They didn't see the energy bounce back at the same angle and hurtle, inverted, into the Time Soldier.

It staggered and screamed. This time, the death throes of the hunter. A tortured, thrashing sound mingled with almost human screams of pain. Strakk lifted his eyes from his arms, in disbelief. Green fire was blazing from the body of the Time Soldier, distorting its outline. The creature writhed in a ghastly dance of pain, its screams neither male nor female, almost animal, mingling with a terrifying din that sounded like the whine of a saw-blade into sheet metal. As they watched, the creature twisted and spiralled into a vortex of light, growing smaller and smaller, until it finally blinked out of existence.

The silence was deafening.

Ace pushed the scarred table aside. Dust that had been backgammon pieces trickled to the floor. She stood up, looking around. There was no sign of the Time energy, nor any of its products.

'What the hell happened?' Strakk breathed.

'Physics,' said Ace, with a satisfied smile. 'Spook City scored an own goal.' She kicked the remains of the table. 'What are these made of?'

'Hylerium,' said Strakk. It's used everywhere.'

The look that passed between them spoke volumes.

'Can you walk?' Ace asked urgently.

'I'll try.' Strakk was aware that his arm was turning numb, and an internal chill was making him shiver uncontrollably. 'We have to get a message to Lightbase. Tell them everything we know.'

'Lean on me,' Ace said.

He took her arm. 'Thanks. Sorry I blew it.'

'We're still alive. That means we're winning. So far.'

With Ace supporting the weakening Strakk, they made their escape from the rec-room.

You will reveal the code for the starship's warp motors.

The voice crashed through infinity. It was mediated through the leader of the lime Soldiers, and was addressed to Cheynor. The soldier's eyes pulsed with their hypnotic red as the barrel of the gun was pressed between the officer's eyes. It felt icy cold.

'Why?' Cheynor whispered in bewilderment. 'With all your powers. What possible use could this ship be for you? All we want is to return to Earth '

You will not return to Earth. You will become one in union with the Garvond, harvested from the fields of Time as many were before you. Reveal the code.

'I don't know what you mean.' Cheynor wondered how long he could keep bluffing.

The access code for the warp motors is neurologically embedded in the minds of the ship's three senior officers. We can extract it, but it will be painful and will leave you of no use to us. It will cause you far less inconvenience if you choose to tell us.

He knew the crew were waiting for his move. They had lost Terrin. They had lost Quallem in all but body. Darius Cheynor was the last hope of the Survey Corps crew, and he did not know what he was going to do next.

'My security force outnumbers you.' It was the best he could think of.

Your guards have been eliminated. All humans except those here on the bridge have been eliminated.

A skeleton crew, thought Cheynor, and wished he hadn't.

'I can't do it,' he said. 'If I give you control of this ship, I have betrayed my fellow human beings.'

The Garvond pulsed with energy. The skeletal jaws moved in their curtain of fire, but no words were heard. Invisibly, a command was sent, and Cheynor saw the leading Time Soldier glow briefly as it was received.

His arms were pinned from behind. The gloved hand of the leading Time Soldier descended over his face. A second later, it felt as if the cold and grasping hand reached into his mind and tugged at it. Cheynor was dimly conscious of being forced to his knees.

He saw dark ravens, pecking at the rubble of his mind, and a swollen sunset over a polluted river. The skull of the Garvond burst from the sun and hurtled towards him, its yellowing teeth savaging Cheynor's memories. He was a small child, running as fast as he could across the rubble, slipping in filthy mud, gashing his leg open as he fell. Above him, a helicopter chattered and twittered, descending, coming in for a strafing run. Fountains of mud burst on either side of him. Shattered rocks exploded as the helicopter hurtled through the skies.

He heard the triumphant screech of the pilot, saw its face of ragged flesh and cracked bone. He was rolling, down, down the slope, deeper into his mind. He wanted to scream, No, not that way No, not that way, but he could not.

There was a boy in the river. He was screaming, sinking. Something underneath was pulling him down. Down to the caves beneath. He wanted to call his name. The name of his brother, Simeon. The mud clutched at his ankles now, and the cold sunlight stabbed his eyes. He reached for Simeon's hand.

