She looked out across the valley, towards the monastery, sitting on its distant rock. 'That's what I want,' she repeated. 'The pod, some Kapteynian vol-au-vents, the Doctor and a vegetable peeler.'

She grinned down at Joel, who shivered uncontrollably. 'Doesn't take much to keep me happy.'

On a tree stump, somewhere in the forest, the Doctor sat, listening to a nearby stream.

He could see the water through the trees, a little way away down a gentle slope. It caught the moonlight in tiny sparkling flashes.

The water sounded like music, like a million miniature bells. The sound echoed softly from the trees, mixing with the low breathing of the wind in the leaves.

It was so calming. So quiet and random, so soft and natural. It soothed his mind, soothed away the panic and the worry. He could feel all of that built-up fear drifting away on the water, years and years of it, bubbling softly downstream.

The little girl he was holding couldn't hear it, of course.

She was so small and light it was as though he had an arm full of nothing, but he was holding her tightly, as tightly as though the lethal arrow still connected them.

'Death defies the Doctor,' he murmured, and even the words went floating downstream.

It took Chris far longer to find the grave than he would have liked. He wished he hadn't hidden it quite so well.

He crept through the forest. It was so quiet. Even the birds had been scared silent, waiting to see what would happen next.

At first he had wondered why the monastery hadn't been attacked yet, but his first look at the battlefield had given him a good idea. The two armies had annihilated each other. Part of him was glad. They wouldn't be terrorizing any more peasants. On the other hand, if Umemi and Gufuu were helpless now some other daimyo would just move in and take over.

He couldn't a.s.sume it was all over. Not yet. There might be reinforcements on the way, or even one of those other daimyo. And G.o.ddess knew what Joel 176 might be up to. They needed to open the pod, and for that they needed the Doctor.

Chris was looking so hard for the oddly shaped rock that he almost ran into a pair of Gufuu's samurai. He slipped behind a huge pine. They'd found the body of one of the enemy warriors. As he watched, one of them loosened and yanked off the man's helmet, while the other pulled his dagger out and started slicing slicing.

Chris thought about throwing up, but he was too furious with the Doctor.

He turned, putting his back to the rough bark. And saw the rock.

He crept away as the samurai concentrated on their grisly work. They'd present the head and claim the kill, though the poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d had probably been skewered by one of the arrows that had randomly hailed down through the trees. Here and there, shafts still stuck out of the soil or tree trunks.

Chris followed his trail. The rock, the marked pine. . .

The empty grave.

The freshly dug soil was scattered again, the leaves and twigs shoved to the side. Had someone dug up the Doctor's body, dirk in hand, ready to slice away his head and claim the kill?

No. The dirt had been pushed away from beneath.

He made himself look closer, making certain. The body of the little girl was gone as well. Had the samurai dug her up and taken her away? No. She wouldn't earn them any reward from an admiring daimyo.

Chris turned from the grave, stared out into the silent forest. Somewhere out there the Doctor was walking with a cold child in his arms and dirt in his hair.

Suddenly he was a lot less angry.

Penelope had finished emptying the Doctor's pockets. It had taken more than an hour. How did they make garments in the future, that they could hold such quant.i.ties of material?

Night had fallen, and the early spring air was chilly. Even Talker had sent most of her little group indoors, remaining by the pod to watch over it herself.

The stars burnt in the blackness overhead, astonishingly bright.

Penelope sat on a veranda, arranging the objects she had discovered. She could not identify many of them. It was as though, in these handfuls of knick-knacks and junk, she had the unimaginable future spread out before her.

Mr Cwej's precipitate departure had saddened her more than almost anything since the beginning of this sorry adventure. His conviction that the Doctor must still be alive was so intense intense. The lively grin with which he had announced his intentions to return to the crude grave!

177.

She had not had the heart to say a word against his plan. Worse, the Roshi had not tried to stop him either. Perhaps the holy man knew mere words would not be enough to dissuade the young man from his fantasy.

And what, Penelope Sarah Gate, will become of you?

Mr Cwej could not pilot the Doctor's time ship, as he had explained to her; with the Doctor gone, they were trapped here. The Roshi was preparing for a siege, his monks checking their narrow stocks of food. Perhaps she would be trapped here while the pod's sad story played itself out. Eventually the samurai would overrun them, and she would be slain, or worse, along with all the others caught up in this situation.

