Mandell was right. Brokhal growled softly. 'You mean, I think, did we do it? The answer is no, Mr President. This attempt to divert us from the true matter at hand will not succeed.'

The President maintained his neutral expression, despite the strong urge to show some sign of derision. 'Pack-Mother, what am I intended to think? Our patrol craft reports being shadowed by a camouflaged Dragon, and immediately thereafter is attacked and stripped, the crew murdered.'

This was the game governments played, of course. The President must know as well as Mandell and the Pack Mother that the Veltrochni hadn't done this. They would have no need to rifle the ship, and would simply have erased it from space. But the game had rules, especially in those rounds when it threatened to spread into a wider conflagration.

'You may think what you like. We did not do it. But if one of my ships was in the vicinity, perhaps they have information that could assist you, as you say. I will ask my commanders.' She vanished suddenly, the link terminated at her end.

Klein shut off the hologram link, and looked questioningly at Mandell. 'Could the Veltrochni have done it?'

'Certainly. But why would they want to?'

'To look at our latest engine designs, of course!' Mandell didn't like his tone at all. It was too patronising.

'They could do that by monitoring communications at the shipyards - which I'm sure they do, incidentally. Anyway, the Veltrochni drives are far more sophisticated than our own.

Why should they go to all this effort to steal an inferior engine?'

Klein frowned, desperate to prove that this was an enemy he could use to his own advantage. 'To test whether they could take one of our ships.' A hostile force always boosted the election turnout, Mandell had noticed. A good interplanetary crisis always took the heat off if there was any local scandal, and he resolved to check up on who the President was sleeping with these days; perhaps some bubble was about to burst, and Klein's bodyguards were about to receive a duelling challenge on his behalf. That could be why Klein was so keen to find a decent enemy.

'Not their style,' Mandell said placidly, knowing that it would annoy Klein.

The President's face went red. 'Not their style? Whose side are you on anyway?'

'The side of the truth,' Mandell lied. He smiled appeasingly.

While it was always useful to have an enemy to direct other people's attention towards, right now he couldn't risk making the Veltrochni that enemy. Otherwise it wouldn't look good when he went to meet them at Elchur. 'The Veltrochni aren't that roundabout. They're like a rubber band - you can stretch them so far, and then suddenly they snap back and give you a sore face without warning. And if it had been them, they could simply have transmatted aboard. But the most likely thing a Veltrochni Dragon would do is reduce the ship to a few wisps of plasma which we would never even have found.'

'So you think they didn't do it.'

The penny was dropping at last. 'That is what I said.

Unless, of course,' he added nastily, 'that's what we're supposed to think.' Klein's eyes almost crossed as he tried to wrap his head around that one. Mandell never ceased to be amazed at the stupidity of the electorate. to think.' Klein's eyes almost crossed as he tried to wrap his head around that one. Mandell never ceased to be amazed at the stupidity of the electorate.

'Then who? Pirates?' Klein scoffed. Despite the stories, space piracy was extremely rare. The simple fact was that it just wasn't profitable. Carrying anything through space was so expensive that the simple evasion of taxes and excise duty offered more than enough profit to make any criminal happy.

The only occasional pirates who did operate were those who did it purely for the thrill.

Mandell shook his head. 'Not pirates in the way you mean.'

Actually the answer was quite simple, if irritatingly vague. 'It was done by someone who needed engineering parts, and couldn't get them any other way.'

'That's a great help,' Klein muttered sarcastically.

'Glad to be of service, sir,' Mandell replied blandly. 'Now that that's cleared up, I have some things to attend to...'

Chapter Seven.

The Foreign Technologies tether was a wide squat dome outside the fringes of Vandor Prime's atmosphere. It was linked to the ground by a forty-mile vertical magnetic levitation cord, up and down which carriages made the hour-long trip.

The Coriolis effect put plenty of stresses on the construction of every tether, but sufficient safeguards were built into the environmental control fields to compensate for that, and keep the tether steady.

Rather than labs, the tether had wide-open hangars and dry-dock facilities, since it was built to handle spacecraft. It was here that the salvage from battles, or the rare ship brought in by a defector, were first brought for examination.

