‘Space Police. Upholders of Galactic Law.’ The creature’s little mouth made each word sound like a knife strike. ‘They learned of my activities and deemed them illegal.’

‘And, what – they got you doing time?’ She smirked. ‘Shame they didn’t throw away the key.’

‘Be assured, I was confined for a long time. A long, long time.’ He walked across the dais towards her. ‘This is why I operate the way I do.’

Ace stiffened at his approach. ‘What, you mean, using your rat monsters to front the operation?’

‘The Ratts are my paid employees. My work is legal, Child of Earth. I operate under the guise of charity.’

‘Charity?’

‘You understand this word, I think.’

‘Yeah. You could say so.’ Ace stared at him, her anger rising. ‘You’ve been abducting homeless kids, poverty survivors, dragging them halfway across the universe to chuck them in a foot-shredding desert and you call that charity?’

‘I do.’ His feet shrank into his veined, lumpy limbs and he jumped down from the dais with a smile. ‘After all, what is charity but giving away that which is unwanted – or unneeded – to somebody else …?’

‘You twisted scumbag.’ Ace felt the urge to throttle this monster with her bare hands. She started forward, but staggered almost at once. Her head was spinning, and she overbalanced. It hit her at last: why he’d been going on like this, biding his time … God, Professor, how slow have I become? ‘This smoke in the air,’ she whispered. ‘It’s … not incense, is it? It’s … some sort of drug.’

‘You are more compliant now, I think, Dorothy. Yes?’ Halogi-Kari gave an excited little jump in the air and scuttled towards Ace, black eyes shining, a clawed hand bulging from beneath the fleshy stump of his right arm to make a beckoning gesture. ‘Now I can show you what is to come.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

‘Less than 23 minutes till the whole place goes up!’ cried the Doctor, as the TARDIS set them back down, a touch reluctantly, perhaps, aboard the collector. ‘Let’s hope it won’t take long to get the space-time coordinates for the next station in the sequence. Let’s hope there aren’t too many more in the sequence after that. Let’s hope we find everyone quickly. Is that too much to hope for?’ She tossed Squidget over her shoulder and a big grin at Yaz. ‘Nah! Come on.’

Yaz stepped out of the cool of the crystalline control room into a charred, fetid space where fluid sizzled on the blackened walls. It was like arriving on the inside of a rotisserie chicken with the heat on high, while someone blasted the flesh with a taser for good measure. The background hum and murmur of strange power had been replaced by piteous sounds like groans and mewlings and drunken shrieks.

‘So which bit are we in?’ Yaz said.