'Oh, but you were.' The Doctor's face creased into a fleeting smile. 'I like to be listened to. Touching. Gets you right here here.' He tapped his chest, on both sides, then gave her a parting wave. With his hands plunged into his pockets, he wandered back towards the antigrav-tube. He did not look back.

'Hey!' she called. 'Come back soon, when things are better!'

As she watched the little figure saunter away, ducking and weaving between the tables and the enthusiastic plants, she realized she did not know if he had heard her last words or not. After a few more seconds, he was gone from her sight.

Strakk's legs were still supporting him, but Ace could sense him growing weaker, and felt more and more weight on her own shoulder. She wondered how long she could keep it up.

Eventually they had to stop, at yet another of the junctions. Ace had been on many freighters and battlecruisers where one level looked much like any other, but the Icarus Icarus was the worst of the lot, with its cramped corridors and its smudgy lights that made you squint. The girl checked the power in her pistol while Strakk, wheezing and coughing, slumped against the wall by one of the service-ladder shafts. was the worst of the lot, with its cramped corridors and its smudgy lights that made you squint. The girl checked the power in her pistol while Strakk, wheezing and coughing, slumped against the wall by one of the service-ladder shafts.

'Not carrying any morphine, I s'pose?' Strakk asked, gritting his teeth.

'Sorry, not my scene.'

'Thought not. Worth asking. You know, those things are bound to be guarding the shuttle-bays.'

'Not necessarily. They probably think everyone's dead. Or they haven't bothered to check.'

'I'm cold,' Strakk muttered, 'but it's just my age, I reckon. What about you? Feel all right?'

She looked down at him, surprised. 'Yeah.'

He nodded, wincing as another stab of pain went through the rheumatic joint of his shoulder.

Ace snapped her gun shut. 'We've got to keep going, soldier boy.'

He shook his head. 'Got... to rest...'

'Come on!' She grabbed him under his good shoulder, pulling him with all her newly honed muscles, but he resisted. 'Sit there and you'll never claim your pension.'

'I wanted to die,' he said quietly, 'once. When they took me to identify Anji's body. As for Mikaela my daughter there was nothing left. Too small, you see. Burnt to a crisp. But they let me look at Anji.' He glanced at Ace, trying to focus on her with his weakening eyes. 'It was enough. I wished I'd been in the skimmer with them.'

'I'm sorry,' Ace said. She hoped she truly was. She heard a voice reminding her of something deep within her soul, her weaker, more vulnerable younger self 'A friend of mine got in a fire. It wasn't an accident. The smell of burning freaked me out for months after.' She was fingering the restrainer-bangle on her wrist, longing to rip it off.

Strakk, recovering his breath, looked Ace up and down properly for the first time. 'Look, when I saw you and the Doctor on Q4, I just thought you were just scavs. For metal, maybe. You're not, though, are you?'

Ace leaned against the bulkhead, gave him a languid smile. 'You gonna get up, Albion?'

'What were were you doing there?' you doing there?'

'You'd never believe me. Just call me a troubleshooter, all right? As in, I shoot and it causes trouble.'

Strakk grinned incredulously. 'Captain Terrin used to make a joke like that.' He shook his head, gazing into the distance. 'Poor bastard.'

'Hey, c'mon. He might not be dead.'

'No I meant it was his only joke.' He slumped back. 'It was thanks to him that I got myself a life. Y'know? After Anji and Mikaela... Well, I kind of went to pieces. I had a kind of job on a samizdat network, but it sort of fell through. Didn't have anywhere to go. One night, I found myself in a bar on some hole of a moon or other, with a load of off-duty Survey crew. One of them was a girl called Tanja Rubcjek. I guess we just... got on well. The way people do.' He shrugged. Ace smiled indulgently. 'She suggested the Corps to me. I laughed it off, but in the end I went for it. Three months later, I was on Terrin's crew.' He smiled bleakly. 'And I end up stuck here with you.'

'Some guys would give their right arm for that.'

'Not funny.'

'Wasn't meant to be. Come on, we'd better move.'

Ace reached out. She realized, though, that Strakk was not concentrating on her words, for his eyes were looking past her at the corridor wall. With her heart thudding, she followed his gaze.

A ghost. Flickering against the wall. Ace backed off, the pistol levelled with both hands. It won't do any good, she thought, but it feels better. Strakk gathered his strength and moved back with her. They could feel the cold wind, and the ghost, flickering with light, took form.

At first Ace wondered if it was a trick of her mind. Then, as she looked into the face she knew so well, she took a step forward.

She felt Strakk's hand on her sleeve. 'Don't move, you idiot. It's a trick. A projection.' He, too, had recognized the familiar crumpled suit, the fedora with its paisley hatband matching the tie, and the face with its lines of wisdom.

