The guards, shaky for all Neville's boasting, turn their guns on these beautiful ones. The figures snort and jerk. The Doctor only gets glimpses leathery hooves growing out of what once were hands, bristly snouts instead of noses, thick, yellow teeth.

'Magus, help us!' snorts one creature. 'Help us!'

They fall to their knees, metamorphosing hands clasped together, pleading for mercy.

Neville stops. He appears to ponder on their condition for a moment. 'Oh, for heaven's sake. Guards,' he orders. 'Kill them.'

Once the dust has settled and the noise has died away, the Doctor removes his hands from his ears. The bodies lie in their shrouds, their deformities hidden from sight. The guards are smiling, pleased to have been of service.

Cartridges eject from stocks.

He glares at Paul Neville, disgust overwhelming him. 'How many more, Neville, how many more will you kill for your ridiculous delusion?'

'Just two,' Neville replies. 'Put them in the airlock.'

'Neville!' implores Pelham. 'We're partners!' She pushes herself away from the Doctor, trying to distance herself from him.

Neville looks at her with disdain. 'Partners? A vain, attention-seeking hack like you? You're joking.'

The guards herd them to the circular hatch. Beyond, through the gla.s.s of the porthole, sits the bathyscape. Neville spins the hatch lock. 'You are about to get a unique view of the palace, a view that no one has experienced in over a million years. It should be interesting, if a little brief.'

The hatch is opened. The guards push the pair towards the airlock. Neville watches, amused. 'Should you wish to beg, I should do it now.'

The Doctor tries for the last time. 'Neville. I'm trying to help you. All I've wanted to do since I got here is help you. You're making a terrible mistake. The higher dimensions are inimical to all life. All. Including yours and all your followers.'

Neville is smiling, barely listening. 'It is time to open the tomb of Valdemar, Doctor, time for the Dark One to live again. He is awake now. I can hear his voice. He is everywhere. Such a pity you will not be here to witness the glory.'

'Neville!'

The guards push them into the airlock and the Doctor can only watch through the porthole as Neville locks them out.

He sees him mouth a command. Presumably, to open the floor hatch to the outside and the corrosive clouds waiting for them.

'Any bright ideas, Doctor?' asks Pelham, anxiously jumping from foot to foot, unconsciously toying with that bangle on her wrist.

'Hundreds, but none of them work.'

'Well, we've got to do something.'

There is a terrible grating sound. The temperature drops and the Doctor feels his ears pop. 'They're lowering the pressure. We've got about ten seconds.' He looks around.

There's got to be something, some way out. There always is.

The grating noise increases from worrying to deafening.

Pelham looks at him, her face drained of all colour. 'Is this the worst thing?' she moans.

'I think so,' he nods. There just isn't enough time.

The floor begins to move, sickeningly quickly. Maybe there isn't a way out of this one after all. There's a first time for everything. He is surprised when Pelham suddenly leaps at him, arms open. 'Hold me,' she cries.

The floor opens up and they plummet, straight down into the acid clouds.

Part Two

'But how is it that this lives in thy mind?

What sees thou else in the dark backward and abysm of time?'

The Tempest

Chapter Ten.

Robert Hopkins is in his cabin, running over the latest ship's-efficiency statistics when the call comes.

If any member of the crew, or anyone at all for that matter, had been unwise enough suggest that what Hopkins was doing was meditating, they would have regretted that suggestion quickly enough. Meditating, however, is essentially what he is doing.

There is something rea.s.suring in the cold lists of percentages that run in neat orderly lines down the white pages. Hopkins finds that studying them concentrates the mind and body wonderfully, and each time he emerges from this task he feels his muscles are less stiff, his mind less cluttered than when he began.

Checking the ship's efficiency is as good a way of pa.s.sing the time as any, and pa.s.sing the time is all they are doing here for the moment.

They have been in orbit around Ashkellia for exactly twelve days, six hours and eighteen minutes. Hopkins keeps a timepiece by his cot to keep him aware of this fact.

When the alarm goes off, he is jerked out of his studies. It can only mean one thing.

He feels himself begin to shake in the flashing of the red emergency lights. His breath emerges in short jumps. Got him, he thinks. Got him!

He must compose himself. Already the boots of his crewmen are hammering along the decks of the ship. His ship.

