'All my ministers,' the Black Man said, although he hadn't opened his eyes, and he hadn't stopped smiling. 'Not so much to say, these days.'

Homunculette stopped a couple of metres in front of the throne. 'You sell weapons?' he asked. 'People come here to buy guns from you? Is that it?'

The Black Man opened his eyes, at last. His irises, Homunculette saw, were as dark as his skin. 'They've always sold weapons in this place,' the Black Man said. 'Weapons to their friends, weapons to their enemies. Got the works. Plasma rifles. You want plasma rifles? Real ex-military. Got pistols, got mortars. Even got alien bigshot guns. Expensive, those alien bigshot guns.' His smile widened ever so slightly, and his face wrinkled up, making him look several decades older than he had before.

Having said that, Homunculette wasn't sure how old he'd looked before. 'Relics. I'm interested in relics. That's all.'

The Black Man laughed at that. The laugh was almost subsonic. 'What kind of relics you thinking of? Relics that go "boom"?'

Homunculette shook his head, then leaned forward, so he could hiss the next three words without the mannequins hearing.

'The Toy Store,' he said.

The Black Man didn't reply straight away. Homunculette watched his irises widening, blotting out the whites of his eyes. Homunculette wondered if the man was using some kind of narcotic. It'd explain the smile, anyway.

'Expensive,' the Black Man said, eventually.

'Not important,' Homunculette snapped.

The Black Man nodded. 'Whatever you say. Got most of the stuff they kept in the Toy Store. Got things the Cybermen left behind, back in the 2030s. Got real Ice Warrior relics, from before they dropped the rock. Your kind of line?'

'No. I'm looking for something specific. A box. A casket. Two metres long, made of metal. It's got '

'Sorry,' the Black Man cut in. 'Can't help you.'

Homunculette flinched. What was that supposed to mean? 'It's important,' he insisted.

'Can't help you.' The Black Man shrugged, and stretched, but he didn't stop grinning. 'Try next door. Try the zombie-men in the House of Lords. Hah-hah.'

Homunculette bared his teeth. 'Listen to me. You don't know who I represent. We want the Relic, and we know it's here. We scanned this planet's entire timeline. We worked out that this was the most opportune moment to remove it.' He emphasised the bit about scanning the timeline. If this man dealt in alien technology, he'd probably heard of the Time Lords, even if it was just as a rumour.

The Black Man didn't look impressed, though. 'Don't got it,' he said. 'Had it.'

Homunculette felt himself blanche. 'You... had it?'

'Had it. Went.'

No. No, no, no. The High Council had been sure this timeframe was the best era to seize the Relic. If the Black Man had already sold it, it meant...

...that someone else had intervened.

Someone time-active.

The enemy?

'We need it,' Homunculette gibbered. 'You don't understand. We need it. The war... if we're going to stand a chance...' He stumbled towards the throne, fists clenched, adrenaline glands working overtime. He guessed there were probably self-targeting defence systems around the chamber, homing in on him even now, but at this stage he didn't much care. The Black Man threw up his arms, presumably in a gesture of peace.

'Careful,' he said. 'Careful.' Calmly, he reached into the pocket of his topcoat. 'Matter of fact, my buyer... the man in question... said there'd be someone else turning up after the property. Left a message. See?'

He held something out for Homunculette to inspect. Homunculette blinked. It was a card, like a business card, but thinner than paper and a brilliant silver in colour. Cautiously, he took it from the Black Man's hand, then turned it over in his palm. The card was covered in scratches and swirls, which seemed to reorganise themselves as he watched, forming words in High Gallifreyan. He noticed a set of co-ordinates, apparently for a TARDIS navigational system.

'An invitation?' Homunculette queried.

'See? You want the property, you go talk to the new owner.' The Black Man leaned back on his throne. 'You want any bigshot guns, you come back, hah?'

Homunculette looked up at him, but the man had already closed his eyes. He waved at the walls, and the female voice started shaking the floor again.

'...every time we say goodbye.'

Oh look. Here comes Homunculette. He's snarling, I see. I suppose that means we'll be reporting another mission failure.

It took Homunculette almost an hour to get back to Marie. He decided it was something to do with the anarchitect moving the landmarks around, but when he told Marie this, she insisted he'd just got himself lost. 'I didn't detect any anarchitect,' she said, pointedly.

They stood in the spot where they'd arrived on Earth, next to a great grey slab of roadway on the other side of the river. In her current body, Marie was a good head taller than Homunculette, her skin the same colour as chocolate, her hair plaited behind her back. Her clothes would probably have been fashionable in the earlier half of the twenty-second century, although 2169 was a notorious fashion blackspot, apparently.

'I told you, the bridge vanished from under me,' Homunculette grumbled.

'Are you sure you didn't just fall off it?'

Homunculette gave her his best scowl. 'Open up,' he said.

Marie sighed, then drew a line across her face with her finger, from the centre of her forehead to the tip of her chin. Her head opened up obligingly, the crack unfolding into a doorway big enough to accommodate a decent-sized humanoid.

