She hated bleak and wintry things alone.
All that was warm and quick, she loved too well--
A light, a flame, a heart against her own;
It is forever bitter cold, in Hell.
--Dorothy Parker, Tombstones in the Starlight

 Lynch fired the revolver, and the Doctor fell to his back with a startled cry. "My apologies, Doctor," he said, reholstering his pistol, "but I have my orders."

 "Understandable," the Doctor said, sitting up, "but impolite nonetheless. Perhaps a quiet word with your superiors?"

 "You're alive? But--how?"

 "Reflex. The heart keeps beating, the lungs keep pumping, and conscious thought is pretty much superfluous to the whole process. Nice, that...gives me time to wonder what 'the project' is, and why protecting it is worth infecting eight hundred people with a lethal biomorphic entity." His stare was like a dagger of ice pointed at Lynch's heart, and his voice was filled with a quiet, omnipotent chill.

 "I..." Lynch's words dried up in his throat. He'd been briefed about the Doctor...they'd told him that he was resourceful, clever, dangerous in the extreme. But they'd never told him about this stare...this look that reduced you to a child, ready to confess to any misdeeds, ready to repent for any sins if he would just stop looking at you like that...he tried again to speak. "I..."

 "Listen to me very closely. I don't know if you truly understand what it is you've unleashed, and right now, things are too desperate for me to fully make clear the enormity of the problem. So I'll simply ask, very politely, what you know about the project, and who instigated it."

 "La verite est la dehors," said Lynch, just before he collapsed.

 The Doctor reached into his pocket, very carefully, and pulled out a copy of Quotations From Mao. A bullet had gone halfway through the book, but had not managed to pass all the way through Mao's inspirational sayings. "Interesting," the Doctor muttered, "Mao's words stopping someone's death for once." He replaced the book in his breast pocket, and crawled over to Lynch. He checked for a pulse and, finding one, proceeded to pry open Lynch's eye.

 "Ah," he remarked, "hypnotic conditioning. Someone's very protective here..."

 "Indeed," Rakshan said from behind him. "Everyone has their secrets to keep, Doctor. Including you."

 The Doctor turned around to see Rakshan holding onto Leela in an iron grip, her body slumping lifelessly in its arms. "Are you going to try to kill me again?"

 "For the moment, Doctor, I see the benefits of a temporary alliance against the corruption. To that end, I have already captured this woman--she was lying in wait for you behind the vegetation."

 The Doctor nodded. "Tell me, when I was standing in front of the assassin there, calling out for someone and looking desperately at the bushes, did it perhaps cross your mind that I might be expecting an ally there?"

 "No."

 "Ah. Well, never mind, then. But could you let my friend go? I'm almost certain that's an unhealthy shade for a human to be turning." Rakshan complied, and Leela fell to the ground. "Thank you. Now, in order to more effectively combat the corruption, I think we should pool our information. I'll go first." He paused. "Alright, now you go."

 Suddenly, the door to the kitchen shattered into splinters, and Andrews' mother walked through the empty doorway. Her hands appeared to have been shattered at the wrist, but she seemed oblivious to the pain as she walked towards them. She opened her mouth to speak, but instead, writhing tentacles oozed their way out of her mouth.

 "On second thought," the Doctor said as he scooped up Leela, "perhaps we can pool our information later."

 Cobalt bombs were expensive, after all.

 "What is that thing?" the Doctor asked as they slammed another door behind them.

 "The penultimate corruption. The prelude to the end of life on this planet. Everything I have worked to stop."

 "Just what I was thinking myself. However, I was hoping for something a bit more empirical."

 They made a final dash to the front door to the mansion, just as the door to the foyer shattered behind them. They flung open the door, only to be confronted with row upon row of villagers, their eyes a dull, brassy red, their hair leached of its color, their faces contorted in hate. "Aigthsninsssethine," the one in front said, reaching out for the Doctor.

 The Doctor slammed the door in his face. "No solicitors," he said, turning to face Andrews' mother.

 Splinters of bone now protruded through the stumps of her wrists were her hands were, and thin tubular filaments slithered in and out of the center of the now-hollow bones like grotesque tongues. The tentacles in her mouth were distending her jaw now, and she wept tears of blood as she walked towards them.

 "The Queen Mother is nearing birth," Rakshan whispered as she approached. "She seeks to use us as a source of nutrients for the newborn Primus--until that source is available, she will seek to contain him within herself."

