***You're going too far! You're endangering the prime unit! All firing stops. All firing stops now. No more living! No more units to be brought to life!***

 The ship gave one final lurch and then stopped moving. Jadi peered cautiously out from beneath his arm. "I think they've stopped."

 "Are you sure?"

 "Hell no." He tilted his head to one side and tried to listen, but his ears were ringing (in an E flat diminished ninth chord, he was somewhat proud to note; very difficult to achieve). "Maybe they finally hit something vital. Or maybe we got lucky and something fell off our ship and hit theirs..."

 "Or maybe you've gotten very unlucky indeed," said Costello.

 He was lying in the same position he'd been lying in all along, which of course was impossible. He hadn't fallen from his bunk; he hadn't so much as opened his eyes, even when half the shuttle's cargo hold had fallen on top of him. He should be dead, Jadi thought wildly. "All right!" he shouted. "That's enough!" He tracked his gun around and pointed it directly at Costello's head. "I want answers, and I want them--"

 "I wouldn't do that if I were you." Costello's eyes snapped open, and Jadi realized that the outward calm had been a lie; his eyes were raging with insane triumph. "I'm in telepathic communication with the leaders of the Rsand hive. I've told them to cease firing. I've told them to help us dock safely with the station. And if my communications with them are severed, I've told them to destroy both the station and this shuttle."

 He smiled. "Your turn."

 Angela looked at Jadi. "You can stop holding on to me now."

 Wil shot to his feet. "I'm not in contact with it! See? No Scrabethsts here! Total lack of Scrabethsts!" He held his hands out to demonstrate their emptiness. "All contact with Scrabethsts occurred in the past tense! And I was going to wash my hands after in any case! You can't shoot me before I've washed my hands, I can't die with dirty hands--"

 He couldn't help but notice that they didn't appear to be listening to him. Four laser rifles were pointed directly at him. He could almost see their fingers, or mandibles, or whatever it was insects had, tightening on the triggers. A wave of despairing uselessness swept over him as he realized there was nothing he could do. Going to die, trapped, what would the Doctor do, what would Jadi do, what would Angela do--

 --they wouldn't be here in the first place, that's what. Wrong question.

 What would I do?

 "Fine!" he shouted. "Kill me! See what happens then!"

 "You will live," the Rsand commander corrected him.

 "Right! Damn right I'll live, and I'll be stronger than ever!" Wil smiled a tight, manic smile, sweat trickling down his forehead. When in doubt, lie like a chronic fatigue sufferer in a mattress factory outlet. "You don't know who you're messin' with, no, no way, nohow! I am the terror that flaps in the night! I am the call-waiting beep that disrupts the Internet service provider connection of crime! I am TRICKSTER GWILYM!"

 "Further commands," one of the Rsand spoke up suddenly. "Prime unit in danger. Imperative discover reason, purpose of threat. Possible new order. No more living."

 What would I do? Be damn lucky, that's what.

 Wil stuck his finger in the air. "Then let's find out what those new orders are, shall we? Your prime unit doesn't want me dead. You need to know for sure!"

 The Rsand buzzed amongst themselves for a moment, and then the leader of the squad turned to Wil. "Prime unit specified all units to live. Unit requests to live?"

 Wil sagged with relief. Now we're getting somewhere. "Yes!"

 "Proposal is acceptable. Wil will remain dead. Interrogation. Purpose of Scrabethst to be determined. Then you will live."

 Wil thought about this for a moment. It didn't seem to make any sense, not at first. But by the time he'd come to some very nasty conclusions about the Rsand's beliefs about life and death, he was already being frog-marched down the corridor.

 One of the Rsand approached him. "We have received new orders from the prime unit," it barked at him. "All units are to be preserved until further notice. You will be taken for interrogation."

 "Oh, I can answer your questions now," the Doctor said. "But you won't like them. If you did, you'd be able to answer them yourself."

 "Explain?"

 "Hypotheses," the Doctor continued. "Take all the facts, analyse them, and come to a certain conclusion. For example, your speech patterns. At first they appeared insect-like, and buzzing. Now they appear more human. Or in my case, Gallifreyan. Something has obviously changed. It isn't the shape of your vocal cavity, and it isn't the shape of my ears. Therefore it must be something in the translation. And if the source of my translation has changed..."

 "Explain!"

 The Doctor looked at the Rsand. "You've been tricked. Lured by a madman hoping to conquer brave new worlds and turn them into a copy of his own dementia. But I can help you. There's another black hole on the station, trapped in a box, and I can set you free."