If only they knew what the pod was. The thought of the link Mr Cwej supposed she shared with it chilled her. She looked over to where Talker sat on top of the thing, as though it was a replacement for her cold and forgotten egg, buried somewhere in a distant wood.

Penelope shivered. Was the pod watching her, through some sense she could not imagine, an icy and alien mind observing her every thought and action?

They had pleaded with Talker at length, but she would not give up the object's secret. Penelope had wondered if the Kapteynian even knew what the pod was. But surely she and her comrades would not have battled so hard to reach the object if it was not of supreme importance to them.

They ought to lift up the pod, carry it outside the walls of the monastery, and leave it to be taken by the first person who wanted it.

Of course, convincing Talker of the wisdom of this sensible course of action might prove difficult. If not actually fatal.

There was a flurry of motion near one of the monastery's walls. Penelope looked up. To her astonishment, Mr Cwej was striding across the courtyard.

'You can close your mouth now,' he joked, as he walked up to her.

'I confess I did not expect to see you again.'

'I couldn't find the Doctor,' he said. He crouched down, and started rummaging through the collection of objects she had acc.u.mulated. 'I was right.

He was still alive. He'd even dug his way out of the grave.'

Penelope's hands went to her mouth. 'Mr Cwej!' she gasped. 'That is a horrible thing to say!'

He glanced up at her. 'He pretended to die. Probably to force me to take charge of this whole mess.' He looked more amused than angry. 'I might kill him myself, when I find him. Anyway, he's gone off somewhere, so we're back to square one having to cope with this by ourselves.'

He was positively jaunty. It was such a change from his earlier frightening calm and, before that, his melancholy. 'What do you have in mind?' she asked carefully.

178.

He had found the item he wanted, a flat square of coloured metal. He held it up between thumb and forefinger.

'How much does Talker trust you?'

'A little,' said Penelope.

'I think it's time we let Schrodinger's Cat out of the box.'

Talker was letting herself doze. These primitives couldn't do anything to the pod. Even less than she could do to it, without Technician, without equipment, without even this Doctor everybody kept going on about.

She didn't know what she was going to do. It wasn't fair to have involved all of these aliens in the struggle with the Caxtarid. Eventually the slaver was going to become bored with chasing them around, and then she would call for reinforcements, and that would be the end of the matter.

She clucked, agitatedly. The whole population of this backward, wet world might be in danger, if the Caxtarids took a shine to them. The humans had few technical skills, but they might still make useful slaves. Or tasty meals.

We should never have come here. Should never have made our escape. But what choice did we have?

Over and over she saw those frantic hours aboard the Caxtarid vessel. A great, long, metal ship, shaped like a needle, stabbing through hypers.p.a.ce.

There had been sixty of her species aboard, slaves fresh from Kapteyn 5, still astonished and angry and even panicked by their new condition. Forty had died in the escape attempt.

Foolish Caxtarids, to have left together so many Technicians, so many Warriors. . . but the leader of the rebellion was a mere Gardener, with reasons of her own.

She had planned everything so carefully, knowing that once the Caxtarids realized what was happening, no plan would be enough to resist their anger.

All the guards the rebels had posted, all the equipment they had h.o.a.rded, all of it meant nothing in the end.

The rebellion had started when the chimes for third shift had echoed through the vessel. Sudden and silent, the Warriors pulling on their purloined armour and grasping their stolen weapons. The Technicians silently forcing new instructions into the ship's systems. The Gardeners rising from their work in the hydroponics area with cold black eyes. All with their instructions mem-orized, plans of the ship, weak points in the Caxtarids' defences, the timetable of actions to be taken, everything.

And in the end it had been a desperate, running battle, as their plans were crushed by the Caxtarids' superior numbers and weapons and cruelty, and they'd been running for their lives to the escape pods, cut off from the small 179 fighter ships, cut off from one another, the narrow corridors crammed with the bodies of slaves and slavers.

It was nothing to be proud of. Nothing. Talker clucked again, wishing she had an egg to sit on, wishing she had a hill to pluck the weeds from on a warm afternoon. This was not what she had wanted to do with her life.

