The plane was pretty well intact, but there were flames on the ground and she could smell fuel so there was a real risk of an explosion. Emergency vehicles were heading their way, blue lights flashing. Fire tenders, an ambulance, smaller vehicles Trix couldn't yet make out in the evening gloom.

She stopped and turned around.

There was a crowd of monsters between her and Fitz.

A dozen of the creatures, about twenty feet away from each of them.

Fitz had skidded to a halt.

'Go!' Fitz shouted. 'They're after me me.'

So, these were the Vore. Almost as one the insects were looking from Fitz to Trix, as if they were unsure what to do. They were grey flecked with silver, their bodies ungainly and a little asymmetrical. The light was glinting off compound eyes the size of beach b.a.l.l.s. Their joints clicked and clacked as they moved.

Trix stood perfectly still, tried to work out why she wasn't dead. They were following their instinct to attack the nearest human, but with two targets identical distances away they were having difficulty deciding between them.

164.

They were animals, Trix realised, not intelligent beings. Some sort of social insect, like a bee or an ant.

Fitz understood the situation too. He started to take a step towards the Vore.

'What are you doing?' she screamed at him.

'Saving your life. Trix, you have to run!' he shouted.

'Stay back from it!' she yelled at him.

If she took one step away, she solved the insects' dilemma for them and they'd pounce on Fitz. One step towards them and they would take her, but he would be safe. . . for the moment, at least. Her foot lifted from the ground.

'No!' Fitz shouted.

'What do we do?' Trix asked.

The drivers of the emergency vehicles had seen the monsters and they were staying back. No help was coming. There was an aeroplane primed to explode behind Fitz. Backing away wasn't going to be an option.

'I love you!' Fitz shouted.

'Fitz. . . not like this. We can make it.'

'One of us can. You.'

'There's another way. There's time to '

'You know there isn't. Trix. . . tell me your real name.'

She told him.

Even from this distance, she could see him smile. 'It suits you.'

Fitz took a single step forwards.

One of the monsters decided: half-walking, half-hopping, it loomed up in front of Fitz. The others decided too, all following it.

'Cigarette?' Fitz asked, holding the packet towards the Vore for a moment.

There was an edge of nervousness in his voice. He took one for himself.

'It's my last one, I promise.'

Fitz lit the cigarette, took a drag.

'I've always used humour as a defence mechanism,' Fitz told the monsters.

'Right now, I'd prefer body armour, but there you go.'

One of the creatures edged forwards, jaws mashing. It seemed curious about the ciggie. They'd churned up the gra.s.s as they'd come over.

Fitz took a puff.

'The thing is, the joke's on you. I beat you. The woman I love is going to get away. I saved her. For once in my life I'm the b.l.o.o.d.y hero. So I'm going out on top, yeah? I win.'

Fitz flicked the cigarette away.

The monster raised a claw. Another had shuffled into place behind him. A third was to his left, a fourth to his right. A fifth, a sixth, a seventh, an eighth, 165 a ninth. . . Well, after the first few it didn't matter any more. All of them were facing him.

'Are you lot waiting for my last words? Yeah? OK, let's have a think.'

Fitz made a show of scratching his chin.

'Got it. Here they are. The last words of Fitzgerald Kreiner, s.p.a.ce hero.' Fitz jabbed two fingers up at the nearest Vore, right in front of its face.

Then, as one, the creatures leant forward, opened their maws, expelled rasps of white vapour and Trix saw Fitz die. She didn't hear him fall, he didn't cry out or make any other sound. One moment he was alive, the next he wasn't.

He'd fought an enemy that couldn't comprehend his heroism.

He'd died saving her.

She had to get away, for it to mean anything. Trix turned and ran, faster than she'd ever run. Behind her one of the aeroplane's engines exploded, then another, then another, then the last one. The fireball obliterated the Vore, and threw Trix off her feet.

She barely noticed.

Fitz was dead.

166.

It was in these these times that the visions came of the great Black Eye. It began to be scryed in the visions of the people, watching balefully over them. Not in the past, or the future, but in overtime. Written over past, present, future, in dreams and in waking, an alternity drawn times that the visions came of the great Black Eye. It began to be scryed in the visions of the people, watching balefully over them. Not in the past, or the future, but in overtime. Written over past, present, future, in dreams and in waking, an alternity drawn across across their history of now forever. All they could do was dismiss, push the thoughts back. Their presumption was that this vision, of another kind of themselves, was a pure symbol, a their history of now forever. All they could do was dismiss, push the thoughts back. Their presumption was that this vision, of another kind of themselves, was a pure symbol, a representation representation of the actual. That such a vision, themselves erased with only five ghosts to wander lost, could become true, that under the Black Eye their primate shadows would rule the s.p.a.ces between moments, was of the actual. That such a vision, themselves erased with only five ghosts to wander lost, could become true, that under the Black Eye their primate shadows would rule the s.p.a.ces between moments, was literally literally unthinkable. unthinkable.

