'Next?'

'Five. . . Seven. . . Eleven. . . Thirteen. . . Seventeen. . . Nineteen. . . '

' Jesus Christ! Jesus Christ! ' '

She felt Fitz's pain a split second before her own. An explosion in his right leg. They all collapsed and for one precious moment the noise was cut and she felt herself falling. There was a sharp crack and another fleeting explosion.

This time Fitz's left arm. No! Not Fitz's arm. Her own arm. Her own pain.

It shrieked through her brain, volume full blast. She tried to scream and it emerged from her lungs like a small cough.

Then the noise. A tidal wave of too much noise. The curious scent of earth intensified. Alien dirt. Somewhere at a deep, deep level she knew they weren't 20on Earth. The notion was whipped up in the spiralling tornado of other people's thoughts until she lost sight of it completely and there was only the noise.

Fitz was no stranger to pain since he had met the Doctor. It went with the territory, he understood that plainly enough. You have big adventures, you accept the downside that you're gonna get hurt now and then, in all senses of the word. No pain, no gain. You want a rich and fulfilling life, you get it full of all sorts of s.h.i.t.

The alternative was more frightening. To remain at home selling half-dead shrubs to half-dead biddies, with only your jamming sessions and never-to-be-realised dreams for comfort. To get locked into a pattern of life that would age you just as quickly as running around the universe losing your head every now and then. He'd reached the conclusion long ago that, given the choice, he'd rather get old dying than get old dead.

But still he detested these moments of uncertainty, when you think you're a mere spit into your thirties and you're going to cop it in a vicious alien storm on a featureless planet a billion miles from London and not a slavering monster in sight to make your exit heroic. Fitz just wasn't a connoisseur of the anticlimax.

'It's bleeding badly,' the Doctor informed him.

'It's bleeding painful,' Fitz informed him right back, squeezing the words out through his teeth and his pain. 'You go on. Leave me here.'

But the Doctor was busy working, tearing Fitz's shirt to create a strip of material like a bandage. He set to work above the wound, using an old wooden ruler that came, impossibly long, out of his coat pocket to create a tourniquet.

For a moment the agony intensified, then began to ease as the Doctor tore off another strip of shirt to dress the wound.

'There's a lump of material embedded in it,' the Doctor told him. 'It looks like a slice of rock. I'm going to have to leave it in there.'

'Great. I can grow old with buried shrapnel. Moan down the pub about me d.i.c.ky leg. Probably worth a few free drinks. That's cool.'

Fitz tried to hoist himself up to see how Anji was doing. She had collapsed motionless in the mud. Her eyes were open but she was gazing at nothing at all. The hail and sand were hitting them but there was no blink, no reaction.

'Is she going to make it?' he asked.

'She'll be fine,' the Doctor a.s.sured him. But Fitz knew the Doctor well enough by now to recognise the difference between sincere confidence and bl.u.s.tering determination. 'We need to get you under shelter. Come on. Stand up.'

21.Easier said than done. Fitz struggled to his feet with the Doctor's help and a few well-chosen expletives. The next thing he knew he was being lowered again, this time into a hollow. Then he found he was being pelted with the broad-leaved, thick-stemmed growths that pa.s.sed for vegetation on this world.

They wouldn't win any major horticultural prizes in his book. But they did make good cover against the lashing sand and hail. The biting cold still had teeth, but they were blunted now so they could only gnaw rather than slice.

Fitz found the Doctor's face in front of his own.

'Don't move,' the Doctor ordered. 'I'll, get back to you as soon as I can, all right?'

'Well, if I'm not here, I'll've just gone for a quick jog round the block to keep warm. OK?'

The Doctor smiled. Then frowned. 'I won't be long,' he promised, and vanished.

Trying to lift himself up to see, Fitz was stunned by an abrupt invisible kick in the teeth. He collapsed back and lay in his hole listening to the howl of the wind and the scuffling of the Doctor as he lifted Anji and continued on his way.

A moment later there was only the sound of the wind. Fitz gazed up into the dark night sky, full of whisked-up phantoms and ghost shapes in the combined sand-and hailstorm. He was shaking now with fatigue. His leg thudded like a big ba.s.s drum. Since their emergency landing his head had felt as if it were filled with jelly and bizarre new aches that were and weren't headaches. He wasn't sure what exactly bypa.s.sing the phase modulators had done to him, but he wouldn't choose to put himself through that particular mangle again in a hurry.

