'I'm Shythe Shahid and this is The Empire Today The Empire Today , on the spot, on , on the spot, on and off the Earth. The buildings are falling. Thirty towers in Overcities around the globe have fallen onto the Undertown following acts and off the Earth. The buildings are falling. Thirty towers in Overcities around the globe have fallen onto the Undertown following acts of sabotage. Insurance claims are estimated at five hundred trillion Imperial schillings, a sum which will effectively bankrupt the of sabotage. Insurance claims are estimated at five hundred trillion Imperial schillings, a sum which will effectively bankrupt the First Galactic Bank, a.s.suming that anybody remains alive to make a First Galactic Bank, a.s.suming that anybody remains alive to make a claim . . . ' claim . . . '

Forrester hit the wall twice in rapid succession on the puckered spot that had to be a door control. The door itself, an almost invisible slit, opened instantly.

Before it could close she reached through the opening, grabbed hold of Cwej's hair with her left hand and pulled him toward her.

'I can't take you anywhere,' she snapped. She caught a quick glimpse of three gleaming forms moving towards them. Her right hand came up, finger pumping the trigger of her blaster. A cone of hard radiation filled the opening: an opaque wall of light too bright to look at directly. The bots staggered back, their surfaces blistering, as the fleshy door pulled itself shut behind Cwej.

'How did you ?' he breathed.

' end up with a partner like you? G.o.ddess knows.' She scowled at him, then seemed to catch herself and ruffled his hair instead. 'The door's pressure-sensitive. I leaned against it and fell through. It must have shut behind me.

Don't worry, golden boy, I wasn't trying to escape your adolescent charms.'

She gazed at the now blank wall through which she had dragged him. 'A wide-beam blaster will blind them temporarily, but it won't stop them for long. They'll figure out the door trick pretty soon. We need to think, and quickly. I know that's not your strong suit, but give it a try, will you?'

'I don't think . . . ' he started, but trailed off as he realized where they were.

'The engine room?'

'The engine room.'

He gazed around in awe. The icaron ring at least, that's what Cwej presumed it was lay like a quiescent animal, taking up most of the s.p.a.ce in the oval room. Its smoothly contoured lines suggested tension and reined-in power. Great k.n.o.bbly cables linked it to nodes in the ceiling.

'That's what's been causing all the trouble?' Cwej breathed. 'That's what's driving people loopy with these icaron things?'

'Yep,' Forrester said. 'The icaron ring.'

214.He looked at her dubiously. 'Are we safe?' he asked.

'Are we ever?' she replied snappily, then sighed. She was riding the kid pretty hard. 'Look, if the Doc's right, then it takes a frequent exposure plus possibly body-bepple as well to make someone susceptible. So long as we don't end up living here, we should be all right.' She looked levelly at him.

'But if I see your blaster turning my way, I'll fry your head till your eyeb.a.l.l.s pop, understand?'

He swallowed. 'I understand.'

The door suddenly bulged toward them as one of the bots leaned against it.

Forrester could see its hands, fingers splayed, stretching the thin but resilient flesh. Another pair of hands appeared, then another. For a moment they hesitated, then they pulled in different directions, straining the material almost to transparency. A gap appeared between the folds of the door: small, but growing.

A metal face moved close to the door, gazing through it, its sensors meeting her eyes.

'There's no hope for you,' the bot said, its voice m.u.f.fled but still comprehensible. She recognized that voice now, although she hadn't in the flitterpark. It was the same voice that the bot in the hotel had talked in, the bot who had even now she had trouble believing it who had made her kill Martle. 'Even if you escape this ship,' it continued smoothly, reasonably, 'where can you go?

You must know that your Adjudicator Secular is in my pay. You're criminals now, she's made sure of that. The Order of Adjudicators will hunt you down like rabid ber hounds. There's nowhere you can run. There's nowhere you can go. Why not just give in and let me end it for you now? I'll make it easy, I promise.'

'Like you made it easy for Fenn Martle?' she yelled. 'Screw you! If you want us so bad, come in here and get us!'

'So,' it said, 'you have regained your memory, Ms Forrester. How very unpleasant it must be, knowing that you killed your friend, your partner and, had he lived, perhaps even your lover.'

Cwej glanced over at Forrester, frowning. She closed her eyes for a moment, remembering, then took a deep breath and consigned her newly recovered memories to the large area of her mind labelled JUST TOO BAD.

