So Vile a Sin (10 page)

‘Or at least, I might have been.’

‘What?’

‘I’m on Iphigenia, Roz. I need your help. Desperately. Come at once. Aulis. You won’t miss it.’

‘What do you mean, you might have been the Doctor?’

‘If you don’t reach Iphigenia right away,’ said the maybe-Doctor, ‘I won’t have been. No one will have been. There’ll have been no one to tell you not to spoil your tea with sweetener.’

Roz stared at him. She reached for her money belt, on the end of the bed. ‘I’m on my –’

She looked up. He was gone.

She pulled on her shoes, swearing. She didn’t know what the hell that had all been about, but she did know one thing.

Whatever was on Iphigenia was so dangerous that not only shouldn’t she go there, but the Doctor shouldn’t have gone there either.

74

2

Iphigenia

5 January 2982

Bruchac was going over the pre-flight checklist when he saw the guy waving at him from the tarmac. He put down his DataStream clipboard and walked down to the main airlock of the Hopper, halfway down the length of the little intersystem shuttle.

The safeties were off in Aegisthus’s artificial atmosphere, both doors open.

The guy was standing beneath the airlock, the wind blowing his blond hair around. ‘Hi,’ he said, waving an ID. ‘Biocustoms. Can you let me up?’

Bruchac hit the extend-ladder button with his toe. The guy grabbed hold of it and hauled himself up, work case tucked under his arm. He was tall and muscular, filling out his blue uniform.

The yellow and black flash of Aegisthus Biocustoms bulged on his left breast.

‘Thanks.’ The guy smiled. There was an environmental mask slung around his neck. ‘Charter Pilot Leo Bruchac, right?’

‘Why didn’t you radio ahead?’ said Bruchac. ‘I’m due for pushback in twenty.’

‘I’m in a hurry.’ The customs guy snapped open the work case, consulted the screen in the lid. ‘Is this your ship?’

‘For the next month,’ said Bruchac. ‘Look, is there a problem?’

‘Maybe,’ said the customs guy. He was in his twenties, and 75

sim-hero handsome. Bruchac imagined him on a recruiting poster.
Organic Import/Export Regulation – it’s a man’s life
.

The guy took out a medical handscan, putting down the work case. ‘I just this minute got a report that on its last trip this Hopper visited Mictlan. About a week ago.’

‘Yeah,’ said Bruchac. ‘Part of the supply route.’

‘Mictlan’s a nice planet,’ said the customs guy, waving the handscan around the airlock. ‘If you like dead people.’

Bruchac said, ‘Look, I checked the flight records myself.

Everything was SOP. The Hopper stayed in the spaceport and didn’t go anywhere near the quarantine areas. And it went through standard decontamination before leaving. You must have all that in your records.’ He looked at his chronometer. ‘I’ve got passengers arriving any minute.’

‘There’s just been an outbreak of Breckenridge’s Scourge reported on Mictlan,’ said the customs guy.

‘Breckenridge’s Scourge? I’ve never even heard of that.’

‘Neither had I, until we got the report in half an hour ago.

Turns you into one huge boil, apparently. Thing is, Biocustoms on Mictlan say the standard decontamination might not kill it.’

‘You’re kidding. They only just contacted you?’

‘Apparently it takes about a week to incubate. People are dropping like flies on Mictlan.’ He paused. ‘Not that that’s anything new.’

‘So what you’re saying is, this shuttle might be contaminated?’

The customs guy shrugged. ‘They say the outbreak started with bacterial particles lodged in a Hopper’s air filters. Don’t worry, I’m sure you’ll be fine.’ He started waving the hand-scan at Bruchac.

‘Listen,’ said the pilot. ‘You’ve got a lot of work to do. Why don’t I leave you to it?’

‘Sure,’ said the customs guy. ‘I’m going to check the air filters and do a sweep of the ship. You can wait back in the ready room if you want.’

‘No problem,’ said Bruchac. ‘No problem at all. Just give me a yell when you’re done.’

76

The Hopper’s cockpit was tiny. Chris Cwej squeezed in through the door and looked through the front window. Charter Pilot Bruchac was legging it across the tarmac. Chris grinned and tossed the work case into the co-pilot’s chair.

He went down to the cargo deck. There were a couple of Ogron handlers still lugging boxes of equipment around, securing them for the flight. Chris smiled at them. Small eyes stared back.

