Efficiently, too a minute or so later, the crimson of the door was retreating into the pastel white of its housing.

A skullfaced woman was framed in the doorway. Nivet just had time to realise the retina scans that had denied them access would've alerted Mother Tana to their presence, before the back of her hand smacked into his face. The force of the blow swiped him off the ground, and before he could even cry out, the back of his head had exploded into a brief but brilliant display of light. Nothing took its place but the darkness.

Tana looked on in pleasure as Compassion crouched over Nivet protectively.

'So you're the new TARDIS ... Clearly you care for the young man who would control you ... What a divine little paradox you are.' What a divine little paradox you are.'

Compassion straightened up, turned and scowled. 'I had plans for him.'

'We have plans for you, Tobin.'

'Get in line,' Compassion hissed, raising her arm and moving forward to strike.

Then she stopped, frozen in midair.

Tarra laughed, and drew closer. 'You can't harm us. You belong to us, we control you ...'

She held up her ivory control box and tapped one of her talons against it. 'You are of the Remote. You have been marked for our service.' She caressed Compassion's auburn hair.

'When the time comes, a little Faction biodata will be inserted into every new TARDIS you create for us. Our power shall grow ... and grow ... and grow ...'

Tana could see the cold anger rising in Compassion's eyes, and sniggered. 'Such things we shall do to you, my dear.'

Chapter Thirtyfive.

Eternal kill

'Passing the blame really is a waste of time, don't you think?' the Doctor said crossly. 'And I'm not sure there's much left.' He looked at Greyjan, aware that Mali's influence wouldn't protect him here for much longer. The President was still staring into space or two spaces really, one with each eye, his mouth open as if about to speak. 'What's this really about, Greyjan?' the Doctor demanded. 'You saw the War might come and you turned your back on it; you knew we'd find out about it in due course ... so that can't be why you've come back.

And you threw power away when you killed yourself so long ago, so why would you pursue it again now and in your condition?'

Timon glared at him. 'You will show respect to the President, Doctor.'

'If he earns it, certainly,' the Doctor countered. 'So explain to me, Grcyjan. Greyjan?'

Everyone waited in the uncomfortable silence, until the Doctor lost patience and spoke again, more urgently now. 'I'm close to becoming a Faction agent myself, so I can recognise that you are not. So what are you, Lord Greyjan? A diversion, an aberration sent to muddy the waters?' He advanced on Greyjan's throne. 'No, there has to be some significance about you, something special. You're a construct supplied by the Faction to perform a specific task.' He marched over to Greyjan, waved a hand furiously in front of the man's eyes. 'So what am I missing? Hello? Are you there?'

'Restrain him!' roared Timon.

The Doctor realised he'd gone too far again, pushed his luck. He wasn't thinking clearly. He could feel the virus egging him on, wearing him down, hoping to exhaust him, getting ready to claim him when at last he was defenceless, taking possession, rising up ...

A Faction ascension.

The thought cracked through his head like gunfire, then it was gone. As the guards rushed for him, his head throbbing, the Doctor spun round behind Greyjan and held the man's neck in an armlock.

'Back off!' the Doctor snarled.

'Do as he says,' Timon instructed the guards, rising painfully out from his own chair. 'Harm the President, Doctor, and we shall kill you.'

'I don't want to harm anybody,' the Doctor stated, 'but I'm running out of time, can't you see that? We need answers!'

'Do you mind?' Greyjan said, back with them as if nothing had happened. 'You're shouting in my ear. If you're going to be this bothersome, old man, I'll talk to you.'

The Doctor gritted his teeth and forced himself to calm down, to let his arm go slack. Greyjan wriggled his head about and took some ragged breaths. The Doctor waited. The chamber remained in tense silence.

'I'm not sure why they've brought me back,' Greyjan confessed. 'I can only assume some higher power has decreed I have a part to play.'

'Then you're in fine company,' the Doctor said darkly. 'Seems Gallifrey as a whole's quite willing to blame its misfortunes on some higher power. Perhaps because that negates any responsibility for individual actions." He stared round at the crowded council chamber, at the many guns pointing at his head. 'All of you only doing your duty, right? Paying lip service to history.'

'You speak of duty, Doctor, of responsibility,' Mali said. 'What of your own? The Edifice is your vessel, and it is helping to start the War. Like it or not, you are responsible.'

The Doctor closed his eyes. 'No. If you're so obsessed with where to place the blame, look to your own doorstep! It was Gallifrey's actions, your singleminded pursuit of prophecy, that created this situation -'

'All right, I accept that!' Mali was clearly affected by the charged atmosphere in the room.

She tried to stop herself from shaking. 'But now you have to accept that there's no time left to change things back the way they were before. That there can be no going back for you.'

