He was interrupted in his pleasant thoughts by Dibber's coarse tones. 'Does this ship have a name?'

'What?' Glitz was thinking of schemes and what passed for deep personal quirks here; he didn't want to be bothered with trivia.

'A name. All ships gotta have names, haven't they? But I don't see any name for this one.'

He had a point, Glitz supposed. He glanced around at the paperwork on the various clipboards that were dotted around the cockpit . 'Nosferatu, . 'Nosferatu, it says here.' it says here.'

'What's a Nosferatu, then?'

Glitz had no idea. 'Some sort of old Earth reference, I suppose. People round here are into that sort of th-'

He broke off as a loud mechanical trumpeting echoed from somewhere deeper in the ship. He hadn't heard anything like it before. Perhaps it was some sort of anti-theft device switching on... He exchanged a look with Dibber, and could see that he was thinking similar thoughts. They both pulled guns from their belt pouches, and went towards the door aft.

'After you, Dibber - I'll watch your back.' Glitz doubted that his attempt at giving a good reason for sending Dibber through first actually made any impression. It didn't have to, anyway, as Dibber was through the door before he'd got all the words out.

There was a small crew section just behind the cockpit, with four tiny cabins and a small galley. Beyond that was the main hold, with the engines at the far end of the ship. The noise had stopped with a resounding crunch, and there was nothing untoward in the cabins or galley.

There was something very untoward in the hold, though. It had been empty when Glitz first came on board - he had checked in case there was anything extra worth stealing - init now contained a large blue capsule garnished with the unwelcome phrase 'POLICE BOX' in prominent letters.

'They didn't waste any time, did they?' Dibber whispered.

'This ship must be more valuable than I thought.' The unpleasant thought occurred to Glitz that it might in fact be an undercover police vessel. That would explain why they transmatted a capsule full of... whatever, on board.

The door opened, and Glitz affected a somewhat strained smile that he often used in attempts to disarm upholders of the law. He stepped forward with his hand extended in friendship, hoping the new arrival wouldn't notice the gun behind his back until it was too late. 'Officer, what a pleasant -' He stopped, blinking, as an imposing man with a ludicrous patchwork coat emerged. Somewhere in Glitz's brain, a couple of synapses sparked. 'Half a millisecond, you're not the law.'

'It's the Doctor,' Dibber exclaimed. 'You remember - the Time Lord geezer from -'

'Ravolox! Of course. I remember now.' And that courthouse... This box had been there too. He realised belatedly that it must be the Doctor's TARDIS. He leaned aside to greet the Doctor's companion. 'And Mel, of -' He broke off. Instead of the slim and bubbly red-headed girl he remembered from the last time he met the Doctor, there was... well, a penguin.

'What are you gawping at?' the penguin asked, in defiance of not having lips with which to form proper words. 'Don't tell me you're one of those people who thinks black and white is old hat, and nothing beats the full Technicolor glory?'

Glitz puffed himself up to retort, but the Doctor hastily interceded. 'Sabalom Glitz!' He shook Glitz's hand heartily, and Glitz wondered what he was so cheery about. 'It's always good to see a familiar face.' He looked at Dibber, and pointed.

'And it's young Dibber, if my memory doesn't deceive me.'

'Er, hi, Doc,' Dibber mumbled in a confused manner, which was nothing unusual.

'You three haven't met, have you? This is Frobisher.

Frobisher, meet Sabalom Glitz and Dibber.'

'Pleased to meet ya, bub.'

'Er, likewise,' Glitz managed to say. 'Where is Mel, then?'

The Doctor affected a rather strained look. 'Still at home in Pease Pottage, I sincerely hope. I haven't actually met her yet, you see.'

'Eh?' To Glitz, temporal mechanics was something that involved turning back the clocks on used spaceships.

'The last time we met, at my trial, Mel had been plucked out of the future of my timestream. Once we left, she was returned to her rightful place.' The Doctor's eyes narrowed suspiciously. 'Which reminds me, what are you doing in this time period? We're a couple of million years too early for you, surely?'

Glitz shrugged it off. 'Told you last time, didn't I? Your old mate with the beard of evil arranged the transport for our little tickles.'

