The Road to Shalka Part 4: The End of the World

[Soldeed]

It had been a difficult, wearisome day. People's problems, all of them her responsibility, just kept on coming. Mrs Stiggs' son was getting his headaches more and more often, and needed better medical attention than the local drunken, knife-wielding potion merchant could offer. Mr Barnaby had spent all his money for the month on a new shotgun and now wanted to know what he was going to do about paying the rent. Young Jenny Fisk, just turned fifteen, cried all the time and was unable to say what it was she had come to ask for help with. Poor, lonely old Mr Goddard was almost blind now, but couldn't afford to lose his job as watchman at the mill. She had poured out her fortune to help the less fortunate, and so the lives of these people and a thousand others had somehow come into her care. If she failed to solve their problems, they muttered and cast resentful hidden looks at her, for the smiles and thanks and astonishment at her early acts of generosity had quickly given way to an assumption that her charity was no more than their due. Plus, in the cripplingly expensive model village constructed for the workers on the estate, the newfangled sewerage system was playing up again, and people were talking about the old days, when they just used to fill in the old holes and dig new ones as they needed them.

Far too late to be home. It must be ten o'clock, for the summer evening was growing cool, and the sky was a sparkling blanket of stars. She trailed home up the path, kicking in annoyance at the heavy skirts of her stiff, confining dress, towards the simple modern brick house she had had built on the ruins of the old mansion. Before opening the front door, she couldn't help looking up, up above her head.

So many stars.

Her eyes, which had once been so wide and bright and full of life, were those of a tired woman now, and seemed smaller and duller. The tangled mass of her dark curls was tamed, cropped and packed into an efficient bun at the back of her head. That dazzling smile which would light up her face was rarely seen, and had been replaced by a stretched, mechanical replica, manufactured for the benefit of others. She was still only twenty-two.

"Oh, Doctor," she murmured to the empty sky, "Are you up there, somewhere?"

"Jasmine!"

She turned, and stitched a look of friendly welcome across her face at the approach of Ralph Spriggs, the indolent, dull-witted, but genuinely well meaning son of the neighbouring landowner.

"Hello, Ralph." She stepped forward, away from the door. "It's very late. I hope you're not going to be all alone on your way back to your own house."

"Oh, no. My coach is waiting for me down on the road. I just thought I'd stop by and tell you I'm going to try again to persuade my father to build a model village for his workers, just like yours."

Jasmine had known Mr Spriggs for years and knew for a fact this was never going to happen.

"I'm pleased to hear it," she said. "Perhaps you'll have more luck this time. Well, goodnight."

"Goodnight." He seemed perfectly happy with the way the conversation had gone, and turned to go. "Oh, I saw a funny thing while I was walking up here. There was a man fishing in the canal."

"Really?" Jasmine managed a weary smile. "Did you tell him there are no fish in there?"

"Yes, I did."

"And what did he say?"

"He said..." Ralph frowned in puzzlement. "'What would I want with a fish?'"

With a smile and a shrug the young man was on his way, off down the path. Jasmine stood still for a moment, staring after him, then found her gaze swinging inexorably towards the canal which snaked its way along beside the London road, between the hills. Now, keep calm, she told herself. Think. It could be anyone. Just some oddball with nothing better to do than mess about on the canalside. So why was this tingle of suppressed excitement rolling its way around her insides and creeping softly up her spine? Before she knew what she was doing she was lifting up her skirts and, for the first time in years, mustering a run down the slope towards the water's edge. There was a man here in a sharply tailored black coat, sitting on the towpath with his back against an iron post, legs stretched out in front of him and crossed at the ankles. He was disinterestedly dangling a fishing rod into the still, murky water.

Jasmine's heart pounded as his narrow face and dark blue eyes turned towards her. He smiled a thin and crooked smile.

"Hello, Jasmine."

"Doctor!"

She felt light headed with a kind of overwhelming relief, as if growing up under the weight of all her responsibilities had been a bad dream and she was waking to find she was still a fresh, bright teenage girl. It was the new Doctor of course, the one who had helped her against the Klavites that night before vanishing in his strange blue box, but as he set aside his fishing rod and rose to his feet she knew it was him; she could see the beloved old man, her childhood friend, gazing down at her.

The Doctor inspected her closely, leaning forward to peer into her eyes. His brow crinkled in an expression of mild dissatisfaction with what he saw.

"You look terrible."

It was supposed to be a laugh, but it came out a sob, and she ducked her head down defensively. She felt his arm about her shoulders.

"It's all right now. Come on."

They walked in silence along the path a little way, while Jasmine's head spun dazedly with heavy, clashing thoughts. Four years since everything had changed, her guardian had died and her friend the Doctor had left her. Four years of trying to act the part of a grown up. Four years of work. Four years of responsibility. Now his arm was around her and her head was on his shoulder and she felt safe. She felt she could fall asleep right there and dream something beautiful for once. She closed her eyes.

"Things have certainly changed around here," he was saying. "You've done good work, Jasmine. The people have enough to eat, clean water, decent houses, they're happy."

"They never seem happy," she sighed tiredly.

"Oh." He gave a rueful chuckle. "I know how that feels. Daleks, Cybermen, Sontarans... I spend my time dealing with the nastier side of life. Sometimes you just have to stop, take a deep breath, and remind yourself that's not all there is. Remember, no one's every going to come to you and tell you what a nice day they've had. Doesn't mean they haven't."

"I suppose." Leaning against him, Jasmine seemed to feel her mind afloat in a haze. "But sometimes... sometimes I just wish they'd stop. Leave me in peace. Just for a little while."

"What you need," the Doctor confided, "Is a holiday."

"A holiday." She smiled, mournfully. "And while I'm playing quoits at Bognor Regis, who's going to make sure Mr Prenswick doesn't evict the Kellers from their home?"

He accepted this with a moment's silence, then asked quietly:

"Tell me something. That morning, after the Klavites, when I asked you to come with me and explore the universe. Do you ever wish you'd said yes?"

No, I have a life here. I belong. I'm needed. I have work to do. People depend on me. I could never have... I could never... All empty bluster. Like a whispered confession, she said:

"Every day."

"Well, then."

He halted, and she opened her eyes to find herself staring at the eight foot high bulk of that strange blue box with the mysterious writing on the front. The Doctor stepped away from her to unlock the door and push it open invitingly. He looked at her with a teasing flick of an eyebrow.

"Come on."

Jasmine froze, hesitated, took a wary step back as if he would drag her in.

"No. No, it's... it's too late."

"Never too late."

"I have responsibilities."

"They'll still be here when you get back." He patted the box's side. "Time machine. I can have you back five minutes ago. What have you got to lose?"

She stood there, not knowing whether to go forward or back, and he grinned at her indecision.

"Oh, come on, Jasmine. Don't you want to see the Crystal Sea of Kiperia? The famous Blue Stone of Galveston?"

She could feel something inside her, an old, forgotten joy rising in her breast, and unexercised facial muscles twitching and sparking in a smile which suffused her face, and neck, and shivered through her whole body. Next moment, she was darting past the triumphant Doctor before she could change her mind, into a flaring white light that dazzled and blinded, and gave way to gleaming steel machines that loomed over her like feeding vultures, and a voice was saying:

"Disengage successful. Remove the subject."

Flat on her back on a cold, hard plastic table, Jasmine looked around wildly at the lab, the white-coated scientists, the hulking, monstrous thing coming for her, and remembered.

[Soldeed]

The sentinel droid's great hand fully encircled Jasmine's upper arm, not squeezing hard enough to crush the flesh, but applying just enough lift to keep her from placing her feet fully on the floor, so that teetering on her toes she was forced to half skip and run to keep up with its giant strides. Like a grotesquely exaggerated parody of a mediaeval knight, its limbs and torso were shielded by great curving plates of white armour, making its bulk seem even greater than it was. Its head meanwhile was nothing but a tiny pair of optic receptors, nestled down safely between its massive rounded shoulders on an articulated, extendable neck.

Dressed only in a shapeless white smock and loose, baggy trousers, Jasmine was barefoot, and snatched her feet up from the chill, metallic floor, and struggled in the machine's irresistible grip to turn back, towards the white-coated scientists clustered over the computer readouts by the examination table.

"Please," she called out in desperation. "Please, just tell me, what do you want from me? What am I doing here?"

They ignored her, and the droid pulled her towards the door.

"Just tell me why I'm here!" Her own voice tore painfully at her throat. "Why are you doing this to me? How much longer is this going to go on? I'm begging you, say something." She was screaming as she was dragged out into the corridor. "Won't someone please just talk to me?"

The laboratory door slid shut, and in despair she fell silent and allowed herself to be led down a series of blank grey corridors, each faceless metal door identical to the last. She couldn't even tell which one was hers, but eventually the droid halted, opened the door with a touch of its finger against the pressure pad on the wall, and pushed her, not roughly, into the empty, featureless white plastic cube which had been her home now for over a month. She shivered at the sound of the door hissing shut, sealing her up in the confined, coffin-like space and fell weakly to her knees. She looked up and cried out:

"Doctor?"

* * * * *

She was sitting hunched in a corner, face buried against her drawn-up knees, when the doorway slid open once more. She didn't stir. She knew she would be dragged off for the next session anyway, but this passive resistance was better than no resistance at all.

There was a pause of a few seconds, then a familiar voice said:

"Well, if you don't want to be rescued I'll just push off, shall I?"

Jasmine straightened with a jolt, banging her head against the wall. It was him! The lean, angular features, the vivid dark blue eyes, the long black coat with the coils of gold braid about the cuffs and buttonholes. He stood casually in the entrance, one hand in his pocket, the other resting against the doorframe.

"Doctor!"

It was all she could say. Dumbfounded, she stared at him as if he were some kind of apparition. He raised an eyebrow.

"Yes. Correct. Well, it's good to see you don't have concussion but I'd envisaged this escape as a reasonably fast-paced affair. Would it interfere with your plans for the rest of the evening if we got under way now?"

She gaped at him for a moment longer before leaping to her feet and running to join him in the doorway. He grasped her hand.

"Come on, Jasmine."

They were away, tearing off side by side up the empty corridor. The Doctor's long legs drew him ahead and he pulled her along after him. A sharp left turn, then a right, then another right, then another left.

"Not far now."

She didn't care how far it was. She had been locked in a plastic cube for a month. She was happy just to be running. Alarms began to ring through the corridors, and she laughed at the knowledge that her captors feared what had happened. Booted footsteps behind them, and she rejoiced at having broken their arrogant complacency and made them run. The ringing whine of gunshots, and she knew they must be desperate. The people who were controlling this, the shadows she sometimes glimpsed at the observation windows above the lab, were worried, perhaps dragged out of bed to deal with the crisis, perhaps shouting at each other, perhaps arguing over who was to blame...

The Doctor's grasp on her hand loosened and slipped away. Jasmine stumbled to a halt, cast about in search for him, and found he had tripped and fallen to the floor. She leaned to grasp him by the elbow and pull him forward, but found herself dragging at an immobile dead weight.

His face, pale and shocked, lifted to meet hers, and the hand he had clasped to his chest fell limply away soaked in sticky red fluid. With a look in his eyes of hurt disbelief at what was happening to him, the Doctor sagged forward into her arms and rolled onto the floor, mouth hanging open, staring sightlessly at the ceiling. Still and empty as a bundle of old clothes.

"No." Jasmine said the word quietly, in a puzzled tone. She tweaked at the Doctor's sleeve, expecting him to sit up, shooing her irritably away. "No," she said again, louder, when there was no response. "No. No. No no no!" Suddenly she was screaming, dragging at his arm, trying to make him get up, say something, do something. "You can't! You can't! You can't!"

He lay there, heavy and unyielding. The blood pounded in Jasmine's temples, a red mist filmed her eyes, and then a bright white flash blotted out the scene.

"Oh, thank God."

She shivered with relief. All just another illusion. She waited for the sensation of the table underneath her, and the dispassionate voice of the scientist ordering her to be returned to her cell. The crushing, sickening memory of what she had just been through weighed down on her and she covered her eyes wearily with one hand.

"Be brave, Jasmine."

Her head snapped up. For some reason the white flash that usually took her straight back to the lab was still flaring around her, and the Doctor was here. He stood watching her closely, dressed as before, hands in his pockets, the blood still flowing from the wound in his chest.

"You're not real," she said.

"Then why are you talking to me?" She had no answer, and he went on. "But you're right of course. I can't believe you were taken in, it's not even a good likeness. Where's the noble proportion of the brow? And have you seen the stupid beaky nose they've given me?"

"It's not really beaky," she found herself saying. "It's just sort of pointy. That's how your nose really looks."

"Nonsense. Anyway, enough of this, we have very little time. How are you?"

She drew breath to tell him, then stopped herself.

"You're not real," she insisted.

"You know perfectly well I am. Not in the flesh of course, this is a mechanically induced hallucination taking place solely within the confines of your own head. I thought the best way of getting to talk to you would be to hack into the system and take over one of the characters. Tempted as I was by the opportunity to play one of the brutish guards, the Doctor seemed the most sensible option."

Against her will, Jasmine allowed herself to hope, and once that chink of light had been let in blind belief came flooding in after it. She ran to him, and flung her arms about him with a kind of desperation, as if clinging to a life raft.

But his coat felt like plastic, and his hands against her back were like cardboard. She pulled back, and saw his face was resolving into a simplified, two-dimensional version of the real thing.

