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'When is a lightning bolt not a lightning bolt?' he asked.

Chris who knew a cue when he heard one said, 'I don't know. When is a lightning bolt not a lightning bolt?'

'When it's a projected energy weapon,' said the Doctor. He tossed the damaged puck back onto the deck. 'I doubt vi!Cari found the punchline very funny either.'

6

Faces in the Water

Another dirty day is brokenly dribbling.

Gotta get my gun and blast your sibling

Down around in the undercity town.

Gotta get away before they bring me down.

Adjudicator Truth by Hith's With Attitude

From the HvLP: Terrorformed (2952)

She was wading waist deep in the bile-coloured water of some nameless Undertown canal. Her left shoulder hurt, there were new dents in her armour and a vicious welt on her right cheek. The water dragged at her legs as she struggled after the metamorph. She was tired and hurt and she wanted to lie down and sleep.

'For Goddess' sake,' she shouted, 'stand still so I can kill you.'

Perhaps the metamorph heard her because it stopped running then. Perhaps it too was tired of the chase.

Forrester knew, even before the metamorph turned to face her, knew with a sick certainty whose face the alien had borrowed this time.

Her blaster was heavy, the grip slippery with moisture. It dragged at her hand as she struggled to haul her arm up into a firing stance. Her own face, bracketed in the sights, looked back at her.

The eyes were wide, pleading.

Forrester thumbed her blaster to its highest setting.

The metamorph reached out her hands to her.

She shot it in the chest.

She noted the surprised look on her face, the fist-sized hole in her chest. Watched herself tumble backwards into the stinking water.

Somebody called her name – Martle?

Forrester let the blaster fall listlessly to her side.

Somebody called her name – feLixi.

She was all right, the metamorph was five years' dead and she was a very long way from the Undertown. She was lying on a canvas blast chair in feLixi's listening room and the soft roaring was the sound of the sea. The lights had been lowered and feLixi's face was a pale blur above her.

'What happened?' she asked.

'According to aTraxi you'd been drinking flashback.'

'Is it pink?'

'Yes,' said feLixi.

'Oh,' groaned Roz. 'At the party. What does it do? No, don't tell me – it stimulates the memory.'

'You're supposed to drink it with a mixer. Here,' feLixi held out a glass, 'drink some of this.'

Roz cautiously accepted the glass. 'What is it?'

'Something called purge.'

'That's not a very romantic name.'

'It's not a very romantic drink,' said feLixi. 'But it should clean out your head a bit.'

Roz swallowed a mouthful. It tasted of nothing, like distilled water. 'Could you turn up the lights? I could do with a bit of harsh unreality.'

When saRa!qava had said weird she had meant weird. FeLixi's house was shaped like a rocketship that had buried itself nose first into the ground. Not like a spaceship, but an honest-to-God, cartoon rocketship the colour of old brass, with three fins sweeping into the air above an unlikely exhaust nozzle and a double line of portholes down the front. It sat between two normal buildings and listed backwards ten degrees. A white picket fence separated it from the street.

There was a gate, and a path made from unevenly laid stone flags led up a short earth ramp to where an upside-down airlock door hung open. FeLixi told her later that the door couldn't be closed.

Inside it was worse, with tilted ceiling/floors on which fixtures and control surfaces were bolted.

You had to climb up a ladder to reach each floor in turn. The whole of the third floor was taken up by a spherical chamber that rotated on gimbals to maintain a level floor. Sensors mounted on one of the fins picked up sounds from outside and relayed them into the chamber. FeLixi called it his

'listening room'. 'I like to listen to the sea,' he had told Roz when she first arrived. 'It's soothing.'

Too soothing, she thought, because it had lulled her into sleep and remembrance.