He pictured himself lying here in his shallow grave, covered with the dank-stinking foliage, out in the middle of the lifeless plain on this G.o.dforsaken dead rock. He pictured the Doctor, Anji hanging off his arm like a life-size puppet with her strings cut, lifting the binoculars intermittently to keep his fix on the dim-glimmering lights of the invisible city he swore he could see out in the distance and the blizzard. Fitz closed his eyes, and allowed himself the luxury of anxious thoughts about Anji. His mind drifted back through the past hours since he'd emerged from scary darkness to find himself still in one piece following the TARDIS's emergency materialisation.

' She's going to be fine She's going to be fine,' the Doctor had said. But he'd said it so many times that Fitz was sure he was saying it now only to try to convince himself.

They'd emerged from the sanctuary of the TARDIS into the humdinger storm and Fitz had instantly sustained a twisted ankle in the fumbling blackness and 22shifting ground. Anji was a dead weight between them, entirely lifeless for the first hour or so, then starting to emit intermittent little sounds like those of a kitten coming out of deep anaesthetic.

' We should wait out the storm We should wait out the storm,' Fitz had argued.

' We need to get help We need to get help,' the Doctor had insisted.

' Get us in closer Get us in closer,' Fitz had pleaded.

' Can't risk a short hop Can't risk a short hop,' the Doctor had answered. ' We've already slipped two We've already slipped two local-time months off target. We could end up anywhen. local-time months off target. We could end up anywhen. ' '

' We're not going to make it. We're not going to make it. ' '

' She's going to be fine. She's going to be fine. ' '

She's going to be fine. The phrase echoed through his skull as his eyes closed lightly. The phrase echoed through his skull as his eyes closed lightly. She's going to be fine She's going to be fine, he told himself again and again. She's going to he She's going to he fine. So why was he so d.a.m.n scared for her? fine. So why was he so d.a.m.n scared for her?

As Fitz began to drift in delirium, he became only vaguely aware of the vibration of the ground a steady rumbling like an earthquake that just couldn't be bothered to get out of bed in the morning. He wondered what the h.e.l.l it was, but that was only one worry in his overcrowded head as he lay there in a pool of human suffering and thankfully allowed the darkness to come in and consume him.

The clang of rattling metal was almost deafening when Aaron Pryce entered the holding bay. The clatter came from the twelve t.i.tanium doors, reverberat-ing from inside the cells. As he stepped down between the doors, Pryce felt the hairs on the back of his neck bristling. He stood for a moment, trying to understand the reasons for his own fear. It was an irrational reaction, he knew, but one that he couldn't for the life of him fathom or prevent. It was something in the air. A kind of supernatural presence. He stood there feeling like a small child alone in the dark.

He wouldn't be sad to see the end of this particular cargo, and he'd counted the days since Dr Domecq had been summoned from Earth Central to deal with this little problem.

Pryce had always felt decidedly uncomfortable in this small section of the city, and the physical attributes of the place didn't help. It was a short corridor with meagre light, and the only heat came from the nearby motor-cooler heat exchangers. The cells had been added as a makeshift solution to a bizarre storage problem prefabricated boxes bolted hastily on to the side of the medicare block. The whole place was a patchwork flung together from previously discarded or damaged building units. He could see messy streaks of weld, like 23.solidified gastropod trails on the bare metal, and there were regions of dull rust in the walls. Pryce always felt that the whole slipshod edifice might collapse at any moment.

But structural integrity was the least of his worries. There was a larger danger here, something deeply disturbing. And he sensed it most keenly at times like this, when the inhabitants of the holding bay were restless and frustrated.

Pulling himself together, Pryce thrust the chunky metal key into the lock of the first door. Instantly, the noise silenced.

Pryce sensed the rancour intensifying inside him. It was his way of dealing with the fear, replacing something he had no power over with some raw emotion that was under his own control. The door swung open in front of him and he stalked into the cell.

He found the small shape cowering in the opposite corner. The only illumination was a single pathetic bulb in the corridor, but the thing in the cell raised its spindly arms to shield its eyes from the light.

In the background, the rattling resumed, this time quietly, a begrudging but insistent clatter of metal doors in their frames. Pryce realised that the doors were banging in harmony, all of them thumping at precisely the same rate.

And there was the sudden, dread realisation that the banging was exactly in time with his own heartbeat.

