But things had gone wrong. The med comps had picked up on the abnormalities and recognised the pattern even though it was so widely dispersed. That would explain why the human agents were now showing themselves. They'd been forced into the open to rectify their plans.

The modus operandi pointed to an organisation that would regard genetic enhancement and bioengineering as their playground. And that pointed to the impostor Domecq and the girl. Although the girl showed no physical signs of enhancement, her psychic processes certainly did. According to Peron, Kapoor had displayed clear signs of telepathic ability, particularly in connection with the creatures.

Trying his com, Tyran received only a continuous hiss of static. He cancelled the call in annoyance and jumped up from his seat.

'I think we better try talking to our impostor again,' he said, already heading for the door. 'Don't you?'

Domecq held back, shaking his head. 'Even the mind probe failed on him.

He's a man of immense enhancements. His outlook has probably been fundamentally altered by his employers. He'll die before he talks. I have an impecca-ble instinct for these things.'

'Peron said he showed uncommon affection for Kapoor,' Tyran said. 'Perhaps I can prove he's not quite as resilient as you might imagine.'

As they left, the room fell into silence. A moment later, the silence fell into a state of disrepair as one of the seats toppled over and Anji emerged from under the desk, crashing her head as she clambered out.

The other Domecq, they said. Dr Peron had asked her if she'd been travelling with Dr Domecq. The conversation above the desk, coupled with the Doctor's coat, emptied pockets and the blood-spattered carpet, had supplied 170enough clues for her to paint a sketchy but probably accurate picture of what had happened to the Doctor.

Typical! You turn your back for one minute and the guy's poking his nose into all kinds of trouble: getting himself interrogated, subjected to mind probes and generally crudely abused. The Doctor had an unenviable knack for dropping them into the smack dead centre of calamity, and she'd begun to wonder if the TARDIS had some kind of bad-situation sensor in its guidance system. You turn your back for one minute and the guy's poking his nose into all kinds of trouble: getting himself interrogated, subjected to mind probes and generally crudely abused. The Doctor had an unenviable knack for dropping them into the smack dead centre of calamity, and she'd begun to wonder if the TARDIS had some kind of bad-situation sensor in its guidance system.

The lights were dimming sporadically, conjuring shadows and pools of darkness into the room. The whole place was falling apart and they were, natch, taking the rap for it all. She had to get to the Doctor. Find out what was going on. Maybe grasp him from the jaws of adversity. Or something. One thing was sure the two men on their way to see him right now were not going for a friendly chat.

She dashed for the door and peered cautiously out to see one of the lift doors closing. The vast reception area was still empty, so she risked rushing across to the door and watching the little digital counter that showed which level the lift was descending to. The counter was flickering on and off like the rest of the lights, but the numbers were just about managing to hold on by the skin of their teeth. Finally the descent stopped. Level twelve. She waited to make sure, watching the display fade and fizzle, before finally calling the next lift.

If the Doctor was on level twelve, then that was where she was too.

When the monitor finally died, Leung had spent a few minutes attacking it with repair programs, before reverting to attacking it with his bare fists. Where the software fell sadly short of expectations, he was gratified to see that his fists achieved the desired results. The monitor stabilised, but Leung frowned at what it showed. It was simply black, although the dialogue told him it was active and fine.

Trying his fists on it again, he failed to get a picture. With a sigh, he stood and marched over to the door, preparing his pistol before unlocking the cell to peer inside.

He was baffled to find the cell empty. The bunk was in position, crumpled where the prisoner had been resting, a pair of shoes and socks left neatly at the side. Otherwise nothing.

Stepping inside to jab his pistol under the bunk, Leung was mystified to find the s.p.a.ce completely clear. Then he was winded. The prisoner dropped from above. The pistol went scuttling out of his grasp. His head hit something hard.

171.

There was a flurry of wild moments. Then his own pistol a centimetre from his face as the prisoner bent to collect his shoes and socks.

The man was smiling out of his battered and tired face.

'It's been a pleasure,' he was saying. 'But I'm afraid I really have to go now.'

