The Ancestor Cell

Peter Anghelides & Stephen Cole

For my parents, Margaret and Allan Anghelides.

PA

For Theresa Shiban, with love.

SC

Chapter One

Travelling companions

Lady Withycombe had remained for some twenty minutes on the carriage seat, lounging in that warm and comfortable state in which, half asleep, half awake, consciousness begins to return after a sound slumber. In her reverie, she had recalled with pleasure her latest visit to Lord Ostler’s charming town house; the satisfaction that had blossomed in her breast as she cast a shiny new threepenny bit with ostentatious abandon to her porter at St Pancras; and the ragged urchin who had waved so impudently at her from atop the station wall.

Thus she sat, unsure for a moment of exactly where in the universe she found herself, gradually growing aware of a crumpled figure’s presence on the opposite seat – a seat that, prior to her recent nap, had been unoccupied.

‘I thought, sir,’ she ventured after a modest pause, ‘to have this carriage for my exclusive use.

This aspiration notwithstanding, you are, I am sure, welcome to join me for the duration of your journey. What, sir, is your destination?’

But the other remained silent in his place, so that Lady Withycombe would have thought herself still dreaming and her unexpected companion a carved wooden statue, were it not for the cooling breeze from the half opened window beside her.

The dishevelled figure stared, and his eyes blinked occasionally, and his lips moved in a constant quiver of mumbling. He wore the collar raised on a light brown coat, which was in urgent need of brushing, and his tumbling brown locks seemed more suited to a young woman. A soiled hat perched indecorously on the back of his lank head of hair.

Lady Withycombe essayed her enquiry one more time, with the same lack of response.

When, after some consideration as to the wisdom of her action, she chose to lean closer to listen to the man’s mumblings, she thought she could make out a handful of the words. The stranger was asking the oddest of questions: ‘Phase malfunction?’ was the first, followed shortly by, “That’s just jargon, isn’t it? Isn’t it?’

‘I confess,’ she said, coming to a decision at this, and now looking about herself for her small suitcase, ‘I am unable to assist you.’

Under any other circumstances, Lady Withycombe would have called for the guard and made an immediate request for the unkempt stranger to be removed forthwith to third class. Yet there was an ineluctable suspicion in her own mind that it was she who was in some way transgressing, and not this unexpected and odd new arrival.

When the train stopped at the next station, she lifted her suitcase through the door and went in search of a different carriage. On leaving, she could once again make out the stranger’s mutterings: ‘Must find … Must find … Doctor?’

Chapter Two

Ultimatum

Odd that he hadn’t noticed that before, thought Fitz. The cloth ribbon that edged the console was frayed, and several studs were missing. He reached up from where he lay and ran his middle finger tentatively over the ribbon, and the thin material parted under the slight pressure. A new ship, he thought, and already it was wearing out.

Not like the Doctor’s previous TARDIS, he thought. There, everything had seemed old because everything seemed to be covered with a precisely measured layer of dust, designed with a meticulous eye for intricate detail to look ancient, as though someone had disguised it as a slightly seedy old college library so that you wouldn’t see it for what it was – a fantastically complex space vessel that knocked Emperor Ming’s sparking rocket ships into a cocked hat.

Fitz missed the old TARDIS. He missed the dappled light on its grand wooden staircase, the deep heartbeat rhythm of the Chamberland grandfather clock, the pervasive scent of dust and sandalwood and safety. He missed the marquetry inset on the occasional tables where the Doctor poured rose pouchong into bone china cups. Gold rimmed cups with rose motifs like the ones at his Auntie Norah’s. Her tea always tasted special because she used only sterilised milk in long, tall, thin bottles with gold metal tops …

Who am I kidding? thought Fitz. The Doctor’s previous TARDIS wasn’t more secure: it was just more familiar than this one. Compassion had never liked mixing with others, even before she’d been magically transmogrified from a stuffy bint into their present time ship. As if to prove her lack of regard, she gave yet another wild lurch and rolled him violently away from the console. His shoulder smacked against a stout oak chair.

He opened his eyes, which he had screwed up as he’d pitched headlong across the floor.

Below him Fitz could see blackness – no, he could make out pinprick stars, real images and not just specks dancing in his terrified eyes. Frozen shards of ice scattered in a cold explosion all around him until they melted into the distance.

Behind him, he could feel the reassuring bulk of the oak chair, but when he swivelled round he discovered that it was no longer visible. Instead, far in the distance behind him, he could make out the orange brown disc of a planet. Three points of yellow light speared through space towards him. It took him a moment to work out that the TARDIS scanner had extended to fill the entire room, enveloping them in a 360 degree view of their immediate surroundings in space.

In space? Hadn’t they just been hiding deep in the labyrinthine depths and convolutions of the time vortex? Yet now they were in plain view in normal space time.

‘Doctor?’ His voice was a croak, barely audible over the hum that surged all around him.

‘Doctor, I thought we’d escaped them.’

A dozen yards from him now, Fitz saw that the tiny six sided TARDIS console was drifting in the middle of nowhere, like a tired grey mushroom floating in soup. Unfazed by the feet that he was walking in midair, or maybe just unaware of it, the Doctor scampered and danced in space around the console.

Even before he noticed the unfamiliar scowl on the Doctor’s long face, Fitz knew something had gone badly wrong, inadmissibly wrong. The Doctor’s random movements over the controls betrayed a hopelessness, a fear, and not the capricious indifference that marked his usual confident control of the ship. He was muttering to himself, ‘How can they have traced us? Could they have cracked the Randomiser’s seed? Maybe I should have relied less on vectors derived from strange attractor charts. Chaos aware control techniques are childishly simple if you know what you’re doing.’

‘Doctor?’ persisted Fitz. ‘We’re under attack, and you’re babbling about … strangely attractive charts?’

The Doctor stared at him, looking as though he might burst into tears at any moment.

‘They’re beautiful. They’re butterfly shaped fractal point sets …’

‘Spare me the jargon, Doctor, and get with the beat. I don’t want to hear about pictures of insects. I hate insects, wasps especially. Holiday snaps of red admirals are not going to impress whoever is on our tails, and if they catch us they’ll beat the crap out of us.’

‘Yes yes yes,’ snapped the Doctor testily, his mood swinging suddenly in the opposite direction. He lunged at the next panel along, but he snatched his hand away almost immediately as though the controls might be hot. Fitz saw his expression pucker into doubt as his elegant fingers waggled over a different control. Maybe he was trying to cast a spell over it – things seemed to have reached that level of desperation.

Before the Doctor touched the control, it moved of its own accord. The Doctor slammed his fist against the console, and threw his head back so that he was staring up into the midnight darkness and the stars above them. ‘Compassion!’ he bellowed at the TARDIS. ‘Leave the driving to me, if you’d be so kind.’

Compassion’s voice sounded out all around them. ‘A right mess you’re making of it.’ Fitz noted that she sounded as infuriatingly calm as ever, despite the howl of noise that was building in the background, and despite the Doctor’s evident fury. Or possibly because of that. ‘Hold on tight; Compassion added.

Fitz felt the movement in his stomach first, and then he felt like retching. Their surroundings swirled savagely about them, distant stars smearing in stretched arcs as the perspective shifted. It was as though they were in a glass cage that was twisting on two axes, yet the unseen floor remained solid beneath Fitz’s body. He considered standing up, sensed his stomach lurch again, and decided to stay where he was. The wailing sound of Compassion’s TARDIS engines started to reach a crescendo.

The Doctor clutched at the two nearest console panels as the universe spun around them. The incongruous landmark of the console was the centre point of the giddying movement.

Their pursuers loomed larger now behind the Doctor. Spinning balls of fire outlined him against their oncoming glow and turned him into the silhouette of a frantic marionette, a shadow puppet against their jaundiced yellow light. His voice thundered from the centre of his dark shape. ‘Compassion! Return control to the console! Do it now!’

A racing movement from above made Fitz stare upwards. As the TARDIS started to move, the flat line of frozen ice rings slowly stretched until they were concentric circles. Fitz could see where the TARDIS had broken through the nearest ring. There was a vertiginous movement in the perspective, and suddenly it was as though he were staring at the same view the wrong way down a telescope. Then the view rotated swiftly around one axis and, in an unnerving change, became completely steady, so that the circles looked like a distant target in space. At the same moment, the shriek of the engines dissipated into the usual calm hum of the console room.

Fitz took this chance to scramble unsteadily to his feet. He staggered over to join the Doctor at the console, hardly believing he could traverse the invisible floor, half fearing, half hoping he might tumble away into the inky depths of space and away from this nightmare.

The Doctor didn’t acknowledge he was there. He seemed fixated on a spot far off in the distance over Fitz’s left shoulder. Fitz followed his burning gaze. ‘Are they still there?’

In answer, a flaring blue fireball barrelled towards them at a colossal, impossible speed. At the last moment it veered away, scorching off into the vacuum.

Fitz ducked. He peered out from the unlikely shelter of the console. In the distance a tiny point of light suddenly smeared wide across the darkness, growing with incredible speed until it loomed like a huge, planet sized red shape blocking their escape route.

Fitz re emerged from his hiding place, ashamed at his instinctive reaction to duck and run.

A woman’s voice filled the space around them, clipped tones that brooked no disagreement.

The voice of someone used to being obeyed without question or prevarication. ‘I am commander of Presidential Quadrun 19, and Chancellor of Time Present on the High Council. You cannot outrun this war TARDIS. Further vessels from the fleet are already at intercept positions in real space and tangential time routes on all statistical possibilities. Your vessel is forfeit, Doctor. Surrender or we’ll fire on you directly.’

Chapter Three

Not waving

‘War TARDIS?’ said Fitz faintly. Although the universe was no longer spinning around his head, the sick feeling in the pit of his stomach had returned with a vengeance. ‘Doctor, how far up the creek are we? And is there a paddle within reach?’

The Doctor’s face, however, was now a blank mask. Fitz elbowed him sharply in the ribs, to little effect.

‘Doctor, how can that thing be any kind of TARDIS? It’s huge. It looks as big as Mars.’

The Doctor shook his head at Fitz. “That TARDIS is mapping its internal dimensions on to its external dimensions, so it looks a great deal bigger than it actually is in real space. It’s a flabby gesture of intimidation designed to frighten primitive opponents.’

‘Well, it scares the shit out of me,’ said Fitz.

‘But it does somewhat weaken their defences,’ noted the Doctor. ‘Makes them vulnerable to weapons attack. Not that that is going to help us, I’m afraid. Which they will have calculated, of course. They know me too well.’

‘Surrender, or we’ll fire,’ said the clipped voice again.

Another blue fireball surged towards them. The Doctor lowered his head, studying the console panel before him. Only his eyes seemed to move, blue shards of ice flicking from side to side as he searched in vain for the right control.

The fireball scorched overhead and away from them.

‘Final warning, Doctor,’ said the war TARDIS commander’s voice.

‘Compassion,’ said the Doctor. His voice was measured, low, dangerous. ‘Release control to me.’

‘No,’ said Compassion. ‘We will not surrender.’

It was as though she had slapped the Doctor in the face. ‘I have no intention of surrendering, Compassion. Release the controls.’

Fitz clutched the Doctor’s sleeve. ‘Is this argument by invitation only, or can anyone join in?’

In the distance, two more planet sized shapes unfurled from nowhere. Then another two.

Soon, Fitz could make out nine of the huge devices.

‘Doctor, that woman said “war TARDIS”. What the bugger is going on?’

The Doctor snapped his gaze to Fitz briefly, and launched into one of his too familiar monologue lectures. ‘We’ve been forced out of the time vortex by those broad spectrum Tuckson Jacker pulses —’

‘Like on Drebnar!’

‘Do pay attention, I haven’t time to debate this,’ snapped the Doctor. ‘Are you going to release these controls, Compassion, or am I going to lash up an override? Yes, Fitz, I should have realised back then. They almost trapped us in those ice rings, but Compassion got us out of that.’

‘Got herself out, more likely,’ interjected Fitz sourly. He clamped his mouth shut as the Doctor quelled him with a look.

‘Compassion got us out of that,’ he insisted. “That war TARDIS commander has been sent with eight other vessels out there to capture us, because she wants to take Compassion back to Gallifrey, my planet of origin, so that my people can use Compassion as the basis for future timeships in their as yet unstarted battle with an unnamed future Enemy, and I have no intention of letting them do that to her.’

Did he never have to breathe in? wondered Fitz. “This is madness.’

‘Madness or not, that war TARDIS is not just casting a drift net into the time vortex, now: they’ve got us on the end of their line and they’re reeling us in. If they do hit us with one of those focused strikes of Tuckson Jacker energy it will incapacitate Compassion and me – but you, Fitz … you’d be very lucky to survive.’

‘Very lucky,’ Fitz echoed. ‘Right.’

Now, are you going to release these controls to me, Compassion?’

‘Aha,’ said Compassion. There was an unfamiliar note of triumph in her voice. ‘Found them.

You can’t have thought you could hide them from me for ever, Doctor.’

‘Them?’ Fitz leapt back in alarm as one side of the console opened, and a brass spike rose up.

Once it reached a foot and a half tall, further brass branches sprouted from its side, curving until they formed concentric circles. It reminded Fitz of the ice rings in the distance, like a target. Fitz could now make out a pulsing hum, almost human, a basso profundo building deep within the TARDIS.

‘The battle is not over,’ said Compassion.

The Doctor scrabbled at the unresponsive controls before him, his previous calm utterly dissipated. “This is not a battle, Compassion,’ he yelled, panic edging his voice. “This is an escape.’

‘Prepare for a disabling strike,’ cut in the war TARDIS commander’s calm, insistent tones.

‘Time to stand and fight,’ said Compassion. The bass note continued to grow, and the TARDIS trembled beneath Fitz’s feet.

The branching brass device began to sink back into the console, its rings retracting. The Doctor grabbed hold of it with a panicked yell, but he couldn’t stop its descent. ‘I forbid it. I will not —’

‘Fire,’ said Compassion, as calmly as she might say ‘hello’ to someone.

Fitz belatedly recognised what the brass device was just as it vanished from view. It wasn’t a target. It was the sight for a targeting device, and some kind of trigger too.

A wave of savage red light filled the entire scanner around them. Fitz panicked for a moment, believing the war TARDIS had struck home. But within seconds the searing red light had coalesced into a blood red ball of fire which rapidly shot off into the stars. As the missile raced away, the deep note of the TARDIS sank back to normal.

‘Doctor,’ said the war TARDIS commander, ‘you cannot … Rungar protect us! We’re under atta—’

The horrified voice stopped abruptly. In the distance, one of the huge orange red shapes convulsed, twisted in on itself, and then sparked into a starry spike of brilliant light.

‘Target eliminated,’ said Compassion.

‘No!’ blazed the Doctor. ‘I will not captain a vessel of war, Compassion. I will not allow you to destroy any more lives. It’s evil.’

‘It is necessary,’ she replied.

‘I don’t believe that. I don’t believe there can ever be a necessary evil. Or the lesser of two evils. It’s always evil.’

Fitz could hear the sneer in Compassion’s voice. ‘You would sacrifice all of us to protect people who would gladly destroy us to win a war with their Enemy. An Enemy who they don’t yet know!’

‘That is not my point.’

‘Then what is your point?’ snarled Compassion. ‘I’m sick of running from them. If it’s my destiny to be the forerunner for future TARDISes, and that destiny is unalterable, then I might as well make a stand here and now.’

The Doctor tugged at his long brown hair in a wild gesture of frustration. ‘I won’t believe that our destiny is unalterable. If we can’t avoid them, we can … discuss it with them. Convince them. I know them …’

It looked to Fitz as though the Doctor was grasping at straws as well as his hair. The mocking sound of Compassion’s laughter continued to echo around the room. The Doctor ducked beneath her battered console, and started tugging at unseen controls. Shortly, he gave a short cry of triumph. A hatch flipped open on the panel above him, and a fist sized box levered its way reluctantly into the air. Fitz recognised it at once. “The Randomiser,’ he said. This was the contraption that supposedly chose an arbitrary destination for their every trip. If even the Doctor didn’t know where the TARDIS was headed, then their pursuers would be unable to find them. Except that, somehow, they had traced them. “That thing’s no use, Doctor,’ said Fitz. “That smooth talking commander said they’d covered all our escape routes.’

‘Only tangential time routes on all statistical possibilities,’ said the Doctor quickly, still scrabbling at the controls.

‘More jargon.’ Fitz frowned. ‘I can understand crossword clues better than you. Talk in English.’

‘Probabilities,’ insisted the Doctor. “The Randomiser works on improbabilities.’

‘Except they obviously have the seed number for your childishly simple coded algorithm,’

said Compassion. The sound from deep within the TARDIS had built to another crescendo.

‘Fire,’ she added as though it were an afterthought.

Another blaze of red light hurtled towards the remaining war TARDISes. Within seconds another was vaporised. One of the planet sized war TARDISes must have realised what was happening, and snapped itself shut again like an umbrella so that it was just a point of orange light. It started to race towards the TARDIS.

‘We can use another seed number,’ muttered the Doctor darkly, ‘something their Matrix calculations can’t derive from what they know about me. Why are you frightened of wasps, Fitz?’

Fitz stared down at the Doctor, thrown by the conversational gear change. ‘Er … I was stung by a nest full of them. It was up in my parents’ attic. I had a bad reaction —’

‘Anaphylactic shock?’ said the Doctor through a mouthful of wires.

‘Hell of a shock for my mum,’ said Fitz. ‘I came out in so many lumps it looked like nettle rash.’

‘How old were you?’

‘Eight.’

‘How many times were you stung?’ The Doctor brandished a control that was connected with translucent loops of wiring to the underside of the console.

‘Um … twenty three. Same number as our house, my dad said.’

‘Aha!’ The Doctor made an adjustment to his new control. ‘Eight point two three is our random seed.’

Compassion laughed some more. The bass note of her weaponry systems was starting to grow louder again as she prepared a further strike. ‘You think it’s that simple?’

‘Random numbers don’t have to be complex, they just nave to be random,’ the Doctor said bleakly. ‘It doesn’t all have to be sandamandorian regression or chaos theory. So shut up, Compassion. I’ve had quite enough of you.’

He slapped his hand down hard on the Randomiser control.

Compassion hissed her disappointment at the Doctor as the lurching notes of dematerialisation began.

Fitz turned. The unnerving scanner image all about them was fading, slowly replaced by the familiar furnishings in the console room. There was the odd teak sideboard with knobbly legs, and candles guttering on top. He could see the wardrobe door on the darker side of the room, which led to the Doctor’s quarters. To his left was a tall bookcase full of badly arranged leather bound volumes. Next to that, the small stretch of wall that was bare except for some indented circles, translucent and backlit, which seemed (like so many things these days) to be a private joke between Compassion and the Doctor.

Compassion hiccuped violently, signalling that they had materialised again. But where? The scanner, even the small one in the far wall, remained blank. Fitz circled around the console to rejoin the Doctor.

‘She’s released the controls to me,’ said the Doctor. “Thank you, Compassion.’

Silence.

‘You’re welcome, Doctor,’ said the Doctor sarcastically. ‘Oh, don’t sulk, Compassion.’ He studied the display in front of him. ‘Now that is a bit disappointing. We’ve hardly travelled any distance at all. Look, you can see the trace signals of the remaining war TARDISes.

They’re within this sector, but at least they’re moving away —’

Suddenly, the TARDIS lurched violently. The console room floor, previously the only firm foundation in the entire place, rippled like a rucked carpet and dumped Fitz on his bum. The Doctor, predictably, seemed to have ridden the wave without even a pause for breath.

Fitz watched the ripple in the heavy wooden floor bounce off the wall by the sideboard and back towards him. Books started to leap off the bookshelves in a manner that would excite their authors but was starting to alarm Fitz. ‘What’s happening?’

‘Oh dear,’ said the Doctor as the floorboards undulated beneath him. ‘I rather think there’s a problem with Compassion’s systems …’ He chattered away incomprehensibly for a while, checking various readings. ‘Phase malfunction,’ he concluded.

‘Phase malfunction?’ Fitz retorted. “That’s just jargon, isn’t it? Isn’t it?’

The Doctor continued to grub around beneath the TARDIS console, throwing parts casually over his shoulder as they came loose. ‘Must find … must find …’ he seemed to be muttering.

A low moan started to reverberate around the console room. The door of the wardrobe buckled as if it was made of cardboard. The hat stand by the far door shimmied like a belly dancer, and deposited a raincoat and a battered trilby on to the bucking surface of the floor. A huge wave of wood reared up before Fitz’s disbelieving eyes. ‘Doctor …?’ he persisted.

‘Compassion?’

Fitz at last recognised that the low moaning sound was actually Compassion’s voice. It was doing something he’d never heard her do before. She was sobbing.

The wave of wood surged forward, carrying Fitz on its splintering crest and hurtling him towards the wall.

Chapter Four

Abandon ship

‘This is no time to doze off, Fitz.’

The Doctor’s politely persistent tone brought Fitz round again. He had closed his eyes for only a second, surely. When he opened them, he wondered if he was still dreaming.

The Doctor leaned over him where he had landed. Fitz lay in a crumpled heap on a hard, irregular surface, his back pressed painfully against a warped wall. An uneven light cast a sickly pallor all around them. It coloured the Doctor’s face, too. ‘Come along, come along, Fitz. Rise and shine, time for your morning exercises, twice around the block before your first ciggie of the day.’ There was a frightened look to him, Fitz thought. Despite the enforced cheeriness of the Doctor’s tone, the humour didn’t reach his pale, hooded, haunted eyes, and that worried Fitz more than anything.

As if noticing his concern, the Doctor winced and pinched the bridge of his own nose between two slender fingers. ‘Headache,’ he said, blinking rapidly. ‘Sorry.’ He extended a hand to help Fitz up.

They were in a squarish cave. It was uneven and off white, as though scooped out of a block of ivory by some huge, crude device. Fitz was momentarily thrown by the sight of a snapped wooden pole propped against the crooked surface of the nearest wall. It was the splintered remains of the TARDIS hat stand. Just past it were two small piles of shredded leather bound books, and a cracked roundel. What had happened to the TARDIS? he wondered. ‘Is Compassion OK?’ he asked.

‘I don’t think so,’ the Doctor replied. He pointed to an unmoving figure.

Compassion stood, stock still, by the far wall of the ivory cave. Her eyes were wide and unblinking, her mouth slightly agape. Her arms stuck out at angles from her torso, palms forward, fingers splayed wide. She looked like a bizarre statue of Shirley Bassey, thought Fitz, except that the image was more frightening than funny.

Fitz struggled to his feet too, shrugging away the Doctor’s offer of help, and stared closely at Compassion. ‘What’s happened? Did they harm you?’

Her eyes flickered, but remained glassy. Her lips started to tremble, and he thought she was about to reply. But the Doctor seized his arm, and dragged him violently back from her.

‘Come away, Fitz. Come on, now.’ Amazement, anger and surprise all raced through Fitz as he felt himself being wrenched aside.

Compassion’s mouth widened, like Shirley Bassey’s when she was about to hit a top note.

The lips quivered, extended into a wide ‘O’, became a shout, a bellow … and kept expanding until her entire face was consumed, her head split asunder, and an impossible chasm opened up in front of the Doctor and Fitz. Compassion convulsed, throwing her chest out and her hands up to shoulder level. A bubbling, hissing, gurgling sound echoed off the hard surfaces of the cave, and then a torrent of noise and objects hurtled out of the space where Compassion’s head had been.

‘Bloody hell,’ said Fitz, which seemed inappropriately mild under the circumstances.

A sofa was flicked casually across the cave, coming to a shattering crash against the far wall.

Compassion shrugged briefly and convulsed again. Two deckchairs cascaded out of her, unfolding wildly as they spun away, followed by a gout of sulphurous flame and a sparking shower of electronic parts which spattered over the nearby floor. With one final heave, Compassion disgorged an impossibly huge wardrobe, which tumbled end over end before landing with a splintering crash, a thick dark crack splitting one of its heavy, carved oak doors.

Fitz decided it was safe to start breathing again. He got to his feet, stiff with the pain from where he had fallen. His bum felt as if it had been kicked all the way down the King’s Road.

There was now a huge, untidy assortment of discarded objects all around them. Scattered furniture was dumped at incongruous angles. Bric a brac, cracked ornaments and bent cutlery littered the floor. Fitz found the twisted remains of a Meccano set tangled in one corner.

When he stood on an unopened packet of Woodbines, it confirmed everything.

‘There’s stuff here from my room, too,’ he said quietly. ‘It’s as though Compassion’s been turned inside out.’

‘Not exactly,’ said the Doctor.

Anger boiled up inside Fitz again. He felt the skin around his eyes tightening and heard his voice rising an octave. ‘Well, what would you call it, exactly, Doctor? Huh? Do be precise.

Don’t spare me the detail.’

When the Doctor turned to look at him, though, Fitz bit back his next reproach. The Doctor was looking panicked. Surely Fitz hadn’t scared him?

No, of course not. It was something more profound.

‘What’s the matter, Doctor?’

The Doctor tried an unconvincing half smile. ‘As I said, I don’t like it here, either, Fitz.’

‘Then let’s get back in the TARDIS and bugger off out of here.’

The Doctor kept him back with a calm, firm hold on his arm. ‘Compassion can’t let us back inside. And I’m not even sure if it would be safe to do so.’

Compassion’s head was tilted back. Her eyes were closed, her mouth an upturned ‘IT, and her chin jutted out like a petulant child’s. She was perfectly still again, not even breathing, and her arms dangled limply to either side of her. The cave seemed to have become brighter, though Fitz still couldn’t work out where the illumination was coming from – it was just there, as though the wall and floor and ceiling were suffused with light. And none of the objects seemed to have a shadow, giving the slightly surreal impression that they were cut out pictures haphazardly piled on to an overbright child’s painting.

Fitz experimented a little with placing his hands over some of the objects, but couldn’t create a shadow. He decided to ask the Doctor, but when he located him he was engrossed in the sad examination of something he’d picked out of a burned pile of components. He showed a fist sized object to Fitz.

‘The Randomiser,’ Fitz said. ‘So even if we can get back in the TARDIS, we can’t go anywhere without being traced. We’re royally screwed, aren’t we?’

The Doctor tossed aside the blackened remains of the device, and it clattered across the floor.

‘I’m frightened too, Fitz. I don’t like this place any more than you do.’

‘What is it made of? Some kind of polished rock, maybe? Or a sort of plastic.’

The Doctor shook his head solemnly. ‘No. It’s bone.’

‘Yeah, right:

‘Yes,’ insisted the Doctor. He wasn’t kidding around. ‘I think we’re in the bleached remains of some behemoth. Or we’re shrunk inside the skeleton of a smaller animal. It’s all relative.

The cadaver of some dead creature, anyway. There’s a stench of decay here.’

‘Sorry.’ Fitz smiled and wafted with his hands. “That would be me. Well, I was very frightened.’

The Doctor didn’t want to be amused. ‘No, I mean a smell of death. Can you sense it, too?

It’s on the tip of my memory … just out of sight in my mind’s eye.’ He turned a slow circle, as though he was worried about being observed by someone.

‘Didn’t you once tell me,’ said Fitz, ‘that smells are unconscious animal drives communicating directly to the brain?’

The Doctor was staring at him aghast. ‘Animal drives?’

Fitz made a placating gesture with his outstretched hands. ‘OK, sorry …’

But the Doctor was not looking at him, he was looking beyond him, at Compassion. ‘Get back!’ he hissed.

Fitz whirled round, expecting to see some huge piece of furniture bearing down on him.

Instead, he could only see Compassion, unchanged from before.

The Doctor tugged at Fitz’s tatty jacket sleeve. ‘Come away from it!’

‘It?’

Within seconds, it was obvious. An insectoid leg appeared, then another, and then a third.

Soon, the creature had scuttled around to the front of her, and dropped to the floor with a clattering noise.

It was a spider. Fitz wasn’t afraid of spiders. Except when, like this one, they were the size of an overnight bag.

Fitz said over his shoulder, ‘Run?’

‘Run,’ confirmed the Doctor, so they did.

At one end of the cave, the hard contours of the uneven floor curved away into a narrow doorway. Fitz hurried through after the Doctor, aware of the scraping sound of the spider as it scuttled after them.

They plunged on through the narrow passages. Sometimes one of the rawbone conduits split without warning, and the Doctor would dive down one route without hesitation. His long stride swiftly took him ahead. Fitz was sometimes aware which way to turn only by seeing the Doctor’s shadow flickering after him.

At one of these junctions, Fitz burst out of a narrow exit and found himself at one side of a tall, broad cavern. He had been following hard on the heels of the Doctor’s shadow, and was therefore amazed to see the Doctor a dozen yards away on the other side, recognisable from the familiar green coat and tousled brown hair. He had his back to Fitz, and was trying without much success to open a couple of heavy metal doors set into the far wall. The Doctor turned to see where Fitz was, and called over, ‘Give me a hand with these.’

The Doctor’s shadow was spread across the bone yellow floor immediately in front of Fitz. It stepped forward across the cavern and rejoined the Doctor, who seemed not to notice.

Fitz was just about to comment when two things happened. First, he remembered that there were no other shadows here.

And second, the scuttling sound of the huge spider came from immediately behind him.

Fitz gave a loud cry of alarm, and raced over to join the Doctor, tugging at the doors. They did not budge.

Across the chamber from them, the spider appeared at the only other exit. It hesitated in the open archway, its foremost legs tapping an impatient rhythm on the hard floor. There was a clicking echo throughout the room. Fitz watched the Doctor for a reaction, but he was holding his head in his hands and moaning softly. ‘My head feels like it’s going to burst.’

Fitz thought about Compassion earlier, but said nothing.

The spider moved towards them. He could see. mouth parts opening and closing in its massive head.

Fitz took one of the Doctor’s hands away from his head, and pulled him away from the huge, closed doors and around the outside of the room. ‘Get ready to make a run for it,’ he said.

The Doctor stumbled after him.

The spider had reached the middle of the chamber now. It was hard to know which of its many eyes was watching them, to judge when they could run.

In the end, Fitz gave up trying to work it out. He could feel his stomach quivering inside, and a tightness stretching through his chest. There was nothing brave about it, he told himself, nothing brave at all: there was just no choice.

‘Go, Doctor!’ he hissed, and pushed him firmly in the back so that he stumbled along the wall.

The spider rotated, shivering on the skeletal arcs of its eight legs, ready to follow the Doctor.

Element of surprise, Fitz told himself. He stepped towards the spider, moving quickly, getting the number of paces right as his speed gathered. He pulled back his right foot, his favourite foot, ready to put the ball in the back of the net.

The spider twisted back towards him. His foot flew forward, and the instep of his scuffed brown brogue swung up viciously beneath its head.

There was a brittle crunch as his foot connected. The hideous creature flew backwards, its legs folding together. Before the spider hit the far wall, Fitz was already legging it himself, out of the chamber.

‘Go!’ he shouted at the Doctor, who was cowering in the doorway. ‘Go on!’

The Doctor didn’t say anything, just vanished out of the room.

Fitz could hear the spider scuttling after him again. He charged around the corner after the Doctor, and found himself at one end of a long bone corridor. The Doctor was already at the far end, several hundred yards away. It was like staring down the wrong end of a telescope, Fitz thought. He shivered with the feeling of dcja vu.

‘Don’t wait for me!’ he called after the Doctor, before taking one step on the long stretch between them.

Suddenly, however, he was standing right next to the Doctor.

‘No need to shout,’ complained the Doctor, poking himself in the ear with his forefinger.

‘This place is trying to spook us,’ said Fitz.

‘It’s succeeding,’ said the Doctor, and pointed at two figures twenty yards ahead of them at the next bend.

Fitz stared at them. ‘I’ll never complain about crappy ghost trains again.’

The two figures were clearly the Doctor and Fitz. The Doctor standing next to Fitz turned to look back the way they had just come. ‘Is the spider close behind us?’ he asked fearfully.

Ahead of them, the distant figure of the other Doctor had turned around too.’ … close behind us?’ Fitz could hear faintly.

The Doctor tapped him on the shoulder, and turned him round. Far beyond them, at the wrong end of the telescope, they could see another Fitz and Doctor with their backs turned.

‘Temporal distortion?’ asked Fitz. ‘Time loop?’

The Doctor shook his head.

‘All done with mirrors?’ Fitz ventured.

The Doctor indicated a door beside them. It had three large indented circles in it, and at first Fitz thought it was part of the wall inside Compassion’s console room. ‘More things to frighten us?’

The Doctor was pressing his fingers hard against his temples, screwing his eyes half closed against the pain. ‘Brave heart,’ he said distantly, reached out and opened the door. He stepped through and beyond without a moment’s hesitation. His shadow slipped after him, swallowed whole by pitch dark nothing.

Fitz considered the inky blackness, vacillating for a second. Then he thought about the bone spider, breathed in deeply, and jumped through the doorway.

First Interlude

In his footsteps

His skimmer crosses the sky like a tossed stone skipping across water. In the rear scanner he sees jittering glimpses of landscape as he breaks cloud cover – the vast sea boiling away still under the setting suns, red and ruddy mountainsides, measureless plains stretching out before him. He sees it all but takes nothing in.

All he cares about is the knowledge he seeks. Somewhere on this planet he will find it – if the ancient library still stands. Its location is as secret as the forbidden information it purports to hold.

If any of his own kind knew he was here, he would be dead. The .misinformation camps were not set up on Gallifrey without reason. The reality bombs were carefully detonated to obscure, to indoctrinate, to keep the truth hidden from minds such as his own. Minds that are considered reactionary, traitorous, because they wish to think for themselves.

He is here to learn the origins of the War To learn why the Time Lords are losing everything.

Paranoia and fear have replaced complacency and arrogance in the traditional Gallifreyan character; he is truly a Lord of his Time as he checks and rechecks for any sign he is being followed. He seems typical in many respects of men now dwelling on one of the nine Gallifreys. These planetary clones were constructed as bolt holes, hideouts, decoys to draw Enemy fire even before the first shots were fired – at least, that is what he believes. He wants, for the first time in his long life, to know. So little is really known now.

He’s been told, taught, trained, that to live now is as to live in Gallifrey’s glorious past.

Ancient biological defences against such threats as the Charon and the Great Vampires have been revived and reconnected, augmented by science of the darkest design so as to have still more devastating, more destructive capabilities. Once clocks ticked on Gallifrey, but now the people do. It is a planet of walking bombs.

He wants to know why. He’s risking so much just by being here. He feels so exposed in this primitive machine he might as well be naked in midair, screaming for the reprisals to come.

He will be missed. He will be searched for.

He feels there is no going back now.

But be has an example to follow. A hero known as the Doctor, who left Gallifrey in the ancient times. A man of peace, ingenuity and the most extraordinary luck.

In his own lifetime, chance has been eliminated. Each battle is fought and refought until time is so worn down it can no longer support the conflict, and collapses. The hole is sealed, the battle moves on, never won or lost, merely re enacted by both sides, again and again. The reasons why, even the form of the Enemy, constantly shifting, forgotten, irrelevant.

He is back in the past now, at a time when the Doctor was in his greatest danger, hunted by a hundred thousand agents scattered throughout space and time. They waited for this misfit to reappear in his stolen TARDIS so they could catch him and steal back the ship that would sire the first fighting force. Once, that ship bad been a woman. She’d been transfigured into the most precious weapon Gallifrey could ever possess.

A means to fight the endless War.

A signalling circle of red in the display screen distracts him. At last, after skimming the planets desolate surface for hours, his skimmer is detecting the tiniest signs of life squeezing through defective filters, originating from a nameless mountain range in the southern hemisphere. Somewhere in the lifeless homogeneity of Pangea is the Great Library, submerged in a trough of rock as if itself nestling between the pages of an ancient book. He will have his answers, have documented historical fact, and he will know what his life has been for.

The tiniest sparkle of reflected light in glass signals his destination. He likens himself to the Doctor at that fateful time. Knowing nothing, about to discover the truth of it all.

Chapter Five

Dusty reception

The stiff wind swirled the orange red sand across the barren plain, gusting it into coloured clouds backlit by a dying sun. In the distance, far to his left, maybe ten kilometres off, the Doctor could discern the stark outlines of an industrial city’s edges. In all other directions, the stark landscape vanished to the horizon with only the rarest of scrubby half dead trees to break the pattern.

He waited patiently for Fitz to arrive, as he had himself, from nowhere. While he did so, he reflected on how his headache had disappeared. He bunked away the grains of sand that the edge of a squall had thrown up, and turned a complete circle. He was entirely alone, a long way from anywhere, with only a bag of jelly babies and a can of fizzy Vimto in his pockets.

Could be worse, he reflected. It could have been a can of Tizer.

‘Doctor.’

Behind him stood a silhouette, a tall and hooded outline unmoved by the whirling gusts of sand, probably on account of the long heavy robes. They dropped to the soft ground from the figure’s thin shoulders like velvet curtains. The figure drew back its hood.

‘I shouldn’t do that, if I were you,’ said the Doctor in a conversational tone. ‘Best leave your hood up and keep the sand out of your … ah, I see. Well, perhaps I should have guessed.’

The figure didn’t flinch from the growing storm, protected as it was by an angular mask of solid bone. No eyes were visible through the dead sockets. The whole top half of the face was obscured by the cadaverous disguise. Two razor edged canines curved savagely from the upper jaw. Beneath this, just visible, withered skin covered a sharp jawline, hardly less skeletal than the mask. The mouth moved from side to side as though chewing, and between the bloodless lips filthy brown black teeth scraped together. It took a moment for the Doctor to recognise mirthless laughter.

‘Do share the joke,’ said the Doctor. ‘I haven’t heard a good gag since the late fourteenth century.’

The teeth stopped grinding. ‘You have a mission.’ The voice was surprisingly soft. It seemed almost whispered, yet it cut through the sound of the wind as though spoken directly in the Doctor’s inner ear.

‘And the punchline would be …?’ The Doctor turned away, trying to look unimpressed.

Unnervingly, the figure stayed in his eyeline, circling him effortlessly. ‘I am the Uncle Kristeva. We are Faction —’

‘You are Faction Paradox,’ spat the Doctor. ‘Yes, I know. That much is patently obvious.’ He lunged sharply towards the figure, hoping to peer deep into the bony sockets, to stare down the Faction Paradox agent and show he was not as scared as he felt.

Kristeva floated effortlessly away from him. ‘You’re not listening, Doctor. We are Faction Paradox.’

‘Gin and tonic twice, barman,’ muttered the Doctor. ‘All right, sir, I heard you the first time.’

‘I am Faction. You are Faction.’ Now Kristeva loomed closer, and the Doctor could stare into those dead sockets. Could see that there was nothing behind them. Could see the bone growing straight from the puckered dead skin of Kristeva’s face. The rotted teeth were close to him now, and the sibilant breath hissed from the crooked mouth, yet the Doctor could smell and feel nothing. ‘Since we first found you on Dust you have been ours, Doctor.

You’ve known that, surely. We infected you then, and our virus has worked on you throughout your successive lives.’

‘Dust?’ breathed the Doctor, looking around them at the unforgiving desert. ‘Is that why you’ve brought me here?’

‘Don’t fight the virus any longer, Doctor,’ breathed the soft voice. ‘Your destiny can’t be altered.’

‘Hah!’ roared the Doctor. ‘You seem to be confusing things. I can’t change the past. But I can prevent what is yet to happen – though I wouldn’t expect Faction Paradox to honour that distinction.’

The Doctor was disappointed that his defiance elicited only more mocking laughter from Kristeva. ‘Believe that if you wish, Doctor. You’ll belong fully to the Faction soon enough.

You’ll perform our mission soon enough. Why not do it willingly now, not painfully later?’

‘Whatever it is, I refuse. So you can send me back to my friends now. I don’t want to spend another moment here on Dust.’ He studied Kristeva’s reaction. ‘Oh,’ he stumbled. “This planet isn’t Dust.’

‘No,’ murmured Kristeva. He stretched his arms wide, and the long full sleeves of the robe fell back to reveal bone thin arms covered in stretched, liver spotted skin. The fingers on the clawlike hands grasped at the sky. ‘Even though the virus in you wasn’t yet strong enough, we were able to use Compassion’s Remote inheritance to steer her here, to override her charmingly naive Randomiser. Those simpletons chasing you think that was their work. How little they understand you, Doctor. And how easily that will be their downfall.’ The claw fingers pulled together into points on the wizened palms. ‘Do you still not know where we’ve brought you?’

‘Stupid of me,’ admitted the Doctor. He studied the ripples in the sand at his feet, scuffing over them with the toe of his shoe. ‘I’ve been away for so long that I hardly recognise the old place.’

‘Yes,’ said Kristeva, as though making an effort to congratulate a slow child. ‘We thought it would save time if we assumed your acceptance. This is Gallifrey.’

The Doctor shaded his eyes with one hand and blinked up at Kristeva. ‘And that bone place we landed in – some kind of Faction holding area, I presume?’

Kristeva said nothing, and the Doctor shivered. A heavy weight was pressing down on his shoulders, which felt as though it might push him right down until the soft sand swallowed him whole. ‘Promise me I won’t have to wear one of your stupid masks.’

Kristeva inclined his head solemnly.

‘All right; sighed the Doctor. ‘You’d better tell me what you want me to do.’

So Uncle Kristeva began to brief his newest Faction agent. When he had finished, he said,

‘No need to mention you’ve met me, Doctor. I wasn’t here.’

The light faded on the horizon. The Doctor pulled up the collar of his jacket tight to keep warm. ‘What about Fitz?’

‘You don’t need the boy,’ hissed Kristeva. ‘The boy is a distraction.’

‘And how did you get here?’ asked the Doctor, looking around. Kristeva was nowhere to be seen.

‘I told you,’ said the Uncle’s voice in the Doctor’s head, the sound of dead leaves blowing away. ‘I never was.’

Chapter Six

Uninvited guest

Fitz’s not very secret fantasy was to have pretty young women screaming at his feet as he looked down at them from the stage filled with smoke and light and sweat. However, a professional career as an internationally famous guitar legend with a rock band who played their instruments with their teeth had rapidly vanished in place of a reluctant vocation as a universally ignored roadie for a Time Lord who saved worlds using string and sealing wax.

So it was with some small nostalgia that he studied the girl who was now screaming up at him so hard that he could see that thing at the back of her throat waggling fit to burst. Though he had to admit he’d played better venues.

Once his eyes had become accustomed to the darkness, he could make out the shabby curtains, grimy flooring and dilapidated furniture that spoke of student dives the world over.

Enough of his pals from the LSE, band members or hangers on, had let him crash on the sofas of their crummy lodgings after a late drinking session for him to recognise the kind of place he was in. He could detect the distinctive sharp odour of burning incense, so whatever university they were from they obviously had a ready supply of revolting joss sticks.

Odd lanterns glittered around the edges of the room. Fitz could hear a low hum of machinery, and the less steady hum of several voices. The voices were repeating some kind of mantra, low urgent words that he could not quite make out. Now he could see them –maybe as many as a dozen people in a couple of groups. They were all wearing long gowns, though most of them had pushed the cowls back over their shoulders.

Somehow, Fitz had ended up standing on a low round table, surrounded by five people with their heads bowed. Across the small and shabby room, a smaller group were huddled over some kind of screen. How depressingly familiar, he thought: Fitz Fortune is strutting it on stage, and people still prefer to watch TV in the corner. ‘Not your best audience to date, Fitz.’

he muttered to himself. ‘Don’t expect heavy tipping.’

He peered down at the bowed heads around him, all oblivious to his sudden appearance.

There was a stocky blond lad, rolling his short cropped head from side to side above his broad shoulders and humming tunelessly. A girl with a slender neck and a tidy auburn bob stood next to him, doing the same. Next to her was another girl with a fuller figure, long dark hair cascading over her bare shoulders and hanging in front of her face.

Bare shoulders was the first one to notice Fitz’s scuffed brogues on the raised podium. She nudged Auburn bob next to her, and both women stared up at him.

Fitz grinned sheepishly. ‘Is this a private party, or can anyone join in?’

His face fell when he took in what they were wearing – the upper halves of their faces were grotesquely disguised with half masks, skull featured coverings with sunken sockets and savage fanged upper teeth. Great – he’d materialised in the middle of an undergraduate Hallowe’en party.

Bare shoulders reached up and removed her mask, revealing wide brown eyes which stared at Fitz in amazement.

Fitz could feel his heart racing a little. ‘I’m afraid I haven’t brought a bottle,’ he said in what he hoped was an apologetic, mollifying tone.

And that was when she had started screaming.

Three of the others backed hurriedly away from Fitz. Auburn bob seized the screaming woman and shook her vigorously. ‘Quiet, Kaufima,’ she hissed through her own mask.

The others in the crowd were restless, too. They were all about the same age, college kids no doubt. One man looked like he was in his late forties, tall, with curry, greying brown hair. His slightly snooty, aristocratic air and I know I’m good looking demeanour marked him out as the senior visitor to the party. Fitz half expected him to be wearing jeans with neatly ironed creases, like every other unhip college lecturer he’d ever met.

Meanwhile, the burly blond lad had regained some of his composure, and looked less like a scared teenager now. ‘Oh, very good, Ressadriand,’ he called back in a confident voice to the TV viewers on the far side of the room. ‘Just to frighten the girls. Where did you conceal this one, then? Did he scare you too, Tana?’ he asked Auburn bob.

‘Speak for yourself, Kellen,’ replied Tarra.

Before Fitz could react, the blond guy, Kellen, reached out and grabbed one of his legs and tugged. Fitz fell down on to the makeshift podium with a thump.

‘Careful, Kellen,’ said Tarra. Fitz would have thanked her for her concern, but she was looking at him as though he was a zoo exhibit. ‘You don’t know where he’s been.’

‘Dragged in off the streets by Ressadriand as his party piece,’ snorted Kellen, pulling off his bone half mask to look closely at Fitz with a hard, pale eyed intensity. ‘A trick to make us think the ritual had been a success. Well, it fooled Kaufima anyway.’ He jerked his head contemptuously at the long haired woman, whose screams had at last subsided into sobs.

‘Nice touch. The drop of blood, the low lighting, the Visualiser humming full of foreboding in the background … and all that mumbo jumbo about “a forbidden sight of the future”!

Woooohh!’

The crowd that had scattered in alarm at Fitz’s unexpected arrival was now drawing closer around him again. He didn’t like the way their initial surprise and fear was turning into curiosity, even anger, as Kellen started to convince them that they’d been deceived. Fitz jerked his ankle sharply out of Kellen’s grasp, and knelt up on the small table. He glanced around nervously as the youngsters approached.

They looked to be in their late teens or early twenties. Most were wearing fine garments which were strangely incongruous in the impoverished surroundings of the room. Typical –

he’d crashed a fancy dress party for toffs who were slumming it. So why were they all wearing the fright masks?

The people by the TV had joined the crowd around Fitz now. The young man in charge was a lank haired thin boy, who strolled across the room as though he owned it.

‘So, Ressadriand,’ Kellen said to this newcomer, ‘amaze us with the explanation for your clever trick.’

Fitz watched the thin guy’s reaction. For all his swagger, Ressadriand seemed as surprised as the others. ‘No trick, Kellen. It worked, just like I said it would. A real materialisation!’ His voice betrayed no doubt, but his eyes gave him away.

‘Well, of course,’ said Kellen with heavy sarcasm. He leered at Fitz so closely that Fitz could see his pink scalp beneath his short cropped blond hair. ‘So where did Ressadriand pick you up, little man?’

Fitz considered his options. One: attempt a calm put down (lost for words). Two: beg piteously (kneeling on this podium could be tricky). Three: head butt this thug and leg it (could he break through the gathering circle of people?). Before he decided, though, Tarra had moved in. ‘Come away, Kellen, leave him alone. He’s obviously confused and frightened.’

She eased Kellen aside, and helped Fitz down from the podium, like he was a four year old worried about the height. He blinked at her innocently, and leaned on her arm more than he needed to. While he allowed her to lead him to the far side of the room, he kept looking around for the bare shouldered screamer with dark hair – Kaufima, wasn’t that her name? She looked as if she needed a bit of comforting herself, and Fitz was the man to offer it. But all he could see were astonished faces, each appearing from behind its skeletal half mask and peering at him curiously from a distance and not wanting to get too close to this sudden apparition in their midst.

Tarra steered him to where the others had been watching television. Actually, now he was close enough, Fitz could see it was more like a computer screen, albeit with an odd receptacle attached beneath it like a small washbasin. In the half light flickering from the computer screen, the bottom of the little receptacle was speckled with irregular, dark spots.

Tarra continued to ask him if he was OK, whether he wanted a drink or to sit down. Fitz was disappointed to realise that it wasn’t a come on: it was like being fussed over by his Auntie Norah.

The swaggering leader of the group, Ressadriand, had joined them again. He was obviously rehearsing his fierce look, but Fitz decided it just made him looked constipated. ‘Who are you?’ asked Ressadriand.

Tarra laughed, a high bright note which punctured the stern mood. ‘Most amusing, Ressadriand,’ she whispered to him. ‘I know he’s one of your parlour tricks. To impress the girls, of course. Well, I’m not fooled, but I am impressed. A magnificent performance.’ She leaned her head close to his in a conspiratorial gesture. ‘You obviously made a big impression on the High Councillor’s daughter over there.’

Ressadriand cast a furtive glance across the room, and Fitz saw he was looking at a smartly dressed older girl on the far side. She smiled weakly at them, obviously desperate to leave.

She almost leapt out of her porcelain white skin at the next thing.

Tarra seized Fitz by the shoulders, spun him round, and proffered him to the cowering assembly of well heeled youngsters. Her high, calm voice echoed over his shoulder and around the shadowy room. “This wretched figure has been delivered to us,’ she announced.

It seemed to Fitz from the crowd’s reaction that this was the last thing they’d expected. That the whole thing was a bit of fun that had suddenly got out of hand.

Tarra was loving every minute of it, milking it for all it was worth. ‘Behold,’ she announced,

‘this is Fitz Kreiner! Our séance is a success!’

The congregation oohed, as though they were at a fireworks display. Some of them bowed their heads. After another heartbeat, a ragged round of applause broke out.

It was only at this point that Fitz remembered he hadn’t told anyone his name.

Chapter Seven

Turn on, tune in, drop out

The meeting broke up shortly afterwards, and the crowd of nicely attired partygoers meandered out of the grimy lodging house. Many of them were muttering about the séance; most of them were clearly startled and surprised by what had happened. Their little game had become all too real, Fitz decided.

Only a handful remained, and disappointingly the long haired screamer wasn’t one of them.

There was Kellen, who seemed unable to take his eyes off Fitz, and was generally acting as if he was Jack Slipper after cornering Ronnie Biggs.

Ressadriand, meanwhile, was tidying up the room. Fitz almost laughed. The strutting boy of earlier now looked as though he was desperate to clear stuff before his parents came back and discovered he’d had an illicit party, and none of his guests were helping.

Fitz didn’t know how he himself had managed to crash the party. How could they have drawn him here, as Tarra had announced? She must just be making it all up, as she had implied to Ressadriand. She was currently on the other side of the room, facing the older aristocratic guy, talking quietly to him. Her body language – the way she angled her head, the slope of her shoulders, her arm gestures –suggested she was letting him down gently. He looked like he was hugging himself, and wasn’t taking it well. Dirty old man.

Suddenly, Tarra leaned in, seizing the man by the hair at the back of his head, pulling his face close to hers. She was kissing him. Abruptly, he pulled his head back, and then tugged his hair out of her grip.

Tarra chuckled and placed her hands on her hips, appraising his reaction.

The dirty old man was touching the back of his head, as though she had pulled his hair too hard. He touched his bottom lip, and saw his fingers were stained with blood where Tarra had bitten him. She was still laughing when he shuffled off angrily.

Fitz nodded after him as Tarra returned. ‘College lecturer? Research student?’

Tarra frowned a little, puzzled.

‘Isn’t he a bit old for you?’ asked Fitz.

She smiled, revealing her perfect white teeth, surprisingly pointed. ‘Who, Eton? Oh, he’s quite a bit younger than me, Fitz.’

Fitz showed her his ‘oh yeah?’ look. ‘Well, Eton should eat more of what you have for breakfast, then. It’s rude to ask a lady how old she is, of course.’ He paused to suck his teeth.

She didn’t take the opportunity to answer. ‘So, how much do you weigh, then?’

She simply offered him an enigmatic smile. Well, thought Fitz, who knows how old all these guys are? He was rubbish at guessing ages. After all, the Doctor looked younger than Fitz’s dad – and, not long after first meeting him, the Doctor had casually mentioned having a granddaughter. If the Doctor could be a grandfather and still look like that …

Kellen muscled up to them at this point. ‘Fitz Kreiner?’ he said abruptly.

‘Er … yeah:

‘What kind of name is that? I thought you Outsiders were all called Gur or Blug.’

Fitz was in two minds about pretending to be someone he wasn’t, because it seemed clear that some of them already knew who he was. He could hear his mum’s admonishing voice in his ear’ Careful, Fitzie. Your sins’ll find you out, boy.’

‘I suppose Kellen is a toff’s name, then?’ Fitz’s sarcastic tone suggested he thought otherwise. ‘My father enjoyed The Great Gatsby far too much and christened me Fitzgerald, my mum thought I stopped growing at the age of six and called me Fitzie, but my friends call me Fitz. You,’ he added, ‘can call me Mr Kreiner.’

Kellen bristled. Tarra put a calming hand on his tensing shoulder.

‘Where are you from, Outsider?’ said Kellen.

Fitz gestured around the grimy student digs. ‘I’m from Archway, of course.’ They continued to stare at him as though he was some kind of alien. All right, then. ‘Archway?’ he continued.

‘London, Earth, the Milky Way, the Universe, N2 8GT.’

The word ‘Earth’ had a gratifying, if completely unexpected, effect. Kellen’s jaw dropped, and Ressadriand was so surprised that he stopped tidying up. The two men studied Fitz, looking for the card in neatly inked block capitals that explained what this museum exhibit actually was. Tana remained studiously unimpressed, however.

‘Earth?’ croaked Ressadriand.

‘Where else?’ said Fitz, though he felt less certain now.

‘A monkey man,’ snorted Kellen.

‘Oo oo,’ said Fitz, deadpan.

And then he looked more carefully around the room.Why had he assumed he was back on Earth? He walked around the little podium, thinking things through. Maybe he’d wanted to return to that safe and shabby life, a place far removed from the recent terrors, a time long before his travels through time with the Doctor. Maybe it was instinctive, to step through a doorway and go back to what he knew.

Ressadriand’s gob smacked look was enough for the scales to fall j from Fitz’s eyes. The clothes, the wall hangings, the furniture were all unlike anything he’d seen in London. The technology set in the far wall – which he’d just assumed was a television but which they had called a ‘Visualiser’ – was unknown, alien. The low lighting permeated the room evenly, there were no fly specked forty watt bulbs hanging from frayed wires. Even the air smelled different –not the sour smell of old dust and stale urine that seemed to pervade most student digs, but a sharp, almost electric tang that made his nose hairs tingle. There wasn’t even any cigarette smoke

– definitely not a student pad in London.

Ressadriand and Kellen continued to gape at him, the way he’d stare if he’d met a Neanderthal with its elbow on the polished mahogany of Molly’s bar.

His foot scuffed into something on the floor. He looked down and saw one of the gruesome Hallowe’en half masks. Things became clearer all of a sudden.

Not Earth.

‘We summoned a human!’ Ressadriand’s young face suddenly creased into a huge grin. He was practically dancing on the carpet

– or whatever passed for carpet on this planet.

‘You’re telling us this is not one of your tricks?’ said Kellen dubiously.

Ressadriand was still burbling: ‘A human! I knew it, I knew it, I knew it!’

Kellen snorted. ‘You did not know it. You were as surprised as the rest of us, wasn’t he, Tarra?’

Tarra was watching their reactions, as though separate from events.

Fitz decided he had the advantage of them at last. He strolled casually back from the podium, stooped low and picked up one of the bone half masks from the floor. It was surprisingly heavy. This made him realise, with a small lurch of his stomach, that it was fashioned from real bone. It had been sliced from the front of a skull. A human skull?

Steady, Fitz, keep it together.

He placed the skull mask over his eyes. It sat snugly in place, as though it were made for him.

‘Do you know what you’re playing with?’ he said in his Vincent Price voice. ‘I do, now. This isn’t the sort of party I’m used to. More of a clique than a party, wouldn’t you say? More of a

…’

Pause for effect, Fitz. Twirl your moustache.

‘A faction?’ he added.

He was pleased with the reaction to this. Ressadriand and Kellen both took a sharp intake of breath. Even Tarra snapped a sudden look directly at him.

Fitz turned around on the spot, encompassing the whole room in a wide armed gesture.

‘Quite the clandestine gathering you had here. But now that your playmates have scurried off safely to their hidden homes … Well, come on, be honest with me. You’re related, aren’t you? I’m sure I can see a faint family resemblance.’

He stared at them each in turn, imagining the startling effect the mask would have on them.

‘Why, you could be cousins !’

Ressadriand had now transformed from overexcited teenager to terrified kid. He was even backing away now. Tarra, however, had swiftly regained her composure, Fitz noted, and was whispering in Kellen’s ear.

Kellen stepped towards Fitz. ‘You seem to be well informed about Faction Paradox.’ Fitz hoped his own reaction couldn’t be seen behind his mask. ‘Remarkably well informed for an Earthling.’ Kellen spat the last word out with contemptuous dismissal.

Ressadriand hushed him with a hissing sound through his teeth and a feeble wave of his hands. He scurried over to the door of the room and shut it firmly, as though someone outside the tired digs might overhear their secrets.

Kellen took Fitz by the wrist, and drew him over to the Visualiser. ‘We should continue our search.’

‘No!’ protested Ressadriand, hurrying back to join them. Kellen scooped up a bone mask with one hand and dropped it into place on his face, never relinquishing his grasp on Fitz’s wrist.

Tarra was already wearing her mask, and offered another to Ressadriand. He took it from her as though it might be electrified.

Fitz decided not to wrench his hand free. If he failed to break Kellen’s grip, he’d be conceding a weakness. Better to try to remain aloof, in control, as though graciously permitting the blond lad to steer him towards the Visualiser as he played his bully boy game with the frightened Ressadriand. Even so, Fitz couldn’t stifle a little ‘eek!’ when he felt the palm of his trapped hand being scraped against one of the sharp canine teeth that protruded from Kellen’s mask. Nor could he then prevent his arm muscles from tensing involuntarily when Kellen jerked his hand towards the Visualiser. Fitz could feel blood dripping from his palm, and hear it spotting the metal surface of the small basin below the Visualiser’s display screen.

He glared at the blond man. The teeth on Kellen’s half mask were wet with Fitz’s blood.

“The human vascular system is relatively weak, of course,’ Kellen said softly. ‘And the blood runs thin. But it should be sufficient … ah, yes.’

The Visualiser screen had flared into brilliant life, casting weird shadows behind them. In the sudden light, Fitz saw that Tarra’s face was alive with new interest.

Ressadriand blustered beside her. ‘Earthlings have such short lives. You … you’ll be hard pressed to find any kind of future for him.’

‘Let’s see how long our monkey lives,’ grinned Kellen, indicating the status display on the screen. ‘A hundred years … two centuries … five centuries …’

Ressadriand stared. ‘A thousand years.’

Fitz gulped, tried to regain his composure. ‘What are we looking for, then? A nice picture of my skeleton in the rotting remains of an oak casket?’

The Visualiser display swirled, clouded over, and finally snapped into sharp focus.

Kellen released his grip on Fitz’s wrist. Fitz snatched it back, wincing as the pain seemed to increase. He extracted a grubby hankie from his coat pocket and pressed it to his palm. When he looked back to Kellen, he could see a mixture of amazement and fear in his eyes. The youngster hadn’t expected the game to get so real, so suddenly.

Fitz eyed the display. The reading indicated that the view was some two thousand years in the future. His future.

The swirling grey haze of the vortex was disgorging a tumbling figure.

Kellen plucked his mask off and looked in growing horror at the figure. His face told Fitz that this was a game for him no longer. ‘What is dial?

‘The future,’ crooned Tarra.

The black silhouette became an ancient humanoid, battered, torn. Despite its huge age, it was alive. Around its wizened torso, the figure was tightly clutching its one remaining arm.

Chapter Eight

Question time

Castellan Vozarti stared out of the viewing window and tried to focus on the roof of the Panopticon in the distance. The Jasdisary Building rotated slowly, and would complete one entire corkscrew turn in exactly fifty eight minutes. He couldn’t remember now what was special about the number fifty eight, but the Architect had probably included it in his treatise.

