'I don't want them harmed,' Domecq told him as they sped down the corridor towards the hold.

'I don't care what you want,' Tyran said. 'If these things really are the cause of everything, if they really are the psychic weapons you suspect, I'm going to have them deactivated any way I can.'

He swung the mind probe at Domecq as they marched.

'We don't have much time,' Tyran said. 'Our comptechs are fighting a losing battle. While we've got the comps online, I'm going to take whatever they've got in those evil little minds.'

Domecq grasped him by the shoulder and swung him to a halt in the middle of the corridor.

'You're not sanctioned to take this action,' Domecq warned him, his face dark with meaning.

'I just sanctioned myself to take whatever action I deem necessary to keep my crew here safe.'

Tyran s.n.a.t.c.hed his hand away and stomped off.

'Earth Central will destroy you for this,' Domecq shouted after him.

185.

'Earth Central can try to do what the h.e.l.l it wants to me,' Tyran yelled back without missing a step.

This time the guard snapped to attention when he saw Tyran approaching.

Tyran threw him a brusque salute and indicated the door to the cells.

'No problems?'

'No, sir.'

But, as he pa.s.sed through the storeroom into the hold, Tyran knew immediately that something was wrong. Last time they were here the doors had rattled and slammed and there was a subtle but definite sense of tension in the air, as if the creatures had sensed their purpose.

Now the short corridor was silent, except for the howling wind outside that sounded as though it were clawing at the walls to get in. Pushing his key into the nearest lock, Tyran tugged the door to find the cell dark and cold. . .

. . . and empty.

Fitz raised his hand into the air but didn't turn his back on the trooper. He saw immediately the smirk disappear from her face when she saw the explosive he was holding.

'Cyclotol concentrate,' Ayla said somewhere behind him. 'Develops a detonation pressure of about fifty thousand atmospheres a square centimetre.'

The trooper was drip-white, Fitz noticed, and he felt the colour abruptly drain from his own face too.

'If it goes off it'll take everything within a quite a few square metres,' Ayla continued. 'Very instant. Very painless.'

The gun was wavering now in the trooper's hand, and Ayla stepped through a slow wide arc to take it from her. With a sigh of relief, Fitz lowered the explosive stick and regarded it with a new respect bordering on reverence. The smirk had transferred itself from the trooper to Ayla.

'Tranquilliser pellet,' Ayla said, matter of fact and businesslike.

The trooper reached carefully into a pocket and removed a small blister pack that contained a row of tiny pills. Popping one of the pills, she slipped it into her mouth at great pains to keep every movement clearly visible. A few seconds later she slumped to the ground and Ayla was fussing over her comatose body, snapping a pair of the trooper's own cuffs around the wrists and grasping the woman's flashlight.

Fitz was gingerly tugging the sticks of explosive out of his pockets where he'd stuffed them.

'I was kidding,' Ayla said.

186.'Hmm?'

'It's not really cyclotol concentrate. It's old-fashioned TNT. We use it to excavate sometimes. Keep hold of it.'

'We've got a gun now,' he pointed out. 'Seems a bit stupid running about loaded up to the eyeb.a.l.l.s with this stuff. One spark and I go off like a box of fireworks.'

'Keep it,' she said, grabbing some of the sticks from him and proceeding to stuff them into her own pockets and pouches. She tapped him on the chin with one and grinned. 'We're going to use it in our daring and nail-biting escape from the very jaws of death.'

'Oh,' said Fitz. 'Righto.'

The chopper was being hurled about like a kite in the storm, and visibility was down to the windscreen. But the Doctor refused to give up the controls and let the autonavigation system take them in.

Bains had strapped himself into one of the side seats, but the children were all crouched on the floor huddling against one another for stability. He found them peering at him intermittently out of huge black eyes, skinny hunched shapes like primates. They'd been nervous of him at first, but the Doctor had soothed their fears, introducing Bains as their friend, and finally they'd seemed to accept him as such. One of the girls had taken his hand, pulled him down to her level, and stroked his face with cold, spindly fingers. In an instant he'd understood there was a trust between them. Not just himself and the girl, but all of them.

The dead child was still shrouded in the makeshift sling that the Doctor had carried strapped to his back, and now it was fastened into the seat beside Bains.

He could just see the top of its head through an opening in the material, a few loose strands of wispy silver hair curling out from the folds.

Again, he felt the chopper suddenly dip and swerve.

'Where the h.e.l.l did you learn to fly these things?' Bains asked the Doctor over his shoulder.

The Doctor didn't look back. 'I watched Captain Foley last night,' he said.

'The principles are fairly elementary.'

Of course, Bains didn't believe for an instant that the Doctor had trained by watching Foley last night, but he let the comment go, as he had done most of the Doctor's comments over the last hour or so.

Their escape had been effortless. Unlike Bains's earlier miserable failure.

The Doctor had led them up through the superstructure in a series of cagelike 187 lifts that apparently maintenance crews used in emergencies. They'd reached toplevel unhindered and unseen except by a few rogue rats. They'd emerged through one of the ventilation maintenance blocks out into the vicious storm and made swift progress to the chopper pads.

The Doctor had entered military codes to release the chopper, and in no time at all they were on their way. When Bains remarked on the smoothness of the operation, the Doctor had waved a hand dismissively.

'I'm something of an expert at escape attempts,' he'd said, adding, 'and besides, I've had all day and unlimited computer access to plan this one.'

The expansion of the word 'comp' jarred. But it was only one of many, many small mysteries that this man seemed to carry around with him.