Hopkins unfolds his leather battledress and fits it neatly over his white, hairless skin. His skin has always been utterly smooth, up to and including his head. A hereditary disease introduced accidentally into his family through genetic manipulation by those who were once his masters. He only has to look in the mirror to give himself a thousand reasons to go on, to persist in bringing them to justice. Him, the son of generations of bookkeepers and clerks to the Elite.

He closes the ship's log, marking the page with a thick bookmark. He will have to finish this later. The pride he is feeling is because he knows what is happening has nothing to do with fate, or destiny, or any of that phoney mysticism so beloved of the Elite. It is down to hard work and persistence. Nothing but. Groaning and straining, he pulls on his tight knee-length boots.

The footsteps have become knocks at his cabin door.

Hopkins pulls on the steel helmet. He is ready.

Once open, the doorway reveals the bare access route to the bridge. It is lined with his lieutenants. They snap to attention, saluting. He looks up at them (they are all far taller than he) and struts past, triumph unconcealed on his face.

'So, he is here, Carlin,' he states as the retinue follow him to the transmat-receptor room.

'It appears so, Citizen Hopkins,' replies the younger man, a nephew of one of his uncles, a cousin first removed or something. 'Your trust in the woman was not misplaced.'

Of course, it wasn't nepotism that got Hopkins's cousin here, oh no, it was proven ability. There is no place for nepotism in the New Protectorate. It irks Hopkins only slightly that Carlin's moustache bears proof that the genetic hairlessness did not extend to that side of the family.

He takes his cousin's arm, 'I fancy I have a way with the weaker s.e.x, Carlin. I pride myself I understand the warped logic of their minds. Now, they have not been arrested as yet, have they?'

'I have stationed the guard according to your orders. No one has been in there.'

Hopkins's lip curls. 'Good. Good. I want the first face he sees to be mine. So he will know exactly what will happen to him. It is said I have a particular apt.i.tude for this kind of work, Carlin, is that not so?'

'Indeed, Citizen Hopkins, without question.'

They reach the hatch with its stencilled black lettering, the two guards swiftly acknowledging Hopkins's presence. He checks his uniform; he wants to be immaculate for this moment. 'Do I look all right, Carlin?' he asks, although he knows it sounds like a demand.

'If I may, Citizen,' replies Carlin cautiously, and straightens the neckerchief.

'Right,' says Hopkins. He takes a deep breath. Sweat is trickling down his hairless back, pooling inside his waistband. 'Open the door.'

Robert Hopkins positively runs inside the room. Where he stops.

It is not Paul Neville. That man in the transmat-receptor room is not Paul Neville. It is, instead, a clown.

The clown is flapping at the singed end of an improbably long scarf wrapped round his neck. His floppy brown hat seems to be smoking slightly. Pelham is there beside him, absolutely pale.

'So you see,' the clown is saying, with all the pomp of the circus, 'a dual transmat-activator in that bangle on your wrist would be just the thing I would use to get two people out of a hopeless predicament.'

He turns to Hopkins and offers a hand. Hopkins stares at the soot-blackened object. 'h.e.l.lo,' says the clown, his eyes wide and mad. 'I'd like to thank you for saving our lives. It was you that provided Ms Pelham here with that bangle, wasn't it?'

Hopkins nods to Carlin, who promptly floors the clown with his Protectorate law-bringing blackjack.

'Who is this?' Hopkins seethes at Pelham, a fraction of the anger he will bring to bear upon her later.

'I'm the Doctor,' comes a pained, m.u.f.fled voice from the floor. 'Do you mind if I get up? I feel awkward talking to a pair of boots. And boots that, if I may say so, seem a little tight. You need to watch your circulation.'

Hopkins kicks the clown, who clutches his head once more and shouts in agony. 'I was only saying,' he manages, 'you seem a little too big for your boots, no need to get the hump.'

Enraged beyond all endurance, and worried that in his ire he will kill this buffoon too quickly, Hopkins snaps his fingers. 'Bring them,' he sneers.

They had caught her with embarra.s.sing ease. Despite Neville's warnings, despite her own experiences, Miranda Pelham had walked straight into it.

She had been back in the solar system, chasing up a lead.

Word had come in that a merchant had visited a planet in the Pan-Arlington system and come away with a set of coordinates, inscribed into ancient monoliths. These coordinates, he claimed, were in pictogram form and described the final resting place of a 'black skein', a creature with twenty heads that had menaced the long-extinct race that had put them there. For a large sum of money, the merchant would divulge the coordinates on Charon, Pluto's twin. Two dark twins a long way from the sun.