The Architect had been a Devotee of Apeiron, of course. They’d managed to keep that quiet, afterwards – quite enough superstition on Gallifrey as it was, these days.

A muffled cry from behind him momentarily broke his concentration. That wasn’t good: Vozarti needed to concentrate on where he was looking. If he didn’t focus on the Panopticon roof carefully enough, he would accidentally catch sight of his own reflection in the window, and be surprised all over again at how young he looked. The evening’s reflected sunlight wasn’t as bad as the harsh illumination of day – his red hair looked darker and his clear blue eyes more hooded, brooding perhaps. Even so, he’d have traded back this younger looking incarnation for his old one, gout and deaf ear and bald head too. There was something familiar about it, and he suspected he got more respect from the Chancellery Guard then. An ill advised attempt to grow a thin, gingery beard had only reinforced this. It had also made him look younger than his son, instead of four hundred years older. But what were his options? Retirement because of ill health, driven out of office to allow that guttersnipe Trantres to slip into his still warm boots, or a forced regeneration?

The roof caught the orange light of the sun. Vozarti wondered how long it would be before the Edifice encroached on the planet, and started to cast its shadow permanently over the Capitol, over the Panopticon itself. Not before the Reaffirmation Ceremony, he hoped. That would be too dreadfully symbolic – literally casting a shadow over the celebrations.

The Jasdisary Building, all ninety storeys, slowly turned on its antigravs.Vozarti quietly cursed the Architect again. The whole idea was a stupid nuisance, he had decided. And he’d decided long before his previous incarnation’s legs had given up on him. The problem was that you could never work out which was the best exit from the Jasdisary, because it had no external windows – for aesthetic reasons, the Architect had said – on the lower thirty storeys.

So you could end up travelling around the entire base of the building to get to the Panopticon even if you chose the same exit at the same time of day, because the rotation of the Jasdisary was erratic – for artistic reasons, no doubt.

There was a long groan from the interrogation suite behind him. Vozarti tried to filter it out.

That had been no problem when he’d been deaf in one ear, of course.

The Panopticon itself was just as impractical as the Jasdisary, like most of the architecture of the Capitol. The unnecessarily enormous Panopticon had six needlessly gigantic statues in it, one over each of the wildly oversized doors in the massively out of scale walls. The walls arched up to a ceiling that curved like the inner surface of a small artificial moon. It was a masterpiece of physical and temporal engineering, obviously. But it was typical of a Time Lord joint project: each of the six colleges had ended up trying to outdo the others, so that each side had to become bigger and bigger. The Cardinals of each college had stared each other down, like their huge statues, unwilling or unable to drop their gaze and lose face before their peers and rivals.

Eventually, the Scendeles ran out of money, bankrupted their college, and almost everyone else saw sense. Seeing sense was easier once one of the Cardinals had blinked, of course. But they hadn’t stopped before they’d already built a structure that now took the best part of a morning to traverse on foot, and which had its own weather system. (The Patrexes, meanwhile, went on to even greater financial disaster after constructing a son et lumière portico for their Academy Lodge, which cost more to run in one month than they spent on building it in the first place.)

The Panopticon roof had rotated almost completely out of view at last. This had happened twice since the interrogation began. If Vozarti intervened at the right point, about another forty seven minutes, he calculated, he could complete the interrogation in time to sneak through the admin offices and machine rooms in the base of the Jasdisary while it was neatly aligned with the Panopticon’s nearest entrance. That would save him a long trek around the building to the President’s office. Even with fast transport, there was once a President who couldn’t keep his appointments, and ended up with his final meeting of the day running hours behind. A Time Lord President who couldn’t keep time.

The Penansulix Structure was in view now. Beyond it, faintly discernible, hovered the Edifice, a nightmare looming over Gallifrey’s horizon.

Another shout from the interrogation suite. This one startled Vozarti, jolted him from his reverie. After one last despairing look at his too young reflection, he turned to stare at the prisoner through the one way mirrorwall.

The prisoner was shouting with anger. Unusual, after this long. That would turn to shouts of pain soon enough. And yet, as he watched, the prisoner was just becoming more indignant.

Despite the way he was strung between the posts, he was arguing with the Chancellery Guard. Sometimes, his pale eyes would stare towards Vozarti, as though he knew he was being watched, and his words would be addressed to his unseen tormentor.

‘You were caught attempting to break into a high security area,’ Chancellery Guard Captain Ditrec was telling the prisoner as though this was a major revelation. ‘Without authorisation, without requesting permission, and at a time of maximum alert. You’re a known subversive and —’

‘Yes, yes,’ snapped the prisoner. ‘So if you’ve read all my press cuttings, why can’t you tell me my name, eh? You have no record of my biodata in the Matrix, or you wouldn’t be going through this whole charade. So cut to the chase, why don’t you?’ He gave a further groan of dismay as Ditrec ratcheted up the power on the equipment. Sparks flew.

Vozarti watched the guard take off his jacket and hang it over a chair. He wondered whether Ditrec would be careful not to get the prisoner’s blood on his shirt. At least the red material of the jacket hadn’t shown that.

Ditrec sat on the chair, and stared at the prisoner closely. ‘Why were you attempting to break into the secured TARDIS cradles if you were not attempting sabotage or theft?’

‘How many more times do I have to tell you?’ sighed the prisoner. ‘I was lost and confused. I can barely remember who I am.’ He tossed his head back in an unsuccessful attempt to flick the sweat caked hair off his forehead. Now he was staring directly at Vozarti, impossibly, through the mirrorwall. He knew he was there. ‘Won’t you come in and do your own dirty work?’

Ditrec twisted round in his chair to look at where Vozarti was standing. ‘Special request, sir?’

Castellan Vozarti sighed despairingly. The guard had no technique. The Castellan waved one hand over the control at waist height, and the one way mirrorwall dissolved into its constituent particles. He stepped into the room, and brushed Ditrec aside as the guard leapt to attention. ‘Idiot.’

‘Castellan Vozarti,’ Ditrec yelled at him. ‘Permission to employ the mind probe, sir!’

‘No,’ said Vozarti calmly. ‘Not the mind probe. And there’s no need to shriek at me like that

– I’m not deaf, you know.’

‘No, sir, sorry, sir!’ bellowed Ditrec.

The prisoner was smiling broadly. Vozarti wondered if he was on the edge of a grimace. He reached out to touch the pain control, pondering whether to flick it higher.

‘Castellan Vozarti,’ said the prisoner quickly. ‘I think the President should know that I have access to a Type 102 TARDIS.’

Vozarti felt himself go cold. He remembered a series of restricted Council meetings, a number of agreements entered into by the assembled highest of the High Council during the recent crisis, unminuted commitments made to the President by each and every one of them.

He knew at once who the prisoner was.

Vozarti wrenched the pain control around until it hit the end stop.

The hum of power died away as the machine switched off. Despite the prisoner’s brave facade, Vozarti noticed, his body visibly relaxed. ‘You can leave us now, Ditrec. End of shift for today.’

‘Are you sure, sir?’ cried the guard from just behind him.

Vozarti winced. ‘Yes, that’ll be all, Guard Captain. Dismissed.’

Ditrec put his red jacket back on, saluted noisily to Vozarti, and stepped out of the interrogation suite.

Vozarti motioned with his hand and the missing wall reassembled itself, an opaque and soundproof barrier now. Another gesture released the prisoner from his bonds.

Vozarti reached to his own belt and took out his staser. ‘A Type 102 TARDIS?’ he said quietly. Tell me more, Doctor.’

The Doctor had slumped down on his haunches, and was rubbing life back into his wrists and forearms. ‘Do you know what happened to my coat? I’d only just got it.’

‘Doctor?’

‘I will speak only with the President. You must have realised that.’

Vozarti said, ‘I have the authority of the High Council in these matters.’

The Doctor stared up at him defiantly. ‘I’ve waited quite some time for a member of the High Council to deign to visit me here,’ he snapped. ‘I can wait just as long again until the President arrives. Or you could take me to her – that might be more courteous. Romana and I are old friends.’

Vozarti let the unwarranted familiarity slide by, remembering how President Romana had described the Doctor in that secret briefing. ‘I understand you are acquainted.’ Vozarti gestured one more time, and the wall behind him dissolved again. He took a slow, pensive stroll over to the observation window. Thirty nine more minutes, he thought to himself. ‘Very well, Doctor.’

The Doctor was standing beside him. He had recovered his frock coat, and was shrugging it back on. ‘You sound reluctant, Castellan. Is it such an impropriety in the power structure for you to do this? After all, it means the Time Lords will learn more about the future of time travel.’

Vozarti tucked the staser back in its holster. ‘No, Doctor,’ he said, staring out at the last visible edge of the Panopticon dome. ‘It’s just such a very long walk.’

Chapter Nine

Message in a bottle

Vice President Timon turned the bottle over for the hundredth time, feeling it tingle on the skin of his long, thin fingers, through his palms and then out across the back of his hands.

Colours swirled over it, illuminated by the stark white light above his desk, an oil slick sheen that fluctuated constantly over the bottle’s surface as the contours shifted through time. It was beautiful, if unpredictable. Timon preferred things to be predictable.

On the other side of his desk, through the eddying colours of the bottle, Timon could see three Chancellors – Fremest, Branastigert and Djarshar. Djarshar was still talking. Like all Time Lords from the Patrexian College, he was never short of a word, could speak without interruption or pause for breath, and always seemed to know what he was going to say. At least that was appropriate for a Chancellor of Time Future, thought Timon. Yet as Djarshar droned on, he noticed that even Chancellor Fremest’s eyes were glazing over at the torrent of words.

‘I have another appointment, Chancellor Future,’ said Timon, smoothly interjecting his words and emphasising matters with the formal address.

Djarshar’s conversation stuttered to a halt. ‘I don’t think this matter can wait …’ That was when he saw who was coming into the room. ‘Oh, well, I see.’

Timon smiled inwardly. No words now, Chancellor Future? Doubtless they would come in time. But he simply said, ‘We will talk at the full Council later, Chancellor.’ He nodded to Fremest too. ‘Chancellor Past.’

Fremest, the Chancellor of Time Past, turned to go. Djarshar did not take this hint to leave.

He was still staring at the newcomer who had arrived with Castellan Vozarti. ‘Well, well, Doctor …’

‘Well enough, Djarshar,’ said the Doctor, tugging at his green lapels in a futile attempt to straighten his crumpled frock coat. The strain of recent interrogation showed in the marks on his lace. ‘You’ve done well for yourself, I see. I imagine you’re just leaving, though, so goodbye.’ He strode up to the desk and stood boldly in front of the Vice President. ‘You’ve done well, too, haven’t you, Timon? I remember you as a junior time technician, don’t I? All bookish study and no practical work in the field. No panache, a bit like that rudimentary Klein bottle you’re holding. You’re a functionary, Timon. And I said I wanted to speak with Romana. Where is she?’

Timon set the bottle down on the desk, between two neat piles of reports. It bobbed about a little before it decided which parts of itself existed at the same point in time as the desk. ‘I am the Vice President, Doctor,’ said Timon slowly, deliberately. He allowed himself a lazy look at the Castellan standing at the prisoner’s shoulder. ‘You would do well to remember your own position.’

He was surprised when the Doctor threw back his head and guffawed.

‘Been there, done that, got the T shirt,’ the Doctor laughed. ‘I was President of Gallifrey myself, you know. On several occasions.’

‘A president doesn’t deserve the title until at least a century of service. Maybe even not until his first Reaffirmation,’ huffed Fremest. ‘Yours was the shortest term of office ever.’

‘Not shorter than Greyjan,’ interjected Timon. He regretted it immediately. Branastigert, the Chancellor of Parallel Time, was clearing his throat.

‘Officially,’ Branastigert began, precisely enunciating his words as usual, ‘the term of office concludes …’

Timon was half afraid that Branastigert was about to list a complete history of Time Lord presidents, so he held up his hand for silence.

He did not need to, for the Doctor had interrupted already. ‘Pedantic poppycock! You don’t need centuries in office: you need centuries of practical experience. I really don’t know what all the fuss was about when I was President. And I certainly didn’t feel the need for a cohort of Lords Temporal and a second in command flunky to do my dirty work.’

‘How typical of your college,’ snapped Chancellor Djarshar. ‘The Prydonians! Renegades, fugitives, lunatics and ingrates. You think Gallifrey owes you everything. And you, Doctor, are the most insolent of all of them.’

‘Your President is a Prydonian, is she not?’ said the Doctor. That shut Djarshar up at once.

The Doctor placed his palms flat on Timon’s desk and stared into him. ‘Speaking of the President, I told Castellan Vozarti that I wanted to talk to her.’

‘The President,’ intoned Chancellor Parallel. ‘Really, Doctor, your tone suggests she is nothing more than a function. She is the Lady President, she is the War Queen, she is our Head of States. She is Mistress of the Nine Gallifreys.’

The Doctor smiled. ‘I hope she wears a big badge. To get all those titles on it, I mean.’

‘I am her Vice President,’ said Timon coolly. “The Lady President is unavailable. Preparing for her own Reaffirmation Ceremony. Busy with affairs of state.’

‘If you want my co operation, then Romana is the only one I’ll talk to.’

The Chancellor Parallel cleared his throat again. “The Lady President Romana,’ began Branastigert pompously, ‘is personally inspecting the Edifice. She left earlier today with the Chancellor of Time Present —’

Timon saw that the Castellan was irritated by the way Branastigert had suddenly volunteered this information.

‘Edifice?’ asked the Doctor.

‘A vast structure which appeared recently in the skies over Gallifrey. The Lady President Romana swiftly recognised the threat it poses.’

‘Threat?’

‘A massive threat,’ Branastigert continued, despite Vozarti’s deepening scowl of disapproval.

‘It appears to be warping local space, bending gravity around it, spreading ripples into the local vortex. We cannot risk destroying it lest we unleash a white hole or some such cataclysm.’

‘Cataclysm?’

‘As foretold in the Green Book of Gallifrey,’ observed Djarshar gloomily.

‘My Lords Temporal!’ snapped Castellan Vozarti at last. “The Doctor is a prisoner, not a Council adviser.’

Timon waved his hands in admonition. With a few simple repetitions, the Doctor had indeed managed to elicit more information from the two Chancellors than was appropriate.

Unfortunately, being admonished by the young looking Vozarti was hardly threatening.

Timon found it difficult to take seriously someone who looked like a surly pre centenarian.

The Doctor was laughing again, much to the other Chancellors’ annoyance.

‘Do not mock, Doctor,’ said Djarshar, hurrying towards the doors, his long robes of office swirling over the flagstone floor. ‘If she were here, I am sure the Chancellor of Time Present would agree with me. And now that you have arrived, I must consult the Black Book of Gallifrey for further guidance.’

The Doctor’s derisive laughter echoed after him. “That’s right, don’t rely on your own skill or judgement: make a decision by looking it up in an index.’ He waved an imaginary book in his hand. ‘Check it out in the Little Red Book of Gallifrey. Consult the Bones of the Dead, and the Scrolls of Antiquity and the Runes of Rassilon. Don’t rely on the Sense of Common or the Patently Obvious. Scurry off and see whatever toys and trinkets are left in your musty cupboards.’

Timon was shocked by the Doctor’s levity. He could see that the other Chancellors were, too.

‘Do not presume to mock us,’ whispered Branastigert. “The Slaughterhouse is no subject for levity.’

‘Slaughterhouse?’ asked the Doctor.

‘We should not pander any longer to this collegiate arrogance!’ Djarshar admonished the Doctor with a wagging finger. ‘You put the presumptuous pride into Prydonian. I’d say you never deserved promotion beyond Scrutationary Archivist. Yet you obviously believe you are some kind of Gallifreyan hero. Well I tell you, Doctor, you are no Haclav Agust. You are no Yassinbur.’

And with this ostentatious admonishment, Chancellor of Time Future Djarshar swept grandly out of the Vice President’s office, trailing the Chancellors of Time Past and Time Parallel in his wake, an imperious exit marred only when he caught his robes of office on the door handle.

Timon looked at the two who remained – the absurdly young Castellan standing to attention, and the shabby figure of the Doctor. ‘You should not taunt the Chancellors, Doctor. You must realise that your continued existence lies in their gift. Do not depend on your presumed friendship with the Lady President, for the Lords Temporal and I are her High Council. We are Gallifrey.’

‘Oo er,’ said the Doctor in a languid tone. ‘So many things to worry about. The Lords Temporal holding the Sword of Rassilon over my head by a thread. The Edifice of Doom hanging over Gallifrey. And how will I ever get the bloodstains off this jacket?’

Timon grinned at the Doctor through the bottle, seeing his features shift and change. ‘Talk yourself to an early grave, Doctor.’

‘Well, I mean! An Edifice? More of the Time Lords’ typically overblown terminology for everyday things that they do not have the wit to understand. Whoever heard of such a thing

…? Oh.’ The Doctor’s scoffing words faded away as he looked at a display screen behind Timon. The Vice President had simply switched it on as the Doctor was talking. The whole wall now showed the looming shape of the Edifice hanging over the Gallifreyan horizon.

‘It seems it is a container of some kind,’ explained Timon. ‘From what we can determine, it is made of solid bone.’

The Doctor snapped his head round to stare at Timon. ‘Bone?’

‘Do you think you can exploit your routine of wide eyed innocence on me, Doctor? Knowing the Faction’s predilection for bone, we fear it may be some kind of trap.’

‘Far too many of Gallifrey’s youth have been turning to superstition,’ said Vozarti quietly.

‘Growing numbers of the bored and disaffected are dabbling in Faction rites. Falling into the cults of Eutenoyar and Apeiron …’

Timon was unsure whether he liked this revelation in front of the Doctor. ‘We have not attempted to penetrate the Edifice,’ he interjected. ‘We are … studying it.’

‘Hah!’ snorted the Doctor. ‘What you mean, Timon, is that you’re kidding yourselves.

You’re observing it in the absence of knowing what else to do. Come on, you can admit it to me and the Castellan. You’re afraid.’

‘We are cautious.’

‘Formalistic flummery!’

‘Tell us, then, Doctor,’ began Timon, his voice low and dangerous. What do you know of the Edifice? We know you steered your TARDIS by it.’

‘What?’

‘All this bluster about needing to see your friend the President, and your ability to deliver us a Type 102 TARDIS. Do you think we are not yet aware of all this? The Lady President Romana was captaining the second of the war TARDISes that pursued you past the Edifice.’

Timon was pleased to see the Doctor’s reaction to this information – initial disbelief turning to horrified acceptance. ‘Imagine how she’s going to feel about the loss of two vessels. So stop playing us for fools, Doctor. You’re still alive for a reason. Tell us about the Edifice.’

The Doctor had slumped down into a chair, as though his legs had finally surrendered to fatigue. ‘I tried to prevent those deaths.’

Vozarti was standing over him now. ‘Our observations of the Edifice haven’t been fruitless.

We know that a genetic imprimatur is needed to gain access. And the signature is unmistakable, Doctor. It’s yours.’

Timon watched the Doctor’s reaction. He seemed to have been numbed by this new information. The Vice President picked up his Klein bottle again, rotating it in the actinic light that spilled over his neatly organised desk, and feeling the soothing temporal effects on and through his hands again. ‘You are the key to this, Doctor –literally.’

Timon smiled to himself, feeling a satisfied glow spread through his hearts, and the warm tingle of the bottle in his hands. He exchanged a knowing glance with the Castellan, and returned his gaze to the Doctor. They had him now, he could tell by the way that the Doctor obviously could not look at him – he could only stare at the stone flooring and shake his head sorrowfully.

‘I cannot help you,’ the Doctor said. He suddenly thrust his hand forward, fingers splayed and held unwaveringly over the desk in the stark overhead light. Timon almost jumped, almost dropped the bottle.

Then he looked more closely. Saw what he was being shown.

Despite the sharp light falling on the desk, the Doctor’s hand cast no shadow.

‘I am becoming a Faction agent,’ stated the Doctor bleakly. ‘My biomass must’ve changed beyond recognition. I can’t get you into the Edifice.’ The Doctor pulled his hand back. ‘Not now.’

Timon continued to gape, hardly noticing that he had let go of the Klein bottle. It rolled across the bright clean surface of the desk, its shape morphing and twisting in the light, until it dropped off the edge. Timon heard it smash on the flagstones. The Doctor sat in his chair, unmoved. ‘You …’ Timon gulped, tried to compose himself again. ‘You allowed yourself to be taken by the Faction?’

Vozarti tossed his head in a gesture of contemptuous dismissal. ‘So, the Doctor is of no value to us after all.’ He activated his communicator. ‘Guard detail to the Vice President’s office immediately.’

This seemed to break the Doctor’s gloom. ‘You’re forgetting Compassion.’

Vozarti sneered. ‘Expect no mercy from us now, Doctor.’

‘I mean, the Type 102 TARDIS.’

‘You gave it a name?’ This evidently amused the Castellan greatly.

‘You need Compassion to mother your new sentient TARDISes –President Romana told me so herself. To prepare for the forthcoming war with the Enemy.’

‘You’re remarkably well informed, Doctor. But you are Faction, so unfortunately that does not surprise me.’

‘I have not surrendered to the Faction yet.’ The Doctor leaned on the desk and stared straight at Timon.

Timon remained strangely fascinated by the way the whole of the Doctor’s face was illuminated, none of it in shadow, as though softly lit from within. ‘Let me try to synthesise something from Compassion. Some way that you can propagate your new TARDISes without inflicting whatever horrors you have in store for her. If you can guarantee that, Vice President, I promise I’ll find a way into the Edifice. I’ll find a way to make my new Faction tainted imprimatur compatible with my old, purer one.’

Access to the 102, thought Timon. A way on to the Edifice. All without the involvement of the Lords Temporal and the usual collegiate squabbles on the High Council. And the Doctor was practically begging him.

The main doors opened, and three Chancellery Guards strode into the room. They saluted the Vice President and bellowed at their Castellan: ‘Reporting as ordered, sir!’

Vozarti winced, and waved their salutes away.

‘Very well, Doctor,’ said Timon. He immediately instructed the guards to escort the Doctor to residential quarters in the Penansulix Scientific Structure. ‘Use my transport.’

Vozarti scowled as they left the room with the Doctor, though Timon saw that even this did not add many lines to the Castellan’s face.

‘I know what you are worrying about, Castellan. That this is a scam of the Doctor’s to free himself of the Faction virus.’

Vozarti was still scowling. Timon rose from his seat, smoothed down his robes of office, and walked around the desk to place a reassuring hand on Vozarti’s arm.

‘If it is, then he is wasting his time – there is no hope. The Doctor may think that practical work is better than bookish study. But I’ve researched the darker side of Gallifrey’s history, and I know that once you are marked by the Faction, there is no way back. We shall have the Type 102 from him, we shall board the Edifice, and then the Doctor can rot in his personal Faction hell.’

‘Shall I advise the High Council, sir?’

‘I’ll tell them myself,’ said Timon. Eventually, he thought. No point in letting the genie out of the bottle yet.

At his feet, the glittering shards of the broken Klein bottle flicked in and out of the present.

Chapter Ten

Taken for a ride

The underground carriage smelled of undusted upholstery. No, not underground – what had Tarra called it? Oh yeah, the Transtube. The travel system that would take them to the centre of the capital, or maybe it was the Capitol, wherever that was. Their section of the Transtube was empty. Just like the Northern Line late on a Sunday night, he thought. No matter how closely he looked, though, he couldn’t see any adverts for Beecham’s Powders.

That would be too much to hope for, he thought, as memories of the weird seance came back to him. A weird seance with him as the star turn. He felt Tarra’s cool hand in his. ‘Do you think that guy just smuggled me in as a trick?’

‘Picked up some sad case from the MidTown, you mean? Promised you a few cheap beers.

Or maybe,’ she continued, looking askance at Fitz’s dishevelled appearance, ‘a change of clothes and a square meal?’

Sure, thought Fitz, build up my confidence. But he persisted: ‘What do you think?’

Her reaction was inscrutable, and she said nothing.

‘All that stuff,’ persisted Fitz. “The blood in that basin. And what they were saying afterwards, about how we’d seen a forbidden snapshot of my future Tarra squeezed his hand, then let go. She produced a small ivory box from her pocket. There were regular indentations in its upper surface, and she ran her fingers slowly over them, as though she was reading Braille. The light of the carriage made the skin of her slender fingers seem old and puckered, like she’d been in the bath too long.

He was about to ask where she had heard his name before when Tarra pressed a sequence of indentations in the box. Fitz found himself thrown away from her down the length of the carriage as the Transtube screeched to a halt.

Fitz picked himself off the floor. He wasn’t surprised to find that Tarra had obviously braced herself for the emergency stop, and was now standing by the doorway.

‘Ouch; said Fitz in a perfectly normal voice, but Tarra was either obviously fully occupied or just ignoring him.

Her fingers flickered over the ivory control device. At once, the nearest exit door vanished into the floor. Fitz had been impressed with the way the doors had all done this when they first boarded the Transtube, back near the run down digs. He was even more impressed to see that now, exactly aligned with their exit, was a doorway in the tube wall. The door creaked open to reveal a dank six sided corridor, with one of the sides forming a narrow walkway at the bottom.

‘These tunnels are weird,’ observed Fitz. ‘Hexagonal. You’d think it was easier to dig them circular.’

Tarra said, ‘Six is a special number: six members of the High Council, six colleges of cardinals, six sides to the Great Panopticon, six suits at cards.’

‘Six suits?’

‘Flames, Clouds, Souls, Deeps, Mesmers and Dominoes.’

‘Numbers count,’ said Fitz lightly.

‘More than you know,’ she answered. ‘Now don’t dawdle. I want to get this done and get back to MidTown.’

‘MidTown?’

‘Kellen and Ressadriand and the others are waiting for us, Fitz.’

Typical, thought Fitz. It’s a slum, so it’s given an elevated name. Not too elevated, but enough to imply that it couldn’t possibly be where the dregs of society pooled together and could not escape.

Except, of course, for Tarra and Kellen and the others. What were they doing out there?

Slumming it. Literally.

‘I said don’t dawdle.’

As soon as Fitz stepped out, the Transtube door flicked back into position, and the whole train started up again, thundering away into the darkness. Tarra switched on a light in the tunnel, pocketed her control device and moved off.

‘You know,’ Fitz called after her into the weakly lit corridor, ‘there are easier ways to fare dodge.’

But she had already turned the first corner. Fitz listened for a while to the buzz of the Transtube rail behind him before hurrying after Tarra.

Chapter Eleven

House call

The Doctor was faintly ashamed of himself. He couldn’t remember when he’d last had so much fun playing with scientific equipment.

The laboratory he’d been assigned on the ninety sixth floor of the Penansulix Scientific Structure was filled with the most advanced new Gallifreyan technology. He was like a greedy boy let loose in a sweet factory. He caught himself getting excited at the sight of a pergestion funnel or a linked pair of elestoman matrices or a really flashy test tube holder, and remembering with a jolt that he should be worrying about Fitz. Or the threat to Compassion. Or the changes he’d observed in the Capitol since his last visit. Was this just avoidance, a refusal to admit he knew what was important, what needed to be done, what his priorities should be? Or was it an admission that he was confused, uncertain, unable to decide?

Or had Faction Paradox assumed control?

But then he’d go and examine another area of the huge room, and discover a lamaseric uncertainty conduit, and suddenly he was nose deep in the truffle box again.

Thus he had continued for nearly twenty four hours. The only things that were missing to make it the most perfect of laboratories were a kettle and a mug. A quick rummage in his pockets produced two Earl Grey tea bags, but he could find no simple way to boil water for them.

He’d felt parched since arriving at the Penansulix late on the previous evening. He had been delivered by Vice Presidential transport, much amused at the start of the trip by Vozarti’s look of disgust as his driver had launched the flying car and left the Castellan to make his own way on foot.

The journey here had been swift, but the open top vehicle had allowed the Doctor to take in some of the scenery as they zoomed at high speed through the vast hexagonal Panopticon. As they’d swooped down below cloud level, he had been dismayed to see the variety of hawkers, commercial displays, and ad hoc displays of unsafe technology that dotted the floor space all around the huge enclosed area.

Worst of all, he had noted, were the torn and wretched figures trying to scavenge a living by begging and stealing from wherever they could. He’d tried to protest, get the driver to set the vehicle down, when he’d seen Chancellery Guards shoot down a petty thief who was fleeing from a food stall. The vagabond had been attempting a zigzag escape through a thronging crowd of richly dressed Time Lords, but at a shouted command from the pursuing guards they had all dropped down low to expose the wretched man. Seconds later, the thief had been shot dead, and the crowds resumed their leisurely meanderings.

Before the Doctor had had time to press his angry protest further, the driver had banked them into an arc through the mist laden air and zoomed between the legs of the massive statue of Omega, which guarded the southern exit. The car had shot out of the Panopticon, scattering a handful of smaller vehicles plying their trade by the exit, and powered out into the heavy sulphurous fug of industrial Gallifrey. And now here he was, taking guilty pleasure in his privileged state of the art equipment, having briefly witnessed the other end of the scale.

Stay alert, Doctor, he tried to tell himself as his fingers caressed a Dyson container in its stand. Stay worried. (Oh, look, the dissected remnants of an amaranth – such a pity that technology had been proved so catastrophically unstable.) Stay angry!

Perhaps it was fortunate, therefore, that his first visitor turned up just as he was decoupling the elestoman matrices.

‘I see you’ve unpacked,’ she called from the doorway. ‘Don’t forget to keep the original boxes, in case you want to return anything.’

‘You took your time,’ he replied, and didn’t look up.

He could hear the swish of her beaded dress as she sashayed across the laboratory floor. It took her a full minute to reach him, and he didn’t look up until she had stood next to him for a further thirty seconds.

‘Let’s be civil,’ she said.

‘An appealing option,’ said the Doctor, finally allowing himself to meet her eyes.

‘Particularly since I’ve already encountered your military, Madam President.’

‘So formal, Doctor?’ Romana’s green eyes flashed in amusement. ‘It’s like our very first meeting. Though, on reflection, I seem to remember there was rather less respect on that occasion.’

‘You’ve changed since then, Madam President.’

She flicked self consciously at her fringe of black hair. ‘I’ve regenerated. And you can talk, Doctor.’

‘A nice distinction,’ he retorted. ‘Though you’re not as nice as I remember.’

Romana pouted prettily, and tossed her head. Ropes of pearls rattled at her neck like lustrous snakes. ‘Well, be nice to me, Doctor, I’ve had a beastly day, what with your unexpected arrival and all this tiresome preparation for my Reaffirmation Ceremony. And I’d say we’ve both changed, wouldn’t you?’

“The Romana I knew would not have tolerated this Gallifrey. Even less would she have governed and sanctioned it.’

She fingered one drop earring. ‘You make it sound as if I died.’

The Doctor rounded on her, jabbing his hand at her for emphasis. ‘I saw a man die today on the floor of the Panopticon, Madam President. In the very place where your tiresome Reaffirmation Ceremony will take place. That poor man died for the high crime of stealing a half loaf of bread. Cut down by the ceremonial guard at the heart of your administration, and not a single person of the hundreds nearby lifted so much as an exquisitely gloved finger to help him.’ He heaved an exasperated sigh. ‘So, in short, whatever I remember of Romana does seem to have died.’

She arched her pencil brow, and walked a little distance away, still fiddling with her earring.

The Doctor remained where he was, feeling somewhat foolish to be brandishing an elastomanic coil in midair. He let his arm drop to his side. ‘Your Reaffirmation Ceremony, eh? Well, forgive me if I don’t congratulate you on your sesquicentenary, Madam President.

Though a century and a half in power would explain the change in you.’

Romana swivelled on one of her pointed heels to face him again. ‘Really, Doctor. Whatever happened to trust? You must remember me well enough to know I’m rarely impressed by melodramatics. So let me be candid with you.You say you detect a change in me. Well, the change in you is all the more plain and alarming You have allied yourself with Faction Paradox, with the traditional bogeyman of your own people. No, no …’ She waved away his muttered protest. ‘You are withholding information about the whereabouts of the Type 102

—’

‘Compassion. She has a name —’

‘– the whereabouts of your equipment,’ persisted Romana firmly, ‘the Type 102 TARDIS

that your own people, Doctor, your own people, need to survive the forthcoming War.’

‘You know my views about changing the future course of history: you must at least remember that from the years we travelled together.’

‘And I should look back on our travels together with nostalgic affection?’ she asked tartly.

‘Affection didn’t stop you from attempting to assassinate me when we cornered you in the Kasterborous ice rings yesterday. As for the Chancellor of Time Present, she was not so lucky.’

“That was Comp—’ The Doctor bit back his excuse. “That was unfortunate.’

‘Little comfort to the crews of the destroyed war TARDISes.’

‘War TARDISes!’ spat the Doctor. ‘It took the Time Lords fifty generations before our travel devices were accepted as tools of exploration and investigation. And it took another twenty before we reach consensus that they could be used for participating, for interfering … But in what insane universe did TARDISes become weapons of war? And you are, as I understand it, the “War Queen”?’

Romana gave the Doctor a look as cold as the ice rings. ‘You can’t even control your own TARDIS, can you? As ever. But I’m sure you will lead us to it. You know you must. We must possess the Type 102.’ Her voice softened. ‘I do hope that you’re not going to tell me that you really have given yourself to the Faction. That would be too, too depressing.’

‘The change to my biodata has only just been triggered,’ muttered the Doctor, and immediately wanted to kick himself. The President knew how to winkle information out of him – he was letting his guard down.

‘Good, I knew it would be reversible,’ said Romana. ‘No matter what loyal dullards like Timon are advising me.’

The Doctor could see from her sly smile that this had got the reaction she wanted out of him.

He tried to compose himself by rigging up some equipment as an improvised water boiler.

Tea would be very calming at this point, he decided.

Romana raised her arms slightly, and with an easy movement of both wrists she flicked back the cuffs on her sleeves. Her long, glittering fingernails etched confident gestures in the air as she operated a nearby display.

Almost despite himself, the Doctor left his impromptu water boiler and walked across to read the details on Romana’s display screen. ‘Great jumping gobstoppers!’

‘Very demotic, Doctor.’ Romana’s smile had faded. ‘But I agree with your sentiment. That’s a Code Chi Delta Epsilon class event you see happening, Doctor.’

‘A Code Chi Delta … are you just making this up?’

‘It’s a code phrase,’ she snapped.

‘No, I mean these results … they have to be faked.’

Romana perched on a bench and watched the Doctor check through the display. ‘No. There are massive anomalies occurring in the timelines. Terrible temporal pulses washing over Gallifrey, causing no end of frightful effects. Civil disorder, superstition … And they are worsening exponentially as the Edifice grows larger. We’re still only ten per cent along the time asymptote, and look at the effect already.’

After several minutes of further examination, the Doctor slumped down on the bench beside her, his face in his hands. ‘I don’t know what worries me more,’ he said at last. ‘the fact that this catastrophic exponential distortion is happening so rapidly, or the fact that you thought it so likely to happen that you already have a code phrase for it.’

He peered at her through his fingers. He knew what he had to do.

‘Tell me about this Edifice.’

‘You’ve seen the data. It’s as if causality can’t make up its mind what has happened and what didn’t happen.’

‘How can you possibly have decided that? Unless your temporal scanners have improved beyond recognition since I was last on Gallifrey.’

Romana gave an apologetic little cough, and dangled her shoes on the tips of her outstretched toes. She was studying the tattoo on her bare ankle as though it were the most fascinating thing in the whole room. ‘Think of that scanner as untested technology.’

‘Untested …?’ mused the Doctor. Suddenly he made the connection. ‘Untested! This is from your own future!’ he fumed. “That’s terribly dangerous. It’s madly perilous. Think of the potential …’

He trailed off, embarrassed.

‘Think of the potential paradoxes?’ Romana was clearly amused. ‘Well, you’re the expert, Doctor. Oh, I’m sorry …’ She pretended to correct herself. ‘I should say, you’re becoming the expert.’

He scowled at her.

‘Frowning spoils your boyish good looks,’ she chided as she eased herself back into her stilettos. She flicked at one of her drop earrings with a glittering fingernail. ‘Doctor, I’m prepared to put you in. the charge of an elite Gallifreyan research team.’

‘That’s very civil of you.’

‘I’m afraid it would be a military research team.’ She waved away his gasp of protest. ‘You needn’t look so miserable: you’ve worked with the military in the past.’

‘It points towards a miserable future for Gallifrey.’ He stared over at the temporal scanner again, and heaved another sigh. ‘Very well.’

‘There’s no need to be so precious, Doctor.’ Romana had already crossed the floor in a swift series of clicking steps. She flicked open the door, and called through it, ‘You may enter now, Mali.’

A tall woman stepped into the laboratory, hefting a heavy metal box full of equipment. She was a good head taller than Romana. Her eyes were set wide apart on her squarish face, which was framed by closely cropped auburn hair. She stopped beside Romana, not quite standing to attention, like someone who was trying to unlearn the rules of the parade ground.

‘Madam President,’ Mali said. Her voice was husky, slightly sibilant. She was studying the Doctor, refusing to blink her dark blue eyes as though she might miss his reaction.

The Doctor realised his jaw was open in annoyed surprise, and decided he might as well speak to Romana. ‘Don’t tell me. You thought it would save time if you assumed my acceptance?’

‘I trust your instinct.’

The Doctor was not convinced. ‘You trust me so much that you need to carry a transmitter on you.’ He wasn’t impressed with her look of feigned hurt. ‘In your earring. Don’t pretend.’

‘Well, don’t be uppity with me, Doctor. I told you, I’ve had a beastly day.’

And she was gone, leaving Mali to stare at the Doctor.

‘You’d better come in,’ he said quietly.

Mali continued to stare at him, unblinking. She didn’t seem to be struggling to hold the heavy box perfectly still. She must be a trained combat soldier with muscles like an Ogron.

He rolled his eyes at her and tutted. ‘Should I salute?’

‘I think she might quite like that,’ said Uncle Kristeva.

The Doctor almost leapt out of his frock coat.

Kristeva was standing behind him, looking like a medieval death figure who had temporarily misplaced his scythe. The dead eyes were pointed towards the doorway. The Doctor followed their gaze, and saw that Mali was still frozen there. No wonder she wasn’t struggling with that huge box.

The dry sound of Kristeva’s laugh filtered across the laboratory.

‘You’re a laugh a minute,’ said the Doctor. ‘What are you doing here?’

Kristeva raised a skeletal finger to the sockets of his bone mask. ‘Watching.’ The jawline moved sideways into a leer. ‘And I wanted to congratulate you on your progress, Cousin Doctor. Know we are near.’

The Doctor grimaced. “That’s very comforting.’

‘What is?’ said Mali from the doorway.

The Doctor whirled back to see her moving across the room towards him. He twisted around to look for Kristeva again, but the skeletal Faction agent had vanished as unexpectedly as he had arrived.

An emphatic thump from behind him made him swivel back again. Mali had struggled to set the heavy box of equipment down on the nearest bench with the help of two newly arrived Chancellery Guards.

Water started to bubble in the boiler next to the Doctor. He smiled sheepishly at her, embarrassed at the manic spectacle he was creating.

‘Call me hopelessly optimistic,’ he said, brandishing a pair of tea bags, ‘but have you brought a couple of mugs with you?’

Standing beside Mali, the two Chancellery Guards scowled back at him.

* * *

The hissing and gurgling noises from the dark corner of the warship set what was left of Kristeva’s teeth on edge. The voice, when it came, crackled like static interference, echoed off the bone walls and off again into the darkness.

‘He is ready?’

‘He is progressing.’ The opaque jellies that were his eyes could barely make out the ancient woman who clung to the far wall. ‘He will be ready soon, Mother.’

‘What could you see?’

Kristeva closed his torn eyelids carefully, exhausted by his limited projection on to the planet of their enemies. The planet of their victims. ‘I sensed the virus taking hold of him. I could commune for only a short time.’

From the corner, he could hear a long hiss of satisfaction. ‘No matter. The body of Faction will join us soon. We shall perform the rituals together, and we will be stronger. Stronger than the Time Lords. Do you know the creature called Compassion, Uncle?’

Kristeva nodded, but did not open his eyes. ‘I knew her before she was first remembered, when she was still known as Tobin.’

‘She shall be ours again, Uncle. And this thing of bone, too, this Edifice. And then …’

Kristeva heard Mother Mathara give another great sigh of anticipation. ‘It will be quite a reunion, Uncle.’

Second Interlude

Know your enemy

He’s made it inside the closed library undetected; his body has been re engineered so often he barely recognises it himself, so he is not surprised the security systems fail to do so.

All remains quiet in the hushed vaults of the library. The carpet is thick and soft to absorb every footfall, every movement that might disturb the reverent atmosphere. He moves along it silent as a cat, sticking to the shadows of the towering shelves and statues.

He knows his story begins with shadows – his hero, the Doctor, lost his shadow in the days before the Event. The Event is the moment the war began, buried beneath billions of years of history toppling in on itself. And yet, somewhere in the library, he senses that strand of history still protruding from the rubble, like a hand reaching out from chaos for something sure to hold.

He finds something similar now himself: a data terminal, a means of access. He pauses for a moment, glancing about him to check this part of the library is deserted, then walks to the terminal. He pushes the clumsy user interface and eyeboard to one side, staring instead directly into the shining crystal lens. He feels laser light snap on behind the connection screen, probing his retina. Then he’s inside, and with shadows still looming over him he finds even without trying that he is summoning data retrieval on Faction Paradox.

The Faction stole shadows. The Faction stole time. What started as a group of disenchanted spiritualists on Gallifrey who celebrated the power of the individual’s biodata over the so called laws of time became a cult dedicated to chaos and destruction of all kinds. The Faction’s ambition grew with their numbers and with their strength. They forced themselves to see patterns in the universe that the earliest Time Lords had glimpsed and shied away from for their sanity’s sake. Yet he is unsure as the data floods over him if they held their beliefs so sacred that they would sacrifice all in their name. Or whether their beliefs altered as the patterns wore into their minds, changing them, and reality, for ever.

Grandfather Paradox, the most revered and sacred figure in the Faction’s religion, backed himself out of creation to prove the naïveté of the riddle be stood for, that is what is whispered. The Grandfather showed that a man can go back in time and kill his own ancestor, that a man can do anything be likes if he’s powerful enough. If he keeps watching the patterns.

Though the patterns swimming by his own eye are simple and harmless, he feels a moment’s guilty kinship with the Grandfather. He is shocked by the clarity of knowledge here in the system, knows his presence here risks summoning forces from the future to destroy it in reprisal for his escape.

He will be missed. How long can he have?

He is sifting through chapters and footnotes, casual references and in depth studies. Then he finds data so old and pure he nearly laughs out loud in surprise. It is only a few lines of information, a tiny taste of what must be a newly discovered book – a relic so ancient and delicate its knowledge remains bound indelibly in parchment and skin, awaiting a more comprehensive reinterpretation by technology.

The Faction heartland endures an endless eleven days in conceptual space. Exploiting a calendrical anomaly, a legal loophole in the laws of sidereal time, a Shadow Parliament presides over the universe like the unkindness of ravens beyond its walls, clattering and swooping over the feeding grounds. The Speaker’s seat remains empty until the Grandfather will claim it, until …

The ancient book’s open pages seem to slam shut on him as the fragment ends. He is dazed for a moment, and his link into the datacore shuts down. He cannot revive it. The crystal lens is opaque and blank now, like the bottom of a bottle. No pattern disturbs its surface.

He must seek the book itself. He hurries from the shadows into the dull light of the main concourse, trying to stay calm, to feel his way to the text he needs. He fears he will be missed.

Chapter Twelve

Great minds

It had been a mistake to tag along, led by his loins instead of by logic. And now there was no way back. All Fitz could do was watch the delectable Tarra expertly manipulating a mass of connections in a torn off access panel as she broke into the Capitol’s main computer.

She hadn’t called it that, of course. She’d given it some complex jargon name, like

‘Amplified Panasonic Network’, but she might as well have been speaking Swahili for all the sense it made to him. All he knew was that it all seemed a bit odd for a girl like Tarra, who (he had learned from Ressadriand) was the daughter of some high ranking local statesman.

What would this High Councillor do about the light of his life hacking into the computer?

Smacked wrists and no allowance for a week, he imagined.

‘Why have you brought me here?’ Fitz asked. She didn’t look up from her work. Perhaps if he provoked her she’d respond. “That guy Eton fancies you. Why didn’t you buy him a ticket instead of me?’

Tarra gave a short laugh. “That wet fish? Eton is the Castellan’s son. He might make a lot of noise about the need for an alternative order, but it’s all just a game to him.’ She favoured Fitz with a bold look. ‘This would be too real for him. Are you excited, Fitz?’

Fitz gulped. OK, OK, he told himself, you’re a resistance fighter burrowing into the German HQ. There’s a gun in your pocket, a radio in your hand, and a cyanide pill under your tongue.

Allons, enfants! Courage, man brave! ‘Er …’ His shoulders sagged. ‘Well, it’s all a bit real for me too, actually.’

Tarra turned back to her work. ‘You were frightened by that image on the Visualiser. Don’t be. You have it in you to be a great and brave man.’

‘You know who that was? Who … who I’ll be?’

Tarra changed the subject. ‘Eton could have helped us here, of course. He used to work for his father, when he was a student. So his biodata still provides access to the APCN.

Fortunately …’

She opened her palm to reveal a clump of curly brown and grey hairs. The handful she’d pulled out of the back of Eton’s head when she snogged him at the seance!

As Fitz considered this, Tarra crouched over and seemed to heave. Fitz squeezed forward to help her, worried that she was about to be sick. Instead, she hawked up a disgustingly glutinous sniff, and spat into her palm. Fitz pondered whether he might be sick himself at this point. Red blood mixed with the hairs.

‘Ugh,’ observed Fitz helpfully. ‘Yuk. Oh … er … urn … are you OK, Tarra?’

She was entirely unmoved by the repulsive sight. ‘Eton’s biodata,’ she repeated, ‘do pay attention.’

Oh God, thought Fitz. She’d bitten Eton’s lip, too. Drawn blood. But that was –

Tarra slapped her palmful of grobbed up biodata on to a device she’d attached to the computer. The computer obligingly hummed and whirred into new life. “There we are,’ she said with a satisfied sight. ‘We have access to the Matrix.’

‘You can tell me what the Matrix is, of course.’

She filled the dark chamber with her bright smile. ‘It’s a distillation of the minds of the great and good who have died, and all those who have ever held office. All the past Councillors, Lords Temporal and Presidents are here. The High Council defer to them on all things. The collected wisdom of the ages, ossified in this archaic system.’

‘They program it before they die?’

‘No Fitz. They become it when they die. They join it, and thus they keep their dead hands on the tiller of the ship of state.’

Fitz thought back to his communist friends on Earth, like Jin Ming. He could see Tarra fitting right in, quoting The Thoughts of Chairman Mao and waving her little red book with the best of them. ‘So, this computer is keeping their brains in a jar.’

Tarra laughed at this. ‘Not that most of them were worth keeping. Except for Rassilon the Great, I suppose, and Torkal the Great. And Greyjan the Sane, of course.

Fitz laughed too. ‘So Greyjan wasn’t so great, eh?’

Tarra’s smile snapped off like a popped bulb. ‘Don’t mock, Fitz. This is too important.’

Fitz acted braver than he felt. ‘Come on, this is all for Kellen’s big joke, isn’t it? That’s what you made out before we left.’

‘Kellen’s another rich boy acting bad. But he’s right about one thing: he can capitalise on the Edifice’s presence, and play this prank on the High Council. That’ll make more of a spectacle than their stupid Reaffirmation Ceremony. With what we get from this break in here, Kellen can present the High Council with a faked up re creation of Greyjan.’

‘And Greyjan would be …?’

Tarra’s beatific smile had returned. ‘Why, the great Sage of Paradox, of course.’

‘Of course.’

‘Paradoxically back from his own grave.’ She sounded distant now, as though she was losing herself in some other world. Fitz imagined her being sucked down into the computer systems as her voice faded. ‘Imagine – Greyjan, returning to confront those rationalist sceptics on the High Council, and preaching doom and disaster.’

Hilarious, thought Fitz. And I thought the previous party was insane. ‘So we grab some dead guy’s details from this Matrix,’ he said carefully. ‘Sounds like a fancy kind of grave robbing.’

‘Mmmm,’ said Tarra dreamily. Fitz wondered if she’d heard him at all.

‘So, what can you see?’ asked Fitz. It was like watching his mate Ronnie dropping a tab, and listening to him struggle to find words to describe the never before experienced sounds and colours.

‘Ohhh,’ said Tarra throatily. “That’s unusual. Most unexpected.’

‘Do tell,’ said Fitz tartly.

‘Most of the biodata is from the dead, you see. Or the occasional sample from the current High Council. But here’s a very rare example – an ex President who left office and who is still alive. I didn’t expect to find him.’

Fitz was unimpressed. ‘Was he a Great as well, then?’

‘Remains to be seen,’ said Tarra quietly. ‘I should have remembered, I suppose, that I might stumble across the Doctor.’

This certainly got Fitz’s attention. ‘Did you say … the Doctor?’

‘Mmm,’ said Tarra, smiling, her eyes closed as the data swam past her eyes. ‘He was the four hundred and seventh and the four hundred and ninth President of Gallifrey.’

For a moment, Fitz just nodded, impressed with this feat of the Doctor’s. Then the penny dropped. And he was listening so carefully now he could hear it from a mile away.

Gallifrey.

They were on the Doctor’s home planet, Gallifrey. The people who would do anything to seize him, the Doctor and Compassion.

Bloody hell. Could he be any further up the creek?

* * *

‘You really don’t like me, do you, Doctor?’ Mali was curious, rather than offended.

‘Please don’t interrupt. If I’m to get into the Matrix without overwriting all my previous biodata, I need to concentrate here.

Mali continued to stare at the back of his neck. ‘What have you got against me?’

The Doctor looked away from the Panatropic Bypass Relay. She felt his gaze rake her from head to toe. ‘I hardly know you, so I really can’t judge.’

‘You’re not exploiting your “elite Gallifreyan research team”. Not even a token involvement.

I have several degrees in temporal engineering. And I know how to make tea.’ She waggled her empty cup at him.

The Doctor resumed his work, changing the access controls with a delicate adjustment of his sonic screwdriver and a small piece of well chewed bubble gum. ‘I just don’t approve of the company that you keep.’

Mali considered the two Chancellery Guards, who were lounging on the far side of the Matrix Room with a determinedly bored air. “They’re mostly harmless. Tragdorvigandorvigan and Klenchron are good men, Doctor.’

‘It wasn’t them I was thinking of … Aha! We’re in.’

‘If I judged people by appearances the way you obviously do, I’d assume you were an indolent postgrad student who flunked discontinuity physics three times before scraping a pass.’

The Doctor narrowed his eyes at her. ‘All right, so you’ve got access to the Academy records.

That doesn’t mean I’m going to let your colleague there stick his head in here.’ He fussed around with the controls he had devised, and started strapping them to his own head.

Mali bristled. ‘You really should use our expertise, Doctor.’

The Doctor paused, one hand poised in midair, a connector wire a centimetre from his forehead. “This is a complex fractal interface with a nonreal pseudo environment, not the Number Twenty Two bus to Putney Common. I’ll need to have a little dig around in the Matrix for any remains of my earlier visits there. I think I might recognise them a little more easily than you. You don’t need a double starred degree in temporal physics for that.’

‘You’re looking for untainted biodata to work with?’ Mali hunkered down close to the Doctor. She could see he was screwing up his eyes tightly. ‘Are you OK?’

‘It’s just …’ He gritted his teeth, as though trying to block the world out. He looked as if a wave of pain was surging through his every fibre. ‘I need to do this before the virus takes full control.’

Mali waited until the wave seemed to break and crash, until the Doctor’s tense shoulders slumped in relief. She patted him on the arm, and then started to attach the wires to his forehead and temples. ‘All right, let’s get you in there, Doctor.’

She admonished herself silently. Don’t get too friendly. You’re here to do a job. Get him through it, get the information, get out. Even so, she couldn’t help feeling a little sorry for the renegade as he struggled with the virus. And he had made an interesting job of bypassing the usual Matrix replication protocols.

The Doctor’s body suddenly became rigid. At first Mali thought he was fighting the virus again, but then she recognised the initial spasm as the Matrix absorbed the conscious mind of the person connecting in to it. Within a few seconds, he had slumped awkwardly to one side.

Mali supported his limp torso to prevent it falling. She clutched his wrist, her fingers probing for a pulse.

The Doctor was so inert that Mali was startled when his clear, confident voice said, ‘Well, this is jolly interesting. They haven’t tidied up much since I was last here.’

He was able to speak to her, yet she knew he must be deeply immersed in the Matrix. His handiwork on the access controls was certainly remarkable, she conceded.

She beckoned for one of the guards to come across and listen, which he did with evident reluctance.

‘How can he do this, Klenchron?’ she asked. ‘He’s surfacing part of his conscious mind while still within the APC Net.’

‘You’re supposed to be the expert,’ grumbled Klenchron.

Mali shook her head in admiration. ‘It’s extraordinary.’

‘Thank you very much,’ said the Doctor. ‘Perhaps we will make a good team after all, Mali.

You really have got a good postgraduate degree in parallax theory, haven’t you? And lots of useful subsidiary subjects in your first and second degrees. And you like gardening. That’s nice. And you’ve been on active service. Oh, dear, yes, you’ve been in the military for some time, haven’t you?’

His lips were set in a grim line. His eyelids were closed, but beneath them the eyes were swivelling in their sockets as though he was looking wildly around.

‘How do you know all this?’ said Mali. ‘Madam President did not say that she had briefed you …’

‘No need,’ snapped the Doctor. ‘It’s surprising what one can find if one knows where to look in here. Now that is interesting.’

‘What?’

The Doctor’s head shook slightly from side to side. ‘I’ve found the data trail from my most recent previous visit. But someone’s been covering over my tracks. No, no …’ He shook his chestnut curls in an irritated gesture of dismissal. ‘No, someone’s tracing my tracks. No!’ His voice was a shout.

‘Doctor?’

His voice was a whisper now, as though he was worried about being overheard. “There’s someone in here already. I’m not sure if it’s the effect of the Faction virus, but I can sense something else. Someone else. Someone alive.’

* * *

Fitz stared at Tarra, his mind still churning. Gallifrey. The Time Lords. He was lost Gawd knew where on the one planet that the Doctor was trying to avoid at all costs.

Even in the poor light of the odd shaped corridor, Fitz could see that Tarra still had a vacant look in her eyes, as though she was focusing on something in the far, far distance, and was hardly aware that he was there. So it was a surprise when she interrupted his thoughts. “They know we’re here.’

‘Er …’ said Fitz. Yeah, that’s cool, guy. Smooth. Stay calm. Don’t talk about Time Lords.

‘Er … what’s this “we”, anyway? You’re the one with your head in the box.’

Tarra’s head swivelled towards him, her beautiful brown eyes bright but unfocussed. “They know we are in this part of the building. I … . Wait …’ Her eyes closed, and her face seemed to crumple into a scowl. “This isn’t just a record of the Doctor: he’s actually in the Matrix.

He’s here!’

Fitz wanted to ask if the Doctor was OK, but held himself back just in time.

‘Well,’ grinned Tarra, her eyes still closed, the eyeballs sliding beneath the lids. Her eyelids scrunched into tight creases. ‘I think I’ll just erase the Doctor’s record.’

‘Is that wise?’ Fitz gasped.

‘Wise or not, it’s done. Now let’s get out of here before they trace us.’

She fiddled with her odd, ivory control device.

Fitz nearly leapt out of his skin when a hissing roar came from the corridor behind them.

He’d already thrown up his hands in surrender, whacking them painfully against the corridor ceiling, before he realised that it was another Transtube screeching reluctantly to a halt.

‘How do you do that?” he asked her feebly.

Tarra brushed past him, stepping into the Transtube. ‘Does it matter? Now we have what we came for, Fitz.’ She held up the ivory box, her arm waving at him.

The Transtube rocked as it gathered speed. ‘I have the securely held bioextract. It’s what we need for the ritual this evening.’

‘What about the Doctor?’ asked Fitz. ‘What will happen now you’ve erased his record?’

He studied Tarra for a reaction, but there was none. She said, ‘I’ve done more than merely erase his record.’

* * *

‘How can there be anything alive in there with the Doctor?’ asked Mali.

‘Of course,’ Klenchron told her sarcastically. ‘He can identify one other live user among the billions of other dead minds in there. I think not.’

‘Shut up,’ hissed the Doctor, and then reeled off a string of Gallifreyan numbers and sigils, for all the world as if he was singing a song.

Mali snapped her fingers. ‘Hey, those sound like co ordinates. Klenchron, check them out.

Give them to us again, Doctor.’

He sang them once more.

Klenchron’s communicator flickered as the result appeared almost immediately. ‘Local,’ he said urgently, his thin lips twitching beneath his bulbous nose. ‘Somewhere in the old quarters …’ He started to bark a series of commands into his communicator.

‘Quiet!’ snapped the Doctor.

Mali squeezed his nerveless arm. ‘Whoever it is can’t hear us.’

‘Curses!’ spat the Doctor. ‘Whoever it is can certainly hear me! It’s coming …’

His body began to shake, as though he was having a seizure. The connections started to shake loose. He convulsed again, and his eyes snapped wide open.

For a moment, Mali thought she saw fear and loathing and madness swirling in the dark pupils within their bright blue irises.

The Doctor sat up abruptly. ‘Run,’ he said quietly.

He tried to stand up, but his weak legs buckled.

‘Run,’ he said again, more distinctly, an insistent, commanding note entering his voice.

Mali was helping him to his feet when the Matrix console beside them exploded into shards.

Chapter Thirteen

Edifice

‘Stop fussing,’ said the Doctor. He did a swift inventory of his injuries. Nothing major. Not much minor, apart from some bruising. No broken bones that he could detect, let’s just check

… yes, hipbone still connected to the thighbone, thighbone still in loose proximity to the kneebone …

Mali continued to dab at his forehead with a damp cloth. ‘Stop fussing yourself,’ she said.

‘Or I’ll ask them to keep you here for another few days.’

The Doctor sat bolt upright in the hospital bed. He stared at the door, wondering whether he could struggle past Mali. Out into the corridor, towards the … .

Towards the what? He had no idea where here was. Or where it went. The hospital room connected to the corridor, the corridor connected to …?

Hospital. Even the word made his hearts palpitate. He had to get out of here.

‘You know, I feel a great deal better.’

‘Let me be the judge of that,’ said Mali, easing him back against his pillow.

The Doctor pushed himself into a sitting position again. ‘And you have a medical degree, of course,’ he sneered, ‘you’re an expert —’

‘Yes,’ she replied simply, pushing him back again.

‘I must’ve missed that detail.’ He struggled again. ‘I’m a doctor too, you know.’

‘You’re the Doctor,’ replied Mali obstinately. ‘And that’s an honorary title, as you well know, Doctor.’

‘Well, I’ve been dumped out of the Matrix by better people in the past, you know.’

‘And doubtless you’ve been in bigger temporal explosions.’

He scowled at her. ‘As a matter of fact, yes.’

‘Better people than whom?’

The Doctor slumped into his pillow. ‘I’m really not sure. I didn’t get a look at her … Aha!

Her! Well, that’s a start, isn’t it?’

Mali studied his reaction. ‘We found where the Matrix was being tapped. Some access tunnel in the ancient foundations of the Capitol, with none of the security of the newer buildings.

Whoever it was knew what they were doing. Knew what she was doing, it seems.’

The Doctor slid out of bed, and started looking around his room. ‘Where are my shoes? Oh look, someone has kindly cleaned my clothes. Pity about the marks on the coat. You know, just before I was thrown out of the Matrix, I saw whoever she was remove a securely coded bioextract.’ He balanced on one foot as he tried to put his shoe on. Now, he considered his trousers, which were freshly laundered and draped over the back of a nearby chair.

Mali stared at him with impatience. After watching him try, and fail, to pull his trousers on over his shoes, she said, ‘What was the stolen bioextract?’

The Doctor hopped on to the bed again. He took off the shoes, placed them on the bed, seized the trousers, and leapt into them. ‘It was the bioextract of a former president called Greyjan.’

‘Greyjan?’ Mali could hear the surprise in her own voice.

‘Yes, why? Is it important?’ asked the Doctor, hopping about as he struggled to pull up his beige trousers. ‘Who was Greyjan?’

‘He was Gallifrey’s briefest serving President. Ruled for only three years.’

