorities.’

Set a little way from the water was a long picnic-style

bench. There were three women there: a blonde, a redhead

and a brunette; all of them looked around 40, perhaps a

little younger. They wore similar outfits, almost like thick

saris, all of them patched and mended. They were

attending to a cloud of children, all under five, all with

bottles of juice. Two of the women were at an advanced

stage of pregnancy.

‘Ladies,’ said the Doctor, smiling, sitting down.

The children were, despite the women’s best efforts,

something of a law unto themselves.

‘These aren’t all yours, are they?’ the Doctor joked.

‘Who else’s would they be?’ one of them asked, too

confused to be offended.

The Doctor, at the second attempt, managed to count

seventeen young children. It was mathematically possible,

he supposed.

Jeffip was dishing out a couple of bowls of soup from a

large stone pot. It was watery, but looked like lemongrass

and mushroom. When the Doctor tried it, it tasted

surprisingly strong.

‘I’m the Doctor, by the way,’ the Doctor said to the one

who didn’t look pregnant, the one with blonde hair.

‘Dela.’ She raised her left hand, then returned her

attention to wiping the mouth of a 2-year-old. The

children all knew to drink up their soup and eat their

mushrooms.

‘How many children do you have? If you don’t mind

me asking?’

‘Sixteen,’ Dela told him, too busy to look up. ‘I’m

between at the moment.’

‘Hard work,’ the Doctor suggested.

Dela turned her head and raised an eyebrow.

‘You knew that already,’ the Doctor said.

‘I knew that already,’ she confirmed, giving him a nice

smile.

‘We have to repopulate.’

The voice belonged to a new arrival, a woman as old as

Jeffip, so around 60. She was scholarly-looking, with

thinning grey hair. ‘Welcome to New Arcopolis. I am

Jennver.’

‘And do you have children?’ the Doctor asked, turning

away from Dela.

‘Not for fifteen years,’ Jennver said, without emotion.

‘Ah. Yes… I understand.’

What had once been raw had been smoothed away over

the years, like pebbles in a stream. Before the Fortress

arrived, all of the grown-ups here would have had jobs

and friends, families and an expectation of what the future

was going to be like. All taken away in an instant. The

Doctor wondered what they’d been like before.

‘As I’m too old to have children and too weak to work

the fields, I occupy myself as leader of the Council.’

Jennver beamed and raised her hand.

Jeffip was smiling. ‘Jennver is also our only

obstetrician.’

‘Delighted to meet you,’ the Doctor said. This was the

first time for centuries he’d heard the word “obstetrician”

twice in twenty-four hours.

‘You are also a doctor,’ she asked – a little warily, the

Doctor thought.

‘I am.’

‘Alsa told me a little about you last night. The

hologram she took wasn’t terribly flattering.’

‘She didn’t get my good side,’ the Doctor suggested.

‘Given that it was a 3D image, that’s just unforgivable.

Kids, eh? You must have a terrible time controlling them.

They must outnumber you ten to one.’

‘They all come to understand their duty to posterity.’

‘Duty?’

‘Well, yes. None of us have any choices. The—’

‘—women have to have lots of babies, and it doesn’t

matter so much if the boys are eaten by ghosts?’ the

Doctor finished for her. ‘Either way, you don’t need to

teach them to read.’

The Doctor looked over to Dela for support, but she

was studiously looking the other way.

Jennver bristled, but managed to stay civil. ‘Our

society faces exceptional circumstances, Doctor. We were

left with thirteen women of childbearing age. Everyone,

men and women, lost privileges and rights. None of us

have the life we would ask for. We retained a functioning

society. There are now 148 girls and women. The eldest of

the children will soon be adults, and have children of their

own. There will not be the same pressure on them.’

‘I calculate that an average of ten children will suffice,’

said Jeffip. ‘Then six for the generation after that. We

can’t expand beyond the settlement’s ability to feed itself,

of course.’

‘It is not how I would organise an ideal world,’ Jennver

conceded. ‘We have never mistaken this situation for the

ideal world. We have adopted a clan structure, one that

seems to hold together.’

The Doctor nodded. His attention had wandered back

to the Fortress. He needed to get on with what he’d come

here to do.

The park was roughly triangular, probably two miles on

each side, surrounded by skyscrapers and other huge

buildings. The Fortress was visible, but further away than

ever, a dark island almost lost in a sea of architecture. The

Doctor was confident he could make a break for it, but he

wanted as much of a head start as possible, so he was

waiting for an opportunity to sneak off without alerting

anyone.

They’d finished breakfast and left the mothers looking

after the children. Now, an hour or so after he’d woken,

the Doctor was following Jeffip and Jennver as they

walked among the tents.

‘I’d love to hear your thoughts on where the Fortress

came from,’ the Doctor told them.

Jennver looked dismissive. ‘I don’t think we’ll ever

know for sure.’ She’d taken against him, the Doctor was

sure of it.

The old man leant more firmly against his walking

stick. ‘Shouldn’t stop us asking the questions, Jennver.

I’ve been doing that for fifteen years. Certain facts are

self-evident. It is the product of a civilisation far in

advance of ours. That civilisation is aggressive and

paranoid. They operate on a scale that I know I can’t even

comprehend. Their agenda is entirely unknown and their

methods do not, as far as I can tell, have any precedent in

our history. It is probably alien.’

‘Only probably?’ the Doctor asked.

‘It may have time travelled from our future. In which

case, it may have been built by our descendants for no

other reason than that they knew it appeared when it did.

The destruction of our civilisation may have been a

necessary step in the creation of theirs.’

‘I tend to the belief that time travel is a logical

absurdity,’ Jennver said.

The Doctor nodded approvingly. ‘Oh, absolutely. In

fact, I was saying the exact same thing to a bloke down

the pub just next week.’

‘They did something that wiped out 200 million people

in an instant. And it obscured nine of the stars. Did you

know that? I have drawn up star maps, compared them

with ones from the last fifteen years.’ As Jeffip said that,

the Doctor remembered the box of scrolls back in his lab.

‘The nine nearest stars to this world – apart from our own

sun, of course. An atmospheric effect, I think.’

‘Not everyone is so sure any stars have vanished,’

Jennver said gently. ‘None of us were even amateur

astronomers.’

‘Surely there are records?’

‘Every database is dead, powerless.’

‘There must be old books in museums and libraries?’

‘We have different priorities.’

The Doctor’s jaw must have dropped, because Jennver

looked annoyed.

‘Museums and art galleries had controlled conditions,

all dependent on their power supply. We needed to plant

and harvest. We couldn’t afford to waste any effort.’

‘So every masterpiece of all the great artists of

Arcopolis is sat mouldering?’

‘Rather them than the crops in the field. You can’t eat

books.’

Jeffip had the decency to look ashamed.

‘Most of the statues and sculptures are still there,’

Jeffip noted. ‘We did want to bring Dance of Days to the

settlement, make it a feature of our square, but it’s solid

bronze. It was just too heavy. Shame, as it’s pretty

inspiring.’

‘It’s not going anywhere,’ Jennver muttered. ‘We were

right to start afresh.’

Jeffip was also clearly keen to change the subject.

‘Doctor, we were once a proud people. We thought

Arcopolis had reached the pinnacle of technology and

society. But the only conclusion I can reach is that we

were caught in the crossfire of some intergalactic war that

had nothing whatsoever to do with us. We were an anthill

run over by a tank.’

The Doctor pursed his lips, but decided not to say

anything.

‘Who was Jall?’ the Doctor asked Jeffip later on in the

morning.

Jeffip nodded, upset to hear the name. ‘A lovely girl.

One of the first to be born, she’d just come back to us.’

‘I gather she was killed.’

‘By ghosts, yes. Her body was found the day before

yesterday, by the Ground Wing. It’s a shame. She was old

enough to start thinking about having kids of her own.’

‘Alsa wanted to know if I murdered her.’

‘She thought you were a ghost at first, didn’t she?’

‘Yes.’

‘There you are, then. She’s angry and she’s a child,

Doctor – not objective.’ He hesitated. ‘It’s odd. So much

death, but that was only the third body I’d ever seen.

Everyone taken by the ghosts vanished. We lost a couple

of people early on. Couldn’t take it. Selfish. We’ve been

lucky since then, in the settlement.’

That puzzled the Doctor.

It was gone midday.

Beyond the tents, the park had been ploughed up and

various crops planted. The fields were full of people –

children, mostly – just like pre-Industrial Revolution

farms in Europe. At least on Earth they’d had horses and

oxen to pull ploughs. The only mechanical sound he could

hear was the splash and creak of the water wheel, on the

other side of the tents.

The Doctor was keen to get back in Jennver’s good

books before he left. The leader of the Council was at the

edge of the fields, deep in conversation with Dela.

A crowd of children – a little older than the ones he’d

met at breakfast – were picking what looked like blue

strawberries. A little boy offered the Doctor one, and he

gratefully accepted.

‘Tasty,’ he said, and meant it. It actually tasted a little

meaty, like beef. A little. He had another.

‘So, Doctor,’ Jennver said. ‘You knew about the

Fortress before you arrived. Did you know Arcopolis had

been destroyed?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you know that we had survived?’ Dela asked.

‘No,’ the Doctor admitted.

Dela and Jennver shared a glance.

‘Now you know about us, you have new plans.’

The Doctor was puzzled for a second or two, mainly

because it hadn’t even been a question. ‘Well, yes, of

course,’ he said hurriedly. ‘Um… what do you mean?’

‘Alsa said you fixed her comm,’ Dela said. ‘A man of

your abilities would be very useful around here.’

‘Um…’ He floundered for a moment. ‘Oh, I see. Yes.

I’m happy to do what I can to help out. I’m up for odd

jobs, tinkering, fixing up. Anything, really.’ He looked

over at Dela and smiled. ‘Within reason. Nothing that

changes things too much, of course. I’m not meant to

interfere, but, well, that ship sailed a long time ago.’

Jennver was smiling and nodding, keen. ‘That’s settled.

See what you can do. We’re having a Council meeting

tonight. You should come to it.’

The Doctor checked his watch, looked back over at the

Fortress. ‘Yes, of course,’ he said.

By mid afternoon the Doctor was getting itchy feet. He

was a traveller, he liked travelling.

Dela was pleasant company, and now she was showing

him around, introducing him to people. She’d just had him

shake hands with a brawny, bearded man called Fladon,

the blacksmith, although he was away from his workshop.

Fladon was in his late forties, dressed in a jumper knitted

from reeds and what looked like a PVC kilt. It wasn’t a

look the Doctor would be rushing to adopt.

Fladon suddenly shouted: ‘Come back have you?’

He was calling out to Gar, who’d just come swaggering

round the corner and had his hands back in his pockets.

He didn’t come over, or answer Fladon’s question, he was

just wandering through.

‘What’s he doing out?’ Gar scowled when he saw the

Doctor. ‘That’s the Ghost Doctor, that is.’

‘He’s a man, Gar,’ Dela said.

‘Frad’s dead,’ he called out, either indifferent or

successfully feigning indifference. He’d passed by, now.

‘Boys will be boys,’ Dela sighed, picking up a bottle

Gar had dropped.

‘Children shouldn’t be running around outside getting

exercise, they should be inside playing violent computer

games and eating junk food,’ the Doctor agreed.

‘We let children play.’

‘And die?’

‘Life here is hard,’ Fladon said. ‘Kids learn that adults

stay away from the city for good reasons. We tell them,

but they have to learn for themselves, so a lot of them go

out into the city when they’re old enough. We give the

more grown-up kids comms to use in emergencies. It’s

healthy to question, to work things out. They all reach the

same decision in the end. Some only go there for a few

days, others for years. Sooner or later, they all come back.

The girls faster than the boys.’

‘They all have so far,’ Dela agreed quietly. ‘If the

ghosts don’t get them.’

‘And the adults never leave this park? At all?’

‘Well, I remember what the city was like. It’s very

painful to go back, see the state it’s in. All the places I

went to with Gyll, just… dead.’

‘Gyll?’

‘Yes.’ She blushed, didn’t want to say any more about

Gyll. ‘I’ve not set foot there for… well, ten years. At least.

Very few of us have. We’ve been busy here.’

‘But all the stuff there…’

Fladon snorted, raised his hand to shut the Doctor up

before he’d really started. ‘We learned self-sufficiency.

How to make things and fix things. Not rummaging

around in other people’s garbage.’

‘That’s… admirable. To an extent, but…’

‘It must seem odd. Like I say, we all go through a

phase of thinking that. All the kids do. But life here is

fragile. Our survival is tenuous, and there’s no guarantee

that this place is even viable. We can’t control our destiny,

but we must do what we can. It’s childish to think

otherwise.’

The Doctor considered. ‘OK… one example: medicine.

Even after fifteen years, there must be medical supplies in

the city that haven’t expired, so do you—’

‘No,’ Dela said.

‘All those births, you must have—’

‘No,’ Dela interrupted again, laughing. ‘I wish we did

at times.’

‘Well… why don’t you?’

‘Because instead of relying on technology, we have to

rely on ourselves.’

‘Oh, too simple,’ complained the Doctor. ‘Too glib.

Come on… when the Fortress arrived you would have

both have been – what? – mid-twenties? So you know

what the doctors of Arcopolis could do. So what was

possible? Heart transplants – easy-peasy. Lungs, livers,

kidneys… eyes. Faces. Had you done brains? They’re

tricky, but I bet a civilisation that could build –’ he found a

particularly impressive building on the skyline and

pointed at it ‘– that skylon could manage a good old brain

transplant. I bet you’d cured just about everything. If you

got squished up in an aircar crash, I bet they’d just

unsquishify you. I bet it was practically an outpatient’s

procedure.’

‘We had advanced medicine,’ Fladon said. ‘We’re

certainly at an advantage now because our ancestors

eliminated genetic disease. But sooner or later any

medicine would run out. Better to get used to making our

own remedies, rely on our own strength. Imagine what

would have happened if we had been reliant on robot

surgeons? I don’t know what we’d have done if we hadn’t

had someone like Jennver who could deliver babies.’

‘What’s your life expectancy now, Fladon? Twenty

years less than your father’s?’

‘At least. But the survival of the species is more

important than any individual. We need to know that our

grandchildren and their grandchildren will survive.’

‘The ghosts keep to the city, the lightning only strikes

those going near the Fortress,’ Dela agreed. ‘We have a

life for ourselves here. It’s hard, but it’s safe. Take risks

and we could all die.’

‘It’s a good way to live, here,’ Fladon said.

The Doctor looked at Fladon. ‘In tents, literally in the

shadows of some of the most beautiful buildings ever

constructed?’

‘Yes. Living in the shadows is better than dying in the

light.’

‘We live here, now, Doctor,’ Dela said softly, a little

reluctantly. ‘It doesn’t matter what’s in the city. It doesn’t

matter what we’d change if we could. We all of us have to

learn to make the best of it.’

‘Fatalism? Just letting the universe do its thing?’

‘Given how we find ourselves here, how we couldn’t

prevent losing everything we had in an instant, it’s a

perfectly rational response, wouldn’t you say?’ Fladon

said gruffly.

The Doctor stuffed his hands in his pockets and took a

good look around. ‘No. No, I wouldn’t.’

Late afternoon, and Alsa had just got out of bed and

dressed. Her limbs ached. She sat there, half-crouched,

thinking about her next move. A shape shifted behind the

milky plastic wall, a parent coming her way. It turned the

corner, and Alsa was surprised to see the Doctor.

‘I was just popping in to see Dela,’ he said. ‘You were

on the way, so I thought I’d say “hi”. Hi.’

‘How’s the head?’ she asked, careful to sneer. Alsa

realised she was sitting upright. Something about the

Doctor put her on the alert.

‘I had a bandage, but I took it off. There’s a bruise

there, but nothing worse.’

‘It’s so small, isn’t it?’

The Doctor reached for the bruise.

‘No,’ Alsa said. ‘This place. The settlement. All these

one-storey buildings. I don’t think you can even measure

the tallest buildings in Arcopolis.’

The Doctor laughed. ‘Well, someone had to, to build

them. The tallest ones are eight, nine hundred storeys, I

think, something like that.’

‘You’ve seen taller, though?’

‘On Gammadendrax, they have a tower that reaches all

the way to their moon.’

‘Their what?’

The Doctor spent a second considering the quickest

explanation, then he said, ‘It’s so tall it would be like

stacking all of the towers of Arcopolis one on top of each

other. There’s no roof, just two ground floors, one on one

planet, one on another.’

‘That’s stupid. What happens in the middle when

you’re going up it? Do they start falling instead of

climbing?’

‘That’s just what I asked. You’re a very smart young

woman, Alsa.’ His grin melted away, and all of a sudden

he looked very stern, very serious. ‘Why do you behave

the way you do?’

Alsa frowned. ‘What choice do I have?’

‘You tell me,’ said the Doctor.

So she did.

Almost every kid went to the City when they were old

enough. There came a point when you just did the sums,

and realised that if all the parents were busy at their work,

and if there were so many more kids than adults, then

there was no way the parents could stop you doing what

you wanted. The very first thing every kid wanted to do

was to explore the City that had been looming over the

settlement all their life, utterly taboo.

Usually what happened – Alsa’s experience was pretty

typical – was that you’d tag along with some older kids,

perhaps even break away and run back if they went too

far.

Her first trip into Arcopolis, she hadn’t liked it. The

buildings were too tall, everything was wrong. There were

shadows and tiny dangers and humiliations everywhere.

She’d slipped over on a walkway and fallen into a pothole

and got wet and bruised.

A lot of the girls, in particular, didn’t stay there for

long. They were always better looked after by the parents

than the boys were, given more interesting things to do.

Alsa stuck with it.

She got used to the City quickly. Soon, she was leading

younger kids there herself. She’d discovered a department

store once, all by herself, close to the settlement but which

hadn’t been touched. She’d prised open the sliding doors

with a crowbar. There had been eleven kids with her, and

they’d swarmed in, pushing and biting and shoving to be

the first inside. They’d just run around the place in a pack

at first, before breaking up into smaller groups and

exploring for themselves. The store was full of everything.

Clothes and make-up and sport stuff, a load of dead

electronics.

There was a food hall, and that was where Alsa ended

up. Most things people used to eat had been made by

machines, but there were luxuries, and people got those

from stores. The smell was terrible, like a cesspit. A lot of

stock had just rotted. There was fruit juice, in pretty green

bottles but, judging from the first half a dozen of them

Alsa broke open, it had all fermented, so she left the rest

alone. Some food was perfectly preserved, in plastic packs

or in metal tubes. Most of the tubes had pictures of the

food on.

She’d peeled back the plastic on one pack, eaten

something strange, a bit like mushroom but with an odd

melty, stringy texture.

‘Meat,’ the Doctor said.

‘Eh?’

‘The muscle and fat of a dead animal.’

Alsa thought about it, more curious than anything else.

‘That was meat? The parents go on about meat.’ She’d

liked the taste, but mainly because it was so gross. She

looked down at her own hand, flexed the muscles of her

fingers.

‘The attack wiped out all the animals. Except for the

parents. Given that cannibalism is, um, off the menu, that

means you’re all lifelong vegetarians.’

‘You’ve eaten meat?’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘You’ve done loads of things, haven’t you?’

The Doctor pursed his lips and nodded. ‘That’s… fair

to say. I’ve had more opportunities than you.’

‘Yeah, well, obviously.’

‘What’s your plan? What’s it all about, Alsa?’ He sang

that last bit, although she didn’t recognise the tune.

‘What?’

‘Are you going back to the City and staying there all

your life?’

‘Doesn’t matter what,’ she said, frustrated. ‘Girls

become women, they get pregnant, have babies, look after

them, the men help, but they can’t have babies, so the

women have to, so there’s no choice, we need to

repopulate.’

‘It’s your duty.’

‘Are you laughing at me?’

‘No.’ He clearly meant it, for what that was worth.

‘It’s what we do.’

‘But there is a choice about how you do it,’ the Doctor

said.

He was the first person who’d ever understood.

‘They don’t get angry,’ she said. ‘You notice that? Are

they holding it all in? I can’t tell. When I get angry… it

boils. It never completely goes away.’

‘They’re not guilty, either,’ the Doctor added.

‘Guilty?’ she said, annoyed with him. ‘What have they

got to be guilty about?’

‘Even if you were there and saw it all, even if you

know it’s not your fault and you did your very best, you

ask yourself why. Why did I survive? Why do I deserve to

live, when so many others have died? Why was I the only

one?’ He paused, then, ‘Guilt. Even if you hide it, it’s

there. It eats away at you.’

He looked up at her, gave a nervous smile.

Alsa had watched the performance, unimpressed. ‘I’ll

take your word for it,’ she said. ‘I don’t feel any guilt. I

wasn’t there. Not my fault. But I get angry. I hate this. It’s

stupid. I want to lash out, hurt people. All the time. I can’t

help it. It’s all such… it’s all…’

‘Wrong?’ the Doctor supplied, and it was as good a

word as any. ‘Not the way things are meant to be. This

isn’t the life a 13-year-old girl should have. You’ve been

denied so much.’

‘Doesn’t matter what.’

‘So you keep saying. But you don’t mean it, do you?’

‘No one could do anything about the Fortress. Even if

there had been a warning, even a hundred years’ warning,

what could they have done? There was nowhere to run to,

no way of fighting it. We are where we are. Here in a load

of stupid, small, cold plastic tents. Everything perfectly

balanced by Jennver and Jeffip, no alternative, no way to

change even the slightest thing without all of us dying.’

‘So your solution is to lose your temper?’

She looked at him, stared him right in the eye. It was

very important for him to know that this wasn’t an act,

this wasn’t a game, this wasn’t anything trivial or stupid

or childish. ‘Someone has to.’

The Doctor was nodding, mouth clamped shut. It was

like he was grinding his teeth. Without another word, the

Doctor turned and left, his coat tails flapping.

‘It’s all different now, though, isn’t it?’ she said quietly,

once he’d gone. ‘Now is when everything changes.’

The evening was a little chilly, and the Doctor had his

coat on. He’d still not had a chance to recover his

possessions, and felt almost naked wandering around with

empty pockets. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d

done it. Hundreds of years ago, at the very least. It was

also odd not having to plan the rescue of any friends from

imminent danger.

Not that he was short of company. Unfortunately. Qerl

– the Doctor thought that was his name – was doggedly at

his side.

Qerl was a farmer. Dela had left the Doctor with Qerl

about two hours ago. It was teatime, and then it was going

to be bedtime for the young children. So the Doctor had

been stuck with Qerl who, unlike Dela, wasn’t terribly

prepossessing. They’d spent the whole time discussing

soil yields and crop rotation. Qerl was now onto the

subject of nitrogen fixation and the Doctor had concluded

he would have had a more rewarding chat with a

diazotroph.

The Doctor glanced up at the sky. It was evening, so it

had gone a very dark green. He couldn’t tell where the

missing stars would have been. He hadn’t spent all that

much time in Galaxy Seven, so wasn’t familiar with the

night sky, and it was clouding over anyway. Peering up,

though, he could swear three of the stars were moving in

close formation. Before he could confirm it, they were

behind a cloud.

Frustrated, the Doctor returned his attention to

terrestrial concerns. He’d soon be out of here and heading

over to the Fortress. He hoped he could get there before it

started raining.

The Council met in the largest tent, which was long and

narrow, like an Anglo-Saxon mead hall, and set a little

apart from the rest of the settlement, on a raised bit of

parkland. The Doctor was welcomed inside. There were

ten adults in there, all sitting at one end of rows of short

benches. Alsa lounged precociously among them, looking

at home. Gar was there, but a wallflower. The adults were

dressed in a variety of styles – mostly wraps and robes

and saris, that kind of thing – all the clothes were clearly

handmade and practical.

Qerl was taking his place on the benches. Jennver stood

for a moment, addressing the Doctor rather formally.

‘We’re here to welcome the Doctor to New Arcopolis.’

A round of polite applause. Jennver took her seat. The

Doctor did a little bow, thanked everyone.

‘He has already met a great many of us,’ Jennver

continued. ‘It’s clear he will fit into this community. He’s

a very talented individual, and starting to understand how

and why we do things here. I suggest we leave it a few

weeks until I formally revise the schedule, so we can see

which of his many—’

The Doctor had raised his hand.

‘Doctor?’

‘Er… no,’ he said.

Jennver looked puzzled.

‘I’m not here for weeks,’ the Doctor said.

‘But you said you’d help us.’

‘Well, yes. For a bit. I did that. I thought you were all

gathering this evening to wish me bon voyage.’

Murmuring from the adults.

‘Hang on,’ the Doctor complained. ‘I told you. I was

happy to see how I can help out around here. If you’d let

me have my sonic screwdriver back, I could have done

more, but as it is I’ve improved the range of the comm

mast, given Qerl advice about his berries, serviced—’

‘You’ve done marvellous work,’ Jeffip said. ‘Don’t you

like it here?’

‘It’s lovely,’ the Doctor said, aware there was a dash of

tetchiness in his voice but unable to remove it. ‘Charming.

Friendly. But I came to this planet for a reason. There is a

weapon inside the Fortress that is very dangerous. I intend

to decommission it.’

‘I say we let him,’ Alsa announced.

Jennver held up a hand, and Alsa fell silent, albeit with

bad grace.

‘Forgive her, Doctor. As the saying goes: children must

find their own way to New Arcopolis.’

‘Um… nothing to forgive. I, er, agree with her.’ He

looked over at Alsa suspiciously, but the girl was smiling

and nodding sweetly.

‘You can’t go anywhere near the Fortress,’ Jennver

said. ‘If you go there, you will die. There are the ghosts,

but there’s also the lightning.’

The Doctor decided to be gentle. ‘I appreciate that you

have a strong taboo against approaching the Fortress. Very

sensible. As Alsa will have told you, it’s well defended. I

have the ability to thwart those defences. I don’t mean to

boast, but I’m uniquely qualified to do that.’

‘You were knocked out by a 13-year-old girl,’ Fladon

pointed out, to some laughter from the others.

The Doctor could take a joke. ‘Indeed. A girl whose life

I’d just saved. Perhaps she left that bit out.’

‘I told them,’ Alsa said, not rising to the bait. ‘I’ve told

them everything. We were really close to the Fortress. I

think you can do it.’

‘Thank you,’ the Doctor said, a little unsettled by her

magnanimity. ‘Now, there will be no danger to anyone

here. In fact, after I’ve deactivated the Fortress, it will be

just another building, and you’ll be safe to go back into

the city.’ He smiled at them, tried to keep it cheerful.

‘I say we let him,’ Alsa repeated.

The Doctor turned to face her, ignoring the others.

‘Alsa, with the best will in the world, if you wanted to let

me get into the Fortress, why did you hit me with that

rock? If you hadn’t, I’d have finished the job by now.’

The adults were murmuring again, glancing at him,

talking among themselves. Was this the sort of seemingly

polite social situation which would abruptly turn into a

trial and end with him being thrown down into a pit filled

with local carnivores? He’d been the guest of honour at

plenty such events, over the years. Come to think of it,

there weren’t any local carnivores left, were there? So he

could relax. Presumably.

The Doctor looked over to Jeffip for some help.

The old man took the hint and stood, bit his lip a little

nervously.

‘So… Doctor. What would you do after that?’

‘Once I’ve decommissioned the weapon, I’ll be on my

way. Things will change here, obviously, but it’s not up to

me to say how.’

Some of the adults were agitated, some angry. No one

seemed terribly happy. Except Alsa.

This is why I should avoid politics, the Doctor mused.

‘Why abandon us?’ Qerl said.

‘I’m not “abandoning” anyone. You were getting on

fine without me.’

‘The problems we have to overcome can’t be solved in

one day. Another pair of hands, another brilliant mind,

could be of such benefit.’

