'We are expecting company.'

'Who?' we asked.

'We can sense the approach...'

'Who? What can we expect?'

'We have bonded in order to protect us all from this oncoming threat,'

said the Spider d.u.c.h.ess.

'Oh, great,' said Iris.

At which point the flat stretch of ice between our huddled party and the Spider d.u.c.h.ess exploded upward and outward in a vast, chilling surge of water and ice. Great jagged plates burst apart and were flung through the air. A gigantic body was heaving itself beneath our feet and struggling to crash through the ice. The water boiled in fury, in billows and clouds of steam and all, for a few awful moments, was noise and confusion.

The creature beneath us threw back its grizzled head and roared. It surged out of the hole it had made.

'Uh, Doctor,' said Iris. She backed into the doorway of her bus. "That large and horrible creature we've been expecting - I think it's here.'

It was a walrus, incalculably ancient, the size of three double-decker buses. Before we could even react it had hauled itself out of the crack in the ice and thrashed around, trying to get to us. It looked so ungainly on the ground, sliding about on great black flippers that were each the width of a Volkswagen Beetle. It was dragging the solid bulk of its body behind - those ma.s.sive haunches! I was spellbound by those fetid, yellow tusks, clagged with plaque, and the thick black whiskers that bristled from its jaw and round its jowls.

I yelled at everyone to get back aboard. They were stunned into confusion, scrabbling for purchase on the unsteady ground. Sam was shouting back at me: that if the ice cracked across we wouldn't stand a chance. Gila just looked ready for a fight.

But it was the Spider d.u.c.h.ess who came to our rescue. As the walrus got its bearings and roared and lumbered towards us, it was met in battle by that gleaming, now much less awkward composite being. Her legs were like tentacles, lashing out as she hurried towards it. She seemed almost to relish the sport of skittering and scampering around the beast, and throwing out cables of the thickest, stickiest web fluid you could imagine. Her legs bristled, flashed and jabbed at its leathery hide.

It thrashed and screamed at the webbing she tried to la.s.so it with. It even gashed its own flesh with its tusks in the attempt to pull it off.

The many eyes of the newborn Spider d.u.c.h.ess glowed a coruscating green. She bought us time to hurry back to the bus. I grabbed the blind Bearded Lady by both arms and brooked no rebuke, manhandling her back to safety as she bellowed and demanded to know what was going on.

The Spider d.u.c.h.ess was almost dancing with glee on the ice.

At last, it seemed, she had found a worthy opponent upon which she could try out her new self, her whetted, augmented powers.

The walrus groaned and shrieked and started to flail its ma.s.sive tail, making the plates of ice shudder and start to crack.

'Doctor...' Sam pulled at me, as if I had to sort this out. I turned to Iris.

She had already launched herself out of her wheelchair, and was ransacking her little armoury - the weapons cupboard under the stairs. I tried to warn her: don't use anything too heavy, don't break the ice...

There was a crackle of livid energy on the air and a scream of rending metal and we whirled to see the walrus sinking one of its tusks into the Spider's metallic abdomen. Her legs flexed and shuddered spasmodically. Sam swore.

Gila then decided to take matters into his own hands. He bolted back off the bus and hurried across the ice. Great spumes of frost and ice impeded him like a mini storm, but he ploughed on and we saw him whirling a cleaver he had fetched from Iris's a.r.s.enal. As the walrus stepped up its onslaught against the Spider d.u.c.h.ess, Gila sank that cleaver into the creature's unguarded, blubbery and wrinkled elbow. The walrus screamed. With a careless flick it knocked Gila on to his back, and stepped on him with one damaged flipper. The wind knocked out of him, Gila struggled there, pinned, and it was a moment or two before he could howl his outrage.

'Do something!' Sam shouted.

'Sam!' Iris shouted back at her, and dragged her over to her rusty cache of weapons.

I said something like, 'I'm not having her using your filthy old weapons,'

and I got knocked aside by the two of them. Underfoot the ice rocked and buckled once more. I couldn't even stand straight. Iris and Sam were breathlessly conferring.

Beside me Major Angela was fumbling with her fur coat, and produced the smooth gla.s.s jar in which the earliest Empress was kept. I was afraid she would drop it and Ca.s.sandra would be dashed to the ground.

'Maybe she can help us...' the Bearded Lady said.

'Don't count on it,' said Iris briskly, now bent over in the wheelchair at the door of the bus. Sam was helping her rig up some oddments from the armoury. They were hurriedly clicking together the legs of a tripod. I dashed over to see them a.s.sembling a rusted contraption and was in time to see Iris produce, from an old locker, the longest, nastiest harpoon you have ever seen.

