'Get her!' Atrimonides swung into sight followed by a group of troopers. Strings of b.l.o.o.d.y vomit drooled from his mouth, a legacy of prolonged foam inhalation.

But as the gauntleted hands of the first trooper made a grab for her hair, Christine felt an empty sensation in the pit of her stomach.

The executive transporter seemed to be pressing against her back.

It was moving!

Face twisted with rage, Cheryl drew back her fist and threw another punch. Blood burst from Piper's nose. She fell back against one of the emergency s.p.a.cesuit lockers, and the unpowered door flipped open at the touch of her body.

Cheryl stepped forward to deliver another blow just in time to catch the dead body of her husband as it fell from the locker.

The slab side of the executive transporter loomed like a cliff out of the white fog, getting larger by the second as the shock wave from the explosions which had set it adrift in the first place propelled it nearer and nearer the executive transporter bay wall. The troopers were scattering away from Christine, thrashing through the foam, well aware that although the executive transporter had no weight, it still had ma.s.s, and hence momentum. A lot of momentum. Enough to squash Christine, and anyone else in the vicinity, against the wall like bugs.

She glanced quickly from side to side. There was a lot of transporter, and she was half way along it: too far in either direction to make it to safety. She glanced up; no chance there, either: a loading gantry projected from the wall above her head. It was already buckling as the executive transporter moved remorselessly nearer. She scanned its side, looking for something anything that might help her survive the impact. All she could see before a whirling storm of foam obscured everything were att.i.tude control thrusters, IMC logos and refuelling ports.

Cheryl clutched hopelessly at Sam Russell's body and burst into tears. She nestled his mottled face in the curve of her shoulder, stroked his cold hair, felt the awful grating of the bones in his neck.

Her eyes were cold when she lifted them to Piper's face.

'The suit malfunctioned!' Piper cried. 'I didn't know! I found him here on the floor with his neck broken. I didn't kill him!'

Cheryl let Sam's body slump gracelessly to the floor and moved towards Piper, hands outstretched.

The executive transporter was six metres away.

One group of troopers had tangled together in their panic, still in the executive transporter's path. Fights were breaking out as the knot of flailing bodies rotated gently in mid*air.

Five metres.

Christine could now make out charred patches of hull and the seams where metal plates had been hyperglued together.

Four metres.

Klaxons hooted. Sparks from the balcony drifted through the foam, becoming soggy bits of black carbon which mixed with it, looking like dirty snow. Voices screamed.

Three metres.

Two indistinct figures had broken away from the struggling ma.s.s and were desperately flailing towards Christine and the safe area at the other end of the executive transporter.

'ACCESS HATCH', she read embossed into a transparent panel, and, in smaller letters underneath, 'IN EMERGENCY, ENTER CODE 398.' A small keypad sat smugly beneath the panel.

Two metres. One.

The troopers were screaming.

She flipped the panel up and keyed in the code, banging her elbow against the wall as the executive transporter pressed close.

The word 'ERROR' scrolled up in glowing virtual letters on the metal panel beside the keypad.

Bernice's torch flickered and died. People scrambled away from the centre of the Operations Room in panic. A nimbus of light had collected there, spinning gently. A low whispering sound echoed around the room.

'What the h.e.l.l ' she said.

Thin air gathered itself around the light, thickening. A shape was forming there, something... Something...

Someone screamed. Bernice felt something, some force, move through her, penetrating her skin as though it were ether. A yell of surprise was wrenched out of her. The sensation pa.s.sed, leaving her nauseous and curiously empty...

In the centre of the room, the light gathered into a curling ribbon and solidified, erupted into a rippling curtain of sparkles.

'Is that... Paula? Paula?' someone said.

There was a smell, like summer, like A final flash of light and the phenomenon was gone. In its place stood Miles Engado.

Christine had to bend her arm down by her side to get her fingers to connect with the keys. Because of her awkward position, she was forced to use the prosthetic arm (the fake one, she kept thinking), and the fingers were dull and leaden. The sudden pressure of cold metal against her nose forced her to turn her head sideways until she couldn't see the keys any more. She prayed, and fumbled the code in.

A hand clutched at her shoulder, then moved to circle her neck with killing force. A burned face loomed out of the greyness. Atrimonides. Sweat stood out on his brow, fury was bright in his one good eye. The fingers tightened their grip. Unable to bring her hands up to defend herself, Christine began to choke.

'Christ. Sam. Sam! Oh, Christ. Piper, you b.i.t.c.h.'

Cheryl threw another punch. She laughed hysterically as Piper grunted with pain and fell to the deck. Cheryl knelt beside the sobbing woman, drew back her fist and prepared to follow up her blow with another.

