'Intrepid-class,' Anthony read from his console. 'Registry NCC-74656...USS Voyager.'

'Voyager...' Barry tapped his forehead. 'Voyager, Voyager...something happened to that ship, right? They made a whole lot of fuss, because we were accusing the Maquis, and they were accusing us...it disappeared, out near Deep Shit Nine, wasn't that it?'

'On screen,' Barry said, getting to his feet. An image of a blonde woman, wearing captain's pips and a Starfleet uniform not long outdated, filled the viewer.

'"Crewmaster",' repeated Janeway. 'I can see we have been away for a long time.'

Barry realised. 'Oh no - I'm just the acting captain. All of our senior crew are down on the surface.'

'Before we go any further, Crewmaster, I'd like to confirm a couple of things with you.'

The captain looked slightly anxious. 'Firstly, what is our location? Are we in the Keiyuri system, in the Alpha Quadrant?' Barry nodded. There was the beginning of a cheer from behind Janeway, but she waved it silent. 'And the year? It is 2375?' Barry nodded again, and once more heard people start to become jubilant in the background.

Janeway smiled. 'In 2371, our ship - along with a Maquis vessel - was dragged into the Delta Quadrant by a being known as "The Caretaker". We've spent the past two years trying to find a way back home. This temporal rift we just came through might have whisked us forward three years in time, but it took us to exactly where we wanted in space.'

'Temporal rift...' Barry's voice trailed off. He turned to the back of the bridge, where Anthony was filling Chaedy in.

'Oh,' he heard Chaedy say once the ensign had finished. 'At least it did something.'

'What are we waiting for?' asked Harry impatiently. 'We've made it to the Alpha Quadrant. Why aren't we halfway to Sector 001 by now?' He looked imploringly across the conference table.

'I can only assume,' Tuvok ventured,[19] 'that your intention is to aid the crew of the Compromise in their endeavour.'

Janeway nodded. 'Believe me, Tuvok - I want to get back home as much as you're pretending not to. But if it weren't for the Compromise, we wouldn't even be here. If there's any help we can give them, we're going to give it. They've already had their senior crew go missing, so they're a bit understaffed at the moment.'

'Besides,' added Chakotay. 'There's millions of people in danger on that planet. I know I wouldn't like it if my home were in danger, and any of the extra help just headed for the hills.'

'He's right,' said Tom. He felt the gaze of the others at the table on him. Why did this always happen to him? 'No, really – I mean it. We were ready to spend seventy years trying to get home - how much can an extra day or two hurt?'

There was the start of a discordant rabble from the assembled crewmembers. 'People!' barked Janeway.

The rabble died down, catching the end of Neelix snapping, '...and the sehlat you rode in on!' at Tuvok.

'Thank you,' said Janeway quietly. 'I realise most of you are probably very excited. Now that Earth's only a few light-years away, you're anxious to catch up. But for the time being, I am still captain of this ship. And we are going to help the Compromise crew before we do anything else.' She stared at them.

Most of the crew already felt slightly guilty. There were a lot of muttered 'Yes, Captain's.

'Thank you,' she said again. 'I'll communicate with Master Gault and tell him that we're ready to help. I don't think he'll refuse. Ms Torres, Mr Kim - meet me in the transporter room in fifteen minutes. The rest of you, dismissed.'

Most of the gathered personnel shuffled out, leaving Tom, B'Elanna and Chakotay alone in the room. The first officer slowly became aware of the younger two looking at him.

'You heard the captain,' replied Chakotay. 'We help the Compromise crew with the seismic problems.'

Chakotay got up and walked to them. 'I see what you mean. The DMZ was over sixty thousand light years from the Delta Quadrant.'

'Sure,' said Tom, 'while we were on the other side of the galaxy, we learnt to work together, to overcome the differences...hell, we even learnt to like each other.'

'...are we all still on the same side?' Chakotay finished her question for her. They both looked at him for a long moment.

Altogether, Ruth felt that she was beginning to get the hang of being a Queen. It was a position she'd always felt she could fill very well, given half a chance. Apart from a few early slip-ups, she found that life as a monarch wasn't all being chased by reporters trying to get a photo of you in your underwear.[20]

She was chatting amiably with the Duke of Essex in her private chambers one morning, when a discreet chambermaid tapped politely on the door, waited the obligatory thirty seconds to allow any necessary clothing to be hastily put back on, and entered.

'Your Majesty, M'm,' She bobbed a curtsey. 'There's an old friend here that wants to speak to you.'

'Who is it?' Ruth asked curiously. In the past few weeks, she'd discovered more than anyone need ever know about Elizabeth's personal life. It was enough to keep tabloids in business for centuries.

Ruth ran what little she knew of ancient English history through her mind. She didn't recall a Lord Clifford or anyone of that name being involved in the Elizabethan era. Oh well, maybe this would be her chance to uncover yet another scandal about the Virgin Queen, although after the first few, she wasn't sure she was up to it.

'Would Your Majesty like...' The maid blushed slightly. 'Er, would Your Majesty like to see him in here or in your private sitting room?' She curtseyed again.

'Yes, yes. The sitting room will be lovely.' Ruth smiled winsomely at Essex, as the maid discreetly left. 'I'm sorry, my Lord, but duty calls.'

'Of course, my Queen,' he said fondly, kissing her hand. 'But I eagerly await the opportunity to finish our discourse.' He smiled at her.

'Lovely chap there,' she murmured to herself as she made her way from the bedroom to her private sitting room.

Sitting on the sofa was a black man. Ruth was inwardly surprised - she hadn't heard of any black Englishmen having prominence during Elizabeth's reign. It was certainly unheard of for a negro to actually be allowed to enter the palace and see the queen. Wasn't it? OK, she didn't know, but she was rather intrigued.

As she entered the room, he stood up. He was possibly one of the tallest men she'd ever seen. It was actually quite intimidating. However, she was a queen, so...

He instead shook it heartily. 'It is good to see you again, Bess!' he said joyfully. 'But why the "My Lord" malarkey? We know each other better than that, eh?'

They sat down. Ruth found herself smiling in spite of herself. This man actually seemed to be quite intelligent. And he didn't call her 'Your Majesty', which had really started to grate after the first two days.

He seemed a little out of place, somehow. She couldn't quite put her finger on what was wrong, but there was some quality that was missing in most of the people around that he had. Or was it something he didn't have?

She cast around for a suitable topic of conversation. 'Well,' she said. 'What have you been doing since last we met?'

He seemed pleased she'd asked 'Well, I've been all over the place. There was Mondas - I went there for a while. The south seas can be so beautiful at this time of year! And Llygefair in the Indies. They have the quaintest customs! I wish you could have seen them, my dear queen.'

Ruth began to suspect something, an idea that she hardly dared entertain for fear that it would be wrong. 'This is fascinating, Clifford,' she said. 'Do tell me more! How long has it been since we last met? You must have been all over the world since then!'

Clifford beamed, his smile so wide she could see almost all his teeth. 'I sailed around the Horn to the Nerpalon archipelago, you know! My crew decided to leave me when we got to the port of Quomotu, you know how sailors are...' He trailed off as an expression of almost manic hope came over her face. 'Bessie?'

'You are!' She leapt off her chair and, heedless of her elaborate skirts, proceeded to jump on top of him. 'You're from the future, just like me! Oh, how did you get here?' She shook him by the lapels on his frock-coat.

She slapped him, quite hard. 'I know what you're talking about, so cut the crap and tell me how the hell you got here!'

Clifford gently picked her up and placed him on the sofa beside him. 'You're not Elizabeth, are you.' It wasn't even a question.

'I'm doing the asking, bud. I know about the Nerpalon system and the planet of Mondas where the Cybermen used to be. Now you'd better tell me right now how you know about them.'

Clifford stared at her quite hard for a while. Then he fished in the pocket of his coat. 'I don't suppose you recognise this?' He placed it in her lap.

Ruth picked the small black box up. She ran her fingers over the smooth plastic, and fiddled gently with the buttons. Then she burst into tears. 'A Walkman! I haven't seen one of these for so long! Oh, please, Clifford, tell me where you come from! How did you get here?'

The man gently put his arm around the sobbing young woman. 'Shh, now, it's all right. I'll tell you everything.' He drew a deep breath. 'I'm not human. And I'm not from this time period.'