Immediately after Veta's vision, the lights had fouled up and now the comp system was refusing to respond. Veta perched in front of it looking distressed but determined, while the 'gram flared and hissed and cackled at her.

'It's no good,' Josef said.

'We can't stop now.'

'You're never going to get any sense out of it while it's acting up like that.'

She ignored him, continuing to trawl the lines of code with a dozen or more stabilising programs proving less than useless. She'd miraculously managed to open a couple of files and skim through the information they contained, but it was tortuously slow going and the information was highly corrupted. Like trying to read a book whose pages had been crumpled into little b.a.l.l.s.

'There look,' she said suddenly.

'What?'

'They built an annexe. It's been basically bolted on to the side of Medicare Central. Twelve cells.'

'How do you get to it?'

'It's near Peron's office,' she said, pushing her finger into the shaky 3-D plan.

'I recognise the layout.'

'Twelve cells,' he said, remembering the image they'd witnessed of Pryce entering the darkened cubicle containing the child.

'That's obviously where they're being kept. So that's where we're going.'

'We'll never get in,' he complained, feeling the fear gripping hold even at the thought of an attempt.

'Course we will. There's a major comp disruption. There'll be technicians everywhere. Come on.'

She was already halfway to the door, not even bothering to cancel the comp.

As she swept open the door he grabbed his jacket. He was twisting into it, following her out, when he crashed into her and realised she'd come to a dead stop.

There were six of them in the corridor. Black combat gear and multiphase rifles. The rifles were aimed at Josef and Veta.

'We seem to have a comptech problem,' said Colonel Peron.

172.It happened as they made their way towards the cells to check on the prisoner.

The lights went out, and Tyran found himself in pitch-black quiet. Even the motion of the city-machine had finally stopped. There was a sound he hadn't heard in months, not even in the plush apartments of his own private suite.

Something that sent a shiver down his corporate spine and meant the end of absolutely everything.

Silence.

The lift was plunging smoothly when the lights went out. Then all h.e.l.l let loose as Anji crashed and tumbled and came to an abrupt, bone-wrenching halt. As she lay waiting for the emergency lights to ignite, feeling a bit like a pebble in a cement mixer, she realised that her slightest movement was making the lift shift and creak. She had a flash image of the lift jammed against a narrow ledge in the shaft, holding on with only millimetres of movement between safety and oblivion below.

She could hear the sound of her own ragged breathing. Her adrenaline-soaked body wanted to run, to yell, to thrash about wildly. But she could only lie there feeling her battered bruises, not knowing how badly injured she'd been in the fall, not knowing if movement would dislodge the lift from wherever it had jammed.

Even after a pause long enough for her eyes to get accustomed to the dark, she could see absolutely nothing. No vague areas of light and shadow. Not even the faintest glimmer of illumination anywhere. Such a profound and perfect darkness that she wondered if she'd been knocked blind in the fall. Her breathing intensified at the idea, rasping fast and shallow out of her lungs.

Forcing herself to remain calm, she told herself that she wasn't wasn't blind. She blind. She wasn't wasn't badly injured. The lift badly injured. The lift wasn't wasn't going to plummet into the depths. The lights going to plummet into the depths. The lights would would come back on. In a minute. Any minute now. Any. . . minute. . . come back on. In a minute. Any minute now. Any. . . minute. . .

now. . .

She closed her eyes and tried to picture herself in a crumpled ball in the corner of the upturned lift. She'd worked with a trader who used Eastern methods of visualisation to combat what he called 'the pressures of life in the city'. He was mid-to late thirties so he'd had a good few years of 'pressures'

to deal with, including the late eighties, so she'd forgiven his pseudo-mystic leanings. Now she remembered him sitting there with his eyes closed when one of his more adventurous portfolios spectacularly crashed leaving his numero-uno numero-uno client high and dry, several hundred thousand pounds adrift. She smiled to herself. The pressures of life in the city? If only he could have known. If 173 client high and dry, several hundred thousand pounds adrift. She smiled to herself. The pressures of life in the city? If only he could have known. If 173 only. . .