"Sorry," he said. "I can't have those pseudo-scientific thugs realising what I'm up to. All this is taking place in a fraction of a second in real time, it's your dream-state perception of it that gives us a chance to talk, but there's still a limit to how far I can extend it. I'm afraid you have to go back now."

"But you haven't done anything!" she protested. "You haven't told me anything!"

The representation of his face was now too crude to convey any emotion, but from his stoop he looked a little hurt.

"I thought you'd be pleased to know I was somewhere near. That I was working on the problem."

"But no one will talk to me here! They won't tell me where I am, what they want from me, anything."

The featureless, stick-figure Doctor paused, placed the ends of its arms where there would be pockets if it had any.

"You're on the Gorro Amari space station. It's a famous scientific research centre at the cutting edge of technology in this quadrant. As for what they want from you, I know they're making you experience these hallucinations to provoke an emotional response, and then recording your thought patterns. I don't know why yet."

"Doctor, I... you've got to get me out of here. I can't take any more of this."

"One thing I've come to realise about you, Jasmine, is that you're capable of taking more of everything than most people think, including you."

Jasmine lowered her eyes miserably. The last thing she needed just now was to be told how strong she was. All she wanted was someone to tell her everything was going to be all right.

"And on top of that," came the voice, thinning now to a distorted electronic reproduction. "Whatever else happens, you'll always have me."

She looked up in plaintive appeal.

"You will get me out of this, won't you?"

"Who has got you out of every mess you've got yourself into over the past four years?"

She should be throwing that back in his face, telling him he was the one who'd got her into most of those messes, but instead she felt a reluctant smile cutting through her unhappiness.

"You have."

The barely visible thing spread its arms.

"Then what are you worrying about?"

Jasmine blinked, and she was on the examination table again, the towering machines pulling away and the heavy-footed sentinel droid coming for her. She had to remind herself not to look cheerful as she was pulled up into a sitting position and then dragged away.

[Soldeed]

Yet again Jasmine started back to consciousness on the table with a blend of relief and pain. They had made her believe she had chosen to leave the Doctor, to stay behind on one of the planets they visited, and he had turned his back on her in bitterness and left without a farewell. So real. It was still there in her memory as if it had actually happened. His look of hurt and disappointment, immediately concreted over by the hardening of his features. "Stay, then," he had said, and the Tardis door slammed in her face.

Wearily she pushed herself up into a sitting position and swung her feet off the side of the table. Might as well cooperate, she felt, as the experience of being hauled off down the corridor back to her cube was best got out of the way quickly. But the order for the sentinel to come and take her away was forestalled by a barked command:

"Step back from the prisoner. She's coming with us."

The white-suited man paused, and Jasmine's head turned to look at two black-clad troopers striding towards her across the lab floor. The fabric of their suits was armoured with plates of gleaming dark metal, and the impenetrable visors of their helmets hid their faces completely except for their jowly chins and thin lips. Each grasped a bulbous, chunky energy weapon in both hands.

"General wants to see her," one said.

They didn't wait for a response, but marched past in front of the scientist's face, and one of them grabbed Jasmine by the wrist, wrenching her violently forward off the bench to crash down onto her knees on the floor. She scrambled up, only to be sent sprawling again by a vicious dig in the ribs from the muzzle of a gun. The two of them seized her arms, gloved fingers digging bruisingly into her, and dragged her off.

One of the scientists, an elderly, distinguished looking man with a square cut, snowy white beard, looked up from the readouts of this latest procedure long enough to observe the girl's departure, her feet scrabbling for purchase on the floor as she teetered in the remorseless grip of the soldiers. He frowned with a vague sense of unease and said to his colleague:

"Doesn't this seem a little..."

The other man clapped him on the shoulder.

"Now, now. You know better than to get emotionally involved with the test subjects. Soon the experiment'll be over and she'll be disposed of, quick and painless. Remember, it's all for science."

* * * * *

Through the station, past sentinel droids, cleaning droids, maintenance droids, servitor droids, delivery droids and no people at all. By the time they reached their destination Jasmine was slumped against her escorts' grasp and was allowing herself to be half carried along the endless succession of passageways. But she was still alert, taking notice of how her surroundings were changing, from the gleaming, clinical white plastic which had been her home for the past month to a gentler, more softly lit environment with carpeted floors and abstract artworks on the walls. Her eyes widened to see, at the end of the latest corridor, a curved porthole, and a scintillating starfield beyond. It struck her afresh just how long it had been since she saw the sky.

Jerked to a halt at a grandiose set of bronze-look double doors, she waited while one of the soldiers pressed a discretely unobtrusive white button in the wall, and was rewarded by a preremptory shout of "In!" from the other side. The doors slid open to reveal a huge room, with a small man at its centre.

The room was dome-shaped, oak coloured, very warm, with carpet that rose to the ankles and tangled between her bare toes. It was virtually featureless, undecorated, the one item of furniture the vast expanse of desk beyond which the sole occupant was visible from what seemed a great distance, sitting on a high backed, black upholstered swivel chair which was also the only chair in the room. The size of the chair and desk made him seem diminutive by comparison, but in any case he couldn't have been more than five foot six. He was in his forties, with close cropped ginger hair, pale skin, and a face which seemed almost rigid but which was constantly on the move, the muscles of jaw and eyesockets working and pulsing with suppressed energy, the thin lips twitching and writhing over his teeth. Tightly buttoned into a black uniform with gold braid running down the arms and row upon row of medal ribbons on the chest, he watched her approach with small, pale, bright eyes.

"Well now," his voice was sharp and abrupt, the words gabbled out in bursts. "So this is the child we've gone to all this trouble for. Somehow I'd expected something a bit less mundane. All right, let's have her closer. I want a look."

A violent shove between the shoulderblades sent Jasmine stumbling forward, forcing her to save herself by grabbing the edge of the desk. The man leaned back in his seat, showing his teeth in a taut, stretched little smile.

"My name is Feigle. General Feigle. You should be honoured, human. Your pathetic little backwater of a planet would normally be beneath my notice. Does it please you to know that coincidence has caused your existence to be of some significance?"

If this is an exchange of insults, you're short, ugly, and that suit does nothing for your complexion. Jasmine wished she'd said it, but she was tired, frightened, her arms hurt where the soldiers had held her, and as she straightened, pulling her hands away from the desk, keeping her eyes clear and her face composed was the best she could do.

"What do you want from me?" she managed to ask with a steady voice. Again Feigle bared his teeth in a joyless smile.

"Oh, nothing at all. But, you see, you'll soon be dead, and I wanted to meet you in person before that, so I can gauge the success of this experiment from first hand knowledge. So come on, I want to get to know you. Tell me how it feels to be a helpless, humiliated captive in this place, to know your life or death are subject to my whims. Have you given up hope yet? Have you accepted that neither the Doctor nor anyone else is coming to save you? Are you ready to beg me for your life?"

He leaned forward, eager for a response, and the sight of his flushed, excited face sparked a revulsion in Jasmine from which she drew strength. Her lip curled, she folded her arms, and then the alarms sounded.

"Alert, alert. This station is now in an emergency situation. All non-technical personnel please stand to the escape capsules and await further instructions. Repeat..."

The calm yet imperious female voice went on steadily, while sirens whooped in the background. Feigle leaped to his feet, his whole body fidgeting.

"What's going on? Is this for real? Are we in danger? You!" He pointed at one of the soldiers. "Go and find out! And you..." He pointed at Jasmine and fumbled at the holster at his belt. "Don't start celebrating. If we have to evacuate, then it's best I kill you right now."

But Jasmine wasn't really listening. She had noticed, at the moment the alarms went off, a circular hatch sliding soundlessly open in the wall. It said "Escape" on it in big red letters, which she was taking as an omen. Of course, now Feigle was in her way...

After hearing many stories of the Doctor's previous adventures, and his previous companions, she had remarked that it might be a good idea if she was to learn to fight, like that mad woman in the skins, so she could be of use in a tight corner.

"Oh, no," the Doctor had said. "Slippery slope. One moment you're pulling a few martial arts tricks as a last resort, the next you're standing alone, trying to hold the bridge singlehanded against a rampaging mob of angry, hairy men with sharpened metal implements. Far better to run for it, and try and come up with a more cerebral way around the problem."

"But what if there's someone in my way while I'm trying to run for it?"

"Ah. In that case..."

And he had explained.

Jasmine's leg swung up, and Feigle's eyes widened in horror, his mouth falling limply open, as her foot crunched home between his legs. He toppled sideways, and the soldiers were far too late to stop her diving headfirst through the hatchway and sliding down the chute beyond. She was aware of the alarms cutting off immediately, and the light from the room behind her being cut off by the hatch sliding shut. She whooshed out of the chute and rolled to a halt in a dark and silent little room. There were tiny portholes here, just six inches across, and a sturdy looking, tightly sealed oval door in black metal.

"Jasmine!"

His voice. She whirled, and was disappointed to see nothing but a series of pockets and pigeon holes in the wall, stuffed with nameless gadgetry.

"No, over here."

She followed the sound, and plucked from its holster a six inch grey plastic rectangle, flat and weightless in her palm. Her face lit up with relief, as if she was free already, at the sight of the Doctor's face looking out at her from a playing card-sized screen .

"Ah, there you are. Well done, Jasmine, I wasn't sure how quickly you'd pick up on the idea. Now, this chamber accesses the escape capsule for the general's quarters. You just need to go through the airlock, then follow my instructions for launch, and you'll be blasted away from the station much too fast for anyone to follow. I'll pick you up in the Tardis."

"Right." Clutching the communicator tightly, she turned to look at the hatch. "Right. How do I get through the door?"

"I've reset the access codes. Just type into the keypad, 92413956, and press the big black switch."

She did as she was told, and with a hiss of unlocking clamps was through into the airlock. The second door at the end of a cramped six foot tunnel on the other side was opened by a simple tug on a lever, and she was through into a spherical space capsule, just large enough for one person, its interior encrusted with a confused tangle of controls and storage lockers. There was one chair, thickly upholstered and steel reinforced, with a complex safety harness hanging ready for use.

And in the chair sat a man.

He was large, still, and pale-skinned, garbed in a featureless black tunic suit. His sharply trimmed black beard gave him a satanic appearance, but it was his eyes, when he raised them to focus upon her, that sent a shiver through her bones. She could see nothing there. They were like two unfathomable pools of dark water, every nameless secret hidden beneath a calm surface. Unhurried, he reached out and took the communicator from her, thumbed a switch which darkened the screen and obliterated the Doctor's face.

Jasmine found herself paralysed, scarcely able to breathe, still frozen in place half way into the capsule.

"Who are you?"

The man's voice was quiet, mellifluous, with a thrumming note of power.

"You may address me," he said, "As Master."

[Soldeed]

His footfalls were eerily silent, but Jasmine knew the Master was right behind her when, her breathing shallow with apprehension, she re-entered Feigle's presence. The general was striding up and down his office, seething and twitching with barely contained frenzy, and still a little bow-legged, and he whipped around to stare at her with pale murder in his face.

"You!" He advanced on her, knuckles whitening in his clenched fists, as if he would strangle her there and then. "You'll be sorry. You'll curse yourself for daring to raise a hand to me. You'll beg for the chance to lick my boot and pray for forgiveness. Do you know what that machine down in the lab can do to you? You think it's only for giving unhappy dreams? It can make you believe you're experiencing every torture ever devised, bones crushed, skin flayed off, guts torn out. You'll scream your way through it all until you die of your wounds and then we'll reset the machine and you'll go through it all again, over and over till I give the word to stop."

Jasmine grasped for the brave joke, the defiant retort, tried to think what the Doctor would have said, but her jaw and mind were locked by the simple, straightforward fear of this vicious little man's revenge. She stayed silent, straining every nerve to stay composed, and not give him the satisfaction of seeing her break down in front of him.

"You!" Feigle jabbed a finger at the Master, hovering silently at her shoulder. "Take her back to her cell, and then prepare a torture program for her. And it had better be good. I want to see the visualisation tomorrow."

"As you wish," came the Master's soft voice. He touched Jasmine lightly between the shoulders. "This way, young woman."

He directed her out of the main doors and into the carpeted passageway beyond. He escorted her along, once the doors had slid shut behind them, not by dragging her by the arm, not by shoving her so she stumbled in front of him, but by walking along at a steady pace beside her with his hands linked behind his back. The notion that she might attempt to make a run for it did not seem to have occurred to him.

"What..." Jasmine rubbed agitatedly at her forehead, aware she might not want to know the answer to this question, but unable to prevent herself from asking it. "What are you going to do to me?"

"Mmm?" The Master looked over at her, as if she had disturbed him in the middle of some inconsequential but interesting reverie. "Oh." He waved a hand dismissively. "Don't worry about that. I'll tell him I tortured you and mock up something suitably gruesome for him to watch. He'll be happy."

She stopped dead, and found herself bending weakly forward, hair falling over her face, shivers of relief running through at her at the removal, with a few calm words, of the nightmare vision which had loomed inescapably before her. She looked up, and found the Master watching her, a trace of impatience drawing down his features.

"Thankyou," was all she could say.

His dark eyes were almost black, and his gaze seemed to cut right through her.

"Be assured of one thing. If it were in my interests to do so I would visit on you tortures that would have Feigle running and crying for his mother. It so happens that in this particular instance it will be quicker and simpler to fake it."