‘I know that. I—’

‘Why can’t you return to us after you’ve destroyed the

weapon?’ Jennver suggested.

The Doctor toyed with agreeing. He’d told them the

truth before, though, and didn’t want to start lying now.

‘You don’t see the bigger picture,’ the Doctor insisted.

Uproar.

‘We don’t matter?’

The Doctor faltered. ‘You matter.’

‘But not as much?’

The Doctor’s smiled flickered. ‘It’s not the way I

would put it…’

He was saved from being glared to death by Alsa, of all

people.

‘Look… shut up, everyone. The Doctor’s right. There’s

a bigger picture.’

The Doctor didn’t have to wait long for the sting in the

tail.

‘It’s not about him helping out with the crops and

chores. Don’t you get it? We need the Doctor to do

something none of us can: sort out the Fortress. But after

that, it doesn’t matter if he stays. If he gets rid of the

lightning and the ghosts, we can move back into the city.’

Stern silence from the adults, all their attention on the

girl.

‘Here we go,’ moaned Alsa, gearing up for a blazing

row. ‘Look, we’ve had good reason to be scared. But it’s

just a building, there’s no magic.’

Jennver sighed. ‘We should stay out of the city. All of

us.’

‘Whyyyyy?’

The members of the Council were shifting in their

seats, but had begun to look more relaxed. There’s a point

in every argument where one of the people crosses the

line: goes too far, says something that’s demonstrably

wrong, steers themselves onto a different point, one that

can be knocked down more easily. They all thought Alsa

had arrived there.

Jennver was looking kindly at her. ‘Because that is the

past and we have to live in the future. We can’t be

dependent. We need to start afresh, not… cannibalise what

was lost. That would be slow suicide.’

‘There is a whole city there, full of stuff.’

‘A finite amount of “stuff”.’

‘Plenty for three hundred people. There are apartments

with real beds and bathtubs. Tools and other equipment.

Games. Clothes. There’s just about everything we need

and it’s going to waste.’

‘Once, yes, we could live in the city. Not any more. It

isn’t practical.’

‘Why not?’ said Alsa, a real flash of fire in her eyes.

‘You wouldn’t understand.’

‘Oh, here we go. I wasn’t alive before. I don’t know

what it was like before. Life was so different before. I

wasn’t even born. I know that. I know what it’s like now.

And it’s rubbish. You’re scared. That’s all it is. Cities are

for living in. Let’s live in the city.’

It was clear to the Doctor that this was not the first time

they’d had this out. The arguments must have been

endlessly rehearsed and repeated, and the whole

discussion had the air of a well-worn ritual.

Maybe it was his headache, or he wasn’t concentrating,

but the Doctor couldn’t see where Alsa was heading with

this, why she thought she’d change anyone’s mind this

time. Was she just arguing for argument’s sake?

‘It’s not just the ghosts and lightning,’ Jennver sighed.

‘We can’t just move into the ruins.’

The Doctor tried to race ahead of what was being said,

tried to get to where Alsa was going. This wasn’t just a

teenager kicking against the system. Alsa was cunning –

the bruise on his head throbbed its agreement at that – and

had something up that designer-suited sleeve of hers.

What had changed?

Jennver was carrying on with what sounded like a

familiar lecture. ‘A great city needs lighting, heating. A

whole infrastructure, all mechanised. Clean water didn’t

just miraculously come out the taps, the buildings didn’t

repair themselves. That was done by machines… and

machines need power. We have no way of activating the

energy satellites. Unless you have some magical power

supply—’

‘No!’ the Doctor – who had just worked out what Alsa

was up to – shouted. ‘No. Alsa, no.’

Jennver was distracted, but soon got back to her script.

‘Without a power supply for the whole city… we can’t

live there. We don’t even know that the satellites are still

there. Jeffip wasted years trying to turn on a small portion

of the grid. It wasn’t built that way, couldn’t be altered.

Arcopolis long ago exhausted its fossil fuels. Wood

burning just isn’t efficient enough.’

The Doctor was on his feet, seriously considering just

making a dash for the door. ‘The weapon at the heart of

that Fortress has to be destroyed.’

Jennver was looking around, bewildered, like he had

just changed the subject.

Alsa spelled it out. ‘The Fortress. The Doctor says

there’s this weapon, yeah? He says that it can project

holograms and fire death rays, and that there are—’

‘We’ve always known—’

‘Yes. We’ve always known that that thing had a power

source. The difference now is the Doctor. He says the

Fortress has got infinite power.’

Jeffip had been thinking. ‘You know how it runs,

Doctor?’

‘Yes. The Fortress doesn’t have a power plant that also

supplies the weapon, it’s the other way round: the weapon

powers the Fortress. The fact that the Fortress has power

is the proof that the weapon is still in there and is still

active.’

Alsa smirked. ‘Infinite power sounds like plenty to run

a city with. That’s what the Doctor should be doing:

instead of destroying the weapon, he should take that

power and harness it.’ She pointed straight at him. ‘The

Doctor can lead us out of the darkness and back where we

deserve to be: into a city of light and heat and safety. The

Doctor could do that. Don’t you see – he’s our saviour.

Him.’

Everyone was looking straight at the Doctor. Alsa was

practically licking her lips, a glint in her eyes.

‘If he wants to leave us after that, let him.’

The Doctor closed his eyes, slumped.

‘No,’ he said.

‘If we could harness that power…’ Jeffip began.

Fladon was scratching his hairy chin. ‘Alsa’s right,

isn’t she, Doctor? You could do this.’ It was the first time

the Doctor had seen him smile. ‘As soon as we get the

power back on, we could get some robots running, they’d

start fixing things.’

Jennver was looking upset. ‘We make our own

salvation,’ she said in a faltering voice. Then, stronger,

‘We will survive through the efforts of our own hands.

Not by praying for angels to come down and save us.’

‘We don’t need to pray, we can just ask,’ said Alsa.

‘You’ll save us, won’t you, Doctor?’

He realised he was glaring at her through narrowed

eyes.

‘No,’ he repeated.

Utter silence.

‘Can’t or won’t?’ Alsa asked after a moment, leading.

She’d known that he would refuse. ‘Instead of being

selfish and destroying that power source, you connect it

up to the grid for us. We can go and live in the city. We

could live in the Fortress itself.’

It all sounded so reasonable, but she was so angry. It

was infectious, too – the Doctor could feel himself losing

his temper.

‘I came here to deactivate the Fortress,’ he spat.

‘Destroy it. Not to do it up as flats.’

‘Now you know we’re here, though, that changes

things, surely?’

‘Not enough,’ the Doctor said curtly. ‘That weapon

can’t fall into the wrong hands.’

‘No space travellers have ever come here. Except you.’

‘If they did, having a weapon to defend ourselves

wouldn’t be a bad idea.’

The Doctor walked up to Fladon, who’d said that, and

jabbed a finger at him, before turning to address the other

Council members. ‘You all saw that? That’s how it

happens. It starts with “we could really use this around the

house” and then – not one minute later – suddenly it’s “we

could use it to kill our enemies”. That’s fine when it’s a

stone tool, or fire, or a knife, or a hunting rifle. It’s even

fine when it’s a missile.’ The Doctor hesitated. ‘Pushing it

a little by that point, admittedly, but it’s still fine. The

weapon in that Fortress is too powerful.’

Alsa was angry. ‘Says who? Too powerful for you,

perhaps. Not for us.’

‘Doctor, Arcopolis was a place of peace. We had not

known war or even serious crime for many thousands of

years,’ Jeffip said. ‘A weapon is no temptation for us.’

‘Perhaps the Doctor wants it for himself. We should

take stewardship. We know we wouldn’t use it.’

‘We have no ambitions except survival. We could be

guardians of the weapon.’

The Doctor took a deep breath, understood that his

answer had to be diplomatic, had to be considered,

couldn’t under any circumstances include the phrase “you

imbeciles”. He looked over at Jennver. The leader of the

Council hadn’t spoken, or even moved, for ages. Her little

world was collapsing. She glanced up at him, willed him

to say something to convince the others.

‘Doctor, we have already experienced the very worst

thing that could happen,’ Qerl said.

This time, the Doctor couldn’t keep it in. ‘You think

that the worst thing that can possibly happen has already

happened, because you’ve seen one civilisation fall?’

‘As the victims of a terrible attack,’ Jeffip began, ‘I

think we can understand the dangers. If the weapon was in

our custody, we would prevent it from falling into the

hands of people who would misuse it.’

‘We lost everything,’ Qerl said.

‘You don’t know the meaning of the word,’ the Doctor

muttered.

‘And the people who built it?’ Jeffip asked. ‘Won’t they

just build other weapons like it anyway? They might

attack us again.’

‘They are all dead,’ the Doctor snapped back, ‘and

there’s a lot less of their planet left than there is of this

one. The war it was built to fight is long over. That is the

last weapon of its type.’

Jennver was looking over at Alsa, thoughtfully.

Everyone had lapsed into silence.

The Doctor was beckoning to Jeffip. ‘Stand up. Come

on. Remind me: what was that you said about star maps?’

‘That there was an atmospheric effect that was

blocking out the stars, that—’

‘The stars were vanishing?’

‘Surely you’re not suggesting that the weapon’s

disintegrating stars, one at a time?’

‘No.’ The Doctor straightened. These were reasonable

people. He would reason with them.

‘Words like “infinite” and “ultimate”… they’re too big.

There’s an old saying: “One death is a tragedy, a million

deaths is a statistic.” When you think about the people that

died here, I imagine you don’t think of the 200 million…

you think of your parents, your children, your best friend,

even your pets. You remember the countless millions

through the ones you cared for.’

He saw a few of them nodding warily, and decided to

press his advantage.

‘I’ll try to explain what this weapon does. All right…

imagine you really wanted to destroy your enemy. Really

wipe out all trace of them.’

‘We don’t have enemies, we don’t want to destroy

anyone.’

‘Which is why I said “imagine”,’ the Doctor said

testily. ‘Back in the day… the Bronze Age, say, you’d start

by burning down your enemy’s village if you really

wanted to destroy them, not just defeat them or enslave

them or steal their stuff—’

‘You’d just kill everyone,’ interrupted Alsa.

‘Exactly. Put them to the sword. Well, put the sword to

them, it’s far easier. I digress. So… kill all the people. Not

just the soldiers, but all the women and children.’

‘Barbaric,’ Jennver muttered.

‘Well, yes. Trouble is: what if someone managed to

hide? What if a group of soldiers was out on patrol? What

if there was a merchant away from town at the time? Let

one puny little boy go and he’ll end up as Conan the

Barbarian. It’s practically the rules. He’ll be back.’

‘You’d need good information,’ Jeffip said.

‘Exactly. Know your enemy. But even if you really

managed to kill every last person and burn all their stuff,

there would be traces. Statues and gravestones. Even bits

of broken crockery. You could just about get rid of all that,

if you put a lot of effort into it.’

‘You wouldn’t need to go that far,’ Jeffip objected.

‘Not normally, no. But what if you did want to remove

all traces?’

‘You could never remove them all,’ Jeffip said.

‘Course you could,’ Alsa countered. ‘If you wanted to

hard enough.’

‘Even if you dropped a bomb on it you’d leave a

crater.’

‘And rubble,’ the Doctor chipped in. ‘Don’t

underestimate rubble. Even when the last building of

Arcopolis falls, there will still be debris. A good

archaeologist could come along in 10,000 years and piece

things together. After that… well, it’s terrible to admit it,

but plastics and radioactives and refined metals…

pollution, I guess… would be there. You’ve carved out

tunnels and cuttings for roads and so on. But I guess you

could build a bomb powerful enough to smash all that to

dust. Would that be enough?’

‘No,’ Alsa said finally.

‘No?’

‘Because the next village along, they’d remember the

destroyed village. They’d be able to… I dunno, draw

pictures of it. It would be on their maps.’

The Doctor nodded. ‘Good.’

‘So you’d have to kill them too,’ Alsa added, sounding

almost gleeful. ‘And… the next village along. And…

the…’

Jeffip was thinking it through, now. ‘A technological

civilization… one with radio and satellites, you’d have to

kill everyone else on the planet. No… more than that,

you’d have to go to other planets to make sure they hadn’t

seen it through telescopes or heard any of their broadcasts.

Everything in the light cone.’

‘Yes.’

‘So… that’s what that weapon does?’

The Doctor almost laughed. ‘No. That’s just if your

enemy lived in one village on one planet. That weapon

was designed to use against an enemy with footholds in

different galaxies.’

‘That would be… impossible.’

‘Why?’

‘It would be too much work. It would take billions of

people thousands of years to do all that.’

‘So you build a labour-saving device,’ the Doctor said.

Every single person in the room turned to look over his

left shoulder. That was the direction of the Fortress.

The Doctor nodded. ‘Touch a button and no more

enemy. No more traces of enemy. They’d be gone. The

weapon doesn’t just kill them, it kills everyone who’s ever

heard of them. Destroys everything they’ve ever built and

drawn and written. Everything they’ve ever seen, even the

stars in their sky. Erases it all. It’s a weapon that would

give your run-of-the-mill ultimate weapon an inferiority

complex.’

‘How?’ Jeffip asked. ‘I mean, how could anything do

that?’

The Doctor waved his hand airily. ‘Quantum physics.

The observer effect. The superforce. Vunktotechnology.

Vundatechnology. The people who built that weapon

knew their stuff.’

The Doctor checked his watch.

‘Wait,’ Alsa said. ‘Even when it had killed your

enemy… there would still be you. You’d be left. You’ve

heard of the enemy. If you wanted to erase every trace,

you’d have to kill yourself.’

The Doctor nodded. ‘Logically, pretty much whoever

your enemy is, you’d end up destroying the entire

universe, including – obviously – yourself. It was a

weapon of last resort, to be used only when all was lost.’

‘Who would be stupid enough to build a weapon that

did that?’

‘Building it isn’t the issue,’ Fladon said.

‘No?’ the Doctor asked.

‘They could build as many as they wanted to. The

problem’s when you use it.’

The Doctor sighed. ‘“When” being the operative

word.’

‘Quite a deterrent,’ Jeffip said.

‘A what?’ Alsa said.

‘A threat,’ the Doctor said. ‘If your opponent knows

he’s going to be utterly destroyed, he won’t attack… four

times out of five.’

‘I’d attack,’ said Alsa.

The Doctor motioned for her to continue.

‘Well, if I knew my enemy would destroy themselves

when they fired, I’d know they’d never actually fire it.

When it came to it, they’d hesitate and –’ she mimed

herself smashing them.

‘When it came to it, they didn’t hesitate,’ the Doctor

pointed out.

‘Why is the universe still here?’ Alsa asked, sounding

almost disappointed. ‘What stopped it?’

The Doctor paused.

‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘I’ve asked myself the

same question. There might be some kind of protective

field around the weapon. If you’re near enough, you’re

immune. It would explain why you survived.’

There was a murmur around the room.

‘That travel tube you were all in must have been

directly underneath the Fortress when the weapon fired.

You must have been within that protective field. Thank

heavens for public transport, eh?’

‘What happened, Doctor?’ Jeffip asked.

The Doctor looked down at his feet. ‘They called it an

assault, but it wasn’t, it was a massacre. Unprovoked,

avoidable. And the historians who called it the Last Battle

of the Seventh Galaxy didn’t even notice Arcopolis. The

millions who died here barely qualify as a fraction of the

casualty figure.’

‘Not even an ant run over by a tank,’ Jeffip said

weakly. ‘Not even a flea on the back of that ant.’

‘The weapon in that Fortress has to be destroyed before

it can be fired again, and I’m the only person in the entire

universe who can destroy it. Now, if you’ll excuse me,

that’s what I’m going to do.’

He turned and strode from the room, hoping against

hope no one would try to stop him. Not because he was

worried that any of them could, but because he was

worried about what he would do to anyone who tried.

The Doctor’s words settled over the room. Out of all the

parents, only Jeffip had really reacted. He was staring at

the ceiling, like he could see through the plastic sheets and

up at the stars. Jennver was quiet and pale.

‘Come on, then,’ Alsa urged. She was already on her

feet.

Fladon was frowning. ‘We should only be concerned

about the here and now. The children.’

‘Agreed,’ Qerl called.

‘Yeah, yeah: it’s all about me,’ Alsa said impatiently.

‘What are you agreeing to? You’re agreeing that we’re

going to force the Doctor to power up the city. Yes?’

Jeffip didn’t understand why Jennver hadn’t restored

order. ‘Did you not hear what he said?’

‘What’s done is done,’ Fladon repeated, to nods of

agreement.

‘Light years,’ Jeffip said. ‘Don’t you understand? I…’

‘The Doctor’s getting away,’ Alsa complained.

‘We know where he’s going,’ said Jeffip sourly.

Fladon was standing. ‘We need to stop him.’

‘Look… if we’re going to do this—’ Jeffip began.

‘This?’ Alsa said. ‘What?’

Jeffip sighed. ‘Jennver?’

Jennver looked up. ‘The Doctor has ruined everything.’

‘I will follow the will of the Council,’ Jeffip told her.

For so long, that had meant agreeing with its leader.

They’d survived. Jennver had delivered every child,

organised it all so that each of them had food and shelter.

‘We must do what we must,’ she whispered.

Fladon took that as an order. ‘All right. First of all, let

the Doctor get into the Fortress. Alsa, follow him.’

‘Ask me nicely.’

‘Young lady.’

‘I just want you to remember: I saw him first. I brought

him here. I showed you what to do next. Showed you

things could change. Most of all, I want you to look at

Jennver there, and remember that look on her broken old

face.’ Alsa didn’t wait for a response; she was already

pulling Gar along.

Jennver looked around. ‘Alsa’s question was a good

one. What exactly are we trying to do? We know what the

Doctor wants. Are we really going to force him to do

something else?’

Jeffip looked annoyed now. ‘We’ve all been forced to

do things we don’t like. Why should the Doctor be any

different?’

The Doctor met Dela. She was strolling towards him, a

shawl made of foil draped over her shoulders. Her face lit

up.

‘I was on my way to the Council meeting,’ she called

out to him as they came closer.

‘Go back to your children, Dela.’

She stopped, taken aback.

The Doctor stopped, too. ‘I didn’t mean it like that.’

The shawl was silver, but with a painted pattern, a sort

of abstract leaf design. She’d told him earlier that she

painted. They’d talked a lot that afternoon. The shawl was

pretty.

‘You’re angry.’

‘Not with you.’ The Doctor started walking again. Dela

followed. It was a cool evening, the air was moist. It was

going to rain.

‘You’re leaving?’

‘Yes.’

‘Take me with you.’

‘What?’

‘You could.’

‘No. It’s far too dangerous.’

‘Not just to the Fortress. To outer space. I don’t like it

here. I can’t defend it the way Jennver and Fladon can. I

want to travel with you. In the TARDIS. Be like… Rose.’

The Doctor stopped. They really had talked a lot.

‘No.’

‘Someone will look after my…’ But her voice trailed

away. She knew it wasn’t that easy.

They’d crossed the threshold into Jeffip’s tent. The

Doctor took a moment to remember the way to the

laboratory.

‘New Arcopolis is borderline viable,’ he said. ‘If I take

just one person away from it, there’s a chance that

everyone else dies. Not only your children. Everyone. You

can’t leave. You can’t.’

She knew that already, of course. ‘That’s it then?

Because of something that happened years ago, something

too big to comprehend, there are no choices? Just a

treadmill of duties and obligations and no chance of

escape?’

‘Yes,’ the Doctor said. For both of us.

He’d gone the wrong way. This room had a small metal

bed and various toolboxes. There was something lying on

the bed, covered with a sheet made of the same silvery

material as Dela’s shawl.

He listened out for a moment, but he didn’t think

anyone was following them. The Council must still have

been arguing about a course of action. He had a few

minutes, then.

The Doctor peeked. It was the slender corpse of a

teenage girl, in sporty white shorts and camisole top.

There was a grey flannel over her face.

‘Jall?’ he asked.

Dela nodded. ‘She was killed by ghosts.’

The Doctor frowned.

‘That’s been bothering me,’ he announced.

‘It happens,’ said Dela, her voice faltering.

‘Are you all right?’ the Doctor said.

Dela wasn’t. ‘She was my daughter. My first child. It

happens. If she hadn’t been in the city, the ghosts wouldn’t

have got her. She’d come back, but still visited the city.’

The Doctor shook his head. ‘I saw a ghost kill that boy,

er, Frad. He was disintegrated. At the very least. There

wasn’t a body.’

‘You’re… right. There’s never a body.’

‘Oh, I know I’m right. What’s that flannel for, do you

think?’

Without waiting for a response, the Doctor peeled the

flannel off. Dela gasped and stepped back.

Jall’s eyes were missing. The Doctor bent over – he’d

put his glasses on – and peered into the sockets, with an

enthusiasm which was enough to make Dela cough a mild

expletive.

‘They’ve only removed the eyeball. Everything else is

in there. I mean everything. The bones of the orbit, the

optic nerve, the muscles…’

‘She had green eyes,’ Dela said quietly. ‘Really bright

green. We joked about who the father was, no one else

here has them. Pretty eyes.’

‘They wouldn’t be so pretty out of context,’ the Doctor

noted absent-mindedly. ‘Sorry, that probably came out a

bit horrid, didn’t it?’

Dela nodded, swallowed what she had been about to

say to him.

‘I have no idea how you’d do that.’

‘Or why?’ she added softly.

The Doctor thought for a moment. ‘I’m still stuck on

how, I’m afraid,’ he admitted. ‘There aren’t even scratches

or bruises on the eyelids. The eyes might have been

dissolved, I suppose. Acid. They didn’t spill a drop.’

‘They?’

‘Well, just about the only thing I know for certain is

that this didn’t happen spontaneously. And it’s just too

precise to be an accident. It’s… well, I was going to say

“surgical”, but I don’t know any surgeons who could do

that good a job. This was a conscious act. The other

thing… you don’t die if you lose your eyes. So she was

killed some other way. No marks on the body, no sign of a

struggle. I’d need longer with the body. Hmmm. Did she

smoke?’

He placed the flannel back over Jall’s face.

‘I’m sorry… I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Cigarettes? Cigar? Pipe? Um… inhale the fumes from

dried leaves?’

‘We… I don’t think anyone in Arcopolis ever did that.

Why would you want to? It must be an outer-space thing.’

‘It smells like she smoked.’

‘I smell it too, now. Perhaps it was something they used

to preserve the body.’

The Doctor beamed. ‘That makes sense! Well done.’

‘Thanks.’

‘It wasn’t something they used to preserve the body.’

He put the foil sheet back and swept from the room.

Dela hurried after him, after a glance back at the shape

under the silver foil.

Dela showed him the way to Jeffip’s laboratory.

The Doctor removed the sonic screwdriver from the

vice and clipped the casing back together. He slipped it

into his pocket and did the same with the psychic paper,

the ball of string, the anti-radiation pills, the pocket

Gallifreyan-Cymraeg phrasebook, the bag of kola nuts,

the yo-yo, a collection of coins from a dozen different

planets, the everlasting matches, the TARDIS key and

everything else of his.

‘Come back,’ Dela told him. Her eyes were wet, she

was still thinking about her daughter.

The Doctor put his hand on her shoulder. ‘I will. I’ll

find out who did that to Jall.’

‘And punish them for it?’

The Doctor’s eyes flashed fire. ‘Oh yes.’

It was a warm night, and it was beginning to rain.

The Doctor had been unconscious when he’d been

brought here, but he’d spent the day since looking out to

the Fortress, memorising the landmarks of the Arcopolis

skyline. He had his escape route worked out. There were

no walls or fences – why would there be? – but the river

blocked off the most direct route to the Fortress.

He followed the course of the river, heading past the

mill upstream. He was away from the tents in minutes,

moving quickly until he was out of the park and into the

city. It was raining heavily by then, so he confined his

route to covered walkways, or at least routes that had

some form of shelter.

The city was noisy, with all the rainwater glugging and

surging through drains and sewers and pipes. When

Arcopolis had been inhabited, the gutters and pumps

would have been maintained. Now, they were rusted shut

or worn away or plugged up. The city and the rainfall

would wrestle with each other, trying to get the other to

give way. There would be different results in different

parts of the city.

It was dark. It would make him difficult to spot, but

would give anyone following him the same advantage.

They knew he was heading for the Fortress, so they didn’t

need to pursue him, just show up there. He still didn’t

have a canoe, so he’d approach the Fortress from the

opposite side, perhaps try one of the half-buildings. It

would take him until morning to get there, and then he’d

use the sunlight to assess the best way in.

The Doctor passed a white dome that must have once

gleamed. Now it was grubby, cracked open like a boiled

egg. Half a dozen boys in colourful suits of armour they’d

improvised from sports equipment and padding huddled in

there, against the rain and the cold. They might even have

seen him, but apparently he wasn’t worth getting drenched

for.

Above them all, a clear plastic walkway was sloshing

with water, like a log flume. The ground was very soft.

There was a crack of thunder. This wasn’t anything more

than a simple storm, but the buildings that surrounded him

were fragile things, and the water could easily dislodge a

piece of masonry or plate glass and send it hurtling down

at him.

Midnight, or near enough, and the Doctor was picking his

way over a broken slope of tiles. Moss had squeezed out

through the gaps, cracked the ceramic. This had been a

wide plaza. The tiles were white, and, even at night, the

contrast of the tiles and the growth between made for a

vivid, just-about-regular grid pattern. In the middle of the

plaza was a great circular shape. It had once been a

fountain, but it had collapsed in on itself, cracked, filled

up to overflowing with giant lilies.

The rain had eased up, but the ground was still slick

and the air cool and damp. It smelled sharp, earthy, rusty.

A little like blood, the Doctor thought.

A glass man was no more than a dozen paces ahead of

him, facing to the Doctor’s right. It was an abstract human

figure, almost featureless. It was the size of a small adult

and slightly pot-bellied, or at least it had very poor

posture. It didn’t move as he approached.

Whatever it was, it wasn’t a ghost. The Doctor

concluded that it was a statue, after all.

The glass man turned its head, took a step back, as

though it was only now aware of the Doctor and had been

startled by his presence. The face was almost smooth, with

tiny bumps and crevices instead of a nose and mouth.

It was too dark to make out much detail, all the Doctor

could see was how the figure distorted the scene behind it,

so the Doctor took another step forward. The glass man

raised a six-fingered hand, in what would have been a

defensive gesture if a human being – or Time Lord, for

that matter – had made it. There was a golden disc set into

the palm of the creature’s hand.

‘I’m not trying to hurt you. I’m the Doctor, by the

way.’

It lowered the arm, then started to run, an almost

comical sight as it barely moved its arms or upper body,

just its legs.

The Doctor gave chase, but the glass man could clearly

outrun him. For one thing, despite having bare, glass feet,

it had a better grip on the slick tiles than the Doctor’s

trainers could manage. He discovered that as they turned a

sharp corner. For another, the Doctor had spent all night

picking over wet and uneven ground and was beginning to

ache from the exertion. It didn’t stop the Doctor trying,

but he soon fell behind.

The glass man ran through an open doorway into a

deserted building, and by the time the Doctor caught up to

that, he couldn’t hear its thumping, solid footsteps any

more. It had got away.

The Doctor was a little out of breath.

Someone was standing over Alsa. Before she was fully

awake, she’d lashed out at him.

Gar managed to dodge her hand. ‘It’s me,’ he hissed.

All around them, children were stirring. It was getting

light.

‘They’ve spotted him heading into the Car Factory.’

Alsa nodded. It was starting to come back to her.

Last night, she’d used the comm to contact two dozen

boys and a couple of girls, not always the strongest or

tallest, but the toughest. Most of them were already within

a few hours of the Fortress, and most would drag other

kids there with them. Alsa had spent a quarter of an hour

in the settlement stuffing things into bags and pulling

together rainwear before heading off with Gar.