 "Then let's try to prolong things, shall we?" The Doctor smiled, and tossed a jelly baby over the Queen Mother's shoulder. She turned for an instant to track its flight, and in that instant, the Doctor darted to the left. Seeing its opportunity, Rakshan darted to the right. Both of them ran directly past the Queen Mother, narrowly avoiding tendrils that lashed out at them.

 Andrews wasn't so lucky. A tentacle an inch thick split the skin of the Queen Mother's leg and wrapped itself around his ankle. He fell down hard, almost dragging the Doctor with him.

 The Doctor turned back, aghast, but Rakshan pulled him forwards again. "Too late," it said, "the Primus has already begun to feed."

 The Queen Mother's skin had already split now in dozens of places, each one with a tendril that extended from it. They dug into Andrews' flesh, drinking greedily of his blood, sucking his vital fluids into some central shape that was even now ripping its way free of the body of its mother...

 The Doctor and Rakshan ran.

 The Doctor and Rakshan dashed through the kitchen without even noticing the small box on the floor. An accidental push from Rakshan's foot sent it tumbling down the stairs again.

 It was lucky its speakers were turned off, or the swearing would have given it away.

 "Curiouser and curiouser," the Doctor said. "Do you know what these red patches are?"

 "Yes," Rakshan said as it looked out the window. "It is a mild sedative. I secreted it to make her more manageable. If you like, I will secrete the anti-toxin." It dropped Lynch to the floor and walked over to Leela, smearing a greenish ooze across her forehead.

 Almost immediately, she started to moan. The Doctor smiled down at her. "Wakey wakey," he said.

 "Doctor," she croaked out, "someone attacked me."

 "Yes, but it turns out he didn't mean it. Leela, meet Rakshan. Rakshan, Leela. The two of you have a lot in common, oddly enough."

 Leela extended her had, but Rakshan had already returned to staring at the window. "Doctor," he asked, "how do you propose that we leave this building? The Primus will be searching for further nutrients almost immediately, and we are the closest source. It is entirely possible that it will decide to head for the village, of course, but it is more likely that we will be its first victims."

 "You mean it won't attack the infected villagers?"

 "No." Rakshan sighed. "It will use them as...appendages. They will bring it food, and further converts to become slaves to it. Eventually, this entire planet will be infested with the corruption. Then, it will begin to create a ship capable of traversing the interstellar void. It will consume its slaves, launch the ship, and place itself into a state of suspended animation until it can land on another planet and begin the process anew."

 The Doctor grimaced. "Sounds nasty. And you've been tracking one here?"

 "No, Doctor. I was tracking...it would be simpler if you knew all this already. Perhaps there is truth to your words when you say that the Time Lords did not send you here--I cannot imagine they would entrust a task of this urgency and leave you so utterly bereft of knowledge."

 "You will not speak to the Doctor that way!" Leela shouted, drawing her knife.

 "My apologies," Rakshan said with a sardonic grin. "It was not my intention to slight the Doctor's intelligence."

 "Quite alright," the Doctor said with a grin, "I'm more than used to it by now."

 "Indeed," Rakshan said. "In any event, I will endeavor to explain briefly. I am what is known as an Ajare, a member of a race of symbiotic lifeforms. We exist in the form of a microscopic spore that seeks out amenable lifeforms, and then commune with those lifeforms in a mutuallybeneficial relationship. We can also utilize our biomorphic talents to restructure non-sentient life in a similar fashion--"

 "Like your weapon," the Doctor responded.

 "I do not understand," Leela whispered. "Is he one of the red-eyed things out there?"

 "No!" Rakshan responded with unusual vehemence. "They are a corruption of everything we are--Ajare biomass that has been re- engineered for use as a weapon. A Matralan had stolen a supply of our spores, and was reconfiguring them here on Earth into a parasitic lifeform that could be used to create totally subservient armies, completely under the control of the Primus--which would then be controlled by the Matralan through the use of drugs and cybernetic implants that would keep it at a certain stage of its life-cycle."

 "What is a Matralan?" Leela asked.

 The Doctor whispered, "A creature that exists in both normal space and hyperspace--its physical existence is here in normal space, while its intelligence is in hyperspace. It's very small, but very very smart."

 "Does it ride around on the back of a big slug?" she asked.

 "Sometimes--have you seen it?"

 "It tried to kill you. I took it off the slug, but it bit me and ran away."

 "It will probably be attempting to assert its control over the Primus," Rakshan interjected. "I suspect that the project has been out of its control for quite some time, and it's just now beginning to panic."

 "Speaking of panic," the Doctor said quietly, "I think that dresser's moving."

 With a crash, a forest of tentacles shot up through the floor below them.

 TO BE CONTINUED...