She didn't doubt it, but for the moment he was the first person she had met over this last hellish month who had helped her in any way, and she was grateful.

"Thanks anyway."

A faint smile.

"Ah, this is a human thing, isn't it? Well, you're welcome."

They walked on a little way in silence.

"I nearly made it," she recalled. "I'd have escaped if it hadn't been for you. I'd have been with the Doctor in the Tardis, safe, right now."

"Yes, you would. And Feigle's decision to have you brought to one of the luxury apartments, with ready access to an escape chute, would have been looking rather foolish. That, at least, would have been entertaining."

"But how did you know?" she persisted.

"How did I know...?"

"How could you be waiting for me in that escape capsule? How did you know the Doctor would try to get me out that way?"

The Master shrugged.

"It's what I'd do."

There was another silence. But Jasmine had been a long time without anyone who would respond to her at all. She eyed a hulking sentinel droid, discretely standing like a statue in an alcove in the wall, then looked up and down the deserted, silent corridor.

"Where is everyone? This place is huge, but all I've seen is a handful of scientists in the laboratory and then you lot. There must be more, somewhere."

"A few. But this station is the foremost designer and producer of androids in the quadrant. If for marketing purposes only, they're keen to show that with enough robots you hardly need people at all. There are some administrative staff, a hundred odd scientists, and that's it."

He didn't look round at her as he spoke. His tone was level, soft, and uninflected. But at least he seemed willing to answer questions, so she pushed on:

"Do you know why I'm here? What they want from me?"

"Yes, of course I do." A pause, and he looked down at her expectant face. "Oh. No, I'm not going to tell you."

"Why not? What harm could it do? I sit in my cube, I get taken down the corridor to the lab, they give me nightmares, then they take me back to my cube again." Jasmine tried to stop her voice becoming ragged in her frustration. "So how's any of that going to change if you just tell me why?"

"Well, I'm simply concerned that if the Doctor contacts you again via the reality simulator then you'll pass the information on to him and that will give him an advantage."

"What are you talking about? He's never contacted me except through the communicator today."

The Master gave her a little nod of acknowledgement.

"I commend you. I can see the Doctor has made one of his better choices of companion. Only a fraction of a second's pause before your denial. But much hangs on that fraction of a second, Jasmine, and you have now told me what I wanted to know."

This, at least, brought silence, and Jasmine passed the rest of the journey with the sickening knowledge that she had let the Doctor down, and given away his secret to this man, whose name she knew from stories which had been fun and exciting to hear, but who she had never been prepared to meet face to face.

The door of her cube rolled open at the touch of a button, and Jasmine looked despairingly into its blank interior.

"At least tell me why they're treating me like this. Can't I have a bed? A chair? Something?"

The Master stood disinterested, hands behind his back.

"I'm afraid your physical wellbeing is simply not a priority. As long as your mind's intact they will keep you in the cheapest, least complicated manner possible. In fact, the original plan was to remove your brain and keep it alive in a jar, but ultimately it was decided that the risk of neurological damage during the extraction process outweighed the convenience of the arrangement."

"And then what?" asked Jasmine bitterly. "When they've finished with me?"

He paused, just for a moment, as if this was something he had genuinely never considered.

"Well, if no one else has any use for you, you'll be disposed of. I think the biology department might want to keep your body. We're a long way from Earth and I don't suppose they have a complete human specimen."

He inspected her frozen, strained face with a detached interest, and cocked his head on one side in a vague expression of sympathy.

"Perhaps you'd like a tour of the facilities before you go back to your cell. The establishment is actually very fascinating."

"You're hoping to get a bit more information out of me?"

"Of course. But who knows, perhaps you'll manage to get something out of me? Gain a clue as to what convoluted plan has brought you here. Besides which, I'm tired of contact with nothing but militaristic buffoons like Feigle, and I'm sure you've had enough of staring at the four blank walls of your cell. A short break will be refreshing for both of us."

Jasmine hesitated, but he was right about the cell. There was little she would not rather be doing than sitting in there on the hard floor through long hours of nothing. A walk, a tour, even in this company, would at least be something.

"All right," she said.

[Soldeed]

Reclining in the black velvety depths of the luxurious swivel chair behind the desk in his office, the Master was becoming increasingly expansive.

"At that point I concluded that a simpler, more direct solution was in order, so I seized a sword which had been hung for decorative purposes on the wall. With a loud cry of 'Haha! Like that, is it?' however, he immediately acquired a sword of his own."

"The Doctor?"

Perched on the comfortable but slightly less luxurious chair opposite, Jasmine's reserves of caution were draining away rapidly as she got caught up in this unlikely tale. The office was smaller than Feigle's, but it was warm, and pleasant, and had a contoured oval window with a stunning view of the stars beyond, and he had given her a glass of fruit juice. She leaned forward, elbows on the desk.

"Well, you must understand," he was saying, "That at this point in his life cycle he was a very different person from the two Doctors who I gather you've encountered. He was very quick to leap into the thick of the action, very keen on fast cars and flying machines, and he was a tall, lean, long-nosed individual with an impressively bouffant white hairstyle and a wardrobe of colourful, frilly clothes, all of which combined to give him the appearance of an angry parrot."

Caught by surprise by her snort of laughter during a mouthful of juice, Jasmine clapped a hand over her mouth, hoping none of it had come out through her nose. The Master paused with an indulgent air while she collected herself.

"So who won this swordfight of yours?" she prompted.

"Ah, well, I would like you to bear in mind that I had been in jail for several months at this point and wasn't in the peak of physical condition. He was also at the time considerably taller than I..."

"You lost, then?"

"Strictly speaking, what happened was..."

He was interrrupted by the sharp hiss of the doors retracting.

"What the hell's going on here?" demanded Feigle, striding in, two guards at his back. "I told you to take her back to her cell. I will have my orders obeyed!"

The Master leaned back in his seat, his hands clasped at chest height, his dark eyes upon the armed men advancing towards him. There was no tension or anger in his posture, but an absolute stillness. A wrinkle of displeasure marked his brow for an instant, and then was gone.

"I decided to talk to her for a little longer," he said easily. "I thought perhaps I might gain her confidence and she might let slip some valuable piece of information about the Doctor."

Feigle blinked, his glance flicking between the two people sitting at the desk.

"Well now you've told her," he objected. "She knows what you're up to."

"Ah, I'm afraid she'd already guessed that," said the Master with an approving look at Jasmine. "And since I'm similarly aware of her ambition to find out the reason for her incarceration here, we are, so to speak, circling one another."

An ugly twist of contempt knotted in Feigle's face, and he lunged forward to grab Jasmine by the hair, dragging her agonisingly up out of her seat and hurling her with a violent wrench into the arms of his soldiers. After all she'd endured, it seemed as though these few minutes of civilised treatment had lowered her resistance, and she couldn't withhold a cry of pain.

"Take her away," Feigle ordered. "Lock her up."

They obeyed, and Jasmine tottered resignedly out in their grip. The Master had watched the scene placidly, and Feigle rounded on him.

"And you! You were hired because you're supposed to know the Doctor. This whole project was your idea, so you'd better make it work."

"It'll work," the Master said. "Everything is proceeding according to plan."

"According to plan! He almost got her out today."

"But I stopped him. As I intend to stop everything else he attempts. Until the time comes."

Feigle seemed momentarily calmed, but with a twitch of nervous energy was leaning forward across the desk.

"You've got to find out how he did it! If he has access to the station computers..."

"He has no such thing. He has access to a few peripheral functions like security cameras and alarm bells. All the station's vital functions are on closed systems."

But how can he hook in from outside to our computer network?"

"He can't. The base is too heavily shielded. Nobody could patch in an external link."

"But..."

"Therefore," the Master continued calmly, "He is not working from outside. He is inside the station at this moment."

Feigle's constant, quivering motion was stilled for a moment, his face blank.

"Ridiculous!" he protested. "You said yourself the base is too heavily shielded. He could never get in without being detected."

"Wrong, I'm afraid. With a Gallifreyan time-space capsule, he can go wherever he wants."

"But... what... then... he's somewhere around here at this very moment! We have to find him!"

"Indeed. I suggest you order the service droids to scour every square centimetre of the station from the storage holds to the hull cavity and not forgetting the ventilation system."

"Yes. Yes." Feigle's eyes narrowed. "I'll have the service droids search the station. We know what he looks like, we know what his craft looks like. There's no possible way he can stay hidden."

"Good thinking," said the Master drily. "I'm sure your elegant plan will bring results in short order."

Feigle looked at him suspiciously, and leaned forward again.

"And as for you..." He jabbed his stiffened finger into the centre of the Master's chest. "You've got work to do, remember? I want to see that girl screaming and begging. The vid on my desk by tomorrow evening, or else maybe you'll be starring in one of your own."

His upper lip drew back to show his teeth in a semblance of a grin, and with a sharp about turn he marched out of the room.

The Master sat back, and rubbed his large hands slowly together while the doors slid shut and returned his privacy. A slow smile gathered and spread across his face, and a low chuckle emanated from his throat.

"I can't believe you're actually working for this character."

The Master paused, then swivelled his chair at a gradual pace until he was facing the voice's source. He showed neither displeasure nor surprise. His eyes glittered.

"My dear Doctor. What an unexpected pleasure."

[Soldeed]

The Doctor's scornful face, backed by the familiar roundels of the Tardis console room, stared down at the Master from the wall mounted viewscreen.

"A salaried employee now, is it?" he continued. "Perhaps we should change your name to something more appropriate. The Servant. The Lackey."

The Master wafted the jibe aside with a languid movement of his hand.

"Purely a temporary arrangement, I assure you. Even a renegade timelord has bills to pay. And you'll be gratified to know that my long association with you greatly increases my marketability. Feigle's offer for a little advice on coping with your potential interference was remarkably generous."

"Feigle, yes." The Doctor's eyes sharpened intently. "I trailed them here after they snatched Jasmine on Hagulon Beta, and I assumed it would be some old enemy. But I've never seen the man before in my life. Just what is he after?"

"All will become clear in due course. Assuming you live that long."

"Perhaps it'll become clear sooner than you think. What was it you said earlier? You plan on stopping everything I try 'until the time comes'? Now that was an interesting choice of phrase. Careless too, getting chatty about your future plans when you know I'm keyed into the system."

"Ah, too true," the Master agreed, shaking his head mournfully. "I must be getting old. Unless of course it should emerge that letting you have a few hints about the first plan was all part of the second plan."

The hard-eyed smile crawled across his pale face, and the Doctor frowned, but answered with a superior sniff:

"First plan, second plan... Overcomplicated as usual. That was always your weakness."

"And yours was your predictability. For instance, I know your own plan is going to be something very dramatic and large scale, and that you're very close to putting it into action."

"Oh, you're hoping to throw out some guesses and get me to own up to the truth? You've played that card too often."

"Not at all. Your young friend has been here for a while, more than long enough for you to come up with something. The attempt in Feigle's office today depended on his capricious decision to have her brought into his presence and was therefore a spur of the moment affair, not the main plan. The fact that you've made yourself known to me here tells me that you're past the stage of hiding patiently behind the scenes gathering information, therefore the attempt will be soon. And likewise, that you're under the impression it doesn't matter if I know you're tapping the communication system tells me you're not relying on that ability for the success of your idea, therefore it's something unsubtle." The Master leaned back with a satisfied look. "You see, Doctor, too many years have passed, too many encounters. We have few surprises to offer one another."

The Doctor had listened closely, but without so much as a flicker of a response to indicate whether the Master's hypothesis was correct. Afterwards, he let the silence stand for a moment, unhappily contemplating his old enemy with an appraising eye.

"I think there are one or two surprises left," he said quietly. "First, I had to get used to the idea that there was no evil thing you wouldn't do in the pursuit of power. For a while, I imagined there might be something left inside, a line you wouldn't cross, but eventually you made me give you up. Then I watched you slip deeper and deeper into insanity, obsessed with your plans to cheat death and with your vendetta against me. Do you have any conception of how I felt, seeing you sink lower and lower every time we met? But even then I honestly believed you retained some form of self respect. I never thought I'd see you playing second fiddle to a spiteful, sadistic little weasel like Feigle."

The Master's eyes dropped to the floor, and his shoulders moved, once, in the bare bones of an internal shudder of laughter. He smiled easily and looked back up at the Doctor.

"Weasel he may be, but he's a weasel with a large number of armed men at his command and that makes him a weasel to be treated with some respect."

"Did you see him earlier?" Agitated, the Doctor leaned forward towards the screen. "Did you see him all twisted up with pleasure at the thought of what he was going to have done to Jasmine? He wants to sit and watch the film tomorrow evening. Is his side really the side you want to be on? Doesn't it make you feel sick inside? Doesn't it make your fingers itch and your toes curl and your teeth grate? Don't you recoil?"

The Master listened to this placidly.

"Not really. I like the girl, she's very personable, but I'm afraid my brief social interaction with her has given you a false sense of optimism. Frankly, the weasel can do what he likes to her as long as it doesn't interfere with my own schedule."

The Doctor drew back, frustrated, but took in a breath and persevered:

"I sometimes wonder if this callousness is something you have to work at. Very easy to let your concentration slip and allow some feelings through. You didn't have to give her a fruit juice."