The floor of the bridge came up to meet him.

Cheynor crouched, clutching his stomach, feeling the pain recede. He could hear his own breathing, ragged and harsh. He blinked rapidly and the glare faded to yellow, then red. He was hauled to his feet, and in the haze his vision came back to him. He focused on Quallem. She was hugging herself and looking fixedly at the Garvond. Other faces swam into view, familiar faces that he had seen every day for the last two years Larsen, Gessner, Rost, McCarran all perspiration-slicked, all frightened, all watching him.

The Time Soldiers released their grip, and once more the Garvond crackled with excited energy.

You will tell us, Darius Cheynor. Willingly or otherwise, you will tell us.

There was silence on the bridge, except for a soft sound just at the edge of Darius Cheynor's hearing. It was gentle, melodic, and unsettling.

He looked down, knowing what he would see, at Listrek Quallem. She had started, very quietly, to sing.

Chapter 14.

Cracks 'Du musst herrschen und gewinnen, Oder dienen und verlieren, Leiden oder triumphieren, Amboss oder Hammer sein.'

('You must either conquer and rule or serve and lose, suffer or triumph, be the hammer or the anvil.')J.W. von Goethe

The President of St Matthew's College was playing chess against his TARDIS, and losing.

As the pieces flicked across the scanner, pushing his queen deeper into an unforeseen trap, he allowed his mind to wander. It was ironic, he thought, that he should have escaped the routine into which Gallifrey had fallen, only to acquire a taste for the sedentary academic life. It had been a dynamic world once, a powerful world, the home of the Time Lords. But the man who now called himself the President was far, almost immeasurably far, from the Ancient Time, from an era when even the exploits of famous renegades had become legend.

Among the Time Lords, he had been nothing. Known at the Academy by the code of Epsilon Delta, he had become a mere attendant to Gold Usher, with mundane duties and no real responsibility. That, despite a respectable double beta in cybernetics, was where he had ended up, a robed lackey wasting his brilliant mind. He had had another name, then a longer one a different face, and certainly no title; but his lowly position had given him unforeseen advantages. For one thing, no one expected Epsilon Delta to have any kind of scientific knowledge, and so it did not occur to anyone that he would have either the means or the inclination to adapt a spare TARDIS to his own palm and voice prints, under the guise of official inspection.

Nor did many other Time Lords have any idea of the progress in the cybernetics faculty of the new, advanced Academy. His creation, a totally new model, had been the result of a combination of factors. The first had been his own under-estimated skill in electronics. Another was the enormous amount of time during which nobody really cared where he was and what he was doing, time which he often spent in the Panopticon archives, reading, preparing. Some files had restricted access but he broke into these, and became something of an expert in the much-discouraged doctrine of weaponry systems.

Over that time, which by Earth standards could be measured in decades, his hatred and resentment grew. He watched the colourful displays in the Panopticon, nodded respectfully to the elders in their heliotrope robes, while inwardly he seethed, sought escape from this mindless life and yearned for his revenge.

One night, Epsilon Delta had left. The primed TARDIS was waiting, and creations were planted inside, ready to let him in. He picked up security transmissions from Gallifrey on a coded channel. It was the crowning irony for him that the disappearance of a Type 102 was noticed far more quickly than his own absence, and indeed was awarded a far higher level of importance by the High Council.

He read, in the data banks of his TARDIS, of those other, legendary renegades, black sheep whose histories had been suppressed and who seemed to revel in ridiculous titles. Prominent among these case histories were those of three escapees who had passed through the Academy. 'The Rani' he had heard of, as her experiments had been notorious even in his day. The name of 'The Master', too, had been mentioned in the hushed tones of rumour, although he gathered that little had been heard of that troublemaker on Gallifrey for quite some time many doubted, indeed, that he was still alive. It was the third renegade who intrigued him, a Prydonian who called himself 'The Doctor'. He, too, had stolen a TARDIS, but according to the files, that had been a minor offence in comparison with his interference on numerous planets. Twice this Doctor had been put on trial for his actions, and both times he had actually come out of it quite well. There seemed to be a subtext contained in the report, a kind of grudging acceptance of the Doctor's existence and, indeed, of the occasional necessity of his intervention. All of this intrigued the new renegade, and he determined to find this other Time Lord as soon as possible. Somehow, Epsilon Delta had an instinct that here lay the key to his much-needed revenge.

