'I know.'

Ca.s.sandra fell quiet inside Iris's head then, and they absorbed the immensity of the dark and the glistening silence of the night frosts. 'Uh-oh,' came the voice again,'I can sense it again. A presence closing in on us. Something that knows we are here and sharing its wilderness.'

Iris came fully awake. 'Who? Our objective?'

'No - something far bigger. Beneath all this icy crust. Deep under the chilly water. Some ma.s.sive presence.'

'Terrific.What is it?'

'I can't even make out a face. Just a load of vaguely malicious intentions.

The mind I sense is too primitive for me to catch a hold. Its thinking is too fuzzy. But it's underneath us, certain miles under the ice, trying to tune in and find us. It can't, quite, yet.'

Iris shuddered.'Never a dull moment. Are you sure it isn't that spider thing you're picking up?'

'Oh no,' said the Empress Ca.s.sandra. 'She's got a fine mind.

Wonderfully honed. One of those deliciously spiky and odd, spidery minds - just the sort that a spider ought to have. I was out there earlier tonight, talking to the spider and her lover.'

'Her lover? You mean the d.u.c.h.ess? You've been in communion with both of them?'

'Yes, it was rather interesting. The spider has been craving attention for years. The two of them are rather besotted with each other.'

'So I gathered.' "They're planning to mesh.' Iris swallowed.'What does that mean?'

'They're going to pool their resources. Become one entirely symbiotic creature.You'll see.' Iris squinted into the dark, but couldn't see much.'Well, good luck to them.'Yet she couldn't see the fun in becoming one with your lover in perpetuity. Surely half the fun was in not being doubled - in being two distinct persons, both individual.

'Don't be so humanist,' snapped the earliest Empress. 'Why should spiders and cyborgs think along the same individualist lines as you do?

They can't think of anything better than being one partially cybernetic arachnid. They can't wait to get it together.'

'Stands to reason,' his mused.'Spiders and cyborgs are always wanting to evolve. To transgress, to become the next thing up the evolutionary scale. I suppose it's natural.'

'No it isn't; laughed the Empress. 'It is gloriously unnatural, and that is why they are both in bliss.'

With that, Ca.s.sandra, the oldest Empress of Hyspero, was gone and Iris was alone. She blinked and found that her mind was clear again.

'Doesn't she remind you just a little bit of Mae West?' The Doctor was standing beside the cab of the bus, leaning on her wheelchair. He was wearing one of his more infectious grins.

"That's it,' Iris laughed.'All that sa.s.siness. That's exactly who she's like.

How did you know I was talking to her?'

He shrugged and flopped down into the wheelchair. Outside the wind had picked up, and with a terrifying keen it rattled all the windows.

Iris said, 'She reckons that there's something under the ice. Hunting for us.'

He nodded. "The Scarlet Empress has given us a comparatively easy time so far. I thought she'd be sending something out to challenge us.

Oh well. I'm sure it's nothing we can't deal with.' He rubbed his palms briskly, though she knew he couldn't really be cold. 'Why don't you go and rest? Everyone else is sleeping.'

'I think I will.'

'How are you holding up?'

'Oh... just about. I'll see this little jaunt through to its end.'

'I hope so, Iris.'

She looked worn, he thought, as she heaved herself out of the driver's seat. Her face was drawn and grey under the preposterous orange plant-pot hat.

'How far do you think we have before we get to the coast?' he asked, burying his concern in practical questions.

'Major Angela says we should get there sometime tomorrow.'

He smiled.'I'm a rotten sailor.'

'You're much more modest this time, you know. I remember a Doctor who claimed to have been instrumental at Trafalgar.'

'Do you?'

Later that night, with dawn starting to shimmer on the furthest corners of the ice field, the Bearded Lady stole out of the bus and went to find the d.u.c.h.ess. She battled through the skirling wind and knew she was taking a ludicrous, foolhardy risk, going blind into the wilderness.

Heavy clods of snow and ice clung to her beard and her combat boots as she plodded, trying to keep track of her direction. For the past few days since leaving the seclusion of Kestheven she had tried to appear put out and cross at having to share her time with the others. Secretly, though, she was quite enjoying herself. The old fierce pleasure she took in danger was reviving in her. Her only regret was that Iris didn't run an altogether tighter ship. They were carrying on like civilians, like a picnic party. And she felt that the others were falling into the habit of mocking her bl.u.s.ter and effort at control. Especially that Doctor.

Worst of all, though, was the suggestion that the d.u.c.h.ess, fabled member of her own one-time crack fighting team, was actually in the throes of falling in love with an arachnid. The idea turned her purple.

