She heard him turn another page. She knew what he was reading. The Rule Book. He was always reading the Rule Book. Always quoting it at her. If she could have
her way with his Rule Book, he'd never again be able to sit and swallow at the same time!
An undulating whine cut through the boredom, and an amber light began to flash on the communication panel. What this time? wondered McLuhan, as Bazin leapt from his bunk beneath her. Another brawl?
Another shoplifter?
Bazin pressed on the flashing amber light, and replied: 'Duty guards.'
The quiet, sinister voice of Kane hissed softly back out of the intercom.
'We have an incident in the Lower Sectors, Quadrant 6. An aggressive non-terrestrial.'
McLuhan felt a small spark of excitement shoot through her nervous system.
Kane's voice continued. 'It's marked with a radio tracking device. I want the creature eliminated.' There was a slight pause, as though Kane were thinking. 'Bring me back its head.'
The intercom went dead.
McLuhan smiled. An ANT hunt!
She swung her legs over the side of the bunk and jumped down. Bazin was checking his hand-gun in readiness. He fumbled with it nervously.
McLuhan looked at him sceptically. 'How many ANT-hunts you been on?' she asked.
Bazin looked up, uncertain. 'ANT-hunts?'
'A-N-T: Aggressive Non-Terrestrial,' she explained patiently. 'You ever seen one?'
'Well, not as such
He'd probably once seen a picture of some brightly coloured creature in a comic book!
'Didn't think so,' sighed McLuhan.
'But it's a standard procedure.'
McLuhan narrowed her eyes. 'What do you think a standard non-terrestrial looks like?'
'Well...'
'Try thinking of a scorpion, two metres high, coming at you out of the shadows..."
Bazin's eyes were wide with disbelief and fear. McLuhan picked the hand-gun out of his hands. 'So do me a favour and leave the water pistol at home.' She dropped the hand-gun on one side, and turned to the armoury racks. The Cosmolite .65 gigawatt bolt-beam Heavy Combat Gun weighed ten kilos. Most of that was accounted for by a bolt-beam generator which, at full power, could blow a fifty-centimetre hole in one-metre thick armour plating from two hundred metres distance. 'If I'm relying on you to watch my back, I want to know that you're carrying enough artillery to blow this ANT clean across the Space Lanes.'
She tossed a Cosmolite to Bazin as though it were no heavier than a child's toy. It almost flattened him when he caught it.
In the chamber of the Singing Trees, no one had spoken since the Doctor and the Creature had left. The distant voices sang softly in the breeze, and Glitz, Mel and Ace, each sitting on boulders of ice, drifted along on their own thoughts. Eventually, Glitz sighed, 'This is the life, eh? A whole universe out there, with all the myriad mysteries of the cosmos, and we're sat twiddling our digits in some benighted wodge of permafrost!'
Mel looked up. 'We could always pass the time playing a game, I suppose. / Spy or something.'
Ace and Glitz both turned to stare at her.
'Just a suggestion,' offered Mel, lamely.
'Bilgebag's right,' admitted Ace grudgingly. 'I wanted some adventure. I wanted to do something exciting, see something beautiful, just once in my life...'
Glitz smiled. 'You know, believe it or not, I was young once.'
'So was I...' sighed Ace.
'I was a right tearaway,' continued Glitz. 'Thought I knew it all.'
'Some things never change, do they?' taunted Ace.
'Ah-ah,' admonished Glitz, 'allow an old man his moment of pregnant introspection. Where was I?'
'Pregnant introspection,' reminded Mel. 'A right tearaway. Some things never change.'
Glitz recovered the line back through his memories. 'Ah, yes - the things I've seen... The places I've been... Me and the Good Ship Nosferatu -
been everywhere together. Riding on the Space Winds... Diving through the Rainbow Clouds... Nowhere to go but onwards... The Asteroid Breaks. The Nebula Ridges. Out beyond the edge of the Twelve Galaxies.'
Ace had been listening to this with growing enchantment and was now staring at him wide-eyed. 'You've been outside the Twelve Galaxies?'
'Me and the Nosferatu. Been everywhere together.' He sighed. 'The most exquisite delights the universe has to offer. If only I could have bottled them, I'd have myself a nice little earner.'