Chris cracked open lockers until he found a spare pilot’s uniform. It was a size too small. He looked at his chronometer –

the passengers would be here in five. He shrugged and started pulling off the Biocustoms uniform, tossing the mask into the locker. The Ogrons were ignoring him, strapping down the last of the equipment.

In his time he’d flown everything from an Adjudicator flitter to an experimental Nazi plane. The Hopper would have bog-standard controls; he could probably let the flight computer do most of the work. All they had to do now was get out of the spaceport before Bruchac checked with someone.

He was back at the airlock in time to welcome the passengers aboard. Two men, one in his mid-thirties, one in his sixties, and a young woman with a fine-boned face. All of them in casual gear, duffle bags slung over their shoulders. And the Doctor, in his tweed jacket, smiling breezily.

‘Professor Martinique?’ Chris asked.

The older man raised his hand. Chris said, ‘I’m Charter Pilot Cwej. Come on up. I have a couple of pre-flight checks to complete, and then we’ll be ready to depart.’

He helped Martinique clear the top of the ladder. Thankfully, the airlock had a bit of elbow room, despite a row of metal storage cabinets along one wall. Martinique shook his hand. ‘This is Emil Zatopek, my assistant, and this is Iaomnet Wszola, a student. And this is –’ He waved at the Doctor, wearing that slightly bewildered look people sometimes got around the Time Lord.

‘My flight engineer,’ said Chris. ‘Hello, Doctor.’

‘Everything running smoothly?’ asked the Doctor.

‘Very smoothly. Why don’t you show everyone to their cabins, and I’ll get us under way.’

77

Iaomnet stopped in the airlock doorway, giving him a sharp look. ‘I thought the pilot we booked was called Bruchac,’ she said.

‘Oh,’ said Chris, ‘he’s not feeling too well.’

Once they’d been under way for a few hours, Chris left a cluster of semi-smart navigation programs in charge of the flight and headed aft to the galley.

The academics and Iaomnet were sitting on the floor around a Japanese-style table. The flat white surface was covered in hard copies of enhanced satellite images. To Chris they mostly looked like fuzzy photocopies of blobs, but Martinique and Zatopek were deep in conversation, scribbling on the pictures in red pen.

Iaomnet gave Chris a ‘What can you do?’ smile. She had black eyes, and jet-black hair cut in a practical bob.

The Doctor was trying to puzzle out the Hopper’s kitchen appliances, without giving away the fact that he’d never used them before. Chris squeezed past Martinique and Zatopek and rescued the rice cooker from the chilling unit. ‘Where are the Ogrons?’ he asked.

‘In their quarters,’ said the Doctor. ‘I invited them to dinner, but they declined.’

‘We couldn’t have all fitted in here at once,’ said Iaomnet, unfolding her legs. Her head knocked against the wall behind her.

‘Ouch. Why on earth is the galley so small?’

‘More space, more fuel, more money,’ said the Doctor. ‘You could park this ship in the first-class suite of a luxury spaceliner.’

He stepped on Chris’s foot, which Chris took to be a secret signal until he realized that the Doctor was just trying to get past him to the drinks machine.

Chris folded down the menu screen above the heater, idly tapping his way through its index while the Doctor battled the drinks machine. ‘Dinner in two minutes,’ said the Time Lord optimistically, nudging Chris out of the way.

Chris put the menu screen up and sat down at the table, awkwardly folding his legs sideways.

‘So these are Iphigenia?’ said Chris, peering at the photos.

78

‘Yes,’ said Martinique, surfacing from his discussion with his assistant. His dark hair was fashionably tinged with grey.

‘Satellite images. Here you can see Aulis Crater, and here, right in the centre of the crater, Artemis Mons. The mountain of Artemis, the Greek goddess whom no man could see unclothed –

on pain of death.’

‘And that’s where we’re going, is it?’ asked Chris.

‘Yes,’ said Zatopek. He looked only a little older than Iaomnet, with striking features and black hair pulled sharply back from his face.

‘The largest crater anywhere in human space,’ said Martinique.

‘Are you sure these are from a satellite? They look like a military fly-by to me,’ said Chris. He tapped a finger on the faint white lines at the very edge of the picture. ‘You always see a scale like this on long-range recon probes.’ He picked up another of the photos. ‘Same again here, and on this one.’

‘Are you the first academic expedition to Iphigenia?’ asked the Doctor, juggling an alarming number of bowls, cartons and cups over to the table.

