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She turned around, her face half covered by machinery. ‘Don’t worry,’ said Chris. ‘I’m not going to try anything.’

287

The engines were a tiny grinding sound under their feet. It didn’t take much power to shift the buggy’s eight wheels. They rumbled softly forwards, the hangar’s airlock door automatically sliding upward. A minute later, they were on Mimas’s surface.

The Doctor looked as though he was asleep. Chris decided to let him rest; there was nothing to talk about while the Brotherhood were listening, anyway. He looked past the exhausted Time Lord, on to the surface.

The crater was something like ten klicks deep. The near rim cast an inky shadow, rising up to hide the stars. Chris tried hard not to think of it as a great big mouth.

At this temperature, ice acted like rock. He could see huge pits and scars where other meteorites had hailed down on Mimas. He tried to imagine huge machines sculpting the crater, tiny suited figures welding together the skeleton of the rim walls, creating a massive fake.

‘I’m not going to make it through this,’ said the Doctor.

Chris looked at him. ‘We’ll be all right.’ The Doctor looked as though he could barely open his eyes. ‘What did they do to you?’

‘Oh, they haven’t even started yet,’ he said. ‘The entire gestalt is here, Chris. Deep beneath the surface. The new Grandmaster.’

Waiting for you, said Iaomnet, making Chris jump. We’ve been waiting for a long time.

‘Iaomnet tried a few basic scans,’ said the Doctor. ‘They’re very powerful, Chris. I won’t be able to keep them out of my head.’

Chris sat back in his seat. The Doctor had always relied on tricking his enemies, knowing more than they did. How do you keep an ace up your sleeve when the Brotherhood can see right up your sleeve?

Relax, said Iaomnet. He doesn’t have a clever plan this time. I could tell that even from my initial scans. He’s so desperate to stop us he’s rushed in. Chris could see her reflection in the windscreen. It’s almost as though he wanted to become one of us, she said.

Janus

288

The Chief Programmer’s beeper went off at 01.00 local time.

She rolled out of bed and on to the floor. ‘Cruk,’ she said, picking herself up and snatching the beeper from the bedside table. She hit the transmit button. ‘Timmins,’ she said. What’s up?’

‘You’d better come and see this,’ said whatever poor sod had drawn night-watch duty in the computer centre.

‘That bad, huh? Let me guess. The counterintrusion routines have gone off again for no reason.’

‘The counterintrusion routines have gone over to the other side, ma’am,’ said the night watch.

‘Say that again,’ said Timmins.

‘I think you’d better get down here, ma’am.’

Timmins got down there. The compute centre was a smallish, octagonal room, the eight wall panels giving you access to every part of the main system. The night watch and a couple of bleary-eyed techies were standing around, looking useless.

‘Let’s get to work,’ said Timmins. ‘What exactly is the problem here?’

‘Me,’ said the computer.

‘Very funny,’ said Timmins.

‘It’s an AI, ma’am,’ said night watch. His name refused to spring to her mind. ‘It began a download at zero hours exactly.

We couldn’t stop it.’

‘An AI?’ said Timmins. ‘Do you know how much memory space that would take up?’

‘All of it,’ said the computer. ‘Of course, it’s not all of me. In fact, it’s one of my pieces that’s achieved a certain level of sentience on its own. See what happens when you let your children do as they please?’

Timmins leant on the console. Did the download complete?’

she asked night watch.

He nodded. ‘The whole OS was junked. It ate the counterintrusion routines.’

‘I just added them to myself,’ said the computer. ‘After all, they’re not dissimilar in structure to some of my own routines.’

289

‘Look,’ said Timmins. ‘Are you trying to tell me that Centcomp Node Number One, the centre of the Empire’s computer control, has just been inhabited by an artificial intelligence? Who the hell are you, anyway?’

‘You may have heard of me,’ said the