"Then they"ll kill Rokk!"
Kat hesitated. "But what if he gets to Enros and dooms the planet?"
"We don"t know that will happen!"
"I"m sure of it!" They locked eyes, each hoping to find rea.s.surance in the other"s stare.
From the direction of the Great Hall, they heard a male voice screaming.
223.
"I"m cold," said Chris.
Roz had to agree. Detrios was freezing: the surface could support life, but that was about all. Even so, it wasn"t like her partner to complain about such things. He was trying to avoid thinking about what happened next. That, more than the temperature, caused Roz to shiver.
"Where now?" she asked.
"I don"t know." Chris scanned the dunes half-heartedly. "I"ve never been to the surface before."
"Then I suggest we find a way down." He gave a slight nod, which Roz decided was consent enough. She set a brisk pace and hoped he would follow. She shuffled dust out from under her feet and kept her eyes peeled for downward-leading hatches.
"I"m not sure about this."
She halted, surprised by her partner"s sudden remark. He cut a solitary figure against the dull grey backdrop and she knew that, at this moment, it would be easy to persuade him to give in. He wanted that. She owed it to him not to let it happen.
"Can you turn back? Can you go home and forget about it all?" Chris shook his head. "Come on then," Roz said, her brusqueness masking her true emotions. "Let"s search."
She just hoped she would be able to cope with the fallout later.
Without pause for thought, Kat broke cover and raced towards the Great Hall. Thruskarr reached to s.n.a.t.c.h her back, but he was too late. He followed reluctantly, but at a good pace despite that. They were halfway down the pa.s.sage before Kat realized that, just beyond the now open door, a fight had broken out.
The five cultists had rushed into an ambush. Through a flurry of fists, sticks and knives, Kat saw the faces of Rokk and Myrg.
They had taken their foes by surprise, but the odds were still against them. Kat jumped in and propelled one cultist to the floor. Thruskarr took care of another, flipping him into a wooden bench. In seconds, it was over and only the four rebels were standing.
Now the heat of the moment had pa.s.sed, Kat realized that the scream she had heard had come from Myrg"s throat: the bait 224 which had lured his enemies within. He was leaning against the wall now, panting, whilst Rokk nodded only a brief acknowledgement to the new arrivals before hauling one of the groggy but conscious cultists to his feet. "I want to know where Enros is!"
His captive spat at him. Rokk increased his grip until the young man squealed. Kat was suddenly aware of banging from the other entrances. She saw that benches had been pulled in front of them. But the cultists were determined and the northern door was splintering beneath a concerted onslaught.
Thruskarr studied the shadows searchingly. "It doesn"t make sense that Enros would be anywhere else. This is the only guarded area."
Rokk"s prisoner laughed, although his voice was hoa.r.s.e. "Our Lord is too clever to be beaten by mere heathens. You will not find him." Kat remembered the so-called deity"s secret hiding place, in which he had concealed himself when she and Christopher had tried a similar a.s.sault. She almost revealed the information, then thought it might be best if Rokk didn"t share her knowledge.
Rokk lost patience and punched the cultist, who collapsed in a heap. He grabbed another. "One of them will tell us!"
Kat laid a hand on his arm. "We haven"t enough time. We"d be better off getting out of here!"
"There are only four of us," Myrg agreed, worriedly.
"Where is Krossli?" asked Thruskarr.
"He provided a diversion to get us in here," said Rokk. "I think they caught him." In a spurt of rage, he pinned the cultist against the wall. "That"s why this sc.u.m is going to tell me what he knows! I"m not letting our sacrifices be for nothing!"
Kat still hung onto his arm. "It"s not worth it!" she insisted.
"Listen, Rokk, I really think the world might end if Enros dies!"
Rokk whirled and stared at her with contempt. "Not you, of all people!"
"No!" she said hastily. "But -"
She was interrupted by a crash and a shout: the north door had fallen and seven cultists charged into the Hall. Kat spun towards 225 the door she had entered by, but six more were hurtling from that direction. Rokk acted quickly, grabbing the knife from his captive"s belt. He threw it to Kat, then brandished his stick. The outnumbered rebels moved, in a back-to-back circle, to the centre of the room.
The two attacking forces converged upon them.
Chris didn"t recognize the area of the underground city into which he and Roz emerged. It was evidently residential: rough holes cut out of damp walls gave access to barely habitable caves. Most were part.i.tioned off by curtains, but in others Chris saw ill-made furniture and family groups huddling together in fear. Many more civilians were out in the streets, talking in doom-laden tones, not knowing what to do as (so far as Chris could make out) civil war ran rife through their community.
Those people who noticed the visitors avoided them, displaying a mixture of fear and disgust.
"Come on," Roz hissed as he faltered, his eyes drawn to the images of misery. "Forget them."
