'Ard' old buddy, where's the... s.h.i.t!'

Dommer had come flailing into the shaft below Ardamal. He caught sight of the woman at the same time she heard him. Her eyes widened. Dommer swung his flamer up to cover her as she twisted her handgun around. She hadn't trained in null*gray, that much was obvious. Her body spun in the opposite direction to her gun as she fired, conserving angular momentum and throwing her aim completely off. Energy flashed past Ardamal in a long arc of fire, blistering the side of the shaft, missing his face by less than half a metre.

Dommer, chanting some kind of battle hymn, fired.

His incompletely a.s.sembled weapon exploded, smothering his head, arms and shoulders in a ma.s.s of flames. Screaming, he cartwheeled into the side of the shaft and rebounded, leaving a smear of grease and soot. The smell of roasting flesh drifted up the shaft.

Ardamal ignored the distraction and took careful aim again.

The prisoner was trying to stabilize her spin, and failing. There was no fear in her eyes: only hatred, and the knowledge that she could never, ever die.

He pulled the trigger.

The s.p.a.ce where she had been was obliterated in a flash of hard radiation. When the blaze cleared, there was nothing.

For hours the planet had grown no larger in Miles Engado's faceplate; seeming instead to retreat as he fell towards it. Lucifer was indifferent to him. It tolerated his advance, but would make no concessions. He berated it, screaming out his rage and his fear until his voice was a croak, and small droplets of sweat and spittle hung about his face. It made no difference. Lucifer did not hear him. Or, if it did, it paid him no heed.

Drained by his ranting and lulled by the way he could float in the starsuit, just touching the padded interior, he drifted into and out of sleep like a man wandering through the rooms of an empty house. His dreams were short and violent, punctuated by images of a vast, barnacle*encrusted shape which drifted disdainfully away as he swam towards it.

When he finally surfaced, his mouth stale and his eyes hot and gritty, Lucifer's atmosphere had already enfolded him like a shroud. He twisted his head to look upwards, but Moloch was just a faint disc half hidden by the clouds: a burnished coin beneath polluted water.

He floundered in panic as, for a brief moment, he could not remember why he was there. He knew that he had written a note explaining everything, but the note was back on Belial and he had forgotten its contents. Had he said that he was going to his death in Lucifer's inferno? Had he written about the great hunt, the rites of the warriors? It was all so far away now. There was only him, and the clouds, and the hidden face of Lucifer.

He was not falling. Rather: thin muslin sheets of brown and red were being pulled past his eyes, patterned like the blankets woven by the women, patterned like the rug that hung on the wall in his daughter's room. Shadows drifted past him like fronds, dappled with refracted sunlight, tied with thin streams of bubbles as he sank slowly into the welcoming depths of the ocean, under the incurious eye of the great Whale...

When he awoke again, it was with a pounding headache. The starsuit was hotter now; the heat of re*entry and the energy of Lucifer's interior triumphing over the best human life support technology. His sweat had floated from him whilst he slept, and whilst he fell, overwhelming the humidity regulators, pooling in the extremities of the starsuit and soaking into the padding. The atmosphere had closed in: now it was as if a clumsy child had finger*painted amorphous swirls and blobs in dull colours over his faceplate.

His thoughts were clearer now. Perhaps the heat had given his mind the boost it needed to throw off the dream world that had gradually surrounded him since Paula's fall into the maw of the Beast. He remembered the note. He remembered writing of Paula's death, of how he could not live without knowing the truth, and how, if he gave himself into the hands of the great Whale, he knew that he would be reunited with her in death.

He remembered wanting to write a farewell to Piper. He wondered if he had.

Miles shook his head wearily. Project Eden had eaten five years of his life, and spat them back at him, empty of meaning. There had been no contact with the Angels; there would be no power source for Earth. He had failed his race as he had failed his family.

The indicators were beginning to flicker hesitantly, reminding him of his foolishness. He was a stupid old man who deserved to die. Like his wife. Like his daughter.

He prepared to give himself over to whatever fate Lucifer had in store for him.

And that was why, when Paula's face swam out of the murky clouds and peered incuriously at him, Miles Engado screamed.

The room was warm and inviting, like a gentleman's club, or the lounge bar in her local back in Perivale. It engendered immediate feelings of friendship, of belonging. For the first time since Heaven, Ace thought of Julian, and of the times they had sat in worn green leather armchairs, the hum of traffic from the A40 outside making waves in their gla.s.ses, knowing that the barman thought they were underage but also knowing that Ace intimidated him so much that he wouldn't say anything. This room was like that: oak panelled, plushly carpeted, lined with portraits, slightly musty. The chandeliers floating near the ceiling were a touch ornate for her taste, but she liked the huge wooden table stacked up with what looked like real fruit. After so long eating recycled meals on Belial, her salivary glands sprang into life with sharp little pangs of antic.i.p.ation.

