‘You’re funny,’ said Joe.

‘Thank you,’ the Doctor said.

Lukas shook his head. ‘Home,’ he said to Joe. ‘Come on.’ He all but dragged his little brother away.

‘Bye, Doctor,’ Joe called back.

The Doctor waved as the two boys vanished into a side street. Then he started to wander towards the lower end of Chiswick, and the M4 flyover, towards Brentford. And that nice Italian in the square. Luna Piena. He hadn’t had a

decent Italian meal in years. Centuries perhaps.

SINCE 1492 was written on the psychic paper.

Which was weird, because the psychic paper didn’t work like that. At least, it hadn’t in the past. It was bad enough that people were using it more and more to send him messages these days, but when it started answering him unbidden, it was time perhaps to give it a two-thousand leaf service.

He shoved the leather wallet with the paper in it back inside his jacket pocket and tried to forget all about it.

At the back of his mind, though, he still had a nagging worry, an echo of Lukas Samuel Carnes’s not unreasonable question: what was an M-TEK and how had he saved Lukas from it?

To which the answer was obvious.

He hadn’t.

So Lukas was still in danger (if the psychic paper was to be trusted), and he had to save him.

Oh, and another question needed an answer.

How had Lukas’s little brother Joe known to call him ‘Doctor’?

So… Luna Piena or getting embroiled?

It wasn’t much of a decision was it? Food was nice, but a mystery, that was far better.

He wondered how Donna was getting on and whether he should stop by and tell her he might be busy for a couple of days.

Nah, she was probably best left alone to do family stuff.

And so he turned around and headed up the side street

after the two boys.

On the penthouse suite floor of the Oracle Hotel, Dara Morgan and Caitlin were staring at a bank of flat-screen monitors, connected to the computer, by the fibre-optic cables which Terry Lockworth and Johnnie Bates had died setting up earlier.

On most of the screens was a sine wave, pulsating rhythmically, as if the computer were breathing. Which it was. Sort of.

But on the largest, central screen was an image, a photo, taken from CCTV cameras that had been automatically hacked into and enhanced to almost perfect resolution, according to the parameters the computer had been set to.

‘Madam Delphi,’ Dara Morgan asked. ‘What is this?’

His finger traced the outline. It was a tall blue box standing in a Chiswick alleyway between two dumpsters.

‘The TARDIS,’ replied a strong, feminine voice, echoing across the room, the sine waves on the other screens pulsating and changing as it spoke.

‘He is here,’ Caitlin said. ‘Already.’

Dara Morgan nodded enthusiastically. ‘Five hundred years, as the legends foretold. The Chaos Bringer.’

‘Five hundred and seventeen years, one month, four days,’ corrected Madam Delphi. ‘We did not allow for cosmic shift five hundred years ago. That was a tad…

unfortunate.’

Caitlin addressed the computer. ‘But Madam Delphi, there have been other attempts…’

‘And because of that cosmic shift, because the universe

breathes shallow breaths as well as deep ones, the alignments have never been perfect.’

‘But on Monday all will be perfect.’ Dara Morgan stroked Madam Delphi’s surfaces. ‘And you will have your revenge.’

‘On the Doctor. On mankind. On the entire universe,’

Caitlin said excitedly.

‘Oh sure,’ Madam Delphi pulsed her sine waves.

‘Absolutely. Love the revenge thing, my darlings. But especially on the Doctor.’

It was 5pm in the UK. So, in sunny New York, the Big Apple shadows stretched as the midday sun beamed down, covering the city in an unusually humid blanket.

This was not good news for the inhabitants of the MorganTech office block on 52nd and Seventh. The air conditioning had failed a few hours earlier, and the automatic drinking fountains had ceased pumping cool water into the water coolers. The main reason for this was that all the power in the block was off. The main doors had failed first, followed by the phones, IT equipment, air-con and so on.

It had taken Melissa Carson on reception a few minutes to twig that everything had gone wrong. She tried calling maintenance. Obviously, as everything maintenance maintained had failed, there was no way to get maintenance to maintain anything. This had annoyed Melissa, so she had committed the corporate crime of leaving her desk to find someone.

Instead, what she found – other than stalled elevators probably containing rapidly dehydrating passengers, and

internally locked electronic doors – was a pile of dust on the floor by a junction box in the basement. Presumably maintenance had been doing something to the wiring and had fused the systems. It didn’t occur to Melissa (and why should it?) that the ashes she was wiping casually off her Dolce & Gabbana heels had once been a guy she’d waved to earlier that day called Milo. But she did wonder where Milo and the guys were.

Casually, as she stomped back to her desk in frustration, she flicked the open junction box shut.

At once, the newly installed fibre optics came to life, pulsing purple light throughout their network. The occupants of the building, already whingeing about stuck lifts, no air-con and crashed computers, had all of ten seconds to register their PCs flicker back into life. As office workers do, everyone reached forward and touched their keyboards.

A massive arc of purple light pulsated throughout the building, touching everyone, not just those using the PCs.

Not a person, a roach or a moth in the basement was spared the purple pulse of energy.

Forty-two seconds after Melissa Carson had shut that junction box, all one hundred and seven humans, eighteen rats, two thousand creatures of various sizes and shapes but with six legs or more and three pigeons on the roof were all dead.

‘We have a slight problem, guys,’ Madam Delphi pulsed at Dara Morgan and Caitlin. ‘The MorganTech building in Manhattan is offline. The terminals are terminal.’ There was a noise like an electronic laugh, and

the sine waves pulsed accordingly.

Dara Morgan frowned, tapping at another part of Madam Delphi’s array of monitors and keyboards.

‘I’m not wrong,’ the computer reported.

‘I know,’ Dara Morgan said quickly. ‘You’re never wrong. I’m trying to ascertain what the problem is.’

‘Human error,’ Madam Delphi reported. ‘What else is it going to be? I mean, let’s be honest with each other, you lot are always the weakest links in the chain.’

‘We need New York,’ Caitlin said.

‘Well, we haven’t got New York any longer,’ said the computer.

‘Can you override the pulse?’

‘No,’ snapped Madam Delphi. ‘Too late anyway.

Honestly, my sweets, you’re wasting your time. I’ll see if I can shift resources to a back-up server and start again.’

Dara Morgan lost his cool for the first time in ages.

‘Don’t you get it? We don’t have time to start again. We have to have New York’s M-TEKs online at 10am Manhattan time on Monday.’

‘It’s the city that never sleeps, if I remember my song lyrics,’ the computer said.

‘Yeah, maybe it never sleeps. But it pretty much stops work at 5pm on a Friday and doesn’t go to work at weekends.’

‘Oh, my darling boy, have some faith. I’ve been at this kind of thing across the universe for a few million years now. We’ll just have to do a merger this afternoon. A hostile takeover by MorganTech on a small company in…

ooh let me guess… oh yes, look, here’s one.’

On Madam Delphi’s big screen a shot of a smallish (for New York) office building, all chrome and glass with people milling about popped up.

‘I’m accessing their systems… now. Ooh yes, lots of people. They do hardware service and repairs, a firm co-owned by the Mafiosa, a Chinese Triad and initially set up by IRA laundering. None of whom know about each other obviously. Easy to take over because none of them are going to stand up and scream about it.’