"I can"t," he protested. "How could I? I never saw this last time. I thought of the Detrians as being just rulers, cultists and rebels. What about these people? What about the real inhabitants of the planet?"
"We can"t help them all."
"But to rescue one woman? It all seems so pointless. We can"t let this happen. We can"t let the Doctor . . ." He tailed off, realizing that he had begun to shout.
Roz looked at him with a pitying expression. She had known this all along; known just how futile their mission would be. But she had acceded to his demands anyway. She had even persuaded the Doctor to do likewise.
She had known that Chris had to see for himself.
He turned away to digest that revelation. His new line of sight brought him face-to-face with a Detrian woman. She was cowering in her dirty hovel and clutching a screaming child to her breast. Chris almost felt like crying himself, at the merciless inevitability of her fate.
Roz was there for him, as always. "Shall we head back to the 226 rendezvous point? Or do you want to carry on searching?"
"They"re the cause of it!" a hoa.r.s.e, male voice interrupted, removing the need for that painful decision. The Detrians had chosen to avoid them no longer.
Chris felt Roz tensing. Her hand hovered over her gun and he reluctantly made his do the same. They were becoming surrounded by what he could only liken to a lynch-mob. Too many to fight; their only chance lay in calming them.
"We"re not here to hurt you. Please let us pa.s.s. We"re simply looking for someone."
"Like Enros?" You one of his pink-skinned alien friends?" A murmur of discontent answered that cry.
"No, no!" another man piped up. "This one escaped from Enros!"
"That"s right, I did," said Chris, eager to distance himself from the evil cult leader. "We"re no allies of his."
"They betrayed him," wailed an old woman. "Their defiance has brought this fate upon us!" This time, to Chris"s dismay, the crowd fairly roared its agreement.
"Fickle alien idiots," Roz growled. She went for her weapon, but two people jumped her from behind. Her grip loosened involuntarily and the blaster hit the floor.
So, a second later, did Chris and Roz. The Detrians, convinced of their unholy intent, acted with one bloodthirsty group mind and swarmed over them in an unstoppable torrent.
The chaos in the Great Hall was exacerbated by the sudden arrival of two more groups. Even as the third and final company of cultist sentries fought their way through the western door, twenty or more yelling rebels charged across the open northern entrance. Kat"s heart leapt, initially at her own unexpected reprieve, but again at the sight of her brother, Mortannis, at the head of this latter force.
A nanoseg later, she was trapped in the midst of a savage battle, and she hardly knew which way to turn. Bodies dropped, people toppled into her and Kat"s ears rang with the cries and clangs and sickening thumps of an all-out war. She remembered the knife which Rokk had given her, but she couldn"t bring 227 herself to use the lethal weapon. Instead, she waded through the melee, pulling crazed cultists away from her friends, delivering kicks here and there and doing what little good she could. As well as the rebels who had disappeared with Mort, Kat recognized some of those she had left at the hut. Her brother had succeeded in motivating them where she and Rokk had failed. And his efforts were paying dividends: the fight was surely turning their way.
In those confusing, exciting, somehow unreal moments, Kat"s mind lurched from thought to thought: from Christopher (wherever he was now), to Enros (was he worried, or were things going as planned?) to the strong and comforting image of Mortannis (she didn"t doubt that he would come out of this okay) to the Miracle, which shone down on them through the self-made hole in the roof of the Hall. She wondered if it really was a gift from some G.o.d more benevolent than Enros. And what that G.o.d would think of all this.
Then a strong voice, louder than human vocal chords could produce, ordered: "Stop!" And, just like that, the fighting came to a ragged halt.
For a moment, Kat thought that that should amaze her. But her own body, like the rest, had been frozen immobile by the barked command. Enros, she realized, trying to think dispa.s.sionately, must have had an artificial voicebox fitted to amplify his words so.
The sight of the revealed cult leader was certainly a cautionary one. His machine-augmented, ravaged body glittered in the Miracle"s blue-green radiance. That same light cast his features into shadow.
"I will not have this fighting amongst my subjects," he intoned. Kat saw for the first time that he held a ceremonial knife. "If this is the way the Detrians behave, then they do not deserve to survive in this life or the next." A gasp of fear rippled from his audience as Enros poised the blade at his own chest. "I demand and expect nothing less than your total faith. If I cannot have that - if one more blow is struck by any of you - then I will terminate this miserable reality!"
228.
All those a.s.sembled, cultists and rebels alike, were stunned into silence. Kat felt somebody tense beside her; when she looked, she saw that it was Rokk. But even he, certain as he had been of his own beliefs, did not dare make a move.
n.o.body dared to disobey.
Enros licked his thin lips and shifted his grip on the knife handle. His face twitched and he blinked rapidly. He spoke in a low, convincing, dreadful tone as he underlined his terrible threat.