The Doctor winced. 'I presume by that you mean the Master? Last I saw, you and he were caught in a limbo atrophier.'

'Yeah. Well, the Time Lords got us out eventually. Your old mate did in the technicians and did a runner in his TARDIS.

After that, the Time Lords sent me back to my rightful time, the ungrateful screeds.' And after he'd helped save them and the Doctor, all free of charge. It was criminal, that's what it was...'

'Here, we'll be coming up on the landing site in a minute,'

Dibber reminded him.

'Right, lad. You'd better come and strap yourselves in.

We're about to land.'

'Oh, anywhere interesting, perchance?'

'Not really. It's just a junkyard.'

'Doesn't sound like your sort of stamping ground,' the Doctor said, with a questioning tone.

Glitz wasn't going to be drawn. The Doctor was all right by him, but he was honest, so it'd be better for all concerned if they just did their business without fuss. 'I dunno. You never know what you might find in a junkyard.' He went up to the cockpit, where Dibber had started the landing cycle.

'What are we going to do with them?' Dibber asked.

'Why, buy them a drink, of course,' Glitz announced expansively. 'It's the least we can do, seeing as they'll make such good scapegoats if anything goes wrong.' This was business, after all, and he couldn't let personal regards get in the way. 'You just concentrate on getting us down in one piece - under their scanning umbrella, if you don't mind.'

'But won't they notice us when we reach the landing pad?'

Glitz sighed. 'We're not going to land at the landing pad, Dibber. We're going to land beside the tanker where I hid those crystals. Otherwise it might look a tiny bit suspicious when we leave the landing pad to go and look for them.'

'Right you are, Mr Glitz,' Dibber agreed.

The word junkyard was something of a misnomer, of course.

Much of the settlement's population had actually set up home within the gargantuan hulks of rusting metal that they were slowly consuming. This meant they were essentially working to destroy their own homes.

Grounded starships each as long as a city block loomed high over the network of landing grounds and breakers'

yards. The streets were mud, walled by the hulls of the ships'

carcasses. People scurried among them like maggots in a corpse.

Watching through the port in the Nosferatu's Nosferatu's crew room, Frobisher thought that in many ways it was the saddest sight he had ever seen. People scraping a living by tearing apart rusted hulks that were no use to anyone... He couldn't imagine what it must be like to be reduced to living like that. crew room, Frobisher thought that in many ways it was the saddest sight he had ever seen. People scraping a living by tearing apart rusted hulks that were no use to anyone... He couldn't imagine what it must be like to be reduced to living like that.

'There it is,' Glitz said, pointing at a massive steel skeleton.

'Right where we left it.'

'What if some of the locals have found the crystals?'

Glitz was losing patience with this lack of faith in his criminal genius. 'Dibber, do you think I would be so stupid as to stash them in a ship which was still being worked on?

This one's been left to rot - all the good stuff is long gone.

Nobody comes here any more.' So he hoped, anyway. Fate had a habit of making a liar out of him in these situations.

Well, he'd brought the multi-blasters when they stole the ship, so if any of the local pack-rats had had it away on their toes with his crystals, they'd regret it.

Dibber brought the ship in for a perfect landing in the shadow of the stripped starship. It was like a metal whale, but a thousand times larger. The sun had set, but there was a permanent twilight cast by reflections from Vandor Prime's atmosphere.

'All ashore that's going ashore,' Glitz said cheerily as he returned to the crew section. He certainly wasn't going to let the Doctor and his... friend stay in here; how could he frame them if they did that? Of course, he hoped that wouldn't be necessary, but it was best to be prepared.

'This way...' Glitz ushered the Doctor and Frobisher out, Dibber subtly bringing up the rear while trying not to look like he was keeping an eye on them. 'I need a few spare parts for my new ship,' Glitz lied fluidly. 'This looks like just the sort of place to pick them up.'

The side of the hulk rose into the sky, but there was a number of gaping holes in the side. Glitz led the way though one of them, into an empty hold the size of a large sports stadium. The air was filled with the tang of rusting metal, but to Glitz it smelled like freshly minted coins.

