Sam adjusted her scowl by a millimetre or two, then followed the Doctor. She threw the book over her shoulder as she walked, leaving it lying in the middle of the pa.s.sageway. She had a suspicion that the Doctor's pockets would be able to grow another copy at a moment's notice, if they needed to.

Homunculette poured himself another gla.s.s of whatever it was in the bottle. He wasn't sure how much of the stuff he'd drunk, but he was still in control of all his facilities. Predictably.

'Can't get drunk,' he said. 'I'm d.a.m.ned if I'm not going to try, though.' He turned to the woman sitting at the bar next to him. 'Have you been to Simia KK98, ever?'

Sheepishly, the woman shook her head.

'No. And you know why, don't you? Because you're human, that's why. Too stupid to go anywhere.' He started slooshing the stuff around in his gla.s.s, trying to make the clots of green go away. On KK98, his House had spent whole months like this. Sealed into the silos under the permafrost, waiting for the enemy probes to finish scanning the surface. His entire House. Doing their best to get drunk, or to go mad, or to do anything that'd stop them thinking for a while. Other species had it easy. Other species weren't alcohol-immune. Humans would have been able to drink themselves blind in the darkness, singing songs of affectionate comradeship and making jokes that wouldn't have been funny to anyone on this side of the consciousness threshold.

The human woman wrinkled her nose. Homunculette wondered if she was sniffing at the stuff in the gla.s.s, or at the stuff on his suit. He didn't much care. Her problem, not his.

Unless you counted the Shift, which Homuculette didn't, there was only one other person in the c.o.c.ktail lounge. The male human, Colonel something. Homunculette thought about the officers in the Time Lord Last Wave, the old men who'd force-regenerated themselves until their skins had been covered in black organic blast-proofing. Then he thought about the fat idiot in the green shirt, sitting at a table at the back of the lounge, staring into s.p.a.ce. The contrast was almost laughable.

The c.o.c.ktail lounge was yet another stone-walled room near the heart of the ziggurat, this one fitted with a bar and more drinks cabinets than Homunculette could be bothered counting. The furnishings didn't match the style of the architecture, here. Even if you were in the middle of the Unthinkable City, Qixotl had said, a c.o.c.ktail lounge had to look like a c.o.c.ktail lounge. There were some laws of the universe that just couldn't be broken.

The human woman nervously shifted her backside around on her fake wooden bar stool. 'It's kind of interesting,' she said, obviously forcing herself to make polite conversation. 'The way you drink. You look very... human. Uhh. Or is that an insult where you come from?'

'What do you you think?' Homunculette slurred. think?' Homunculette slurred.

'No, but really, what I meant was... oh, G.o.d G.o.d.'

Something had distracted the woman, had made her look towards the doorway. Homunculette thought about turning to see what she was gawping at. He spent a few moments wondering if it was worth the bother. In the end, he decided that even if it wasn't worth the bother, he'd enjoy complaining about having to make the effort. So he turned.

And spilled his drink.

There were two people standing in the doorway. Something moved around in Homunculette's bowels, the result of a deep-rooted atavistic terror as old as civilisation itself. He felt a wave of interest ripple across the chamber, the Shift's way of p.r.i.c.king up its ears.

The female newcomer lifted her veil, and removed the mask she wore beneath the fabric. It was real bone, Homunculette realised, the front half of a genuine skull. The face under the mask was young, unquestionably human. The woman was in her twenties, her cheekbones sharp triangles under a layer of pale white skin. Red hair was drawn back across her forehead and tied behind her neck. Her eyes were soft, wide, green. Her features weren't as harsh as you'd expect for someone who walked around dressed as a dead bat. To Homunculette, she looked more like a child than anything else. Ready to believe whatever fairy stories she liked the sound of.

'Good afternoon,' she said, politely. Her voice was soft. Cultured. 'My family name is Cousin Justine. This is Little Brother Manjuele. The Spirits are with us, and we hope you'll behave accordingly.'

The security centre was, logically, the best-defended part of the ziggurat; from here, you could shut off all the City's defences, including the ones around the Relic. Mr Qixotl knew hoped, anyway the systems would be homing in on him as he shuffled towards the chamber, taking the appropriate biological samples. As always, he experienced a moment of pure paranoia at the doorway of the room, and thought about what might happen if the defences didn't recognise him for some reason. Nothing tried to rip his head off as he stepped through the doorway, though, so he calmed down a bit.

He'd been in Trask's room when the alarms had sounded. He'd been able to hear the toucans, even from the depths of the ziggurat, screeching their parson's noses off out in the forest. Trask had kept talking, regardless.

