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AgRaven laughed at that and Bernice breathed out.

The Doctor stepped in at that point, asking questions about how much of a data record God really had of the murder and whether it was too much trouble to have it transferred to the villa's own memory. It was all pertinent stuff but Bernice got the strange impression that the Doctor was just asking these questions on automatic pilot. As if, having now talked his way into a leading role in the investigation, he was just going through the motions. Bernice did not find that comforting at all.

KiKhali was swearing out loud, presumably for agRaven's benefit. 'Meatbrained, dysfunctional, gland-debilitated organo-fascist,' hissed the machine.

AgRaven sat down in the closest comfy-field and watched kiKhali as it twitched from one side of the travel capsule to the other. The indicator panel showed that they'd reached the main transverse transport tunnel in the base material and were accelerating to a cruising speed of nine kilometres a second. There was no sensation of movement.

KiKhali lapsed into silence.

'Have you finished?' asked agRaven. 'You shouldn't have let them upset you so much. They're only barbarians.'

'Barbarian!' said kiKhali. 'That woman was so primitive she should have been wearing a skull necklace. God shouldn't let animals like that wander around the sphere.'

AgRaven was genuinely shocked. 'KiKhali,' she said, 'that was beneath you. You're just upset because she insulted your intelligence.'

'You liked that line,' said kiKhali. 'I saw you smiling. I bet you wish you'd thought that one up yourself.'

'Won't stop me using it in future,' said agRaven.

'I can't believe we just handed the whole investigation over to a bunch of retrogrades.'

'You include the Doctor in that category?' asked agRaven.

The drone shifted slightly. Many drones cultivated little non-verbal mannerisms like that when talking to non-machines – adding, or so they claimed, an extra layer of subtlety to their conversation. AgRaven had worked with kiKhali long enough to know that such a twitch in its movement was an indication of uneasiness. She suspected that they were as much a polite fiction as the face ikons which were supposed to mirror a machine's mood.

'Especially the Doctor,' said kiKhali.

'Perhaps God's involved him on purpose,' said agRaven. 'Entangling him in this murder may force him into a pro-active posture. That should help God gather more data for a profile and that's bound to facilitate further extrapolation of Time Lord culture and intentions.'

'I love it when you talk like a machine,' said kiKhali.

'Especially since he's brought people with him this time. They might not be as careful as he is.'

'I just wonder if it's worth the aggravation.'

'Don't you want the secret of time travel?'

'I have a serious moral objection to time travel,' said kiKhali. 'I don't like the idea of what it might do to the exercise of free will. If you know what's going to happen in the future then your actions become pre-ordained.'

'Didn't stop the Temporal Interest Group's experiments, did it?'

'That was just power politics,' said the drone. 'They got it, so we gotta have it. Besides the TIG

were looking for valuable spin-off technologies, trans-dimensional engineering, that sort of thing.'

'God said it was a treaty violation.'

'Opinions differ. I for one don't think the Time Lords have been entirely honest in their dealings with us. We still don't have a delegation on Gallifrey, we don't even know whether we're dealing with people from our relative past or future, we don't even know whether this "Doctor" is the same as the last one. In fact, we know much less about the Time Lords than they know about us.

Strategically, that's a serious disadvantage.'

'You're just a militaristic hawk at heart, aren't you?'

'Built that way,' said kiKhali.

Bernice waited for Chris and Dep to disappear upstairs before leaning over and asking Roz exactly why she felt the need to constantly antagonize complete strangers. Roz gave her little twisted half smile.

'Because it was easy,' she