The Doctor tapped the console, thoughtfully. ‘Have you heard of a timeslip?’
‘No. What is it?’
‘Something that can happen if you try to make a jump through time without any adequate form of control. At least, that’s the theory. You arrive with your timescale way out of alignment with your surroundings; subjective time seems normal, but it’s passing much more slowly in relation to everything else.’
‘You mean... the whole Terminus is on slow time?’
‘A neat way of putting it. Yes, that’s more or less what I mean. What we’re witnessing is probably a high-speed emergency programme to deal with an unstable engine – except that it’s taken several hundred years to get this far.
Kari shook her head. ‘This is madness.’
‘If I’m right, the time differential will make it impossible to move that lever. It would take the strength of a giant.’
‘A giant?’ Kati said, and their eyes met as they both had the same realisation. There was a giant already around. He took the Lazars off into the forbidden zone.
Olvir, meanwhile, had found the Garm.
Unfortunately, he seemed to have found it too late.
The beast was empty-handed, and there was no sign of Nyssa anywhere. Olvir wasn’t sure how best to deal with it. Intimidation was probably a waste of time, as he’d found when he failed even to sting it with his burner – and he didn’t have the weapon anyway, so it was all rather academic.
He knew that it could understand at least a few rudimentary commands. Furthermore, he was wearing enough of his Vanir armour to look as if he was entitled to exercise authority. He decided to give it a try.
He stepped from the shadows before the Garm, and his nerve almost failed him. The dark beast seemed to fill the passageway, and the glowing coals that were its eyes gazed down on him and their message seemed to be,
I see through you, little man
.
‘I’m unarmed,’ Olvir said quickly, showing his hands. The Garm stopped. Olvir added, uncertainly,
‘Can you understand me?’
‘Perfectly,’ the Garm said.
The voice was a shock. An inhuman, bass-magnified whisper, it seemed to come, not from the Garm, but from all around the Terminus itself. In spite of the strangeness, there was an unexpectedly gentle quality.
‘Why are you doing this?’ Olvir said. ‘Why are you torturing people?’
‘I drive the disease from them. All would die, but many survive.’
‘And the last one you treated? Nyssa? Did she survive?’
‘She is recovering.’
‘Where?’
There was an awkward pause. Then: ‘Follow me.’
The Garm turned to go. Olvir, having no better ideas, did as he was told.
Bor hadn’t moved from the bunk where they’d laid him. Even if he’d wanted to, he probably couldn’t have managed it. Sigurd was the only one who stayed around after trading his rostered duties against a promise of extra work in the future. He’d had some absurd idea that he might be able to help. Instead, he could only witness Bor’s slow defeat by the effects of an overlong stay in the zone.
‘Try to relax,’ he urged, as Bor stiffened with a particularly bad spasm of pain.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Bor gasped after a while, as the spasm ended and left him with a few moments of relief. He’d already had all of Sigurd’s Hydromel, protesting at the sacrifice. ‘In a couple of hours there won’t even be a Terminus. Or a company. Or anything... I found out all about it in the zone.’
‘What’s going to happen?’
‘That’s the trouble. I can’t remember.’ Bor managed a weak, wry smile. ‘Short-term memory’s always the first to go.’
Another spasm threatened. Bor waited it out, but for once it didn’t last. Perhaps even that was a bad sign. Sigurd said, ‘Look, I’ll get more Hydromel.’
‘Eirak won’t release any.’
‘Who said I was going to ask him?’
Sigurd went across to the thin curtain that divided the sleeping quarters from the larger space of the headquarters section. For all of the great size of the Terminus, the amount of usable space that was available to the Vanir had always been small. But even the best-shielded sections gave only temporary protection, and without any means of controlling the circulation of contaminated air their effect was limited.
The Hydromel container was on open view,. The two chains that held it down were thin, but the real problem lay with the trembler alarms to which they were connected. Any attempt to cut them or to smash the lock would bring Eirak running. And if that happened Sigurd knew that, within a few days, there would be another Vanir lying sick and delirious on the other side of the curtain, and it would be him. Eirak could cancel his supply and make it stick. If he could order Valgard into the zone and get away with it, he could get away with anything.