'It's a harpoon gun!' Sam cried.

Outside there was more noise as, in one sudden swoop, the Spider d.u.c.h.ess lashed back into life and attack. She gripped hard on to the sea beast's leathery back, confounding it. It bucked and jounced and howled, inadvertently freeing the enraged Gila. The Spider d.u.c.h.ess was thrown around, yet held on, her legs and tatters of web whipping in the frigid air as a blizzard of ice swept up around them.

I saw Iris quite methodically fitting and snapping together the last of her harpoon gun. Sam was hanging back now, gazing in appalled horror at the contraption she had, up until a few moments ago, been helping that wily old devil to construct. She was wrestling with herself, I could see it.

She wouldn't help Iris any more, but she couldn't stop her any more.

Sam looked at me. Iris got behind the contraption. She wedged her body into position. She squinted down the sightlines. Sam saw where she was aiming and suddenly yelled out,'Tell the spider, tell her to get out of the - 'And Iris fired.

A whipping loop of metal cord shot out of the bus after the spear and the noise and the crack and the smell of the cordite was overpowering as Sam and Iris were thrown backwards across the gangway.

When the harpoon hit home there was an almighty wallop.

The screen fizzles and crackles into life. Lurching views of the interior of the bus. Glimpses of the panic and flurries outside. Iris has grabbed her camera again and is recording, gabbling into the microphone.

We see the Doctor's appalled face and Sam running for the doorway.

Then the viewfinder fixes on the view outside.We see the battle in its dying throes.

The Spider d.u.c.h.ess is still lashing itself with webbing to the creature's back. The walrus has a spike lodged in its fleshy breast and it thrashes against the ice. Its screams ring hollow on the soundtrack, blocking out everybody else's noise.

And we see Gila rolling and running free on the ice.

The walrus bleeds copiously down its leathery bib. It flails and tosses back that gargantuan head. The harpoon is stuck in it like a huge and silver thorn.

Gila is running towards us. His face is contorted.We see him heave on to the bus and he's wrenching the harpoon gun and rearming the device.

We hear the Doctor shout out in protest.

We see him run to stop Gila. Bodies cl.u.s.ter into view, jostling for control.

Iris is yelling loudest now, right into our ears.

The camera is dropped and we see, oddly enough, a fairly benign view of a table lamp, an Art Deco number of a bathing belle holding the shade.

When Iris picks up our camera again, Gila has won control. He is arming the gun with explosives. And he fires.

'But the spider...' we hear the Doctor say, over the whine of the bolt as it is loosed and the lash of the cable.

Gila is a marvellous shot. It hits.

With a final howl of complaint the walrus explodes. In a ghastly, colourful instant its body is torn to shreds. Even if we run back and rewind this film now, it all happens too fast for video to quite pick up the intricacies of this onslaught. There is a flash, rolling plumes of filthy smoke and then...

a shower of b.l.o.o.d.y, vast gobbets of flesh on the clean snow. Closest to us, closest to the bus and the camera, falls the ruined head of the behemoth. Its tusks have splintered into pieces. There is a hail of already clotting blood.

And, in the heart of the smoke and noise, we see the Spider d.u.c.h.ess crack into shards. Her legs are split and they tumble like straws. Her body, the thorax gashed and bursting apart like silver fruit, is flung clear.

All that can be heard aboard the bus is shouting.

Gila turns snarling to the camera. His face fills all our screen. His eyes are livid green. All trace of humanity appears to be gone.

The picture vanishes.

'If this was sent by the Scarlet Empress,' said Sam, 'won't she send something else after us?'

They were standing in the still-smoking, partially torn and bleeding sides of blubber.

'I'm sure she will,' said the Doctor tersely.

It had started to snow. The day was ending, it seemed. The dense sky was lowering in.

A few yards away the Spider d.u.c.h.ess was tending to her own wounds, which still blazed and sparked away. Gila and the Bearded Lady scooped up snow to put out the little flames and cool down her metal skin. She wasn't speaking yet.

Major Angela said,'You've wrecked her. You've blown her to pieces. I'm glad I couldn't see what you did.'

'Shut it,' Gila snarled, bending over the Spider d.u.c.h.ess's vast torso. He peered with expert care at the workings inside the gash in her flesh.

'She's going to survive this.'

'You blew most of her legs off. How can she move?'