Mr Qixotl. I have an offer. A personal offer. To make. To you.

Qixotl should have broken off the conversation right there and then, should have scurried off to check the defences. But it was hard, getting away from Trask. Yeah, sure, he made you feel like every living cell in your body wanted to be on the other side of the planet, but when it came to making your muscles move... when you were around Trask, the atmosphere always felt kind of sticky, like the air had died and putrefied in his presence.

Better this way. In private. A private meeting.

So Qixotl had stood there, like a great fat dead thing, watching Trask's jaw bobbing up and down until he'd finished his spiel. He still hadn't got to grips with the deal Trask had suggested. Most of the bidders would be offering technology, weapons data, information, but Trask...

Qixotl. Think. Think about this. Very carefully.

The security centre was, like every other room in the ziggurat, made out of mathematically replicated stone. But the other areas were built for the comfort and convenience of the guests, whereas the security centre was designed to be as repulsive as possible. Currents of cold air swept around the walls, pumped into the chamber through hidden ventilation shafts, the oxygen laced with negative ions, so you felt like there were things crawling over your skin all the time. Bronze gargoyles squatted in the corners, making disgusting rasping noises and breathing out noxious fumes. The room was hung with tapestries, too, depicting various scenes of degradation, mutilation, and humanoid sacrifice. Mr Qixotl had programmed the fibres to move about when they knew no one was looking, so the eyes didn't so much follow you around the room as keep looking over your shoulder in a "behind you!" kind of way.

In the centre of the chamber was the master console. It looked seriously out of place here, 100 per cent state-of-the-art designer hardware, too complex to disguise as a chunk of stone. Mr Qixotl shambled across to the controls, and tapped his foot impatiently as a customised pixscreen began to rise from the surface of the console. The pixscreen gave him the low-down. Something had materialised near the City wall, in resonance with the Brigadoon circuit. Two biological units had left the capsule, and they'd been pursued by the leopards for several minutes before...

Before they'd simply stopped registering. According to the pixscreen, they no longer showed up on the security scan. At least, not as intruders. Mr Qixotl's toes stopped tapping. Outside, the toucans weren't screaming any more. If the intruders had been killed, their bodies would still have registered as alien biodata. Even if the leopards had eaten them, there'd be some kind of trace.

The pixscreen was non-reflective, which was a pity, as Mr Qixotl was quite interested in knowing whether he'd actually gone pale.

His fingers flew across the console, coaxing and cajoling the controls until the pixscreen gave him a visual representation of the biodata inside the security system. The invite cards had been designed to take surface traces from the bidders and transmit the information back to the City's datacore, so the biodata of all those who should have been attending the auction was kept in memory. Qixotl watched the information waltz across the screen. Most of the biodata was human. The two UNISYC reps, the Faction Paradox people (human-plus), Homunculette (human-plus-plus-plus-plus)...

There were two unfamiliar traces on the screen. Mr Qixotl felt his body temperature drop by a good ten degrees. n.o.body should have been able to insert new data into the works, not that quickly. To do something like that, you'd need to be biodata ultra-aware. Even a Time Lord wouldn't have been able to manage it. Well, a Time Lord President, maybe, someone who'd worn the Sash of Ra.s.silon and fingered the Great Key, but apart from that...

Oh no.

Not him. Please.

One of the two alien biodata readings was human. Qixotl knew this only because it was so similar to the UNISYC readings. The second trace was different.

He knew that trace. He'd seen it before. The last time he'd seen it, it had been more erratic, a more complex pattern, but there was no mistaking it.

'Him,' Qixotl said, and his voice echoed around the walls of the chamber, becoming a series of hideous slippery noises. 'It's him. It's him him.'

Faction Paradox shouldn't have been on Earth. Come to think of it, Faction Paradox shouldn't have been anywhere, really.

Somewhere in the back of the Doctor's cerebellum, automatic processes were listening out for Sam's footsteps. She was still there, somewhere behind him in the corridor. Nothing to worry about, then, not yet. The rest of his mind could concentrate on more important...

No.

...on more critical matters.

Back on Gallifrey, in the days when the skies had been the kind of orange you only ever seem to get in childhood memories, the Spirits of the Faction had been numbered among Time's bogeymen, like Ra.s.silon's Mimic or the Great Vampires. Now he'd run into them, twice, within a couple of decades. Twice in two regenerations.

Perhaps it was sheer chance. Or perhaps something had happened to the universe, something so large you couldn't spot it from down here at ground level. Some great cataclysmic event, scattering the Faction's agents across the continuum. The Doctor imagined them infiltrating the whole of history, even infiltrating his own past. Reshaping the timelines so that he kept running into them, time and time again.

