Blood.

'Her suit integrity is breached, Ace. A slow leak, but the pressure, it drops. She could lose the rest of her arm.'

'I told her to check that seal.' Ace sounded furious.

'You also told her to help Yukio, if I recall.'

Ace nodded guiltily. 'Kosi, you're right. It's my fault. I should have checked her suit again. d.a.m.n!' She thought for a moment. 'See if you can patch it, Lars.' Ace turned to Jesus. 'Got anything for me yet?'

'I've got one idea, but you're not going to like it.'

Inside her helmet, Ace's head tilted curiously.

'We go down the inside of the Bridge,' he continued.

'You're right, I don't like it. How do we get in?'

'The Bridge is woven from a monofilament thread. All we have to do is force the weave apart.'

'And how do we get out when we reach Moloch?'

Jesus shrugged. 'I've no idea.'

Ace considered. 'It's got to be better than trying to abseil down the outside. Okay. We'll go for it. Let's see if we can widen the hole enough to get Christine through.'

It took thirty minutes for them to locate a frayed section of the Bridge; force its weave apart with clamps and keep the gap open with plastic crates. The Lift continued to oscillate as it rotated, swaying with the movement of the Bridge. Jesus stared around the chamber. Building up to the big one, he thought. He was developing a peculiar feeling in the pit of his stomach; a feeling beyond sickness, beyond shock. Ace would have known the feeling. It was called determination.

When the hole was big enough, Jesus stepped through and switched on his s.p.a.cesuit lights. The interior s.p.a.ce was about three metres across, a pastel yellow in colour, tubular and bulked out with strange*looking machinery which was attached to the crosshatched 'walls'. Jesus shone his light 'down' the shaft, thankful, for once, for the lack of gravity.

His light glinted on a surface that swayed and twisted sickeningly into the distance. It was like looking down the eye of a hurricane.

'How's it look?'

'Like something out of The Wizard of Oz The Wizard of Oz.'

'What?'

'I said '

There was a particularly violent jolt. More pieces of the machinery began to break away to join the expanding cloud of trash already in evidence inside the Bridge. A chunk of blood drifted in front of his visor. He batted it away impatiently, not even pausing to consider how quickly he'd adjusted to Yukio's death.

'I said it's looking better every minute.'

'I hope you're right.'

Lars and Kosi carefully manoeuvred Christine through the gap.

Ace followed them in. 'Don't suppose you ever heard a story called Jack and the Beanstalk Jack and the Beanstalk?'

'This would be soyabeans, yes?'

Ace sighed. 'Forget it.'

In complete silence, the interior of the Bridge began to rock again. He gripped the side of a curved triangular plate which was fitted to the wall, and began to manoeuvre himself further into the shaft. One corner came loose in his hands.

'Don't rush me. I think I can see electrical equipment in here, bigger than anything I've ever seen before. We're going to have to be careful.'

'We haven't got time to be careful.' Ace squeezed past Kosi and Lars. 'Give Christine to me and follow me down.' Ace took the psychologist from her two bearers and clamped her suit arms to the unconscious woman's shoulders. Then she took a quick sighting down the shaft and launched herself into s.p.a.ce. Her lights dwindled rapidly in the distance.

'Ace, be careful!' he said.

Was there a measure of excitement in her reply? 'Careful or dead, at least it's my choice!'

Kosi and Lars exchanged brief looks and then launched themselves after the girl.

Jesus shrugged. It was one way of getting down, he supposed. He was about to push off when the Bridge rocked again; a much stronger oscillation this time. He thrust his helmet back through the gap one last time. The Lift was finally coming apart in curlicues of alien material and clouds of human*made debris. There would be a brief but spectacular meteor shower in Lucifer's upper atmosphere tonight, he thought, wondering if those on Belial would watch and think of them, as he had thought of Paula Engado when she'd become a shooting star.

As the walls of the Bridge rippled, he pulled himself back inside. 'Instruction,' he said to the suitbrain, 'forward thrust full.'

The head*up display died.

'Instruction ' he said again, but it was too late.

The walls closed on him like a vice.

Jesus screamed with pain and surprise. His limbs bent and snapped, his helmet cracked open and there was a stinging pain in his eyes. He tried to close them but the eyelids were frozen in place, unable to move.

They were still open when he died.

Chapter Eight.

Alex Bannen was crying.

Piper had never seen him look so vulnerable. His cheeks glistened with tears and his hand hovered over the head of the thing he had called his son.

Behind him the Mushroom Farm was ablaze. Great arcs of energy flashed from cap to cap whilst thunderclaps pumped air through the forest of glittering stems. A haze of water vapour hung overhead and dripped from the underside of the mushrooms, making the ground slippery and treacherous to walk on. Piper had to fight to maintain her balance as the chamber shook.

The Doctor and Bernice were stumbling between the mushrooms of twisted metal, with the Doctor talking nineteen to the dozen and gesturing wildly with his still furled umbrella. Piper managed to catch Bernice's eye, but the archaeologist only shrugged helplessly. Piper turned to where Bannen was clutching the slender trunk of a tall mushroom to keep his balance. The wind whipped droplets of condensation into his face, where they mingled with his tears.

b.l.o.o.d.y idiot, she thought savagely. What the h.e.l.l did he think he was doing?

'Come on, Alex. Stop messing with things you don't understand. Leave that to the Doctor before you screw things up even...' Her voice trailed off as she noticed the boy watching her with grey, expressionless eyes. Bannen's son? Perhaps, but it hadn't taken her long to work out what the boy really was.

'It wasn't meant to be like this.' Bannen's face was slack.

'Yeah, well, that's as may be,' she said, unsure how to treat this new, defenceless Bannen. 'Come on, let's go.'

