'Your grandfather met a G.o.d, and that's all he said? It couldn't be such an unmemorable occurrence.'

'He wasn't interviewing him for the radio! What were you expecting?'

'I don't know. I never really thought about what you'd ask someone who met a G.o.d. It's not an everyday happening.'

'No? You said you met the Dog General just the other night.'

'That's different; that's just a spirit, not a G.o.d. All I'm saying is that you'd think he would have said something about whether Weng-Chiang breathed poison and gazed with beams of light like the stories say. I mean, that's not something you could miss, is it?'

'Well, since all the stories say that, maybe he just a.s.sumed we'd already know that part, and didn't want to waste his breath on something we already knew. Unless you're trying to tell me you have doubts?'

The other man's indignant reply was lost as they clumped back down the companionway into the darkness under the deckhouse. Woo considered following them, but decided against it. Instead, he would follow the Doctor and Romy to keep an eye on her them.

They would be on board by now, if the Doctor had been right. Woo hadn't heard any shooting, so it seemed reasonable to a.s.sume that he had been right. Woo didn't know where on the ship they were, of course, but he knew who they were going to ask for. All he had to do was ask the same question.

The guard who had been leaning boredly on the rail was now strolling along the deck amidships, presumably on his regular beat.

That meant he would pa.s.s under the eaves of the main deckhouse. Woo waited until the guard was directly below, then reached down. He grabbed the back of the man's collar at the same time as punching him behind the ear. The guard slumped a little, unconscious, but was still held up by Woo's hand. Grabbing his collar with the other hand as well, Woo heaved the guard up onto the roof of the deckhouse. He quickly tied the guard's wrists and ankles and shook him awake.

The guard drew in a breath, but Woo clamped a hand over his mouth before he could call out. He tut-tutted. 'That's no way to greet a visitor,' he whispered. You just didn't get the same quality of thugs these days, he reflected. 'Where is the senior officer's stateroom?'

He shifted his hand to the guard's throat, squeezing just hard enough to let him breathe enough to talk in a croak. 'The colonel?'

'That's right.'

'At the stern inside the sterncastle and the first deck down. It's at the end of the corridor, so you can't miss it.' The guard's face was turning an unhealthy blue tinge.

Woo pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and gagged the man with it. 'Thanks for your help.'

Woo left the guard on the roof, then dropped silently to the wooden deck. Pausing only to dodge behind a ventilator pipe when two men went past, Woo padded to the shelter deck in seconds. A small knot of men were busy with ropes for the sails on the sterncastle above, but they were all too engrossed in their work to notice him.

He ducked inside a bulkhead door and found himself in a vestibule with two doors and a stairwell. Hoping that the guard hadn't lied to him and imagining what he would do if he had Woo went down the steps. There, he found himself in a short wood-panelled corridor that turned left two doors down. He peeked round the corner and saw that there was indeed a door at the end. A guard stood outside.

Shooting would alert any hostiles inside the room, so that was out of the question, but he still had to get that guard out of the way, and quietly. He stuck a hand round the corner, tapped gently on the wall, then made a come-hither motion.

He heard hesitant footsteps almost immediately, listening closely to judge their distance. The guard's shadow stretched out past the corner, giving another means to work out how far away he was. Woo counted down until he was reasonably certain the guard was precisely one step away from the corner, then delivered a head-high kick as the man took that last step.

The guard walked straight into Woo's boot, and fell, poleaxed. Woo stepped over the body, then moved down to the end of the corridor to press his ear against the wooden door. 'An honourable age,' the Doctor's rich tones were saying. 'You seem to be keeping in shape that's very important for the health of the elderly.' Evidently this colonel must be quite old. Good, Woo, thought, that meant he wouldn't be much of a danger.

Satisfied that the Doctor had everything in hand, Woo opened the door and stepped in. 'Sorry I'm late but ' Then he noticed who was sitting behind the desk. A gun was in Woo's hand instantly, swinging into a firing stance. The Doctor clamped a hand over it with a grimace an instant before a cold muzzle was pressed to Woo's temple from behind the door.

The Doctor then looked back at HsienKo.

'That was a very fast draw,' she acknowledged in an admiring tone, which Woo was too stunned to feel flattered by. 'You can only be this Yan Cheh I've heard so much about.

Do come in.'

Woo closed the door, the adjutant who had been behind it confiscating his Colts. HsienKo narrowed her eyes, looking him over. He felt uncomfortably like a snake faced by a mongoose, but was glad that Romy was unharmed. And the Doctor, of course. Not that HsienKo wasn't equally enticing.

'I know you,' HsienKo muttered. 'You're Woo! The owner of the Club Do-San.' Her face broke into a grin of satisfaction; obviously she was putting the pieces together.