And some of the other small mysteries that he carried around with him were the children. He'd given Bains only the sketchiest explanation on their way up in the cages. The Doctor didn't know who or what exactly they were, but he was sure they were somehow linked to all the troubles that WorldCorp were experiencing on Ceres Alpha. He also suspected something to do with connections he'd made between what he'd read on the medicare comps and what he'd read in Bains's journals that they were something to do with Bains's dig.

Bains had lost the strand of the conversation at this point, but the Doctor had said that hopefully things would become clearer if they could visit the dig.

The chopper dipped abruptly, and the storms parted in front of them like a curtain.

'There,' Bains said. 'That's the area. There's an entrance to a cave system.'

He pointed. 'Just follow that rim. About a hundred metres. You can put us down just outside it.'

The chopper swooped and the Doctor brought them in for a perfectly executed touchdown, unhooking himself and opening the door before the pro-pellers had even had time to stop. Bains tumbled out after him, and found the Doctor standing nearby gazing up into the sky. The effect was stunning.

There was a kind of void in the storm above them, an opening through which they could see a star-filled sky. Around the perimeter of the opening was a frontier where the storm was a grey blur, and beyond that it quickly became an impenetrable wall of sand and wind.

'We seem to be in the eye of the storm,' the Doctor noted.

'I've never seen anything like it,' Bains admitted.

'Fascinating. . . '

'b.l.o.o.d.y amazing. . . '

188.Without warning the Doctor was moving again, heading back to the chopper where the children were helping each other out, landing one at a time in the dirt. Bains watched their huge black eyes widen as they gazed about in wonder.

Then he saw one of the children bend and scoop up a handful of loose soil, lifting it for the Doctor to see. The child gazed expectantly into the Doctor's face, and the Doctor knelt to examine what the child was showing him. Then the child spoke, its voice soft and quiet, barely a sound at all.

'Home,' it said. 'We belong.'

Tyran answered the com call and Peron's head appeared in the air above his desk. The woman looked exhausted, the stress now very evident in her features.

'Yes?' Tyran demanded, his voice a whip-crack sound.

'Sir, we have a fix on the girl. We're moving in now. But we've done a complete sweep for the impostor and for the children. Nothing.'

'Nothing?'

'No, sir. If we can trust the comp readings, then they've left the city completely.'

Tyran was beginning to consider the significance of her words when she continued.

'I've also done a scan for Professor Bains. He wasn't in his apartment so I used the biodata readings we took from him today and ran a city-wide scan with them. He's also gone.'

Now Tyran was finally beginning to see the pattern in the apparent chaos.

'Get a chopper out to Bains's dig,' he told her.

'I've already done that, sir. Captain Foley is on her way right now.'

'Excellent.' Tyran grinned. 'What orders has she got?'

'Bring them all back alive, sir. Or as alive as they need to be to answer questions.'

'Slight adjustment to that order, Colonel. Patch it through to Foley, would you? I want them all back here all right, but I don't want a single one of them alive. Got that?'

'Yes, sir.'

'Oh, and Colonel. . . '

'Yes, sir?'

'Destroy everything in Bains's apartment, would you?'

Peron nodded. 'Yes, sir,' she said, and her head cut cleanly out of the air.

189.

'We seem to be getting our comps back online with these creatures off-city,'

Tyran pointed out to Domecq, who sat alongside him at the huge desk. 'I think the answer to all our problems is staring us right in the face, don't you?'

Jorgan was sticking close to one of the troops. If anybody was going to find his prisoner, it was going to be the professionals, not his ramshackle army of brutes.

The trooper was using a detector, but the readings were all over the place because Jorgan's rabble was darting about here, there and everywhere. They'd tried to use Damsk's medical readings for the man, but they'd found all the records deliberately sabotaged, presumably by Damsk. So the trooper was reverting to more old-fashioned scanning techniques, looking painstakingly for patterns of movement that might indicate the pursued rather than the pursuers. It was not going to be easy, but Jorgan felt it was still probably more effective than his men.

'There!' the trooper said suddenly. 'We got one body not moving. He's resting. Ground level. He's found himself a hidey-hole. Looks like he's planning to lie low.'

The trooper marched forward, keeping an eye on the readings, raising her rifle with her spare hand in readiness.

'Twenty metres. . . Eighteen. . . Fifteen. . . Viczinski, can you read me? Close in on my position. . . Viczinski?'

Jorgan was gazing, into the forest of girders and huge thick beams, watching the light from the trooper's torch zooming in on their prey.

'Ten metres. . . Viczinski? Where the h.e.l.l are you?'

There was a central strut-array up front, cross-linked with braces that created a cagelike effect with a hollow core. There was just enough room for a man to squeeze inside, and when the trooper's light got close enough to pick out the detail they could see that the middle of the struts was piled high with packaging. They could also see a boot protruding from underneath.

The trooper stopped dead only a metre away.

'All right. Come on. Let's have you out of there.'

No response.

She nudged the boot with the muzzle of her rifle.

' Move it! Move it! ' '

Again, nothing.

Keeping the gun up front, she reached in to tug at the cover, revealing the body beneath, and her voice was suddenly full of defeat and fury.

190.'Viczinski! You stupid '

A roar from behind them cut off her voice. Instantly they were running.

Galloping back towards the entrance. Jorgan was breathing hard and fast, not quite able to keep up with the trooper, who was lighter and more agile on the rubble-strewn surface.

Out in the open, with the winds ripping round them, they saw one of the giant machines crashing through the perimeter fence. It grumbled with a commotion of sound and a stench of exhaust gases out into the field, and was quickly consumed by the storm. Jorgan watched as the surrounding machines were started one by one, preparing for the chase. He was about to clamber up the ladders into the nearest one when the trooper grasped his elbow.