'Not biting, Doctor?' Kreiner jeered. 'Need me to knock some more sense into you?'

'Be silent.' Tarra gestured to the transparent benches gaining more solidity all the time.

Tana's smile and the coy slant of her great skull head were almost coquettish. 'He's coming,'

she breathed. 'Him.'

'Who?' Mali whispered.

'Coming to claim his seat at last?' the Doctor challenged as a light flickered on over the empty chair reserved for the Speaker of the Faction's parliament. 'Oh, what an entrance.

Grandfather Paradox.'

'But Grandfather Paradox doesn't exist,' Mali whispered urgently, seeking the Doctor's confirmation.

'He exists as a concept and that's dangerous enough. With the timelines so mutable, with chaos punching its way free, some unthinkable event or paradox could Ve brought him physically into being.'

'No,' Mali protested. 'He's just a Faction phantom.'

'As is this entire projection of their parliament,' the Doctor answered, cautiously taking a step closer towards her as if fearing further rejection. "The Faction think they've won at last; it would be unthinkable for the Grandfather not to be here in some form, even if they have to invent him themselves. Unless he's been waiting in the sidelines all this time, of course.

Indestructible ... living for ever ...'

Mali wished the sprinklers would shut off and help her stop shivering. 'Another selffulfilling prophecy?'

'Self ...'

The Doctor trailed off as a blurred figure shimmered into existence under the light, a smear of watercolour grey crouching over its podium. The shape began to swim into focus, to gain a little weight and shape. Mali saw it was a man, tall and emaciated in an old hessian cloak.

The hairless stump of his severed arm peeped from the bogeyman's shroud.

Mali felt her skin crawling. 'You're right, it's him,' she whimpered. 'But it can't be.Who ...'

The Doctor beside her fumbled for her hand, and lost in her terror she let him take it. As the definition of the image increased, Mali could see it begin to breathe, shuddering over the lectern, gathering its strength.

Finally, the figure straightened, and she could see it clearly now. This apparition wore not bone but its own, cold face, the measure of its rank and stature. She took in the shaved head first, then the hooded, glittering glaciereyes. The sallow skin. The cruel thin smile, aloof and alien.

She shook her hand free from the Doctor's grasp. Unable to articulate words, she backed away.

'My life ends as it began,' the Doctor whispered, his face twisted between fascination and disgust at the sight of himself looking out from the podium over the Shadow Parliament.

'Congratulations, Doctor. You're a grandfather again.'

Chapter Thirtynine.

Ruin

Although Fitz's body was racing down corridors with Romana, his mind was still back in the chaos of the berthing cradles. It had been like watching a disaster movie playing out for real; those useless TARDISes might as well have had Titanic scrawled along their sides. The energy ribbon had fried half the people in the room as it swept through, and the exploding time ships had done for practically everyone else; the only people who'd escaped death by blue light and white cylinder were those being trampled underneath by the frantic crowd.

He'd seen scenes of suffering and destruction so visceral he felt his stomach couldn't screw up into a ball much tighter.

A gaggle of guards had joined up with them. He'd been thrilled at first safety in numbers, and numbers trained to deal with all this crap at that. But the sense of security had been a fleeting one. Romana mayVe technically lost the Presidency, but it seemed she hadn't lost her respect among her hardwon guards nor her knack of making men jump to attention whenever she wanted something. And it was quite plain to Fitz she wanted them all to lay down their lives in repelling the Faction invasion. Great.

The only comfort Fitz could find was that at least he'd be reunited with the Doctor again.

Assuming nothing too terrible had happened of course.

Yeah, right.

At last, they reached the grand corridor that terminated in the bronze double doors of the Council Chamber. They were blackened and cracked, like so much of the architecture.

Ruined.

'So now we're here,' Fitz said, 'what are we supposed to do?'

'The Doctor must be key to their plans,' she said. 'So we get him out of there ...'

Fitz was ready to smile, before Romana finished her sentence.

'... or we kill him.' or we kill him.'

In an icy cloud of blue vapour, two more skullfaced figures in black materialised in the crowded chamber. But Mali could tell they were real, saw the steam streaming from their mouths as they breathed in the dank atmosphere.

