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"Watch it, mush!" weighed in Ace.

The Doctor looked surprisingly meek. "Perhaps you have something in mind?"

"It's obvious, isn't it?" Shonnzi snatched the document out of the Doctor's grasp and flung it over the side of the tower.

The Doctor stopped in mid-protest. The same elemental wind that gusted at the Banshee's robe caught the paper and lifted it through the air. It fluttered and smoothed directly into the hovering frame.

The grey of the document flickered like the scanner in the TARDIS. The tower began to shudder, releasing more rivulets of loose stone as the fearful apparition strode across the platform. Ace dodged its advance, pulling the Doctor and Shonnzi with her.

The Banshee reached the edge of the tower. It raised its arms again and repeated the gesture that took in all the world and its trapped universe. Thunder boomed.

"Hojotoho," observed the Doctor from the floor. "Very Wagnerian."

Ace clung to Shonnzi — not to him, he noted. He began to hum "The Descent into Nibelheim" to himself, because it was awesome and bombastic and seemed to fit the scale of the explanation he suspected they were about to witness.

Either the tower was shrinking or the frame, the reality window, was growing. It became immense, blotting out everything else, until there was only the grey and the tiny tower to which they clung.

The empty grey flickered like a pirate video. In its depths, a star began to shine. Then another emerged and then whole constellations, as if they were bobbing up to the grey surface. The whole sky was filled with the lights of a thousand celestial forges. Glittering and winking, pulsars and quasars, like a star city. And it began to shrink down so that organized patterns became apparent. Bank upon bank of twinkling circuitry. Layer upon layer of calculated block transfer energetics, like a vast brain and nervous system.

Against the starscape stood the black shape of the Banshee Circuit.

There was a tremendous whoosh overhead that nearly floored them. A golden disc a metre wide overshot the tower, slowly turning as it fell into the distance. It was the forerunner. They crouched as the air began to scream. Hundreds of the discs were rushing over the tower, tumbling into infinity like spilled gold coins.

Then the discs began to take on a design. Falling into row after row in a tight honeycomb configuration. Wall after wall forming into chambers and corridors behind which the glimmering star circuitry was stashed.

Ace reached across and squeezed the Doctor's hand. "It's the TARDIS, Professor. We've got it back!"

"Where from?" he growled and gazed in amazement at the manifest powers of his ship. Glittering interface boundaries peeled into existence like a cortex around the inner Time-Space package. The transcendence of the dimensions. The infinite variety. The Multum-in-Parvo logistic. Battered blue-panelled walls slotted impossibly around the gigantic structure, reducing it to the paltry proportions of a common or garden British police box.

"Yeah!" shouted Ace and started to clamber up. The Doctor seized her jacket and yanked her down again.

"Wait!" he ordered. "The Banshee's the flight recorder too. It's showing us what happened before."

The completed TARDIS hovered, spinning in the blank grey sky. In the virtual air above it, a small readout window spelt out "DRAMATIC DECONSTRUCTI0N" in Middle Gallifreyan.

On the periphery of vision, symbols flickered. "TYPE 40: DIMENSIONAL REGRESSION. OPTIONS AVAILABLE."

The Doctor was only a third of the way down the list of three when the whole menu blocked out in grey.

"OPTIONS WITHDRAWN."

There was a terrible crushing sound.

"Don't look!" warned the Doctor, incapable of doing anything else.

The police-box form of the TARDIS quavered and was suddenly sucked into its own centre point. From around its diminishing outer edges burst a torrent of dimensions, grey and gold, surging and churning across the void. Shapes and angles, ideas and nightmares, yesterday and tomorrow, hurled and colliding together until they formed Now.

Time and Space and