"That's if you do run it.'

He kept an admirable poker face, but she recognised enough of the Doctor she knew to be able to tell when she'd scored a point. "That's it, isn't it?

You don't run this Triad, but for some reason you want people to think you do.'

He smiled faintly. 'And why would I do that?'

'To cover up the involvement of aliens in it. The fact that they're the ones who are running it! Excep Excep t' Her confidence in her own judgement faltered. 'Except that surely you'd want to expose them and stop them, not hide them?' t' Her confidence in her own judgement faltered. 'Except that surely you'd want to expose them and stop them, not hide them?'

'Stop them from doing what?' the Doctor asked simply. 'Things aren't always as you expect.' He looked round. 'There's someone behind you.'

Sarah turned and flinched. Chiu, the man from Kwai Chung, was there, and this time she could clearly see the unnatural violet glow of his eyes. He wasn't human. 'Who are you? What are you?'

'Our intelligence appreciation was correct. You are intelligent and dangerous.'

As compliments from an admiring opponent went, she could have hoped for better. 'And you're evasive. You didn't answer my question.'

'We are refugees, if you like. We came to Earth to recover technology and any remaining personnel from an earlier expedition of several years ago.

On our landing approach, however, the ship was damaged. We escaped through transposition arches but the ship crash-landed. We did not know where. That is why we enlisted the Doctor's help to assist us in recovering and repairing the ship, so that we can leave when the technology we came for has been dealt with.'

'Then the Chinese government is hiding you?'

'No,' Chiu said. 'Its members are unaware of our presence. Yue Hwa is not able to report us to them.'

'I don't see why not.'

'How would they react if he were to tell them that some of the people attracted to his covert trap are aliens? They would withdraw him from the operation and send him to a mental hospital.'

'But you can't be absolutely sure of that. Not completely.'

'No, we cannot. So, to make certain, we have placed a block on his mind.

He is incapable of discussing us other than as foreign partners in the gang's business.'

Sarah didn't get it. She could think of so many advantages that collaboration with a superpower would offer Chiu and his people. Surely it was self-defeating to avoid them. 'Why? I mean, China has a space programme, so why not make some kind of deal with them or with America or Russia or Britain?'

'We did not become involved with any of your planet's governments because we require secrecy.'

Sarah almost laughed. Almost. There was something in his voice that held her back, and made her wonder. 'Oh come on - surely the resources of a major world power could keep you under wraps?'

'You operate from a misunderstanding of the reasons why people keep secrets. Have you ever heard the saying that the only true secrets are the secrets that keep themselves?' Sarah nodded. Governments cannot keep secrets because they try too hard to keep them for the wrong reasons.

They do not really keep secrets from rival governments, because those rivals have sufficient resources to send spy satellites to photograph bases from space, or to tap into computers and take what they want.'

"Then why do governments keep things secret?'

'To hide the funding from their own peoples; even their own lobbyists and supporters. If you support a government because you want it to spend money on hospitals, you do not want to hear that it has actually been spending your money on a new spaceborne weapons system. So, it hides that system not from their rivals - who can see it on their satellite photos - but from you. We have long since found that where a secret is used to mislead the accountants, there are always others - perhaps rival supporters of the same government - tracing the money to try to expose the secret. A criminal organisation, on the other hand, must by nature remain secret, simply to survive. Therefore those chasing the money are the rivals, the police, and they do not have the resources, nor are they working from the inside. Our secrets, then, remain our own.'

"That's a very cynical way of looking at things,' Sarah pointed out. She would have expected a human to think that way.

'Yes. But it is one we have come to through experience.We did, many years ago, attempt to form an agreement with one of your planet's leading powers. However, that proved proved unwise.' unwise.'

'And now you're trying to take over again with the help of evil men -'

'No. I will not debate the concepts of good or evil with you, but either way we are not "trying again". We have one mission objective: to leave Earth.'

'To leave?' Sarah was relieved but couldn't see why they had bothered to come in the first place if they just wanted to leave. 'If you didn't want to do anything with Earth, then why did you come here?'