The Doctor stopped struggling for a moment. ‘That rings a bell. I think I may have heard about Greyjan somewhere … Have you seen my shoes about? I’m not sure that – Ah, yes, I think these are the ones.’ He paused. ‘Mali, you seem to be remarkably well informed about this particular dead president.’

‘Greyjan’s something of a cult figure at the moment.’

‘Popular?’

‘No, I mean as in a religious cult. He’s one of the more widespread current superstitions on Gallifrey.

‘Since when were you all so superstitious?’

‘Please, Doctor, finish getting dressed.’

The Doctor started lacing up his shoes. ‘Why is Greyjan a cult figure?’

‘Perhaps because he only became President by chance, after the two other candidates withdrew unexpectedly. Maybe that appeals to people who feel dispossessed? Certainly, no one had expected Greyjan to become President, not even Greyjan himself. He’d always been more absorbed by his own researches.’

‘Oh dear,’ said the Doctor, sitting down heavily on his bed.

‘What’s the matter?’ asked Mali. ‘Are those the wrong shoes after all?’

‘No, no, these fit perfectly,’ said the Doctor. ‘I’ve just remembered something rather significant about Greyjan’s researches.’

* * *

The gloom seemed to pervade the room even more. Evening was drawing in again, but Fitz had expected that seeing the shabby dwelling in some kind of daylight would rob the place of the oppressive feeling that had permeated it on his unexpected arrival. It didn’t. It wasn’t seedy or sad or in any way reassuringly familiar. There was a dark sense of foreboding as Fitz and Tarra went in.

Or maybe that was just him, Fitz thought. Everything Tarra had told him about this so called practical joke was spooking him. He tried to think back to the impromptu seance he’d once organised for a hippy chick called Eleanor, to convince himself that this was the same kind of put on. But he’d been with the Doctor too much now, been away from Earth too long, to be deluded by that. When you’ve seen plant creatures and faeries, it’s not too much of a leap of faith to start believing that a good looking woman and her two wacko friends might bring someone back from the dead.

Tarra was busy getting things ready for the forthcoming seance. Fitz remembered something she’d told him on their journey, something that had rung a bell in his mind. ‘What did you mean about chaos theory?’

Tarra barely paused from her bustling about the dusty room. ‘Greyjan’s own researches, before he became President, convinced him that there was a law like chaos theory which governs paradox. He concluded that the fabric of the universe itself on some level was in essence a commodity that could bend to accommodate time and its impossibilities.’

‘So he used that when he was President, right?’

‘No, he died after only three years in office. The shortest period of any Time Lord President.

It was rumoured that he took his own life – no one was sure at the time. What is certain was that his sciences were declared outlawed and arcane.’

‘Not,’ said a new voice/that anything as trivial as that will stop us from using them.’

It was Kellen, Fitz saw. Large as life and twice as ugly.

‘Tonight, Greyjan’s Presidency will resume. Tonight the great Sage of Paradox will be reborn!’

* * *

‘Don’t be dreary, Doctor. Why would anyone want to liberate Greyjan’s bioextract from the Matrix?’ Romana pared one of her nails, giving it twice the attention she seemed to be affording to the Doctor.

Mali stood by calmly, but the Doctor hopped angrily from foot to foot.

‘And do stop that; said Romana testily. ‘I hate it when visitors crush the pile in my carpet.’

The Doctor thumped across the floor of the Presidential suite, and stood so close to Romana that their noses almost touched. ‘Why worry about your decor when you should be worrying about the future of this planet?’

She smiled with no warmth. ‘And don’t lecture me, Doctor. These days, I worry about little else. Why otherwise do I indulge your investigations.’’’

‘Because you think they’ll secure you a Type 102 TARDIS.’

‘I depend on it.’ She strolled to her chaise longue and stretched out on it. Her beaded skirt draped decorously over her shapely legs, an effect which evidently pleased her greatly. ‘You haven’t made best use of your research time, I understand.’

‘I’m sure the Lady Mali is good in her own field,’ said the Doctor, without looking at the young woman.

‘Combat Elite Mali is expert in many fields.’

‘You’re not listening to me, Madam President. There is more to this than unauthorised access to the Matrix. Why would someone else search down and erase my original bioextract from the Matrix?’

‘It’s obvious,’ replied Romana. ‘There is now no record of your biodata before it was tainted by Faction Paradox.’

The Doctor glared at Romana. ‘Just the sort of dirty trick that your agents would contrive.’

‘Nevertheless, Doctor, it means that the only hope of tracing your untainted biodata is to find your genetic imprimatur within your TARDIS. Your Type 102 TARDIS.’

The Doctor stamped his feet in a petulant display of sheer exasperation, childishly pleased at the impression it made on the shag pile. ‘Well, how very convenient for you!’ He wheeled on Mali, who had stood until now observing the confrontation. ‘Was that your plan all along?

Sabotage my only other chance to undo the Faction virus, ensuring that you could get your hands on Compassion. Was it?’

‘Of course not,’ she said softly.

Romana giggled from her chaise longue. ‘It’s unfortunate for you of course, Doctor. But you must admit that now it’s in your interest and mine to trace your Type 102.’

The Doctor slumped down into an easy chair, though he was feeling anything but easy as his mind rushed through all his current options. After several minutes of uninterrupted silence, he said, ‘What if I could synthesise the essence of your future TARDISes from Compassion?

Would you promise not to force breed her with your current TARDISes?’

Romana pursed her lips, and considered the suggestion. ‘Why would I agree?’

‘The Edifice will continue to grow,’ said Mali, before the Doctor could speak.

Romana stared at her, as though she’d uttered a profanity in a church. At last she said, ‘Go on, Mali.’

The Doctor watched Mali swallow nervously and take a deep breath. ‘Latest reports in from my man Tragdorvigan, Madam President, he’s on the E monitor.’

‘Yes, yes,’ snapped Romana, clearly nervous about something. ‘What about the Edifice?’

Mali looked grim. “The Edifice’s effect on causality is increasingly being felt here on Gallifrey, and rippling out across the universe. It’s as if a thread has been pulled in the fabric of space time and is starting to unravel.’

‘Stop being so coy,’ said the Doctor. ‘Don’t you think it’s time you showed me this Edifice?’

* * *

Technician Nivet stared at the blank screen in the bank of equipment and cursed quietly under his breath.

‘Magic incantations?’ the Doctor said, smiling.

The burly blond technician looked up at the Doctor briefly and smiled. ‘No, merely old technology. Predictably unreliable. I spend more than half my time coaxing it back to life, instead of using it for what it was designed for.’

‘He’s supposed to be the finest technician in the whole of Kasterborous,’ noted Vice President Timon.

‘So why is he working on this pile of junk?’ asked the Doctor.

Castellan Vozarti’s laughter filtered across the Survey Room. He sounded like a sniggering schoolboy, thought the Doctor. ‘What’s so amusing, Castellan?’ asked the Doctor. ‘I should have thought you needed all the best equipment you could lay your hands on in this crisis.’

This made Vozarti cackle even more. ‘Listen to yourself, Doctor.’

‘What?’ The Doctor stared around the room, taking in the amused reactions of Romana and Mali. Djarshar, the Chancellor of Time Future, stood next to Vice President Timon. Both remained stoically unmoved. The Doctor raised his eyebrows and smiled back at the others.

‘ What?’

‘Technician Nivet does indeed need the best equipment he can lay his hands on,’ said Romana. “That’s why we want your Type 102.’

The Doctor’s smile vanished. “That “equipment” is not negotiable.’

‘It’s such an irony,’ continued Romana, ‘that it was one of Nivet’s war TARDISes that you destroyed.’

‘Wha—’

‘The first of the war TARDISes you shot down was from the fleet that Nivet maintains for the Chancellor of Time Future.’

The Doctor continued to glower at her. ‘And you are aware of the circumstances of that unfortunate incident. Why are we wasting time? Show me this Edifice, for goodness’ sake.’

‘Surely you have seen it on our horizon, Doctor?’ Chancellor Djarshar had folded his arms, an emphatic barrier between them.

‘Yes, yes, yes,’ the Doctor said. ‘From this angle, that’s barely a two dimensional view. I think we need to examine it in at least the basic four, don’t you? Come on, Nivet, what’s the problem?’

Nivet continued to mumble. The Doctor marched smartly up to the bank of equipment, raised his right fist and delivered a sharp blow to the top of the dead screen. It immediately sprang into noisy life.

‘Nice technique,’ said Nivet.

The Doctor wiped invisible dust from the top of the screen. ‘Is this Phase 40 equipment?’

‘Yes.’

‘I have a way with obsolete machinery.’ He paused for a moment, then placed a tentative hand on the technician’s broad shoulder. ‘I’m sorry about your war TARDIS, Nivet. And her crew.’

Nivet shrugged off the hand. ‘I know. Look, the screen’s showing some readings at last.’

The four dimensional display crackled into life.

‘Look!’ breathed Romana, joining them at the display. ‘It’s almost entirely visible in all dimensions.’

The Doctor could sense a tightening in his chest. His breaths were starting to become ragged.

The familiar feelings of fear and anxiety and panic were starting to well up in him once more.

It was as if every instinct in him wanted him to leave the Edifice alone, not even look at it.

‘Can you see what it is?’ Romana said. ‘Why couldn’t we see that before?’

Nivet said, ‘The spatiotemporal cartographer has mapped out the Edifice’s four dimensional structure. So at last we have a temporal orientation as well as a spatial one. It looks a bit like a flower, doesn’t it?’

‘More than that; the Doctor uttered. The display now showed a huge flower, with six broad splayed petals. Usually, it would have been bright yellow, of course, one of thousands scattering down from high up in the Capitol rafters over a cortege. ‘It’s a Gallifreyan Flower of Remembrance.’

Nivet snorted. ‘Most unlikely. Though who knows what’s really out there? If you believe these readings, then you’d believe that the thing’s carved from bone! And why would it look like one of these … Flowers of Remembrance?’

‘You’ve not been to many funerals, have you, Nivet?’ Timon said. ‘The flower is a memento mori. It is a portent of doom. A dreadful omen —’

‘Vice President!’ snapped Romana. ‘Do not even feign such superstitious nonsense. This is no phantom: it is a physical event which is causing untold damage to local space time.’

The Doctor gasped for breath. I’ve seen it before. I recognise the markings on the petals. We were too close, and we were only considering it in three dimensions, but …’

Romana had come across to him, held him by his upper arms. She seemed concerned about him. ‘What is it, Doctor?’

‘No wonder Compassion reacted like she did when we landed.’

Romana released his arms, and a dreadful realisation started to fill the Doctor. The Lady President hadn’t been concerned to discover what was happening to him.

She was concerned only to discover what he knew.

‘So,’ she said to the rest of the room, a tight smile on her lips/the 102 has been on the Edifice all this time, has it Doctor? And we thought you’d concealed it on Gallifrey.’

The Castellan stepped forward to confront the Doctor. ‘We must have the Type 102.’

The searing pain in the Doctor’s chest and head threatened to engulf him, to overwhelm him.

‘I … I thought you were all … too afraid … of this Edifice.’

‘The Type 102 TARDIS is too great a prize to let slip away, Doctor. We must remove it from the Edifice immediately. No more games or timewasting.’ Vozarti grabbed hold of the Doctor’s chin and forced him to meet his gaze. ‘If you’ve been up there already, you must know how to get back aboard.’

‘I don’t,’ protested the Doctor weakly. ‘I swear, I don’t.’

‘You know how to reach the Type 102.’

The Doctor knew deep in his terrified hearts what the Castellan was going to say next. ‘I can’t,’ he said pitifully. ‘I just can’t.’

‘Nonsense,’ snarled Vozarti. ‘You will lead us on to the Edifice.’

Chapter Fourteen

Talk of The Devil

Fitz choked a little as the smoke caught the back of his throat. The air of the shabby digs was once again filled with the powerful scent of strong, alien incense. As a boy, he used to think that the worst cocktail of smells in the world was his father’s combination of Old Spice and Park Drive. In this room, there was something worse. The electric tang he’d first noticed was masked by these pervasive new scents, which made him feel slightly heady, distanced from what was happening somehow. On the whole, he decided, he’d prefer a drag on one of his dad’s Park Drives.

The seance had started as soon as the light had faded all round MidTown. Ressadriand had seemed surprised to see Fitz and Tarra back so swiftly, and was initially reluctant for the evening seance to begin. Tarra and the cocky lad Kellen had mocked him for his cowardice.

So when the rest of the coven had started to drift in through the gathering gloom of evening, that wet drip Ressadriand had reluctantly fired up the Visualiser while the others prepared the room.

Now the low chants and moans of the coven echoed eerily around the small room. The walls flickered in the candlelight and the soft speckled illumination from the Visualiser screen.

Tarra was weaving her way about the room, orchestrating the movements and sounds, and waving her ivory box around. Fitz watched warily, unable to join in. His family weren’t churchgoers, and he’d never felt comfortable when attending a funeral or a wedding.

Everyone else always seemed to know the words of the ceremony, and could sing the hymns in tune. He always felt as if he’d been invited to a dull gig for a band he’d never heard of.

And so it was at the seance, except that now he did not feel anything like the warmth or benevolence of a church service. What was it then that did feel so familiar?

He watched Tarra for a while. He could see the curves of her body under the man material of that little black number she’d slipped into. The skull mask was a bizarre addition. She continued to slink around the room with that feline grace, as though she was stalking something in the darkness, humming an eerie tune which controlled the events.

Even with their cruel and savage half masks in place, it was obvious who the other coven members were from their clothing. There was Kaufima, the foxy chick with the bare shoulders, thrashing her head from side to side and spraying her long dark hair in all directions. The twins, whose names he couldn’t remember, shuffled their feet in synchrony.

Old man Eton was, not surprisingly, trying to get close to Tarra, but she just shimmied away and out of reach as the crowd surged about the room.

The coven members continued to weave their own pattern around Tarra, parting to allow her a way through, closing up again after she’d passed. Being led by her steps, her movement.

Dancing to her tune.

Kellen danced in Tarra’s wake, following her every move, he had thrown his head back, and was grinning at the audacity of it all. Fitz could see the guy’s teeth beneath the bone half mask. The other coven members were more solemn, though, swaying from side to side in time to Tarra’s ululating song.

That was it, Fitz suddenly realised. That was what he found so familiar from those church services. It was the solemnity, the reverence. And maybe something else?

He looked towards the Visualiser. Ressadriand wasn’t swaying, he wasn’t getting into it at all. Through the half mask, Fitz could see Ressadriand’s eyes. They were wide with alarm.

Yes, thought Fitz. That was the other thing he’d sensed. It was an uneasy edge to the whole performance. It was fear.

* * *

The Doctor slumped in his chair, pressing at his temples with his balled up fists. But even this did not ease the pressure building inside his head. Faintly he could hear Castellan Vozarti talking.

‘I will not return there,’ replied the Doctor, choosing each word carefully.

The Castellan crouched down beside him so that he could not avoid making eye contact. I was not offering you a choice, Doctor. You will board the Edifice with us, and you will take us to the Type 102.’

The Doctor stared up at him through tears of pain. ‘You are mistaken, Castellan.’ Behind Vozarti, the Doctor could see Romana shaking hands with a thin old man who had just entered the Survey Room. The newcomer was dressed in the formal dress of a High Councillor, seemingly bent double by the weight of his heavy robes, but the Doctor did not recognise him.

Romana released the man’s hand. ‘You are welcome to stay, Councillor Samax. The Doctor is about to identify the location of the Type 102.’

‘Madam President,’ demurred Samax in a reedy voice. ‘I must prepare for your Reaffirmation Ceremony.’ He bowed, and left the room.

The Doctor straightened up in his seat with some effort. ‘Madam President, may I respectfully remind you of our agreement? I was to be allowed to synthesise the essence of the future TARDISes —’

‘No longer necessary,’ snapped Romana, her cold tone a stark contrast to the way she had been addressing Samax a moment earlier. ‘We know where the Type 102 is, and we can recover it for ourselves. It only remains for you to identify exactly where.’ She stood over the Doctor. ‘Do the decent thing, and provide the coordinates, Doctor. At least that will save us the trouble of a long search through the Edifice.’

The Doctor snorted in disgust. ‘Do your own dirty work, Romana.’

Vozarti pulled the Doctor’s hands sharply away from his head. ‘You are in no position —’

The Lady President placed a manicured hand on Vozarti’s forearm. ‘No need, Castellan.’

Vozarti scowled, which just made him look like a petulant teenager. ‘I’d prefer this resolved before the Reaffirmation Ceremony —’

‘Very tidy!’ spat the Doctor. ‘All done and dusted, so that your celebrations can run uninterrupted.’ He staggered to his feet, rounding on Romana angrily. ‘Well, I hope your flunkies have plenty of time to do things just right for you, Madam President. I hope they make the Panopticon spick and span for your big appearance. Don’t forget to get them to scrub the floor well, because you wouldn’t want to trail the hem of your robe through any of that blood.’

Romana blinked at him, evidently unmoved. She spoke in a quiet, controlled voice. ‘Who are you to speak of spilled blood? I just swore in Samax as the new Chancellor of Time Present.

You’ll recall how his predecessor died, of course.’ She did not let the Doctor bluster out his excuse. ‘Technician Nivet, start scanning the Edifice in all four local dimensions. The Doctor will provide you with the necessary assistance.’

The Doctor dropped down into his seat again and another lance of pain spiked his chest.

Nivet looked up from the spatiotemporal cartographer. ‘Madam President, there’s a big temporal distortion in the Edifice, bigger than any we’ve detected before.’

‘Anything on the E monitor?’

‘Tragdorvigan reports not, ma’am. But the Edifice distortions continue to extrude through many dimensions and are heading towards Gallifrey.’ Nivet continued to manipulate the cartography controls as he spoke. ‘I’ve adjusted the sensors so that they now show where the Edifice is touching the planet surface. It seems to be becoming more volatile.’

The Doctor cried out as the pain worsened.

Vozarti was ushering Romana towards the doorway. ‘Madam President, you must return to safe quarters. I’ve called for a retinue of guards.’

Romana wafted at him with long fingers. ‘Oh, don’t fuss.’

‘I will not have you discomfited before the Reaffirmation Ceremony,’ persisted Vozarti. ‘You must be prepared and composed. Anything else will give succour to those superstitious elements who see signals and portents in the tiniest of events.’

The heavy doors of the Survey Room swung inwards, and a group of Chancellery Guards swept in. At a gesture from the Castellan, two of them seized the Doctor by his arms and hauled him up from the chair. The Doctor recognised Klenchron, one of Mali’s two guards, as they started to drag him across the room.

As this happened, he caught a glance of the display by the cartography machine. The four dimensional image of the Edifice twisted and fluctuated before his eyes. The savage pain twisted in the Doctor’s gut. ‘Turn off your probes,’ he groaned at Nivet, struggling to free himself from the guards. ‘Turn them off. You’re giving that thing an itch. And it’s going to scratch.’

* * *

The dancing seemed to be reaching its climax. Fitz watched Tarra step aside from the main group, as though she wanted to just watch them. She was smiling, as though congratulating herself on the delirium she had induced. The coven had taken up her wailing song, and now continued its noisy, violent thrashing without her.

Tarra looked across at the Visualiser. Ressadriand was standing beside it, considering the frenzied scene. He had pulled off his half mask, and was staring in plain horror at the escalating events. Fitz could see the youngster’s mouth moving, but could not hear his voice over the howl of the coven.

‘No,’ Ressadriand was mouthing. ‘No.’

Behind him, the grey speckled image on the Visualiser screen suddenly flared brilliant white.

It obliterated the flickering orange yellow candlelight, and cast an actinic sharp light over everyone in the room, throwing jagged shadows behind them.

Despite this, Fitz found he could not tear his eyes away from the screen. A shape had formed.

It looked like a yellow white flower with many petals, slowly rotating against a dark background.

Ressadriand struggled with the Visualiser. ‘This is getting out of control,’ he howled.

“There’s something … Oh, Rungar, protect us! What is that thing?’ He started to struggle with the controls, panic making him fumble and slam his fists against them. On the screen, the ghostly image of the flower grew ever larger.

Fitz was thrown aside as a couple of the coven raced over to Ressadriand. Kellen was trying to pull him away from the controls, with Eton standing by and staring in disbelief at the image on the screen.

‘That looks like a Flower of Remembrance,’ said Eton. The light from the screen flickered over his face.

‘It’s an omen!’ wailed Ressadriand. ‘We should stop this now!’

‘I agree,’ said Eton.

Kellen was furious, and tore off his own half mask so that he could see better. ‘No, I say we continue. Get away from the Visualiser, both of you.’

Fitz started to move forward, ready to rescue Ressadriand from an unseen attack by Kellen.

Then he felt a firm grip on his shoulder, and was surprised to find it was Tarra holding him back. ‘Too dangerous,’ she said in a soft clear voice that cut through the growing howl from the Visualiser.

He saw that she had grabbed Kellen too.

‘Too late,’ Tana said.

Ressadriand thumped at the controls of the Visualiser, screaming out, ‘No!’

Eton’s face pulsed in the light from the screen as he tried to drag Ressadriand back to safety.

The entire Visualiser seemed to have lit up now, even the frame and the controls. The coven had fallen silent, amazed and appalled at what they were seeing. Eton was holding on to Ressadriand, wrapping both arms around his torso, trying to drag him back. They were still in this strange embrace when there was a huge, soundless explosion of white light.

Fitz knuckled his eyes and then blinked away the afterimage. Tarra’s grip on his shoulder had eased, and he stepped cautiously up to the Visualiser. For a while, as his sight returned, he thought that it appeared to be made of bone. Then the moment had passed, and things looked as they had before. Except for one thing.

Both Eton and Ressadriand had completely vanished.

* * *

‘It’s all right,’ grinned Nivet. “The Edifice is withdrawing from Gallifrey.’

Vice President Timon watched him adjust some more controls. He was a smart young technician, Timon noted. He would need to find him some rewarding work, something for the Vice President, rather than languishing in the office of Time Future.

Timon was still idly calculating how best to steal Nivet from that old bore Chancellor Djarshar when the prisoner made a sudden move. The Doctor had struggled free from his guards and bore down on Nivet.

‘The Edifice is not withdrawing from Gallifrey,’ the Doctor shouted.

‘Guards!’ Castellan Vozarti rushed forward, gesturing for the President to stand back. Timon did the same. Best to keep the Vice President safe too, he decided.

‘What are you saying, Doctor?’ That pretty woman, Combat Elite Mali, was at the cartography machine, examining the display.

The Doctor shrugged off the guards, and at a gesture from Mali they did not retaliate. Timon noticed that they stayed close to him, though.

‘Thank you,’ said the Doctor to Mali. ‘What I’m saying is that the Edifice is not withdrawing.

Nivet, you must turn this device off. The Edifice is obviously responding to any kind of temporal scanning. You’re just drawing its attention —’

‘No,’ insisted Nivet, ‘you can see there that it’s —’

‘It’s just probing, reaching out to —’ The Doctor broke off in horror. ‘Look!’

‘Oh, no!’ breathed Nivet.

From where he stood, as far from the cartographer as possible, Timon saw the image of the Flower of Remembrance suddenly expand wildly.

‘Ferisix and Thrayke preserve us!’ cursed Nivet.

The image swelled to fill the screen, seeming to reach out for them. Involuntarily, everyone who had gathered around the display screen suddenly leaned back. The Castellan and the guard, Klenchron, laughed nervously at their own surprised reaction.

Their laughter turned into a yell of alarm.

Timon found he was shouting in fear and amazement too.

Long, thin shapes sprang out of the cartography display, ethereal shards of bone which spiked out around the crowd of people surrounding the display. In seconds, each person was pulled howling and screaming back through the screen.

Timon looked wildly around the room, initial disbelief turning into horror.

The Castellan and his group of guards. Mali and Nivet. And the Doctor. They were all gone.

Chapter Fifteen

Set in bone

Mali felt as if she were liquid, splattering out in uneven gushes on to a cold, damp floor. It was only pain that eventually turned the fluid into flesh, viciously defining each muscle. She supposed that meant she was still alive.

‘Be careful what you wish for.’

‘We’re on the Edifice, aren’t we?’

‘Yes … Yes, I’m afraid so.’

The disembodied voices rang clearly through the musty air, and Mali felt she should know them. Lifting her head a fraction, she timidly opened her eyes. A smooth surface beneath her was gleaming dully.

Nearby, in the gloom, a dark, bulbous eyeball glared malevolently at her.

In horror, Mali attempted to recoil, but the sudden movement locked her arms and legs into cramps. Even as she gasped with the pain, Mali saw that the eye was just the top of a helmet; the Chancellery Guard whose head it protected was stretched out beside her.

‘How? How did it take us?’ That was the second voice again – the Castellan, of course. She still wasn’t used to this version of Vozarti –his soft, mild tone was nothing like the outraged bellow that had driven her through so many training exercises at military academy.

‘I’m not sure. Perhaps it wanted us to come.’ The first voice belonged to the Doctor, well mannered and precise, deliberating over every word. She closed her eyes, listening to him, gathering her strength.

‘How could it just reach in like that and take all of us … here?’

‘We’d all better get used to the idea.’ Mali heard the Doctor walking away, then a rattling of heavy doors. ‘No way out – won’t budge. We seem to be locked in.’

Dazed, her vision still a little blurred, she saw him come out of the shadows and back towards the indignant Castellan Vozarti. They were in a vaulted chamber, large and gloomy, apparently devoid of furniture and purpose. The floor might’ve been carpeted with broken teeth, littered as it was with dull and jagged debris she couldn’t identify. The Doctor seemed baffled himself, peering about in the half light at the fallen bodies around him. Presently his gaze fell on her, and he held out a hand. She reached for it instinctively.

‘Are you all right?’

Even as the Doctor spoke, his own face crumpled and his fingers flew to his temples.

Random noises seemed to yank themselves from his throat as he fought to find some way of expressing the pain.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ Vozarti asked him guardedly from the shadows.

‘Doctor?’ Mali lowered her own arm with the absurd notion that perhaps she’d caused his distress by pointing.

‘This place,’ the Doctor gasped. ‘Something … things … in here …’

Vozarti impatiently stepped over two of his men to get nearer the Doctor. ‘What are you saying?’

‘Something’s in here with us.’

Mali turned automatically to scan the room, her training finally sparking her back into life.

Those guards awake enough to feel alarm at the thought of the Doctor’s ‘something’ pushed themselves up on their elbows and gazed groggily around. Nivet, she noticed now, seemed peacefully asleep and did not stir.

It was getting a little brighter. A feeble, sickly light from somewhere up above was driving the sticky shadows in the room further up the ruined ivory walls. But one dark shape remained, holding its ground.

Suddenly it was striding across the gritted floor towards them.

‘See it?’ the Doctor stammered. ‘A spider. A spider, made of bone!’

Mali glanced up at Vozarti, to check she was looking in the right place. ‘What do you mean, bone?’ he said. ‘It’s a shadow.’

‘A man’s shadow,” Mali whispered, forcing herself to her feet and drawing her gun.

‘Bone like everything else in here. Dead.’ The Doctor kept repeating the word as the shadow stalked closer. ‘Dead. Dead. Dead.’

‘What’s casting it?’ Mali fired her staser as it neared her, the report echoing around the room.

‘Hold your fire!’ Vozarti told her, furiously. ‘We don’t know what it is or how it can harm us!’

The blast did not impede the shadow’s progress. The Doctor was curled up in a ball, still chanting to himself when the shadow fell upon him – and then into him.

Mali blinked and the shadow was gone. When she blinked again, the Doctor was back on his feet.

‘We need a plan,’ he said abruptly.

Vozarti stared at him. ‘What are you —’

The Doctor waved his protest away and started pacing the floor. ‘I didn’t get to see much of this place when last I was here. We need to know more about it. Its function. Its limits.’

The Doctor flashed a smile at Mali that presumably was meant to be reassuring, acting for all the world as if nothing had happened. Klenchron lay on the broken floor still sleeping, but Nivet now yawned noisily and opened his eyes. Mali wished she’d been unconscious for just a few minutes longer herself before finding she’d been poured into this new, alien world.

Only her fear remained liquid now, sloshing around her stomach as she watched the Doctor continue his pacing. He was like a deranged marionette, his strings being twitched by something high up in the shadows.

* * *

Mother Mathara still stood on the flight deck of her ancient warcraft.With the gears and pulleys in her feeble legs still defiantly temperamental after centuries of maintenance, it was more trouble than it was worth to attempt to sit down.

‘Was the scoop successful?’ Mathara asked.

‘It picked up all organics near any kind of temporal probe,’ Kristeva confirmed.

While his words pleased her, the thin reed of his voice put her on edge as always. ‘Will the Doctor be among them?’

‘We’ll know soon.’

The bone bloom hanging improbably in space was still depicted on the main screen. Mathara found her head tilting gently to one side to consider the image – not, for once, from faulty servos failing to balance her large, crusty head, but because it was a sight she found pleased her. The Faction had no real explanation for the Edifice as yet, but they understood its significance as a symbol: a certain sign that things were to change, and to their advantage.

The great white flower’s petals quivered and pulsated as strange energies played across them, and she thought about the prophecy the Edifice had brought with its appearance here. Ever since Dust, since the Faction virus had wormed its way into the Doctor’s dying body, the timelines stretching across the universe had grown more and more twisted, malleable, uncertain. Whole regions of space time had degenerated into chaos, warping and changing to the point where they threatened to become rival universes themselves, linked by an enclave of time corridors; an obverse, the powerless onlookers had termed it, a temporal boil on the poisoned flesh of the cosmos. And the destabilising effects of the infection were spreading.

It was a long time since Mathara had felt anything like excitement, and she recognised it tickling her senses with a deep pleasure. Important things were happening. Things that could make millennia of events unhappen in just a few sweet moments.

‘The Edifice is reacting,’ one of her technicians called out. ‘Energy levels up already.’

‘We have our confirmation, then.’ Mathara smiled under her mask. “The Doctor’s there. He is the catalyst, just as predicted. The Edifice is responding to him.’

The white light of the flower was so brilliant that Mathara’s eyes began to ache. The plastic flaps of her eyelids lowered. She remembered a lover proving himself by going back into her own past and hacking out every terrible thing that had happened to her. He hadn’t left a good deal behind. When they’d separated and the pain became too much for a soul that had never known distress, she’d arranged for the man’s mother to die, with him, in childbirth. Only a few stubborn traces of him in her mind reminded her he’d ever existed. Mathara felt oblivion as being white, like the flower.

Her long life within the Faction had left her many memories to cherish, but she’d periodically insisted they be destroyed also. Such acts renewed her. They reminded her that nothing in the past was sacred. There was only the future.

The bone flower held a feeling of anticipation, like a heady scent.

* * *

The Doctor sauntered forward a short distance and flung open his arms as if welcoming a sunbeam. ‘Do you know, I feel alarmingly at home here.’

Mali frowned. ‘You can’t be serious.’

‘Can’t I?’ the Doctor asked airily, rocking on his heels. His shadow did the same, but it seemed to Mali a fraction of a second out of sync. ‘You know, that’s always been my trouble.

Frivolous. Frivolous to the point of —’

‘– getting your head blown off if you don’t shut up and get over here,’ Vozarti interrupted, pointing his gun at the Doctor. ‘By me. Now.’

The Doctor seemed to trot over quite obediently, but then breezed past Vozarti and Mali to stand with Klenchron and Nivet.

‘Whatever that shadow thing was, Doctor, it went straight for you,’ Vozarti said.

‘Shadow thing?’ the Doctor echoed.

‘Don’t try to act clever.’

The Doctor almost smiled. ‘I don’t have to.’

Vozarti was clearly unnerved by the Doctor’s change of mood. ‘What you do have to do is exactly what I tell you to.’ As if seeking to prove his authority here, Vozarti signalled with his hand and the five Chancellery Guards formed a defensive ring around them, guns trained on the silent corners of the room.

‘Well,’ Nivet began, hugging himself to keep warm in the chill air. ‘Now that we’re here, we need reinforcements. Help from outside.’

‘A war TARDIS, fully armed,’ said Klenchron with feeling.

‘Same problem applies as before,’ Vozarti said wearily. ‘No Doctor, no way into the Edifice.’

‘No easy way in,’ Nivet corrected him, casually. His self assurance made Mali want to spit.

‘If we’d made a concerted effort to breach this place’s defences —’

Vozarti scoffed. ‘Without knowing what was inside first?’

‘Well, we’re inside, aren’t we?’ Nivet winked at the Castellan.

Klenchron nodded earnestly. ‘We can tell them everything they need to know. Everything.’

‘I doubt that,’ said the Doctor. ‘I doubt that very much.’ He was glancing about furtively as if afraid of discovery, his show of confidence apparently forgotten. Mali shivered. Was the Faction virus influencing these mood swings, or something more insidious, here in the Edifice?

‘What do you mean?’ Vozarti asked impatiently.

‘Just a feeling.’ The Doctor waved a hand in the air as if attempting to conjure something from the ether. ‘I mean, how come we’re all here?’

Nivet shrugged. ‘Your name’s on the door.’

The Doctor smiled tightly. ‘If slightly misspelled.’

‘Obviously, when this thing responded to our probes, the presence of the Doctor confused it,’

offered Klenchron. ‘It made a grab for anyone close by.’

‘That might explain the how, but not the why,’ the Doctor snapped, a chestnut curl falling over one eye. ‘Not the why,’ he repeated morosely.

Mali crossed over to join him. ‘What’s really bothering you, Doctor? More invisible spiders?’

The Doctor looked at her curiously. ‘I have the feeling I should be rather afraid of spiders.’

He started nodding to himself, lost in thought.

‘All right, here’s what we do,’ Vozarti announced, pulling out his communicator. ‘Nivet, contact the President. Let her know our position.’

Nivet took the communicator and tried it. Static filled the chamber with echoing background chatter. ‘Not a chance with this,’ he concluded. ‘Perhaps if I had another …’

Mali handed him her own without hesitation. ‘Here.’

Nivet took it without thanks and started scrutinising it closely. Vozarti turned to the Doctor.

‘And you, Doctor —’

‘Me Doctor. You’re spot on.’

Vozarti wasn’t fazed. ‘You will take me to the Type 102.’

The Doctor’s face fell. ‘Will I?’

‘Immediately.’

‘I’m desperately disappointed in myself.’

Mali pushed between them. ‘I thought the doors wouldn’t open?’

The Doctor clicked his fingers as if something brilliant had occurred to him. ‘She’s absolutely right.’

Vozarti shook his head, his red hair glinting in the dull light. ‘We’ll force them open.’

‘What’s with the “we”?’ the Doctor asked, feet crunching on debris as he skipped over to the massive doors. ‘Have you felt how heavy these doors are?’ As if to prove his point, the Doctor gripped the thick, ornately carved handles on the door and pulled.

The doors practically flew off their hinges in their haste to open for him, sending him reeling.

For a second, everyone seemed frozen while the noise of the doors slamming into the bone walls chased itself round the room. The Doctor himself was teetering on one leg, as if he were an ornament disturbed and about to fall.

Mali anticipated the Doctor’s next move before he could make it. She was already running by the time the Doctor had begun his own sprint, through the doors and into whatever lay beyond. She heard Vozarti yell at her as she reached the threshold of the room, glimpsed a dark green coat tail flapping crazily like a bat into the darkness. As she moved to follow it, she realised Vozarti’s shout had been a warning.

Silently, the doors to the vaulted chamber had swung closed again behind her – she was cut off from the others. Mali gripped the heavy handles in the dark. She felt no surprise but a fraction colder when the doors, once more, refused to budge.

Chapter Sixteen

Possessed

Vozarti cursed and kicked the doors. ‘It’s impossible,’ he complained.

‘Isomorphic?’ Nivet hazarded, apparently more interested in taking the back off Mali’s communicator.

‘They didn’t open for him earlier …’ Vozarti began to smile with realisation, until he remembered how this body’s grin could make him appear slightly pathetic. ‘But that was before the shadow got back inside him, wasn’t it? His Faction inheritance.’

‘Faction agents don’t have shadows,’ Klenchron pointed out, peering over Nivet’s shoulder.

‘It’s in all the nursery rhymes.’

Vozarti strode over. ‘Has it occurred to you this place might be where they keep their shadows?’

Nivet looked up at him in mild surprise. ‘Bit mystical for you, isn’t it?’

‘Truth is we know nothing about this place except that the Doctor feels right at home, and that he can open doors here while we can’t.’ Vozarti looked for the hundredth time around the bare bone walls of their cell. “That’s an advantage I don’t like him possessing.’

‘Possessing,’ Nivet murmured. The communicator beeped encouragingly to him as he inserted a tiny needle into its circuitry.

‘Perhaps he’s possessed,’ Klenchron suggested miserably. Everyone stared at him.

Nivet looked back at Vozarti and smiled. ‘Well, I guess if we are getting mystical about things, we might as well go the whole way.’

Vozarti glared at the two technicians, then turned to his guards. ‘All right, get firing at those doors. We’re going to blast our way through.’

* * *

Mali pressed on along the tunnels of the Edifice. She paused every few steps, pointing her staser into the gloom as though it might help her see, straining to catch the slightest sound that might give away her quarry.

Now, at last, her efforts were rewarded with a slow scuffing noise. She tensed, held her breath, tried to work out the direction of the sound. It was behind her. No, in front. It sounded not like one man walking, but many.

Getting closer.

She turned three hundred and sixty degrees, caught a glimpse of something moving far behind her, felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand up.

‘Phased temporal image,’ said a voice in her ear.

She jumped so hard the staser jerked from her hand. When she turned, the Doctor was smiling sorrowfully at her. Studying the gun as if familiarising himself with its purpose, he held its snout against her chest.

Oddly, she found herself more concerned by what he’d said than by the weapon. She made a point of speaking loudly, attempting to prove he wasn’t intimidating her. ‘Explain.’

‘That’s you, that is,’ he said, pointing behind her at the shadowy form. ‘By the light at the end of the tunnel. I do hope that’s symbolic.’

Mali shuddered. ‘Symbolic? What are you suggesting, that I’ve turned my back on myself?’

‘Perhaps sham bolic might be a better word,’ the Doctor mused. ‘You followed me without a communicator, and now I’ve got your gun.’

Mali decided to gloss over that. ‘How can that be me over there?’

‘Some kind of warp ellipse, I think. Side effect of profound extradimensional stress. A clue.

And I think I’ve found another one.’ Without taking his eyes from Mali’s own, the Doctor disarmed the staser and pressed it back into her clammy hand. ‘Here. It won’t work, but holding the thing might still make you feel more brave.’

‘I’m not afraid,’ Mali said instantly.

The Doctor smiled faintly and took her free hand in his own. ‘Then you can hold this too.’ He tugged her, away from the direction of her phantom image. ‘This way.’

‘No, Doctor,’ Mali said. ‘We’re going back to the others. You can open those doors again and let the others out.’

‘Shan’t.’ The Doctor squeezed her hand a little more tightly. Their eyes met.

‘Why did you let me find you?’ she asked, quietly.

‘I wanted company.’

She glanced behind her again. Her image was still turned away as if in disgust. The Doctor’s grip on her hand was just beginning to hurt, though his face was still soft when she turned back to him.

‘Let me show you something,’ he whispered.

He let go of her hand only when satisfied she was following without protest. Mali had the sense that the tunnel was winding round, going deeper and deeper into who knew what.

‘There,’ said the Doctor.

He was gesturing at a small hole in the wall. Mali could see that the bone like fabric of this place had worn so thin in this spot it had started to crumble away.

‘Come on, then,’ he encouraged her.

Mali squared up cautiously to the blackness. She waited as unfocused shapes slipped into solidity, then felt the hairs on her neck tingle once again.

Away from her, faintly glowing parallel lines bisected the gloom horizontally again and again, growing thinner as they stretched away into the distance. Each one had to be a tunnel like the one she was standing in. Two great tubes of bone stretched vertically away like spokes, jointing the tunnels, a support network of some kind.

‘Quite a sight, isn’t it?’ the Doctor said. ‘You’ll notice the radii are equally spaced, and that the angles formed by each consecutive part are of perceptibly equal value.’

‘A logarithmic spiral,’ Mali muttered.

‘Good; breathed the Doctor, like a teacher proud of his pupil. ‘A polygonal line that intersects obliquely, at angles of unvarying value, all the straight lines radiating from a centre.’

Mali turned to him and crossed her arms. ‘Such geometric precision only confirms that this place is an artificial construct built for a specific purpose. A purpose responding to the diseased tissues inside you, Doctor. A Faction trap.’

‘Are you certain?’ The Doctor shook his head and she felt her smugness slipping. ‘If the number of spokes was infinite, the length of the rectilinear elements would reduce indefinitely and change the polygonal line into a curve.’

‘Infinite? The technology doesn’t exist.’

‘Are you certain?’

‘And even if it did, why bother?’

The Doctor pressed his eye to the gap in her place. ‘Perhaps this place had no choice in the matter.’

‘You’re talking in riddles, Doctor.’

‘Sorry.’ He paused for a moment. ‘I suppose I’m just trying to distract myself from thinking about where the logarithmic spiral most commonly embodies itself in nature.’

Mali remembered the Doctor’s distress at the phantom he’d seen back in the chamber, and felt her blood run cold. ‘In a spider’s web.’

‘Consider our view.’ The Doctor stepped aside to allow her another look at the endless, fibrous tunnels glinting in the half light. ‘I think we’re two flies caught in the web of the largest, cleverest spider in history.’

* * *

‘Wait.’

Mali obediently stopped at the Doctor’s command. She kept telling herself that was exactly what she was doing already, just biding her time until the Doctor was sufficiently off guard so she could overpower him.Well, in theory, maybe. But Mali knew she was matching the Doctor’s long stride along these damned corridors because she didn’t know what else she could do. She was afraid, and fear was making her a sheep. She wondered if the Doctor acquired all his companions in this way.

At least she was keeping tabs on him. Perhaps Vozarti would find a way out and come looking; he’d find her with the Doctor, and in the distraction perhaps she could act. Show them both she was experienced enough to think clearly and function effectively, whatever the situation. As the Doctor had been doing for centuries.

Except, in this place, it was clear he was just as frightened as she was. He was just better at concealing it, and she envied him that more than anything.

‘What are we waiting for?’ she asked.

‘Headache got worse a moment ago.’ His face was clammy in the pale luminescence of the tunnels. ‘It’s just a feeling, but …’

Abruptly he began walking backwards, waving his head about as he sniffed the air. Then he turned to face the wall and stopped.

Mali saw what he was staring at. ‘I’m sure that doorway wasn’t there before,’ she said slowly.

The Doctor looked as if he were trying to stare the sturdy wooden door down. ‘Agreed.

Which suggests that some—’ He faltered over the word, rubbed a hand over his eyes. ‘It suggests we’re meant to go through.’

‘Predestination?’ Mali scoffed with exaggerated contempt.

‘I used to think Me was made up on the spot,’ the Doctor said. “That’s the way it should be.

Nothing in the future should be written down. But for a long time now …’

Apparently tiring of pursuing his line of thought, the Doctor pressed a palm flat to the door.

Before he even touched it, it was swinging open and he was walking through.

She acted without thinking and followed him through. Then she swore in disbelief.

The magic door had led from the sinister tunnel to a wide open heath. A desolate tract of wasteland stretched out before them, patchy grass and scrubland rippling in a chill wind. The ground was damp, as if it had just been raining. The sky itself was bone grey, lost in smudges that might have been clouds.

‘Maybe “written down” was the wrong analogy,’ the Doctor murmured, eyes screwed up from the downpour. “This is more like a watercolour.’

Mali looked at him. ‘A what?’

‘A kind of painting.’ He paused, seemed to become more thoughtful. ‘What’s worrying me is whose signature it will carry. And whether or not it’s a fake.’

He set off at a brisker pace. Mali felt the wet mud suck at her grey shoes as she followed him, shoes that had never been exposed to the elements. The Doctor’s own were battered brown.

They seemed to glory in the mud caking them, just as he did, striding on against the blustery wind.

Mali kept up with the Doctor for some time before deciding she should be ahead of him. She was about to start jogging, when she realised the Doctor had come to a sudden halt. Peering into the grey naze, she saw what it was that had taken his attention.

Half buried, incongruous in the scrubland, was a large mahogany cupboard. And there, just by his feet, was a collection of silver knives, forks and spoons, all bent and distorted.

‘How did these things get here?’ Mali asked.

But the Doctor was looking over her shoulder at something. She turned and saw a white pillar, partially sunken in the mud, some way away.

‘Doctor?’

He pushed past her, splashing leadenly towards it, slipping, stumbling, always keeping on.

She herself was skidding in the wet mud as she tried to keep up with him.

As they got closer to the object, Mali could see it wasn’t a pillar: it was a statue of some kind.

Buried up to its shins in the mud, it looked like a chess queen, carved from ivory or bone.

‘Happy?’

Mali slithered to a halt a few feet behind the Doctor. His tone chilled her more than the wind.

‘What are you talking about?’ she asked.

He skidded round to face her, clearly distraught. ‘This is what you’ve been searching for.

This is why you’ve done so much, and why you’re chasing so many terrible things. All in her name …’ He turned back to the bone statue. ‘Compassion.’

The ashen figure was slick with rain, its face twisted in a silent scream.

Chapter Seventeen

Shadowplay

‘It’s all right. You can let go of me now.’

It was something Fitz would never have imagined himself saying while caught in a clinch with a gorgeous doll, but Tana’s grip on his wrist had cut off sensation to his fingers. He pulled off her mask with his free hand. Tarra’s brown eyes were large and unblinking as she stared at the Visualiser, or at the empty space around it where Ressadriand and Eton had stood.

He gently tugged her round to face him. She looked at him as if she’d been unaware he was even there before letting him take his wrist back. He could see the marks her nails had made in the skin. The poor cow must be in shock. He didn’t blame her.

This was a game that had got well out of hand.

Kaufima appeared in front of him, tears running down her face. “They just vanished.’

‘That’s what it looked like,’ Fitz agreed cautiously.

‘Rubbish,’ Kellen snapped. ‘The pressure was too much for Ressadriand to handle, that’s all.

He couldn’t take it, so he and his wet nurse rigged all this up to scare us.’

Fitz narrowed his eyes. ‘What colour’s the sky in your world, Kellen?’

‘Burnt orange,’ Kaufima whispered, staring into space, the sarcasm lost on her.

‘Good idea, Fitz,’ Kellen said, smiling widely. ‘Keep her distracted, thinking about what’s familiar.’ He laughed, pulled off his half mask. ‘I have to hand it to Ressadriand: that was quite a show. I’ll have a lot to live up to.’

Fitz felt a familiar sinking feeling. ‘What are you talking about, Kellen?’

Kellen turned and looked at Fitz like he was dirt. ‘We’ve still got things to do – and we’ll get them done a lot faster now I’m in charge.’

Fitz looked nervously round at the cowled brethren. ‘Didn’t notice anyone casting votes.’

‘No need.’ Kellen smiled smugly round at his audience. Rattled themselves, they were clearly responding to his confidence. ‘Proposed by: me. Seconded by … Hey, Tarra, want to second me?’

Tarra’s face was still pale, and she was back to staring at the Visualiser. Clouds of static whirled and bled into each other hypnotically over its monitor.

Fitz tore his gaze away and shook his head to clear it. To think he was the one normally accused of living in a dream world. ‘Don’t you think all that can wait? We need to find out what really happened to Eton and Ressadriand.’

Kellen persisted. ‘Come on, Tarra, everyone else seems amenable to my taking over as head of the coven.’

Fitz ignored both Kellen and the murmurs of assent that greeted his question and jumped in before Tarra could say a word. ‘They didn’t leg it anywhere – the lights weren’t out for long enough.’

‘My first act will be to restore the great Sage of Paradox to life,’ Kellen proclaimed. “This very night. Hey, why so cagey, Tarra? It was your idea to resurrect Greyjan in the first place.’

Fitz had opened his mouth to start shouting when Kellen’s words sank in, and he fell silent.

Tarra’s idea? He suddenly had the oddest feeling that if this had been an Armchair Theatre play on TV, menacing incidental music would’ve started up right about now.

Kellen clapped his hands, pacing round, trying to dispel the edgy atmosphere building in the cave. ‘All right, everybody, maybe the monkey’s right. Look outside, check that Ressadriand and Eton aren’t hiding there waiting to play any more tricks on us.’

‘Do you think they will be?’ Kaufima said, still rattled.

‘I promise you, they’ll be far away from here by now.’ Kellen kissed her extravagantly on her forehead, and nuzzled his nose against her wet eyes. She giggled and pushed him away.

‘Come on, then,’ he said softly. ‘Get going.’

She nodded, squeezed his arm, and hurried after the others towards the comfort of daylight.

Fitz turned to Tarra. ‘You never said the Greyjan thing was your idea.’

Tarra fingered the bone mask in her hands, looking just a little embarrassed. ‘Is it important?’

‘What’s important,’ Kellen said quietly as he came over to join them, ‘is that that lot don’t get so spooked they drop out of the coven.’

‘Why is that so important?’ Fitz asked him. ‘What are you really doing this for, Kellen?’

Kellen smiled unpleasantly at him, like a teacher confronting a wayward child alone after school, aware that his classmates could no longer offer support. ‘I’ve long seen the real potential of this group. We’re extending our knowledge all the time,’ he said. ‘Not regurgitating textbooks, learning the patterns of the universe by rote. We’re only interested in the forbidden knowledge.’

Fitz felt horribly uneasy. ‘Ever stopped to wonder just why it was forbidden?’

Tarra, who had recovered some of her composure, attempted a smile. ‘All knowledge is power. That’s the maxim this place was founded on. Those who know more than everyone else are —’

‘– more powerful than everyone else,’ Kellen concluded. He stabbed a finger repeatedly against Fitz’s chest. ‘And besides that, there’s the intrigue. Come on, you must be as desperate as we are to know who that one armed figure we saw in the Visualiser really is, aren’t you?’

Fitz was determined not to show Kellen was getting to him, and gave a small, tight smile. ‘I think I could live with not knowing, thanks all the same.’

‘Why should you live without knowing, Fitz?’ Kellen said, an edge to his voice that Fitz found more frightening than the man’s skull mask in the ceremony. ‘What right do you have to ignorance?’

‘These are good things we’re doing, Fitz,’ Tarra said blandly. ‘If you turn your back on knowledge, you doom yourself to slavery at the hands of those who know better.’

Fitz could see Kellen had done a good job on Tarra. No wonder she was so keen to help him: the woman had to be totally brainwashed.

‘That’s the real lesson you learn on a world like Gallifrey,’ Kellen went on. ‘A world that cites a hundred reasons why it’s best not to interfere, when the truth is it’s too afraid to take charge of the cosmos.’

Fitz sighed. ‘You’re not, I take it.’

Kellen simply smiled again. ‘Since the Dalek incident, things have begun to change here.

Slowly, sure, but they’re changing. That bone thing in the sky is a part of it, a catalyst of some kind, I’m sure of it. A sign that all the traditional knowledge that’s served us for generations, it’s not enough. The tide is turning. And when it does …’

‘You want to be riding the wave,’ Fitz muttered. ‘Wipe out.’

Tarra walked over to the Visualiser, the cool click of her heels on the cave floor distracting both men. “The litany we need to perform the Salvage Rites will be at Eton’s place,’ she said.

‘Salvage Rites?’ echoed Fitz.

Tarra nodded. ‘Summoning the loa to retrieve that projection as a real space time event will be child’s play, with the full power of the coven operating.’

Fitz felt his guts twist. ‘Do you mean you’ll lift an image of that bloke right out of the future?

Bring him here so … so we can talk to him?’

‘Right here,’ Kellen agreed. ‘But not just an image.’

Fitz swallowed. ‘Not just an image? But …’

‘Should be fun, don’t you think?’

‘Oh yeah,’ stormed Fitz. ‘A real laugh. A jolly little prank. That guy is … Well, it sounds like he’s the person I’m going to become, isn’t he? From out of my future?’

Tarra walked back over and squeezed Fitz’s hand. This time, her touch was soft and calming.

‘A possible future, perhaps. But all things can be changed.’

‘Then let your mind be one of them,’ Fitz implored her. ‘Leave him where he is, for God’s sake.’

She shook her head. ‘It’s important, Fitz. If we can bring that figure out from wherever he’s been drifting, it’ll be a crucial demonstration of the power of the loa —’

‘Stop calling them loa!’ Kellen complained. ‘I keep telling you, Tarra, they’re equations. Just equations.’

‘Makes them sound less scary, doesn’t it?’ Fitz said, his voice rising a fraction as fear seemed to give his balls a squeeze. ‘Equations just are, you can write them down or cross them out.

But loa are voodoo, right? And so is bringing some geezer who’s been dead for thousands of years back to life.’

‘Speaking of which,’ Kellen said, as the first of his inherited acolytes walked back into the cave. ‘If our little joke is going to be ready in time for the President’s Reaffirmation Ceremony … we’d better get moving.’

‘Hey, tell you what,’ Fitz said bitterly, ‘I’ll get moving first.’

‘Fitz, don’t go.’ Tarra protested. ‘Stay with me.’

He put a thoughtful finger to his mouth as if faced with a difficult decision. ‘Well, sounds like real fun, but I think I’ll pass if that’s all the same to you. Raising the dead may raise the roof for you lot, but me … I think I’ll skip.’ Fitz slouched off, hands in pockets. He didn’t know where he could go or what the hell he was going to do next, but hanging round here was not an option.

Despite resolving to walk straight out, Fitz couldn’t help spoiling his exit by turning for one last look at Tarra. She was staring at him, mournfully, shaking her head almost imperceptibly from side to side. He should go back for her, take her away from Kellen. He should try to make her see that what she was doing was wrong.

No. He should learn to mind his own bloody business.

Fitz turned on his heel and carried on walking towards fresh air and sunlight.

* * *

Kellen sneered at Fitz’s back as the gangly primitive left the room. Kaufima came in at the same time, and gave Fitz a wide berth as he stomped past her, focusing on Kellen. Her tears had dried, and she was trying to put on that composed act for him again.

Poor little Kaufima. She looked fantastic, she dreamed of setting the world on fire, but was as wet and as dull as ditch water. She came closer, and Kellen smirked. Like so many bored little rich girls, she kept sniffing around him long after the event, ever keen to escape the safe, dull boredom of the Capitol.

‘Isn’t it dangerous to let someone as primitive as he is on the loose on Gallifrey?’ Kaufima asked him. ‘If he’s caught, he could tell the guards about us.’ She felt herself flush. ‘He could name us!’

‘Don’t worry about the monkey,’ Kellen told her. ‘He won’t go far. Where can he go? And besides …’ He leered at Tarra. ‘Now Eton’s cleared off, there’s no one else vying for the attentions of our high priestess, here.’

Tarra looked annoyed and skulked away. Kellen saw Kaufima try but fail to disguise a small smile of satisfaction before petulantly puffing out her cheeks. ‘How are you going to get rid of him, Kellen?’

He slid an arm around her, enjoying the blush that crept over her pale cheeks. ‘Let me worry about that,’ he murmured. ‘First, I’m going to bone up on my rituals.’

‘Need some company?’ she asked, looking into his pale blue eyes.

‘It’s a serious business,’ he said, slowly withdrawing his arm. Kaufima looked away, the blush growing almost crimson. Maybe she could burn after all, mused Kellen. ‘We’ll assemble again this evening.’

Kaufima seemed uneasy. ‘So soon?’

‘So much to do,’ Kellen said. His voice had become cold. ‘And like I say, don’t worry about Fitz. When we’ve finished giving Greyjan the Sane back to the world, we’re going to have some fun with our little monkey.’

Third Interlude

Infected

Now he has found the book hanging in its stasis field at last, be considers its convenience.

None of his kind trust anything straightforward now: they would think this a trap, unreal, a construct existing for some unknown purpose. It cannot exist simply for him, the Event pinned down in its pages. It cannot own just one truth for its own sake.

Even so, he lets hope guide him as he gently removes the ancient book. It is bound in reptile hide of some kind, with an omniscate embossed on the cover. He smiles to see the volume sag and settle once returned to Pangea’s gravity. It is a reaction so genuine, so strangely honest, it heartens htm. He lifts the heavy cover, turns pages. They whisper like secrets as they pass his fingertips, and he knows he must be swift and careful. He will be missed.

Then a fragile page bursts over his hand into fine white powder. He scans the fragments, anxious, and finds they relate to somewhere called Dust. He wonders for a moment if the irony is intentional, fears some sort of trick. On that miserable world, he knows his hero’s life force was infected with a Faction Paradox virus that would one day make him one of their own. That it changed his biodata, growing stronger with every regeneration until it could riddle his existence with the Faction’s interference. Then, in the Doctor’s eighth life …

The dust has fallen in discomfiting patterns around his feet. The page revealed beneath is dark and crusty. He reads faded words in disbelief. Every Time Lord knows the Enemy homeworld is called Earth. Some believe it is retribution for the ancient Time Lords standing by and watching as the little world was invaded and devastated time and time again. Some believe the Enemy faked a thousand invasions to lend their stupid speck of a planet some semblance of dignity. In any case, the Time Lords take a more active interest in that world now. He himself has helped prepare and launch a great warship three billion years in the past, its mission to destroy Earth once and for all, not by travelling through time, but through space.

A pan of him has actually believed the stratagem might work. But the words on the page destroy the dream, and more beyond it. The dark page demonstrates that Earth is not the homeworld of the Enemy – at least, not today, a voice inside whispers, not for this author’s purposes. It seems this has been but one more smokescreen, meaningless after all, a ball of rock and sea and misinformation. He feels his patience edge up to a precipice. He has long suspected that many of the absolutes he clings to are falsehoods, but this book seeks to prove his entire existence a fiction.

* * *

He cannot put it down. The dust seems to flicker in the low light, and makes strange patterns around his feet.

Chapter Eighteen

Looks familiar

The summons roused Mother Mathara from her dozing. Her great bone head seemed heavy on her shoulders as she eased herself into a sitting position on her couch.

‘Who’s there?’

‘Kristeva. I have a field report.’

Mathara went to rub her sleepy eyes and froze. It was a ludicrous gesture she always attempted upon waking; no amount of time or scorn seemed able to make her stop. She made her outstretched hands into fists. Her eyes were lumps of jelly pinned to circuit boards, well out of reach.

She cursed herself for falling asleep and activated the door control.

Kristeva nodded respectfully as he shuffled in to the dark room.

‘Is Greyjan’s construction proceeding?’ she croaked.

‘It is.’

‘And Kreiner?’

Kristeva’s transparent lips twitched. ‘The body in the vortex shall be regained.’

‘A useful opportunity,’ Mathara remarked. ‘Quite apart from Kreiner’s own value to the Faction, if it can be demonstrated that organic life from our own world can pass through the bottle universe and back into our own without …’ She chose her words carefully. ‘Without adverse effects …’

Kristeva nodded, his face threatening to crack open. “The mixing of realities now seems inevitable, Mother Mathara. The loa whisper it with unanimous voice, in every tongue. The energies wreathing the Edifice continue to be stoked by the Doctor’s presence. The time will soon come.’

Mathara nodded. ‘Time … it concerns me there is still no record of the Edifice being a Faction construct, not in any point in our history.’

Kristeva inclined his head. ‘It is paradox, Mother Mathara. An event wiped from our old history in anticipation of a new one.’

Mathara cackled. ‘It seems appropriate that the Doctor should prove his loyalty to us by reclaiming the Edifice for the Faction under the very noses of the Time Lords.’

Kristeva nodded. ‘As well as helping us engineer what is to come.’

* * *

Vozarti glanced across at Nivet for the tenth time in as many minutes. ‘Still nothing?’

‘Nothing from Gallifrey,’ Nivet agreed evenly, frowning at the lash up of equipment at his feet.

‘I’ve been getting readings on the portascan,’ Klenchron piped up.

Vozarti quietly ground his teeth while the technician failed to elucidate. The atmosphere in this place was like an acid, corroding the spirit, and soon their position would become untenable. His guards were rapidly losing morale, and doubtless faith in him at the same time.

He couldn’t really blame them: he looked like a kid fresh out of the Academy, and he’d let their captive escape. Mali was gone, and he was powerless to open the doors that could get them out to follow her. If no word came through from Gallifrey soon he knew he’d be facing losing control.

‘So report your findings, Technician Klenchron.’ Use rank names, Vozarti decided. Remind the men of order, of hierarchy, of duty. ‘And perhaps you’d like to explain why you undertook them without specific instruction?’

‘I suggested he give it a try,’ said Nivet. ‘I understood it was our function to learn as much as we can about this structure.’

‘Very well. So what have you learned?’

