'It's time for bed,' he told her.

She rose automatically and he accompanied her to their room, leaving on the nursery lamp as they left.

In bed he wrapped his arms around her and felt the shape of her body against his. Nuzzling her soft warm hair, he breathed her scent. Since their baby had died, they had rarely spoken in bed, bar the routine queries 'Did Leanne come today?' he asked.

'She called on the comlink.'

'What did she say?'

'I don't know. I didn't want to talk to her.'

'She's here to help.'

'I don't want help.'

A long pause ensued, but she didn't relax in his embrace. Her body felt stiff and angular, refusing to yield. In the silence he could hear the steady grinding groan of the city-machine's progress. He felt the almost imperceptible jiggling motion that became such a part of your daily ambience that you mostly forgot it was there.

'What were you doing in the nursery?' he asked at last.

35.'Nothing.'

'If its something on the comp, I could help,' he offered.

'It's nothing.'

He let out a heavy sigh and felt his eyes begin to close. Over the last two months he'd felt increasingly that he was trying to impose on her emotions.

That he was as unwelcome an intrusion into her grief as Company Therapist Leanne was. A pattern of alienation had been set up between them shortly after the loss of their baby, and that pattern had become ever more convoluted and complex, as if they were performing a dance of avoidance. They were excluded from each other's world now. Strangers in close proximity.

These thoughts he took into his dreams, as he did every night. And there they were put to rest by the dragons and monsters of his psyche.

For'ard Obs was a tumultuous ma.s.s of activity, with people jostling for precious s.p.a.ce on the overcrowded tables. Bains had left his jacket over the seat next to him in order to stake a territorial claim, awarding himself a slice of view through the giant observation screen out into the dark storms of Ceres Alpha.

But it was getting busy now and people were beginning to muscle in on the reserved chair. He'd successfully resisted a number of hostile bids. A young woman with severe features cut across his line of vision as he gazed out into the swirling blackness that was night on an angry planet.

'I don't think she's coming,' the woman said. She had a low feminine voice, the kind of voice that might have been produced by inexpensive larynx work.

'I'm sorry?'

'I think you've been stood up,' she said. 'Can I buy you a drink?'

Bains grinned. It wasn't every day he got an offer like that. The woman must have been about forty, still with her clear girlish complexion and sharp bright eyes. Bains wasn't exactly decrepit, but at a hundred and forty-nine he was advancing now in his middle years and the only interest he usually earned was that of slightly more mature women. Since he had left his teaching post back on Earth his opportunities for immature conquests had all but vanished.

Obviously that worldly-wise casual charm of his had not deserted him while he'd been embroiled in his work for the last forty years.

'Any other time I'd jump at the chance,' Bains a.s.sured her, trying to sound earnest. 'But I'm waiting for a business colleague. Sorry.' A white lie, but Bains wasn't in the mood for talk, and he had his own good reasons for avoiding the company of women.

36.

'Don't apologise.' The woman laughed and the severity of her features softened momentarily. Bains almost regretted his rebuff. 'Maybe some other time, eh?'

'Maybe.'

He took a sip of his drink and when he looked up the woman was still there.

She scanned the room, then observed Bains coolly.

'Haven't seen you in here before,' she announced.

Ten out of ten for perseverance, thought Bains. 'Probably because this is the first time I've been here.'

'First time in For'ard Obs? What d'you do with yourself at nights?'

'I'm an off-city.'

'Really?' she moved in closer, depositing herself on the edge of his reserved seat. 'What d'you do?'

'I dig up dead things.' He was trying to be blunt. Trying to say 'p.i.s.s off'

without employing the actual phrase. But it wasn't going to work.

'Sounds absolutely fascinating.' There was irony in her voice.

'Well, I get a kick out of it.'

'Oo-ooh. Bit of a necro, eh?'

Bains found himself becoming distracted by the sparkle of her drink and the sparkle of her eyes. When she'd been in your face a few seconds, she wasn't as severe as you first thought. There was a kind of streamlined beauty about her that he suddenly found alluring. He smiled but left her question unanswered.

'I prefer to get my kicks with the living,' she told him, putting her drink on the table and leaning back, making herself at home in the seat.

As she moved, Bains couldn't fail to notice the exaggerated curve of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s straining against the thin material of her blouse. Everything about everybody seemed to be exaggerated these days. Too-dark eyes, too-large b.r.e.a.s.t.s, too-wide shoulders. Only a few generations ago you could tell those with the money. They looked different. They looked too good. Not just the clothes, but the physical features too. Now anybody with a handful of dollars could afford enhancements, and the whole universe seemed to be populated by beautiful people. The nice thing was, you could generally tell a lot about a working-cla.s.s person from the enhancements they chose to buy. A forty-year-old girl with enhanced b.r.e.a.s.t.s, for example, might indicate a certain shallowness.

'I still don't want you to buy me a drink,' Bains told her flatly.

