'Responsibilities?' Kreiner echoed in disgust. 'You're lying.You're a fake, Doctor. Just like that boy you made.'

The Doctor looked away. 'Am I?'

'Don't you dare turn away,' Kreiner hissed, dull throbbing replacing the buzzing in his head.

A surge of anger jolted through him. 'Don't you think you owe me?'

The Doctor clenched his fists. Then, slowly, turned back round to face him.

'You're right,' he said, suddenly dead calm again. 'Let's do a deal. Allow me to stabilise the Edifice, just as Tarra and the Grandfather want me to. Then, if there's time, I'll do whatever you want.'

Kreiner's heart leapt ... then started to sink again. 'We won't get the chance after you've fixed the Edifice.' An awful thought occurred to him. 'And if the Faction bug does take you over, what's to stop you giving me away?'

'Come on, Fitz. We're old friends, aren't we?' The Doctor smiled, and his bruised lip cracked open. A drop of scarlet squeezed from the split. 'So very, very old.'

Romana was inspecting her troops. She herself was holding a tiny pistol. Didn't look like much but then, knowing her, it was probably the most efficient killer of the lot. Fitz gripped the bazooka and looked down at his feet rather than at the scorched double doors ahead of them. He wondered which of the weapons he'd find jammed up his nose should he decide to mutiny.

'You first,' Romana whispered to Ryssal, who looked like he was wearing a metal rucksack on his back, bristling with strange grey filaments. A large red light was winking provocatively on the strap across his chest. Hit me, it was saying. Hit me and come see my surprise. Ryssal looked scared half to death already.

'Hey,' Fitz called lightly. 'Cheer up. You're not just any old guard, you're the advance guard!'

'Funny man.' Ryssal forced a crooked smile.

Fitz found himself getting a bit choked. 'Just open your mouth as you go in. Set of gnashers like that would put the willies up anyone.'

'You'd better shut up,' Ryssal said goodnaturedly. 'You'll kill me with laughter before I reach the door.'

Fitz felt his heart sink. 'You'll be all right, kid.' Ryssal might've been a hundred and ten for all he knew, but it seemed the right thing to say.

Romana turned now to Mali. 'Right. Ryssal goes in. We wait until the lights go up, then we move.'

'What is that pack, anyway?' Fitz wondered aloud, watching Ryssal psych himself up to hit the red button.

'All right, Ryssal,' Romana ordered. 'Move off and keep moving. Don't stop, whatever happens: you have to open those doors. Go on,then! Now!'

Ryssal lurched into life as if someone had wound him up and let him go. As soon as he slapped his palm on the button he started to scream. He shook, seemed to twist and pulsate before Fitz's eyes, then he was literally a new man, someone older and at least a foot taller, his bright red trousers rising up his shins. Another scream, throatier, and the blurring began again. The box on his back seemed to be burning bright, but it was strapped to someone else, now, a fat man waddling down the corridor, no, now someone stringbean thin, staggering on, and on, approaching the doors. It was like watching some kind of macabre cartoon show.

'What the hell is that thing doing to him?' shouted Fitz.

Romana waved her arm to silence him, although Ryssal had to be waking the dead already.

'It's forceregenerating him. The energy of the cell renewal isn't allowed to dissipate: it's harnessed by the device and released by the first energy weapon that strikes him, unleashing a imitative field into the immediate area. Gets past any defences, changes your foe upon contact. If they don't die from shock they're too disorientated to fight back.'

Fitz's mouth felt bone dry as he watched Ryssal stagger on.

'I designed it for combat at close quarters,' Romana said quietly.

'You designed it?' Fitz shook his head, stared down again at his own gun.

'Ryssal was a child,' Mali said coldly. 'He had eleven lives remaining.'

Romana shrugged. 'So he was the obvious choice. The more regenerations you squeeze out, the more potent the field: 'You're worse than the bloody Faction,' Fitz snapped.

'I didn't start this War,' she said coldly.

'But you're happy enough to escalate it.'