The quest came to consume those that followed it. The fascination fascination, in both the ancient and modern senses of the word. For a race concerned with observations and acquiring knowledge this, the all-seeing void, was the ultimate negation. Yet it empowered them, made them G.o.ds. Do nothing, they cautioned, do nothing and all will be well in heaven.

Extract from The Monkey to Time The Monkey to Time saga saga ( circa circa November 2001) by Marnal November 2001) by Marnal

Chapter Ten.

Ask Not. . .

The Doctor laughed out loud.

It was like a magic trick, or Sherlock Holmes' deductions, or the GU equation. When you put it that way it was so simple, so self-explanatory, so beautiful, so obvious that what had seemed the most Gordian problem was instantly almost mundane, and its elegance was its own proof. How had he not asked that question before?

Now he stood up. He had to tell someone.

He sat down again. No. First write it down, to be on the sate side.

He scratched out six words, autographed it with a question mark, read the six words back to himself, and he laughed and laughed and laughed.

Twenty minutes ago, the Doctor had reached a dead end in his efforts to work out what had happened. So he'd come back to the control room to act out the scene so far, to see if that triggered any a.s.sociations. Seconds before Gallifrey had been destroyed he'd done something clever with the TARDIS computer. So, to re-enact that, he'd hovered at station one, examined the library computer, toyed with a few of the b.u.t.tons. The panel and controls had been smashed by the explosion, but he was still able to retrace his steps.

It made no difference; he couldn't work out what he'd done. Cryptic clues, hints, answers not-quite spelling out other answers. It was like the hardest crossword puzzle in the universe.

So he'd sat down, cross-legged on the control-room floor, frustrated. The TARDIS was still days away from its destination.

He'd sulked for a little while, but didn't enjoy it. Instead, he reached over for the book bag and fished out one of Marnal's novels. A slip of plastic had fallen out. There was a paragraph of text, in a language that looked like Greek at first until the Doctor realised it was an equation, and solving it resulted in a short message. An extraordinary way of communicating that was half-writing, half-maths. It was only after he read it that it struck him that it ought to have been impossible for him to decipher it.

It said it was a 'matrix projection' about 'the destruction of the cicatrix' that went on to predict dire consequences for the Time Lords. The slip of plastic showed no sign of age, but the book it had been in was covered with dust and 169 looked as though it hadn't been touched for a hundred years.

The slip was an artefact from his home planet. The Doctor knew that he and the TARDIS were from Gallifrey, but this was different, somehow, because it was something new. He didn't know what the slip of plastic was referring to, and wondered if he could find out from looking up information in the handful of Marnal's books that he had with him. It hadn't taken him much longer to work out that the plastic slip was being used as a bookmark.

He'd started to read the book eagerly, but the words were drier and dustier than it was. It was a description of the 'Matrix', the Time Lords' central computer. It was amplified and panatropic, whatever that meant. It had exitonic circuitry, but the term wasn't explained. They used it to monitor the whole of time and s.p.a.ce. . . then did nothing but observe. The Doctor's eyes had slid off the page before he reached the end of the first paragraph, and his mind began to wander into stray thoughts. First, about how hard the floor was, next about how bare the room was, then about what he might do to redecorate.

Ten seconds later, ten seconds ago, he'd asked himself the right question, the one that had been eluding him. And he'd laughed.

Now the Doctor read back what he'd just written, with a real sense of triumph: What did I gain in return?

Trix thought she felt Fitz's hand on her hip, his kiss on her forehead. But she hadn't. She'd woken alone. It wasn't quite light outside and the second moon was s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up that way of telling the time, anyway. As she checked the bedside clock she couldn't work out how many hours it had been since he'd gone, with all that travelling through time zones. Her watch was still on New York time. Her nostrils and shirt still smelled of his cigarette smoke.

The owners of the little hotel at the top of the hill had been delighted to get her business, although they'd insisted on cash more than happy to take dollars.

'America's not had it so bad, has it?' the receptionist asked her.

Trix had told her about Fitz, but the woman hadn't seemed to hear. Everyone here had a strange mix of pragmatism and optimism. They thought the second moon could well disappear as quickly as it had appeared, and felt life would get back to normal. If the world was going to end, it was going to end. Their role, as they saw it, was to negotiate some sort of acceptable life between these two extremes. We are where we are.