'Not as unpleasant as what I'm going to do to you,' she snapped.

'What's it talking about?' Cwej asked, looking at her but keeping his blaster trained on the door.

'Dunno.' She grimaced. 'But I think this is the end, kid.'

He smiled. 'Couldn't be in better company.'

Didn't the kid ever give up? Forrester tried to come up with a snappy come-back, but there was nothing left to say. She had run out of words, run out of 215time, run out of life.

The bot hands pulled at the flesh of the wall. The gap in the door gaped wide. A metal arm reached into the engine room towards them, its hand a multi-barrelled plasma cannon.

She took up first pressure on the trigger. Make every shot count.

A series of explosions rent the air beyond the doorwall, coming so close together that they almost sounded like one long detonation. Quiet reigned for a second or two.

And then the door irised open.

Forrester's blaster was up and tracking before Cwej could even blink. She had time to take in the entire panorama outside the door the bots sprawled on the floor with huge, smoking holes in their backs, the group of aliens who looked like Powerless Friendless but wore blast-resistant battle armour and were attached to floor, walls and ceiling, and the guns that were pointed at her and Cwej. Especially the guns.

She saw Cwej's knuckle whiten on his trigger.

A blue, four-armed shape with big ears moved behind the Hith warriors.

The next thing Forrester knew she was standing beside Cwej and knocking the barrel of his blaster upwards. It discharged into the ceiling, just missing a Hith warrior. Cwej's expression was confused as he turned towards her.

'It's all right,' Roslyn Forrester and Provost-Major Montmorency Beltempest said in unison to their respective companions, 'I think they're on our side.'

The pain in the Doctor's shoulder suddenly ceased. He gasped great ragged breaths as the butlerbot's pincers withdrew and Tobias Vaughn suddenly jerked in his seat.

'I can't do it,' he said, and tensed his neck, awaiting the claws of the bot again, but Vaughn didn't seem to hear him.

'Whether you believe me or not, Doctor,' Vaughn continued as if nothing had happened, 'my only aim has always been the protection of humanity. I believed that my affiance with the Cybermen could bring great benefits for the Earth. I was wrong, I know that now, but in the thousand years since then I have worked to ensure the success and the technological advancement of first the Alliance, then the Empire. INITEC has been in the forefront of weapons development as well as robotic and genetic research. I had to ensure that humanity was safe safe from Daleks, Jullatii, Cybermen, Draconians, Chelonians, Ice Warriors, Sess, Kraals, Nestenes, Greld, Zygons and every other one of the many races that have tried to invade this small but oh-so-important planet of ours. Sometimes you have been here to help us, or so I have later found out from the records and the reports of those involved.

216.Sometimes you haven't, but we coped anyway. Whether you were here or not, I took it upon myself to help.'

'Tobias Vaughn: Defender of the Earth?' the Doctor asked, tongue very much in cheek.

'And why not?' Vaughn abruptly stood up and gazed out of the wall-wide window, stained crimson now by the fires outside. 'My weapons, my s.p.a.ceships, my warbots they have all contributed to making the Empire what it is.'

'A monolithic force for oppression and misery!' the Doctor snarled.

'Yes,' Vaughn said, nodding, 'but a stable one. A safe one.'

'You really claim to have saved the Earth?'

'If it wasn't for the invention of the boson cannon a development of the INITEC laboratories the Jullatii would have overrun the Earth in 2350. If my researchers had not already built the first of the Vigilant laser defence satellites, then the Zygons would have melted the ice-caps and flooded the world in 2765. And who do you think designed the glitterguns that won the Second Cyberwar?'

'You must have enjoyed that.'

'I confess that I derived a certain pleasure from the act, but my primary aim was to ensure the safety of the Earth. After all,' and Vaughn turned and bestowed a superior smile upon the Doctor, 'we couldn't always rely on you to turn up in time, could we?'

The Doctor grimaced, and Vaughn continued: 'When the chance came to capture the new Hith battleship, I grabbed it with both hands. After all, to be able to exploit such a radically different piece of technology . . . Just think of the years of research that we could forgo!'

'And how far have you got in five years?'

Vaughn pursed his lips into a little moue of resignation.

'These things take time, Doctor. The Hith had developed their science along a parallel course to ours, one based on biological systems rather than mechanical ones. With that they overcame fundamental problems that we had wrestled with for years. It takes time to a.n.a.lyse such a radically different technology, but we are succeeding, by taking that ship apart, piece by piece, plate by plate, vein by vein, cell by cell.'

