'No. A smaller ship. Smaller and faster a very different drive system, in fact.'

'A fresh trail, you say. Recent, then.' With a sinking feeling, Trix asked the obvious question: 'And it leads. . . ?'

'Straight to Thebe.' The Doctor fixed her with a stony stare. 'Someone's got here ahead of us.'

To Fitz's surprise, and despite the angst sweeping round his mind, he quite enjoyed his time in the PadPad thinkset.

49.A wise man once said that that all you needed to succeed in life was a good idea and it didn't necessarily have to be your your idea. On that basis he'd decided to base his mental designs on some of the more mental places he'd landed up thanks to the Doctor. If Halcyon was prepared to use this thing to mess with Fitz's head, then Fitz would return the compliment. Halcyon would gasp, he would wonder. . . He might even throw up. But he wouldn't forget Fitz in a hurry. idea. On that basis he'd decided to base his mental designs on some of the more mental places he'd landed up thanks to the Doctor. If Halcyon was prepared to use this thing to mess with Fitz's head, then Fitz would return the compliment. Halcyon would gasp, he would wonder. . . He might even throw up. But he wouldn't forget Fitz in a hurry.

He started out gently, kitting out the first room like a dwelling on Mechta a quite literally mental place where, nevertheless, he'd been happy for a while.

He made the walls and floors whitewashed concrete, added in the raffia mats, the plain worktops. . . then spread a stylised mural of the imposing Mechtan pyramids over one wall. It had been a good home, there. While it lasted.

The next room resolved itself in the thought cloud as a large, shadowy s.p.a.ce. Fitz squashed a slightly sanitised version of Il-Eruk's tavern on Yquatine into its contours. That should make baldy sit up and take notice.

The shape of the next template was almost cathedral like, putting Fitz in mind of the old TARDIS control room. He decked it out in bra.s.s and blue, a proper Jules Verne cathedral, and made the console itself into an occasional table at its centre. This was actually fun!

So it went on, each room getting wilder as his confidence grew and his mind got used to the technology. His parting shot, the coup de grace coup de grace, was a recreation of the Council of Eight's hourgla.s.s room, a crystal chamber with shelves and shelves of the twinkling timepieces in an unsettling shade of mauve.

'Finished,' he told Sook.

'We both are,' she said, looking at him in exhausted horror. 'You've been in there for hours '

'I have? It seemed like just a few minutes.'

'Of course it did! It's PadPad!' She switched off the thought cloud and removed his headset. 'Where did all that that come from?' come from?'

'Impressive, huh?'

'That's a nice word, Kreiner. So is "ugh". So is "disaster".'

Fitz winced as he sat back up. 'You don't think Halcyon will like it?' His last hopes abruptly p.r.i.c.ked like the bubble over his head. 'Um. . . Could I maybe have another go with it?'

'Even if there was time what would be the point?' Her look of horror had twisted into one of disgust. 'Hopeless, pathetic amateur. You really thought you could just waltz in and busk it, didn't you? No training in the schools, the Forms and Compa.s.s, not a shred of research not even the basics!'

'How was I supposed to '

50.'Don't you realise everyone here is graded alpha-plus in eight disciplines?

Halcyon insists on it!' She took some deep breaths, dearly willing herself to be calm as she removed something like a tiny plectrum from the headset and surveyed it bleakly.

He clutched her arm. 'You could do the templates for me!'

'I told you, the PadPad projects directly into the brain. He knows the way I think!'

'Then couldn't you lose that thing?'

'He'd only make you do it over, and I'd be piling incompetence on top of incompetence!' She glared at him, grey eyes bulging like they were going to pop. 'I'm Halcyon's personal a.s.sistant! Don't you see that if anything disturbs his safely ordered little world, it's my my fault? Like you just turning up with no warning in the middle of a contemplation chamber! I covered for you, Kreiner. fault? Like you just turning up with no warning in the middle of a contemplation chamber! I covered for you, Kreiner.

I convinced him to take you seriously, gave you the chance to save both our skins. And you. . . '

She turned and stalked from the room.

'Sook, wait '

'We'll talk later. Oh, how we'll talk later.'

