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  The contrailed fireball was getting larger; you didn’t need to be a rocket scientist to realize that it was heading straight towards them.

  McGuire didn’t hesitate; he yanked the steering wheel a quarter turn, aiming the buggy in a direction which he hoped was headed away from the crash. The shuttle’s generator was leaking; the colour of the flames told McGuire that. If it went critical upon impact and they were within a klick of ground zero, they wouldn’t stand a chance. McGuire hit the accelerator, watching as the buggy’s own generator edged towards red-lining.

  He just hoped it would be fast enough. And far enough.

  ‘Who the hell are you?’ Rachel was standing close up to the suspect, hands on her hips. What really annoyed her was the way that he was smiling at her. A charming, boyish smile that she wanted to wipe off his face with her fists.

  ‘Adjudicator Christopher Cwej, ma’am.’

  He was six three and impressively built, wearing black jeans and a padded silver jacket that could have been some sort of survival gear. His physique was obvious, even through the jacket, and Rachel could detect the smiles and glances from the female members of her team, and that made her even more angry. Blond, blue-eyed, a recruitment poster boy if ever she’d seen one. Just like her brother Michael. Rachel dismissed the memory and glared at the stranger. ‘So what the frag were you doing in my Transit tunnel?’ She had been prepared for anything as the tunnel resolved: little green men, brutal robots... anything but this.

  The boy frowned. ‘Transit tunnel?’ And then his eyes widened. ‘Transit tunnel. Of course. Yes. Transit tunnel.’ She was immediately suspicious of his hesitation, but allowed him to continue. Give him enough rope... ‘My ship broke up in subspace; your Transit beam must have caught me as the ship disintegrated.’ He grinned. ‘You saved my life, Ms...?’

  ‘Bollocks!’ As if the laws of physics were there for his benefit! ‘You’re one of them, aren’t you?’

  Chris shrugged. ‘One of whom, ma’am?’

  Rachel stepped forward and thumped him on the chest. ‘Those bastards who have invaded Earth, and cut us all off from the rest of the Alliance!’ Ships breaking up in subspace, indeed. If your ship broke up in subspace, you died – it was as simple as that. So who did he think he was kidding? She turned to the frightened kid next to her. ‘Shoot him!’

  ‘Professor Anders?’ he asked.

  ‘Shoot him!’ she screamed. ‘Before he brings his friends here!’ Didn’t the boy understand? The Black Fleet had been terrorizing the outer worlds of the Alliance for the last six months, and their final, unexpected act had been to invade Mother Earth and blockade the solar system. Rachel and her colleagues were now trapped on Charon, with limited supplies and the constant threat of the Black Fleet finishing off what it had started, and this bastard was one of the ones responsible.

  Suddenly, Felice was next to her, her hand on her shoulder. ‘Come on, Rachel. Don’t you think you’re over-reacting?’

  Not Felice as well. ‘He came through the stunnel, damn it! Shoot him!’ Realizing that it was all up to her, she grabbed the plasma rifle from the pimply boy beside her and flicked off the safety catch.

  And aimed the rifle at Chris’s chest.

  The shuttle hit like the fist of God. Roz fell to the ground as it bucked beneath her, and saw the Doctor valiantly attempting to keep his footing as she pitched to the ground. But even he couldn’t fight seismology; she watched, spitting dust, as he collapsed in a plume of red. Half a klick away, a geyser of green flame ignited the Martian twilight.

  Roz winced. It reminded her of the Imperial Landsknecht flitter that had been stolen by a group of joyboys; they had managed to fly it through one of the gravitic beams holding up Overcity Five, thus screwing up their antigrav drive and thereby plunging into the Undercity. By the time she and her partner Fenn had reached the impact zone, there was nothing left of the occupants and some very satisfied under-dwellers; nothing like a barbecue to please the crowds. But that was then, and this was now. Within seconds, she had scrambled to her feet and bounced over to the Doctor, pulling him up by the hood of his survival jacket.

  ‘Are you okay?’ She took in his nod and nodded in return. ‘Then we’re needed.’ She inclined her head towards the inferno that raged in the distance.

