The Doctor hesitated in the middle of the living room. 'I thought you were a man of powerful ideals. I thought you'd stop at nothing to get to the truth. I'm sorry if I misjudged you.'

He marched to the door.

'Hey, wait!' Bains placed his cup on the sideboard and picked his way through the paperwork to the Doctor. They stood facing each other for an uncertain time before Bains lifted his hand to show the Doctor a tiny gap between his thumb and forefinger.

'That's how close I came today,' he said. The gap closed completely and he squeezed tight and gritted his teeth. 'That's how close I came to being dead.

And I was perfectly willing to make that sacrifice. But do you know what happens to all my evidence if I die? It dies with me. I'm the only link to the truth on Ceres Alpha. And it's vital that I survive to tell my story.'

'Organisations like WorldCorp are una.s.sailable,' the Doctor reminded him.

'Men like Gaskill Tyran are untouchable. I don't understand why you are standing here now, but I really don't think a man like you is ever going to get off this planet alive.'

Bains sighed heavily. At the bottom of his heart he knew that was true. He didn't understand why WorldCorp had seen fit to let him live this long. But preserving that advantage, however slim or artificial it really was, seemed the most important thing right now. While ever he was alive, so was the truth about his work.

'I really must go,' the Doctor said quietly. 'I can manage alone, but having you along with me would have made things so much easier.'

'Hold on,' Bains said, grabbing his jacket. 'If you really are going to the dig, you'll need an expert guide.'

112.Appearing gratified, the Doctor swung open the door and they were about to march out into the corridor when they stopped dead in their tracks.

'Doctor,' said Captain Foley, swinging her rifle in his direction. 'What a surprise. Going somewhere?'

There were two armed military personnel at her shoulders, both of them big enough to have trouble getting through a standard doorway.

'Captain Foley,' the Doctor said. 'A surprise indeed. We were just about to take a walk. Professor Bains here has offered to show me the sights.'

'That might be difficult at the moment,' Foley suggested, at pains to keep the gun in plain view. 'Mr Tyran wants to see you. He wants a report on the work you've been doing today.'

'Of course,' the Doctor said brightly, turning to Bains. 'Perhaps we can do our little tour later.'

'Will you be long?' Bains asked.

The Doctor redirected his gaze to Foley, who shrugged. 'That depends on Mr Tyran.'

'In that case,' Bains said gloomily, seeing another chance slipping through his fingers, 'you may be gone some time.'

'Yes,' the Doctor agreed, an oddly resigned look pa.s.sing through his features.

'I'm afraid you might be right.'

'I think I'll go have an hour in For'ard Obs,' Bains told him. 'There's someone I'd like to talk to if she's there.'

'You do that,' the Doctor said, touching Bains on the shoulder in an amicable parting gesture.

Bains smiled uncertainly, and the Doctor waved a brief goodbye as Foley marched him off down the corridor.

' Dead? Dead? ' Josef looked as though he were about to wet himself. 'How? Why? ' Josef looked as though he were about to wet himself. 'How? Why?

How come you were so long in there?'

'He killed himself,' Veta said as they swept down the corridor towards the elevators. 'Just after he took my call, by the looks of things.'

'Oh Christ.' The elevator door opened and they clambered inside. 'Did you let them know in medicare?'

'No.'

'So what were you doing in there all that time?'

Veta watched the hysteria rising inside him, saw the tightness of his face and the quickness of his eyes. He looked like a man possessed.

'Calm down, will you?'

113.

'Calm down? You've just found Dr Pryce dead and you're strolling about cool as anything. What's going on, Veta? What the h.e.l.l's happening?'

Gritting her teeth in an attempt to keep a lid on her boiling anger, Veta grasped him by the shoulders and forced him to look her in the eye.

'I don't know what's going on,' she said. 'But we're going to find out.'

'What d'you mean?'

Pulling Pryce's databook from her pocket, she saw Josef's alarm intensify a hundredfold.

'You didn't steal his databook?'

'We borrowed it,' she told him softly.

's.h.i.t!' His arms flew up, knocking her hand from his shoulder. 'You know what you've just done, don't you?'

She was about to respond when he continued like a barrage.

'You've implicated yourself. Don't you think it's going to look mighty d.a.m.ned suspicious when they discover his databook on you after he's just committed suicide? Have you got any idea what you've done?'

He punched the control pad and stopped the lift, poking the panel to take them back down. Veta instantly cancelled the instruction.

'What are you doing?'

'Taking you back. We can return his databook and put a call in from his apartment to say we found him.'

