Bill Groan?’

‘Mind your own business, you unguidely—’

‘Listen to me, Winnowner Cropper,’ said the Doctor,

‘I’ve figured it out. It took me a while, because I didn’t have a Guide to show me the shortcuts, but I figured it out.’

He wandered back to the console.

‘The Morphans don’t matter,’ he said sadly. ‘They are not building Hereafter for their descendants. They’re building it for their ancestors. There are around a thousand human beings sleeping here in the mountain, in suspended animation.’

‘What?’ asked Vesta.

‘It’s been misremembered over the years,’ said the Doctor. ‘Patience is such an important virtue to you Morphans. “Those who are patient will provide for all of the plantnation.” Well, “the patient” are right here.

Patients. Lined up in hibemetic capsules under the Firmer. I’m pretty sure they represent the elite of Earth before. The most powerful and influential people.

People who were convinced that they deserved to live.

People who believed they were so special they had to have a brand new world made just for them.’

He looked at the lurking shadow of the Transhuman.

‘People, in fact, who weren’t prepared to toil away their lives building a new world. They just expected the boring work to be done for them by common and disposable labourers.’

‘Th-that’s not how Guide explains it!’ cried Winnowner.

‘I’m sure Guide puts it a great deal more delicately,’

said the Doctor. ‘But that’s the size of it. And only this, only the interference of the Ice Warriors, rival colonists, is a crisis major enough to force the system to wake some of them up. A Catagory A crisis. It was enough to wake them up, and arm them for war.’

He stared at the Transhuman.

‘You’re a frightening thing,’ he said. ‘And I thought Ice Warriors were dangerous. It takes a lot of fuel to keep a metabolism like that going, doesn’t it? You’re essentially a carnivore. I thought the transrat swarms were getting out and killing the livestock, but it was you lot, wasn’t it? The first of you to be woken and released?’

‘There was… a fuel requirement,’ it growled.

‘Because the Ice Warriors had disabled most of the flesh farms that were designed to feed you during their cull of the transrats,’ replied the Doctor. ‘You and your kind needed huge hits of high calorific intake to get going.’

The Transhuman walked back into the light of the hologram field and faced the Doctor.

‘You have… no authority,’ it said. ‘The system… does not recognise you. This crisis… is almost resolved. The alien enemy… is virtually routed. Equilibrium will be…

restored.’

‘Good, good,’ said the Doctor. ‘But why don’t you tell the nice Morphans what will happen to them when you finally wake up for good? Even Winnowner doesn’t know that, does she? Tell them. In a few years’

time, another generation or two, when the terraforming is finally finished, and Hereafter is properly Earth-like, the Patients will finally wake up.’

‘This is… the plan,’ the Transhuman said. ‘The colonial scheme.’

The Doctor looked at Vesta and Jack and Winnowner. ‘When the Pilgrim Fathers went across to the New World, they took livestock with them. That’s all you are. Livestock. Doing all the hard work in the meantime, so they don’t have to. And when they wake up in Eden, you know what? They’re going to be really hungry. Really, really hungry.’

‘No!’ cried Winnowner.

‘Meat is meat,’ said the Doctor. ‘Isn’t that right, Mr Transhuman?’

‘Survival requires… certain practicalities,’ it growled.

‘Oh, everyone’s saying that today!’ the Doctor grinned.

The Transhuman lashed out. Its claws passed through the holographic Doctor.

‘Temper, temper,’ the Doctor chided. ‘You can’t touch me. I’m not really there at all.’

‘You have spoken… too much and for too long,’ said the Transhuman. It purred a grotesque approximation of a laugh. ‘Your location has been traced and identified. Terraformer Two, operations management command C, level six.’

The Doctor turned from his console in the gleaming command chamber, ignoring the hologram figures being generated around him. He’d seen something reflecting in the vast plate-glass viewport in front of him.

Behind him, three Transhuman killers were padding towards him from the hatchway on all fours, smiling their eternal smiles. A fourth followed, walking upright, herding three, rigidly frightened captives ahead of it.

Amy, Samewell and Bel.

‘You will cease… your interference,’ it snarled.

‘Ah,’ said the Doctor.

‘Don’t do it!’ Amy said, as bravely as she could manage.

‘If I don’t, Pond, it will kill you,’ replied the Doctor sadly.

‘It’s going… to kill you all anyway,’ it growled.

Chapter

16

Guide Us to Thy Perfect Light

‘Oh well,’ said the Doctor, ‘if you’re going to be like that. I think it’s time to act with a little honour.’

‘What?’ asked the upright Transhuman.

‘He was talking to me,’ hissed Lord Ixyldir.

The Ice Lord leapt out of hiding and swung his war sword at the towering cyborg beast. The stupendous blow hit it in the neck and it lurched sideways. The Transhuman uttered a strangled, drawn-out gurgle of pain and outrage as it toppled.

Bel screamed.

Before Ixyldir’s blow had even landed, his squad of Warriors had joined the assault, lumbering like tanks from their concealment behind pipework and workstations. Ssord led the charge, swinging his barbed axe wide.

The Transhumans howled and sprang forward to meet the attack, claws and fangs bared.

‘Amy!’ the Doctor yelled, beckoning to Amy, Samewell and Bel. ‘Get out of the way!’

The cyborg monsters were too busy with the Martian assault to bother about the three humans. Amy, Samewell and Bel rushed over to the Doctor at the workstation.

‘Get down!’ the Doctor cried. ‘Get into cover!’

‘I thought we were dead in all sorts of different ways then!’ Amy cried.

‘We still could be!’ the Doctor replied. ‘Get behind the console! This is going to get nasty!’

The battle was already a savage and hideously brutal melee. The Ice Warriors put all their cold-blooded fury into every strike and hack of their blades.

The Transhumans ripped back with claws that sliced through scaled plating. They possessed extraordinarily robust physiques. They had been built to be proof against the lethal sonic disruptors that the Ice Warriors had used against the transrats. They shrugged off all but the deepest and most savage cuts of the wicked Martian blades.

Ixyldir withdrew his sword after his first blistering attack to find that his target was already back up and attacking him. Talons lacerated his cape and punctured his pectoral and shoulder guards. Fangs bared, the Transhuman went for his face. Ixyldir smashed the creature in the side of its reinforced skull with his war sword and knocked it onto the floor. It rolled, rising again.

One of the Ice Warriors was already down, dead or dying on the floor. Another was torn and wounded.

Despite being driven, determined and possessing greater numbers, the Ice Warriors were still not going to win the fight.

The Doctor turned back to the hologram.

‘Rory Williams Pond!’ he yelled. ‘Do it now if you’re going to do it at all!’

In the assembly hall, the Transhuman turned with a snarl. One of the humans, the smaller male, had slipped away while it had been occupied with the holographic interloper.

It sniffed, tracking him.

‘Run, Rory!’ Vesta screamed.

Rory was doing more than running. The key that Winnowner had slipped him while the Doctor was distracting the red-eyed beast had opened the padlock of the rear doors. He rushed towards the Incrypt hatch and pressed his palm on the checker.