'Mother Mathara, Uncle Kristeva,' Tarra said, her voice as cold as the freezing water from the sprinklers which pooled at her feet. 'Welcome to our new life. Welcome to Gallifrey.'

The Doctor ignored the intrusion on his own, private grief. He just kept staring up at the dark apparition of himself of the Grandfather. 'Is it always to end in evil?' he whispered.

The Grandfather kept smiling. 'It will never end.'

Mali shivered. The Grandfather's face might've been the Doctor's but his voice was lower, cracked with age, and so much colder. Every word seemed to drip with menace.

The Doctor sneered at the skulking shadows in the parliament's pews. 'So ... You've overwritten your entire history to make me your ruler?'

'The Faction didn't do it; the Grandfather croaked. 'I did.' The ghost of a smile. 'Just as you will.'

'You made yourself Grandfather Paradox?' The Doctor lowered his voice, suddenly excited.

'But then ... this is a trick, right? We you've gotthem! You can order them to ...'

Grandfather Paradox shook his head, and Mali could see the Doctor start to squirm as the intensity of his own gaze was turned on himself. 'You've spent so long flitting from adventure to adventure, never daring to stay in one place. That's what makes you run, isn't it?

You're afraid that your moment is gone the moment you win: The Doctor looked away.

'Well, as I say, no one did this to me,' the Grandfather hissed. 'I sought this out. Fought for it. Made it my own. I belong now.' He waggled his stump. 'I can win for ever. And never, ever run again.' He smiled. 'Doesn't that sound good, Doctor?'

The Doctor had closed his eyes, clearly more confident when able to see only what he wanted to see. 'Lies. This is simply a meaningless projection.'

'The patterns were always there,' Grandfather Paradox assured him. 'Deep, deep back in your own time the first seeds were sown. It was inevitable the Faction virus would take hold of you, Doctor, just as it was inevitable its gestation would finally bring me back into being. As you can see.'

'I can see a new definition of a onearmed bandit, certainly,' the Doctor flashed, nodding at the Grandfather's shoulder.

'This?' The Grandfather brandished his stump with pride. 'I removed this to be free of the brand of the Time Lords.'

'Which you received for what? Outstanding value?'

The Grandfather smiled as if indulging a playful baby. 'I imagine I committed the most terrible atrocities against reality.'

'You can't even remember, can you?' the Doctor realised. 'Doesn't that rather take the fun out of things?'

'I don't need to remember,' the Grandfather snapped. 'The Faction have allowed me to personify their god.'

'You're just a bargainbucket interloper.'

Again, the Grandfather shook his head. 'Imagine how pleasing my service must've been since the virus took hold.'

'That hasn't happened yet.'

Grandfather Paradox smiled coldly. 'But it will. And we shall live my dark life all over again.

Together.'

'Splendid. I'm glad we're dividing the work between us. I'd hate to think of you sitting here with time on your ...' The Doctor affected embarrassment. 'Well, you know.'

'But that's it exactly, Doctor,' the Grandfather said, opening his fist. Now, at last, I hold all time ... here in my hand.'

'Really? All time, eh?' The Doctor peered at the outstretched palm. 'It's so much smaller than I expected.'

'My first act now the war is presaged will be to formally open hostilities ... in spectacular fashion.' Grandfather Paradox looked round proudly at the hundreds of cadavers lining the dark benches in the dank chamber. 'We shall stage a massive retaliation against the Enemy.

We shall fight this War so much more ... thoroughly than the Time Lords ever could.

Embroil so many worlds in the chaos.'

'He's stalling you,' Kreiner shouted in frustration, confirming Mali's own deductions.

'Babbling while he thinks of something ...'

The Grandfather turned on him. 'Speak out of turn again, idiot child; he said gravely, 'and you will know your death a billion times over.'

Kreiner shrank back, and Mali could see his spindly frame shaking. The casual killer had become a quivering child, too terrified even to apologise; but then, she supposed the thought of your god spanking your backside could do that to even the most hardened psychopath.

Pleased to have noted even the slightest concession to vulnerability in the Faction ranks, Mali took advantage of the distraction to sidle closer to the doors.

'You think I don't know myself?' Grandfather Paradox turned from Kreiner and took a step closer to the Doctor. "This last flourish of innocence before the fall?'

