Finally the glow died.

Silence apart from the distant gunfire.

Signalling Kate to stay still, Sarah rose slowly to peer over the top of the desk.

The Yeti had not moved a s.h.a.ggy muscle. It still faced away from them towards the door.

Sarah waited an age. She wondered if Yeti slept standing up. Any minute the gunfire, which was getting nearer, would wake it. Finally she signalled to Kate to crawl out through the back way as slowly and silently as she could.

Kate did as she was told, inching her way out, a look of forced concentration almost certainly stifling a yell of terror.

Sarah, unable to take her eyes from the statuesque monster, willing the brute not to wake up, began to follow. She collided with the chair and lost concentration for one moment.

The bleeping signal started up.

The Yeti's head suddenly swivelled, owl-like through a half-circle, facing to its back. Two burning eyes like red torches caught Sarah in their glare.

It roared and started to turn fully for an attack.

Sarah looked for a weapon. She grabbed up the phone base-tablet.

The Yeti lashed a set of claws across the desk at her. She hit at it with the phone. It lunged again. She threw the phone at its head. She grabbed up some files and threw them as well.

The Yeti raised an arm and brought it down hard, smashing the end of the fitted desk away. The counter splintered sideways, blocking Sarah's escape. The monster started to crunch across the broken plywood.

With a yell, Kate barrelled in behind the monster, hammering at it with a metal vase. The Yeti gave one backward punch with its arm and sent Kate tumbling backwards clutching her ribs.

Sarah, trapped in the corner of the desk, laid hold of the only thing left to throw. She struggled to heave the computer monitor off its station. The Yeti loomed. She saw its fangs as it bellowed. She hefted the monitor up to throw. She thought her arms would break. The screen activated. Its piercing glare blazed directly into her face. Her eyes burning, she reeled backwards under its weight and hit the desk.

Half the windows in the foyer blew in with a tremendous boom. The battle had arrived right outside. The Yeti stumbled back under the blast. The monitor flickered out.

Sarah felt Kate's arms pulling her up over the desk. They scrambled through into the back of the building and up the stairs.

On the second landing, they stopped. Sarah was still holding her throbbing ears, afraid of losing them if she let go.

From a broken window on the stairs, they saw the Yeti lumber out of the foyer below, not using the door. Apparently the battle outside was more important than they were.

They could see that the other Yeti were engaged in hand-to-hand combat with the UNIT troops.

Kate mouthed something at Sarah and pointed into the distance.

'I can't hear you,' shouted Sarah. She could hardly even hear herself.

Kate banged her own ears with her fingers. She mouthed, 'Can't hear you. I've gone deaf!' and shrugged. She pointed at the sky again.

Through the trees, under the web canopy, there was a bulky old-fashioned helicopter coming in to land.

30.

Under Siege NIT's grenades had reduced the lawn to a churned Ubattlefield. Crichton was losing too many men already.

The Yeti were reputed to be robots, but these were sustaining flesh wounds. Surely nothing alive could take that many hits and still keep moving.

In answer to the sweeping onslaught of bullets, the Yeti simply stretched out an arm and shot streamers of smoking plasma over their opponents. The stuff hit the targets and fanned out over them as web. Crichton had seen his men writhing and choking under the mesh. They collapsed and suffocated almost immediately.

He saw Private Rooks, who was a.s.signed to record the raid on video for future reference, stepping out of cover to get a better shot of the battle.

Crichton shouted a warning as a Yeti burst out of the undergrowth behind the soldier. Rooks turned and swung at the monster with the camera. The Brigadier ran at the hostile, unleashing a salvo from his pistol.

The Yeti, determined to deal with one task at a time, floored Rooks and stamped on his chest. It turned towards Crichton and shot a flood of plasma from its claw.

Crichton dodged away between the trees, but the blast caught his shoulder leaving flecks of the web clinging to his battle gear.

In the frenzied moment, Crichton saw Sergeant Beagles run past him yelling, like a fast bowler with a grenade. Beagles launched it at the Yeti. The explosion blew the creature off its hind legs, but as the smoke cleared, the bulky ma.s.s of fur and sinew twitched, rolled over and scrambled to its feet. Enraged, it seemed to have twice the strength.

'Regroup at the road!' shouted Crichton, pulling Beagles away with him.

As he had hoped, the Yeti stood their ground, forming into a line of strategic sentries along the perimeter. As far as he could ascertain, none of them had been destroyed or even disabled.

Only seven UNIT soldiers straggled back to the jeeps.

Crichton, determined not to lose momentum, barked, 'Sergeant, break out the Bonze ATR. Yes, I know it's got a smart-map homer, but I'm not risking any more men.'

He waited for a second, but Sergeant Beagles was staring at him.

'Sergeant. The ATR launcher!'

'Sir, your shoulder,' exclaimed Beagles.

Crichton angled his head. The web caught on his jacket was moving. Its mycelium was throwing tiny filaments out over the camouflage material.

The Brigadier slid out of the jacket and threw it into the gutter. Shreds of sky web were still drifting around them. He surveyed the enemy line. He knew it had been too quiet lately.

His battles had been with the lobby to cut back the British Forces contribution to UNIT to make the organization less militaristic, more civil-service-based. The government, of all people, complained about too much secrecy. Crichton's promotion was at risk. His wife kept mentioning separation.