Homunculette vanished into her interior, and her face folded itself back into the usual configuration behind him. Seconds later, she dematerialised with a wheezing, groaning sound.

'Any ideas who left the invitation?' Marie asked.

Homunculette looked up. High above him, the dome of the console room resolved itself into a map of the local time contours. Marie stretched fluorescent lines between the b.u.mps and eddies, using the co-ordinates on the invite card to calculate the shortest possible route from twenty-second century England to their new destination.

'You're the one with the databanks,' Homunculette said. 'You tell me.'

Like all type 103 TARDIS units, on the outside Marie resembled an inhabitant of whatever environment she happened to land in. And like all type 103 TARDIS units, on the inside she tended to make her presence felt as a disembodied voice. Every now and then, Homunculette got the nasty feeling she was starting to develop delusions of G.o.dhood. 'I see we're heading for more Earth co-ordinates,' Marie mused, neatly changing the subject. 'I wish we could go somewhere exotic for a change. Hic! Hic! I feel like flexing my gravity compensators. If I spend one more day in a G-type environment, I'll get rickets.' I feel like flexing my gravity compensators. If I spend one more day in a G-type environment, I'll get rickets.'

'Stop complaining or I'll take you back to Dronid.'

's.a.d.i.s.t. Now, let's see. We're heading for an East Indian location, about a century in the relative past. Hmm. Actually, I don't think I've got anything suitable to wear. I have an Amazonian supermodel on file, but that's about as near to the mark as I can get. I'm going to have to pick up some decent fashion accessories once we get there.'

'We're going to have to do something about that Narcissus complex of yours,' Homunculette scowled.

'If you give an intelligent ent.i.ty a chameleon circuit, you can hardly expect her not to develop a sense of vanity. And don't bother getting comfortable, by the way. We arrived in the East Indies ReVit Zone twenty-four seconds ago, local time.'

'I know,' said Homunculette. 'I heard you hiccup. One of these days, we're going to have to get that fixed, as well.'

2.

STRANGE MEN AND THEIR COMPANIONS.

According to the calendar on her wrist.w.a.tch (j.a.panese design, capable of telling the time at thirty leagues below sea level and going "eep" right in the middle of school a.s.sembly), Samantha Angeline Jones had known the Doctor for seven months, three weeks, and six days. By Sam's reckoning, this meant he said or did something profoundly strange every 2.1 hours, on average. Including the hours when Sam was asleep, natch. Often, she'd wake up in her room on board the TARDIS in the early hours of the (relative) morning, only to discover that the Doctor had done two or three deeply inexplicable things during the night, leaving the evidence lying in messy little heaps around the ship's corridors.

But today was a good day for high strangeness, even by the Doctor's standards. Since she'd woken up, Sam had been mystified by a grand total of five different things.

Strange thing number one: the Doctor's departure. Sam had wandered into the grand dome of the TARDIS console room to find him preparing to leave the ship. The doors had been open, and he'd been standing at the threshold, straightening his jacket as if readying himself for an important boardroom meeting. He would have looked pretty smart, if it hadn't been for the grappling hook slung over his shoulder.

Strange thing number two: the Doctor's explanation. He'd looked almost embarra.s.sed when he'd seen Sam, and had accelerated his rate of jacket-straightening accordingly. 'Going for a quick game of chess,' he'd said. As he'd walked out of the TARDIS, he'd warned her not to follow him under any circ.u.mstances. Sam had obeyed his instructions, for once. Just to prove she could, really.

Strange thing number three: the computer simulation. After the Doctor had left, Sam had sniffed around the console room for a bit, for the simple reason that she didn't often get the chance to fondle the controls without having the backs of her hands slapped. She'd found a computer monitor screen set into one of the panels, a screen she'd never noticed before, so either it was a new addition to the layout or it had only recently been unearthed from beneath the bits of hardware and empty yoghurt pots that kept cluttering up the console. Like everything else on the TARDIS, the computer had looked positively anachronistic. The graphics had been bright and blocky, the kind you used to get on those c.r.a.p old microcomputers they had in schools back in the '80s.

On the display, there'd been a crude representation of an office block, a grey slab covered in big square windows. Stuck to the side of the building, tilted at ninety degrees so its base was attached to the outside wall, there'd been a rectangular blue blob. The TARDIS, Sam had guessed.

As she'd watched, an animated graphic had popped out of the building. A little pink man, tumbling from a top-floor window. The man-graphic had fallen in an arc, dropping past the TARDIS and vanishing off the bottom of the screen, while at the top of the display the computer had reeled off a series of complex equations to do with the figure's descent velocity. After a while, another man had fallen out of the window, at a different angle, but he'd also missed the TARDIS.

The little men had kept coming, until, finally, one had hit the tiny TARDIS. Immediately, the man had vanished, and the TARDIS graphic had flashed victoriously. Then the whole sequence had begun again, starting with the first, doomed, pink leaper.

Strange thing number four: the Doctor's re-entry. While Sam had been trying to figure out the point of the computer simulation, there'd been a thumping sound from somewhere behind her. She'd turned, to see the Doctor lying on his back near the TARDIS doors. He'd been sprawled at a peculiar angle, arms outstretched, as if he'd just fallen out of the sky. He hadn't been carrying his grappling hook.

