'And you're not one of the enemy?'

'That depends where you're standing,' said the alien. 'Enough about me. What about you?'

He ll of a question. 'I think I'm dying,' he said.

'Hmm. You're badly wounded, certainly. Your suit's never going to dance again. But I don't think the damage to your inner body is irreparable.'

'You're a doctor?'

A pause. 'You should try to relax. Stay still. Stay calm. Wait for help.'

'There isn't going to be any help,' he said. And he could tell the vocal cords were starting to malfunction, because the words sounded flat, empty, and metallic.

The alien tutted. 'There's always help, somewhere in the universe. There's an old story about a tailor, a fieldmouse, and a hatpin...'

So the alien started telling him the story. He tried to follow it, he did his best not to think about what was happening to him, but everything was so hard to focus on, tailors and fieldmice and hatpins, and once upon a time there was the cold, and it was so cold it almost hurt, even though there were no working nerves left in his body, and it was so hard to see, so hard to stay awake...

Darkness.

'...hear me?' said the alien.

Somehow, he managed to open his eyes. There were shapes in front of him, blobs of pink and black, but his retinae were starting to mist over, so he couldn't tell which parts of his body he was looking at. There was a man-sized outline standing over him, and he took it to be the alien, although the figure was too blurry to make out any details.

'Blacked out,' he said.

'Yes. I thought so.' The alien blur shifted a little. 'Try to stay conscious. I'm sorry I can't do more for you myself. I don't really know much about Gabrielidean biology. One of those things I never got around to reading up on. Liquid life-forms aren't really my forte.'

He tried moving one of his limbs, to see if he still could. He didn't feel anything, though, so he had no way of telling if he'd succeeded. 'Injector,' he told the alien. 'Need a medical injector.'

'Yes. That's a thought.' The alien blur wobbled. Patting the pockets of a jacket, maybe. 'Ah. I thought perhaps I could improvise one out of a human hypospray kit, but I don't seem to have a human hypospray kit on me. I'm sure I owned one, at some stage. I wonder where I put it? Bearing in mind that this is an emergency, it'll probably be in the last place I look. Isn't it always the way? I did have a winklegruber neural parameter predictor, once. Always came in handy in situations like this.'

'A what?' he said. There was an ugly grinding noise from his throat when he spoke.

'A winklegruber neural parameter predictor,' the alien elaborated. 'Very useful piece of technology. You tell it what you're looking for, and it works out the last place you'd think of searching. All you have to do then is look where the predictor tells you to look, and you're bound to find whatever it is you're after.'

Well, the alien was doing a good job of keeping him distracted, anyway. 'Use it now,' he hissed. 'The predictor. You could use it now.'

'Oh, I don't have it any more. I lost it. I would search for it, of course, but...'

'...it's going to be in the last place you look,' he said, and he was frankly amazed he could still manage whole sentences like that.

'Precisely.'

He tried to nod. As a result, the head of his human suit rolled right off its shoulders and landed face-down in the snow.

'Are you all right?' asked the alien.

'Yes. Please. Tell me something.'

'Go on.'

'Help isn't really coming, is it?'

There was a period of silence, during which he almost blacked out again. 'I don't know,' the alien said, eventually. 'The others in your platoon were killed by the satellites. I'm sorry. I should think your people will be sending an emergency capsule soon. They'll want to find out if there are any survivors.'

He tried to look up, but he couldn't. He was seeing through the eyes of a severed head, staring down at the snow underneath him. There was nothing but white. A universe of white. He felt his senses switching themselves off, in a desperate attempt to shut out the blankness.

'Thank you,' he said.

'You're welcome,' the alien told him, softly.

Darkness.

When he next regained consciousness, he was alone, but at least there were colours in front of his face again. Somehow, his human head had been turned on its side. He wondered if the alien had done it. To let him have one last look at the world around him.

Simia KK98. He didn't even know why he was here. Until yesterday, he'd never been posted anywhere further afield than Terra Neutra. All of a sudden, the government was mobilising the warships, making plans for full-scale planetary a.s.saults. Something to do with some deal they'd made. The Time Lords were asking the Gabrielideans to send units all over the galaxy, taking out an installation here, a weapons dump there. The Nth Platoon had been dispatched to KK98 because, apparently, their enemies felt the planet to be of strategic importance, and already had a small automated outpost there. If the platoon had survived the mission, it would have been sent straight to Dronid, in time for the big offensive. Dronid. Or "War Zone One", as they were calling it now.