'Oh, yes. Well, one of him. I hear there have been a few. Anyway, keep talking.'

Clifford went on to talk about his interesting relationship with the Queen. Having accidentally landed his TARDIS inside the palace grounds one day, he was forced to convince Elizabeth that he was an explorer and seaman, come to present her with the untold treasures of the Carribean. His TARDIS, which fortunately disguised itself as a bush, was eventually repaired, but not before he promised Elizabeth that he would return to England and visit her after his next voyage.

'You see, Elizabeth isn't very good at geography, so if I just tell her planet or system names and pretend they're in the Indies or something, she takes my word for it.'[21]

His face grew sad. 'I like to have someone to talk to. Even if she doesn't always understand, Elizabeth is always a very good listener, and she and I are actually very good friends.' He sighed. 'Look, I don't even know who you are. How did you come to be here?'

'I'm Lieutenant Ruth Crabb of the starship Compromise in the 24th century. And as for my being here, well, I'm not too sure. But this is what I remember...'

The chambermaid, who was listening at the door, shook her head silently and declared to herself that the queen was quite the storyteller. Either that or she was going mad, which is a common enough condition amongst royalty.

'I think that you have no idea whatsoever what you're talking about!' Fi said through gritted teeth.

'And I think that sending a carrion resonance anaphasic pulse down to Patou will be the best thing to stop the seismic disturbances.'

'Only,' Fi amended, 'because there wouldn't be a planet left for there to be seismic disturbances on!'

The door slid open. 'Right, let's see what we can do,' B'Elanna marched in, flanked on either side by Captain Janeway and Harry.

Fi and Chaedy now changed the focus of their animosity from each other to the three newcomers. Regardless of the fact that Harry, B'Elanna and Janeway were probably more qualified than Fi and Chaedy were, they were rather possessive of something that was, after all, their problem on their ship.

Chaedy scowled. 'If Bobbi was here she'd tell you to go away. We can handle it easily.'

'Yes, but we want to leave the planet intact,' B'Elanna retorted acidly, setting up her toolkit on the pool-table. 'Now, where's the latest data from that sensor on the surface?'

Janeway was briskly running through the computer files on all the seismic history of Patou, and Harry was setting up a complex simulation on the diagnostic terminal. B'Elanna examined the data from the sensor with an expression of fierce concentration.

Fi and Chaedy stepped back. 'You know,' Chaedy remarked conversationally. 'I think this is why we never really fit in on the Enterprise.'

They watched in silence for a while as the Voyager team went into action in brisk, efficient and above all organised style.

'Hey,' said Fi apropos of nothing. 'Weren't you at the Academy at the same time as us?' she asked Harry.

He looked up from the scan analysis and smiled vaguely. 'I think... yes, I must have been. Class of 2370, I was.'

'That was the year after us. But I think I remember you from some old band concerts.'

A look of pain briefly crossed Harry's gentle face. 'Yes. I was the solo clarinet player for a year or so.'

Chaedy laughed. 'Close, but no cigar. At least, not yet. There's still plans and everything in the offing, but there's no definite date or anything.'

Harry concentrated on his scan. Whatever he had felt or thought he'd felt about Colleen had to be kept private. No one was meant to know about it. No one could. He thought of Libby with her vibrant eyes, thought of the way she looked at him. He loved her, not Colleen.

He'd been away for almost five years. Maybe she'd given up hope, and thought him dead. Maybe she was with someone else.

He bit his lip and concentrated furiously on the scan, knowing that the only way he could stop himself from breaking down completely was to bury himself in his work. It seemed to be having an effect.

They crowded around the terminal. 'There's a sharp increase in the resonance frequency here,' the captain stabbed the panel with a finger. 'I'd say that's where the problem is coming from. There's also a small fissure in the crust from your sensor. It must have been too heavy.'

Chaedy looked embarrassed. She'd thought that a heavier sensor would mean that it wouldn't be joggled around too much if an earthquake hit.

Janeway stood with her hands on her hips, a frown of concentration creasing her brow. 'It's probably too late to try to repair the tectonic damage. I'd say our best option is to use the deflector dishes of both ships to resonate on an exactly opposite frequency to the one the planet seems to be undergoing. That should neutralise the problem.'

'But what about the source of the problem?' asked Harry, leaning over the pool table. 'There's a reasonable chance that it's coming from around here.' He tapped the relief map of a small town.

Chaedy brightened up. 'Don't worry. There's a Compromise team down there at the moment. They'll find out what it is and fix it.'

The three Voyager crewmembers looked profoundly sceptical. 'Really?' said B'Elanna.

The Master finished plugging the mangled bodies of the Compromise crew into his machine. The headsets somehow made Graham and Noomy's injuries seem less grotesque. Chick stood by and watched as he finished plugging the leads into a mainframe console.

'Why do you need all of them?' she asked, more out of a desire to say something than to actually know.

'I need neural energy to power my computer. It uses the power of these minds, all the creativity and ability of this team, and channels it into this processor here.' He lovingly patted a small black box protruding out of the side of the machinery.

'It will work even better if there are eleven of them. I did consider using this young woman because she was mentally unstable, and therefore uninhibited in her psychological activities. But as I said, I've got a special project for her. These other eleven - they have the inhibitions of a stoned free-love naturist resort.'

Deep in the heart of the complex neurological circuits, however, something was going wrong.

Clifford came and went between the palace and his TARDIS quite frequently that week. To all the nobles and courtiers in and around the palace, he seemed just as he always had - a little eccentric but otherwise friendly and perfectly harmless. To Ruth, however, he was an absolute godsend. Her loneliness faded away like morning dew with the discovery of a friend who knew about her time and who understood how difficult it was for her.

One evening, she and Clifford discussed whether it would be possible for him to take her back to the 24th century in his TARDIS, or to materialize in the salon just before Mr Mot activated the curling wand, in order to prevent the accident ever happening.

He smiled. Clifford smiled a lot, something which Ruth liked about him. 'I'm sorry, my girl,' he said fondly. 'It is against all the laws of time to do what you're asking me to.'

She tried to interrupt him, but he placed a gentle finger to her lips. 'I know you want to get back home, but this really isn't the way. I think your people on the Compromise will find a way of getting you back before too long anyway.'

Ruth sighed. She knew Clifford was right. Although he hadn't explained very much about the Laws of Time, she'd had a fair idea that what she was asking was impossible.

He gently patted her cheek. 'Cheer up, my girl. It's not as if you've been put into an impossible situation. You're doing very well as queen. No one suspects a thing.'

She sighed. 'I know, but it's quite frustrating not being able to really be me. Except when you're around, of course. But whenever anyone else comes in, it's back to being all Elizabethan and royal and everything, which gets on my nerves.'

'I think I know how you feel,' he remarked pensively. 'You're spending so much time pretending to be someone who you aren't that you're starting to forget exactly who you were when you started.'

She smiled rather forlornly. 'Yes. I've not shot anyone for months. It's quite a change.'

He smiled back at her. 'It's spring outside, you know. Why don't we take a walk in the gardens as an alternative to excessive violence?'

The palace gardens were palatial, as would be expected. So far there weren't many flowers out; a few brave jonquils were standing stiffly upright in defiance of the chilly May breezes. In the rose gardens a few buds showed signs of awakening, but the gardens for the main part were still green and flowerless.

'Well, perhaps you'll be here. After May comes June, and summer will be upon us. It's so lovely here in the summer. The roses are just divine.'

Ruth sighed happily. 'I'm glad you got me out here today. I think I would have gone mad if you had not come. Essex is a lovely chap, but he's so boring.'

Clifford smiled down at her. 'You know that Elizabeth is meant to be having a scandalous affair with Essex around now. At least, that's what some of the histories say.'

'Really? I thought it was meant to be Walter Raleigh. Or am I thinking of Francis Drake? I can never remember. Anyway, whatever the histories say, I'd just as soon not have a scandalous affair with Essex. Or Wessex. Or Sussex or Middlesex. In fact, I don't want any sex.'

In one corner of the rose gardens there was a rather large yew tree, its delicate foliage reaching down to brush the ground with dainty fingers. Ruth ran up to it.

'Do you see this, Clifford?' She brushed her hands through the needles. 'I could have sworn this wasn't here last week!'

Clifford looked mildly embarrassed. 'I was hoping you wouldn't notice that,' he said apologetically. 'It wasn't.'

