The ambit of Belannia XII was a dangerous place to live at the best of times. At the worst of times it was a nightmare. Right now, things were so far past 'worst' it made the combined final voyages of the White Star liners seem like a Sunday punting expedition along the Cambridge ca.n.a.ls.

Sam stood in the medical bay of the fleet flagship and tried to get her breath. She was drenched in sweat, ached in every atom of every bone. Her muscles screamed with fatigue. She felt like screaming with them.

Seventeen hours in a s.p.a.cesuit does that to you.

Seventeen hours dragging survivors from the wreckage of their towns, their worlds, the last of them quite mad and probably dying of radiation exposure; seventeen hours existing on stimulants and very strong tea and...

... and now she was paying the price.

Sick, shaking, she felt as if she had a bad dose of pneumonia. But she couldn't stop. There was work to do. More people left to save.

She shouldn't be here. She shouldn't be looking at them. Another dose of stimulants would keep away the symptoms of fatigue long enough to get the job done. That's all she had come here for. More pills. Not to watch a father and son die.

They lay side by side on emergency pallets, among the worst of the injured. Mercifully there were few - most serious injuries had resulted in death by the time the fleet had arrived. But these two... They caught her and held her. As they lay dying, she could see how they must have been in life. The father, a strong man, driven to protect his family; when they'd found him he'd been near death, curled around his newborn son, clearly trying to batter his way into the already overcrowded shelters. How could he know that he'd already received a lethal dose of the radiation currently washing through the ambit of Belannia Xn? As for his son, the baby was as close to death as anything she had seen. Closer even than Danny had been. And so much smaller, so much more helpless.

How could she let them die?

How could she?

A nurse approached holding a tumbler of water and a handful of pills. 'You shouldn't really be doing this,' she said, in what Sam considered to be the completely unnecessary way of nurses.

'And they shouldn't really be dying,' was her own too-quick, too-slurred response.

The nurse said nothing, merely held out the medication. Sam sighed and apologised.

The nurse nodded.'How many more?'

Sam swallowed the pills and gulped water.'Too many.'

She looked back at the father and son lying side by side, saw the machines entering them, keeping their bodies alive, fighting the inevitable, prolonging life beyond its natural limit. She couldn't bear it. She turned away, then immediately turned back, impaled upon the vision, crucified upon it, unable to let it go.

Soon, the pills began to work in her head, sluicing away the depression, the grainy vision, the ache of exhaustion; the protestations of a body already pushed well past its own natural limits. The medical bay leapt back into sharp focus. Every colour, every shape, perfect. Perfect detail. Perfect clarity. Gla.s.s-sharp, ice-cold thoughts trickled through her mind, increasing rapidly to a torrent, a waterfall of decision.

She took the nurse by the arm, unaware that her grip would leave bruises. Without taking her eyes off the dying family she ordered, 'Get me Saketh. Do it now. These people are going tolive .'

He entered the medical bay like the fall of night, a physical presence of undeniable proportions, and Sam wondered how she could have forgotten so quickly what it felt like to be in that presence, to be surrounded by it and moved by it so deeply that no words could ever express it. She felt it so powerfully that it even competed momentarily with the drugs running through her system, the interference producing a moment of calm, like that at the heart of a storm, a moment in which directionless energy and desperate hope combined to form a single nexus of clarity, a single thought - was she doing the right thing? - before being washed away in the mad rush that always accompanied her vision of him.

She blinked. He was beside the medical tables, peering down with stern intensity of thunderclouds at the dying people. He studied them intently, waiting for something. Sam wondered what. She waited. The monitors bleeped. Saketh said nothing. Sam waited. Time seemed to stretch out, a thin line drawing thinner, the most fragile of connections between now and the future.

Then Saketh turned.

'You want me to save them as I did the other child?'

'Yes,' Said Sam.

'I cannot.'

Sam blinked. The words seemed not to register. No? Had he said no? Why would he - She looked up: Saketh was beside her. He took her hand. She pulled it away. 'You ask yourself why I will not save them when I saved the child you held?'

'I... yes!'

His expression was patience itself. 'The moment of epiphany is never forced. It must be invited.'