The Doctor looked concerned. 'I won't graze my knees, will I?'

'I see the virus inside you,' the Grandfather went on. His voice had fallen again to little more than a cold whisper. "There ... pumped from heart to heart ... through every vein ... it drags and pulls and skulks in your body from head to toe.'

'I shall fight you,' said the Doctor calmly in return. 'I would die before I would serve you.'

'You will change, Doctor,' the Grandfather hissed. 'And you will serve us.'

Mali could feel the temperature in the chamber dropping, seemingly with every new promise from the Grandfather's lips. Still the four dark figures hovered like spirits of Apocalypse in the far corner, watching, anticipating.

'With each breath you take, the virus removes a little more of your old self, a little more of the hero of old ...' The Grandfather smiled cruelly. 'Cell by cell ... rebuilding and reordering your genetic heritage, each bone in your body transfigured into a shrine to paradox ... Yes, I can see it happening now.'

The dark figure of the Grandfather paced round the Doctor in a tight circle, and Mali imagined for a moment that the charred skulls lining his body were staring into the Doctor for amusement. 'I can see it happening now.' The Doctor, already bedraggled from the sprinklers, was looking paler than ever, his face shiny, his eyes red and sore. It was as if the Grandfather's words were finally pushing the Doctor over the edge, now he could see the irrefutable evidence of what he was to become.

Then the double doors crashed open almost right into Mali, and a flurry of guards pushed through into the darkened chamber.

For Fitz, it was like opening a door on to some surrealist hell.

First off, he guessed Romana's grand chamber of office wasn't meant to look as if someone had crammed the Houses of Parliament into the Chamber of Horrors and judging by the ravens that swooped down on them, a dash of the Tower of London for good measure. The guards, when they'd wasted valuable seconds of surprise staring round them in terror, began firing at the man in the dodgy cloak with his back to them. This seemed just a little unsporting to Fitz, until some woman started yelling that he wasn't real, he was a projection or something. But by then old Mother Tarra and her gang had opened fire themselves, Kreiner leading the counterattack. The guards started falling like red skittles in a ten strike.

The woman who'd shouted stumbled out of the firing line and more or less into his arms. She was slim, lithe, and sadly had better things to do than to run away with him that minute to start a family somewhere far away from here. She was holding a gun, and started fumbling with it even as he put her steady on her pins. Romana grabbed her and started bending her ear about something.

Then Fitz saw the Doctor, just staring at the man in the cloak.

This guy was just a projection, right? An illusion. Fitz was off and running, splashing across the stone floor, before he could talk himself out of it. Skirting a number of benches haunted by no end of ghostly freaks, lashing out at the ravens divebombing him, Fitz went to hurl himself straight through the man facing the Doctor.

Only to have the guy turn his head at the last moment and show he was the Doctor or, more accurately, how the Doctor might've looked if he'd spent twenty years in the marines before becoming a psycho. His hair was shorn, his face gaunt and pale. The face was weathered, older, harder.

It was the face of the statue in the shrinking Panopticon.

Fitz really got an excellent view the man had grabbed him by the throat with his only arm (what was this, a convention?) and was picking him up by it, while the Doctor just stood there like a lemon.

The man's touch was so cold it burnt. Something in his eyes seemed to suggest Fitz should be very, very frightened, and it worked like a charm. Fitz dashed off a quick prayer and tried to remember if he was wearing clean underwear.

As it turned out, being lifted off the ground was a good thing. He was too far away to tell for certain, but it looked like the woman had dismantled her gun and now a fork of blue lightning was flashing from it into the soaking wet ground. The water carried the charge, knocking aside Tarra, Kreiner, their ugly mates ... and even sending the Doctor jolting backwards.

With a roar of anger, the Doctor's evil older brother flickered and vanished, and Fitz tumbled to the floor for what seemed like the umpteenth time; on this occasion his knees and palms were the casualties. He felt the cold water soak through his trousers, was glad he could now wet himself without humiliation and squirmed over to the Doctor, who was lying flat on his back with a vacant expression.

'Come on, Doctor,' Fitz muttered fiercely. 'Don't you recognise a halfarsed rescue attempt when you see one?'

The Doctor's head lolled to one side like a corpse's, his eyes meeting Fitz's own.