Klenchron looked worriedly up at him. ‘First off, the Edifice is thousands of years old.’

Vozarti looked round at the shattered chamber. “That I can well imagine.’

‘And these fragments littering the place are riddled with time distortion.’

Vozarti frowned. ‘So the Edifice has time travel capability?’

Nivet nudged a shard of bone with his foot and pushed the portascan back in his pocket. ‘For these fragments to be so irradiated I’d say it’s used it, too. This place must’ve toured half the universe.’

Vozarti felt himself losing patience once more. ‘But what’s it for?’

A harsh, brittle noise like eggshells crushing made them all look up towards the doors.

Patches of the ivory walls were becoming a mottled yellow, as if ageing before their eyes.

Then the dull smears seemed to open outwards as three giant spiders, six feet across, scuttled through.

‘Everyone back away, slowly,’ Vozarti commanded.

Nivet joined him, but Klenchron and the guards remained rooted to the spot as the spiders seemed to scent the air.

A spider made of bone, the Doctor had said.

Their great legs twitched, and eyes like polished onyx gleamed in the gloom.

Bone like everything else in here.

Bristling white mandibles flexed and convulsed under the maw of the creatures’ mouths.

They were illusions, they had to be, in the same way the spider the Doctor had seen had been a shadow. But Vozarti could see the debris on the floor squirm under the bellies of these monsters as they shifted their bulk to survey their prey.

Dead. Dead. Dead.

‘Listen to me, you men.’ Vozarti’s voice rang out around the chamber. ‘You’ll do as I say.

Combat Elite Mali acted on her own and she’s gone, lost out there. She could even be dead –

and all for acting on her own orders and not mine. We are going to survive this. We are going to get out.’

Keep talking, he told himself as the spiders began to edge closer. Keep talking, you’ll think of something.

And he did, too. The flood of relief nearly robbed him of speech. “The patches on the wall,’

he croaked. “The spiders got through there, maybe we can too. Fire! Fire at those patches –

perhaps they’ve been weakened!’

A volley of staser fire rang out, but one of the spiders took several of the shots, pale halos lighting over its broad, quivering body. It took a second for Vozarti to identify the guard responsible.

‘No,you fool, leave it!’

The guard’s jaw was slack with terror, his eyes closed as he fired blast after blast at the spider. Vozarti saw the creature tense itself, as if getting ready to spring.

‘The walls!’ he roared. ‘Keep firing! Keep firing!’

The spiders started their scuttling advance.

* * *

‘Well I think you should go first; Ressadriand said, staring into the inky blackness ahead.

Eton gave him a scornful look. ‘Our glorious leader.’

‘I’m not a leader of men,’ Ressadriand hissed angrily. ‘Your father’s the Castellan – you must’ve picked up something useful from him.’

‘Oh, so suddenly it’s all right to be bom of a High Councillor. It’s not something to be laughed at, is that right?’ Eton shoved Ressadriand backwards against the smooth bone of the tunnel wall. ‘You’re pathetic.’

Ressadriand let the wall support him for a few moments, closing his eyes and conceding that Eton had a point. They’d been wandering round this gutted skeleton for what felt like days, and during that time Ressadriand had blamed Tarra for invoking powers too strong for them to control, Kellen for not helping them disconnect the Visualiser in time, even Eton for getting in his way at the crucial point. But all this was his fault, and he knew it.

‘Perhaps this is some kind of service shaft,’ Eton hazarded. ‘You know, like the lower walkways in the Capitol.’

‘No, I don’t know, actually. Only plebs take the lower walkways.’

Eton ignored him. ‘If we can head upwards and reach one of the main corridors, I’m sure we’ll get through to the crew and sort this whole thing out.’

‘You’re sure?’ Ressadriand waited to be convinced. He was absolutely terrified. The ceremonies had been a bit of fun, a bit of rebellion, something to spice up a stultifying life.

Suddenly, attaining some quiet scholarly position and atrophying in a polished mahogany corner seemed like a wonderful life.When they got back from this miserable place and had ridden out the storm his folks would kick up, he’d pack up the coven for good. There had to be better ways of impressing women than –

Ressadriand opened his eyes and found his erstwhile acolyte had already pressed ahead into the thick darkness ahead. ‘Wait for me!’ he called, and Eton seemed to obey.

‘Thanks.’

‘I wasn’t waiting for you,’ Eton whispered. ‘I was listening. I think I heard something up ahead.’

‘You’re sure?’ Ressadriand took Eton’s sleeve in his hand. ‘What do you think it was?’

His only answer was from the scuttling sound in the dark. The picture it conjured was so vivid, he was glad Eton had chosen not to elaborate.

* * *

‘Goodbye, then, Compassion,’ breathed the Doctor, and placed his lips against her sallow cheek. ‘I’m so very, very sorry.’

Mali watched as he awkwardly embraced the statue. The sky seemed to be clearing, and a pale radiance bathed the heathland stretching out all around them. It was as if the place was at peace now.

The Doctor moved away from his ship and joined her. His face was almost as stony as the statue. ‘I failed her,’ he said simply.

‘This entire mission has been a failure,’ Mali said. ‘We need the Type 102 in the forthcoming War, without it we’ll —’

‘The forthcoming War, the forthcoming War,’ the Doctor parroted. ‘You’re obsessed. Your lives revolve around it, endlessly, don’t they?’

‘We must prepare for our future, Doctor,’ Mali said patiently.

‘Why? Why, when you can prevent that future, build another, better future in its place? A Gallifrey to live for, not die for.’ The Doctor grabbed hold of her hands and squeezed them tight. ‘The future is not immutable. You can change it.’

‘You speak like the Faction,’ Mali sneered. ‘Preventing a war we know will come can only create paradox.’

‘To argue paradox is to run round in circles,’ the Doctor said, throwing down Mali’s hands in disgust. ‘Why don’t you just do something?’

‘We are servants of history.’

‘So throw off your bonds, before it’s too late.’

Mali’s eyes narrowed. ‘Before it’s too late for you, Cousin Doctor?’

The Doctor glared at her, his eyes a flat grey, top lip curled in disdain. He turned away – then pointed to something far off in the distance.

Mali could just discern a hazy image now squatted on the horizon, broad at the bottom and tapering at the top, dark as mud all over. A weird mist was coiling around it, one that seemed to sparkle like signal interference. “That wasn’t there a moment ago,’ Mali ventured.

‘Agreed,’ the Doctor said, pinching the bridge of his nose as if suddenly pained.

‘Are you all right?’

‘I’ll be fine,’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘Tell me. That shape. Does it remind you of something?’

Mali considered. I’ve … I’ve seen it before …’

The Doctor nodded impatiently. ‘Yes. Yes, you have. In Timon’s quarters.’

‘It’s like that bottle,’ she breathed. “The Klein bottle.’

‘And will we find a genie inside it, or the spider at the centre of its web?’ The Doctor stared unblinking into the bright white of the sky over the flickering structure. ‘Whichever, I think we’re nearing the heart of the Edifice. And I think it’s there we can expect to find some answers.’

Chapter Nineteen

Barbarian culture

Kellen felt a thrill of excitement. Tarra was really caught up in the Rites of Salvage, gyrating her lithe body on the slab, spinning and chanting hymns to the loa, leading on the coven to greater heights – or to new depths, he supposed, he didn’t really care which. He saw the way Kaufima was losing herself in the simple repetitions of the chant, the way her sweat soaked hair clung to her neck as she moved round the remembrance tank, in a world all her own.

She’d been such an uptight bitch when she’d first joined them, and now look at her.

The ceremony was all a lot of nonsense of course – Kellen had studied the remembrance tank that Eton and Tarra had stolen from the Museum of the Arcane, and there was nothing mystical about it. All you had to do was turn the thing on and feed in the data extract – the automatics would charge the biomass and take care of the rest, no matter what Tarra’s books claimed. But the fact remained that the atmosphere in the cavern was electric. He had engineered this night, he had the power to make them feel this way. The buzz it afforded him was like nothing he’d ever known.

‘Enough,’ screeched Tarra. ‘We have pleased Sour Time, the malefactor of the spirit, and she has picked a life from her rotten teeth and placed it within the circle.’

Kellen regarded her closely as she moved over to the grimy lid of the oversized coffin. Her fingers coiled around the handle and tendons twitched in her wrist as she prepared to haul open the covering.

Taking his cue, Kellen set a phosphor charge. ‘Release the dead spirit back from Mictlan’s vale, so he may stand again at the portals of this reality,’ he intoned. Kaufima would once have fainted at the mere mention of the forbidden world of the dead. Now she was practically licking her lips as Tarra hefted up the lid of the remembrance tank. There was a hissing sound, as if a snake pit was opening beneath her.

Rusty orange vapour rose from the tank interior, and Tarra’s form grew indistinct. The image of her shadowy body lent her vibrant voice still more charge. ‘We have remembered you well, Lord President Greyjan. Rise up before us now and be known to your followers and creators.’

Kellen held his breath. All eyes were on the battered casket leaking its sickly smoke. There was a clattering, thumping sound from within, as if something in the cabinet wanted to get out but didn’t know quite how. Then, to stifled gasps of amazement, a figure appeared, leaning on the tank’s edge for support. It was a man, heavily jowled, dark thinning hair greying at the temples. Dazed, he looked around him, but one eye was lazy, gazing straight ahead.

‘We welcome you, Lord President Greyjan,’ Kellen announced impressively. ‘Great Sage of Paradox, we have restored you to life, that your life’s work be completed.’

Greyjan’s words came bitterly slowly. ‘I did complete it, you fawning little guttersnipe,’ he complained. ‘I killed myself.’

‘You did,’ Kellen enthused, looking to Tarra for support. She merely looked back at him, lingering in the shadows, so he continued. ‘You chose death in ignorance over embracing the truth, and sharing those dark secrets with the Matrix when your life had run its course.’

‘You make it sound so bloody heroic,’ Greyjan said with a kind of bemused horror.

‘Gallifrey faces its darkest hour, Lord Greyjan,’ Kellen said earnestly. ‘And you must blot out all light remaining. Soon now, the current President, woefully unable to cope with the chaos ahead, must renew her oaths of office at the ReafHrmation Ceremony.’

‘Tedious affairs,’ Greyjan muttered miserably. ‘Almost lethally dull.’

‘When you arrive in front of the masses to contest the President’s right to rule,’ said Tarra, her brown eyes sparkling, ‘that perhaps will liven the ceremony up a little.’

‘Why should I?’ wondered Greyjan.

‘Because you must,’ Tarra said. ‘We have brought you back to life. You must do as we say.’

Kellen felt a stab of nerves. This was still a President, even if Tarra had been doctoring his bioextract to make him easier to manage. To be ordering him around …

But Greyjan seemed to concur with Tarra’s reasoning. ‘Fairly facile little stunt, though, isn’t it? Makes for tawdry entertainment.’

Kellen smiled slyly. Even presidents answered to him now. ‘I promise you, My Lord, the entertainment is only beginning.’

* * *

The spider reared up over the terrified guard. Nivet looked on with a horrified fascination as the creature supported its mass with half its legs in order to seize the man with the other four.

Then its mandibles bit into flesh, and the screams echoing round the chamber muted into thick gurgles.

Seconds later, its bony carapace spattered with blood, the spider settled back to decide who would be next.

‘Fall back!’ Vozarti yelled. ‘We’ll try to circle round them. Get to the doors!’

Nivet, stomach heaving, stooped to pick up his gear – and was astonished to hear a burst of static issue from the tinny speaker of Mali’s cannibalised communicator. He swapped incredulous glances with Klenchron. ‘I’m getting a response from Gallifrey, Castellan!’

‘We need reinforcements,’ Vozarti shouted. ‘Tell them, tell them!’

Klenchron shook his head. ‘I’ll try, but I think the signal’s too faint.’

‘But the fact they’re getting through at all could mean the walls are weakening!’ Nivet shouted.

The static seemed to attract the spiders. Nivet saw all three were moving closer, even as Klenchron kept stabbing at buttons on the comms lash up.

‘Leave that, come on!’ Nivet told him.

But Klenchron wasn’t giving up, muttering fervently into the communicator. ‘It’s our only chance, we have to get through —’

‘Leave it!’

With a chilling burst of speed the bloodied spider lurched towards Klenchron, its bony legs crackling.

‘Run,you idiot!’ Nivet shouted, but he knew it was too late.

Klenchron looked up and didn’t even have time to scream before the spider’s jaws were closing about him, lifting his pudgy body into the air. Nivet, rooted to the spot, saw staser fire blast into the spider’s back to no effect whatsoever. As he watched, the communicator fell from the creature’s maw to the ground in a great flood of bloody spittle. Klenchron’s headless corpse followed it.

The other two spiders scuttled over to surround the receivers, transfixed by the intermittent broadcasts, as if trying to decipher meaning from the signals. Nivet couldn’t get over their sheer size. He felt himself starting to tremble helplessly.

‘Over here,Nivet!’ Vozarti shouted. ‘Now!’

Nivet turned and fled to join the guards huddling with Vozarti in front of the dull patch where the spiders had entered.

‘It’s giving!’ the Castellan hissed, and Nivet turned to see the wall finally begin to crack and welter under the onslaught of close quarters staser fire. Seized by desperation, Vozarti shoulder charged the weakened area. There was a crack, and for a moment Nivet thought it was the sound of a shoulder blade splintering. The guards joined him, kicking at the wall in desperation, all of them frenziedly focused on escape.

So only Nivet saw the gore covered spider crush the receivers, their only link to the universe outside, with its great hanging gut as the creatures turned once more to face their prey.

‘Out of the way,’ Nivet shouted, pushing through the guards. It was his heel that finally broke through the ruined wall.

Using his gun butt to widen the gap further, Vozarti gestured to his frantic men. ‘Through there. Go! Go!’

As the last guard vanished in a blur of red, Nivet swung his legs through the hole in the wall.

His last glimpse of the chamber was at a nightmare angle, all three of the repellent creatures skidding across the filthy floor to devour him.

A second later Vozarti was beside him again. Nivet braced himself, expecting some terrible impact from the spiders throwing themselves at the damaged wall, but there was nothing. All he could hear was the ragged panting of the group as they struggled to catch their breaths.

Nivet looked warily at the hole they’d pushed through, but now they’d left the chamber it seemed pitch black inside and deathly quiet.

He thought of Klenchron lying mutilated inside. They’d not been close, but Nivet had seen him around the labs most days, organising his tests and trials on the psychotropic weapons.

The War had seemed so abstract a concept when Nivet had joined the Military Elite, just a means of getting to do the really juicy research instead of rehashing dried out dead end experiments. That it could lead him into a situation so intrinsically violent … It seemed somehow ridiculous.

Nivet wondered if this was what was meant by the word ‘shock’. There was so little that shocked on Gallifrey.

He was in for another one when he turned. Wondering why Vozarti and his mob were so quiet, he found them staring out through a set of double doors in the wall opposite.

They seemed to open on to a wasteland of mud and gorse.

* * *

‘To your left,’ Eton whispered.

Ressadriand bit his lip to stop his teeth chattering, and turned to find a door in the wall. It was small, as if meant for a child. The crackling of chitinous limbs testing the way in the darkness was growing louder all the time.

‘See what’s through it,’ Eton said. His voice was hoarse, as if he were fighting back tears.

Ressadriand crept closer and reached slowly for the handle. It turned stiffly. The hinges whinged in protest as the door began to open.

Light bled into the darkened tunnel and teased Ressadriand with a blurred snatch of vision.

For a moment he thought Eton had grown eight legs. Then he realised that something had crept so close to them it was ready to pounce.

Ressadriand screamed and scrambled through the doorway into whatever lay beyond.

* * *

Romana, her stirring speech ended, sat back to a resounding silence. Long faces lined the equally long table. She’d asked for their unanimous approval in storming the Edifice, reclaiming their lost personnel – and the Type 102. Timon had seconded this course of action instantly, as always; but she felt now she might as well have been reciting her Vows of Reaffirmation at the others for all the enthusiasm they were displaying.

In a final attempt to win her Council over, Romana attempted to make a lingering eye contact with each of them in turn. Djarshar looked away awkwardly, unwilling to displease his President but unable to bring himself to face the Future that was his office, even if that meant abandoning his best technician. She shifted her stare to her Chancellor of Time Past, Fremest, who affected to be scrutinising the sleeve of his fine robe. Samax could meet her gaze, but doubtless only because the old fool was so short sighted. Shortsighted indeed if he actually thought he’d been appointed Chancellor of Time Present for any skill he might possess, and not because she’d felt he’d be easy to manipulate. Finally, she turned to Branastigert, her Chancellor Parallel.

‘I’m sorry, Lady President, but I must concur with my esteemed fellow Chancellors on this matter.’ He smiled in apology; the expression didn’t sit well on his pale, thin face. ‘You’ve lost your Castellan, two of your science elite and our only easy means of breaching the Edifice.’

Romana took a shaky breath and leaned forward. ‘What’s lost can still be found. Vozarti and Nivet are still signalling, they’re alive. For how much longer depends on the decisions you make today.’

‘How many more lives will you risk in capricious pursuit of Gallifrey’s alleged destiny, Lady President?’ Fremest demanded, returning to his favourite theme. Whenever she experienced the slightest setback in her plans for the War, Fremest would seize on the terrible danger in which she was placing all Gallifrey. ‘You authorise military research, you create a storehouse of the most barbaric weapons the universe can offer on our very doorstep —’

‘These decisions are not in question here, Chancellor Past,’ Romana said coolly. ‘Please confine yourself to the matter in hand.’

‘But that’s just it!’ Fremest said triumphantly. “The matter is well out of hand!’

He’d scored his point. Branastigert nodded in agreement, and so did Djarshar. ‘I must concur with Chancellor Past,’ the Chancellor of Time Future said. “The coming of the Edifice was not foretold; understanding its purpose from a safe distance transcends recovery and implementation of the Type 102.’

‘Precisely, Chancellor Djarshar.’ Fremest nodded sagely in agreement, his glasses slipping down his nose as he did so. “The appearance of the Edifice is a portent of change, of potent change. Before we can combat this anomaly in our skies we need empirical evidence, proof

—’

Romana cut across him. “The probes have given us bankloads of data on the Edifice, most of it gibberish. So far there’s no evidence to suggest what the thing is doing here.’

‘It’s affecting causality, that’s what it’s doing,’ offered Samax – stepping in with a neutral observation. ‘Affecting it in a way that is utterly alien to all our science.’

‘To all our science as we understand the term now,’ Timon pointed out. ‘Surely, Chancellor Future, if we are to counter its threat in years to come it is imperative we understand it in the present!’

‘Well said, Timon,’ Romana said, riding his coat tails and longing for a time when presidents held the rights of veto over their council. ‘We have to act immediately! As I keep trying to make you see, that structure has been sent here by an unknown power and we have to discover why. There can be no more prevarication.’

‘Prevarication? Nonsense!’ Branastigert cleared his throat. ‘I am searching for similar incidents in parallel universes for knowledge that could well prove vital.’

Romana shook her head. Typical of the hypothesising hypocrite, prioritising his pet realities while his own universe went up in smoke. ‘With respect, my Chancellor Parallel,’ she began, her tone glacier cold, ‘no alternative realm can protect us from the destructive potential of the Edifice. Its grip on the timelines is tightening, its assault on local reality intensifying – and we cannot maintain the energy levels required to hold it in check.’

‘Tell us your suggested course of action, Madam President.’ Timon looked at her expectantly, his gaunt figure swamped by his ceremonial robes. She rewarded him for the opportunity to state her case with a dazzling smile.

‘We should be actively combating this peril, not expending energy on a battle we can’t win.’

‘You would have us storm the Edifice like barbarians,’ Fremest tutted.

‘I would have us breach its defences,’ Romana snapped. ‘Agreed, we don’t know what’s waiting for us inside but our impromptu spearhead has survived. With our remaining war TARDISes —’

‘The Doctor is on board, Madam President; rasped Samax, licking his parchment thin lips.

‘His destructive power outstrips a dozen war TARDISes.’

Timon nodded thoughtfully. ‘In … times past, the Doctor has served Gallifrey well.’

Romana looked at him uncertainly. ‘Your point?’

‘It seems agreement round this table may not be reached.’ Timon rubbed his hands in acquiescence as Romana glared at him, eyes warning him furiously to be silent. ‘Surely this

… barbarian aspect that Fremest speaks of is the Doctor’s forte? Let him serve us again. I imagine he’s already rooting out the cause of this inconvenient intrigue in our heavens.’

Romana felt her body temperature dip several degrees. Timon was offering the council a perfect way of evading the decision she needed them to take. “The Doctor is not the man he was, Lord Timon,’ she stated. ‘You know that.’

‘He seems just as insufferable as ever he was,’ huffed Branastigert.

‘I agree, Madam President,’ chirped Samax. ‘I too feel it is wisest to wait.’ He smiled happily. ‘I’ve done nothing but wait all my life, and look at me now! A Chancellor of the High Council at last.’

Just you wait, thought Romana, narrowing her eyes at him. She rose to her feet and slammed her palms flat down on the table, then leaned forward, surveying her council through the dark fringe of her eyelashes. ‘So. You all agree we are to do nothing at all?’

Djarshar squirmed in his seat under her withering look. ‘In the circumstances, Madam President, given the lack of empirical knowledge —’

‘Look at you all!’ she snapped, shocking Djarshar into silence. She glared at each of them in turn. ‘My council … the protectorate of Gallifrey. Paralysed into indecision by superstitious fear.’

‘Madam President, I —’

‘No, Timon!’ she ordered. ‘You will hear me. Just as I have heard the rumours and the whispers that haunt every corner of the Capitol in the wake of the Edifice’s arrival. May I remind you of what really matters? The War, gentlemen. The Enemy’s forces are still coming no matter how hard you all pretend to yourselves they are not. It is our future, and we must be prepared!’ She paused to let her words sink in, stringing out the uncomfortable silence.

‘Unless, of course, you will allow the future to be taken from us?’

No one dared look her in the eye. When Fremest finally spoke, he addressed his remark to the polished black of the table top: ‘Whose future would you be referring to, Madam President –

Gallifrey’s, or your own?’

Romana stormed from the council chamber in disgust, the hem of her beaded black dress flapping around her ankles. The door slammed resoundingly shut behind her.

Chapter Twenty

Everybody’s got something to hide

except me and my monkey

Dangling his legs into the chasm below, Fitz was determined to hum every song from the Beatles ”White’ album before deciding what to do next. He’d got as far as ‘Revolution 9’.

Nothing took him back to those days in 1968 and his life with Maddy more than that song.

He’d already sung his repertoire of Sinatra songs and muttered the odd Skalen meditation to himself. The day had drifted on in a haze of self pity and lost love. In the absence of other options, Fitz was doing what he did best: feeling incredibly sorry for himself.

He was on the edge of a small plain high up in the mountains. He’d left the crappy old house on the mountainside and decided to climb to see if he could spot some kind of sanctuary from above. Nope. So there was nothing for it other than to show some skin to the sun and dream of earlier, easier, kinder times. What came after ‘Revolution 9’? ‘Good Night’, that was it.

Yeah, right. Following on from such a Good Day.

The back of his neck was stinging hot, but if he turned around to offer his front as a burnt offering to Gallifrey’s sun it meant facing the vast, pale bulk of the Edifice. Even in broad daylight it was stealing the sky, and it gave him the creeps; as well as reminding him that he had no idea now if the Doctor was even alive. They’d been in tighter scrapes, he was sure, but even so …

He heard a noise behind him and turned, nearly slipping off his ledge in the process.

‘Careful, Fitz!’ Tarra called in alarm.

Fitz relaxed a little. The breeze was blowing strands of her fine dark hair over her cute pale face. Those cheekbones were to die for. Well, almost, he decided, pulling himself away from the precipice. Tarra watched him, holding her hands demurely behind her back.

‘So how have you been passing the day?’ Fitz enquired languidly. ‘Bit of knitting? Macrame, maybe? Oh, hang on, I know, you had a spot of lunch, then you summoned up the devil?’

Tana smiled, and Fitz had to remind himself he wasn’t meant to be enjoying her company.

‘We’ve created a new Greyjan.’

‘How’s he looking?’

‘Just like he does on his biorecords of course. That’s the image we projected on to the flesh in the remembrance tank.’

‘Flesh?’

‘Time Lord biomass. We’ve been collecting a little from everyone after each meeting. Soon regenerates itself.’

Fitz shuddered inwardly. It was as if his past was overtaking him, never mind catching up.

No matter how much he tried to pretend otherwise, a tank just like that one in the house was the place he was born. Not in 1936 in the Royal Free, Hampstead, the way it should’ve been, but in some back room of the Doctor’s old TARDIS less than a year ago. The original Fitz Kreiner had been … well, lost. The Doctor didn’t like to talk about it, and Fitz himself wasn’t about to encourage him. The way he saw it, while technically he may be more a descendant of the first Fitz Kreiner than the real thing, to all intents and purposes he was the one and only. Period.

To all his intents and purposes, anyway.

Fitz stared up into the salmon sky away from Tarra. ‘If he’s come out of that tank he’s going to feel rough as hell, take it from me.’

‘You’re very perceptive.’

‘My mum was Agatha Christie.’

Tarra must’ve got the message that mention of Greyjan and the remembrance tank was rattling Fitz’s cage fit to burst; she changed the subject to one that might prompt some intelligible conversation. ‘I went to Eton’s place, too.’

‘You have been busy.’ Fitz paused, steeling himself to ask the next question. ‘He wasn’t there, was he?’

Tarra shook her head. ‘I didn’t think he would be. I went to pick up some texts.’

‘That’s nicking,’ Fitz said. ‘It’s one thing stealing bioextracts from a matrix, but to pinch a bloke’s paperbacks, that’s really low …’ Tarra was watching him, puzzled. He sighed. He knew he was only babbling in order to put off asking the question that had been haunting him all day.

‘Where do you think they went, Tarra? Eton and Ressadriand, I She sat down beside him.

‘It’s not important. They’re not important.’

Fitz sighed. “The only thing that matters is Kellen and his glorious vision, huh?’

‘Oh, no.’ Tarra tutted. ‘I wouldn’t say that. There’s you for instance.’ She stroked the back of his sunburnt neck with a slender finger, and Fitz gritted his teeth. Her flesh was like ice against his hot skin. He looked at her, trying to act nonchalant, feeling heat rising all over his body even now he was in her shadow.

‘I’m suddenly important, huh?’

‘I think the man you can bring to us might be,’ Tarra said, and her other arm snaked swiftly up his chest to pull open his shirt.

Fitz yelped twice in surprise, first from her touch, then as he felt metal puncture the skin above his collarbone. He watched disbelieving as Tarra pulled away what looked like a knuckle duster crossed with a hypodermic syringe. He could see a drop of his blood poised to drop from the tip of the needle.

‘What a prick,’ he muttered, closing his eyes before the fire rushing through his veins could do the job for him.

Chapter Twenty one

Face off

‘Well,’ Vozarti said at length, taking in the grim landscape, ‘it’s not bone.’

Nivet checked his portascan. ‘Not natural, either. It’s some kind of renewable resource, though, and it’s growing.’

‘The grass you mean? It’s some kind of simulation?’

‘I mean this whole area is growing.’ Nivet gestured at the wide open space. ‘Replicating and reproducing itself.’

Vozarti frowned. “The layout of the Edifice is changing?’

‘Could explain why the walls were weakened,’ Nivet said, engrossed in his readings. ‘An hour or so from now our former prison cell will be in the open air.’

‘And that could explain why the spiders chose to attack us when they did,’ said Vozarti.

“Their own environment had been cleared away by this … this …’

‘Nature?’ Nivet seemed pleased with his summation.

‘What would cause this part of the Edifice to grow?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe something’s putting flesh on its bones, hi any case, does it really matter? Without our link to Gallifrey we’re dead.’

Vozarti shook his head. ‘I don’t think so.We’ve been signalling for some time. If we stop responding the moment they finally get through, they’ll know we’re in trouble and send help.’

‘The fact that they got through at all suggests the stability of this place could well be fluctuating,’ Nivet pointed out.

‘Then help will be along sooner rather than later,’ Vozarti said. ‘You’re one of the architects of times future, Nivet. Isn’t an optimistic outlook an asset in your line of work?’

Nivet held up a presumptuous hand to silence him, eyes widening in excitement. ‘Perhaps it is, Castellan,’ he muttered, and passed Vozarti the portascan.

Vozarti stared at the tiny winking light on the holographic screen.

‘That’s a TARDIS,’ Nivet said, grinning wildly. ‘Weird residual echo, but it must be close by.’

Vozarti felt his grip tighten involuntarily around the portascan. ‘The 102?’

Nivet nodded. ‘We’ve got her.’

* * *

Ressadriand was heaving the little door shut with all his strength when something heavy fell against it. He cried out.

‘It’s me!’ Eton’s voice was a frantic shout. ‘Let me in, you idiot! Iet me in!’

Ressadriand fell back and let the older man scramble right over him in his haste to be through the doorway. Together they slammed the door shut.

‘Damn filthy thing touched me,’ Eton said, shuddering. ‘It was so cold … hard as bone …’

Ressadriand laid a hand on his shoulder. ‘I thought it had already got you. That’s only reason I —’

Eton shrugged off the gesture and got to his feet. “The only reason you do anything is for yourself, Ressadriand.’ He surveyed the scene: the heath stretched out in all directions, and a cold wind was starting to whip at their muddied robes. ‘Where in Rungar’s name are we now?’

Ressadriand felt like crying. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’

‘Our only chance is to get help,’ Eton snapped.

‘Help?’ Ressadriand stared at Eton as if he was mad. ‘And where are you going to find it, eh?

You want to ask your friend the spider for directions?’

The very moment Ressadriand spoke, there was a scraping sound from behind the door, like a spade tackling frozen earth.

Eton turned and walked off without another word. A second or so later, Ressadriand was back beside him.

* * *

There were hundreds of butterflies nailed to the doors.

Mali looked at the Doctor, wondering if he was going to have another seizure on her. His body had begun to twitch as if he were uncertain how best to express his alarm and dismay.

He reached out to one of the desiccated insects, words forming on his lips but never finding voice. The insect’s body crumbled to fine powder at his slightest touch. All that was left behind was the rusty nail that had pinned it to the rotting wood.

‘My butterflies,’ the Doctor finally croaked, looking at them as if each had been a memento of some long lost love.

Mali left him and circled the giant, flickering structure they’d finally reached, unsure of what to say. Since they’d located the dead Type 102, both of them had fallen silent, lost in their own dark thoughts. She could only feel a crushing sense of disappointment; she didn’t even know why she was bothering to watch the Doctor any more. The reassurances of a predestined future seemed suddenly as out of reach as the Doctor’s safe, untainted biodata, both locked away inside his stone cold TARDIS.

And yet, still the Doctor kept on. He’d lost the chance to be free of the Faction virus. He’d lost his means of escaping Time Lord justice. Where could he possibly go from here? Still circling, Mali saw there were four other splintering doors in the glistening wall of the structure. The papery carcasses of the insects were smothering each one as if seeking sanctuary; perhaps the Doctor was doing the same. Taking refuge in trying to solve the mystery of this nightmarish place.

When she returned to him, he was still staring at the door, only now his fists were clenched.

‘It’s the final sign,’ he said. ‘A sign that whatever this place is, it’s meant for me.’

As though reinforcing the Doctor’s words, the old door lurched on its hinges, and opened inwards. Mali jumped. A skein of fine dust fell on her as most of the pinned butterflies shattered with the sudden movement. She choked, and grabbed hold of the Doctor’s coat before he could dart inside.

‘Not that trick again,’ she managed. ‘Wherever you go, I’m going too.’

A soft light was pulsing from somewhere behind the door. The Doctor gestured sullenly towards it.

‘Then you can go first,’ he said.

* * *

‘The work is not yet done,’ Kellen announced to the sweaty crowd squeezed into the grimy room. “The living body of Greyjan the Sane is proof of our power. While the loa are still with us, it is time to hone our gifts. To unravel another stitch in time’s filthy tapestry. To make natural order our cowering plaything.’

The others were still hanging on his every word, and Kellen wanted to laugh out loud with pleasure. He thought back to the excuses he’d given Fitz, defending the coven in those first sweet moments of becoming its leader, and let his sneer become a smile. What did the real reasons for doing this matter? Just so long as he could always feel this way.

He raised both arms, the smell of his own sweat deliciously barbarian to his senses. ‘Take your masks,’ he commanded. ‘We shall reassemble shortly in the Great Hall. Prepare for the Chaos Ritual!’

* * *

Fitz woke up feeling as if he’d necked a bottle of Pernod before spending the night wrestling gorillas. Currents of pain ebbed and flowed about his body, and he felt queasy with the heat that was coming from somewhere …

A fire. A large pyre had been lit in front of him. He instinctively tried to move away, only to find his arms had been tied above his head.

Dark figures moved past him, the heat of the flames distorting their faces, fleshy pinks mingling with blood reds. Blood. He remembered a needle, a needle going in below his neck, further than he’d thought possible. There’d been fire then, too, and …

A girl. A girl with auburn hair, just the same as the one that was staring up at him now. It had been … She’d done this to him.

She put a finger to his claggy lips as he tried incoherently to accuse her. He knew what the words were meant to sound like, but his tongue was too swollen to properly participate.

‘I’m glad you’ve woken up, Fitz,’ the girl said. Tarra. Her name was Tarra. ‘The ceremony will offer so much more value if you’re able to participate. And I’m glad you’ll be able to see what you’re making possible.’ She traced a finger down his chest, opening each button on his shirt, until her nail became hooked on his belt buckle. Fitz had recovered enough to hold in his stomach despite the pain as she moved closer, and smiled.

‘I was thinking, also, that the time for subtlety has passed. That perhaps you might want to see a little … more of me?’ Tarra coyly allowed the shoulder of her simple white gown to slip down, exposing smooth skin that was equally pale. ‘I’ve been longing to show you …’

Fitz’s aggression diminished somewhat, and a trickle of sweat swaggered down his astonished face. The girl was flaky, sure – but she was still gorgeous as hell. Maybe she was into bondage; each to their own. Whatever, a part of him was almost glad words had left him so he couldn’t utter anything to muck this up.

Tarra licked her lips – then someone walked past, a bloke with blond hair who also looked familiar. ‘Mask, Tarra,’ he instructed, placing something white and round into her hands as Fitz’s heart began to sink. ‘We’re almost ready to begin. You’re on display.’

‘Of course,’ Tarra agreed, her eyes never leaving Fitz’s own, her fingers gripping her ivory mask. ‘But in a moment. I think it’s only fair I give our guest of honour a private view.’

She dropped the mask to the floor, and Fitz smiled. Then she smoothed her hair back behind her ears with both hands, and pulled.

Tarra’s face came loose and fell to the floor beside her other mask. Fitz was left staring into a twisted, grinning skull daubed with blood and gristle.

“That feels so much better,’ the gory creature said before rubbing its sticky red head against Fitz’s chest. ‘Don’t you think so, little monkey?’

Words finally came back to Fitz but he was screaming too hard to use any of them.

Chapter Twenty two

Chaos ritual

They made a curious procession, Nivet decided, leading the way across the heath. Vozarti followed right behind him and the four remaining guards were taking up the rear. Holding the portascan as if waving incense at the head of an ancient funeral march, Nivet turned this way and that to take his bearings on the Type 102 ‘s whereabouts. All they needed now was a body.

‘What’s the delay?’ Vozarti snapped impatiently.

‘Some kind of double echo effect,’ Nivet muttered. ‘It’s odd, as if the TARDIS signal is being swamped by …’ He broke off from studying the indigo screen to stare over Vozarti’s shoulder. ‘No more delays, Castellan. I think we’ve found it.’

Nivet set off for the pale figure at a half run, negotiating a large round table and some weird looking bits and pieces on his way. Clearly the 102 had run into some problems in this place to be spitting out its insides like this. He wondered at the ship’s human form, up to its knees in the mire; why hadn’t it disguised itself? Then he noticed a patch of pink skin incongruous ill in the bone white stone of its body, and reached out a hand to touch it.

‘Don’t!’ Vozarti warned, jogging up behind him. ‘It’s armed. This could be a trick.’

Nivet pressed his finger against the soft flesh, then tapped it against the area surrounding it.

‘No tricks,’ he said. “The organic shell is calcifying. I think it’s dead.’

The Castellan shook his head. ‘It can’t be dead. If it’s damaged, you’ll have to fix it.’

‘But look at it!’

Vozarti ignored his protests. ‘It’s got to get us back to Gallifrey.’

Nivet stood deep in thought as Vozarti directed his men to haul the figure free of the mud, wondering what he might find inside dial statue shell. ‘What about the Doctor?’

‘What about him? He’s nothing, not now we have the 102.’ Vozarti smiled. ‘And a hero’s welcome waiting for us back on Gallifrey.’

‘What about Mali?’

‘There’s nothing we can do.’

‘There’s still the Edifice.’

‘The President will deal with this place, mark my words.’ He gestured at the body being dragged from the earth by the guards, his fresh face flushed with success. ‘Now we have this, the future is secured.’

‘And so’s your pension,’ Nivet muttered. ‘You must be very pleased, Castellan. It seems there’s nothing you’ve overlooked.’

But Vozarti wasn’t listening: he was staring over Nivet’s shoulder. Puzzled, Nivet turned too.

Running towards them were two men, red faced and panting in filthy robes that might once have been white, too exhausted even to call out.

The guards went for their guns, but Vozarti seemed suddenly to come back round. ‘No! Put them away,’ he commanded.

‘You know these people?’ Nivet asked, incredulous.

‘Not really.’ Vozarti shook his head, his mouth set in a determined sneer. “The older one is my son. Eton.’

Nivet looked dumbfounded at the guards, checking he wasn’t missing something and that they were as bewildered as he was.

‘Father,’ Eton gasped. ‘Father, I can’t believe it’s you … I mean, I never dared to … I’m delighted to see you.’

‘Delighted,’ Vozarti echoed in disbelief before turning to the other newcomer. ‘And who might you be?’

‘Ressadriand, sir,’ the mousy haired boy replied. ‘I’m the second son of—’

Vozarti cuffed Ressadriand about the face. ‘I don’t care about your pedigree, or your House, anything except a very good reason why you wear draped about your sorry person the robes of a Faction Paradox initiate.’

Nivet shook his head and let out a low whistle of amazement. This had to beat it all. Up against giant bone spiders the Castellan never lost his head, but against some delinquent kid and his own son a very different man was emerging.

‘Why, Eton? Explain yourself.’

‘Please, Father —’

‘Tell me why!’

Toes curling with embarrassment at having to witness such an intimate scene, Nivet turned his back on the congregation, attempting to consider how he could make this powerless Type 102 open her doors. But any efforts to ignore Vozarti’s anger seemed doomed to failure – the Castellan was screaming loud enough to wake the dead. The fact that Eton looked to be almost twice his father’s age only made the situation more uncomfortable. The words may have sat well with the silver haired curmudgeon that had made lives hell at the Academy, but from this fresh faced upstart they sounded almost ridiculous. Nivet could see the guards were failing to stifle their nervous laughter, but Vozarti was oblivious to all.

‘It’s just a bit of fun,’ Eton said, gesturing to his dishevelled appearance.

‘Fun?’ Vozarti had turned crimson. ‘It’s profane. It’s sick, twisted treachery.’

‘It means nothing —’

‘It brought you here, didn’t it?’

‘I don’t know how we arrived here, but listen, there are spiders —’

Vozarti wasn’t listening, staring at his son as if hypnotised. ‘What future does Gallifrey have if bright, able children like yourselves turn to superstition, to the dark rites?’

Eton nodded impatiently. ‘Spare me the lecture, Father. You’re so pompous, so full of the meaningless history of our stagnant society —’

But son had finally pushed father too far. Vozarti swung a fist at the older looking man, connecting with his chin. Eton went down, while Ressadriand jumped in the air, his face a caricature of fright.

‘Please, Castellan Vozarti,’ Ressadriand stammered. ‘We only want to go home. Please.

That’s all we want.’ The boy was practically wetting himself. ‘We did bad things but we never will again.’

Vozarti stared on as Ressadriand sank to his knees. Nivet turned back to the Type 102, shaking his head. Then he noticed that the pink patch on its cheek had grown larger, reaching down to her ear and her neck. He stared at the pink puckered flesh in fascination, trying to shut out the soundtrack of Ressadriand’s gibbering.

‘Please, Castellan Vozarti, we’re … we’re so terribly, terribly sorry, you see. We’ll do anything to make amends, anything —’

The rambling promise ended in a chorus of alarmed shouting and staser fire. Nivet turned incredulously, expecting to find that Vozarti had decided to shut the boy up for good by opening fire. Then a guard’s head rolled to a stop by his feet and he saw that a giant spider, its bloated body like a stone covered in wet earth and blood, was pulling itself silently from the heath. As its thick legs trampled the guard’s corpse, the ground parted in eerie silence to allow another of the monsters through, creeping up clumsily from whatever fossilised underworld lay beneath them.

Ressadriand was staring in dumb horror, Eton was screaming and Vozarti and the guards were firing. Nivet decided he’d settle for running, but his legs would not respond. They seemed frozen, immobile and useless as the statue standing behind him.

* * *

The Chaos Ritual was nearing its climax.

Kellen watched Tarra again as she snarled and spat and shouted her lines from the ancient parchment she’d taken from Eton’s room. Some of the words he half remembered from school lessons about the dead language of Old Gallifrey. Most were just noises, triggers to feed the hysteria growing in the sweaty room.

The Visualiser had been dragged into the centre of the chamber, and static flickered noisily over its screen, faster and faster, as if in a race against the flames licking the air before it. And tied up against the wall, Fitz was screaming and screaming, the sound of his distress meaningless, just another layer of sound haunting the ritual.

An image was struggling through the interference on the Visualiser’s screen. A hum of power was rising from its insides. Kellen led his acolytes, as Tarra had instructed him, in clapping out the beat of his double pulse. ‘I chain you all to my flesh!’ he yelled, chiefly because he thought it sounded good. ‘You are bound to me. Let the energy feed us and take from us, feed us and take from us …’

The rest of Kellen’s disciples took up the feverish chant. Before the flames, a mustard yellow glow began to insinuate itself, in the shape of a man.

Kellen felt the air grow tangibly colder. He looked around and shivered as he saw the others had noticed it too, pale faced and sweating, chanting faster and faster. Even Fitz had stopped yelling; he was looking on in dumbfounded amazement as the dark shape formed in front of him.

Tarra stopped shouting and dancing, and came to a panting halt behind Kaufima. Kellen was impressed: the mask she wore was even more macabre than her usual attire; she’d powdered her chin with chalk or something … He was strangely touched that she must’ve arranged for a new costume for the occasion. She must be out to impress him after all.

‘Do you see him?’ Tarra asked Kaufima, and the girl nodded, still repeating the mantra along with the others. Tarra clearly wasn’t satisfied with her response. ‘Do you see him?’ she shouted again.

‘Yes,’ Kaufima shrieked, even though she was looking down at her feet. ‘Yes, I see him.’

Kellen actually jumped as Tarra’s big skull mask swung up to face him. He stared into those dark sockets and shivered again. She was shouting at him over the din in the room. “The materialisation remains undefined. The ectothermic balance must be shorted.’

‘What do you mean?’ Kellen mouthed back at her. ‘How?’

Tarra grinned, grabbed Kaufima by the hair and smashed her face against the metal casing of the Visualiser. Stunned, Kaufima could not protest as, widi unnatural ease, Tarra lifted her up and threw her into the fire. Her shouts of terror gave way to the crackling of flesh roasting.

With every moment the flickering image of the man grew more definite as they dragged him into existence.

The chant broke down. People began to scream and mill about in panic. Kellen found himself staring again into the pits of Tarra’s skull eyes, haltingly reading the final words to bring the ceremony to its climax.

It was an accident, he told himself. A horrible accident.

So why was Tarra giggling?

Now she threw open her arms and exalted over Kaufima’s burning corpse. From within the tendrils of smoke curling up from the cadaver, the one armed figure finally solidified before her.

Chapter Twenty three

Familiarity breeds

Vozarti swore. Yet another of the giant bone spiders was pulling itself clear of its wide open grave. That made four of them, now. Ressadriand had run away without hesitation, but Eton remained rooted to the spot, still screaming as the guards were ripped apart in front of him.

Vozarti took hold of his son and threw him bodily away from the closest spider as it bore down on him. ‘Run, you little idiot,’ he insisted. ‘Run!’

Eton, tears streaming down his lined face, turned and ran as instructed, but covered only a few metres before the spider brought him down. Vozarti watched just long enough to be convinced there was nothing more he could do for him, shutting his eyes as the mandibles came down on his son’s chest.

I’ll never be old again, he realised as two more spiders made for him. He felt like a child, bringing a popgun to bear on bug eyed monsters from the darkest corners of the universe.

They must be fought. Who had said that? He’d heard that somewhere … A child’s maxim. A scandalous ideal.

We’ve bred the most terrible things.

The monsters’ jaws were clacking as they advanced, eyes vacant and dull. There was no intelligence behind those eyes, no sentience distinguishing Vozarti from any other piece of meat in this stinking field.

He stumbled backwards, still firing his staser in vain, Vozarti considered running. His son was dead, his guards were dead, there was no one left to witness his devotion to duty now except Nivet. Even as he turned, one of the spiders caught his legs, pulled them from under him and crunched down. He felt bones snap, knew he’d never stand again.

Things that stand against everything we believe in.

Vozarti dug his hands into the wet turf and tried to drag himself free of the monster’s jaws, but the creature held firm and only his flesh was giving. The spider tugged savagely and Vozarti was rolling over and over through the wet bracken and mud, the filth that filled his nose and mouth choking off his screams. Eyes wide in panic and pain, he saw that Nivet was staggering backwards, face as pale as that ridiculous statue. And behind the technician …

* * *

The Castellan was hauled screeching into the spider’s slobbering maw, but still Nivet stared on. Every instinct he possessed was still screaming at him to run for his life, and yet his legs seemed dead already.

Even as he was being devoured, the Castellan met Nivet’s eye, waving his arms, pointing –

trying to warn him …?

The spell was finally broken, but too late. Turning, stumbling, Nivet glimpsed a huge gaping mouth opening wide around him, then fell into slippery screaming blackness.

* * *

‘I think we’ve found the inner sanctum.’

Mali nodded in reply. The Doctor held her gaze for a few moments, his own eyes lost in shadows, before moving gingerly forward into the gloom beside her.

There was a power in the air, a pressure. Mali could feel it. Something ancient and unscientific, stinking of must and dust. It made her feel sick; she longed for the clean and clinical corridors of the Capitol, the safe smell of normality. Right now, she couldn’t imagine ever feeling clean again.

Her head bumped into something sharp, and she couldn’t help a yelp of surprise escaping her.

‘What is it?’ the Doctor said sharply.

Mali cursed, feeling blood on her forehead. ‘I’ve cut myself on something.’

‘Let me see.’

‘It’s nothing,’ she said.

The Doctor pushed her aside. ‘I mean, let me see what you’ve cut yourself on.’

The lighting in the room began to grow brighter. The walls themselves seemed aglow. Mali was reminded of the way the light had increased gradually in that first chamber, then later in the corridors when walking with the Doctor. As if something here was suddenly aware it had company and was leading them to somewhere special in the web of tunnels.

‘That settles it; the Doctor whispered. ‘Look.’

Mali realised she’d cut herself on the beak of a small metal bird. The ornament seemed welded into a round indentation in the wall, as if to be served on a softly glowing dish. The circular design appeared many times throughout the chamber. In the corner of the room was a deformed hexagonal growth, solid bone festooned with tusks and teeth and beads.

‘I thought my TARDIS was dead, destroyed,’ the Doctor said softly. ‘I was wrong. The Flower of Remembrance was the clearest sign of all.’

Mali tapped the cut on her forehead, the sharp pain convincing her she wasn’t delirious. “The Edifice … it’s your TARDIS?’

‘So it would seem.’ He sucked his finger. ‘If its exterior were mapped on to the interior dimensions, just like your war TARDISes manage to do, that could explain its size …’ He frowned, patting the metal bird on its battered head. “This was my pet canary. But ossified?

How?’ He paused. ‘And why?’

Mali doubted the Doctor seriously expected her to answer. Before she could say as much she saw he was transfixed by motes of dust dancing in the soft light. There seemed more and more of them, tiny specks of colour in the air, and Mali felt an instinctive fear as the smell of age grew stronger and as a face formed out of the dancing lights. It was an imposing face, white hair swept back from the lined forehead, strong beak of a nose jutting out. But the eyes

… they held Mali. They were black as night, staring. Mad eyes.

‘Can he see?’ she hissed.

‘I don’t know,’ said the Doctor. ‘But I’m beginning to.’

‘Who is he?’

When she tore her eyes away and turned to the Doctor it was in time to catch a tear trickle down his cheek. ‘He’s me. He’s been holding on. All this time.’

The face of the former Doctor, a thousand whorls of dust, looked at them apologetically. ‘Got lost … in the time vortex.’ The black eyes flickered over their surroundings. “The TARDIS

brought me home.’

The Doctor stepped closer, eyes down on the floor, like a simple peasant uncomfortable in a splendid church.

‘How long have you been here?’ he asked softly.

‘No idea, old chap,’ the dust Doctor answered, smiling kindly. ‘Once I started threading electrons on a string … one a second for eight hours a day. But when the string was two tenths of a millimetre long, I had to give it up. I was becoming obsessive, you know.’

Mali told herself the apparition was joking, but still processed the nonsensical information anyway. If true, he’d have been here for over five thousand years …

‘Silly old fool,’ the Doctor said, and she could hear the smile in his voice trying to mask the pain. ’ Should’ve used hydrogen atoms: you’d have twenty five metres or so by now, you could’ve decorated the room.’

The face in the dust closed its dark eyes. ‘Had to be careful. Didn’t want to give myself enough rope to hang myself with. I have to hold on … to hold on …’

The Doctor’s voice grew a fraction harder. ‘I’d have thought one of the spiders you’ve got running round the place could have nibbled it through for you in an emergency, couldn’t it?’

‘My scouts. The lookouts.’ The dust Doctor’s eyes snapped back open. ‘The spiders were to tell me … tell me when help was at hand.’

‘Why spiders? They’re important to me too, but I can’t remember why …’

‘Seemed right at the time.’ The floating face crumpled in misery. ‘Too late now, of course.

Can’t control them … not any more. Slipping …’

‘No,’ the Doctor said. ‘No, I’ve come now. I don’t understand all that’s happening but … I can help, I’m sure I can. So please, tell me, there are things I must know —’

‘Now, now, my dear feller,’ the dust Doctor said with new and abrupt enthusiasm. ‘Put on a smiling face. Come along. Smile, smile, smile.’

Mali moved closer to the Doctor, saw the anguish in his eyes. ‘No, listen, please —’

‘Do it!’ The dust Doctor’s face was furious. Then, he started to laugh. The laughing was taken up by the acoustics in the room, every syllable wrung out of it again and again, which seemed to amuse the laughing face all the more.

The Doctor clamped his hands over his ears, sinking to his knees. ‘No!’ he shouted. ‘Stop this! We have to talk!’

Mali stared round the room; the face was starting to fade as the laughter ebbed away. ‘It’s no good, Doctor,’ she yelled. ‘He won’t listen! He’s insane, do you hear me? Insane.’

‘Maybe so,’ the Doctor shouted, ‘but we have to get him back. He’s all that’s holding the Edifice together. He’s —’

Even as he spoke, huge splits appeared in the glowing walls of the sanctum. Giant spiders, their bone bellies bloated, polished ivory skin slick with blood, moss and mud, began to push through the wounds in the walls.

Mali stared desperately at the Doctor. ‘His lookouts, he said!’

‘Once they might have been,’ the Doctor replied, clearly terrified himself. ‘Now they’re as deranged as he is.’

One of the spiders forced its way into the sanctum and flopped to the floor beside them. Mali squealed with disgust and dragged the Doctor along on his knees for the paltry shelter of the malformed console. While he clutched hold of it as if hanging on for dear life, Mali scrabbled in the Doctor’s coat pocket for her staser’s powerpack. Behind her she could hear the spiders clattering across the floor towards them, eager for the kill.

Chapter Twenty four

Ancestral manoeuvres in the dark

It was quiet now, the storm and rage of the Chaos Ritual finally over – though it wasn’t the kind of calm that came after a rainstorm, thought Fitz, the cool and refreshing release from an oppressive atmosphere. Instead it was the ghastly calm after a traffic accident, when the screaming tyres and splintering glass noises have subsided and you look around wondering what damage has been done, who needs help. Who will survive.

Fitz’s arms ached from being tied above his head for so long. He struggled to look around the room. Members of the coven lay sprawled – those few who had not fled in abject screaming terror from the place. Everything stank of the strange incense, but with the disgusting background smell of roasted flesh. Fitz tried not to think of Kaufima s burning body, and of course by thinking this could think of little else.

Until he saw Tarra.

She was standing, arms akimbo, in front of the dark silhouette of the figure that the ceremony had summoned.

Kellen had seemed to go into shock for a moment. But now he looked like he was shrugging it off, letting the adrenaline rush of the moment spur him into fresh action. He sounded manic. ‘By Apeiron! We did it. We actually did it!’

‘Yes,’ smiled Tarra, her dark eyes glittering behind her skull mask. ‘Yes, I did, didn’t I?’

Kellen was practically dancing on the spot, like an excited child. ‘Who’d have thought we could?’

Tarra favoured him with her amused look. ‘Well, I would of course.’

‘Yeah, right,’ said Kellen. His mocking words were cut off when Tarra reached out casually and grasped him firmly by his throat.

She watched him struggle for breath for a moment before speaking. She was loving every minute of this. ‘I’m an agent of Faction Paradox. Don’t let these glamorous looks fool you,’

she said, stroking her bone face with her free hand. The fingers came away sticky with black blood. ‘I’m really quite ancient. I’ve been in control of this whole project. If you think I’m going to show you any gratitude for helping with this materialisation, then you’ll be terribly disappointed. So don’t hold your breath.’

Kellen stared back at her, his eyes bulging widely, his face purple. Tarra released him, and he dropped to the dirty floor, whooping and gasping as he sucked air into his starved lungs.

Fitz was surprised to hear himself talking. Maybe it was just nerves. ‘An ancient agent of Faction Paradox?’

She blinked her dark eyes at him and said, ‘It’s rude to ask a lady how old she is.’

Fitz heard a strangely familiar voice. ‘I know how old you are. I remember you as a girl. I remember bringing you into the Faction a thousand years ago.’

It was the dark figure who stood starkly before them. ‘Hello, Mother Tarra,’ it said in greeting.

She nodded deferentially. ‘Welcome to you, Father Kreiner.’

Fitz felt a cold thrill run through his limbs. He wanted to get the hell away, to start running and not stop until he fell in a gasping heap because he couldn’t run any more. But his hands were still bound. All he could do was stare at the newcomer. Stare at Kreiner.

Was he staring into his own past? Or his own future?

Certainly, something in Kreiner’s cracked voice had reminded Fitz of his own. Not the sound that he heard in his head when he spoke, but the sound he heard recorded on tape. He’d first tried that at his mate Billy’s. Billy thought he was going to make it big in the recording industry. Billy was a rotten singer who couldn’t play bass for toffee, but Billy also had a rich dad who’d bought him a cheap reel to reel to keep him happy.

Now he was hearing someone else – something else – playing words back to him in his own voice. Words he’d never spoken. Kreiner’s mask seemed to give the voice a synthetic edge, as if it was being played through a damaged speaker.

Otherwise, there was nothing in Kreiner that reminded Fitz of himself. The bulky armour was cracked leather and plastic, sucking in the poor light of the room. Beneath the split skull of the mask the torn remains of a jaw worked ceaselessly, grinding its teeth as though chewing gum. And when Kreiner finally stepped forward, Fitz could hear the hissing sound of mechanical parts.

Kreiner reached up above Fitz with his one good arm. There was a ripping sound, and Fitz’s hands were released. It seemed as though Kreiner had only had to snap his fingers to sever the cords that bound him.

Kreiner stared straight into his eyes. The jaw stopped chewing. “This is unexpected, Mother Tarra.’

‘A delicious paradox,’ she agreed.

Fitz could see the one armed figure better now. Except that it wasn’t really one armed. The shrivelled remains of the right arm dangled uselessly from the shoulder, and would occasionally flap in a pathetic gesture in its twisted piece of armour.

Kreiner showed him a smile full of cracked and blackened teeth.

Fitz was determined not to be intimidated. He reached out as though for a handshake, and then withdrew it apologetically.

‘You want to scream, don’t you, boy?’ asked Kreiner. Fitz shook his head defiantly, clamping his mouth shut, trying not to give this fearsome apparition any satisfaction.

The apparition didn’t seem to care. ‘Go on. Don’t bottle it up. That used to be my problem.’

And Kreiner threw back his huge bony head and cackled.

There was a scuffling sound. Fitz turned to see Kellen grappling with Tarra.

‘You could have killed me!’ Kellen was shouting at her, having evidently recovered from his near strangulation. ‘Take off that stupid thing and look at me properly,’ he continued, scrabbling at the bone half mask.

Then he staggered back, appalled. He stared down at his hands, which were covered in dark blood.

Tarra turned away from him, and Fitz knew Kellen had at last discovered the truth about her mask. Discovered that it was part of her face.

She stripped back a whole stretch of skin from her forearm as they looked on in horror.

Beneath the peeled skin, Fitz saw the same leathery armour that Kreiner wore.

Kellen screamed.

‘I could have killed you,’ she told him calmly, ignoring his terror.

‘But you did well in my Chaos Ritual. And you will make an excellent Cousin.’

Mother Tarra was smiling beatiflcally as Kellen’s noises subsided into a terrified whimper.

‘You will be among the first. First we took the Doctor. Now we will take you and your coven. And then all the Time Lords will join the Faction.’

Chapter Twenty five

Memories of a blue planet

The staser was useless. The bolts of energy pulsing from the weapon simply scattered and dissipated on the gross, contorted, ivory bodies of the huge spiders. The Doctor watched the gun’s power slowly failing, and finally Mali hurled the ineffectual weapon at the nearest spider in a final futile gesture. It bounced off the creature’s carapace.

As though sensing their prey’s desperation, the spiders skittered closer. The sharp ends of their legs scraped and tapped on the solid bone of the floor.

They came around the edge of the deformed bone console, scratching at its edges as they investigated where the Doctor and Mali were cowering. Their gross bodies cast huge shadows across the twisted shape of the console room.

There was no escape.

The Doctor pulled Mali away towards the rear wall, and they clung to each other in a final, defiant stand against the monsters.

They were not advancing any further. The Doctor pointed towards the exit. ‘See if you can get around and out while I distract them.’

But as soon as Mali made a move towards the door, the spiders lunged for her immediately.

She staggered back to where the Doctor had remained, and the spiders once again held their distance.

“They seem afraid of something,’ Mali said.

The Doctor gave her an odd look. ‘You seem remarkably well informed about the behaviour of oversized arachnids.’

‘This is no time for sarcasm, Doctor. Look at them.’

He had to admit, they were rattling their legs, and strings of thick saliva were hanging from their chittering mouth parts. But they were not advancing on them any further.

At which point, a gaunt figure appeared in the exit doorway behind the spiders. For a moment, the Doctor could hardly believe his eyes. Shortly afterwards, he shouted out a warning.

‘Compassion! Be careful!’

She was staggering around the perimeter of the console room, staring blankly ahead as if she’d only just learned to walk, her legs stiff, and her arms swinging awkwardly by her sides.

The nearest of the spiders spotted her at once, and flicked at her with its leg. Compassion was flung abruptly across the room, connected with the corner of the console, and tumbled to the uneven floor with a thump.

‘Oops,’ she said. ‘Damn.’ And then for good measure she went, ‘Ouch.’

The nearest spider bent its legs, so that it could seize her in its mouth.

‘Oh, get off,’ said Compassion, batting at it with one flapping arm. The spider flicked out another leg, and Compassion rolled over and over until she struck the far wall beside the Doctor and Mali. There, she sat up in a somewhat dishevelled heap, her ginger hair wildly awry and her clothes all tousled. She had the same glassy look in her eyes, but otherwise she seemed unharmed.

‘That hurt,’ said Compassion.

‘You’re …’ Mali hesitated, looking to the Doctor for an explanation. ‘You’re that statue. The one we found out on the heath:

‘Yes,’ said the Doctor thoughtfully, ‘Compassion.’

‘You thought she was dead.’