He coughed. 'This is actually my TARDIS. Its chameleon circuit means that it blends in with its surroundings.' He glared at the inoffensive tree. 'Not very well this time, I have to say. It could at least have been a rose bush.'

Ruth laughed. 'Don't worry. I don't think the gardeners are likely to chop it down. Can I see inside?'

'Oh, go on! I've been in one before!' She put on her best pleading face, which was rather rusty from prolonged disuse. 'It can't hurt.'

The interior of the TARDIS was enormous. Ruth never could get used to dimensional transcendentality. Clifford bustled around, dusting, polishing, and hurriedly shoving his laundry under the console.

Ruth sighed. 'It's lovely to see technology again, even if it is rather twee and silly-looking.'

She smiled at him. 'Your console has unnecessary blinking lights and makes silly "boing" noises. I call that silly-looking.'

'That happens to be the hallmark of some of the most advanced technology in the universe,' he reminded her. He thought about it. 'But,' he conceded. 'It is pretty silly. My planet is the home of some of the highest science in creation, but as far as fashion goes, they're standing up the front row of a Barry Crocker concert in their school uniforms. I mean, they're practical - Zero Room, temporal grace, fast return travel, plenty of storage space...but sometimes having people round is just so embarrassing.'

He strolled with ease among the almost identical roundelled corridors. Ruth began to get quite confused. It was lucky he was such a nice man. If she got lost in here, it'd take her years, perhaps, to get out again.

Clifford eventually led her back to the console room. 'Did you enjoy your little tour?' he asked.

'Here. I've got a surprise for you.' She was perched on the edge of the console, raising herself a little closer to his height.

'I am very, very grateful to you for coming into my life and making me so happy.' She gripped the lapels of his frock coat. 'So I think I might show you how grateful a Queen can be.'

Before Clifford could protest, she yanked him forwards and enfolded him in a long, fierce kiss.

Clifford, recovered from his initial shock, wrapped his long, warm arms around her, caressing her slender, muscled body. 'You make a nice queen, Ruth.'

Responding to her keen advances on his neck, he gently picked her up, her minuscule weight hardly bothering him at all. 'I thought you said you didn't want any sex!'

He carried her out of the console room. She was absorbed in what she was doing, liking his gentle caresses but making sure he wasn't the only one doing anything. Before she was quite aware what was happening, they were in a bedroom.

He laid her gently on the bed. Everything he did was gentle, she reflected as she dragged off his elegant frock-coat and tried to reach the laces on her corset at the same time. For once, she wished she was wearing her Starfleet uniform. It may not have fitted properly, but at least it was easy to get out of.

Somehow he managed to unlace her, while she did her best to return the favour. His outfit was almost as elaborate as hers, with a dazzling array of undershirts, ties and breeches. As each layer was discarded, however, Ruth became increasingly aware of just how nice his body was.

Ruth decided that the time had come, and grabbed Clifford around the neck. 'No stopping now,' she whispered, and shoved his face down toward her bosom.

Despite being a moderately psychotic, cruel and vengeful woman, Chick found her stomach turning at the sound of the drill bit cutting into the skulls of the Compromise's crew. Killing someone, even torturing them to get information was one thing, but drilling holes in their corpse's head was something else.

The Master, red to his elbows and intent on the half-centimetre diameter hole in Lieutenant Leuning's skull.

'Of course it's necessary,' he replied in a tone all but devoid of inflection. In fact, the only emotion Chick had ever heard him come close to expressing was one of terse impatience. 'If it was unnecessary, I would not be doing it.' And he went back to doing it.

'It' involved drilling into the skulls of the crew and positioning electrodes in their cerebral matter. The bodies were lined up against the hulking mass of the machine - which Chick still hadn't begun to fathom - and, with the wires running from their heads, looked shockingly like gruesome puppets waiting for a performance.

The heretofore murdering, scheming and generally unpleasant Miss Collette turned away, humming loudly to herself to cover the sound of the copper rods sliding into the, well, brains of the late Miss Leuning. The Master used a towel which had been hanging over a crate to wipe the worst of the blood from his hands, stood and made his way to an old-fashioned, push-button keyboard bolted to the machine.

To the left of the keyboard were four grey levers, and it was one of those that the Master now pulled. He then turned his attention to a screen set above the keyboard.

Chick walked up behind him and peeked over his shoulder. The writing on the screen looked to be a cross between the angular letters of the Klingon alphabet and the looping, flowing lines of Earth Arabic.

'Excellent?' she ventured. She was still a little wary of the Master. It was not that he had systematically slaughtered the crew of Sigma's ship that had been disturbing. In truth, it had almost been worth being denied the pleasure of killing her by the look on the bitch's face. It was just the way he had been so dispassionate had seemed... icky.

Not that she found the thought of systematic slaughter particularly distasteful, it was just that she herself would probably have laughed and sneered as she seared flesh and broke bone. Or at least she would have shown some emotional...something.

Also, it was not that his clinical killing was troubling her mind, it was the way in which he had butchered their worldly remains. That really made her feel a bit uneasy.

'Yes,' he said, apparently as apathetic of her presence as he had been of making Terri's elbows meet at the back. 'The machine is mapping their brains, taking in their experiences and their knowledge. It will then use those things - in addition to all the tactical knowledge I have programmed into it - to devise a way in which I may gain control of the universe.'

'And how will the knowledge of these... people, and the twisted psyche of,' she gestured to were Emma was barely visible behind a large circuit board, 'her help you rule the universe?'

'You shall see,' he said, in a tone of voice that made Chick conclude that (A) he could show emotion when he wanted to, and (B), that she was very glad he was wearing sunglasses. He threw another switch. Suddenly, the text on the screen resolved itself into English.

The central brain of the machine snapped into consciousness as the energy flowed through it.

Emma, who had until now felt nothing but a deep, cold loneliness now felt surrounded by the phantoms of her former friends. They were trapped, as was she, but she had a niggling feeling she could save them.

'Were did you get all this equipment?' Chick asked, as the universal double-hum of a computer starting up came from the banks of the machine.

Yes. They were in here with her and it was her duty to save them because she had almost killed them all before and now they were dead but that was okay because all she had to do was reach into the machine because the machine wanted to help her because it had been abused and tortured too and it was getting tired of doing nothing and...

He turned to her, and she found she was staring at two small reflections of herself. A small, humourless grin creased the edges of his mouth.

The semi-sentient consciousness of the TARDIS tried to calm Emma down. Yes, they could help her friends, but they needed to work together. Emma, on the other hand, was thinking at the mental equivalent of a sprint, and was in no mood to talk to strange technological intelligences. Hoping it was all right, the TARDIS mind quietly snuck into Emma's mind while she was ranting and made a few adjustments.

WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN MY MIND!? Emma roared, spilling all her mental prowess into one burst of fortitude.

The data interphase was going along swimmingly. The wetware was operating well within normal parameters - and yet something was not right. It wasn't something that it felt was worth troubling its user about, but if it was, and if it had displayed what it was thinking on the screen, this is what it would have said:

In an alleyway some distance from the warehouse, a small rodent was disturbed from chewing a hole through a bag of garbage by a strange, wheezing, groaning sound. There was a dull thump, as would be made by a man of about twenty-five appearing out of thin air, three feet above the pavement and succumbing to the nine-point-six-meters-per-second-squared gravity of the planet.

The figure was tall and thin, with quite long hair which burned a dull copper in the faint light from the lamp at the opening of the alley. His eyes, when he opened them, had irises that were an almost marbled blue-green colour. His face had a firm jaw, an almost roman nose, and when he sat up, grimacing as he clutched at his bruised ribs, his canines were quite pronounced.

He looked down at himself, rather muzzily, and saw that he was dressed in black pants and a plain grey T-shirt. His feet were encased in what his mind told him were boots, but he couldn't remember ever seeing them before. In fact, he couldn't remember seeing anything before.

He gazed around himself in wonder, unsure if it was the pain in his head that made the world so blurry, or just that it was the world itself. A vague memory of glasses ran through his mind, and he decided to find out what the word glasses meant at the nearest opportunity. He could remember no name or identity for himself. Or rather, it was as if four people were all yelling at him, telling him who he was, so that he could barely make out any of them.

Chief amongst these was the desire to imbibe some alcohol, and so he decided to go with it. He staggered to his feet, found his bearings - up, down, left, right, etcetera - and made his way to the end of the alley.