Pryce observed the round dome of the top of the thing's head, mottled with clumps of wispy, silver-coloured hair, before swooping down and grasping the thing by the arms. They felt like slender rods of soft cold metal in his hands, brittle bones covered with a uselessly thin layer of skin. He found the huge saucer eyes peering at him with what he took to be alarm. It was hard to tell with these strange faces. Pryce felt his lips curl with rage as he lifted the thing into the air in front of his face.

'Get them to stop,' he snarled.

The sound continued while the creature remained suspended in the air in front of Pryce. The tempo had increased, and Pryce felt the rate of his own heart accelerating as if to keep up.

'I'm not going to warn you again,' he told the thing.

But the sound persisted, now getting louder and just a little bit faster, until Pryce snapped and hurled the creature into the corner. It landed with a thud, a pile of twisted arms and legs, the ridiculous head bent awkwardly over to one side. The breath exploded out of its lungs and Pryce heard the soft low sound of its voice.

The door rattling endured, and Pryce swept across the tiny s.p.a.ce to grasp the 24creature again, this time by the neck. The thing's eyes widened in terror, and Pryce sensed a huge loathing expand inside him, threatening to consume him completely. There was a moment of stasis, a stalemate when the doors clanged and boomed through his skull while the anger boiled through him.

Then all the pent-up rage escaped Removing a carton of synthogen from the fridge, Veta slit the top and slipped two taste caps into the package before she placed it in the oven. Not even checking the flavour of the caps, she scrunched up the foil pieces and dropped them into the waste. Her life these days seemed to be a hollow ritual of this domestic duty. A long series of empty days punctuated by the preparation of meals.

Not that she ate her meals lately, nor that she tasted them when she did eat. She'd made meals over the last few weeks where she'd forgotten to put in the taste caps and hadn't even noticed. She'd watch Joe's chin whirling uncertainly around the bottom of his face, then see him looking at her with a dazed expression.

The oven cut without warning, its gentle hum suddenly silent while the lights throughout the apartment dimmed and brightened momentarily. Veta watched as the oven restarted, only distantly annoyed at the inconvenience of having to recheck the program. Just a few months ago she would have been intrigued by such interruptions to the smooth running of the city-machine. But now nothing mattered any more.

Josef had droned on about the increasing workload.How the job of comptech had become a mindless ch.o.r.e recently, with the city comps suffering ever-multiplying instances of faults. As if the software were suddenly p.r.o.ne to those old-fashioned viruses that used to threaten their existence. Investigations were monotonous, fingertip searches through measureless reams of data, no sort of job for a human being. And ultimately the problems turned out to be minuscule glitches in the core programming language. Problems that should be instantly self-rectifying. Failures so elementary that n.o.body should notice even the slightest hiccup.

Coming out of the kitchen into the apartment, Veta stood amid the mess and sighed. She really ought to get some work done. She really ought to tidy up.

She really ought to give Joe some kind of home to come home to.

She really ought to.

Then she sensed the movement nearby. Then she saw him standing there.

A small boy, perhaps three years old, with a large oval head and big dark eyes 25.pleading with her. She caught her breath and found she couldn't move. Gripped in a kind of numb inertia, she reached out for him. His face was full of fear. She could sense it in the room. Feel it in her heart. Impending darkness rushing in Then she heard the buzz of the door and found Josef watching her from across the room, a puzzled look on his exhausted face. She turned back to the child, but the room was empty. She looked back at Josef and felt the tears trickling down her face.

'What's up?' he asked, rushing over to hold her.

But Veta couldn't find the words to explain. She couldn't tell him what she'd seen and what she felt. There was no language in the universe that could articulate her pain. She could only cry. And he could only grasp her tight in his arms and wait for the grief to subside.

Dr Mij Peron peered into the globe of gathering static that was supposed to be showing her the events of holding cell one. She could make out only chunks of almost meaningless dark and light, colourless streaks flaring sporadically through the image. Peron tried to refine the signal, instructing the software to hunt down the interference and eradicate it. The sound had already de-generated into a constant incomprehensible cackle, and now the picture was following close in its tracks.

a.n.a.lysing the readouts that streamed through the air below the hologram, Peron could find no reason for the breakdown. The system checked fine and there were no extraneous signals to cause the problems she was experiencing.

The transmitter was only next door, for G.o.d's sake.

Amid the grey fuzz she could just make out the shape of Pryce. He seemed to be flinging his arms wildly but she couldn't see the creature at all now. There was a blaze of white light that could have been fluid splashing through the cell. A short pandemonium of motion. Then she saw the whole 'gram go black before finally collapsing completely, to be replaced by the WorldCorp logo.