Fitz watched her go. Then he got up from the couch. It looked kind of fragile and he wouldn't want it to bend under the weight of his misery.

As he stood up, he felt something hard in his shoe. Frowning, he pulled off the scruffy loafer and, holding his breath, inspected it.

After one or two shakes, the TARDIS key plopped out into his palm.

He stared at it, dumbfounded, not trusting this miracle. His spare key!

The one he'd decided to keep in a super-safe place then promptly forgotten where that place might be.

'Shoe-reka,' he breathed.

'Hey, Kreiner!' Roddle had rallied, propped himself up on his elbows. He stared over, gla.s.sy-eyed and giggy. 'Show's over?'

'Well and truly,' he grinned, new life flooding through him as he stared down at the precious key. 'And if you could just direct me to the loading bay, you'll see what I do for an encore!'

51.

Chapter Seven.

Thebe had loomed large in the c.o.c.kpit window, looking to Trix like a giant squashed doughnut. There was quite a bite taken out of it too a huge impact crater radiating out over almost half its barren surface.

'Miracle it wasn't smashed to smithereens,' she'd remarked.

'Aggregate body,' the Doctor murmured, 'like a rubble pile. Good at absorbing shocks; the trauma of impact was confined to the local area.' He looked pensive. 'Speaking of the local area, I hope our shields hold out.'

Trix jumped. 'We're not under attack, are we?'

'Oh yes. From that.' He gestured at Jupiter's fat, striped face beyond Thebe.

'At this range its magnetic field is slinging out enough radiation to kill us both in less than a second. The ship's generating a counter-field to repel it. I only hope the base is.'

The Blazar HQ was a sloping construction, built like a barnacle within a smaller crater. The landing pad was littered with small s.p.a.ceships, but one craft towered above the rest, a dull silver arrowhead. A long flexible pipe joined the ship and the building together.

'He's nabbed the main docking tube,' observed the Doctor, almost scratching the paintwork of the ships either side as he squeezed into a parking spot.

'That's the way in the crew would use, still, we're not proud. The ancillary port for deliveries will do us.'

And here they were. Another giant ribbed pipe had unrolled like the mother of all condoms to fit snugly over Falsh's airlock, stiffening with artificial gravity. Trix was trailing after the Doctor as they entered the base through the tradesmen's entrance. She glanced around at the silver ribbed walls and shivered; she felt she was walking down some metal monster's throat. At least it wasn't transparent, reminding her that just outside was a super-enormous planet stuffed so fat with gas and iron and energy that it spent the whole time pumping out practically everything that was bad for you except chocolate, typically.

'So, that ship out there,' Trix hissed. 'Bad guys?'

'A deputation of fixers,' the Doctor surmised. 'Fixing things for Falsh Industries so that no one here can tell the truth about what really happened.'

'But, then, if we're too late '

53.'We may be just in time,' the Doctor countered, quickening his step. 'If we hurry.'

They reached a scratched, metallic bulkhead with a grubby keypad set beside it. In the time a slurred computer voice asked them to key-in authorisation codes, the Doctor had produced the sonic screwdriver and had got them in regardless.

The lights were low but adjusted themselves to a higher level as they entered a waiting area of some kind. Trix only hoped the temperature would follow suit it was like a freezer here. The furniture what little there was of it was white, lightweight and plastic. The metal walls were bare save for one; SHIPMENTS was spelled out in large glowing letters above a doorway.

'I suppose the crew loaded up supplies from here,' said the Doctor, walking through into a well-stocked storage bay and gesturing around. 'Explosives, launchers, heat spikes. . . '

'Come again?'

'A lot of the matter out there is superchilled ice, packed with dissolved metallic salts. So the best way to collect it is to warm things up and have a jar handy.'

'Come a long way since candles and pickaxes, haven't we?' said Trix, as she took in the chunky landscape of burnished metal crates, dotted about at random like a child's discarded building blocks. 'Don't think much of this storage system.'

'Stuff's arranged in a simple grid matrix for vertical lifting and transporta-tion. All done by robotic drones, I'd imagine.' He stared up at the flat, feature-less roof where a number of large silver discs were huddling silently. 'There you go. Magnetised I should imagine. Humankind is such a lazy animal.'