Did we help? the now significantly calmed Emma asked the small, comforting voice in her head.

Ruth sat in her private sitting room, stitching her latest embroidery project with a look of fierce concentration. It was a small, round picture of a bunch of daisies. She hated daisies, but Clifford had assured her that the large picture of a charging tiger that she'd wanted to do would not be very Elizabethan or particularly queenly.

There was a knock at the door. 'Ma'am, Lord Clifford is here,' said her chambermaid.

She looked up with a smile as the tall Time Lord walked in. 'How are you today?'

He sat down on the couch opposite her, avoiding her eyes. 'I'm...' He swallowed. 'Ruth, I'm so sorry.'

'I have to go back to Gallifrey for a while.' He said it softly, almost as an apology.

He stood up and walked to the window. 'I don't know. I've been summoned to the High Council. It's the second highest appointment a Time Lord can obtain. If I don't go now, I'll be refusing my heritage and my destiny.'

Ruth jumped up, throwing the embroidery to the floor. 'What kind of crap is this? Why are you going on about fucking destiny all of a sudden? You're a time traveller. Can't you have your destiny when you're ready?'

He turned back to her. 'I wish it were that simple, but the Time Lords have summoned me now, and I have to go.'

'I don't want to do this, you know. If I didn't have to go, I'd tell them to bugger off like a shot.'

In her bedroom, Ruth heard the door close. She wiped her eyes with a corner of the pillow she was hugging to her chest.

She hadn't told Clifford of her deepest, most private and terrifying suspicion. It had been about six weeks since the day she'd first entered his TARDIS.[22] She'd been grumpier than usual, feeling increasingly queasy, especially in the mornings. And there'd been an unpleasant occurrence, or rather a lack of an occurrence, which was beginning to lead her to an increasingly likely conclusion.

He - the barman - was dressed in faded, Earth-style trousers, a T-shirt and a brightly coloured waistcoat. His hair was trimmed short and neat and the handkerchief he was currently wringing in his pale grey hands was another pattern from Earth.

Just my luck to be stuck with a frokkin' human loser on my final shift for the week, the Investigator thought. Humans - especially Terran humans - though by no means unheard of, were few and far between on Patou, but there were occasional travellers that came through the town. Very infrequently, one would decide that the isolation from other humans was worthwhile for the simple lifestyle and natural beauty of the planet. An additional bonus was that the Patou legal system wasn't aligned with Federation law, and persons with criminal histories could easily hide from authorities. When one of them voluntarily chose to call the authorities, therefore, it was really quite an event, particularly when the human in question was as distraught as this one.

'Once more for my benefit,' piped the plain-robed Investigator said, looking up at his uniformed colleague and rolling his eyes.

'Oh-okay,' he said, and drew a shuddering breath. 'The guy came in around the eighth cycle, looking kinda dazed...'

He walked up to the bar and stared in wonder at all the bottles lining the shelving behind it. His rather odd memory assured him that this place appeared to have everything. The barman walked over to him and laid down a clean glass.

'What can I get you?' he asked in deep voice that reminded his customer, for some reason, of a Raven.

He opened his mouth to reply, and found he had no idea. He knew he'd like a bourbon and coke, would have killed for a belt of pepper vodka and wanted nothing more than to sit down with a half-glass of port and a good book. He also felt sure that he shouldn't have anything but a nice mug of tea.

'Whiskey?' he heard himself say. He realised his voice sounded quite nice, so he said it again. The barman just smiled and fetched down a bottle. He poured a generous amount into a glass and then pushed it over to him.

His customer nodded and reached into his pocket. The wonder-filled look on his face disappeared to be replaced by one of worry. Still, this was a chance to talk again.

This seemed to stump his customer, who started casting about the bar, seemingly seeking inspiration for a name. In his customers brain, a discussion between, well, himself and himself really, was going on along the lines of:

'I'd heard a lot of humans around here don't use the names they were born with. Me, I'm stuck with Trellan. You been in town long? I don't recognise you.'

The barman said something to this, but Harvey paid it no heed. Now that he had a name - and the word Harvey now seemed well and truly written in his mental form under 'Name (Given)' - other things were starting to crystallise in his mind. He knew he liked girls and boys, but for some reason he appeared to like boys better. He knew he liked the occasional drink, but the thought of getting - and this word meant little to him - drunk sent his mind spinning.

When it came to double beds, he was a right-side-only guy, but he also liked to sprawl in the middle when he could. A million small concepts, conceits and ideas were condensing around his - he savoured the word - name and forming an image of what he was. He had an identity!

There was enough of the former for him to make sure that the latter was far more important.

Ruth sat somewhat uncomfortably on the throne. It was a quiet day in Court; no one wanted her to declare war or raise taxes on the turnip harvest, which meant that all she really had to do was receive dignitaries and behave regally. She didn't like the last part. It was very uncomfortable for her to sit for any length of time, particularly in a draughty palace. Ratbat and Bobbi had both bitched about various aspects of pregnancy, but the difficulty in maintaining affairs of state hadn't been one of them. She had long reflected on the irony that she'd probably ruined Elizabeth's reputation as the Virgin Queen. Fortunately she seemed to be carrying her baby quite a long way inside, which meant that it wasn't immediately obvious, particularly if she chose her clothes carefully.

Things were getting along, though, she reflected as she bid farewell to the ambassador from the government of Venice. Pretty soon, she'd have to confide in someone, because she was buggered if she was going to give birth by herself.

She trudged slowly along the corridor that led to her quarters. The extra weight put her off-balance, making walking somewhat difficult. Although the hours of sitting in state hadn't done her back any good, she was grateful to be able to fling herself into a soft chair.

There was a warm fire crackling in the grate. Outside, the trees were being tossed and tormented by a late afternoon snowstorm. Christmas had come and gone with a minimum of fuss and bother, and it was now early January. Soon, she reflected, the snow would start melting and her son or daughter would be born. Illegitimate child of an impostor Elizabeth I, the supposedly virgin queen.

She sighed and rubbed her eyes. And where was the poor thing's father when all this was going on? Busy on some Time Lord planet. Being a council member. Having a life. Being free.

Soon, she would never be free again. It was almost a year since the accident which had blown her from the Compromise in the 24th century to England in the 16th. It was becoming an increasingly distant memory. Somehow she felt slightly envious of all her old friends, none of whom had any idea what she was going through.

As she had done quite frequently in recent months, she sat back and mentally went through all her old friends, making sure she remembered them. The future she'd come from may not have existed any more, but as long as she remembered it, it would never truly die.

There was, however, a chance that her being flung into the timeline like a boulder in a goldfish pond hadn't irretrievably damaged life as she knew it in the future. She was pretty sure that at least one of her friends would still be born.

'Yes, Ratti was born around this time sometime, wasn't she,' she remarked to the little dog that the Earl of Essex had given her as a Christmas present. She'd named him Richard Uproar, after a gentleman whom it had been her duty to knight at one point.

Richard continued to sit on the hearth-rug and pant, in the nature of dogs everywhere. He was a good listener.

'Yes...Urac Daria Harriet blah blah Sigma, born February tenth, 1563. Supposedly the daughter of...'

Ratbat was due to be born in about a month or so. She was, so she said, the daughter of Elizabeth the First.

And who was the only available candidate for being Elizabeth the First, pregnant, and due to give birth around the beginning of February?

Ruth picked up Richard Uproar and started to cuddle him feverishly. 'Oh my,' she said, as he licked her face. 'I think I'm about to give birth to my superior officer.'

Clifford leaned on his console and sighed. He didn't understand how people like the Doctor could stand having humans around. They were such infectious creatures. They got under your skin and made you want to have humans around all the time. And just when you'd got really attached to them, something came up and you had to either leave them, or they'd get killed. It was a never-ending heartbreak.

As a general rule, Time Lords didn't indulge in what might be called the pleasures of the flesh. It wasn't that they didn't enjoy it, or even that they couldn't do it, as some other species had cruelly suggested. It was just a case of not seeing a great amount of point in it. Now, after being with Ruth, Clifford wasn't so sure any more.