'Hello, Sabalom Glitz,' someone said from the centre of the room. The speaker stepped into one of many pools of light that shone through the roof. He was of average height and build. A neat black beard squared off his average face, and he wore a dark suit of the latest fashion. 'Glad you could join us,' he said dryly. 'Allow me to introduce myself - Niccolo Mandell: Vandorian Security and Intelligence Division.' Glitz felt the run of luck he'd been so happy about stumble and smash face-first into a brick wall. For the briefest moment, he considered trying to fight his way out but, as his eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, he could make out armed men surrounding them. 'Stopped by to look for a good, honest Job, did you?'

'Yes,' Glitz said hastily. 'Being reputable citizens, we felt we ought to do our part for the community.'

'I thought it might be something like that,' Mandell agreed.

'Most new job applicants report to the personnel office '

'We got lost got lost -' -'

'- having turned up during working hours -'

'Our ship broke down-'

'- and entered through the landing area rather than dodging the scanners to set down in a prohibited area.'

Glitz squirmed mentally. 'Isn't this a public area...?'

'Ah,' Mandell nodded with a smile. 'Then you weren't, in fact, looking for these navigation crystals which were hidden in the reactor core?' He held up an insulated case.

'Well, we were sort of looking for that type of thing,' Glitz admitted slowly. 'I mean, that is what people get into the scrap business for, isn't it? The hope of finding some nice piece of kit that's worth more than a few grotzis.'

'Well, I pity the poor salvager who finds these. By an amazing, nay, miraculous, coincidence, they happen to precisely match the particulars of a set of crystals stolen from the orbital shipyards seven months ago.'

'Do they really?' Glitz asked with exaggerated innocence.

'Then we're lucky you got here first...'

Mandell's face finally went serious. 'Not really, because they still have skin cell traces from your fingertips on them.'

Glitz was about to protest further, but stopped when he saw the glint in Mandell's eyes. As a career criminal, Glitz had become quite adept at recognising when a cause was lost.

Mandell nodded, reinforcing that opinion. 'I understand you just finished a six-month sentence for breaking into the shipyards...' He consulted a datapad. 'The judge said it was the maximum you could get without the evidence. If the crystals had been entered into evidence, you would have got fifteen years.' He hefted the case meaningfully.

'The jig's up, then?' Glitz was glad he'd brought the Doctor and Frobisher out of the ship. If he could just think of a way to pin this one on them... The Doctor was a stowaway, after all and his TARDIS said Police, so he could claim the Doctor forced him to come here under threat of jail...

Mandell grinned. 'Not quite.' Glitz blinked, wondering what that could mean. 'I could very easily turn this in, and put you away for fifteen years...'

'Or?'

'Or I could claim the crystals were found as the result of an anonymous tip, and let you go free.' He took Glitz aside, so that the others couldn't hear. 'If you do a little something to make it worth my while.'

Glitz grabbed at the chance. 'You mean cut a deal?'

'Well, sort of. You see, you already owe me, Glitz. It was me who arranged your early parole. It's me who compensated the owner of that ship you stole today...' Glitz knew that whatever was coming was going to be unpleasant. 'Do the names Chance, Chat, Monty, Oskar and Liang mean anything to you?'

Glitz had a brief flash of deja vu: deja vu: meeting them all for the first time. He wondered if this was what was meant by the belief that your life flashed before your eyes when death was near. 'Maybe...' This Mandell knew enough that lying to him would be a waste of breath. It still took considerable meeting them all for the first time. He wondered if this was what was meant by the belief that your life flashed before your eyes when death was near. 'Maybe...' This Mandell knew enough that lying to him would be a waste of breath. It still took considerable ,willpower on Glitz's part to overcome the innate instinct to do so.

'I know you knew them,' Mandell went on. 'Ten years ago, they stole a cylinder - a relic of sorts - from the Council of Houses on Veltroch. You fenced it for them.' Glitz nodded dumbly. How could Mandell possibly know this stuff?

Mandell leaned in closer with a conspiratorial smile. I bought it.'

'What?' This took Glitz totally off-guard. Something weird was going on here, and it couldn't be good for his personal safety. He almost wished he'd listened to Dibber about going straight.