The man drew a blaster. 'You must be the one who's behind all this!'

 The Doctor looked searchingly at him for a moment, and then shook his head sadly. 'No. It simply won't do, I'm afraid. Those bombs were strategically placed to destroy the Time Dams and leave the command centre untouched. Assuming that whoever placed them into position was acting out of motives other than the desire to make a grand suicidal gesture, they would logically arrange to locate themselves in the one part of the station certain to weather the explosion. I know I didn't do it, I assume the person who has sought a new career as an interior decorator isn't responsible, and since the security cameras will have been knocked off-line by the spatial distortion of our journey, you don't have to play to them. By the way, I'm the Doctor. And, apart from being responsible, you are?'

 'I'm Krevell Costello,' the man snapped, 'the chief engineer of this station. And I don't appreciate being accused of sabotaging my own life's work!'

 'Fair enough. I hadn't worked through all of the implications yet. Although as chief engineer you're the only one capable of authorising the inclusion of alien machinery in the station's structure, which indicates some familiarity with the non-human forces at work here, and speaking of which, that's a fascinating extradimensional chronic hysteresis vector transformer unit you've got connected to the station's force-field generator. Do you mind if I smell it?'

 Costello raised his pistol as the Doctor, beaming politely like a very tall, well-dressed mad child in a candy store, moved towards the control terminal on the opposite wall. 'I wouldn't interfere,' the engineer said sharply.

 'Quite right,' the Doctor agreed. 'You leave that side of things to me.' He leaned down, pressed his hands to either side of the alien machinery and inhaled deeply.

 The average Time Lord's olfactory senses are strong enough to detect a stalk of celery at two hundred paces, and while they weren't linked to the memory centres of the brain as powerfully as in humans--which was fortunate, otherwise most Time Lords would spend their days walking around in a state of permanent hypermnemonic bliss-out, the common cold would induce amnesia, and any alien race could conquer Gallifrey armed only with antihistamines--the Doctor had certain advantages in that respect. He closed his eyes, ignored the man with the gun--

 ('You get--')

 --, and thought his way through the storm of smell to a clear picture of memory. For a brief moment, he detected the unmistakable stench of Dalek technology, and nearly panicked before he realized he was sensing residue from his own fingertips. Don't frighten us like that. Sorry. He concentrated again, sorting through all the familiar smells, filing them carefully in folders marked 'jacket' and 'air ventilation system' and 'where on Earth did that man get fresh garlic cheese so far from his home planet, must ask him later' until he'd isolated the unmistakable fragrance of a very fishy rat.

 '--away from there!'

 'Fascinating,' the Doctor said. 'Absolutely fascinating. This smells like nothing I've ever smelled before. Nothing.' He turned to Costello and beamed as the man's finger tightened coldly on the blaster's trigger. 'Do you realize what this means? Just when I thought I was doomed to refight old battles for the rest of eternity, I've finally encountered something new! Perhaps the Chaotics have given up at last! By the way,' he added as the trigger depressed with a click, 'the piezotronic fractalline centre of your staser unit has just been turned inside out and back again along with everything else in this station, rendering it useless. What were you planning to do on this side of the black hole?'

He smiled, reached forward and took the gun before Costello could tell what was happening.

 'It's all right. You can tell me. I'm a Doctor.'

 Wil's head rolled over and he stared numbly at the little girl singing and skipping rope in the corner of the groceteria. 'One plus one is only two, Gwilym's spine is broke clean through! Will he live? Will he die? Will my mom bake apple pie?'

 Wil looked blearily up at the man typing in the corner. 'Whass happenig?'

 'Obligatory dream sequence,' the man with the glasses, orange plaid shirt and haven't-seen-a-pair-of-scissors-for-months hairdo told him. 'Surreal metatextual imagery, random snippets of word-play, in-jokes, pseudopsychological attempts to turn your character inside out and back again--note the imagery, chaps--and, be honest, just basically fill in time til the next bit, cause frag only knows how we're going to fix that damned spine of yours. Take two. Action.'

 'How many minutes til Wil croaks? One, two, three, four--'

 'Did what was told,' Wil said vaguely. Back to TARDIS. Wait. Find Doctor. Go home.'

 The Otherwil laughed thunderously from his perch on the counter between the pureed tomatoes and exploded lettuces. 'Bwah, he said sarcastically, 'ha ha. Why didn't you try to find the Doctor in the first place? Why didn't you try to warn him about the bombs? Why did you just run for the TARDIS like a kid running back into his hidey-hole?'