The Doctor casually took her wrist in his hand and held her motionless, without the slightest effort. 'That'll be quite enough of that, thank you very much.'

'You don't understand. She killed Paula. I loved her and I loved Sam and that b.i.t.c.h killed them both!'

Piper was cowering abjectly against the far wall, her face streaming with tears. The Doctor turned furiously to Cheryl, and was about to speak when there was a grating clunk from the outer airlock door.

He paused, his words unspoken. Cheryl wiped tears of her own from her face. All three looked at the door.

There was a moment's silence.

With a tremendous crash, the centre of the door exploded inwards. Seven figures in military uniforms strode through the clouds of smoke and across the rubble into the chamber.

A short figure in a sergeant's uniform and full battle helmet stepped forward, gun raised. The figure kicked aside Sam Russell's dead body without a second glance, like so much extra trash. 'Project Eden is now in receivership. All employment contracts are terminated. I have a warrant granting all property and chattels, in full, in situ, to IMC.'

The Doctor's eyes widened at the sound of the voice, and at the face revealed as the sergeant raised her helmet.

'Full cooperation is advised,' Ace said tersely, and fired a blast from her weapon into the wall beside the Doctor's head to ill.u.s.trate her point.

With Atrimonides' fingers biting painfully into her neck, the hatch slid away to reveal blackness. The executive transporter moved past Christine on all sides. With a desperate cry she fell forward, into the carpeted interior of the executive transporter's emergency airlock. The grasping hand at her neck convulsed once, agonizingly, and then relaxed.

The executive transporter boomed like a giant bell as it impacted against the bay wall. Christine didn't hear the scream.

No longer attached to his body, Atrimonides' hand drifted free of the hatch coaming.

Something red and pulpy squeezed out of the centimetre*wide gap between the executive transporter and the bay wall, forming shivering globules which clung to the wall's hexagonal bracing struts.

As the emergency airlock hatch slid shut, Christine curled up into a floating ball and was violently sick.

PART FOUR.

DEMOGORGON.

Corporations have neither bodies to be punished nor souls to be condemned, they therefore do as they like.Edward, First Baron Thurlow

Chapter Fourteen.

As Bernice entered the refectory she almost b.u.mped into the Doctor. He was standing just inside the doorway, supporting Piper O'Rourke, who was looking old, tired and bruised. Beside them both, Cheryl Russell was sucking her bloodied knuckles.

Over the Time Lord's shoulder, Bernice saw that the refectory was full. The entire Project Eden team or what was left of it was milling around: cowed, shocked and submissive. IMC troopers stood along the periphery of the room with raised weapons. The simularity in the centre of the refectory was even displaying the company logo: the letters IMC in brushed duralinium, curved around a spiral galaxy. It looked to Bernice like a hand crushing a b.u.t.terfly.

'Move it!' A muscular Company goon in macho combat gear slapped her rump. She turned and was about to deck him when she realized that his needler was aimed at her stomach.

'I said move it!' He grinned. His teeth were even and white, and Bernice wanted to ram them down his throat. His chest tag read 'ARDAMAL'. Bernice stared him down: memorizing his face and making sure that he knew it. His smile grew wider. She stalked off before she said something that he might regret, stepping accidentally on one of the deactivated security drones now littering the Base, and cracking its delicate sh.e.l.l.

Clang. The ma.s.sive airtight door to the refectory swung shut. Silence fell. People glanced fearfully around at the impa.s.sive troops, waiting for the executions to start. The baleful light from the windows cast trembling shadows towards the IMC logo. Somewhere in the background, the food dispenser drifted aimlessly, offering tasty delicacies to uninterested people.

Bernice beckoned the Doctor over. 'What do you think they're going to do with us?' she hissed.

'If they wanted to kill us, they'd have done it already.'

'Oh yes?'

'Look at it from their point of view. Why waste the energy?'

'We have to do something,' she urged.

'I'm open to suggestions.'

'I thought you were supposed to be the one who always had all the answers.'

He smiled bashfully. 'A convincing bluff, I'm afraid.'

'Certainly took me in.' Bernice glanced around. 'Oh h.e.l.l,' she continued, 'I'm going to make a break for it. Can you cause some kind of distraction, Doctor?'

'Distraction is my middle name.'

'Yes, one of them,' Bernice muttered as the Doctor bounded into the centre of the room.

'Well,' he announced, 'no doubt you're all wondering why I called you here.' All heads turned to watch him as he reached into his pocket and took out three multicoloured b.a.l.l.s. 'You'll like this.' He began to juggle, making it look as if he was just on the verge of dropping the b.a.l.l.s each time he caught them. 'There is nothing up my sleeves but my arms, there is nothing down my trousers but a ferret.'