She’d met a few others at the Tesla Farm, a field of

giant ceramic cones close to the settlement, where the kids

had built up a good stash: torches, binoculars, energy

drinks and loads of other stuff the parents disapproved of.

One of the things they hated most was bicycles. Alsa

never understood that. You could race around on bikes,

and they were simple enough to fix – only the chains were

even a little bit complicated. The tyres got punctured,

yeah, but they could be patched. Alsa, obviously, didn’t

bother; she just found a spare on some bike rack or shop.

Usually, she’d just ditch the whole original bike.

She smirked when she thought of the Council actually

giving her permission to go to the Fortress – although

she’d been the one giving the orders. It had taken two

hours by bike, so she, Gar and the others had shown up

there around eleven and taken position.

By then, just about everyone she’d commed was there,

and they’d posted watch on all the approaches. She had

taken the plum position, in an old clock tower, right in the

middle of the Car Factory. She’d worn herself out doing

all that, and was soon asleep.

‘Any ghosts?’

‘Vrem said he’d seen one, but he’s a liar.’

Alsa shoved Gar out of the way of the window.

The Car Factory was a simple building – a 115-storey

white concrete doughnut with sweeping windows and

gaping hangar doors dotted irregularly at every level. The

Fortress had materialised so that one of its black walls had

just taken a bite out of the doughnut. From her vantage

point, right in the hole of the doughnut, Alsa could look

down on the entire complex, even into a lot of the Factory

building. There was a metal skywalk that gently spiralled

down from the top of the clock tower to the roof of the

Car Factory, and then down to ground level. Cycling

down that was going to make the effort of pushing the

bikes up worth it. The Factory covered such a wide area

that they were well out of range of the lightning here but,

in the past, plenty of kids had strayed from a safe level

and had never been seen or heard of again. Her various

lookouts were all well outside that perimeter.

The parents never told them anything about Arcopolis

or the old days, but sometimes they’d let slip something,

or an adult would set a child straight. To Alsa, aircars had

always been lumps of metal, prone to toppling over if you

played too hard or got too frisky in them. She’d never

found it that easy to picture them soaring over and

swooping between the buildings. Alsa had sat in plenty of

aircar seats, been surprised how comfortable they were,

how many controls and lights and switches there were.

Robots and computers used to stop them from crashing –

Alsa was unclear exactly how.

She knew some of the number symbols, and if she was

reading them right these cars could fly 300 miles a day.

They could have travelled from the settlement to the

Fortress in minutes, not hours, and carried loads of stuff.

You wouldn’t be tired or wet when you got there, either.

If the Doctor was from space, why didn’t he bring an

aircar? She’d ask him when she caught up with him.

She spotted the Doctor walking under a twenty-storey

sign. The sign was made up of bright glass tubes. Some of

the kids said that they heard that in the olden days signs

like that used to light up at night because there was a

special gas in them, but Alsa didn’t believe in that. The

sign was amazing enough as it was.

The Doctor looked tired, but not exhausted. That odd

brown coat of his was darker because it was so wet. His

stupid spiky hair had gone flat and stuck to his scalp.

She’d guessed the Doctor would come this way. He knew

there was an impassable lake on the other side of the

Fortress, and the other ways in had open plazas which

would be just as deadly. The Car Factory was one of the

half-buildings he’d been so fascinated by, and the one that

was the biggest and best landmark.

‘What’s the plan?’ Gar asked.

‘We comm the parents. Let them know we’ve seen the

Doctor. Tell them we’ll wait for them to get here.’ The

way Alsa smiled made Gar feel very nervous.

The doughnut-shaped factory building was vast. Over a

hundred identical floors, each with a high ceiling and its

own production line, all stacked on top of each other. Each

line ended with its own massive door, just waiting for the

finished aircars to fly out of it. The production process had

been, as far as the Doctor could tell, entirely automated.

Sunlight streamed through great, wide windows. There

were a few gantries and inspection ladders for people, and

the Doctor used them where he could, but mainly he just

walked along the conveyor belts. The floors were covered

in dried-up pools of paints, glues and other liquids which

must have escaped from pipes and cans over the years,

when their seals had failed. It brought splashes of colour

and unpredictability to a sterile white and chrome

environment.

The production line, robot workers and all, had frozen

in place fifteen years ago. It meant that the Doctor was

now a fascinated visitor to a museum featuring tableaux of

a state-of-the-art Arcopolis factory. For half an hour, he

almost forgot about the Fortress, the villagers who’d be on

his trail, Dela and Jall, the ghosts, the glass man and

everything else. He put on his glasses to get a closer look

at a few things, he tapped and prodded and danced around.

He’d found a device that was basically a sonic

screwdriver but was the size and shape of a car wash.

Jeffip had mentioned it. He speculated how quickly a car

could have been put together. He marvelled how every

stage of the process was so flexible that each car was

practically custom-built to order. In a city of 200 million

people, there probably weren’t two aircars the same.

Then he’d followed the great curved path along too far,

and found himself faced by the sheer black wall of the

Fortress.

He did the traditional, dodging behind a great stack of

engine blocks to avoid the blue energy bolt that came

hurtling past. A window thirty metres behind him

shattered and threw down daggers of glass and strips of

concrete window frame.

The Doctor peeked through gaps in the stack. The wall

was matt black, at an angle almost exactly forty-five

degrees to the factory floor. Mounted on the Fortress wall,

he could see the gun turret, a thin wisp of smoke curling

up from the barrel.

The gnarled black walls of the Fortress looked almost

fused with the smooth white concrete of the Factory.

Fifteen years ago, the Fortress would have materialised in

the city, like the TARDIS materialised. Unlike the

TARDIS, there weren’t all sorts of safety systems, and the

things it landed on would have been instantly annihilated.

It was, while horrible, quite an elegant solution. The

universe wasn’t designed to have big things like

Fortresses suddenly appear from nowhere. The energy

created by destroying so much matter was fed back into

the transduction corridor, helping to balance the books of

cosmic physics.

The Doctor clacked his tongue. He knew what the

factory was made of – diamond-reinforced type five space

concrete. He didn’t know for sure what the Fortress was

made of – it was ugly black stuff that was probably metal

or something. He wished there was someone here so he

could tell him or her just how much of an expert he was

on particle transduction and how all this knowledge meant

he understood precisely how the Fortress and factory

fitted together.

He fiddled with the sonic screwdriver, adjusting a

couple of its settings with the deft touch of a safecracker.

‘There’s a problem with diamond-reinforced type five

space concrete…’ began the Doctor, talking to no one in

particular.

He pointed the sonic screwdriver at the roof and it

squealed for a few seconds.

A crack appeared, right above the Doctor’s head. The

crack spread, then started to speed up. It raced in one

direction, towards the outer wall. At the last possible

moment, it kinked to the left, hit a point where the ceiling

met the Fortress.

A tiny piece of concrete, a pebble, fell, pinged against

the Fortress wall, skipped and pinged again. The gun

turret swivelled until it was pointing straight up, fired and

atomised the pebble. The energy bolt kept going, slammed

into the cracked ceiling. The roof shattered, and a large

chunk of it dropped onto the gun, bending it in half. A

moment later, a cascade of smaller pieces of concrete

rained down, flattening the remains of the weapon.

‘… and that’s that it’s easy to resonate.’ He looked

down at the sonic screwdriver. ‘I’ve never resonated

concrete on my own before. That was fun.’

He sauntered over to the Fortress wall, thought about it

for a moment, and then slapped it with his hand. It

clanged like a bell. Common-or-garden ugly black stuff

that was probably metal. He found a seam and opened it

up, pulling back a panel that was so thick he needed both

hands to hold it. Once he had slid it aside, there was a gap

there just wide enough for him to squeeze through. So he

did.

The Doctor had entered the Fortress.

Alsa, Gar and a couple of other kids – brothers called Coz

and Moz – were running along a rubber and metal

pathway that curved along the middle of this level of the

Car Factory. It was easier to get around on foot here than

on bikes.

‘Where is he?’ Gar moaned.

‘It’s not this floor,’ Alsa said impatiently, ‘it’s the next

one up.’

They weren’t that far from where the Fortress bit into

the factory. They would have had to slow down anyway.

There was the sound of shattering glass, from upstairs.

They all dived behind a nearby machine. It was a white

thing, it looked like a miniature crane, with a whole set of

sharp tools on the tip of its arm. Looking up at it while she

caught her breath, Alsa thought it might be a robot arm.

The thought of robots that were just bits of people had

always disturbed her when she was younger.

There was a crack and the sound of a rockslide.

The four of them were covering their faces

instinctively. You got used to the buildings crumbling.

‘The floor above,’ Coz said.

‘The Doctor,’ Alsa agreed, not taking her eyes off the

ceiling. They had to get to him before he got inside.

‘It was falling on metal, not concrete. He’s set off a

bomb that’s blown a hole in the wall of the Fortress.’

‘Nah. Whole point of a Fortress is that you can’t just

slap a bomb on the wall. Anything strong enough to

damage the Fortress would have ripped this place apart.’

Gar was confused. ‘We have to wait for the parents.’

‘It’ll take them hours to get here,’ Moz complained.

‘They told us to wait.’

‘Wait?’ Coz wailed.

‘It took us two or three hours on bikes,’ Alsa said. ‘And

they’ll be walking. We let the Doctor open a way into the

Fortress. After that, we grab him. It’s been the plan all

along.’

‘Has it? First I’ve heard,’ Gar noted.

‘Yeah, well, it wasn’t your plan. Can you imagine all

the incredible stuff there must be in the Fortress?’

The boys all snickered.

‘I can’t, and neither can you,’ Jeffip said.

All four kids sat bolt upright. Professor Jeffip was

there. So were Fladon and Dela. Dela was Coz and Moz’s

mum.

‘How?’ Moz said.

‘We lived in Arcopolis long before you ever came here,

Morren,’ Dela said.

‘I used to be a supervisor at this factory,’ Fladon said,

talking to the other adults. ‘I was here four years, and they

said the robots were foolproof, but once, one of them

broke down and…’ He hesitated. ‘Another robot had to fix

it. Sorry, it seemed a lot more dramatic at the time.’

Dela laughed and put her hand on Fladon’s shoulder. ‘A

lot of us worked round here, remember?’

Alsa’s blood was boiling. This wasn’t where the

parents came, this was where the kids came.

‘Oh, calm down, Alsa,’ Dela said. It was exactly the

same tone of voice she used with the babies.

‘How did you get here?’

‘Think about it. It takes hours to get here from the

settlement. We had to get here quickly, not just wait for

the call.’

‘So you were right behind us last night?’

Jeffip chuckled. ‘About an hour behind you, yes. We

waited until it stopped raining.’

‘If it’s any consolation,’ Fladon said, ‘the walk’s just

about worn all three of us out.’

Professor Jeffip coughed, leaning on his walking stick

as he bent over. Jeffip was ancient. He was pale and out of

breath. He’d just walked something like twenty miles, in

the wet. Alsa admired the fact he had it in him.

‘Are you all right?’ she asked.

Fladon looked concerned. ‘If anything was to happen

to you, Jeffip, the settlement—’

He waved everyone away. ‘It’s a cough. Come on.

Let’s get up there.’

Fladon knew a quick way to the next floor, and soon they

were up there and edging around. All of them felt uneasy

so close to the black wall, even when they saw a pile of

rubble where a gun should have been.

No one else saw it, and it was a whole minute before

even Alsa saw the tiny gap in the wall. The Doctor must

have opened it up. There was no sign of him.

‘I don’t think I could squeeze through that,’ Fladon

admitted.

‘I could,’ Alsa insisted.

‘We shouldn’t,’ Fladon warned. ‘It’s too risky.’

Alsa was running for the gap.

‘Wait!’ everyone else was calling. They were chickens.

A chicken was an extinct animal that was scared of

everything. That’s what Jeffip and Dela were like. Fladon

and Gar just did what they were told.

Gar was at Alsa’s side.

‘You coming with me?’ she asked.

‘No,’ he said, trying to block her way.

‘Doesn’t matter,’ she said, pushing him over. She

ducked through the slit in the Fortress wall. No one else

had the courage to follow her.

It was dark inside the Fortress. Black walls and no

windows, the exact opposite of the Car Factory. It took a

moment for Alsa’s eyes to adjust.

She pushed forwards, found she was in a thin

crawlspace between two layers of wall. She edged along.

The roof was angled, making it difficult to stand up. Her

heart was racing, the blood rushing around her, scared and

angry.

Alsa realised that she was already disorientated.

The ceiling sloped, she realised. The higher side was

the inside. Alsa knew roughly how big the Fortress was –

the outer wall was about a mile long and at the end of it

was just a sharp turn then another mile of wall. What if the

crawlspace floor didn’t run all that way? It was so dark,

she’d just plummet.

‘Stay back!’ the Doctor’s voice hissed, and from about

six inches away. ‘Stay exactly where you are, or we’ll

both be killed!’

Outside, everyone was so busy worrying about Alsa and

debating whether they should go back or stay where they

were that it was at least thirty seconds before any of them

noticed the glass man. Jeffip was the first. He didn’t say

anything, just tapped Dela on the shoulder.

The new arrival was in front of a wide window. With

sunlight pouring through its transparent body, it was

possible for Dela to see that there were… things inside it.

A dozen or so tiny, indistinct shapes.

The humans all just looked around at each other,

baffled. No one was sure what they were looking at.

‘We need to leave,’ Fladon suggested.

‘No…’ Jeffip said, his voice trailing away.

Then they all heard it, even though it was only in their

heads.

‘Here.’

‘Was he talking to us?’ Dela whispered.

Dela was looking past the glass man and out of the

window. A structure was pushing down through the green

sky. It was bone-white, and looked like a number of flat

shapes slotted together. It was difficult to judge the size,

but it was immense, as large as a city block, at least. A

central disc with three or four long flat pieces at a right

angle to it, with smaller triangles and dozens of squares

fitted at different angles to those long pieces, a little like

sails on the mast of an ancient galleon. There was a

glowing golden sphere beneath the disc, just hanging

there.

Two others, the same size and shape, were behind it.

They were too strange to be entirely beautiful.

‘Spacecraft,’ Jeffip said. He’d joined Dela. She hadn’t

even noticed him alongside her until he spoke.

‘Is that one of the people that built the Fortress?’ Dela

asked, indicating the glass man.

‘The Doctor said they were all dead. He could be

wrong, but… those ships don’t look anything like the

Fortress.’

‘Does a spaceship have to look like a skyscraper?’

Jeffip, of course, had anticipated the question. ‘It

doesn’t look like it shares anything. No materials, no

design elements. No… philosophy.’

Jeffip took a step forward, and everyone else tensed up.

‘I know what I’m doing,’ he told them. ‘I have to

contact these people. Warn them.’

‘I was being careful,’ Alsa complained.

The Doctor appeared in a circle of white light. Alsa

realised that he’d taken the torch from her bag, which

meant it had occurred to him she might have it and taken

it before she’d even remembered it was there. ‘Good. Not

slowly enough, though. Think of this place as a giant

unexploded bomb. The slightest wrong move and there’s

no negotiating or tricks, the machines running this place

will kill us.’

‘I got past the defences.’

The Doctor laughed, and there was more than a hint of

disdain. ‘There are thousands of defence systems and they

don’t stop at the outer wall. They’re almost all on standby

at the moment.’

‘Standby?’

‘You know. Like a TV that’s on but not really on… ah,

I see the problem. You don’t watch enough television. You

should. Five hours a day, minimum, and sit really close to

the screen. OK… what’s the best way to explain? Oh…

easy. Easy-peasy: this Fortress is asleep. It will wake up if

we disturb it.’

‘How do you disturb a building? It’s just, well, a

building isn’t it?’

The Doctor shook his head, thought about it, then

nodded.

‘That’s not much help.’

‘I don’t know the answer to your question. Inside here

are loads of detectors. They send data to a battle computer,

a sort of machine with a brain—’

‘I know what a computer was,’ Alsa told him.

‘—which works out if there’s anything worth bothering

with. I don’t know precisely how it makes that

calculation.’

‘So we don’t know the rules.’

‘The monsters that designed this place didn’t tell

anyone the rules, because they didn’t want anyone

winning the game.’

The Doctor swung the torch back the way Alsa had

come. ‘Right. You’ve got just as much chance of setting

everything off if you go back. So stick with me. Don’t do

anything unless you’ve seen me do it, don’t step anywhere

I haven’t stepped, don’t touch anything unless I’ve

touched it. No, scratch that: don’t touch anything. If you

see a rock, don’t hit me over the head with it, if you can

manage that.’

‘No promises.’ But the Doctor knew what he was

doing, and she needed him around, at least for the

moment.

The Doctor handed her back the torch and took out

something from his pocket. The same device he’d

recharged her comm with. The end lit up, there was a

buzzing sound and a hatch on the inner wall popped open.

The Doctor smiled. ‘As long as you are the only

distraction, we’ll be fine. Five times out of five. Well…

two times out of… erm… I’m sure we’ll be fine. As long

as no one does anything stupid.’

Jeffip walked over to the glass man. He paused,

probably considering what to say.

It was strange. Dela felt a connection with this creature,

like it knew her. She regretted that it wasn’t mutual. She

wasn’t totally convinced it was alive – not even partially,

like robots. Through the window, she could see the three

alien spaceships. They were miles away but, between

them, they filled the air. White against the green sky, they

could have been freak, sculpted storm clouds with rays of

sunlight peeking out from underneath them. Just about.

‘I am Jeffip,’ the old man said, so quietly that Dela and

the others could barely hear him. ‘I am a native of this

world. I welcome you to Arcopolis.’

But the glass man walked straight past him. Now it was

walking towards Dela. It moved with such grace. The light

sparkled off it. Behind it, through the window, the

beautiful, pristine spaceships were such a contrast to the

dilapidated towers and fallen spires of Arcopolis.

Dela was now shoulder to shoulder with the glass man.

It turned its head. For the first time, she could see its

face. Dela was so close she couldn’t see anything else.

‘We are the Eyeless,’ it announced.

‘But you…’ Dela began.

It had eyes. Just the eyeballs, one above the other, not

side-by-side. They looked just like a human being’s eyes,

just little blobs of white jelly, but they were suspended in

the transparent form of its head. With no eyelids or eye

sockets, the eyes looked too large, and all they did – all

they could do – was stare wildly at her.

The irises were bright green.

She recognised the eyes and so she knew where the

glass man had got them.

Dela screamed.

PART TWO

UNLESS

How do you define intelligence? It’s a word that means

different things to different people. The scientists who

built the Fortress weren’t worried so much about an

abstract debate. They needed a practical answer.

The Fortress could have been given an artificial mind

so brilliant, so adaptable, that it would be able to solve

any problem instantly by thinking it through. Imagine a

student who was brilliant at mathematics, and so was

smart enough to pass any maths exam or test. But the idea

of creating so powerful a mind worried the builders of the

Fortress. They knew plenty of examples of creations rising

up and destroying their creators, and they couldn’t take

the risk. This Fortress would have access to the ultimate

weapon, and making it intelligent and resourceful was just

asking for trouble. Luckily, there was another way of

doing it. Imagine a second student, one who had been

given a list of all the answers. He would also get a perfect

score. Most people would say that it was only the first

student who was really demonstrating ‘intelligence’, but

the results would be identical.

The Fortress had been given a giant list of every

possible problem and the best solutions. Its builders had

set it up so that the Fortress would automatically perform

the required action.

The Fortress ‘thought’. It received information from

millions of sensors dotted inside and outside the building,

but it didn’t have a ‘brain’ as such. There wasn’t even one

place where it did its thinking – that would have been far

too vulnerable to attack – so there were hundreds of tiny

computers, all linked up in dozens of different ways. It

didn’t know right from wrong, any more than a

dishwasher knows what a dish is.

The sensors could see, hear, taste, touch and smell

things far more efficiently than a human being could. It

knew that some forms of attack would be based on

deception – that it couldn’t always believe its own eyes

and ears. So it didn’t just check what it was seeing once, it

asked itself thousands of times a second.

What it sensed now were a couple of humanoids that

had got inside. They posed no immediate threat, and there

was an extremely high probability that they would trigger

one of the automatic defences.

The best model that matched said that there was no

need to intervene and the intruders would soon be dead.

The Doctor hadn’t heard the voice.

Alsa was two steps behind him. They were in a narrow

corridor which was made – floors, walls and ceiling – of

the same black metal as the outside of the Fortress. It

soaked up the light, just giving them enough to see their

feet and the route ahead.

‘It said something about a list. I think,’ Alsa told him.

‘I didn’t hear anything,’ the Doctor said. He continued

striding on, moving quickly but controlling every single

movement, careful where he planted every footstep, every

glance.

‘“We are a list”,’ said Alsa.

‘“We are a list”?’ the Doctor repeated, scoffing.

‘The voice was dead faint. Like it was back outside.’

The corridor twisted downhill, and was lit by dull green

electric lamps. Alsa was impressed by the clean, even

quality of the light. The most impressive thing was that

the lights were just… there. Light usually meant keeping

an eye out to make sure the poppy oil wasn’t running low

or the flame wasn’t too high, that there was enough

ventilation. She had never taken light for granted. There

weren’t all that many things she’d ever taken for granted.

It was the first place she’d been that felt normal. Not

ruined or bound up in a load of stupid rules. The place

smelled clean. This wasn’t a warm place, but it had solid

walls and a dry floor. For all the black metal and darkness,

Alsa felt more at home here than she ever had before.

The Doctor wasn’t saying very much. There hadn’t

been any of his grinning or fooling around. He’d turned to

look back a couple of times, and the expression on his

face was grim.

Alsa wasn’t sure what her plan was at this stage. She

knew where she wanted to get to; the weapon plugged into

the city power grid. She knew not even Professor Jeffip

would be able to do that; it would have to be the Doctor.

She hadn’t worked out, yet, how to force the Doctor to do

it. For now, she’d just stick close to him.

He had some idea of the layout of the place. They’d

only been walking for a few minutes, but it felt like they

were making good progress. The Doctor had already

defused a device that he said had been poised to

electrocute them. ‘Kill us with electricity,’ he’d explained

cheerfully, as he handed Alsa a piece of mechanism he’d

barbecued with the sonic screwdriver.

The corridor broadened out into a small circular room.

‘It’s safe,’ the Doctor said, hesitating just long enough

to give away that he was guessing. There were two open

doorways leading out of the room. The Doctor was

rubbing his lips thoughtfully.

‘Hmmmm,’ he said. ‘Hand your comm over, I’ve had

an idea.’

Alsa scowled at him.

‘Please?’

She passed the bag over. The Doctor quickly found the

comm. He was thumbing at the controls the moment he

had it in his hand and, within seconds, a hologram of the

Fortress was flickering above the comm display.

‘How did you get it to do that?’

‘I hacked into the Fortress battle computer.’

The hologram showed a green and blue wire-frame

representation of the outside of the Fortress. The native

buildings of Arcopolis were marked out in white lines.

Alsa tried to take in as much of it as she could. More and

more details started to fill in on the hologram, apparently

as a result of the Doctor’s playing around. Now it was

showing the internal structure, thick layers of walls

opening into a large vault. In the centre of the building

was a column with its roots in the base and whose trunk

reached up to the very apex of the roof.

None of those things were occupying Alsa’s attention.

‘Do you recognise those?’ she asked, indicating three

vast objects shown floating outside the Fortress. They

were hovering over the far shore of the lake.

‘They look a bit like the Blue Peter ship,’ the Doctor

said, distracted. ‘They’re probably not though,’ he added.

Alsa was shaking her head.

‘Hang on,’ said the Doctor.

One word flashed up on the tiny screen.

EYELESS

‘Eyeless?’ the Doctor said, puzzled.

‘It’s the people who built this place,’ Alsa said. ‘They

know we’re in here, and they’re angry.’

‘Definitely not, probably not, and very possibly,’ the

Doctor said. ‘In that order.’

‘That voice didn’t say “a list”, it said “eyeless”. What’s

it mean?’

‘That they don’t need mascara, monocles or an

optician?’ The Doctor sniffed, clearly more interested in

what the comm was telling him. ‘That they’re fearless and

earless and peerless and tearless?’

‘They’re aliens,’ Alsa said impatiently. ‘If they’re not

the people who built the Fortress, are these the aliens that

the Fortress was built to fight?’

‘No.’

‘So they’re a fourth lot?’

‘Third, surely…’

‘The ones who built the Fortress. The ones they were

fighting. You.’

‘Ah. Well, yes, then they’re a fourth lot.’

‘You met this type before? Know what they look like?’

Alsa asked.

‘Eyeless?’ the Doctor said. ‘Not from just the name.

Eyeless? Eyeless! No. I’ve only been to Galaxy Seven a

handful of times, mind. I’m in a state of Eyelesslessness.’

Alsa looked around for a rock to hit him with, but there

wasn’t one.

‘Do not move,’ a voice said. ‘Stop what you are doing,

Doctor.’

‘Doctor,’ Alsa warned.

The Doctor sighed. ‘Oh, what is it now?’

‘You didn’t hear that?’

‘You hearing the voices again?’ He didn’t trust her.

‘The same voice,’ Alsa insisted.

‘What did it say?’ he asked, not sounding interested.

‘“Do not move”,’ Alsa said.

‘A rather stupid thing to say. Unless it was in here with

—’

They had been followed in. The Doctor and Alsa turned

to see three glass men walking down into the alcove,

taking up position to block all the exits.

A few minutes earlier, when she’d first seen the bright

green eyes, Dela had been sick, helpless as the glass man

stood over her. The eyeballs were just fixed in its head,

watching her. How could they even be functional? Was it

wearing them as decoration, like she used to wear

jewellery?

She had remembered the Doctor’s promise to find and

punish whoever had done that to Jall.

Jall?

Jall. An image of her: those bright green eyes where

they belonged, the two of them laughing. A month before,

when Jall had come back and they’d talked all night, and

Dela discovered that yet another cliché of motherhood –

that your daughter grew to be a friend – could be true.

Dela had looked up to see Jall’s dead eyes peering

down at her.

The Eyeless had been reading her mind, taking her

memories. Dela had tried to resist, but realised she didn’t

know how to begin fighting it off. It stole another

memory, the last one she had of the Doctor, of him

running off into the night. Then another, of her arriving on

this floor of the Car Factory, seeing the opening in the

Fortress wall.

The Eyeless had stayed in her mind but, as it had

turned to face the black metal wall, it was as if it had

loosened its grip a little, and there was enough slack for

Dela to have new thoughts. She had got up, legs shaking,

wanting to leave.

Six more Eyeless had marched in, keeping perfect

formation. Three at the front, two in the middle, one at the

end.

People were allowed secrets. There were things no one

else knew about her. All of them had spilled out, the

Eyeless lapping them all up, not appreciating their value.

Dela had felt the same sense of violation and frustration

she’d had when she was fifteen, when she’d seen the

settings had changed on her diary and realised her mother

had been reading it, and so she knew about Gyll.

Had she just remembered that, or had the Eyeless

remembered it for her?

Dela had wanted to slap it. No – break it. It was glass.

Surely a blow from a blunt, heavy object could crack it

open?

The dead eyes had stared down at her, and Dela had

understood that it didn’t mean to hurt her. Instead she was

a resource, a well of knowledge about the Doctor, so she

had value.

‘The Doctor is a threat,’ it had said, and a wave of

agreement had broken inside Dela’s head. The Eyeless had

turned on its heel, and marched over to the gap in the

Fortress wall opened up by the Doctor. Two others had

joined it.

‘We have an opportunity to study the Doctor. We must

enter now.’