Sam had folded her arms, which was what she usually did when she wanted an explanation. The Doctor had lain there a while, not moving, a huge grin plastered across his chops. Finally, he'd sat up, flicking a rogue wisp of hair out of his face.

'Internal gravity compensators,' he'd beamed. 'Do you know, I had no idea whether that would work?'

And finally, strange thing number five strange thing number five: the Doctor's sudden determination to be somewhere else. As soon as he'd picked himself up off the floor, he'd darted across to the console and had started hammering new algorithms into the systems, eventually punching (yes, actually punching) the dematerialisation switch. Even now, he was busy darting around the controls, fingering this, wobbling that. Sam hadn't unfolded her arms yet.

'Good game?' she asked, more than a little tersely.

The Doctor answered with a wave of his hand. 'He cheats,' he said. 'I'm sure he cheats. He moves pieces around between regenerations.'

'Who does?'

'The General.' He finally looked up at her, an expression of dopey-eyed concern on his face. Sam realised he was checking out her clothes. 'Are you sure that's suitable?'

Sam looked down at herself. She was wearing what she liked to think of as The Basics, a pair of M&S jeans, army boots she'd found in an Oxfam shop in Sh.o.r.editch, and a t-shirt from the TARDIS wardrobe that had apparently been very fashionable in 1976. 'No Idea. I mean, seeing as you haven't told me where it is we're going or anything.'

The Doctor glanced down at the controls again. Sam wondered if he'd already forgotten their destination. 'Borneo. East Indies ReVit Zone. Late twenty-first century.'

'Borneo? That's hot, yeah?'

'Well, quite.'

'No problem, then. Short sleeves and army boots. Good for a sunny day.'

'I said it was hot. I never said it was sunny. Expect erratic weather and severe atmospheric pollution.' The TARDIS ground to a halt as he spoke, the column at the heart of the console coming to rest with an all-conquering thunk thunk. As if the ship had run smack bang into the physical universe and bruised its nose.

Sam reached for the lever which, experience had taught her, activated the scanner. The Doctor slapped the back of her hand, and reached for an entirely different lever that did exactly the same job.

The ceiling shimmered, the dome filling up with an image of the environment outside the ship. Sam a.s.sumed this was some kind of holographic technique, although the last time she'd said that to the Doctor's face he'd grumbled something about primitive life-forms always trying to bring technology down to their own level. Which was rich, Sam had thought, coming from a man who used maser-modulated artron energy to make toast. A forest canopy painted itself across the ceiling, the branches stretching across a featureless grey sky.

'Late twenty-first century,' noted Sam. 'Some of the rainforests made it, then.'

'No they didn't. That's why this is a ReVit Zone.' The Doctor pressed another switch on the console, apparently at random. As luck would have it, the switch was the one that opened the doors.

Two and a half minutes later, Sam found out why the Doctor had asked about her clothes being suitable.

The heat wasn't the problem. A rainforest, she told herself, isn't just an English forest with the temperature turned up. The background noise, the smell, the p.r.i.c.kling feeling you get when the sweat starts pooling up under your arms and your b.r.e.a.s.t.s; it's a whole new range of experiences. Heat or no heat, she felt like she needed more clothes, like she had to put on an overcoat and/or a big floppy hat. It was a psychological thing, she realised. Clothes were a defence, a barrier between her body and the environment. She could practically feel the bacteria crawling into her system. The insect bites didn't help, either.

'Also, we're being watched,' said the Doctor, with his usual flair for pseudo-telepathy.

He was inspecting the undergrowth near the TARDIS, striding around the trees with his hands behind his back, politely avoiding the more intelligent-looking plants. Sam scanned the greenery, but the only animal life she could see was a single toucan, eyeing her up from the branches of a tree. Presumably, that was what the Doctor had meant.

'That's not what I meant,' the Doctor said.

Sam considered folding her arms again, but decided it wasn't worth the bother. 'So,what exactly are we doing in this place? Not that I desperately want to get out of here or anything.'

She emphasised the words I desperately want to get out of here I desperately want to get out of here, but the Doctor didn't take the hint. He started shaking his head. 'Something the General said. The East Indies ReVit Zone. Something to do with me. At least, that's what he implied.'

'What General?'

'The General. I get the nasty feeling there's a loose end somewhere around here, and I'm missing it.' General. I get the nasty feeling there's a loose end somewhere around here, and I'm missing it.'

The Doctor turned to the toucan, and shrugged apologetically. Sam didn't look up at the bird again. Mainly because she was worried she might see it shrugging back. 'Right. Loose ends. What do we look for, exactly?'

'We look for whatever it is the person responsible for the thing we're looking for doesn't want us to find.' The Doctor paused, to let that sink in. Or possibly for breath. 'While we were materialising, the TARDIS noticed something. Something out of phase with the normal event chronology. Have you seen Brigadoon Brigadoon, by the way? Big family spectacular. Lots of Scottish people with unconvincing accents.'

'Er... I've seen Braveheart Braveheart, if that's any good.'