TIME REMAINING: 00:06.59

 So there wasn't much time left to work with. For a brief, shining moment, he'd misread the readout as indicating six hours and fifty-nine minutes.

 TIME REMAINING: 00:06.58

 Short minute, the Doctor thought to himself.

 TIME REMAINING: 00:06.57

 *I've been a foolish old Doctor, and I've made a mistake.*

 He'd been hiding in the ventilation shaft for so long, so self-absorbed. The events that transpired before he'd entered the shaft seemed blurry. Sure, the Doctor had given him the TARDIS key, but Commander Dullet had, amazingly, led him here, to what appeared to be the staff cantina.

 The room was half-lit. Twenty tables stood to attention. They were formica-topped, most of them badly chipped. Wil observed that each table had four chairs, most of which were now toppled over. Strange lumps of color sat on plates. Tall utilitarian glasses full of grey-looking liquids had mostly toppled over, their contents congealing on the formica.

 No doubt about it, the room was deserted.

 Dullet's body slumped next to the coffee machine. Convenient that Dullet had brought him here. Although the Doctor had mentioned fresh coffee on the hotplate in the TARDIS, Wil couldn't recall having ever seen anyone drink coffee on board before. Come to think of it, coffee wasn't even an effective remedy against the state of drunkenness. He did, at least, remember something about drinking lots of water. That would've helped compensate for the hangover, at any rate.

 Oh hey, there was some sort of thermostat above the coffee dispenser. It beeped cheerfully down at him.

 TIME REMAINING: 00:06.21

 Hrm.

 She'd been unable to find an airlock, or a transmat pad, or any other means of egress. It felt like she'd been running for an hour, though ten to fifteen minutes was a more likely estimate.

 It was hot. So very hot. She paused against the outer wall of the corridor. The glass felt cold under her palm. The sweat on her hands condensed on the glass, and a large circle of fog formed. Panting to catch her breath, she traced the words "OUT OF BREATH!" on the glass. As the fog evaporated, outer edges first, the words vanished.

 A bright point of light shot out from the station. Whatever it was, shot directly into the black hole of Arcis.

 She realized she'd circumnavigated the station. Tracing back with her eyes, Angela saw that whatever had just been ejected from the station, had come from the Disposal Chamber.

 She breathed on the glass agaain. The words "OUT OF BREATH!" were visible again, as the fog formed around them but not on them. Heh heh. One moment of physical unfitness, recorded on the edge of singularity.

 Jadi had been in the disposal chamber.

 Non-vital personnel. Costello chuckled to himself. He was getting better with his euphemisms every day. Non-vital personnel had a great double-speak ring to it. If vital stemmed from the old Latin word for alive, for the state of living, then those carefully selected non-vital personnel certainly wouldn't be vital in -- he checked his chronomoter -- just under six minutes.

 He idly wondered if Commander Dullet was still "vital". Karynna hadn't given him much of a chance, not with the amount of alcohol he'd imbibed. Central Personnel records were good, too good. Dullet's old propensity to drink had been mostly suppressed by his years in charge of the Station -- good years, too, prosperous ones for back home -- but any good-sized emergency, and the Commander went off-line. Leaving Costello in charge.

 Karynna entered his office suite. "Just about six minutes to go, Mr. Costello," she reported. She looked exultant. "The Time Dam technicians have been retired with extreme prejudice, the Commander won't be recovering from that binge for quite a while, and the Dams themselves will be rendered non-functional."

 He stared Igon directly in the eyes. "Any last-minute change of heart on behalf of our friends? We can still override the bombs from here."

 Karynna stammered. "But you ordered a strict communications black-out around the station. I've just come from--"

 Costello chuckled. It was good for an authority figure to laugh with the underlings once in a while. Kept everyone loose, and he'd certainly not have gotten this far without keeping that sense of perspective. "Exactly. If we can't trust them to co-ordinate strategy with us without backing out at the edge of Doomsday, we can't trust them as allies, full stop. Therefore, by disabling communications, I won't even give them that chance to back out on us."

 Something caught his eye on one of the scanner readouts. "Who's that? Who's that in the Time Dams?"

 Karynna signed. You couldn't ever finish any sort of conversation with Costello, 'cause some distraction always came up. His strategy lecture had been curtailed by the sight of one of the intruders.

 "He's with the party that I discovered assisting the Commander."

 Costello leaned back in his chair and patted his tunic reassuredly. "Good, then. If he's not with the station, he poses no threat."

 In two minutes, he should've been able to have the Time Dam in pieces at his feet, the bomb rewired seamlessly into its circuits, the explosive long since disposed of. But the Doctor's brain was frozen. There was nothing he could do here. He paced agitatedly and smacked his forehead, as if to rattle the loose thoughts within, but the technology behind the bomb remained inscrutable.

 Well, wait, there was an important point right there. He didn't think the Time Dam technology had derived from Earth, and he was right. And whoever had designed the Dams here had also designed the bombs. The construction materials were different, but the operating principle was the same. The bomb was deceptively clever.

 It certainly wasn't Time Lord technology, thank goodness. The corner of his head that remained forever Brigadier, commented, "Just once I'd like to meet an alien menace that wasn't equipped with a respiratory bypass."

 Inexplicably, he heard the Monitor say, "We are beyond Gallifrey! Beyond everything!"

 Well. This was no time to hear voices from the past. Unless someone in there had something relevant to say, of course. He scanned through his memories, in roughly chronological order, starting from the moment where the Time Lords had lifted his memory blocks, and paying special attention to the time after his emergence from the APC Net, when he'd come away with a host of new Time Lord memories.