And, knowing she couldn’t just abandon the Doctor

and Alsa, but too scared to go into the Fortress after them,

all Dela had found she could do, as she stood there and the

minutes had ticked by, was feel sick again.

The Doctor had allowed himself to get distracted. If he’d

stuck to his plan, not been knocked out by that girl, then

he would have been and gone before the Eyeless showed

up. But then, if that had happened, he’d never have met an

Eyeless. And now he’d met three.

‘Hello there,’ he said cheerfully, picking one to talk to.

‘I’m the Doctor, by the way. I met you earlier. You ran

off.’

The Eyeless were shorter than the Doctor, but towered

over Alsa. This one regarded the Doctor silently for a

good half a minute.

‘You really can’t hear it speak, can you?’ Alsa asked

the Doctor, delighted.

‘It doesn’t have a mouth,’ the Doctor pointed out.

He went over to it. So, this was an Eyeless. This was

the first time he’d got the chance for a proper look, so he

put on his spectacles.

It looked like glass, but was perhaps clear resin or

plastic. It looked hard, but might have been soft, like gel.

Or sticky. It was all the Doctor could do to stop himself

from poking it.

Whatever it was made of was almost flawless, but there

were a few small bubbles in there. Other items, too –

things that he didn’t understand. In this nearest one, there

was what looked like a red cog, about a centimetre in

diameter embedded in its leg; a small V-shaped tube of

plastic in its neck; a gold disc in its hand; what looked like

a seventeen-centimetre strip of stir-fried beef in its chest.

None of these objects seemed to be connected to anything,

and he couldn’t see for the life of him what function they

served. Were they decorative? Did they have some ritual

purpose? Oh, come on, Doctor – ‘some ritual purpose’ is

what people say when they don’t want to admit they

haven’t a clue what an artefact is.

‘Well, look at you,’ the Doctor beamed, genuinely

thrilled. ‘I have to admit, I think you’ve caught me out.

No joints, no muscles, no seams, no capillary tubes. I

thought you might be using nanotechnology, but you’re

not, are you? You’re not a robot. A silicon-based life form.

Or… oh, wait. Carbon-based, like me and Alsa, but the

carbon takes the form of diamonds? Is that it? Are you a

diamond geezer? You look completely solid, but you can

move. Animated glass. That really is remarkable. Are you

going to tell me how it’s done, or is it a secret?’

Ten seconds of absolute silence.

‘I don’t think he can,’ Alsa said, then, more petulant, ‘I

don’t know why not. I’m just telling you.’

‘Is it talking to you? In your head?’

Alsa nodded.

‘Telepaths. A race of glass telepaths called the Eyeless.

I mean, cor, how brilliant is that? I can’t hear it. Can it

hear me?’

‘The entire surface of his body can register the smallest

vibrations in the air. It’s far more sensitive to sound than a

human ear.’

The Doctor turned back to his Eyeless, grinning. He

opened and closed his mouth for a few seconds, made

hand gestures, pretending to speak but with no words

coming out.

‘No,’ said Alsa, a couple of beats after he’d finished. ‘I

think he’s dead clever and just pretending.’

‘I am,’ the Doctor nodded solemnly. ‘But I’m not

clever enough to work out why you call yourself “the

Eyeless”.’

‘That’s obvious,’ Alsa scowled.

‘It’s obvious they don’t have eyes, but why didn’t they

pick their noses?’

Alsa sniggered, and it was a moment before the Doctor

worked out why.

‘You know what I mean,’ he insisted. ‘They don’t have

noses, either. Why not the Noseless, eh? Or the

Mouthless? Hairless? Earless? Heartless?’

‘Can’t they call themselves whatever they want?’ Alsa

asked.

The Doctor thought about it for a few seconds more,

tried to clarify his objection. ‘Groups are usually named

after where they come from, or what they do, or what they

believe in, or what they want to be. What sort of culture

names themselves after something they aren’t? Something

they don’t have? Something that’s not theirs?’

The question hung in the air.

‘What are they, Alsa?’

‘They’re trying to explain. I don’t understand.’

‘Say what you see,’ the Doctor suggested.

‘There are white things, like… structures, all gathered

around a huge ball that looks like the sun, but it’s in the

middle of the night sky. The structures, there are

thousands of them. They’re buildings and vehicles, but

also parts of a machine. There are loads of Eyelesses in

them, all bathed in colourful light. They travel all across

the galaxy. It’s incredible.’

The Doctor could have worked most of that out for

himself.

‘Why?’ he asked.

The Eyeless didn’t say anything, but the question

clearly confused them.

‘They forage for technology. Because they can read

minds, they usually find it easy to come to an arrangement

with the original owners. If not, they take what they want

anyway,’ Alsa grinned. ‘They’re just like me.’

The Doctor raised an eyebrow. ‘Are they, now?’

Alsa laughed. ‘They’ve just promised to change things

here.’

‘Have they, indeed?’

‘They don’t trust you,’ Alsa told him. ‘They say I

shouldn’t trust you.’

‘They’re used to reading minds. They’ve never needed

to earn trust, just taken it. Takers. That’s what they are.

Scavengers. Thieves. Thugs. On a cosmic scale.’

‘They want to know why they can’t read your mind.’

The Doctor jabbed his thumb at his chest. ‘Time Lord.

We come with top-of-the-line psychic defences as

standard. I imagine a race as well travelled as the Eyeless

know all about the Time Lords.’

‘No. They haven’t heard of you,’ Alsa told him.

That burst the Doctor’s balloon. ‘Oh… really?’

‘They just asked something stupid. They – all right, all

right, I’ll ask – Doctor, they want to know if your

TARDIS is a time machine.’

The Doctor felt his grin twitching. ‘Er… no. Ridiculous

idea.’

‘The Eyeless would very much like a time machine,’

Alsa said.

‘I bet they would,’ the Doctor murmured through

gritted teeth.

‘And you say you’re a Time Lord and told Dela that

TARDIS stood for Time And—’

‘Oh. Right. Yes, I see why there’s all this confusion.

Simple mistake. It’s “Thyme”, with an H-Y. The herb. I’m

a Thyme Lord. In the Middle Ages, you’d put some thyme

under your pillow to ward off nightmares. Not that I’ve

been to the Middle Ages, of course. Heaven forfend.

You’d need a time machine for that. As a, er, Thyme Lord,

I know that it’s good with roast chicken. And in biscuits.

You wouldn’t think so, but try it. Couple of tablespoons. I

could go on for ages about Thyme.’

‘Please don’t.’ The Doctor wasn’t sure if that was Alsa,

or the Eyeless speaking through her. Either way, he sighed

with relief. ‘The Eyeless fail to understand why this

means your brain needs such an elaborate firewall.’

‘Isn’t it obvious?’ the Doctor said, then hesitated for a

long while, before adding, ‘It’s because we don’t want

anyone stealing our recipes.’

He smiled, a little uncertainly.

‘They believe you,’ Alsa said, not bothering to conceal

her dissenting opinion. ‘They want your recipes. They

don’t just take stuff. They take experiences. Thoughts and

emotions and fantasies. That’s what the things suspended

in their bodies are for – souvenirs. Badges.’

‘Proof of individual achievement in a hivemind,’ the

Doctor muttered.

‘The rules… they’re dead complicated. If an Eyeless is

the first one ever to feel or do something or go

somewhere, it can wear a memento of it.’

The Doctor looked between the three aliens, tried to

guess what each of the artefacts symbolised. Another

Eyeless stepped out of the gloom, turned its head so it was

facing the Doctor for the first time. The Doctor looked up

at it. He took a deep breath.

‘You’re like me,’ Alsa said, this time to the Eyeless,

proudly pointing to a ribbon on her jacket. ‘I earned that

when I beat Hlann in a fight. Broke his nose. It’s still

wonky. You get what you want. That’s like me, too.’

‘This particular Eyeless does have eyes,’ the Doctor

told her.

Alsa had kept her distance, but now she was straining

to see.

‘Don’t,’ the Doctor warned softly. Then, twirling

around to look back at that Eyeless, taking another step

over, he said, ‘Mr Eyeless… those ships of yours are very

advanced. I mean, just one glance at them and it’s obvious

they have galactic range and they’re powered by an

artificial sun. Very few civilisations get so advanced. The

people of Arcopolis are children by comparison. Well,

Alsa is only 13, I suppose, so she’s got an excuse.’

‘Hey!’ Alsa snarled, instinctively moving closer to the

nearest Eyeless.

‘You seem very pally with them, Alsa.’

‘I can hear their thoughts. They can hear mine.’

‘And you’re birds of a feather?’

‘I’ve no idea what that means.’ Strange colourful,

flappy thoughts appeared in Alsa’s mind, placed there by

the Eyeless. She ignored them.

‘This one killed Jall. Did you realise that, Alsa?’

‘Sure. He’s wearing her eyes.’

He’d assumed she hadn’t seen. ‘Doesn’t that bother

you?’

Alsa shrugged. ‘I understand why he did it. Can’t put it

into words… they’re not like us. And I never really knew

Jall that well. They operate on a bigger scale.’

The Doctor looked puzzled. ‘Did you think that, or did

they think that for you?’

Alsa frowned. ‘I thought that,’ she insisted.

‘Of course you did.’

‘Of course I did. Look, back at the Council, you were

the one going on about the bigger picture. It’s a shame Jall

died, but rather her than me.’

‘What makes you think that’s the choice?’ the Doctor

asked.

‘I don’t come from a planet with choices.’

‘We’ll see about that.’ He turned to the Eyeless with

Jall’s eyes. ‘Those ships are very pretty.’

The Eyeless stayed where it was, let the Doctor come

level with it.

The Doctor waved a hand above his head in the vague

direction of the ceiling, took another step, turned to back

into the wall. ‘But this Fortress is very ugly. It’s horrible.

Offensive. At the moment, it’s… well, it’s asleep. Do

nothing to wake it. Please, please do nothing to wake it.’

His other hand found the door frame.

‘He’s trying to get away!’ Alsa shouted.

She really was very smart.

The Eyeless raised its right hand, held it straight out,

pointing at the Doctor, palm flat. There was a gold disc

embedded there. It flashed with the light of the sun.

The Doctor shrugged when nothing happened. He

tapped his lip with the sonic screwdriver, which he’d just

taken from his coat pocket. ‘A weapon which literally

burns out the neurons. Smoke pours out of the nose and

mouth. Doesn’t work on me, just like your telepathy

doesn’t work on me. Now… you killed Jall and I made a

promise about Jall, and I will honour it.’

He took a step back.

‘Last chance, Alsa. Pick which side you’re on.’

‘You make it sound like we’re playing a game.’

The Doctor looked her right in the eyes, saw nothing

but contempt there. So be it.

‘Alsa?’

‘Yes, Doctor?’ she said, sneering.

‘Playtime’s over.’

Before anyone could stop him, the Doctor took the last

step back through the doorway. As he passed through, in

one movement and without looking back, he turned,

brought the sonic screwdriver up level with the nearest

control panel, operated it, and made the heavy black metal

door slam down.

The Doctor didn’t stick around to see what happened

next.

The Eyeless who’d been closest to him managed to

lurch forward and catch the underside of the door, quickly

twisted to hold it about halfway open. The door was

inching down, and the Eyeless wasn’t going to be able to

hold it for long.

‘Go!’ Alsa was shouting to the others.

The Doctor was already a hundred paces away. He

could hear Alsa swearing and yelling, but it was already

getting faint and after a moment the sound cut off

completely. It felt wrong to abandon her, somehow. That

said, there was no indication the Eyeless would harm her

– rather the opposite – and she was far safer stuck back

there than in the depths of this place.

Alsa’s comm was in the Doctor’s hand, set to display

all the internal defences of the Fortress. Within fifteen

seconds it had saved his life by spotting a row of nozzles

in the floor. They were designed to blast up jets of poison

gas, and he’d have completely missed them. The simple

motion sensor that would have triggered the trap was

easily tricked by the Doctor using a sweet wrapper he

found in his pocket.

There were dull clangs of solid glass against metal

floor. Footfalls behind him. One Eyeless had got through,

but only the one. The Doctor had to slow down a little to

neutralise every trap. Unless there was another door he

could close behind himself soon – and he couldn’t see

anything obvious on the plan – it would catch up with

him.

The corridor curved down. There were a number of

locked doors to either side, but he couldn’t slow down, so

didn’t try them.

He avoided a trap designed to fire plastic straps to

snare his chest like a boa constrictor. He left it live, and

hurried away. Ten seconds later, the Doctor was gratified

to hear it triggered, but also alarmed the Eyeless had been

that close behind him. The glass man didn’t breathe, so the

trap wouldn’t suffocate it, and it’d be free soon enough.

The Eyeless fascinated him. Did they know specifically

about the weapon at the heart of this Fortress, or had they

simply marked out Arcopolis as a potential source of

advanced technology?

He scolded himself. They must know. It was a long

way to come on a whim.

He had to get to the weapon before the Eyeless did. No:

faster than that. He needed to get to the weapon before

they even tried, because when they tried… well, that

would set the Fortress going and make his life difficult.

The Doctor picked up his pace.

If the Eyeless knew about the weapon, he wondered,

did that mean they knew all his secrets?

Whatever the Doctor had done to the door, the Eyeless

couldn’t undo. There had been no way to brace it open, so

there was only time for one Eyeless to get through. This

frustrated Alsa, who kicked and punched at the metal, but

all it did was clang and hurt her fists and feet.

That only made Alsa more angry.

The two Eyeless left behind stood there, unmoving,

impassive.

‘Don’t you ever get upset?’ she asked them.

‘No. All our decisions and actions are rational.’

Alsa barged into the door, shoulder first. ‘Damn it!’

‘You will not open the door using that method.’

‘You don’t get it, do you?’

‘No. I would like to.’

It was just the one with the eyes talking to her now, she

could tell that somehow. It was almost like it was

whispering to her. The other one was keeping its distance.

‘I thought you could read my mind.’

‘That does not mean I can feel what you feel. I would

like to.’

And now Alsa was looking at herself standing over by

the door. She felt confused, but didn’t look it. She looked

gleeful. That girl wasn’t her. It looked like her, but… she

was inside the Eyeless. She was tall, strong. She wasn’t

hungry or cold, wasn’t even breathing. She could see right

through her six-fingered hand. There was a gold disc in

there. It was weird. She wasn’t looking out through little

holes in her skull, like she usually did; she had a total

awareness of her surroundings.

‘We’ve swapped bodies?’ Alsa asked.

‘That is the simplest way of describing it, yes,’ the girl

opposite her said, mumbling and slurring a little, as if she

wasn’t used to having a tongue. ‘We call it

psychografting.’

It was like she was driving its body. The Eyeless was

clearly driving hers, flexing the fingers, running them up

and down her arm. It revelled in the sensation, wide-eyed.

‘How bizarre … arms … fingers … hair!’

‘Watch where you’re putting those hands,’ Alsa

warned.

The other Eyeless shifted its feet, fascinated.

For the first time in her life, Alsa felt calm.

‘You’ve never been angry before?’

‘Not like this. Not the actual emotion, just a copy.’ The

Eyeless in her body was breathing hard, swaying. ‘Such

rage,’ it said.

‘I told you I was angry.’

‘It is exhilarating. All sorts of hormonal surges and

physical responses. I see something, I want to hurt it.’

‘But that’s what I see. All the time.’

In response, the Eyeless punched the wall, then

grabbed at that hand with the other, crying out in pain.

Alsa would have smiled, but the face she wore was

featureless, immobile, so she couldn’t. She looked down

at her own arm… her new one. Alsa couldn’t see herself

inside the glass. A thought crossed her mind: where was

she?

Never mind that: she really wanted to see how much

she could wind up the Eyeless.

‘The Doctor lied,’ she said. ‘All that stuff about herbs

was rubbish. He let me down and he lied to you.’

‘How can you be certain?’

‘Normal people have intuition. Feel it in our stomach.

Try it.’

The Eyeless growled, a noise that made Alsa start, even

in her new, impassive body. She had never made that

sound herself.

‘The Doctor tricked me!’ it snarled.

‘Yes. He tricked us both.’

‘I will kill him!’

The Eyeless slammed into the door then tried clawing

at the metal. Its comrade watched this, impassively.

If it carried on like this, it would hurt itself. No, not

itself: that was her body it was wearing, and Alsa wanted

it back in one piece.

‘You need to calm down a bit. Focus. You want to hurt

him, not yourself. Close your eyes,’ Alsa suggested.

She figured that closing eyes was something the

Eyeless could never have done before, and she quickly felt

the alien’s mind grow almost giddy at the darkness.

‘That is… so strange.’

‘It’s just normal.’

‘No … strange.’ It was opening and closing its eyes,

now. Grinning like an idiot.

After another minute of that, the Eyeless announced it

would restore control of her body and Alsa was back

where she belonged, feeling dizzy and her hand was

throbbing. Alsa felt upset again, but it was dying down,

becoming dulled. She wore the grin the Eyeless had made.

‘We cannot allow the Doctor to escape,’ the Eyeless

said. Now it seemed to be both of them speaking again.

‘We’ve got to be careful,’ Alsa reminded them. ‘The

Doctor said that the Fortress was asleep, and we shouldn’t

wake it.’

‘He said it was on standby,’ the Eyeless concurred. ‘We

should also take into account that, while the Fortress

demonstrates great potential, and warrants full

investigation, we have what we originally came to this

planet for.’

‘You do?’

‘We have the hypercube.’

The information poured into Alsa’s mind, like she was

remembering it. A hypercube was an object where the

interior measurements were larger than the exterior ones.

Like going into a small tent and finding that inside it was

a huge hall.

Alsa got a mental picture of a big, blue, wooden box,

with windows and a light on top.

‘I don’t recognise that at all,’ she said, annoyed that

they expected her to know about it.

‘It is not Arcopolis technology.’

‘Then… ?’ she asked, impatient.

‘We were passing through this space sector when we

detected the hypercube in flight. We were able to calculate

its trajectory to this planet and arrive here two days before

it. It landed on a beach around ten miles from here and our

landing party took possession of it shortly afterwards.

Despite our efforts, we are currently unable to unlock the

door. It remains on the beach where we found it.’

‘Whose is it, then?’

‘Ours,’ the Eyeless said, confused by the question.

‘Whose was it before? Where did it come from?’

‘We think it belonged to the Doctor. We think it is the

TARDIS he spoke to Dela about. While he did not

describe its physical properties to her, he explained that

the noun was an acronym for Thyme… Time And Relative

Dimensions In Space. Hypercubes possess the property of

relative dimensionality.’

What flowed into Alsa’s head next made no sense to

her. It was a string of numbers and other symbols that

might have been numbers, but none that Jeffip had ever

taught her. The word ‘equations’ swam through her mind.

‘I’ll take your word for it.’

‘We will learn all the secrets of the TARDIS.’

‘What does the Doctor use it for?’

‘Apparently it is a vehicle and a home and a museum

and a laboratory and a library.’

Alsa was trying to get everything straight. So, the

Eyeless had come to this planet looking for that big blue

crate, the TARDIS. They weren’t here for the weapon at

all. They might not even know about the weapon.

‘Weapon?’ For the first time when it was in its own

body, Alsa felt the Eyeless radiate an emotion: fear. Then

another: fascination.

The Fortress strategy computer was assessing the pieces

of data it had collected.

There were two alien creatures and a native humanoid

in one of the outer chambers. They hadn’t moved for a

few minutes. The aliens communicated via simple

telepathic broadcasts, which operated at 93.7 megamyers.

The computer listened in, rather than jamming the signal.

There were four more aliens outside, by the breach, and

six native humanoids. An alien and a non-native

humanoid were through the outer defences, heading to the

central vault. There were three spacecraft immediately

outside.

The computer sifted this information. There were two

points of immediate concern.

The three spacecraft were potentially a threat. The

strategy computer was watching them carefully. It toyed

with the idea of a first strike, but rejected it. It was

programmed to use proportionate force.

The non-native humanoid, the one with two hearts,

concerned it more, because he had managed to get further

than the strategy computer had originally projected. He

was the one who had opened the outer hatches, using a

sonic resonator. His avoidance of the various traps and

snares indicated high levels of intelligence and initiative.

It checked its files, and discovered whole dedicated

sections and subroutines about this individual, the Doctor.

It brought them online, studied them.

The Doctor was aware of the weapon. He was making

his way towards it. The computer selected the best

strategy to stop him and implemented it.

This whole planet was quiet in the first place and the thick

walls of the Fortress acted to provide soundproofing

against even the silence. On the other hand, because it was

constructed almost entirely of metal, every noise the

Doctor made as he hurried through the latest corridor rang

out and echoed. It was dark, with just the emergency

lighting. The various traps that had dogged him at first

were becoming increasingly thin on the ground and this

worried him.

The Eyeless must have got out of the snare by now,

although the Doctor hadn’t heard it behind him.

He’d been moving for half an hour. There was still

some way to the central vaults, according to the comm.

The narrow corridors were a maze, like a nervous system

or an animal warren – lots of tunnels branching off and

leading to chambers and alcoves. The whole place was

empty. There were racks and hooks and sockets

everywhere, but no equipment or other material.

The immense strength of the weapon, even when it was

inactive, was as tangible to him as the weather was when

he was outside. He could feel its weight, oppressive.

The corridor opened up in front of him. It was now

twice as wide, although this didn’t serve an obvious

purpose. For no reason he could have explained, the

Doctor glanced down at the comm.

HELP

He looked back up. A beautiful face was looking right

into his eyes. A ghost, standing in front of him, its cold,

crisp glow radiating like nothing else in the perpetual

gloom. It wore the same flowing white robes as the other

ghosts he’d seen, and it looked just as scared, trapped. The

ghost moved its hand, and the Doctor was going to take it,

but then remembered what had happened to Frad.

It’s not trapped, it’s the trap. Don’t forget that, Doctor.

‘And I was just thinking how thin on the ground the

automatic defences had become,’ he said out loud. He

glanced behind him, double-checking the Eyeless wasn’t

there.

The ghost looked bewildered.

The Doctor raised an eyebrow and tried the comm’s

keypad.

TIOUCH ME I DIEE

The Doctor was all thumbs, but the ghost got the

message and took a step back. This was odd. If it really

wanted to destroy him, it could have made a good stab at

it. Why wasn’t it trying? What reason could it have to

delay? For that matter, why wait until the corridor was as

wide as this and it would be easier to duck past? The

Doctor peered at the ceiling to see if there was some sort

of emitter or lens projecting the image. The ghost itself

was gesturing around impotently. Its fingers brushed the

comm.

IM LOOKING 4 SOME1

The Doctor was unused to this form of communication,

so it took a moment for him to translate. This was an

illusion, just a phantom generated by the Fortress. A

defence system. A hologram – or something very like it –

with just enough artificial intelligence to work out where

the chinks in his armour were. A lure. A trick.

What if he was wrong, though? It was an odd trick. He

typed, fumbling a little.

I CAN HLP U

He thought for a moment, then added:

IAM DR? BTW

?????

It asked.

‘I wish I knew,’ the Doctor said, typing, ALIEN

4TRESS. IT ATTACKED ARCPLIS. He frowned, adding,

U TRAPPED HERE?

The ghost nodded, frantic.

HELP FIND HER

The Doctor was about to ask ‘who?’ but the ghost

anticipated this and added: DELA

‘You know Dela?’

The ghost nodded, eager.

‘I know Dela,’ he said. The ghost understood the

meaning without the Doctor having to type it out, and its

face flickered with hope, for the very first time.

‘What’s your name?’ the Doctor asked.

He read the answer.

‘No. No, no, no.’ The Doctor stepped back. ‘This is a

trap. This is still a trap. A very weird, extremely indirect…

non-trappy… trap.’

There was a single word on the screen.

GYLL

‘You’re Gyll?’

Y

Dela’s lover, the one she’d been so reluctant to talk

about, killed on the day the Fortress appeared along with

200 million other people in Arcopolis.

U V BEEN HERE 15 YRS?

The ghost frowned, looked around.

15 MINS MAX

BUT 15 YRS SINCE ATTACK

N

Y

N

YYYWKO

?

WITH KNOBS ON, the Doctor clarified.

Gyll looked very lonely. Sad, more than panicked, like

the universe had slipped through those ghostly fingers.

This is a trap, the Doctor reminded himself. A simple

trick designed to feed back and magnify his fears and

insecurities. Giving him someone to save, allowing him to

picture the satisfaction he’d feel when he looked Dela in

the eye and said he was sorry Jall died, but he had brought

someone else back. The sort of small, human moment he

lived for.

It might not be a trap. This might be Gyll, somehow not

dead.

He could hear footsteps behind him – the Eyeless was

close by. Impossible to tell how close.

The Doctor pulled himself together. The ghost was a

distraction. Whether this was a trap or not, whether it was

Gyll or not, it was still a distraction. The Doctor knew his

priority had to be the weapon, not this.

The weapon could perhaps be altered so that it—

The Doctor didn’t even allow himself to finish his

thought. No.

I WILL COME BACK 4 U, the Doctor typed quickly,

aware as he did so that he’d made a similar promise to

Dela. He added a little more, until it read, I WILL COME

BACK 4 U + DELA.

Then the Doctor swept past, careful to avoid even the

slightest physical contact with the ghost. He didn’t look

back as he hurried away, so didn’t see that Gyll was

watching him go, tearful.

Alsa was working with the Eyeless with green eyes,

trying to remember everything the Doctor had said about

the weapon.

It told her that Dela had fought the telepathic process,

found it unpleasant and intrusive. Alsa liked the feeling of

having the Eyeless in her mind. Despite that, Alsa wasn’t

used to giving. She was used to cooperating, ganging

together and divvying up the spoils. Kids did that when

they had to. There was plenty for everyone, usually. But

you always got something in return for helping someone.

It was only fair.

The Eyeless said it understood, and now, suddenly,

Alsa remembered running across a dusty, airless

landscape, weighing almost nothing, leaping forwards a

hundred metres at a time, kicking up bronze dust and

being flooded with such an amazing elated feeling. Thirty

Eyeless were around her, all sharing that feeling,

amplifying it by endlessly feeding it back, running for

running’s sake.

‘You actually did that?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s brilliant.’

‘There was a danger we would be dashed against the

rocks.’

‘That was what made it brilliant. You could have died.’

‘An unlikely outcome,’ it told her before conceding,

‘although a possible one.’

Reluctant to be dragged away from those memories,

keen for more like it, Alsa remembered what the Eyeless

wanted her to do. Alsa remembered the Council meeting,

knowing exactly what Jennver was going to say because it

was what she always said, letting the smelly old woman

walk into it.

The Eyeless seemed more interested in that than in her

memories of the Doctor.

‘You were angry.’

Alsa snickered. When wasn’t she?

The Eyeless were better than people. They could do so

much that people couldn’t. Jennver and the other parents

wanted everyone to sit around eating weeds, plopping out

babies. Alsa had thought the Doctor would change things,

but he wasn’t going to help her. But she wanted more than

memories – if the Eyeless took the weapon, she couldn’t

use it to power the city—

‘In return for your help, we will give you an engine that

will do that,’ the Eyeless promised.

‘Will I be able to operate it?’

‘Yes. We will give you that knowledge, too.’

‘Only me?’

‘That is your desire, so yes.’

‘Give me another memory,’ she said.

Jall screaming, terrified and alone as the Eyeless killed

her, drank her thoughts so that it was both the murderer

and the victim, the emotion feeding back, just like the

sense of elation had a moment before.

Alsa’s chest heaved like her heart was going to burst

out of it. She felt terrified, but still not quite fully back in

her own body. She was now acutely aware of the weight

of her feet, the sweat in her armpits, the dryness in her

mouth. Her breathing. She was breathing too fast. She had

to stop breathing. Her tongue almost choked her.