It sounded pretty feeble, even to the desperate Paul Neville, but he was unwilling to pa.s.s up any opportunity. He and Pelham were getting closer to Ashkellia, but this would have been the confirmation of a location they already suspected.

Pelham had volunteered to chase it up. She was sick of the Elite supremacist exiles they were sheltering with; their dull, cruel, petty nostalgia for that which they had lost to the New Protectorate. She was also becoming, quite rightly as it turned out, very frightened of Paul Neville. It was clear that he was not in his right mind. In fact, very probably, he was becoming a paranoid obsessive with some distinctly nasty tendencies. He had taken to executing a serf every morning, just to rid himself of his nightly anxieties, and their hosts were running out of servants. It was about this time she met Erik, she recalled. The Elite supremacist movement had supplied her with false papers and given her the dun, coa.r.s.e clothing of a New Protectorate citizen. The creed of the revolution was called Uber-Material, supreme rationalism, and the people of the protectorate followed this creed with the enthusiasm of zealots. Pelham dyed her hair back to its natural colour and removed her make-up. She hadn't realised how old she had become in so short a time.

Charon was as much of a toilet as she'd been informed.

Nothing more than a shantytown anch.o.r.ed to that moon. The only view on offer was the gigantic satellite gulag, a political prison and the shantytown's raison d'etre raison d'etre, a huge grey ball sharing the sky with Pluto itself. Looking up at the grey prison made her shiver.

Her only company was Protectorate prison officials, and the occasional merchant who used the ghastly place as a stopover before journeying to a more enticing part of the Terran solar system.

Pelham spent a week in fear of her life. The Protectorate guards were just the thugs she had expected, her only salvation being their brutish, genetically-reared stupidity (the rumour was that generations ago there had been some distasteful breeding experiments involving Ogrons; she didn't like to think about it). Their lack of curiosity, their lack of anything except perhaps pleasure at the prospect of what they were going to do to certain inmates when they were allowed back up to the gulag almost made her smile.

Almost. It had been a relief when the 'merchant' arrived. A rendezvous was arranged and she walked straight into the trap. One minute she was seated in a bar right on the edge of the town, the next she was being pinned to the floor by six iron clads.

They hauled her up and she got her first view of the hunter himself: First Citizen Robert Hopkins. His skin was as pale and bald as the rumours suggested. She had fainted when he looked at her. His eyes were a pale pink and held not a trace of mercy.

Shaking with fear, Miranda Pelham had pleaded for her life.

No, let's get this correct, she begged, screamed with fear for her life. He just looked at the floor, waiting for her to say the right thing. She did, in the end. She told him where to find Paul Neville.

He didn't kill her. Oh, he shuttled her up to the gulag, gave her the VIP tour of the inquisition chambers where she witnessed a number of surgical procedures that would stay with her until her dying day, but he didn't kill her. He wanted Paul Neville too badly for that.

Of course she told him where he was, the location of the Elite supremacist movement, although she knew that once he had Neville, she would be of no further use to Hopkins.

And if you were of no use to Hopkins...

Only when Hopkins's men were picking through the smoking ashes of the Elite base and could not find Neville amongst the bodies, did she begin to hope that she might survive.

Hopkins sat her down at a field table in the remains of the base. All around, iron clads were sifting through rubble, scrutinising the remains for any clues. She was shivering, her hair shorn, her clothing nothing but a dirty grey blanket, her face blue with bruises.

'I want you to find Neville,' he had said, very calmly. 'You will find him for me.'

'Yes,' she nodded furiously. 'Yes.'

Hopkins had regarded her with his unblinking eyes. 'He trusts you. You have been his closest ally for three years now. There is nothing to connect you to me. We will concoct a story about where you have been.'

'Yes.' She was shivering.

'When you find him, you will contact me. From this moment on, your life is not your own. You belong to me.

Nothing else exists. Once we have parted, if he is not with you the next time I see you, I will have you tortured to death.

Do you understand me?'

'Yes.'

Pelham had returned to Charon, where she waited for Neville to contact her. She often toyed with the bangle Hopkins had welded round her arm, the transmat-bangle with its short-range homing beacon.

When a genuine merchants' shuttle arrived with a message from Neville telling her where to travel next, Pelham had felt like a woman in a dream. Hopkins's invisible leash was with her wherever she went; she knew he would never let her go.