‘I feel like I’m dead,’ said Compassion through gritted teeth. One of the huge spiders chose precisely this moment to rear up and spring on to the shattered bone console that separated it from the cowering threesome. ‘Ferisix and Thrayke preserve us!’ yelled Compassion.

The spider hesitated on its impromptu pedestal, and then dropped back on the far side of the console. The Doctor barely noticed, his gaze boring into Compassion’s lifeless eyes. ‘Spare us the superstitious language, Technician Nivet,’ he said.

‘Nivet?’ asked Mali.

The Doctor nodded. ‘Yes, that is you in there, isn’t it, Nivet? You’re piloting what’s left of Compassion’s external form, and speaking through her external microphone.’

‘Clever,eh?’ said Compassion’s voice. ‘She started to reactivate and opened her doors. I got inside and took over. Eventually.’

‘I can see why they call you the finest technician in Kasterborous. Lucky for you that Compassion’s exoskeleton is indestructible.’

‘Yeah,’ groaned Nivet. ‘But I’m not. I’m getting thrown about a bit in here. Have you noticed, though, that the spiders have been holding back since I got across here to join you?’

Mali nodded, eyeing the Doctor suspiciously. ‘And they only seemed to attack me, not you, Doctor. I think they’re … frightened of you.’

The Doctor rose to his feet, and waved his arms at the nearest of the spiders. ‘Boo!’ he said.

They scuttled to one side, and he was childishly pleased with the reaction until he realised that the creatures were just trying to manoeuvre around him to get at Compassion and Mali.

‘Yes, well,’ he said. ‘Perhaps we’d better come aboard, Nivet. Can you manage that?’

There was a short pause, and then a thick line appeared right down the middle of Compassion, widening until it was, impossibly, bigger than she was. The Doctor pushed Mali into the TARDIS ahead of him.

At once the spiders leapt forward and seized Compassion.

Inside the TARDIS, the Doctor felt himself being propelled across Compassion’s console room as the spiders started to hurl her exoskeleton around the Edifice. ‘For goodness’ sake, Nivet, I thought you were supposed to be clever,’ he grumbled as he slumped across the floor.

Nivet glared across at him. The Doctor could see a livid bruise on the blond man’s forehead where he had obviously cracked his head earlier.

‘So why,’ asked the Doctor, stumbling up to the console, ‘didn’t you think about,’ he continued as he dragged himself around to the next panel, ‘trying to isolate the exoskeleton,’

he went on as he thumped and twisted the controls, ‘from the interior dimensions?’ he concluded with a flourish.

Above them, the monitor continued to show the outside world spinning wildly about them, and the spiders gnashing and slicing savagely as they tried in vain to devour Compassion. But the interior of the TARDIS was otherwise completely calm. The Doctor switched off the monitor, and looked around.

The place was a wreck. What little furniture had remained inside Compassion after her initial landing had been reduced to firewood and bizarre tangled metal sculpture. A pall of smoke seemed to hang over the huge console room. As the Doctor paced around he could feel shards of glass crunching underfoot. He picked up the shattered remains of a bone china cup, and carefully set it down on the edge of the console as though trying not to spill a drop of nonexistent tea.

‘I like what you’ve done with the place,’ he told Nivet.

‘You should have seen it before I spring cleaned,’ replied Nivet. ‘I don’t know how it decided to admit me in the first place —’

‘How she decided,’ corrected the Doctor gently.

‘How she decided, yeah,’ said Nivet warily, as though humouring an aged relation. ‘But it –

she – saved my life.’

‘Utterly typical,’ beamed the Doctor, encompassing the whole room with a grandiloquent gesture. ‘She latched on to the first available technical expert in an attempt to survive. Putting number one first.You were a convenience, Nivet. Though I’m very grateful.’ He started to manipulate the controls. ‘Sadly, there’s no sign of current activity in her identity circuitry, so she must be recuperating and regenerating her conscious persona. Have you been able to do anything with the telepathic circuits, Nivet?’

‘First thing I thought of,’ admitted Nivet. ‘This vessel has a kind of mental link to the Edifice.

It’s very recursive, though, like …’

‘Yes?’ prompted the Doctor. ‘Like …’

‘Well, the same effect you’d get if – no surely not.’

The Doctor smiled at Nivet, encouraging his bright pupil.

‘Well, the same effect you get when two TARDISes are interlocked. You’re telling me that the Edifice is a TARDIS?’

‘My TARDIS,’ said the Doctor, like a proud parent at a baby show.

Nivet looked astonished. ‘But there are trace elements of thousands of different planets embedded in the external structure, and in millions of different times.’

‘Well, I’ve travelled widely,’ muttered the Doctor. ‘Not all Time Lords are unimaginative unadventurous stay at home dullards, y’know.’

‘Thanks,’ said Nivet.

‘Now,’ continued the Doctor briskly, ‘let’s see about those telepathic circuits …’ He placed his palms flat on the console and closed his eyes. ‘Ah yes, some evidence of a connection to the Edifice, and – Aagh!’

Suddenly he was no longer in the TARDIS. He was swirling in an eddying vortex of visions and sounds and scents, some powerfully familiar, and some that resonated on the edge of his mind. He was frightened and delighted and nostalgic and regretful. He was spinning through some past that he had never experienced, but had always known.

In the centre of his mind a sharply defined crystal poured its calm blue light in a cleansing flow through his synapses. There were half familiar creatures here – huge spiders – not the bone monstrosities from the Edifice, but larger, hairier, more threatening, more fearful creatures from his past.

His past?

He was in a blue cave, and the spider queen leered down at him. She didn’t need to devour him, though she could have crushed him with the slightest movement. Or with the slightest thought. She knew he was dying already.

He fled the cave and struggled to the TARDIS.

The door slammed behind him, and he fell against the console as a random dematerialisation began, taking … taking him … taking him to …?

He sat up abruptly. He was in a crumpled heap on the TARDIS floor, in a patch of scattered glass and pottery fragments. He wondered where his dark blue jacket had gone, and then he saw he was wearing his familiar dull green velvet frock coat.

Why was that woman standing over him like that?

It was Combat Elite Mali. She had taken the opportunity offered to her by his sudden telepathic attack. She held a knife to his throat.

‘Don’t move,’ said Mali coldly. ‘Now that we have the Type 102, we no longer need you, Doctor. We will return to Gallifrey at once.’

‘You don’t understand,’ mumbled the Doctor. ‘I know what’s happening here.’

‘I understand perfectly; snapped Mali, and pushed the knife closer. “The virus has taken hold of you, Doctor. You’re a Faction agent. You are the enemy. Resist me, and I’ll kill you right here.’

Chapter Twenty six

Discontinuity

The Doctor stared at Mali, affronted. ‘You stupid young woman!’ he yelled. ‘You’re completely missing the point! I’m not a Faction agent.’

Mali stared down at him, unmoved. ‘Your biodata is riddled with their virus.’

‘No!’ The Doctor shook his head, and felt the knife scrape under his chin. ‘It only probably is.’

‘Doctor, you’re not making sense.’

‘Listen. Listen to me very carefully, because I’ve just worked this out and the logistics are giving me a headache. I don’t want to have to repeat myself: He pondered for a moment, looking rapidly between Mali and Nivet. ‘Perhaps I should write it down. Anyone who gets lost could flick back a page and catch up.’

Nivet sighed impatiently. ‘Well, Doctor?’

‘Just then, while you were laying your hands on that knife, I wasn’t having a seizure, I was connected to the TARDIS telepathic circuits. The circuits in my TARDIS, out there in the Edifice. I was able to push through the shadows and commune with her.’

‘Shadows?’

‘Shadows and cobwebs, yes!’ The Doctor sniffed. ‘Do you know,I don’t think she even recognised me.’

‘The telepathic circuits must be worn to dust by now.’

‘No,’ the Doctor snapped. ‘Not to Dust. To Metebelis III. Giant spiders. Eight legs, Great Ones, blue crystals! I died on Metebelis, not on Dust.’ Mali and Nivet were staring at him.

‘Don’t you see? The Faction altered my timeline, killed me before my time, thought they’d poisoned my body along with my history.’ His eyes were gleaming. ‘But when I finally did regenerate, inside the console room, the TARDIS knew it was wrong. She’d already reached out and communed with me, while I was locked up and at my lowest ebb. She helped me then, put me in touch with my former self – she must have known my future history. And she sensed that the Faction had changed things.’

Nivet was beginning to look excited. ‘I’ve never known of such a bond between TARDIS and owner. An empathic interface of this magnitude is unheard of.’

‘We’ve been through a lot together,’ the Doctor said, shiftily, as if worried some impropriety was being implied. ‘She’s always helped with my regenerations. This time, she took the infected shadow of my dying incarnation into her own workings, holding it in temporal orbit.

When my next incarnation appeared, his shadow was his own, untainted.’

‘And in doing so, the TARDIS negated the effects of the alternate timeline,’ Mali ventured dubiously.

‘Or deflected them, anyway. Undoing them. Abandoning the edited version of my life, and leaving it the way it was.’

Nivet said, ‘Causality doesn’t work that way.’

‘It’s not meant to, at least as far as we understand it. Maybe the old girl cribbed from a higher power. We have encountered one or two in our travels.’ The Doctor smiled briefly.

Mali cautiously withdrew her knife, allowing the Doctor to rise.

‘Thank you,’ the Doctor said. ‘I’m glad I’m explaining this to Time Lords. I think Fitz’s brain would burst:

Nivet rubbed his own head. ‘But the energy required for your TARDIS to contain the potentiality of your diseased timeline would be vast, surely.’

‘Agreed.’

‘And it would increase exponentially the further on you travelled from the nexus point.’

‘She tried to warn me the time was coming. She even took away my shadow. She knew she was facing her own death, and when the dimensional rift over Avalon finally tore her apart, she still held on!’

‘How?’ Mali wanted to know. ‘What could’ve sustained your ship for all that time?’

‘I’m not sure,’ the Doctor confessed. ‘But somehow she must have contained things. Perhaps because if she didn’t, the events of Dust, the Faction’s manufactured past, would’ve established themselves for ever.’ The Doctor smiled sadly. ‘She’s a good, brave ship.’

Mali shivered. ‘Not any more.’

The Doctor frowned. ‘The spirit of my former self must’ve permeated the TARDIS over the millennia – the Faction data inscribed in his cells gradually metamorphosing into the Edifice, like a cancer sweeping through it. The effort of will required to hold on to that strand of causality —’

‘But you are infected,’ Mali insisted. ‘It’s all been for nothing.’

‘No. Not yet. The Edifice is holding two realities in place, or trying to. That’s causing a build up of temporal energy that could wipe out half the galaxy.’

Nivet shuddered. “The chain reaction could do a lot more than that.’

‘But now —’ The Doctor’s eyes were bright.’! was never meant to arrive on Dust. I knew it at the time, it felt … wrong. The TARDIS knew too – her walls dripped with blood!’ He slapped a fist into his palm. ‘That’s the trigger point. That’s when things started to go wrong.

And that’s the time we must return to.’

Mali looked appalled, and raised the knife again. ‘If that isn’t the voice of Faction Paradox, I don’t know what is … Doctoring your own past?’

‘My probable past. Don’t let all your degrees in temporal engineering cloud your judgement, Mali. Try to think like an indolent postgrad student who scraped a pass because he was fiddling about with experiments, not losing himself in theory.’ The Doctor paced the floor. ‘If we can only ensure that the right version of events is restored and confine my time on Dust to the wastebasket as an interesting experiment that failed.

‘There will only ever have been one reality,’ Nivet concluded.

‘Precisely. The paradox will be resolved.’

Mali was sceptical. “The Edifice will remain a paradox itself.’

‘Its energies will dissipate,’ the Doctor insisted.

‘But Doctor, don’t you see?’ Nivet seemed aggrieved. ‘The reason the Edifice is so unstable is that the Paradox infection has spread right along its timeline, from construction to conclusion.’

The Doctor’s jaw dropped. ‘You’re sure?’

Nivet nodded. “That thing’s been bending causality round its little finger bone. To be inflicting the damage we’ve been registering it must be doing so throughout its lifespan.’

‘But now we understand it, we can deal with it, yes? Score a real victory over the Faction.’

The Doctor held out his hand as if expecting Nivet to shake on it. ‘Stabilise the core, trace back to Dust and undo the damage.’

Nivet looked doubtful. ‘Assuming that’s even possible, two things could happen. The Edifice may just blink out of existence, and you along with it,’ he warned.

The Doctor shook his head breezily. ‘Oh, I’ll go on. If we do it right, I may never have been away.’

‘What’s the other possibility?’ Mali asked, though she suspected she didn’t want to know the answer.

‘We’re looking at a ship on the point of collapse,’ Nivet said. “The tiniest tweak on any of those ossified controls, the whole thing could blow apart and take all of causality with it.’

‘Which is precisely what the High Council are most worried about.’ The Doctor looked across the debris strewn console at Mali. ‘Do you still want to slit my throat, Combat Elite Mali? For the first time the Time Lords have the chance to seriously set back the Faction and their meddling! The Faction have slipped up at last –thanks to the TARDIS’s loyalty in trying to hold back time, I’m not their agent. I can fool them, gain their trust, correct my regeneration so that it no longer happens on Dust, then defeat them.’ He smiled encouragingly at Mali. ‘Call it a blow for normality.’

Mali brandished the large, dangerous knife and moved closer.

‘I’m not a Faction agent!’ insisted the Doctor. “They cannot know that this Edifice is my TARDIS. All right, I admit that they sent me here to discover its purpose and, if I could, to seize control so the Faction could use it as some kind of weapon. But now …’

Mali stared at him for a whole minute. Then she said, ‘I think it would be easier just to kill you now.’

The knife moved. The Doctor swung around the console to avoid it.

‘I will not allow you to do that,’ said Compassion’s voice.

Mali and the Doctor stared at Nivet. ‘It wasn’t my fault,’ he protested, eyeing the knife.

‘Obviously,’ sighed Compassion. Her face appeared, huge and menacing, on the scanner over their heads. ‘Leave the driving to me, if you’d be so kind. You’re making a right mess of it.’

At which point, the Doctor felt himself thrown across the console room and towards the battered exit doors. There was a brief, disorientating transition through the dimensions as Compassion ejected him from herself, and he was suddenly sprawled on the floor of the Edifice, brushing up against the chitlnous edge of a huge bone spider leg.

The spider scuttled away from him, alarmed. The Doctor glanced across at Compassion’s battered exoshell. She was getting to her feet, the savage line in her midriff sealing as she did so and trapping Nivet and Mali inside her.

Compassion’s eyes sparkled. The Doctor beamed back at her. She was alive.

He got up and hurried over to the console. ‘Are you OK?’

She closed her eyes and considered the matter. ‘I still feel the debilitating effects of being so close inside another TARDIS. Particularly this one.’

‘Hardly surprising,’ said the Doctor. ‘My TARDIS was largely responsible for your becoming a TARDIS yourself.’

‘You must take your opportunity, Doctor,’ persisted Compassion. ‘Escape the Faction. Start that regeneration on Metebelis, not on Dust, or you’ll be doomed for all time.’

‘And the Time Lords with me,’ said the Doctor quietly.

Compassion stretched her limbs experimentally. ‘I must make my own way, Doctor.’

‘You can’t leave!’ shouted the Doctor, louder than he’d meant to. ‘It’s your responsibility to stay …’ As though disturbed by his anger, the spiders behind him cluttered nervously.

‘Would you control me like the Time Lords?’ Compassion cocked her head at him. ‘Are you so different from them?’

The Doctor lowered his head, and slammed his hands against the wrecked console, so hard that his palms stung. ‘I’m not like them.’

‘Who would you save instead of them?’ Compassion asked. ‘Me? Fitz? Any individual? Any other race?’ When he looked up at her, her swirling grey eyes bored deep into his. ‘All other races?’

The Doctor was about to chide Compassion for her rudeness when he realised his palms were stuck to the console surface. The room was starting to fade away. He knew immediately what was happening. ‘Stop this, Compassion.’

‘I think it’s time,’ said her voice from all around him, ‘for you to see what you’re really facing.’

‘No,’ he said. He started to struggle. ‘No!’

It was no use. She was projecting the images directly into his mind through the console’s feeble telepathic connection. Images he had tried to avoid for so long.

Images of the future. Of Gallifrey’s future.

‘I cannot see this.’

‘Obviously that’s not true,’ Compassion said.

‘I mean I must not see this.’

‘I disagree.’

The history and events and sensations coursed through his mind like a swollen river.

Memories that had not yet established themselves in his mind. Frightful images of an Enemy first strike on Gallifrey, boiling away the three oceans and levelling the great mountain ranges in the northern hemisphere until the planet burned and roiled and became a cinder.

Now the Time Lord fleet was travelling back in time to raze the Enemy battle worlds before the first strike, an ambitious move that ensured that Gallifrey was not destroyed in the first strike because there was no first strike. And a move that contravened all that the Time Lords had held dear for billennia.

The Enemy’s counterattack eliminated the Time Lord fleet by detonating star killers in the systems in which the raw materials for the fleet would one day be mined. No matter that the systems were inhabited. Collateral damage. Only to be expected.

The Doctor howled in desperation and helplessness. ‘Stop it. You must not show me this. I won’t believe it.’ He screwed his eyes up tight in a futile attempt to stem the torrent of mental images and emotions. ‘How can you know this, Compassion?’

Her voice carried across the narrative: “The Edifice is affecting the structure of space time, which makes it a nexus point for past and future events along the causal pathways.’

And still the Future War rolled on through the Doctor’s mind. Strikes and counterstrikes.

Victories won and overturned, retaliation by anarchitecture and revision and paradox.

Territories established, lost, and ultimately eliminated before they had ever existed. An all consuming War of chaos and denial.

Despite the Doctor’s impotent struggle to disconnect himself from the experiential download, he was forced to face the future of his own race. He watched, disbelieving, as the Time Lords of Gallifrey sought out weapons of mass destruction from their own future; became creatures of war; turned their own race into nightmare beings which regenerated until they were monsters designed purely for combat.

They evolved into the thing they were fighting. After generations of the War, it was no longer possible to tell them apart from their Enemy.

The Doctor’s hands pulled away suddenly from the bone console, and he staggered backwards a few steps. He couldn’t tell how long the whole experience had taken. It had seemed so vivid, so undeniable at the time, but now it was fading like a horrific nightmare.

And that was saying something, he thought, as he considered the gruesome sight of the Edifice’s interior once more.

‘So, Doctor,’ Compassion said quietly. ‘Who can you save? And who will you allow to die?

Don’t lecture me on my responsibilities until you face up to your own.’

The Doctor was about to answer her, but something seized him abruptly from behind. For a wild moment, he wondered whether the spiders had finally overcome their reticence and were about to devour him. Then he saw it was a young man with a lick of light brown hair felling awkwardly over his frightened eyes. He had stumbled into the console room and, terrified by the sight of the spiders clustered either side of the exit, had seized the Doctor as the first thing to hide behind.

‘Hello, who are you?’ began the Doctor in a reassuring tone. Or as reassuring as you can be when faced with a group of slavering monster arachnids.

‘Ressadriand – well, never mind who I am,’ gabbled the newcomer feverishly. ‘What’s going on? You’re in charge here, aren’t you? I want to go home …”

He was dragging the Doctor around the twisted bone console and back towards the exit again.

The spiders edged along the outside of the room, allowing them to go.

The creatures saw their opportunity. The Doctor was no longer between them and Compassion. Like a pack of ungainly hounds in pursuit of a trapped fox, they sprang for her.

Compassion reacted immediately. To the Doctor’s frustration and dismay, she simply dematerialised before his eyes, and was gone.

Fourth Interlude

Under glass

His eyes are going glassy, reflecting back the hand scrawled words and their impenetrable meaning, no longer taking them in.

He walks to a glass table and places the heavy book back down. The dust at his feet is disturbed again; past the book, under the glass, the motes loop and whirl. The image forms the bottle from the book in his mind.

That an entity could have such mastery over biosystems that it could create a viable universe from a section of the vortex seems unthinkable. He realises it is perhaps out of kindness or pity the Time Lords sought to obscure the origins of this War. Ever since that first attack, the Enemy has been deemed the only threat, the only foe; they have their forces of course, their agents spread throughout the universe, just as the Time Lords do, and all must be fought. But now to learn of this being with the power to create universes within universes – to learn too that it should be a creature from Gallifrey, and not even a Time Lord …

The entity took the name I.M. Foreman. I Am For Man. It took the form of a world, a biosystem – Foreman’s World. It tested its powers in a myriad ways, but its finest work was the bottle. He pictures it now as perhaps Foreman’s World had intended, a simple construction in three dimensions, galaxies spinning under its mottled surface. A romantic image intended to diffuse the raw power involved in its creation, the terrifying energies locking it all in place.

Staring down at the glass table top, he can imagine glimpses of the bottle’s other dimensions framing and reframing the universe of dust, in so many dark planes. No one in that bottle universe could know they were copies, conjured from the vortex by a playful Creator. Just as he can never know how much of his own existence has been rigged by the architects of the War.

He would do anything to change things.

There are many pages to go in the book. He is nervous that time is passing. Soon the library will open again as the three suns drag themselves from the sea. He must be gone from here.

He will be missed.

The story winds on through the blue black veins of the characters on the page. The thick glass of the windows grudgingly allows the first light of dawn into the old chamber.

Chapter Twenty seven

Source bottle

Kellen had been shocked into silence. Fitz could see the young Time Lord considering what Tana had told him. He was trying to make sense of it all, thought Fitz. Kellen was too terrified to flee. Too much under Tarra’s spell.

Now Tarra adopted a brisk tone. ‘So. Greyjan is recovering from his own rebirth. We must prepare him for the Reaffirmation Ceremony.’ She patted Kellen on the head like an obedient puppy. ‘Your practical joke will be going ahead as planned.’

‘Greyjan?’ rumbled Father Kreiner. With a mechanical groan and a leathery creak,he made his way over to Tarra. ‘I thought the Celestis chose to control the dead, not the Faction.’

Tarra’s face twisted into the parody of a smile. ‘Father Kreiner, the Celestis are themselves long dead. It pleases the Faction to use their technology.’

Kreiner nodded slowly, perhaps afraid that his ancient head might roll off his shoulders. ‘I have been away for too long.’

‘Trapped in the space time vortex,’ said Tana. ‘Imprisoned in a bottle universe.’

Kreiner laughed at this. ‘Yes, they thought they had trapped me in a Klein bottle. In a three dimensional universe that would have bound me for ever. But they made the mistake of casting the bottle into the vortex. It was only a matter of time before you found me. So,’ he snapped, his manner suddenly ugly, ‘what kept you? Did you want me to rot there for another millennium?’

Tarra was not fazed by his sudden mood swing. ‘You can afford to be patient, Father Kreiner.

We of the Faction were merely biding our time. We knew that the Time Lord High Council had stolen that absurd Klein bottle, thinking that they could use it as a bolt hole in the future War. They thought it would be a stronghold from which to elude their future Enemy if they had to. And where safer to hide it than the space time vortex, the domain that they believe they control so absolutely?’ She was smiling, a rapt look on her face as she considered the effects of this action. ‘Who knows what that mistake has done to space time? What it continues to do?’

Father Kreiner stumped across the room towards Fitz. His ancient legs creaked with the effort, but if Fitz had any initial hopes that the Faction monster was enfeebled by his thousands of years lost in the vortex, they were soon dashed. Kreiner kicked out at the slumped coven members who were in his path, and the bodies almost flew aside at the impact.

Kreiner stood before him, and raised his one leathery arm to take Fitz’s chin in his gloved hand. ‘Was I ever this young?’ mused Kreiner, twisting Fitz’s head to one side to get a proper look. ‘Was I ever this naïve? Or this frightened?’

Fitz decided to treat these as rhetorical questions. He could feel the grip tightening on his chin, hear the little motor devices in Kreiner’s arm and fingers whining as the pressure grew.

He winced a little, but said nothing.

‘You know, I can kill you now. Don’t think that I can’t.’

Fitz could hear Tana chuckling, a throaty satisfied sound that filled the dark room.

‘Yes,’ continued Kreiner. “That sounds like a splendid paradox, doesn’t it? I kill my ancestor, but I survive.’ The pressure on Fitz’s chin seemed to reach a peak, and then Kreiner just stopped squeezing and pushed him aside.

Fitz gasped as the blood returned to his face, and he clutched at his chin.

‘But you’re not my ancestor, are you?’ hissed Kreiner. ‘You’re an ersatz version of me, created by the Remote over many years. First on Ordiflca, and then on Anathema. Lifeless biomass, given history and meaning by the remembrance tanks. You’re a fake. You’re a fiction. Truth is, boy, I am the person the Doctor first met, first took from Earth in the TARDIS.’ He closed his eyes, and the lids fluttered as though he were searching deep in his memory. ‘I was the young man who went to China with Mao’s army. I wept at the sound of the T’hiili Queen’s song. I saw the double sunrise on Cherantrin V It was me who travelled with him and … . Samantha? Yes, with him and Sam to Vega Station …’

There was a long pause. Fitz couldn’t think what to say to all this. Couldn’t admit it might be true. Couldn’t speak.

Kreiner’s eyes snapped open again. The Faction monster said, ‘I am the real Fitzgerald Michael Kreiner’

‘And I claim my five pounds.’ He’d found his voice at last. Don’t let this crinkly old sod see you’re rattled, Fitzie. “The Doctor reminded me of what I really am. Being me is more than just existing in a continuous line for ever, you know. You can’t be me any more. Not even if you live for another four thousand years. You could never be Frank Sinatra, like I was on Drebnar. You could never be Fitz Fortune, or Simon Templar, or Alphonse Lebleu. Because you’ve forgotten what it ever meant to be the real Fitz Kreiner.’ He gulped, watching for the Faction man’s reaction. ‘Ersatz? I don’t think so. I’m more Fitz Kreiner than you’ll ever be, you sad, forgotten nobody. Don’t think you can manipulate me like the other poor fools: He nodded at the few remaining coven members, sprawled around them.

He thought that Father Kreiner was going to explode at this point. Instead, a guttural laugh bubbled up and burst out of the Faction man’s skeletal face. Somehow, that was more unnerving.

Eventually, Father Kreiner said, “The Doctor certainly must have thought I was nobody. The same Doctor who you speak of with such affection. He abandoned me, you know. Left me to rot on Earth, left me to the Faction. How convenient, then, to have you –another version of me that he could shape as he wished, that he could control.’ He gestured around him at the fallen coven members. “That he could manipulate, like these poor fools.’

Kreiner stepped up close to him now, and Fitz could smell the stench of his ancient breath, icy on his face. Fitz felt the cold seep into him, filling him with dread and despair. As a kid, he’d dreamed of living to a ripe old age. Well, be careful what you wish for, Fitzie: it may come true.

‘I’ll tell you why I won’t kill you, little fake. Because I want you to learn for yourself about your friend the Doctor. How he knows he can just leave people, give up on them, because there’s always an easy replacement. Ask him about Susan – ask him how he can call himself a grandfather after abandoning her on Earth. She was the first, the first of so many … And when you’ve learned all that, then ask yourself whether everything you believe hasn’t been a lie. I’ve lived thousands of years knowing that. Now it’s your turn, young Mr Kreiner.’ He hissed a dismissive sound at Fitz, and stumped off into the room. “There are many things that my biosystems have erased from my memory over the long, long years I have served the Faction. But I haven’t forgotten what it meant to be Fitz Kreiner. Not for a single moment.’

Fitz watched him go, letting his words sink in. He recalled how the Doctor had refused to discuss the events surrounding Fitz’s return from the Faction all those years previously. And he knew how the Doctor had made it a personal project to humanise Compassion – and look what had happened to her: the result had been quite the opposite. He could scarcely credit what he was thinking. Could it be true?

Maybe Father Kreiner was right.

The cold feeling of dread was still with him in every cell of his being.

He saw that Tarra was watching him closely, her eyes bright within the savage mask of bone.

‘You can understand now our instinct for revenge on the Doctor. Until we realised that, after all, he was one of us all along. That was the most delicious paradox of all.’

Fitz shook his head. Though he knew, deep down, that he believed it now himself. He was going to get away from them the next chance he got. But for the first time in ages, he didn’t know where he would run to.

Chapter Twenty eight

Mother of invention

Nivet landed heavily on the invisible floor for the fifth time. He cursed in such a long stream of obscene language that even a combat soldier like Mali was shocked.

‘Don’t just throw yourself around this place, Combat Elite, he snarled at her as he grasped desperately for purchase on the nearby console. ‘Try to remember what the Doctor did earlier to stabilise the internal dimensions of this TARDIS.

‘You’re supposed to be the expert technician,’ she shouted above the roar of the TARDIS

engines. Stars and planets whirled and spun around them, with the only focal point being the central, six sided console that bucked and reared like a wild animal. ‘What is this thing trying to do?’

‘She —’ Nivet caught himself as the TARDIS lurched again. ‘It has dematerialised from the Edifice, and now it’s trying to escape into the space time vortex.’

Mali staggered to her feet, and clutched at the console. ‘You can’t let it do that. This Type 102 has to be returned to Gallifrey.’

Nivet climbed his way up the console to a standing position. He spotted the control panel he was looking for, worked his way around to it, and operating the system that he’d seen the Doctor using earlier.

The roller coaster ride ended abruptly, and they were no longer thrown about the room. But the scanner which enveloped them on all sides, continued to display a disorientating, sickening view of the outside world as the TARDIS twisted crazily through it.

At last Nivet identified the scanner control, and the lurching, nauseating display faded to be replaced by the sombre, if battered, decorations of the TARDIS walls.

‘Have we landed?’ asked Mali, the relief evident in her voice.

‘No.’ Nivet continued to examine the console. ‘It’s still trying to escape.’

‘Very inventive,’ said Compassion’s voice from above them. ‘I’m quite impressed.’

Nivet looked up at Compassion’s face on the scanner. ‘Thank you. Now that I’ve decoupled the external and internal mapping, and switched off the scanner, I can concentrate on getting you back to Gallifrey.’

Compassion’s voice was honeyed. ‘You don’t really want to take me back there, surely?

We’ve a whole universe to explore. A bright young man like you

‘Enough.’ Nivet smiled, smoothing his battered blond curls back into place and surveying the controls again. “This is my job. Yours is to be the mother of our future TARDISes. I don’t really want to prevent that.’

‘Where are you taking us?’ Mali asked.

Nivet finished his adjustments of the controls. “The TARDIS berthing cradles.’

Above him, he saw Compassion’s smiling face change until it was glowering at him furiously. Then the scanner image faded away.

Within a few minutes, the sound of materialisation filled the room. Perhaps he was being fanciful, thought Nivet, but was it more strained, perhaps less willing, than he would have expected? How strange for him to attribute feelings to a machine like that.

Now they had landed, he felt able to activate the scanner again. One whole wall of the TARDIS disappeared to reveal a view of the outside. Nivet was relieved to see the familiar sight of the TARDIS berths, containing several dozen time machines in their undisguised state – tall white cylinders which seemed to radiate a soft inner light. Because there were so many of them clustered in one space, Nivet knew from his work with them in the past, he could let his mind wander freely and allow their reassuring telepathic background hum to calm him. Many times, when working late in the berthing cradles, he had allowed the subconscious signals to wash over his mind, like soft surf on a warm beach. Now, he closed his eyes and opened his mind.

So it was a jolt to sense something quite different, more disturbing, much more unsettling. He opened his eyes again to study the scanner view, almost expecting the TARDIS shapes to twist and turn and rear like scared animals. Instead of the usual, soothing telepathic chorus, there was a babble of jittery thoughts and … feelings? Yes, it was more than his own reaction to the telepathic contact: the ships seemed to be experiencing emotions.

But ships don’t have emotions, he told himself.

And in the background, there was a stronger telepathic voice, a stark contrast to the peaceful subconscious murmurings with which he was familiar. With a jolt, he realised it was the Type 102 TARDIS. The ship he was currently travelling in.

It was Compassion.

Mali could sense something too. ‘What is it, Nivet?’

‘Shhh. He closed his eyes again.

What was Compassion sensing? No, more precisely, what was she feeling?

It was a kind of horror. He could see it through her scanners, through her observations.

Through her eyes. She was considering the ships in the berthing bay. They were all her inferiors. Their telepathic voices were growing louder in her mind, whinnying like horses frightened by a nearby bear.

She knew that she frightened them. She knew that she would find no companionship here.

That she was the first, unalike, unique.

Compassion was confused and angry. She knew she was alone.

Nivet felt a hand on his arm, and opened his eyes to see Mali standing by him. She was looking worried. ‘Are you OK?’

He was surprised to find his cheeks were wet with tears.

He cleared his throat before trying to speak. ‘We should secure the Type 102 in the berthing cradles and report to the High Council.’

But the TARDIS doors remained resolutely closed.

‘Very inventive,’ he shouted up at the ceiling. ‘I’m quite impressed.’

‘Please don’t leave,’ said Compassion.

Nivet manipulated the controls with growing confidence. ‘She’s rerouting the excitonic circuitry to prevent access from this console.’

‘She?’ asked Mali.

Nivet flashed her a swift look. ‘The Type 102 is more sentient than our current generation of TARDISes. That’s the whole point of capturing her, remember.’ He continued to twist at a variety of controls. ‘Aha, now we’re getting somewhere.’

The view of the berthing cradles abruptly vanished to be replaced by another. This showed Vice President Timon in his office. As usual, he looked as if he hadn’t slept for a week.

Currently, he appeared to be putting on formal clothing, which threatened to swamp his slight frame. ‘What is it, Nivet? Can’t this wait until after the Ceremony.’

Nivet tried not to smile as Timon struggled into his heavy orange cloak. ‘Sir, we have captured the Type 102, though she is resisting our attempts to berth her.’

‘She?’ said Timon. ‘Well, have the Chancellery Guard assist. Better yet, use the TARDIS

fleet to corral the device into position. Or do you simply not want to damage her? he added with heavy sarcasm. He appeared to have a side conversation with someone else in his office, out of sight. ‘All right, I have authorised the release of the TARDIS fleet, and raised the transduction barriers. We’ll also establish an osmosis dampener on the 102 ‘s time signature.

So your new TARDIS cannot leave Gallifrey or its environs.’

‘Very well, sir. Thank you.’

The image of the Vice President started to fracture. ‘Get on … it … not interrupt …

Reaffirma … mony.’

Then he was gone.

Nivet thumped the console. ‘Compassion, stop interfering.’

The familiar sound of dematerialisation began. Nivet threw his hands in the air. ‘Compassion, come on now. You heard the Vice President.You can’t escape Gallifrey. And even if you try to hide, the other TARDISes are authorised for pursuit.’

Compassion remained grimly silent as she vanished from the berthing bay.

‘Very well,’ sighed Nivet, dropping below the console.

Mali watched him. ‘What is it doing? What are you doing?’

‘Working on another override,’ grunted Nivet, heaving a panel out of place. ‘She’s far in advance of so much of our current technology, and yet there are some odd familiarities. This access system, for example, could have come straight out of an old Type 40.’

* * *

Compassion could feel the osmosis dampener cutting into her like cramp.

She took a deep, cleansing psychic breath and plunged into the space time vortex. As she had suspected, most routes were blocked to her. The reassuring warmth of the swirling grey vortex no longer comforted her. She used to love its wild churnings, the unpredictable eddies and twists in its multidimensional depths, the way she could make discovery after discovery while forging new paths for herself. Now, though, the only surprises were where the transduction barriers cut across the misty region like crude bars, preventing her from escaping.

Behind her she could sense, rather than see, the TARDIS fleet at her heels. Again, she felt the wave of despair that had washed over her in the berthing cradles, just as she had realised that the other TARDISes were technically and genetically far below her. Once she had teased the Doctor that he treated his human companions as though they were unruly chimpanzees trying to take tea at a royal garden party. If that had ever been true, she now knew how he must have felt.

The first two TARDISes were upon her. They buffeted against her in the vortex, swooping closer like hounds pursuing a fox.

Another three arrived. They were clumsy, energised, overenthusiastic. They would time ram her. They could kill her.

Perhaps, she reflected, that was the only escape.

Four more TARDISes slammed into her, and the posse began to crush her between them. She would not go back to the berthing cradles, she had decided. She prepared to surrender to her own destruction. But she would take the other TARDISes with her. It was a pity that Nivet would not survive.

Compassion reached deep inside her own systems, knowing that she had the hidden power of a Type 102, and was capable of a devastating riposte.When she unleashed the strike, it was as though she were pouring out everything that she ever was in a primal scream into the vortex.

The effect on the pursuing TARDISes was devastating. The single psychic blast switched them off abruptly. And like a tidal wave in an ocean, the effect rippled through them and the vortex and struck at every other TARDIS on Gallifrey. Every single one of them ceased to function.

She waited for the blast to rebound around the vortex and consume her, too.

Yes, she could have quite liked Nivet, she decided. He was an unusually inventive man.

This turned out to be exactly the moment at which Nivet did his most inventive thing yet.

Compassion grimaced. He was going to materialise her back on the Edifice, where she would be shielded from the effects of her own psychic blast. Back to the Edifice, back to the shattered remnants of the TARDIS that had created her and now threatened to trap her for ever in a living death.

She would survive, she realised. But at what cost?

Chapter Twenty nine

Standing on ceremony

The collar pinched the back of Romana’s neck. Really, she thought, who could have designed this dreadful thing? She studied herself critically in the full length gilt mirror, and heaved a perfect little sigh of exasperation. She hefted the heavy gown, but it still looked like she was wearing a dusty old curtain over her perfectly gorgeous new dress.

Her own preference was for something more chinois, but personal preference had little influence on ceremonial. Maybe she would change the ritual after this ceremony. She was sure she’d seen just the ideal thing in a film once with the Doctor, The Last Emperor.

Perhaps not, under the circumstances. If anyone found out, they might start thinking of her as the ‘Last Empress’, and she’d much prefer to remain the Mistress of the Six Gallifreys.

At least she could afford some of her favourite jewellery. She couldn’t put on her headband –

that would get in the way of the formal coronet during the ceremony. She settled for two ropes of pearls and her favourite tjakelian earrings, each with a chip of pure drublix in the dangling teardrop of precious metal. Both contained a small communications device, through which a flunky would relay appropriate instructions about where she should stand and what she should say. Romana had decided she couldn’t be bothered to learn the entire tedious ceremony.

Soon the hovercar was sweeping the Lady President and her retinue high around the perimeter of the Panopticon. The weather had cleared, and so the sliding glass hood could remain open throughout the journey. Despite her feigned indifference, she was secretly amazed, as always, at the scale of the building, set out in a basic pentagram. Far, far below was the presentation stand, atop a building the size of an office block which had been constructed from nothing since first thing that morning. The High Council and the five colleges had premier spots by the stand.

For everyone else, the entire ceremony would be broadcast on the massive display screens which covered the sides of the stand, and which were visible from any ground position elsewhere in the Capitol. A milling crowd surged around the base of the building already, perhaps seventy thousand people, looking a little lost on the Panopticon floor since it had been cleared of most commercial activity earlier in the day.

With a final adjustment of her awkward collar, Romana stepped out on to the Presidential podium and started her five minute walk to the heart of the ceremonial structure.

She knew the importance of the ceremonial, the significance of this sesquicentennial recognition. This was just the latest of the things she’d had to do to strengthen her personal authority –starting way back when she’d challenged that Presidential lush Flavia. Today’s ceremony confirmed her power and prestige, placed her further above the petty squabbiings of her High Council.

Her people loved her. Which was exactly how it should be.

The unfortunate recent death of the previous Chancellor Present had been less of a blow than she had admitted. Ironically, for a woman in power, the Lady President Romana tolerated women High Councillors less than men. In her present incarnation, Romana had discovered, she was more easily able to convince, manipulate, or bully her male colleagues, particularly those who had staggered on to the dog end days of their current incarnation rather than risk being declared unfit for office after an unhappy regeneration. She had born this in mind when using her emergency powers to directly appoint the new Chancellor of Time Present, the doddery Santas, whose lecherous looks at her in his previous role had long been an amusement to her.

After an hour and a half, though, even these reassuring thoughts failed to enliven her. The dead note in the voice of her flunky, transmitting details through her earring, told her that she wasn’t the only one bored to tears by the whole thing.

The Chancellors of Time Past, Parallel and Present had all sworn their renewed fealty in the ancient language of Old High Gallifrey, and now the boring Patrexian Djarshar was droning on.

‘… in perpetual and continued obeisance to the will of the Time Lord elite …’ Djarshar’s sterile monologue filtered out across the whole Panopticon. It would be a wonder if there weren’t extensive outbreaks of sleepwalking far below on the Capitol floor. At least she was spared that dull youngster Vozarti, whose unfortunate absence meant she didn’t have to sit through his pledge of continued allegiance as Castellan. So next, Romana thought, perhaps the faithful Vice President Timon could bring some sparkle to the events.

There was another sparkle, she admitted, though only in the form of some ugly formal jewellery. She studied the display case in front of her, which held the Presidential coronet.

The climax of the ceremony would be when the Dromeain Archibaptrix placed the coronet on her head, and she reconnected with the Matrix, final confirmation of her Reaffirmation as President. Then she could hightail it back to her office and have a much needed long bath with lots of soothing unguents.

‘… and thus do I confirm my unfailing devotion and subservient role to thee, oh Lady President Romana, oh Head of State, oh Queen of the Five Gallifreys.’

Well, Djarshar had stopped at last. The huge crowds muttered their response, which echoed around the vast enclosure, strangely distorted and disconcerting because of the time it took for the sound to reach up from the Panopticon floor. The traditional chants of the Reaffirmation Ceremony resumed, filling the enormous building as the crowd sang the familiar roundelay.

Now all Djarshar had to do was shuffle backwards, bowing all the way to his seat, and hope he didn’t meander off course and plunge over the side of the stand to his death quarter of a mile below.

The transmitter in her left earring buzzed, and her flunky started to advise her what was happening next. In the absence of the boy Castellan, Vice President Timon had started weaving his way to the main podium. But he got no further than the bottom of the third flight of steps before there was a sudden commotion in the crowd of officials.

A lanky, dishevelled figure with long, lank, dark hair sprouting from beneath a grubby hat with a crumpled brim had burst out on to the fourth flight of steps. His dirty blue check shirt was worn over another check shirt, this one green, and the tails of both flapped about his worn corduroy trousers. His patchy stubble suggested that he’d forgotten to shave for several days. He was now gesticulating his arms wildly, windmilling them around his wiry, slightly stooped form.

The crowds must have seen this on the huge display monitors, because the rhythms of the roundelay faltered, and then died away in a background hiss of echoing mutters. Even Romans’s flunky was lost for words. She could hear him shuffling his paperwork, trying to work out if this interruption was a scripted part of the Reaffirmation.

‘Stop the ceremony!’ yelled the scruffy newcomer, his words carrying across to Romana in the evening breeze.

The Chancellery Guard stepped in front of Romana protectively. Vice President Timon hared up the steps and stood beside her. ‘What is this?’ he blustered.

‘Well, really, Timon,’ responded Romana tersely. ‘How should I know? This whole thing is boring me to tears, but credit me with more creativity if I were to arrange a modest distraction.’

A slight wind started to ruffle the robes of everyone on the podium. She could hear something in the air, and looked up, expecting rain. Bright clouds seemed to have formed high in the Panopticon dome.

‘I’m with the Doctor,’ the wild man was shouting. He eyed the stasers pointed at him with some concern, and made no further attempt to approach Romana. ‘My name is Fitz Kreiner, and I came to warn you —’

‘Enough!’ shouted Timon. ‘This is outrageous. Take him away at once.’

Fitz Kreiner disappeared behind a wall of burly guards. ‘They want to interrupt the ceremony.’

‘You seem,’ murmured Romana to herself, ‘to have managed that quite well on your own.’

She watched a rather yummy guard captain supervise the removal of the man. The captain trotted back up the steps, belying the weight and discomfort of his own heavy ceremonial clothes. The advantage of youth, she thought.

‘Lady President,’ he said, dropping to one knee and bowing his head, ‘I apologise most profoundly for this —’

‘Yes, yes,’ she said quietly so that the broadcast equipment would not hear her. She made a languid gesture of her hand signifying dismissal. ‘Do get on with things, Guard Captain, or we shall all die of sedentary collapse.’

The captain blushed to the roots of his hair.

Romana had a tremendously wicked idea at this point. It was a further way of reinforcing her position in the ceremony. She stepped forward, to ensure the microphones would carry her words to the tens of thousands in the Panopticon and the millions around the planet. “The challenge is rebuffed. Stand now any who would challenge the Lady President Romana, Mistress of the Five Gallifreys.’

So it was rather a shock when someone replied.

‘I do,’ said a man in a lazy, mocking tone.

She whirled around to see a man dressed in the white ceremonial robes of a Gallifreyan President. As he was further upstage than she was, she had to crane her neck up and stare into the light behind him. Damn this collar!

And then it started to rain flowers. Tiny yellow blooms, each with six splayed petals, were spiralling down from the sky. They began to pile up around her, carpeting the top of the ceremonial podium in a vivid wash of bright colour.

The blooms were falling elsewhere in the Panopticon too. A swirling yellow rain, Gallifreyan Flowers of Remembrance which tumbled slowly down on to the spectators far below. A wave of astonished chatter rippled through the crowd.

Romana stared at the man who dared to present himself in the Presidential robes. ‘Who are you, sir?’ she demanded in her most imperious tone.

The man stepped forward, and held out his hands in a placating expression. Not a submissive gesture, she noticed, but a controlling one. He was accompanied by a young woman, who was wearing the ceremonial shawl of a Gallifreyan supporter to the President and the traditional face mask that covered most of her head.

‘Who are you?’ she demanded. ‘What is this affront?’

‘I am Greyjan,’ he said. ‘I am here to reclaim my Presidency for the last doomed days of Gallifrey.’ He seemed to be bored by the announcement, speaking slowly as though begrudging every word, as though the whole thing was just too much trouble. As though the whole thing was a tedious ceremony.

But the onlookers in Romana’s entourage were astonished by the stranger’s outrageous claim, this disrespect of a long dead leader of Gallifrey.

After which, the impostor swept past Romana, reached into the display cabinet, and took out the coronet. In seconds, it was on his head.

The nearby onlookers gasped. They knew he was inviting serious injury or death. Only the President had access to the Matrix.

The impostor turned to face her. He tilted his head in an odd, almost affectionate way. She recognised his jowly face, that lazy eye, from the histories. And the diadems around the coronet were sparkling in sequence as his mind accessed the Matrix seamlessly.

She felt Timon’s hand on her shoulder, pressing down hard through the heavy material. He spoke what she was already coming to accept, despite everything.

‘It is Greyjan.’

Romana rolled her eyes when she saw Timon going down on one knee. She was even less impressed when the rest of her entourage followed suit.

‘My Lord Greyjan,’ said Timon. ‘Lord President, War Emperor of Kasterborous, Head of State, Most High Sovereign of the Five Houses. And Master of the Four Gallifrcys.’

‘Master of the Four Gallifreys,’ echoed the crowd.

‘Oh come on!’ rasped Romana. ‘Are you serious?’

Greyjan studied her with his odd eyes, but there was something incurious about his manner.

‘I reclaim my Presidency. My biorecord predates yours, my term of office has not been formally dissolved. Your access to the Codex and the Matrix is rescinded.’

‘You died,’ said Romana coldly.

Greyjan held out his hands, stretching out the material of his white robe so that he looked almost like an angel. ‘I beg to differ.’

The yellow rain seemed to have stopped now. Greyjan brushed a small pile of flowers off his shoulders, then folded his hands together. He spoke in a clear voice: ‘Guard Captain, it seems that the Lady Romana is the only person unconvinced of my right. Take her below, and keep her under house arrest.’

Romana shook off the guards who stepped forward to take her by the arms. ‘I can walk perfectly well by myself,’ she stated, her tone icy.

She unclipped her collar, and cast it aside with a contemptuous gesture. All through the Panopticon, all around Gallifrey, they would see her from any angle, she decided. The ceremonial gown slipped from her shoulders and into a crumpled heap on the ground behind her. Ex President Romana held her head high as she made her own way to captivity.

Chapter Thirty

House arrest

‘Now you,’ said Fitz, ‘were the last person I expected to be sharing a cab with.’ He was pleased to see that she was narked by his comment. He leaned back and made himself comfortable as the open topped transport launched from the platform. ‘Well, I suppose it gives me the ideal opportunity to say “I told you so”.’

‘I can see that you do indeed know the Doctor,’ said Romana, and she tossed her head imperiously so that her dangly earrings waggled about. ‘Some of his arrogant style has clearly rubbed off on to you.’

‘All my own style, lady.’

‘Lady Romana,’ she snapped, then prodded the guard in the front seat. ‘I demand to be transported in a different car from this rabble.’

The driver was studiously deaf to her repeated protest. Fitz laughed out loud at her spluttered indignation.

‘Now listen. I risked a lot trying to warn you about old One Eye. And the company he keeps

…’ He trailed off. ‘Nice place you have here.’ Fitz looked at her sideways from the corner of his eye and pretended to be enjoying the view. ‘Oh, sorry, I mean nice place you had here.’

Romana swivelled in her seat and stared Fitz boldly in the ear. ‘Very well, Mr …?’

‘Fitz.’

‘Mr Fitz —’

‘Just Fitz.’

He could see her mentally counting to ten. Then she said, ‘Very well, Fitz. You have my undivided attention. You told me so, and I didn’t listen. So why don’t you tell me about Greyjan now?’

Fitz stretched his left arm out across the rear of the back seat, behind Romana, as he used to when he took a black cab across town with his girlfriend Mary. He waved his free hand airily, encompassing the entire huge domed structure through which they were being driven. ‘What is this place?’

‘The Panopticon,’ replied Romana, evidently making an effort not to shrink from his outstretched arm.

‘Ah!’ He stared at her, amazed. ‘I’ve heard of that.’

‘Bully for you.’

‘I thought it had six sides.’

Romana shook her pretty head. ‘No, it’s only ever had five. With a statue at each entrance, one for each of the funding colleges.’ She sarcastically made a great show of pointing things out to Fitz, as though he was on a school trip: ‘Rassilon, Omega, Pandak, Apeiron and the Other.’

‘You’ve forgotten the last one?’

‘No, he was known as “the Other”, ‘Romana observed testily. ‘Now, do I get any answers to my questions?’

Fitz allowed himself to look at her properly for the first time. She didn’t look away, which impressed him. ‘Nothing to tell,’ he said in a voice that could be overheard by the driver. But immediately after he mouthed the words, ‘Later. More private.’

It actually took them a good forty minutes before they were finally escorted to their place of detention. Romana had pointed out that, even if she was under house arrest, she had privileges as a former President. Those privileges included being able to choose her house guests. And her choice was Mr Fitz Kreiner, an associate of another former President of Gallifrey who, in the melee at the ceremony, had not actually been formally charged with any crime.

Fitz admired her calm demeanour, her haughty treatment of the Chancellery Guard, even in her current reduced circumstances.

He also admired her fine lodgings, which were more sumptuous than any hotel he’d ever stayed in. ‘If this is house arrest,’ he announced, ‘lock me up and throw away the key.’

Romana draped herself decorously over a piece of low furniture. ‘A temporary arrangement, I do trust, Mr Kreiner. Fitz.’ She patted the chaise longue, inviting him to sit beside her.

‘You’d better tell me about Greyjan, hadn’t you?’

Fitz explained about the events in MidTown, how he had appeared as part of the seance, and how subsequently he had become involved in the bizarre plan to resurrect Greyjan. He also told her that he had accompanied Mother Tarra, Father Kreiner and Keilen on their journey into the Capitol, only to escape from their group in an attempt to warn the High Council before Greyjan reappeared at the ceremony.

Romana eyed him warily. ‘You’re telling me that Greyjan is a Faction construct.’

Fitz nodded.

‘And you’re also saying that the Doctor may be a Faction agent.’

Another nod.

‘And you are a travelling companion of the Doctor’s.’

Another nod. Then, ‘Oh, be reasonable!’

She studied her nails. ‘You can imagine how it looks. I could really do with more proof of this.’

Fitz could tell she was just testing him. ‘And I could really do with a pint of Watney’s Red Barrel,’ he snarled, ‘but I have to make do with what I’ve got. Look, it’s Tarra – Mother Tarra – she’s in charge. She even brought this … Father Kreiner back from wherever the hell he was.’

‘Mmm. You know that Tarra is actually the daughter of Kandarl, a former High Councillor.’

‘Well tell him she’s a very naughty girl,’ snapped Fitz. ‘Unless your ex Councillor is a very, very old man, she is not his daughter.’

‘Kandarl is dead,’ said Romana dismissively. ‘But you’re right: I think we must assume that the real Tarra is also dead. But this Faction woman now has access to everything that Tarra did. She has access to college research systems, for example. And lodgings in the Capitol.’

She heaved the deepest sigh. ‘With Greyjan in charge now, who knows what the Faction will do. I mean, they could unpick every moment in Time Lord history since his Presidency last ended.’

Fitz met Romana’s eye. “That would be impossible.’

‘That would be the whole point,’ she replied.

Chapter Thirty one

The promise of impossibility

The boy, Ressadriand, was getting on the Doctor’s nerves. He was already irritated that the bone spiders were still following them around the Edifice like puppies chasing their mother.

And as they walked through the warped corridors of the Edifice, Ressadriand’s incessant chatterings and imperious demands were wearing the Doctor down. It was all ‘I insist on knowing’ and ‘I demand to be told’ and ‘What you must tell me’. He put up with this for what seemed like an hour – though it could have been longer the effects of the Edifice made it difficult to judge linear time. But after quite a period of politely ignoring him, the Doctor finally snapped.

‘For goodness’ sake! Will you never stop your inane prattling?’

Ressadriand stared at him, obviously not used to being addressed in this forthright manner.

‘How dare you?’ he began. ‘What right have you to —’

The Doctor rounded on him, staring him into sudden silence. Around them the chill wind of the Edifice whistled its familiar, mournful lament. ‘I think I have every right to feel a bit miffed. I’m trying to concentrate, and all you can do is interrupt me with your obtuse demands. If it wasn’t for you, you bluff young idiot, I wouldn’t be stranded here with Compassion gallivanting off who knows where. To lose one TARDIS might be considered an accident, but to lose two – well that smacks of carelessness.’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ mumbled Ressadriand, crumpling.

The Doctor decided he could feel little sympathy for him. He stalked off down another corridor, knowing that the boy would follow. The clatter of bone on bone told him that the spiders were following too, hesitating just out of sight. ‘What are you doing here, Ressadriand?’

Ressadriand explained haltingly about the seance, and how Kellen and Tana had usurped his role. Initially, the Doctor merely rolled his eyes in resignation as the youngster piled on the self pity about how his simple plan to impress his college friends, and the women in particular, had gone wrong. But as he realised what Ressadriand had actually been orchestrating, his exasperation started to turn into something else, a darker emotion that he hardly recognised in himself, a kind of cold anger.

‘You stupid, stupid fools. What made you think you could dabble in the occult rituals of Faction Paradox? Didn’t you learn anything at your Academy?’

‘It was supposed to be harmless fun,’ protested Ressadriand, still with a spark of indignation.

‘I knew things were getting out of hand when Tarra summoned the loa and materialised the monkey boy’s future self.’

The Doctor stopped abruptly. ‘Monkey boy?’

Ressadriand nodded. “The human.’ He studied the Doctor’s astonished reaction. ‘Fitz Kreiner.’

‘And you summoned up his future on this Visualiser? This was no student prank, was it, Ressadriand? This was something more.’

Ressadriand looked more miserable than ever. ‘It wasn’t my idea of a joke,’ he moaned. ‘It was Kellen’s idea to resurrect Greyjan with the biodata extract. Kellen and Tarra’s idea to —’

‘What?’ The Doctor was appalled. ‘What in the world possessed you to —’ He broke off at this thought.

Stared at Ressadriand.

‘ Possessed you?’ He walked around the dumfounded youngster, circling him like a prowling animal closing in on its prey. ‘This Tarra was no student, was she, Ressadriand? What junior academician would have access to the ancient rites of Faction Paradox? What student could understand the forgotten technology of the Remote’s remembrance tanks, hm? First I thought you were a prattling, interfering nuisance, Ressadriand. But what you’ve done is far more dangerous than that.’ He stopped pacing, and closed his eyes. ‘Perhaps I should have suspected this all along …’

He allowed his mind to drift away, slowly feeling his body disconnect from its immediate location.

‘No!’ shouted Ressadriand. ‘Where are you going? You can’t —’

The Doctor opened his eyes again. Ressadriand was standing perfectly still, his mouth open in mid protest, his eyes wide with indignation but unblinking. Frozen in the moment.

‘Very good,’ said an ancient, splintered voice from the depths of the nearest corridor. ‘You’re getting the hang of this, Doctor. You make a fine agent.’

The Doctor stepped into the corridor, and could make out the wizened figure of Uncle Kristeva. To reach him, he had to pass between the legs of two bone spiders which stood like menacing statues, unmoving but ominous, drops of blood glistening on their slick bellies.

Kristeva cackled at the Doctor’s apprehension. ‘You’re certainly in control of them now, Doctor. No need to fear them, they’ll do your bidding. Intuitive control of bone constructs, another Faction talent that you have honed.’

The Doctor tried not to show his revulsion. Or was it that he just didn’t want to accept that Kristeva might be right? ‘I summoned you to ask about these student rituals on Gallifrey.’

‘Summoned me,’ agreed Kristeva, revealing his rictus grin. ‘Another Faction talent.’

‘Yes yes yes,’ agreed the Doctor hastily, ‘well done me. Now tell me about these student rituals.’

Kristeva pursed his cracked old lips. ‘You know it already, don’t you, Doctor? Our Faction agent, Mother Tarra, steered these enthusiastic amateurs in the Rituals of Paradox.

Channelled their raw energy, focused their half beliefs and turned it to our use.’

‘It was merely a game to them,’ whispered the Doctor.

Kristeva waved away his concern. ‘Call it a rehearsal. It served our purpose.’

The Doctor noticed that the way Kristeva said ‘our’ was inclusive. Kristeva was continuing to draw him into the Faction, implicating him, trapping him with words and actions and emotions. Well, play the game, Doctor. “This Edifice that we’re standing in – when we first met, you didn’t know what it was, did you?’

‘We still do not; admitted Kristeva. ‘No matter When we find out, we will simply go back in time and ensure that we knew all along.’

The Doctor wanted to gasp at this outrageously cavalier approach to temporal manipulation.

But instead he simply said, ‘I believe it will prove to be of vital significance to … us. Once I can access the appropriate technology on Gallifrey, I can present the Edifice to you in its entirety.’

Kristeva placed one skeletal hand on the Doctor’s shoulder. It was a gesture of approval. The Doctor forced himself not to shrink away from it. ‘We’re pleased with you, Doctor. Though it is of less importance to us now.’ The hand withdrew back into Kristeva’s night black gown.

‘All things will come to us shortly.’

The Doctor felt a pang of alarm.

‘Things have moved on since Greyjan’s reappearance,’ continued Kristeva. ‘Mother Tarra has taken charge.’

‘Who is she?’

‘One of our finest young recruits. If someone over a thousand years old can be described as young.’ The thought seemed to amuse Kristeva greatly, and he cackled until he broke into a hacking cough. ‘Does it matter who she is? She’s just another of our Agents, a child to whom we made the Faction’s Promise of Impossibility. She killed the real Tarra, took her place, then killed Tarra’s father. He was a former High Councillor.’

The Doctor sensed the moment slipping away from him. ‘Leave Tarra, Uncle Kristeva. I want to serve the Faction. Let me take charge.’

Kristeva moved his head slowly from side to side. Maybe it was to say no, maybe it was a gesture of disbelief or regret. ‘You still have much to learn, Doctor. When to stay. When to leave.’ He gestured through to the other corridor, where Ressadriand still stood, frozen in a moment of time. ‘As you know with this Time Lord here. You know you have left him to die.’

The Doctor could feel his hearts pounding. What had he done?

‘You know you can change the past, Doctor. But will you? A classic dilemma for a novitiate into Paradox. The first temptation. Save one life by changing the past. Will you stay and save him? Or will you leave? You have the Faction’s licence, Doctor. Your own Promise of Impossibility.’

The Doctor looked between the huge, static spider legs to where Ressadriand remained, unaware of the danger. ‘Once I make one change, I’ll have crossed the Rubicon.’

‘An apt metaphor,’ said Kristeva. ‘Like starting a war.’

‘My first paradox,’ whispered the Doctor. ‘All the others will seem easier after that. Too easy.Where would it ever end? No!’ His voice became a shout. ‘It’s the cheat’s way of doing things.’

