'You are the Time Lord known as the Doctor?' Sha'ol asked.

He believed in thoroughness. Every care must be taken to make sure they had the right person.

'I am,' the Doctor replied, clearly puzzled. 'And you are...?'

'Here to kill you,' Sha'ol completed the sentence for him.

Both bounty hunters raised their weapons.

'And you're wasting your time with those,' the Doctor told the pair a little smugly. He sounded as if he was trying to educate them. An interesting attitude, Sha'ol thought. Not that it mattered.

The Doctor continued. 'The TARDIS exists in a state of temporal grace. Weapons won't work in here.'

Sha'ol fired his disruptor. Nothing happened.

Karthakh growled faintly. 'That is not a problem.' He flexed his hands, his claws sliding from the fingertips. The Doctor backed off.

Suddenly the door behind him burst open, and a full-grown Kastrian leapt out, bearing right down on Karthakh. The Veltrochni tumbled to the floor, his claws striking sparks on the Kastrian's stone skin.

Sha'ol didn't waste time theorising about how a member of another extinct species could be here. The Doctor was a Time Lord, so why couldn't he have visited Kastria? Instead, he darted after the Doctor, who had slipped back through the door.

Sha'ol had no other weapons, but if he could disable the Doctor with the neural inhibitor from his field medical kit, then they could work out a proper permanent solution later.

A smothering sheet was flung across Sha'ol's face as he came through the door. The Doctor's coat, he realised as he struggled free. The Doctor was working furiously at the console, and Sha'ol paused only long enough to pull the medical kit from his jumpsuit pocket.

It must have been long enough, however, because the TARDIS lurched sideways, and Sha'ol slid across the console room floor to crash, stunned, into the main doors.

Frobisher felt himself topple over when the TARDIS tilted.

The intruder went flying overhead, crashing through the door and into the console room. Though the crystalline body he had formed wasn't built for lightning reactions, Frobisher managed to follow him in before he could regain his balance and go after the Doctor.

'Keep him busy,' the Doctor shouted, hanging on to the console. 'Just a few more seconds...'

The TARDIS drives screamed out an echoing wave of sound, and the two intruders were ripped out of sight faster than they could react. The TARDIS straightened immediately, and the Doctor and Frobisher fell heavily to the floor.

The Doctor leapt to his feet, stabbing furiously at the console, while Frobisher shrank back into the comforting penguin shape and shook his head. 'Hey, they've gone.'

'Luckily I thought to dematerialize from around them,' the Doctor explained. 'Now that usually doesn't work, but since they somehow got in by breaching the defence shields, I thought it would be more likely that they weren't fully in phase with the interior dimensions.'

'So the TARDIS rejected them?' Frobisher had learned to live with the Doctor's propensity for technobabble.

'Precisely.' The Doctor finished his programming with a flourish, and stood back to admire his handiwork. 'There.

They won't find it so easy to follow us.' He allowed himself a small smile. 'In fact I imagine they'll find it impossible; I've set the TARDIS to make a series of random jumps.'

Frobisher could see that something was still bothering the Doctor. Being both a private investigator and a shapechanger, he had long since learned to read the expressions of members of other races. He had had to.

'What's eating at you, Doc? You look like you're sitting a test.'

The Doctor's brow furrowed. 'Those two miscreants whom we just ejected from the premises were a S'Raph Tzun and a Veltrochni warrior. Given that the one race was wiped out by the other, it's very odd that two of them should be working together.'

'Maybe that hasn't happened yet. Wherever they came from, I mean.' This time-travel business was fun, but certainly had its difficult moments. Or maybe they were just confused. Frobisher could empathise with confusion.

'Possibly,' the Doctor said slowly, 'but then there is also the question of their getting in here. Neither of those races should have the ability to penetrate the TARDIS defence barrier, or survive in the vortex.' He nodded to himself. 'You know, I think there's more to this than meets the eye,' he pronounced. Frobisher could have sworn he sounded happy about that. The Doctor had never been able to resist a mystery. 'Now that's odd...'

'What is?'

The Doctor tapped a read-out. 'Anything that travels through the vortex leaves a temporal trace. That disreputable pair's trace originates from a human world...'

'You think they came from there?'

The Doctor pursed his lips. 'Not necessarily... But whatever means they had of travelling through time certainly originated there.' He flicked a few switches. 'So that's where we're going next.'

Frobisher cleared his throat. 'Isn't there a saying about lions and dens?'