‘Why did you show me that?’ Alsa gasped.

Jall’s dead eyes peered down at her.

It was only a sensation, like the others.

Was that her own thought or had the Eyeless put it

there? It wasn’t anything like what she wanted to think.

‘Not a nice sensation.’

‘No. Neither good nor bad, merely true.’ It hesitated

‘You want power over others, but why? Do you think you

will be a good leader?’

Alsa shrugged. ‘Don’t you want to have power among

the Eyeless?’

‘No.’ But the only Eyeless with eyes had paused, just

for a moment.

‘I suppose,’ she conceded. ‘Jennver got out of having

babies. She’s too old now, but she wasn’t fifteen years

ago. I want that choice.’

‘Jennver holds the power in the village because she is

the only obstetrician. You need someone to deliver the

babies. She has not shared her knowledge because that

knowledge is her power.’

That simple truth had never once occurred to Alsa, but

there was no disputing it. Jennver had been as

manipulative as anyone. She almost felt admiration.

Alsa’s mind now flooded with a whole new

vocabulary: words like gravidity, macrosomia,

haematocrit, folate, even somatomammotropin. More

years’ experience than she’d lived.

‘You are now an obstetrician,’ the Eyeless announced.

‘What would you like in return?’

‘Your anger.’

The thick steel door slammed down in front of the Doctor

like a guillotine blade, almost taking his toes off.

Symbols set in the door explained it would stay

deadbolt sealed for precisely one minute. Sensors dotted

around the room whirred and bleeped. The Fortress was

performing a full bioscan on him. This didn’t worry him;

it meant he must be getting closer to the weapon chamber.

The Doctor kept aiming glances over his shoulder,

wondering how far behind him the Eyeless was. He’d not

seen or heard it for a while. It might have been caught in

another trap. Perhaps it had met the ghost.

The encounter with Gyll had rattled the Doctor. It

didn’t make sense that the ghost had been one of the

automatic defences. Or, rather, it didn’t make sense to

him. If it was one of the defences, by definition there was

a mechanical, perfect logic involved.

The Doctor wasn’t sure what worried him the most:

that it was all part of a game the Fortress was playing with

him and he didn’t understand the rules… or that he’d

really met the ghost of Gyll.

He’d met ghosts before. That didn’t bother him. They

were usually trouble, but plenty of the people and things

and people-things the Doctor met on his travels were

trouble.

No.

The thing was… the weapon, the ultimate weapon at

the heart of the Fortress, utterly annihilated its target. The

whole point of it was that it left no trace. If that was a real

ghost, it was most certainly a trace. Not just something it

had missed, something it had affected.

The Doctor didn’t want to think too hard about the

weapon; he wanted to get to it, destroy it and leave. Keep

it simple.

The Doctor glanced down at Alsa’s comm, but the

screen was dead. He rattled the device and the plan of the

Fortress reappeared, but as it did so, the floor shook.

That was puzzling. Had he really – ? He rattled the

comm again.

The floor shook again.

‘Am I doing that?’ the Doctor asked out loud,

wondering how he possibly could be.

Then he looked more closely at the display. It wasn’t

him – the Eyeless ships had begun their attack.

This wasn’t good.

The minute was up, there was a click, the deadbolt slid

back, and the door in front of him started to roll open,

very slowly.

There was still no sign of the Eyeless. The Doctor

glanced back –– and something the size of a man, coiled

and glinting, barely visible, was springing at him.

A poised landing and two sharp strides and the Eyeless

was at him, swinging its arm precisely, efficiently. The

Doctor’s reflexive, panicky dodge worked, though, and

the glass hand grasped at air.

The Doctor lurched for the door, but it wasn’t far

enough open, and he merely clanged into it.

‘Get them to call off the attack!’ the Doctor shouted at

the Eyeless, ducking clear of another swipe.

It wasn’t listening. It was hunched down, like a prize

fighter, and had managed to get him to take two paces

away from the door, which was now almost fully open.

The Doctor had to get out of here.

His opponent was used to reading minds, but couldn’t

do that now. So the Doctor simply feinted, moving to step

right, then darting left, past it and through the doorway.

The door slammed down between them.

Timelocked, deadbolt sealed. One minute.

The Doctor took a deep breath and hurried on.

Jeffip watched the four Eyeless who’d stayed out of the

Fortress.

Fladon, Dela and the boys were at the big window,

looking out at the spacecraft. Jeffip could hardly blame

them for that. He, though, was far more interested in the

ships’ builders.

Telepaths. They’d taken memories from Dela, as easily

as if they’d overheard her talking.

What sort of society would a race of mindreaders have?

Jeffip thought of all the things they couldn’t do: lie, cheat,

boast, patronise, deceive, conceal, exaggerate, bluff.

Those all seemed like negative things, and usually they

were, but even the white lies, even being polite, would be

impossible.

Jeffip didn’t like the idea of living in a place where

every passing thought was transmitted to everyone else.

He had lived with the same three dozen adults for fifteen

years, in a situation that forced them together, sharing so

much. Even now, though, he didn’t know absolutely

everything about any of them. They all had secrets. He

often thought things he didn’t really mean, or had

opinions he didn’t want other people to know, or ideas he

wasn’t ready to share.

Jeffip was at a huge disadvantage. The Eyeless knew

what he was thinking, but he didn’t have a clue about

them. He couldn’t even work out where they thought.

They didn’t have brains, at least not like human beings

did, or built-in computers or… well, anything he could

imagine which was capable of thinking.

The Eyeless were wandering around and looked

aimless, but Jeffip thought there must be some alien

purpose to it. They could be pacing out the room, or

performing some other type of survey.

One of the Eyeless was walking up to him, now.

‘What are you looking at?’ it demanded.

This startled Jeffip. Up until now, their voices had been

perfectly calm.

‘I meant no offence,’ Jeffip insisted, looking down at

his own feet.

‘You like looking at people?’ it asked.

Dela was near to them, and she walked over, puzzled.

‘Why’s it doing that?’ she asked.

Jeffip shrugged.

‘It’s like it’s drunk,’ Dela pointed out.

It was a good description. The body language was

different – more of a swagger.

‘We need to get out of here,’ Jeffip said.

‘It’s too risky to stay,’ Dela agreed.

Something had changed, and Jeffip tried to think of the

most diplomatic way of asking. Then he realised that the

Eyeless had read his mind.

‘We consulted our colleague,’ it answered. ‘The

presence of a weapon of such power changes the

equations. We have decided on a strategy of violent

conflict resolution. Do not attempt to leave this area, as

we will have further need of your knowledge.’

The calm way that was announced infuriated Dela, who

just turned to Jeffip and looked like she was going to take

it out on him. Jeffip was equally frustrated. He pushed his

way in front of the Eyeless nearest to him.

‘Careful,’ Dela warned.

‘The Doctor warned us,’ Jeffip said curtly. ‘You know

that already.’

The Eyeless didn’t respond.

‘You would attack the Fortress?’

‘The assault will begin shortly. Please take cover.’

They’d all heard that. Fladon and the boys looked

around and quickly concluded that the safest place would

be behind the engine blocks.

Dela joined Jeffip. He wanted to slap her, even though

he knew she agreed with him that attacking the Fortress

was insanity. What was the matter with him?

‘I can’t allow it,’ Jeffip said, venting his anger on the

Eyeless. ‘I will do everything I can to stop this.’

The Eyeless raised its right hand.

Jeffip frowned. There was a gold disc embedded in the

glass palm. Everyone noticed it at the same time. The

ground had started to shake beneath their feet.

‘I don’t understand,’ Jeffip said, irritated. ‘What do

want me to—?’

The gold disc flashed as bright as the sun for a fraction

of a second. Jeffip staggered one step back, then stumbled

over. Smoke was pouring from his mouth and nostrils. He

tried to pull himself up, tried to cough, but instead all he

did was die.

The Doctor wasn’t worried too much about the Eyeless

ships. He was extremely worried about how the Fortress

would respond to them. He could see from the comm

display that the Fortress strategy computer was running

detectors over the spacecraft, as they moved into attack

position. There was only one reason a strategy computer

collected data.

He had to get to the weapon, and he had to do it right

now, while the Fortress was still inactive, because things

were about to get a lot more dangerous. The route was laid

out for him, right there on the comm screen.

The Doctor began running.

* * *

Dela’s eyes were screwed shut.

She was huddled with the others, behind the stack of

engine blocks. They shouldn’t have come here. It was so

stupid of them. They told the children over and over not to

come to the City at all, but especially not to go near the

Fortress. Here they were, ten metres away from it. If

they’d stayed in the village, what would have happened?

They’d have just lost a few of the boys and Alsa, the

biggest problem case amongst the girls. Jeffip would still

be alive. The Doctor and the Eyeless would have settled

their dispute without them – it wasn’t as though any of the

survivors could have changed anything.

‘What’s happening?’ Morren said, so softly she hardly

heard him, even though her son was curled up, pressing

into her. Even with her eyes closed, Dela’s world filled

with light.

And then came the sound.

It was so tempting to turn and look. To fight that, Dela

imagined her feet had been nailed to the floor and her

eyelids had been gummed up with glue. It was the first

time in years she’d had her two sons with her like this.

The boys were holding – squeezing – her hands. She

hoped she could transmit strength to them. Dela hoped she

had that strength within her to give.

There was terror, like a blanket, numbing her, isolating

her from the outside world. She tried, and failed, to block

out the whole universe.

The ground was vibrating. A sensation Dela

remembered from before, so she concentrated on that, the

past, when the machines and engines of Arcopolis

thrummed all the time, never sleeping, never even

pausing. Every day since, Dela had had moments when

she’d pictured the faces of her parents, her friends, her

lover. There weren’t any tears now, not after so long. She

had also pined for the comforts of the city, the auto-

massaging-showers, the instant food, pills that made

headaches go away, robots that unloaded the washer-dryer

and ironed everything. The humming now was different; a

far less specific memory, one of a sense of activity, the

feel of technology. It made her nostalgic, even as she felt

scared that the light and sound coming from the Eyeless

ships would take her apart. She’d been safe, then.

Dela used to get her music player to record the

birdsong from outside, pipe it through to her when she

was awake. The dawn chorus. She’d not thought about

birdsong for years.

Did that mean her life was flashing in front of her

eyes?

No. She was squatting down, somehow both terrified

and numb. Alive.

Dela remembered the tiny suns hanging below each

ship, and imagined them blasting out solid beams of

energy, all aimed at the same spot on the side of those

thick black Fortress walls.

The light and sound snapped off. She opened her eyes,

discovered she was dazzled anyway, her eyes swimming

with afterimages.

Fladon was saying something. Dela’s ears were ringing

so much she couldn’t make out the words.

Cozzan was on his feet, looking back over at the

Fortress. She tugged at his sleeve, but he was speaking.

‘…ight. Stopped.’

Dela stood and looked. The attack had been so

concentrated that none of the Factory’s windows had

broken. The air, though, felt like it was hissing. It must

have been ionised or… Dela didn’t have the vocabulary.

She looked over at the body lying there on the factory

floor. Jeffip would have known the words.

‘We have to leave,’ Fladon said.

‘They said they would kill us.’

‘They’re too busy. We have to… to… take our

chances.’

Three of the Eyeless were moving back over to the

Fortress. Beyond them, through the window, high above,

the alien ships were lined up. It might have been her

imagination, but Dela thought the spheres beneath them

looked dimmed, diminished. A quick look at the Fortress,

and there was no obvious damage from this side, although

there was a rusty, smoky smell.

The fourth Eyeless hadn’t moved. Dela was level with

it, could see the reflection of her face stretched and

mapped onto it.

‘Attack ineffective,’ the Eyeless said. ‘We anticipate a

counterattack.’

The Doctor followed the directions the comm gave him:

running a hundred metres, sharp right turn, first left. He’d

just come to the end of the last corridor, taken his first step

into the inner vault. It was almost pitch black, a great,

cold, echoing place, bigger than a rocket silo or the

biggest cathedral or even the hangar deck of a carrier ship.

The Doctor – who was very good at seeing in the dark –

had trouble making out much detail. He was about

halfway up it, feet planted on a narrow metal walkway. He

could just about make out that the huge space was

crisscrossed with other walkways, as well as thick power

lines. Below him were more gantries and power lines, and

networks of metal pipes, discs and tubes. There were large

shapes that were indistinct but loomed in the gloom.

The rumbling noise had stopped. The Fortress was no

longer shaking. The Doctor checked the comm, but the

map and directions had gone. In their place, the display

flashed frantic warning icons over an image of a very

small area of the Fortress wall, zoomed in for a second or

two. There wasn’t much damage and the image zoomed

out again.

Klaxons and sirens started sounding. For three seconds

or so, the Doctor assumed that he was the cause of the

fuss, tensed and braced for an attack.

Then the Fortress changed.

Starting at the apex, taking about ten seconds, the

interior of the Fortress lit up, one section at a time. This

soft orange-white light marked out the vast space of the

inner vault. A three-sided pyramid. Here were great

galleries, staging platforms, empty hangar bays and

docking cradles. They sat there in metallic layers, in

rainbow steps and ledges of gold and silver and copper

and iron and steel and bronze. They were connected by

shafts and tunnels, but it was always possible to see at

least one sloping black metal wall.

In the centre of the vault was a thick column, the core

of the Fortress. It was a building within a building, and

looking up and up and up at it, even the Doctor felt a

vertiginous rush.

The column was battleship grey, about the same height

as ten moon rockets on top of each other. It was thirty

metres thick, so really quite slender, reaching from the

ground right up to the top. With its hundreds of armoured

branches, gantries and pipework, it looked a little like a

great and ancient midwinter tree.

Right at the heart of it – and it seemed impossibly far

away, now – was the chamber where the weapon was

housed, waiting. The weapon chamber was a rough blip

halfway down the central column, a pyramid pulled out of

shape by the thick tangle of lines and cables. The Doctor

could clearly make out a single long, straight walkway

leading from the outer walls straight to the weapon

chamber. That was about ten storeys above him, and the

Doctor suspected it would be the most heavily defended

route in the place. The comm was telling him there was a

lift in the central column that would take him straight

there.

The Doctor could hear sets of new traps snapping into

place, all around, whole arsenals warming up.

The Fortress was awake.

There was a fresh hum very close by. A new system

had come online. A quick check of the comm, and the

Doctor could see that the Eyeless ships had the strategy

computer’s full attention. As yet, there was no sign that

the internal defences were being ramped up. If elephants

are stampeding towards you, it’s not the time to worry

about a little cold virus inside you.

‘Bless you,’ said the Doctor.

It was then that a glass arm whipped up and round his

neck, so that a smooth elbow was level with the Doctor’s

Adam’s apple, crushing the air from him.

The Fortress made its move. The first blue energy bolt

hit the middle Eyeless ship. Nothing happened. It fired a

second, more powerful shot, which hit exactly the same

spot. Nothing happened. The third energy bolt punched

right through the hull of the ship.

Instantly, the Fortress brought half a dozen more turrets

to bear, and they all fired, seven blue bolts hitting the

breach in the hull, all from slightly different angles, at

millisecond intervals. The bolts smashed seven different

swathes through the interior structure of the ship, cracking

open decks, igniting flammable items, rupturing power

lines, causing chaos and explosions that quickly became

chain reactions.

The Eyeless ship listed badly, but its crew was able to

right it within moments. While they were doing that, the

Fortress aimed all its detectors and peered through the

holes it had made in the hull. It analysed the deck plans,

weapons systems and engines. Within a second, the

Fortress knew more about the Eyeless ship than its

designers did.

Its attention turned to one of the other ships, the one on

its right. This time, it only needed one shot, which hit at a

seemingly random point on the underside. The glowing

sphere hanging beneath the ship suddenly dropped like a

stone, smashing down into the lake below, mere metres

from the shore. It rolled a short distance, and the water

beneath it instantly began boiling and steaming, and even

caught fire.

The flames were smothered within seconds, as the rest

of the Eyeless ship plummeted onto them. As the white

hull touched the sphere, there was a flash of light and a

huge explosion that blew a great crater into the soft earth.

The shockwave toppled a couple of nearby skyscrapers. A

mushroom cloud of pulverised mud, bits of Eyeless ship

and steam slowly rose. A great wave in the lake sloshed

and slurped against the walls of the Fortress. Tiny pieces

of white hull material and what looked like small chunks

of glass began showering down over a wide area.

The undamaged Eyeless ship fired seven small pulses

of golden light from its sphere, each one hitting and

ripping apart a gun turret.

The Fortress fell silent.

The damaged Eyeless ship drifted back a little. For the

moment – as long as the surviving Eyeless ships kept

where they were – they’d be safe, as the Fortress had no

guns facing them.

This situation was unacceptable to the Fortress.

* * *

The Doctor had broken free of the Eyeless, but it still had

a six-fingered handful of his coat and jacket lapel. The

Doctor was close in, his arm under the Eyeless’ so that he

had it in what he rather hoped was a wrestling hold.

They were about halfway along a metal gantry made up

of thin metal tubes. There was a doorway right at the end,

leading into the central column. A little way from there

was the lift that would lead straight up to the weapon

chamber.

The Eyeless was making all the textbook moves, which

made it easy for the Doctor to anticipate them. On the

other hand, they were the textbook moves in the first place

because they were effective. The net result was that the

Doctor and the Eyeless were dragging each other along

the gantry, almost waltzing, each trying to trip the other up

without losing footing and tumbling off the gantry.

The glass man was clearly trying to calculate a

countermove to break free from him. It had just occurred

to the Doctor that, in theory, he should be able to

communicate with the Eyeless using the psychic paper.

The Doctor couldn’t spare a hand to fish it out, and

anyway the Eyeless would take its opportunity to attack

him if he released his grip.

They got to the end of the gantry, into the lift and the

door hissed shut behind them. The floor began to move.

It was a lift – that was all. It had been on the map, but

from memory the Doctor had thought it had been a little

further inside the central column, not right on its side.

He’d be at the weapon when the lift stopped. Taking an

Eyeless along for the ride hadn’t been part of the Doctor’s

plan.

There were no nozzles or trap doors in the lift car, and

it wasn’t wired up to electrocute its passengers, but that

didn’t mean it was safe in here.

The glass man shoved the Doctor against the back wall.

It wasn’t any stronger than a human being, although that

was strong enough to push the air out of his lungs. He

recovered, twisted, managed to trip the Eyeless over. It

was relatively light, and now he had it pinned, his knee in

its back, although it was hard to keep hold.

The arm the Doctor had hold of was as clean and sharp

as crystal, and had what looked like a little metal anchor

embedded in it. Like a sailor’s tattoo, the Doctor thought,

unable to stop himself gasping out a laugh.

The Eyeless was trying to shake itself free. The Doctor

gritted his teeth and kept holding it down. He wondered

how brittle an Eyeless was.

There was a grinding sound beneath their feet.

They both looked down, puzzled.

Was the Fortress arming the –

The Doctor panicked. When two hearts start racing at

once, it isn’t a pleasant sensation. It sets the epinephrine

flowing a bit too freely.

– weapon that killed Arcopolis?

‘No,’ he concluded out loud, calming himself down.

‘No. This is something else.’

For a start, the weapon was above him, not below. So

what was the noise? Even though he couldn’t hear its

thoughts, the Doctor could tell the Eyeless was asking

itself the same question. It tugged, tried to stand. The

Doctor didn’t let go.

‘If I knew,’ the Doctor announced calmly, ‘I would

have been a bit more specific. Like I say, it’s something

else.’

The lights dimmed a little.

‘They’re diverting power to the… something else.’ The

next creak and clatter was nearer still.

‘Hang on…’

The Eyeless had loosened its grip a little.

‘Let me use the comm,’ the Doctor said. He used his

free hand to retrieve it. ‘The comm? See? Comm see,

comme ça.’

The Doctor checked the screen as best he could without

completely letting go of the Eyeless. To his relief, it

clearly showed that the lift was heading up. It was just a

few floors away from the weapon chamber, and…

Thing was, if the noises beneath them were getting

nearer, that meant the lift was going down. Now the

Doctor came to think about it, it did feel like the lift was

falling.

‘Oh,’ he said, realising. ‘The comm’s been lying to me.’

He let that sink in for both of them.

‘Well… to us, really,’ he added. ‘The Fortress hacked

into the comm, fed me what I wanted to see, gave me a

route that only said it was to the weapon chamber. All the

time it was leading me here.’

The comm went dead.

Another grinding, puttering sound, which echoed like a

cackle, inches beneath them, making the floor of the lift

car thrum and vibrate.

‘If we’re going to survive, we need to cooperate,’ the

Doctor suggested. ‘It’s the rational thing to do.’

The Eyeless hesitated, then nodded. Slowly, the Doctor

let go of it.

The Eyeless held out its hand, which the Doctor shook.

Then the door opened, the lift car tipped itself right over,

and the Doctor and the Eyeless fell out.

They dropped, hands clasped, straight down through

five metres of darkness, before crashing onto a metal

surface. The Eyeless hit it chest first, with a sound like

someone dropping a crate of beer bottles. The Doctor let

go of its hand and it flipped over and slid away, lifeless,

torso dashed to bits, down into the gloom.

The Doctor didn’t shatter, but he did slide off, falling

only a metre or so, but then going on to hit a ledge, rolling

over that for a while, and then down another five metres,

landing flat on his back on solid rock.

‘Ow,’ he noted.

There was a new sound. Metal against metal, a vast

mechanism creaking into life. A great ratcheting noise,

clanks and what sounded like bolts clacking back.

The Doctor had heard a sound like this before, and

tried to place it. It rang a bell… and that phrase reminded

him of the other day, the thing he’d been telling Gar and

Alsa about. Being up in St Stephen’s Tower, chasing the

last of the Steggosians round the workings of Big Ben,

dodging that spiky tail of his.

Concentrate. Concentrate on identifying the noise, the

Doctor told himself.

And don’t black out.

He’d heard this sound in London, but on a different

occasion. Ages ago. Where and when?

‘Tower Bridge!’ he exclaimed, wincing at the effort. ‘It

sounds like Tower Bridge getting ready to open up.’

The Doctor, still flat on his back, soaked up the scene.

He had an ideal vantage point. He was lying in a three-

metre deep, ten-metre wide trench cut into what looked

and felt like bedrock. The trench was very slightly curved.

Above, all around, horizontal and vertical, was a great

mesh of cogwheels, made of the same black metal as the

walls, marked out with silver and grey rivets. There were

drive shafts and pistons like redwood trees. There were

flywheels the size of houses, drive belts you could have

used as bus lanes.

Peering down past his feet, the Doctor could see an

enormous drum, like the front of a steam roller. It was

about a hundred metres away, so partially obscured by the

curve of the trench. It was ten metres tall and just as wide,

so rested perfectly snugly in the groove the Doctor was

lying in. Above and to each side were vast numbers of

cogwheels, belts and gears, all – eventually – connected

up to the axle of the roller.

‘Ah,’ said the Doctor, who’d just worked out what it all

did.

There was a creak, then a clank. A deep rumbling note,

and the roller started edging forwards, towards him. It was

moving at walking pace, so would reach him in about a

minute.

All in all, this wasn’t the best time to realise he

couldn’t quite get his legs to move. He’d just fallen about

ten metres and landed spine-first on solid rock. The fact

that he didn’t feel any pain was not encouraging.

‘This is a really inefficient and melodramatic way of

killing one person,’ the Doctor complained loudly. ‘Even

if that person is me.’

He looked back over at the roller, now fifty metres or

so away from his feet. The grinding was deafening. The

roller must have weighed hundreds of tons, easily.

‘Although I have to hand it to you… it does look like

it’ll work.’

The Doctor could wiggle his toes. Using all his

concentration and willpower, he knew he’d be able to

move in another thirty seconds.

His main problem now was that the roller would reach

him in twenty.

Hydraulics and great gears hissed and clanked around.

Every cogwheel was turning. It sounded like the engine

room of an ocean liner going full steam ahead. The heavy

roller was a wall of metal, turning so very slowly, scraping

and sparking against the bare rock, its rotation as

unstoppable as a planet’s. The Doctor had nothing but

admiration for the engineers who’d designed and built

such an incredible machine.

The edge of the roller brushed the tips of his trainers.

The Doctor forced his feet to move, but they only

twitched. He tried to throw them back over his head to flip

himself upright. They only got halfway.

With a mighty hiss, the roller came to a dead stop.

The Doctor was bent into an L shape. His legs – had he

noticed before quite how long and skinny they were? –

pointed straight up in the air, the backs of them resting on

the cold metal roller.

He was not only bent at a right angle, he was at exactly

the right angle to see what had happened. By comparing

the new position of all the mechanisms, he was able to

work out what all that mechanical activity had been in aid

of.

All this vast machinery at the base of the pyramid was

dedicated to one purpose. It hadn’t been to kill him. The

Doctor now knew what the roller had been doing and why

it had stopped.

‘You’re kidding,’ the Doctor whispered.

The Eyeless ships had disabled the guns on the side of the

Fortress facing them. The fighting was over, at least until

the Eyeless attacked again. Barely controlled thoughts and

concern about the many, many Eyeless casualties flitted

between the four glass men out here.

Likewise, Dela and Fladon were over at Jeffip’s body.

There was a terrible truth about the future. Neither of

them was ready to confront it so soon.

‘What do we do with it?’ Fladon asked, ever practical.

They were a long way from the settlement. It would be

hard enough just getting the body down to ground level to

bury it out here.

Dela knew the sensible thing to do was to leave. There

was nothing they could do here, on the front line of some

interplanetary war. She’d stayed because she hadn’t

wanted the Eyeless to cut up Jeffip’s body just so they

could add a red eye and a blue eye to their collection.

Fladon took her hand, but she shook him away. Dela

felt numb, detached from events.

An Eyeless swept past her, agitated. As she stepped out

of its way, not wanting to antagonise it, a wave of anxiety

passed over her. She had every reason to be worried, of

course, but this didn’t feel like it had come from within

her. The emotions of the Eyeless were infectious. Was that

why she had been feeling so angry before? She’d caught it

from the Eyeless?

There was a crunch.

‘What was that?’ she asked.

The other humans were coming over, wary. The

Eyeless closest to them was looking equally lost.

‘It sounded like ice breaking,’ Fladon said, aware it

wasn’t a helpful answer.

Another crunch.

‘Where’s it coming from?’ Gar asked. They were all

looking down at the floor.

‘The attack must have weakened the Factory’s

foundations,’ Fladon offered.

‘Without even cracking the windows?’ Gar sneered.

The kids who came out into the city were all experts on

the ways buildings collapsed.

Cozzan was looking around. ‘That’s weird,’ he said.

‘It’s possible,’ Fladon said, not hearing. ‘When that

ship hit the ground, it would have fractured the

subterranean travel tunnels. The cracks could have

spread.’

Morren was close, almost huddling. It was

disconcerting for her son to treat her in this way, Dela

realised, more than a little guiltily.

‘Are we moving?’ he asked.

‘No…’ Dela said quietly.

But they did seem to be turning, angling away from the

solid mass of the Fortress. A memory. For the first time in

fifteen years, Dela remembered what it was like to sit in a

monorail carriage when it set off. It would look, for the

first few seconds, like you were sitting still and the station

was reversing away.

They all realised in the same moment it was the

Fortress that was moving, not them.

The immense black wall was shifting. The whole

Fortress was rotating on its central axis, as though it was

mounted on gimbals. It was slow, about walking pace. It

was unnerving, like watching a mountain turning to get a

better look at something.

‘The Factory is in its way,’ Cozzan said.

Now the Fortress was twisting, grinding away the

concrete and metal superstructure of the native building. It

moved clockwise, exposing the side that had been buried

in the Factory to the Eyeless ships.

The ceiling above them was creaking.