She raised her eyebrows at him. 'I'm sorry if I'm intruding. But I noticed you from over there and I said to myself, Carly, there's a man without a great deal 37.to smile about. There's a man who looks like he could do with somebody to cheer him up.'

'I'm afraid I'm just not in the mood for being cheered up right now,' he told her. 'Like I said, maybe some other time, eh, Carly? Thanks for the offer, but no thanks.'

She sighed, took a sip of her drink, and finally came to a decision.

'OK, Mr Misery. I'll leave you to wallow. Maybe see you around, uh?'

He smiled but said nothing, and she left. At last the view became available again, and Bains settled to watch the swirling darkness outside. There was a slight movement, a kind of gentle oscillation as they moved over the surface of the planet, swallowing everything in their path. Huge sensonic dampers with living limbs cancelled most of the effect of the movement in the inhabited areas of the city-machine, but it was a motion that never stopped, was never neutralised completely. The city-machine worked night and day, claiming the planet in the name of the human race. Indigenous microbic life would be consumed to feed the humans' genetic microbes and the very chemical structure of the ground would be recombined to form the ideal soil for the growth of human genetically enhanced crops. Alien landscape in one end, improved earth out the other. The land was consumed to deep level. The original biosphere would be obliterated utterly. The wheels of industry Tyran had said, are an unstoppable force.

Within the next forty-eight hours that unstoppable force would demolish ir-retrievable evidence of the previous inhabitants of Ceres Alpha. The past had so much to say, and WorldCorp were going to silence it forever.

' It's moving! It's moving! ' '

Emerging out of a storm of colliding noises and notions, Anji tried to listen to what the Doctor was trying to tell her. There was shock in his 'voice', undisguised astonishment. She sensed herself being lowered and felt her first physical sensation for hours.

The ground was shaking.

The Doctor crouched at her side. She felt her head being turned but all she could see was storm. Black night and grey swirling sand. There was the sound of screaming winds, but it was soon lost again to the sound of screaming voices.

'What's wrong? What's happening?' She forced the questions into her mouth, but couldn't get them out through her lips.

'I thought it was a city.' The Doctor's voice filled her head. 'But it's a giant machine of some sort. It must be miles wide, a mile or more tall.'

38.

'I can't see,' she tried to tell him.

So the image appeared. She realised that she was seeing through the Doctor's eyes. He was putting his sight inside her head. She tried to focus through all the other noise and the image became clearer. A vast darkness, covered in tiny lights. It was dull grey and black, filthy as the night, stretching off as far as they could see in all directions. The great structure was covered in irregular lumps and blocks, as if it had been built and repaired piecemeal over an age.

Pipes and wiring conduits covered its surface, standing out like grey veins on a heap of dead grey bodies.

Then Anji heard the sound of the howling winds, and realised abruptly that there was also the sound of grinding machinery mixed in. All the songs of h.e.l.l screeching, bellowing, yowling. The vicious storm tore around the vast structure as it forced through the blizzard towards them.

At the base of the moving edifice the ground was being churned. They watched a rolling cloud of dust and debris being flung into the air. Anji knew suddenly that it was the biggest earth-cruncher in the history of the universe.

And it was trundling towards them at a terrifying pace. She remembered Fitz in his hollow, badly injured and unable to run. And it was too late now to go back. She sensed the Doctor making furious mental calculations, trying to work out how long they could outrun it, whether or not they could make it back to Fitz before the machine. The ground was rumbling ominously now, and she became aware that the Doctor was struggling to remain on his feet.

Then the clutter of stuff in her head cut abruptly. She sensed herself falling, flung out her arms, found empty s.p.a.ce, then a jolt. She hit with immense force and felt a great weight of rubble falling on top of her. The last thing she saw was an image of the moving mountain of metal rolling towards them out of the terrifying storm. Eating the planet.

Consuming everything in its path.

Gaskill Tyran gazed at the image of Danyal Bains suspended in the air above his desk. Tyran was lost in secret thought, eyes dark and fists clenched. Carly Dim-itri wondered what dark notions were tumbling through that depraved head of his, what he had in mind for this poor man who had somehow inadvertently, most probably quite innocently, crossed Tyran's path.

Danyal Bains had seemed a nice enough man. G.o.d knew, there weren't many men in Carly's broad experience who had the strength of character to resist what she'd offered. She scrutinised the image of his face. He had tiny lines around his eyes that could so easily be removed. There were touches of grey 39.appearing at his temples. He had a rugged, squarish face that Carly suspected she could find extremely seductive in the right time and place. Although he'd been quite blunt with her in For'ard Obs, she'd come away with the impression of a kindly man. A fatherly man. A man she could trust.

Unlike the man she sat opposite now.

'I can try again tomorrow,' she suggested, finding it almost impossible to keep the quivering out of her voice.

'You seem to be losing your touch,' Tyran said.