"If you - any of you - choose not to follow me, then I shall commit suicide. If that happens, you will all die by my side!"
Roz had been stripped of weapons and was helpless against the frenzied crowd which herded her along the subterranean pa.s.sageways. To make things worse, her partner seemed to have given up already. Chris stumbled along, a short way ahead but separated from her by an impenetrable ma.s.s of fear-driven natives. His head was bowed as if accepting his fate, perhaps as some perverse punishment for the Doctor"s actions. She wanted to scream at him to show some courage, but the sounds of vociferous bloodl.u.s.t deafened her and would have rendered such remonstrations inaudible.
As Roz was pushed and pulled up a metal ladder, she kicked out blindly in token protest. "You miserable, weak-willed sheep sheep!" By the time she lay with the taste of the surface world"s dust in her mouth, she had wounded at least four of them. Not that that would help. One of the Detrians had appointed herself leader and, on her orders, the defenceless soldier was hauled back to her feet and borne towards a raised platform on which - her stomach turned as she saw - a permanent set of gallows had been constructed from st.u.r.dy wood. Hangings were obviously commonplace on Detrios. She could think of better ways to go.
"Get them up here," the mob leader bellowed over the clamour, although her compatriots were already doing just that.
"String the non-believers up!" Roz began to struggle again, her best hope that she would be able to inflict a few more painful bruises before she was subdued.
229.
Then her captors drew back and she felt suddenly lost, standing on the platform, rope binding her wrists and tickling her throat, a trapdoor beneath her feet. The knots weren"t tight and she weighed up her chances of being able to escape before the fatal lever was pulled. They weren"t high.
She twisted to look at Chris instead. His eyes were closed and he was muttering something. The crowd were at fever pitch now, screaming for the aliens" lives and the approval which their sacrifice might bring. But, after a moment, she was able to read his lips. He was mouthing "I"m sorry", over and over. She wanted to say something, but no words seemed sufficient.
She shuddered and held her head up high, and cursed all the fates for letting her die like this. For this, she knew with an icy certainty, was going to be the end for them both.
Unless, by some chance, a miracle could save them.
It was Mortannis who first attempted to break the deadlock in the Great Hall, although even he did not risk using physical means.
"Why should we be afraid of your death?" he challenged Enros. "That"s what most of us came here to achieve!"
"You would sacrifice your universe?"
"We don"t believe your lies!" shouted Rokk, emboldened by Mort"s lead.
Kat watched with a sensation of dread. She began to move through the crowd, feeling that she should be close when the moment came.
"I suggest that those who do believe," said Enros softly, "should kneel before me now. I require a show of unanimous devotion if I am to allow this existence to endure."
Most of the cultists dropped immediately. By the time the rest had followed, a number of rebels were on their knees too. Still more wavered uncertainly before deciding to play safe.
Kat felt exposed, as one of only seven who remained on her feet.
"This desperate ploy of yours won"t work," Mort said. He sounded confident. Kat knew him well enough to know that was a bluff. "Your cultists were defeated before you arrived. It"s 230 over!"
Rokk started forward, fingering a knife which he had obviously picked up during the skirmish. A glare from Enros halted him.
"Why don"t we take him prisoner?" Kat spoke up. Her voice sounded terribly small.
"And let him play the martyr?" scoffed Rokk. "We have to prove that this faker"s death will mean nothing!"
A smile tugged at Enros"s emaciated features. He indicated the worshipful a.s.sembly. "And do you imagine that my new recruits will allow you to commit such a sin?"
"Why not admit the truth?" implored Mort. "We can end this.
We can get on with Detrios"s more pressing problems, united."
Enros looked at the rebel leader with contempt. He opened his mouth to deliver a rejoinder. But Rokk had overcome his fears and doubts. He took advantage of the distraction, leaping across the Hall, knife raised. Enros jumped back with a most unG.o.dlike strangulated cry. Some of the cultists were rising, alarmed, but they were far too late to prevent the inevitable.
Kat acted on instinct. She flung herself at Rokk and brought him down. He bellowed in frustration and threw her off, and now Mortannis was rushing Enros too.
Somehow Kat managed to place herself between the two avengers and their target: the fallen idol who cringed before them.
"I"m sorry," she said, her voice quavering, "but if you want to kill him, you"ll have to go through me first!"
231.
25.Don"t Blame Me
In the end, it was easier than anyone expected.
Ace journeyed successfully through the crystal and almost enjoyed the experience. It had been too long since she had given her combat skills a sustained workout, and the macabre, Aliens Aliens- type scenario which her mind obligingly provided was perfect for flexing her muscles in. The only drawback was the insectoid nature of her mindscape"s protagonists. They brought to mind the Charrl and the things which had burrowed under her skin on the Artifact; worst of all, her mutated possible future self that she had seen when the TARDIS turned itself inside out. Insects were definitely her least favourite monsters.