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Martinique said, ‘How do you know it’s an airlock?’

Iaomnet lifted her plasma thrower. ‘Knock knock,’ she said.

‘Hang on a moment,’ said the Doctor. The airlock loomed on Chris’s screen. Suddenly the picture was filled with steam.

‘Doctor!’ said Chris. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Of course,’ said the Doctor. ‘Just dust and some very, very old air escaping. The airlock is easy to open from the outside. You’d hardly want to design one that was hard to get into…’

‘Unless you were a military installation,’ said Martinique, ‘and you didn’t want visitors.’

‘On the other hand,’ said the Doctor, ‘this particular door was hidden by tons of rock.’

‘So we still don’t know what we’re going to find,’ said Iaomnet.

The Doctor’s point of view shifted, taking in Zatopek’s helmet for a moment. ‘There is,’ he said, ‘as the saying goes, only one way to find out.’

The Doctor and company had been out of contact for two hours.

Chris was sick of playing video games. He decided to go and see what Son of My Father and Sister Son were up to.

The Ogrons were jogging in circles around the cargo bay. Part of the small space was taken up with sensor equipment, but the rest was neatly stacked packaging, collapsed into flat squares.

Chris sat down on an unopened crate, watching the Ogrons for a while. Son of My Father saw him and raised a hairy hand, but they kept jogging, relentlessly, the metal plates of the floor rattling under their feet.

Chris shrugged, took off his jacket, and joined them.

The pointless movement took the edge off his nerves. He wiped sweat from his face as he followed the Ogrons around. No one told them what was going on around them. Did they run because they were nervous? Or were they just burning off excess energy?

95

At last all of them stopped, leaning against the wall and the crates as they got their breath back. Even Ogrons get out of breath, Chris realized. It made them seem more human. Well, it did – it was something familiar.

Son of My Father clapped a meaty hand on Chris’s shoulder.

‘You a regular guy,’ he said. ‘You got to watch out for the people on this ship, Chris. Sometimes bad rocks fool you: look like good rocks on the outside.’

Chris nodded. ‘Thanks. I’ve already worked out that Iaomnet’s not a student. Or not just a student, anyway. She’s probably a double-eye.’

Son of My Father shook his head. 'Not what I mean.’

‘Well,’ said Chris, ‘Zatopek has kind of given himself away as well.’

‘Not what I mean either. Watch out.’

Chris stood up. ‘Is the Doctor in danger?’

Son of My Father just shrugged.

Four hours. Chris couldn’t settle. The Ogrons had gone back into their quarters, but he kept wandering around the ship. He tried jogging for a while, but it just made him feel lightheaded.

He ran a dozen diagnostics on the Hopper’s systems, checking for sabotage, then irregularities, then anything out of the ordinary. He found a few modifications in the drive system, and remembered with a surprisingly guilty start that they’d pinched the ship.

Four and a half hours. He cooked some chicken soup in the galley, but didn’t want it. He tried to grab a nap, but couldn’t, lying in his quarters waiting for the bridge computer to tell him the Doctor was back in radio range.

Eventually he tried so hard to go to sleep that he dropped off from exhaustion.

He felt the dream come down like a terrible weight on his chest, like a tornado blowing through the tiny cabin. He tried to open his eyes, grabbing at the lids with his fingers, and somehow opened them, but the dream didn’t stop, slithering out from under the bed.

Slithering. Green eyes, watching.

96

Chris stumbled across the cabin and smacked into the opposite wall. ‘Go away!’ he yelled. ‘I’m awake!’

A voice came hissing out of the dream’s scaly face. ‘Can’t you feel it?’ it insisted. ‘It’s all changing. Changing all around you.’

There wasn’t much stuff in the cabin, but it was blowing around as though the hull had been punctured. ‘Shit!’ shouted Chris.