Did he have the same history he woke up with, he wondered? Had he ever met the General, before today, or had the man been slotted into his life while he'd been asleep?

Had Sam been here, yesterday?

Had he he been here? been here?

Maybe fourdimensional voodoo-cults were like buses. You waited all eternity for one, and then... the Doctor shook his head, forced himself to concentrate on the matter in hand. No time for flippancy. He still had to work out what was happening here in the twenty-first century. The City wasn't the Faction's work. If the cult had designed the ziggurat, it would have been covered in dried blood and screaming skulls.

The Doctor's automatic processes told him to stop walking. He did as the processes told him, and listened. Consciously, this time. Sam was still trotting along behind him, so obviously, something else had alerted his senses. What?

The Doctor turned. To the left. Acting on instinct.

A staircase was set into an alcove there, a set of hard stone steps leading up to the next level of the ziggurat. There was someone standing a few steps up, staring at him. He would have jumped, if he hadn't had several centuries' experience of being crept up on.

The woman was tall. Tanned. Amazonian, even. Not attractive, but well-designed, the same way early twenty-first century automobiles were well-designed, all sleek lines and aerodynamic curves. She was South American, if her clothes and skin tone were anything to go by. She stood absolutely still, not even blinking. A less experienced observer might have a.s.sumed she'd been physically trained, maybe as one of those glamorous female a.s.sa.s.sins human beings seemed to get such a kick out of. The Doctor knew better, of course. The woman was giving off no biodata signals. Organically, a complete blank.

Almost automatically, he grinned, and extended his hand. 'Good afternoon. You must be in charge around here. I was wondering if you could help me. I think I'm a bit lost.'

The woman didn't respond. The Doctor tried to guess what was going through whatever she had for a mind. He tried not to think about Sam. If he even glanced back along the pa.s.sage, the woman would notice the eye-movement.

He withdrew his hand. 'Ah. Of course. Formal introductions. I was forgetting. How do you do, I'm '

He finished the sentence there, because he guessed that if the woman was a security unit, as he suspected this would be the point at which she'd get sick of his blathering and go for the throat. He expected her to lash out at him, or try to pin him to the ground, or at the very least demand to see his pa.s.sport.

He definitely didn't expect her to open up her face and unfold it into a gaping black chasm larger than her entire body. However, this is exactly what she did.

'What the h.e.l.l are they they doing here?' the alien called Homunculette was screaming. doing here?' the alien called Homunculette was screaming.

Bregman tried to figure out the best way of retreating into a corner without anyone noticing her. A couple of minutes ago, the lounge had been quiet, and she'd been close to opening up a meaningful dialogue with Homunculette, albeit a meaningful dialogue in which he kept slagging her off for being a primitive ape-descendant (which begged the question, what was he descended from, exactly?). Even though the letters on the beermats had kept shifting around, trying to get her attention, Bregman had been on the verge of thinking this "first contact" business wasn't going to be as hard as she'd expected.

But everything had gone very wrong very quickly. The two bat-faced people had arrived, and Homunculette had suddenly started shouting and swearing at them. At his table, Colonel Kortez had tensed up, his sweaty arms flexing under his shirt, ready for combat. Even the beermats had tried to retreat.

Finally, Mr Qixotl had hurried into the room. So far, Bregman hadn't seen him walk anywhere.

Qixotl thrust his hands deep into the pockets of his suit. He looked like he'd been expecting something like this, sooner or later. 'Not sure what your problem is, Mr H. If you've got, y'know, some kind of personal problem '

'Faction Paradox! Faction Paradox, for... I mean, look at them! Look!' Homunculette waved his hand at the skull-people, who hadn't moved an inch since he'd begun his rant. "Cousin Justine", her mask held between delicate black-gloved fingers, seemed alert. Even interested. But not insulted.

'We received an invitation,' Cousin Justine told Homunculette, softly. 'Please. There's really no need to be afraid.'

Homunculette spluttered at her, but didn't get as far as forming any words. Bregman realised he was holding an empty bottle in his hand, and for one nasty moment she thought he was going to chuck it.

'We should be introduced,' said Colonel Kortez.

All eyes turned on him. The Colonel was standing, facing the two Faction Paradox people. Bregman wondered if he was about to have another funny turn.

'Colonel Joseph Kortez,' he went on, snapping to attention. 'UNISYC. On behalf of the people of Earth, welcome to our small and beautiful planet.'

Bregman winced. It wasn't a full rendition of the "Greetings, BEM" speech from the UNISYC handbook, but it was bad enough. Nonetheless, Cousin Justine nodded graciously.

