Eventually, Vaiq turned to Terrin.

'How did you get back here?' she asked.

'Oh, you'll like this,' muttered Ballantyne as he strode past. 'You'll like this a lot. Orbit stations!' he yelled, striding towards the far end of the centre. 'I want that data-shot in twenty seconds!'

Terrin scratched his nose. 'The same way we came, actually. That machine was pre-programmed to return to its last destination, as James here found out rather haphazardly.'

'I knew what I was doing, old chap. I am a friend of the Doctor's, you know,' the man called James reproached him.

'Anyway,' Terrin said, 'one of your security thugs met us in the lift. Charming people. This is James Rafferty, by the way. He's a professor at Oxford. Or at least, he was, some time in the 1990s.' Terrin was obviously enjoying himself.

James Rafferty gave a brief bow. 'Delighted.'

'I see,' said Vaiq, who had decided that she had better appear to have grasped the situation. 'And where might the Doctor be?'

Terrin and Rafferty looked at one another in a rather guilty manner.

We control the Time Focus and your TARDIS. You have lost. Surrender, Doctor. Or I shall blast the years away from these humans one by one. Their ages withering, peeling from them like onion skins.

'It's horrible,' Bernice whispered. 'He's not that creature. He's a human being...'

'We are both old, Garvond,' whispered the Doctor. 'With age should come wisdom. There's more beneath the skin of an onion than you think.' He spread his hands wide. He gave a slow, melancholy smile. Then he tipped one forearm down slightly.

The key of the TARDIS came sliding out of his sleeve and into the outstretched hand of the Time Focus.

'You win,' said the Doctor softly. And he raised his hat to the ghoulish husk of a human before him.

He turned back to face his companions and the shreds of the Icarus Icarus crew. crew.

'People have died,' Ace said, her voice low and threatening. She broke away from Strakk and faced the Doctor. 'People have died, and that's all you can do? To tell it that it's won? We all fought for our lives up here! All of us! Where the hell were you? Where the hell were you?'

The Doctor did not answer. Ace turned away from him and slammed herself up against the wall, fighting her emotions.

Strakk's hand rested awkwardly on her shoulder. She looked once. Saw the twisted flesh, the joints blasted by Time. She shrugged it off, with powerful anger.

The rustling and twittering began again as the Time Soldiers shed the last of their instability. Becoming whole, they screeched in deadly symphony, their outlines filling to opaque forms now. The tallest, the one who had killed Quallem and threatened Ace, swept to the first officer's chair and took the controls with consummate efficiency. On the screen, the swirls of the Vortex were beginning to stabilize.

Benny, outwardly more calm than Ace, was still full of confusion and questions. She could see the whole thing slipping away. It had started with mystery, and the company of James. She felt she could see it ending in horror once more. Soon, she thought, I have to do something about these glamorous illusions of discovering the universe.

She watched the Doctor, across the shadowed bridge.

She could hardly believe it when the Doctor caught her eye with his compelling stare, and then slowly and deliberately winked.

Chapter 22.

Ships of Time 'I want visual!' Ballantyne was shouting. 'Visual, you idiots!'

Rafferty glanced down at Vaiq. 'It's awfully good of you to let me look round your century,' he said politely. 'I shouldn't really do this sort of thing, you know.'

She gave him a brief smile. 'If you're a friend of the Doctor's,' she said, 'then I wouldn't put anything past you.'

Romulus Terrin was staring at the central holo-globe.

As were many more of the unoccupied faces in the arena of the control centre.

A mother will pick out her own child, no matter how young, from the crowd in a kindergarten. And Romulus Terrin, Captain of the Icarus Icarus, had no difficulty recognizing the battered hull of his own ship slowly approaching Q4.

It took him just a little longer to realize what Ballantyne's next logical step might be.

He joined the supervisor at his console.

'Ballantyne. Whatever you do, don't shoot it down!'

The supervisor looked down at him with a withering expression. 'That action would be rather precipitate, Terrin.' He drew breath through his teeth. 'However, as it is on impact trajectory, I would suggest that we have to do something something.'

Terrin shook his head. 'What the hell's been going on up there...? Didn't they get the Doctor's message?'