‘Look at the boy, where you left him,’ said Kristeva, pointing at Ressadriand. ‘He died just before you spoke your last sentence.’ Kristeva showed his rictus grin again. ‘Like a sentence of death.’

‘No,’ said the Doctor softly.

‘I think you know when to leave people, don’t you, Doctor? You left that young man Fitz, for example, in a place on Earth called Geneva. That’s where we first found him. Directly from that moment, he was destined to become Father Kreiner, which is what we needed. That was an early sign of your Faction nature.’

The Doctor squeezed his eyes tight, not wanting to listen any more, but knowing that he had to. ‘Go on.’

‘You left your friend Romana once,’ continued Kristeva. ‘She thinks she learned from you how to distinguish what to fight for and what to fight against. Directly from that, she started on her path to becoming President. She even invoked the right of challenge against the incumbent President, Flavia, for the first time in two hundred generations. And now her futile attempts to stay on and fight the unknown Enemy are making it possible for Faction Paradox to conquer Gallifrey. It was what we needed’.

‘Conquer …?’ The Doctor’s head was ringing like a bell. He wanted to deny it all. But he couldn’t reveal his true feelings to Kristeva. Or was it that he believed it all anyway?

‘You’ve left others, too.’

The Doctor shook his head angrily. ‘No, you don’t know that.’

‘You’re thinking of them now – you can’t hide your thoughts from me if you insist on remembering them now.’

‘No!’

‘Friends you left to die, companions you could return to save if only you take this first step into Paradox. Save this boy. Save all the ones you left behind. I can see them in your mind now … Adric? Katarina? Ah …’ A sigh hissed through his thin lips. ‘You can’t hide your thoughts, Doctor. Yes, your own granddaughter, Susan, you left her on Earth.’

The Doctor struggled to forget, but could only remember.

Kristeva pointed at Ressadriand again. ‘And now here you’ve left this young man, and he’s going to die. What significance will that have? None yet. But now that you’re a Faction agent, you can go back and make it significant.’

‘Tampering with past time,’ murmured the Doctor in disbelief.

‘Well,’ said Kristeva. ‘That’s your job description now.’

‘I could save him only by changing the past?’

‘Yes. Leave the past, and he dies. Change the past, and he lives. The choice is simple.’

‘The choice is anything but simple. I’ll find a third option.’

‘There is none,’ emphasised Kristeva wearily. ‘You kill him. Or you change the past.’

The Doctor stared past the spiders. ‘If he isn’t dead yet —’

‘You killed him when you stepped this side of the spiders. As you knew you would.”

‘Did I? That was just …’ The Doctor struggled for a justification, peering at the doomed Ressadriand. He could feel his eyes stinging. In the end he could only add feebly, ‘That was just coincidence.’

He decided he was prepared to plead for Ressadriand’s life. Yet even in that moment, he knew that that would merely mean asking Kristeva to change the past too. And that wouldn’t free him from the responsibility of altering the timeline – it would still have been his choice.

He turned back, ready to confront the Faction agent. ‘That was just a coincidence,’ he repeated insistently.

But Kristeva was already gone.

In his head, the Doctor heard him say, ‘You are Faction. There is no coincidence.’

And now, back in the corridor, the Doctor could hear the spiders scuttling away into the distance, leaving the tattered corpse of Ressadriand behind them. He stumbled past the remains, anguish creasing his features.

There was barely enough of the boy left to recognise. The ivory walls and floor were spattered with gore.

The Doctor slumped against the hard bone wall of the corridor, covered his face with his hands, and began to weep. Within him he could feel his very nature altering, his priorities reordering, like a physical mutation. Like a regeneration, a fundamental change in the core of his own being.

He didn’t know how long he stayed slumped down like that. He only knew that he was alerted by the sound of a TARDIS materialising nearby. He hurried towards the sound.

Compassion stood before him, eyeing her surroundings warily. ‘Back here,’ she said, no pleasure in her voice. ‘Otherwise, I’d say how nice it was to see you, Doctor. It’s a surprise, obviously.’

‘There is no coincidence,’ whispered the Doctor.

‘What?’

‘Nothing,’ he told her, and gestured that she should let him in. ‘I need to get to Romana.

There are things she must know.’

Chapter Thirty two

Don’t shoot the messenger

Kellen sat quietly in the corner of the room, watching Tarra, transfixed by the strip of black armour marring the flesh of her arm. He’d first got involved in Ressadriand’s odd seance group entirely because he’d fancied her, Ressadriand’s friend, the gorgeous daughter of a former High Councillor. The girl with the lustrous auburn hair, the lambent pale skin, the dark, bashful eyes, and the full, inviting red mouth. She had a fresh aura that came from being in the prime of her first incarnation. She was supposed to be the latest of a large number of Academy contemporaries that he’d seduced and abandoned. That was part of the game. All the women he’d known had understood that, he was sure.

He stared at the yellow flower that he still clutched in his hand. The six petals were crushed together, the life squeezed out of the flower in his grip. He let it drop to the floor.

There had been a time, not so very long ago, when his main ambition was to have Tarra fall for him. And he’d know that had happened when she invited him back to her place, the secure quarters in the Capitol provided for her by her father, the one place where she never took anyone else.Yet here he was at last, sitting on her bed in the comer of the main room, and it had all gone horribly wrong.

That creepy old man Kreiner was leering over her right at this moment. Kelien knew from long practice seducing women at his Academy that he had a repertoire of ways for getting rid of gooseberries. In fact, only recently, he’d given the brush off to Eton, that wet blanket, the youngster with the old face, and made his feelings for Tarra more than plain. But he knew now that his techniques would have no effect.

Somehow, he had convinced himself that he should go along with Tana’s plan – and yes, it was Tarra’s plan, now, not his – at the Reaffirmation Ceremony. He had rationalised his own terror of disobeying as mere complicity.

Tarra had accompanied Greyjan to the podium, while Kelien had reluctantly accompanied Kreiner up the access lifts to the roof of the Panopticon, where, on Tana’s signal, they had released the remembrance flowers stored in the gantries for state funerals. The more he got involved in this plan, the more Kelien realised he had lost any idea of why he was doing it.

He should have done what Fitz had done – fled before they got to the Capitol.

Kellen was losing himself. And he had already lost Tana.

Father Kreiner was working with Tarra at an APCN console. Working with Mother Tarra, to be precise. Yes, that was probably what had finally convinced Kelien that he was on a hiding to nothing.

Where had it started to go wrong? thought Kelien. At what point had he realised that the girl was stringing him along for a change? She’d given all the right signals, responded to all his smart comments, tripped the matching dance steps in the usual student courtship rituals.

Rituals. Yes, she’d made all the running there, too. Persuaded him to take the lead from Ressadriand when his college friend had hesitated. That was all she’d wanted – the ritual, not him. And she’d made it seem so plausible, so appropriate, absolutely the right thing, to run the joke with Greyjan. At the time, it had seemed no more shocking than the hypercubes full of obscene limericks he had sent anonymously to the college bursar.

And then there was that thing with Kaufima at the seance. How could he have convinced himself that was an accident? And he’d got caught up in their rush to get to the Panopticon.

And …

He’d been so stupid. This was too serious, he could see that now. He could see that just by looking at Tarra’s lustrous auburn hair, and knowing that, if she turned, he would see her eyes – no longer bashful – peering at him darkly through the ghastly skull mask that grew directly from her face, her lambent skin peeling in thin shreds at the sides.

‘Can you contact the Eleven Day Parliament from here?’ Kreiner was asking her. He stretched his ancient arms upwards, and Kellen could hear servo mechanisms hissing inside the limbs.

Tarra shook her head. ‘No, but Mother Mathara’s Faction warship relays my signal. They will be pleased to learn that you have returned to active service, Father Kreiner.’

Kreiner sighed with satisfaction. ‘I am pleased, too. Though I hate skulking in this place.’

‘We must leave things to Greyjan,’ warned Tarra. ‘Our presence would alert the Time Lords, and we are so, so close to success.’

This was the moment that Kellen made his decision. He took the six sides of a hypercube from his pocket, and swiftly assembled it. Within another minute, he had composed a short message for Lady President Romana, a terse warning about Tarra and Kreiner.

The cube was just dematerialising when he felt Kreiner’s heavy glove on the back of his neck.

‘Bringing the boy was a mistake,’ said Kreiner, his voice a guttural threat.

Tarra smiled sadly at him. Those full red lips were smiling sadly at him, a stark contrast with the bat mask that tore through the upper part of her face. ‘He helped us with the flowers at the ceremony. Thank you, Kellen. You sweet boy.’

Kellen could feel Kreiner’s grip increase on his neck. It was getting hard to breathe.

‘We’re not the only ones hiding, are we, boy?’ asked Kreiner. ‘I hate hiding. Almost as much as I hate Time Lords. And one Time Lord more than most. When I meet up with the Doctor again, the Time Lord who abandoned me all those millennia ago, I will twist his scrawny neck like a —’

Kellen didn’t hear the rest of Kreiner’s words, as the grip increased, snapped his spinal cord cleanly, and severed his head.

* * *

‘Please desist from doing that,’ said Romana. I do believe I shall start shrieking.’

Fitz stopped twiddling his thumbs. All right, so he couldn’t play with his hands, he wasn’t allowed to practise throwing his trilby on to the hat stand, and pacing up and down on the expensive carpet was forbidden because apparently it disrupted the lie of the pile. There was no beer available, lighting up was ‘too, too frightful to entertain’, and the Lady President was no conversationalist. He wondered briefly about a long overdue cutting of his toenails, then decided he couldn’t face having to revive Romana from a dead faint. And he wasn’t entirely sure whether his socks had holes, and who needs that kind of embarrassment?

Yet Fitz knew he had to stay occupied, otherwise he’d end up thinking more. And if he started thinking, he’d remember what Kreiner had told him. How the Doctor had abandoned him in Geneva, left him to the Faction, forgotten him. Should the Doctor have done that?

Would the Doctor have intended it that way? And most of all, could the –

‘Doctor!’ cried Romana, clearly delighted.

Fitz jolted back to the present, expecting to see the familiar green coat and trailing brown hair. Instead, he saw Romana had removed one of her long dangly earrings and was talking to it. Had she gone bonkers? Fitz’s first instinct on arriving earlier had been to search for communications equipment and try to contact the Doctor. Romana had advised him that all the systems would be monitored by Timon – that was what she’d have done in his place. So maybe it wasn’t such a surprise to discover that she had secreted a communicator in her jewellery.

‘You found my personal frequency? Ah, Nivet, of course.’

Fitz budged up tighter to Romana on the chaise longue. She stiffened perceptibly at the contact, but continued to talk with the Doctor through the earring. At least Fitz could hear what the Doctor was saying now.

‘… need equipment and help to control the Edifice. This could be what you need in the forthcoming War with the Enemy, instead of Compassion. The Edifice could be the best defence mechanism that Gallifrey requires.’

‘Or the best weapon?’ From her voice, Fitz thought, the Doctor would be able to hear Romana was smiling broadly, mocking him in some way. ‘However, I am a little indisposed at the moment, Doctor. Where are you?’

‘I’m aboard my TARDIS.’

Fitz saw Romana contain her delighted gasp, so that the Doctor would not notice. ‘The 102?’

‘Well, I will be so long as Combat Elite Mali decides not to knife me to death.’

‘Mali,’ rapped Romana. “The Doctor is not to be harmed. So long as he is not lying to us.’

‘Thanks very much,’ grumbled the Doctor.

There was a pause, and some muttering in the background. The Doctor was obviously getting Mali to speak. Eventually, another woman’s voice said, ‘I believe he is telling the truth, Lady President. Despite my reservations about his Faction nature. Are there any signs from the E monitor, ma’am?’

‘That’s enough, Mali!’ snapped Romana. Fitz could see she was irritated.

The Doctor must have noticed it too, because he said, ‘This E monitor. I’ve heard it mentioned a few times now. What is it?”

Fitz watched Romana think about this for several long seconds. ‘Tragdorvigan is scanning the higher dimensions.’

Another pause. Eventually, the Doctor said, ‘Yes, and …?’

Romana gave a little sigh. ‘Oh, all right, Doctor. Our psivestigator Tragdorvigan is conducting regular scans for any evidence of the first assault by the Enemy. Whoever and wherever they are, we want to know about it.’

‘Hush hush, I take it?’ said the Doctor’s voice. Fitz could hear some amusement in it.

‘Otherwise the Time Lords would have given it a more pompous name, and made a song and dance about it.’

‘As you can imagine,’ said Romana, ‘it’s not the sort of thing we like to make public. Is it, Mali?’ she added in an acid tone.

‘No, ma’am,’ Mali’s voice said contritely from the communicator.

‘Very well.’ Romana licked her top lip, which Fitz found distracttngly sensuous. ‘Now, what else can you tell me, Doctor?’

‘Well, Nivet here is making a first class job of steering Compassion. We should all be with you shortly.’

‘What of Vozarti and the others?’

A short pause, and then: ‘I’m afraid we seem to be the only survivors. The creatures that inhabit the Edifice have killed pretty indiscriminately.’

‘Creatures?’

‘Twisted remnants of the life forms left aboard this … place before it changed. And now that the Edifice is surging between dimensions, the time fluctuations are more unstable and the number and size of the creatures is increasing. So we’re returning to Gallifrey now.’

Romana set her mouth in a grim line. ‘Very well. Though there are some things you should know, Doctor.’ She briefly summarised the situation, including Fitz’s role in identifying Greyjan’s true nature. The Doctor sounded absolutely delighted to hear Fitz was present, and they spent a minute or two exchanging inconsequential pleasantries until Romana interrupted with an irritated coughing noise.

‘Well, I believe I am paying for this call.’

‘Believe me, Doctor,’ Romana grumbled. ‘I’m feeling the cost. Now, can you find a way to reach us here?’

There was a longish pause while the Doctor evidently consulted with his fellow travellers.

‘We’ll be with you shortly,’ he announced. ‘Or at least, Nivet and Compassion will. I need to find out precisely what Greyjan is really up to.’

Fitz leaned forward and talked into Romana’s open palm. ‘I can guess how you’re going to do that. The usual bull in a china shop routine.’

Romana withdrew her hand daintily, and waved him away with a small gesture of her other fingers. He stood up with ill grace and walked over to sit at the table instead.

‘Something like that,’ he could hear the Doctor saying. ‘I do believe that Combat Elite Mali will be arresting me and presenting me in person to the new President.’

‘Is your plan wise, Doctor?’ asked Romana, the doubt evident in her voice.

‘Are they ever?’ said Fitz to himself.

‘Trust me,’ he replied. ‘I’m the Doctor.’

He was saying something else, but Fitz was distracted by the sound of a TARDIS arriving.

He half expected to see a shape materialising in the corner of Romana’s exquisitely furnished quarters, which would annoy her by crushing her expensive carpet. But the familiar noise didn’t get much louder, and he was startled when a delicate white cube slowly appeared out of thin air on the onyx table.

He picked it up, and the lid seemed to flip up and then snap firmly shut again. He tried prising it open with a dirty thumbnail, but couldn’t even find a seam to work into.

‘I think you’ll find,’ said Romana, ‘that the hypercube is addressed to me.’ She had reattached her earring, and now plucked the delicate cube from Fitz’s fingers.

She placed the hypercube on her palm, and it immediately unfolded for her. She dosed her eyes, and raised her chin. Fitz thought, not for the first time, how pretty she looked with her pale skin set off by her vermilion lips and sharply defined line of straight cut black hair.

After a minute, she opened her eyes again. The cube seemed to dissolve on her palm, and she dusted the cindery remains between her palms with a brisk action. She was allowed to make a mess on the carpet, Fitz noted.

‘I have no idea who Kellen is, but he seems very concerned about Mother Tarra and Father Kreiner.’

‘Kellen,’ pondered Fitz. Was it for real, or another trick?

‘Still,’ said Romana brightly, arranging herself back on the chaise longue. ‘No use worrying about that until Nivet arrives. I do hope the Doctor knows what he’s doing with Greyjan. It would be so embarrassing if things didn’t work out.’

‘Why’s that?’ asked Fitz, knowing he’d regret it.

‘Well, he doesn’t seem to have much time for other Time Lord Presidents. I at least had the good sense to let him think I was retiring gracefully. How will he react when the Doctor marches in and confronts him?’

Fitz wondered why she was smiling.

Chapter Thirty three

Who to blame

Vice President Timon watched his new President with a mixture of awe and apprehension. It was bound to be an awkward time, he told himself, as a new Head of State and Master of the Three Gallifreys settled into his role. What could he expect after only a few hours?

Well, he told himself, perhaps he’d expect the new President to stay awake during his first High Council meeting. He had settled not so much into his role as into his grand Presidential chair, plumping up the cushions and slumping into it casually before dozing off. The Councillors of Time Past, Present, Parallel and Future had seemed much less comfortable, particularly when they were pledging their private allegiances to the Lord President at the beginning of the Council session and could hardly hear themselves for his snoring. At least the absent Castellan Vozarti was spared this indignity, and he would doubtless have suffered it less gladly than the others.

The Chancellors were even more dismayed when Lord President Greyjan had awoken with a particularly loud snort, taking them in with one sweeping, baleful glance, and dismissed them on the spot, spluttering, from his chambers. At this point, he’d also eyed up Timon – eyed up being the operative phrase, since the left one seemed to have a life of its own and rolled around the room as the right eye focused on the Vice President.

Then Greyjan had shaken his substantial jowls and barked at Timon, ‘You’d better stay, Timon old man. I’m a bit rusty with the old Matrix, and you may have to help me plug into the damn thing properly. But first of all, let me have forty winks, would you? Come back in half an hour.’

Thus it was that, some hours later, Timon was watching his new President sifting through the Matrix. ‘Just to get up to speed after all these years, old boy.’

The Lord President looked ghastly, decided Timon, almost corpse like. Which would be appropriate for someone allegedly long dead. And yet behind the languid mannerism and the blustering speech, Timon detected a firm resolve and an edge of steel in his good eye when it looked at him. Into him, even.

Certainly, Lord Greyjan was starting to take him into his confidence in a way that he did not do with the other High Councillors, in a way that even the Lady Romana never had (and she was the high priestess of consensus politics – the seventh way, she had once called it). He had provided clarification and support to Lord Greyjan on a number of questions prompted by the President’s investigation of the Matrix.

It reinforced all Timon’s personal hopes. He had been unable to confess his own growing faith in the superstitions of Gallifrey. His High Council colleagues would have denounced them as treasonable, and so Timon had hidden his true feelings by excessively condemning anyone who gave the slightest hint that they believed in magic, chance or the supernatural.

Overcompensation, perhaps. And perhaps, too, he was trying to convince himself that there was really nothing to the legends. But at heart, in the very core of his beliefs, Timon knew that he looked to Sabjatric and Rungar, the Pythian Heresy, the legend of Cuwirti and Klade as much as most of the population.

And he had conducted his own personal research into the story of the shortest lived Gallifreyan President. It was his obsession with Greyjan the Sane. So for Greyjan to re emerge at this time of crisis was like a revelation to Timon. His own time, it seemed, had arrived.

‘What’s this, then?’ growled Lord Greyjan, interrupting Timon’s reverie. There’s evidence here of some kind of axiomatic encapsulation within four dimensional parameters.’ The President threw a mental image on to a nearby display screen, with the air of discarding a chicken bone. And, like a faithful dog, Timon pounced on it.

‘That, Lord Greyjan, appears to be the bottle universe we … er … obtained.’

‘Don’t pussyfoot around, Timon,’ rumbled Greyjan. ‘If we stole it, tell me who we robbed, and where it was.’

Timon coughed apologetically. ‘We stole it from Foreman’s World.’

‘And from whom?’

‘Well,’ pondered Greyjan. ‘I suppose Foreman’s World was actually the owner, too. Sentient biosphere, you see, er …’

‘Yes, all right. And this four dimensional Klein bottle contained an entire universe?’

Timon nodded eagerly. ‘Yes. Well, a modest one at any rate. We thought that, all things considered …’

‘… it was a bolt hole for times of crisis?’ Greyjan chuckled deep in his throat. ‘Somewhere to hide if this unknown Enemy became too overwhelming?’

Timon smiled modestly. ‘Well, along with the possibility of moving to the other Gallifrey.’

Greyjan sighed. ‘In my day, we considered creating as many as eight or nine other Gallifreys.’

‘We have only one,’ said Timon. “The bottle universe was just a further precaution.’

‘Quite a prize. I hope you keep it somewhere safer than the unfortunate Foreman.’

‘Absolutely, sir,’ agreed Timon, desperate to please. ‘Where safer than the local space time vortex, over which we have such complete control and —’

He broke off. For the first time, Lord Greyjan had sat bolt upright in his grand chair and was gripping its arms so tightly that his pale knuckles went even whiter. For a terrible moment, Timon thought the President was suffering some kind of embolism as colour flooded his cadaverous cheeks and his lazy eye rolled in his head. Eventually he spat out one word:

‘Safe?’ He went a bit more purple and bellowed ‘Safe!’ once more.

So it was almost a relief when two figures burst unexpectedly into the room and stood before the President.

‘Combat Elite Mali,’ announced the one holding the worryingly large knife. ‘I’ve brought you this renegade, Lord President.’

‘Ah,’ said Timon to Greyjan, indicating Mali’s prisoner. ‘Perhaps I should introduce you to the Doctor.’

* * *

It was obvious the moment the Doctor clapped eyes on him that Lord President Greyjan was insane. At first, he had been prepared to allow Greyjan the benefit of the doubt. But the more he listened to the bioform creature masquerading as the former President, the more clear it became: Lord Greyjan – the shortest lived President of Gallifrey, newest President of Gallifrey, Greyjan the Sane from a previous age – was quite mad.

Even Timon seemed embarrassed by Greyjan’s eccentric behaviour. The Vice President had almost welcomed the intrusion when Mali had bustled into the room with her prisoner.

Greyjan had initially seemed not to notice, and was rambling on about four dimensional leakage, strange radiations from Paradox, and dread creatures.

At one stage Greyjan’s mumblings resolved themselves, and he spoke clearly: ‘Conceptual creatures that thrive on the energies of the space time continuum. A force is coming that none can withstand! None shall survive!’ His voice dropped to a harsh whisper. ‘None would choose to live through this.’

The Doctor could see Timon’s unease reaching such a level that the Vice President was ready to usher the newcomers out of the room, away from the spectacle of his President’s apparent descent into lunacy. So the Doctor interrupted in a loud and commanding voice, directed straight at Greyjan: “These creatures, Lord President. Did you see them before?’

Greyjan snapped around his good eye, and his jowls quivered fearfully. ‘Yes!’ He seemed to have a focus now: he was concentrating on the sight of the Doctor.

So the Doctor shook off Timon’s restraining hand, waved away his protective duckings, and moved to stand right in front of the Presidential chair. He stared Greyjan right in the face.

‘Was that why you took your own life all those years ago, Greyjan?’

The President seemed strangely composed now. The flush was leaving his cheeks. ‘I used to lecture at the Academy, Doctor, in lighter times,’ Greyjan said, ‘on the origins of life.’ He cleared his throat and looked around the room as if at a large imaginary audience.

‘I believe that all life throughout the universe descended from a single ancestor cell,’ he began. “The evidence is clear: every known organism shares a common physical and chemical system – and genetic instructions are implemented using a universal code of chirality, whether life be silicon based, or organic. Are we to believe this complexity of nature arose in isolation again and again? No, such properties were present in that very first cell that survived the hostility of its spawning ground, and we, its descendants, inherited and adapted them.’

‘He’s treating us like children,’ Mali whispered, as the lecture went on.

‘Don’t disturb him,’ the Doctor murmured. ‘Perhaps the answer came to him talking to kindergarten classes.’ Then an idea gripped him. ‘Or perhaps he’s simply reciting the words just as he rehearsed them. This Greyjan has been remembered back into existence, and these words along with him.’

Mali frowned. ‘Well, I don’t believe any of this. It’s insane, there’s nothing to substantiate —

’

True or false, it’s irrelevant,’ muttered the Doctor. ‘Greyjan is clearly convinced, and the Faction clearly need him to do something … his theories on the Enemy drove him to suicide, they were his key motivation. The Faction may be using those fears to motivate him now, to their own ends.’ He paused. “The way they manipulate everyone.’

‘No talking at the back!’ Greyjan wagged a stern finger at his class. ‘Now, this last common ancestor should not be confused with the first living thing, of course. Who knows what exotic biochemical systems those first born organisms employed, dragged to the prebiotic precipice and thrown over the edge? Who knows how different, how utterly alien, their genetic codes could be?’ He suddenly looked uneasy. “These organisms died out of course, aeons before they could develop sentience. Only their barest traces exist to tell us they even survived the endless firestorms of the fledgling universe.’

Greyjan’s voice slowed to a halt, and he was left standing silently like a waxwork. ‘Come on,’ the Doctor muttered. ‘We’re just getting to the good bit.’

Greyjan abruptly leaned forward and started up again, his tone growing increasingly hysterical. ‘Now, leave those precious cells lost unknowing in space and consider what we have done to our universe with our knowledge of time travel. Consider the pollution of our TARDIS trails through the wastes of the vortex. Consider the fierce energies of temporal paradox we have created, over and over, searing through the fabric of space time. Blithely we go on, bending time to our will, siphoning the power of singularity and squirting it back out to irradiate the universe!’ He paused, panting for breath. ‘And those ancient, forsaken cells feel those energies. And find that they can grow …’

Mali looked up at the Doctor, unease prickling down her back. He was nodding. ‘They grow into life so utterly alien, so impossible to fathom!’

Greyjan nodded. ‘So perfectly inimical to our own, that to label them with a race name would seem wholly inappropriate, don’t you think?’ He smiled sadly. “They’re just the Enemy.’

‘You foresaw them coming?’ Mali asked.

‘My studies of Paradox Theory, of the order in chaos, led me to suspect what was to come,’

Greyjan agreed, smiling at the irony of his predicament. ‘I wanted no part of it.’

‘Even assuming any of this can be true,’ the Doctor said, ‘why Gallifrey’s Enemy?’ He turned to Timon. ‘What did you do, eh?’

‘They dropped the universe in a bottle,’ Greyjan chuckled dryly. ‘They broke it.’

‘No!’ interrupted Timon. ‘We secured it in the space time vortex.’

‘Imbeciles!’ barked Greyjan. ‘It’s a four dimensional Klein bottle. It contains a discrete area of three dimensional space only if it remains in three dimensions. You put it in a four dimensional space, where it has only one surface. It was no longer sealed once you subjected it to the higher dimensional forces of the vortex.’

Timon dropped down into the nearest council seat, his face deathly white.

‘Like throwing an uncorked wine bottie into an ocean at full swell,’ said the Doctor quietly.

‘Imbeciles,’ repeated Greyjan furiously. ‘It would leak untold amounts of unknown energy into our closed cosmos.’

‘Had I known you’d wanted it,’ the Doctor told Timon, his voice low and dangerous, ‘I’d have taken it from Foreman’s World while I had the chance.’

‘Dumped it on their own doorsteps, the silly asses,’ Greyjan went on. ‘But the energy spread, out through the vortex, to heaven knows where. It nourished this new life, let them grow, develop – adapting to a universe riddled with chronon decay and paradox, sidestepping millions of years of evolution simply by taking paths that did not exist before Gallifrey reached out its fildiy fingers to pull the universe apart.’ He chuckled, but there was little humour in it. “There’s always a price to be paid for progress, isn’t there?’

‘Doctor,’ Mali said, a horrible thought occurring to her. ‘What if the representation of the bottle in the heathland —’

She didn’t have to finish. The colour had already drained from the Doctor’s cheeks. “The Edifice,’ he whispered. ‘My ship, it’s rebuilt itself around the leaking bottle. It must’ve used those same energies to sustain itself.’

Timon clasped his hands together. ‘We feel the emanations of its power distorting this sector of space keenly enough. How much more acutely will the Enemy feel its effect!’

Mali stared round at them all in turn. ‘And that’s why the Enemy’s coming here? Why they’re going to start the War?’

‘If they’re that alien to us,’ the Doctor said desperately, ‘then perhaps they have no concept of war. Perhaps the first blows landed were never intended as such. You must communicate with them, make them see you come in peace …’

‘Enough, Doctor!’ Timon ordered. At last, thought the Doctor, it seemed the Vice President saw something he could seize on to, something to use. ‘You presume to instruct us on our diplomacy? You dare to involve yourself, you, a renegade, half Faction changeling?’

The Doctor looked down at the floor, apparently unable to answer back.

‘Whatever happens now, Doctor, whoever the Enemy may be, you are as much to blame as anyone else,’ Timon shouted. ‘It was you who brought them upon us. It was you who started this War!’

Chapter Thirty four

Future history

Fitz looked up as a quiet bleeping started up from behind the ornate door of Romana’s room.

Someone was coming – but friend or foe? Whatever, they had a chance for a break out. He swung his long legs off the bunk, but Romana flashed him a dangerous look, one that so eloquently conveyed a sense of stay back leave this to me don’t get in the way mess this up and I’ll kill you, that Fitz slumped back on his bed and pretended he was asleep, that nothing was happening. Let the President worry about it. He supposed she was paid well enough.

‘You,’ he heard her say, with a strength of feeling he couldn’t decipher. His eyes snapped open so he could see why. ‘Compassion!’ he breathed, a grin spreading over his face. ‘You’re the most beautiful thing I ever saw, do you know that?’

Compassion looked sourly at him. “That means a lot to me, Fitz.’

‘How did you get in?’ Fitz asked; then noticed the stocky blue eyed blond feller standing beside Compassion.

‘At a guess, she altered the pattern of her retina until she found the one it accepted,’ the man remarked. Then he frowned at something behind him. “That and practically breaking the neck of this poor guard.’

‘Bring him inside,’ Compassion snapped, and the man obeyed.

‘Who’s your friend, Compassion?’ Fitz asked, civil but wary – the guy was bigger than he was, after all.

‘Meet Nivet, my best technician,’ Romana said, utterly unfazed by the rescue and cutting straight to the chase. She stepped neatly over the guard’s body even as Nivet dumped it by her feet. ‘Nivet, I’m concerned as to the stability of the Matrix with this Greyjan construct about. I presume he’ll still have access?’

Nivet considered. ‘Conceivably. But then, so will you. I doubt it’s occurred to anyone to block your Presidential privileges just yet.’

Romana flashed him a glance that could freeze liquid hot magma. ‘I should hope not.’

‘You think the Faction want something from the Matrix?’ Nivet asked.

‘Maybe we do, maybe we don’t.’ Fitz hoped to impress the newcomer with what he hoped was an air of mystery, not ignorance. ‘Whatever, they’re planning something big.’

‘We need to know more,’ Romana decided. ‘Nivet, can you find the rooms of Chancellor Kandarl?’

‘The Lady Tana’s father?’

‘Take it from me: she ain’t no lady,’ Fitz said, deadpan.

Nivet shrugged and angled his head to indicate Compassion. ‘She’ll nave a map on board.’

‘All right, then. Go with her and search for anything you think could be important.’

‘A big dossier marked “Secret Plan” would be good,’ Fitz added.

Nivet stooped and pulled the staser from the unconscious guard’s holster. ‘I’ll need this.

Donated mine to the Combat Elite,’ he explained. ‘She didn’t feel dressed without one.’

The words would normally have caught Fitz’s interest in a moment, but he was too distracted now by the way Compassion was looking at Romana. ‘For what you’ve tried to do to me, I should kill you,’ she said quietly.

‘You belong to us,’ Romana purred, unafraid. ‘Our future history decrees it.’

Compassion didn’t blink. ‘I will never belong to you. Nor to anyone else. For the moment, Nivet has overridden my motive circuits, but I’ll find a way to free myself.’ She clenched her fists. ‘Your history means nothing to me. This is my time.’

Fitz found himself strangely moved. You tell them, girl.

Romana smiled sweetly. ‘Then I must use you while I can, mustn’t I? Now go. Be off, the pair of you.’

‘Watch her, Fitz,’ Compassion said, and stomped off without another glance. Nivet sighed and followed her out.

Fitz felt suddenly awkward. Romana swished over to the door, but he hesitated to follow.

‘Well, Fitz?’ Romana asked, turning to face him. ‘You can’t watch me from over there.

Aren’t you coming?’

Fitz looked nervously into Romana’s sea green eyes. ‘What if Tarra’s holed up there? Isn’t she going to object to someone rooting through her stuff? She might have just tidied up or something.’

Romana sighed impatiently. ‘She’ll be hiding under a stone until she’s ready to come out. It’s the Faction’s way.’

‘So what are you and me doing then?’

‘We’ll search her quarters.’

Fitz sighed. ‘If we find any stones there, we’re leaving them well alone, OK?’

* * *

They hurried through the corridors of the Capitol, Romana sending Fitz on ahead at every junction to confirm that the way was clear while she waited out of sight. The place could’ve been designed for fugitives, there were that many alcoves and dark corners and conveniently placed statues and pot plants.

Fitz felt less confident, though, when he realised he recognised the hall they were moving through from his mad flight through it the night before. They seemed to be heading right for the Panopticon. When he commented as much, Romana merely nodded.

‘Are you crazy?’ Fitz demanded. ‘There’s bound to be guards all over the place.’

She turned to him, and those eyes of hers drilled right through his own. ‘Gallifrey’s not like your barbarous little planet,’ Romana snapped. ‘Even after the Dalek invasion I couldn’t get the High Council to agree to a permanent, fully trained fighting force here. I’m surprised they even bothered with a guard outside our door.’ She sighed. “They know the War is approaching. It’s such a struggle to get any concession past the dinosaurs on my …’ She faltered. ‘On my council. I’ve warned them again and again that Gallifrey can no longer afford to sit back in indolence and look at the universe about it: it has to act, to —’

‘All right, Your Ladyship, all right,’ Fitz said, trying to calm her down before fate could be tempted, sending a whole platoon along the corridor to bang them back up again. ‘Fair enough, this is your manor, you know best.’

‘It’s the quickest route through,’ Romana said, composed again. ‘We’ll use one of the access corridors, and stick to the shadows.’

‘Always assuming Mother Tarra and her Faction haven’t taken them all away,’ Fitz said sullenly.

Romana led them to a patch of marbled wall which split silently open to reveal a doorway.

Gallifrey clearly wasn’t fond of displaying its tradesmen’s entrances. Romana stood inside it, and began floating gently up and out of sight. Alarmed, Fitz ran into the alcove to see what she was doing – and found with a surge of queasiness that he was floating too.

‘Quite a view, isn’t it?’ he heard Romana say above him. Looking up automatically, he realised he could see right up her dress.

She was right, though: the view into the Panopticon was breathtaking. Riding up in Charlie’s great glass elevator, Fitz could see it all laid out before him. It was strange how different it seemed now that the people had cleared away: the sheer emerald walls, the vast floor space, the florid murals carved into the sides of the towering podium Romana had gazed out from just hours earlier –and the statues, of course …

Oh Christ. Something was very wrong here.

‘I don’t remember that statue,’ Fitz said nervously. They were so high up he was almost looking the nearest giant stone figure in the eyes. ‘It looks kind of like the Doctor! His hair’s a bit short … ‘While the great stone figure was sporting a crew cut instead of the more familiar tumbling curls, the resemblance was undeniable. ‘Who is it, one of his ancestors or something?’

‘No, it’s the Doctor,’ Romana said lightly. ‘It’s always been the Doctor.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Fitz protested. ‘You didn’t say he was one of your five statues earlier.’

‘What do you mean, five?’ She sounded vaguely amused. “There’s only ever been four, one for each of the colleges who built the Panopticon.’

Fitz felt his stomach lurch as he looked down and saw how far up they’d come. Maybe Romana was right, and this was some weird effect of vertigo, or … No. As he looked around he realised the whole layout of the place was different. There were four walls now, not five as before. A statue, a corner, and about a quarter of a mile of standing room seemed to have vanished. Fitz knew TARDISes could do that sort of thing, but surely …

‘Stop mucking around,’ Fitz insisted. ‘It had five walls and as many statues, we talked about it!’

‘Four, Fitz.’ Romana’s tone suggested this was the end of an idiotic conversation, but Fitz wasn’t having it. Another soft, posh Time Lady voice was speaking to him too, from a little further back.

‘I remember talking to Tana about Gallifrey’s special number … six.’

‘Preposterous,’ Romana snorted. ‘She’s Faction, you idiot.’

‘She said there were six colleges, six statues!’

‘This is getting tiring, Fitz. The statues are just the same as they’ve always been. The Doctor, the Other …’

‘No!’ Fitz was almost laughing in his frustration. ‘Can’t you see it? It’s all changed! This place is square!’

‘Naturally.’ She stepped off midair and on to a walkway of blue copper, her footsteps echoing lazily around the empty hall.

‘No!’ He followed her on to the walkway and chased after her. The air was colder up so high, and Fitz’s arms were already puckered with gooseflesh. ‘You just can’t see it, can you? Your history’s being torn away and rewritten and you really can’t see it! Your precious Panopticon had five walls earlier. Now it’s got four. What if tomorrow you find it’s got three, and you start telling me that three is the basis of all Time Lord society, huh? You’re not going to worry about this until there are only two sides and it closes on you with an almighty bang, like a book slamming shut on you …’ He dapped his hands together for effect and it sounded like a pistol crack. ” The End!’

Romana came to an impatient halt, then spun round to face him. ‘What could cause such a phenomenon?’

Fitz realised he was out of breath from his exertion. Perhaps the oxygen was thinner up here.

Perhaps he should exercise once in a while. ‘You tell me,’ he puffed. ‘I’m just an Earth primitive who can count to five.’

‘It’s an intriguing thought,’ Romana admitted. ‘A great influx of energy … forcing Gallifrey’s continuum in on itself, collapsing it to a singularity …’

‘Could that happen?’ Fitz asked nervously.

‘Of course it couldn’t; Romana snapped. “There have been temporal pulses washing over Gallifrey for months now, but they’ve only ever caused minor interference with our operations rooms.’

Fitz shuffled his feet. ‘Maybe they’ve got worse.’

Romana’s eyes narrowed. ‘Maybe you’ve got altitude sickness. Five sides, indeed. Now come on.’

She moved off, her black dress flirting with the shadows all around them. Fitz shivered and let her arse lead him onward. He should’ve stuck to just looking up her dress in the first place; maybe then he wouldn’t be bricking himself up here.

* * *

‘If you weren’t dampening my dematerialisation circuit I could take us straight there,’

Compassion complained.

Nivet didn’t stop walking. ‘Of course you would. Via half the known universe I’d imagine.’

‘We could go together,’ she said lightly. ‘With your … technical interests, don’t you think you’d find the experience fascinating?’ She placed a hand on his shoulder to stop him, and let it linger there. ‘It’s not a trick. Your background leads me to believe you could … understand me. Help me to develop.’ She smiled, a smile that actually reached her eyes. ‘Wouldn’t you like to form an … empathic link with me?’

Nivet looked into her wide grey eyes and wondered. He could make them blue instead, or brown. Change her hair from ginger to dark, lose the freckles, take in the chubby cheeks …

Make her look like anyone he wanted. Enjoy something that was truly unique. He started to smile back at her, but as the possibilities went on occurring to him, he found his lips felt more comfortable with the beginnings of a sneer.

‘Sorry, Compassion, I can’t see it working. I’m not sure there’s anything in this universe you could empathise with.’

Compassion casually withdrew her hand, but her smile remained in place. Her apparent serenity bothered Nivet: he had the feeling she knew something he didn’t. It gnawed at him all the way to Kandari’s rooms, where the dark red of the door matched his mood.

Compassion, just as when they had freed Romana and Fitz, allowed her left eye to change shape and colour, presenting a bright green iris in a white almond to the entry coder. Nivet imagined her morphing through a million combinations of retina patterning, and marvelled once again at how technology he could barely begin to grasp was being used so intuitively.

Efficiently, too –a minute or so later, the crimson of the door was retreating into the pastel white of its housing.

A skull faced woman was framed in the doorway. Nivet just had time to realise the retina scans that had denied them access would’ve alerted Mother Tana to their presence, before the back of her hand smacked into his face. The force of the blow swiped him off the ground, and before he could even cry out, the back of his head had exploded into a brief but brilliant display of light. Nothing took its place but the darkness.

* * *

Tana looked on in pleasure as Compassion crouched over Nivet protectively.

‘So you’re the new TARDIS … Clearly you care for the young man who would control you

… What a divine little paradox you are.’

Compassion straightened up, turned and scowled. ‘I had plans for him.’

‘We have plans for you, Tobin.’

‘Get in line,’ Compassion hissed, raising her arm and moving forward to strike.

Then she stopped, frozen in midair.

Tarra laughed, and drew closer. ‘You can’t harm us. You belong to us, we control you …’

She held up her ivory control box and tapped one of her talons against it. ‘You are of the Remote. You have been marked for our service.’ She caressed Compassion’s auburn hair.

‘When the time comes, a little Faction biodata will be inserted into every new TARDIS you create for us. Our power shall grow … and grow … and grow …’

Tana could see the cold anger rising in Compassion’s eyes, and sniggered. ‘Such things we shall do to you, my dear.’

Chapter Thirty five

Eternal kill

‘Passing the blame really is a waste of time, don’t you think?’ the Doctor said crossly. ‘And I’m not sure there’s much left.’ He looked at Greyjan, aware that Mali’s influence wouldn’t protect him here for much longer. The President was still staring into space – or two spaces really, one with each eye, his mouth open as if about to speak. ‘What’s this really about, Greyjan?’ the Doctor demanded. ‘You saw the War might come and you turned your back on it; you knew we’d find out about it in due course … so that can’t be why you’ve come back.

And you threw power away when you killed yourself so long ago, so why would you pursue it again now – and in your condition?’

Timon glared at him. ‘You will show respect to the President, Doctor.’

‘If he earns it, certainly,’ the Doctor countered. ‘So explain to me, Grcyjan. Greyjan?’

Everyone waited in the uncomfortable silence, until the Doctor lost patience and spoke again, more urgently now. ‘I’m close to becoming a Faction agent myself, so I can recognise that you are not. So what are you, Lord Greyjan? A diversion, an aberration sent to muddy the waters?’ He advanced on Greyjan’s throne. ‘No, there has to be some significance about you, something special. You’re a construct supplied by the Faction to perform a specific task.’ He marched over to Greyjan, waved a hand furiously in front of the man’s eyes. ‘So what am I missing? Hello? Are you there?’

‘Restrain him!’ roared Timon.

The Doctor realised he’d gone too far again, pushed his luck. He wasn’t thinking clearly. He could feel the virus egging him on, wearing him down, hoping to exhaust him, getting ready to claim him when at last he was defenceless, taking possession, rising up …

A Faction ascension.

The thought cracked through his head like gunfire, then it was gone. As the guards rushed for him, his head throbbing, the Doctor spun round behind Greyjan and held the man’s neck in an armlock.

‘Back off!’ the Doctor snarled.

‘Do as he says,’ Timon instructed the guards, rising painfully out from his own chair. ‘Harm the President, Doctor, and we shall kill you.’

‘I don’t want to harm anybody,’ the Doctor stated, ‘but I’m running out of time, can’t you see that? We need answers!’

‘Do you mind?’ Greyjan said, back with them as if nothing had happened. ‘You’re shouting in my ear. If you’re going to be this bothersome, old man, I’ll talk to you.’

The Doctor gritted his teeth and forced himself to calm down, to let his arm go slack. Greyjan wriggled his head about and took some ragged breaths. The Doctor waited. The chamber remained in tense silence.

‘I’m not sure why they’ve brought me back,’ Greyjan confessed. ‘I can only assume some higher power has decreed I have a part to play.’

‘Then you’re in fine company,’ the Doctor said darkly. ‘Seems Gallifrey as a whole’s quite willing to blame its misfortunes on some higher power. Perhaps because that negates any responsibility for individual actions.” He stared round at the crowded council chamber, at the many guns pointing at his head. ‘All of you only doing your duty, right? Paying lip service to history.’

‘You speak of duty, Doctor, of responsibility,’ Mali said. ‘What of your own? The Edifice is your vessel, and it is helping to start the War. Like it or not, you are responsible.’

The Doctor closed his eyes. ‘No. If you’re so obsessed with where to place the blame, look to your own doorstep! It was Gallifrey’s actions, your single minded pursuit of prophecy, that created this situation —’

‘All right, I accept that!’ Mali was clearly affected by the charged atmosphere in the room.

She tried to stop herself from shaking. ‘But now you have to accept that there’s no time left to change things back the way they were before. That there can be no going back for you.’

‘No going back,’ the Doctor whispered to himself. But he was missing something, he was sure he was missing something. Ascendance, ascendance … ‘Be quiet, please, I have to think

…’

‘I know you’ve fought to the death for Gallifrey before,’ Mali went on. ‘And I know that we turned on you, for reasons we thought were just. You’ve been acting for the sake of your history, for your freedom and for your remaining lives … But Doctor, will you prize all that over the millions who will die in the War if you don’t end all this now?’

‘By letting you kill me?’ the Doctor whispered. ‘You think that will change things here?’

‘It will change the future.’

‘So you can do whatever you like to it!’ retorted the Doctor.

Mali shook her head. “The Edifice responds to you. With you dead, it can give up the struggle at last; it can relinquish the energies it’s stirred up to shore itself. Compassion will be free. You’ll be free of the Faction. You can see that’s best, I think, Doctor … if you’ll only let go …’

‘Timon, old man,’ Greyjan remarked languidly. ‘Silence that silly girl, would you?’

Poised on his master’s every word, Timon clicked his fingers. Three guards brought their guns to bear on Mali. The astonishment on her face, under any other circumstances, might have been amusing.

‘If you want to die, Doctor,’ Greyjan said, ‘you can damn well join the queue.’ His good eye blazed up at his captive with sudden resolve. ‘But let’s puzzle out this affair first, shall we?’

* * *

‘They’re looking for us, then,’ Father Kreiner said, peering at the immobile Type 102, poking her as if to see what a walking TARDIS felt like, ‘the Doctor’s friends.’

‘I suppose they must be.’ Tarra was seated in Kandarl’s ornate chair, reliving the look on his face when it seemed his own daughter had killed him. She sighed. She’d enjoyed being Tana so much she’d actually travelled back over the girl’s life and lived key moments of it herself.

Even now with her bone face shining in the soft light, she felt as if she was Tarra. Beautiful and young again, she’d moved in the highest social circles, enjoyed the favours and attentions of a string of lovers, become accustomed to luxury. It was like nothing she’d ever known.

She dimly remembered fragments of her ancient childhood, in the filth of an overpolluted colony world, right at the end of man’s empire. She had never been beautiful. When she closed her eyes, sometimes, as she was doing now, she saw a frightened young face looking back at her from a dirty mirror, a vivid red scar trailing down one cheek. She raised a youthful hand to the bone now. She’d been glad when the skin had finally wasted away and she’d had nothing tangible to remind her. But even now, she could never truly believe the scar had been only skin deep.

The Faction had taken her, hundreds of years before. She could see their huge warships glinting in the light of abandoned factories burning under the clouds of their own poisons.

They’d promised | her so much. Promised her revenge. She’d been allowed to kill her real father dozens of times, on each occasion arriving just a few seconds further back. She’d made him suffer again and again the same abuses he’d inflicted on her, made him die solidly for days in the end. But it had never been enough. And something of those feelings had resurfaced when she’d slaughtered Tana’s father. She’d wanted him to know it was his daughter killing him, whispering his name all the time it was happening. It had been so hard to resist going back and slaughtering Kandarl again and again.

But she was a grown up now, and she wore her own hard face as a mark of maturity, and to appease the Grandfather. Perhaps, when all plans were finally acted upon, her service would be felt pleasing enough to let her remain a Tana. Until the mirror finally became too dirty to look into and the ghost of the frightened little girl would at last be gone.

She became aware of Kreiner at her side. ‘I think someone else is coming,’ he said, small arm twitching.

‘We’d better be ready.’ Tana let her eyes refocus on the opulence of the world around her.

She decided Tarra would’ve wished to remember Gallifrey the way it was.

* * *

Fitz cursed his aching legs as he and Romana neared Kandarl’s quarters deep in the Elite Cloisters. Tana’s rooms had been empty, and Nivet and Compassion hadn’t got back to them about this place. Either they’d found nothing, or …

‘Look.’ Romana crouched down by the wall. Something had made a huge dent in it, and there was fresh blood there, too. ‘Does Compassion bleed?’

Fitz shook his head. ‘Don’t think so. Not the old fashioned way.’

‘Damn.’ Romana straightened and turned to him. He caught just a flicker of concern in her gaze. ‘If this was the work of the Faction, they’ll be expecting us.’

Right on cue, the door slid open. Fitz had been hoping Tarra would be back in her babe disguise – she’d be a little easier to stomach in that guise – but no such luck. The very sight of her dressed like a woman but with a peeled white head made him want to run, to run and never stop.

The President and the monkey,’ Tarra said, inclining her head as if in humble welcome. ‘A distinguished visit:

‘We’ve not come alone,’ Romana bluffed.

‘Blatant lies from such a prominent politician?’ Tarra tutted. ‘No wonder you fell from office.’

‘I didn’t fall, I was pushed,’ said Romana coldly. Fitz couldn’t believe she was acting so haughty.

‘What happened here?’

‘Your friends came to a sticky end, I fear,’ Tarra said. ‘But don’t be afraid. We can’t be killing you just yet, can we? Such excellent additions to our ranks. We knew you’d come back to us, Fitz.’

Just as Fitz thought things couldn’t get any worse, he saw Kreiner emerge from the room and push in front. ‘Hello, runaway boy,’ came that horrible voice, his own, cracked and filtered as if through a billion Woodbines. ‘So nice to see you again.’

For a split second as Kreiner pushed through, Tarra was off balance. Romana seized her moment and lashed out, her fist connecting noisily with Tarra’s skull. Romana cried out with the pain of impact, while Tarra just swayed backwards. Fitz tried to run, but Kreiner grabbed his shoulder and spun him round. He raised his fist, more to protect himself than anything else; Kreiner simply gripped it and started to squeeze.

‘Wouldn’t hit a poor, one armed old man, would you?’ Kreiner said, putting on a stupid voice. Fitz wanted to burst out crying. ‘Oh, but we did, didn’t we? Old Stumpy the maths teacher. He did go on about the Hun, didn’t he? Remember?’

Fitz staggered back, slipped in the blood on the floor and banged his head on the cold marble.

Kreiner loomed over him, dark and spindly. ‘Luckily, we mellow with age,’ he hissed. Then he grabbed hold of Fitz’s fringe, almost pulling it out by the roots as he lifted his head by it, fingering the hair through his heavy gauntlets as if remembering. Maybe he was. If this thing was thousands of years old, surely he’d have to be bald by now.

Fitz could make out Romana losing her own fight at the periphery of his vision. Fab. This was it, then. He looked up at the man in black, wizened and creaking, and remembered again his teenage dreams of living for ever.

Then Fitz’s head was sent crashing back down against the floor as Kreiner scornfully pushed him away. The cracking noise reminded Fitz of first break at bar billiards. The next thing he knew, he was inside the room, lying on the floor. Someone – Tarra presumably –had trussed him up with ripped shreds of fabric and dumped him on the floor. She must’ve won her knots badge at Girl Guides first time, too – Houdini couldn’t have wriggled out of this little lot.

It didn’t take him long to catch up on what he’d missed.

Tarra was talking to – or rather, at – Romana. ‘We’re going to infect you, Madam President, with the same destructive gene that has tainted the Doctor’s DNA. Then we’ll force regenerate you until you fall to us.’ She grinned, thin lips parting over needle teeth.

‘Your people will follow, flocking to us in legions.’

Fitz wondered why Romana was taking it so calmly, sitting in a chair. Then he realised she’d been tied to it. No hard floor for her shapely backside. Well, Presidential perks, he supposed.

Kreiner was standing in the corner, watching him. Fitz looked away.

Tarra stepped carefully over him, her big bone head looking down at him from on high. ‘And you, Fitz, will make such a delightfully paradoxical Cousin when you take your seat in the Shadow Parliament alongside yourself.’ She chuckled, and Fitz felt sick to the pit of his stomach. ‘You’ll have a father again. The real Father Kreiner.’

The creepy bastard himself said nothing, but he wouldn’t stop staring. Fitz somehow couldn’t imagine them playing footie together on hazy summer evenings. Kreiner would be useless in goal.

He closed his eyes, not sure whether to laugh or to cry. He held it in. Bullies liked to see you cry, his dad had told him. Don’t give them the satisfaction – they’ll soon get bored and leave you alone. Keep smiling, his mum had chipped in. Makes people wonder what you’ve been up to. For a second he saw them standing before him; then he saw Tarra and Kreiner. He had to hold the tears in, though it felt as if he was losing his mind with fear.

‘We must be going,’ Tarra said.

‘Where to?’ Romana challenged.

Tarra smiled again. To the seat of your power: the Council Chamber. A fitting place from which to witness the greatest triumph of the Faction Paradox, don’t you think?’

Chapter Thirty six

Sage of paradox

Mali looked on impatiently as Greyjan played to his audience. ‘I like to think I was the first to catch the whispers of the Faction unfurling themselves into existence,’ he said.

‘Extradimensional terrorism! Such wickedness, such scandal.’ He laughed, and rubbed his hands together, the pockmarked rubber of his cheeks wobbling as he did so. ‘We really had it coming, you know. Pompous lot.’

Mali sighed, quietly. Every few seconds her gaze darted past the guard, who was half watching her with gun at the ready, and over to Tragdorvigan, sitting there seemingly oblivious to the extraordinary scene about him, monitoring the energy levels in the Kasterborous quadrant. It seemed unthinkable, but if an energy wave was to spearhead the Enemy’s first attack it should register on the E monitor first, give them due warning.

Tragdorvigan gazed calmly on, waiting.

Mali was sick of waiting, listening to Greyjan ramble on. At the Doctor’s request he was recalling all he knew about the Faction. Why was Timon indulging the pair of them like this?

The Edifice was the real threat, the root of the evils facing them. Was she the only one prepared to act? Remove the Doctor and you removed both the Edifice and the Enemy in one hit.

She’d kill him herself if she had to, if that was what it took to save her world. Slowly, cautiously, she felt for the gun Nivet had given her.

‘It was a challenge to Gallifrey’s right to rule, don’t you see?’ Greyjan said. ‘And at a time when I was just discovering the true nature of chaos, Doctor, its raw rigidity and the beauty of its patterns. And just as I was a pioneer, so too were the Faction. They championed dissent.

Illogic.’ Greyjan attempted a wry smile, but only the right hand side of his face wanted to respond. ‘A duff note in our Time Lord harmony. And I saw the madness spread and overlaid itself so many times in so many places. At times, at the height of my black, black powers, I saw the universe as a whole, as a whole, I tell you, saw things …’ His eyes began to dart about as if he was suddenly unsure of his surroundings. ‘The most terrible things …’

‘Yes,’ the Doctor urged him. ‘Yes, tell us about the patterns.’

You do that, Mali urged him, mentally, her fingers coiling slowly round her staser. But you’d better be quick.

* * *

Oddly, now Tarra and Kreiner had left the room, Fitz was even more scared. It was the thought of their coming back to get them that chilled him to the bone.

As always when he was terrified, he felt like talking. It was a useful distraction, avoided his wetting himself or blubbing.

‘We’re in big trouble, aren’t we?’

Romana said nothing, but Fitz wasn’t about to let her off the hook that easily. ‘Didn’t you say they were meant to be hiding, not giving us a hiding?’

‘Be quiet, Fitz.’

Fitz obliged for a good ten seconds.

‘What do you reckon they want with your throne room, then?’

‘I wonder if Timon will change his allegiances again and side with the Faction,’ Romana said, sneering at the thought. ‘Pathetic old fool.’

Fitz considered. ‘You’re gutted about that, aren’t you?’ He prided himself on his sensitivity these days.

Romana scoffed bitterly. ‘What I took to be fortitude, strength of character … He’s just sick.

A scared old man searching for hidden meanings in life, pretending there’s something more to life than we see in the run of things.’ Romana snorted. ‘He uses arcane teachings the way a drunken man uses a street lamp.’

‘To piss over?’ hazarded Fitz.

Romana looked at him and sighed. ‘For support rather than illumination. To steady himself.

Just the same as that cadaverous impostor Greyjan the Sane. You saw what pursuit of those unattainables did to him.’

‘Uh huh.’

‘There is no support in life, no mystical meaning,’ Romana said fiercely, as if trying to convince herself. “There’s just your duty to perform and the wheels of time, pushing you on.’

‘I think I’ve been pushed far enough for the time being,’ Fitz said.

There came a sudden grunting from Compassion as if in sympathy. Fitz looked over and saw her arms move a fraction. She looked as if she was taking off one of the mime artists he’d seen in San Francisco, leaning into a wind.

‘Whatever they’ve done to her, she’s breaking through it!’ Fitz breathed. ‘Come on, girl!

Come on!’

* * *

‘The patterns, Lord Greyjan!’ coaxed the Doctor. He was getting somewhere, he could feel it.

‘No!’ The colour abruptly seemed to drain from Greyjan’s face. ‘I’d rather die. That’s what I thought when I last faced them, anyway … Leave it to the Faction. They see it all, they always have … So wretchedly clever, it’s hopeless to try to outsmart them, you know.’

Timon could stay silent no longer. ‘But Lord Greyjan, the Faction are wayward children!

They care nothing for the arts, for the sciences – they are book burning philistines.’

‘Don’t be such an old bore, Timon,’ Greyjan chuckled. ‘Anyway, you’re wrong. Half their science may seem like guff, but it works a lot better for being so. And they don’t burn books.

They just draw over them.’

He mimed a big scribble in the air. ‘Look, another pattern!’ he shouted, delighted, struggling to sit upright in his chair. The Doctor duly allowed him some slack with his arm.

‘But it doesn’t matter, you see,’ Greyjan said, feeling for the Coronet of Rassilon on his balding head. ‘It’s time to step aside, now. Only the Faction are strong enough to inherit the Time Lords’ mantle, to face what is to come.’ He beamed about the room with half his mouth. “They have my vote.’

There was an instant outbreak of shocked murmurs around the room at the President’s scandalous words. Greyjan acknowledged the shocked faces all around him with benign nods.

‘Heresy,’ Timon muttered. ‘This is heresy, Lord President.’

‘It’s pragmatism, you silly old fart,’ Greyjan retorted, his lopsided smile returning as Timon’s jaw dropped still lower and the muttering grew louder.

The Doctor closed his eyes, trying to shut out the madness around him and concentrate.

‘They have my vote,’ Greyjan had said …

‘Vote …’ the Doctor echoed aloud. Then his eyes widened. ‘Ascension! Of course!’ He stared round the room, aware his voice was rising with panic and excitement. ‘We’ve all been fools. We’re being distracted from what’s really in store!’

* * *

All eyes were on the Doctor now, no one was watching her. Mali felt the weight of the cold gun in her sweaty hand.

‘Too much to worry about, too many balls in the air,’ the Doctor went on, a hand clasped to his forehead as if trying physically to hold his thoughts in order. “The Edifice, the Enemy, rumours of War … This is a crucial time, the time of prophecy. Time, Greyjan, time.’

‘Lord Greyjan is the great Sage of Paradox, Timon proclaimed shakily. ‘It is meet he should return to us in a time of temporal turmoil, to put right all that has gone wrong while he has slept. Presently he is simply unwell, that is all.’

‘You found the home of the Faction, didn’t you, Greyjan?’ the Doctor murmured, nodding as if he already knew the answer. ‘The heart of their power.’

‘The Eleven Day Empire,’ Greyjan said, a nostalgic look in his good eye, a mad gleam in the other. ‘Nestled in an improbable eddy in sidereal time, barely detectable.’

‘You knew the Faction stronghold in time … and said nothing?’ Timon was appalled, rage screwing up his gaunt features.

‘I applauded their ingenuity,’ Greyjan confessed. ‘Took their secret to the grave. It gave me great pleasure I must —’

‘Eleven days on the planet Earth in September 1752,’ the Doctor said, cutting across him. ‘A Shadow Parliament, they like to call it.’

‘You too are well informed, Doctor,’ Timon snapped.

‘I was offered a seat there if I could accomplish my task,’ the Doctor replied with equal hostility. ‘To get to the heart of the Edifice. To let its powers build as it responded to my presence. To smear the scent of Time Lord blood into this sector of space to attract the Enemy. They told me it was a weapon to be used against Gallifrey. I wanted to disarm it for you, when all the time …’ He laughed briefly and bitterly. ‘Oh yes, I played my part well enough.’