‘It really isn’t worth the trouble, you know,’ Bor called feebly from the sleeping area. And the pity of it was, Sigurd had to agree.
The Garm said nothing more, gliding along ahead of Olvir. The young raider kept his distance. Silence only added to the aura of power around the beast, and Olvir could still remember how ineffectual his burner had been against its armoured skin. They’d already come down through open deck areas with strange markings drawn out on the floor, and passed through a long corridor that seemed to be lined entirely with black glass. Now they emerged about half-way down a metal gantry onto a spiralling access ramp.
The Garm led him upward. They were back in the open, and the ramp led them between vertical cooling fins several storeys high. Olvir took one look at the drop from the unguarded edge of the ramp, and wished he hadn’t – the air turbulence between the fins tugged at him and tried to pull him over. The wind was nowhere near strong enough, but it was an uncomfortable feeling.
They climbed into the support structure at the top of the fins, and Olvir could see the metal-honeycomb skin of the Terminus only a few metres overhead. The ramp ended in a grillework deck that groaned slightly as the Garm’s weight came onto it, seeming hardly enough to protect them from the long fall into darkness below. It began to occur to Olvir that he’d trusted the Garm too readily, but he was already so apprehensive that he didn’t think it could get any worse. Besides, if the animal meant him harm, none of this would have been necessary.
In the far corner of the deck was a square tank about the size of a double cabin. It had probably been some kind of monitoring or flow-control room for the cooling fins, but now the window overlooking the drop had been covered with metal sheets spot-welded at their edges. The only other access was by a door with some kind of wheel-operated lock. The Garm raised a massive paw to indicate this. Olvir was, it seemed, where he wanted to be. Wherever it was.
He looked at the Garm and said, ‘Well?’ But the Garm didn’t move. This was as far as it felt able to go without running against some earlier instruction. Olvir went across to the door and took a closer look. There was no provision for a key or anything like a key, so it was possible that the mechanism was just a simple catch.
This could be a problem. The simple things always were. Races sharing some part of their culture and history could take for granted such things as catches and switches and dials, whilst to outsiders they became complex puzzles. Olvir turned again to the Garm. At least he could try asking for some guidance.
But the Garm’s head was turned slightly to one side as if to listen to something that no one else could hear.
Olvir realised that the Vanir must be sounding the signal to bring the Garm back to the storeyard for another Lazar. As if in confirmation, the Garm turned and began to descend the ramp.
Olvir felt strangely alone. The Garm had hardly been good company, but at least it had been alive and, in spite of the surgical alterations that had been carried out to ensure its obedience, it had seemed intelligent. Doing the best that he could to fight the solitary feeling. Olvir set to work on the catch.
It didn’t take as long as he’d feared. It was simply a case of performing two operations at the same time, and the door swung open. As Olvir stepped forward, hands grabbed him and jerked him roughly inside.
Taken off-balance, the weight of his armour brought him crashing to the floor. He had an impression of dazzling whiteness and a dark shape poised over him and ready to strike.
I’m glad Kari didn’t see this
, he was thinking,
what an embarrassing way to go
.
But then vision started to clear, and the dark shape filled out with detail as its small fist was slowly lowered.
‘Olvir!’ Nyssa said. ‘What are you doing here?’
She climbed off his chest and let him sit up, blinking at the brightness of the room. It had been tiled in white throughout, and there was some kind of pulsing illumination from above that gave off a faint ozone smell.
There was also something else; Nyssa was showing none of the signs of the Lazar disease.
Olvir said, ‘You came through the cure?’
‘Just about,’ Nyssa said, and from her expression it had been a pretty grim process.
‘What happened?’
‘Just a massive dose of radiation and nothing else.
There’s no proper diagnosis, no control.’ She gestured around. ‘And this is supposed to be someone’s idea of decontamination.’
Olvir got to his feet. ‘Let’s go,’ he said. ‘The sooner we can put the Terminus behind us...’