The pale image of the Doctor lifted his chin slightly as if listening. Then he stepped into the corridor, smiled, and raised his hat in their direction.

For a moment, Time seemed frozen. Neither of them heard, until it was too late, the spectral fluttering. Ace saw the ghost of the Doctor walk into the bulkhead and shimmer into nothingness, just as the rushing hit her from behind, and she swung too late. Strakk cried out as he was pinned to the floor by a Time Soldier.

Ace saw the gas-masked snout solidifying right in front of her, felt the chill on her lips as it raised its gun.

The Time Soldiers, flickering like candle-flames, turned their heads from side to side as if scanning the air for orders. Then Ace and Strakk both heard the echo of the voice.

Bring them, said Garvond. said Garvond. Bring them to the bridge. Bring them to the bridge.

The Doctor, alone in the lounge on Q4, was deep in thought.

He knew he should have acted when he sensed the disruption in the air in Oxford. He had checked with his diary the eighteenth of November, 1993, had most definitely been a Thursday in the Earth calendar, a day when the streets should have been bustling with students' bicycles, minibuses, hurrying shoppers. And yet the traffic had been Sunday traffic. The couples strolling through the Botanical Gardens had been people enjoying their leisure day. And that newspaper...

'The TARDIS,' he muttered to himself. 'If only I could get back there...'

There was a brief trilling from the direction of the door. He ignored it, but it sounded again five seconds later.

Vaiq's voice crackled through the intercom.

'Doctor? Are you all right in there?'

Irritation flitted across his face, and then he relented. They could not be expected to understand, not with limited information. He pressed the lock-release, and let them in.

'You're going to be needed,' Vaiq said, as she and Terrin entered a little sheepishly. 'Ballantyne's called a briefing, to decide what we ought to do.'

The Doctor made a contemptuous sound as he stretched out on the sofa, just as Terrin was about to sit down. 'Meetings, briefings, conferences can't people think think and and act act in this century?' in this century?'

'You said something about the "fields of Time", Doctor,' said Vaiq cautiously, as she poured herself a glass of nectarine juice from the decanter. 'What exactly did you mean?'

The Doctor sat up very slowly, and looked from one to the other. As representatives of the human race, he thought grimly, they were not the ones he would have hand-picked to hear this first. But they were better than most, and they were prepared for anything now.

'There is a book,' he said, 'a book which only a few pairs of eyes on my world have been permitted to see. The reasons are obvious enough. It is called The Worshipful and Ancient Law of Gallifrey The Worshipful and Ancient Law of Gallifrey ' '

'Gallifrey?' said Terrin. 'But that's just a myth itself. All the stories of Time Lords and Guardians no one's ever proved ' He was quelled by the Doctor's impassive gaze. Terrin knew that nobody had ever looked at him in quite that unearthly way before.

'You told me once you were broad-minded, Captain,' said the Doctor chidingly. 'Kindly allow your mind to be stretched a little further.' He sat cross-legged on the couch and closed his eyes. 'The book,' he said, 'has many properties. But it tells in part of the coming of a creature, a being more powerful than Time itself. It has been given many names. Garavond, Garivont, Garvond. Its names there are several thousand are corruptions of the Old High Gallifreyan gjara' vont gjara' vont: "of darkest thought". It can feed, you see, on fear, buried suspicions and mistrust.' His eyes snapped open and he saw he had their rapt attention. 'We cannot let it take form. Time will no longer have a winged chariot, but rather a carriage of death, guarded by demons.'

'Doctor,' Terrin put in, 'if this creature is just a legend '

'Believe me, Captain, it's very, very real.'

'But how can it gain enough power to do this, assuming it's been dormant until now?' he asked, baffled. 'Surely if it's been unheard, unseen all this time '

'It has been dormant deep in the Matrix.' The Doctor was almost thinking aloud now. If his help was to be useful, he reasoned, it was better for them not to be ignorant of what they were dealing with. 'Part of the Matrix is the Panotropic Net, the sum of all Time Lord minds, living and dead, from the great Rassilon himself to the lowliest of orderlies. According to the legends, the Garvond was held imprisoned by that power, the power of Time Lord minds. But the creature could feed off the very hate and fear that was keeping it captive.'

Vaiq slammed her glass down on the table. 'Doctor, what you've said up to now seems to have been borne out. But how the hell do you know know? How do you even know that this this Gara-vont creature really exists?'

The Doctor's voice was sombre. 'Because apparently,' he said, 'I created it.'

Chapter 16.

Into the Vortex 'The innocent and the beautiful Have no enemy but time.'William Butler Yeats

The bridge was like a nightmare. Ace saw, out of the corner of her eye, the young lieutenant being brutally pushed to the floor by his Time Soldier captor, and she bit her lip. Her eyes, though, were drawn in horrified fascination to the swollen globe of darkness on the Captain's podium. With a crackle of light, the creature within reared up to watch the arrival of the new prisoners, and gave a purr of satisfaction that rolled across the bridge on a wintry chill. Shuddering, Ace found herself behind Cheynor, in the centre of the ring of Time Soldiers.