The snow started blowing up again. He couldn't feel it on his skin, but he could see the flakes sticking to his eyeb.a.l.l.s. He couldn't even close the lids. Perhaps he'd been better off lying face-down, after all.

There was nothing more for him to see. He decided to detach his brain from the suit. Human senses weren't going to do him much good now.

He flexed a nerve, tugged himself free of the false skin. The head shut itself down.

Darkness.

Darkness. This wasn't a memory any more. He was here, in the depths of the darkness, being taken apart, thought by thought. There were others here, he could see them, even though he no longer had any eyes. They were the ones he'd heard whispering. The ones who'd rescued him from Simia KK98. They were gathered around what was left of his true body, gazing down at him with pale, hard faces. They were all dressed in robes, flowing robes with high collars...

Time Lords? The Time Lords wore costumes like these, he'd heard. Had his allies rescued him? Was it really that simple?

'...process seems to be working,' one of the robed figures was saying. 'It's the same kind of procedure we're using to make the anarchitects, but applied to a living subject. Not difficult, once you know how to handle the Celestis' technology.'

'Won't he turn against us when he finds out who we are?' another asked.

'It. Not he. It's purely conceptual. Gender doesn't mean anything to it, now.'

'But will it turn against us?'

No. No. Not Time Lords. Those weren't the robes of the High Council. They were parodies of Gallifreyan costumes, worn by beings that had nothing but contempt for Time Lord society. Which could only mean...

'Not a concern,' the first creature said. 'It was a professional soldier, in its former life. Practically a mercenary. I'm sure we can convert it to our cause. I told you it was the ideal subject, didn't I? We could have extracted it from the timeline sooner, but I wanted to wait until it had met the Doctor. To let it get the biodata scent, so to speak. We'll let it keep that particular memory.'

It? Was he an it, now, like the creature had said? It tried to speak, although it didn't have a mouth. It only had its thoughts, but its thoughts were enough. It reached out for its captors, and felt raw ideas shift inside their heads, making way for its message.

'WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?' it demanded.

The beings seemed shocked. It could feel their thoughts brushing against it, concepts rubbing and jostling as it settled in their perceptions.

'Not yet,' the first of the figures said. 'Not yet. You're not ready for your instructions. You still have a few traces of your old ident.i.ty left. We have to remove them.'

'WHAT DO YOU MEAN?'

But the beings didn't say another word. It felt the last remaining fragments of its past vanishing from its non-existent brain, the memories of its former life as a Gabrielidean plucked out and discarded with surgical precision. Soon, there would be nothing. No flesh, no mind, no ident.i.ty.

Darkness.

12.

SHIFTWORK.

There was a humming in the air. To most ears, it would have sounded something like an engine, but Colonel Joseph Kortez preferred to liken it to the constant and unchanging vibration of the one true will of the universe. He considered humming along with it, but decided this probably wasn't the time.

He stepped through the archway, out of the ziggurat and into the pavement-coloured daylight of the ReVit Zone. According to the Colonel's watch, it was early evening in the East Indies, but the sun still seemed to be under the impression it was lunchtime. The other buildings around the City enclosure didn't cast shadows, he noticed. Presumably, time had a special relationship with the Unthinkable City. The world never turned around here, the sun never did anything as impolite as making shade. He wondered if it had been the same in Brigadoon.

Before he even had time to meditate on that, the ground was wrenched open in front of him. All of a sudden, everything smelled of melted plastic.

Kortez turned. He was far enough away from the ziggurat to be able to see the roof, plus the ugly black shape hovering over it. The humming, Kortez realised, was the ship's drive mechanism. A tiny point of green light opened up on the underside of the vessel, then widened. Much like the third annihilating eye of Shiva, in the Colonel's view.

Another explosion. Kortez raised his arms to his face, to protect his eyes from the blast. Only then did he notice that his hands were burning.

The black ship had opened fire, scorching the ground from its vantage point above the ziggurat. Kortez had been on the edge of the blast. He would have called himself lucky, if he hadn't known it was nothing to do with luck and everything to do with the natural balance of karmic law. The fire had seared his hands, but there hadn't been any pain. The swords used by the warrior-philosophers of ancient j.a.pan had been sharp enough to amputate a man's leg without him feeling a thing, Kortez had heard. The ship's weapons were just as efficient, just as painless. The skin on his hands was charred, the flesh underneath sizzling, the nerves entirely burned out. The fire seemed to be spreading, working its way up his veins like a spark on a fusewire.