Martinique gathered up the photos before they could be either further analysed or covered with soup. ‘The significance of these pictures has eluded previous investigators. The crater’s age, for example. Now, it formed during a period when the surface of Iphigenia was not plastic enough for the crater to have formed the way it did. A meteor of that size striking a clump of ice and rock should have shattered it into pieces.’

‘Maybe your estimate of its age is off,’ said Iaomnet.

Martinique waved his hand. ‘There are other, smaller indications. The shape is a little too perfect. Other things.’

‘So if this is military information,’ Iaomnet wanted to know,

‘where’d you guys get it?’

‘I have my sources,’ Zatopek said severely.

‘Tell us about the significance of the pictures, Professor Martinique,’ said the Doctor, kneeling down at the table.

The academic nodded and shuffled through the photos until he found the shot he wanted. He dumped the rest of them into Zatopek’s lap. His assistant raised an eyebrow and started putting them back in order.

79

‘Here,’ said Martinique. He tapped a circled area with the tip of his pen. ‘Do you see anything out of the ordinary?’

‘It looks as though a meteorite strike took a bite out of the mountain,’ said the Doctor.

‘That’s right,’ said Martinique, a little surprised. ‘Revealing a complex substratum.’

The Doctor picked up the photo and held it up to his nose.

After a moment he took out his bifocals and slipped them on.

Chris leant over for a better look, his head almost resting on the Doctor’s shoulder.

Beyond a certain point, he knew, computer image enhancement merged into metaphysics. But the line down the side of Artemis Mons, if it was real and not some binary artefact, could only be artificial.

When the Doctor lowered the photo, everyone was looking at them expectantly. Iaomnet had paused with a forkful of fish halfway to her mouth.

‘Disneyland,’ said the Doctor.

‘Where’s that?’ said Iaomnet.

The Doctor just handed the photo back and picked up a sushi roll in his chopsticks.

‘There’s something artificial under the surface of the mountain,’ said Chris. ‘Some kind of hidden base?’

‘A military listening post?’ said Iaomnet.

‘If it were,’ said Martinique, ‘I’m sure we’d have been refused permission to visit. No, this is something much older. It is not only artificial – it is an
artefact
.’

‘How old is that thing?’ said Iaomnet.

‘Quite a find,’ said Martinique. ‘Quite a find.’ He beamed at Iaomnet. ‘Material for a remarkable dissertation, wouldn’t you say?’

The internal cabin doors were designed to withstand vacuum.

Chris had to shuffle around with the tray until he could press the door chime with his elbow. It took the Ogrons a whole minute to answer.

80

One of them stared at Chris through the open door. ‘Hi,’ said the Adjudicator. ‘I didn’t know whether you guys were going to the galley, but I thought you might like this.’

The Ogron’s gaze lowered slightly until he was looking at the tray Chris was holding. The eyes were nearly hidden under a narrow, protruding ridge of bone, the naked skull sloping up and back to where straw-coloured, limp hair hung down at the back of the head.

The Ogrons had come with the ship, like a couple of appliances. They’d accepted the sudden change in the crew and destination without question. Martinique had fussed over the cargo, delaying their departure for a nail-biting quarter of an hour, and the Ogrons had just done whatever they were told.

Chris could see the other Ogron lurking in the cabin, watching him. Another pair of squinting, mistrustful eyes. ‘Er,’ he said, ‘I looked up some Ogron recipes in the database. I’m not much of a chef – I hope I got it right.’

After a moment, the Ogron stepped back. Chris decided that was an invitation, and stepped into the cabin.

The Ogrons just stood there. They tended to do that, the Xenoculture course had taught, if you didn’t give them an order or some other reason to act. They’d been the same while they’d been loading the cargo hold. Like robots.

The blank stare was rather unnerving. ‘Um, could you pull the table down?’ Chris asked.

Right away, the Ogron who had opened the door unlocked the table and folded it down from the wall. Chris gratefully put down the heavy tray.

‘OK,’ he said, ‘I had to improvise a bit, but the database suggested some substitutes. This is mostly raw mutton and a little bit of ice to keep the temperature down, some rock salt, some geranium leaves and some basil.’

The Ogron who had opened the door shuffled up to the table.

He scooped up a handful of meat and sniffed at it. Then he pushed it into his mouth and chewed, hard, muscles bulging beneath his jaw.

‘My name’s Chris,’ said Chris.

81

The Ogron eyed him for a moment. ‘Good food,’ he said. His voice was deep and throaty. He made a sound like coughing, deep in his chest, and the other Ogron joined him at the table.