  ‘I just hope that there are survivors,’ the Doctor muttered as he brushed himself down. Roz wondered why the Doctor couldn’t wear an outfit made of dirt-repellent material, like her body armour. Then she remembered that she wasn’t wearing it, and looked down at the jeans, thick jumper and silvery atmospheric density jacket that were now covered in light brown dust. Oh well. Another explosion roared through the tissue-thin atmosphere; same distance, same direction. A secondary generator, Roz mused; talk about overkill.

  ‘Different power source,’ said the Doctor, reading her mind. ‘That sounded more like a cold fusion reactor... Did you take your tablet, by the way?’

  She nodded. ‘Although the fusion generator’s clean, the whole place’ll be flooded with gamma radiation if that deuterium generator went off.’

  ‘So let’s not beta round the bush; I think there has just been a pile-up.’ Two puns for the price of one, thought Roz. A bargain.

  The Doctor pointed his umbrella purposely towards the crash site. ‘Come along, Nurse Forrester.’

  At a bouncing trot, they reached the crash site in just over five minutes. Or rather, they reached a sandbank overlooking a scene of carnage which made the flitter incident in Undertown look like a mid-air fender shunt. Thankfully, the fact that the shuttle was now ten metres of crumpled osmidium doing a very good impression of a bonfire was reassuring; if its deuterium generator had gone critical, Mars would have had another crater, approximately two hundred metres across. But the state of the shuttle didn’t bode well for survivors, Roz decided.

  The cold fusion detonation that they had heard had been the responsibility of the broken mess that lay about ten metres from the shuttle; from the wreckage, Roz identified it as the remains of an ATET, an all-terrain excursion transport still used in her time. One of those designs that never went out of fashion, she supposed, like Coca-Cola bottles. Its entire rear section was missing, consumed by the exploding generator. Thankfully, however, cold fusion reactors blew up with little radiation and minimal damage, although this had ensured that the ATET would never go on another excursion. She noticed that the Doctor was already at the foot of the sandbank.

  Fighting a losing battle against the crumbling sand and low gravity, Roz half-scrambled, half-skidded down the bank towards the crash site, dragging up her triage-and-treatment training as she did so. But the lack of movement made her wonder whether it would be needed or not. If not, the only thing she would need would be a shovel.

  ‘Over here!’ called the Doctor, pointing towards the rear of the burning shuttle. ‘I think I can see somebody.’

  Roz followed, but she didn’t share the Doctor’s optimism.

  Chris considered his options. Knocking the rifle from the woman’s hands would be simple, but the armed guards might not be as green as they looked. And a plasma rifle was deadly, even in inexperienced hands. Perhaps he could grab the rifle and attempt a stand-off -

  A small blonde woman wearing the same white jump-suit as the bad-tempered harpy interposed herself between Chris and the business end of the rifle. ‘This is stupid, Rachel. Shooting him won’t help.’ She looked round at Chris and smiled, and he couldn’t help grinning back. ‘If he’s innocent, then you’ll be committing murder; if he is one of the invaders, we might be able to find a way to pierce the jamming field.’

  The older woman seemed to see reason. ‘Be it on your own head, Felice.’ She turned to the guards. ‘Take him to one of the empty rooms in the dorm-block. But post a guard.’ She scowled at Felice. ‘We’ll let him sweat for a few hours, just to make sure that he isn’t followed. And while he’s doing that, we have work to do. I want to know exactly how he ended up in my stunnel.’

  Chris
allowed himself a measured and secret sigh of relief. He was safe. But what about the Doctor and Roz?

  Only one person had survived the shuttle crash, and even that was a miracle, given the twisted wreckage that remained. There appeared to have been only two occupants: a man – presumably the pilot – who had been disembowelled, and woman. Roz was currently kneeling next to her, applying a dermal patch to a superficial wound while the woman wittered on and on. Roz briefly wondered whether the Doctor’s survival kit included a general anaesthetic, but decided that the woman’s gabbling was probably due to shock; besides, the Doctor wouldn’t be too impressed if Roz started rendering everyone who annoyed her unconscious. Half the known universe would be asleep.

  She looked over at the shuttle; it was still burning brightly in the thin Martian atmosphere, flickering green flames that provided some welcome warmth. Night was still four hours away, but Mars had a very protracted twilight and it was already becoming difficult to see. She returned her attention to the woman, and regretted it immediately.