Homunculette snorted. 'You're wasting your breath. She's as human as you are. No, I take that back. She's less less human than you are.' human than you are.'

Cousin Justine looked unshaken. 'We've come on behalf of the Faction. On behalf of the Spirits, and on behalf of the Grandfather himself. I renounce my humanity for the sake of the family.'

'Spirits?' repeated Colonel Kortez. He sounded genuinely interested. Bregman remembered what she'd heard about him back in Geneva. After Saskatoon, he'd spent a year in India, on one of those spiritual discovery missions the military psychiatrists were always talking about. UNISYC had very nearly put him in the Zen Patrol, after that, which was second-best to a spell in a padded room with soft furniture. Bregman had the horrible feeling this conversation was about to get mystical, big style.

Homunculette started s...o...b..ring again before Cousin Justine could answer. 'The Faction's a voodoo cult. Just like your voodoo cults on this rear-end of a planet.'

'We have similar customs,' Justine agreed. 'But, with respect, the family aspires to greater things. We have no dealings with the Spirits of Earth. Only the Spirits of Paradox.'

'"Aspires"?' Homunculette squawked, practically spitting on his opponent, even though they were metres apart. 'You're a bunch of thugs, that's all. Criminals who got lucky. You only wear that... that...' Homunculette gestured towards Justine's mask, presumably not being able to find a suitable word for it. 'You only wear that that because you want to scare people. Spirits, my backside.' because you want to scare people. Spirits, my backside.'

For the first time, Cousin Justine looked genuinely offended. 'Then we have a conflict of beliefs,' she announced, somehow managing to keep her voice level.

Kortez was nodding his head off. Mr Qixotl was slowly edging his way back out of the room. Homunculette was still snarling. 'You stole everything you know from us. Your whole... grubby little gang... only exists because of our technology. Go on, try and deny it.'

'That's not '

'Look. See that? You see it?' Homunculette was looking around the room for support, his finger shaking as he pointed at the bone mask. 'Tell them what it is,' he demanded. 'Go on. Tell them.'

Cousin Justine looked away, only for a moment. 'It's a skull,' she admitted.

'What of? Tell them. What's it the skull of?'

Justine looked uneasy. 'The skull of a Time Lord.'

'Hah!' Homunculette whirled around, like a lawyer who'd just made a devastating attack on the accused. 'See? That's my people she's talking about. My people.'

Bregman gawped. The mask was wider than Homunculette's whole head. She imagined a skull just like it, writhing under the man's skin, bursting out at the edges. Time Lords had dimensional engineering, according to the UNISYC files. Did they have heads that were bigger on the inside than on the outside, or what?

'The Time Lords fought a great war, many years ago,' Cousin Justine explained, addressing the other representatives en ma.s.se en ma.s.se. 'They won. If they'd lost, by the grace of Time, then this is how they would have looked.' She raised the mask a little.

Homunculette snorted again. 'That mask shouldn't exist in this timeline. You see how dangerous they are? Even their headgear breaks the Laws of Time. Even their headgear.' He started laughing, for no immediately obvious reason. Bregman wondered if he was getting hysterical.

Cousin Justine merely nodded. 'Of course. There's great power in these totems. The Time Lords would have us destroy things that shouldn't exist. Only the family understands their value.'

'Oop,' said Mr Qixotl.

Immediately the focus of the situation changed. Mr Qixotl had backed out of the doorway, trying to get as far away from the argument as possible. Unfortunately, he'd backed into someone coming up the pa.s.sage.

Suddenly, all of Bregman's anxieties, about the ziggurat, about the auction, about the aliens, completely dissipated, only to be replaced with one simple and terrible new sensation. Full-blown body anxiety.

Kathleen Bregman was pale-skinned, 163 centimetres tall, and had hair that stuck together in ugly clumps whenever it was exposed to daylight. She wasn't technically unfit, but whenever UNISYC ran a standard physical QRT her test scores hovered ominously around the 0.6 mark, and she'd never told anyone about the pains in her guts or the needles in her legs when she did the ten-kilometre survival run. Whereas, by contrast, the woman who'd walked into the room was tall, bronzed, and in a very real sense perfect. She wasn't even attractive, as such. The way she moved told the world she didn't need to be attractive. If supermodels were as cool as they thought they were, Bregman decided, then this was how they'd look.

The woman manoeuvred past Mr Qixotl without breaking her stride, brushed past the Faction Paradox representatives without a second glance, and stopped in front of Homunculette.

'There may be a problem,' she told him.

Homunculette dropped the bottle. It bounced. 'Problem? What kind of a problem?'

'An intruder.'