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In a strange way the very ease of accessing the data caused Bernice the most problems. On the 'puter equipment she was used to there would have been small delays compiling such a large array database. There was hardly a gap between Bernice finishing a request and the terminal saying – ready. She realized that it had become her habit to use those little moments of impatience to collect her thoughts. She found herself suffering from information meltdown – like turning on a shower and getting a face full of scalding water.

'Why was vi!Cari so unpopular?' asked Bernice.

SaRa!qava shrugged. They were having a break for ginger tea and biscuits. Smelly was amusing herself by throwing the terminal off the table and lunging for it as House picked it up again. Bernice was forcing herself not to think about the database, trying to keep her eyes off the output screens that hung around the kitchen like heraldic pennants. A new screen appeared each time Bernice created another subset in her database whether she wanted one or not. She couldn't get them to stop and they were stacked three deep in places.

'It annoyed people,' said saRa!qava.

'Enough for someone to want to kill it?'

'Do you have children?'

'No,' said Bernice. 'Haven't got round to it yet.'

'But you've dealt with children, looked after them?'

'Let's just say that I've been in the same room as children,' said Bernice. 'Some of them even lived to tell the tale.'

'Have you ever got into a why loop with a child?' asked saRa!qava.

Bernice gave her a blank look.

'It's when a child asks, "Why?", about something obvious, like "why is the sky blue?" So you say because the atmosphere refracts the light. And the child asks "Why?" So you explain about refraction and –'

'The child asks why again, and again,' said Bernice. 'I've had that done to me.' Hell, she thought, I do it to the Doctor all the time.

'And suddenly you find yourself trying to explain what an elementary particle is in toddler terms and asking yourself why you're doing this and you can't stop even though you know they're just going to ask it again.'

Not me, thought Bernice. It's Because I say so and Shut up and drink your milk, long before we get to sub-atomic particles. I'm probably a very flawed person.

'It has to be one of the most irritating things I can think of,' said saRa!qava, 'and vi!Cari was a billion times worse.'

Why? Bernice almost asked. However it was done, someone went to a lot of trouble to murder vi!Cari. What precisely was it that vi!Cari did that got someone that pissed off with it? But saRa!qava was giving her definite I don't want to talk about it vibes when it came to the details so Bernice backed off.

'You haven't input ship positions,' said saRa!qava.

'You fly ships inside the sphere?'

SaRa!qava looked blank.

The trouble with the TARDIS translator, thought Bernice, was that it was so good you didn't know when you were making a mistake. 'Spaceships,' she said. 'We are talking about spaceships?'

'Not inside the sphere,' said saRa!qava, 'but close, docked at the spaceport or near the system.

I can't think of anything else that could shoot down a drone. Apart from another drone.'

'Through the side of the sphere?'

'Oh yes,' said saRa!qava. 'The ASBIG came up with a lot of new weapons for the war. Remote forced quantum singularities, controlled hyperspace breaks and something called a Pin-Stripe Cattle Grate which nobody ever talks about.'

Bernice told the terminal to give her a listing of all spaceships docked or near the sphere at the time of the murder. 'No such thing as too much data,' she muttered to herself. The terminal put up yet another screen – making twenty-three so far – and asked her what radius she wanted the search volume to be.

'Thirty light-years,' suggested saRa!qava.

So Bernice told the terminal thirty light-years, speaking the words before the sense of them had a chance to set in. That couldn't be right, no crukking way, no weapon she knew had a range of thirty light-years. Oh my God, they could take out the Daleks without raising