On the bridge, Bernice had sidled up next to the Doctor. He did not acknowledge her.

'What were you doing there?' she muttered.

'Surrendering, Benny,' answered the Doctor. 'As the Garvond ordered.'

Benny looked hard at him, or rather at his profile. 'Material isn't everything in the game,' she said. The Doctor remained impassive. 'You gave the Time Focus the TARDIS key. That's not a surrender, that's a sacrifice. Skewer movement. A clever pinning of the knight.'

There was the very slightest flicker of the Doctor's eyes towards her. She got the idea he might just have been impressed. 'Rodzynski versus Alekhine,' he murmured. 'Look it up some time.'

'I will,' Bernice answered quietly. 'If it works.'

The face which had once belonged to Tom Cheynor was blazing with energy. The hand of the Time Focus stretched out towards the Doctor and beckoned him towards the police box.

Come, Doctor. The time is now.

'Doctor,' said an urgent voice at his elbow. It was Lieutenant Strakk 'Doctor, there's something I've got to tell you.'

'It'll keep, Lieutenant.'

Strakk was glancing nervously at the Time Soldiers manning their stations. 'I'm not sure it will, Doctor '

But the Doctor had stepped forward to the TARDIS. 'Ace,' he said quietly.

She turned from the wall, faced him as if bracing herself to attack. Her face was cast downwards, lost in shadow.

The Doctor nodded sadly, as if something he knew had been confirmed. He paused at the door to the TARDIS, beside the Time Focus.

'Best of luck, everyone,' he said, and stood back to let the creature into his time machine. There was a rush of green light as the humanoid form blurred and slid through the doors like liquid. The Time Soldiers, chattering with excitement, glowed from within.

Strakk cast a worried look at Cheynor.

The acting captain did not appear to notice. He was still gazing at the point where the young man had been standing, the young man who had so resembled him.

'I thought I'd seen this all before, Strakk,' he said. 'When it started. You realize what this means? It wasn't me that had lived it before. It was him.' Cheynor nodded towards the blue box. 'My ancestor.'

Strakk stared at his senior officer. 'Are you sure you're all right, sir?'

'No,' Cheynor murmured. 'I'm not. That's how those creatures were able to get such a precise fix on the Icarus Icarus. The race memory. The link between us...'

'Don't worry,' said the Doctor softly. 'The show must go on. They would always have found someone.' He raised his hat to the assembled crew, gave one last smile to Bernice and entered the TARDIS.

Ace moved so quickly that even the Time Soldiers were not there to stop her. She pushed Cheynor and Strakk out of the way, and with a determined leap she was inside the TARDIS as the doors slammed shut.

Bernice, Strakk and Cheynor slowly turned to look at one another.

The Time Soldiers were still absorbed in guiding the ship through the Vortex, and did not appear to have noticed, or did not care. The flickering lights and low twittering of their communication continued, above a confused babble from the TechnOps. Cheynor waved an absent hand to calm them down.

'I just hope she knows what she's doing,' Strakk muttered.

Benny shook her head. 'I don't,' she said. 'If she's not going to get the Doctor into trouble, then I hope she's got no idea at all.'

She fell.

In the first instant, the sickening wrench had grabbed her stomach and she knew she was plummeting through blackness, the dimensions losing shape around her. She felt the rush of air, steeled her body for an impact, hoping the combat suit would absorb it.

Dizzying lights, red and green, swirled around her.

And Ace, at high velocity, tumbled towards nothingness.

Chapter 23.

Architecture and Mortality The TARDIS had been watching, waiting. It had recoiled from the sentience whose power had coursed through its library, but it could do nothing to reject it. Even sending a warning was not necessarily a good move. For this TARDIS, plucked from a world where its owner had died a shattering death, did not trust this man who called himself the Doctor. How could it?

Many things had happened which it did not understand. And now its dimensions, over the last few weeks, had been twisted and turned like the layers of that multicoloured cube which the Doctor used to enjoy playing with. It had even felt parts of itself taken away, sensed the patches of blackness and pain when they died.

It knew there had to be a reason.

