Chapter 7
Firman heard the soldiers emerging from the mess hut and cowered like a furtive rodent, crouching down low to the mud, trying to sink into the ground and disappear. Convinced he was about to be detected, his hands cramped with terror not at the thought of discovery but at the nameless, unthinkable consequences should he fail in the task his master has set him.
They didn't see him. The troopers split up into pairs and spread out across the camp. None of them were inclined to walk out into the graveyard where Firman lay blanketed by the dark. He waited a few moments longer and then resumed his efforts, scraping at the soft earth with a trowel and with cracked, blackened fingernails, digging a hole deeper and deeper at the base of a cross.
* * * * *
The Doctor leaped to his feet, suddenly bursting with energy and enthusiasm.
"Right! Let's go."
The others looked up at him doubtfully.
"Er... where to?" Kallon asked.
The Doctor jabbed the datapad screen impatiently with one bony finger.
To these pillars. To the gate, as your people have insisted on calling it."
"Why?" asked Alison in despairing protest.
The Doctor snorted derisively but managed to slow himself down enough to explain.
"Isn't it obvious? It's not a gate, but it's something. It was built higher than the rest, so it's significant. There may be a clue there. Now come on, we're just wasting time."
Kallon didn't stir, leaning back in his seat and linking his hands over his stomach.
"You want to leave the security of the force barrier and wander round the wilderness in the middle of the night looking at old stones."
"Security?" repeated the Doctor, eyebrows lifting like hawk's wings. "Interesting choice of words. Ask poor Mr Sanderline how secure it is. I already told you, that wall was built to keep something in. Whatever's doing the killing is walled up in here with us!"
"Mm." Kallon glanced out through the semi-transparent plastic window of the hut, eyeing the moisture beading on its surface and the pitch black night beyond. "All the same, I think I'll leave this one to you. Corporal Bremen here will go with you, won't you, Corporal?"
"Yes, Sir," the corporal with the datapad replied dutifully.
"Suit yourself," the Doctor said, looking far from displeased at this turn of events. "Come on, Alison."
"Ah, no." Kallon raised a casual hand. "She stays here, I think. Call it a little insurance on my part."
The Doctor, already heading for the exit, jolted to a halt and whirled to face him.
"What?" His lips tautening, he advanced pace by pace on where the officer remained calmly seated. "If you think I'm going to leave her here, with someone like you, a preening, callous, self..."
"Um, Doctor?"
Alison interrupted him diffidently and he looked round at her, irritated at having his flow broken just as he was gathering steam.
"What?"
"To be honest with you," she confessed, "I'm okay with staying here in the dry."
He stared at her for a moment, visibly holding onto his breath, and closed his eyes for a second before speaking again.
"Right. Fine. Have a lovely evening, the both of you." He turned again and strode for the exit. "Coming, Corporal? Apparently it's just you and me."
* * * * *
Outside in the night, two soldiers stamped their feet so that the mist swirled agitated about their boots. They glowered in sullen resentment at the dim glow emerging from the huts and thought of the warmth within.
"Morale officer," one muttered bitterly. "Like our job's not tough enough we have to babysit some spoilt little tenderfoot."
"Right," agreed the other. "A spoilt little tenderfoot who's just looking for an excuse to have us all shot for dissent."
"Did you hear about the morale officer from the 27th? Sent a whole platoon to the eradicator because he didn't know which one of them wrote a limerick on the general's command ship."
"Oh, yeah..." The other brightened. "Hey, didn't he walk under a diffusion bomb at the Merovia bridgehead?"
"Huh." His companion grunted with the smugness of a juicy secret. "That's what the dispatches say."
"What do you mean?"
"I had it from a bombardier who got transferred to us from the 27th. He was one of the survivors after they got wiped out at Doniman. Anyway, he says there was never any diffusion bomb. He got fragged by his own men."
The second soldier paused, then gave him a sideways sceptical look, suspecting he was being laughed at.
"Nah... they couldn't kill a morale officer. They'd never get away with it. There'd be investigations."
"No," said his friend with a cunning look. "See, these officers are all well connected, all from rich government families. Now, no one wants to hear that their little prince got shot in the back by his own men. They want to hear that he went down a hero, holding off the alien horde. So whatever anyone thinks really happened, they're all just happy to stick with the diffusion bomb story."
The other soldier digested this, turning a contemplative gaze back towards the huts.
"Wow," he commented at last, and paused a few moments longer. " Course, the 27th didn't have civilians scurrying about the place, telling tales."
"No."
Their breath steaming in the chilly damp air, they both eyed the huts in silence.
* * * * *
Alison sat back and sighed gustily in her boredom, her eyes roaming around the drab, cavernous room in search of something other than plastic chairs and tables to settle upon.
"Should have told him he had one hour or the girl gets it," she said belligerently. "Call yourself a villain?"
Sitting across the table from her, Kallon looked up from his calm perusal of a hand-held data pad.
"Well... no," he said. "You may not like me very much, Alison, but believe it or not I came here to help."
"You're no fun," she grumbled, folding her arms. She glanced over at the guard on the door. "Anyway, you've only got one henchman left. What happened to the others?"