People started laughing: nervously at first, and then with real amus.e.m.e.nt. A wave of relaxation swept across the room. Even the troopers seemed to be fascinated as they crowded closer for a better look. Perhaps their orders didn't cover lunatic Time Lord jugglers.

Bernice took advantage of the show to slide sideways, until she was standing behind Miles, Teal Green and a psychologist named Filo Julee. A few yards away, the food dispenser's sensor light was on as it scanned the crowd for likely clients. She looked it over. It was just about large enough...

'Hey,' she whispered. The food dispenser ignored her. 'Hey, over here! Don't, you recognize a customer when you see one?'

The machine wafted away from her and attempted to interest a pale Miles Engado in a tofu bar.

The Doctor had four b.a.l.l.s in the air now, although n.o.body could see where the extra one had come from. He was milking the audience for all he could get: throwing the b.a.l.l.s out in every direction and catching them in a windmill of arms. He was mugging terribly, his rubber features running the gamut of exaggerated emotions from wide*eyed amazement to crumpled despair.

'Oh, for...' She tried to catch up with the machine, but she didn't want to attract any undue attention from the IMC troopers, and the thing seemed determined to ignore her.

Christ, she thought savagely, a person could starve to death whilst that thing forces sticky buns on dieters and ham rolls on vegetarians!

Finally, she grabbed hold of the dispenser's cooling fin whilst it was waving a krill doughnut around in a vain attempt to attract custom, pulled it close and, in a casual and unremarkable manner, moved her hand down to the dispenser's access plate and ran her fingers around the seam until she felt a magnetic bolt buzzing beneath her fingers.

The Doctor was standing on one hand now, and juggling five different b.a.l.l.s whilst singing a medley of songs by Abba. Under cover of the racket he was making, and the laughter of his audience, Bernice quickly removed the first four bolts. The fifth one decided, for some mysterious mechanical reason that only small but vital components are privy to, that it was going to play up. Bent over at an ungainly angle, trying to wrench the thing free, Bernice was acutely conscious of the picture that she must be making. The small of her back began to feel warm as she imagined a small bead of laser light centred there, cueing a flamer, or a needier, or a screamer, or anything nasty and permanent.

There! The bolt came away with a tacky wrenching sensation. Somebody had probably spilled something on it. Bernice straightened from her crouch with the five bolts buzzing like bees in her hand, pulled the access plate open and furtively tried to check the s.p.a.ce inside the dispenser. Most of the food seemed already to have been disseminated, and a safety cut*out had switched off the stasis field when she opened the hatch. Bernice dumped the remaining food on the floor with a few sweeps of her hand and kicked it under the rubber skirts of the machine. She glanced around with an innocent expression on her face, but all eyes were on the Doctor's antics. She pulled the shelves out and climbed swiftly inside the food dispenser, jerking the leads from the stasis*field generator and pulling the plate shut after her.

There was something sticky beneath her fingers. Chocolate? Machine oil? Whatever it was, it was just the icing on a whole mountain of complaints. She was forced to crouch in the bowels of the machine with her knees up around her ears, her elbows jammed against the interior dispensing machinery and her back wedged so tightly against the shelf supports that she was going to come out with her spine looking like a piece of corrugated duralinium. And the machine did have bowels she could smell them: a dark, rancid odour comprising the spilled residue of a hundred types of food. She wanted to be sick, but that would be a bad idea. A very bad idea.

Paper*thin knives of light penetrated through air vents in the dispenser's casing and drew hot lines across Bernice's face. Motes of dust sparkled and died as they drifted in and out of the beams. Bernice wanted to sneeze.

By s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g her eyes up against the glare, she could just about make out what was going on in the refectory.

The Doctor was standing on his head and juggling the b.a.l.l.s by knocking them with the soles of his feet whilst gargling 'The Star*Spangled Banner'. One of the troopers was pa.s.sing his helmet around his colleagues, who were putting money into it. A collection? Bernice didn't know where the Doctor got his talent from, but if he ever got tired of fighting ultimate evil, he could make a healthy profit as an intergalactic busker.

Suddenly the b.a.l.l.s were gone. The Doctor stood frozen with his legs waving wildly and a baffled expression on his face. The laughter swelled, and was supplemented by applause, which died away slowly as the crowd gradually realized that this was not part of the act. The Doctor clambered petulantly to his feet, with the thunderous expression of a child whose toys have been impounded.

Bernice watched, amazed, as a spiral of pink flesh rotated in the air behind the Doctor. Six more joined it, slowly s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g out of nothing, until they suddenly stretched together into a tangled web of pulsating tendrils. Four of the Doctor's five b.a.l.l.s appeared in the midst of the fleshy curtain.