'Well, I don't intend to lounge around here,' Trix announced. The hovering discs gave her the creeps.

So did the faint whining noise up ahead. A door opening.

Someone was coming.

Silently she joined the Doctor in ducking behind one of the giant crates.

Pounding footsteps sounded in a bewildering chorus of echoes, as someone swift but heavy traced an awkward path through the crates. Winding nearer and nearer.

The Doctor mouthed at her: 'They know we're here!'

She followed him as he crept away from their crate, moving without hesitation, turning this way and that as the silver maze zigzagged on all around them. Behind her she could hear the weighty sounds of their pursuer, match-ing them for pace.

'Where are we going?' she hissed.

'I don't know,' said the Doctor.

54.They turned a corner and found the way blocked by another crate.

'Answer: Not far,' said Trix.

The heavy footsteps were getting closer. Trix made to retrace their steps but the Doctor pulled her back. 'It's no good,' he said. 'They're too close.'

Her eyes flashed at him as she yanked her arm free of his grip. 'So what do you you suggest we do?' suggest we do?'

He cradled both hands together. 'Bunk up?'

She stared up at the sheer silver monolith. It had to be ten feet high. 'You're not serious?'

'From the sound of their tread, our pursuer hails from a world with significantly lighter gravity,' said the Doctor, gesturing for her to put her foot in his makeshift stirrup. 'So let's take advantage of that!'

Trix stepped uncertainly into his grip and felt him propel her easily upwards. She scrabbled up the sheer sides of the metal crate, gasping as her nails split or bent backwards. At last her fingers gripped the top of the box.

The pounding of the bogeyman's feet was tangled up in her heartbeat as she heaved herself up on to the top of the thing.

'Done it,' she gasped, jubilant for a second.

But from here she could see what was chasing them. It was just a stone's throw away. And it could see her.

It wasn't human. It walked on two legs, had two arms, was even wearing a kind of dark s.p.a.cesuit. But its skin was grey, its face was broader, the features all bunched up in the middle. Its eyes were dead-looking, fish eyes. Its ears were more like gills, flapping where its cheekbones should be. As it saw her it nodded slowly and quickened its steps.

Trix peered over the top of the crate at the Doctor. 'It's an alien,' she told him. 'It's seen me, it knows right where we are!'

'Run,' the Doctor told her. 'Run and jump. Keep to the crate-tops, out of its reach.'

A bolt of white light shot past her head. She smelt burning hair and guessed it must be her own. 'It's got a gun!' She reached out her arm. 'I'll pull you up.'

But she had to throw herself flat against the lid of the crate as another death ray whizzed past her shoulder.

'Make for the other end of the hall,' he said firmly. 'I'll meet you there.'

Another light-beam slammed into the crate she stood upon, sent sparks shooting up from the side.

'There!' said the Doctor, smiling. 'Now I have a handhold, I'll be fine! Move! Move! ' '

Trix looked around for the next crate within jumping distance. She'd be able to cover more ground this way, but that thing would have her in its sights. . .

She jumped, landed nimbly on the next crate. Caught another coruscating flash of light behind her.

55.The thing was aiming at the Doctor now, and his coat-tails had just gone up in smoke. He shrugged off his heavy velvet coat, trailed it like a bottle-green flag behind him as he took a flying jump and skidded on to the next crate, losing his footing. It was just as well another laser beam crackled through the spot where he'd been standing.

Crossly, the Doctor balled up his smoking coat and flung it at the creature, knocking the gun from its grey, meaty hand. Then he was up again and off, bounding over the crates with Tigger-like abandon.

Getting out of range, Trix realised, figuring it was time she did just the same.

She started jumping again, more hesitantly. Each time she landed, the crash and thump reverberated around the storehouse, made her think the thing was shooting again.

What was it doing?

Nauseous with exertion, legs aching and her heart pounding halfway up her throat, Trix turned and swore.

The thing wasn't firing any more. Now it held some kind of electronic dooberry in its fat fist, and was turning a dial. One of the silver discs had bobbed away from its herd in eerie silence. . .