'Of course,' Fritchoff whispered back. He stopped cutting to explain. 'I can't support the concept of honour in war. It's a construct of cultural forces.'

'Never mind that, just carry on sawing,' the Doctor urged.

Romana stood in the doorway of the Femdroids' master control room and gave a long, heartfelt sigh. It seemed that not a single piece of their equipment had survived Stokes's onslaught, and clumps of fizzing, sparking circuitry lay on all sides, along with shattered gla.s.s, chunks of metal and toppled panels.

K9 made a swift survey of the room. 'Component failure estimated at sixty-eight per cent, Mistress.'

Romana threw Stokes an accusing look. 'Did you have to be so thorough?'

'It did the job.' He pushed past her and gestured to the wall screen, on which they could see Harmock talking to some of the dome's workers, the immobile Femdroids in the background. 'There, you see. If I'd reined my energy in, we might all be dead by now. They were shooting at us, remember.'

Romana considered. 'In fact, they were shooting at me and K9. You and Harmock were just going to be reconditioned. We were the threat.'

'Affirmative,' said K9. 'Perhaps because we were the only ones to begin to perceive the illusion.'

Stokes righted a chair that had fallen in a comer and sat in it. 'Pure conjecture. It won't get you any further. I say we should just put this down as being one of the great, unexplained mysteries of the universe, and clear out. We could use your TARDIS for that.' He made the suggestion with a casualness that unnerved Romana. 'We're too far out from anywhere important to make the journey any other way, I should think. After all, it took me millions of years.' He clapped his podgy hands together. 'What I'd give to see a good, old-fashioned transmat pad.'

Romana clicked her fingers. 'What did you just say?'

'Transmat pad,' said Stokes again. 'Why, have you got one? There are none about here - it's shockingly primitive Romana paced around the room, her mind piecing together recent events.

'They have a Fasts.p.a.ce link to Barclow, but no transmat.'

'I pointed this out earlier, Mistress,' said K9.

'Yes, yes.' She stopped in front of a large, gla.s.s-fronted unit that Stokes had all but ripped apart. 'And it's a ridiculous anomaly. They work on the same principle.' She turned to Stokes and pointed a long finger at him. 'And you come from a place with both. Tell me, how does a Fasts.p.a.ce link work?'

'What?' Stokes screwed up his face. 'How am I expected to know that? I've no interest in technicalities. As long as it switches on and it does what I want it to do I don't care how it works.'

'But you've seen enough Fasts.p.a.ce engines? You could picture one in your mind?'

'Just about, I suppose.' Stokes looked uncomfortable. 'Where is this leading to?'

'Duplication from mental image manipulation,' suggested K9 cryptically.

Stokes kicked his casing lightly. 'What does that mean?'

'K9,' said Romana. 'Retrieve data from our last encounter with Mr Stokes, on the Rock of Judgement. Compare the technological specifications of this room to the specifications of that environment.'

K9 whirred. 'Cross-indexing.'

Stokes stood up. 'Do you mean what I think you mean?'

She looked him in the eye. 'When you drifted here, Stokes, I don't think it was the Femdroids that found you but their creators.'

'Mistress,' said K9 brightly. 'Correlation is almost total. The Fasts.p.a.ce technology used here was adapted from Mr Stokes's memories of similar systems from his own homeplace. He also has knowledge of detailed computer simulations such as the one used to create the world outside the dome.'

'No, I don't,' Stokes protested. 'I don't understand the first thing about computers.'

'But the image of them was in your mind,' said Romana. 'You'd come into contact with them. The Creators teased out the image from your mind and from it learnt the rudiments.'

Stokes shook his head firmly. 'I only came here three years ago. The stuff you're talking about is hundreds of years old.'

'Suggest your lifecycle and mental state were conditioned,' said K9. 'You were returned to a cryogenic state and only revived recently.'

'Probably for quick reference.' Romana tapped him playfully on the shoulder. 'The Femdroids wanted you up and about so they could tap your brain in an emergency.'

Stokes sank back down in his chair and put his hands up to his temples. 'I have the most appalling headache.' Then a smile started to play about his lips. 'You mean to say, all that's happened here centres around me?'