The Doctor waved a hand at the window. 'But look at the result: riots, madness and death. Is it worth it? Is this the stability that you were so proud of achieving?'

Vaughn shook his head. 'You don't understand, do you Doctor? You're stuck in the short-term view, whereas I, with the whole sweep of history behind me, can appreciate the long-term one. Yes, there are riots. Yes, there is madness.

Yes, there will be some deaths. The Empire will survive, however. Earth will 217go on, stronger than before, backed by the knowledge of icaron manipulation.

This is just a blip in the upward graph of human progress.'

'The end justifies the means?' The Doctor was livid. 'Don't tell me it all comes down to that discredited philosophy, Vaughn? Even you cannot be so unimaginative. Icarons are fantastically dangerous.'

Vaughn shrugged, and looked away. 'Perhaps you are right,' he said finally.

'Perhaps, as the years have pa.s.sed, my moral sense has become eroded.'

'You didn't have much moral sense back when you were helping the Cybermen.'

'You think not?' Vaughn asked. 'You examined my micromonolithic circuits, Doctor. You know how easily they could have been modified to kill people, rather than render them unconscious. I had to fight the Cybermen over that.

They would have preferred a clean sweep.' He paused momentarily. 'It worries me that I stand between mankind and the darkness, and if I . . . fail, then mankind is lost. That is why you must help me, before it is too late.'

'I don't understand,' the Doctor said quietly. 'What are you so scared of?'

Vaughn's full metal lips pursed slightly. 'Doctor,' he said carefully, 'I am not . . . what I was. I have paid a galaxy's ransom over the years to fund research into biological engineering, genetics, bionics, robotics and data storage. Do you remember the Biomorphic Organizational Systems Supervisor, Doctor? I built BOSS, although, looking back, I see that it was a mistake. And Professor Kettlewell remember him? I funded Think Tank's research into robotics so that they could build a body for me. I have ransacked the bodies of Cybermen left behind in the snows of the south pole, the rotting brickwork of London's sewers, the sterile surface of the moon and the metal corridors of s.p.a.ce Station W3, and I have learned many lessons from them, but I have found no way of placing my mind back into a human body again, nor building a robot body as good as the one that Cybermen built for me. You are right about me, as you were right about the Cybermen a millennium ago. Each time I decant my mind from one body to another, I lose a little bit more. My memories are beginning to become '

'Corrupted?' suggested the Doctor.

'A thousand years . . . ' Vaughn looked away, 'and I have lived every second of them. How many different methods of data storage has my mind pa.s.sed through? With every conversion from magnetic media to optical crystal, from optical crystal to positronic lattice, from positronic lattice to hyper-cache, information is lost. Entropy, nibbling at the edges of my thoughts. I can no longer remember the names of my parents, the taste of fresh strawberries, the feel of a woman's skin. I have lost so much.'

'Well,' the Doctor said, slapping his hands upon his legs, 'this has been nice, Vaughn, but ' He got up from the chair. ' I must be going. Things to see and 218people to do. Thank you for looking after the TARDIS for me, and all that, but '

'Sit down.'

The Doctor sat down again.

'I need you,' Vaughn said. 'I thought that I just needed your time machine, but I cannot even open the door.'

'Isomorphic controls,' the Doctor murmured, glad that he had managed to lock the TARDIS's door when he left. He had been known to leave it open for the entire duration of his stay upon a planet.

'I need you to operate it for me. I want you to take me back to before the time we first met and help me rescue the body I once had, the body the Cybermen built for me. Or take me into the future to a time where humanity can build me an equivalent. I . . . I need to touch and to taste again, Doctor.

Not for me. Not just just for me, but for the Empire. I am its last defence. If I die, humanity is lost. I had hoped that the Hith ship, and that remarkable organic technology of theirs, could help me in my bid to build a new body, but their body chemistry bears no relationship to anything we understand. You are my only hope.' for me, but for the Empire. I am its last defence. If I die, humanity is lost. I had hoped that the Hith ship, and that remarkable organic technology of theirs, could help me in my bid to build a new body, but their body chemistry bears no relationship to anything we understand. You are my only hope.'

'No, Vaughn.' The Doctor's voice was less of a negation and more of a warning, but Vaughn didn't pay it any heed. 'You don't understand the way that time works. I can't change what has already occurred, or influence what will be.'