She wished she had her bag. There was a torch in her bag. But of course the Doctor and Fitz were blokes and they just didn't recognise the absolute necessity of a girl's handbag.

At last she felt able to move her arms cautiously. She shifted her weight so that she was supported in a semi-upright position against the wall, or floor, or ceiling, or whatever she was resting against when the lift clattered to its halt.

Running her hands over her body, she felt bruised but not seriously damaged.

After a while she felt confident enough to try to stand. Her legs were like jelly and so was her head, but at least the adrenaline had dispersed from her system.

She vaguely remembered reading somewhere that an adrenaline pulse would last normally only a few brief seconds before the chemistry was depleted.

As she clambered to her feet, the lift creaking and moaning around her, she stopped abruptly to listen. There was another sound mixed with the groaning of the lift. A sound she couldn't hear distinctly at first, but which swiftly grew clearer to make the adrenaline burst through her veins again.

A scurrying, scuffling kind of a sound.

The explosive charges looked like slender sticks of dynamite with small digital timing mechanisms fixed to one end. Each mechanism consisted of a tiny red switch and what looked like a remote-control antenna. There was a miniature screen on the end of each stick, which Fitz presumed was a communications device.

Stuffing a handful of the sticks into his overall pockets, he gazed into the storm to keep an eye out for approaching lights. The hubbub of voices had receded, and he could see pools of flashlight illumination bobbing about in the mid-distance.

He'd formulated a plan, of sorts, but it was full of holes and potential disasters. Ideally, he just needed to make a run for it in one of the giant earthmovers.

In theory, that was an easy plan. In practice, however, he had no idea how to drive or control one of those things. The others were much more expert and they would easily catch up with him. Besides, even if he did manage to, say, smash up all the controls in all the pursuit vehicles, then there were still the troops on his tail and they had real fire power and some sort of flying machine that could cut through the storms.

So, all in all, his chances if he made a run for it weren't really all that good.

What he needed was time to think, and maybe somewhere to wait out the storm. Maybe let them think he'd got away, and make his dash for freedom 174bright and early in the morning when there was n.o.body about. There was certainly enough cover in the storm to hide. He could probably even get some sleep if he could find somewhere on the construction site to get his head down.

As he cast about for ideas, the lights. .h.i.t him.

' Got him! Got him! ' somebody yelled on the other side of the fence. ' somebody yelled on the other side of the fence.

A chaos of voices suddenly growing nearer. Fitz set off at full pelt towards the skeletal structure that he could just see looming out of the squall. As he made his way towards the building he could hear the fence rattling behind him.

They were close, their lights sweeping about him like wild things.

There was a platform nearby. As Fitz was clattering across it, he realised abruptly that it was a materials lift obviously for the purpose of getting stuff up into the structure. There was a simple mechanism with b.u.t.tons on the side, and he punched it frantically.

The platform rattled and shuddered, and finally began to rise with an infuriatingly unhurried momentum. The lights were getting swiftly nearer, coming together out of the storm, crowding nearby and flashing at him sporadically.

Fitz considered jumping off and letting them think think he'd gone up on the platform. By the time he'd made his decision it was too late. There were shapes surrounding him on the ground. he'd gone up on the platform. By the time he'd made his decision it was too late. There were shapes surrounding him on the ground.

He was just out of reach for them to jump on after him, and he watched them gazing up out of their ferocious light, dark blobs shuffling about, considering what to do next. Then more lights appeared. Sharper, more focused beams. Probably the troops. There was movement among the black blobs, but he couldn't make out what they were doing or what they might be saying.

Then the platform ground to a halt and Fitz felt his legs buckle beneath him.

d.a.m.n! Remote control. Probably a safety cutout in case of accidents. The platform remained momentarily stationary, the wires that controlled it whisk-ing about and clattering in the wind. Then he was moving again. This time down. Back to the lights and the troops and the guns. Remote control. Probably a safety cutout in case of accidents. The platform remained momentarily stationary, the wires that controlled it whisk-ing about and clattering in the wind. Then he was moving again. This time down. Back to the lights and the troops and the guns.

