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***

Anstaar screamed as the creature lunged for her, toppling her from the platform. Snarling, it moved to grab hold of her, leaning directly over the transmitter. The Doctor dived back over to the bunch of wires, disconnected them and shoved them back in.

The platform glowed with light once again, and the monster screamed as its head and torso began to peel away out of existence, caught in the milky light. A few seconds later the scream stopped as two brute, club-like legs toppled and fell to the floor. Anstaar lay unable to move amid the debris.

The Doctor moved over to her and stroked her hair, tenderly. 'Oh, Anstaar,'

he breathed. 'Oh, Anstaar, what have I...' He snatched his hand away from her, looked over at the severed legs of the Kusk and wiped a hand across his forehead. 'It wasn't revenge. It wasn't, it wasn't, but I've lost - and I thought...' The Doctor turned and left Anstaar lying there.

'Doctor!' she called out, hurt and confused.

'There isn't time,' called the Doctor from behind the console. 'Everything depends on whether the link between this controlling computer and the space-time probe deep inside Hirath is still strong enough.' He banged his fist against the touchscreen in frustration. 'Come on, come on...

Everything's being channelled into this one room. You can do it.'

Anstaar crawled towards him, shocked at the deYastation around her, wondering how this shell could ever have been the place she had lived and worked in for so long.

'What's happening?' she pleaded, gasping for breath.

The Doctor's fingers were a blur of movement. 'Hirath's about to rip itself apart in a temporal explosion.'

'A what?'

"The damaged probe. There's another one down there and it's pushed the planet too far. Hirath's going to take half the galaxy with her when she goes.' Anstaar saw him clasp his head in his hands as he waited for a device to power up. Then he looked at a small piece of smooth, rounded metal. "They'd never have escaped to put this information to any use even if none of this -'he gestured around the burnt-out room - 'had ever happened. Idiots.' There was pity in his voice. 'Poor, hopeless idiots.'

Anstaar shook her head, struggling to use her good leg to raise herself to a standing position.

"The year,' demanded the Doctor, suddenly, peering at the screen.'Is it 3177?'

'Of course it is,' Anstaar grunted as she leaned heavily against the console.

'Good, the anchor point still remains.' He looked up, and his eyes cleared for a moment, his gaze less furious and intense. He slapped his forehead. 'I understand now! The moon itself, it's our anchor!' He turned to look at her with new hope in his eyes. 'We must turn back the clock!' He began 259

reconnecting the partially overridden digitpad interface with the computer.

'What?'

'Bypass the real-time anchor. This computer's simulating the passage of time for the probe down there, keeping it stable, yes?'

'All right,' nodded Anstaar blankly. 'It regulates the time disruptions -'

'- by fooling the probe mechanism down there into thinking they all make sense, that all the disruptions are natural, part of the planet, meant to happen . It does so by operating a complex set of algorithms that balance out every distortion, every last piece of temporal friction. The unit here, and so geographically the planetoid it's based on, is its anchor - a spatio-temporal reference point. It's really quite clever.'

'Yes.'Anstaar nodded, more because she felt it was expected of her than for any other reason.

'But also stupid!' cried the Doctor with a flourish of his hand, his fingers fluttering deftly over the digitpad he had rewired back into the system.

'Because if I can shift that anchor, convince the probe that we're at a point far in Hirath's past -' one hand slapped down on a pale-green option button on the touchscreen, the other wiped sweat from his brow - 'way, way back to a time when this moon was far, far closer, newly captured by Hirath's