There was a slight cough beside them. Piper turned, and found the Doctor standing at her shoulder. She hadn't heard him approach. From the expression on Bannen's face, neither had he.

The Doctor began to speak, in a voice so quiet Piper wondered how she could hear his words above the storm. 'A great many years from now, in another universe, a man in a mirror told me to do nothing. "It is done," he said.'

Piper suddenly had the crazy idea that all the Doctor's masks had been stripped away, leaving him with no more armour than the truth. She shivered.

'It's very hard for me to do nothing,' he added softly. 'I rebel against it. But there are times when nothing is simply the best thing to do.'

'What does he mean, Dad?'

Bannen didn't seem to hear the voice of his 'son'.

The Doctor glanced at the simularity. He crouched down so that his head was level with the boy's face, and smiled rea.s.suringly. He seemed to have no trouble in accepting the presence of the child.

'My friend Bernice and I have been trying to work out how to stabilize the moons,' he said. 'This room is obviously the key element in an important system of controls. The controls were disturbed, and now we have to put them right.'

'Or your other friends will die.'

The Doctor nodded solemnly.

The boy turned to his 'father'. 'Dad. Dad!'

Bannen did not respond.

Piper scowled. 'It's useless. If Christine had used her eyes and spotted Bannen's instability she could've prevented all this. He's good for nothing but trouble now.' She looked at the Doctor, but he appeared not to be listening.

'Perhaps nothing is all we need from him, or from anyone,' he said at last, and smiled triumphantly.

'Do what?' Piper said.

'Feedback! The ability of a system to monitor its output and correct for mistakes. That's what I'm waiting for.'

'You think,' said a hesitant voice, 'that everything might be all right?'

The Doctor turned to where Alex Bannen was crouching and looking over at them.

'No,' he said sternly. 'Entropy demands that everything will not not be all right, but sometimes we can rage against the dying of the light.' be all right, but sometimes we can rage against the dying of the light.'

A sudden, eerie flash illuminated the cavern. The pillar that marked where the Pit pa.s.sed through the Farm had begun to glow. Bands of yellow light rose and fell across its surface; diaphanous spokes rotating about rose*hued hubs intermeshed with each other, beautiful reflections of a deeper order within.

A deep chime filled the chamber with rolling echoes.

'"It is done,"' the Doctor whispered.

Piper drew in a relieved breath as the wind fell.

The deep rumbling beneath their feet abruptly stopped, and the electrical discharges faded away. The blanket of fog above their heads began to disperse, sparkling the mushroom*shaped domes with soft diamonds of moisture.

In the upper part of the chamber, a rainbow glimmered.

From Bishop's ship, moored close to the Bridge, the scale of the disaster was apparent.

The Adjudicator had discarded his heavy black robes and ridiculous collar, and was slumped in his padded control seat wearing just boxer shorts, socks and electrostatic sock*suspenders. His feet were resting comfortably on the ship's control panel. As he watched the events occurring between the two moons, he blew on a plastic beaker of fragrant Arcturan tea.

Ripples were travelling up and down the Bridge, but the anchors remained firm. The amplitude of the vibration even seemed to be reducing slightly, although the movement was still sickeningly ma.s.sive. Staring for too long at the simularity made him feel dizzy.

He tried a sip of tea and winced as the hot liquid scalded his tongue.

Somewhere up there the Lift was disintegrating. Bishop was glad it was too small to see: it made suppressing the imagined screams of the people inside that much easier.

The ship's neural net interrupted his second sip of tea.

'You have a call, Trau Bishop.'

Muttering darkly beneath his breath, Bishop set down the beaker and dived for his robes. He wondered who was calling Miles, perhaps, or that little clown the Doctor. They had already tried to get him to mount a rescue mission using his ship. He had explained that the amount of paperwork involved made it impracticable, but he was sure they hadn't believed him.

When the picture of the Bridge disintegrated to reveal the stern visage of Bronwen ap Bryn, Adjudicator in Extremis, he was shocked. The last he had heard she had returned to Ponten VI the planet which had been ceded to the Guild of Adjudicators in perpetuity by a wary but appreciative Earth Central but that was too far away for anything but the so*called pigeon post; recorded messages dumped into a hyperdrone and aimed at the recipient's projected location. If Bryn was calling live, she had to be nearby. Even so, the tachyon signal was so faint that the neural net was having problems extrapolating a recognizable picture. The face of the Adjudicator in Extremis seemed to be composed of flat green slabs. Fuzzy highlights delineated her features and her mouth lagged behind her words. Superimposed upon her face, flickering digits recorded the cost of the call. Typically, that part of the transmission seemed unaffected by the disruption.

Bryn's mouth worked silently. More than a second out of synch, a blast of static shot through the protesting audio system. Bishop winced.

'Your pardon, Extremis. I was not expecting a personal visit.'

'I'll not... sagree w... at. I was in... vicinity on... cial business and... Your repor... o far is... nconclusive.'

'There have been some some additional problems.'

A flexing of the green planes making up Bryn's face could have been interpreted as a smile. Or a frown. With her, the two were practically interchangeable.

'Problems are your job, Adjudicator.'

Funny how the software let that one through unaffected.

'Flattered as I am by your confidence, Extremis, I'm afraid the situation is getting complicated.'

The green slab representing Bryn's left eyebrow slipped upwards questioningly. Or perhaps it was a system glitch. Bishop hesitated before going on. 'There has been another death an apparent suicide and indications of sabotage on a grand scale. Additionally, there are discrepancies in the Base personnel records, involving three extra people.'

'...tra peop peop...'

Bishop took a deep breath. 'I feel that the proceedings here may escalate seriously if a careful check is not kept on the situation. For this reason, I would like to request the presence of another Adjudicator.'

Bryn's mouth worked silently for a few seconds.

'...te out of... e questio... m afraid.'