Overhead, the ship opened up its annihilating eye again. What pa.s.ses must pa.s.s, Kortez told himself, but now wasn't the time of his pa.s.sing. There was no way he could make it to the City gates without being taken out by hostile fire his karma wasn't that that good so the only way was back, into the shelter of the ziggurat. He made a run for it. The fire burst across the ground where he'd been standing, then spread, so he could feel the heat licking at his back. good so the only way was back, into the shelter of the ziggurat. He made a run for it. The fire burst across the ground where he'd been standing, then spread, so he could feel the heat licking at his back.

He was beginning to feel pain, at last. A slow, uneasy throbbing in his arms. But pain, he reminded himself, was not an issue. In the grand karmic scheme of things, he was a soldier, and a soldier understood nothing but his duty. He leapt towards the ziggurat entrance.

The Doctor practically bounced back into the hall, as did his little companion. Qixotl felt like giving both of them a good slap.

'It's no use,' the Doctor told the bidders. 'E-Kobalt's blocked off the stairway. The air's full of Kroton supercorrosive. Is there another way up?'

All eyes turned on Qixotl. That had been happening a lot recently, and Qixotl was getting fed up with it. 'Uh, no. Can't we clear this corrosive stuff away or anything?'

'Well, I could use an EHF variable phase signal to readjust its cellular structure.' The Doctor patted his pockets. 'Unfortunately, my sonic screwdriver seems to have deserted me again. It can be a bit temperamental, sometimes.'

'Again, I'm not sure I understand our situation,' said Cousin Justine. 'Are we to believe the Shift intends to attack us? If so, does the Kroton vessel have sufficient power to damage the ziggurat?'

Qixotl tried to skulk off into the shadows, before anyone started asking him how tough the building was. Technically, the place was built out of block transfer calculations; local s.p.a.ce-time had been remodelled using sheer mathematics, no actual physical materials had been used. In theory, mundane weapons weren't supposed to be able to do any damage to the City. In practice, Qixotl hadn't had time to check his maths, and he suspected his calculations might have been slightly off-centre. The way things stood, he doubted it'd take much force to make the City come apart at the seams. Really, he'd been counting on the defensive systems to stop that kind of thing happening.

Fortunately, n.o.body was paying him the slightest bit of attention. 'I'm not sure,' the Doctor mused. 'But even if the ziggurat's safe, there's a chance that '

'The Shift won't let us out,' reported Colonel Kortez.

The Colonel stood in the main archway of the conference hall, his hands stretched out in front of him, as if he wanted to keep a close eye on what they were doing. Qixotl winced when he saw the injuries.

The Doctor looked surprised. 'Colonel? Where have you been?'

'Outside. On a mission to recon the area surrounding the ziggurat, with special regard for traps, ambushes, or enemy emplacements. As ordered.'

'Ordered? Ordered by whom?'

Everybody looked at Qixotl, again. Qixotl shrank back even further. 'Look, I just said it might be a good idea to check out the rest of the City, right? I mean, y'know, you can't be too careful.'

The Doctor shot daggers at him. Not literally, of course, although Qixotl could easily imagine how he'd look with cybernetic bolt-firers grafted into his skull. 'You mean, you wanted to see if the Shift would shoot at anyone who left the building.'

'Don't look at me like that,' Qixotl mumbled.

The Doctor turned back to Kortez. 'Apparently, the Shift wants us to stay right where we are. I'm sorry, are you all right?'

'Pain is not an issue,' the Colonel informed him.

'Oh. Good. Well, anyway, we'll have to find another exit. My TARDIS is somewhere out in the rainforest, I'm afraid.'

Homunculette snorted. 'Don't look at me. Marie's not going anywhere.'

'We weren't looking at you,' Cousin Justine pointed out.

Homunculette rounded on her. 'What about you, then? How did you get in here? One of the Faction's little TARDIS mock-ups, was it?'

Qixotl clicked his fingers. 'Yeah, right! Your, what d'you call it, your shrine. It can get us out of the City, yeah?'

By Justine's side, Little Brother Manjuele clenched his teeth. 'No way,' he growled. 'No way you comin' with us.'

The Doctor held up a placating hand. 'Needs must when the devil drives. Cousin?'

Justine dabbed her face with a black silk handkerchief. Her skin was still speckled with blood, after the four-way fight earlier on. 'Very well.'