Mali’s finger tightened on the trigger. The Doctor was babbling, now. This madness had …

to … stop …

‘And me, Doctor?’ Greyjan struggled free of the Doctor’s loosened grip, whirled around to face him, his crown shifting to a jaunty angle. Mali cursed – he was blocking her line of fire.

‘Have you fathomed my part in all this?’

The Doctor pointed at him in accusation. ‘You know it yourself, now, don’t you?’

Greyjan nodded, feverishly.

‘Listen to me, everyone!’ The Doctor ran over to Timon, who stared disbelieving up at him.

The guards didn’t react, waiting to see what would come next. Mali brought up the gun but hesitated. All her instincts were screaming to her that she had to hear this. Only the monitoring technician was still resolute at his station, refusing to be drawn into the drama unfolding around him.

‘The period of Greyjan’s Presidency,’ the Doctor said, ‘while the briefest in Tune Lord history, spanned those Earth relative days in September 1752.’ He paused, theatrically, letting the information sink in. ‘I believe that Faction Paradox have deciphered the chaos of the Enemy’s first assault. Whatever unknowable energies are released, they plan to use them

– drawing on Greyjan’s ancient access codes now active again in the Matrix – to overlay their Shadow Parliament directly here.’ He shouted round at the assembly and the fresh outbreak of scandalised mutterings as if worried those about him might be deaf. ‘Here! The heart of the Faction’s power, here on Gallifrey!’

‘Preposterous, Doctor,’ Timon said, but his frail voice betrayed his fear.

‘No. No. They can do it. The Faction took Greyjan’s data extract, they fashioned him and buried just one purpose in his higher consciousness.’ The Doctor started to advance on Greyjan. ‘To restructure the probability matrices to their own design!’

‘I say, am I doing it now, without even realising?’ Greyjan asked, clearly delighted. ‘How wonderful of me. How wonderfully clever.’

The Doctor lunged for the coronet, but Greyjan slapped away his hands and jumped up, starting to dance round the Council Chamber. ‘Let it come!’ he shouted. ‘Let the Sour Time be upon us.’

Timon moved up out of his chair, made a feeble grab for Greyjan, missed and fell forward on to the Council table. ‘Guards!’ he wheezed. ‘The President is unwell, restrain him!’

Greyjan jumped on to a chair, howling with laughter. The ancient jewels in the coronet he wore started to glow a deep ruby red.

The Doctor staggered back from the chaos as each of the guards ran to obey, charging about after Greyjan as if playing some mad game. ‘What are you waiting for, Mali?’ shouted the Doctor. ‘Stop him! Use that stupid gun you were subtly trying to shoot me with, before it’s too late!’

He knew everything as usual, and Mali felt herself flush even as she took careful aim, tracing Greyjan’s frantic movements with the staser barrel. Greyjan’s red, puffing face was a vivid target. She squeezed on the trigger.

Then something hard hit the back of her neck, knocking her to the ground. Her training kicked in: she rolled forward easily, turning to face her assailants – a woman with some kind of skull mask and a figure in black widi one arm.

Everyone in the chamber came to a breathless halt, like children caught playing somewhere they shouldn’t, silent with guilt.

Timon began to splutter with impotent rage. ‘Who would dare …?’

‘Oh, they would,’ said the Doctor, his voice ringing round the Council Chamber. ‘The Faction advance guard, I take it,’

The skull faced woman snapped her withered jaws together. ‘I am Mother Tarra.’

‘Guards!’ yelped Timon. ‘Shoot to kill! Kill them!’

A guard close to Mali glowed red, then seemed to wink out of existence. She stared at the empty space in horror, a faint smell of sulphur catching in her throat. ‘I wouldn’t shoot,’ the man in black growled. ‘Or I’ll do the same to your President, your Vice President – then the whole stinking lot of you.’

‘Do as he says,’ the Doctor commanded. ‘We mean it.’ Mali turned to him in horror. ‘ They mean it,’ he corrected himself, but his voice was hushed now. With it, a heavy silence fell across the room.

Most of the guards looked to Timon for guidance, but he couldn’t meet their eyes, staring at the floor, trembling. Some turned to Greyjan instead, who was staring with bemused fascination at the two newcomers.

‘This really is very cheeky of you,’ Greyjan said eventually, almost admiringly. ‘Faction Paradox, daring to set foot once again on Gallifrey.’

‘Our ancestral seat,’ Tarra said, licking her thin lips. ‘We have returned to claim our own, President Greyjan.’

‘I was never truthfully yours,’ Greyjan protested mildly.

‘In the end,’ Tarra said, her sunken eyes sweeping round the room and settling on the Doctor,

‘everyone is ours.’

‘But in the meantime you’ll have a good gloat, eh?’ the Doctor challenged, but Mali could hear the faked confidence in his voice. He was putting on an act, just as he had on the Edifice when he felt everything getting too much. Unsure of himself. Uncertain of how much he was changing.

‘So endlessly brave, Doctor,’ Tarra sneered. ‘Even in your condition.’ Mali detected a twinkle deep in one of the bone sockets. ‘Or in our condition. You’ll commit so many atrocities in our name when you finally fall to us, rushing in where angels fear to tread.

Perhaps we’ll even let you out in the universe with your little wayward Romana once more, place those lively imaginations to a better use.’

‘Romana was looking for you. Where is she?’ the Doctor demanded. ‘And what have you done with Fitz?’

‘What … have we done … with Fitz?’ croaked the figure in black. As Mali stared on, the figure began to shake. Then he lurched towards the Doctor, arm outstretched, the fingers of his gauntlet curling to a claw.

Chapter Thirty seven

See how they run

Romana drummed her fingers impatiently on the side of the chair as Compassion’s face contorted with the effort of whatever it was she was doing to her insides. Finally, she fell forward, right on top of Fitz.

He gasped, winded. ‘Compassion, love, maybe there was a time when this would’ve been fun, but …’

Compassion tumbled off him, her eyes rolling too for good measure. ‘Shut up,’ she said, ripping through the fabric that bound his wrists to his ankles. He winced as pins and needles started waking the cramped muscles.

‘Where is Nivet?’ Romana asked. ‘That blood —’

‘He isn’t here,’ Compassion said simply.

Fitz decided not to probe that one any further. ‘So, it’s just us, then. Not much we can do, is there? I vote we stay here and let the Doctor save our arses.’

Romana looked at him. ‘You can’t rely on him. Not any more.’

‘Yes I can,’ Fitz said simply.

‘The Doctor’s not the man he was, remember? He’s the man he will be.’

‘He’s still the Doctor, whatever they do to him.’

‘Loyal to the last,’ sighed Romana, but it was clearly of no consequence to her. Fitz found himself considering his stance. The whole planet seemed to be against the Doctor, and here he was denying all atrocities, acting for all the world like the Doctor’s goodwill ambassador for the United –

He left you in the UN building and never came back. Let you live for hundreds of years as another man, knowing be could put you right in a few minutes.

‘He’s still the Doctor,’ Fitz insisted quietly, more to himself than to anyone else. ‘He’ll still save the day, whatever it takes.’

Romana ignored him, apparently thinking the situation over. ‘And with Faction Paradox actually working inside the Capitol …’ She kicked her feet against the floor. ‘Compassion, come on, untie me. We have to get to the Council Chamber.’

‘Maybe you do.’ Compassion snapped through Romana’s bonds and flung them against the fat wall. She crouched threateningly over Romana. ‘But understand this. I’m not letting either you or the Faction control me, not ever.’

Romana smiled without warmth. ‘As you’re so fond of saying.’

‘So I’m keeping out of this.’ She turned to leave. ‘Do what you want, I’m getting clear.’

Fitz was appalled. ‘But Compassion, what about the Doctor?’

‘There are hundreds of TARDISes on Gallifrey should he recover. He won’t need me.’

‘You know that’s not the case,’ said Romana quietly. ‘You know that you disabled all the berthed time machines when the TARDISes pursued you. I don’t know how.’

‘Maybe I don’t know myself,’ said Compassion.

‘So you’d be leaving the Doctor and me here to rot,’ Fitz said, trying to look as helpless as possible.

‘She’s not leaving. She can’t go anywhere,’ Romana sneered. ‘Not after what Nivet did to her.’

‘I broke free of the Faction override,’ said Compassion. She closed her eyes. It looked to Fitz as if she was meditating, but he knew she was examining some inner resource. ‘I can certainly find a way to break free of …’ Compassion faltered,fell back against the wall. ‘No,’

she said quietly. ‘Oh no.’

Fitz swallowed hard. ‘What is it, Compassion?’

‘I think …’ She broke off, arched her back and opened her mouth as if she was screaming but someone had turned down the volume. The crystal in the chandeliers shattered.

‘Tsunami,’ she choked, her eyes grey like sea water. ‘A shadow sweeping across space, so powerful …’

“The War,’ Romana breathed. ‘It’s beginning at last.’

Compassion staggered out of the room. Fitz and Romana swapped glances and ran after her.

The corridor outside was empty. Fitz could hear a familiar wheezing and groaning sound filtering around the nearest junction. By the time he had rushed around the corner, all he could see was Compassion’s fading form, her back turned to them, arms outstretched as if in surprise or alarm.

Fitz slumped against the corridor wall, a wave of despair breaking over him. ‘Bugger. She was right. She found a way to break free.’

Romana seemed to think carefully for a moment. ‘Come on,’ she called.

‘Where are we going now?’ Fitz called back, dolefully. He wished Compassion hadn’t taken off like that; he’d feel a lot safer with somebody indestructible than with someone as flaky as Romana.

‘The Council Chamber.’ The President of Gallifrey was already pegging it down the corridor, hoisting up her black dress round her waist so she could run more quickly. Her legs offered Fitz the only incentive he could think of to keep up with her.

‘And what are we going to do when we get there?’ Fitz panted.

‘I’ll tell you,’ said Romana, ‘when I think of something.’

* * *

‘You don’t know me, do you, Doctor?’

Kreiner stared at the baffled face of the man he had dreamed of killing for so many centuries.

His hatred for the Doctor had sustained him, dragged his ancient consciousness through all the Faction had demanded of him. The idea that one day this Time Lord would be his to kill had haunted all that long, cold time in the vortex; caught between the pain of consciousness and the despair of his dreams, existing on and on, the Doctor was about the only thing that could make him feel anything at all.

And now he stood before him.

‘Dust,’ said the Doctor. ‘I knew you on Dust. But I … I can’t remember …’

Good, Doctor, thought Father Kreiner as he moved towards him, savouring every slow step.

Thank you. Give me no reason to show you mercy.

The fading sensors in his ancient armour told him the Time Lord woman was reaching for the staser on the ground, but Tarra destroyed the weapon in a moment with her disintegrator pistol.

On his chair, Greyjan tittered like a schoolchild.

‘Everyone will remain quite still,’ Tarra said.

Kreiner ignored her, closing in on the Doctor.

The runtish Timon’s outrage had obviously got the better of him. ‘Be gone from here, Faction scum,’ he warned, puffing himself up and marching over. ‘This is the Council Chamber of the High —’

He never finished the sentence. Kreiner turned and gripped Timon by the throat. A second later there was a brittle snap as Timon’s head fell back at right angles to his neck. He tottered for a moment, mouth open as if about to comment on the gilt on the ceiling, before his body buckled and fell to the floor.

Kreiner watched the old head bounce into a corner, then he wiped his fingers on the tattered material of his cloak.

The guards looked first at each other in helpless alarm, then to Greyjan. ‘Throw down your guns,’ he said, his jollity suddenly gone. “There’s nothing anyone can do now.’

‘Thank you, Lord Greyjan,’ Mother Tarra said sweetly.

‘Why was that necessary?’ the Doctor protested, angrily. ‘He was an old man, he could do nothing to harm you.’

‘You never can tell with Time Lords,’ Kreiner said, still advancing, while the Doctor defiantly held his ground. ‘You’d think they were good as gold and nice as pie. But then, one day …’

The Doctor’s eyes narrowed. ‘I know you …’

Kreiner nodded. ‘Oh yes …’

A technician at a console across the room started staring wildly around, clearly unsure who to report to. ‘Scanners detect massive disturbance in the vortex.’

Kreiner turned on him. ‘Silence! I’m not having anything spoil this moment.’

‘Father Kreiner, you will be silent yourself,’ Mother Tarra hissed. “The time has finally come.’

‘Yes,’ Kreiner agreed. ‘My time.’

He turned back to the Doctor, and saw that all the defiance, the outrage, seemed to have vanished. He looked like a small boy placed in a confusing adult world beyond his understanding.

His voice was equally small as he stared fearfully at the bogeyman coming to get him: ‘What did she call you?’ He placed both hands to his temple as if suddenly in pain.

‘Poor Doctor. Am I giving you a headache?’ Kreiner said softly. Then he snarled. ‘Do you remember what you gave me?’

The Doctor said nothing. Kreiner could feel his internal medical systems flushing his blood with tranquillisers, struggling to keep him calm as he reached out to the Time Lord and bellowed into his face.

‘You gave me away!’

The Doctor recoiled from his outstretched hand, and stumbled backwards. Somewhere behind Kreiner, the technician shouted out, eyes wide with fear. ‘Energy signature … I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s impossible to imagine, so powerful …’

Mother Tarra was rubbing her hands together. “The opening strike,’ she cooed softly.

‘Full spectrum analysis impossible,’ the technician continued. ‘It’s going to pass right through the transduction barriers.’

Kreiner’s sensors indicated a charge building in the air. ‘How long till impact?’ someone yelled.

‘The instruments are swamped; the technician shouted. ‘Timing malfunction. Can’t decipher any of these readings.’

‘Soon,’ Greyjan wailed, clutching the coronet, guards backing away from him as his hands started to smoke. The rubies inset on the metal band seemed to glow brighter and brighter.

“That’s all you need to know, man, it’s soon now.’ He gave a short, mocking laugh.

‘Retribution.’

Kreiner wanted to remain oblivious to the raised voices around him, to make the noises just part of the soundtrack playing in his head as he took the final steps towards the man who used to be the closest thing he had to a hero, ready to settle the score. He reached out again to grab the Doctor’s neck, to haul him to his feet, to make him look and truly appreciate what he’d done. The Doctor’s pained expression grew wider and brighter and closer all the time, so close now he couldn’t start to take it in. I’ll have his head, he thought, caught in this moment, mounted on a wall. I’ll stare at it all day, every day, for ever and ever.

‘Do you remember when it happened?’ Kreiner snarled, his fist fastening round the Doctor’s neck. ‘Leaving me in Geneva, out of your hair while you went out with Sam as usual?’

The Doctor tried to shake his head. Kreiner knew on some level the action was signalling disbelief, shock, but his anger wanted him to see it as a denial, one more callous dismissal.

‘I always thought you’d come back, you see?’ Kreiner felt the words catching in his throat as if they were hooked there – he had to spit them out. ‘I trusted you. I always trusted you.’

‘I …’ the Doctor’s voice was barely audible to Kreiner over the sound of the valves and pumps pushing his blood faster and faster through his ancient body. ‘I couldn’t reach you …’

‘You liar,’ Kreiner spat. ‘You never thought what might have happened to the real me. You settled for some … some lookalike, a home made version. Suited you better, did it? Less rough edges? Another customised companion?’

Kreiner was dimly aware Tarra was yelling something at him, but he wasn’t letting go of the Doctor now, not for her, not even for the bloody Grandfather. He wondered if a tear might fall out of one of those scrunched up eyes if he squeezed the throat just a little harder.

‘So how do you feel, Doctor, now you know? Now you realise?’ Squeeze hard. ‘Like a dad who pushes his kid up to the post office in a pram then only remembers him when he’s on the bus home?’ Squeeze harder. ‘Like a kid who gets a new dog, then finds his old one wasn’t put down after all?’

No tears. When the Doctor’s eyes snapped open they were too dull even to catch the light.

* * *

Mali looked on helplessly at the violence of the confrontation, her fingers still burning from the staser’s destruction.

‘You, guards,’ the skull faced woman instructed. ‘Make sure the Doctor isn’t killed.’ Mali saw the guards look at each other, uncertain what to do. Then Tarra shot one of them dead, his smoking body vanishing even as they watched.

‘Now, if you please,’ Tarra said demurely, big white skull glistening.

Shaking, one of the guards moved over to where Kreiner had dropped the Doctor to the floor, keeping well clear, and another cautiously went to follow. Impartial observers, as all good Time Lords once had been.

Mali cursed. She’d suddenly realised that if the Doctor was killed, if the Edifice let go, the Faction’s power would be broken.

‘Poor Father Kreiner,’ Tarra said sweetly. ‘I do understand his need to … purge his system.’

‘Power still building,’ Tragdorvigan shouted helplessly.

Tarra swung round to look directly into Mali’s eyes, who couldn’t help but shudder. ‘Battle is commencing,’ she said, ‘and you have the honour of being the first to know …’ Tarra’s jaws snapped shut with a crack. ‘We’re coming to get you.’

* * *

Kreiner threw the Doctor’s body down like a doll to the shaking floor of the chamber. He glimpsed red figures in the periphery of his vision, spun round at his audience of guards and screamed at them to keep away.

They did.

‘So tell me how, Doctor,’ Kreiner bawled, bringing down the metal heel of his boot on the pale face beneath him. Blood leaked from the Doctor’s nose, but still there was no sound, still no saltwater. ‘Tell me how you are going to make this all right.’ He kicked out again. ‘Why won’t you say anything? What are you thinking of? What? ‘And again. ‘ Tell me what you’re thinking!’

The Doctor’s eyes flickered over him through puffy eyelids. He lay flat on the trembling ground, as if his body was too heavy to shift an inch.

‘I’m so sorry, Fitz.’

Sorry?

He’s laughing at you.

‘I’m not Fitz,’ Kreiner whispered as the room kept on shaking, his fist clenched steel like inside the heavy gauntlet. ‘Not any more.And you’re not getting away with it.’

* * *

Mali stared round the room, unblinking. The guards had fallen to their knees, or were curled up into balls. No one was watching out for the Doctor any longer as Kreiner raised his one good arm ready to strike. The technician was doing the same, but only to bang his fist against his useless controls. Greyjan was starting to shake, muttering, intoning a meaningless jumble of letters and numbers, hands still clamped over the coronet, the smell of singed hair and flesh a sharp tang in the air.

Mali started to cry. She had no idea now what to do, what was right or what was wrong – she was aware only of the rising tension at the back of her head. A vestigial, animal instinct that fire was coming from the sky and they were all going to burn.

* * *

Kreiner felt a sudden blow against his crippled right side. Tarra must finally have decided enough was enough, and had swooped down on him like a bird of prey. She sank a handful of talons into the stump of his wizened arm and propelled him forward. With a yell of pain, Kreiner collided with the for wall. The tremors in the room increased, as though it was the force of his impact that was making all Gallifrey shake this way. Or the force of his anger.

A roar of power, low and distorted, began to fill the room.

‘When I give a command, Father Kreiner,’ Tarra said coldly, ‘you will obey me.’

‘The Doctor must be mine,’ Kreiner said, trying to rein in his fury.

‘You fool,’ Tarra said. ‘He is ours already.’

‘Don’t trust him.’

‘It is not a matter of trust.’

‘He’s still the Doctor, whatever we do to him.’

‘The decision has been taken, Kreiner!’ Tarra snapped. ‘Now be silent! You will displease the Grandfather.’ She put her hands to her head as if mimicking Greyjan, who was muttering so much faster now. ‘Mathara is keying in the codeways, I can feel it. The Matrix is opening to the Faction. Can you feel it?’ Kreiner said nothing, just stood there, his black bulk heaving with deep breaths. ‘We shall be a physical presence here.’

The lighting in the room grew brighter, harsher. The Doctor was still lying just where Kreiner had dropped him.

Kreiner heard the woman soldier scream as the power rose to a crescendo. In time, he decided, the Doctor would be screaming too.

Chapter Thirty eight

Burnt down days

‘It’s no good, Romana, Fitz yelled as the rumbling that seemed to be shaking the Capitol apart got still louder. ‘We’ll never make it in time! We have to take cover!’

Romana was saving her breath for running. ‘No!’ she said.

‘It’s your own fault for making this place so bloody big!’ Fitz complained. As they ran, he was getting some idea of just how big it was, too, even if it was somehow shrinking. Crowds of people were pushing past at every junction, shouting, panicking, feeding the feeling that things were spiralling out of control. Two children, alone and frightened, were swept along in the throng. An old man with a stooped back called and called for someone to help him, but there was no answer.

These people were sitting ducks. Where were the air raid sirens? Where were the wardens, and the shelters? How stupid were these people?

Fitz decided to change tack. He grabbed hold of Romana, forcing her to skid to a standstill.

‘You’ll be no good to anyone dead!’ he shouted to her.

‘Get off me, Fitz!’

‘If we find somewhere to hide until —’

Romana punched him in the eye.

Finding himself on the floor again a moment later, Fitz thought at first that the band of crackling blue power sweeping down the corridor towards them was a symptom of concussion. Then he saw what it was doing to the people it passed over, heard the screams.

He could see where the stooped old man had been smeared over a wall, the flesh melting down to the floor.

When Fitz smelled the burning, he knew it was far too late for hiding.

* * *

Mother Mathara clapped her hands together as a representation of the energy wave – a spiralling band of brightness cutting through space time like cheese wire – played over the main screen.

She pottered over to a lowly looking metal box, about the size of a coffin. Blank and featureless save for a small keypad set into its top, it had been nicknamed the Junction Box by their engineers. Its function was to channel power.

‘How does it work?’ Kristeva had asked once, and she’d laughed.

‘I don’t know,’ she remembered saying. ‘And if I explained today, the method would probably have changed by tomorrow. All that matters is that it does work.’

Simply input the relevant codes and the prophecy would become self fulfilling, sparking and arcing across infinity.

The damage was hitting Gallifrey already. The Greyjan construct’s block transfer computations were like surgical incisions, wound after wound opening up the Matrix, making ready for the transfer of Faction blood.

Kristeva swung round to face her. ‘All is ready.’

Mathara smiled. ‘Another life begins today, Kristeva,’ she said, and carefully keyed in the transference codes for the conceptual shift.

‘Transition successful.’ Kristeva’s voice was an icy whisper of triumph.

‘Soon we shall have a new home,’ Mathara said. ‘A new outlook on the strata of reality.

When it is stable, we will go and join Mother Tarra.’ She pressed her palms together as if in prayer. ‘We will welcome the Grandfather at last to his new domain.’

* * *

Power slewed through the Council Chamber, and pixels of light danced round Greyjan’s head. The lighting overloaded and blew, and a pale emergency white bathed the room in a sickly glow. Some of the guards simply winked out of existence as a dark ribbon of energy seemed to tie itself across the breadth of the room. There were more explosions, more showers of magnesium light searing the air.

Crouched on the floor, Mali looked round wildly in horror. She told herself that the chaos would pass, that all she had to do was remember her training, hold on for the right moment to fight back and serve her President. But still the ground trembled, and still Mother Tarra kept rejoicing in the destruction.

Somewhat typically, the Doctor waited until the room was practically shaking itself apart before getting to his feet.

‘Greyjan!’ he yelled, wiping the blood from his nose. Mali could hear an edge to his voice even above the power storm crackling through the Council Chamber, rougher, sharper than before. ‘Greyjan, the coronet! Give me the coronet!’

‘Got over our little attack of guilt, have we, Doctor?’ Kreiner shouted. ‘Back to saving the world, now, is it?’ He and Tarra were standing side by side against the far wall, untouched and steadfast in the storm like figures from a nightmare.

The Doctor ignored him. ‘The coronet, Greyjan!’

‘What, this old thing?’ said Greyjan, just as his hands caught fire. He blew at them, bewildered, as if trying to put them out. Then he clutched at his hearts, his fine robes smouldering under the touch of his flaming fingers. For a moment he looked agonised, then his eyes widened with joy. ‘Not before time,’ he gasped, before falling to the floor. A beatific smile crowned his smoking corpse as death took him once again.

Without a word, the Doctor made his way over to Tragdorvigan at his station; the man was punching ineffectually at different buttons, by the look on his face, entirely in vain.

The Doctor scowled. ‘Two thirds of Gallifrey will be affected,’ he shouted, peering over the man’s shoulder at the screens. ‘Millions will die!’

‘Only the beginning, Doctor,’ Tarra called back.

‘Look out!’ warned the Doctor, hauling Tragdorvigan out of his seat as power surged through the console. He flung the man clear just as electrical fingers grabbed at the space he’d been occupying. Mali could see that the relief on the Doctor’s face was heartfelt. He’d saved one life.

But Kreiner had grabbed Tana’s gun and, with precise aim, shot Tragdorvigan himself. The Doctor yelled in outrage as the man’s body was knocked back shaking into a bank of instruments before melting away into thin air.

‘Why?’ the Doctor shouted. His nose was bleeding again. ‘Why, Fitz?’

Kreiner shrugged. ‘Why save him and not me?’ he shouted back. Then he aimed at the last surviving guard, and fired again. ‘Or him?’ There was another angry shout from the Doctor as the man went down.

Mali played dead herself, trying to slow her frantic breathing, trying not to shake. This Kreiner was clearly psychotic – more dangerous even than the Faction woman.

What would these people do with her world?

The Doctor balled his fists and took a step closer to Kreiner. ‘What would you have me do, Fitz?’

‘Kreiner,’ the man in black insisted, stamping his foot. ‘Father Kreiner.’

‘What would you have me do, Father Kreiner? ’ the Doctor spat. ‘Let more innocents die just so you don’t feel so hard done by?’

Kreiner fired the gun into the air. ‘I want you to take some responsibility, you hypocrite!’

Tarra quietly took the gun from Kreiner and Mali breathed a little more easily. ‘Be still, both of you,’ the skull faced woman said. “The Matrix has been infected with Paradox now. It carries our taint.’

‘The effects can be undone!’ the Doctor yelled. ‘I’ll find a way to stop you. I swear —’

‘It is too late to stop it now,’ Tarra said, her voice mounting to an exultant shriek. ‘Far too late.’

A grinding, wheezing noise seemed to be starting up all around them. Even the emergency lighting dimmed. The Doctor’s bruised but defiant face was lit only by guttering sparks from the ruined consoles beside him, as Gallifrey’s technology gave up and died.

‘Behold, Doctor, the first projection from the Matrix.’ Tarra cocked her head and grinned.

‘Under new management.’

Ancient pews started forming from thin air, aged green leather stretched across each. Mali had nothing to gain from playing dead now, so she scrambled up to join the Doctor. Dark shadows clattered around the ruined chamber like great birds, cawing and snapping at her.

Head down, she pressed on and fell into the Doctor’s arms. He held her, tightly – whether to comfort her or to be comforted himself she didn’t know. Either way she gripped him tightly, pressed her face against his chest, inhaled his scent of sandalwood and … no, there was something else. His skin was icy cold, and there was a whiff of decay about him. He looked at her, puzzled and hurt as she pulled away. She found fresh tears forming in her eyes.

Above her the air was thick with birds, jostling in the darkness as the benches of the Shadow Parliament seemed gradually to overlay themselves on to the Council Chamber.

* * *

Fitz supposed he should’ve thanked Romana for slugging him one and saving his life. She’d thrown herself down beside him as the energy wave sizzled overhead, and together they’d dragged themselves down one of Romana’s service corridors. Fitz felt a surge of hope as he saw the corridor give on to the TARDIS cradles until he remembered that, thanks to Compassion, the ships would not be flying anywhere.

They watched from the shadow of a bulky white cylinder that was clearly in for repairs. Fitz shuddered to see the crush of the crowd as they fought each other for access to the berthed TARDISes.

‘We need your helpful friend to put right whatever it is she did,’ Romana muttered.

‘She wasn’t exactly unprovoked, was she?’ Fitz retorted. Even so, he too wished desperately that Compassion would show up again.

Then he had an idea. ‘Even if we could just get inside one of them … they’re indestructible, right?’

The first TARDIS exploded as another sizzling indigo band of energy coursed through the cradles. Fitz bit his lip and said nothing at all, closing his eyes as the screams of the panicking crowd grew still louder.

* * *

Compassion had her eyes firmly closed. She could still visualise the last thing she had seen when she fled from Romana and Fitz. A huge skeletal thorn which had seemed to pierce reality in front of her. It had dug into her, a cold pulsating claw pulling at her insides. That was when she had willed herself to dematerialise, her stomach cramping with the effort.

Now warmth had returned to her as she felt the world shifting back into focus. After some considerable time, she opened her eyes. She was back on the heath that had held her before.

She shuddered. Back on the Edifice, the only place Nivet’s limiter would let her run to.

But now the Edifice had grown so bloated it was beginning to puncture Gallifrey itself. When the energy wave hit, the one would act as a conduit for the power into the other. With the Faction ready to tap into that circuit, siphoning off all the energy they needed.

They’d timed it all to perfection.

Compassion looked up at the darkening sky and shivered.

Almost immediately, she was thrown to the muddy ground as, all around her, the simulated grass caught fire. She saw a huge bone spider suddenly rearing above her and instinctively rolled out of its way. Its sapling thick legs collapsed under its own weight, and upon hitting the ground, it silently crumbled to the consistency of chalk.

Compassion stared in horror as the conflagration took hold. Parts of the sky began exploding above her, raining down fierce sparks, and the grey clouds darkened into poisonous smoke.

She thought of running, but really, where was there to go?

* * *

‘Why struggle against us now, Doctor?’ Tarra called, apparently quite sincerely. ‘Join us.

You will in the end, you have no choice.’

Mali knew she was right now. She glanced at the Doctor; he was ashen faced – apart from the bloody weals rising after Kreiner’s assault – but he said nothing. The benches of the Shadow Parliament were still insinuating themselves into the chamber, and dark hooded phantoms were filing in from nowhere to take their imaginary seats. At least the projection seemed to be keeping Kreiner and Tarra on the other side of the room. But she could hear the ravens everywhere, nestling high above in shadowy eaves.

‘How are they doing this?’ Mali whispered.

‘Like she said, it’s just a projection, utilising feedback from the Matrix,’ the Doctor explained, his voice drained of all emotion. ‘Some kind of relay triggered ray phase shift I shouldn’t wonder. That’s the sort of nonsense their people employ.’

‘Then we’re finished.’

‘There’s one hope,’ the Doctor whispered. ‘The Faction don’t know that the Edifice is my TARDIS. They don’t know I may not be fully infected after all.’

‘How can that help us?’ Mali demanded, happy to be convinced. But the Doctor didn’t say another word.

‘There’s not an event in the universe, past present or future, that we can’t make our own from the vantage point we now possess, Doctor,’ Tarra said. “The people of Gallifrey will fall to a new Dark Age of superstition and fear. We shall control all aspects of all life. Free will no longer exists.’ Her teeth shone in the eerie light. ‘But our lives, Doctor, shall be different from anybody else’s. That’s the exciting thing. No one in the universe can do what we’re doing.’

A fine haze of water started falling from the sprinklers in the cracked ceiling, as if in a belated effort to extinguish the fading flames. The Doctor stood stock still in the downpour, Mali shivering beside him.

‘What do you say, Doctor?’ Kreiner shouted. ‘On Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays we’ll knock the universe down, and Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays well build it up again.

Half day closing on Sundays while the assorted masses worship before us. Interested?’

‘In a life where death has no meaning?’ the Doctor called back. ‘Where heroism is redundant, sacrifice a joke?’

‘Not biting, Doctor?’ Kreiner jeered. ‘Need me to knock some more sense into you?’

‘Be silent.’ Tarra gestured to the transparent benches gaining more solidity all the time.

Tana’s smile and the coy slant of her great skull head were almost coquettish. ‘He’s coming,’

she breathed. ‘Him.’

‘Who?’ Mali whispered.

‘Coming to claim his seat at last?’ the Doctor challenged as a light flickered on over the empty chair reserved for the Speaker of the Faction’s parliament. ‘Oh, what an entrance.

Grandfather Paradox.’

‘But Grandfather Paradox doesn’t exist,’ Mali whispered urgently, seeking the Doctor’s confirmation.

‘He exists as a concept and that’s dangerous enough. With the timelines so mutable, with chaos punching its way free, some unthinkable event or paradox could Ve brought him physically into being.’

‘No,’ Mali protested. ‘He’s just a Faction phantom.’

‘As is this entire projection of their parliament,’ the Doctor answered, cautiously taking a step closer towards her as if fearing further rejection. “The Faction think they’ve won at last; it would be unthinkable for the Grandfather not to be here in some form, even if they have to invent him themselves. Unless he’s been waiting in the sidelines all this time, of course.

Indestructible … living for ever …’

Mali wished the sprinklers would shut off and help her stop shivering. ‘Another self fulfilling prophecy?’

‘Self …’

The Doctor trailed off as a blurred figure shimmered into existence under the light, a smear of watercolour grey crouching over its podium. The shape began to swim into focus, to gain a little weight and shape. Mali saw it was a man, tall and emaciated in an old hessian cloak.

The hairless stump of his severed arm peeped from the bogeyman’s shroud.

Mali felt her skin crawling. ‘You’re right, it’s him,’ she whimpered. ‘But it can’t be.Who …’

The Doctor beside her fumbled for her hand, and lost in her terror she let him take it. As the definition of the image increased, Mali could see it begin to breathe, shuddering over the lectern, gathering its strength.

Finally, the figure straightened, and she could see it clearly now. This apparition wore not bone but its own, cold face, the measure of its rank and stature. She took in the shaved head first, then the hooded, glittering glacier eyes. The sallow skin. The cruel thin smile, aloof and alien.

She shook her hand free from the Doctor’s grasp. Unable to articulate words, she backed away.

‘My life ends as it began,’ the Doctor whispered, his face twisted between fascination and disgust at the sight of himself looking out from the podium over the Shadow Parliament.

‘Congratulations, Doctor. You’re a grandfather again.’

Chapter Thirty nine

Ruin

Although Fitz’s body was racing down corridors with Romana, his mind was still back in the chaos of the berthing cradles. It had been like watching a disaster movie playing out for real; those useless TARDISes might as well have had Titanic scrawled along their sides. The energy ribbon had fried half the people in the room as it swept through, and the exploding time ships had done for practically everyone else; the only people who’d escaped death by blue light and white cylinder were those being trampled underneath by the frantic crowd.

He’d seen scenes of suffering and destruction so visceral he felt his stomach couldn’t screw up into a ball much tighter.

A gaggle of guards had joined up with them. He’d been thrilled at first – safety in numbers, and numbers trained to deal with all this crap at that. But the sense of security had been a fleeting one. Romana mayVe technically lost the Presidency, but it seemed she hadn’t lost her respect among her hard won guards – nor her knack of making men jump to attention whenever she wanted something. And it was quite plain to Fitz she wanted them all to lay down their lives in repelling the Faction invasion. Great.

The only comfort Fitz could find was that at least he’d be reunited with the Doctor again.

Assuming nothing too terrible had happened of course.

Yeah, right.

At last, they reached the grand corridor that terminated in the bronze double doors of the Council Chamber. They were blackened and cracked, like so much of the architecture.

Ruined.

‘So now we’re here,’ Fitz said, ‘what are we supposed to do?’

‘The Doctor must be key to their plans,’ she said. ‘So we get him out of there …’

Fitz was ready to smile, before Romana finished her sentence.

‘… or we kill him.’

* * *

In an icy cloud of blue vapour, two more skull faced figures in black materialised in the crowded chamber. But Mali could tell they were real, saw the steam streaming from their mouths as they breathed in the dank atmosphere.

‘Mother Mathara, Uncle Kristeva,’ Tarra said, her voice as cold as the freezing water from the sprinklers which pooled at her feet. ‘Welcome to our new life. Welcome to Gallifrey.’

The Doctor ignored the intrusion on his own, private grief. He just kept staring up at the dark apparition of himself – of the Grandfather. ‘Is it always to end in evil?’ he whispered.

The Grandfather kept smiling. ‘It will never end.’

Mali shivered. The Grandfather’s face might’ve been the Doctor’s but his voice was lower, cracked with age, and so much colder. Every word seemed to drip with menace.

The Doctor sneered at the skulking shadows in the parliament’s pews. ‘So … You’ve overwritten your entire history to make me your ruler?’

‘The Faction didn’t do it; the Grandfather croaked. ‘I did.’ The ghost of a smile. ‘Just as you will.’

‘You made yourself Grandfather Paradox?’ The Doctor lowered his voice, suddenly excited.

‘But then … this is a trick, right? We –you’ve gotthem! You can order them to …’

Grandfather Paradox shook his head, and Mali could see the Doctor start to squirm as the intensity of his own gaze was turned on himself. ‘You’ve spent so long flitting from adventure to adventure, never daring to stay in one place. That’s what makes you run, isn’t it?

You’re afraid that your moment is gone the moment you win: The Doctor looked away.

‘Well, as I say, no one did this to me,’ the Grandfather hissed. ‘I sought this out. Fought for it. Made it my own. I belong now.’ He waggled his stump. ‘I can win for ever. And never, ever run again.’ He smiled. ‘Doesn’t that sound good, Doctor?’

The Doctor had closed his eyes, clearly more confident when able to see only what he wanted to see. ‘Lies. This is simply a meaningless projection.’

‘The patterns were always there,’ Grandfather Paradox assured him. ‘Deep, deep back in your own time the first seeds were sown. It was inevitable the Faction virus would take hold of you, Doctor, just as it was inevitable its gestation would finally bring me back into being. As you can see.’

‘I can see a new definition of a one armed bandit, certainly,’ the Doctor flashed, nodding at the Grandfather’s shoulder.

‘This?’ The Grandfather brandished his stump with pride. ‘I removed this to be free of the brand of the Time Lords.’

‘Which you received for what? Outstanding value?’

The Grandfather smiled as if indulging a playful baby. ‘I imagine I committed the most terrible atrocities against reality.’

‘You can’t even remember, can you?’ the Doctor realised. ‘Doesn’t that rather take the fun out of things?’

‘I don’t need to remember,’ the Grandfather snapped. ‘The Faction have allowed me to personify their god.’

‘You’re just a bargain bucket interloper.’

Again, the Grandfather shook his head. ‘Imagine how pleasing my service must’ve been since the virus took hold.’

‘That hasn’t happened yet.’

Grandfather Paradox smiled coldly. ‘But it will. And we shall live my dark life all over again.

Together.’

‘Splendid. I’m glad we’re dividing the work between us. I’d hate to think of you sitting here with time on your …’ The Doctor affected embarrassment. ‘Well, you know.’

‘But that’s it exactly, Doctor,’ the Grandfather said, opening his fist. Now, at last, I hold all time … here in my hand.’

‘Really? All time, eh?’ The Doctor peered at the outstretched palm. ‘It’s so much smaller than I expected.’

‘My first act now the war is presaged will be to formally open hostilities … in spectacular fashion.’ Grandfather Paradox looked round proudly at the hundreds of cadavers lining the dark benches in the dank chamber. ‘We shall stage a massive retaliation against the Enemy.

We shall fight this War so much more … thoroughly than the Time Lords ever could.

Embroil so many worlds in the chaos.’

‘He’s stalling you,’ Kreiner shouted in frustration, confirming Mali’s own deductions.

‘Babbling while he thinks of something …’

The Grandfather turned on him. ‘Speak out of turn again, idiot child; he said gravely, ‘and you will know your death a billion times over.’

Kreiner shrank back, and Mali could see his spindly frame shaking. The casual killer had become a quivering child, too terrified even to apologise; but then, she supposed the thought of your god spanking your backside could do that to even the most hardened psychopath.

Pleased to have noted even the slightest concession to vulnerability in the Faction ranks, Mali took advantage of the distraction to sidle closer to the doors.

‘You think I don’t know myself?’ Grandfather Paradox turned from Kreiner and took a step closer to the Doctor. “This last flourish of innocence before the fall?’

The Doctor looked concerned. ‘I won’t graze my knees, will I?’

‘I see the virus inside you,’ the Grandfather went on. His voice had fallen again to little more than a cold whisper. “There … pumped from heart to heart … through every vein … it drags and pulls and skulks in your body from head to toe.’

‘I shall fight you,’ said the Doctor calmly in return. ‘I would die before I would serve you.’

‘You will change, Doctor,’ the Grandfather hissed. ‘And you will serve us.’

Mali could feel the temperature in the chamber dropping, seemingly with every new promise from the Grandfather’s lips. Still the four dark figures hovered like spirits of Apocalypse in the far corner, watching, anticipating.

‘With each breath you take, the virus removes a little more of your old self, a little more of the hero of old …’ The Grandfather smiled cruelly. ‘Cell by cell … rebuilding and reordering your genetic heritage, each bone in your body transfigured into a shrine to paradox … Yes, I can see it happening now.’

The dark figure of the Grandfather paced round the Doctor in a tight circle, and Mali imagined for a moment that the charred skulls lining his body were staring into the Doctor for amusement. ‘I can see it happening now.’ The Doctor, already bedraggled from the sprinklers, was looking paler than ever, his face shiny, his eyes red and sore. It was as if the Grandfather’s words were finally pushing the Doctor over the edge, now he could see the irrefutable evidence of what he was to become.

Then the double doors crashed open almost right into Mali, and a flurry of guards pushed through into the darkened chamber.

* * *

For Fitz, it was like opening a door on to some surrealist hell.

First off, he guessed Romana’s grand chamber of office wasn’t meant to look as if someone had crammed the Houses of Parliament into the Chamber of Horrors – and judging by the ravens that swooped down on them, a dash of the Tower of London for good measure. The guards, when they’d wasted valuable seconds of surprise staring round them in terror, began firing at the man in the dodgy cloak with his back to them. This seemed just a little unsporting to Fitz, until some woman started yelling that he wasn’t real, he was a projection or something. But by then old Mother Tarra and her gang had opened fire themselves, Kreiner leading the counterattack. The guards started falling like red skittles in a ten strike.

The woman who’d shouted stumbled out of the firing line and more or less into his arms. She was slim, lithe, and sadly had better things to do than to run away with him that minute to start a family somewhere far away from here. She was holding a gun, and started fumbling with it even as he put her steady on her pins. Romana grabbed her and started bending her ear about something.

Then Fitz saw the Doctor, just staring at the man in the cloak.

This guy was just a projection, right? An illusion. Fitz was off and running, splashing across the stone floor, before he could talk himself out of it. Skirting a number of benches haunted by no end of ghostly freaks, lashing out at the ravens dive bombing him, Fitz went to hurl himself straight through the man facing the Doctor.

Only to have the guy turn his head at the last moment and show he was the Doctor – or, more accurately, how the Doctor might’ve looked if he’d spent twenty years in the marines before becoming a psycho. His hair was shorn, his face gaunt and pale. The face was weathered, older, harder.

It was the face of the statue in the shrinking Panopticon.

Fitz really got an excellent view – the man had grabbed him by the throat with his only arm (what was this, a convention?) and was picking him up by it, while the Doctor just stood there like a lemon.

The man’s touch was so cold it burnt. Something in his eyes seemed to suggest Fitz should be very, very frightened, and it worked like a charm. Fitz dashed off a quick prayer and tried to remember if he was wearing clean underwear.

As it turned out, being lifted off the ground was a good thing. He was too far away to tell for certain, but it looked like the woman had dismantled her gun and now a fork of blue lightning was flashing from it into the soaking wet ground. The water carried the charge, knocking aside Tarra, Kreiner, their ugly mates … and even sending the Doctor jolting backwards.

With a roar of anger, the Doctor’s evil older brother flickered and vanished, and Fitz tumbled to the floor for what seemed like the umpteenth time; on this occasion his knees and palms were the casualties. He felt the cold water soak through his trousers, was glad he could now wet himself without humiliation and squirmed over to the Doctor, who was lying flat on his back with a vacant expression.

‘Come on, Doctor,’ Fitz muttered fiercely. ‘Don’t you recognise a half arsed rescue attempt when you see one?’

The Doctor’s head lolled to one side like a corpse’s, his eyes meeting Fitz’s own.

And he smiled, but not in relief or in welcome. The cold sneer of a smile looked so wrong on his face, so out of place that the image affected Fitz far more than any of the carnage he’d witnessed this day.

The Doctor snarled and reached out his arm just as his evil twin had done, but Fitz rolled away just in time. ‘He’s turned!’ he yelled, scrambling to his feet. ‘The Doctor’s on their side.’

Fitz heard a shriek of triumph greet his warning. Tarra was back on her feet again. Her mates clearly wouldn’t be far behind.

The Doctor beckoned Fitz closer with a crooked finger, the smile never leaving his lips.

‘Oh, Doctor,’ Fitz whispered, backing fearfully away. ‘Oh sweet Jesus, what are any of us going to do now?’

Romana answered the question for him as appositely as she could with a commanding yell.

‘Run!’

* * *

‘We should destroy them for their impudence,’ Mathara croaked from the wet floor. Kristeva helped her to stand.

‘As a show of strength,’ Tarra remarked, ‘it was feeble. There’s nothing they can do to really harm us.’

‘The Grandfather,’ Kreiner said, dragging himself up to stand beside Tarra. ‘He’s vanished.

What happened?’

‘Our presence is not yet fully stable,’ Tarra answered. “The power surge disrupted the projection, that is all. He will return to us.’ She hissed, and rubbed her dainty hands together.

‘While the Doctor shall join us for the first time – at last.’

She glided across the room, through the half formed benches of the Shadow Parliament and the great shadows of the agitated ravens, to stand by the side of the still smiling Doctor. Tarra watched him blinking slowly, gazing around him in wonder like a newborn taking in his surroundings for the very first time.

He smiled. ‘I’ve got some catching up to do.’

Chapter Forty

Slaughterhouse

‘Where are we going now?’ Fitz wailed. First Compassion had walked out on him, now the Doctor had gone bad. Why the hell was he bothering? Why didn’t he just curl up and die now rather than prolong the agony?

Then he thought of the hundreds he’d seen die, and told himself perhaps he should stop being such a whingeing bastard.

He found he was running alongside the pretty woman. ‘I’m Fitz,’ he said. ‘What was that clever thing you did in there?’

‘Mali.’

‘Is that the art of conjuring blue sparks into water?’

‘No, that was just me discharging a power pack. My name is Mali.’

‘Pleased to meet you.’ He considered. ‘But discharge is such a horrible word, isn’t it.’

Romana signalled they should stop running. ‘We caught them off guard. We won’t be so lucky a second time.’

‘Lucky?’ snorted Fitz. “That fiasco had number thirteen written all over it in black magic marker.’

Everyone looked at him a bit oddly, so he shut up, half listening while Mali explained the way the Faction had let themselves into the Matrix.

‘Was that what Tarra was up to when she was sniffing out Greyjan’s brains?’ he asked.

‘She might have been carrying out some groundwork, I suppose,’ Mali conceded.

‘A Faction presence inside the Matrix,’ Romana muttered. ‘Four dimensional mitochondria.’

Fitz sighed. ‘Duh. Of course. How did I miss it?’

‘It’s like what’s happened to the Doctor,’ Romana snapped impatiently. ‘Just as his host cells have been invaded by Faction microbes, so the Matrix is being overrun by the Faction. They corrupt the cells, forcing them to work in symbiosis with the Paradox virus. Take up permanent residence.’

‘So there’s no cure for the Doctor?’

Romana looked very clear about the deal in her own mind. ‘None.’

‘And the Matrix?’ asked Mali.

‘I won’t let the Faction take it. I won’t allow them that power.’ She put her hands on her hips; we’re cooking now, thought Fitz. ‘If we have to, we’ll destroy the Matrix ourselves.’

A collective gasp went up from Mali and the guards; Fitz got the impression Romana was advocating pulling down heaven and building a car park in its place.

‘If we’re going to survive, we’ve got to adapt,’ Romana insisted. There was an almost fanatical gleam in her eyes that reminded Fitz of Jin Ming and his fellow inmates in the Red Army. ‘And if that means fashioning a new world for ourselves, so be it.’

‘What are your orders, Madam President?’ Mali asked meekly.

‘We have to access the Slaughterhouse, before they get their hands on that too.’

Fitz noticed an absence of deafening applause for the idea. ‘Slaughterhouse?’ he said uneasily. ‘Doesn’t sound like a very Time Lord name.’

‘To be honest,’ Romana said as she strode off, ‘it isn’t a very Time Lord room.’

‘Where are we going?’ Fitz called, resolving not to follow her entirely without question.

Romana didn’t look back. ‘My TARDIS. It’s berthed in its own cradle. It may have escaped the worst of the damage.’

‘But even if it did, the Type 102 disabled —’

‘Well, we’ll just have to get it working, Combat Elite Mali. There’s no other option.’

‘Can’t we just walk it?’ Fitz wondered. ‘I don’t think my legs have dropped off quite yet.’

Romana looked to be on the point of losing her rag, swishing to a stop and turning on him.

Why was he always on the receiving end of Time Lord aggro? ‘No, Fitz, we can’t just “walk it”. Only my TARDIS has the necessary access codes to gain entrance to the Slaughterhouse.

The objects held there are so destructive they have to be stored in a stabilised time eddy hundreds of kilometres underground.’

‘T’riffic,’ said Fitz, and they all tramped on in silence to the Presidential wing.

Romana’s Presidential TARDIS was still intact in its tiny alcove. From the outside it resembled a clear glass cube; you could actually see right through it as though it was empty.

Very classy, decided Fitz. Once inside, Mali was soon flat on her back under its console, trying to get enough juice through to it to manage the short hop into the bowels of the planet.

The interior was equally tasteful, bright and minimalist, but instead of the outside world, there were walls a whiter shade of pale. But given the choice, Fitz decided he would plump for the just the right side of plump Compassion model. Sucker for punishment that he was.

Romana sat up in the command seat, raised on a circular dais, staring into space. Fitz wondered how he’d be feeling if it was his world tying in tatters around him. Guiltily, he decided it was a bit like when the papers reported earthquakes in Bongo Bongo Land or wherever. It didn’t realty mean much unless they were your people.

‘I think it should function now,’ Mali said, wriggling out from the console. Fitz hurried over to help her up before one of the guards could get in there. She ignored his outstretched hand and got up by herself.

Romana nodded to her newly designated driver, a scrawny looking kid called Ryssal, who looked like the mutant offspring of Tommy Steele and Ken Dodd: he had the goofiest teeth Fitz had ever seen.

‘Mali’s got the magic touch,’ Ryssal lisped appreciatively. ‘She’s really something, isn’t she?’

‘You can spray that again,’ Fitz replied, wiping his face, and Ryssal, clearly used to being mocked, laughed good naturedly. He gingerly activated some controls. A small bulb lit up blue but nothing else happened.

‘Shame you don’t have the magic touch yourself, isn’t it?’ Fitz said genially.

‘Some would say he did, Fitz,’ said Mali, smiling warmly at Ryssal, who blushed.

‘Let me off,’ Fitz muttered sourty. ‘I’m suddenly feeling sick. I don’t want to go.’

Only when Romana opened the doors did he realise they had already arrived.

Fitz was the last one out into the Slaughterhouse .While the others gathered dutifully around Romana, Fitz stared about him. He realised Romana hadn’t been kidding about its not being a typical Gallifreyan room. There was no ornate finery, no ostentatious decoration here. The walls, floor and ceiling were all a clinical white, brilliant like virgin snow on a sunny day, and made him feel just as cold. The brilliance made judging the exact size of the place tricky, but he reckoned the Albert Hall was a fair comparison. Oddly, his Cuban heels didn’t echo as he walked over to join the others. He cleared his throat, and again the sound didn’t cany. It was as if the air had been deadened. The whole place had the feel of a morgue, but instead of corpses, sinister looking equipment lay stacked in neat rows for as far as he could see.

Fitz’s breath came out in steam as he walked shivering over to the others. ‘Not paid the gas bill?’ he asked, rubbing his arms through his shirtsleeves.

‘We haven’t got long,’ Romana told her little band, ignoring him. ‘The Faction will be consolidating their stronghold. We can’t let them complete that process.’

‘What do these things do?’ Fitz asked, gesturing to the pile of alien devices before them.

‘Apart from giving me the willies, that is.’

“They destroy things,’ Romana said simply.

‘Anything in particular?’

‘Everything in particular.’

Fitz sighed. ‘Fab.’

Romana set off to browse, looking the weird machinery up and down critically in the same way most birds scanned clothes racks for something in their size. ‘We didn’t know who the Enemy were going to be,’ she said, ‘so we had to be sure we would be able to hit back at them with something. We know that they will employ agents, but not what form those agents will take.’

Fitz nodded. ‘So you covered all bases. The weapons are homemade, are they?’

‘Some.’ She hefted a squat, metal box that doubtless did something incredibly nasty. ‘Many I selected personally from war worlds the universe over.’

Take this War pretty seriously, don’t you?’ Fitz murmured.

‘It threatens my planet and my people,’ Romana said, that odd glint back in her eye.

‘Everything I know and care about.’

Like that well known triangular Panopticon and its three mighty statues, thought Fitz sourly.

He started to shiver.

‘I won’t let filth like Faction Paradox destroy Gallifrey,’ Romana added, her voice almost lost in the white immensity of the Slaughterhouse.

‘One wrong button pressed round here,’ said Fitz, ‘and you could do the job yourself.’

Romana was scowling at him.

‘Sorry,’ said Fitz. ‘Did I say that aloud?’

Under Romana’s direction, they tooled up and made their way back to the glass cube, which glittered in the harsh light like a giant diamond. Fitz felt ten tons heavier with what looked like a miniature bazooka, sleek and shiny, hanging round his neck. Romana had been vague about its exact function, but he understood that it fired concentrated bursts of high speed protons which had a fairly unpleasant effect on anyone who got in then way. Nice.

He felt a bit guilty even holding it. Just as long as no one nicked it off him and pointed it his way, he thought, sighing. The Doctor would never use a gun – well, mostly never.

What would he be using now?

‘Many of these weapons haven’t been tested, Madam President,’ Mali said, as Ryssal once again smoothly steered Romana’s TARDIS back to the Capitol.

‘That,’ Romana pointed out, ‘is exactly what we’re going to do with them now.’

‘In a battle situation?’ Mali’s face offered polite surprise, but her voice was too harsh, disbelieving for the expression to be sincere. ‘I am a trained soldier, Madam President …’

Romana sucked her cheeks in. ‘With very limited field experience.’

Miaow, thought Fitz. But Mali was too angry to be fazed.

‘Enough field experience to know you are sending us on a suicide mission.’

‘I am your President, Combat Elite Mali!’ Romana roared. ‘You will do as I say!’

Oh dear, thought Fitz. Pulling rank after only one comeback. Not a good sign.

He glanced round at the guards. Like him, most were looking down at their own pieces of hardware with the same gloomy concern.

‘Watch out Jerry,’ Fitz muttered. ‘Here we come.’

* * *

The Doctor stood in the centre of the Council Chamber, shadowy benches stretching back all around him into the gloom. Tarra, Kristeva, Mathara and Kreiner were all clustered around him, watching intently.

‘Who do you serve?’ Tarra demanded, scrutinising his wan face.

‘The Grandfather is my god,’ said the Doctor.

There were murmurs of assent from the shadowy figures lurking on the great benches.

Mathara took a step closer to the Doctor. ‘What nourishes your soul?’

‘Divine and perfect paradox.’

Kristeva moved in. ‘You will spike on sharp sticks the heads of your past incarnations.’

The Doctor nodded. ‘The past is nothing.’

‘Your arm will be taken,’ Kreiner chipped in, clearly with a great deal of satisfaction.

‘I raise it now in the Faction’s service.’

‘Good,’ muttered Tarra, caressing the wet velvet clinging to the Doctor’s right arm as more murmurs of satisfaction filtered down from the onlooking Shadow Parliament. ‘You are ours.’ She turned away. ‘It is time for you to finish carrying out your first instruction.’

‘It is,’ hissed the Grandfather’s voice, as his one armed form shivered into solidity once again. Tarra felt the power radiating from him. Just to have the Grandfather near … That it should be she who stood at his right and only hand …

‘What must I do?’ the Doctor asked, like a child anxious to please an angry parent. It was a question she had asked herself, so many times.

‘The Edifice will be of incalculable value to us,’ Grandfather Paradox observed. ‘If we can access the multiple universes at its core, our resources and power will be near infinite. But first, it must be made stable.’

‘I understand,’ the Doctor said.

‘You will travel to the Edifice. Its structure will have been weakened by the enemy blast.

Kristeva, you have brought the gravitic stabilisers?’

Kristeva held out his skeletal hand to show a number of the small, dull, metal cubes. ‘I have.’

Mathara opened her seemingly empty palm. Then she gestured to what looked like tiny insects spiralling above their heads. ‘Cameras, Grandfather. Our people approach in ships of every size. If it pleases you, we shall broadcast to the fleet, so that all the Faction may see the first spoils of our endless war.’

The Grandfather nodded acknowledgement. ‘I shall retire until all is prepared. There are still

… adjustments to be made. Mother Tana will go with you, Doctor. So too will Father Kreiner.’

Kreiner bowed. A chance to redeem himself, thought Tarra. We shall see.

Then the Grandfather flickered and was gone. Soon after, the skeletal figures crowding the benches drifted from sight too. Only the ghostly, breathless sound of flapping wings lingered in the chill air.

‘How are we going to get to the Edifice?’ Kreiner asked.

Tarra smiled and produced the ivory control box ffom her pocket.

* * *

Compassion had shut down her systems for their own protection. With so much power surging through the Edifice she had no intention of being time rammed again. Now the storm had passed, but she’d woken to find night had fallen over the now well and truly blasted heath. A starless sky as black as the thickest shadows. She took that as a fairly ominous symbol of the current physical state of the Edifice.

Just as she was about to plan her next move, Compassion bellowed in pain as what felt like hot knives cut through her insides. It felt like nerve endings were shredding, tendon wires snapping, a hot paralysis beginning to settle. It was the Faction, she could recognise the pain.

Even here they could reach her. Perhaps especially here in this sick, dying place.

Kicking and screaming, she struggled against the fishhook tugs that were dragging her back.

But with her engines shrieking louder than she was, Compassion felt herself reassembling at the Faction’s bidding.

Where was she?

Back on Gallifrey, she could feel it. The Council Chamber, she imagined. Her higher sensors told her there were two or three levels of reality overlaid on the room, but the chamber was a big enough mess even in visual mode.

Recovering, she found herself opening to allow the Doctor to board her. Tarra and Fitz’s alternative self followed him in. There was a slight buzzing sensation, and Compassion realised tiny camera eyes were darting about inside her, broadcasting the view.

‘We’re going back to the Edifice, Compassion,’ the Doctor said, his voice dull and flat.

‘Don’t try to fight the Faction’s control.’ He paused. ‘It doesn’t work.’

Compassion felt uncomfortable as he input the co ordinates. The last time he’d touched her inside he was wrestling for control, desperate for her to respond. Now his hands were like frozen meat, pushing stiffly at her switches. She could sense the resignation in every precise command.

Kreiner turned to Tarra as Compassion readied herself for takeoff.

‘Give me two minutes alone with him.’

She looked at him, black sockets gaping like surprised mouths.

‘Please.’

Tarra looked at the Doctor, standing motionless now by Compassion’s controls. ‘Still you persist. You wish to harm him again?’

‘No. But there are things I need to say to him.’

‘We set the past adrift, Kreiner, or we set it alight.’ It was obviously a stock Faction phrase. It was also clear from his reaction that Kreiner wasn’t impressed. ‘Let go of your former life,’

Tarra continued. ‘It is meaningless.’

Kreiner reached out a gauntleted hand to touch her cheek. ‘What were you called before you were a fairy tale Time Lord princess, Tarra?’ he said, not hiding the smirk in his voice. ‘What name can you still not bear to go by?’

Tarra’s eye sockets seemed almost to warp, to narrow at him. She took his hand, and lowered it from her glistening cheek.

‘All right. You have until we reach the Edifice,’ she said. ‘I shall activate the camera transmitters then.’

She walked over a small footbridge and out of the console room.

Kreiner turned now to the Doctor, who returned his look placidly, as if he too were wearing a mask. Reaching out with his good arm, Kreiner grasped hold of Compassion’s internal monitor controls and twisted savagely hard. She screamed with the pain of it, but could hear no sound. It was as if she were leaving her own body, a disembodied intelligence, all perception gone. They would do this to her for good, in the end, make her mute, blind, senseless, a nameless power source bent only to their will. As her own heart pumped on without her, Compassion saw Kreiner stalk over to the Doctor, arm outstretched, before her world went dark.

‘Alone at last,’ she heard him whisper, then silence.