And now it was definitely time to get back to the

village.

Dela, her children and Gar all ran, as the big window

finally shattered and the floor beneath them began to

ripple and moan. Sparks flew from the machines of the

Factory production lines, giving up the final ergs of power

they’d hoarded for fifteen years.

A minute later, with a triumphant, echoing slam, the

Fortress stopped moving. Almost round the corner, now,

Dela and her sons turned to see a black wall identical to

the one that had been there before.

The Eyeless had stayed rooted to the same spot. They

had been showered with debris from the shattered window

and the wreckage that had fallen from the ceiling. Dela

could see three of the four, and they didn’t seem injured or

damaged, or whatever the right word was, but the other

was gone. Dead. Jeffip’s body had been completely

buried, possibly even crushed, and the other Eyeless must

be under the rubble, too.

Fladon hadn’t run, but had been thrown over as the

Factory convulsed. Now he was getting up, coughing.

Stay still, Dela heard herself think. It was another

warning from the Eyeless.

It came too late.

Fladon was blasted to pieces by a blue energy bolt.

The Doctor had buried the automatic gun, but on a wall

that was now facing away from them. The new wall had a

new turret.

Dela heard three Eyeless voices screaming warnings.

Not to her, to their ships. She was already running, pulling

all the children along with her.

The Fortress had turned itself 120 degrees and locked into

place with a new side facing the Eyeless ships. The lake

sloshed around its base, trying to settle down.

Fresh guns now faced the Eyeless. Ten of them fired,

the energy bolts converging on the same spot on the

sphere hanging below the undamaged ship. They

punctured it, let it explode in mid-air.

The fireball enveloped the vessel above, burst it and

then dispersed the remains on a shockwave that broke

every window within a ten-mile radius but bounced

harmlessly off the Fortress itself.

The last surviving Eyeless ship, the first to be hit, fired

little golden pulses, intending each one to hit a turret on

the Fortress. It had worked before, but now the Fortress

was ready for the attack and it fired seven shots, each

hitting an energy pulse, popping them. Then the guns fired

a third time.

By now, the Eyeless ship had thrown up a force field,

which absorbed most of the energy but couldn’t stop the

ship being flicked miles into the heart of the city, right

into and among a cluster of skyscrapers.

The Fortress took no pleasure watching the Eyeless

ship slamming into a tall tower, its masts toppling and the

hull corkscrewing down to the ground. The ship flipped

over as it fell, bounced off other structures, carved great

gouges into the buildings, scooped out blocks of masonry.

The Fortress was keeping a tally of alien life signs, and

that fell to zero during this process, even before the bulk

of the ship hit ground level.

The Fortress updated its records to register it had

neutralised a threat.

As the ship’s force field had failed, however, the ship’s

artificial sun had broken off – or been deliberately ejected

– and was now hurtling towards the Fortress. The strategy

computer detected this and had the automatic guns blast at

it, but it had been caught off-guard, and wasn’t able to get

a good aim. It scored ten near misses. Ten energy bolts

shot off in different directions, far into the morning sky.

The ball of energy continued on its course.

The Fortress had no strategies to prevent the impact,

and switched to damage limitation.

Alsa could read the mind of the two Eyeless, an ocean of

resentment, rage and frustration.

‘What’s going on?’ she asked.

‘So many dead.’

‘What? Who’s dead?’ Was it talking about Eyeless or

real people?

‘We are now in the line of fire,’ it told her. ‘The side

facing the ----’

That last word hadn’t come out at all. ‘The what?’

The shockwave from the blast had already knocked

them off their feet when the front wall shattered and

hurled itself at them, so quickly Alsa didn’t even have

time to close her eyes. She saw the two Eyeless lifted off

their feet and slammed into the back wall like dolls. Then

all she could see was the slab of black metal that reared up

off the floor and was about to hit her right in the face. A

wave of heat washed over her, but everything was dark

now.

The Doctor finally managed to summon the willpower to

stand up. He hopped to his feet, trying not to cry out as he

realised just how many bruises he had.

He knew there was no way he could scale the sheer

side of the trench, and the metal of the roller was far too

smooth to get a handhold.

He checked the comm. The three Eyeless ships had

been destroyed. He could believe that, but he couldn’t

trust the comm with much else. So he tossed it up onto the

ledge, stepped back, and used the sonic screwdriver to

detonate its battery. That blew a metre-thick chunk of rock

out, which fell into the trench, forming a rough set of

steps. He clambered out, onto the floor at the base of the

Fortress.

He pulled himself upright, twisting his aching shoulder

round to see if that helped the pain. It didn’t. He looked

up. The weapon chamber appeared to be impossibly high

above him. He was at ground level and virtually at the

outer wall. He’d have to get across the whole of the floor

to the central column, then climb up, somehow. The

Fortress was awake now, all the defence systems online.

The Doctor could feel it peering down at him, waiting for

the moment to pounce. That little trick with the comm and

the lift car demonstrated that the Fortress was far more

than just a machine designed to kill an intruder, it was a

machine designed to enjoy killing an intruder. Not because

it liked being vicious, almost the opposite: it liked solving

puzzles. Murdering him would satisfy the Fortress in the

same way as it was satisfying to solve a crossword.

His foot scuffed against something solid. A glass head,

with a great crack in it. The Doctor picked it up. It was

light. Decapitated heads tended to be heavier than they

looked, in his experience. This one was utterly inert,

nothing to indicate it had ever been alive.

‘One down,’ the Doctor noted, carefully laying the

head back on the rock floor.

He was trying to work out what to do next when a

streak of golden light punched its way through the wall

behind him, about a hundred storeys up. It looked like a

small, squashed sun.

The Doctor made a run for it. This wasn’t just to avoid

the debris, which was already beginning to crash down

around where he had been standing. It was also because

the ball of energy was so bright, so powerful and such an

immediate threat that it would both blind and occupy

every sensor in here – for the next few precious seconds,

at least.

Its light had seared an afterimage into the air itself, but

almost all of its force had been spent getting through the

walls. It managed to bore a hole in the tangle of walkways

and cables, but all the sphere could do after that was

splash feebly into the central column, like a blob of lava.

It left a congealed splash of metal, like a sore, on the side

of the column, and that was already cooling rapidly.

It posed no further danger to the Fortress. Which meant

that the only remaining threat was the Doctor himself.

He gulped.

The winding corridor Alsa had come along with the

Doctor to get this far into the Fortress was all gone,

replaced by a sloping tunnel of jagged black metal. The

explosion had burrowed hundreds of metres deep into the

thick double walls. Sunlight streamed in through the gap,

down past the stumps of sliced pipework and cables and

through the five glass men standing there.

Alsa was already up. Her nose was a bloody mash, like

someone had punched it. She was dabbing it with her

sleeve. Apart from that, she was fine.

She felt the anger of the two Eyeless who’d been with

her all this time, burning hotter than ever and hotter than

her own. The three newcomers were offering to share their

calm, simply paste over the negative emotions. The one

with the green eyes was refusing, suggesting that they

have his rage instead.

‘Are you the only survivors?’ Alsa asked.

There should be others – scouts and other patrols. None

of them were close enough for telepathic contact, though.

They ought to be regrouping. It was known that many

hundreds, all of the Eyeless on the ships and two down

here, had died. There might only be these five.

Human beings had the expression ‘their memory lived

on’, but it wasn’t true, not really, it just meant that people

remembered the dead. And it wasn’t like the parents

remembered everyone. The thirty-seven parents were just

ordinary people. They had had friends and relatives – very

small families back then from what they always said, ones

with less than a handful of kids. Say they knew a thousand

people, being really generous – this was a dizzying

number of people for Alsa. Say, for sake of argument, they

each ‘knew’ a different thousand people. They ‘knew’ a

woman they passed in the street, or a neighbour they’d

never talked to, or some shop assistant. That would mean

that between all of them, they only remembered 37,000

people, out of all the people in Arcopolis.

The Eyeless did the maths: the parents only

remembered around 1 person in 5,405. It was total

oblivion for everyone else. Not even their names survived.

They didn’t even count as strangers.

It was different for the Eyeless. Their memories

literally lived on, copied into the minds of the other

Eyeless.

The Eyeless shared everything. There was no privacy,

and Alsa didn’t like that idea. She’d never liked people

looking at her. She dressed in layers and layers of

clothing, never went swimming when the others did, never

told anyone else how she was feeling about stuff. That

was for babies.

The Eyeless were better than people. Alsa had worked

that out ages ago. They could do so much she couldn’t.

But it wasn’t just that – they were so much more

ambitious. All of the glass men here had done so many

things. Wanting privacy felt silly. Childish. Still, a part of

Alsa needed it. She felt a lot more comfortable thinking of

their communication as a conversation, not a mingling of

thoughts.

She wondered if they could still give her the engine

they’d promised her. She hadn’t said anything, but they

knew she was thinking about that, and hadn’t answered.

The Eyeless felt trapped now, alone, but they were

practical, they were looking for a solution. Their telepathy

only worked over a short distance. They couldn’t call for a

rescue ship with it. They needed a beacon.

Like the comm mast in the middle of the village, Alsa

thought. She hadn’t meant to volunteer that thought, but

the Eyeless were already agreeing to commandeer it. As

one, the five of them turned to go.

‘Hang on! Don’t you want this weapon?’ she asked.

The Eyeless hesitated.

‘Of course,’ they said finally, in unison. ‘It is also in

our interest to ensure no one else has it.’

‘The Doctor won’t trade for it.’

‘We cannot read his mind, so cannot say that for

certain. You think we have to use force.’ It wasn’t a

question, of course, as the Eyeless knew exactly what Alsa

thought.

She pictured the scene: armies of Eyeless, surrounding

the Doctor, arms raised, about to tear him to pieces. She

asked them if the Eyeless would do that.

‘Yes, if the stakes were high enough.’

‘Well – are they?’

‘If the Doctor is describing the weapon accurately,

there is a dominating strategy: the weapon should be

acquired at any cost up to, but not including, our total

annihilation.’

Now the Eyeless were picturing the interior of the

Fortress. Before the ships had been destroyed, they’d

scanned the building. The five glass men and Alsa

contemplated the results. Alsa could see where the

weapon was – right at the heart of the pyramid – and she

could see how to get to it. One walkway led straight there.

Simple.

Except that she could also see the defences. Automatic

guns and other systems that Alsa struggled to understand.

There was a flutter of excitement.

‘What?’ Alsa asked.

The impact of the miniature sun that had powered the

last Eyeless ship had smashed a long, straight route

through the interior of the Fortress. This had disrupted the

defences. The Fortress had compensated – realigned

various turrets and so on – but coverage wasn’t perfect.

There were a few blind spots.

It took Alsa a moment to interpret the images.

‘There’s a safe route through, now?’

No… but there was an area close to the weapon

chamber with only one gun. It would be possible to follow

a route along pipes and gantries, then drop down and run

the last fifty metres.

‘That’s not so far,’ Alsa thought. ‘And that one gun?’

Could fire five times in that time, maintaining eighty

per cent accuracy.

‘If someone stepped onto that walkway, four times out

of five they’d be killed?’ Alsa asked, aghast.

No, they explained patiently. That would be true if it

could only fire once. It could fire five times. If someone

stepped onto the walkway, they’d be killed 3,124 times

out of 3,125.

She didn’t believe them, so they patiently talked her

through the probabilities. They were right.

‘That’s the same as saying there’s no way across!’ she

cried out.

There was always a solution, the Eyeless assured her. It

was simply a matter of finding it. This was something to

work with. Their best chance.

The Doctor and the Fortress were not locked in an epic

struggle.

This would be over quickly. The Doctor would get to

the weapon or the Fortress would kill him. This wouldn’t

be a game of chess; it would be more like a shoot-out. It

felt to the Doctor like he was fighting a volcano… no, an

ogre. A mechanical giant.

This thought heartened him a little, as he’d fought

ogres and giant robots plenty of times in the past, and

hadn’t been beaten by one yet.

Then again, the bad guys only had to win once.

The Doctor had concluded that if he stuck close to the

exposed mechanisms that had moved the Fortress around,

it wouldn’t be able to attack him with the really nasty stuff

like high explosives or acids or even energy blasts. It

meant he was running a very convoluted course to the

central pillar, darting from one delicate piece of

equipment to another, always careful to leave plenty of

options for himself. He was still alive, obviously. So far,

the defences had consisted of nothing but bursts of

radiation that he could literally just shake off and little

blasts of poison gas that were relatively slow and so easy

to see coming.

A tiny dart nicked his hand as it whizzed past.

The Doctor didn’t slow down, but had a quick look at

the damage: a very light scratch that stung like a paper

cut. He didn’t like this. Not to say that he’d have preferred

to have his hand sliced off, but… well, why just poke at

him?

On instinct, he dived and rolled. A mini-missile shot

straight over him. It was moving fast, but the Doctor could

tell it was only about the size of a bottle of wine. It

bobbed around making the distinctive buzzy, dopplered

sound of an antigravity generator.

The Fortress fired a second mini-missile, which the

Doctor leapt over like it was a hurdle. The weapon had

anticipated the Doctor would duck, like he had the first

time, so it had aimed low. Glancing back over his

shoulder, the Doctor saw that both missiles were now

arcing round to have another go.

He glanced down at his hand, with its tiny scratch.

The dart had taken his biodata sample.

The missiles were programmed with his genetic details,

and wouldn’t give up until they’d hit him.

Dela and the children were outside now and had finally

stopped running. Dela’s skin was tingling. It had only

been when she saw Cozzan’s red face that she realised

they all had instant sunburn from the sphere that had

broken off the Eyeless ship. Apart from that, she felt fine.

The boys had no obvious injuries or distress. She was

proud of how calm they’d been.

They had led her out of the Factory down to ground

level and straight into an area thick with trees. The

Fortress still overshadowed them, but they were shielded

from the worst of the oppressive black shape by a canopy

of fronds and ferns and flat leaves. Dela could barely see

ten paces in front of her.

‘It’s the Urban Jungle,’ Morren told her solemnly.

‘A good place to get lost,’ Gar said.

‘Yes,’ she said, looking back. She wondered if the

Doctor was all right.

The ground was wet from the previous night’s rain, and

the air was saturated with the smells of loam and fruit and

pollen and bark and so much else.

‘What was it before?’ she wondered aloud. They were

east of the Factory, not all that far from where she’d lived.

There had been nothing like this in the City back then.

The boys all approximated a shrug.

Dela tried to get her bearings. ‘Close to the Aircar

Factory, in the direction of the… it’s the Botanical

Gardens. No, too close, they were miles away… wait…

the plants have spread out. Seeds and spores must have

blown here.’

‘There are domes and stuff in the heart of the Jungle,

where the plants are thickest,’ Gar confirmed, nodding his

head in the right direction, keeping his hands in his

pockets.

‘Nothing’s very colourful,’ Dela said.

‘What do you mean? It’s all green.’

Dela laughed. ‘I used to come here. Well, to the

Gardens.’

‘With, er, thingy?’ Cozzan asked.

‘Gyll, yes, and on school trips and with my parents

before that. It was where rare plants were kept. There

were flowers, then. Every size and shape and colour.’

The flowering plants would have survived the coming

of the Fortress, but slowly died off without any insects to

pollinate them. The vegetation no longer had to appeal to

bees or ants.

‘What are we going to do?’ Cozzan asked.

Dela had been thinking. ‘We go back to the settlement.

Get out the way, let the Doctor and the aliens… the other

aliens… settle their dispute.’

‘I meant now Jeffip and Fladon are dead. They did so

much.’

Dela hadn’t thought her heart could sink any lower.

She’d put that question to the back of her mind.

‘They learned their skills. Boys like you will have to

step up to take their place. We will all have to be braver.’

‘You lived in the Jungle before?’

‘No… it wasn’t here, this was all just part of the city. I

was a bank manager.’

‘A what?’

She smiled. ‘That would take a very long time to

explain. Jeffip was a teacher. A primary school teacher.

Fladon worked in the Car Factory. Very little of what we

knew before was any use.’

‘Mum!’ Morren called out. He was a little way ahead,

and was now signalling them all to slow down.

The boys’ feral instinct was to duck down. Dela craned

her neck, hoping to get a better look at whatever it was.

Gar grabbed at her.

Dela felt them in her mind before she saw them.

Dozens of Eyeless, marching in single file, each of them

negotiating the obstacles and hazards they encountered,

ducking under branches, stepping over root bores and

round fallen trees without breaking their stride or their

perfect formation.

A burble of thoughts, imperatives and observations,

flittered between the aliens. They were marching on the

Fortress; were one of five groups heading there; wanted to

get inside the building and acquire the weapon before the

Doctor did.

If they saw the humans, or heard their thoughts, they

didn’t acknowledge it. The glass men were already hard to

see, and within seconds of passing, the column had

completely disappeared into the foliage.

‘I have to warn the Doctor,’ Dela said. No one was

more surprised hearing the words than she was, but saying

them had been a liberation. She knew it was the right

thing to do. Then, she said to the boys: ‘You can find your

way back to the settlement? Do that. Warn Jennver and the

others. Tell them what happened.’

She hugged them all, even Gar. That left them too

embarrassed to object. Dela took her chance to escape

them.

The two missiles were circling and had the Doctor pinned

with his back to a large metal pillar.

They were in a circular vault, around seventy metres in

diameter. The missiles were circling the perimeter of the

room, sticking close together. There were ten exits,

equally spaced, along the perimeter, but every time the

Doctor made for one of the doorways, one of the two

missiles started heading for it and they could travel four

times faster than he could. The pillar he had his back to

was a crankshaft in the middle of the room that the

missiles didn’t want to damage, so they were waiting for

him to make his move. They didn’t seem to want to come

in any closer than the perimeter.

He had to get to one of the doors, but every time he

started towards one, it became clear the missiles could get

there first.

He was more than a little annoyed with himself,

because there was clearly, mathematically, a way to get to

a door. The Fortress was setting him a puzzle.

‘Something to do with pi,’ he told himself.

He waited until the missiles were directly behind him,

then ran for it, straight towards one of the doors, but one

of the mini missiles started powering round. He turned his

head, and it was obvious that it would get to the door

before he got anywhere near.

The Doctor ran back to the middle of the room, and the

shelter of the mechanism there. The missile raced past the

doorway before resuming its perimeter patrol.

‘2 pi R,’ the Doctor said, still trying to work out the

solution. ‘The radius of the circle is, um, call it a hundred

feet… er, I mean thirty metres… and there’s a value of…

they’re four times faster than me, so if I’m standing a

quarter of the radius of the… I’m in the centre of the

circle, so if I… but there are two missiles… so if I’m

standing an eighth of the radius of… Oh, stuff this for a

game of soldiers!’

In no mood to play along, he pulled out the sonic

screwdriver and started running straight at the missiles.

One of them pitched round and straight at him. There was

no time to check, so the Doctor fired away and hoped he’d

got it right.

A big glob of air shimmered in front him and the

missile flew right into it. Instantaneously, every screw,

weld, seal and rivet failed. The missile became a bucketful

of missile components, not one of which was connected to

another. The pieces also lost all their momentum, just

drizzling down onto the ground.

For every action there was an equal and opposite

reaction – in other words, the force of the sonic burst

flicked the Doctor off his feet and sent him flying back.

He landed on one foot, stumbled, fell and landed

awkwardly. His body noted irritably that it was tired and

bruised and scratched enough already, thanks.

Despite that, the Doctor felt like kissing the sonic

screwdriver. There was a cloud to the silver lining: the

Maximum Disassemble setting drained all its power. He

could set the screwdriver to recharge itself, perhaps by

absorbing ambient sound, but that would take a few

minutes.

Which was a shame, as the second missile was coming

straight for him right now.

It was moments away. Reflexively, the Doctor flinched

and raised his elbow so it was right between his head and

the missile, peered at the weapon through the crook of his

arm.

The air between them was blurring, growing

opalescent.

The Doctor had just formed the thought that it might be

a residual effect of the sonic burst when the shape

resolved into a ghost – a middle-aged man in a toga, with

a smooth head.

The ghost fixed a dark-eyed stare at the Doctor,

surprised to see a man cowering quite so comprehensively

from it.

The ghost didn’t see the missile coming. The Doctor

did, through its translucent, bald head. He wasn’t sure

what would happen, but couldn’t do much to affect the

outcome anyway. In the event, the missile hit the ghost

square in the back of the head and the two were

annihilated in a burst of light.

The Doctor blinked the flash out of his eyes.

‘Oh, I am so sorry,’ he murmured. It was pure luck that

he hadn’t been hit himself, but that didn’t make him feel

any better about it.

He scrambled around on the ground for something,

found it and hurried off towards one of the doorways.

Before he got much further, his route was cut off by a

shimmer in the air. Another ghost had appeared. Another

one. Another. Within moments, there were too many

ghosts to count – there was just a tornado cloud made

from long limbs, flowing robes and hair, lit from within,

engulfing him.

* * *

The Eyeless had been burbling away, crunching the

numbers, drawing up their plan. Alsa stood between them

all, but didn’t feel involved. They were finally calming

down. As was she, Alsa realised. Their emotions were

catching.

The mental images of the inner vault held in the five

Eyeless minds dripped details of the traps that lay in wait.

The Eyeless had worked out that the Fortress would only

ever hit back slightly harder than it had been hit. The

Eyeless had confronted it with three ships. If they had

brought thirty, it would have attacked them with ten times

the ferocity.

‘The Doctor was smart to show up here on his own,

without any guns or other weapons,’ Alsa said. ‘He left his

spaceship on the beach, so he’s still got a spaceship.’

She was trying to rile them, but it wasn’t working. The

Eyeless understood she was impatient, so without waiting

to be asked what her plan was, she told them they should

let the Doctor do the hard work of getting the weapon,

then ambush him. Simple.

‘No,’ the Eyeless said. It was like a chorus. ‘It is not

acceptable to allow anyone else even temporary control of

the weapon. We have to acquire it first.’

‘There’s no way to do that,’ Alsa complained.

‘We have calculated an option that guarantees we can

secure the weapon chamber before the Doctor arrives,’ the

Eyeless told her.

As one, they turned towards the corridor that led into

the central vault.

‘Are you going to tell me what it is?’ Alsa demanded.

The corridor was uneven and blasted, making it tricky to

follow them.

She saw their plan.

‘That’s it? Charge at the guns? It’s suicide!’

‘Not for all of us. The benefit justifies the cost.’

‘You don’t want to die, surely?’

‘It is not our preference. Humans have adopted such

strategies. Your current culture is based around short-term

sacrifice to ensure the survival of future generations.’

The whole point, Alsa thought sulkily, was that she

hated that and wanted it changed. They still hadn’t

reassured her that they could build the engine they’d

promised her.

‘How many is “enough”?’ she asked.

‘It only needs a handful,’ the Eyeless said. ‘One will

certainly survive, there is a sixty-seven per cent chance

that more than one will. The survivor or survivors will

acquire the weapon.’

They’d reached a small antechamber. Through the next

doorway, Alsa could see the vast interior of the inner

vault, so much larger and more solid than the mental

picture had made it seem.

Alsa looked over at the five Eyeless.

A handful.

The Eyeless with Jall’s eyes held out its hand, waved

its fingers almost cheerfully.

‘A handful is six,’ it told her. ‘You are the sixth.’

‘Touch me and I die!’ the Doctor shouted.

Countless ghosts swirled away until he was out of their

reach, but still they circled him. The Doctor looked ahead,

then behind, but couldn’t see past the ghosts. There was

no way out.

One soon drifted into the eye of the storm, floated in

front of him. A young man. It thought about reaching out,

but hesitated… and was lost to the throng. As soon as its

light had faded, another ghost had taken its place. It was

screaming, silently, and even the Doctor flinched at the

raw horror in its eyes.

‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,’ said the Doctor, trying to

move out of its way, but there were ghosts in every

direction. Dozens. Hundreds. Thousands. Their light, blue

and pearl grey, wasn’t cast far from them. Every few

seconds, a ghost or group of them would break from the

pack to confront him.

He saw five ghostly children in short robes looking

around. Four of them were crying, and the other was

looking up, too surprised to react. The Doctor had to try

something for them. He took the sonic screwdriver from

his pocket. It had recharged enough for him to take some

simple readings. They told him nothing, so he thought

about it.

Could they really, somehow, be the lost souls of

Arcopolis?

‘There’s nothing I could do,’ the Doctor said quietly.

‘Nothing I can do.’

Two ghosts appeared in the children’s place – a man

and a woman with almost angelic expressions, holding

hands, trembling a little. They had gone almost as soon as

they’d arrived.

‘I said I’m sorry. I meant it. I’m sorry.’

Dark thoughts swirled inside the Doctor, almost filling

him, almost dragging him under. All the other ghosts, his

own ghosts.

‘There is nothing I can do!’ he whispered.

Would he have to look all 200 million of them in the

eye? The Doctor vowed to do that, if that was what it

took. He would stand here, tell each of them to their face,

however long that took.

‘Really. There’s nothing.’

But he would be telling them all the same thing.

They were crowding a little closer, now, although there

was still a sense of respectful distance. He had to get to

the weapon. As the Doctor stepped forward, the ghosts

moved with him, blocked his way.

‘Can’t you hear me? Don’t you understand?’

There was no individual response from them, nothing

to suggest a connection or a meaningful communication.

There was just their shock and loss and emptiness. A

hollow, objectless, grief. The sense of loss, the sense of

futility, the sense of fate. It echoed within the Doctor. The

sense that this shouldn’t have happened, eliding without

difficulty into a sense of helplessness.

‘I wish I could. I wish I could do everything. I wish I

could save everyone. I can’t.’

Fifteen years ago, this had just been a normal world.

These people hadn’t been criminals or vicious or even the

tiniest bit selfish. They didn’t deserve this. They had been

peaceful and prosperous. Charity was easily given when

there was plenty for everyone, and their magnificent city

was a monument that there once had been. But even now,

even after all this time and hardship, the survivors of this

fallen civilisation had fed him from their own meagre

supplies. Everyone would have a little less to eat, but the

Doctor had just sat there and slurped up their soup and

chomped away on their fruit. They’d shared their lives

with him, showed him kindness. Not threatened him with

violence or even with confinement. They were good

people. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair on them. None of it.

What had he done for them? What could he do for

them?

He checked the sonic screwdriver again.

‘You’re not even a blip on the sonic,’ the Doctor said. ‘I

don’t have the answers. I don’t know what you are, only

some of the things you’re not. There’s no point crowding

me.’

The Doctor tried to move on, but the ghosts were

consciously blocking him, now. They had become

agitated.

‘I mean it! Begone! Shift!’

They all moved a little closer.

‘Touch me and I die. Just die. That would be it.

Nothing like… what you’ve got. Just an end to it all. And

then where would you be?’

As he’d thought that, for only a fraction of a fraction of

a second, the Doctor wondered if that would be so bad.

‘Do you think you’re special?’ the Doctor demanded.

He had seen so many people die.

‘At least some of you survived,’ the Doctor shouted,

angry at them now. ‘You weren’t the last.’

The ghosts were all glaring, now, eyes fixed on him.

Like that pack of kids when they’d first attacked him.

They weren’t as angry as him. How could they be? Even

all of them added together, how could they be?

‘I’m the last one,’ the Doctor said. ‘I’m it. My people

died. All of them. And Time Lords don’t die just the once,

you know. You have to kill us a lot more than once to

make it stick.’

Still the ghosts pressed at him, some holding out their

hands like beggars after a scrap of food, some shouldering

towards him like they were after a fight, some apparently

just wanting him to see them cry. They kept coming, like

waves to a beach.

‘Do you know what? In the end their sacrifice made no

difference. Because they survived. Thousands of them,

millions. Just one. It doesn’t matter. It’s the same thing.