Sam found her head shaking with manic in tensity.'No. No that's c.r.a.p. No, I'm not buying that.You can save them.You saved Danny - I don't know how you did it but you did it - and you can save these two. It's a father and his son! Doesn't that mean anything to you?'

'Of course.'

'Then tell me why! '

A moment of consideration. 'Because you do not know for certain they were trying to enter the shelter. They might have been trying to leave. If that was the case their decision is already made. I cannot change it. They would not want me to.'

Sam bit off a furious answer, because in her heart she knew that Saketh was right. There was no way to find out. No way to tell.

There were so many other injured and so little time in which to try to find them that even if there had been witnesses to the tragedy of this small family there was no way of determining who they were, whether they had survived, and on which of the eighty-three ships of the fleet - some of which were carrying thousands of refugees - they now were.

Saketh was right.

Sam bit her lip until she drew Mood. The sharp taste thundered in her head. Blood. It was all about blood. Her Mood was hot and clean. Their blood was infected, the cells and proteins damaged by radiation, blasted by invisible cannon fire. They were going to die. How was she going to deal with that? How could she? It was out of her control. How could she bear that thought. They were there. Before her. Alive. She could touch them. Feel the heat of their bodies. Feel the pulse in their veins, the Mood in its slow life-surge through the endless loop. But they were dying, the surge of blood bringing only death to the cells of their body. Cancerous mutations, evolution run wild and out of control, the force that drives life into its future now driving them to their deaths.

Saketh was right.

'There is a way.'

What hope could there be for - 'What did you say? '

'There is a way.'

'What is it?'

'You must make the decision for them, and bear the responsibility for that decision afterwards.'

'Fine. Do it.' Sam did not hesitate.

'I cannot. Not to them.'

'Don't play b.l.o.o.d.y games with me, Saketh.'

'Life is not a game, Sam.'

'You just said you can save them.'

'You were not listening. I said you can save them.'

Sam felt her insides twist.'By taking communion?'

'Yes.'

'You save me and then I save them.'

'Yes.'

'I can't.'

'Why not?'

Sam did not miss the ironic role reversal. How could she answer his question? How to tell the vampire how you fear and hope to become one of them? How to explain that their lives were your death? How to tell the Believer that somewhere inside you know his Belief is an infection, a disease transmitted from one to another by the power of thought and speech, the human need to communicate, to touch something greater; how to tell him that you abhor that image, that you could never become a part of it; that to accept one belief meant the death of another - death or trans.m.u.tation, it was all the same - that you couldn't ever make that choice for someone else? Not ever ?

Except... now you've been given the choice, now there are real people involved, people you can see and touch, and now that this is the case... well, all that has changed.

How to say it?

She did not have the words. She wasn't even sure she fully grasped the ideas. They were just feelings, a riptide of choices scouring the inside of her head with knowledge of the future.

How to explainthat ?

He knew anyway. 'Belief is a heavy burden. You must be strong to bear it.'

'I am not strong!' Her voice was a desperate cry.'I am weak!'

'Then, Sam, you must decide for yourself how much you want this family to live.'

Sam turned away then, their grip on her still as powerful, and she had to fight every step for the strength to move away, fight for the strength to maintain her own ident.i.ty in the face of this almost unrefusable choice, a choice she could submit to so easily. A piece of bread swallowed and the gift - bis gift of life - would be hers to bestow. She wouldn't need him to allay her fears, to allow her the moral high ground she now realised that she needed so badly. She could take it all upon herself. All of it. She could save all of them. Everyone. But what would it cost her? How would it change her? Why did she fear it? Why did it burn her? Why whywhy why why ?

'I can't...' Her voice was a moan. 1 have to, you know, to think about it, OK?'

'Of course you do.' His voice was calm, held none of her bitterness or desperation, none of the burgeoning anger.

Unable to bear his humility she turned from his presence. She froze, the decision, the endless possibilities for countless lives stilling her mind and body, rendering her motionless and powerless. She felt her heart smash itself mindlessly against her ribcage, felt that any minute it might burst or stop, felt poised on the precipice of a decision that would change her for ever. What made a heart? Did a heart think? Did a heart feel? Or was it just a machine? What about a mind? The bean kept the mind alive, but the mind could shape a human heart. It was a symbiosis. Saketh could shape the hearts of thousands, millions. Her mind could do so as well, if she wanted it to. Was it still symbiosis? Was it still natural? Was it right? Was the right of fife to survive paramount?