'No going back,' the Doctor whispered to himself. But he was missing something, he was sure he was missing something. Ascendance, ascendance ... 'Be quiet, please, I have to think ...'

'I know you've fought to the death for Gallifrey before,' Mali went on. 'And I know that we turned on you, for reasons we thought were just. You've been acting for the sake of your history, for your freedom and for your remaining lives ... But Doctor, will you prize all that over the millions who will die in the War if you don't end all this now?'

'By letting you kill me?' the Doctor whispered. 'You think that will change things here?'

'It will change the future.'

'So you can do whatever you like to it!' retorted the Doctor.

Mali shook her head. "The Edifice responds to you. With you dead, it can give up the struggle at last; it can relinquish the energies it's stirred up to shore itself. Compassion will be free. You'll be free of the Faction. You can see that's best, I think, Doctor ... if you'll only let go ...'

'Timon, old man,' Greyjan remarked languidly. 'Silence that silly girl, would you?'

Poised on his master's every word, Timon clicked his fingers. Three guards brought their guns to bear on Mali. The astonishment on her face, under any other circumstances, might have been amusing.

'If you want to die, Doctor,' Greyjan said, 'you can damn well join the queue.' His good eye blazed up at his captive with sudden resolve. 'But let's puzzle out this affair first, shall we?'

'They're looking for us, then,' Father Kreiner said, peering at the immobile Type 102, poking her as if to see what a walking TARDIS felt like, 'the Doctor's friends.'

'I suppose they must be.' Tarra was seated in Kandarl's ornate chair, reliving the look on his face when it seemed his own daughter had killed him. She sighed. She'd enjoyed being Tana so much she'd actually travelled back over the girl's life and lived key moments of it herself.

Even now with her bone face shining in the soft light, she felt as if she was Tarra. Beautiful and young again, she'd moved in the highest social circles, enjoyed the favours and attentions of a string of lovers, become accustomed to luxury. It was like nothing she'd ever known.

She dimly remembered fragments of her ancient childhood, in the filth of an overpolluted colony world, right at the end of man's empire. She had never been beautiful. When she closed her eyes, sometimes, as she was doing now, she saw a frightened young face looking back at her from a dirty mirror, a vivid red scar trailing down one cheek. She raised a youthful hand to the bone now. She'd been glad when the skin had finally wasted away and she'd had nothing tangible to remind her. But even now, she could never truly believe the scar had been only skindeep.

The Faction had taken her, hundreds of years before. She could see their huge warships glinting in the light of abandoned factories burning under the clouds of their own poisons.

They'd promised her so much. Promised her revenge. She'd been allowed to kill her real father dozens of times, on each occasion arriving just a few seconds further back. She'd made him suffer again and again the same abuses he'd inflicted on her, made him die solidly for days in the end. But it had never been enough. And something of those feelings had resurfaced when she'd slaughtered Tana's father. She'd wanted him to know it was his daughter killing him, whispering his name all the time it was happening. It had been so hard to resist going back and slaughtering Kandarl again and again.

But she was a grownup now, and she wore her own hard face as a mark of maturity, and to appease the Grandfather. Perhaps, when all plans were finally acted upon, her service would be felt pleasing enough to let her remain a Tana. Until the mirror finally became too dirty to look into and the ghost of the frightened little girl would at last be gone.

She became aware of Kreiner at her side. 'I think someone else is coming,' he said, small arm twitching.

'We'd better be ready.' Tana let her eyes refocus on the opulence of the world around her.

She decided Tarra would've wished to remember Gallifrey the way it was.

Fitz cursed his aching legs as he and Romana neared Kandarl's quarters deep in the Elite Cloisters. Tana's rooms had been empty, and Nivet and Compassion hadn't got back to them about this place. Either they'd found nothing, or ...

'Look.' Romana crouched down by the wall. Something had made a huge dent in it, and there was fresh blood there, too. 'Does Compassion bleed?'

Fitz shook his head. 'Don't think so. Not the oldfashioned way.'

'Damn.' Romana straightened and turned to him. He caught just a flicker of concern in her gaze. 'If this was the work of the Faction, they'll be expecting us.'

Right on cue, the door slid open. Fitz had been hoping Tarra would be back in her babe disguise she'd be a little easier to stomach in that guise but no such luck. The very sight of her dressed like a woman but with a peeled white head made him want to run, to run and never stop.

The President and the monkey,' Tarra said, inclining her head as if in humble welcome. 'A distinguished visit: 'We've not come alone,' Romana bluffed.

'Blatant lies from such a prominent politician?' Tarra tutted. 'No wonder you fell from office.'

'I didn't fall, I was pushed,' said Romana coldly. Fitz couldn't believe she was acting so haughty.

'What happened here?'

'Your friends came to a sticky end, I fear,' Tarra said. 'But don't be afraid. We can't be killing you just yet, can we? Such excellent additions to our ranks. We knew you'd come back to us, Fitz.'