His words contained profound implications. And so did his eyes.

'I'm sorry,' she told him.

She wanted to say more, to fill the portentous silence with excuses and apologies, but she knew better by now. She'd let him down and that was a dangerous thing to do. In recent months, as operations on Ceres Alpha had proved progressively more difficult, as the city services had begun to crumble, Tyran had grown ever more unstable. She'd suffered his frustration, his escalating volatil-ity. She'd spent increasingly long hours. .h.i.tched to her personal accelerator, repairing the injuries he'd inflicted, soothing the bruises and healing the scars before she could show her face in public.

The suspended image of Bains flickered and crackled unexpectedly, twisting and coiling as the projectors dephased and struggled to correct themselves. The room lights dimmed and Tyran's eyes flashed about in the dark. Cancelling the image, he slammed his fist on the desk and pressed back in his seat in silence.

There were fires raging in him. They were going to tear through, and she knew she was going to get scorched.

As the lights flared back into life, Carly rose and made her way round to his side of the desk, taking her steps like a predatory cat, putting on an act of sensual self-a.s.surance in an attempt to cover her dread. As she stood at his shoulder and sent exploratory hands down over his chest to test his reaction, she was shivering. After a while he grabbed her hands. With his free hand he reached into his pocket and drew out the squat black shape of the mind probe. She flinched at the sight of it. She saw him send a signal to the desktop and the walls came alive with images. They were so close up that she could hardly make out the detail at first. Then she realised they were pictures of Tyran lashing out. He was using the desktop comp to channel her thoughts, to project them on to his walls. Fierce dark eyes in a mask of spite. The walls were red, and the room pulsed with hatred. Carly pulled back her hands and brought them up to her face, an instinctive reaction to his a.s.sault.

'Turn it off,' she snapped.

40.

He sprang from his seat to face her. She felt a fresh surge of fear, and found his sneering face close to hers.

'Don't ever tell me what to do.' he hissed.

'I don't want you inside my head,' she implored.

Flinging her aside, Tyran leaned over his desk to make adjustments and the walls continued to pulse with colour, spinning images flashing through a viscous red paint that looked like thickening blood. Memories of beatings. Memories of terror. The room was alive with her deepest fears, and they all contained this man.

' Stop it Stop it,' she screamed, clasping her hands over her ears in a desperate attempt to keep him out.

But the sound shrieked louder through her head, tearing at her mind. The intensity of pain rose to a swift crescendo until all she could hear was the screaming Surfacing from darkness and a kind of unfocused haze of sleep, Josef Manni found the bed empty at his side. Puzzled, he glanced at the bathroom to find it in darkness. He pushed himself up on to his arms and listened to the brittle silence of the apartment, disturbed only by the constant background rumble of motion.

There was a gleam of light in the corridor. The glow from the nursery lamp.

But no other light at all.

Checking the clock, Josef saw that it was a little after three in the morning.

Dragging himself out of bed, he plodded in his bare feet down the corridor to find Veta slumped in the nursery, cross-legged on the floor. She had her back to him, and this time she didn't sense his presence. She was oblivious to his watching her. Oblivious, it seemed, to all the world. She sat there apparently in a trance, completely still. Then he saw with a small shock that the crib had been moved from its usual place in the corner.

Nothing had been moved in the nursery for over two months. To touch anything at all in this room was sacrilege. It was a shrine to their lost child.

Nothing less.

Josef stepped silently over the threshold, and now Veta did sense him there.

She turned to face him, remaining slumped on the spot, and he saw her cheeks streaked with tears, her dark eyes haunted. And beyond her he saw what she was looking at.

A holographic picture of a baby, sealed inside a plastic incubator. There was no movement at all, just a long, sorry silence.

41.He recalled her furtive activities on the comp over recent weeks. Her refusal to accept his help or even tell him what she was up to. Abruptly, the anguish exploded inside his chest. A feeling of sickness spread through his soul. He watched her watching him with those big dark eyes, then glanced again over her shoulder at the holographic baby.

Veta was smiling at him. When she spoke, her words were a whisper.

'I got him out of the medicare computer,' she said softly. 'I just couldn't bear the thought of him left in there alone.'

Josef simply stared. It was an image of their dead baby, exactly as they'd seen it with Dr Pryce in the isolation room two months ago. He felt the tears trickling down his own face, and felt the familiar aching emptiness that threatened to swallow him up.

'Isn't he beautiful?'Veta said, her words as soft as the silence of the room.

She turned back to him and he saw the smile jerking, a crazy animation of her lips. Her eyes were full of shadows and joy.

'Isn't he beautiful?'

De-ann Foley was about to climb into the shower when the hail came, and she was annoyed as h.e.l.l because she was sweaty and smelly after a harsh workout in the gym. Although she knew it was just a comp call, she still grabbed a towel before she gave it permission to enter her bathroom.