The sound of an incoming helicopter turned their heads.

There was no immediate reaction from the Yeti. The helicopter was a Hind 63 troop-carrier, rescued from a museum from the look of her. She settled in the field across the road swirling up clouds of dead web.

Captain Bambera jumped down and ran towards Crichton.

Behind her, a line of troops began to disembark and fall into line. Bambera saluted. 'Zen Platoon Three reporting, sir.

Where do we start?'

Viewed through the observation window, Modem Nucleus Room One was empty.

Travers shambled through the door, slicing at the web with his stick. He stopped at the first modem terminal and began to run his trembling fingers over the keyboard.

He faltered, trying to recall the log-in codes.

All the monitors in the room turned towards him. Their screens began to glow.

A voice in the audio system hissed out at him. 'Travers?

What happened to your faith, old man?'

The Professor guffawed. 'Huh. Saw your Light of Truth, that's what. Brought it back here from Tibet. But I'll put a stop to it.' He started trying to force open the maintenance panel on the terminal.

There was a burst of laughter from the loudspeaker system.

Travers turned and saw a group of Chillys staring coldly in through the observation window.

A distant claxon was sounding.

'More intruders as antic.i.p.ated,' announced the Intelligence.

Travers watched the Chillys file into the room. They approached a web-covered metal coffer. Its lid slid open for them. In turn they each extracted a silver sphere.

The Chillys stood in a circle. The spheres bleeped and leapt, vanishing, absorbed into the human bodies.

As the shapes burst into their new monstrous imagos, Travers gave a wail of anger and started to strike at the nest of computers he had designed and created.

The voice mocked his rage. 'Travers, Travers! You are still my closest instrument of all!'

The screens flared.

Travers was caught in a globe of light. The radiant envelope slowly faded, leaving only a cold gleam that froze over the old man's watery eyes. He stumbled and reached helplessly for the desk. His trembling fingers suddenly gripped it hard, feeling the shape and contours. A power indivisible from hatred and need gripped the shape and contours of his thoughts again.

The new Yeti ignored him, striding off to reinforce the university's defences.

The Brigadier reckoned he'd had some close calls in his time, but this call came closer than anything he could remember.

Obviously his arrival was not a moment too late.

So they called his days Blood and Thunder, did they? Well, he didn't feel like Attila the Hun. As much as the battles, he remembered the men who died. He had always undertaken to break the news of a death in action to a soldier's family himself. He had done it many times. And every time it was painful.

That made his own family, for what it was, so much more precious. Now Kate was threatened, he saw it all from the other side. He wanted there still to be a world for his grandson to inherit. People had died today who were not even under his command, yet their deaths felt like sacrifices enabling him to go on. He was supported by people that society had rejected.

He coped with that burden the only way he knew how: the fight he undertook was for them.

Hinton et Harrods requiescat in pace.

Their loss must not be in vain.

As he was marched along the endless corridors, a monster's claw on his throat like a vice, his thoughts turned inevitably to the Doctor. Facing the Great Intelligence was, after all, where it had all started.

What would the Doctor do?

Why wasn't the Doctor here?

Inevitably, the Doctor would do the one thing that was least expected. Frequently aggravating, but generally splendid stuff The Brigadier had infinite respect and admiration for the Doctor, but the man could be impossible. The Brigadier always had to fight not to play second fiddle to the Doctor's whims and Machiavellian leaps of imagination. He was rarely even granted the status of magician's a.s.sistant a position usually already taken. He generally felt more like the unsuspecting volunteer from the audience. It could have been worse he could have been the rabbit.

But when he got something right, why did the Doctor always look surprised?

Well, this old buffer wasn't going to be outdone by an alien who changed his face as often as normal people changed their socks.

'My dear Brigadier, there are no normal people here.' He heard the Doctor's irritated response.

Faced with his imminent retirement, the second time he had retired, he decided that if necessary, he would go out in a blaze of heroic glory. Anything rather than dwindle away organizing fetes and flower shows.

He watched the woman who was being escorted by Chillys in front of him. There was something vaguely familiar about her, but he was d.a.m.ned if he could think what. Perhaps he had seen her at one of those interminable parents' evenings, where he repeated the same deadly joke to every mother and father about leading a platoon being no different from getting his maths cla.s.s through their GCSEs.

As the party emerged into the open air, they heard a not-so-distant explosion and the clatter of gunfire. The Brigadier guessed that it should be dark by now, but the web canopy in the sky was casting a sickly phosph.o.r.escent glow over the buildings. The web crackled overhead. The beams directed up from the roof pyramid played over its surface like spotlights.

They were on a square bordered by steps on three sides like an amphitheatre. Row upon row of Chillys sat transfixed there, awaiting the start of some unspecified spectacle in the arena.

The Brigadier expected gladiators or lions to arrive at any moment. Only recently Celia had related some firstformer's joke to him.

Monsieur, Monsieur. I want to see Madame Guillotine.

You can't. She's out chopping!

At the centre of the square stood a plinth on which was set a pyramid of silver globes. Two figures waited there. A heavily built man in a frantic pullover and a Captain in full uniform. The Brigadier recognized Cavendish immediately and despised him.

With another boom, a fresh bolt of gold light shot up from the roof pyramid and punched through the canopy.

The party stopped abruptly as they all stared upwards.