Veta was shaking her head, instructing the elevator to take them to their home level.

'Too late. I already did some work from his comp. We're going to Medicare Central.'

' What? What? ' '

'I took a look at this,' she said, waving the databook in front of him. 'There are a lot of antenatal records but all the postnatal stuff was transferred somewhere else. Pryce doesn't have any record of what happened after the birth.

Don't you find that singularly odd?'

'So what are we going to do? Walk into Medicare Central and ask to see all their top-secret files?'

'That's exactly what I'm going to do.'

He looked at her as if she'd suddenly turned green with purple spots. He was apparently lost for words.

The elevator door opened and they stepped down the corridor to their apartment.

114.'I'm a.s.suming that the postnatal records are kept by Colonel Peron,' she said quietly as they went. 'I set up a substructural glitch on her machine. When she turns it on, her entire personal system will collapse.'

'She'll call comp maintenance,' he said.

Opening the door to let them in, Veta nodded.

'I also set up an intercept on her next call to comp maintenance. The call will be rerouted.'

'Where?'

Striding across the living area, Veta switched on the comp and Josef watched the WorldCorp logo curling through the air.

'Right here,' Veta said, slumping into the seat beside the comp.

She patted the arm of the chair and invited him to join her, but he floundered in the doorway refusing to settle. Feeling exhilarated and abruptly more alive than she had done for months, Veta grinned at him.

'All we can do now is wait,' she said.

'Yeah,' Josef said bleakly. 'Wait to be called into the lion's den.'

Having spent G.o.d-knows-how-long drifting in and out of nightmares about being devoured by the ground and savaged by legions of dog-headed barbarians, Fitz decided he'd had enough bad dreams for one day. He took a deep breath to evaluate the pain levels in his poor, racked body, and realised with some considerable relief that he felt much better than he had any right to do.

Sitting up on the bunk, he prodded experimentally at the monitor, trying to locate the off switch. The thing began to screech in alarm, and his poking intensified until it fell sullenly quiet. Alert for the sound of boots coming clomping, he was thankful to hear only silence. There was a storm brewing outside and the clamour of the nearby building site had vanished.

He tugged the sensor wires free and hung them over the machine. Swinging his long legs over the side of the bunk, he immediately regretted moving when a wave of nausea hit him. He sat with his head in his hands until it pa.s.sed, then got up gingerly to a.s.sess his balance. He was a bit shaky but at least he was able to remain reasonably upright. He felt as though he'd had maybe one too many on an empty stomach, but that feeling he was equipped to cope with from long experience.

His clothes had been taken and he was wearing a flimsy white gown that would make him a tad conspicuous out in the storm. He wondered if Ayla had been the one to undress him, and his cheeks flushed at the thought. There was something improper about a woman seeing you in the buff when you weren't 115 conscious to make excuses or sheepishly flex the muscles you possessed. He began to cast about, looking for clothes.

There was a tall locker on one wall, and Fitz discovered a work tunic hung inside. There was fresh underwear along with Fitz's old boots stacked neatly in the bottom of the locker, presumably left by Ayla.

As he dressed quickly, Fitz heard the approaching sound of a nearby machine. Lifting one of the observation flaps in the canvas wall, he discovered a tempestuous night outside. The same combination of sandstorm and every other kind of storm he'd met when they force-materialised last night. Trust the Doctor to drop them in the middle of the hurricane season. Typical!

In the swirling squall he could make out the giant lumbering shape of the most gargantuan earthmoving machine Fitz had ever seen. It was painted in that standard yellow colour that all such machines throughout the cosmos seemed to attract. It was one of those comforting universal constants Fitz had discovered that made you feel at home when you were a billion trillion light years from Earth and the twentieth century. Except that this machine was probably bigger than an office block: the biggest, most fearsome machine Fitz had ever seen. So huge that the outer reaches disappeared into the storm before his eyes could discern the shape of it.

The thing trundled past on innumerable caterpillar tracks, travelling with surprising speed for something so vast. In the machine's searchlights, Fitz could make out what looked from here like a compound full of similar vehicles. They were like crouching monsters, huddling in the fierce storm, waiting their time to advance and to conquer. With an army of those things, Fitz thought, you could vanquish worlds.

He closed the tent flap when he heard the distant clamour of raised voices.

They were like phantoms in the wind, but as he concentrated they became human voices rising in argument.