It was entirely inappropriate, but she couldn't help herself. Moloch seemed so long ago.

And there was something else in the room with her.

She turned slowly, ready for action.

Whatever it was, it vanished as she turned.

She caught sight of a movement out of the corner of her eye, whirled, but was too late to see anything. She was alone.

b.u.g.g.e.r this for a game of soldiers, she thought, and opened her mouth to speak.

'I must apologize for my staff. Their actions can be precipitate.'

The voice surprised her. Or was it voices? Ba.s.s, tenor, alto and soprano; the words seemed to glide up and down the scale from moment to moment with no consistency. Their direction seemed to change as well. It was almost as if she was surrounded by a choir, with each person allocated one word, but so well rehea.r.s.ed that the sentences flowed seamlessly along.

'Precipitate!' Ace snarled. 'Your "staff" killed my friends. I don't care what fancy words you use, I call it murder!' She waved her weapon menacingly. Whatever vanishing act had saved her from the goon with the gun, it had left her armed. Foolish, very foolish.

There was a laugh from behind her. Ace snapped around, priming the weapon as she moved. The laugh curled around her, beginning as a soft chuckle, evolving through a deep guffaw, and ending as a childlike giggle, once more behind her. Her lips thinned. Her finger slipped inside the weapon's trigger guard. 'I'm warning you. Stop taking the p.i.s.s.'

'The Terrestrial sense of humour,' said the voice. 'There's nothing quite like it anywhere else in the cosmos.'

Ace frowned. She'd intended to appear threatening, not amusing.

'Yes, I'm afraid they're ruined,' the voice continued, as if engaged in a different conversation. 'Perhaps you would like to slip into something more comfortable.'

Ace frowned. What was going on here? The conversation was hopping all over the place like a dakkabug on a griddle.

'Albert, the master of witty repartee, says "p.i.s.s off",' she retorted, finally finding a use for the punchline of the worst joke she'd ever been told.

A whiff of burned material caught her attention. She glanced down, trying to trace the source of the smell, and suddenly noticed that her leggings were scorched and her polycarbide armour was blistered and smoking, its structural integrity ruined.

'Oh sod,' she said. 'I'd just worn them in, as well.'

'Ah, no, your friends are not dead,' the voice said. For a moment, it was a child's voice, just behind her shoulder, but then it was old, and quavery, and a million miles away. 'No, merely anaesthetized. I have them under medical supervision.'

Ace frowned. She remembered...

...A spray of warmth across her face... A flash of light... Shadowy figures emerging from a doorway with weapons raised... Hands grabbing her and pulling her down... Rachel and Chas sprawled in undignified positions on the floor... Lars screaming and falling... A hypogun... A coldness spreading across her shoulders and racing through her limbs... The long fall into darkness...

She supposed it was possible that they weren't all dead. She suddenly found it much easier to breathe. There had been too much death already in her life. She wanted to believe that her friends were still alive.

But it didn't quite make sense. The weight hovered over her shoulders, ready to settle. Her finger tightened on the trigger. 'Why am I I awake and p.i.s.sed off, then?' she started to ask, but the voice interrupted her before the 'awake' was complete. awake and p.i.s.sed off, then?' she started to ask, but the voice interrupted her before the 'awake' was complete.

'Your const.i.tution is strong, for a human,' it said. You fought off the effects of the anaesthetic faster than my medical orderly thought possible.'

It made a strange sort of sense. She remembered waking up in a long room filled with covered beds; knocking a uniformed man to the ground; taking his gun and running.

She felt disoriented: like Alice in Wonderland, everything seemed to be a.r.s.e*about*face.

'All around you,' said the voice suddenly.

'Where are you?' Ace snapped, and stopped, taken aback.

'No, I can't,' the voice continued.

'Can you read my...?' She bit off the sentence, waiting for the voice to continue.

Not a sound.

She opened her mouth experimentally.

Nothing.

'If you can't ' she said quickly, and stopped.

Nothing.

' read my mind, then how could you answer my questions before I had a chance to ask them?' she gabbled, and took a deep breath.

'How embarra.s.sing,' the voice said. 'I appear to be slightly out of synchronization. My apologies.'

A fleshy black shape swelled up from nothing in front of her. Thin tendrils spilled from it and trailed to the floor. Beside her another, squatter, shape appeared, its tendrils quivering restlessly. Above her head, a pancake*shaped ma.s.s of blue flesh slowly spun. Something moved down by her feet. She took a quick step backwards. The thing stayed where it was: a small, grey, pear shape made of some doughy material.

Ace raised her stolen gun, unsure which of the things to aim at. Her fingers gripped thin air.

The gun had vanished from her hand.

'Allow me to introduce myself,' the voice said. The grey ovoid pulsed in time with the words. 'My name is Legion, and I am acting captain of the Interstellar Mining Corporation vessel Insider Trading Insider Trading.'