Just then the doors smashed open and armed black shock troops poured out firing. Ryssal was shot twice in the chest before he seemed to explode, a blinding light filling the corridor.

Fitz closed his eyes. When he opened them again and saw what was left of Ryssal he was sick.

Tarra stepped out of Compassion and into the darkened chamber. A low, drowsy hum was sounding, and as the Doctor followed her outside, it rose in pitch, the lights brightening a little with it.

'This must be the control room,' the Doctor said. 'Good old Compassion. She was better prepared this time.' He nodded respectfully to Tarra. 'Under your control.'

Tarra acknowledged the compliment with a demure nod of her own, and looked around her.

The control room, if you could call this derelict shack by such a name, was a wreck. The walls, once white and polished bone, were now cracked and flaking. A hard, sickly yellow substance had oozed through large holes in the structure like thick pus. The console itself seemed to be rotten, fluffy spore clouds coating its dull ivory controls.

She could see the Edifice was holding on by a thread.

Behind her came Kreiner, followed by the cameras, buzzing over her shoulder. Kreiner was silent. He hadn't said a word since he'd talked alone with the Doctor.

'Look,' Tarra said as a lined face formed out of tiny motes of dust in the fetid atmosphere.

'What is that?'

The Doctor looked and reacted. 'Some kind of projection. Of the man I used to be.'

'The Doctor I met on Dust,' Kreiner said heavily. 'Where I lost my arm.'

Tarra looked at him sharply. 'What is his face doing here now?'

The Doctor seemed to ponder the matter deeply. 'As Father Kreiner has said, that's me as I was when the virus first took me. Perhaps this is a security measure now that we're here in the control room.' He smiled faintly. 'It's my name on the door, after all. This must be some kind of recognition test.'

Tarra regarded the face as it stared down at the Doctor. 'You looked so innocent then.'

'Colourful. Bright. I was like a butterfly,' said the Doctor, taking the tiny stabilisers from his pocket. Tarra couldn't decipher his tone, but his gaze never shifted from his former self. 'A butterfly pinned down in the memory. Time is a fickle mistress. If I'd only espied her coming.' He gently tugged on one of the brittle bone levers. 'I'm ready to begin.'

The dark eyes of the dust Doctor fixed on to Tarra for a moment and he frowned. Then the apparition vanished. The Doctor seemed not to have noticed.

'Where's it gone?' Tarra asked.

'Scanning procedure must've terminated,' he said, attaching the little cubes to what she supposed were key points around the misshapen console. 'I've satisfied its security requirements. The Edifice will respond, now.'

The whorls of light started to darken; another image seemed to be forming.

'What is it?' Tarra wanted to know. She was suddenly uneasy.

'The camera link is twoway, remember?' Kreiner said calmly. 'Whatever medium the Edifice was using to put up that face, our gear has tapped into it.'

The picture hardened into definite shapes. It took Tarra a few moments to work out that she was staring at a naked bleeding torso quivering on two twisted legs, the tatters of a red uniform flapping around it.

'That's all that's left of a Time Lord guard,' she said slowly. 'What is happening?' she shouted up at the tiny flying cameras.

Kristeva's voice suddenly came through, distorted over the ancient speakers in the room.

'Under attack! Weapons -'

'How can this be?' Tarra shouted at the screen. "The Time Lords are not strong enough ...'

Mathara's face loomed up, a massive bloodred skull. 'I have transmatted down reinforcements from my ship. We will hold the Council Chamber.'

Her harsh features shimmered and vanished, and Tana's heart quickened at the sight of the Grandfather's gaunt, halfstarved face staring down upon them all.

'The Time Lords will fight to the death,' he said, blue eyes livid, his form flickering on the primitive display screen. 'They are bringing new weapons of war to bear. I have almost secured the Matrix. Secured the Faction's future. You must hurry, Tarra.'

'How long, Doctor?' she demanded.

Still he didn't look up. 'The systems are stabilised, they're responding. I'll have it all sorted soon.'

'Send the Type 102 to Mathara,' the Grandfather ordered. 'She will form an indestructible barricade.'