The Doctor looked at him coolly. 'Whoever sent those two did so from the Gamma Delphinus system. I don't know about you, but if someone wants to kill me that badly, I'd rather like to know who and why. Or would you prefer to simply fly around, waiting for more assassins to find us?'

'Well, if you put it that way...' Frobisher said aloud, though his first thought was 'Yes!'

'I do,' the Doctor said with an air of finality. 'In situations like this, it's initiative that decides the outcome, Frobisher, and I'm not going to leave that to a Tzun and Veltrochni who want me dead.'

Chapter Three.

Vandor Prime was the fourth planet out from the star Gamma Delphinus. Its capital, Neo Delphi, was a crusted mass of shifting rockcrete and metal that covered a chunk of the southern continent like a scab.

Most people called it the Jewelled City, because they had no imagination of their own and just picked up on what some down-market visnews journalist correctly thought would make a catchy slogan. The planet had originally been colonised as a source of jethryk, but the mining boom had long since died out, and it reverted to being just another human world. Nowadays there were no more jewels around than there were in any other colonial capital.

Wide streets and narrow alleys were cut deep into the high-rise flesh of the city. Transit tubes and roadways draped the enormous buildings like tinsel on a Christmas tree. Between the uppermost buildings that grew from the roofs of those below, the floating malls and apartment blocks dodged each other at a snail's pace. Immensely long transit elevators tethered the exclusive geostationary asteroid neighbourhoods to the sprawling body of the surface city.

In the deeper and darker areas of the city it sometimes didn't get fully light at all. It was not so much the shadows cast by the surrounding buildings that kept it dark, but a sort of omnipresent cloud of twilight. It was almost as if the population's thoughts were psychokinetically warping reality itself. Either that or no one had properly programmed weather control.

Niccolo Mandell wouldn't have been surprised in either case. As far as he was concerned it was impossible to underestimate the intelligence of the average person. Even as he kept his beard in trim, he could imagine how impressive this exclusive quarter of the city must look to the masses.

He grinned into the bathroom mirror at the thought. The face that looked back at him was intelligent, cultured, and a very good mask for his emotions at any given moment. The black hair and neat, squared-off beard gave him just enough of a sinister air to encourage fear and respect; his piercing eyes under straight brows offered just enough casual openness to be trusted - or at least tolerated - by those who should know better. In short, exactly the impression he wished to project.

He straightened, his moustache also suitably trimmed.

'Everyone hates you,' he told his reflection quietly. 'They hate what they fear, and they fear what has power over them.' It was simple logic. He liked to remind himself of it every day when he got to the office. He had a reputation to uphold, and it wouldn't last long if he was as sweet here as he was at home with his newly pregnant wife. People would think he'd gone soft, and not think he could handle the job any more.

He didn't mind that people feared and hated him. So long as Kala still loved him, the rest of the galaxy's population didn't really matter.

He dabbed on a touch of scent, and drained a mug of the strongest coffee that could be legally imported. It was time for another conference with his employers. Employers... It was an amusing thought, to which the President and his Cabinet no doubt subscribed. They were the government, and he worked for them. Mandell saw it a rather different way, of course. Governments came and went every few years, but he would still be here.

The seat of Vandor Prime's government resided in the plush chairs of the Forum at the heart of the formerly Jewelled City. The actual legislative council sat in a large circular debating chamber halfway up a gilded spire.

At the foot of the spire, the marbled outer halls of the Forum were filled with milling politicians and diplomats from various GalSec worlds. Niccolo Mandell ignored them, since they were ineffective as far as governing this planet was concerned. These were the ones who would sort out what happened after the crisis. They would decide which world should be blacklisted, and which deserved reparations. They would decide who to accuse of taking which sides afterwards.

But they wouldn't do a damned thing to actually alter the course of events. They were political vultures, waiting to feast on the expense accounts that came with the duty of forging belated treaties and settlements.

Parasites, Mandell thought, bloodsucking leeches... He wished he was one of them. Not that he didn't love his own job, but the chance to play the great game across the whole galaxy was, well... his guts tightened. The chance to dig into a deeper cash reserve couldn't be bad either.

'Am I looking...?'

'Affable, sir,' the press secretary told the President. 'As affable as the public expect.' He was struggling to keep up with the President's entourage as they moved though the marbled and gilded hallway of the Forum.

'Good,' President Klein said happily. Thin white hair and a broad smiley face lent itself well to the image of a concerned schoolmaster or the like. Klein had always felt that such an appearance was the one described as affable, and had since striven to be affable in word and deed. 'Are the snipers placed - just in case of need?'