"That's where you're wrong. The fruit juice is all part of the plan, just like everything else." The Master leaned forward a little, his black eyes intensifying. "You're quite convinced, aren't you, that your way of life is superior to any other? Should I be like you, and drift around the universe, and gain nothing and build nothing and leave nothing behind? When you're gone, there'll be nothing to prove you ever existed. Is that your rebellion against the Time Lords? Do those decadent, enfeebled ponderers shudder at the mention of your name? I shall live forever. In body, or failing that in legend. The universe will be marked forever by my presence, and that, old friend, is what makes a life worth the living."

There was a sudden energy, an alertness about him, and a flash of white teeth showed through his steady, placid exterior in anticipation of the Doctor's reaction, but the Doctor looked away with a mild air of distaste.

"You should try being good, you know," he said distantly. "Just for a year, say. You might like it, and you never know till you try."

The Master relaxed back in his seat and smiled broadly.

"Perhaps I shall. In the millennia ahead I shall no doubt be in frequent need of novel experiences. For now, though, I shall look forward to finding out what plan you've cooked up to retrieve your young friend. I trust it will be entertainingly melodramatic."

His finger stabbed a button on the desk, and the screen went dark. Left alone, the Master sat peacefully for a long time, his face contemplative and still, stroking his fingers steadily through his beard.

Meanwhile, in the Tardis, the Doctor stared intently down at the blank monitor, as if expecting it to give up some secret. His palms slammed down hard onto the console top.

"Just wait, you hairy faced old fraud. I'll give you melodrama."

[Soldeed]

Sitting on the hard, cold floor, propped up in the corner of her featureless cube-shaped cell, Jasmine watched the doors with weary apprehension. She had no way to measure time, but she had been awake for a while now, so she was calling it late morning, and that was when they usually came for her.

She flinched as the doors slid open, then watched in surprise as the Master strode confidently in.

"You seem quite relieved to see me," he remarked. "That's not the reaction that usually greets my arrival."

She hesitated.

"Are you real? The last time someone other than the sentinel came in it was a hallucination."

"Ah, yes, they made you believe the Doctor had come to rescue you, didn't they? But it seems unlikely they'd make you dream about me."

"True."

"Good. Now then..." While the doors slid shut at his back, the Master retrieved sheets of a transparent paper-like substance from a flat black folder under his arm. "I want to show you something important, but first I shall need your promise to keep it a secret. Not from the Doctor, obviously, if you see him I expect you to tell him everything, but from everyone else."

Jasmine made herself stop and be wary, but she had been staring at blank walls for a long time. She was absurdly fascinated by the glimpse she had had so far of the complex diagrams on the documents.

"Nobody but you ever talks to me anyway. So I promise."

"Excellent. So..." A little stiffly, the Master knelt down on the floor in front of her. "I know the Doctor is hidden somewhere in the station. Naturally I advised Feigle to have the service droids execute a thorough search for him."

He inspected Jasmine with interest for any sign of anxiety at this news, and raised an eyebrow to see her listening closely, with no sign that she even considered the Doctor might be caught in this way.

"Of course they didn't find anything," he went on. "He would have hidden himself better than that. But how, when those droids know every inch of this establishment? What possible hiding place could there be? The answer is, simply, that those droids don't actually know anything except what's fed to them by the central computer. What if someone, someone who's already hacked into the system, had simply changed the stored version of the station plans? He could have excluded the room in which the Tardis landed and those poor stupid machines would have worked their way carefully around it as if it didn't exist. So..." He spread out a sheaf of papers in front of her. "I printed out these copies of the floorplans and looked for blank spaces. But I found nothing, and so I had another think. I sent the service robots out again, and had them make precise measurements of every room, duct and passage in the station. It took them hours, but when they were done I loaded the figures into my own computer and produced a fresh set of plans. What do you think I found?" He threw a fresh bundle of papers down in front of her and pointed carefully to a small dark patch lost in the middle of a bewildering cobweb of black lines. "Just about police box sized, wouldn't you say?"

He examined her again and to his satisfaction this time he saw her tense, her lips parting, her eyes darting briefly from side to side. He continued to talk.

"You understand, of course? He didn't just eliminate that room from the map. He redrew the whole map, incrementing the dimensions of every room just enough so that they would fit together and cover up that empty space. An ingenious and painstaking operation which would have fooled most people. Of course, at that point he didn't realise I was here."

Jasmine was silent for a moment, staring down at the bundle of plans on the floor. Then she looked up, directly into his face.

"Why haven't you told Feigle?"

"What makes you think I haven't?"

"Because you're telling me."

"Ah." He smiled. "Well spotted. Yes, quite right, I've no plans to share this discovery with Feigle. But I'm afraid I must insist that you do something for me in return."

"Me?" She shifted in her place in the corner, and wrapped her arms about her knees. "What do you think I can do for you? I'm stuck in a plastic cube. I don't even have a hairbrush."

"Quite," agreed the Master. He eyed her hair with interest. "It looks quite tidy, considering."

Instinctively Jasmine touched it with her fingertips.

"Well, I've been..." What was she saying? "Look, what do you want?"

"Well, stuck in a plastic cube though you are, you must have realised that you're considered to be a person of some importance. This whole complex and expensive project has been organised around you."

"Importance?" Jasmine made herself take a deep breath, swallowing her frustration so that she might continue in a level tone. "What good does that do me? What can I do or say to make any difference to anything? I'm sitting in a plastic cube and no one will even tell me why!"

"I'll tell you why."

He paused, while her wide eyes focussed intently, almost desperately upon him, her whole body poised on edge as if ready for the starter's pistol. He let her wait for a moment before continuing.

"Or at least I will if you agree to undertake this small task for me. That's in addition to my not betraying the Doctor's location, quite possibly getting him killed and certainly ending your hopes of imminent rescue."

Jasmine concentrated, and made herself think.

"If I do this for you, whatever it is," she said slowly, "What's to stop you giving the Doctor up straight afterwards?"

"I can assure you I have no interest in doing any such thing. My plans at the moment simply don't involve doing him harm."

"So you say. But you're probably lying."

"Hmm." The Master grinned broadly, unoffended. "I see he has told you something about me. But my judgement is that you're not really in a position to drive a hard bargain. Either you do as I ask, find out why you're here, and perhaps keep the Doctor safe, or you stay in this cell, find out nothing, and I certainly go off right now and spill the beans to Feigle. Which is it to be?"

Jasmine looked into his face while he waited for her answer and raised his eyebrows inquiringly. The suffocating sense of powerlessness she had lived with these past weeks weighed down on her, and she let her head fall forward, holding her brow in her palm.

"Your answer quickly, please," the Master said, not ungently.

"You know I've no choice," she muttered bitterly. "Of course I'll do it."

"Splendid!" His voice was immediately bright and energetic. "You won't regret it. Now, to start with, something I'm sure you'll find fascinating. There's someone I want you to meet."

He climbed to his feet, and drew from inside his tunic a slender remote control device which he pointed at the door. A click of a button, and it was sliding open.

"Come in, now," the Master called.

Jasmine sat in her corner and watched the new arrival walk steadily into the cell. A cold iron weight drove into her belly, freezing electric shudders ran up and down her rigid limbs, her facial muscles locked hard, and she could muster only a desperate, strangled gasp of protest that this was the one person who could not be walking into this room.

It was her. The face, the one she remembered looking out at her from the mirror, the shapeless white smock and trousers, the same, from hair to toenails, all the same. Her own wide, dark eyes looked down at her with a calm interest.

"Jasmine," said the Master smoothly, "Meet Jasmine."

[Soldeed]

A stiffening cold seized hold of Jasmine, permeating through to her bones, and she struggled clumsily to her feet, pressing back against the corner of the cell as if she could push her way through it and escape the twisted impossibility she was facing. Her double's wide eyes and bland expression could not have been in sharper contrast to her own pale, strained features.

The Master's low chuckle cut across between them.

"Unsettling, isn't it?" With a click of his remote control he closed the doors. "If she's you, then who are you? But don't worry, you're still the one and only Jasmine. This one here..." He rapped the double on the forehead with his knuckles. She didn't respond at all. "... Is a perfect facsimile on the outside but doesn't have much going on inside, isn't that right?"

"Yes, Master," the double replied quietly. Her eyes were perfectly blank, and empty.

"See?" said the Master. He stood shoulder to shoulder alongside the thing, his black tunic and its white smock making the pair of them look like some bizarre wedding couple, and in the disorientation of that vision, realisation struck Jasmine like a flash of light and she straightened with a gasp, because suddenly she understood.

"I know why I'm here! I know what you want from me!"

"Really?" The Master looked interested. "Do go on."

"It's an android. It's supposed to be able to pretend to be me, but even though it looks like me it doesn't know how to act like me. The Doctor said those sessions in the lab were all about provoking me into an emotional response and then recording my thought processes. You're going to take all that recorded information and program it into the robot, so in any situation it'll be able to do what I'd do."

The Master listened closely to this, and there was a genuine recognition in his eyes. He almost looked proud of her.

"Spot on. Well done, young lady. Now I wonder, can you guess, what purpose we could have in constructing a perfect replica of you? It's not simply that we've enjoyed your company so much we thought it would be better still with two of you."

Jasmine paused, and thought.

"It'll be something to do with the Doctor. It'll be something big, because of all the trouble you've taken over this." Her face darkened, as the euphoria of making some sense of her imprisonment drained away and the fear grew of the use to which they might put this machine. "And it won't be anything good."

"All accurate of course," said the Master with a sly smile. "But I doubt you'll ever think your way through to the full detail of the plan."

"And are you going to tell me?"

"Of course. I said I'd explain and I'm a man of my word. Ha! Not really of course, but on this particular occasion I am going to do what I said I would. Have you ever heard of Ichthys Minor?"

"No."

"Nothing to be embarrassed about, not many people have. It's an aggressive, violent, but rather small planet in the Kozak spiral of which our little friend General Feigle happens to be military dictator. Its sole shot at, as it were, the big time, was during the process of disarmament which followed the end of the Ferastian War. Feigle hit upon the idea of ambushing a consignment of planet-killing Ixis missiles which were being taken for disposal in a black hole. It was a sound plan. It would have made him a force to be reckoned with, but fortunately for most concerned he was betrayed by one Issius Treed, a scientist who he had been expecting to get the missiles functioning for him. You won't be surprised to learn that at some point the Doctor became involved. He was the one who got a warning to the Ferastians, and he also got Treed safely away before Feigle could get his hands on him.

"So far, nothing out of the ordinary you might say. The Doctor saves the day and the universe stumbles blindly on to the next crisis. But you've met Feigle. You can imagine he's not the type to accept such misfortune in a philosophical frame of mind. He has conspicuously failed to get over it and move on. I think deep down he still half believes the plan worked and he's a feared, powerful warlord, bestriding the cosmos. The occasional reminder that he's actually the disliked, distrusted ruler of a small, backward and frankly rather shabby little planet is distasteful to him. Hence his interest - let's be honest and call it an obsession - in finding Issius Treed and doing unpleasant things to him.

"So we're building an android to replace the Doctor's companion. When it's finished, we'll let the Doctor rescue it and fly off smug in the knowledge of another good deed done. In time the android will carefully broach the subject of Issius Treed, chat to the Doctor about him, and find out where he's hiding. And the android will pass the information back to us."

He eyed Jasmine closely, gauging her reaction.

"So now you know it all."

Jasmine leaned back loosely into her corner, eyes closed and head resting against the wall, assimilating this information. Slowly, unstoppably, a smile spread across her face, splitting inevitably into a huge grin of pure delight, and her dark eyes opened wide and the Master's unwavering observation was met with a gale of joyous, helpless laughter.

"That's a terrible plan!" she managed, almost choking. "Terrible! The Doctor won't be taken in by an android copy of me. He'll spot it in five minutes no matter how carefully it's programmed. Whose idea was this?"

"Mine," said the Master levelly.

She quelled herself for a moment at this, but the effort was too great and the laughter bubbled back up through her tightly compressed lips. Noisy now, high pitched, almost hysterical.

"You? You came up with this? You're supposed to be an archvillain! What were you thinking?"

The Master pursed his lips while she doubled over, breathless and still chortling. Then the corners of his mouth made the briefest twitch upwards.

"It's not one of my best, I admit. But you're neglecting one important factor."

Jasmine straightened, her laughter burning itself out. There was a sudden sense of weakness. Her limbs were trembling as if in a fever.

"Which is?" she prompted light-headedly.

"Which is," the Master said, smiling solely with his intense black eyes, "That I don't give a damn about Feigle or his need for revenge or his unrealistic fantasies of interplanetary conquest. You're quite right, the plan probably won't work, but that doesn't really signify because I very much doubt whether it will ever be put into action. Feigle trusted my advice and paid the scientists on this station a fortune to undertake the project. That's all that matters to me."

Jasmine swallowed, took a deep breath, and found herself sober again.

"So you're up to something more. You're using me, you're betraying Feigle, and you're out for yourself." She considered. "Yes, that sounds like the man I've heard stories about. What's the real plan?"

He gestured to the door.

"Come along with me, and I'll show you."

"You're not worried someone will notice I've gone?"

"Not really." He addressed the android. "Robot Jasmine?" It turned its head to face him in patient inquiry. "Please sit down in that corner. Draw your knees up to your chin and look miserable."

The machine did as it was told. Its forlorn, broken expression would have moved the stoniest of hearts.

"You see?" said the Master. "In this respect at least, it manages a creditable impression of you."

"But we'll be seen, won't we? There are security cameras everywhere."

