'We got the new pa.s.scode,' Veta announced triumphantly. 'The databook's plugged in. I'm going into it. . . now now!'

The hologram seethed with lines of data, flowing like a raging river. File headings surged and spun in its depths, whipped up by the furious currents of information. The room was filled with a resounding hiss that sounded to Josef like water gushing.

As they watched, the hologram flickered uncertainly, off and on again in an instant.

'What was that?'

Veta checked the system, hurling a bubble of test programs into the main hologram. It bobbed and sank and resurfaced. Veta shook her head.

'Nothing wrong as far as I can see. . . '

Again the system failed for an instant, and now the hissing was getting louder. Veta cancelled the test bubble and launched a stabilising program to replace it. The dataflow continued to flicker, but the information was still managing to get through.

154.'What is is that interference?' Josef demanded. that interference?' Josef demanded.

'I don't know. Never heard anything like it.' Veta was biting her nails, gazing absently into the stream.

The 'gram crackled and fizzed and finally collapsed altogether to leave a solid black orb hovering above the desk that reflected the light ominously.

'What the h.e.l.l happened then?'

Veta rebooted and the 'gram opened up. She ran a brief diagnostic that failed to find anything wrong.

'Did we get the info?' he asked.

She checked the log, nodding uncertainly.

'Quite a list,' she said. 'But certainty not all of it.'

'Looks like we got some big holorecs,' he commented, poking his finger into the middle of the 'gram.

She took a deep breath and he found her eyes full of disquiet.

'So,' he said. 'D'you wanna see one or not?'

She was a million miles away, fingers pulling and poking at her chin. She'd got exactly what she wanted, but now couldn't face the truth.

'You do it,' she urged, jumping out of her seat to let him in.

Josef took her place in front of the 'gram and caressed the desktop with his fingertips, drawing down a file that had been recorded a month ago. Somebody, presumably Peron, had given it a t.i.tle: EXPT 71.

With an unsettled look at Veta, he opened the file and projected the 'gram full-scale. The apartment was instantly inhabited by ghosts. Peron stood over by the kitchen, partially embedded in the wall, while Pryce rummaged in a cupboard that was suspended in midair on the opposite side of the room. By the side of Peron was one of the children, like the one they'd seen earlier in Peron's scratchy recording. This time the picture quality was better, and they could see the child clearly. It was noticeably younger, but still possessed a large, bulbous head and was impossible to s.e.x from its facial features. As it observed Pryce across the room out of its great, black, slanted eyes, Josef saw with revulsion that the child had been strapped by its wrists and ankles to a gurney. Peron made some adjustments to a wall comp, presumably keeping an eye on the recording, while Pryce eventually found what he was looking for in the cupboard. Josef saw a laser scalpel briefly visible before it disappeared into Pryce's pocket, and Pryce left the room.

155.

Continuing with her adjustments, Peron ignored the restless fidgeting of the child on the nearby gurney. The child was tugging at the restraints, trying to release its long spindly arms. It gazed up at Peron, but if she noticed she ignored it.. Instead she busied herself checking the other side of the room, which Pryce had just left. After a moment of fumbling with the wall comp, a full-size image appeared in the s.p.a.ce Pryce had left. It was a small cell that contained a bunk, a toilet and one of the children. The child cringed as Pryce opened the door and came inside. He closed the door behind him and that half of the room fell dark, illuminated only by a single dim light in the ceiling.

Removing the laser scalpel from his pocket, Pryce advanced on the child, who was cowering in the corner by the toilet.

Peron cancelled the image and Pryce vanished.

The child on the gurney was becoming more agitated, jumping up and down and making hysterical squeaking noises. Peron simply stood impa.s.sively watching without the slightest compulsion to soothe it. After a few seconds, the squirming and jumping had become a furious struggle to escape its bonds, as if the child were in paroxysms of pain. A second later, the image vanished completely, and Josef found Veta standing there with the remote control.

Her eyes were full of tears, her face was full of pain, and her voice was full of certainty.