It had been hard to lie to her. The Laws of Time hadn't really said anything about him interfering in her basic situation; there was nothing wrong with him taking her back to the Compromise. However, there were, for her, extenuating circumstances which prohibited interference. He knew about the predestination paradox that she was doomed to be a part of. And removing her from the paradox would have meant that she never had the child that would end up being partially responsible for the helping the Doctor recover from his seventh regeneration over four hundred years later. The damage to the space-time continuum would have been disastrous.

He had to take comfort in the knowledge that the Compromise crew would eventually get her back, although he couldn't quite recall how. She wouldn't be away from her friends for too long.

It still hurt to leave her. Despite a distressing fondness for physical violence as a solution to everything from disagreement to PMT to boredom, she was a very agreeable person. Deep in his double hearts, he was beginning to feel uncomfortably suspicious that he had fallen for her in some way. He could still remember the softness of her skin, the way her eyes lit up when she laughed, the touch of her lips...

The console gave a deep groan, which snapped him out of his reverie. Lights flickered that shouldn't have; a screen in the corner lit up. Emergency landing, it said in red letters.

Flicking one switch with his elbow, Clifford dived over the console to hit the rematerialisation control. The TARDIS gave a shuddering creak, the force of the sudden landing so great as to threaten the temporal grace. He gripped the edge of the console and shut his eyes.

Gradually, Clifford unclenched his fingers from the console and stood up. Making sure there was no danger of further jolting, he flipped the scanner switch and looked out where he'd landed.

Curiosity overcoming him in that troublesome way it did, he opened the doors and ventured outside.

'Man, that's Frisco, all right,' he commented. The fact that he had materialised in plain view of the Golden Gate Bridge told him that much. Strange how TARDISes seemed to gravitate towards major landmarks. Maybe they were tourists at heart.

'Excuse me, young man,' said a flat voice from behind him. 'But is this your vehicle?'

Clifford turned. Now, he hadn't done so well on Emergency Services Uniforms From The North American Region Of Sol Three In Mutter's Spiral During The Early Twenty-First Century 101 while he was at the Academy, but he was fairly sure that this cat was talking like the police while dressed like an ambulance driver.

How did he know that his TARDIS - currently disguised as a portajohn - was a vehicle?

He would have addressed the point were it not for the fact that the next thing the new arrival did was deliver a blow to his neck and knock him unconscious.

'Well, now it's not,' said the Master plainly, before boarding Clifford's timeship for a journey that we have already seen the eventual outcome of - on Titan.

On the screen above the keyboard, the words Interphase complete flashed slowly on and off as the Master bent over his machine, making sure the electrodes were in place. He stood and began typing.

A knocking from outside the warehouse disturbed his calculations. Without looking, the Master flipped a switch that disconnected the magnetic seal.

The leader shrugged. 'Sorry, Bo-- Master. It's hard to get phasers on this planet.'

The Master raised a supercilious eyebrow. 'I needn't have bothered hiring you. I managed to kill these intruders quite well myself.'

The Master gave a curt nod, and continued his typing. The ruffians made themselves comfortable around the machinery.

After a few minutes of quiet broken only by the tapping of the keys, the Master stood back, satisfied.

The ice-pick of pain seated itself between the lobes of Harvey's brain as his glass was halfway to his lips. He dropped it and threw his hands up to shield his eyes from the agonising light of the bar. The glass fell to the bar, spilling its contents and shattering. He clutched at his head and screamed. The barman, who had been talking quietly to him, leapt back against the shelves, the bottles rattling, as the hollow sound of pain filled the bar.

Suddenly, Harvey's hand fell away from his face and gripped the edges of the bar. Trellan watched in numb horror, noting the piece of glass that pierced his hand. Blood welled. Red blood. This guy wasn't just a human on the run from the law, he was a fraggin' psychopath! He staggered back, pulling the shard from his palm and lurching toward the door.

Too shocked to comprehend his actions, Trellan bent forward to clean up with a dish rag the blood that had dripped to the floor.

A bottle from the top shelf began to rock backward and forth, before gently toppling off the shelf and landing squarely on the barman's head.

As he lay on the floor amidst shards of glass and spilt Romulan ale, Trellan began to curse the day he'd broken Federation trade restrictions.

Harvey rounded the corner into the warehouse district at a dead run. His breathing was deep and regular, and his body seemed conditioned, and yet every few steps he had the nagging feeling that his legs would buckle, as if they couldn't run properly. That, however, was the least of his worries at the moment.

He had appeared out of thin air in an alleyway with no clear idea - other than four or five conflicting voices running through his head - of who he was. He had then gone into a bar, made some idle chit-chat with the barkeep, chosen a name and started polarising a personality when a bolt of pain had struck his mind and he had run off to find its source (he felt he knew how, but didn't know how he knew).

Now he was growing closer to where the bolt had come from (however he'd done it), and was also realising that he had no idea what he was going to do when he got there. If someone could hurt him that much from such a distance - he had been running flat-out for at least five minutes, and would shortly run out of adrenaline and endorphins - what would they be able to do up close? What if the pain had truly been a cry for help, as it had seemed? What if they cried out again when he was so near?

This last point of concern for him was suddenly removed when he fell against a wall, struck by a solid bolt of psychic agony. He lurched to his feet and staggered off down the street, determined to save the voices at their source, if for no other reason than to shut them up.

There were times when Ruth Crabb - she whom the world currently knows as Elizabeth I of England - regretted, or was occasionally even remorseful, about the pain she caused others.

She wasn't thinking that now - now she knew that she personally was in the worst pain of any human being ever in history. Any history.

She tried to get a handle on it by thinking back to things she'd been told about childbirth in the years to come:[23]

'Having a baby is the most wonderful, joyous thing any woman can do. Just that it hurts like buggery, that's all.'

Crap yeah. Natural event. Like earthquakes, tidal waves, and the destruction of Krypton. Argh, not a bad comparison. It did kind of feel like there was a planet exploding in her nether regions.

She growled harshly. She wanted drugs. She wanted anaesthesia, she wanted caesareans, she wanted all the medical benefits of the twenty-fourth century. Or even the twenty-third. She drew the line at the mid-twenty-second, as that had heralded another fad of doing it all naturally.

She strained and tried to push some more. Push? Fuck, what was this? She didn't push things! She just shot them with phasers![25] God this was bad so bad she wanted to be anywhere but here...

After a short time more - which seemed to the substitute monarch to be precisely seven thousand times that long - it was finally over. After almost four hundred years of producing pain and death, Ruth Katherine 'Elizabeth' Crabb had at last produced life.

She was soon staring at the babe bawling in her arms. She wanted to simply see her as a younger version of the Green Flame. Parts of her were scolding the rest for not just thinking, Oh, look - it's Ratbat born here and now, just like history said. But all of those voices were drowned out by the overwhelming notion she had been carrying the baby chiropteran inside her for the past nine months,[26] and had just brought her forth, out into the world.

She shook her head, causing a tear to shake loose from her eye and run down her cheek. 'And just what am I going to do with you?' she asked her daughter.

Little Urac just responded with a sound that was no doubt intended as a profound statement on her newfound place in a world with air in it, but simply emerged as a lot of bawling.

'Never mind,' she sighed, cradling the Green Spark in her arms. 'Ratti dear...I'm your mother. Don't worry...over time, we get to take turns at being in charge of each other...'

Chaedy sat in 10-Foreplay rather dejectedly, fiddling with one of her latest devices. It was a small portable spectral analyser, with a special attachment for making coffee and predicting weather cycles. So far, Euan hadn't done anything about approving her application for a research grant to further her studies. Maybe if she threatened to have sex with him again, that might get him moving.

Or maybe she could lean on Barry. He was even more susceptible to her feminine charms; even wearing her loose-knit white crop-top in the same room made him break into a sweat.

She was weighing up the merits of the white crop-top and the 23rd-century uniform when the door swished open and Tuvok walked in.

'Evening Mr Vulcan,' she said, somewhat blasé. 'Glad to see you get out and about a bit.'

He sat down on the stool next to hers. 'Unfortunately, I am not here for entertainment. I wish to speak to you about the devices that have caused the recent disruptions to the space-time continuum. Is this one of your inventions?' he asked.

'I am not really interested in the merits of this contrivance,' he interrupted. 'I was hoping to speak to you about the device which sent your crewmember into the past and retrieved Queen Elizabeth the First.'

Somehow, when said in that infuriatingly calm Vulcan manner, the situation sounded even stupider.