"There aren't, actually. Not at the moment, anyway. I've advised Feigle that the Doctor is probably using them to spy on us, and it would be best to have them turned off."

"But what about when they come to take me for today's session in the lab?"

"There isn't one. Today's the day when you're supposed to be enjoying the torture program I'm supposed to have written, remember? The scientists have been given the day off and, as a result, so have you."

Jasmine felt something unwanted nagging at the back of her mind, and realised it was a flicker of admiration for this man and the sheer clockwork elegance of his scheming. She hastily shooed it away, reminding herself of what he was.

"So if there are no more objections..." the Master continued. He reopened the door with his remote control. "... We'll embark on our little expedition together. I flatter myself I still have one or two more surprises in store."

[Soldeed]

Feigle marched into his luxurious office, his constant, tightly wound nervous tension knotting its way up his spine and along his arms to his fingertips. He walked to the desk, drummed his fingers on its surface, turned his head one way and then the other, his sharp little eyes darting about the room.

Eventually he made an abrupt turn and went over to the nutrition machine. Pressed for a soothing cup of hot Korixian tea and waited impatiently while the device whirred and hummed to itself.

The hatch slid open and a hand emerged and passed the General his cup. He took it and started to turn away.

"Gah!" He started violently with the realisation of what he had just seen. "Aargh!" In his shock he had spilled the scalding liquid over his trousers. He scrabbled at them, hissing between his teeth in pain, trying to pull the damp material away from his flesh, then a moment later remembered to grab the flap of the holster at his belt.

"Now, now." The Doctor was head and shoulders out of the service hatch, and aiming a lethal-looking bulbous handgun directly between Feigle's eyes. "Let's keep this fair, if you don't mind. Unfair, I mean."

Feigle's wide, staring eyes locked on the man squeezing his way out into the room, and he tensed rigid at every muscle, the instinct to grab a gun and shoot clashing head on with the instinct to cower and hide. His lips writhed agitatedly, and showed his teeth in a stretched little smile.

"You won't shoot me. I've read a lot about you, Doctor. You wouldn't gun down an unarmed man in cold blood. It's not what you do."

"Is that right?" The Doctor's eyes seemed very bright as he stepped forward into the room, stretching out the weapon to arm's length till it almost touched Feigle's forehead. "Did you read that in a file somewhere? Is there a list of things I'll do and things I won't? I wouldn't bet my life on it if I were you, little military fellow. You see, I don't mind people trying to kill me, I'm used to it, but my companions have a very special status in my view of things, and I take strong exception to someone trying to get to me by hurting them. It takes us into a whole new area of things I will and won't do, and that list of yours, you might as well use it as firelighters."

The cold muzzle of the gun prodded Feigle right between the eyes. He didn't stir.

"Still not convinced, I see," the Doctor continued. "Still not sure if I'll really shoot you. But it doesn't actually matter because I only need to look at you once to see you're not the man to test me. Maybe I'll kill you, maybe I won't, but you'll do anything I tell you rather than take that chance. Watch."

The Doctor reached forward with his left hand and retrieved Feigle's gun from his holster. Held it delicately between finger and thumb while he stepped over to the waste disposal chute and dropped the weapon in. Somewhere out on the hull of the station it was jettisoned into space. Feigle didn't move a muscle.

"See?" said the Doctor. "Has this episode given you an insight into the sort of man you are? Now sit down behind your desk because there's something I need you to do for me."

Feigle stood motionless, the flesh under his eyes twitching violently. The Doctor prompted him with raised eyebrows and the slightest movement of the gun barrel, and he obeyed, walking stiff-legged across the room to sink into his chair. The Doctor followed him all the way and stood over him across the desk.

"What do you want?" Feigle muttered.

"Hmm. Let's see." The Doctor stood up on his toes to look over the desk at Feigle's belt. A flat black plastic rectangle hung there. "Is that the key card for that little space yacht moored at airlock 47? That's a nice ship. I'll have that."

"What?"

Incredulously Feigle glanced down at the key card, then back at the Doctor, manifesting a kind of puritanical disapproval at this frivolous request. Next moment he was shrinking back into his seat, away from the raised gun muzzle, and with a scowl he unhooked the key card and slapped it down on the desk.

"There."

"Thankyou," said the Doctor. "And, um, I want this pen as well." He retrieved a silver, monogrammed, computer-enabled writing implement from under the general's nose and pocketed it. "And this plastic cup." This went into his other pocket. "And I also want your left shoe."

"You..." Feigle's face contorted furiously. "You're pushing me too far with these games, Doctor."

In a swift movement the Doctor lunged forward across the desk, grasped Feigle's collar and dragged him forward, pressing the gun barrel into the flesh of his cheek. He spoke with icy menace.

"I used to have a pair just like those. But the left one got some kind of alien pus on it which just won't come out. So hand it over."

Released, Feigle stared at him, simmering with hatred, but jerkily, as if it were the greatest physical effort imaginable, bent over to unfasten the clasps on his left boot. He slammed it onto the desk. The Doctor inspected it critically.

"Well, that's no good, it'll never fit me." He looked over at Feigle curiously. "Is it true what they say about men with little feet?"

Sitting in his chair frozen with anger, Feigle whispered between clenched teeth:

"You'll die for this, Doctor. You'll suffer, you'll beg, you'll..."

"Oh, wait, I forgot one." The Doctor shifted his grip on the handgun. "What I want you to do now is get on the intercom and order one - not two - one of your men to go and retrieve Jasmine from her cell."

Feigle swallowed, and looked down and eyed the communicator on his desk like an unwanted meal.

"I've given orders she's not to be moved from the security block under any circumstances."

"So you'll now countermand those orders."

There was a pause, and when Feigle raised his head his face was lit up with a gleeful intensity.

"This won't work, Doctor, you've made a mistake! My men aren't stupid, they'll realise something's wrong when I suddenly change my mind about this. By the time someone's brought the girl all the way up here they'll be ready for you. How do you think you're going to get away then? You have me as a hostage. You really think that's going to get you out when there's an armed man on every corner?"

The Doctor had listened to this, untroubled. He leaned forward.

"Who said anything about bringing her all the way up here?" He straightened. "No, let's not make one of your apes tax his mind, let's keep it simple. Just have him take her out of the security block, round the corner, storage bay 14B. How does that sound?"

"14B?" Feigle's sharp little eyes flicked uncertainly from side to side. "There's nothing there except..."

"Never mind about that," said the Doctor coldly. "One other thing: Jasmine is to have a credit stick loaded with ten million in transferable intergalactic bonds in her pocket when she arrives."

"Money?"

Feigle scowled his contempt at the mundanity of the demand. The Doctor levelled the gun afresh.

"Just do as you're... what was that?"

He wheeled swiftly, aiming the gun at the doors and circling cautiously around to Feigle's side of the desk.

"Is there someone shifting about out there?" he said slowly. "Don't get your hopes up, General, if it's your guards you can be sure I'll get you before they get me."

Feigle didn't answer. He was watching as if hypnotised the Doctor's gun, not two feet from his face, pointing steadily away from him.

"Hmm." The Doctor paused, still aiming the gun at the door. He seemed to have forgotten about Feigle entirely. "I know there was someone out there. Maybe they were just passing by."

He scratched his ear thoughtfully with the gun barrel.

At that instant Feigle sprang from his chair and clutched the gun desperately in both fists. His shoulder slammed into the Doctor's side, sending him reeling helplessly way across the office to tumble onto the carpet. Backing up, sweating copiously and breathing fast to the point of hyperventilation in his excitement, Feigle scrambled the gun around to point it tensely at the man on the floor.

"Ha! Should have been more careful, Doctor. A little overconfident, were we? Had me down for an armchair general who wouldn't dare tackle you himself? Wrong, I'm afraid."

The Doctor didn't answer, but lay propped up on his elbows watching Feigle with an air of calm interest. The General hurried over to his desk and stabbed at the intercom switch.

"This is General Feigle. Security to my office. Immediately." He held the gun steady in both hands and gave the Doctor a tight little smirk. "Well, now. Looks like you'll be getting your reunion with your young friend after all. Once we've got you both down in the lab we'll see what we can get out of the pair of you."

"And just what is it you're hoping to get out of us?" asked the Doctor quietly.

"Oh, patience," Feigle admonished triumphantly. "I don't want to spoil the surprise."

"In that case..." The Doctor rose steadily to his feet, the muzzle of the gun following his every move. "It looks as if it's time I was on my way." He turned to contemplate the nutrition machine. "Back into the supply ducts, where men are empty drinks cartons. Farewell."

"Stop!" Feigle's voice was shrill as the Doctor turned his back and headed straight for the hatch. "One more step and I'll shoot you down right now!"

"I doubt that, somehow."

The Doctor started to clamber head first into the opening. Feigle clenched his teeth, shifted his aim to the Doctor's foot, and pressed down hard on the trigger.

A thin metal rod popped out of the gun's muzzle, and a little flag unfurled from it with the word "ZAP!" written on it in large, colourful letters. The Doctor paused, a twinkling eye was briefly visible as he looked back, and he vanished into the duct, shoulders quivering with silent laughter.

"I knew it!" Feigle cast the toy gun violently away and seethed impotently in the centre of the room. "I knew he was bluffing! Weak, stupid, do-gooding..."

He bashed his fists over and over against the surface of his desk until his fury was spent and a shuddering, twitching silence descended over him. Then suddenly his head snapped upright, his face cleared, and a light came to his eyes. A slow smile coiled its way onto his lips.

"Oh, Doctor, you have made a very grave mistake. I see it all. You've been clever, but it's over now."

With a firm, steady movement he clicked the intercom switch again.

"Feigle here. Reactivate the security monitors immediately." He stared into space for a moment, his eyes quivering with the speed of his thoughts. "Report the Master's current position."

[Soldeed]

Down many levels in the lift, through heavy, shielded doors, past rows of passive sentinel droids, the Master led the way ever deeper into the top security heart of the station. Again and again he typed security codes into keypads, leaned forward for retinal scans, pressed his hand onto panels to be read, until at last they stood in an antiseptic white passageway, a single, straightforward plastic door ahead.

"Ah, now we come to the delicate part," he said, his habitual half smile gathering a new intensity. "Just remember, Jasmine, you're a robot."

"I'm a wha..."

He was pushing open the door and ushering her forward, and she stifled her own protests at the sight of six pairs of curious eyes turning to meet them.

The white-coated occupants of the room were clustered avidly about a gleaming steel platform at its centre, finding their way between the hulking, tangled machines which competed for the space. On the platform itself lay a disassembled mishmash of human and mechanical parts; a fleshy hand, perfect down to the fine hairs and slight mottling of the skin, segued into a splayed coil of gleaming silver and transparent pipes, rods and filaments; a head, the face that of a thickset, authoritative man, was split open at the back to reveal a firmament of flickering gold lights. One of the scientists stepped forward, running his eyes over Jasmine in a proprietorial manner.

"Well, I trust you're satisfied. As I said, she is a perfect facsimile down to the finest detail."

"She's not bad," the Master said with an air of condescension. "I think the original was a little plumper, but we'll just have to say she lost weight during her captivity."

Jasmine clenched her teeth and made herself stare blandly ahead, robot-fashion. The scientist looked sniffy.

"I see. Perhaps you'll bring her through and I'll prepare the vault for her."

Vault? Jasmine hesitated nervously, and it was the surreptitious prod of the Master's knuckles in the small of her back that got her moving forward, following the man in the white coat through a side door into a second capacious chamber. One entire wall, forty foot by forty foot, was taken up with an immense circular slab of gleaming steel that must have weighed hundreds of tons. The scientist hurried over to a looming bank of computers and busied himself at the controls.

"You're not really going to put me in there?" whispered Jasmine, gazing apprehensively at the gigantic vault door.

The Master smiled slowly, his eyes avidly focussed on the great metal construction.

"I most certainly am. Nothing to worry about. The interior is climate controlled, atmosphere controlled, humidity controlled. It's one of the safest places in the galaxy, and one of the most secure. That's why I'm going to need your help, and the Doctor's, if I'm going to rob it."

He forestalled her bewildered rejoinder by taking her elbow and guiding her firmly towards a rectangular plastic casket which emerged from the wall just under the curve of the door. Six foot long, slightly wider at the near end, and lidless, it looked disturbingly like an open coffin.

"You'll lie down in this," the Master explained. "And when that man has coded in the assorted security information it will whisk you off for storage inside the vault itself."

"And what do you expect me to do once I'm in there?"

The Master's eyes slid briefly over to the man at the computer panel before he answered:

"You'll await my signal," he said, and slipped a tiny black metal sphere into her hand. "On this. Then, you'll open the main vault door for me."

"Open it? How am I supposed to..."

"Here." He produced a sheet of paper, folded repeatedly into a compact square to fit into the palm of a hand. "The vault was designed to keep people out, not in. Follow these instructions and you shouldn't have any difficulties."

Jasmine felt a familiar resigned, sinking sensation as she eyed the confining box she was expected to climb into and assimilated the reality of what she was being expected to do.

"You could have told me this earlier, but you had to spring it on me at the last moment, didn't you? You're worse than the Doctor."

The Master smiled faintly.

"I think the universe would agree with you on that score."

"What are you planning on stealing anyway? I always thought you weren't in it for the money."