'I'm going to kill her,' she said.

The call had come through from Military One just after Foley had seen the impostor locked in the cells. A message from Colonel Peron to locate Dr Pryce and report back to her. Foley had tried the usual channels, putting a call through herself to his com, asking Military One to trace him. But it seemed that Dr Pryce had vanished himself into thin air.

Putting a call in to Medicare Central, Foley had discovered that Peron was out of her office, and that there was still no sign of Pryce. She called Comp Maintenance and spoke to a frazzled-looking operator, requesting a comptech to meet her at Pryce's apartment.

The comptech who turned up was a wiry man with a thin face and long nose: a nervous, twitchy type. lie refused to break Pryce's code until Foley had gained express permission from Military Security and his boss had come online to confirm the order. But finally she was in.

Pryce's apartment appeared to be empty. The place was silent. No sign of life. He'd left the lights on low in the living area, but he'd also left the door open at the back of the room and she could see a bright light shining beyond.

156.She stepped towards the light and saw that it was coming from one of the bedrooms.

The bedroom in question actually turned out to be Pryce's study. She found him slumped across his desktop in a pool of congealed blood. They hadn't been the best of buddies, Pryce and she. They'd had more than their fair share of run-ins over the last few weeks since Military One had set up their tense semi-residence in Medicare Central. But it was still something of a shock to see him like that. Perhaps it was the influence of the Domecq impostor, but her mask slipped and she felt suddenly sorry for Pryce. Then she slammed up the defences and told herself not to be so feeble. She had a job to do here and feelings didn't come into it.

The position of the body and the injuries made it pretty obvious what had happened here. The room was immaculately tidy, devoid of any sign of a struggle. It was a fairly sure bet that Pryce had committed suicide. Foley felt she could safely risk six months' wages on it.

She was about to com Peron to deliver the news when she stopped. Some blood had pooled on the carpet at his feet, dark red and thick. It formed an almost perfect circle. Except that one edge contained a slight indentation.

Kneeling to take a closer look, Foley could see that the indent had been caused by somebody touching the very rim of the puddle. Going by the drag pattern and the lack of nearby blood trail, she guessed that whoever had stood in the blood had done so quite a long time after death, when the blood had almost dried.

The disturbance was so slight that whoever had been in here probably hadn't even realised they'd left a clue to their presence.

Scanning the shelves around and under the desk, Foley couldn't be sure if anything had been taken or moved, but Pryce had a good collection of databooks and it was quite possible that one or more could have been taken. The only way to be sure was to look through them and check the sequence of dates.

It might take a while to establish for certain whether any were missing.

Deciding that this wasn't a job for her, Foley touched her com.

'Peron.'

Captain Foley's head arrived in the air nearby.

'Sir, I found Pryce.'

'Where is he?'

'In his apartment. He's dead.'

The words were a simple statement of fact, empty of compa.s.sion.

157.

'Dead?'

'Suicide.'

This wasn't a surprise to Peron, of course. She'd been observing his slide for weeks, seen the psychosis building inside him, watched him disintegrate.

She had a file on her databook that followed him down his dark little hole to oblivion, and the culmination of the Pryce Experiment had been staring her in the face for weeks. Now she could close the file with her summation: mental trauma inflicted telepathically by the creatures.

'Right,' Peron said. 'Get a clean-up duty in there. Keep it high-security. I want all his databooks bringing to me. I'll make you responsible for their safe return, Captain.'

'Sir. There may be a security leak.'

'What d'you mean?'

'There's evidence that somebody was in here some time after Pryce died.'

'Evidence?'

'I think somebody stepped in the blood on the carpet. It was considerably congealed when that happened, sir.'

'In that case, get his apartment sealed off. Get our forensics in there. If anybody saw him after he died, I want to know who, when and why. Report back to me as soon as you've got something to tell me.'

'Yes, sir.'