In the Duty Guards' Room, McLuhan and Bazin stripped down the mechanisms of their Cosmolites, to check one final time that the vibration absorbers were loose and the electrical contacts secure.
McLuhan was relieved to see that Bazin's familiarity with the weapon was faultless. She was beginning to feel the effects of the adrenalin in her bloodstream - a sharp fear that tightened her muscles and made her heart race. She looked at Bazin briefly, and wondered how much fear he was hiding and trying not to let her see. He was only a boy really. What was he doing, wasting his life as a soldier?
He snapped the locking bolt into position on his weapon, and looked up. McLuhan snapped her bolt into position, and looked back at him.
'Ready?' she asked.
'Two metres tall, you say?'
'Minimum.' McLuhan's gaze was steady. 'Let's go.'
She saw the fear in the boy's eyes.
If the Doctor had known that the map he was carrying contained a radio tracking device, he would not have been peering at it and muttering, "They always mark North and South on these things, but never Forwards and Backwards,' as he and the Creature made their way through the dark Ice Passages.
If he had known that the tracking device would lead McLuhan and Bazin to the Creature, he would never have looked up and said, 'Tell you what, you seem to know the way, why don't I leave it to you?'
If he had known that the map would eventually cause the death of the Creature, he would never have tucked it into a fold of the Creature's membranous skin.
If he had known. But he didn't.
Kane looked down across the Cryogenics Chamber in triumph. From his high gantry, he could see hundreds of dead-faced mercenaries, lined up and waiting for his command. This is what it would be like when he returned to Proamon! His eyes blazed jet-black.
He waited for the final few cryogenics tubes to rise and release their occupants. He had waited three thousand years. He could wait a few moments more. The remaining mercenaries stumbled forward out of their tubes, and took their places in the rows of lifeless, death-filled faces. Kane looked down again and was filled with the exquisite feeling of absolute power.
His voice echoed through the chill silence. 'The time is at hand! In a few hours, when the Dragonfire is finally mine, we shall be able to leave this worthless planet. But first we must clear out all the humans. I want you to spread terror throughout the Upper Levels, and drive the humans towards the Docking Bays. Drive them onto the spacecraft. I want no one left alive in Iceworld. The terror which will seize the planet of Svartos here today, will soon strike the planet of Proamon, my former home. Then we shall move swiftly throughout the whole of the Twelve Galaxies, and take our revenge for the injustices that have been done to us. Once, I was driven from my home; soon, no one in the Twelve Galaxies shall have a home!'
Kane was in total control now, and his final cries rang through the chamber: 'Now go and destroy the humans in Iceworld! The Dragonfire is mine!'
The taste of power was sweet and subtle, like a rare, intoxicating fruit.
Kane needed no other food.
The Space Trading Colony of Iceworld usually had between 1,000 and 1,500 travellers in it at any one time, and there were Docking Bays for up to 500 spacecraft. The travellers would stay two or maybe three days, stocking up on food supplies, repairing their spacecraft, or just relieving the boredom of space travel by relaxing in the Refreshment Bar, Sports Hall, Beauty Salon or Restaurant.
Stellar's mother had decided to treat Stellar to a meal in the Restaurant. Well, actually, it wasn't exactly that she wanted to treat the little girl - more, that she wanted to treat herself, after her traumatic experience with the hooligan waitress and a milkshake - and there wasn't much she could do with Stellar apart from take her along.
Stellar was quite excited to be eating in a grown-ups' restaurant for the first time, and she couldn't wait to get back home and tell her best friend, Milli-mind. The waiters had brought special child-size knives and forks, because the ordinary ones were too big for Stellar. The waitresses had brought some extra cushions for Stellar to sit on, because the chair was too low for small children. They had even brought extra cushions for Ted, Stellar's teddy bear, so that he could sit next to her and watch.
Her mother (now wearing a white, sparkly number fringed with willowy, pink feathers, since the distressing incident with the milkshake) occasionally pointed out famous people as they came and went. That man was the man from Stellar's favourite holovision programme. That man used to be a famous pop vocalist when Stellar's mother was a teenager, and she'd bought all his videos.
That woman was a brilliant scientist, and people said she was the kindest person in the Twelve Galaxies. That woman looks a bit like...
no... (But Stellar saw that the woman looked a bit, but not exactly, like the woman her father was now living with.)
