Bevin was almost shaking, and the Doctor put a comforting arm around her, which she tried to shrug off, and failed.

 "You must be so scared," he said. And she burst into tears.

 "Why don't you take us to meet your Nana?" he suggested gently, "then we can sit down over a nice cup of tea and chat about this like grown ups."

 Bevin looked deep into the Doctor's eyes. How could she trust him? How could she know what he would do? She didn't want her grandmother to die. She didn't want death and destruction. But somehow, she did trust him. She couldn't help herself. She looked up into the night sky, found her lucky star - the slightly green one - and made a silent wish. She wished that she was doing the right thing.

 "Come on," she said quietly. "I suppose that Grandmother will be expecting you."

 ***

 Bevin's Nana lived only a few city blocks away, in a ramshackle building that looked more like it had been thrown together than built. Most of the windows had either been boarded up or bricked over from the inside and a baffling number of chimneys and pipes protruding at crazy angles from clearly home-made holes in the walls.

 "Just go in on your own, Doctor. She was quite insistent on that. She can be very strong willed when she puts her mind to it."

 "And her grand daughter takes after her in that respect," beamed the Doctor, opening the door and entering the house.

 "The Doctor's one of the good guys in the Universe, really," said Wil. "He liberated the entire Epsilon Quadrant from the threat of the Mutant Gremloids once."

 "And that's good, is it?"

 "Yeah, that's good." Wil nodded towards the door.

 "Nana said he'd be in there for an hour and twenty five minutes. She'll be right. She always is, damn it. It's like she's seen everything before and knows what's going to happen."

 "We could go for a drink and you could tell me a bit more about it."

 Bevin found herself smiling at Wil, tried to hide it and failed.

 ***

 "Source of Tachyon leakage identified, leader."

 The bridge of the warship orbiting Altos 3, the warship known as Warship P8764X, was sumptuously decorated. It had been designed at the height of the powers of the second Sumaran Empire. It had been a time of decadence and opulence, and this was reflected in the deep red velvet carpet, the marble steps from the main bridge down to the sunken bath, the rosewood paneling on the walls, and on the various control consoles, and the abundance of gold trimmings. One wall was dominated by a perfectly preserved tapestry depicting a snake devouring the world, a tapestry of great beauty, and of great cruelty.

 The occupants of the bridge were not members of the Sumaran Empire. That empire had long since fallen, and the current owners of the ship had found and salvaged the ship. Its opulence meant nothing to them.

 "Excellent," replied the leader, forming his metal-skinned hand into a powerful fist.

 He was standing in the centre of the bridge, in front of the chaise lounge that the previous captain of the vessel had used. His was a small crew - himself and five troopers. They had been on a routine surveillance mission in the Magellan cluster when their ship had been destroyed due to a computer malfunction while navigating an asteroid field. The crew had (as per standing instruction 46542I) abandoned the vessel, identified and commandeered the nearest alternative. That ship was Warship P8764X. Its technology was limited, but it had enabled them to detect a faint Tachyon trace from the third satellite of a nearby solar incidence.

 They had made their way into a geo-stationary orbit and reconfigured their scanners to identify the source of the emissions. As per standing instruction 2. Tachyons could mean one thing only - a vessel capable of time travel, a vessel capable of preventing the destruction of their home world.

 Warship P8764X had only limited short range scanners though, so it had taken them some fifteen years of local time to identify the source. They were patient though. For a time ship, for the chance to save their home world, they could wait forever.

 ***

 'Hancock's' was much less stuffy than the cantina. It was an open air bar set around a swimming pool on a roof top about three blocks away from Nana's home. Bevin had ordered two Denebian Sparklewards, a lurid green and yellow drink which Wil eyed warily.

 "Is it natural?" he asked, eyeing the drink suspiciously. "It doesn't look like ale."

 "Try it," she coaxed, "I'm sure you'll like it."

 Wil tried it. Wil didn't like it.

 "Do you always spit out your drinks like that?" asked Bevin. Wil nodded mutely, smearing his mouth with the back of his hand.

 "Can I ask you a question?" he said, as soon as the burning aftertaste had subsided sufficiently. "Would you really have killed the Doctor back there?"

 "Yes," she nodded, "yes I would. I don't want my Nana to die."

 "But it's not as if the Doctor's actually going to kill her."

 She shrugged. "He might do for all I know. I'll be keeping an eye on him."

 "But you left him alone with your Nana?" Wil was clearly puzzled.

 "It's hard to explain," she said, leaning forward to take her glass between both hands. "Nana's always been a very ... insistent... woman. She is difficult to say no to, and she more or less demanded that if I bumped into the Doctor I should take him to meet her. And so I tried not to meet you. I tried to make sure you left Altos 3 without seeing Nana. It didn't work. I should have stayed in bed."

 She picked up her drink, downed it in one, and gave Wil's glass a greedy look. He pushed it towards her.

 "So he's talking to her now, and within a week she'll be dead. That'll make a lot of people happy." Her voice was edged with bitterness, and hurt.

 "Why?" asked Wil. "What's wrong with her?"

 ***

 The Doctor pushed the door closed behind him. The house was filthy and it smelled. Cobwebs and curtains hung from the ceiling in front of him, making it feel like every step forward he took was pushing deep into a soft cavern. As he stepped forward, the house seemed to grow warmer, and darker, until he found himself in a room that was pitch black, sealed from the outside. The room felt huge, larger than he would have thought possible, and it was stiflingly hot.