Cutting the call, Peron returned to her comp. The auto-shut had closed down her 'gram and replaced it with the WorldCorp animation. For a moment she gazed into it as if hypnotised, watching the birds curling through the air into the distance and back again, forming and losing and reforming the loose and extended 'W'. In the animation, the sky was a clear deep blue without a hint of pollutant clouds and the sun was a bright yellow disc that always shone.

If only.

It took a while to get the hang of the hologram thing, but Anji finally realised that pressing the com just about anywhere would activate it, and the rest she could do by simply talking to the resultant hologram. Presumably the com was somehow linked into the main computer system, so she decided to use it as little as possible just in case somebody somewhere stumbled across her usage and thought they might check up on it.

It turned out that the vent system had a nifty little network of lifts running along parallel to most of it for the purposes obviously of human inspection.

They were one-man open-cage affairs that were thick with grimy dust, and 158evidently hadn't been used in years. But it saved having to clamber up what looked like interminable miles of stepladders that also followed the vents in the cramped and only intermittently illuminated superstructure.

Every so often she had to bring her lift cage to a clanging halt in order to get her bearings and check her progress. There were several intersections on her journey that meant she had to climb out of the cages and push her way through filthy hanging wiring harnesses that ended at junction boxes which looked to Anji like laptop computers. She'd poked at one experimentally, and it had thrown a small hologram into the air that contained multiple windows of computer code that were completely meaningless to her brain, despite the fact that she'd trained for years to grasp at a glance the intricacies of multinational balance sheets.

She located another lift cage in the gloom and operated the hologram, delighted to see just how close she'd managed to get to the VIP suite.

'Can you give me a close-up of the last section?' she asked.

The hologram performed a neat little pirouette and expanded to show her that she had only a few levels left to climb. The lift cage should take her to the correct floor, and there was an inspection hatch that should allow her to get back out and have a nosy around. In the weak yellow illumination of the nearby light, she checked her clothes, which had been filthy enough before she set off, but now looked as if she'd taken a mud bath in a sc.r.a.pyard.

She'd have to keep a low profile. Perhaps try to find some fresh clothes along the way. Hopefully, she'd find the Doctor and he could get her back to the TARDIS.

There was movement nearby in the dark. For a second she thought she'd imagined it. But there it was again. A shuffling shadow keeping low. A clump of nearby wires swung around as the thing brushed past them, and Anji jumped into the cage and pressed the b.u.t.ton to take her up.

The cage refused to budge. She tried again, peering into the shadows trying to locate the movement, but again the cage remained stubbornly inactive.

Then she saw it, this time more clearly as it sauntered into a local pool of light. A rat the size of a cat. It shuffled about, sniffing the air and coming closer.

Anji froze. She'd seen rats. One or two. But never so close, and never in such intimate conditions. And never one so d.a.m.ned huge. The creature stopped in the middle of the puddle of light, gazing up at her in the cage, and the hairs on the back of her neck stood on end. The breath emerged from between her lips in coa.r.s.e rasps, and she became terrifyingly aware of a mind-numbing fear that made it impossible to move a muscle. The rat opened its mouth and emitted a 159 long hiss. It observed her out of its little black beads-for-eyes, and they shared a moment of inertia.

Forcing herself to reach up, Anji clasped a rung of the nearby ladder. As soon she moved, the rat stopped hissing. What the h.e.l.l did that mean? Was it preparing to pounce? She caught a brief glimpse of yellow teeth and a lapping pink tongue, before the rat suddenly lunged forward into the shadow and the cage around her shuddered and clattered.

In a furious explosion of arms and legs, Anji shot up the ladder as fast as her limbs could project her, not for a second looking back. Lungs pumped. Heart thumped. Her whole body afire with fear. She heard the cage behind her clang and rattle, and had a fleeting vision of the rat clambering after her.

At the top of the ladder was an intersecting floor. She threw herself on to it, tumbling painfully. Burning with adrenaline, she gawked about in the dark.

She had no idea where she was, but she could see a service hatch nearby and she scrambled on hands and knees to get to it.

Hurling herself through and slamming the door behind her, she found herself in a storage cupboard lined with metal shelves. The shelves were crammed with packets of cleaning products, and there were several large buckets piled up against one wall.