Once they had been fully deconstructed and analysed here, they would be sent on to the Thor Facility, or a military shipyard, or wherever else they could best be put to new use.

The Doctor's TARDIS had been brought to a small dry dock near the tether's hub. The dock had smooth walls with plenty of room to bring in equipment, while a long channel led to a launch port on the outer surface of the dome. SID Deputy Director Wei was overseeing attempts to enter the TARDIS, and had rounded up a posse, of off-duty engineers who weren't engaged in studying other ships.

He had then gone home for the night, leaving the TARDIS in the tender care of supervisor Colman. Colman had once reverse-engineered a Dalek time controller, so Wei felt that he would be best able to discover the secrets of the Doctor's machine.

Wei returned in the morning, to find Colman's team scattered around the small plain-walled dock, glaring at the TARDIS. If he hadn't known that the whole lot of them were zero-rated for psi abilities, he would have thought they were trying psychokinesis on it.

'You haven't even opened it yet?' he asked. He wouldn't have minded so much if they were baffled by the interior workings, since it was the product of a far more advanced technology, but he had certainly expected them to be able to open the doors.

'It's quite odd.' Colman shook his head. 'It's almost as if we aren't actually touching the thing itself. There isn't a mark left on it.'

Wei looked at the TARDIS. It was wood; he could see that it was wood. Wood couldn't resist that sort of punishment, so how come it wouldn't open? 'Have you tried blasting it?'

'Blasting it?' the scientist echoed, annoyed. 'We've blasted it, burned it, drilled it, cut it... We've tried diamond and borazon drills, thermic lances, sonic lances, laser cutters, all of them useless. Right now I'm just waiting for the plasmic lance to come up from the main dock. If that doesn't open it, nothing will.'

Sha'ol looked up at the maglev tether which tapered away into the sky above. They would be going in essentially blind, and Sha'ol did not approve of such a tactic. It was in clear violation of the second Precept which R'Shal passed down into Tzun law millennia ago.

'We should have brought pulse lasers,' Karthakh growled.

'How many opponents are there?'

Karthakh peered at the hand-held scanner. 'Fifteen hundred lifeforms.'

'Many will be technicians and scientists. Unarmed civilian workers.'

'But there will be armed guards.'

'Ten per cent of installation staff is the standard human procedure,' Sha'ol recalled. That didn't sound much, but they would be heavily armed, and no doubt there would be automated defences as well. The humans were less advanced, but they were not fools.

'Seventy-five to one,' Karthakh muttered. 'That will be a challenge, unless we can seal off the area we want.'

The warrior who knows himself but not his enemy will suffer as many defeats as victories, went the second line of that Precept as Sha'ol recalled it. 'It would have been prudent to bring the pulse lasers.'

Two swords clashed, hard enough to strike sparks. They weren't laserblades or chainswords either, Glitz noticed, but old-fashioned steel.

The combatants, both orientals, wore gaudily coloured satin uniforms with wide sleeves, tied and belted with colourful silk. Some cymbals and gongs clattered distantly behind them as they flew through the air like leaping salmon and duelled across the tables. Diners and drinkers maintained an admirable calm - or petrified gaze - as the fighters moved among them.

The female fighter lost her sword, which was batted cleanly through the audience by her opponent's swing. It contrived to slice the tops off some carefully placed pineapples on a buffet table. In retaliation, she bounded forward into a high somersault, snatching his sword from his hand with her feet, and sending it sailing off to slice open the coconuts next to the pineapples.

Glitz watched, mouth agape, as the pair continued their act. 'Friends of yours?' the Doctor asked. Glitz nodded dumbly. He'd forgotten how well Chat and Liang could move, and was astonished to find that rather than slowing down with age, they seemed to be more agile than ever.

They were standing in the audience of the Delphic Circus, where patrons could wine and dine while watching acrobats and creative cooking. Chefs at hotplates were surrounded by admiring onlookers as they juggled both ingredients and utensils. The air was filled with spice and smoke, and everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves immensely.