She had to think.

She had tothink.

In the end it was the stimulants that gave her the strength to run, not walk, from the room.

Sam ran. She had no idea where she was going but every part of her, mind and body, told her tomove . The drugs ran her system, cranking up the adrenaline, battering her with the need to act, to perform any action; the fear and uncertainty, the guilt clouding her potential decision; Sakedi's voice rumbling in her memory like a herald of doom, raising ghosts of things she would far rather forget.

Things like the car dear G.o.d the car it's going to her father. The look on his face when he heard the news. The need for a transfusion. That they wanted to take the blood that's her blood all over the bonnet of the empty sh.e.l.l she had become and fill it with new life.

New life.

They wanted to give her new life and he'd refused!

Sam pelted along the s.p.a.ceship corridors, pushing aside refugees and crew alike, her fists bunched until the nails drew blood from her palms. Inside her head a voice building to a shriek, the sound of memory, the sound of a bad thing, yes avery bad thing, calling her to anotiier time, to a moment she'd never experienced, the moment of revelation, her moment of epiphany. Her eyes, opened wide, saw only the car. Her first car and it was autumn red and sweet as her first kiss and fitted her like a glove.

It moved like a dream, the red car, ghosting on silent wbitewaUs across the sun-softened tarmac, laying tracks in ancient dust which could never match her speed, and which seemed to slide from the paintwork as if hoovered by angels.

She stopped once, to draw back the roof and buckle it down. The sun. She had not seen the sun for so long. Not her own sun anyway. She slipped the shift into first and took off along the highway.

The sun was kind but the wind was a demon, wrenching at her face, driving the very air from her lungs. But it was her wind - her car, her wind, she was in control. She had a full tank of petrol, the ink was still wet on her licence and her eyes were full of the future.

She drove.

She breathed in the sweetness of the future and - oh - how she drove.

Across country, field, hill, valley, mesa; past people and truckstops, other vehicles; beneath ironclad clouds and piercing sunshine the road rolled ever on; ever on into her future. And she was the future. For a single week in the car, the red car that fitted her like a glove, she was the future. And it was her; they were indivisible. Nothing else mattered.

Until the layby.

The girl.

The accident.

She hadn't even been speeding.

Five, maybe ten miles per hour at the most. Fast enough to mangle the bike, trap the girl beneath.

The blood. So much blood.

Red, like her car.

She got out, walked towards the girl, tried to move her bike. The girl screamed; she stopped. Allowing the bike to settle only produced a terrible moan.

The blood, everywhere, red like her car.

It fitted her like a glove, too.

The paramedics arrived soon after, a storm of white metal, professional expressions, gleaming instruments. The bike came off and the girl was loaded on to a gurney.

Later, at the hospital, her father refused permission for a transfusion.A Witness. He was a Witness. The girt was in a coma; be bad control She had freaked; screamed at him, beaten him with clenched fists. Save her! They can save her! You have control! You have the choice! She's your child! Don't you want her to live? Doesn't it mean anything to you?

He had folded her small fists in his own huge hands, callused and beaten by the elements - a worker, this, a worker with land and with people - and brought her near to him; she felt the beat of bis body, the heat of his belief. He had said nothing. Why should he? He had no reason to justify himself to her.

He had held her tight and she had let him, and together they had watched her die.

Later there had been questions but no charges were pressed. But she asked her own questions, made her own accusations, levelled her own charges.

She had watched the girl die and known then that of att the places she bad been - att the worlds she had visited and different species she had met - of them all the most alien was here on her own world, and it was the human heart. For what could love and live and yet surrender life so easily? How could it be?

She had to know.

She had to know!

So she followed the man. The father She tracked him by e-mail and binoculars, by determination and obsession; and there were times when she was scared, yes, times when she lay awake in cheap motel rooms and questioned her sanity, but there were other times, times when she almost felt her heart beating in time with his, muscle moving with muscle, blood with blood; the blood he had denied his child, and she knew then that her belief, her own obsession, was validated. She had to know. She had to know why.