 The Rsand blinked rapidly. "We will die?" it asked in awe.

 "If that's what you want, yes."

 The Rsand stared suspiciously at him. "You were seen consorting with a Scrabethst. How do we know we can trust you?"

 "Ah, I'm afraid you don't. I'm going to have to ask for your faith." The Doctor looked the Rsand right in the eyes, all two hundred of them. "But you don't have to give it to me. I'm not going to get inside your mind like Costello did," (and I'd very much like to ask him how he managed that, because I've got a terrible suspicion about it) "and I'm not going to impose my will on yours. It's your choice."

 The Rsand tapped its feelers against its skull as if pondering something. "But if I do choose to place my faith in you I'll never know if it was truly my choice or not. The only way to be sure is if I choose to disbelieve you. And if I do that then it'll prove you were right..."

 "Some things are the same in every universe," the Doctor shrugged, "logical paradoxes being one of them, I suppose." He turned away. "I won't make the decision for you. Just promise me one thing--base your decision on the facts as you've seen them. Or heard them. What does my voice sound like to you? What *did* my voice sound like to you?"

 The Rsand blinked again, and then turned back to its fellows, determined. The Doctor listened to the buzzing clicks behind him, and smiled as the image of the humans' space station began to grow in the ship's observation port.

 "The rest," he concluded, "is science."

 Jadi blinked rapidly. Angela looked at him, worried. "Settle down," she urged. "He's got to be going somewhere with this."

 "My trigger finger is getting itchy."

 "Look, I know he sounds insane--"

 "No, I *mean* it. I think the trigger *is* my finger. Oh, sheesh--"

 "I thought it was just a difficulty in translation at first," Costello continued, "I thought they thought of life as death and death as life--You know? But it's not like that at all. We humans believe in an afterlife, as in `life after death', and people of some religions spend their lives preparing for it as if that's the only real life, as if this is all prologue. The Rsand have just taken that one philosophical step further. They believe that when they die, that's when real life begins. So they call it coming to life. It's so simple. And they believe that if they pass through this black hole, they'll all come to life."

 "So why bring the station through the other way? Why kill everyone on board?"

 "Well, it has to work the other way, doesn't it? If they come to life on our side of the black hole, what do you think happens to us when *we* go through? This is our afterlife! We're all dead here! And I can find--" he stopped abruptly. "It was the Doctor," he repeated, "he made it all go wrong. He threw off all the calculations--"

 "You can find what?" snapped Jadi.

 Costello shook his head rapidly. "A mathematician named Klein / Thought the Moebius strip was divine..."

 Angela had stopped walking behind Costello and was staring at him in something like pity, something like horror. "That's all that's going on?" she asked quietly. "No evil from the dawn of time, no collapsing Universes, no vast, multicosmic conspiracy? It's just *you*. You're the only reason this all happened. Who are you looking for here? Who died?"

 "Not my fault!" Costello suddenly shrieked. "The Doctor! He brought another black hole with him!" He shook with barely controllable rage; he'd passed through the calm centre of his insanity and back into the whirling clouds of fury on the other side. "Thought I could stop this one from the other side but he brought another one *through*! One black hole through another, turned inside out and back again, threw everything off, threw out all my calculations, spatial distortions stronger than I'd prepared for, and he killed *everybody*! The Doctor did it! Not me! *Look*!"

 Their path had taken them back to the shopping centre's promenade; later, Jadi would wonder whether that was coincidence, whether Costello had deliberately chosen his route, or whether it had been the TARDIS influencing them in order to show them what had happened to it. Because something definitely had.

 It was still the TARDIS, on the surface at least. But it made Jadi's and Angela's eyes water to look at it, as if there were somehow hundreds, thousands of TARDISes, all in the same place at the same time, all slightly different. Angela, who had never seen anything remotely similar before, stared in awe at the shimmering structure; Jadi, who had, glanced nervously about the room, looking for cats.

 "They die and they go to our Universe," Costello babbled. "We die and we go to theirs! Stop all the black holes from the other side, nobody ever goes away! She must be here, she must be here somewhere, I've come too far to stop! All Rsand!" he shrieked, and Jadi and Angela spun around to see a boarding party of Rsand standing behind them. "All Rsand, new orders! Prime unit safe! Prime unit only to be preserved. Bring all others to life. Bring all others to life *now*!"

 TO BE CONTINUED...