And… do you know what?… life is always better than

death. Always. Yet I want all of them dead. Every single

last one of them. When did I become someone who

wanted to exterminate? When was that? When did they

win?’

The ghosts weren’t listening.

The Doctor lunged at the next one with the sonic

screwdriver, brandishing it like a dagger.

‘Just leave me alone!’ he shouted.

And they did.

‘You need to take control of your physical responses,’ the

Eyeless advised Alsa.

She was sobbing.

‘You are more than a child, now,’ the Eyeless assured

her.

The five Eyeless had taken up their positions, facing

the first metal gantry, standing two by two, with Alsa in

the middle row. They had been sifting through her

memories, acquiring her acrobatic skills, earned over

years of making her way around the collapsed city. They

already had similar abilities, learned from creatures called

‘monkeys’ they’d encountered on another planet, and they

gave Alsa those to augment her own talents.

She could see the weapon chamber. One of the

automatic gun turrets was there, not quite facing them.

‘If we went really slowly…’ she started to say. That

had worked the first evening with the Doctor. The guns

were, what had he called it?

‘Motion sensitive,’ came the voice in her head. ‘That

was before, when the Fortress was merely on standby.’

Weren’t there other Eyeless? Why did she have to do

this?

‘They are on the way, but we need to act now, before

the Doctor acquires the weapon.’

This was all the Doctor’s fault, Alsa thought. All of it.

The Eyeless at her side was the one with green eyes.

‘I’m scared,’ Alsa admittedly quietly.

‘Yes. Your fear is exhilarating. Inspiring. I believe I

actually feel it, rather than experiencing it second hand, as

is usually the case.’

The Eyeless were poised to go.

‘Assemble your last thoughts,’ the Eyeless said. ‘If you

do not survive, at least those thoughts will.’

They were waiting for the prompt. This was it… she

was going to be dead in just a few minutes.

‘No,’ Alsa said.

The Eyeless turned its head. ‘Explain.’

‘It means no.’

‘Our impression was that you wanted to be part of our

project. That you only wanted to be more like us.’

She thought about it. She wasn’t like them. Couldn’t

be.

‘We have the ability to psychograft you permanently to

a body like this one.’ It raised a hand to its glass chest.

‘No,’ Alsa said.

She turned, could literally see the Eyeless thinking

about grabbing her.

‘No,’ she repeated. ‘This isn’t right. It isn’t human.

This isn’t how things should be. I thought you aliens

would have the answers. But you don’t, do you? Not you,

not the Doctor.’

‘With only five of us, acquiring the weapon is not

assured,’ the Eyeless told her.

‘That’s your problem,’ Alsa called back, already almost

back around the corner.

The Eyeless watched her go. The others were babbling

at it, demanding to know whether they were going to abort

the mission. The Eyeless felt another surge of anger, this

time coming entirely from within itself.

‘Charge,’ it told them.

Defending against the alien assault on the weapon

chamber was complicated by the loss of a number of

perimeter turrets. Although there were only five aliens,

their attack was cleverly choreographed, involving a

sequence of precisely timed leaps down walkway levels.

The Fortress alighted on the same sums the Eyeless had,

and realised that as things stood there was a good chance

one of this group was going to survive.

The surviving gun covering that section was already

powered up. Now it fired, picking off an attacker. It was a

test shot. The strategy computer had been concerned the

refractive material the Eyeless were made of could be

resistant to attack from energy weapons. It wasn’t, and the

Eyeless burst into fragments when the bolt hit it. One

subsystem counted and tracked all the pieces, just in case,

but they were inert, apart from a little psychic residue.

A subroutine warned the Fortress to pay attention to the

Doctor. He was a long way from the action, but had made

it to the base of the central pillar and destroyed two

missiles. The column was a sheer surface, with no

handholds. The Doctor was many minutes away from the

weapon chamber.

The gun guarding the weapon chamber fired again,

another alien fell. That situation was under control.

There was still a strong possibility at least one of the

Eyeless would survive.

The Fortress was programmed to anticipate any

possibility.

A subsystem warned the strategy computer that it had

lost track of the Doctor.

This wasn’t possible.

It ruled out the Doctor’s disintegration. It scanned all

the places the Doctor could be, given the topography of

the Fortress and that he was a humanoid pedestrian. It

ruled out every teleportation and stealth technique in its

databanks, even the hypothetical ones.

When all that failed to explain where the Doctor was,

the strategy computer allocated more computing power to

the problem, performed a more thorough crosscheck of its

records, opened every database.

A couple of subsystems warned the strategy computer

that the Doctor was falling towards the weapon chamber.

The Doctor had been on the ground level, the weapon

chamber was in the mathematical centre of the chamber,

many hundred of storeys above that. Things fell down, not

up, so the strategy computer ignored them. When the

subsystems insisted, it shut them down for repair.

There was a finite number of places the Doctor could

be, given the laws of physics.

He wasn’t in any of them.

The strategy computer kept looking.

The Eyeless with green eyes stood on the walkway.

Shards and splinters of clear glass littered the ground. The

air sizzled where the energy bolts had just sliced through

it.

This Eyeless was the only survivor. It looked down.

There was a narrow crack on one side where its collarbone

would have been if it had had one. It didn’t hurt. There

was no sign of the Doctor. There was nothing between it

and the open door leading to the weapon chamber. It was

three steps from the doorway, safe.

It could sense the weapon in there, a strange and

terrible taste.

A brown, flapping shape swept up from under the

walkway at great speed, grabbed the Eyeless, lifted it

three metres into the air. It was the Doctor, falling

upwards, using the weight of the Eyeless to slow his

ascent. But he had too much momentum, and now both of

them were dropping up.

The Doctor was fiddling with something he was

holding, and they both drifted back down to the walkway.

The Eyeless landed on its feet, the Doctor on his side,

rolling a little way towards the door before coming to a

halt.

The Eyeless was between the Doctor and the door, but

it didn’t want to turn its back on him.

The Doctor was on his knees, pulling himself to his

feet. Once he was standing, the Doctor held out his hand.

A small metal cube was hovering in his palm.

‘Antigravity generator,’ he explained. The Eyeless

could not read his mind or feelings, but the Doctor’s body

language and manner of speech indicated tiredness.

Unlike an Eyeless, humanoid bodies grew weary. ‘Used it

to fall all the way from the ground. Was part of a missile

that I—’

The Eyeless shoved into him, tried to push him off the

walkway.

‘Hey,’ the Doctor said, twisting around, trying to

maintain a foothold.

The Eyeless slammed into him again, but this time the

Doctor was ready, and sidestepped. The Eyeless was able

to right itself before its momentum could carry it over the

edge or into the field of fire of any of the turrets.

Without any hesitation, the Eyeless swung for the

Doctor again. The Doctor made only a half-hearted

attempt to block the arm, but managed to deflect the blow.

The Eyeless adjusted its fighting style to a more

informal one, elbowed the Doctor in the face, gave him a

kick in the stomach and quick left-right punches to the

head. A head butt after that, and the Doctor sank to his

knees.

‘Turns out I’m the one with a glass jaw,’ the Doctor

coughed.

The Eyeless moved in for the kill.

‘Wait,’ the Doctor said, holding a splayed hand up,

almost losing his balance. ‘Hang on. Don’t.’

The Doctor pulled himself upright, using the Eyeless

for balance.

The Eyeless recognised the expression on the Doctor’s

face as it drew level with its own. Alsa wore that

expression. Defiance. Eyes wide with a sense of victory.

This was incompatible with the Eyeless’ understanding

of the situation. The Doctor had clearly made a move.

As the Doctor stepped away, the Eyeless became aware

that there was a new object embedded in it. The Doctor

had pushed the cube he’d been carrying into the flaw in

the Eyeless’ collar.

The Eyeless looked at his opponent, and saw the

Doctor had his sonic screwdriver in his hand.

There was a flare of blue light, an ultrasonic squeal,

and the antigravity cube activated. The Doctor, the

walkway and the weapon chamber fell away from the

Eyeless’ feet. As it plunged skywards, it could just make

out the Doctor stepping through the door into the weapon

chamber.

All around the Eyeless, turrets and gun barrels twitched

and took aim as it plummeted up to the apex of the inner

vault, far above.

The Doctor stepped into a room that was a tiny hollow

pyramid, its interior virtually featureless. There was barely

room for him, let alone anyone else. Not enough room to

swing an Eyeless.

He was worn out, but he had work to do and he’d

already got his glasses on. He knelt in the centre of the

room, concentrating on the weapon. It was suspended in a

web of power lines. To human eyes, it must have looked

rather plain. It was a cylinder, about a metre long, ten

centimetres wide. It was burnished metal. No obvious

controls or trigger, no letters or numbers or symbols. More

interesting things were going on in the higher, lower and

sideways dimensions, obviously.

‘Infinite menace and a slight hum,’ said the Doctor out

loud, quoting Douglas Adams.

It was activated by touch, so he couldn’t use bare

hands. The Doctor fished around in Alsa’s bag and found a

pair of woolly gloves. He slipped one on.

He could have reached out already, plucked the weapon

from its cradle. There wasn’t anything stopping him.

There wasn’t a booby trap on the weapon – that would

risk damaging it. The Doctor’s hand was at his side.

Why hadn’t he destroyed it already?

He knew he was holding back. He wasn’t sure why. He

looked around, sheepishly.

The weapon continued to hang there.

Go on, he willed himself.

It would be so easy to imagine that his hesitation was

the result of some last line of defence, that it was the

weapon itself staying his hand with some sort of hypnotic

command. That wasn’t what was happening.

The Doctor hadn’t moved for over a minute, now.

He could feel the energy crackling inside the cylinder,

like a trapped, perpetual lightning bolt, but perfectly

black. So dark it would blind anyone who looked straight

at it.

Why hadn’t he destroyed it?

‘We’re both the last of our kind,’ he concluded, quietly.

It was complex, uniquely so, but there was no mind in

there, no consciousness, no life, nothing that could answer

back.

Destroy it. The Eyeless could be here any minute.

Destroy it.

‘If the Eyeless got hold of you, then… well, that would

be terrible. Worse.’

He wasn’t like the Eyeless. Not at all. He travelled the

universe like them, true. Flitted from planet to planet.

Revelled in new experiences. Didn’t put down roots. They

were irresponsible, though. Not that he was the most

responsible person in the universe, but his hearts were in

the right places. He didn’t kill people.

The Eyeless he’d just sent plummeting up to its doom

might have been the last one.

The memory of a reptile hand clawing at soot-stained

limestone. The Doctor’s thoughts had returned to the

battle with the dinosaur man in the clock tower of the

Houses of Parliament, the Steggosian he’d told Gar and

Alsa about. The Doctor could recall the creature’s rank,

not his name. There was no one left now who could

remind him. The Doctor had let the Steggosian Captain

fall to his death, knowing he was the last of his kind.

He remembered the last of the Racnoss, consumed in

flames. He remembered the death throes of the Pyroviles.

He remembered an army of Daleks sucked into the

howling Void. He remembered Richard Lazarus, dying in

a blitzkrieg of sound courtesy of a cathedral organ and the

sonic screwdriver.

They weren’t victims. They had been poised to kill,

springing traps they’d set themselves. The best word to

describe them was monsters, and the best thing to do with

monsters was fight them.

The people of Arcopolis, they were victims.

What if the weapon could be used for good?

The Doctor hadn’t taken his eyes off it.

‘There’s no such thing as evil science,’ he said finally.

‘Anything can be turned into a weapon. Anything. If you

worried about what wicked men might do, you’d never

invent anything. You’d never light a fire or pick up a rock.

You can kill people with medicine, drown them in a

bucket of spring water, burn them up in sunshine.’

The opposite was true, too: any sword could be beaten

into a ploughshare, every spear into a pruning hook. It was

sometimes difficult to see how. He, alone in all the

universe, had the knowledge to do it with this weapon. No

one else understood the science like he did. More than

that, he knew it was at least possible, because he’d seen

the ghosts. The weapon wasn’t meant to leave traces, but

the ghosts were traces.

There’s more to this weapon than I thought.

The Doctor tapped his teeth with his fingers, then

rapped his forehead with his knuckles. This was a change

of plan, no doubt about it. He could study the weapon,

learn a bit more about it. It might not be possible. There

was a chance, though.

If I destroyed the weapon now, I would lose that chance

for ever.

‘Good point,’ the Doctor noted.

He peered up at the weapon over the top of his glasses.

He might be able to use it to create, not destroy. Reverse

its polarity, or whatever.

Every instinct was telling him to destroy it.

He took a step back, thought for a moment. Was it

possible to use this for the good?

No one else possibly could. You might.

The Doctor decided not to destroy the weapon.

Some superstitious urge made the thought of touching

it uncomfortable, even through a glove. He slipped Alsa’s

bag off his shoulder, turned it inside out and put his hands

in, like it was a giant oven mitten, then reached into the

web of power lines and began plucking the weapon from

it. The cylinder was solid, surprisingly heavy. It was

warm, even through the artificial fibre of the bag. The

detached cables still buzzed, still had enough energy in

them to bite.

The Doctor was cradling the weapon now, needed both

hands to lift it.

One last power line to detach, then the weapon would

be free, and he would turn the bag back outside in and

hide it out of sight and out of mind. As the Doctor tugged

it loose, there was a clattering noise from outside the

chamber. He glanced through the door.

The very last thing he saw before the whole Fortress

went dark was an army of Eyeless charging down the

walkway towards him, arms raised like clubs.

There was a theory that the way to defeat an enemy

was to turn their own strength against them.

‘Well,’ the Doctor sniffed, ‘at least I have plenty to

work with.’

The Fortress strategy computer recognised that it was

about to be deactivated, knew it had no options remaining.

It drew all its strength from the weapon, and the Doctor

was well on the way to disconnecting it.

A thousand subroutines had warned it not to

underestimate the Doctor from the moment he’d been

identified, yet it had done just that.

It had just been overrun. Eighty-eight of the aliens

inside it, all exploiting the safe route to the weapon

chamber, all heading for the Doctor. The guns in that

section had all been disabled, and the power would be

shut off within moments.

The Doctor would destroy the aliens, of course. The

strategy he would adopt was straightforward. The

computer felt no regret or anger. It cycled through its

complete list of strategies one last time, not knowing

anything else to do.

And then the machine stopped.

When the lights had gone out, the Eyeless leading the

charge had been within seconds of reaching the weapon

chamber.

Now it was pitch black but, as if to compensate, the air

was saturated with sound. The noise was made up of

almost a couple of hundred heavy glass footfalls on metal,

echoing off the walls.

Instantly the command went out, and the Eyeless came

to a halt. Had a squad of human soldiers tried to do the

same, the line would have concertinaed and slipped up;

maybe a couple of people would even have been pushed

or tripped over the edge of the narrow walkway. Their

telepathy allowed the Eyeless to coordinate the move.

The immediate situation was easy enough to

comprehend, and broke like a wave over the Eyeless: the

Doctor was in the weapon chamber, dead ahead of them.

Through the one doorway leading into the chamber,

they’d seen the Doctor with the weapon in his hand. With

the power offline, that meant there were no active defence

systems.

They had to get to the weapon, and quickly.

As the echoes died down, they shared their memories

and impressions of the inside of the Fortress, swiftly

overlaying them all, self-correcting the discrepancies,

until they had built up a mental map of the structure. This

was a rare process for them, to so totally give up their

individuality. They elided their memories and perceptions,

effortlessly becoming, to all practical purposes, a single

creature, a beast with 88 heads, 176 legs, 1,056 fingers,

one mind and one objective:

Kill the Doctor.

He couldn’t disguise the sounds of his feet scuffing the

floor, his breathing, his double heartbeat. Eighty-eight of

them heard him at the doorway.

As one, they charged at him.

The foremost reached the doorway and the Doctor

wasn’t there. Three of them felt their way into the

chamber. They held their hands out, thirty-six fingers

twitching like antennae.

One of the Eyeless brushed against a power line, which

sparked and froze it rigid, forcing another one to step

aside, into the path of another power line. Another spark.

The third was trapped between them.

The three of them would recover in minutes. The

remaining eighty-five knew that the Doctor was no longer

in the weapon chamber. He couldn’t be far.

One of the Eyeless, towards the middle of the pack,

was shoved aside, toppled over the edge. Two of its

comrades managed to grab it before it was lost for ever.

The one nearest those two swiped out to grab the Doctor,

who must have been responsible for the initial shove.

Instead, it grabbed one of the rescuers, unbalanced it. All

four tipped over, off into the darkness.

Sharing this sensation, all the Eyeless reeled, moved to

brace for when they landed.

Eighty-one flares of blue light; eighty-one electronic

squeals; eighty-one Doctors, holding eighty-one sonic

screwdrivers aloft, eighty-one ultimate weapons tucked

under eighty-one arms. The Eyeless lurched in eighty-one

different directions to grab him.

The Eyeless reeled, assimilated the experience. There

was only one Doctor, but all of them had seen him then

sent the information to the others.

Simultaneously, they felt the rush of air from above.

There was a grinding crash, followed by a series of

creaks. The ranks of the Eyeless had been diminished,

bisected.

Sixteen Eyeless leapt out the way, finding either air

under their feet, or the side of a comrade, bumping them

until they were over the edge of the walkway. The Eyeless

felt the air whistling past them, felt the impacts. Most

were able to swing an arm out, connect with some cable or

other walkway.

Nineteen other Eyeless had just vanished.

The wave of realisation broke over the survivors – the

blue light hadn’t just been to disorientate them, it had

loosened a large section of pipeline that had been hanging

overhead.

That pipe was now a curved wall dividing the Eyeless

into two small groups – one of seventeen individuals and

one of twenty-nine.

There was a creak and the wall moved.

‘Ah…’ the Doctor’s voice called out, from just above

all forty-six of the Eyeless.

Another creak.

‘Look,’ the voice continued. ‘Um… you have lights in

your hands, remember? Might be an idea to use them.’

They remembered. Three of them raised their hands

and activated them. Three soft golden lanterns in the

darkness.

The Doctor was standing on top of a cross-section of

fallen pipe that had landed square in the middle of the

walkway. It was about the same height as the Eyeless.

The Doctor silently surveyed the scene, then started

running backwards on the spot, and the pipe started rolling

towards the exit.

The twenty-nine Eyeless on that side started running

ahead of it – rather that than leaping off or being crushed.

None of them had time to note the gleeful glint in the

Doctor’s eye. He had only got the pipe a little way,

though, before the Eyeless behind him worked out that

they could shove at it, trying to steer it.

All this activity meant that the lanterns went out again.

The sound of the pipe creaking and rolling along filled the

darkness.

After a few moments, there was a great clang as the

pipe crashed into the outer wall of the vault. It was

wedged in place.

The Eyeless in front of the pipe were blocked out of the

inner vault, for the moment at least. The Doctor was also

boxed in, though.

The Eyeless prepared to go in for the kill, three

climbing up onto the top of the pipe with the help of the

others.

The Doctor wasn’t there.

Moments after the lanterns had gone out, the Doctor had

grabbed a dangling piece of cable and clambered up it.

The Eyeless had been too busy pushing the pipe to notice,

and the racket that it had made covered his tracks.

He’d climbed up a couple of levels and found a narrow

gantry, all of this in the dark, every handhold and escape

route found by blindly flailing an arm.

He was three or four levels higher, now. He flopped

down on the solid platform, needing to get his breath

back. He tried not to make any noise.

The weapon was still in the bag, weighing on his mind.

He felt exhilarated, full of possibilities. He could hear the

Eyeless clattering around below him, caught glimpses of

them moving, arms aloft and glowing, hurrying along the

tops of gantries and the thickest pipelines like palace

guards. They were all many levels below him. The search

pattern wasn’t as systematic and ordered as he’d expected

from them. He had them rattled.

The Eyeless were still angry and agitated, like they had

been infected. They’d been changed by their experiences

here. Ideas, attitudes, beliefs, emotions… they could

rapidly spread through any society. Jokes or pop tunes or

new slang or catchphrases could appear one day and

everyone in a country would know them within a week or

two. The Doctor had met hiveminded races before. They

all had a slightly different mechanism for spreading the

word, but their great strength was that they could share

information instantly and totally efficiently.

These Eyeless were addicted to anger now, took

pleasure from it. If they got into contact with the rest of

their kind, the anger would spread, across the galaxy. An

advanced race with a massive space navy, an urge to steal,

fuelled by anger. They’d swarm across the cosmos.

It wasn’t as though the universe was short of monsters

already. He’d have to nip them in the bud.

The Doctor glanced down at Alsa’s bag.

There was an easy way to do this. A surgical strike. Use

the weapon. Just once.

Exterminate.

The Doctor shivered, physically pulled himself back

from the bag.

Destroying the Eyeless because of what they might

become? All so easy, using the weapon.

The simplest thing was just to destroy it. Here and now.

He stood, stiffly, but also a little wobbly on his feet.

Not a brilliant combination when the way around here was

across narrow gantries and on top of pipelines.

The Doctor could have used Alsa’s torch, but the

Eyeless would be on him like… he was going to say like

moths to a flame, but moths tended to lose that battle.

He’d be safe in the dark for a little while.

There was a light forming in front of him.

This was really bad timing, he thought, tucking himself

out of sight.

The ghost of a very, very old woman, looking around,

perplexed. She didn’t see the Doctor. Lit from within, the

lines and wrinkles of her face were stark, spidery.

The Doctor looked down. He could see Eyeless looking

up, calculating a route to the ghost. Then, like a dying

ember, the ghost just faded away.

The Fortress was without power, now. The ghosts

weren’t a defence system, after all. That nagged at the

Doctor. So what were they?

They weren’t a coincidence.

It would be almost comforting to think that they were

the restless souls of the 200 million killed here in

Arcopolis, that the injustice of their deaths had scarred the

very atoms and molecules. Nature had laws, but no

justice. If there was a ghost for every untimely death,

there would be few places in the universe that weren’t

haunted.

The weapon had done this. It was a logic puzzle, but

the answer wasn’t in the programming of the Fortress, it

was somewhere in the laws of physics. When a ghost

touched someone, they both vanished – that was part of

the puzzle, too.

He had to get out of the Fortress to somewhere safer,

somewhere away from the glass men and the ghosts

themselves.

The Doctor lowered himself down a level, scurried on

his hands and knees through a narrow crawlspace. Fifty

metres of that, and he found an access hatch that he slid

open. He climbed out onto what the acoustics told him

was a wide platform, dusted himself off, slung the bag

over his shoulder, turned and almost walked straight into a

ghost.

This was a ghost he’d already met. Behind it, other

ghosts, dozens of them and more all the time. They cast

light and shadows over the platform.

Last time, they’d communicated via Alsa’s comm,

which was gone now. The Doctor remembered the idea

he’d had for talking to the Eyeless. He slipped a slim

leather wallet from his pocket, and opened up the psychic

paper.

‘You can hear me,’ he whispered. ‘I can’t hear you.

Here, let’s try this.’

The ghost nodded, relieved, and tiny, neat copperplate

handwriting appeared on the paper.

I am Gyll.

‘Yes, I… recognise you. Don’t you recognise me?’ The

Doctor found himself wondering if this was how Gyll’s

handwriting had always looked. With all their computers

and robots, would the people of Arcopolis have even

bothered learning to use pens?

I’m not sure. Something is different.

‘Yes.’

The Doctor opened the bag, let the ghost see inside it.

‘This is the weapon that killed you,’ the Doctor said.

‘This is what murdered you all. Don’t touch it.’

The ghost drifted towards it, head turning to get a

better look. And, as it looked down, and he saw it

alongside the weapon for the first time, it came to the

Doctor what the ghosts were.

So small a thing.

‘Yes,’ he said quietly.

Now you have it.

‘I’ve promised to destroy it, the very first moment I

can.’

Yes, I know you mean to do that.

‘I have to break another promise. I can’t save you.’

The ghost stared at him, blankly.

‘I can’t save you, because I know what you are, now,’

the Doctor said. ‘You’re not Gyll, not really.’

I am Gyll.

‘No. The weapon killed Gyll. Killed everyone. But you

can’t destroy matter and energy so utterly. It’s impossible.

There’s always something left behind. Even if you drop a

nuclear bomb, you burn shadows into the concrete and

tarmac. Blast shadows, they’re called.’

The Doctor paused, took the time to breathe in.

‘Gyll was ripped from the universe, but the imprint

remained. You’re a blast shadow. A complicated one,

because Gyll was killed by this very, very complicated

weapon. But you’re only the echo of the ghost of

consciousness. Here.’

He let the equations flow from his mind and across the

psychic paper, a model of eleven-dimensional time and

space. Beautiful, beautiful mathematics.

I don’t understand that.

‘You don’t have to. All that you need to know is that I

do understand it. You’re a shadow, and the person that cast

it is long gone.’

I am Gyll.

‘No,’ the Doctor said simply.

I know I am.

‘No. You ghosts aren’t real, you’re holes in reality.

Anyone you touch falls right out of the universe.’

Something was agitating the ghosts behind the Doctor,

making them flit over and around him. They couldn’t have

overheard what he’d said. Were they moving to block his

escape?

They weren’t… They were looking at something ahead

of him. The sea of ghosts parted just long enough for the

Doctor to see a small army of glass men walking slowly

towards him.

At their head was the one with Jall’s eyes. It had a

charred pit the size of a fist in its chest. A dozen paces

from the Doctor, though, it came to a halt, as did all the

Eyeless behind it.

What is happening?

‘You’re holding them in place,’ the Doctor reasoned.

‘They are powerful psychics. So many ghosts, all those

memories, all that pain and anguish. It’s paralysing them.

Like a deafening sound would stop a person in their

tracks.’

The one in front tries to communicate. It is so angry.

‘What is it saying?’

That you want the weapon for yourself, that they are

the Eyeless & want only to study it. That they had nothing

to do with the death of Arcopolis.

‘It calls itself an Eyeless, but it has eyes,’ the Doctor

noted.

The ghost moved forward, as did a number of the

others. They all peered into the glass head, saw the two

eyeballs mounted there. The Eyeless squirmed under the

scrutiny, but couldn’t retreat. It was like its feet had been

glued to the metal floor. The ghosts looked around at each

other, puzzled, then all but one of them fell back.

‘Human eyes,’ the Doctor confirmed. ‘Ask it to

explain.’

The ghost just swept over to the Eyeless, who writhed,

tried to escape, but couldn’t. The ghost calmly took its

memories. The ghost floated in front of the Eyeless for a

few seconds, like an attentive listener.

‘Those are Jall’s eyes it’s wearing,’ the Doctor said

quietly. ‘Ask it who Jall is.’

The ghost turned back, stared into the bright green

eyeballs, looked back at the Doctor, shocked. It was

remembering it all, taking the thoughts and memories

from the Eyeless. Seeing what the Doctor couldn’t – the

moment of Jall’s death, the drinking in of her last, terrified

thoughts, the taking of the eyes.

Finally, words appeared on the psychic paper.

Dela had a daughter?

‘Yes.’

We only talked about children.

The ghost didn’t seem to know if it had heard good

news or not. It had no memories of the last fifteen years,

just a snapshot of Gyll’s mind at the moment of death.

‘Things are different now. Everything has changed.

Dela has many children. The only way for the people of

Arcopolis to survive. Jall was the eldest.’

& now Dela’s firstborn is dead.

‘Dela is alive,’ the Doctor told the ghost. ‘She should

be safe, but thanks to this creature I can’t be sure of that. I

made a promise to Dela. You can help me keep it. But…

there’s a cost.’

The ghost held out a finger, almost touched the

Doctor’s lips. There was no need to say more.

