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77

Iaomnet stopped in the airlock doorway, giving him a sharp look. ‘I thought the pilot we booked was called Bruchac,’ she said.

‘Oh,’ said Chris, ‘he’s not feeling too well.’

Once they’d been under way for a few hours, Chris left a cluster of semi-smart navigation programs in charge of the flight and headed aft to the galley.

The academics and Iaomnet were sitting on the floor around a Japanese-style table. The flat white surface was covered in hard copies of enhanced satellite images. To Chris they mostly looked like fuzzy photocopies of blobs, but Martinique and Zatopek were deep in conversation, scribbling on the pictures in red pen.

Iaomnet gave Chris a ‘What can you do?’ smile. She had black eyes, and jet-black hair cut in a practical bob.

The Doctor was trying to puzzle out the Hopper’s kitchen appliances, without giving away the fact that he’d never used them before. Chris squeezed past Martinique and Zatopek and rescued the rice cooker from the chilling unit. ‘Where are the Ogrons?’ he asked.

‘In their quarters,’ said the Doctor. ‘I invited them to dinner, but they declined.’

‘We couldn’t have all fitted in here at once,’ said Iaomnet, unfolding her legs. Her head knocked against the wall behind her.

‘Ouch. Why on earth is the galley so small?’

‘More space, more fuel, more money,’ said the Doctor. ‘You could park this ship in the first-class suite of a luxury spaceliner.’

He stepped on Chris’s foot, which Chris took to be a secret signal until he realized that the Doctor was just trying to get past him to the drinks machine.

Chris folded down the menu screen above the heater, idly tapping his way through its index while the Doctor battled the drinks machine. ‘Dinner in two minutes,’ said the Time Lord optimistically, nudging Chris out of the way.

Chris put the menu screen up and sat down at the table, awkwardly folding his legs sideways.

‘So these are Iphigenia?’ said Chris, peering at the photos.

78

‘Yes,’ said Martinique, surfacing from his discussion with his assistant. His dark hair was fashionably tinged with grey.

‘Satellite images. Here you can see Aulis Crater, and here, right in the centre of the crater, Artemis Mons. The mountain of Artemis, the Greek goddess whom no man could see unclothed –

on pain of death.’

‘And that’s where we’re going, is it?’ asked Chris.

‘Yes,’ said Zatopek. He looked only a little older than Iaomnet, with striking features and black hair pulled sharply back from his face.

‘The largest crater anywhere in human space,’ said Martinique.

‘Are you sure these are from a satellite? They look like a military fly-by to me,’ said Chris. He tapped a finger on the faint white lines at the very edge of the picture. ‘You always see a scale like this on long-range recon probes.’ He picked up another of the photos. ‘Same again here, and on this one.’

‘Are you the first academic expedition to Iphigenia?’ asked the Doctor, juggling an alarming number of bowls, cartons and cups over to the table.

Martinique gathered up the photos before they could be either further analysed or covered with soup. ‘The significance of these pictures has eluded previous investigators. The crater’s age, for example. Now, it formed during a period when the surface of Iphigenia was not plastic enough for the crater to have formed the way it did. A meteor of that size striking a clump of ice and rock should have shattered it into pieces.’

‘Maybe your estimate of its age is off,’ said Iaomnet.

Martinique waved his hand. ‘There are other, smaller indications. The shape is a little too perfect. Other things.’

‘So if this is military information,’ Iaomnet wanted to know,

‘where’d you guys get it?’

‘I have my sources,’ Zatopek said severely.

‘Tell us about the significance of the pictures, Professor Martinique,’ said the Doctor, kneeling down at the table.

The academic nodded and shuffled through the photos until he found the shot he wanted. He dumped the rest of them into Zatopek’s lap. His assistant raised an eyebrow