'Hi again,' she said without much enthusiasm. 'Thought we'd crash your Hallowe'en party. Sorry we didn't bring a bottle.'

Cheynor hardly seemed to have heard her, but Quallem had unfurled herself from her ball like a hedgehog, and stared at Ace.

'Nous allons mourir,' said Quallem gently, as if to a child. 'Nous allons tous mourir.' It was as if she had found the still point in her hurricane of madness, to lie at its centre, oblivious of the pressure which was crushing her.

Ace turned to Cheynor in horror. 'What's Boadicea under? Or don't tell me, she finally flipped?'

'I have relieved Lieutenant-Commander Quallem of command,' said Cheynor levelly.

'And the spooks relieved you,' surmised Ace. 'Brilliant work, Major Tom.'

His face was bleak now, she saw, the tanned strength like a pantomime mask. She wondered what he had seen, what had happened since she left.

'Is there anybody else?' he asked in a whisper.

'Alive? We didn't see anyone. The place is empty.'

'Mostrell? What happened to him?'

Ace wondered quite how to put it. 'He... won't be on solids again for a while.'

You will listen, if you wish to live.

The voice echoed from every surface on the bridge. They looked into the Garvond's heart of darkness, some fearfully, some, like Ace, more resolute.

When you have revealed the access code, thundered the Garvond, thundered the Garvond,this ship will be ours in which to destroy all hated life. Our time-ship will sail the Vortex, consuming all in our path.

'It's my ship,' said Listrelle Quallem quietly.

Cheynor and Ace were not near enough to stop her. She had climbed to her feet and was facing the Garvond with anger in her eyes.

'It's my ship!' she screamed. 'Mine! You can't do that. I don't want to play with you. Get out of here. Get out!'

The Time Soldiers were sizzling with excited new energy. Ace saw the dozen pairs of red eyes burning with a lust for new life-force, and could only watch in horrified fascination. It was strange how Quallem had regained a haunted beauty and nobility. Lifting her head on its slender neck, she met the Garvond's stare without flinching. Looking death in the eye, as only the truly brave or mad can do.

Time energy burned on the Garvond's claws. Its words were borne on a hiss of delight.

Then you... command this vessel? Fascinating.

Quallem's face was glowing under the alien lights. 'It's my ship,' she murmured, swallowing. 'It's my ship and you're not to hurt it...'

Three of the Time Soldiers had surrounded her in a crescent, like attendant angels of death.

Ace knew what was going to happen. And there was nothing she could do to stop it.

The flash of light filled the bridge. Dazzled, thirty-one humans flinched. The Time Soldiers did not even appear to have fired, merely to have extended their aura in three fluctuating beams, which converged on Quallem. The woman was frozen in a parody of surrender, her arms high above her face. The light poured from her, scattering, and her mouth opened in a silent scream as her back arched, her legs withered.

Ace lifted her eyes from her hands and looked into the flames of Time. She saw, dimly, the face of Quallem shrinking on the skull like a toffee-wrapper shrivelling in the fire, and molten flesh pouring from her body. Her red-gold hair burned with whiteness.

Ace blinked. There was a greenish after-image on her retina. It was a second before she was aware of how quickly the light had snapped off.

Where Listrelle Quallem had stood, there was something that was still just alive. One half of the skull was dented and blackened. The jaw was working, trying to cry out, and wisps of white hair were blowing in the breeze. Bone gleamed under the lights. The apparition's legs were cracking to powder. As they watched, the husk of Quallem crumbled and fell. Her skull, brittle as chalk, smashed into pieces and the shards were scattered across the floor. The report echoed up into the highest reaches of the bridge, reverberated in their minds, stamping something there which their nightmares would always be able to summon.

The Garvond rippled with a pulse of energy. Another command, like a mental finger-click. The Time Soldier next to Cheynor rammed him up against the nearest console and held him there.

'Let him go,' Ace snarled.

Everyone turned to look at her.

Now Ace, too, met the creature's empty eye-sockets, and shivered involuntarily.

'I always hated Trick or Treat,' she murmured. Then she raised her voice. 'I suppose if you had a brain I'd be able to see it. What are you on, bonehead? The X-plan diet?'

The Garvond's head seemed to lift from its body, looming up in the globe of darkness, over Ace. It appeared fascinated by her.

Ace folded her arms. 'You see that plastic skeleton in the ghost train? That's you you, that is. That's what you do for a living.'

It was far enough. The Time Soldier wrestled her arm in a no-compromise grip, and then the floor of the bridge connected with her face. She could feel numbness in every muscle of her body, and realized with a shock that she was quite unable to move.