'We did consider your planet a potential subject for absorption when we first discovered it. Since then it has been rejected as a viable or desirable target for annexation. It is strategically unimportant and, frankly, would be too much trouble to maintain.' Chiu made a hand motion and several spheres began displaying images.

Sarah didn't recognise all the specific locations or events, but she did recognise them as news footage. Iranian students burning US flags, shocked paramedics at Dunblane Primary School, tracer fire over Baghdad, riots that could be anywhere in the world, authorities in protective suits entering the Tokyo subway, the North Hollywood shoot-out of a couple of months earlier. That was only the beginning.

'If you were a visitor to this world,' Chiu said, 'with a home many light years away, would you want to remain here one moment longer than you had to?'

Sarah didn't answer. She didn't need to; she knew he would able to read her answer in her face. 'Where's home?'

'I believe the phrase is "that information is on a need-to-know basis", and you do not.' He held up a small crystal, which spun, and Sarah found she suddenly couldn't move, though she had no idea why not. Chiu looked at the Doctor. 'What does she know?'

'She's worked out enough of it. Now that we have her here, we can enter the final phase.'

Chapter Twenty-Two.

Still Haters

'Switch on the lights,' Kutzov ordered. He looked uncomfortable in the smaller submersible Chiu's people had attached to the hatch of his boat.

The lights turned the void of the viewing screen rigged by the Doctor into a starfield as beautiful as any seen at night. Tiny plankton and grains of sand were illuminated starkly against the blackness. Then a glint of metal emerged from the darkness, curving out of the seabed. What could be seen of it above the sand was as smooth and shiny as a piece of untouched tinfoil.

Half of it was buried, and much of the rest was out of range of the lights, but it seemed to Sarah that it was both oval and humped, like a flattened Coke bottle lying on its side. 'How do we get in?' she asked. 'I don't see an airlock or anything& it must be buried.'

"The entrance is wherever we wish it to be.' Chiu guided the small submersible upwards, barely lifting it over the sunken metal.When it was over a sufficiently flat expanse, he descended until everyone felt the clang of impact. He then took a small device from his pocket, and pressed something on it. There was a strange vibration from the hatch in the floor and Chiu released the submersible's controls.

To Sarah's alarm, the Doctor was already opening the hatch and she flinched at the expected deluge when he pulled it open. Nothing happened, except that the Doctor shone a torch into the sunken gap below.

Chiu slipped around him and dropped into the hole, then reached out a hand to help the others down: first the Doctor, then Sarah and Yue Hwa.

'Welcome aboard the Qe'shaal', he said.

'This is your ship?' Sarah asked.

'Yes.'

'What happened?'

'We weren't sure at first. We thought the ship was struck by lightning, but research proved it was shot down by a naval vessel.'

'Why?'

'Even when not in stealth mode, the ship would give a relatively small radar return for its size. We suspect that those responsible believed the Qe'shaal to be a military aircraft belonging to a rival nation.'

'You don't seem too bothered.' Surely a warrior race would be out for revenge?

Chiu just about smiled. "That's a perfectly understandable error. These things happen in military circles. The person or persons who fired upon us were correctly doing their duty. Why should we bear them any malice for that? Their act was not out of malice towards us.'

'Would it make a difference if it was out of malice?'

'Yes. Our lack of malice in return would make us superior. Actions should be in pursuit of a definable goal. Anything else is an unacceptable risk and tactically foolish.'

'Do you think of everything in military terms?' It was starting to get annoying as far as Sarah was concerned.

'When on duty, yes.'

'Are you ever off duty?'

'Not while part of an operational unit on a non-allied planet.'

'You mean you've been on duty twenty-four hours a day for -'

'Yes.'

In the tales Tom told later, he didn't know what the alien weapon was, but the few creatures he'd seen since escaping had gone down pretty quickly when shot with it. He just hoped they were dead, not merely stunned like on Star Trek.

Tse Hung had gone straight to the lifeboats and made a getaway. Tom wasn't interested in following the gangster; his first order of business was to get the ship back into navy hands. According to him, Mister Action, he didn't really need the UNIT team members, but he released them anyway as his good deed for the day.