As Tarra scraped her long nails over the ornate surface of the ivory box, Compassion, screaming in furious silence, slowly faded from view.

Chapter Fortytwo.

Fitz/Kreiner

Fitz fired his gun through the thick smoke belching out from the council chamber. There was no kickback: it was just like firing a toy raygun. Except everyone he hit with it burst into flame.

Another bone man went up in smoke, and he told himself that one day he'd feel guilty. Get through this, live through it, and he'd happily spend a lifetime of guilt just to make up for it.

His stomach had hardened to the reality of the situation pretty quickly. The Faction weren't pussyfooting about: they meant to hold on to whatever it was they had captured, and were responding to Romana's ugly tactics in kind. It was kill or be killed, he told himself. Kill or become Father Kreiner all over again. Or a lump of dogmeat like Ryssal.

There was a familiar roaring, wheezing and groaning sound. Fitz laughed jubilantly and squinted into the grey fog, ready for Compassion to appear, indestructible fists flashing through the Faction ranks, a real secret weapon.

Instead she came carried in the arms of a fresh squad of Faction soldiers, holding her up like a shield as they advanced, deflecting whatever rays and beams Romana's filthy arsenal could chuck at them.

'Cosmic,' said Fitz.

'You must hurry, Doctor,' Tarra instructed. The scanner was showing darkness and smoke, but not much in the way of hard details as to how the battle was going. 'How long will it take?'

'You can help me,' he said. 'On the other side of that door you'll find equipment. I need something to adjust the linearity of the proton flow.' He thought. 'A spanner or something.'

'I'm not technical,' Tarra said. 'Kreiner, you go.'

'Come on, Tarra, it's only a spanner.'

A camera fly buzzed close to the Doctor's head and he swatted at it absentmindedly. Tarra stared hard at him, but he wouldn't meet her gaze.

'Fetch it, Kreiner.'

The Doctor was getting flustered. 'My dear girl, if you don't know what a spanner -'

'Kreiner!' she ordered.

Kreiner hesitated, looked at the Doctor almost as if for guidance ...

It all fell into place.

Tarra threw herself at the Doctor with a howl of anger and frustration, her sharp teeth tearing at him. He cried out, his back crushed against the console by her weight. The console emitted a low groan of warning.

She rained down blows upon him, screeching into his face. But somehow he managed to press his foot up against her stomach, and kicked out, propelling her backwards. She tumbled into Kreiner, who grabbed hold of her with his good arm.

'You ...' She struggled to be free of his grip, spat into his blackmasked face. 'What is it, Kreiner? Forgotten which side you're on?'

'II'm ...'

His splitsecond hesitation gave her all the time and justification she needed. She pulled out the gun from her belt and fired straight into Kreiner's stomach.

He yelled, a highpitched wail that popped her ears. She turned in time to see the Doctor hurl himself at her, and she spun aside, still caught in Kreiner's grip. The Doctor missed, fell past her. She laughed, twisted her arm free at last, overbalanced. She realised she was falling through an open doorway, realised the Doctor hadn't been lunging for her but for the door handle, that now she was ...

It was cold and dark. She was outside, rain lashing down at her, soaking and stinging her. She turned back to the door but it was shut. Hundreds of winged insects were pinned to its splintering wood like badges.

'I'll break this door down!' she screamed. 'Let me in! I'll tear you apart, Doctor! I'll destroy you!'

She sensed rather than saw the shadow fall over her. Spinning round, she saw the creature that cast it: a vast, misshapen spider, over six metres across, was limping towards her, drooling a thick white liquid from its slashedopen mouth. It was clearly sick, dying. Eyes like uneven growths were packed round its crusty skull, and as it approached she saw herself reflected in their cold depths, spreadeagled in the doorway eight times over. She could feel the pins in the door scraping her back through her gown like fingernails, and insects grinding and disintegrating against the heavy material.

Her only thought was, Don't let that monster eat me.

She was still thinking it when the spider collapsed, flicking out a bony leg as thick as a tree trunk as it did so, skewering her to the door.