And it sensed the reason had something to do with the creature whose tendrils it now felt gripping it once more.

The TARDIS shuddered as its dimensions undulated anew. Rooms lay scattered like confetti upon the waters, and now, more flotsam and jetsam came, riding the waves.

Ace felt herself smack into water and carry on falling, enclosed by chill, slowing. She floundered, unable to tell in the blackness if her eyes were open or closed. Then she felt her shoulder being grabbed, and her body hauled from above by a great strength.

She spluttered, moving to rub the water from her eyes as she straightened up.

She was dry.

The Doctor stood opposite her, watching her intently and with a hint of concern. She spread her hands, looking uncomprehendingly at him and into the blackness beyond. She wondered whether she ought to say that there appeared to be nothing supporting her feet or would she fall when she said it, like Bugs Bunny when he looked down and saw that he'd whizzed off the edge of a cliff?

The Doctor grabbed her hand. 'I might have known you'd try to follow. Don't you realize you could ruin everything?'

Ace was astonished. He appeared genuinely angry. She almost said that she hadn't been going to do anything so rash. That she just wanted to smash his world apart in fury when she saw him give the TARDIS key to the thing that used to be Tom Cheynor, after all they had done, after the hijack, and what had happened to Quallem and McCarran and Dr Mostrell. That it had only been something deeper, primal, an emotion wrenched out of her by the struggle with the Time Soldiers, that had made her want to act. To be where the solution was. She still wanted to scream at him that she had nearly died once too often.

Instead she kept her voice level. 'So what the hell's happened to the TARDIS?' She shook off his hand in undisguised irritation.

'A lot of things. But when I left Oxford with the Time Focus on board, I knew the risk I was taking.' He looked at her almost pleadingly. 'I'd set the architectural reconfiguration in motion some time ago. Now, I just triggered it to randomize. If there's anywhere I can trap the Garvond eternally eternally...'

Ace went pale. She grabbed the Doctor by his sleeves and almost shook him. 'And what about us? Will we be trapped here too?'

The Doctor gave her that look she knew so well. The one which meant he couldn't or wouldn't answer directly. He appeared ghostly in the blackness. Like a Time Soldier. Ace shivered, with a sudden mental image of herself, too, transformed into one of these inhuman dimension-riders.

'It all depends,' the Doctor said softly, looking out into the blackness. 'When you're dealing with non-Euclidean space...' He winced and shook his head. 'I don't even know how many effective dimensions the TARDIS has '

Ace was rapidly beginning to regret her curiosity. 'Effective dimensions?' dimensions?'

An unearthly screaming shattered the void. Ace, her heart thudding, looked up. Discs of white were whirling above her like the lights in a nightmare ballroom. They were more than light, though; they had solidity, depth... Now they were starting to fall from the sky like autumn leaves.

They looked familiar. Ace suddenly knew why. They were surrounded by falling TARDIS roundels. She felt the Doctor tugging her hand, and now they were running, running with the Garvond's screeches of anger in their ears.

A staircase extended in a corkscrew under their feet, growing with each footstep. It swirled below them, like cream in black coffee. Ace saw that the Doctor was occasionally glancing at a device she recognized as his homing beacon, although she did not know how it would help. She just hoped he knew where he was going.

Strange objects, half-real, floated past them. Ace glimpsed a pair of shoes spinning off into infinity, and a couple of parchment scrolls on which she read, in Gallifreyan, the words, 'Certificate of Dimensional Engineering'. After them fluttered a paper bird, which she saw was actually a 'Viz' Christmas Special. Her head reeled.

The Doctor stopped, panting, making Ace come to a sudden halt behind him. He was making frantic alterations to the homing beacon.

Something made Ace turn and look up the staircase behind them. With a roar that seemed to shatter the space of the void, a figure loomed over the crumbling edge. Ace saw something glowing green and red, pulsing with energy, like a humanoid but now much taller. It bore the face and limbs of a man, vaguely familiar, but suffused with a deadly radiance. And the mouth... As it threw back its head for another triumphant roar, Ace saw, with astonishing clarity, the vicious teeth and the blackness that lay beyond.

'Doctor '

'Quiet, Ace '