‘Go! Quickly!’ the Doctor urged.

‘Where does it lead?’ asked Arabel.

‘Away from here,’ replied the Doctor, ‘and that’s probably it’s most appealing quality at the moment.

Go!’

Amy scrambled onto the ladder and started to descend. Arabel followed her, and then Samewell.

The Doctor held the hatch lid up, and then followed Samewell as soon as the lad had gone down a few rungs.

Behind him, a final brutal blow broke the door in. It squealed open on mangled hinges and snow swirled into the vent. An Ice Warrior filled the doorway, staring with malevolent yet expressionless red eyes.

The Doctor clattered down the first few rungs, pulling the hatch lid down after him.

It had almost engaged in the shut position when a green pincer caught the edge of it and wedged it open.

With an exclamation of alarm, the Doctor pulled down.

The Ice Warrior pulled up.

No contest.

Chapter

9

The Night is Darker Now

The Doctor grabbed the underside handle of the hatch with both hands, teetering on the edge of a rung. He dragged down on it as hard as he could, teeth clenched, eyes closed. Below him, climbing down the ladder as fast as they could go, Amy, Arabel and Samewell looked up and called out in dismay.

The Ice Warrior simply flipped the hatch up as easily as if he was opening the lid of a wheelie bin.

The hatch went up, and the Doctor went with it. He was pulled clean off the rung he’d been standing on. He dangled for a nanosecond from the handle, his legs hanging free and driving the pedals of an invisible bicycle.

Then he lost his grip.

The Doctor dropped like a stone. The sudden release of his weight jerked the hatch out of the Ice Warrior’s clamp of a hand, and it fell shut. There was a click as the latch engaged.

The Doctor was in no position to appreciate that the Ice Warriors had just been shut out. He was simply in a position of falling crazily down the vent shaft with his legs and arms waving. He hit Samewell first, knocking the young man off the wall ladder. Samewell barely had time to grunt in surprise. They were falling together when they hit Arabel, who was immediately below Samewell. The impact took her off the ladder too. She held on by one hand for a second, but couldn’t retain her grip. Then she was falling with them.

All three of them, a tumbling, yelping bundle of limbs and bodies, collided with Amy, who was the lowest of the four. Her feet slipped off the rungs of the ladder, but she managed to retain her grip. The elastic strap connecting her mittens through the sleeves of her duffel coat caught on the rung for a moment, just long enough for her to plant her grip.

The Doctor, Samewell and Arabel plunged past her and vanished into the darkness of the shaft below.

‘Oh my god! Oh my god!’ Amy babbled, hauling herself back onto the ladder properly, and tilting to gaze down at the drop below. ‘Oh my god! Doctor!

Doctor!’

Her voice echoed back. There was no other sound.

There was no reply. There was no reassuring answer, no It’s OK Amy, we landed safely on this convenient mattress.

On the positive side, there was no sound of impact either.

Amy swallowed hard, shocked by the disastrous turn of events. She called out their names again, and clambered down a few rungs. Then she went back up two steps, unhooked her mitten elastic, and started again.

There was a resounding clang from up above. The Ice Men had started work on the hatch.

Ice Warriors, she told herself, Ice-stupid-well Warriors.

She started to climb down as fast as she could.

Several times she went too fast and slipped. The shaft seemed to go down for ever. They were going to be so dead when she finally reached them. It was going to be upsetting, and very messy, and then she was going to be alone with only Ice Men for company.

Warriors. Warriors!

She carried on down, running out of puff from the exertion. Despite the Doctor’s earlier pledge that the day would be full of Christmas fun, and there’d be an absolute minimum of unnecessary shouting and running about, it had turned out to be the exact opposite. Things really had to stop ending up like this.

The universe was a beautiful, amazing and enthralling place, and she wanted to travel widely and enjoy it, preferably in the alive company of her husband and her good friend the Doctor. Amy was beginning to believe that she wasn’t getting the most out of the universe by touring it at speed, and viewing it in passing. There was never any time to look at things. There only ever seemed to be time to glimpse things while running away from other, more pressing, things.

Amy stopped. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath and blew it out. Her mind was in totally flippant mode because she was trying to block out the idea that she had just seen the Doctor fall to his death, along with two other people she didn’t know particularly well but had good reason to believe were nice and entirely undeserving of death by highspeed ground.

She opened her eyes and started to climb down again, breathing hard, trying to bolster her confidence.

The steady, brutal clanging from the hatch far above wasn’t helping much.

They wanted in, and they wanted in now, did those Ice Men. Warriors. Warriors.

She ignored the banging and scraping, and kept going, one rung at a time, hand-and-foot, hand-and-foot, down and down. How far did this place go?

Amy became aware that there was something different about the shaft below her. It was hard to tell what at first. She grimaced and really hoped it wasn’t a decorated with splatted bodies type of different.

Fortunately, it wasn’t.

The ladder was coming to an end. The rungs ran out at a point where the whole shaft began to gently tilt to the left, like a drainpipe. It went from a straight vertical to a 35-degree drop with a very smoothly engineered bend like a joint in a piece of guttering.

She felt a distant breeze, cool and fresh coming up from below. The shaft seemed to be full of sound, sound just waiting for a chance to echo.

She stepped off the last rung and steadied herself on a sloping floor that, three metres higher up, had been wall.

‘Doctor?’ she called.

The echo came back to her. She edged forward.

It was quite tricky to walk on the angled floor. She struggled to keep her balance. The Ice Warriors continued to hammer and gouge at the hatch high above her.

The tube reminded her of something. She realised what it was. It was like a giant version of those water slides they had at big leisure centres, those great big, slaloming tube rides that Rory loved so much. It was just like that.

Or it was like an oversized version of those hamster playpens people bought from pet shops on the assumption that hamsters liked that sort of thing.

She wasn’t convinced they did. If this was typical of the experience, it wasn’t much fun and she could begin to appreciate the generally surly demeanour evinced by many hamsters.

She edged her way along. There was still no sign of the Doctor or Arabel or Samewell. They must have come all the way down and then shot off around the bend like Rory on a monster waterslide. Or a surly hamster doing hard time in a transparent plastic penitentiary.

‘Doctor?’ she called again, leaning forward to peer into the darkness, combing her hair out of her eyes with her fingers. ‘Doctor? Give us a shout if you’re OK, yeah? Doctor?’

Behind and above her, the Ice Warriors turned their sonic blasters on the unyielding latch and blew it to pieces. The awful noise of the blast reverberated down the shaft to her and made her jump. Her foot slipped.

She kept her balance.