As the fires inside her began to die, she stood and tried to calm herself, taking deep breaths and keeping a wary eye on the hatch.

On one of the shelves she noticed a heap of folded overalls. She grasped one and flapped it out to try it against her for size. The garment was big but would fit well enough to disguise her filthy appearance, so she thrust her legs into it before she poked her head out into the corridor.

n.o.body home. It looked like a rarely used backwater of a big hotel. Pulling her head back inside, she pressed the com to get her bearings. The red dot that represented her had now converged with the green dot that represented the VIP suite. Bingo! Grasping a bucket and cloth, she strolled out into the corridor and hesitated uncertainly before marching off to try some of the doors along the sides.

All she had to do now was find the Doctor.

The search party was marching Fitz back to the main door when the lights. .h.i.t them. They came curling out of the storm, swooping down from high in the sky, the roar of the engines competing with the roar of the winds. There was a moment of confusion, and Fitz saw his chance.

160.The man with the gun raised his hands to protect his eyes from the swirling light and gushing dark. The others were momentarily surprised by the arrival of the chopper.

Fitz s.n.a.t.c.hed the gun and levelled it at them, putting several paces between himself and the goons. They raised their hands in unison, looking dismayed and stupid. But the chopper was probably loaded with troops arriving to pick him up. Fitz probably had only seconds before they dismounted with rifles and marksmen. For an instant he considered what the h.e.l.l he could do, then he had an idea.

Swinging the gun, he took a shot at the nearby landbugs. They erupted into flames with a roaring explosion, and his legs erupted into frantic motion.

Suddenly he was lost in the storm, the wind ripping at him and the sand and rain battering his sore skin. He kept running until the fear that he could get himself completely lost overtook the fear that they might catch him.

Lungs searing, he came to a halt and looked back to see the dying flames of the fire he'd started. He could also see vague splashes of light washing through the agitated darkness, probably the troops searching for him. He could hear voices yelling above the sound of the squall, and the lights began to spread out around him. Then there were more lights and more screeching voices as the damage he'd inflicted brought more of them out after him.

Trying to get his bearings in the impossibly wild darkness, he set off in an attempt to reach the compound where he'd seen the giant earthmovers earlier.

There would be cover there, and hopefully somewhere to hide and gather his thoughts.

Out of the storm came a pulse of bright pink light and the ground exploded near his feet. They'd spotted him. He forced on, hoping the storm would give him cover, and a second pulse of light went yards astray.

Behind him, the voices and lights were becoming more agitated and more concentrated as his hunters converged. He could see the compound ahead.

The fence picked out in mad spatters of the pursuers' lights. Then another flash of pink sent him flying. He crashed to the ground, lungs filled with dank earthy air. He heard them closing in. The lights were crashing about him. The storm screamed in his ears.

A flare went off in the distance, way off target, and suddenly there was even more confusion as the lights swept this way and that. Fitz took the opportunity to run, scrambling for the compound fence and clambering up and over and collapsing to the ground on the far side. He scrabbled on his hands and knees until he reached a nearby earthmover, and managed to hurl himself behind one 161 of the giant caterpillar tracks before the lights caught up.

Gasping breaths that shuddered through him, he lay in the grease-stinking dark and peered out at the chaos of winds and voices and churning lights.

They'd reached the other side of the fence but the sand had obviously already covered his tracks because they were milling about in bafflement muttering to one another.

Fitz was about to crawl further under the giant machine when the lights picked out something that s.n.a.t.c.hed his attention. A stack of boxes over by the fence where the searchers were congregating. The boxes were black metal things with white lettering sprayed on the sides. And the lettering was the thing that had grabbed his attention EXPLOSIVES.

Things were happening far too fast. Peron's com was operating constantly, buzzing her like an annoying fly. The guard she'd posted on the hold called, his head appearing in the middle of her comp 'gram so that he was fused with the report she was working on. He was sufficiently stressed for the lines of anxiety to show through the lines of data.