They all then progressed through the ship, taking it back deck by deck. The aliens fell quickly as the humans knew the environment better. The reports made afterwards actually list more dead aliens than the Doctor ever said were in Chiu's crew to start with. If Tom knew that, he didn't care.

He just led the troops through the ship, blasting anything small and grey, and releasing anyone trapped in a locked room. Within half an hour, the ship's crew were free and Tom had ceased to even notice the odour of incinerated aliens.

Even when the Westmoreland was back in navy hands, she was still dead in the water. In the CinC Davis shook his head and tutted. 'Everything's down.'

'How quickly can you be back up and running?' Tsang asked.

'Whatever sort of electromagnetic pulse they used hasn't fried the circuits& Half an hour. It takes at least that to cold-start the engines'

'You're not nuclear-powered?'

'No, Colonel; gas turbines.' Davis sounded proud of the fact. Not a pro-nuclear man, Tom judged. That was a pity; he seemed likeable otherwise.

Pity.'

Colonel?1 Tsang was sounding slightly spaced-out to Tom. He didn't think she was handling this well at all. 'If you had a reactor, we could scuttle the ship and hope to take out the aliens that way.' Tom was acutely aware of several UNIT guns now pointed in the direction of Davis and his sailors. 'As it is, we'll just have to hope we can get things online in time to try depth charges.'

'Colonel, there are more important matters at hand than destroying aliens who aren't aboard this vessel.' 'No, there aren't,' Tsang corrected him.

Everyone was nervous as hell. Yue and company had probably seen too many films in which people wandering round deserted ships walked into something nasty. They should try the position of experience that Sarah had; it was even worse.

Though the interior of the ship was metal, there were no breaks or joins to indicate connections to other rooms. Chiu simply stopped, seemingly at random, and stepped through the metal. As the others followed him, they found that the walls moulded themselves around their bodies, forming an opening, with a millimetre to spare, that let them through.

Sarah paused to kneel by a dark smear scorched onto the floor. A few pieces of bubbled metal and plastic were welded into the centre of the burn. 'What's this?'

'One of the flight technicians who didn't reach a transposition arch in time,'

Chiu replied. He barely spared the burn mark a glance.

Sarah couldn't tear her eyes away even as she recoiled from it. 'That's horrible.' The others were already rounding the next corner and didn't answer.

After passing through several chambers - they seemed to be bubbles within the ship's material, and so couldn't really be called rooms -the party came to a central area.

It was the size of a small office, and divided into little alcoves around a central space. Blank metal bulges protruded from the floor where consoles would normally be positioned, and a cracked pillar linked squat domes in the floor and ceiling.

One of the scientists moved to a featureless extrusion in the wall. As he touched it, the greyness of the natural metal colour dissipated like morning mist and a smooth console display was in its place. 'Internal power relays are functioning.'

'Sit-rep, status,' Chiu demanded softly.

'life support and gravity core nominal. Gravitational waveguide has been ruptured in the crash, as we expected.'

"That shouldn't be too much trouble if we work together,' the Doctor interrupted. "The technology I've given you should be able to rectify such a minor problem relatively rapidly.' He beamed.

'How rapidly?' Chiu demanded bluntly.

The Doctor waved the question away. 'A matter of a couple of hours.'

'Begin the procedure immediately.' Chiu moved to a sphere lying against the wall and picked it up. He held it carefully in the air and when he took his hand away, it remained there. 'Communications.'

'We are unable to fully link in to the fleet Comnet and transmit our status,'

another alien reported, 'but we are receiving transmissions from local beacons and relay points.'

'Excellent.' Chiu put a palm to the floating sphere, concentrating. 'I should be able to get an update on the situation offworld.' The sphere came to life, showing stars, glowing symbols and coloured specks. 'Doctor, you had best see this.'

'What is it?' The Doctor hurried over and peered into the sphere. As he watched, Chiu focused it on three red cursors. 'Coming here?'

Three battleships.'

'Looking for you?'

'Yes. We must be spaceborne before they arrive. If not, they will assume the humans have taken hostile action to prevent our return home, and will react accordingly.' The red cursors flicked off and were replaced by three tiny starships - stilettos hurtling Earthwards.

'How far off are they?'