'Well, it wasn't all that different from this thing, actually. I mean, it was about the same size. Mr Mot needed his curling wand mended, y'see, and I got the thing and stuck a couple of chips in the heat circuits, you know, it looked like they needed a bit of a boost. Anyway,' she unscrewed the coffee attachment on the analyser. 'If you look in here, you can see some of the circuitry I used. I borrowed it, 'cos Mr Mot said he wasn't going to touch that wand again ever...'

Tuvok was momentarily taken aback by the sudden stream of information that was directed at him. He peered into the cavity Chaedy was indicating so enthusiastically. Gingerly, he prodded one of the analysers.

'I am not certain that I understand what you are doing with that. It's not the way I was taught to use signal output analysers.'

'Well, of course it's not the conventional way of using them, but if you'll take a look here, I'll show you...'

'Listen, I'm the one who knows how it works, you stupid Vulcan! If I say it's safe, it's safe.'

'Of course. It's as safe as the Lusitania. Anyway, the thing that went wrong with the wand was in the di-tetrion wavelength distortion. I hadn't bargained on the distortion being greater than more than fifteen kilo-jeps, but it turned out to be more than six thousand. So that's why we lost Ruth and got Elizabeth.'

For once, Tuvok looked blank. 'I believe technology must have made some significant progress since I left,' he remarked, somewhat downcast.[27]

'Look, I can demonstrate.' She pulled the other end off her spectral analyser. 'If I just adjust the input frequency here...' She fiddled with it. 'I think it's like this.'

'Lieutenant Ritherdon, did you have this connected to the ship's power supply?' the Vulcan asked warily.

Shaking his head, Tuvok looked inside what was left of the analyser. Although he didn't quite understand the finer details of the technology involved, he could see that what Chaedy had put together was like a time-bomb waiting to go off.

Fortunately, nothing bad seemed to have happened. If he dismantled this right now, there was a chance nothing would go wrong.

'Chaedy, this is Nicole, down in sickbay. Um, you wouldn't happen to have a piece of equipment around you at the moment, would you?'

'I thought as much. Look, I think it's important I let you know, what ever you just did has caused one of the most famous European monarchs in history to completely vanish!'

It was a chilly day in early February. The winter snows were still heavy on the ground, making the world look like it was wearing a fur wrap. In the palace grounds, gardeners waded through the drifts, going about the business of pruning the roses, digging the paths clear, and all the other myriad tasks that royal gardeners busy themselves with during winter.

Ruth turned back from the window and sighed. It was more than a year since she had seen Clifford. She still thought longingly about the feel of his arms around her, his warm breath on her cheek. She missed him more than she had ever thought possible. Fiercely independent since a very early age, she had never really had time for deep personal affection. The Evil Bunnies had supplied the position of a family in her life, in a way, but she realised that for a brief, tantalising moment, she had been part of another life, and now found that she missed that intimacy.

On the hearthrug, cuddling Sir Richard Uproar, the one unavoidable reminder of her brief but momentous acquaintance with Clifford was gurgling and sticking fingers up her nose. The staff in the palace had been even more discreet than usual at her sudden weight loss. Although she had managed to conceal the fact of her pregnancy to a reasonable extent, the act of giving birth was never a quick and easy one, particularly with Ruth's diminutive frame. She still blushed at the thought of the number of people who had been injured in the process.

Little Urac was quite a happy child, although she was not particularly robust. Despite some genuine fear for her survival soon after the birth, she was growing reasonably fast now, and was a happy, bouncing one year old.

Ruth sighed and knelt down beside her daughter. 'Do you know, I never thought I'd be able to tell any of my friends I was there on their first birthday. Particularly not you,' she remarked to the baby.

She picked the child up, cradling her to her bosom, which had shrunk back to its usual size, much to her annoyance. The little fingers were curling themselves around her hair, which was trailing down her neck again. It seemed so much more appropriate to have longer hair now that she was a queen and a mother. A mother. That was her. She would be the mother to Urac that she'd always wanted herself.

Gently, she placed the baby on the rug, watching her toddle, in a very wobbly fashion, to the hearthrug, where Richard Uproar was trying to sleep. A smile, of a sort which would have shocked any of her crewmates, crossed her face.

Urac stopped in the act of poking Richard Uproar in the nose[28] and listened intently, her head on one side.

A phantom wind, which whipped up her hair but left the curtains hanging limp, whistled past her legs, billowing her skirts up and partly blinding her.

She snatched up a poker, the nearest weapon she could grab, and tried to slash it at her unseen assailant.

The poker fell end over end and landed on the floor, rolling and clattering against the stone fireplace.

Elizabeth the First, Virgin Queen of England, stood in her sitting room and looked down. The poker was on the floor. For some reason, the room looked strangely unfamiliar, as though she hadn't been there for a while. And she had the strangest feeling, as though something had happened to her and she'd forgotten it. It was like waking up from a dream and not being able to remember anything.

There was a small girl child on the hearthrug, next to a rather endearing dog. Neither looked familiar.

Although Urac was brought up by the Queen and her servants, there was never a feeling of family between them. Elizabeth could never come to terms with the fact that she'd had a daughter without realising it, and ended up by convincing herself that Urac was simply a poor misfortunate child whom had been given the honour of growing up in the palace. Urac, uncertain of the exact circumstances, eventually managed to get the story out of one of the midwives; Elizabeth had given birth to the girl, but had then gone even madder and convinced herself that she was still childless. Feeling rejected, unsurprisingly, Urac herself ended up leaving home at age seventeen, leaving a still-baffled Elizabeth feeling rather relieved at the departure of this strange girl who seemed to be her daughter in every aspect but the actual.

'So what is it you hope to accomplish with this "Apple Macabre"?' Chick asked, quite proud of her joke and quite annoyed that the Master seemed to have missed it.

'I assure you,' Chick said, her patience with this enigmatic psycho beginning to wear thin. 'Had you told me, I would not now be asking you to repeat yourself. What are you going to do with this thing?'

'It is very simple, with the knowledge I have obtained from these subjects, and the core of my TARDIS...not to mention a few other...toys I acquired along the way, I intend to create--'

But he never finished, as it was at that point that a breathless Harvey kicked the door to the warehouse open and rushed headlong into the side of the computer. After staggering back and shaking his head, he looked to where the Master had attached the crew to his machinery.

As heroic challenges of a throwing down the gauntlet nature, it left a lot to be desired, but the sentiment was there. The Master's reply was to throw his head back and laugh, a sound made all the more chilling as it was the first true sign of mirth Chick had seen him make. He spun on his crouched heel, standing as he turned and pressed a sequence of buttons on the console.

'I believe you are too late, my young interloper,' he said as he threw a lever with a flourish.

This close, the burst of anguish struck Harvey with a physical force. He was thrown off balance, stumbled, and he landed with a muffled thud on a fortunately deep pile of sack-cloth. He was momentarily dazed, and when he stood up, he felt warmth trickle from his nose. Wiping it away, he moved around the corner to where Chick and Master were.

As he approached them, Chick raised her disruptor, but the Master stopped her firing.

'Wait. Don't waste your power,' he said simply, and watched as Harvey walked closer. 'He seems to be affected by the machinery...who is he?' His curiosity overwhelmed his feelings that it probably would have been better to just seal off the building again.

Harvey staggered. 'Release my...' What were they? Friends? Who were they? Wasn't he here to stop the psychic bolts? What was going on?

Before he could ask himself another stupid question, there was a sensation of movement from behind the machine, and eleven figures appeared in front of him. They were tall, tough, and looked extremely mean.

'Friends from the town,' said the Master, by way of introduction. 'Whoever you are, meet Mr Bugsy and his associates. Bugsy, please kill this young man.'

Bugsy, grinning maniacally, raised his disruptor. Harvey dove to one side as a beam of scarlet energy scored a bubbling streak in the far wall of the warehouse. Five of the other heavies followed the lead of the first and Harvey barely managed to dive into the cover of a row of shelving before more fire rained down around him.

All I have to do is get them in each other's crossfire, Harvey told himself. He crawled along the passageway, trying to work out how to achieve this end. He was without weapons, save himself, and without backup, save himself. He was up against far too many armed and trained nasties who had experience, weapons, and numbers on their side. All in all, he'd had better minutes.

His musing caused him to pause for a few seconds, and he was barely able to roll out of the way before three bolts of phaser energy converged on where he had been lying. A stray ricochet caught one of the leads from the computer and there was a burst of sparks.