Then it fell onto the Eyeless, hands thrust out like

talons, thrusting its elbows deep into the glass chest. The

ghost was silently screaming, swirling through the body

and mind of the Eyeless. The other glass men were

powerless to move, let alone defend their colleague. The

one with Jall’s eyes managed to lift one foot, at last, but it

lost its balance, had to send its hand to the edge of the

platform to keep itself from falling over the edge.

Its glass was losing its brilliance and looked almost

charred. The Eyeless raised its right hand, trying to use the

weapon embedded there, but couldn’t summon any light.

A second ghost hurtled past the Doctor and through

another of the Eyeless. Then another, then another, then

another. All of them, throwing themselves into the Eyeless

ranks, tearing the strength of the glass men out with their

bare hands.

The Eyeless swatted at them, not connecting with

anything. The ghosts were dashed to pieces as they hit the

Eyeless, vanishing when they touched anyone, as they had

before, but they eroded their opponents in turn. This was

an entirely silent process and as each ghost dissipated,

their light faded, and the interior of the Fortress grew a

little darker.

‘An eye for an eye,’ the Doctor said, so softly the

words were almost drowned out by the sound of shattering

glass.

He had seen enough death, and gained no satisfaction

from the thought of more. Wearily, he watched, waited

until the inevitable moment when the last light faded.

Kill you.

The words crashed through the Doctor’s mental

defences.

The ghosts had gone, but one Eyeless was still there,

the sheen of its skin faded, pitted. Damaged by contact

with the ghosts, but surviving through sheer force of will.

The glass man rose to its knees, watery, broken light

seeping from its damaged right hand. Of course it was the

one with Jall’s eyes. The last of the Eyeless.

Its face was level with the Doctor’s. They were inches

apart, at most.

Kill you.

It was the Doctor’s own voice. He was the bringer of

darkness, the oncoming storm, the murderer of whole

worlds.

The Doctor couldn’t tell if he was thinking that or the

Eyeless was thinking it for him. He found he wasn’t

resisting as the Eyeless’ hands closed around his neck, as

he began sinking to his knees. The fight had gone from

him. This was his death, and there was no one in this

universe who would mourn him, and the Eyeless would

take the weapon.

Unless.

‘I have something for you,’ he managed to croak out.

The Eyeless stood motionless.

‘You can’t have the weapon,’ the Doctor said, getting to

his feet. He held out a small metal shape on a loop of

chain. ‘You like trading? You always want something

new? How about this key?’

The Eyeless looked warily at it.

‘The key to my TARDIS,’ the Doctor said. ‘You were

right. That blue box is a time machine. But you’ve not

been able to get inside, have you? I… will do you a deal.’

The Doctor looked down at the pieces of glass scattered

on the gantry.

‘You ran the numbers,’ he said quietly. ‘Well… run

these numbers: if you let me live and let me destroy the

weapon, you can have my TARDIS.’

The Eyeless took a step forward, reached out, but the

Doctor snatched the key away.

‘The most important thing is destroying the weapon,’

the Doctor said quietly, almost to himself. ‘No one should

have it. Not me, not you, no one. I will pay any price to

see that weapon broken in half.’

The key dangled tantalisingly out of the reach of the

Eyeless.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ the Doctor said. ‘You

could kill me, take the key, take the weapon.’

The Eyeless was careful not to betray its reaction.

‘The TARDIS won’t let you in unless I tell it to. After

that, it’s simple enough. The flight computer is, well, let’s

just say it’s fairly intuitive. This isn’t a trick… well, I

would say that. Honest, it’s not a trick. Trust me, I’m a

doctor. But this is the deal: you watch me destroy the

weapon, I give you the key. I’ll just stay here, with the

villagers. Live out my life. Look after them, if they’ll have

me.’

The Doctor paused, sagged a little.

‘I can do good here. You get a time machine and you

can fly off in it. Hand on hearts, right now I can’t imagine

you’d do any more harm than I’ve already done.’

He looked straight at the Eyeless, a glint in his eye.

‘You’re a strategist, you’re a rational being. It’s a good

deal. Particularly for you… individually.’

The Eyeless turned its head slightly.

‘Nothing wrong with a bit of ambition,’ the Doctor

assured it, raising an eyebrow. ‘Eh? Know what I mean?’

The Eyeless held out its hand.

‘Say no more,’ the Doctor said.

The Eyeless blocked his way. It held out its left hand,

palm up.

‘You can’t have it yet. Let’s go outside, then I’ll

destroy the weapon.’

It stayed where it was, twitched its fingers.

The Doctor strained to look around it, both sides.

‘Oh… all right.’

Its glass wrist had begun to ripple, eager for the trophy.

‘Handy,’ said the Doctor, his mouth managing to flicker

at the pun. ‘You’ll never lose the key this way. And, of

course, if you’re… stuck with the key, you, uniquely

among all the Eyeless, get to be the TARDIS captain.

Primus inter pares, eh? If you’ll pardon my Welsh.’

The Eyeless looked down at the TARDIS key. The

possibilities started to surge through its mind. It leapt for

the Doctor, greedily gripping the lapels of the Doctor’s

coat with a six-fingered hand, the Eyeless’ mind grabbing

for the Doctor’s mind.

There was something he wasn’t saying, wasn’t there?

His secret. That it was the Doctor who—

‘Oh, shut it,’ the Doctor snapped, shrugging off the grip

of the glass hands. The psychic onslaught continued and

for a moment, they were eye to eye. The bright green,

unblinking, stolen eyes. The Doctor and the Eyeless both

understood what had to happen next, and that it would

soon all be over.

‘You’re a thief,’ the Doctor said softly, his mouth close

to the side of the Eyeless’ head. ‘A murderer. And I meant

everything I said, and you had your chance and you blew

it.’

The Eyeless thrust its hand into the bag to grab the

weapon. The Doctor threw his hand out to stop him.

A hand brushed against the weapon, grabbed it.

The weapon fired.

A moment later, the Doctor was alone in the darkness.

He strode from the wreckage. He emerged from the

great gash in the side of the dead Fortress, into the sunlit

Car Factory. The weapon was still in the bag slung over

his shoulder. Rubble and smashed glass and bits of rag

were strewn over the factory floor. Great chunks and

beams of the concrete ceiling had come down.

The silence pressed against his eardrums.

He’d survived. At least he assumed he had. Perhaps,

like Gyll, he only thought he’d survived. He didn’t know

exactly what the weapon had done. Why it had spared

him. He didn’t know if it had spared anyone else.

He might truly be alone, now.

He needed to get back to the TARDIS. He turned, wanting

companionship, more than anything, but there was no one

beside him.

It was a warm afternoon, so he took off his coat and

folded it over his arm and Alsa’s bag and what was inside

the bag. He could feel the sun against his face, at least.

He must be alive.

He had scoured the darkness. The instant the weapon had

been activated, the Eyeless had gone. He had been the

only thing left in there, the only trace of life.

There had been no light, no sound, the air had been

perfectly still. All there had been was the metallic smell,

faintly like dried blood, and the press of his feet through

the soles of his trainers down onto the platform, and the

throb of the bruise on his temple. Without those, it would

have been oblivion, nothing. He had felt numb,

dissociated. It had crossed his mind that he was imagining

everything, merely remembering. Then he had

understood: if he could have those thoughts, he still

existed.

He thought, therefore he was.

Now, outside, sunlight and silence streaming over him, he

sat on a metal block. He ached all over. Behind him, the

Fortress was creaking, cracking.

He thought of the weapon destroying all life. Not just

the Eyeless, but all the humans here, all the trees and other

plants and bacteria, then out into the universe, its fingers

poking into the gaps between space and time and rooting

out every life form on every world and between all the

worlds, striking so swiftly no one could even see it as it

went about its work.

Everyone dead. Everyone dead but him.

Had that happened? How long would he be left

travelling on his own? How long would he need to accept

there was no one else? How many dead planets would he

have to visit?

The rubble that had tumbled down had blocked every

way out but one. One of the vast machines – the sonic

screwdriver the size of a car wash – hadn’t buckled. Its

arch now formed a short tunnel, the one way out of here.

It also gave him something to do. He found the control

panel for the machine, which was on the side facing the

Fortress. He brushed off the dust and fragments from it.

The device was fully charged. It absorbed sound, and

there would have been plenty when the floors above it

collapsed.

He whispered things to the machine, told it some of his

fears and secrets.

‘Doctor!’ a voice called.

It was Dela. She ran over to him, through the arch and

to the other side, and was rather surprised when he

grabbed her, pulled her off her feet and gave her such a

hug she almost snapped in two.

‘Bad day?’ she asked, when he finally let go.

‘Oh, you know… I stole an infinitely powerful super

weapon, exchanged text messages with the dead, had an

ethics debate with a psychotic teenage girl and a fight in

pitch blackness with an army of glass men. An average

sort of Saturday, really. It’s still Saturday, isn’t it?’

‘I think it’s still Saturday morning. Are… are you all

right?’

‘The Eyeless that killed Jall is dead.’

‘The one with her eyes?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Thank you.’

He nodded. ‘They’re all dead.’

And eventually Dela said it was probably for the best.

‘And the weapon?’ she asked.

Hesitation.

‘Doctor?’

‘The Eyeless didn’t get their hands on it,’ he told her.

‘It’s in the bag.’

The bag was draped over his shoulder.

‘The joke is… the joke is that it didn’t work. Twice,

now, the weapon has failed to do what it was designed to

do.’

‘This is what it does when it fires a dud?’

‘Yes.’

They sat in silence for a little longer.

‘I miss—’ Dela said.

‘I thought—’ he said at the same time, then, ‘Go on.’

‘No, you first.’

‘I thought it might have destroyed everything.’

‘Everyone but you.’

‘Everyone but me.’

‘The weapon could really do that?’

‘Yes.’

‘We still might be the last two people.’

‘Yes. What were you going to say just now?’

‘What? Oh… I miss the birdsong,’ she said. ‘Sorry, I

don’t have the grand thoughts you have.’

The Doctor broke into his first grin since emerging

from the Fortress.

‘Why haven’t you destroyed the weapon?’ she asked.

‘I will… I will now,’ the Doctor agreed. ‘Right now.’

The pair of them stood, helping each other up.

‘Well,’ said the Doctor, then seeing Dela’s expression,

‘Um, why are you looking at me like—?’

A waft of perfume and the bag was tugged hard off his

shoulder.

The Doctor turned to see Alsa, a wild sneer on her face,

her nose caked in dried blood. He ducked out of the way

as she swung the bag at him. No, not at him – at Dela. The

metal cylinder inside the bag connected with the side of

Dela’s head, and she slumped.

‘It’s quite effective at close range, yeah?’ Alsa noted.

Alsa had felt the Eyeless die through their own senses.

Those that had been gunned down, those in the ships,

they’d just faded away. They had never meant anything to

her… but when the one with green eyes went, there was a

moment when Alsa thought she’d also become nothing.

As soon as she’d seen the archway, she knew the

Doctor would have to come out this way. She’d waited,

kept out of sight as Dela had gone past. As soon as she

saw the Doctor leave the Fortress, she’d just known the

weapon was in the bag. Her bag. She had no idea how – it

wasn’t just because there weren’t many other places it

could be, she really could sense it.

This had been her plan right from the first moment

she’d heard about the weapon, realised what it could do:

let the Doctor get it, force him to give it to her. Alsa

stepped back into the arch, blocked the only way out. The

thing in the bag was twice as heavy as she’d been

expecting. She couldn’t look at it yet, couldn’t take her

eyes off the Doctor, needed to keep both her hands free.

‘You killed the Eyeless.’

‘Yes.’

‘All of them?’

‘Here, yes. Beyond that, I don’t know.’

She had fleeting images of other worlds, pulses of

intense emotion, flakes of esoteric science and history,

remembered what it had been like to briefly be an Eyeless.

Was that memory all that was left of them?

‘Alsa, that Eyeless had started to infect the others. It

couldn’t see any further than itself. It thought its problems

were the universe’s. And you think the same, don’t you?’

‘But it’s OK, because I’m just a kid? Go on then – push

off. Leave me to it. You’re not going to solve anything.’

‘Your civilisation will survive. It will take time, many

generations, before it thrives. But it will survive.’

‘I saw a way out of this.’

Alsa hefted the bag, and she saw the Doctor flinch.

‘It would mean even more death. Everything touched

by that weapon becomes corrupted.’

‘I thought that you were our saviour. I thought you

could change things. I thought the Eyeless would.’

‘I know,’ the Doctor said, not taking his eyes off her.

‘And I’m sorry you thought that.’

‘All I wanted was to be treated the same as an adult.’

‘Oh… you really don’t want me to do that,’ he told her

darkly.

‘I’ve never wanted anything else from anyone!’ Alsa

shouted, holding up the bag. ‘I just want someone to take

me seriously! If I’ve got to use this weapon to do that—’

‘“Seriously”?’ the Doctor said. ‘Oh, I can do seriously.’

The Doctor held his arm out, pointed the sonic

screwdriver up above her head. Alsa looked up. For the

first time, she registered that this archway was part of a

machine. A metal bolt above her head slid shakily back

and locked into a new configuration.

The machine was humming. Blue lights started

flickering all around her on the sides of the archway, in

weird patterns. There were three other bolts – one on

either side, one between her feet.

Alsa steadied herself, stared right at him, mouth open,

eyes narrow.

‘That machine is like my sonic screwdriver,’ the Doctor

said. ‘You’re standing in the resonator cage.’

Alsa shrugged, partly to look brave, partly because she

didn’t understand what the Doctor meant.

The Doctor pivoted his arm around, pointed it at a pile

of engines. The tip of his sonic screwdriver flared and the

engines just fell apart, the tiny components cascading

down.

The Doctor turned to aim the sonic screwdriver back at

Alsa. She didn’t look up the next time he activated it. The

bolt to her left slid back and locked into place, just like the

first. The Doctor blinked, lowered the sonic screwdriver.

‘Two more bolts to go,’ she told him, feeling brave,

proud of herself. She had the strength for this, she knew

that.

‘I think the Eyeless altered your mind,’ the Doctor said.

‘That would be so much easier, wouldn’t it? You could

kill me in good conscience, then.’

The Doctor lowered his sonic screwdriver.

‘Oh I could never kill you, Alsa,’ he said. His voice

was tinged with sadness. ‘But what about you? Could you

kill? Really?’

Alsa already had one hand tugging on the bag’s flap,

and now she saw the weapon for the first time. It was a

metal tube, that was all. It was humming to itself.

‘This is it?’ she asked.

It surprised Alsa how calm the Doctor looked.

‘Touch it, it will activate,’ he said. ‘It’ll kill everyone

you want it to.’

She’d won. Alsa knew she’d beaten the Doctor. That’s

why he was so calm – he knew there was nothing else he

could do. He couldn’t even kill her.

Why was she hesitating? Dela was slowly coming

round, shaking her head and getting unsteadily to her feet,

watching Alsa warily. Was it because of Dela that she was

hesitating?

The Doctor was looking right at her. ‘There are no

rules here, now,’ he said. ‘No Jennver. No monsters

forcing you to do anything. No authority. No laws. No

witnesses. You can do whatever you want to me. Anything

you want to Dela. No one can stop you, no one can punish

you afterwards.’

Alsa thought about it. It sounded like the ultimate

freedom.

‘Do it and no one will tell you off, or hold you to

account.’

Alsa looked down at the weapon again. It would be so

easy to shut the Doctor up. Very easy.

‘You’re on your own. No one but yourself to blame.’

He let that sink in.

‘It’s up to you. Your choice. I made my own choice just

now. Will yours be any different? Do what you want.’

Alsa could feel something beneath the metal surface of

the weapon, something inside it, around it, working into

her like roots and damp into an old wall. She could almost

feel it starting to eat away at her.

‘All it does is destroy?’ she asked.

‘Yes.’

‘This isn’t a trick?’

‘You know it isn’t.’

‘Yeah… I know.’

Alsa couldn’t make herself move. Couldn’t decide. She

could destroy anything. Everything.

‘It’s not easy, is it?’ the Doctor said.

‘No.’

‘The fate of all life in the universe is in your hands,

Alsa. Literally in your hands.’

‘This is what it’s like for you all the time?’

‘Oh yes,’ the Doctor said quietly. ‘And doesn’t it just

drive you mad?’

Alsa stepped off out of the arch, wrapped the bag

closed and handed it to the Doctor.

‘Help me,’ she said.

The Doctor took the bag, weighed it in his hand. There

was no relief in his eyes. Why would there be, now he had

the weapon weighing him down again?

‘I don’t know what to do,’ Alsa told him. ‘I live here. I

don’t know anywhere but here. You could take me back.’

‘Back?’ Dela asked.

‘His TARDIS is a time machine. He could take me

back to before. He could take us all back.’

The Doctor was shaking his head. ‘It doesn’t work like

that. That isn’t what happened.’

He’d wrapped the bag around itself, cocooned the

weapon.

‘Destroy the weapon,’ Dela insisted. ‘You can at least

do that. Do it now.’

‘Yes.’ The Doctor paused, looked down like that

genuinely hadn’t even occurred to him. ‘I need to get it

away from here. I have to get back to the TARDIS.’

‘The Eyeless said they had taken possession of it.’

‘We don’t need to worry about the Eyeless any more,’

the Doctor said quietly.

‘Take me with you,’ Alsa said.

‘All right,’ said the Doctor, distracted. Then he looked

up sharply, realised what he’d said. Dela was staring at

him, empty-eyed.

‘I’ll come back,’ the Doctor told Dela. ‘I’ll…’

He paused. Looked at Alsa, then Dela, then up at what

was left of the ceiling.

‘Actually, yes. Come on, Alsa. I know how we do this.’

‘You can help me?’

‘Squaring circles. What I do best,’ he declared happily.

He indicated the arch to Alsa. ‘Lead on, McDuck.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘No, you don’t. Lost in translation. But you will

understand. That’s the point.’

‘I’d better.’

‘I wouldn’t mind an explanation, too,’ Dela said.

‘All in good time,’ the Doctor chuckled.

The three of them stepped through the arch. Alsa was

holding Dela’s hand.

After walking another twenty metres or so, the Doctor

turned back. ‘Hang on, I almost forgot.’

He pointed the sonic screwdriver at the archway, and

the final bolts fell into place. The air filled with sound

which then spiralled into the archway, building and

building and compressing. Finally, the energy released in

a single burst, which shot out away from them, hit the

Fortress, took it to pieces.

The black metal walls slipped apart, avalanched,

sploshed down into the lake far below. Each layer fell

away in turn, faster and faster as the supporting structure

was weakened, pieces of pipe and gantry and platform and

gun turret and doors and light fittings, until the whole

Fortress had gone, and there was nothing but sunlight and

fresh air and the sound of tons of metal crashing into the

water in its place.

Dela, Alsa and the Doctor were laughing, but couldn’t

hear each other. They had to clamp their hands over their

ears.

The Doctor kept his promises to both Alsa and Dela.

Now, a large blue wooden crate, decorated with rows of

square panels and a flashing light on top, arrived in the

centre of the settlement.

A messenger boy had run to Dela even before the

strange noise it made had fully died down.

The Doctor stepped out of the TARDIS, looked up at

the huge metal sculpture that now dominated the central

square.

‘That’s new,’ he noted.

‘It’s old,’ Alsa told him, puzzled, stepping out after

him.

‘It’s called Dance of Days. They must have moved it

from the city this morning. Is this what you were going to

show me?’

‘No. Look around.’

There were people everywhere. All ages, plenty of kids.

The distant buildings of Arcopolis were covered in ivy,

most of them. Others had tarnished, become brick red.

There was a gap in the skyline where the Fortress had

been, like the city was missing a tooth.

A crowd was gathering around the TARDIS.

‘It took us weeks to get it here,’ a man said.

Alsa wouldn’t have recognised him if he hadn’t had his

hands in his pockets. He wore a tool belt, and his hair was

starting to thin a little.

‘Gar?’

He nodded.

Alsa turned, drank it all in. ‘This is the future.’

‘Yup,’ the Doctor said. He was also looking around.

Everyone clearly knew who he was. Many of them had

been there twenty years before. The others must have

heard stories about him. An older woman stepped out

from the group.

‘This is your time machine?’ Dela asked. Her hair was

extraordinarily, vividly white, now. She looked radiant.

‘Yes.’

‘It doesn’t look like a time machine, it looks like…’

She wasn’t sure what it looked like.

‘There’s a reason,’ the Doctor assured her. ‘A really

good one.’

‘You don’t look a day older.’

‘I’m not. Not quite.’

She ran a hand along his temple. ‘You still have the

bruise.’

‘You must have scores more children by now,’ the

Doctor said lightly.

‘Only one more. Lios. A boy. Well, a man now. It’s all

grandchildren these days.’

The Doctor beamed. ‘Hang on. Almost forgot. Brought

you a present.’

He nipped back into the TARDIS.

‘And the weapon?’ Dela asked.

Alsa held out a small, charred piece of metal for Dela

and Gar to inspect. ‘We went to an asteroid – like a little

planet. It didn’t have any air, so we had to wear

spacesuits. There was a plasma vent, like a pit of energy.

We dropped it in there and the weapon just opened up. We

couldn’t look at what was inside, but once it was out, it

couldn’t survive in our universe. Then we went to another

planet and ate weird stuff called “burgers”.’

The Doctor emerged from the TARDIS holding a

birdcage. Inside were two birds that would have fitted in

the palm of his hand. Their feathers were a rainbow, from

their red caps to their violet wingtips.

‘Kegronian Halcyons,’ the Doctor said. ‘A breeding

pair. Widely regarded as having the most beautiful

plumage and song of any bird in the universe. Very

adaptable. Not much meat on them, but… well, that’s

good news for the Kegronian Halcyon, isn’t it, all things

considered?’

The Doctor opened a small door on the side of the

cage, and the two birds pushed their way out, then spread

their colourful wings and they were off, swooping around

each other, darting towards the city and so many potential

roosts.

The others watched the birds, but the Doctor was

staring at the necklace Dela wore – a glass pendant.

She glanced over at him. ‘They’re all over the city, get

washed up in the streams. The water wears them smooth.’

Gar was handing the Doctor one, but he held up his

hand. ‘Won’t work on me. Alsa?’

Alsa took one. ‘Oh…’

‘Memories?’ the Doctor asked.

‘Yes,’ Gar said. ‘Some from the Eyeless, some from the

ghosts.’

‘A source of technical knowledge?’

‘And a way of broadening our horizons.’

Dela smiled. ‘Gyll,’ she said, touching her stone. ‘At

least… I like to think so.’

‘So you go into the City, now?’ Alsa asked.

‘Yes,’ Dela said. ‘We choose to. We have choices, now.

There are so many of us, we’ve actually lost count. Which

is silly, there aren’t all that many. Thousands.’

Alsa smiled.

‘It makes everything a lot easier.’

The Doctor was grinning. ‘Who says there are no

second chances, eh? What wally ever said that? See, Alsa,

it all works out.’

‘Yes…’

‘So now you’ve seen this, I can take you back, safe in

the knowledge that it all turns out for the best and—’

‘Doctor,’ Dela cut in, ‘it didn’t happen that way.’

‘It doesn’t what?’

‘This is the first time we’ve seen either of you for

twenty years. You said before that if it isn’t what

happened, it can’t happen.’

‘I…’ The Doctor was lost for words. ‘We must have…

no. It’s the plan, you see. A bit of Ghost of Christmas

Future, just enough to make Alsa mend her ways – that

was what that McDuck reference was all about. I really

liked the McDuck reference.’

‘You never came back. Is that bad?’

‘It means…’ the Doctor began, ‘we must have got

sidetracked. Or… worse.’

‘You’re so thick,’ Alsa said.

‘I’m not,’ the Doctor objected. ‘I’m great.’

‘Don’t you get it?’

The Doctor looked around, nonplussed.

‘I get off here,’ Alsa explained. ‘I stay in the future.

Can I come back, Dela? I know all about obstetrics.’

Dela raised an eyebrow.

‘You don’t have to,’ the Doctor said. It wasn’t clear if

he meant that Alsa didn’t have to stay or that Dela didn’t

have to take her. ‘Although, come to think of it, that

would work.’

‘I just told you it would…’ Alsa pointed out.

‘I was talking in terms of the timeline,’ the Doctor said

airily.

‘You can be a child here, Alsa,’ Dela said. ‘There are

plenty of other children now. You can be grown up. Only

if you want to, only when you’re ready.’

The Doctor was beaming. ‘There are choices here for

you, now. Yes. The perfect solution. If anyone asks, this

was the plan all along. What a great idea this was of

mine.’

‘You could stay, too, Doctor,’ Dela said.

‘Well,’ he said, smile flashing, ‘it wouldn’t be fair on

the rest of the universe, you having me all to yourself,

would it?’

‘Life’s not fair,’ Alsa noted.

The Doctor sniffed the air, turned on his heel, drank in

the scene. He was lost in thought for a moment, then

realised he’d placed his hand on the side of the TARDIS.

There was a big, wide universe out there and he had his

second chance, too.

‘Life’s not fair?’ he echoed. ‘Well… I’ll have to see

what I can do about that.’

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Jon Blum, Graeme Burk, Mark Clapham, Mark

Jones, Danielle Labbate, Philip Purser-Hallard, Kate

Orman, Lars Pearson, Lloyd Rose, Jim Smith and Robert

Smith. Thanks to the many and various behind the scenes

people, including, but no doubt not limited to, Lee

Binding, Albert DePetrillo, Caroline Newbury, Nicholas

Payne, Gary Russell and Steve Tribe. Special thanks to

Justin Richards and to Russell T Davies.

David Tennant reads Pest Control

Written by Peter Anghelides

Launching a new series of audio exclusive stories from BBC Audiobooks

Also available from BBC Audiobooks

Abridged readings of the Doctor Who novels by cast members from the BBC TV series, with bonus

author interviews

The Stone Rose

The Feast of the

The Resurrection Casket

by Jacqueline Rayner

Drowned

by Justin Richards

Read by

by Stephen Cole

Read by

David Tennant

Read by

David Tennant

David Tennant

The Nightmare of

The Art of

The Price of Paradise

Black Island

Destruction

by Colin Brake

by Mike Tucker

by Stephen Cole

Read by

Read by

Read by

Shaun Dingwall

Anthony Head

Don Warrington

Sting of the Zygons

The Last Dodo

Wooden Heart

by Stephen Cole

by Jacqueline Rayner

by Martin Day

Read by

Read by

Read by

Reggie Yates

Freema Agyeman

Adjoa Andoh

Wetworld

Forever Autumn

Sick Building

By Mark Michalowski

By Mark Morris

By Paul Magrs

Read by

Read by

Read by

Freema Agyeman

Will Thorp

Will Thorp

Peacemaker

The Pirate Loop

Wishing Well

By James Swallow

By Simon Guerrier

By Trevor Baxendale

Read by

Read by

Read by

Will Thorp

Freema Agyeman

Debbie Chazen

Available on CD or as a digital download

AUDIO – BOOKS ON THE GO

Also available from BBC Books

featuring the Doctor and Martha

as played by David Tennant and Freema Agyeman:

Beautiful Chaos

by Gary Russell

ISBN 978 1 846 07563 6

UK £6.99 US $11.99/$14.99 CDN

Donna Noble is back home in London, catching up with

her family and generally giving them all the gossip about

her journeys. Her grandfather is especially overjoyed –

he’s discovered a new star and had it named after him. He

takes the Doctor, as his special guest, to the naming

ceremony.

But the Doctor is suspicious about some of the other

changes he can see in Earth’s heavens. Particularly that

bright star, right there. No, not that one, that one, there, on

the left…

The world’s population is slowly being converted to a new

path, a new way of thinking. Something is coming to

Earth, an ancient force from the Dark Times. Something

powerful, angry, and all-consuming…

Document Outline

Also available from BBC Audiobooks