 "Hello there?" he said, wiping his forehead with his cravat and removing his jacket.

 "Oh, you're here at last."

 Click.

 A single light came on, high overhead, illuminating the bed in the centre of the room. It was made from clear kontron crystal, and the light refracted through it at crazy angles. Tiny strands of crystal shot out from the main body of the bed at strange angles, disappearing into the walls and the ceiling and the floor, but it remained quite clearly a bed. With bedposts.

 "Well, come on, young man, shift yourself over here. We need to have a wee natter."

 "Bevin said that you wanted to speak to me."

 "Yes, yes, I know that. And she didn't shoot you either and you've got the cartridge from her gun in your pocket and it will stay there for about twenty four hours before you give it back to her and save her life." He could tell that she was old from her voice, certainly close to death, but she had a sense of purpose about her, a confidence that he recognised in himself.

 "I need to tell you some things about the war that is coming, Doctor."

 "Madame Nostradamus said much the same to me, just before she died. She looked up at me from her death bed, called me 'Snooky' and then told me all about the Second Dalek War. Wars happen. And I've given up worrying about my future."

 He had been walking forwards slowly towards her, and as he did, he managed to make out her figure in the bed. Her skin was a deathly white, made paler by the bright light reflected on it, and her body was tiny, almost as though she was fading away. Her skin seemed little more than gauze, barely sufficient to hold her bones together. Her face was otherwise very similar to Bevin's, so much so that nobody would doubt that the two were related.

 "Do you have any idea what a gigantic pain in the bum it is to know what's going to happen in the future?" she asked. "Pretty gigantic, that's what. And the last few years have been the worst. I've known all sorts of things. Whether the summer would be nice. What colours were going to be in fashion. Major shipping disasters. Oh, and the war, too. I've always known about that, though. Watching your own death tends to be memorable. You know what the worst bit of it is? Knowing exactly how much you can get away with warning people. You can't warn them too much because you know that they don't get too much warning. So you don't. But you want to. Oh, and sometimes you decide to, but something happens to stop you."

 "You don't mean prescience, do you?" asked the Doctor. "You've actually seen it."

 "Yes. I was not much older than young Bevin. About six days and twelve hours. But of course you'd guessed that."

 The Doctor nodded, and the old woman reached out a frail arm, grabbing his cravat and pulling him down until their noses were less than an inch apart.

 "You won't tell her, will you. Because I remember it will be a big surprise when I wake up and discover that I've gone back in time and I'm going to be my own grandmother."

 The Doctor shook his head, and the old woman coughed. She sounded very ill. Carefully he prised her fingers away from his cravat, stood up, and straightened his clothes.

 "You didn't have to become your own grandmother, you know. And you don't have to die."

 "You were supposed to understand, Doctor. It has to happen. I remember it. I remember it felt so wrong, and I got so angry - I was so strong back then, so angry. Time is like a circle for me. I have seen everything happen twice. And it will all happen again."

 He reached down, and took her slender hand between his. "Sometimes time is a circle," he said softly. "You can go round and round forever. But I've never found an infinite loop. Sooner or later you can always break the loop and go off at a tangent."

 She smiled a wan smile. "Help me to the window," she said, indicating a small curtained alcove in a far corner of the room. "We're about to be invaded, and I quite fancied watching."

 ***

 Bevin was still drinking Denebian Sparklewards, and Wil had found an ale that was to his liking.

 "When I was a girl," said Bevin, "I used to lie awake at night, scared in case the sky fell down, or a flood washed us away, or Nana died overnight. And Nana always knew. And sometimes she would come into my room and hold my hand and tell me that everything would be all the same in the morning, and it always was. I must have been five when she told me that she wouldn't die until I was all grown up. She took me out on to the roof - I remember it was a clear sky like tonight - and she pointed out the lucky star to me. I've been wishing on it ever since."

 Wil stifled a belch, and apologised.

 "Which one is it?" he asked.

 "That one." She pointed to the bright greenish wishing star. Wil put his face against her arm, followed the direction she was pointing in. Then he turned, grinned, and pulled a coin from behind her ear.

 "My round," he said cheerfully, leaping to his feet with almost catlike grace. "Same again?"

 Bevin wasn't paying attention, though. She was staring at infinity over his left shoulder.

 "Bevin?"

 When she eventually spoke, her voice quavered. "Wil. I think? I think the wishing star is getting bigger."

 He collapsed back into his chair and turned to look back at the point she had indicated a moment before. It looked like she was right. The wishing star was definitely getting bigger. And then it started moving.

 "I don't think it's a star," he said. "And I don't think it's getting larger. I think it's a spaceship landing."

 He and Bevin looked at each other for a moment, the concern clear on their faces, then turned to watch as the ship grew steadily larger.

 ***

 The older Bevin and the Doctor watched too. He held her carefully, feeling that she might topple over and injure herself if he let go.

 "Do you see it?" she asked.

 "Yes," nodded the Doctor. "I can't make out the markings, though."

 "When you do, Doctor, you won't recognise it. You never saw any Sumaran ships, but you need to know that it is powered by Sumaran technology, the blue crystals which focus the mind, in the same way that our ancestors used kontron crystals to manipulate time."

 The Doctor stiffened. He had encountered the final product of Sumaran technology twice before. He had hoped never to meet the Mara again.

 "The vessel is not crewed by Sumarans, though."

 He relaxed.

 "It is crewed by Cybermen."

 To be continued...