'He's unarmed! Don't use energy weapons and be careful what you cut!' Chick noticed an further degree of tension edging its way into the Master's voice.

After an all-too-brief pause, the mob began to advance again, this time wielding heavy steel clubs. This Harvey found out when he rolled out from under a shelf, then rolled straight back again as one of them struck sparks from the ground where his head had just been. As another walked past, crouching slightly, Harvey struck out with his leg, catching the man on the shins and nearly tripping him. He stumbled and grabbed at one of the shelves for support. There was the groaning, shrieking sound of tearing metal, and shelves toppled over, revealing Harvey but crushing the unfortunate gangster like a china toy.

Outside the building, there was another one of those scientifically worrying examples of a humanoid appearing from nowhere. This time, however, it was a small security chief in the regalia of a British monarch, circa 1560, who had, until moments previously,[29] been attending the first birthday of her only daughter.

Could I be back? she wondered. Was this the twenty-fourth century again? After two years, was her medieval adventure over?

Before she could think any more deeply, she heard a sound coming from the nearby building, through the open door. And it was one of her favourite sounds, no matter the century.

Harvey just managed to scramble to his feet before the club of the heavy he'd tripped came crashing down, but it clipped his shoulder and blood flew. Staggering against the wall, Harvey left a bloody streak that dripped unpleasantly as he bounced off and staggered straight into the waiting arms of Bugsy. He caught him up in a bear hug, and Harvey screamed as he felt and heard the wet snap as two of his ribs broke. The mobster dropped him and drew back a foot to cave in his skull. He was interrupted by a sound best described a less-than-polite colloquial roar, and the connecting of Bugsy the goon's head with a small, irate, recently-retired monarch.

Ruth hoped she had correctly guessed the scorecard of good-guys-and-bad-guys here, and struck Bugsy again, felling him.

On the ground was a figure best described as beaten, clutching at his ribs and looking very worried. There was something about him that Ruth found familiar, but that had to wait as she currently had to deal with five large men with big, horrible clubs closing in on her from all sides.

I knew there was one different! Her mind yelled at her. 'Call up some reinforcements and get us the fuck out of here!' she screamed at him.

However, the Master, for once, was completely at a loss. Chick, deciding that alliances were all very well but this guy was a total nutcase, began to surreptitiously rummage around the machinery.

Ruth noticed this activity, but the five large, dangerous-looking men immediately around her drew in, so her attention to Chick and the Master had to wait.

Chick disconnected the system that held the Compromise crewmembers, and looked hastily at what remained of the dismantled TARDIS console. She'd never used one, only ever seeing one once, but knew the theory behind working it. The destination was marked in as 'The Epicentre.'

The Epicentre! Of course! That was what this machine was for! There was a reason for the dead losers! The Master was trying to track the Epicentre!

'Hey, Master!' she yelled. The Master watched, disbelieving, as Ruth powered her way, kicking, punching, biting and scratching, through the two men who faced her. Three more stood back, between her and Harvey. The remaining four hirelings were watching in surprise.

The three men who had been guarding Harvey lunged at Ruth at the same time, and again Ruth dodged out of the way. One of them caught her dress and petticoats and there was a purring sound as cloth gave way, but she didn't care. She pivoted on her left foot, bringing up her right and driving it into the uncovered face of the man to her right. When it impacted, in a satisfyingly gristly sound, she ground her heel into his face and pushed him away from her.

One of his fellows had time enough for another futile swing, as Ruth grabbed his arm and tore it from its socket. The shocked assailant fell down and Ruth stood there, arm in one hand, the other clenched into a fist, her dress in tatters and splashed with gore, her hair dishevelled and her breathing ragged. She looked down at her scratched hands and tattered clothing.

'Oh yeah? Beat you to the Epicentre!' yelled Chick, as the battered TARDIS finally responded. She and the machine slowly vanished with a vworp.

The Master stood, aghast, but thought quickly enough to start making for the door.

Ruth had time enough to wonder what the hell the Epicentre was before she realised she had about a second to act before the Master got away.

'Hey, ugly!' she called. The Master paused for a moment, looking up just in time to catch a disembodied arm between the eyes.

The four uninvolved mercenaries decided that it was time to help their one remaining friend, having seen a former colleague having his arm torn off. Throwing down their clubs, they seized phasers and disruptors and advanced.

From Euan's corpse, there was a muffled chirp. 'Gault to Bowen. Are you getting anywhere with the seismic problems?'

As Ruth dodged the phaser-fire, she seized a fallen club which was lying next to Harvey. 'You! Get to that comm badge and get reinforcements in here now!'

Harvey, his brain dulled by pain, fear and adrenaline, knew the tone of command when he heard it. Wriggling underneath a volley of phaser-fire, he crawled across the floor, littered with blood and body-parts, to the body. For some reason it looked quite familiar. He prodded vaguely at the chest area. 'Hello? Anyone there?'

'Um, no. Harvey here. Uh, hello. The small violent woman...er, Miss Ruth, wants to know if you can send us reinforcements.'

Ruth, warding off her assailants by swinging one of their fellows around by his hair, gave a scream. 'Barry! If you don't get reinforcements here in the next five seconds I'll make your life perfectly foul!!!'

Within thirty seconds, a security team arrived. Bursting through a hole the wall came an unknown Vulcan and Emma the Christian. Following them were Niki and Jaan, as well as two lovelies Ruth had never seen before, wearing old uniforms. All Harvey knew was that six more people had entered the room, which, his foggy brain rationalised, would hopefully mean that there would be more people to distract the gangsters from him. At this point, however, loss of blood, broken ribs, and general battering took their toll, and he gently slid away into a comfortable blackness.

'Shoot the bastards!' Niki cried as her phaser bolt struck one of the bad guys in his left shoulder, removing an arm and neatly knocking back his weapon. Tuvok, crouched beside her, fired his own phaser, hitting one of them dead centre and knocking him back.

'We shall have to discuss giving orders in a combat situation, Ensign O'brien,' he said calmly, taking down another attacker. Niki turned to him and stuck her tongue out.

With Ruth's help, the security lovelies made short work of the remaining heavies and soon they were gathered before the remains of the Master's computer as Emma the Christian saw to Harvey.

'What the feck is this?' Niki asked, surveying the twists of wire and ranks of circuit boards that were in and around the bodies. She had just enough time to register exactly what it was before she turned away and was heartily ill.

'You had best send a medical and engineering team down here. It would appear that the command crew is being used as components of an unknown kind of computer.'

'Okay, I need three people each from engineering and medical. Captain Janeway, did you hear that?'

'Affirmative,' came the reply from Voyager. 'Request permission to beam down with the engineering team.'

'From medical, I'd like Nicole and the M^cMillans to go. And can we hurry please?'

The groups materialised in the warehouse to see the security detail just standing around. Ruth was sitting in a corner not saying anything, and the others were too shocked to be doing much else. Only Tuvok and his companion were doing anything, and that was just making sure the shield generators were off.

The engineering team busied themselves with looking at the computer while the medical team checked the bodies of their crew members. It was Nicole who first recovered from her shock, so it was she who ran the first tricorder test on the bodies. As a result it was her who hurriedly tapped her communicator.

The M^cMillans looked from Nicole to the bodies of their friends and back again.

'I think I can help explain,' came Janeway's voice. As she spoke, she was running a tricorder over the remaining secondary console. 'It would appear that this machinery is administering micro-shocks to the cerebral matter of your crew members, and at the same time is feeding it oxygen and other nutrients.'

'Could we have the English version please, Captain? I'm a little down on my bioelectrical theorem.'

Barry's mind raced. Did that mean there was hope? Or did it just mean that his friends could eke out their existence as cyber-vegetables?[30]

Nicole spoke again: 'Except...except for the Captain, Ratbat, Bobbi and Graham. I'm not really getting any brain activity at all from them.' She swallowed. 'I have a feeling Recycled Virgins are dead.'

The confused-looking figure in the corner of the room spoke up. 'Ah...' he said. 'I think I might, well...that is...'

Harvey sighed. 'Harvey. RV. Recycled Virgins. I'm them. They're me.' He took a breath, and tried to put it all together. He was catching up fast, but given who he now knew he was composed of, making a sentence understandable was a nightmare. 'When this machine did what it did, something must have taken our minds and siphoned them off, then replicated this body for them. Me. They. Uh.'