"Ah, no. To be frank I'm mostly in it for, as you humans say, the hell of it. The unscrupulous accumulation of power and knowledge has kept me occupied down the ages. But on this particular occasion I'm in it for something rather more fundamental. Survival. My survival, to be precise."

"Survival?" Warily she looked him up and down. "What do you mean? Are you ill or something?"

"In a manner of speaking. I am afflicted with the disease known as life." He smiled in what could have been taken for sympathy at her confusion. He spread out his hands and inspected his fingernails. "I look well enough, don't I? A little pale-skinned but otherwise a picture of health. Well, so I should, I only acquired this body quite recently. But like all things it will in due course decay and grow old and I shall have to find another, and another, and another after that. It's difficult, dangerous, and to be quite honest rather tedious. Hence my ambition to break the cycle, and remain forever in my present form, unchanging, for all eternity."

His dark eyes glittered and grew distant, and Jasmine had to restrain herself from taking a defensive step back.

"Immortality?" she asked. "The Doctor says..."

"Yes, yes, I can imagine. The Doctor has many exceptional qualities but ambition is not among them. He is prepared to live out his allotted time and then die, and contents himself with the platitude that it is the natural order of things." The Master's face hardened unsmilingly before relaxing again. "I personally do not hold myself subject to the natural order of things."

He glanced over again at the scientist, still busy at the controls, before continuing.

"You saw the robot copy of you. Unimpressive, wasn't it? As you so rightly observed, no matter how cleverly programmed it is, it could never be a completely convincing replacement because a computer simply doesn't function like an organic mind. Most computers, I should say. Various mad scientists and crackpot dictators have attempted to build an artificial living intelligence, a machine that can genuinely think as we understand the term. The results have been mixed, to say the least, and those which could arguably be described as successful have been the size of small space cruisers, so the prospect of a thinking, intelligent android remains remote. Except for the Hergan Anthropos, of course.

"Its origins are obscure, but it was unearthed in the Hergan asteroid cluster about twenty years ago, and was the subject of first a bidding war and then an actual war between the major technology corporations of the region. It was an android, with an infinitely reconfigurable, dynamically self-assessing mechanical brain capable of mimicking every function of the organic mind. A unique technological miracle. For twenty years scientists have been trying unsuccessfully to unlock the secret of its design. And at the end of the day it wound up here, in that vault."

The Master eyed the great metal door covetously.

"I will steal the Anthropos. Its mind is blank, empty now, so I will transfer my own consciousness into it, and live forever, immune to both age and sickness." He gave a half smile and a shrug. "As long as I keep an oil can handy and avoid excessive humidity."

Jasmine looked at him in disbelief.

"You want to be a machine?"

"We are all machines. I will be a unique, exceptional machine. So no change there."

"Oh, God." She dropped her head and rubbed her hand agitatedly across her eyes. "You're insane. How did I end up here, with you?" She looked up. "All right, so I open the door for you. How are you expecting to get past all those scientists and guard robots?"

"Ah. That's where the Doctor comes in." He took a moment to watch her baffled expression before continuing. "Feigle has made a common mistake. He equates the Doctor's pacifist inclinations with weakness. He has no idea of the danger he's in. The Doctor has killed more sentient beings over the ages than I ever have, and when he realises my precautions will stop him from rescuing you in a low-key, underhanded manner he will have no hesitation in doing it in the most direct, spectacular and destructive fashion imaginable. I can't tell exactly what he'll do, of course, but I know it'll be very soon now, and though a certain amount of improvisation will be required on my part I'm confident that in the ensuing mayhem the combination of your help from within the vault and the high security clearance Feigle's money has bought me will enable me to retrieve the Anthropos and be gone before anyone has the presence of mind to wonder what happened to me."

"And what about me?"

The Master looked at her with empty, dispassionate eyes.

"What about you?"

"The Doctor will be expecting to find me in my cell, or in the lab. If I'm down here, helping you, how's he going to rescue me?"

"Quite," said the Master. "Well, who knows? Perhaps he'll find you anyway. He's really quite good at that sort of thing."

"Can't I just come with you?"

The slight twitch of one eyebrow indicated that he was genuinely surprised. He paused for a moment and said thoughtfully:

"Why would I allow you to do that?"

"Because it wouldn't be any trouble for you if you're leaving anyway, and because I'm helping you now."

He continued to look at her in silence. He seemed to be waiting for her to add something to this.

"Because of what Feigle will do to me if I'm still here when he realises what we've done!"

Again, no response. With a sense of desperation, Jasmine thought hard.

"Because some day, the Doctor's gratitude, and mine, just might come in useful to you."

The Master blinked. Jasmine waited edgily while he considered the point with an air of cool detachment, until at last he focussed his hard, dark eyes upon her and said:

"If you become a hindrance to me in any way..."

"I understand."

He gave a curt nod.

"Then you may come. We'll send the Doctor a message once we're clear of the station and then I'll leave you somewhere he can pick you up."

Jasmine felt a light-headed sense of relief, as if the glimpse of a distant escape route was the same as actually being free. A matter of seconds later the scientist turned from the controls:

"All right, it's ready. Get her into the casket."

Jasmine wrapped her arms about herself to restrain a shudder as she looked down at the confining narrow box she was expected to climb into. She turned to the Master.

"You will come for me, won't you?"

A wicked light sparkled in his eyes, and he leaned forward with a grin, white in the black of his beard.

"Trust me."

[Soldeed]

"Feigle is pushing his luck now. I'm sick of having that goosestepping militaristic oaf thinking he runs my station."

In his fully automated office, with no secretary or assistant to listen to his grievances, the station administrator was forced to talk to himself. He was fuming at the images displayed on the public viewscreens. Every hour, they flashed up, and the message was always the same:

"The man in these pictures is the Doctor. He is a saboteur and an anarchist. Be on your guard at all times and report any sightings to General Feigle."

"Report to General Feigle!" The administrator's knuckles whitened at the clenching of his fist. "The nerve! I should have thrown his money back in his face, should never have taken the contract, should never have let him and his gang of thugs aboard the station. I hated the idea from the start. The..."

He blinked. The revolving 3d computer image of the Doctor's head and shoulders flickered and vanished, to be replaced with a picture of a common or garden sentinel robot. Baffled, the administrator watched the white metal and shielded eye sockets of the machine go round and round on the display.

"Ooh, that doesn't look too good, does it?"

The administrator started and looked down at his palm held personal communicator. The face of the man on the little 3 inch screen was familiar to him, because up until now it had been displayed on the main viewscreens once an hour.

"Wrong picture on your wanted poster," the Doctor continued brightly. "Computer glitch, I expect. This sort of thing happens all the time, but it's always annoying."

The administrator held up his communicator in puzzlement.

"What are you hoping to achieve here, Doctor? Everyone knows what you look like by now. Playing with the computer's image files won't change that."

"Well, concerned as I am by the thought that I can be readily identified by a few dozen ineffectual, overweight scientists, you'd do well to consider another factor. Namely, that robots are stupid, and if you tell them that the face in a given image file is that of an enemy they'll believe it and act accordingly, no matter how absurd the conclusion to which it leads them."

The administrator paused, thought, and a second later his face paled. The Doctor was heedlessly elaborating on his theme.

"One posited definition of insanity is taking an incorrect assumption to its furthest logical conclusion. By that..."

"Doctor!"

He looked irritated at being interrupted.

"What?"

"Do you realise what you've done?"

"Yes."

"Those robots have been ordered to arrest you on sight by any means necessary. If you've changed the image in the central data bank they'll see one another, they'll think they're recognising you and they'll try to arrest each other. They'll fight to the death!"

"And?"

"Listen! Those are our top of the range sentinel droids. They're virtually unstoppable. They'll tear the whole station apart trying to destroy one other."

"And you're under the impression I'll think that's a bad thing?"

The administrator's face sagged piteously.

"But... but you're a scientist yourself! How can you want to wreck a place like this? We are one of the foremost research centres in the..."

Even from within the confines of the little flat screen, the savage twist in the Doctor's expression from flippancy to fury was alarming.

"Shut up!" He lunged forward at the screen, blue eyes ablaze. "You think you deserve my respect? Are you proud of what you've achieved here? You have allowed your station to be used for experiments on sentient lifeforms. You have caused pain and suffering. Whatever else you've achieved in your life is nothing now. You have given up your right to be called a scientist."

The administrator dropped the communicator on his desk and stepped back weakly. He looked about the room with a sense of desperation.

"I'll change the image back," he muttered. "Change it back, or just blank it out altogether."

"Good idea," the needling voice called from the discarded communicator. "I only hope no one's flooded the network with white noise messaging. That might make accessing the data core rather difficult and your sentinels will be left with nothing but the images in their pointy heads."

White faced, the administrator froze, then rushed back to the desk and bent imploringly over the tiny screen.

"Please!" he begged. "Please, please just fix this and I'll kick Feigle and his brutes out and you and your friend can go free. I'll do it gladly! I always hated this contract."

"Not a bad offer," the Doctor said coolly. "But you strike me me as the type who might see things in a different light once you're not wriggling on the hook any more. I have to go now. I have things to do."

The screen went dark and the administrator straightened, looking with a sense of unreality around his warm, comfortable office which was suddenly a cold and unfriendly place.

* * * * *

Far away towards the other side of the station, a lone sentinel droid patrolled the corridors, its great oval feet clunking down solidly in a metronomic rhythm on the carpeted floor. In time, it came to a security door manned by a second droid. It halted.

"Immediately discard all weaponry and raise your arms," came its bass, synthesised voice, carefully calibrated for maximum authority and demoralising effect. "You are to be restrained and confined until further notice."

The other droid stared in silence for a moment, then its own identical voice boomed back:

"You have been identified as an unauthorised and potentially dangerous alien. You will give yourself up into my custody."

"Surrender at once or minimum physical force will be employed to subdue you."

"Turn and place your hands against the wall or you will be fired upon."

"This is your final warning."

"This is your final warning."

The bulky machines moved with inhuman speed, whipping up their forearm-mounted energy cannon to the aim, and the passageway rang with the piercing din of blaster fire.

* * * * *

The Master stalked slowly along another corridor, head down, hands linked behind his back, deep in thought. His obsidian eyes stared down at the grey plastic floor lining as if there was something fascinating written there. A sly, thin voice spoke up from behind him:

"There you are at last. You know, I don't usually like my employees to be this difficult to track down."

The Master sighed with a deep sense of boredom, and turned slowly.

"General Feigle," he stated. "Having a nice day?"

Feigle walked forward slowly, his smile repeatedly fading and then twitching back into place, his eyes almost feverishly bright.

"I am indeed. I've made an important discovery and suddenly everything's a lot clearer. Sergeant!"

The Master looked sharply from side to side as armed men rushed from the side passages to surround him. They primed their levelled weapons with a click and a whine of swelling energy. Feigle advanced, mingled fury and triumph contorting his face.

"In the army," he said, "We execute traitors."

[Soldeed]

Frenetic with excited energy, Feigle seemed to be executing a kind of pagan tribal dance, circling and darting at the Master while he was shepherded along at gunpoint by four soldiers.

"Ten million credits! So that was your price. Thought you'd get away with it, didn't you? Thought you could fool me. Thought I was just some flat headed military idiot who'd fall for anything. You and the Doctor."

The Master, who had been plodding steadily along, ignoring him, lifted his head at this.

"Me and the Doctor? What can you possibly be talking about?"

"Oh, think you can still bluff your way out, do you? Well, I'm afraid you're out of luck. No doubt he told you about his attempt to get the girl released by holding me hostage. Perhaps he forgot to tell you what he let slip while he was throwing his threats around."

"The Doctor let something slip, did he?" murmured the Master half to himself. "I think I'm starting to see where this is going."

"He wanted her taken, you see, not to my office where we were, not to one of the escape pods, not to some secret location where his Tardis was hidden, no. He wanted her taken to storage bay 14B. Does that ring a bell? It should, because the only thing in it is your Tardis."

Feigle grinned victoriously at the sight of the Master closing his eyes, placing the fingertips of one hand gently in the space between his eyes.

"Ah, you see it now, don't you? You know you've made a mistake setting yourself against me.

"You're right," the Master said, and Feigle swelled with triumph. "I have made a mistake. I neglected the possibility that the Doctor might move against me personally before attempting to rescue Jasmine. With hindsight it's obvious, since I'm clearly the only one involved in your bargain basement little army capable of obstructing him in any way. Of course he saw the need to get me out of the picture."

Feigle smirked.

"Nice try, but it won't work, I'm afraid. When he told me about the storage bay he had me at gunpoint and he was giving me orders. He thought he was home and dry. He thought I was going to order one of my men to take the girl to your Tardis where you could fly to the other side of the galaxy before anyone could stop you. He thought I was an armchair general who relied on his soldiers to back him up, who'd never have the nerve to tackle him singlehanded."

The Master showed his teeth and gave a low, dark chuckle.

"Tackled him singlehandedly, did you? Tell me, how long did he have to spend pretending to have forgotten your existence? How many times did he have to wave his gun under your nose before you plucked up the nerve to grab it? I'll give him credit, it can't have been easy convincing a feeble hearted beribboned buffoon like you to take any sort of action and leave you thinking you'd done something brave."

"Quiet." Feigle held up a hand to signal a halt and the whole party stopped by a pair of black plastic swing doors. "You're not wriggling out of this. I let you get away with your veiled insults and your superior attitude in the past but this is where it ends. Get in there."

The Master stepped forward to the threshold of the room and inspected it critically.