'That's how you could track our movements any time Kwok or I have been there, either the waiters were eavesdropping or the tables were bugged. Correct me if I'm wrong.'

'I've never heard of this Yan Cheh,' Woo said stiffly. It was the only thing he could think of; to brazen it out.

HsienKo shook her head. 'As you see Doctor, I've kept my faculties as well as my figure over six decades.'

The Doctor tilted his head. 'You are human, aren't you?'

Woo looked at him as if he were mad.

'Yes.' She smiled coyly.

The Doctor smiled slowly. 'Well, if you don't mind my saying so, you seem to take that question rather in your stride.'

HsienKo's expression didn't change. 'I believe it's called being inscrutable. The gwai lo gwai lo seem to like that.' seem to like that.'

'Ah, face. Well, I'm willing to have any delusion shattered.'

'Of course; you are not western, are you, Doctor?' She shook her head as Woo wondered what she and the Doctor were talking about. It seemed as if they were talking at cross-purposes, but something about their tones told Woo that this wasn't the case.

The Doctor snapped his fingers, as if inspiration had struck.

'Ah, I see. You blame me for your father's death, and you want revenge?'

HsienKo gave an amused shake of the head, though ice glittered in her eyes. 'I don't practice rhetoric, Doctor; if I blamed you for my father's death, we wouldn't be talking right now.' She half-closed her eyes. 'The survivors of the Tong told me what happened, and I gained other information on the subject from the police and newspapers. My father had been greatly shamed, but your intercession allowed him to retain face in death.'

'Then why are you throwing it all away by following his original path?'

'Is that what you think? This is not throwing anything away. My father's honour will be maintained, and enhanced, when my work is complete. You will approve when it's all over, Doctor, believe me. As it is, I am rather busy at the moment, so our discussion will have to wait.' She turned to the adjutant. 'Escort our guests to the brig.'

K9 didn't like being so close to water. Electricity and liquids just didn't mix well. Machines could not, by definition, became bored, but K9 would have had to admit, if asked, that one could only a.n.a.lyse the particle const.i.tuents of the same river a few times before it ceased to be an efficient act.

It had proved useful, though, as the water was displaying a surprisingly high level of charged particle decay. It wasn't enough to be dangerous, but the information was worth filing away in his data banks.

The other thing which had occupied his time was calculating what stage the Doctor's plan would have reached.

According to K9's internal chronometer, and cross-referencing with past data, the Doctor and Romana would be locked up by now, and would doubtless soon call for his a.s.sistance.

With that in mind, he set about a.n.a.lysing the electrical system of the speedboat he was sitting in, and calculating how he would best be able to operate it, bearing in mind that he had no limbs, and it had no computer to access.

The brig was a small and grimy cabin that hadn't been used for years, going by the dust. The Doctor was lying on a bunk, humming 'n.o.body knows the trouble I've seen', while Woo tested the door and porthole with his bare hands. He was wondering if he could open either of them. So far, he had had little luck. Romana sat thinking. 'Terrestrial anthropology isn't really my field, but that girl can't be more than what, twenty-five?'

The Doctor paused from his humming. 'Unless there's a temporal instability involved.'

'I don't think anyone's ever made a study of the effects of ma.s.sive chronon irradiation on the humanoid body...I suppose it's possible that a ma.s.sive dose at the embryonic stage could produce some sort of mutation; so why not antegeria?'

'Antegeria?' Woo asked. All of this was beyond him, and he was beginning to wonder if he was hallucinating due to ergot poisoning from tainted rice, perhaps.

'Lack of ageing,' the Doctor explained. 'The opposite of progeria, or Hutchinson-Gilford's Syndrome. Sufferers age to death before they reach p.u.b.erty because their metabolic rate has been vastly accelerated. In this case, the opposite occurs: HsienKo just doesn't age.'

'You mean her metabolic rate has slowed a great deal?'

'Not exactly, if that had happened she'd be hibernating. It must have some connection to the chronon radiation we've been tracking; she's absolutely riddled with it and can somehow exploit telluric current. How old did she say she was?'

'Sixty-five. She doesn't look a day older than Romy here.'

Romana winced at the nickname. 'Actually, by Earth years I'm a hundred and '

'Shh!' The Doctor put a finger to his lips. 'That places her date of birth in 1872. That rings a bell...' He mumbled incoherently to himself for a moment. 'What was it? "We came home in '73...It's been in the family quite some time!"

Of course! The Time Cabinet!' He slapped himself on the forehead.

'What?' Romana looked baffled for once.