She ploughed on through knee-deep snow, managed to steer a brave and blind course between the ice ziggurats that had been sculpted by the winds.'d.u.c.h.ess?' she bellowed against the noise.'Are you still with us?'

She wanted, perhaps, to give the cyborg a piece of her mind. The idea was rather vague and unformed in her mind, but she did want to say her piece. She felt that somehow the d.u.c.h.ess was letting the side down by getting herself so involved. She needed a timely reminder of what their duties - as soldiers of Hyspero - actually were.

It had been Angela the Bearded Lady who, many years ago, had found the d.u.c.h.ess in the first place. On one of her few forays into further s.p.a.ce she had become embroiled in a strange adventure on a life-sustainable moon. On that jewelled and arid ma.s.s Major Angela had found it necessary to put paid to the machinations of a powerful vizier called Sit al-Husn, who had been busily fashioning an entire race of cyborgs. For raw material he had been using the cannibalised spare parts of a colony of human beings who had crash-landed on his private moon. He rescued and utilised their hearts and minds.What luck for old Sit al-Husn! He had cracked open their shiny colony ship and found salvageable bodies of flesh suspended in gloopy life-giving syrups. The fight with him and his spanking-new cyborgs had been one of the Bearded Lady's earliest adventures, she reflected fondly - when her team had only three members. They had foiled the vizier Sit al-Husn's plans, destroyed his secret base and demobilised his hordes of marauding cyborgs - all apart from the d.u.c.h.ess, who, for reasons of her own, found the conscience to help them to win. Happier days. The team of three had become four and they had banished the vizier to Z-s.p.a.ce, as she remembered, before they returned to Hyspero via his wonky and unreliable interst.i.tial bridge. As far as Angela could make out, that was a kind of transdimensional escalator that had burned holes in her boots and given her a headache that lasted a week. So her fighting squad of bandits had been born.

Oh, and then, about a year later that same vizier had returned to take over all of Hyspero, his strength redoubled and his powers charged by a mysterious scimitar he had found deep in Z-s.p.a.ce and he had come wanting to wrest the throne from the Scarlet Empress. She had called in the four to deal with him again. That time, too, it had been the d.u.c.h.ess who had saved their necks.

So many stories, Major Angela thought.

She stood at the mouth of the ice cave. She could almost feel the darkness within upon her skin. Blindness had made her extra sensitive to certain conditions and presences. Her beard actually bristled to tell her who was nearby.

These days she wasn't used to being out in such open s.p.a.ces. It wasn't good for her to feel exposed or out in the open like this. Angela was used to having her protective bears at her back.

The ice at the mouth of the cave had melted and retreated a little and this sound attracted her - the steady drizzle of cold water. She knew the spider and the cyborg were beyond that curtain of melt water. She could sense the bulked, languorous shape of the spider just back from the mouth of the cave, draped in her netting.

'Dawn is up,' she said into the darkness.'We must be on our way.'

There was a hiss and a crackle and she knew when the d.u.c.h.ess was about to speak. The voice seemed to come from right beside her.

'Why did you come out here to talk with me?' asked the d.u.c.h.ess.

'No reason.'Angela found herself turning to go.

'You were thinking, weren't you, about the way we used to be? When we were together in one team? It isn't like you, Major Angela, to dwell upon the past.' The d.u.c.h.ess sounded curiously gentle.

Something twisted in Angela's gut. No, this wasn't like her. She was supposed to be tough as old boots. She was never given to remorse.

She certainly never felt anxious about the future, as she did now.

Something was pushing at the back of her mind this early morning. An awful sense of foreboding that was alien to her.

'You don't think that we are going to make it through this mission,' the d.u.c.h.ess said flatly. Once more, in that implacable manner, the cyborg had put her cold finger right on it.

'We're all so much older now,' said the Bearded Lady. Her shoulders had slumped. Suddenly she looked very small. 'No, I don't think we're going to make it. How can we even think of going against the Scarlet Empress? Even at our height we wouldn't have dreamed of that.' She sighed. Then came sounds of stirring from within the ice cavern, as if the spider was waking and preparing to emerge.

'I have never heard you sound so defeated, Major Angela,' said the cyborg.

'To tell you the truth, what I feel like doing is just getting rid of this... thing for ever, here and now.' From inside her voluminous furs she produced the jar that contained the eldest Empress, Ca.s.sandra. 'I could burn a hole in the ice and we could drop her into the dark water and she'd be gone and the Empress would have nothing to pursue us for.' In the light of the morning the jar was a vivid heliotrope.

'No.'When the d.u.c.h.ess spoke again, her voice was somewhat altered.

'You'll do nothing of the kind, Major Angela.'

The Bearded Lady gave a little jump.'Why? What's happening?' Once again she cursed her blindness. She hated not knowing what was going on.