'Not all.' Romana glanced at the row of deactivated Killer Femdroids in their berths. 'I don't know how they created such sophisticated machine intelligences. Anybody can make an android, but the brains inside are staggeringly advanced. I can't think how you'd ever have met something as clever as Galatea.'

K9 beeped insistently and shot forward. 'Mistress. Mr Stokes and I spent two hours and fourteen minutes together during the affair of the Xais mutant.'

Stokes laughed openly. 'You mean, you are the blueprint for Galatea?'

'It is very likely,' said K9.

'Hmm.' Stokes raised a finger. 'But I don't see any time-travel boxes like your TARDIS.'

'Duplication of the TARDIS is impossible,' K9 said smugly. 'It would take a human many years of study to understand the least of its workings.'

Romana's attention was once more taken up by the screen's view of Harmock talking to the citizens. 'So, the Creators made the Femdroids, and the link to Barclow. I can see why they would want to improve the lives of their people. But then why the simulation?'

Stokes waved a hand. 'I hardly think anybody is going to just pop up and explain it all, dear.'

The words were barely out of his mouth when there came an electronic whistling noise, and the air in the centre of the room shimmered to form a hologram. Galatea stood before them again.

'I leave this message,' she said coolly, 'in the hope it shall never be needed...'

Fritchoff marvelled at the Doctor's recovery from the agony of the Web. In short order, he had reset his own shoulder joint, sneaked from the base under the very noses of the few remaining Chelonians, and stolen an unmanned patrol vehicle. They were now rolling through the war zone, which had returned to its previous soothing silence, the forward screen leading them at a safe distance behind General Jafrid's larger armoured vehicle.

The Doctor piloted the craft with the ease of familiarity, changing gears and traction settings without paying much attention as he ran through their position in his own mind. 'The flies are going to come in soon and start their feast. We've no allies, and pretty soon no enemies either, when this lot have torn each other apart. My friends Romana and K9 are far away on Metralubit, and I'm not sure if I could find the TARDIS again if I tried.'

Fritchoff wasn't certain about the details of the speech but he caught the general drift. 'It's a nihilistic outlook, and one with which I have to agree.

What we're seeing is the inevitable, irrecoverable end of a non-revolutionized society.'

'I thought the revolution was inevitable?' asked the Doctor.

'There may be certain extenuating circ.u.mstances, especially when, as here, there is an invasion or subjugation by a hostile power.' He slumped back, which was difficult in the cramped surroundings. 'We must both accept our deaths, and accept that whatever personal hopes and fears we may have had in our lives have been made irrelevant.'

The Doctor gave a cynical laugh and nudging him with a bony elbow. 'I don't know about that, Fritchoff. You might still get your revolution yet.'

The hologram expanded, replacing Galatea with a shimmering network of unfamiliarly arranged stars. Romana moved closer, feeling that she could reach out and touch the myriad points of light and snuff them out like candles.

'The Fostrix galaxy, Mistress,' said K9.

Stokes edged nearer. 'I hope this is going to be an apology as well as an explanation.'

Galatea's voice came from the centre of the image as the representation shifted, narrowing down on the enormous cerise sphere of Metralubit. 'Our world was settled by pure-strain human colonists centuries ago, and has developed into a thriving, economically self-sufficient society of several billion.'

'She should have been a travel agent,' muttered Stokes. The image shifted to show a view of Metron similar to the one they had seen from the window of Harmock's study. But this city, although markedly similar in design principles and in its general layout, with curving towers and transparent travel tubeways, was dirtier; and the people moving around between the buildings were more varied, more hurried. More real, thought Romana.

Galatea's voice went on. 'We had developed a limited s.p.a.cefaring capacity.

So it was that our scientists were able to intercept a stray s.p.a.ce capsule that wandered into our ambit. Inside we found a human from a far distant time.'

The picture now showed a team of white-coated scientists prising open a metallic coffin to reveal Stokes, who was in perfect condition after millennia of sleep. He was wearing his pyjamas and dressing gown, and clutching a teddy bear to his chest. His duffel bag lay at his feet. 'I don't remember that at all,' said Stokes as he watched his own eyes opening. 'I could have sworn it was the Femdroids who revived me. I recall the moment distinctly.'