  ‘I knew it was a bad idea,’ she was saying. ‘I told them at Jacksonville that it was too dangerous to travel over there, what with this awful blockade, but would they listen to me? Of course not; I’m only a singer. Did I tell you that I was a singer?’ Roz nodded; the woman had proclaimed her profession at least twenty times in the last ten minutes. ‘I was supposed to be performing at Arcadia Planitia this evening. I don’t think that’s very likely now, do you, Ms – ?’

  ‘Roslyn Forrester.’

  The woman smiled with ruby-red lips, running a manicured hand through her raven hair. ‘I’m Carmen Santacosta.’ And then a wistful smile. ‘That’s my stage name, anyway. Show business; smell of the greasepaint, roar of the crowd. I was so looking forward to performing tonight.’ She looked over Roz’s shoulder and frowned. ‘But listen to me, going on about my problems.’ No thank you, thought Roz. I’d rather tear your throat out with my bare teeth. ‘How are the others?’

  Roz gave Carmen the once-over and decided that she was more than capable of being on her own for a few minutes. Even if she wasn’t, Roz needed a break. ‘Hang on, I’ll find out from the Doctor.’

  ‘Lucky that a doctor happened to be near by,’ Carmen added cheerfully, as Roz gingerly scrambled to her feet, extremely conscious of the lower gravity.

  Yes, very lucky. Lucky to be stranded on Mars. Lucky to have turned up in the solar system when it’s crawling with Daleks. Roz walked over to where the Doctor was living up to his name, flitting between the three survivors and administering blankets and pillows he had salvaged from the ATET as needed. Apart from the green light from the ATET wreckage, illumination was courtesy of ten little wooden sticks placed in a circle around them. The Doctor had called them ‘everlasting matches’; stuck in the soil and ignoring the paucity of the Martian atmosphere, they added flickering yellow highlights to the scene. A few metres outside the circle, a shrouded bump marked the one casualty from the ATET, a poor unfortunate whose chest had been virtually minced when the generator had blown – it looked as if the rear bulkhead that had separated the generator from the cabin had ruptured and torn straight through him.

  ‘How are they?’ she asked, kneeling down beside him as he took a break from tending his patients.

  ‘Minor injuries, nothing too serious. At least, not yet.’ He looked up at the sky, now a glorious blue-black. Roz followed his gaze and noticed Earth, a point of light that shimmered above the horizon. She shuddered.

  The Doctor obviously misinterpreted her shudder. ‘If you think it’s cold now, Roz, wait until the shuttle burns itself out. By then, night will have fallen, and that will put us in real danger of hypothermia.’

  Roz nodded; already she could feel the cold creeping through her atmospheric density jacket and she cursed herself. Her Adjudicator’s uniform had built-in temperature control and insulation, but had she put it back on once they had left Benny’s wedding? Oh no, she had raided the TARDIS wardrobe for something comfortable, and now she was regretting it. Comfort is the best way to lead an Adjudicator into a sense of complacency; wasn’t that what Konstantine had said? And, just to rub it in, he’d delivered that pronouncement in their suite in Jackson City. On Mars.

  ‘Why are they still unconscious?’ she asked, trying to forget about her time squiring. ‘Surely they should have recovered from the crash by now?’ The three bodies, covered in reflective, insulated blankets from the ATET, were as unmoving as the shrouded corpse.

  He squatted on the ground and warmed his hands over one of the matches. ‘At a rough guess, I would say that the driver of the ATET attempted to avoid the shuttle as it crashed. Unfortunately, he overloaded the generator. This particular model of ATET was notorious for a rather nasty design flaw: under certain circumstances, the cold fusion generator had a tendency to go critical.’

  ‘What sort of circumstances?’

  ‘Influx of hard radiation.’ He nodded over to the shuttle wreck. ‘Although the deuterium generator didn’t explode, the secondary engines did, briefly flooding the surrounding area with high-energy gamma radiation. The ATET was caught in it and its own generator went critical. And, as a side-effect of that explosion, there was a promethion pulse.’