'But you have, Doctor. I've seen the evidence. You continually interfere with history. I've tried to catch you, time and time again, but by the time I discovered that you had appeared, you had already left. I planned different methods of intercepting you, but they all failed.'

'Until now,' the Doctor said sourly.

'Until now,' Vaughn concurred. 'Earth demography has finally developed to a point where robots almost outnumber humans. Every few hours I would send my attention skipping from one bot to another, all over the Earth. When I finally saw your machine arrive, I had it taken away before you could return to it, and hidden in hypers.p.a.ce so that you could not locate it. I tried to have you taken into custody by the Adjudicators knowing that my agent could have you brainwiped, but you were too fast again, and you had left Earth for Purgatory before the Adjudicators could find you.'

'Cwej and Forrester?' the Doctor said, raising his eyebrows. 'They're your agents?'

'No,' Vaughn said, 'they are just as they appear to be: foolish humans. I should have taken charge myself, but I left it up to them. More evidence of my growing . . . problems. I moved your TARDIS my TARDIS now back into this building and sent a message to my agent on Purgatory to have you 219killed there, but I was too late; you and Provost-Major Beltempest had already left for Dis. Always one step ahead, eh, Doctor? The Adjudicators and that tiresome companion of yours such a disappointment after the keen mind of Miss Herriot, by the way returned to Earth and started to make a nuisance of themselves, so I determined to put them out of my misery. Even that failed.

They took refuge in the Undertown, and now they are causing trouble in hypers.p.a.ce.' Vaughn's metal eyes took on their dreamy look again, as if he was looking at something a long distance away. 'I see you still choose your a.s.sistants for their persistence,' he said eventually.

'More often than not, they choose me,' the Doctor pointed out.

'The woman Summerfield is currently causing quite a disturbance aboard by Hith ship. She and her friends are systematically destroying some of my most sophisticated bots.'

'Bernice does have a habit of getting into trouble.' The Doctor grimaced.

'Of what interest is that ship to you, Vaughn? Just a plaything, a bauble to amuse yourself with?'

'Just think how secure humanity would be if the Earth Empire had such vessels.' Vaughn frowned, and turned to look out of the window. 'We are safe from attacks from s.p.a.ce, I have made sure of that. The INITEC ships and the INITEC weapons that the Landsknechte use are an almost impenetrable shield. But attacks through time . . . ' His metal fist clenched impotently at his side. 'I sometimes sit here, dreading the first signs that I am being unwritten, Doctor. Do you understand that?'

His froglike features swung back towards the Doctor, crimson light coating his skin. The Doctor just looked back without any expression on his face, apart from what he hoped was a tinge of loathing but probably, knowing his luck, looked more like worry.

'Are you familiar with W.B. Yeats?' Vaughn asked suddenly, apropos of nothing. 'He wrote: "Never to have lived is best, ancient writers say; never to have drawn the breath of life, never to have looked into the eye of day; the second best's a gay goodnight and quickly turn away."' Vaughn shook his head. 'He was wrong. The knowledge that I I, Tobias Vaughn, might never have existed, gnaws at me constantly. Your time machine can not only preserve me, but also preserve the Empire. Two birds with one stone.'

'In the same poem,' the Doctor said quietly, 'Yeats also wrote: "Endure what life G.o.d gives and ask no longer span." You might do well to think on that, Vaughn.'

Vaughn wasn't listening. 'The Daleks have time travel, I know that,' he said, scowling. 'I saw their time ship at the 1995 Earth Fair in Ghana, but it left before I could capture it. Cybermen from the future came back in time to the sewers of London, so I know that they will develop it too, and they still hate 220me for what I did to them . . . '

Paranoia, thought the Doctor as he watched Vaughn's histrionics. The man is insane. Truly insane. Identifying his best interests with those of humanity.

Such hubris.

'. . . and even those moronic Sontarans can travel through time, albeit in a crude fashion. Despite all my best attempts, despite my financial support of Whittaker, Blinovitch and the rest, I have not been able to get hold of a workable time machine. Until now.'

The Doctor shook his head. 'Time is fragile, Vaughn. It's a connected net of delicate threads, each one under tension, each one pulling on uncountable others. n.o.body can predict the changes that they might cause if they break one of the threads.'

'Not even you?' Vaughn said, lightly but dangerously.

'Not even me,' the Doctor said. 'I'm playing with a fire so dangerous that I could scorch eternity.'

'And what gives you the right?' Vaughn asked.