Chapter Forty one

Ever the mortal

Mathara had her hands to her head. ‘I sense the seething life around us,’ she whispered. “The pain and the death, but there is resolve and purpose too.’ She turned to Kristeva. ‘This room must be safeguarded.’

‘Nothing can harm the Grandfather,’ Kristeva said, gesturing to the empty benches, spectral in the cold gloom. ‘His presence is immortal.’

‘But are not his servants worthy to be saved?’ Mathara whispered. She had lived for so long, endured so much. Now that the moment of triumph was here to be enjoyed she found she was terrified it would be taken from her.

‘The Capitol is in ruins, the Time Lords are weak cattle roaming it aimlessly,’ Kristeva asserted. ‘Our warships are approaching Gallifrey now. Our people will settle soon enough.’

‘In the meantime, I will arrange for our crew to transmat down,’ Mathara decided. ‘Until all opposition has bowed down before us.’

* * *

Kreiner stroked his gauntlet against the Doctor’s cheek. His voice was a low growl: ‘You’re faking, Doctor. Aren’t you?’

The Doctor blinked, but didn’t speak.

‘Aren’t you?’ Kreiner insisted.

The Doctor sighed. ‘You can’t kid a kidder,’ he said.

Kreiner felt his head buzzing, but couldn’t give the feeling a name. ‘I knew it.’

‘You know me.’

‘You left me.’

‘I was left with no choice.’

Kreiner paused. The Doctor was too good with words. That’s why the inadequacy of his apology, Kreiner realised, had actually meant something to him, for all his desperation to believe it had not.

The buzzing feeling was still there.

‘How did you fool the Grandfather?’

The Doctor looked away. ‘Seems I’ve been fooling myself for a long time.’

‘Well, I won’t give you away,’ Kreiner said. He paused for a moment. ‘Not like you did me.’

The Doctor still couldn’t look at him, and kept quiet.

Kreiner took a step closer. ‘What are you planning?’

Still silence. Kreiner took a deep breath.

‘I don’t care what you do, Doctor. Only …’ The buzzing was getting worse. Then he remembered the name for it. It was a word that meant little to men as their lives stretched on and on soullessly before them.

Desperation.

‘Only let me go home. Make me who I was.’

The Doctor closed his eyes and opened his mouth:’! can’t, Fitz.’

‘Don’t call me that. I’m not Fitz. Not unless you make me, like you made – like you made him Fitz.’ He grabbed hold of the Doctor’s coat, pulled him closer. ‘Look at me. What I’ve become. Go back to Earth in 1963. Don’t take me with you. Leave me behind, leave me be.

Let me stay a bum from Archway who’s never going to amount to anything.’ He felt a sob wrench its way out of him. ‘We’ll kill Tarra, Doctor, you can run and we’ll —’

The Doctor shushed him, like he was shushing an infant. ‘I can’t help you like that,’ he whispered. ‘I’d just make one more paradox, a cheat’s way of doing things.’

‘It’s all about knowing when to leave people, right, Doctor?’ Kreiner said. ‘And you left me for dead millennia ago.’ He snorted. A cheat? You cheat all the time!’ Kreiner grabbed hold of the Doctor’s neck. ‘You cheated me.’

‘I made a terrible mistake,’ the Doctor gasped. ‘Don’t you think I’d go back and change that if I could? But I’m not like the Faction. I won’t keep the promise of impossibility. Not even now with their toxins trying to drown my body. Not even now.’

Kreiner almost choked on the thickness of his saliva as he released the Doctor’s throat.

‘Please.’

The Doctor fell back and massaged his throat. ‘My first paradox,’ he whispered hoarsely. ‘All the others will seem easier after that —’ The Doctor’s swollen eyes were looking somewhere far away. ‘Say I did take you back,’ he said. ‘Would it be the same world you remember?

Would it be the next day? Or the day after?’ He shook his head. ‘It won’t be the universe anyone remembers once the Faction get to work. Nothing will ever be the same. Literally, nothing. And if I do as you ask, I’d be doing the Faction’s work for them. Changing the past, transforming the future. I’m too close to being Faction already, can’t you see?’ The Doctor had become so impassioned that one of the cuts on his face had reopened, and a drop of blood fell on to his knuckles. He stared, transfixed.

‘See? Blood on my hands.’

‘On your hand,’ Kreiner retorted, bitterly. ‘If you don’t save me you won’t save yourself.

You’ll become Grandfather Paradox.’

‘So it would seem,’ the Doctor whispered, a sad smile on his face. ‘But I’m not running away from my mistakes this time, Fitz.’ He paused, lips pursed as if a terrible secret were hanging from them that he was desperate to spit out. “The Edifice is my old TARDIS, Fitz.’

Kreiner stared at him, incredulous. ‘What?’

‘It is. I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I have to face up to my responsibilities —’

‘Responsibilities?’ Kreiner echoed in disgust. ‘You’re lying.You’re a fake, Doctor. Just like that boy you made.’

The Doctor looked away. ‘Am I?’

‘Don’t you dare turn away,’ Kreiner hissed, dull throbbing replacing the buzzing in his head.

A surge of anger jolted through him. ‘Don’t you think you owe me?’

The Doctor clenched his fists. Then, slowly, turned back round to face him.

‘You’re right,’ he said, suddenly dead calm again. ‘Let’s do a deal. Allow me to stabilise the Edifice, just as Tarra and the Grandfather want me to. Then, if there’s time, I’ll do whatever you want.’

Kreiner’s heart leapt … then started to sink again. ‘We won’t get the chance after you’ve fixed the Edifice.’ An awful thought occurred to him. ‘And if the Faction bug does take you over, what’s to stop you giving me away?’

‘Come on, Fitz. We’re old friends, aren’t we?’ The Doctor smiled, and his bruised lip cracked open. A drop of scarlet squeezed from the split. ‘So very, very old.’

* * *

Romana was inspecting her troops. She herself was holding a tiny pistol. Didn’t look like much – but then, knowing her, it was probably the most efficient killer of the lot. Fitz gripped the bazooka and looked down at his feet rather than at the scorched double doors ahead of them. He wondered which of the weapons he’d find jammed up his nose should he decide to mutiny.

‘You first,’ Romana whispered to Ryssal, who looked like he was wearing a metal rucksack on his back, bristling with strange grey filaments. A large red light was winking provocatively on the strap across his chest. Hit me, it was saying. Hit me and come see my surprise. Ryssal looked scared half to death already.

‘Hey,’ Fitz called lightly. ‘Cheer up. You’re not just any old guard, you’re the advance guard!’

‘Funny man.’ Ryssal forced a crooked smile.

Fitz found himself getting a bit choked. ‘Just open your mouth as you go in. Set of gnashers like that would put the willies up anyone.’

‘You’d better shut up,’ Ryssal said good naturedly. ‘You’ll kill me with laughter before I reach the door.’

Fitz felt his heart sink. ‘You’ll be all right, kid.’ Ryssal might’ve been a hundred and ten for all he knew, but it seemed the right thing to say.

Romana turned now to Mali. ‘Right. Ryssal goes in. We wait until the lights go up, then we move.’

‘What is that pack, anyway?’ Fitz wondered aloud, watching Ryssal psych himself up to hit the red button.

‘All right, Ryssal,’ Romana ordered. ‘Move off and keep moving. Don’t stop, whatever happens: you have to open those doors. Go on,then! Now!’

Ryssal lurched into life as if someone had wound him up and let him go. As soon as he slapped his palm on the button he started to scream. He shook, seemed to twist and pulsate before Fitz’s eyes, then he was literally a new man, someone older and at least a foot taller, his bright red trousers rising up his shins. Another scream, throatier, and the blurring began again. The box on his back seemed to be burning bright, but it was strapped to someone else, now, a fat man waddling down the corridor, no, now someone string bean thin, staggering on, and on, approaching the doors. It was like watching some kind of macabre cartoon show.

‘What the hell is that thing doing to him?’ shouted Fitz.

Romana waved her arm to silence him, although Ryssal had to be waking the dead already.

‘It’s force regenerating him. The energy of the cell renewal isn’t allowed to dissipate: it’s harnessed by the device and released by the first energy weapon that strikes him, unleashing a imitative field into the immediate area. Gets past any defences, changes your foe upon contact. If they don’t die from shock they’re too disorientated to fight back.’

Fitz’s mouth felt bone dry as he watched Ryssal stagger on.

‘I designed it for combat at close quarters,’ Romana said quietly.

‘You designed it?’ Fitz shook his head, stared down again at his own gun.

‘Ryssal was a child,’ Mali said coldly. ‘He had eleven lives remaining.’

Romana shrugged. ‘So he was the obvious choice. The more regenerations you squeeze out, the more potent the field:

‘You’re worse than the bloody Faction,’ Fitz snapped.

‘I didn’t start this War,’ she said coldly.

‘But you’re happy enough to escalate it.’

Just then the doors smashed open and armed black shock troops poured out firing. Ryssal was shot twice in the chest before he seemed to explode, a blinding light filling the corridor.

Fitz closed his eyes. When he opened them again and saw what was left of Ryssal he was sick.

* * *

Tarra stepped out of Compassion and into the darkened chamber. A low, drowsy hum was sounding, and as the Doctor followed her outside, it rose in pitch, the lights brightening a little with it.

‘This must be the control room,’ the Doctor said. ‘Good old Compassion. She was better prepared this time.’ He nodded respectfully to Tarra. ‘Under your control.’

Tarra acknowledged the compliment with a demure nod of her own, and looked around her.

The control room, if you could call this derelict shack by such a name, was a wreck. The walls, once white and polished bone, were now cracked and flaking. A hard, sickly yellow substance had oozed through large holes in the structure like thick pus. The console itself seemed to be rotten, fluffy spore clouds coating its dull ivory controls.

She could see the Edifice was holding on by a thread.

Behind her came Kreiner, followed by the cameras, buzzing over her shoulder. Kreiner was silent. He hadn’t said a word since he’d talked alone with the Doctor.

‘Look,’ Tarra said as a lined face formed out of tiny motes of dust in the fetid atmosphere.

‘What is that?’

The Doctor looked and reacted. ‘Some kind of projection. Of the man I used to be.’

‘The Doctor I met on Dust,’ Kreiner said heavily. ‘Where I lost my arm.’

Tarra looked at him sharply. ‘What is his face doing here now?’

The Doctor seemed to ponder the matter deeply. ‘As Father Kreiner has said, that’s me as I was when the virus first took me. Perhaps this is a security measure now that we’re here in the control room.’ He smiled faintly. ‘It’s my name on the door, after all. This must be some kind of recognition test.’

Tarra regarded the face as it stared down at the Doctor. ‘You looked so innocent then.’

‘Colourful. Bright. I was like a butterfly,’ said the Doctor, taking the tiny stabilisers from his pocket. Tarra couldn’t decipher his tone, but his gaze never shifted from his former self. ‘A butterfly pinned down in the memory. Time is a fickle mistress. If I’d only espied her coming.’ He gently tugged on one of the brittle bone levers. ‘I’m ready to begin.’

The dark eyes of the dust Doctor fixed on to Tarra for a moment and he frowned. Then the apparition vanished. The Doctor seemed not to have noticed.

‘Where’s it gone?’ Tarra asked.

‘Scanning procedure must’ve terminated,’ he said, attaching the little cubes to what she supposed were key points around the misshapen console. ‘I’ve satisfied its security requirements. The Edifice will respond, now.’

The whorls of light started to darken; another image seemed to be forming.

‘What is it?’ Tarra wanted to know. She was suddenly uneasy.

‘The camera link is two way, remember?’ Kreiner said calmly. ‘Whatever medium the Edifice was using to put up that face, our gear has tapped into it.’

The picture hardened into definite shapes. It took Tarra a few moments to work out that she was staring at a naked bleeding torso quivering on two twisted legs, the tatters of a red uniform flapping around it.

‘That’s all that’s left of a Time Lord guard,’ she said slowly. ‘What is happening?’ she shouted up at the tiny flying cameras.

Kristeva’s voice suddenly came through, distorted over the ancient speakers in the room.

‘Under attack! Weapons —’

‘How can this be?’ Tarra shouted at the screen. “The Time Lords are not strong enough …’

Mathara’s face loomed up, a massive blood red skull. ‘I have transmatted down reinforcements from my ship. We will hold the Council Chamber.’

Her harsh features shimmered and vanished, and Tana’s heart quickened at the sight of the Grandfather’s gaunt, half starved face staring down upon them all.

‘The Time Lords will fight to the death,’ he said, blue eyes livid, his form flickering on the primitive display screen. ‘They are bringing new weapons of war to bear. I have almost secured the Matrix. Secured the Faction’s future. You must hurry, Tarra.’

‘How long, Doctor?’ she demanded.

Still he didn’t look up. ‘The systems are stabilised, they’re responding. I’ll have it all sorted soon.’

‘Send the Type 102 to Mathara,’ the Grandfather ordered. ‘She will form an indestructible barricade.’

As Tarra scraped her long nails over the ornate surface of the ivory box, Compassion, screaming in furious silence, slowly faded from view.

Chapter Forty two

Fitz/Kreiner

Fitz fired his gun through the thick smoke belching out from the council chamber. There was no kickback: it was just like firing a toy raygun. Except everyone he hit with it burst into flame.

Another bone man went up in smoke, and he told himself that one day he’d feel guilty. Get through this, live through it, and he’d happily spend a lifetime of guilt just to make up for it.

His stomach had hardened to the reality of the situation pretty quickly. The Faction weren’t pussyfooting about: they meant to hold on to whatever it was they had captured, and were responding to Romana’s ugly tactics in kind. It was kill or be killed, he told himself. Kill or become Father Kreiner all over again. Or a lump of dogmeat like Ryssal.

There was a familiar roaring, wheezing and groaning sound. Fitz laughed jubilantly and squinted into the grey fog, ready for Compassion to appear, indestructible fists flashing through the Faction ranks, a real secret weapon.

Instead she came carried in the arms of a fresh squad of Faction soldiers, holding her up like a shield as they advanced, deflecting whatever rays and beams Romana’s filthy arsenal could chuck at them.

‘Cosmic,’ said Fitz.

* * *

‘You must hurry, Doctor,’ Tarra instructed. The scanner was showing darkness and smoke, but not much in the way of hard details as to how the battle was going. ‘How long will it take?’

‘You can help me,’ he said. ‘On the other side of that door you’ll find equipment. I need something to adjust the linearity of the proton flow.’ He thought. ‘A spanner or something.’

‘I’m not technical,’ Tarra said. ‘Kreiner, you go.’

‘Come on, Tarra, it’s only a spanner.’

A camera fly buzzed close to the Doctor’s head and he swatted at it absent mindedly. Tarra stared hard at him, but he wouldn’t meet her gaze.

‘Fetch it, Kreiner.’

The Doctor was getting flustered. ‘My dear girl, if you don’t know what a spanner —’

‘Kreiner!’ she ordered.

Kreiner hesitated, looked at the Doctor almost as if for guidance …

It all fell into place.

Tarra threw herself at the Doctor with a howl of anger and frustration, her sharp teeth tearing at him. He cried out, his back crushed against the console by her weight. The console emitted a low groan of warning.

She rained down blows upon him, screeching into his face. But somehow he managed to press his foot up against her stomach, and kicked out, propelling her backwards. She tumbled into Kreiner, who grabbed hold of her with his good arm.

‘You …’ She struggled to be free of his grip, spat into his black masked face. ‘What is it, Kreiner? Forgotten which side you’re on?’

‘I I’m …’

His split second hesitation gave her all the time and justification she needed. She pulled out the gun from her belt and fired straight into Kreiner’s stomach.

He yelled, a high pitched wail that popped her ears. She turned in time to see the Doctor hurl himself at her, and she spun aside, still caught in Kreiner’s grip. The Doctor missed, fell past her. She laughed, twisted her arm free at last, overbalanced. She realised she was falling through an open doorway, realised the Doctor hadn’t been lunging for her but for the door handle, that now she was …

It was cold and dark. She was outside, rain lashing down at her, soaking and stinging her. She turned back to the door but it was shut. Hundreds of winged insects were pinned to its splintering wood like badges.

‘I’ll break this door down!’ she screamed. ‘Let me in! I’ll tear you apart, Doctor! I’ll destroy you!’

She sensed rather than saw the shadow fall over her. Spinning round, she saw the creature that cast it: a vast, misshapen spider, over six metres across, was limping towards her, drooling a thick white liquid from its slashed open mouth. It was clearly sick, dying. Eyes like uneven growths were packed round its crusty skull, and as it approached she saw herself reflected in their cold depths, spread eagled in the doorway eight times over. She could feel the pins in the door scraping her back through her gown like fingernails, and insects grinding and disintegrating against the heavy material.

Her only thought was, Don’t let that monster eat me.

She was still thinking it when the spider collapsed, flicking out a bony leg as thick as a tree trunk as it did so, skewering her to the door.

* * *

Guns were starting to fire and bombs were dropping, yet Mother Mathara was suddenly soothed by the presence of the Grandfather in her mind.

‘Go to your ship. Co ordinate the fleet. Prepare them for entry to their new home.’

‘But the battle …’ Mathara felt her breath catch in anticipation.

‘The battle is ending. The Matrix has fallen. The Time Lord dead are ours to play with. Their ancient power has been given to us that it may be utilised to its full potential.’

The voice faded, and with it the sounds of battle seemed to grow fainter as well. As Mathara watched, the ragged splendour of the parliament building came into sharper focus. Aspects of the Council Chamber actually grew into the gaps in the ruins as reality around her warped into obedience. The shadowy figures lining the benches grew more substantial: she saw skeletal faces under once splendid cowls, caught whispered chatter and excited gestures. As the vision grew more splendid and more solid, Mathara imagined she was glimpsing the blur of loa in the air, glorying in this bold manifestation.

She turned to Kristeva, teeth beaming bright. ‘We have them,’ she said. ‘Gallifrey falls.’

Kristeva nodded slowly, raising his arms as if preparing to summon some elemental force.

‘Now to destroy those who would challenge our supremacy once and for all.’

* * *

Kreiner was rolled clear by the Doctor just as the razor sharp point of the monster’s leg burst through the heavy oak. He’d been pressed up against the door, squinting through a knot in the wood, scrabbling to hold his guts in with his only hand. Now he realised the ancient nanites in his self repair circuits were simply too old and tired to be bothered this time. Just like him.

He ought to be really angry right now, but instead he just felt a bit numb.

‘So which side were you on, Fitz?’ the Doctor murmured, cradling his head, studying the wound.

‘The right side of the door, it would seem,’ Kreiner answered. He felt a surprising rush of warmth when the Doctor smiled at his joke; then realised it was blood soaking his armour.

‘ “A butterfly pinned down …”’ Kreiner looked up at the sound of the warm, rich voice. He saw the image of the old looking, grey haired Doctor appear like an uncertain angel above him, picked out in motes of light. ’

“If I’d only a spider coming …”’ the dust Doctor went on. ‘That really was an awful pun, old chap. I thought you were going to give the whole game away.’

Typical melodramatic Time Lord style, thought Kreiner. Your life could come round to call even as it came crashing round your ears. ‘Your old self is right,’ he muttered, and tapped the crusty edge of his stomach wound. ’

“Espied ‘er coming”, indeed. As lines go, that was more painful than this is.’

‘Maybe so,’ the Doctor said ruefully. ‘But I only had the one chance to get through to you.’

‘Think I’m past it, do you?’ the old face said, frowning.

‘Of course not,’ the Doctor said hurriedly.

‘I think I am,’ Kreiner said simply. ‘Passed away.’

‘Hold on, Fitz,’ the Doctor whispered encouragingly.

‘For what? Christmas?’ Kreiner laughed weakly, and a spurt of blood ran iron over his tongue and teeth.

‘Where there’s life, there’s hope,’ the Doctor said. Kreiner saw the old Doctor mouth the words along with him.

Just then, the evil spike of the spider’s leg started to twitch, trying to pull itself back through the splintered door. Kreiner flinched automatically, then wished he hadn’t as the pain tore through him. He coughed, felt bile dribble into his mouth, knew he didn’t have long.

‘Call off that thing,’ the Doctor instructed, as if he were referring to an overenthusiastic hound dog.

‘I thought you wanted it here,’ the dust Doctor replied sulkily. ‘I do wish you’d make your mind up. I’ve so little control, you know.’

The spider continued its experimental leg flexes. The Doctor gently pulled Kreiner to one side of the door, deeper into the shadows.

‘Is there hope, Doctor?’ Kreiner whispered. The pain was sharpening his senses now, and with it came a new determination that he would not die in this place.

The Doctor smiled and his lip split again. ‘Always. There’s always something.’

‘Promise?’

‘I promise.’

Kreiner realised, as the Doctor gave his solemn word, that he actually believed him.

Perhaps he really had never forgotten what it meant to be Fitz Kreiner.

‘So you’ve saved him,’ he heard the dust Doctor say. ‘A single person. What are you going to do now?’

Kreiner closed his eyes, let his gauntlet trace the gaping hole in his stomach again. He wanted to hear what the Doctor would say, but it was so warm here in the shadows, so comfortingly dark, he just wanted to sleep.

Then his eyes snapped open, compelled by some premonition.

Hovering over him, face huge and bright, centimetres from his own, was Grandfather Paradox.

Chapter Forty three

The choice

‘Back behind the TARDIS!’ Romana yelled, lobbing a grenade into the advancing Faction troops.

‘No!’ yelled Fitz. ‘You’ll hit Compassion!’

The grenade went off, obliterating the men who were hiding behind her. Compassion dropped to the ground, her eyes tightly closed, but she was picked up again by more scurrying soldiers.

‘She’s a TARDIS, you idiot,’ Romana snapped. ‘Indestructible. So let’s use my TARDIS in the same way!’

Fitz remembered the ships he’d seen torn apart in the Fjiemy’s first attack, and discovered a moment later he could squeeze the trigger on his proton gun with crossed fingers.

Suddenly, a dark shadow fell across Fitz and the others, as if the ravens from the transfigured Council Chamber were flying overhead as one.

‘What’s happening?’ Mali yelled.

Fitz blinked. The light had changed: it was murkier, a sickly yellow. Then the corridor started pouring with blood around him, and the floor started giving way. He turned round in shock, saw something grab the guard beside him and haul him into the blackness that was closing in.

He backed away, into something cold, gasped, turned –and found that the crystal of Romana’s TARDIS was looking more like an ice cube, smooth surfaces dribbling and melting. The marble floor dissolved as if acid were flooding it, revealing rusting grilles beneath. Through the mesh Fitz saw hundreds of people crushed in together, the blood flowing from the walls soaking them stickily. They pressed their hands up against the grating, screaming for help.

He felt thousands of eyes burning into him, but was still too shocked, too bewildered by the onslaught, to react.

A tiny voice inside him was telling him that was probably the idea, when he felt something squeeze his arm. He cried out, pictured the vanishing guard, snatched his arm away, opened his eyes …

‘Jesus, Mali,” he said. ‘What’s happened? Who are these people? How did we get here?’

‘We still have Fitz, Madam President,’ Mali reported. ‘He’s real.’

‘Real confused, you mean,’ he said. ‘What’s going …?’

Romana was suddenly beside him, a pale spectre. ‘The Matrix has restabilised …’ Her voice was hollow. ‘The Faction influence has been woven into its databanks.’

Fitz shut his eyes from the terrible sights around him, but could still feel the blood pooling at his feet. ‘Bad, right?’

‘Grandfather Paradox is using the Matrix to project his preferred reality on to ours.’

‘But I —’

Fitz could see now that tears were welling in Romana’s eyes. ‘You were right, you stupid idiot primitive, you were right.’

‘I was?’

‘Ripples back through time from this moment – the moment of capitulation. Rewriting history, diminishing us, weakening us …’ She grabbed hold of Fitz’s shirt with both hands, a broken nail scratching into his chest. ‘How many sides does the Panopticon have?’ she said quietly, mouth twisting as she fought back tears.

‘Six,’ whispered Fitz.

‘It’s circular!’ Romana screamed at him. ‘One great wall capturing the unity of the one great Gallifrey!’

‘There are nine Gallifreys!’ Fitz yelled back into her face, bumping her little snub nose with his own. She jerked her head back, and the hot tears cascaded down both china cheeks.

‘Nine!’

‘No,’ Mali said, her voice unnervingly calm. “There isn’t even one.’

Romana slumped to the ground. The people trapped under the grille jostled and shouted beneath her feet, reaching out for her, begging her to deliver them from evil. She held her head in both hands, snivelling like a child.

‘Look,’ breathed Mali. ‘Look there.’

He knew it was a bad idea, but he couldn’t stop himself. Fitz opened one eye, and saw the image of a small boy in a spotlight ahead of them. He was screaming as dark figures held him down. By their feet were big black medicine bags, bulging open with strange, angular instruments. The figures held what looked like blowtorches to his face, ignoring his cries of pain, searing away the flesh and boiling the blood until the hard, white bone poked through beneath.

Behind the boy, a long, long line of shivering, terrified people waited their turn.

‘Why?’ Mali whispered in outrage. ‘Why do this?’

‘It’s an illusion, right?’ Fitz said desperately. ‘Just to scare us. Right?’

‘No,’ Romana said, her voice husky and flat. ‘It’s what they’re going to do to us, now that the Grandfather and Faction Paradox have finally won.’

Fitz stared at her, stunned. Then he felt something pulling at his leg. Pulling him in. He screamed at Romana and Mali, first for help, then for mercy, but his cries meant nothing with so many already echoing in the bloody darkness.

His body was being eaten away by the shadows. At least it was painless, he thought. At least it was quick.

* * *

Mali blasted away at the shadowy form that had taken Fitz, but it was no good. He vanished from view, still struggling.

More gunfire sounded in the confusion. An intense white light lit up their surroundings, and another guard screamed as the sound of a detonation echoed round the nightmare.

‘It’s no good,’ Mali whispered. “They’re toying with us, enjoying themselves. They know we can’t fight them. Not now.’

Romana turned to her, and Mali that saw the fierce determination in her green eyes was boiling away into tears.

‘We can’t have lost,’ Romana said, lip trembling, utterly crushed. ‘Everything I ever did was to stop this from happening.’

Mali took hold of her.

‘I can’t have failed,’ Romana snivelled, resting her head against Mali’s shoulder. ‘I can’t let this happen to my people!’

‘There’s nothing we can do,’ she said. ‘There never was.’

Together they waded into the cold water of the dissolving TARDIS. As the screaming and the madness went on outside, its buckling doors washed open and closed suddenly around them.

* * *

‘There’s always something. I promise.’

The Doctor spun round at the sound of his own voice. ‘No!’ he bellowed. Grandfather Paradox was standing with one foot on Father Kreiner’s chest, nudging his boot heel into the wound.

‘What do you mean, no?’ the Grandfather asked. ‘I’m really something.’

‘You’re a projection,’ insisted the Doctor. ‘You can’t hurt us.’

Grandfather Paradox tutted. ‘I have corporeal form, now! So saying, he pressed his boot down against Kreiner’s chest. There was a thick sound like eggshells crushing. Kreiner howled and writhed.

‘Fitz!’ The Doctor sprinted over to tackle Grandfather Paradox, but the ghost of his future self swatted him away as if he were one of the tiny buzzing cameras. He tumbled helplessly against the writhing leg of the bone spider, and gasped as it pressed down hard against his own ribs.

He heard the boot crunch through to a solid floor, a high gurgle, and then nothing.

‘Why?’ the Doctor cried, struggling to be free of the spider’s thick white leg. ‘Why this senseless, evil killing?’

‘Father Kreiner had become a renegade. Turned his back on his own people.’ He heard the Grandfather tut. ‘Where could he have got an idea like that?’

‘He trusted me again!’ The Doctor was shouting now, his fury pouring out. ‘He’d have forgiven me.’

The thin form of his future self leered at him. ‘You will never be forgiven, Doctor,’ said Grandfather Paradox. ‘Never. Not now.’

The Doctor pushed once more against the skeletal limb pinning him down.

‘Trying to leg it?’ The Grandfather chuckled mirthlessly, and looked at him with the dispassionate interest of a surgeon at an autopsy. ‘Why are you not ours? Your body was riddled with the Faction virus – I sensed it in the Council Chamber.’

‘You sensed it because you are attuned to the infected timeline trying to overprint itself on to the original,’ the Doctor shouted up at the distorted image.

Grandfather Paradox scowled. ‘You’re lying!’

‘He’s not, you know.’ The ghostly image of the dust Doctor stood, hands on hips, in the middle of the control room.

Suddenly the great leg came away in the Doctor’s hands, crumbling like soft rock. There was a thud outside as the enormous spider crashed to the ground. Which of the apparitions had disposed of the creature he couldn’t tell.

The Grandfather drifted smoothly over to confront the ghostly dust Doctor across the console.

‘What would you know about it.you young fool?’

‘Perhaps I’m older than you think,’ said the wraith haughtily. ‘I never died on Dust. I should never have been there. I should never have been infected.’ He patted his chest soundlessly.

“This body died on Earth. The TARDIS knew and she gave up her existence to try to save me. She’s been siphoning off energies from the bottle universe to hold both my fates in the balance, here at the nexus point.’

‘I am your fate.’ The Grandfather glared down, eyes burning with malevolence. “The game is played out, Doctor, and I hold all the cards.’

‘Perhaps we could have a whist drive.’ The Doctor got warily to his feet and retreated over to the side of the dust Doctor, who turned to him.

‘It seems to me there are three directions this little tournament could move in,’ the dust Doctor said, scratching the back of his illusory neck.

‘Oh really,’ the Grandfather said. His boots thudded as he walked slowly and calmly around the console.

‘One: you can run. Leave the universe to it. What can you do to save Gallifrey now?’

The Doctor was backing away slowly under the Grandfather’s advance, eyes locked into his malevolent stare. ‘Two?’

‘Surrender to this third rate god in the machine here.’ The dust Doctor nodded towards the Grandfather. ‘Beg him to change his mind, to spare Gallifrey, to temper his visions for his Paradox hordes overrunning all space and time. Perhaps there’s a chance.’

The Doctor and the Grandfather were circling each other now, looking for an opening, the projection of the white haired man a surreal referee in the middle. Three of them together, snapshots of a single life. No escape: how could you run from yourself?

‘I like the sound of option two, Doctor,’ said Grandfather Paradox, moving a little closer.

‘What about it? Are you ready to beg me?’

The projection of the dust Doctor seemed to swallow hard. ‘Or three …’

A look of alarm suddenly clouded the Grandfather’s face. “That’s enough!’ he snarled, and sliced his arm through the projection. The image of the valiant, defiant, younger Doctor dissolved into motes of dust.

The Grandfather smiled his lopsided, evil grin. ‘On your knees, Doctor. We both know it’s the only viable option.’

The Doctor stared at where his earlier self had been standing. The atmosphere in the room had changed, dropped several degrees in an instant. His glands had risen in his neck, were throbbing under his arms. His cheeks and lips were bursting out in spiteful ulcers, little pinprick pains trying to jab him over the edge, to where the Grandfather’s sick future would be waiting.

‘You heard him,’ the Doctor whispered as the Grandfather moved nearer. ‘There’s a third option.’

‘What could that mad fool know? Come on, beg me to save Gallifrey. To suffer your silly friends to live. Gallifrey’s last uprising has been crushed. Go on. I’m a god, you can trust in me.’

‘Like Father Kreiner trusted in you?’

‘Worship me, Doctor. Oh, I know it’s a little narcissistic … But one day you’ll see it from my point of view.’ Again, the dry cackle. ‘You will, you know.’

The Doctor continued to back away towards the console, trying to think, his clouded brain buzzing as if it was filled with wasps. ‘I will never become you! There has to be another way

…’

He closed his eyes, gripped the controls, tried to re establish the psychic link to hear what his earlier self had been about to say. The tiniest essence of life force was all the Grandfather hadn’t managed to strip away with his psychic blast. The one strand binding the grinding dimensions of the Edifice together.

There was a loud snapping noise from one of the ancient bone control panels and the Doctor’s eyes opened wide. A cloud of mould spores flew from the misshapen mushroom of the console as a dull brass lever sprang up.

Concentric rings hooped round the spike of the lever, forming a symbol like a target.

The Doctor started to shake his head in horror, to mouth silent words in disbelief. But as he turned to recoil, he found the Grandfather was upon him His pale shining face rushed to meet his own, and his hooked hand grasped for his throat.

Chapter Forty four

Ended

‘You’ll never reach that lever, Doctor,’ hissed the Grandfather.

‘I don’t want to,’ the Doctor muttered, as the bony fingers closed more tightly round his swollen neck. ‘If I do, I lose everything I hold dear.’

The Grandfather tried to pull the Doctor away from the gleaming brass spike. ‘So why even try?’

‘Because I’m not you. Because I’m the Doctor.’

‘You are a fool.’

Dark spots clouded the Doctor’s vision. He felt a roaring pressure in his ears. ‘You’ll kill me,’ he gasped.

‘What’s one more paradox now?’ the Grandfather spat into his face. ‘I can survive anything.’

The Doctor grabbed hold of the Grandfather’s stump and squeezed as hard as he could. He saw his own aged and pitted face grimace in pain, and knew he had to try harder. He clutched at the lever, almost touching it. The Grandfather tugged him away, just as the Doctor had hoped. His numb fingers scrabbled for one of the metal stabiliser cubes, and freed it from its housing. Somehow he managed to secure it between two fingers and started pounding the bare flesh of the stump with his fist.

Still the Grandfather held him fast. In desperation, he swung up both legs and kicked as hard as he could into Grandfather Paradox’s stomach.

The Grandfather let go and fell backwards. The Doctor landed heavily on the cracked ivory floor.

Immediately, the Grandfather recovered and swooped through the air, his cloak never moving, wrapped protectively round him like a chrysalis. The Doctor imagined with a chill this was only the first of many cadaverous forms peeping out. He rolled desperately out of the way, felt a rush of cold air pass his hot face.Then he turned to find Grandfather Paradox blocking his way to the console.

‘It’s hopeless, Doctor,’ the Grandfather said. ‘I have only to wait and you will be mine.’

The Doctor looked up at him, wiped a streak of blood from his mouth. ‘You’re right. It is hopeless. You’re really not my type.’

An almighty lurch shook the Edifice. Hot blue sparks flew from the console, and a nonsensical gabbling of whispered voices rose in the room like a tide. ‘Listen to me, Grandfather!’ The Doctor spoke slowly and gravely. He held up one hand like an Earthly man of God warding off the evil before him, and approached the console from the rear. “The Edifice is losing form. It’s grown to this colossal size by mapping its external dimensions on to those of its interior. It’s as big inside and out … but the dimensional interfaces are fatigued, wearing thin.’ The Doctor showed the stabiliser cube in his other hand, and smiled.

‘Now I’ve removed this, it won’t take so much to bring the whole thing tumbling down.’

The Grandfather gestured to the curved brass handle. “The device is useless, it can’t focus fire now. It’s just a relic of the ancient times of conflict.’

‘You’ve helped bring those times upon us again,’ the Doctor said. ‘No one knows that better than the core of this good, tired old TARDIS of mine.’

The Edifice pitched again, and its floor became a steep gradient. The Grandfather reached out with his missing arm to support himself, and fell with an angry shout. The Doctor tumbled forward too, hurting himself against the edge of the console. He staggered round to the lever

– but the Grandfather seized him by the leg. Before he lost his balance, the Doctor plucked one more of the stabilisers from its housing. At once the gabbling voices grew louder. The lighting dipped, and the Doctor crashed down to the filthy floor.

‘Let me go,’ he gasped, kicking and punching the Grandfather. ‘You wanted the power of the Edifice, you’re going to get it.’

‘You’re bluffing.’

‘No.’

Grandfather Paradox smashed his head down against the Doctor’s own. There was the dull smack of bone on bone. The Doctor wasn’t sure whether his head was spinning or the Edifice had actually begun to turn on some precarious axis. He gathered all his strength into one punch, and his fist smashed into the Grandfather’s cheek. Soundlessly the Grandfather fell backwards, and the Doctor staggered back to his feet.

‘Just one bolt fired will drain off the last of the binding energy holding the Edifice together,’

he yelled. “The internal dimensions will collapse down to something the size of this stabiliser.’

The Grandfather stared back at him. ‘Gallifrey, Kasterborous … this entire sector of space will be torn apart, destroyed.’

The Doctor nodded, eyes welling with tears. ‘For ever,’ he said firmly. ‘But your entire fleet will perish along with it.’

‘You will die too.’

‘Just as well, I think; the Doctor said, gritting his teeth. ‘I’d never be able to live with the memory anyway.’

‘You will destroy all Gallifrey – wipe out millions of lives.’

‘I never thought I’d admit to choosing the lesser of two evils.’

He seized the branching brass device on the console, but again, the Grandfather flew over to grapple with him. With the Edifice tipping at such an angle now, the Doctor couldn’t get clear. He tried to duck, but Grandfather Paradox held his right arm, twisted it painfully behind his back.

‘Give in to me,’ the cold voice hissed. ‘You know you can’t bring yourself to do this.’

‘I must!’ The Doctor gasped. The words ground out of him: ‘I will be sparing my people a war that will dehumanise them to the point of becoming monsters. I will be saving them from whatever living nightmares the Faction’s technology can inflict upon them.’

The Grandfather’s voice rose in fury. ‘And yourself?’

‘I don’t know which way this TARDIS will jump,’ the Doctor whispered. ‘Nor which timeline will be set in stone. But at least that’s what it will be. Stone, not bone.’

‘I will ensure that the Faction’s reality is chosen,’ hissed Grandfather Paradox in his ear.

‘You will never destroy the Faction. All of space and all of time is riddled with us.’

The Edifice lurched the other way, and the two men tumbled away from the console. The Doctor struggled to be free, but his arm was held tight.

He went suddenly limp in the Grandfather’s grip.

‘Riddled?’ he gasped, shaking sweat from his eyes, pain pricking all over his weary body. His voice hardened. ‘I’ll give you a riddle. I’ve been thinking of a paradox – an extra special one, just for you.

That missing arm of yours, the stuff of your legend.’

The Grandfather scowled down at him. ‘I removed it myself. To defy the Time Lords branding me their prisoner.’

‘No, you didn’t.’ The Doctor threw his head back, to stare defiantly into the burning gaze of his own future one last time. A focus point. His own target.

The Grandfather held one of his arms fast. The Doctor suddenly reached out with his free hand.

‘You cut off your own arm because you used it …’

The Doctor gripped the trigger mechanism. The Grandfather couldn’t stop him, his one hand locked round the Doctor’s other wrist. The voices chanted louder and louder.

‘… to do …’

The Doctor twisted down with all his strength, the myriad voices cheering him on, joining him in unison to scream the final word.

‘… this.’

The whispers stopped abruptly. The Grandfather seemed to scream with the voice of the millions still caught below on Gallifrey. The Doctor hung on to the vibrating bulk of the ancient console, and pressed his face against the hard bone surface as if for comfort.

The Grandfather howled his despair to the universe.

The Doctor had spent his life moving on from place to place, trying to keep the pages turning, never to reach the end of the story. Finally, there was nowhere to run.

Why could he hear footsteps?

* * *

The sound of the Grandfather’s anger tore Kristeva’s mind apart. He spun around the Shadow Parliament, heard excitement turning to disbelief, then to terror. The figures on the benches were in uproar, struggling around in panic. One of them burst into flame, and like a torch, set light to everything and everyone he touched.

‘We’re too strong!’ Kristeva shouted at them. ‘Too strong to burn down now!’ He struggled to the empty Speaker’s chair, reached for the heavy gavel resting on the mottled bone lectern.

He had to bring order. Order. He screamed the word, brought down the hammer, but it shattered to dust. Kristeva stared at it in horror. He’d gone too far. This parliament knew he was a false Speaker, that the Grandfather was gone once more. And Kristeva presumed to stand in his place?

The air was suddenly thick with huge, dark birds, tearing at him, pushing him from the podium. Kristeva fell forward, smacking into the hard, wet floor. He saw reflections of the spreading fire in the water, panicking feet stamping over his worn out body, slipping and sliding in the gloom.

He forced himself up through sheer effort of will, pressure in his head rising higher and higher. His blood felt as if it was boiling in his skull, then it burst out in jets through his eyes, poured from his mouth.

He blundered into someone else, felt spindly limbs snap trying to push his dying body away.

He looked up into wide dark eyes, the anger and frustration he saw there mirroring his own.

* * *

Up on the deserted flight deck, deafened by psychic feedback from the agony of the loa, Mathara clutched at the empty air for support. The gears in her old legs had gone into spasm, overloaded by the strength of her shock. Twitching, her slight frame held upright only by the stubborn gears, she saw the Edifice vanish, and the beginnings of an explosion so profoundly destructive it failed even to register on the spectrums of sight. You could see only what wasn’t there: no light, no substance of any kind, radiating out, a new bloom replacing the ancient flower.

The nothing was as potent a symbol as anything the Faction had ever embraced. Still Mathara was reaching blindly out to it when she, and the Faction fleet, snapped out of existence for ever.

Final Interlude

The time

Sunlight pokes him in the eye. Now he knows it all. Everything.

And already he is forgetting why he has come.

He stares at the book accusingly, then drops it to the floor. The thick carpet absorbs the thud of its falling. All this is a trick, one more lie, another deception. He chides himself for coming here, for childishly seeking any kind of absolute. He must leave this place, this trap. Now the future will be coming for him; he has given his location away.

He turns and fades.

He will be missing.

* * *

In perfect stasis, protected by security systems that will defend against any living creature, the heavy volume hangs suspended in the sunshine. A closed book, undisturbed.

Chapter Forty five

Aftermath

Fitz emerged into the light with a shout of terror and surprise, staring wildly.

‘Shut up.’ The voice sounded softly all around him.

‘Compassion,’ he whispered. ‘You broke through whatever they laid on you.’ He paused.

‘Obviously,’ he added.

‘No. Old Mother Tarra’s control box stopped affecting me, just like that. Bloody good job, too. I was able to fix the damage you –that Father Kreiner did to my internal monitor. Hear myself think again.’

Fitz let the details sail over his head. ‘Why would it just stop —’ He paused, a hope flaring in his twisted guts. ‘Could it be something the Doctor did? To Tarra, I mean? But he was …’

‘I don’t know what happened.’

‘What about Romana and —’

‘I told you, Fitz, shut up.’

Fitz nodded, closed his eyes, concentrated on holding himself here, here in the warmth of the familiar room. He felt his mind slowly slithering back from the edge of losing it altogether.

He looked down at himself: soaked, bruised, splattered with blood, but alive.

‘You’re safe,’ he cooed to himself, hugging his body and rocking on his knees. ‘For you, Britischer pig, ze var is over.’

Then he keeled over and let the tears out at last.

Fitz was aware of nothing else but the thick, choking sobs for some time. Eventually he found his voice again and was able to ask weakly, ‘Where are we going?’ He considered again.

‘Where can we go? We’ll be watching our backs for ever.’

She didn’t answer. Distantly, Fitz recognised the sound of her engines shifting up a pitch, preparing to run regardless.

Compassion hiccuped. Fitz knew her well enough to know that this meant she’d materialised, but he was too tired to ask where. He closed his eyes, like a child on the back seat of a car foiling asleep and feeling safe with a grown up behind the wheel. When Compassion’s engines started up again shortly afterwards he didn’t question it, simply allowed the noise to soothe him to sleep.

When he opened his eyes again, he found that Compassion had decided to switch on the scanner display. It showed a planet, Gallifrey, he assumed, but something was wrong. The planet was losing its form. The dark cloudy red of its surface was scudding away into space, its spherical form twisting into a helix, consuming a nearby moon in a single gulp.

Fitz got up wearily, every muscle aching. He thought back to Kaufima in the cave as he watched Gallifrey go up in smoke through Compassion’s eyes. ‘That’s a burnt orange sky all right,’ he muttered.

‘The Doctor,’ said Compassion. ‘He’s destroyed the Edifice, the Faction, his own planet.’

‘No.’ Fitz swallowed hard. ‘The Faction destroyed the planet.’

‘Have it your own way.’

Fitz shook his head, remembering the Doctor as he’d last seen him on the filthy floor of the Council Chamber. ‘Believe me, this isn’t my own way.’

For a moment, the whole planet glowed brighter than a sun. Then it was nothing more than a pinprick of light.

The stars began to blink out, one by one.

Compassion’s engine note changed, and the darkness of space on the scanner screen drifted into the comforting greys and blues of the bruised vortex.

‘I’m free,’ Compassion whispered all about him.

‘I suppose you are,’ he said, staring up into her sparkling depths. He could feel a new power in her, a confidence. He found it made him want to smile, despite all that had happened.

Even so.

‘I wish – I wish we could’ve saved the Doctor …’ His voice caught in his throat as a tear that had escaped the previous exodus tried to worm its way out.

‘You should go to his room,’ came Compassion’s voice.

Fitz did as he was told without question. And there, flat out on his bed, bruised, battered but alive, was the sleeping form of the Doctor.

Fitz stared at him for some time. He couldn’t decide whether to start weeping again or to laugh out loud.

‘I snatched him from the Edifice, like I snatched you from those Matrix projections,’

Compassion whispered.

Fitz took a shuddering breath. “Thank you. I only wish —’

A long, long pause.

‘I only wish we could’ve saved him before it came to this.’

Compassion said nothing. He felt her presence stealing from the room.

‘Maybe you left me in Geneva, Doctor,’ Fitz whispered. ‘Maybe I left you with the Faction.

But maybe now we can both leave all this shit behind.’

He walked to the door, then paused on the threshold. Thought of the little boy in those Matrix projections, screaming as the spectres melted his face down to the bone. Saw the string of the Doctor’s yoyo hanging from out of his torn trouser pocket.

‘Life goes on, Doctor,’ he murmured, staring at the pale figure wrapped in its evergreen coat.

‘And so will you.’

Chapter Forty six

Travelling companions

‘You’re sure about this, Compassion?’

‘Obviously.’

Fitz lit up a cigarette with shaking fingers. The time had come at last.

The Doctor remained cold and pale on the couch, a frown slapped on his face as if even taking shallow breaths required Olympian feats of concentration. Compassion was positively glowing. For the first time, she’d provided a holographic version of herself inside the console room. He guessed her bothering to provide a focus for him to talk to was something of a big deal. A goodbye in person – or in as much of a person as she could ever be.

Fitz took a big drag on his ciggie, watching as Compassion folded a piece of paper and walked over to the Doctor. ‘Can’t you make those instructions bigger?’ he called. ‘What if he loses them? Or doesn’t even find them?’

Compassion didn’t look up. ‘You know him.’

‘That’s why I’m asking.’

‘The first thing he’ll do is search his pockets.’

‘My pockets, you mean.’ Fitz sighed. I’ll miss that coat.’

Compassion turned to him, a smile literally flickering on her holographic face. ‘As long as you turn up at the right spot in 2001, Fitz, you’ll get it back, won’t you?’

‘You think he’s going to be wearing the same coat for more than a hundred years?’ Fitz allowed his withering look to soften into something more thoughtful. ‘Mind you, I suppose that cut does have a certain timeless quality about it …’

‘Time to go, Fitz.’

How could she say that so casually? He took another mournful puff and tried again. ‘You’re sure about this?’

‘You’ve got more than enough money there to sort out a new life for yourself …’

‘I mean about him.’ Fitz plonked his old trilby on the Doctor’s head. ‘He still doesn’t look too clever.’

‘For the hundredth time, he’s not Faction any longer. You can see his shadow, can’t you? The Edifice jumped the right way. The Doctor was never on Dust … not now. Causality’s been thrown back on course.’

‘You make it sound like a football or something.’

Compassion rolled her eyes. ‘Well, whatever. The Doctor won’t be kicking it for some time.’

‘If it never really happened, how come I can remember …?’

‘The memories may still alter.’ Compassion waved her hand at him to shut him up. ‘I’m not prolonging these proceedings by explaining temporal causality spirals to you.’

Fitz grumbled: ‘I guess if I’d blown up the world I wouldn’t want to remember it. I can’t see it, you know. Him just waiting around, living with that, for a hundred years …’

‘Approximately. Before the TARDIS has re formed itself.’

Hanging around in Gallifrey’s ashes, checking the scale of the damage, Compassion had located the only piece of matter larger than an electron in the vicinity. A little black box, about an inch square, shining like wet coal.

‘So, it’s renewing itself, right?’ Fitz said, not convinced. ‘Like, that is going to grow police box size.’

‘Eventually,’ Compassion said, ignoring his jibe. ‘It’s healing just as he will. It’s going to take some time, that’s all. And it needs to be close to the Doctor throughout that time.’

‘So you’re stuffing his TARDIS in his pocket too, like a snuff box or something?’ Fitz jumped up again, agitated. ‘Compassion, this will never work. A thousand, a million things could go wrong.’

‘I know.’ She pursed her lips. ‘Follow the Doctor’s lead. You’II just have to hope for the best.’

‘Right. ‘Cause I’m just so lucky that way.’

Fitz felt the ground shift ever so slightly under his feet, the tingling at the back of his neck that told him they’d materialised somewhere new.

‘We’ve landed, Fitz,’ Compassion said, her image fading. ‘Goodbye.’

So he was on his own, now. Fitz felt like he was six years old again and had lost his mum in Woolworth’s. ‘Why the rush?’ But he was already talking to empty space. ‘Hey, don’t suppose you could change into something snazzy for me to get out of, a corvette or something, let me impress my new neighbourhood?’

The room remained silent, empty save for him and the Doctor under the ten watt rays of some lamp she’d forgotten to turn off. He felt suddenly as if he were somehow intruding.

The Doctor still lay on his couch, like a body in state. In a right old state. Fitz took a last draw on the cigarette and prayed he wasn’t paying his last respects to his old friend.

Compassion’s doors swung open. Outside, the sun was shining in a picture book blue sky. It was still cold, though.

‘See you, then,’ he whispered to the room.

Fitz turned, took a deep breath, and prepared himself for what he supposed was the first day of the rest of his life. ‘I’ll see you too, Doctor. Everything will be fine. Life’s a game of cricket, right? You’ll have a nice, easy century, then back to the pavilion. OK?’

He couldn’t help glancing back. The Doctor, even unconscious, looked as doubtful as he did.

* * *

Nivet looked around. He was in a large room, empty except for the striped mattress he lay on.

‘Welcome to your new home.’

So, he was on board Compassion. But she didn’t sound urgent, or resentful, or in any of the moods he’d come to associate with her. She sounded happy. What was going on?

‘What do you mean, my new home?’

‘The old one got blown up,’ Compassion said, casually. ‘Just as well I scooped you up when I did. I thought you’d be out cold for ever.

But Nivet was still trying to take in her first sentence. ‘What are you talking about, blown up?

Gallifrey? You can’t just blow up Gallifrey! It’s …’

‘It’s happened,’ Compassion said. ‘Deal with it.’

Nivet stared around at the bare white walls, wondering if perhaps they should be padded.

‘What’s happened?’

And, while he knelt there on the mattress, Compassion explained everything, in uncompromising detail. The Faction’s stranglehold on the Matrix. The battle. The Doctor’s struggle, and the death of their world. The details wouldn’t stay in his mind, he couldn’t take it all in. It was like listening to the story of some ancient gods, it didn’t relate to him. All Nivet could think of was that his home wasn’t there in the sky any more.

‘You’ve lost a world, but gained a universe,’ said Compassion. ‘A universe free of the Faction, of the petty squabbles of the Time Lords, of the threat of the Enemy …’

‘Maybe so, but … but …’

Lost for words, Nivet stared around in outrage. As he did so, he noticed the pale walls blending to terracotta, saw lead slates begin to cover the floor, until his mattress was like a raft in a grey sea.

‘This is like my room back on …’ He broke off. ‘How are you doing this?’

‘Telepathic circuits,’ Compassion cooed. ‘I want you to feel at home. I need someone who can … sustain me. Someone who understands the way I function. Since the Eye of Harmony’s been poked out, I’m not sure how smoothly I’ll be running in the future. And I intend it to be a long, long future, Nivet. I’ll need you. And you’ll need me.’

‘I get no say in this?’ Nivet snarled.

‘Obviously,’ she whispered in his ears. ‘I do hope you like your quarters here. But I’ve placed you a little way from the central console room, I’m afraid.’

Nivet felt his mattress sinking into the ground, and soon he was kneeling on the cold, hard floor. ‘Really,’ he muttered.

‘The console room is my heart, if you like. But your room is just under my thumb.’

Nivet felt the temperature rise for just a second, like the breath of a lover on the back of his neck.

* * *

Compassion hurled herself spinning through space. She threw her head back and laughed with a child’s delight at her freedom. As she travelled on, the vortex seemed to sparkle and shine about her.

* * *

The Doctor isn’t sure how he arrived in the carriage. It smells of dust and distance. That is no clue.

A woman sits opposite, her lips slightly parted as she breathes softly in her sleep. Would she know? What will he ask her?

There is something on the tip of his mind. He tries out some of the things he does remember, rolling the words around in his mouth to see how they feel.

This seems to wake the woman. She is asking him a question, in English. An Englishwoman.

Does that help? She wants to know where he is travelling to.

Where is he travelling? Indeed, where has he come from? His mind seems to shy away from the question, a door in his mind closing, securely sealing a dank cellar, a deep dark room which needs no illumination. Lock the door. Pocket the key.

He slumps lower in his seat, hunching into his coat.

The Englishwoman is talking again, but by now he isn’t listening to her. He tries out some more words. ‘Phase malfunction sounds familiar. Why is that? But, that’s just jargon, isn’t it?

Well, isn’t it? He tells himself so, yet remains unconvinced.

The train slows down, and the woman climbs from her seat to retrieve her case. Before she leaves, she glances around to ensure she has not dropped any of her belongings. Pats her coat pockets experimentally.

As he watches her go, he sees that the woman is confident that she has forgotten nothing. But what has he lost? It’s on the tip of his memory.

Never mind. He knows who will be able to help him. He’ll look for the Doctor, find him. The Doctor can help.

Whoever he is.

The Eighth Doctor’s adventures continue in The Burning by Justin Richards, ISBN 0 563

53812 0, available August 2000

Acknowledgements

Dominoes: Sue Cowley, Mike Tucker, Vicki Vrint Deeps: Lance Parkin, Jac Rayner, Justin Richards Souls: Paul Cornell, Lawrence Miles, Lars Pearson, Marc Plan Clouds: http://www.gallifreyone.com/ – especially Shaun Lyon Flames: Lucy Campbell, Anne Summerfield

Mesmers: Adam and Samuel Anghelides

About the Authors

Peter Anghelides has two previous Doctor Who novels published by BBC books: Kursaal and Frontier Worlds. He contributed to the BBC collections More Short Trips and Short Trips and Side Steps, as well as writing a debut story for the Eighth Doctor’s companion Samantha Jones on the audio collection Earth and Beyond. He has also written for Visual Imagination, Marvel Comics, BBC Magazines, Virgin Publishing, Mediawatch International, and the Valley Park Community Newsletter.

Peter’s day job is with the world’s biggest computer company, where since 1988 he has had a variety of jobs, including technical author, project manager, and line manager. Previously, he has been an academic and a journalist. He is married to award winning writer Anne Summerfield, and lives with her and their two sons, Adam and Samuel, in Hampshire.

People keep asking Peter where his surname comes from, and he explains that it comes from his father.

Born in 1971, Stephen Cole spent a happy childhood in rural Bedfordshire being loud and aspiring to amuse. He liked books, and so went to the University of East Anglia to read more of them. After graduating in English Literature and Film Studies, he spent four years reading far more Enid Blyton than can be good for anyone as Editor of BBC Worldwide’s pre school magazines. Finally tiring of Noddy’s companionship, he opted to oversee Doctor Who books, videos and audios for the BBC instead. Three years later, half dead, he was charitably offered employment by Penguin Books as a Managing Editor.

Stephen has had several books published, from children’s poetry to Home Learning titles, from non fiction to novelisations of award winning Disney/BBC TV series Microsoap. As a writer for Doctor Who he has produced audio dramas, assorted articles and reviews and co written a novel (Parallel 59 with Natalie Dallaire). He lives in West London.

Published by BBC Worldwide Ltd

Woodlands, 80 Wood Lane

London W12 0TT

First published 2000

Copyright © Peter Anghelides and Stephen Cole 2000

The moral right of the authors has been asserted

Original series broadcast on the BBC

Format © BBC 1963

Doctor Who and TARDIS are trademarks of the BBC

ISBN 0 563 53809 0

Imaging by Black Sheep, copyright © BBC 2000

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Mackays of Chatham Cover printed by Belmont Press Ltd, Northampton

Document Outline

Front Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Chapter One: Travelling companions

Chapter Two: Ultimatum

Chapter Three: Not waving

Chapter Four: Abandon ship

First Interlude: In his footsteps

Chapter Five: Dusty reception

Chapter Six: Uninvited guest

Chapter Seven: Turn on, tune in, drop out

Chapter Eight: Question time

Chapter Nine: Message in a bottle

Chapter Ten: Taken for a ride

Chapter Eleven: House call

Second Interlude: Know your enemy

Chapter Twelve: Great minds

Chapter Thirteen: Edifice

Chapter Fourteen: Talk of The Devil

Chapter Fifteen: Set in bone

Chapter Sixteen: Possessed

Chapter Seventeen: Shadowplay

Third Interlude: Infected

Chapter Eighteen: Looks familiar

Chapter Nineteen: Barbarian culture

Chapter Twenty: Everybody's got something to hide except me and my monkey

Chapter Twenty-one: Face off

Chapter Twenty-two: Chaos ritual

Chapter Twenty-three: Familiarity breeds

Chapter Twenty-four: Ancestral manoeuvres in the dark

Chapter Twenty-five: Memories of a blue planet

Chapter Twenty-six: Discontinuity

Fourth Interlude: Under glass

Chapter Twenty-seven: Source bottle

Chapter Twenty-eight: Mother of invention

Chapter Twenty-nine: Standing on ceremony

Chapter Thirty: House arrest

Chapter Thirty-one: The promise of impossibility

Chapter Thirty-two: Don't shoot the messenger

Chapter Thirty-three: Who to blame

Chapter Thirty-four: Future history

Chapter Thirty-five: Eternal kill

Chapter Thirty-five: Sage of paradox

Chapter Thirty-seven: See how they run

Chapter Thirty-eight: Burnt-down days

Chapter Thirty-nine: Ruin

Chapter Forty: Slaughterhouse

Chapter Forty-one: Ever the mortal

Chapter Forty-two: Fitz/Kreiner

Chapter Forty-three: The choice

Chapter Forty-four: Ended

Final Interlude: The time

Chapter Forty-five: Aftermath

Chapter Forty-six: Travelling companions

Ackowledgements

About the Authors

Copyright

Table of Contents

Front Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Chapter One: Travelling companions

Chapter Two: Ultimatum

Chapter Three: Not waving

Chapter Four: Abandon ship

First Interlude: In his footsteps

Chapter Five: Dusty reception

Chapter Six: Uninvited guest

Chapter Seven: Turn on, tune in, drop out

Chapter Eight: Question time

Chapter Nine: Message in a bottle

Chapter Ten: Taken for a ride

Chapter Eleven: House call

Second Interlude: Know your enemy

Chapter Twelve: Great minds

Chapter Thirteen: Edifice

Chapter Fourteen: Talk of The Devil

Chapter Fifteen: Set in bone

Chapter Sixteen: Possessed

Chapter Seventeen: Shadowplay

Third Interlude: Infected

Chapter Eighteen: Looks familiar

Chapter Nineteen: Barbarian culture

Chapter Twenty: Everybody's got something to hide except me and my monkey

Chapter Twenty-one: Face off

Chapter Twenty-two: Chaos ritual

Chapter Twenty-three: Familiarity breeds

Chapter Twenty-four: Ancestral manoeuvres in the dark

Chapter Twenty-five: Memories of a blue planet

Chapter Twenty-six: Discontinuity

Fourth Interlude: Under glass

Chapter Twenty-seven: Source bottle

Chapter Twenty-eight: Mother of invention

Chapter Twenty-nine: Standing on ceremony

Chapter Thirty: House arrest

Chapter Thirty-one: The promise of impossibility

Chapter Thirty-two: Don't shoot the messenger

Chapter Thirty-three: Who to blame

Chapter Thirty-four: Future history

Chapter Thirty-five: Eternal kill

Chapter Thirty-five: Sage of paradox

Chapter Thirty-seven: See how they run

Chapter Thirty-eight: Burnt-down days

Chapter Thirty-nine: Ruin

Chapter Forty: Slaughterhouse

Chapter Forty-one: Ever the mortal

Chapter Forty-two: Fitz/Kreiner

Chapter Forty-three: The choice