  As the conversation strayed into the realms of particle physics, Roz held up her hand. ‘What the hell is a promethion pulse?’

  ‘Nasty, short-lived particles caused by third-generation cold fusion reactors when they go critical,’ he replied tautologically. ‘They have an immediate and deleterious effect on the human brain, causing unconsciousness. No permanent side-effects, though; they should wake up soon.’

  He was interrupted by a groan from the ground. The compact, olive-skinned woman with tight, curly hair was coming round.

  ‘You’re safe,’ reassured the Doctor, placing a comforting hand on her shoulder. Her reaction was immediate; she grabbed the Doctor round the throat and lifted him above her.

  Roz could have sworn that he gargled ‘oh no, not again,’ before sinking to the ground. However, she was too preoccupied to notice an enormous shape that detached itself from the shadows and lumbered away.

  Christopher Cwej sipped the coffee that one of the guards had brought in and tried not to wince at the bitter, earthy taste as he pondered his predicament. He knew that he was on Charon, the oversized moon of Pluto, and from what Felice and Rachel had said, he was in some kind of stunnel research base. But where were the Doctor and Roz?

  He tried to recall the sequence of events inside the TARDIS, but it was difficult; his mind couldn’t seem to link them together in any logical order. He remembered the Doctor frantically operating the console, and the floating orange ball that had suddenly materialized in front of them. The Doctor had handed both of them a silver atmosphere density jacket and a survival kit – Chris’s jacket was currently slung over the back of another chair, the kit on the seat – and then urged them to dive through the ball. Chris had watched as the other two vanished into the luminescence before following them, well aware of the explosions behind him as the console room broke up. But only he had arrived here.

  He considered how he had arrived on Charon; according to Rachel, he had been caught in a subspace tunnel. Hadn’t the Doctor called one of the two reasons for the break-up a ‘subspace infarction’? Perhaps the two events were connected. Don’t be stupid, Chris, he chastised himself; of course they’re connected.

  And perhaps the Doctor and Roz were scattered atoms, adrift in subspace.

  Putting the fate of his companions to one side – he was worried sick about them, but there wasn’t a lot he could do while locked in a cell on Charon – he returned his attention to the facts at hand. Stunnel technology put the date anywhere between the early twenty-first and the middle of the twenty-second century. But what else had Rachel said? Something about Earth being invaded, the blockade of the solar system... With a horrible squirming feeling in his stomach, Chris suddenly realized when and where he was. It did nothing to make him feel be
tter.

  The single pertinent fact about Charon that Chris could remember was the reason why it was still a radioactive cinder, even in the thirtieth century. It had been the target of a vicious and uncompromising nuclear bombardment by the Daleks. No, that wasn’t quite right, he corrected himself; there had been two attacks. The first bombardment had destroyed the domed colonies, but the survivors had fled underground, only to be killed by the second bombardment, which took place on 7 May 2157. Chris remembered the date because it was his father’s birthday, one of those odd facts which tend to stick in the mind.

  He put down his mug and got up. ‘Excuse me,’ he called through the door. ‘Being in the Transit tunnel has left me feeling a bit muddled, and I think there might have been some sort of time-slip involved as well. What’s the date?’

  A click and a whirr and the door opened. The guard – who looked like a kid to Chris – frowned, and the scepticism was clear as he answered, ‘It’s the seventh.’

  Oh shit, thought Chris. Say it isn’t true. ‘The seventh of what?’

  The kid gave him a ‘what planet are you on’ look, but Chris was used to that by now. ‘I told you I was confused, friend.’

  ‘The seventh of May, 2157. 11.35 a.m., to be precise. Remember now?’

  Chris felt the cold sweat bead on his forehead as he turned his back on the guard. Oh yes, he remembered. He definitely remembered. Wherever the Doctor and Roz had ended up, at least they were safer than he was.

  Roz leapt forward, but overshot in the lower gravity. Then again, she thought, low gravity conditions can work to everybody’s advantage. Landing on the tip of her boot, she pirouetted round and kicked the woman’s arm away from the Doctor’s throat, before slipping and landing on her backside.

  ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ yelled Roz, trying to ignore the fact that she was currently sitting on her butt and in no position to argue.