'They are,' Mandell said, before the press secretary could say anything. 'I don't imagine they'll be needed.'

'The Veltrochni have been saying some pretty strong things, Mandell. Accusing this administration of theft is not exactly the height of diplomacy.' In fact, Klein suspected, they were just trying to set up an advance justification for whatever it was they were up to. He'd never liked the Veltrochni much; give him a dialogue with a real political race like the Alpha Centauri any day of the week.

'Their words are a mere bagatelle, Mr President. They simply wish to make those who would like to see relations between us deteriorate think that we're not close enough to bother taking action against.'

Klein stopped, nodding thoughtfully. 'Now that's an interesting thought. I trust you're doing the same thing from our end?'

'Naturally.'

'Good.'

The very rich and the very poor in every city have one thing in common - they live with one foot in the past. The elite have ancient buildings faithfully restored at great expense, while the poorest scrape a living in the original buildings that are dwarfed by more modern neighbours, and often falling apart with age.

Every city on every planet in the galaxy had a region with the reek of poverty: a decrepit hive of crime and despair where even the proverbial muggers went in pairs. Or they would do, if there was anybody worth mugging there. The one thing visitors and residents alike could trust was that everyone there was out to get you. Naturally, since it was the one place where you knew exactly where you stood with everybody, it was just about the safest place in the city if you knew what you were doing, and didn't look too closely at the activities around you.

In one of the city's more lived-in bars down in the area known as Methuselah Town, a man of stocky build was looking for someone. He wasn't exactly fat, but certainly had plenty of meat on his bones. A roguish face was surmounted by tightly curled black hair, and surrounded by a neat but full beard. His britches and knee-high boots were rather shabby, and his silk tunic rather faded from its original garish pattern. A bandolier of energy cells for a blaster was tied over one shoulder, and he wore odd fingerless gloves.

Odd in the sense that while one was black, the other was red.

He had certainly come to the right place, if the semi-dressed girls draping themselves over men in the smoky booths was anything to go by. After six months in a rehabilitation colony he'd have to test that his charm was still working, and in fashion. Unlike most visitors to such places, however, Sabalom Glitz was seeking a particular individual. Through air that was thick and rancid due to inefficient atmospheric cycling, he spotted the face in question in a booth in a rear corner. That face was also bearded and topped with curly hair, but was rather longer and thinner than Glitz's. Its eyes were focused somewhat dreamily on a row of dusty bottles behind the bar.

Glitz settled into the booth.

'Wake up, Dibber, it's nearly noon.'

Dibber blinked and grinned. 'Good to see you again, Mr Glitz. Just thinking about what to drink next.'

'Thinking? Stick to doing, Dibber, you're better at it. And talking of doing, get me a drink, will you?'

When Dibber came back with a couple of bottles, Glitz stretched out his legs and breathed deeply.

'Even more than a drink, tasting the free air is the first priority for me, Dibber. You know how I hate those rehabilitation centres. It's like being on holiday with a bunch of art students.'

Dibber nodded solemnly. 'Definitely something to be avoided, Mr Glitz. The rehab colonies on this planet sure aren't very good - can you believe they were serving low-calorie foods? There weren't even any fights in the whole six months.'

'Psychological torture, lad. They were trying to confuse us.'

'It worked. I dunno, if that's how rotten the rehabs are on this planet, I might as well go straight.'

'Go straight?' Glitz echoed disbelievingly. 'You must be joking.' People who had known other lives went straight, Glitz thought; not the likes of him and Dibber.

'I always wondered what it would be like to do a proper job,'

Dibber went on. 'Get paid regularly... that sort of thing.'

Glitz briefly considered trying a mock heart attack on Dibber - he was beginning to sound serious. 'You don't know what it's like out there. Believe me, the employment market is very overrated. Go straight, and the next thing you know you're paying taxes, and no longer your own boss.' The problem with the straight and narrow, Glitz had often noticed, was that it didn't leave much room for manoeuvre, any interesting detours.

'But I ain't my own boss now, am I?'

Ah, Glitz thought, so that's what this is about.

'That, my lad, is because you are still undergoing your apprenticeship. Once you strike out on your own, you'd really have to redouble all your efforts.'

Dibber frowned. 'But I already work an eighteen-hour day for you.., How am I supposed to work a thirty-six-hour day?'

Glitz wondered why Dibber had started trying to argue technicalities with him. 'How should I know? I'm an entrepreneur, not a mathematical prodigy!'

'I suppose you're right,' Dibber agreed sullenly. He looked around the bar uncertainly. 'So what do we do now that we're out of rehab?'