Pushing his feet into his boots and strapping up quick, Fitz was about to investigate when he caught sight of himself in the mirror by the door. The bright orange tunic didn't do a lot for him. He wasn't the stockiest of blokes at the best of times, but he looked ridiculously lanky in the overall. The long straggly hair did nothing to enhance his image, and the fact that it was still caked in mud and stuck out like something you'd buy in a joke shop added to the overall sense of calamity. Licking his hands, he hastily tried to tame the wilderness above his face, before conceding that he was fighting a losing battle.

He flashed himself the Sean Connery smile and decided that when he got back to the TARDIS he really must make time to get a proper haircut.

116.The corridor outside was short and mud-splattered. An all-canvas construction that whipped and rattled in the wind. There were dull yellow lights strung from the ceiling, dirty and underpowered, which threw up gloomy spectres on the flapping surfaces. Fitz made his way rapidly to the far end and crouched by the flap that represented another door. Beyond was a further stretch of corridor, similar in construction but much longer. It was empty, so Fitz slipped through and risked following the sound of the voices.

There was a further door about halfway down and, as he approached, Fitz could hear the arguments much more clearly. Kneeling by the door, simply a double flap loosely st.i.tched, Fitz found he could peer through the gaps down the seams. Beyond was a large open area lined with long tables and benches, evidently some kind of meeting hall. Men in orange overalls milled about in the distance, grumbling among themselves, while on a raised platform nearby, partly cut off from his view, Fitz could just make out the great bulk of a bearded man beside the slender shape of Ayla Damsk.

Ayla was speaking, her voice raised above the muttering of the a.s.sembled rabble.

'We can talk to him tomorrow morning. He needs to rest. He's in no state '

'We can talk talk to him tonight,' the bearded man argued, and Fitz instantly recognised the voice as that of Jorgan, who had been so keen to interrogate Fitz earlier. 'I say it's quite obvious who and what he is. Considering the problems we're up against here, there can only be one explanation to him tonight,' the bearded man argued, and Fitz instantly recognised the voice as that of Jorgan, who had been so keen to interrogate Fitz earlier. 'I say it's quite obvious who and what he is. Considering the problems we're up against here, there can only be one explanation rival agents rival agents! That man Fitz is obviously one of them. He must have been treating the soil when the collapse took him by surprise.'

While he spoke he swept his arms with energetic gestures and jabbed the air with his finger. He was a crowd-pleaser, a showman, and a general murmur of agreement rose from the mob.

'I don't believe he's an agent,' Ayla said, her voice equally firm and emphatic.

'And if he's unable to remember who who he is there's not a lot of good in questioning him, is there?' he is there's not a lot of good in questioning him, is there?'

'This loss-of-memory stuff is just a put-on,' Jorgan claimed. 'He's having us all on.' Fitz saw Jorgan turn his back on Ayla and point with his thumb. 'There,'

he said, jabbing his own back, 'see where it's wet.'

More ugly growling. Things were likely to turn nasty, Fitz thought, and he didn't want to end up on the messy end of a man like Jorgan. He began to back away silently from the door, but it was only when he rose from his knees that he felt the hand big as a shovel grasp him by the scruff of the neck.

117.

Peron had returned to her own office when the call came in from one of her medicare troops. She took it on her personal com and the face snapped into the air in front of her. Peron recognised the young private as Danes. He was keen and looking for promotion, hungry for recognition.

'Sir. The girl. She's gone.'

'Gone?' Peron queried. 'Impossible. I set up an alarm on her med unit.'

What the h.e.l.l was going on here with these people? They were making a distinctly irritating habit of disappearing.

'Sir. The med unit seems to be malfunctioning. It's reading as if she's still here, but she's most definitely gone, sir.'

Activating her desktop, Peron tried to operate the sec cams in med-ops. But the hologram that opened up above her desk showed nothing but a hollow void of static. The static proceeded to churn and coil in on itself, finally vanishing into a swiftly developing dark centre like water down a plug-hole. Gazing in consternation at the empty s.p.a.ce, Peron prodded her desktop repeatedly with increasing irritation. The s.p.a.ce remained just that.

'Get a search under way,' Peron ordered, the exasperation showing in her voice. 'She's in no state to have gone very far. And report to me immediately with a bio-detector.'

'Yes, sir,' Danes responded.

Cancelling the call, Peron regarded the desktop with a brooding scowl, as if that might magically rectify all the glitches and problems she was experiencing.

She tried the desk again, but the scowl had achieved nothing, so she put a com call through to comp maintenance. There was a two-second delay before they answered, and then a hara.s.sed-looking man's head materialised in the middle of her office.

'Comp Maintenance, how can I help you?'