"A padded cell? Are you suggesting I plead insanity?"

"Hold him."

Two guards seized the Master by the upper arms and held him rigidly while Feigle drew something slowly from the pouch at his belt. A pressurised, pushbutton hypodermic.

"Now don't be frightened," he said, advancing with the instrument held high. "This'll just sting for a moment."

He jabbed the point into the Master's throat, touched the button, and a faint hiss signalled that the hypodermic had done its work. Feigle stepped back, his smile flickering on his mouth.

"You think of yourself as quite the all-round scientist, don't you? Well, here's a test for you. What effect will the intravenous injection of 20 milligrams of rivocite hexium have on your physiology?" He feasted triumphantly on the stiffening of the Master's frame, the chilling of his eyes. "Congratulations, I see you do know. Dead in twelve hours, most of that time spent in screaming, nerve shattering, blood boiling agony. That's why you're in the padded cell. I wouldn't want you taking the easy way out and smashing your brains out against the wall. In with him."

With a shove, the guards sent the Master stumbling back into the cell. Feigle stepped forward into the doorway.

"Well? You've never been short of a sarcastic little putdown before. Don't tell me you're finally lost for words."

The Master paused, touched his fingertips to the point on his neck where he had been stuck with the hypodermic, then looked at them with an air of curiosity before turning his black, hollow eyes on Feigle.

"You will be dead very soon."

Feigle smiled contemptuously.

"I'll come and visit you in a few hours. I think I want to hear you beg me to kill you."

The doors of the padded cell hummed shut.

* * * * *

In the dim reddish glow which was the only illumination of the vault's interior, Jasmine sat perched on the edge of a shelf and tapped her heels idly together. The chamber was not large, considering the vast metal door which protected it, and consisted mainly of rows and rows of labelled drawers of many different shapes and sizes. She had had to struggle out of one of these drawers, into which she had been deposited in her coffin-like box once it had been mechanically drawn into the vault, and had found that it was labelled simply "Jasmine". She had explored for a while, but those drawers which were not empty mostly contained nothing but anonymous data cartridges. The only one of interest had been the one labelled "Anthropos".

The robot which was the cause of all this had been a disappointment when she pulled open the drawer for a look. It looked quite basic compared to the sentinel droids, just a simple humanoid form with a flat grey metal faceplate, a circular grill for a mouth and lifeless eyes of red glass. Eventually sheer boredom had caused her to play with the litle remote control pad she found alongside it in the drawer. She had got the lights in its eyes to come on, and discovered that it would obey her spoken commands, but it wouldn't do anything of its own accord. Whatever its mechanical mind might be capable of, for the moment it was an empty vessel.

So she was telling it her story.

"I think the Doctor will come and save me in the end," she said. "He usually does, although not as often as he likes to make out. I've got him out of trouble once or twice myself, you know? So I can't help thinking, perhaps it was wrong to ask the Master to take me out with him. Perhaps once I open up the safe and hand you over the Master and I should just shake hands and I should head back to my cell. Wait there for the Doctor. But that's absurd. I mean, listen to what I just said, I'm seriously considering turning down a perfectly good, solid escape route, and why? Because it's not the Doctor's escape route. That's idiotic, that's just blind faith, and if nothing else the Doctor's always taught me to think, to rely on my own intelligence. Otherwise, I might as well be a robot." She glanced over at the silent machine and shrugged apologetically. "No offence."

She was quiet for a moment, gazing reflectively up at the high ceiling. She smiled to herself and continued more softly.

"The Doctor. What can I tell you about him? He wanted to give the bride away at my parents' wedding, but my mother said if there was any giving away to be done she'd do it herself. They made it up to him the following year and let him be my godfather. Now..." She frowned, trying to get this right. "Now they're gone, and he's the only friend I have, anywhere. We travel around at random. Sometimes we help people, but for us time just passes, nothing changes. He treats me like a child, and the annoying thing is he's right to do that, because compared to him that's all I'll ever be. He has no idea how many times I've almost left him. All those places we've visited where I've thought, here I could have a real life, a home, a career, friends, a family... But I never have, I don't think I ever will. I'm only human, as he sometimes tells me. He's the Doctor. How could I ever choose something else? After all this, how could I go off and be just a regular person? Seeing the universe, helping him save people's lives and freedom is the best... the best destiny I could hope for."

She looked over at the Anthropos, standing in the corner. Its dully glowing red eyes really did seem to be on her, as if it was listening, but it made no move.

"Sorry," she said. "Didn't mean to bore you with all that stuff. I've had no one to talk to for a while, I think I may be going slightly mad. I hate this place. I'm really looking forward to being rescued."

A sharp, trilling electronic sound made her look down at the spherical device clutched in her palm.

"Oh. Looks like the Master's ready for us. Let's get this door open."

* * * * *

Halfway along the corridor towards his office, Feigle pressed for a second time the button on the spherical gadget his men had confiscated from the Master, but again there seemed to be no response. With an impatient shrug he was about to discard it into the waiting hands of the nearest guard when an ear-splitting, jagged noise from somewhere around the next corner made him freeze.

"What was that?" he rapped out.

"Energy weapons," said the nearest soldier, his voice muffled by the helmet. "Heavy, too."

"I know that you idiot! I want to know who's firing heavy energy weapons in the corridor. Go and check."

"Me?"

Feigle hissed like a snake in sheer fury, a drop of spittle landing on the man's visor. When he spoke his voice was icily level.

"Yes, you."

The soldier edged forward an inch at a time, while the sounds of combat grew closer by the second. He was still metres from the corner when a sentinel droid, the fiery orange halo of plasma weapon impact still dissipating about its armoured limbs, came staggering backwards into view and crashed like a runaway truck into the far wall. The soldier was already running full tilt back towards the rest of the group when the droid vanished from sight in a cloud of blazing superheated vapour from the devastating follow-up volley.

Feigle and his men stared in disbelieving horror as the flames faded again. The corridor wall was completely destroyed for a distance of ten feet in both directions, along with the entire contents of the rooms behind it. The robot was virtually undamaged; a little scorched in places, leaking fluid from an elbow joint, some circuitry exposed at its throat, but sufficiently functional to release a storm of retaliatory fire from its own heavy weapons.

"Quickly!" ordered Feigle. "We've got to..."

All at once he realised he was alone. His troops were sprinting for their lives in the opposite direction.

"Stop!" he shouted, running after them. "Come back! Wait for me!"

* * * * *

The Doctor tiptoed cautiously along the cell block passageway, his head twisted around to keep one eye on the battling sentinel droids at the entrance. They were far too busy to concern themselves with him. He counted his way along the cell doors, stopped, and in a matter of seconds had sprung the lock with his sonic screwdriver. He found himself breathing a little quicker than usual as the door slid open.

The girl sitting in the corner of the cell looked up at him with wide, strangely calm eyes. The Doctor grinned broadly.

"Hello, Jasmine."

She gave him a pleasant smile in return.

"Hello, Doctor."

[Soldeed]

"Hello?"

The vault door had been easy enough to open from the inside by following the Master's detailed written instructions, and Jasmine peeped cautiously around its massive steel bulk out at the empty room beyond.

Quiet. Very quiet. She hesitated. It hadn't been made clear, but she'd been assuming the Master would be out here waiting for her. She tiptoed forward a few steps, far enough that she could see through the open door into the next room, where she had seen the men working on an android earlier in the day. The dismembered android was still there, the bright lights illuminating it from every angle, but the scientists were all gone.

Jasmine shrugged. She turned back to the Anthropos, standing watching her from inside the vault.

"Come on."

Wordlessly it obeyed her instruction, and together they walked out, through the deserted chambers and passageways, past carelessly abandoned briefcases, files and lab coats, all the way out of the maximum security area without meeting a living soul. At the final door, standing open like all the others, she paused at a scorched ring burnt into the armour-plated wall. She touched it, and rolled the crumbling soot between her fingertips.

"What's happened here?" she asked the unresponsive Anthropos. "It looks like the aftermath of a battle."

She looked around in confusion.

"M-Master?" she called out. It was difficult to get used to calling someone that. "Master? Where are you?" She sighed, with a sense of exasperation. "Typical. That's Time Lords for you. Right, come on. Change of plan."

It took time. She avoided the lifts and took the stairs, which was tiring. Once on the correct level, she frequently had to draw her mute companion into the shelter of a side passage or closet when the sound of energy cannon flared up again somewhere near, and they would crouch motionless, until the sound faded or at least moved further away. It was a complicated route, but she knew where she was going because the maps the Master had shown her were emblazoned on her memory. When she stood at the nondescript storage room door, she knew exactly where she was. She pressed the door control and felt light headed. For a moment, she honestly thought she was going to faint for the only time in her life. That solid, sturdy rectangular blue box said home and sanctuary to her like no place she had ever known. She stumbled forward and leaned against the Tardis door to save herself from falling, the material cool and rough under her palms.

"Doctor!" She struck the door weakly with her fist. "Doctor, are you there?"

* * * * *

A sentinel droid stood motionless in one of the main viewing lounges, facing the great window and the dazzling starscape beyond. But it was not looking through the window, it was looking at it, and at its own reflection. It was confused. Its programming was sophisticated enough to cope with the concept of reflective surfaces, but its programming was also telling it that the image in the window was an enemy, to be apprehended or, failing that, destroyed. It raised its forearm cannon, then lowered it again. It stood there for a moment longer, then raised the cannon once more with an air of decision.

* * * * *

A light breeze was detectable flowing along the corridor.

"Feel that?" said the Doctor leading his charge along by the hand. "Means there's been a hull breach somewhere, and it won't be the last. This station's soon going to be a very unhealthy place to be."

"Yes, Doctor."

"I'll confess I'd hoped for a little more applause for the rescue," he added in mock irritation. "Perhaps next time I'll just let you find your own way out."

"Yes, Doctor."

"'Yes, Doctor,' 'Hello, Doctor'. I'm afraid a month spent in the company of these military types hasn't improved your powers of conversation."

"No, Doctor."

He frowned, this time for real, and stopped to turn and take a look at her.

"What's the matter with you, Jasmine? You seemed all right yesterday. Have they done something to you?"

"No, Doctor."

He looked closer, directly into her wide, dark eyes, then closer still. He pressed his thumb to her eyelid and rolled it back while she stood meekly still. He brought his face almost into contact with hers to stare hard into the pupil of her right eye.

With a gasp he stepped sharply back.

"Android!"

Jasmine's mechanical double looked back at him with an expression of bland curiosity.

"What android is that, Doctor?"

"Shut up!" He jammed his palm against his forehead and tried to think. "This is the Master's doing. And I thought I'd got him out of the way." He looked agitatedly up and down the corridor. "Right. Back to the Tardis. I'll find her."

"And what shall I do, Doctor?" asked the robot placidly.

He looked round at her, and opened his mouth to reply before realising what he was doing. With an impatient gesture he turned and stalked off without a word. From a distance he could be heard muttering:

"I'll find her. I will find her."

The android watched him go, and stood and waited patiently for further orders while the din of battling sentinels drew ever nearer and the breeze grew stronger by the second.

* * * * *

Fretting outside the locked, silent Tardis, Jasmine cast repeated anxious glances at the storeroom door. Already once she had heard the sounds of battling sentinels pass directly in front of the sole entrance to this confined space and she was acutely aware of how vulnerable and trapped she would be should anyone or anything chance to blunder in.

"Wait here," she told the Anthropos, though she doubted it would do anything else unless prompted. Then she slowly squeezed herself into the narrow gap between the Tardis and the wall, and sidestepped carefully into the cramped and gloomy space beyond, safely hidden from any chance visitors. A blinking red light and a flickering viewscreen caught her eye.

Jasmine smiled to see the Doctor's handiwork. A hole had been drilled in the wall, and a loop of silvery, semi-transparent cable had been tugged out and hooked onto a second cable which led down to a tangle of compact technological gadgetry all clustered together on a rickety looking camping table. The viewscreen, the quality of its reception fluctuating erratically, showed an image of her old cell, or one just like it, now empty. She steered clear of the complex array of touch-sensitive keys, but there was a little black button, on its own on a walnut-sized plastic bulb connected to the viewscreen by a wire, that she just couldn't resist tapping.

The image on the screen changed instantly. Now it showed a corridor, quite nondescript, could have been any one of a hundred on the station. She touched the button again, and started at the sight of two of the hulking sentinel robots standing toe to toe in the centre of a deserted lab, struggling like frenzied gorillas, their claw-like fingers tearing at one another's armoured sides, demolishing priceless scientific instruments with each sideways lurch and crushing them underfoot.

Jasmine shook her head in bafflement at all that had happened during her relatively brief incarceration in the vault, and changed the image again and again. She saw more battling sentinels, gaping holes torn in the station's outer hull, and not a single living being, anywhere. Eventually an exterior view showed her a flotilla of shuttlecraft and spherical escape pods, all making speed into the far distance.

She looked further. More empty rooms and corridors, more high-powered shootouts between sentinel droids, and then she froze with a gasp.

It was the Master. He was sitting in the centre of the floor in some kind of padded cell, his legs spread out before him, and in a repetitive, monotonous motion he was clawing and clawing at the cushioned floor with his fingernails, dragging and scratching at the material like a rodent trying to gnaw its way out of its cage. She stood there for a moment, watching him pursue his pointless, meaningless task and then couldn't watch any more, and turned her head away.