‘You don’t understand! There must be thousands of people who’ve passed through here and think they’re cured. It’s all just hit and miss. Nobody cares.’
Olvir tried to get her towards the door, but she wouldn’t be distracted. ‘Listen to me,’ she went on urgently. ‘The cure works, but it has to be controlled.
Otherwise you just trade one killer for another!
Radiation-induced diseases that may take years to show!’
‘All right!’ Olvir said firmly. This was a rescue, and the rights and wrongs could be argued out later. ‘Let’s concentrate on getting away.’
Nyssa allowed herself to be ushered towards the outside. ‘It could all be changed,’ she said as they stepped out onto the decking.
‘I don’t doubt it,’ Olvir assured her. ‘But for now, we’ve got a lot of ground to cover.
The Vanir hadn’t given the signal for the Garm. The Doctor had.
The small box housing the subsonic generator had been fixed to its upright by a couple of bolts, and removing it hadn’t been a problem. The Vanir might have a back-up, but after seeing the rest of their shoestring operation, he doubted it. Without the box the Vanir couldn’t recall the Garm; with it, the Doctor and Kari had the exclusive use of the animal’s strength.
The Doctor’s main fear at the moment was that Eirak and the others might arrive before the Garm did. It was unlikely that they’d hear the signal at any distance – the Garm probably had an implanted receptor somewhere at the base of its brain for that –
but it would soon be time for the next Lazar transfer.
Kari stood at the pick-up point. She’d found some white dust and used it to give herself something of the pale complexion of a Lazar, but under the make-up she was drained and nervous anyway. At least she wouldn’t have to worry about the disease itself, if the Doctor’s theory about a narrow-range virus was right; although radioactively foul, the Terminus would be clean as far as the disease-causing organism was concerned. The evidence was there in the Vanir. For all of their close contact with the sick, none of them showed any signs of joining them. They had other problems.
Kari glanced at the Doctor. ‘You’re sure this will work?’ she said.
The Doctor gave her a confident smile. ‘Trust me,’
he said. And he thought to himself,
I hope I don’t regret
this...
The Garm was with them before they knew it. He emerged from the shadows as smoothly as a dark sunrise and then he hesitated, looking from one to the other as if he was unsure of what to do next.
‘Go!’ the Doctor urged. The plan was that Kari should retreat before the Garm, leading him back towards the Terminus control room. The Doctor would follow with the subsonic generator, ready to use it as a crude training-aid if it should be necessary.
But Kari said, stiff and panicky, ‘I can’t remember the way.’
‘Deception is unnecessary,’ the Garm told them, and the Doctor and Kari exchanged a look of astonishment. ‘You’ve given the signal. I have no choice but to obey.’
It was a relief to put the storeyard behind them. An appearance by Eirak and the others at this late stage would at best delay them, and time was already impossibly short. The line which marked the edge of the forbidden zone was a paradoxical indicator of their safety.
The Doctor led the way, following the control cables again to the bridge of the Terminus. The Garm hesitated a little when faced with an ascent into areas that it had never seen before, but the persuasion of the subsonics over-rode everything else.
Just as they were coming level with the point where Bor had attempted to damage the lines and had instead succeeded in damaging himself, the whole of the Terminus seemed to give a distinct tremble. It happened again as they reached the control room, as if the whole massive structure of the ship was beginning to absorb the strain of the forces that were to come.
The Doctor wondered for how long the Terminus might hold out. Would it be destroyed in the blast along with everything else, or would it make another one-way leap into nowhere on the crest of the shockwave? Either way, they’d never know.
The Garm had trouble fitting into the narrow space of the control room. The Doctor saw with alarm that the handle had almost completed its closure. They had minutes, at the most. He hurriedly explained what he wanted the Garm to do, feeling precious time slip by as he talked.
The Garm looked at the handle. It jerked down another fraction.
‘I’d appreciate it if you’d hurry,’ the Doctor said.
The Garm turned the glow of its eyes onto him.
‘This is necessary?’
‘If you can return the handle, I can disconnect the circuitry controlling it.’