The Doctor pointed to a shadowy alcove at the rear. 'If I'm not very much mistaken, they'll be in there when they're finished.' He started off towards the backstage area, ignoring the signs that insisted it was for employees only. Glitz followed the Doctor's lead, and the pair threaded their way between the diners and dancers.

They had left Dibber, Frobisher and Monty to study the datapad with Mandell's instructions now that the Doctor had assured them it was cleansed of poison. Glitz didn't feel particularly cleansed, but the Doctor had assured him that all was well and, after all, he did have the right qualifications.

The two acrobats were just coming out of the ring when the Doctor and Glitz reached the backstage area. For a moment, they hesitated opposite each other, then the woman grinned.

'Sabalom Glitz!' She grabbed him in a bear-hug. For all her slightness, he felt as if she was crushing him to death. 'I've missed you, believe it or not.'

'How long has it been?' Glitz managed to say when he caught a breath. 'Ten years?'

'Seems like yesterday. Still hanging around with Dibber?'

''Fraid so,' Glitz admitted. 'He's not exactly the most sparkling of company, but there's no finer fetcher and carrier in all the system.'

'I'll never know why he takes all that crap from you.'

Neither would he, Glitz suspected. 'Isn't that what apprentices are for?'

Wei watched closely as Colman manoeuvred the plasmic lance into position. It looked like any other tripod-mounted cannon, except that the business end tapered off off to a point. to a point.

The rest of the technicians had taken shelter behind a force screen just in case, but Colman stayed to make final adjustments.

'We're ready any time you are,' he told Wei.

'Start cutting.'

Colman flicked a switch, and a beam of pure power stabbed at the TARDIS. The wooden surface hissed, and the paint on it started to bubble. It was working, Wei thought exultantly.

The TARDIS was proving more resistant than even dwarf star alloy, but it was breaking up all the same. In a few minutes they'd be inside.

His smile froze as a loud trumpeting noise emanated from the TARDIS, and it faded from sight. Colman hurriedly switched off the lance, then stepped into the space where the TARDIS had been. Luckily the lance had been pointed out of the launch port. 'What the..?'

Wei blinked. The TARDIS must have had some sort of defence mechanism that took it away from imminent clanger.

There had been no way to predict that, but he knew Mandell would criticise him for it anyway.

'Search the tether just in case it's only made a local jump to evade the lance, and track down Glitz's ship in case it returned there.' If it had gone any further than that, they might never find it. 'And pray that -'

A web of energy arced across the dock, and two figures materialised on either side of the plasmic lance. Wei realised with a shock that the larger one was a Veltrochni.

Alarms blared as security robots descended from overhead conduits almost immediately. The Veltrochni switched the magazine in his KEM rifle to explosive-tipped darts, and opened fire one-handed. A flurry of darts slammed into the security robots, punching through their armour before detonating. Wei and the others leapt for cover behind monitor consoles and portable generators.

Shards of robot casing and circuitry scattered across the floor as the robots sparked and burst. Explosions blasted craters in the far wall, and reduced lab benches to fragments.

The other intruder, smaller and grey, meanwhile leapt nimbly around the burning wreckage, picking off technicians with well-placed disrupter shots.

Wei had never been so terrified in his life. He had no idea who these intruders were, and didn't really care. All he wanted was to get out in one piece. And change his underwear. Driven by the instinct to escape from danger, Wei shoved Colman aside and bolted for the door.

The door was already closing, but Wei flung himself headlong across the floor.

The door slammed shut an inch from his foot.

Wei lay on the floor far several long moments, his legs too rubbery to stand upright. He knew he had to get security down here, but first he had to stop shaking long enough to stand.

Karthakh punched through the wall panel beside the door, ripping out a handful of wires. With a quick short-circuit, the emergency pressure seal clamped over the door, as it would if the dock had been depressurised.

Sha'ol was efficiently herding the remaining four humans into the little control room to one side of the dock, and Karthakh joined him. The humans were all pale with shock and fear. Karthakh thought that was a good thing, as it would make them more amenable to cooperation.

'Who is the superior officer?' Sha'ol asked.

'Me,' a scrawny human with grey hair answered. 'I... I'm Colman. Chief of-'