Just as Fitz thought things couldn't get any worse, he saw Kreiner emerge from the room and push in front. 'Hello, runaway boy,' came that horrible voice, his own, cracked and filtered as if through a billion Woodbines. 'So nice to see you again.'

For a split second as Kreiner pushed through, Tarra was off balance. Romana seized her moment and lashed out, her fist connecting noisily with Tarra's skull. Romana cried out with the pain of impact, while Tarra just swayed backwards. Fitz tried to run, but Kreiner grabbed his shoulder and spun him round. He raised his fist, more to protect himself than anything else; Kreiner simply gripped it and started to squeeze.

'Wouldn't hit a poor, onearmed old man, would you?' Kreiner said, putting on a stupid voice. Fitz wanted to burst out crying. 'Oh, but we did, didn't we? Old Stumpy the maths teacher. He did go on about the Hun, didn't he? Remember?'

Fitz staggered back, slipped in the blood on the floor and banged his head on the cold marble.

Kreiner loomed over him, dark and spindly. 'Luckily, we mellow with age,' he hissed. Then he grabbed hold of Fitz's fringe, almost pulling it out by the roots as he lifted his head by it, fingering the hair through his heavy gauntlets as if remembering. Maybe he was. If this thing was thousands of years old, surely he'd have to be bald by now.

Fitz could make out Romana losing her own fight at the periphery of his vision. Fab. This was it, then. He looked up at the man in black, wizened and creaking, and remembered again his teenage dreams of living for ever.

Then Fitz's head was sent crashing back down against the floor as Kreiner scornfully pushed him away. The cracking noise reminded Fitz of first break at bar billiards. The next thing he knew, he was inside the room, lying on the floor. Someone Tarra presumably had trussed him up with ripped shreds of fabric and dumped him on the floor. She must've won her knots badge at Girl Guides first time, too Houdini couldn't have wriggled out of this little lot.

It didn't take him long to catch up on what he'd missed.

Tarra was talking to or rather, at Romana. 'We're going to infect you, Madam President, with the same destructive gene that has tainted the Doctor's DNA. Then we'll forceregenerate you until you fall to us.' She grinned, thin lips parting over needle teeth.

'Your people will follow, flocking to us in legions.'

Fitz wondered why Romana was taking it so calmly, sitting in a chair. Then he realised she'd been tied to it. No hard floor for her shapely backside. Well, Presidential perks, he supposed.

Kreiner was standing in the corner, watching him. Fitz looked away.

Tarra stepped carefully over him, her big bone head looking down at him from on high. 'And you, Fitz, will make such a delightfully paradoxical Cousin when you take your seat in the Shadow Parliament alongside yourself.' She chuckled, and Fitz felt sick to the pit of his stomach. 'You'll have a father again. The real Father Kreiner.'

The creepy bastard himself said nothing, but he wouldn't stop staring. Fitz somehow couldn't imagine them playing footie together on hazy summer evenings. Kreiner would be useless in goal.

He closed his eyes, not sure whether to laugh or to cry. He held it in. Bullies liked to see you cry, his dad had told him. Don't give them the satisfaction they'll soon get bored and leave you alone. Keep smiling, his mum had chipped in. Makes people wonder what you've been up to. For a second he saw them standing before him; then he saw Tarra and Kreiner. He had to hold the tears in, though it felt as if he was losing his mind with fear.

'We must be going,' Tarra said.

'Where to?' Romana challenged.

Tarra smiled again. To the seat of your power: the Council Chamber. A fitting place from which to witness the greatest triumph of the Faction Paradox, don't you think?'

Chapter Thirtysix.

Sage of paradox

Mali looked on impatiently as Greyjan played to his audience. 'I like to think I was the first to catch the whispers of the Faction unfurling themselves into existence,' he said.

'Extradimensional terrorism! Such wickedness, such scandal.' He laughed, and rubbed his hands together, the pockmarked rubber of his cheeks wobbling as he did so. 'We really had it coming, you know. Pompous lot.'

Mali sighed, quietly. Every few seconds her gaze darted past the guard, who was half watching her with gun at the ready, and over to Tragdorvigan, sitting there seemingly oblivious to the extraordinary scene about him, monitoring the energy levels in the Kasterborous quadrant. It seemed unthinkable, but if an energy wave was to spearhead the Enemy's first attack it should register on the Emonitor first, give them due warning.

Tragdorvigan gazed calmly on, waiting.

Mali was sick of waiting, listening to Greyjan ramble on. At the Doctor's request he was recalling all he knew about the Faction. Why was Timon indulging the pair of them like this?

The Edifice was the real threat, the root of the evils facing them. Was she the only one prepared to act? Remove the Doctor and you removed both the Edifice and the Enemy in one hit.