Doctor Who_The Wintertime Paradox by Dave Rudden & Alexis Snell

Author:Dave Rudden & Alexis Snell [Rudden, Dave & Snell, Alexis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781405946117
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2020-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

8

A Girl Called Doubt

When the Cybermen came to Agrippina, everything changed.

Change was the one constant, amid the chaos of the invasion. There had been so many news broadcasts, so many panicked voices – government statements, arguing reporters, experts and anti-experts referring to the Eleventh Cyber Legion as an army, as a plague, as demons, as the end of days. The only thing these competing opinions actually did agree on is what the Cybermen were there to do.

Conversion.

The Cybermen had converted Agrippina in a whole host of ways. It had been a planet of blue skies scrubbed clean of cloud by strong winter winds. Its cities had been long avenues lined by crocuses and neat plazas of marble so white it was hard to tell where the stone ended and the snow began. Agrippina Primus, the capital, had been a city of churches – not just the towering Cathedral Majoris at the city’s heart, but dozens of little chapels and shrines and places of worship, each as unique as a loved one’s smile.

Now, most of Agrippina Primus’s avenues are rubble. The perfect lines of the plazas are cratered by bombardment, and the sky and the snow are grey with ash. From the top floor of the abandoned warehouse in which they’ve made camp, Doubt can see that many of the churches still stand but, instead of reaching proudly for the sky, their steeples now list to one side like a company of punch-drunk knights.

‘All the crocuses are dead,’ she whispers. It is the first time she has spoken aloud in days.

‘Get away from the window,’ Sergeant Terrick growls from beside the fire. He is the largest human being Doubt has ever met, and the quietest – a huge brute of a man whose eyes stare out, bleak and bright, from a face permanently darkened by camouflage paint and soot.

‘We have to keep in cover, Doubt,’ Memnes says. His voice is kinder. This is how it always works with the sergeant and the scientist: Terrick growls; Memnes smooths.

‘The further we get into the city,’ Memnes adds, ‘the likelier it is we’ll run into any steelers the legion left behind.’

Steelers. It’s as good a name as any for the Cybermen. It describes what they are, and what they do.

Doubt pulls back from the blown-out window but does not apologise for her carelessness. She’s only been part of the resistance for a short while, but she’s already noticed that the extra second it takes to say sorry is a second you could be using to fall back in line. You don’t apologise. You correct your mistake.

The other members of the squad have set up a chem-fire in the centre of the room, with boxes stacked around it so that the light doesn’t escape. All the boxes are still in shrink-wrap. A vending machine in the corner is somehow still running. There are mugs in the sink. If you were to ignore the broken windowpanes – shattered like all the others in Agrippina Primus – then these soldiers would be the only sign that the war had happened at all.

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