Tales from the Red Planet: The Colour of Dried Blood

James Lomond is a writer at Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews - All the latest Doctor Who news and reviews with our weekly podKast, features and interviews, and a long-running forum.

Marcus Scarman died three times.

He first died on Earth when he entered Sutekh’s prison. It was the crowning moment of his archaeology career at All Soul’s College. His heart pounding, he entered the ancient chamber picturing his colleagues’ faces. The next moment his own soul was torn out through his eyes by an Osirian god.

He died for the second time on Mars. Using his body as a puppet, Sutekh sent him there to destroy his psychic chains – a telepathic field generator in a Martian pyramid. When you trap death in a box, you put the key far away. But death sent Marcus Scarman. With the generator gone, Sutekh’s mind released him. Scarman’s mind returned to his body momentarily before it dissolved into ash.

Servicer robots guarded the pyramid. The were covered in layers of bioengineered skin like wrappings on a mummy. The Prime Servicer guarded the generator chamber. Unlike the others it had its own power supply and a larger positronic brain. It could plan and react. It could almost think.

Destroying the generator created a burst of telepathic energy. As his body burnt, ricocheting psychic energies imprinted Marcus’s consciousness. And with the generator gone, the Servicer’s duties were over. The pyramid fell silent and it opened its telepathic receiver for new instructions. It found Marcus Scarman’s mind waiting in the dark.

And so a middle-aged Professor of Egyptology, one hundred million miles from home, took refuge in the brain of an abandoned robot. He walked the deserted corridors and remembered. He remembered his childhood and the school that he and his brother, Laurence attended. He remembered the old Priory; hiding in the priest hole with toffee apples; his first dig; his professorship. He remembered the letters from Laurence he stopped replying to. And he remembered the blood on his hands.

As Sutekh’s puppet, Marcus had strangled his brother. And he remembered what Sutekh had seen: The look in his brother’s eyes the moment that kind and timid man realised he was going to die. Laurence had begged, “Marcus, please.” And this haunted him.

A Servicer power pack lasts for hundreds of years. And Marcus Scarman spent this time thinking about Laurence. Eventually he discovered the Pyramid’s psytronic transmitter. He projected unconscious messages back in time to his brother. Laurence Scarman, unaware of the distant influence, built a radio telescope in his living room forty years before anyone else knew how.

Marcus sent a message. It began “Beware Sutekh,” telling him to flee, to escape. He spent the next five hundred years wondering whether Laurence heard his message. Whether, in another timeline, his brother had escaped that death.

The All Souls professor of Egyptology died for a third time as a soul misplaced in the oldest pyramid in the Solar system. His robotic body slowed and stopped in the dark stone corridors, bandaged hands clenched in regret. Outside there was a storm. Martian sand lashed at the sides of the pyramid, with walls the colour of dried blood.

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