He had time. By Time Lord standards he was quite young, the equivalent of three hundred and fifty Terran years. He saw the gas sculptures of Remmosica, the Leisure Hive on Argolis, the pyramids in the sands of Earth... An unfortunate encounter with some belligerent Sontarans forced his first regeneration, and the body he was left with was, by no stretch of the imagination, as handsome as his last one. Time Lords were not meant to worry about their external appearance but Epsilon Delta had learned that it was important in other parts of the Universe and he was decidedly unhappy with the tubby, ageing figure that he now presented. Still, nothing could be done he wasn't about to waste a regeneration for the sake of vanity.

He set himself up, for fun, in several different roles on various planets. The one he enjoyed the most, though, for which he had had to fabricate academic credentials with the utmost precision, was his existence as President of the largest and richest of Oxford's colleges. Sometimes it occurred to him to pop into the Science building on Banbury Road and casually mention where they were all going wrong, but he had resisted the temptation so far it was not really his scene. Earth was a useful hideaway, and plentiful supplier of good wine and smoked salmon sandwiches.

It was at about this time that he began to notice something very odd about his TARDIS. Although it had all the facilities of the Type 102, adapted to his own needs, and a fully functioning chameleon circuit, there was something wrong. The time machine, although dimensionally transcendental, was finite finite. And its energy was being drained. This was something of a shock to Epsilon Delta. He had the computer run the scan again, and discovered that the craft was, in fact, shrinking. He had sudden, horrible visions of Space-Time folding in on itself in parody of the Great Crunch, until only the console room was left, until... He had shivered, gathered his wits and set off on foot to locate the interface.

He remembered, now, his first sighting of his destiny. He had walked through the corridors lined with greyish roundels for something like an hour before he found what he was looking for. The anomaly appeared to be a wall of lights, barring a corridor deep beneath the replica of the Royal Albert Hall that he had programmed in at some point during his travels. The lights ate up the roundels as they advanced, and it was then that Epsilon Delta had heard the voice in his head for the first time.

Do not fear, Time Lord, it had said. it had said. You shall have your revenge. You shall have your revenge.

After that, it had been so easy. The Garvond had promised him not only the domination of Earth, but also a vast source of energy, to achieve with his TARDIS feats never attempted by Time Lords, even those from his advanced epoch. They would travel together to a period of 'crystallized' time, a thousand-year period in the history of Earth. As the President knew, these stretches of immutable Time were rare and possessed a huge inertia, making them difficult to tweak and disrupt. Any minor change like, for example, the assassination of a Government minister would release a vast amount of energy...

He broke off from his reverie as Amanda stepped smoothly back into the console room, fresh from recharging. Her body, still supple and humanoid, was tinged very lightly with a moon-silver colour.

She touched the console with her fingertips, smiling down at the President.

'He has you beaten,' she said.

'I know.' The President irritably stabbed at the key that toppled his king. The red and green whirl of lights at the heart of the time rotor pulsed with victorious energy, and an audible roar of power coursed through the console room.

It had not been so long ago, he reflected, that the Garvond had reached out and touched his mind. He had come to know what the Garvond was. Where it had come from. And everything, like the perfect detective mysteries of Colin Dexter which the President admired, had come together, and he had chuckled at the irony of it all. Through the creature, the President (as he now liked to call himself, following the Gallifreyan renegades' tradition of adopting titles) learned the pleasure of true malice. Of taking Time in one's hands and 'I did not locate the Doctor's time machine.'

Amanda's voice registered, and he turned to her wearily.

'What's that you say?'

'The Type Forty. It evaded me. There is a mark on the lawn, and yet I detected nothing.'

