‘We had to survive! This was a viable planet—’

‘You had a fleet of ships, Ice Lord. You could have gone somewhere else. The humans did not have that option.’

Ixyldir did not reply. For a few minutes, as the group continued to walk, entering a long, metallined hallway, the only sound was the tramp of feet and the rumble of the world-building engines.

‘Anyway,’ said the Doctor at length. ‘Let’s not dwell on your not-really-very-honourable-at-all decision-making process. You started to tinker with the terraformers. This was ten years ago. You knew it would be a gradual process that would take a long time, but you’ve got plenty of that, haven’t you?

Hibernation systems on your starships. Lifetimes that are naturally three or four times those of humans. You could afford to play the long game. The Morphans, you know, they talk about patience a great deal. It’s a fundamental quality of their culture. Not an easy, sleep-through-it-all patience like yours. I’m talking about the patience required to live and work every day, generation after generation, for a future ideal that will benefit your descendants. It’s admirably selfless. Don’t you think so?’

‘It is… worthy of respect.’

‘It is, isn’t it?’ the Doctor said. ‘They just work towards the future. They make their contribution. They get no reward. They’re just investing the effort of their lives for the good of other people they’re never going to meet.’

They came out into another turbine hall, and Ssord led them up a broad metal staircase towards an upper level.

‘So, your tinkering?’ said the Doctor. ‘You employed seed technology first?’

‘Modified seed cultures were introduced to the primary terraformer systems. Initial results were positive.’

‘But you reached a tipping point eventually,’ said the Doctor. ‘Eventually, as the winters began to get colder, the automatic monitoring systems governing the terraformer systems began to notice there was a problem. They performed self-diagnostic reviews and identified alien properties in the system. They needed to resolve the problem, so they accessed the DNA libraries, reopened the flesh banks, and grew a brand new batch of transrats to flush out the system.’

‘Vermin was our first problem,’ Ixyldir acknowledged.

‘Transrats are resilient,’ said the Doctor. “The more you killed, the more they made. That must have become a bit of a war. A guerrilla war, going on underground in the mountains, where the Morphans couldn’t see it.’

‘We prosecuted the vermin. The problem took about a year to control.’

‘You used standard sonic disruptors, and you were forced to destroy some of the DNA banks and flesh farms so that the terraformers simply couldn’t produce as many replacement transrats?’

‘Yes.’

‘And that still wasn’t enough, was it?’ the Doctor asked. ‘They’re resilient, as I said. Eventually, you must have realised that you couldn’t beat the transrats. You had to find a way around them so they were no longer an impediment to your schemes?’

‘We were forced to select alternatives to the processes we had originally put in place,’ replied Ixyldir, ‘the processes that the vermin had disabled.

Seed technology was no longer viable, because the vermin simply devoured it.’

‘You started to actually convert the terraformers themselves? Recalibrate their systems?’

‘Yes.’

‘And that’s when things really escalated, isn’t it?’

asked the Doctor.

‘In here!’ Ssord said abruptly.

The Doctor followed the Ice Warriors through a large hatch, noting that the palm-print reader had been drilled through.

They entered a massive, well-lit control room.

There were several banks of consoles like the one in the telepresence chamber, each with a row of high-backed chairs. The chamber itself overlooked one of the secondary sequence prebiotic crucibles through a vast plate-glass wall. The Doctor paused to enjoy the view of the giant chrome tree. Drizzle from the cloud systems swirling the ceiling of the crucible chamber pattered against the glass wall like light summer rain.

‘Yes,’ the Doctor nodded. ‘This will do the trick nicely. A central operation nexus. Would have taken me ages to find this, especially with you lot chasing me.’

‘What happens now?’ asked Ixyldir. ‘If you have tricked us into revealing the location of this facility to you, I will kill you myself.’

‘I would expect no less,’ replied the Doctor. He sat down at one of the workstations and began to play with the controls, lighting up banks of indicator functions and small hologram read-outs.

‘You see, Ixyldir,’ he said as he worked, ‘what I think has happened is this. You tampered with the terraformers. The system detected you, and manufactured transrats to solve the problem. So you started tampering in a different way to get around the transrat problem, and the system detected that too. It hadn’t got many options left, so it had to do something quite radical.’

The Doctor turned to look at the Ice Lord.

‘It built something else, Ixyldir,’ he said. ‘Something bigger and nastier. With what was left of its flesh farms, it manufactured something else.’

‘Like what, cold blue star?’ Ixyldir asked.

The Doctor shrugged.

‘The next effective stage beyond transrats.

Something Transhuman, is my guess. And that’s what you’re fighting now.’

Chapter

15

Now in Flesh Appearing

The thing prowled out onto the bridge. It was making a noise in its throat that was part growl, part purr. Its metal claws clinked on the grilled walkway as it took each step.

Amy, Bel and Samewell backed away from it, almost forgetting that a pair of Ice Warriors was closing on them from behind.

It was a monstrous thing. It was almost a man, a huge, lean, well-muscled man, in the same way that a transrat was almost a rat. It had been seriously bio-engineered. Its feet and hands were cybernetic implants that extruded huge steel talons. Amy realised, with rising disgust, that she could see where the bones of the hands were fused into the metal sheathing.

Flexible armoured cables corded its skin like external arteries, and its scarred, baby-pink flesh was puckered with grafting scars, and covered with sockets and surgical plugs. It was moving on all fours like a giant cat. There was a disturbing hint that its human DNA had been blended with that of a major predator, like a leopard or panther, altering its spine, hips and legs so that it could move fluidly and comfortably in quadruped form. It smelled of meat and blood and diseased tissue. Upright, it would have been easily as big as the Ice Warriors, perhaps as much as three metres tall.

Its face was a human skull that had been reinforced with chromed steel and adjusted, like a regular road car customised as a hot-rod. The jaw was huge, and the chin pointed and prominent, in order to accommodate the gleaming set of monstrous fangs. The teeth, twice the size of even adult human dentition, were coated in steel like precise medical instruments. It had a grin full of scalpels. Lip-less, cheek-less, the teeth formed a permanent smile. The crown of the skull was covered in wires, cables and tubes that formed a long, straggly mane of thick strands.

Its eyes glowed red.

It pounced.

Amy, Bel and Samewell ducked instinctively. The thing went clear over them anyway. Leaving a deep, throbbing growl in the air behind it, it crashed into the Ice Warriors.

Still cowering low, Amy turned to see what was happening. The red-eyed monster was taking both of the Ice Warriors on. The glinting steel claws of one forepaw ripped around and tore a deep gouge through the scaled chest plate of one of the Ice Warriors, driving him backwards. The Warrior hissed in pain.