Stellar would have so much to tell Milli-mind when she got back home!
McLuhan descended the service shaft with only a couple of strides and immediately spun round with the Cosmolite. The first nervous excitement of starting out on the ANT-hunt had now given way to an alert concentration, with the knowledge that she soon might die. She scanned the darkness of the Ice Passage. It seemed to be clear. She nodded up to Bazin, at the top of the ladder, who quickly scrambled down and joined her. They both looked round in the gloom. Their fingers were tight on the triggers of their Cosmolites, balanced lightly on gyroclamps attached to their shoulder harnesses.
'It could be anywhere,' said Bazin. 'How are we going to see it in this dark?'
'Here, use this.' McLuhan passed a small electronic device to Bazin.
'What is it?'
'It's the signal tracker. Kane said the ANT was marked. Tape the tracker on top of your Cosmolite where you can see it. If this ANT so much as twitches, I want to know about it.'
The Doctor had to scramble to keep up with the Creature. It had no hesitation about which way to go, and its tall, skeletal body was perfectly suited to striding over the ice boulders. It took the Doctor straight to the Ice Garden - the huge, domed chamber where tiny flowers sparkled like constellations in the night sky. The Doctor gazed around, breathtaken by the immense beauty of it.
'With silver bells and cockleshells..." he murmured, half-remembering an old Earth nursery rhyme. 'It's magnificent. A huge planetarium.' He peered more closely at the patterns, as though something were wrong.
'But the perspective's distorted. Where was it drawn from? Not here on Svartos. Where is Proamon?'
The Creature gestured with its long, bony arm, and pointed to a slightly raised section in the centre of the floor. In the middle of this area, a single ice flower glittered red. Other smaller white flowers were dotted on circular orbits around it. And at the very rim of the raised section, lay a small, pale-blue flower.
'A solar system. This must be a large red star,' said the Doctor, pointing at the sparkle of red, 'with smaller orbiting planets, and this small blue one must be Proamon.' He looked back at the star-studded roof. 'And these are the constellations seen from out past the Seventh Galaxy: the Waterfall, the Great Lever... but they're not quite right. The shapes are slightly distorted. It's all out of alignment.'
He shook his head. 'It's beautiful, but it's out of date. The star systems have changed. These star charts are no use any longer.' He looked at the Creature, who was watching him. 'How long have you been on this planet? Two thousand years? Longer?'
But the Creature couldn't answer.
'We'd better go back to the others.'
Mel, Ace and Glitz were still sitting glumly in the chamber of the Singing Trees. No one had kept track of how long they had been waiting for the Doctor and the Creature to return - it had been ages. Ace sighed.
'This is naff. This is mega-naff.' She picked up her canvas shoulder-bag and tipped the contents out onto the ground. She poked through the assorted bits and pieces. 'And what's more, I've run out of nitro.' Then she thought of something, and her face brightened. 'But I've got tons more back in my quarters.'
Mel looked up, her eyes sparkling. 'Let's go back and get it.'
'No, thank you,' interrupted Glitz, 'we'll steer clear of the home-made stuff, I think. There's six hundred kilos of commercial back on board the Nosferatu. I'll go and fetch some of that.'
Ace's eyes lit up at the mention of Glitz's spacecraft. 'The Nosferatu?
'And you both stay here,' ordered Glitz, imagining all the trouble he might have with these two.
'Aww...' complained Ace loudly.
Glitz turned to her with strained patience. 'Just for once, Sprog, do you think you could do what you're told?'
Ace sat down in a sulk.
'Why do we girls always get left out?' moaned Mel.
Glitz was about to tell her, but decided not to. He always had trouble with feminists - usually because they were right and he was wrong.
Instead, he just said, 'I'll be as quick as I can,' and he disappeared down one of the Ice Passages.
Mel and Ace sat glumly.
The crunch of Glitz's footsteps on the ice disappeared down the passage.
Slowly, the two women turned to each other. A broad smile broke out on both their faces. They stood up, and crept quietly after Glitz. Ace peered cautiously round the corner of the passage. No one in sight!
Quickly, they scampered down the passage, following Glitz's tracks in the snow. The tracks turned into a side passage further along. Ace crept up, with Mel close behind her. Together, they peered round the corner.