Slamming the desktop to cancel the image, Peron leapt up and stormed from the office. As she marched towards the holding bay she realised that she was shivering. Then she realised that she couldn't get the final image out of her mind. The 'gram had gone absolutely black for an instant before it cut. Absolutely black, without a hint of interference or static, like a perfect sphere of gla.s.s in the centre of her room. It reminded her of something that had always troubled her deeply and inexplicably.

The creatures' eyes.

26.

As she reached the holding bay, she found Pryce emerging from the storeroom door.

'Dr Pryce,' she said with a trace of sarcasm. 'Fraternising with the enemy?'

He was pale and a little out of breath, but his face was abruptly occupied by a tight smile. It was forced, of course. A mask to hide his real face, the one that was cracking up underneath.

'Dr Peron, how are you?'

His voice was quivering, but he was managing a half-decent job of keeping it under control.

'Very well. You?'

His white coat was filthy, covered in stains and dust. He realised with a small gasp of shock and began to brush himself down, doing his utmost to sustain the smile.

'Oh, I'm fine. Fine. Busy, but, you know. . . ' The stains were proving just too much for him.

'Fine?'

'That's it.' He sent a hand into his hair and that was when she realised just how untidy it was.

'Are you having a little trouble?' she asked.

He shook his head, struggling now to support the smile he'd squeezed into his lips. 'No. No problem. No problem at all.'

Pressing his security code into the door com, Pryce watched her nervously.

Peron had a sudden impulse to bark an order at him to pull himself together.

She wanted to slap his silly face and knock some dignity into him. But with a magnificent force of will she instead insinuated a wry smile into her face.

'I take it you've had. . . words with them.'

'You could say that.'

'Are they back under control now?'

'Oh, yes. Quiet as the grave in there now.'

'It might be an idea to get yourself cleaned up, Dr Pryce,' Peron said. 'We don't want to worry the patients, do we?'

He nodded uncertainly, then turned on his heel and marched off down the corridor. She watched him vanish round the corner before inspecting the door com closely. There was a trace of liquid where Pryce's fingertips had entered his code. Just a trace, hardly glistening at all, but when she touched it with a tissue she realised it was red. His or the creature's, she wasn't entirely sure.

Either way, it meant that Pryce was at the end of his tether.

And that Military One were probably near the end of their little experiment.

27.Danyal Bains sat alone in a room that would be big enough to house multiple families back on Earth. It was vaguely obscene that one man should command so much s.p.a.ce. The desk in front of Bains was vast and empty. The room itself was almost clinically clean and barren of either pictures or ornaments of any kind. There wasn't even an image of Gaskill Tyran's immediate family and that, thought Bains, said a great deal about the man with whom he was currently supposed to be in conference.

The walls were constructed of grey panels with white edges that created the impression of radiating white strands spreading outwards from behind the big black seat at the head of the desk. The white lines intersected each other in such a way as to suggest a spider's web. The effect was obviously intentional, and Bains wondered if Tyran had actually designed the place himself. When he had first sat down to wait, Bains had imagined the black blob of the chair on the opposite side of the desk suddenly unfurling immense legs and opening a pair of giant, multifaceted eyes which fixed him with an emotionless stare. The longer he sat there, the more the image unnerved him. He suspected it was a deliberate ploy to undermine his confidence.

Checking his watch again, Bains jumped to his feet and began to pace about the room in a growing state of agitation. If he had better things to do with his time, he would be losing his rag by now. As things stood, however, what he had had to do with his time depended entirely on the outcome of this meeting with Tyran. to do with his time depended entirely on the outcome of this meeting with Tyran.

The door opened with an un.o.btrusive swish and a medium-sized man swept in and stood farside of the desk, surveying his domain with a cultured, detached demeanour. What Gaskill Tyran lacked in physical stature he more than made up for in his calculating, understated intensity. Wearing black, with unnaturally dark eyes (which would probably cost a whole three months' wages for most people), and thick black hair swept back from his wide face, he was a man you immediately knew not to underestimate.

On Tyran's entrance, the walls of the room took on a pale-blue hue, splashes of the colour washing through the previously grey panels. The room seemed to have come alive in response to its new occupant.

'Sorry I'm late, Mr Bains,' Tyran said, waving vaguely towards the chair at the opposite end of the desk. 'Please take a seat.'