 Every person he'd ever met, every friend he'd ever made, stayed with him, spoke to him. But none of them recognized the technology.

 TIME REMAINING: 00:05.00

 He glanced back at the clock. No no no! Two more seconds wasted. There was only one thing to do then. As he'd heard himself say to Chang Lee, "Don't be here!"

 He left.

 "You're right, Mr. Costello," Igon said.

 He stood up. "We've about three minutes left, so it's time to move towards the center. Anything to get away from the blast perimeter."

 Followed by Igon, he left his office for the last time. He could see the digital reading counting ever-downwards. Five minutes until the first stage of the plan was carried out. After that, things would start to get out of control. He didn't like the notion of having to transfer the entire station manually into X-774.

 "Let's go through this one more time, Igon. You've checked design stress, yes?"

 Igon blinked, still looking like the student she'd been three years ago. Still, you couldn't move from University to Arcis in three years without some degree of thinking on your feet. Mere total recall wouldn't get you this far, and Igon certainly didn't have total recall, but she was quick.

 "I ran the equations through two engineer characters --"

 "Puller and Neysi."

 "Puller and Neysi. They assured me that the station would collapse like a house of cards if we moved even one mile closer to the black hole."

 "Which doesn't reassure me. We're moving *through* the thing."

 "But here's the beauty of it, you see. The time loop that the X-774 engineer installed, will get us through unscathed, totally protected."

 "Yes, I checked their design specs myself, but it's completely alien to even the best engineers I consulted. Still, that intruder we ejected out of the disposal chute apparently made it through Arcis in one piece."

 "One piece?" Karynna's eyebrow arched dramatically. "You mean, he got through the hole even without a pressure suit?"

 "That was the test run that I asked for. If a humanoid, exposed to space, can survive those pressures, we have to take that next logical leap and assume the station will, of course."

 Now Igon was getting the picture. She still had that student mentality -- couldn't understand what was going on until you reduced the stellar engineering of an exo-temporal race of human mathematicians into a textbook problem. See Dick rush into space. See Dick remove his space suit. See the black hole. Rush, Dick, Rush! See Dick survive the extraordinary pressures.

 "At any rate," he said, "we've got about one and a half minutes to find out."

 "Angela, where's Jadi? We need to get out of here."

 Ferris turned around. "I think he just got ejected into space."

 The Doctor snarled at her. "I left him in your care. You're the only one I can trust to take care of him. Why didn't you stay with him?"

 "Doctor, he was going to turn me in --"

 "No excuses!", he snapped. "I've already told you. You're safe with him because he's safe with me. Abandoning him while we're on the brink of singularity is not the sort of intelligent maneuver I'd have expected out of you."

 "Doctor, I'm sorry."

 "Yes yes yes, that's academic," he said. He moved away from her and paced up and down the stretch of corridor. "First thing's first, and this station doesn't get pulled into Arcis in 30 hours. We've got about three minutes."

 Dullet looked authoritative. He wore a sharply-creased black tunic, and didn't have a single strand of hair on his head. It wasn't too much of a stretch to imagine his eyes being blue and piercing, and his voice reedy and captivating. Except, his eyes had been dulled over by the substances, and his voice had cracked during the brief time Wil had spoke to him.

 Death, death, death. It's OK if you don't look them in the eyes after they've expired. Then it won't sink in. Time to get out of here, Wil.

 "Bombs. The Time Dam controls are rigged!"

 "I - I don't get it. Why bother to set the station to explode? Those figures only gave us 30 hours or so before the Dams themselves collapsed."

 The Doctor began striding down the hall. For such a short man, his legs carried him fast and far. Angela was quick, but not that quick.

 "We have to get back to the TARDIS and transport ourselves through Arcis. It's the only way. I don't want to be inside this station when the gravitational forces take effect."

 "But Doctor, I still don't understand the need for sabotage."

 The Doctor kept talking, breathlessly, while continuing down the hall. "Typical human reaction. The world's about to end, so you make a power grab."

 "Destroying the station --"

 "The bombs won't destroy the station. Assuming there even is more than the one I just saw, the structure should remain uncompromised. No, it's just that the Dams will collapse sooner, and we'll rush into the black hole sooner."

 He paused. "You know, there's something not logical about this. New plan. You get to the TARDIS and have Wil let you in. You'll be safe in there. I'm travelling with the station and I'll meet you on the other side."

 "I don't understand -- a minute ago, you just said --"

 "I have a rioter to nab. Someone knows what he or she is doing and I'd like to talk to him reasonably over a cup of tea and find out just what it is I don't know yet. Now off you go, Angela."

 Angela ran.

 No, there was no no-one left in the suite. Apart from the bodies of the two technicians.

 That was it! Three terminals, but only two bodies. Someone else was at large, someone who knew how the Time Dams operated, and he thought he knew how to find them.

 Red numerals caught the corner of his eye.

 Uh-oh. A bomb. There's a bomb in the concourse. There's a bomb in the concourse and it's detonating in seconds. Where'd all the civilians go? Where's the TARDIS key? I left it next to the coffee dispenser.

 The bomb went off. Will was hurled through the air, and crushed the top of his spinal cord against the TARDIS. The last thing he had time to register was that he tasted metal in his mouth. Had he been chewing iron?

 When the Time Dams failed, Arcis Station fell out of position. It didn't even have time to spin out of its precise orbit before it rushed into the Black Hole of Arcis at a speed humans couldn't register. The super-gravitational forces of the black hole sucked station and passengers into itself in a nanosecond.

 And then there was nothing left.

 To be continued...