'The zygma beam; Magnus Greel's zygma beam!' The Doctor looked very harried all of a sudden, and Woo didn't like that idea at all; if the Doctor went mad, he'd have a hard time getting them out of this. 'T'ung Chi gave it to the widow of Brigadier-General Litefoot when they left Peking in 1873.

Before that, it had been seized by T'ung Chi's army after arriving from the fifty-first century. Greel's technology was based on Findecker's Folly, d'you see? The double-nexus particle. It used a zygma beam to push the cabinet back through time...'

Her eyes brightening, Romana nodded eagerly. 'As the beam intersects with the Earth's electromagnetic field, it reacts with it to produce ma.s.sive discharges of chronon radiation. Its spatial area of influence must be in direct proportion to the length of the zygma beam; a tiny localized disruption at source, and a wider discharge at the destination, since the beam has lost coherence with distance.'

'Ah. That's a much better idea than I had.' The Doctor's expression hardened. 'Yes. That time shift is discharging chronon energy into the Earth's geomagnetic field, making the natural telluric currents powerful enough to carry travellers.'

'If they've got a chronon source in phase with the current.

Such as a sample of HsienKo's cellular structure. The blood samples set into those geomantic compa.s.ses, perhaps.

Presumably HsienKo herself doesn't need one.'

The Doctor grinned proudly. 'Well, that's a bit basic, but very well put, Romana.'

'Thank you.'

'Very clever indeed,' HsienKo added from outside the brig. 'The energy radiations from Weng-Chiang's Time Cabinet left many side-effects upon its arrival while I was in the womb. My immortality is only one of them.' The door opened with a rattle of keys, and Mister Sin waddled into the brig, still in his now rather stained j.a.panese school uniform. Woo nodded to himself. Obviously this was the dwarf he'd seen at the docks. He wondered why it wore that grotesque wooden mask, and then felt his blood cool and slow.

It wasn't a mask, he saw, and its joints swung without any movement of muscles under the sleeves and trouserlegs.

Instead it was stiff and mechanical, like a poseable mannequin being moved by invisible hands.

The Doctor's eyes widened, then narrowed in a surprisingly chilling look. 'What is that doing here? Is that what you went to the music hall museum for?'

'Oh, don't mind him; I just don't want you trying anything foolish. But yes, this is why I went to the museum in London.

Sin is a very useful tool.'

'Sometimes so is sweaty nitroglycerine, but letting that thing run loose is like juggling the stuff. I thought I'd deactivated it.'

'There was a spare circuit the prototype. The pig's brain matter had decayed, but there's a fairly infinite supply of that from the local restaurants.'

'I don't think much of its outfit.'

HsienKo laughed. 'A society girl with a ventriloquist's doll would be commented upon. With a child, though...Who would stop a child? We're wasting time, however, and what I want is for Romana to join me out here.'

'What are you going to do with her?' the Doctor growled.

Woo tensed himself to spring, rather than waste time talking.

'How many times must I tell you? I have no wish to harm you. I want both of you with me, but it would be safer for you to travel separately. This way I know that even if you escape, you will follow. Sin, if either of the men move, kill the other.'

Woo was tempted to risk it, but sacrificing the Doctor in such a manner wouldn't be honourable. Besides, the Doctor seemed to have previous knowledge of this group, so his survival was vital if Woo was going to learn all he could. He relaxed slightly, his teeth itching, as one of the guards pulled Romana out of the brig.

'Take her to the launch, I'll explain everything to her there,' HsienKo ordered.

As the guard escorted Romana out of sight, Sin backed away towards the door, his eyes glinting as sharply as bodkin points. It was as if he were trying to will them into provoking him. Once he was outside, two more guards came in, each with one of Woo's Colts. They motioned to the Doctor and Woo to leave the brig.

HsienKo looked away slightly as the Doctor glared at her.

Sin, however, glared right back. 'I know you won't really see,'

HsienKo said, 'but this is not how I would prefer it to be.'

Woo thought she looked genuinely remorseful, but long experience had taught him how easily that could be faked. 'I can only ask you to bear with me for now. In two days, you will see that I am not the monster you think. I know you will understand then that what I am doing is for the best, and I hope you will forgive me, but for the moment you are misguided.'

'One of us is. If you're planning to bring back Weng-Chiang, it won't be the best for anyone,' said the Doctor.

She looked sideways at the guards, who had bristled at this insult to their G.o.d. 'We shall see. Guards, take them to the forward hold where they'll have a little more room, and wait for the launch to come back for them.' With that, she turned, leading Sin off into the darkness.

Fourteen.

he Doctor and Woo were led down a steep companionway to T wards the bowels of the ship. Woo suspected that the word bowels was particularly apt in this case; the cargo hold they were shown into had been converted for quite a different purpose.