 '--five, six, seven, eight--'

 'Looking for the Doctor!'

 A tall brown-skinned man with short dark hair and a sharply cut black uniform peered down at him. 'Aren't we all?'

 '--seven, ten, four hundred and thirty-three, two--'

 'And why did you hit on Angela like that when she first walked into the TARDIS? Who do you think you are, anyway? Buzzcock indeed! She's smarter than you! She's a professional thief, Jadi's a professional bounty hunter, and you're a professional Fool! One of these things is not like the others! What did you think, that courage was osmotic? Did you think jumping into the middle of universal threats would shake sense into you? Well, you're gonna die now, and you're keeping the rest of us waiting.'

 'Why did they have to come along?' Wil cried deliriously. 'Who invited *them* into the club, huh? Answer me that!'

 A tubby, five-foot-high green duck looked down at Wil and raised a sardonic eyebrow. 'You think you've got it bad with them? Trust me, you don't know you're *born*.'

 'Seven hundred and nineteen!'

 Wil leaned down to himself and whispered, trying not to attract the Otherwil's attention. 'Don't listen to me, I don't know what I'm talking about. But none of them do, you know that? Angela shouldn't have moved you, that was probably the worst thing she could have done--under normal circumstances. But it ended up getting you clear of the TARDIS, and that's a good thing at the moment--cause what happens when you turn a black hole inside out, and pull it through another black hole? And she did it by accident. See? Everything's an accident. Nobody knows what they're doing. You're not alone, Wil, don't ever think that for a moment--everyone else is just as lost as you, they're just better at pretending otherwise. Watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat.'

 'You're not wearing a hat,' Wil pointed out.

 'Your point being?'

 The girl stopped skipping and smiled beatifically. 'Speaking of point beings,' she interrupted in a sing-song voice, 'they're heeeeere...'

 The Otherwil stood up abruptly. 'Hear that? Of course you do, I couldn't tell you about it if you didn't. Something's docking with the station. Time to lose consciousness. Play dead, Wil. The forecast calls for invasion.'

 'Not at all,' Jadi said roughly, clutching a light blue gown about himself. I don't faint, he told himself, I simply had an adverse reaction to being shot out of a space station with no environmental suit and passing through a black hole and being turned inside out and back again and then waking up and being probed by an alien whom I naturally assumed was planning to invade my Universe, but I didn't faint. Good. I was worried there for a minute.

 He clutched the gown about himself again. 'Any chance of my getting my real clothes back?'

 'Apooolllochchiesss,' the Rsand repeated tonelessly. 'Manoooffactchchurrred prodtuct offf ozzzer oooniverssse. Exsssspossssed to sssspacssse and ozzzer sssstresss. Sssstudy reckwirred.'

 'Right.' He clutched the gown together again and gazed at the view before him. More and more Rsand ships were approaching the hole in space and the station which had just appeared in the middle of the fleet; the swirling colours of the space-time vortex reminded him of something he'd seen before, and he nervously peered about the Rzand bridge, looking for cats. He pulled the gown together again. 'Where did you *get* this?'

 'Technollooochchy exsschchange. Prodtuct offf ozzzer oooniverssse. Linguissstic data, "hossspital gown".'

 'Well, that's just perfect.'

 'Mooossst pleasssed to hearrr arrre we. Honorrred guessst yoooo are.' The Rzand turned to another, larger Rsand standing behind Jadi, and clicked something musical at it. 'Fffirssst livvve connntact wifff ozzzer llifffe-ffforms,' it continued to Jadi. 'Alll prevvvious exssschchange via technollooochchy annnd exssso-lllight commmooonicassshunzzz. Yooo tellll usss muchch about our neighbourzzz.'

 'Happy to help,' said Jadi--

 --slashed the flat of his hand into the exposed tissue between the plates of the approaching Rsand's exoskeleton--

 --yanked it back out before the guard recoiled, its plates slamming protectively together, too late--

 --turned and belted down the corridor, his robe flapping open behind him, chitinous scrabblings and furious hissing echoing behind him, rushing whisper-fast before him.

 On the bright side, he thought, the TARDIS must have come through the black hole with the rest of the station. Otherwise the translation circuits would have been inaccessible and Jadi never would have realized that the Rsand was ordering his guard to take him to the dissection chamber. Honored guest my brother's left buttock.

 The scrabbling grew louder as his pursuers gained on him. He turned a corner, darted through the nearest door, and froze as fifteen thousand Rsand in armoured space suits turned to see what the noise was.

 To be continued...