'Hypno-conditioning,' whispered Romana.

'The human, Stokes, came from an age of great forward strides in technology. His mind was rich with information, which our scientists drew out over a long period.' The picture changed to show Stokes, still in his dressing gown, attached to a recording device by electrodes fixed to his temples. His lips were moving rapidly although his eyes were unfocused.

'After several years, much was learnt. The pace of Metralubitan technological development was increased greatly. Many uses were found for this knowledge: hydroponic rearing of vegetation, Fasts.p.a.ce travel, the invention of conditioning machines.'

'I never knew there was so much in my head,' said Stokes.

'But the greatest innovation was the creation of mobile artificial intelligences. Stokes had witnessed the repair of one such intelligence and his memory of the interior components provided for the creation of the Femdroids.' The hologram now showed a production line of the beautiful women, doll-like faces being positioned over positronic brain cases.

Romana was pleased to have her theory confirmed. 'They're just like you, K9.'

'Negative,' said K9 emphatically. 'The component array is entirely mismatched, a rough approximation of this unit's complexity.'

[image]

'They're a d.a.m.n sight better looking,' said Stokes. 'If I was the Doctor I'd pop your brain into one of those dollies right away.'

K9 swivelled about, outraged. 'The Doctor Master has stated he is very fond of my outer aspect.'

'Of course,' said Romana soothingly. 'We like you just the way you are.'

Galatea continued. 'Each Femdroid was a.s.signed to a particular task in administration, thus lightening the menial load of the organics. We do not feel tiredness or boredom and are thus more efficient.' They saw a quick-cutting montage of scenes: Femdroids a.s.sisting in all areas of life, lifting crates, making beverages, walking through the corridors of the Parliament Dome (corridors that were genuinely crowded). The image settled on Liris, seen at work in the computer room. 'This unit, our senior researcher, was a.s.signed to investigate the history of the Metralubit colony. She discovered something sickening. The periodic collapses in the great Metralubitan civilizations - and the huge amounts of deaths - were not because of earthquakes, internal dissent, civil strife, et cetera, as had been thought.'

They saw a graphic display similar to the one Romana had created. 'About every two thousand years the people of Metralubit have been harvested, eaten as carrion by a nomadic race of tiny intelligent insectoids. The truth lay dormant in the folklore and culture of our world, but an organic would never have seen it.'

'Insects? What's all this about now?' protested Stokes.

'Mistress,' put in K9, 'recall insect life on Barclow.'

Romana remembered the tiny bite to her cheek. She rubbed at it thoughtfully. 'Yes, I do.'

'Liris took her information to me,' said the hologram. 'We acted according to our utilitarian programming - the maximum possible happiness for the maximum number of the population - and formulated a plan to trap and destroy the Hive. We knew that, alone, our organic masters were helpless prey; they had proved that by falling to the previous five harvests. What we had discovered could not be made public, as the humans would panic and make mistakes.'

Stokes nudged K9 with the toe of his shoe. 'They've certainly inherited your superiority complex.'

'To my reasoning, their course of action is merely logical,' K9 retorted.

Galatea returned to the forefront of the image. She seemed to be addressing them directly, only her shimmering outline indicating that she wasn't standing right there. 'We constructed a ma.s.sive transmat engine using information from the mind of Mr Stokes. One night as the organics slept we sent them all away.'

'They did what?' Stokes was incredulous. 'Those girls think big, don't they?'

'All but a handful of the organics were sent to the verdant planet Regus V in the next system but two. Food supplies are plentiful there, and Femdroids were dispatched to organize them and keep them in effective social units.

On Regus V the citizens were protected from the inevitable return of the Hive.'

'I'm beginning to understand,' said Romana.

'I'm glad somebody is,' Stokes grumbled. 'I'm going to wind this thing back and watch it all over again. I'm sure I've missed something.'

'We continued to run the administration in the dome,' said Galatea. They saw the familiar scenes of Harmock and the overalled citizens tramping about the corridors. 'We used our conditioning machines on the humans here, together with a complex computer simulation, to enhance the illusion that Metralubit remained a densely populated world. It was essential to use real humans in the dome, particularly the leading political figures, to lend verisimilitude to the trap.'

'I wish she'd say why,' said Stokes.