The Cyborg's voice had become louder and scratchier, and oddly-doubled.

'G.o.ds...' Major Angela gasped, though she wasn't in the least bit religious.

She could feel something emerge from the cave. She knew that it wasn't the d.u.c.h.ess, and it wasn't the spider. It was something else, that gave off a fierce, metallic heat that seared her skin as it pa.s.sed. The snow hissed, melting on contact. She could even smell rank, burning flesh and hair. She cowered.

What emerged from the crepuscular darkness of the ice cell was a spider, a little larger than the original spider, fashioned entirely from silver and gla.s.s. Its brittle legs hissed and snapped and sparked as it tested them out, as if it was a newborn creature, rather than the alchemical product sprung from a combination of two component beings.

It moved with a certain ungainliness across the ice past Major Angela, its skin gleaming like a newly created alloy in the wavering sun. The ten eyes of the d.u.c.h.ess surmounted the original faceted eyes of the spider like a cl.u.s.ter of bright jewels studding the pommel of a sword. Those vastly improved eyes drank in the light.

Even without being able to see this new being, the Bearded Lady knew exactly what had happened.

The hybrid creature spoke in both voices at once.

'You said we had all grown older, Major Angela. Whereas we... have made ourselves anew.'

'How?' asked the Major helplessly.

'It is accomplished. We are bonded.'

With each further, increasingly sure step that the Spider d.u.c.h.ess took, the snow and ice hissed and steamed. Her carapace was iridescent in the dawn. That brightness, that heat radiated outward and drew the others, aboard the bus, to the windows, to see the morning's new arrival.

And also, the heat of this bonding drew the attention of the creature that was cruising them, and coming after them, far below the ice, in the still leagues of water below. This creature looked up, and saw a beacon leading to his goal in the shape of the Spider d.u.c.h.ess.

He heard the Scarlet Empress tell him to go in for the kill.

Chapter Twenty-Four.

The Walrus and the Turtle

We spent some time that morning thinking about spiders.

Oh. I am the Doctor. I think I should explain. I'm not all that used to this first-person narrative mode. I've always had a liking for the free indirect.

I'm not sure what this says about me. But... I'm holding the action up.

And what a lot of action there was after this!

First of all I was aboard with the others explaining that it was once believed - all over the cosmos, in many different traditions, as these beliefs are inclined to crop up simultaneously - that the souls of sleeping persons could leave their bodies in the form of spiders. Not a very comfortable belief, I agree. So when Sam, Iris, Gila and I woke and saw this incredible transformation wrought on the spider, my first thought was that someone's soul had crept out through the night and not returned.

Odd thoughts. Then I realised that the spider and the cyborg had gone the whole hog and had linked themselves up into the same, incredible being.

Of course I thought of W.B. Yeats writing in that poem of his, 'changed, changed utterly / a terrible beauty is born.' Because there was indeed something compellingly beautiful about the altered creature we looked out and saw that morning.

The spider, I said to the others, was always looked upon as a rather untrustworthy creature. So was the lizard, and I stole a glance at Gila here, but didn't say anything. I've always thought of spiders as highly intelligent and organised, though I have never enjoyed their company much.

I asked Iris if she had ever happened across the outer worlds where spiders rule the roost? Very dark places. Terrible food, of course.

Wonderful opera. I asked Iris,'Have you ever heard the spiders sing?'

The Spider d.u.c.h.ess was lowering itself to rest on the ice, as if she needed to recuperate from the shock of reinvention.

I thought about the myth that the spider lowers itself on a thread and is thus a.s.sociated with joys descending from heaven. All nonsense, of course.

I thought about the d.u.c.h.ess's decision to marry herself to all that tradition and that mythology. Both she and the spider had effectively placed themselves right outside any particular race. They had become completely unique. And then I thought that it wasn't so much like gaining a marriage partner, as gaining six extra legs. Iris seemed to read my mind just then and added, 'And the ability to spin thread.'

The silver arachnid spent some time on the ice, basking and recovering.

I cooked us all up some breakfast - French toast and lashings of syrup - and we waited to see what the Spider d.u.c.h.ess was going to make of her new-found self. We couldn't quite be sure if we could still trust her.

There was some heated debate on board the bus about whether we should simply drive on and see if she would follow, or whether we ought to try to communicate properly with her Major Angela came stomping and huffing aboard and said that the Spider d.u.c.h.ess had become a most uncommunicative colleague and wasn't saying anything much just at the moment. She looked sickened by the whole affair.

And then... and then the Spider d.u.c.h.ess called us out.

Her voice came insinuating across the plain of ice and we were drawn outside to speak to her.