Jasmine thought, and her eyes flicked from one to another of the objects on the table: the notebook covered in the Doctor's incomprehensible handwriting, the hand-held communicator just like the one on which he had spoken to her when he tried to get her out in the escape pod, the floorplans with each room labelled with an alphanumeric code, and lastly back at the viewscreen, the code of the location clearly displayed in the top right hand corner.

She looked at the Master again. Scratch, scratch, scratch at the floor. He looked insane, and his surroundings seemed to back that up, and she really didn't want to meet him in that condition. But she thought of the mayhem caused by the sentinels, the fleeing escape craft, and the great yawning rifts blasted in the station's hull, and a firmness came to the set of her jaw.

"Right."

[Soldeed]

The Master continued to scrape determinedly at the padded floor, on and on at the exact same spot until at last the material gave way and parted under his cracked and reddening fingernails.

"Ah. Finally."

Revealed beneath the padding, set into the floor, was a ventilation duct. Not big enough to crawl down unfortunately, barely six inches across, but large enough that having twisted off the protective grill the Master was able to push his left hand down into the channel below. He tapped his fingers in a fast drumbeat against the metallic interior.

"Come along now," he said softly. "Rodent or similar scuttling thing alert. Do your duty."

Keeping up the tapping, he closed his eyes, and listened. A stillness came over him, until a faint hiss heralded the approach of something very small and very fast hurtling towards him along the pipe. With a snarl he whipped his left hand clear and plunged his right down into the aperture to jam down savagely on a compact little metal body. With a fast scrabbling motion he found its edges with his fingers before it could slip away. It pulled strongly but futilely against his grip.

"Got you."

Careful not to scrape it against the rim of the vent, he drew the tiny robotic vermin killer slowly out of its natural environment in the ventilation system up into the room. Its propulsion fields drove aimlessly in one direction then the other in its programmed desire to be constantly on the move. It had the appearance of a huge, legless insect, its deadly antennae waving steadily and glowing bright white at the tips with a charge capable of killing a dozen rats from a single touch. The Master stroked its head absently with the index finger of his left hand.

"Stay calm. I just need your assistance for a moment."

He rose to his feet, moving a little stiffly, and walked over to his cell door. For a moment he just stood there, running his eyes around the barely visible frame, squashed deeply into the padding of the wall. Then with deliberate slowness he leaned forward and allowed the little robot's antennae to make contact, just once, about three quarters of the way up the door's edge.

There was a spark and a crackle, and the Master allowed himself a little smile as the door swung obediently open.

* * * * *

The Doctor kept his eyes open on the way back to the Tardis. The sentinels might not be looking for him, but he was well aware of the danger of being caught in the crossfire, or of meeting one which, by now, had become so damaged that it was incapable of understanding its own wrong orders. He slipped into the storage room and found himself staring at a strange robot, blocking the way to the Tardis.

He started back, and stood poised, alert for any hostile move from the android. After a few moments it became obvious it wasn't going to do anything except stand there staring at him and the Doctor straightened, puzzledly meeting the gaze of its dully glowing red eyes.

"Oh..." He gave it a dismissive wave and turned away to squeeze past the Tardis to his computer network linkup. "Later, later."

In the confined space at the back of the storeroom, he immediately knew something wasn't right. The handheld communicator was missing, so were some of the floorplans, the image on the viewscreen had changed and... someone had been writing on the front page of his notebook. The Doctor snatched it up, read quickly, and his eyes grew wide and his hand pressed over his mouth.

* * * * *

Crouched in her hiding place in a storage closet, Jasmine winced at the blast of a violent explosion just yards away which rattled her teeth and stabbed into her eardrums. The flimsy door crumpled under the impact, affording her a view of a battered, barely recognisable sentinel, missing a leg and an arm, its remaining bodywork a blackened wreck, hopping determinedly forward and blazing away at a similarly ruined droid at the other end of the corridor. She gave it a few more seconds to get clear, then bolted, out of the closet and into the side passage opposite.

She raised a brisk run, putting the sounds of battle behind her, but she hadn't got far when the communicator she clutched in her right hand along with a sheaf of floorplans started a furious, insistent beeping. She looked down.

"Doctor! You're safe!"

Her face lit up at the sight of him on the little three inch screen, only to fall when she saw his expression.

"Safe? Safe? This station's on the verge of disintegrating around us, it's overrun with crazed killer androids, and who knows what other nasties are out there? Is this really the time to go exploring?"

"I have to get the Master out of..."

"No! No you don't. The Master can take care of himself and he doesn't deserve your help anyway. Have you forgotten he's the one who got you into this?"

"I know, I know. But... this past day... in his way, he's been good to me."

"He has not! Everything he's done has been in his own self interest."

"Yes, but..."

"Jasmine." On the screen the Doctor leaned forward intently. "What happens when you don't do as I say?"

She felt a flare of temper, but swallowed, and with a sigh recited obediently:

"I get into trouble and end up having to be rescued."

"Exactly. So do as you're told, stop being childish, and come back to the Tardis."

She grimaced, and restlessly looked along the corridor down which she had been heading. She found herself lowering the communicator so she wouldn't have to look in his eyes.

"No, I'll be back soon," she said. "I'm more than half way there now. Two thirds, probably."

She set off again, one step, two steps, and then his voice came:

"Jasmine, don't do this to me!"

She'd been promising herself she wouldn't let him bully her, but the note of pleading in his voice made her stop, and lift the communicator to eye level once more.

"Jasmine." His face was pale and strained with emotion. "Jasmine, please, if you ever had the slightest affection or regard for me, please come back to the Tardis."

For a moment they both stood gazing at one another in silence through the medium of a tiny handheld gadget. Finally Jasmine spoke.

"All right. All right, I'll come back."

* * * * *

Weak with relief, the Doctor leaned heavily forward on the flimsy table and watched the jolting, ever changing view of the walls and floor as Jasmine headed back towards him at a steady light-footed run through the deserted corridors. She'd made good progress, met no sentinels, and could only be a few minutes away now.

"Once we're back together," he said, "We'll talk about what to do about the Master. You show me where you saw him, perhaps we can help him from here if the computer network's not too badly damaged."

Jasmine's voice was a little breathy from the exercise.

"Well, you should be able to see him, he..."

The picture on the viewscreen jumped wildly, and the Doctor flinched along with it. Next instant the image showed the floor flying up towards the communicator, there was a bounce, and then he could see nothing except an unmoving worm's eye view of the plastic carpet stretching out ahead.

"Jasmine?" Tensely he gripped the edges of the screen. "Jasmine!"

There were sounds, just barely audible. A scuffle, a dull, solid impact, a few grunts, a whimper.

"Jasmine?"

At last the image moved again. The communicator was lifted, turned around, and Feigle's twitching, grinning, wild-eyed face came into view.

"Hello, Doctor. I'm afraid Jasmine's indisposed just now. Can I take a message?"

His high pitched cackle rang out piercingly from the speakers.

[Soldeed]

The Master was not in the habit of running, ever, but run he did. All the way along an endless, flawlessly memorised sequence of passageways, into the maximum security zone, to the vault. Here he slowed to a trot, then a walk, his eyes set on the gigantic metal door, standing wide open.

"Jasmine?"

His mellifluous voice filled the stillness of the cavernous chamber. There was no answer. Unhurriedly now, he strolled to the vault and inspected its contents calmly, the drawer marked "Anthropos". It too was open, and empty.

The Master gave a slight sigh, standing there alone, dwarfed by his cavernous surroundings.

"Well. That's it, then." He shook his head slowly. "Humans!"

* * * * *

The viewscreen was filled with the sight of Feigle sblack personing joyously at the sight of the Doctor's shocked, strained face.

"Well now, Doctor, what's the matter? You seemed quite certain of your superiority last time we met. Of course, so was the Master, and I've already killed him. Could it be you're worried about your friend? Well, don't be. She's perfectly safe, for the moment. See."

The image swung around, and showed Jasmine lying sprawled face down in the centre of the corridor, head twisted awkwardly to one side, cheek squashed into the carpet. The Doctor's fingernails dug deep into his palms at the sight of Feigle's hand gripping her hair to drag her up and show her face to the monitor. Her eyes were closed, her mouth hung loosely open, and she didn't respond when he released his hold and let her head fall back heavily onto the floor.

It was as if his vocal cords were stretched tight as piano wire. He could barely whisper the words:

"Leave her alone."

The picture reverted to Feigle's gloating face, the lips drawn back from his teeth in a contorted parody of a smile.

"That's really up to you, Doctor. Ha! I should have done this in the first place. I went along with the Master's plan, let him play his games so you could play yours in return. The two of you are a joke, so in love with your own cleverness you're more interested in showing off than winning. Well, the games are over now. The girl dies, right now, unless you tell me where I can find Issius Treed."

"Issius?" replied the Doctor mechanically. "I met him once, years ago. I've no idea where he is now."

"Ooh, that's a shame. So let's see what else we have in the magic bag, here." He scrabbled around in the pouch at his belt and retrieved a second pressure hypodermic, the clear yellow liquid visible swilling inside through its transparent sides. "Ah. Chemistry's a hobby of mine, you know. Poisons mostly, of course. Now this is concentrated stigrius extract. I'm fairly certain this dose is plenty to kill a single, fairly small human. Shall we try it?"

The viewscreen showed the point of the hypodermic plunging unhesitatingly towards Jasmine's shoulder.

"Stop!"

"Ah, suddenly remembered something about Treed, have you?" said Feigle with a sneer. "That's good. Of course, right now you're thinking up a lie to tell me. Best be careful, Doctor. I've already found out a great deal of information about Treed's new life and identity. I hear something I know to be untrue..." He held up the hypodermic clutched in his sweaty fist. "You don't get a second try."

The Doctor was silent, gripping the edges of the table with whitening fingers. Feigle basked in the joy of his situation and then began to count:

"Five, four, three..."

"All right, all right!" The Doctor closed his eyes for a moment, then spoke as if every word was a physical effort. "Issius Treed is on Ephrium. He's working as a research meteorologist at the planetary ecological institute. He's taken the name Fraxus Pentin."

He bowed his head weakly, while Feigle's grinning mouth gaped wide in triumph.

"Thankyou, Doctor. I think you're telling the truth. Now beg me not to kill her."

The Doctor closed his eyes, his head hanging down.

"Please don't hurt her."

"Beg me on your knees."

The Doctor's mouth spasmed violently, but immediately he dropped to the floor.

"Please, General, I beg you not to hurt her."

Feigle's frenzied, excited giggle rang around the room.

"Wasn't so hard, was it? So I win again, and perhaps this is something you'll remember in future. Gifted amateur you may be, but I'm a professional, and you're out of your depth. Now, I'd love to stay and chat but there's someone I have to go and kill."

The picture on the Doctor's screen swayed sideways as Feigle drew back his arm, then there was a blurred movement and the image exploded against the far wall into a hissing grey nothing.

* * * * *

The Doctor's coat streamed out behind him as he sprinted full tilt down the corridors, heedless of the ongoing sounds of battle from remote corners of the station. Without pause or caution he tore along the shortest possible route, never slowing until he recognised a familiar set of doors and a side passage, and Jasmine's prone body lying motionless in the centre of the floor.

Still twenty feet from her he decelerated to a walk, deep lines of suppressed panic etched across his brow and dragging their way down his face. He drew nearer slowly, reluctantly, as if she was something to be feared.

Jasmine lifted her head.

"Ohhh... ow! That little freak. Where did he go?"

"Jasmine!"

The word came out as a breath of relief. Her eyes focussed on him and a dazzling smile danced across her face.

"Doctor!"

In a second she was in his arms, her face buried against his chest, her hair brushing his cheek. The Doctor closed his eyes, held her, and knew that whatever else might happen, for this one moment everything was right.

Briskly he placed his hands on her shoulders, pushed her back to arms' length.

"Right, that's enough of that. We have to stop Feigle. He's about to jump on his space yacht and head off to kill an old friend of mine."

Jasmine grinned mischievously and held up her hand to display the black plastic rectangle concealed in her palm.

"He'll have difficulty. I've stolen his key card."

He stared in astonishment for a moment, then his head fell back in a whoop of laughter. His hands pressing warmly into her shoulders, he looked deep into her sparkling dark eyes, the relief and gratitude flooding through him. Then he found his gaze drifting, just a little, over her shoulder to where the hypodermic Feigle had threatened her with lay discarded on the floor.

It was quite empty.

Jasmine looked up in concern at the low animal moan of pain that escaped the Doctor's lips.

"What's wrong?"

Instantly he looked down into her eyes, smiled. Stroked a curl of hair from her cheek and memorised every detail of her young face.

"Nothing," he said. "Nothing's wrong."

He folded his arms about her and held her close.

"We'll go away somewhere," the Doctor said. He kept his voice warm and steady while the tears streamed down his cheeks. "The Eye of Orion. Agrathus. You liked it there, didn't you? Or wherever else you want. For as long as you want. You've earned it, Jasmine. I'm so proud of you. And..." He squeezed his eyes shut as if he could lock out this reality. "And I love you so much."

His composure cracked as her body grew limp and heavy in his arms and he fell with her, down onto his knees. Face crumpled with pain, he tenderly cradled her head against his shoulder.

"It's all right, Jasmine," he whispered. "It's quite all right. You won't be alone, I'll never leave you. Just as I've always said. While there's life... there's...."

He sank his face into her hair.