At last he could see their faces. Quite a reception committee. There was Jorgan, a handful of his Neanderthals, and three black-clad figures with helmets and goggles and stubby rifles which Fitz presumed were standard military issue around these parts. The combat crew lifted their rifles to cover him, and he raised his hands where they could see them. Then he saw Ayla among the Neanderthals. Her hands flashed up to cover her eyes. She held up the fingers of her free hand. Five fingers. . . Then he noticed she was holding one of the squat pistols that the fieldbase personnel used. Four fingers. . . It was a completely different design from the military rifles. Three fingers. . . Some kind of 175 flare pistol? Two fingers. . .

Jorgan watched the prisoner descend and just couldn't stifle the grin that spread across his own smug face. Now they were getting somewhere at last.

Now they had real rifles, real firepower, and they had the prisoner back in their grasp.

As the platform descended, the prisoner lifted his hands into the air in a gesture of defeat. The troops moved in, rifles trained, and now the platform was only a few short metres off the ground. Then The scene turned white. An instant of panic and blindness. Then the flare had gone.

And so, it seemed, had the prisoner. . .

She was moving fast, the wind ripping through her hair, the breath bursting out of her. Fitz was limping badly, holding on for dear life. They made their way together into the depths of the structure, tumbling over rough ground they couldn't even see below them. The agony of their flight seemed to last for ever, until finally, gradually, they slowed to a full stop and she leaned him against one of the giant support pillars.

He collapsed to the ground, wincing in pain, struggling to catch his breath.

She peered back through the forest of beams and girders, and only in the furthest distance could she make out the confusion of lights behind them.

'We need to keep moving,' she gasped.

'Give me a minute,' he said, his voice as ragged as the wind that cut through the framework around them.

'One minute,' she agreed, collapsing beside him so they leaned against each other in shared exhaustion.

'Maybe five,' he rasped.

His legs were afire. His lungs were screaming for air. He couldn't face running again. He'd just been through far too much in the last twenty-four hours. He knew he was capable of only so much, and after a day like today he'd just about reached that limit.

He felt Ayla pressing against his shoulder, felt her heaving, heard her breathing deep and hard. He wanted to grab her and thank her. Maybe plant a big sloppy kiss on her lips. Without her he'd be dead. He was perfectly aware of that. She'd dragged him out of the mud, cleaned him up, got him back on his feet. Then she'd saved him from the pack.

176.'Why are you doing this?' he asked.

She huffed. 'I told you. I did forty years for PlanetScape. Military Arm. We were on Gildus Prime and there were problems. People were dying all over the place, and the crops we'd got established all withered in the s.p.a.ce of three days.

They said it was corporate infiltration. There was a witch hunt. Everything just went stupid. There was so much hope and so much money ploughed into that project. Now I can see the same thing happening here. History repeating itself.

And I knew a lot of good people who died on Gildus Prime.'

He reached across and grabbed her hand. Squeezed it tight and found her face turned towards him. Found her big beautiful eyes peering into his, smiling.

Then there were lights. Combing the area. Sweeping around and disrupting the cosy shadows around them.

'We need to get moving,' Ayla said, tugging him back to his feet.

He grasped the girder for support as he felt his legs begin to give way beneath him, and only then did he see the figure in black. She was a young woman with storm goggles raised above her eyes. She was watching them with the beginnings of a smile curling through her tight lips. Fitz sensed Ayla moving nearby. The woman jerked her rifle and Ayla's movement stopped.

'Now,' the trooper said softly. 'Turn round and get your hands in the air.'

Emergency lighting ignited at last, and Tyran tried his com. Still inactive. The corridor was barely illuminated, full of bizarre shadows and pools of deep dark.

Domecq's face was picked out in the curious gloom like an apparition, his blond hair glowing slightly under the yellow lights.

'We're going to get this sorted once and for all,' Tyran told him, stalking off in the direction of the cells. 'Our impostor friend has got some urgent questions to answer. We'll take him to the girl and use her to get the truth out of him.'