'I know,' she said.

Steel inspected her over the link, seeing that she was in uniform and ready to go. He condoned her decision with the merest hint of a nod. '40th and 1090th,' '40th and 1090th,' he said in his usual businesslike tone. he said in his usual businesslike tone. 'Reports of a group of fiction geeks taking part in a roleplaying game right out in the street.' 'Reports of a group of fiction geeks taking part in a roleplaying game right out in the street.'

'The sc.u.m!'

'You have to stop it, Waller. It's only a small step from roleplaying games to devil worship.'

'Don't worry, Steel, I'm on it.'

She roared out onto the roadway.

The city looked as it always had, packed with people driving or trudging from work to home and vice versa. Today, though, there was a difference in the air. Something under the surface. Waller wondered how many of the people she could see were viewers of Static, followers of Hal Gryden. How many were harbouring fictional thoughts, just waiting until she was out of sight or until they could pluck up the courage to act on them.

Gryden had spoken the truth about one thing. Her world was at war.

And with that thought came the proof of it: an explosion, shaking the roadway beneath her jets, sending a column of smoke up into the air.

She hadn't imagined it. Other people had heard it, felt it, too. They were falling against each other, afraid.

It was her job to save them.

Waller turned her bike around with a screech, the rogue roleplayers forgotten.

She headed for the source of the disturbance.

By the time she got there, the fire brigade had arrived and were hovering on their antigravity platforms, spraying foam through the flamelicked windows of an office block. The fire seemed to have engulfed three floors and workers were stumbling from the building's main entrance doors below, coughing and spluttering, faces blackened by soot.

Pa.s.sersby were panicking, screaming, trying to run, and Waller could see no obvious culprit for the bombing. She intercepted a few people, tried to question them, but it was like Arno Finch's bank siege all over again. They had witnessed something outside their experience, something for which they hadn't been prepared, and their minds were racing, imagining.

Frustration welled up inside her, and before she knew what she was doing, she was firing her gun into the air, yelling for calm. 'I am an officer of the law and you will answer my questions!' She only made things worse.

Trapped at the centre of a storm of hysteria, Kimmi Waller had never felt so helpless.

And then her eyes alighted on an infoscreen on the side of a hypermarket, and it all seemed unimportant.

The pictures were innocuous enough: just shots of the outside of the Big White House. But the subt.i.tles told a terrible story: coming in of a disturbance at the Home for the Cognitively Disconnected. We spoke to a doctor who managed to escape the building as the trouble started. He told us that many of the home's patients had been released from their secure rooms and were wreaking havoc. A police spokesperson has a.s.sured 8 News that the situation is in hand and that there is no call for speculation. This is only the latest in a series It made a chilling sense. The Big White House. Where else would Gryden find so many misguided converts to his evil cause? What other building was such a great symbol of the laws he hated? On what other battlefield would he draw so much of the attention he obviously craved?

Everything else was a distraction. The Big White House was where this war would be won or lost.

It was three sectors away strictly speaking, outside Waller's jurisdiction.

On the bike, she could be there in about twenty minutes.

It was getting dark as she rode up to the Big White House, but the lighting units of a dozen news crews provided a bubble of illumination on the street in front of it. There were police bikes all over the roadway, but not as many as she might have expected. Evidently Gryden's tactics were working and too many cops were tied up with his followers elsewhere.

No one seemed to know what to do. The rules didn't cover a situation like this, because it had been considered inconceivable to the people who had drawn them up.

A number of heated arguments had broken out, everyone shouting over each other. Waller only hoped that the channels receiving this footage were responsible enough not to broadcast it. The last thing the people needed right now was to see their guardians, their authority figures, squabbling like infants.

She strode through the sea of uniforms, exuding authority, silencing angry voices in her wake. She picked on a short, wiry constable who was screaming at the man in front of him, emphasising his point by stabbing a forefinger into his chest.

'You!' she barked. 'Who's in charge here?'

He turned to face her, took in the pips on her shoulder and jerked to attention. 'You are, ma'am. By my reckoning, you're the most senior officer present.'

And now everybody had fallen silent and was looking at her. Waiting for her instructions. And Waller had no idea what to say, because she had never been in charge of an operation like this. There had never been been an operation like this. an operation like this.

She had dreamed of this moment, though. Guilty, secret dreams, yes, but ones in which she had risen to just such a momentous challenge. The chance to end Hal Gryden's threat once and for all.

Her vidcom buzzed and she heard Steel's voice from her wrist: 'I heard everything, Waller, and he's right. You're the highestranking officer at the scene. You have to do this. You 'I heard everything, Waller, and he's right. You're the highestranking officer at the scene. You have to do this. You can can do this.' do this.'

'Why haven't we gone in yet?' she asked.

'Doors are barricaded,' one of the officers answered.

'Then break them down!'

'He's taken hostages, ma'am.'

'"He"?'

'The ringleader. Calls himself Captain Jack.'

And then there was only the moment and the orders tripped easily off Waller's tongue: orders that the escapees from the Big White House be questioned again, that the records of the chief instigators be pulled, that riot equipment be requisitioned and that someone get her a vidphone link to this 'Captain Jack'.

A camera orb was pushed into her face and she gave a terse but rea.s.suring statement to the watching world.

Then a sergeant came running up to her and pressed a phone into her hand. 'We've made contact, ma'am.'

Waller glanced at the image on the phone's screen. Pretty boy, she thought dismissively. Then she took another look and had the same thought again, only more warmly this time.

She blinked and pulled herself together. 'All right, pal,' she growled, 'no fiction. Just tell me what it takes to end this.'