He gave her a thoughtful look, then twisted at the waist to inspect his sole remaining bodyguard.
"Hm. Good point." He lifted his head to address the man. "Trivic. Go and see what's..."
Kallon broke off and looked at the misty gloom half-visible through the hut's window. He turned back around to take in the desolation of the abandoned tables and chairs around them in this room which had somehow become deserted but for them.
"Actually," he said softly, "never mind. Stay where you are."
* * * * *
The Doctor puffed a little with the exertion of hiking through the muddy, rocky terrain, sloping steadily up towards where his companion assured him the two supposed gateposts stood. The moisture hanging heavily in the night air beaded silver on his hair and coat and shone on the pale skin of his face. He stopped to take a breath and glanced round at the soldier struggling along at his heels.
"Come on. We haven't got all night as far as I know. What's your name anyway?"
"Bremen, Sir," replied the corporal. The Doctor tossed his head back scornfully.
"Your first name, you ridiculous man. You're not at school."
"Erm..." A young man with half-formed, well-scrubbed features and pale curly hair plastered damply to his scalp, the soldier looked down at his feet, embarassed. "It's Jak, Sir."
"Fine. And it's Doctor, not Sir. Please try to remember that."
"Yes Si... Doctor."
The Doctor set off once more at speed, his long legs carrying him over the ground fast enough to make Jak Bremen struggle to keep up. They had long since penetrated the force barrier around the encampment, Bremen using a coded key to deactivate one of the pylons, and they were now striking out alone over unclaimed land. The young corporal kept one hand on the sidearm holstered at his hip, his eyes roving cautiously over what little he could make out of their surroundings. Soon the stones loomed up before them, black against the night sky, twenty foot high rough-hewn monoliths weighing many tons.
The Doctor stood with hands in pockets, feet braced apart, looking up at the columns with an air of satisfaction.
"Right," he said. "Jak, did you bring a torch?"
The young soldier looked suddenly queasy, tensing at the unexpected question as though struck in the pit of the stomach.
"No... I mean... was I supposed to?"
The Doctor gave an impatient "tut".
"Lucky I did, then."
A pencil-thin black tube in his hand flashed into life and played its beam along the rain-slick surface of the nearest column. Bremen watched him, standing awkwardly in the knowledge of his own uselessness.
"What's this?" the Doctor asked suddenly, the pitch of his voice rising a notch as the torch's light zeroed in on a point six feet above the ground.
"That?" Bremen peered closely, his dark-accustomed eyes blinking against the light. "Oh..."
The pillar bore a row of crude markings, furrowed deeply into the stone. Little more than angular scratches crushed up one against the other as though created in extreme haste.
"Some of the monuments have those," he said with a shrug. "No one knows what they're for."
The Doctor's only response to him was an irritable shake of the head while he peered closer, raising the torch up high.
"Well, it's a warning, that much is clear enough. Let's see. Beware the... the single eye... the fire... burns like ice..." He frowned. "This is surprisingly difficult."
Bremen goggled at him.
"You can read it?"
"I can generally read all alien scripts," the Doctor replied airily. "But this is so primitive, it barely counts as writing at all. Now then..." He traced the last few marks with his fingertip,
brushing away clumps of ancient moss and lichen from the rock. "Beware the... the giants made of... of... rainwater?"
He paused, looking faintly embarrassed.
"Well. I might have that last bit slightly wrong. Then again, with the limitations of this script, they might just have been expressing as best they could a concept that was strange to them."
"Rainwater." Bremen puzzled over this. His eye was caught by the sheen of water on the Doctor's coat, and the way it glinted in the starlight with his movements. "So, what... shiny?"
The Doctor glanced round, not with a cutting remark for once, but looking genuinely and pleasantly surprised at hearing something from his military companion which was not stupid.
"Not a bad thought. They were a stone-age people, they would have had no glass, no metals, no polished gems... yes, it might just mean shiny."
He ran his fingertips thoughtfully across the marks driven into the column, and the short-lived brightening of his expression fell steadily into shadow as he mused softly to himself:
"Shiny giants. With a single eye. And fire that burns like ice."
* * * * *
Back at the encampment, four of the troopers stood huddled round a portable heater in the shelter of the storage bunker from which they had retrieved it, shielded from the prying eyes of the officer if he should choose to emerge from the mess hut and check that they were patrolling as ordered. The device glowed redly in the night, sending waves of blessed, shimmering heat through their bodies, driving out the cold embedded in their bones, allowing fingers and jaws to unclench. Their mood lifted, this simplest of pleasures making life seem quite bearable after all.
Not fifty feet away, the loose earth stirred, unnoticed, at the base of one of the crosses in the makeshift graveyard. It was sucked down as though into a muddy whirlpool and then forced back up, the ground shifting like a living, beating heart, the cross itself slanting slowly over as it was undermined. Slowly a great bulging mass of earth rose up like some grotesque black monster, and then fell away in clumps, revealing little by little the mud-streaked thing beneath.
A great silver hand drove into the firmer ground alongside the grave, crushing the heavy soil with inhuman strength as the thing pulled itself upward. Eyes as dark and blank as the windows of an abandoned home fixed themselves on the four armed men who stood clustered such a little distance away.