The President waved a pudgy hand. 'The Doctor's using trickery. These Type Forties are rather resilient. We must have it, though. The Garvond has drawn all it can from this model, and the Doctor's is part of the plan an essential component of the time reconfiguration. At least we have the Time Focus.'

'And the others.'

'They entered unannounced,' said the President with a shrug, and he got up and began slowly pacing the console room. 'I could hardly invite them in for tea and muffins, could I?' He scowled not at Amanda, but at the fizzing knot of lights in the time rotor.

'I don't know,' offered Bernice from her alcove. 'Nothing wrong with being reasonably civilized.'

The energy crackled and flickered.

Despite herself, Benny shivered. It looked angry, she thought. Like a wasp trapped under a glass.

'It would revolutionize his new paper to Berkeley, I admit,' the President continued. 'But we can't have anyone wandering in and out of TARDISes, no that won't do at all.' He was talking more to himself now. 'Quite out of the question.' He stopped, then smiled directly at Amanda. 'But yes, you are right...' His brow creased once more. 'To complete the equation, we do need the Doctor.'

'It needs me,' said the Doctor broodingly. He put his feet up on the table again and assumed an expression of intense concentration.

Helina Vaiq, who had joined the Doctor and Terrin in their quarters, frowned at him.

'So, Doctor, you think you know something about this mystery... attacker?'

The Doctor looked slowly up at her, and his features darkened with foreboding. It chilled her like nothing had done since that day back home, when they had heard the napalm-tanks coming over the rise towards their shanty town.

'Oh, yes,' he said grimly. 'I think I almost know too much.'

The silence was broken by the bleeping of Vaiq's intercom. She gazed at the wrist-device in astonishment for a second. 'That's the priority channel.'

Terrin and the Doctor exchanged concerned glances as the co-ordinator took the call at the holo-terminal.

'Vaiq here.'

Ballantyne had hovered into view. Behind him, they could see the control centre, bustling with agitation.

'Where the hell are you, Co-ordinator? We need you right away in Sector 20!'

'I'll meet you there. Ten minutes.'

'That's not all, Vaiq. Get four guards and bring those two prisoners down with you. I want to see them with my own eyes when they explain this.'

The hologram snapped off.

Vaiq, dumbfounded, turned to face the Doctor and Terrin.

'Well, you heard him,' she said.

Sector 20 was one of the station's gigantic loading hangars, criss-crossed by fragile walkways and spindly stairs. As the Doctor and Terrin were marched at gunpoint along one of the bridges, the Doctor glanced down, saw steel stretching away below him and hover-vehicles scuttling across the floor far beneath them. To their left and right, huge crates, coloured vermilion or emerald, lifted themselves silently on antigrav beams, but below, the loading bays echoed with the creaks, clangs and shouts of continual activity.

They were frog-marched along another walkway, underneath another vaulted ceiling, and the Doctor involuntarily widened his eyes. These people knew what they were doing, he thought. Their construction engineers were respected throughout the known galaxy, and with good reason. To think that it could all crumble to dust. Just one slip. One mistake now, and it would be ended, the lives of thousands hurtling to their end in an instant. He shuddered. It could not be allowed to happen.

'Doctor,' said Terrin quietly, 'I picked up the supervisor's badge.'

The Doctor darted a warning look at him. 'Say nothing, Captain. Leave it to me, do you understand?'

'Doctor, I know what a philosopher would do. I have always thought there must be truth in death. Philip Larkin said '

'Be quiet, Romulus.'

Terrin looked crestfallen, but drew breath sharply as they were brought to a halt.

A small, concerned knot of people had gathered on one of the antigrav levels. With Vaiq leading, and the guards behind, the Doctor and Terrin stepped into the diagonal column of light which led to the floating floor.

At the top there was Ballantyne to greet them. His face was set in a kind of hardened whiteness, like a mask of clay. The Doctor thought he looked frightened. It did not take long to find out why.

The body had been cordoned off by a domed forcefield, and lay against one of the crates like a broken doll.

'Why don't you have a closer look, Doctor?' said Ballantyne in a low, threatening voice. 'This is, after all, something which you will know about?'