Tendrils from the two black shapes reached out to entwine with each other, pulling their cores closer together until, as Ace watched in amazement, they melded together into a single muscular column of flesh crowned with thorns.

'b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l,' she said. 'Why didn't you say so earlier? I've been trying to find you for ages.'

They fell together, father and daughter, through the poisonous atmosphere of Lucifer. Father and daughter and something else.

'You're alive.' Miles whispered. He felt sick with joy. His tears floated from his eyes and star*splashed perfectly against his faceplate, one by one. 'You're alive!'

Paula was not the daughter he remembered. She had undergone a sea*change into something rich and strange down in the depths of Lucifer. The great Whale had turned its terrible gaze upon her, transfiguring her once*smooth skin into sheets of light which hid deeper firefly gleams, like the Northern Lights back on Earth.

And yet he recognized her.

'Dad?' He heard her voice in his head. 'Dad, you shouldn't have come '

'I had to. The Angels saved you. They care care. They want to help us.'

'They didn't save me.' The pain in her voice cut him deeply. 'I was dying, and so was one of them... There was a connection... Somehow, we drew strength from each other, enough to stave off death for a little while longer. We joined, but the joining can't last. Our time has come. We've been waiting for you. We had to tell you...'

His throat was tight, and his mouth was twisted out of shape by grief. 'Tell me what?'

'To leave. Get everybody out of Belial and Moloch now, before it's too late.'

'And walk away from the best chance we've had in years to complete the mission?' He felt a wave of exasperation rise within him. 'Don't you understand? The Project will finally be able to work! You can translate for us, human to Angel, Angel to human. You'll be the saviour of the Earth.'

'You haven't been listening to us. We can't save anyone. We're dying. We can feel the pull of the core, dragging us down, forcing the last change upon us '

'There must be a way you can help us communicate with them. If there's just one thing you can tell me, one clue to how they think '

'You were the same when Mum died,' she wailed. 'She wanted to tell you so many things, but you were too busy talking to listen. She needed to know that you loved her; so you told her all about the new drugs she could get from the Arcturans, or the huge advances in radiation treatment since rho mesons had been discovered. She didn't want want any more pain, she wanted to be held. any more pain, she wanted to be held. You never told her that you loved her. You never told her that you loved her.'

'Do you blame me? After what she did?' His voice was quiet and bitter. Her silence was answer enough. He closed his eyes for a minute. When he opened them, he had an audience.

Paula was floating in the centre of a circle of Angels.

They hung before him; swirling, shifting, changing, somehow moving whilst staying perfectly still; their bodies evolving like glowing patterns in a three*dimensional kaleidoscope.

'They want you to go,' Paula said without words. Her voice bubbled and changed like her body. 'We want you to go.'

'You don't understand,' he cried. 'My whole life has led me to this point. To here. You can't tell me it's for nothing. n.o.body can. I won't hear that! Paula. I love you. I want need answers!'

'I don't have any for you, Dad. I'm sorry.'

The uniform fitted Ace perfectly. It wasn't as sophisticated as the one she had worn whilst attached to IMC during the Dalek Wars, three hundred years in the future, but it brought back memories of belonging, of finally being accepted on her own terms by a group of her peers.

She looked over at the pile of burned clothing she had shed like a snake's skin, and shuddered.

It was a mistake to go back, she thought. I've outgrown the Doctor now. He needs me more than I need him. My future lies elsewhere.

Legion was seated at the head of the table, and to either side of her, and floated up near the ceiling. One of the black, tendrilled parts of its body was picking apart an orange and ingesting it, segment by segment. The grey ovoid, some distance away, expanded and contracted in a movement which reminded Ace of nothing so much as chewing, although there was no way that she could see whereby the fruit could have been transmitted from one part of Legion to another.

'This is probably a stupid question,' Ace said from her position at the foot of the table, reaching out for another piece of fruit, 'but are all these bits you, or what?'

'I see you have noticed a certain peculiarity about my appearance.'

'No s.h.i.t?' she said, straightfaced.

Ace could sense a sudden chilliness in Legion's manner. The various parts of its body strained towards each other and collected into a hairy spherical fragment balanced on three pipe*cleaner legs at the head of the table.

'I will not tolerate disrespect!'

'Sorry, Captain,' she snapped automatically. She sat up a little straighter and resolved to regard her host with more of an open mind. Legion was obviously intelligent, and deserved to be treated as such.

'Very well,' Legion continued. 'I am not human, as you are.' It paused, obviously expecting some kind of shocked reaction.

Ace nodded, saying nothing.

'Whereas the lives of humans, and other linear races in the cosmos, are constrained to four dimensions, we are privileged to move through seven.'

'There aren't seven dimensions,' Ace exclaimed, and then added, 'are there?'