Captain Jack's response was equally brusque. 'A change in the law. Most of the people in here have done nothing wrong. Yeah, some of them are sick, and they need treatment but not the sort that gets dished out here. And the rest just need to be left to get on with it, not persecuted for reading a book or listening to a good story or telling someone they look nice today when they don't.' 'A change in the law. Most of the people in here have done nothing wrong. Yeah, some of them are sick, and they need treatment but not the sort that gets dished out here. And the rest just need to be left to get on with it, not persecuted for reading a book or listening to a good story or telling someone they look nice today when they don't.'

'You're asking the impossible,' said Waller. 'If you weren't fantasy crazy, you'd know that. The law doesn't change, ever.'

'Time it did,' said Jack. said Jack. 'If you can't do it, find someone who can. You know we've got hostages.' 'If you can't do it, find someone who can. You know we've got hostages.'

'That a threat?'

'It's a statement of fact, just how you like it.'

'Is Hal Gryden in there? I want to speak to Hal Gryden.'

'Never met the guy. Look, I hate negotiating by phone. It's so impersonal. You wanna have dinner? We got food in the kitchens here you just bring the wine and the candles. Oh, and keep the uniform. It's s.e.xy!'

And then, with a cheeky wink, Captain Jack cut off the connection, leaving Waller fl.u.s.tered and unsure how to react.

If he'd asked for money or a fast car, she could have stalled him. As it was, she had no idea no idea at all how she could have begun to address his demands even if she'd wanted to.

'Let me talk to him.'

The voice sent a chill down her spine. She turned, to find herself as expected looking into a pair of intense blue eyes: eyes that could stare through her helmet visor, right into her childlike soul.

'Let me talk to him,' repeated the Doctor.

'He hung up.'

'I know. I meant I could go into the building.'

'No chance. I couldn't guarantee your safety.'

'He won't hurt me.'

'He's fantasy crazy. You don't know what he'll do.'

'Hero complex. Thinks he's saving the world. I know the type. And he wants publicity. I work for a TV channel, remember?'

'I didn't know that!'

The interjection came from a sandyhaired kid with a floppy fringe. Waller hadn't noticed him before, standing at the Doctor's elbow.

The Doctor smiled tightly and laid an arm across the kid's shoulders. 'New research a.s.sistant. Still training him up. So, what do you say? Do I get to report on the news story of the century? Inspector Waller's triumphant retaking of the Big White House, as told from the inside?' He let go of the kid and leaned in closer to Waller, lowering his voice. 'I could help you, you know. Take a vidphone in there, find a quiet corner, give you a call, let you know what's happening, how the land lies, that kind of thing.'

He certainly made the idea sound appealing and it wasn't as if Waller had a better one. 'So I just let you in there?' she said numbly.

'Yeah.'

'You and your... a.s.sistant?'

The Doctor glanced at the kid as if he had forgotten he was there, then shrugged. 'Yeah, I s'pose so.'

'And if it all goes wrong, if they kill you...'

'Then you warned me. You were truthful. No one could blame you.'

Waller looked at the cops around her, feeling the weight of their expectations. In the end, she just knew she had to make a decision, give an order, or lose all their respect. In the end, she had no choice.

'As soon as you can,' she said sternly, 'you call the police emergency number. They'll route you straight through to my vidcom.'

'Got it,' said the Doctor.

And he was already halfway to the gates, the kid at his heels.

'Wait! Aren't you taking a camera in with you?'

He hesitated, turned and patted his pockets as if expecting to find just such a device in one of them. Then, brightly, he called back, 'I'll improvise!'

And he was off again.

'Remember,' Waller called after him, because she wanted to regain that fleeting feeling she had had before he'd turned up: the feeling that she was actually in control. 'I'm waiting for that call!'

But the Doctor didn't answer her.

FIFTEEN.

'Situation?' The Doctor strode through the empty panelled pa.s.sageways of the ground floor of the Big White House, Captain Jack by his side, Domnic struggling to keep up with them both.

'The building is in rebel hands,' reported Jack, all clipped and efficient. 'We released all the patients, apart from those in the secure cells on the top floor of the central block. Our forces number about 500. Discounting those who are deluded to the point of uselessness or zoned out on drugs or who just don't want to fight, that number comes down to about 220.'

'Hostages?'

'Sixtythree. The orderlies here are used to outnumbering the patients. We took 'em by surprise. Some ran. The rest we locked in the fourthfloor dorms.'

'Defences?'

'We got our most rational guys watching the groundfloor doors and windows, but they won't be so easy to hold. The rest of us are based up on Three. The only ways up are the lifts and two staircases. We're doing the best we can, but we're illequipped and illprepared. Frankly, we're relying on the hostages to keep the cops at bay. We wouldn't hurt them, but they don't know that.'

Two patients were manning a lift each, keeping them down here with their doors open in case of need. The Doctor noted that the other two lifts were similarly locked on the third and fourth floors respectively.

'Plan?' he prompted, as they rode upwards.

'Ah. That's where we're winging it a little. Primary aim is to gather intel, find out who or what is responsible for the antifiction laws. I'm guessing that, if we kick up enough of a fuss here, they'll come to us.'

'They already have,' the Doctor murmured.

The lift reached its destination with a ping and the doors rattled open to reveal two more pyjamaclad sentries. The Doctor recognised Arno Finch, who acknowledged him with a weak smile as he pa.s.sed and ventured uncertainly, 'I'm doing it. I'm doing what you said, Doctor. Making a real difference. Aren't I?'

He had only one question left, but it was the most important one.

'And Rose?'

The third floor was abuzz with activity.

People were standing up beds to block windows, breaking up furniture to use as weapons, or just running around, caught up in the excitement and probably dreaming that they were anywhere else but here. One woman was in tears, believing the building to be under attack from bomber planes. She was led gently into a dorm and encouraged to have a liedown.