Trix had been worn out, and hadn't wanted to outstay her welcome at the airfield. The car had been waiting there, as arranged. A nice powerful BMW, one anonymous enough to avoid police attention. She'd driven through the 170 dark, surprised at how few cars there were on the road and how normal everything else looked.

Now she was already booting up her laptop and fiddling around with phone leads. The landlines were down here, but her mobile still had a signal.

The main cloud of Vore had swept right round the world, and was somewhere on the Russian steppes at the moment. The global death toll was being put at 9,970,000. That made Trix think of shops pricing items at 9.99, to make it look as though they weren't charging a tenner. A trick that worked, of course. Ten million people had died yesterday, and the sheer scale of this was incomprehensible to her.

Trix sat back and absorbed the news. She'd spent a day coming up with worst-case scenarios. You could talk about 'millions' or even 'billions' of people, but it meant nothing. Then she thought about what a planet was, related it to what she knew about. She'd just spent fourteen hours in the air, going both ways over the Atlantic. She and Fitz had travelled across a tiny segment of the Earth to get from London to New York. It was a big planet. The planet was still here, though: all the buildings, the museums, the libraries, the statues, the graves. The plants and animals, the seas and continents. Even thinking like that, without putting faces to it, it was too much to take in at once. As with everyone else on the planet, Trix's brain hadn't caught up with everything that had happened.

She turned the TV on. Endless pictures of people mourning. No piles of dead bodies, but it was breakfast television. There were church services. The new pope hadn't made a public appearance yet, but the Vatican was insisting he was well and hadn't been taken when the swarm hit St Peter's Square.

Great swathes of the world had been completely unaffected. For some parts that had been it was just the latest in a line of natural disasters, and life had barely changed. When the famine in Darfur and rebuilding after the Asian tsunami were presented as 'life goes on as normal', you knew the world was in trouble. Cut against this were s.n.a.t.c.hed images of Vore just walking down streets. Some of them had been seen munching on plants or killing livestock.

They didn't seem to eat people, but they did occasionally grab them and carry them off into the air and none of those people had been seen again. The United Nations had declared the very first global emergency. GM-TV was listing the celebrities believed to have been killed. EastEnders EastEnders had lost more than had lost more than Coronation Street Coronation Street. Dec was fine, but there was no sign of Ant. The latest thing was a spate of unexplained injuries people finding bruises they couldn't account for. Trix checked, and was surprised to find a livid purple mark on her arm.

The pundits were still only 90 per cent certain that the Vore came from the second moon. There were good photos of it now. It was the colour of sand-171 stone, with the occasional straight groove carved in its surface, and features like stacks and mounds that looked artificial. There were no visible cities or roadways. The Americans and the Russians were considering a nuclear response, but Trix could immediately see a problem even if there was a way to get them to the moon all the nuclear bombs in the world would barely dent its surface, and the monsters didn't even live on the surface.

She felt numb, like she was watching her own life not living it.

From her car last night Trix had phoned a few family and friends, trying not to fear the worst if she couldn't get through. Anji and Greg were alive. When she'd told Anji that Fitz was dead it was the first time she'd said the words out loud, and she'd had to pull over to the hard shoulder for a cry. She'd imagined Fitz sitting in the pa.s.senger seat, making some lame remark about a shoulder to cry on. Anji couldn't think of anything to say, or any way to contact the Doctor, but gave Trix a few government and UN numbers to try. All of them had been engaged, but she'd try them again this morning.

Trix was crying again.

Another Vore skittered over the roof. There was a heavy storm under way, possibly the result of weather patterns disrupted by the second moon, possibly not. It had knocked out the electricity in the street. With so many dead there wasn't even anyone to turn on the automated message at the power company, let alone send anyone out to fix the problem.

'We shouldn't just be cowering in here,' Rachel whispered.

'You're perfectly welcome to try going back to your parents' house,' Marnal replied.

He'd spent the last hour writing his diary by candlelight, and he'd made it very clear he didn't need any help from her. They were in his library. They'd barricaded the house, moved wardrobes and other bits of furniture to block the doors and windows. From time to time a black shape would pa.s.s by a window. She a.s.sumed these were Vore, but they could have been anything.

'We should be doing something,' she insisted.

'What do you suggest?'

'You're a Time Lord. Don't you have advice or skills you could offer to the government? You can't leave investigating that new moon to NASA.'

Marnal laughed at that. 'The human race will be dead long before they've mustered the rockets they need to do that. You do realise that planets don't normally just appear like that?'

'Of course I do. Do you know why it happened?'

Marnal's full attention was back on his diary.

'You do, don't you? Are they in one of your books?'

'No,' he said, surprisingly quietly. 'Once again, you can thank the Doctor.'

172.

'I don't understand.'