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‘Doctor,’ Hater Of Humans snapped, ‘you will aid me in . . . Doctor?’

But neither the Doctor nor Provost-Major Beltempest were there.

Adjudicator in Extremis Bij Kakrell stood on the highest point of the Adjudication lodge, watching the towers burn.

‘I can’t believe it,’ she said, the flames casting her shadow back across the roof like a huge, flapping cape. ‘After all we worked for. To see it all like this.

In flames . . . ’ Lost for words, she just shook her head.

‘The Divine Empress has declared martial law,’ Duke Marmion, Lord Protector of the Solar System, murmured. His thin, emaciated face seemed to glow in the light from below. Behind him, a small knot of peers – the Marquesa of Earth and her retinue of counts and countesses, viscounts and vis-200

countesses, barons and baronesses – milled in a panic. ‘Crowds are gathering on the approaches to the lodge. Under the authority vested in me by the Divine Empress’s proclamation, I’ve taken the precaution of ordering all of your Adjudicators to shoot to kill.’

Kakrell whirled around.

‘Shoot to kill?’ she snapped. ‘Isn’t that a little . . . premature?’

Marmion’s face was slicked with sweat, and there was a wild, uncontrolled look in his eyes that Kakrell didn’t like one bit.

‘It seemed a prudent course of action,’ he said, ignoring her accusing gaze.

‘The Surgeon Imperialis is no nearer discovering the cause of this plague of violence. She believes that it might only affect those people who have seen the inside of a body-bepple tank, but . . . ’

Kakrell could have finished the sentence for him. Over sixty per cent of humans on Earth had beppled themselves in major or minor ways. This could mean the apocalypse had finally arrived.

A distant explosion distracted her. She turned her head towards the source of the sound. For a moment the world was as it had been, as it had always been, with the tops of the towers stretched out below the lodge, the forests, lakes and sculpted gardens linked by walkways and bridges.

And then one of the towers slowly sank from view, pulling its bridges after it. She could clearly hear the terrible tearing noise as they snapped, one by one, echoing like the crack of doom across the burning cityscape.

‘I don’t – I don’t believe it!’ she sobbed, as the slow, remorseless crash of the tower hitting the Undertown reached her ears. ‘The null-grav engines are failing!’

‘Not failing,’ Marmion murmured. ‘They’re being sabotaged.’

‘Then this is the end,’ she breathed. ‘The end for the Earth Empire.’

‘Yes,’ he breathed, and she glanced over at him, unwilling to believe that she could hear excitement in his voice.

‘How did you do that?’ Beltempest asked as the airlock of the Hith ship opened to the Doctor’s touch, revealing the translucent tunnel of the boarding tube extending ahead of them.

‘It’s a gift,’ the Doctor said. ‘We’d better move fast. Hater Of Humans’s troops will be right behind us.’

‘Remind me,’ Beltempest said as they ran along towards the walkway that linked the Skel’Ske to Earth. ‘Why exactly are we in the vanguard of an alien invasion, rather than bringing up the rear?’

‘If Powerless Friendless is aboard that craft,’ the Doctor panted, ‘then Bernice is probably with him. Knowing Bernice, there’s no knowing what trouble she’s getting herself into.’

201

‘Fair enough,’ Beltempest said, his trunk swinging as he ran. ‘Just so I know.’

They reached the end of the boarding tube, where it had been melted into the substance of the walkway. The Doctor’s head turned right, as if he intended to swing into the walkway and run on towards the Skel’Ske, but his entire body turned left and took him off towards the doorway to Earth. An expression of comical amazement twisted his features.

‘Doctor?’ Beltempest shouted, coming to a halt. ‘I thought . . . ?’

The Doctor slowed to a halt just inside the doorway, and frowned. ‘The TARDIS?’ he said in puzzlement and dawning joy. ‘The TARDIS! I’ve found her!’

‘What’s a TARDIS?’ Beltempest asked.

‘She’s . . . Never mind.