She brushed a wing over the cool metal surface of the pod. 'I can't even do anything for you,' she murmured.

The human, Misht Jate, was walking up. Talker opened her eyes, c.o.c.king her head to watch the alien.

'h.e.l.lo, Talker,' she said. 'How are you?'

'I know what you're thinking,' Talker said. 'We can't. . . do anything about the pod, so we might as well hand it over to our enemies. It won't be of any use to them, so what damage will be done?'

'I don't think we can ask you to do that,' said the human. 'And it would be your decision, Talker.'

'True,' she squawked. 'I'm the one with the gun.'

'So I suggest you run,' said Penelope.

She slapped her hand, palm first, on to the pod.

Talker looked down to the metallic object stuck to the pod. She looked back up at the human. She decided not to shoot her She leapt straight into the air and flew as far and as fast upwards as she could.

Penelope was almost knocked over by the force of Talker's explosive flight.

She leant back, watching the bird shooting up into the air like a cannon ball.

A moment later, she felt a gigantic, invisible force grab her, harder than the insane tuggings of the fourth dimension.

'Chris!' she screamed, as the force dragged her to her knees.

He was there in an instant, hovering, not sure of whether to touch her.

'Does it hurt? What's it doing?' he demanded.

But she couldn't speak. The thing dragged her bodily across the ground, knees sc.r.a.ping in the dust. Her hands flung themselves out towards the metal.

'Is it trying to communicate?' Mr Cwej was shouting. 'Can you hear anything in your mind?'

Penelope's hands were wrenched forward and slapped hard on to the metal of the pod, fingers spread. She felt the coldness of the metal, its smoothness, and then she felt a rushing power of such intensity that she thought her skull would shatter and her heart would explode and she realized that she was nowhere near ready to die yet.

Gufuu-sama ignored the pulsing pain of his wounds, coolly walking the length and breadth of his camp, taking stock of his situation.

180.

His army and that of Umemi-san had been far too evenly matched. Similar numbers, similar arms. All these years, neither of them had been able to gain the upper hand, and this battle had been no different.

He stepped inside his war camp. It was a wide, gra.s.sy area, shielded from the wind by curtains strung tautly between poles, each curtain bearing his b.u.t.terfly mark. Some of the wounded had been evacuated to nearby houses and a temple at the end of the valley, but few places in this contested territory were safe. He had ordered the rest brought here.

His doctors drifted from body to body, some of the injured warriors writhing, some still. None of them could be used in further fighting; anyone who was still capable of combat was outside, guarding the camp.

The foreign boy, Mintsu, was helping one of the doctors as he washed the wounds of a badly hurt samurai. The lad looked nauseated by the work. He had intelligence and useful knowledge, but little spirit. Still, he had managed to slay an attacker. Gufuu-sama had witnessed it himself What courage the thick of battle could inspire!

Seeing him, the lad ran up, and bowed deeply. The gla.s.s frames he wore on his face fell off, and he s.n.a.t.c.hed them up. Gufuu restrained a smile.

' O-daimyo O-daimyo,' said the boy, 'what happens now? Why haven't we gone back to your castle?'

Gufuu-sama decided to forgive the lad his rough manners, given his barbarian origins and the shock of his first battle. 'Once our reinforcements arrive,'

he said, 'we'll attack the monastery. I've sent a messenger demanding they hand over the pod, but Kadoguchiroshi is a stubborn old priest I doubt he'll capitulate. He sheltered one of my concubines after she ran away, and I couldn't even buy her back from him.'

The boy looked as though he was going to cry. Gufuu-sama sighed internally. The lad was going to need toughening up if he was going to serve. He was gazing at something behind Gufuu-sama's shoulder. . .

A moment later, there came a cry of surprise. Gufuu whirled, his sword half drawn.

It was the Doctor.

'Oh my G.o.d,' said Joel, faintly. Gufuu just stared.

The man was filthy, covered in fresh soil. His eyes blazed in his dirt-streaked face. He looked like a demon, something that had fought its way free from h.e.l.l and was here to curse them all.

In his arms, he held the corpse of a young peasant girl. Her rough clothes were soaked with blood.

'See what you've done,' he breathed, then he swayed and fell forward, on to his knees.

181.

Unturtled Out OutOUT.