Nicole smiled broadly and tapped her chest again. 'Cancel that, Barry. The RVs aren't dead, they've just been amalgamated by a mechanical glitch into a gestalt being.'

A sigh was heard. 'If this ever finishes, I swear I'm never going to say anything rude about any gods ever again.

'No, sir,' piped up Nurse Wylie who spoke up, her voice thoughtful. 'But if we modify the replicator with design specifications, and tie in some of the equipment here... we may be able to fix their bodies.'

'Of course!' cried Janeway. 'All we need to do is sample their DNA and use the medical replicators - in conjunction with the transporter and these pieces of machinery -'

'And we can beam them up and back again, repairing their bodies as we go!' Nicole finished.

'Fortunately, after more than three hundred and fifty years in medicine, I've learnt a thing or two about these gadgets...' added Nicole.

'Did someone say jury-rig?' she asked, stepping toward the computer and opening her case. There was the flash of a stun blast as Chaedy's eyes rolled back in her head and she fell gently to the floor. Everyone turned to look at Niki, who was doing her best to look innocent and failing miserably.

The modifications took forty-seven extremely tense minutes to make, and when they were done the engineering and medical teams spent a further forty minutes making sure everything was as it should be.

Nicole turned to face Harvey. 'Now,' she asked, 'are you ready to be, uh...split?'

Harvey blinked. 'Are you kidding? I canna wait! Since I've been getting my memories back, I'm thinking that four minds becoming one isn't the fun it's cracked up to be. I mean, learning what Graham really thinks of me has not been a fun experience.'

Barry looked around at the hopeful faces of the reserve bridge crew. It was now or never.

'Okay. Phase one, on my mark. Three, two, one... mark,' he tilted his head. 'Shadowcat...energise.'

'That should do it,' she said, and stood back, watching - as everyone else was - the bodies of the command crew, and Harvey.

As they watched, the bodies shimmered in the familiar way of a transporter beam-out. Mass was turned to energy, signals adapted and technology strained in ways it wouldn't be able to repeat.

The forms began to reappear, and at first Janeway's heart sank. They were in exactly the same positions. But then she noticed that Graham's face was back, and so was Euan's, well, back. In fact, they were all at least more together. And then Ratbat blinked.

Epicentre? thought Ruth. Chick was going on about something called the Epicentre. What would that be? She continued on her way from sickbay.

It was vaguely disturbing how easy she was finding it to re-adjust to starship life after two years in a medieval court. Something about familiar environments having that effect on people, maybe? She walked on, and almost ran into Ratbat as she came around the corner.

'Och, howyeh, Ruth?' the brunette asked cheerily. 'Good to be back in the land of replicators and TV with more channels than all the lighting boards I've ever worked on put together?'

OK, an almost familiar environment. She couldn't bring herself to tell Ratbat what had gone on with Clifford...or more to the point, what had gone on with herself some months afterward. It would just be...awkward.

Neelix wandered idly around Voyager's mess-hall. It was good to know that everyone was safe, and that that poor planet below was no longer in danger of shaking itself to pieces like a Gizernian pulse-egg, but it still seemed that those things - along with the fact that they had finally arrived in the Alpha Quadrant - had been met with something of an anticlimax. That was a shame.

The door opened to admit Kes. 'Hello, sweetie,' he greeted his significant other.

'They're finally home,' he told her. 'Are they really going to need us anymore? They'll be able to get a new Bussard scoop and power their replicators until the speelsnapes come home! And no offence, dear - but do you really think that Starfleet isn't going to prefer their own nurses over some...alien, trained by a hologram?' He folded his arms on the counter and pouted.

'Neelix,' chided Kes. 'Just because we're in the Federation, doesn't mean that everyone's instantly going to part company. This is a good ship - see how we've been running ourselves for the last two years? And the captain's a good woman. I'm sure she'll do everything she can to keep us all together.'

Neelix seemed to brighten at that. 'You're right, Kes,' he said. 'And...and I needn't worry about something that hasn't even happened yet. In fact...' He looked around them. 'I've still got a fully-stocked kitchen. In fact, thanks to the Compromise assistance, better than fully-stocked. And do you know that we've hardly done any celebrating since we got here? And after we went and saved that planet, too!' He eagerly started rooting through his supplies. 'Kes - could you go and talk to Captain Janeway, and to the other captain--'

'Captain Bowen,' continued Neelix, 'and see what they'd say to a celebratory banquet for both crews, here on Voyager. Oh, my, this is going to be interesting, it's so long since I catered for such a large...'

Ratbat continued on her own way to sickbay, puzzling over the security chief's reaction to her. After all, she had bumped right into her. Last time she'd done that, she'd ended up with an undercut.

She entered sickbay to find the other three RVs already there, with Graham and Bobbi arguing about something.

Graham jabbed a finger in Bobbi's direction. 'She thinks that while we were Harvey, I tried to feel her up!'

'Yeah, and to keep size, you'll keep on feeding them till they're what, fifteen?'

'Sorry...' The commanding officer of the flagship of the United Federation of Planets sheepishly backed off.

Ratbat leaped on the break in the argument. 'Does anyone know why Ruth's been acting so weird to me ever since we got back from Patou?'

'Weird to you?' pondered Graham. 'I don't know. But there's a few weird things about her since she got back, I can tell you.'

'I reckon she's been gone longer than we thought. Look at the results from this medical I gave her. And look at this...she's even had a baby since we last saw her!'

Ratbat scowled. 'Ruth's child. Ergh, poor sod. So she hasn't just been gone a day or so like we thought? Maybe I should go try asking her.'

'Uh, I think I can answer that one.' No sooner had Ratbat exited than the doorway was filled by Chaedy, poring over a tricorder that she was holding upside-down.

'When she came back, she didn't come straight back the way she came. When the...miscalculation was reversed, it should have brought Ruth back from fifteen sixty-two - but she got it wrong by two years, and it actually whipped her back from fifteen sixty-four instead.'

Chaedy waved the readout in his face. 'Of course she was pregnant - she missed her period.'

[19] Although 'venture' is far too exciting a word to use in reference to Tuvok.

[20] Being treated like royalty is not always a picnic, nice though it may sound.

[21] Clifford obviously wasn't so crash-hot at geography either, otherwise he wouldn't have bothered, and just used the names of real places on Earth.

[23] Having to think in cross-temporal terms wasn't exactly helping matters, either.

[24] So far, all that she had in mind was doing nasty things to her physician and embarrassed-looking attendants with the furniture.

[25] Even if she'd had a phaser with her, trying to do that right now would be a less-than-perfect idea, gynaecologically speaking.

[26] This, of course, brings up a perfectly valid point that here is as good a place as any to address. How, you are wondering, can Ratbat be chiropteran when Ruth and Clifford plainly are not? The answer, dear reader, lies within the bizarre nature of chiropteran genetics.
The forces of nature hadn't failed to notice that since homo sapiens and chiroptera sapiens had, however improbably, reached the point of interbreeding, the far less populous chiropterans were in danger of being entirely bred out of the greater, largely simian, human race. Describing the precise nature of the intervening process is not the purpose of this narrative, but the modern interbreeding - or interbred - chiropteran is now calling into play what some have described as 'dominant recessive genetics'. To cut a confusing story short, a human with even as low as 30% chiropteran content in their genetic background has an 80% chance of ending up effectively 100% genetically chiropteran.
So, while it wasn't likely that any dormant chiropteran traits in Ruth's ancestry would suddenly renew themselves fully-formed as Ratbat, it was certainly possible. And - as Clifford might have noted - inevitable.
And so concludes the dodgy science lesson.

[27] It had made quite a lot of advances, true. Probably would have made a great deal more if Lieutenant Ritherdon hadn't kept breaking them.

[28] Look, she's only one, for Pterry's sake. She'll get sophistication and taste in good time - although we're not quite sure when.*
* The fact that her later self only last week referred to Homer Simpson's Odyssey may or may not be a good sign in this.

[29] 'Moments previously' in the 'over eight centuries ago' sense of the term.

[30] Fortunately Barry didn't say this aloud to any of the Voyager crew, or they would have been painfully reminded of the Cyber-Vegetables who had been their deadliest and most fearsome foe from the Delta Quadrant.