The Spider d.u.c.h.ess spoke then, in a fractured voice that was much more identifiably a composite of two separate beings than before. 'I cannot move. I cannot move.'

The fizzing stumps of her once elegant silver legs waggled and thrashed in the chilling air. Her mandibles clattered with a kind of animatronic despair.

"We can't just leave her here,' said Sam, coming up to see.

'We must,' said Gila.

Major Angela started to argue, but the Spider d.u.c.h.ess interrupted her.

'Leave me here in the snow. Soon the Scarlet Empress will send her guard, to see how and why we destroyed her sea beast. I will be here to deal with them and prevent them from following you. You have to go on.'

'What will you do?' the Doctor asked.

'I will deal with them,' said the Spider d.u.c.h.ess. 'I will recover my strength and lie in wait in the snow. If the guards come to get you and drag you back to Hyspero, I shall put them off the scent. You all have to be able to return there under your own steam. The way you want. I will stop them for you.'

"Thank you,' said the Doctor.

'I wish I could come with you.'

'We'll come back for you,' the Bearded Lady promised. 'When it's all over.'

Then they walked back to the bus.

Iris's bus and Iris herself were relieved when they could drive free of the ice. A hundred miles or so on they found themselves back on frozen ground, and free of the risk of cracking the ice beneath them and plunging into the depths. Now they were close to the coast, and frosty, scrubby gra.s.s provided the only obstacle as they drove into the oncoming night. Major Angela listened to them describe the harsh landscape about them and she declared they were now very close to the sea.

They toiled up a hard-going hummock of land and there, beyond, was the flat dark sash of the sea, widening out before them. The stars looked brilliant. Iris gave a great sigh of happiness at the change in the view.

'Now I really feel we're getting somewhere,' she said, still at the wheel.

The Doctor was at her elbow. He nodded out to sea.'Look at that ship.'

His eyes were narrowed. She was used to his eagle eyes by now and struggled to follow his gaze. True enough, just out to sea, in roughly the stretch of beach for which they were heading, was a tiny, toy-like, distant vessel. Its silver sails bulged out in the moonlight and soon all the bus pa.s.sengers were staring at it.

'Transport's been laid on for us, it seems,' said his.

'We've got someone to find, first,' said Angela.

The Spider d.u.c.h.ess began her slow, slow, infinitely slow drag towards home. Her blasted legs, like errant children, came twitching and sliding on the ice towards her.

And when they drove down to the shingle beaches the next morning, they found him.

A restless night had been spent aboard the bus, with everyone apart from the moody, shifty Gila, sitting close for comfort and warmth, wrapped inside their furs from the Kestheven bears. In the night Iris had sat a little while alone, watching the vast churn and shimmer of the dark sea. She opened the doors and went out for a cigarette, bracing herself against the side of the bus and hugging herself for warmth. Perhaps she was feeling a little better. She stamped her feet on the rutted, frozen road.

And then, out of nowhere seemingly, a cat slunk past her. She saw its eyes first, lit up in the night, flat pale discs of green. Then she looked and the cat stared back. It had one tattered ear, as though it had been brawling. It looked altogether tatty and aloof. It came slinking out from under her bus, looked at her briefly, then padded off into the stiff white stalks of the gra.s.s, and vanished. She shrugged and stamped on her cigarette b.u.t.t.

That had been last night. In the morning they were busy again, rolling along by the seaside, looking for Major Angela's elusive fourth member.

To Sam, this whole place looked benighted and empty. As if there had never been a living soul on this beach. Then, suddenly, Gila barked out in surprise and made Iris pull over.

He led them out of the bus, and across the shingled beach. They ran, crunching the gravel and pebbles and sh.e.l.ls underfoot.

Right where the sea was caressing the rocks of the sh.o.r.e, there was a plinth set into a kind of protected bay. The plinth was streaked white with salt, partially eroded and whittled into a stunted, grotesque form. Atop the plinth there was a block of ice, about the size of a grown man. It was ice like gla.s.s, faceted and brilliant, cut to perfection, but twisted and uneven in shape. As they approached it looked to Sam like a shrine.

Within the ice she could now see a dim shape trapped within.

The Doctor came last, huffing and pushing Iris over the shifting stones in her wheelchair. The small wheels ground arthritically on the shingle, cracking delicate purple sh.e.l.ls. He heaved and hauled her over banks and tatters of leathery brown seaweed.

By the time Iris and the Doctor reached the plinth and the ice, the others were staring upward at it with satisfaction.