Julia waited on a wooden jetty that projected out into the gently lapping edge of a wide lake. It was after dusk and the far side of the water was a jagged blackness against the velvet starfield of the sky. By day that was a breathtakingly lovely mountain range called the Niverfolge with snow on the peaks even in summer. The tallest and most symmetrical of them was Mount Lumgonie which was an extinct volcano. Very extinct, she had been assured. Not that they would be in danger here on the other side of a three mile wide lake, but she had seen the old Earth film Dante’s Peak and didn’t want to see the beauty of the region destroyed overnight by ash clouds and lava flows.

There were lights on the lake, moving slowly towards the jetty. It was Araya and Addison Drey-Farrah coming in their motor launch to tonight’s dinner party. She smiled in anticipation. She liked the couple, a pair of Haolstromnian gendermorphs who would probably look spectacularly beautiful in evening gowns for this social occasion after being casually handsome men by day.

A ruggedly handsome male was tying up the launch as it came to a smooth stop. That would be one of their Tràill. The TARDIS translation circuits interpreted that word as ‘slave’, but in Haollstromnian society it was really a paid servant, a member of the working class in a heavily stratified system, but nothing unethical. She watched the two dinner guests step off their boat, their sultry bodies sheathed in a silvery fabric that shimmered as they moved. Their hair shimmered with silver, too, as did their cosmetics, probably applied by another well trained Tràill. They looked like personifications of stars out of mythology and Julia had to resist feelings of utter inadequacy in their presence.

Not that she wasn’t beautifully dressed in a deep red gown with gold threads catching a glint in the light of the real flaming torches that lit the way back up to the house.

It was a beautiful house, something on the lines of a Roman citizen’s holiday villa in Baiae, with terraced gardens leading down to the narrow shingle beach that bordered the lake. As they walked they heard music and the lights under the canopy where dinner was set al fresco on this warm second summer night.

That was one of the oddities of the planet Alapas. It had eight seasons in the year. The second summer coincided with the second shortest days, so that long, balmy evenings under starlight could be enjoyed for as long as four months before the autumn brought cooler, wetter weather leading into the almost polar winter, dark except for three of four hours, but filled with floodlit winter sports.

The second oddity of Alapas was the reason Chrístõ’s father had bought the villa long ago, and why it had been recommended as a perfect honeymoon destination.

And it WAS a perfect honeymoon. Julia was happy to be spending an eight season year in such a beautiful place where they had made so many good friends like the haolstromnian couple across the lake.

There were four other guests for dinner. Jake and Rona Danbury were old Earth aristocracy. Jake was technically a viscount, though he never really used the title. SabeTha and ThaTred Han-sEt, the unusual capital letters being part of the spelling, pronounced with a distinctly hard sound, were actually natives of Alapas, part of the upper class of that world which was stratified much like both Haollstrom and Gallifrey with a nobility who went back through dozens of generations, a business class and an underclass who did most of the work.

The point was that they were all, around the table, from their society’s elite. Chrístõ was, since their wedding, the newest patriarch of one of the oldest Oldblood families. Araya and Addison owned land wider than Luxembourg on the surface of their world. The lower classes literally lived below them, in an underground world of mines, factories and habitats with artificial suns that dimmed or brightened to mark the night and day.

Only the very, very rich could afford to live on Alapas. Well, that wasn’t completely true. A service class who cleaned the houses, cooked and waited on the aristocrats also lived there, but nobody thought about them very much – apart from Julia, who talked to them and found out that their home villages were pleasant and their lives as comfortable as any working people could expect. She would never have agreed to living there if there was any suggestion of slavery or badly paid drudgery involved.

The months since they arrived at the start of the first winter had given Julia plenty of opportunities to play hostess at dinners, lunches and teas. When they returned to Gallifrey she would be well past the terror that gripped her on the first such occasion. She would be a fully fledged lady of the house by then.

This was a very pleasant dinner. The food, the wine and the company pleased her. The one disconcerting thing was the way people who looked, at most, twenty years older than she was could remember Chrístõ’s parents staying in the same villa more than two hundred years ago.

THAT was the oddest thing about Alapas. Something like ten thousand years ago the twin suns that created the double seasons came into a peculiar conjunction. The planet had been bombarded by something scientists had called CvB rays. The letters stood for something with no translation in English or Gallifreyan, and was so technical it would have meant very little to most people.

What they did, was slow down the aging process in the population by some kind of huge factor that meant they would live for thousands of years without aging and without illness or disease.

Which meant some of the oldest natives still remembered the conjunction when they were children. It had been a frightening time. Many people thought it was the end of their world. When it turned out to be the very opposite there was rejoicing.

There were also obvious problems. Yes, the people would live for a very long time, but they found it very difficult to have children. One in fifty couple conceived in any given century. The population of the ‘lucky’ planet shrank.

Which was why the government began to allow off-worlders to buy property on Alapas. It was very expensive property. Like beach front houses in Monte Carlo, they were only for the very rich.

Chrístõ’s family WERE very rich. But his father had not bought the villa because he could afford to. He bought it because he had married a Human woman and their life together was limited. Unlike their dinner guests, though, they had not abandoned Gallifrey. From time to time they had come here and spent a year, eight beautiful seasons, enjoying peaceful luxury before returning home to their demesne on the southern plain only a fortnight after they left, and, because the CvB radiation had the same effect on any carbon based humanoids, barely a few days older.

When they first arrived here, Julia had asked WHY his parents hadn’t stayed longer. Chrístõ had told her that his mother didn’t want to live forever. She valued the extra time they spent here, but she felt it was wrong to stretch her life beyond what was normal.

Even though she had died in her forties, terribly young, and before Chrístõ was old enough to fully understand why, she had not felt that a thousand years on Alapas was worth a single year in her own home.

And Julia thought she understood why. They had could come here for one Alapas year. When the first winter came around again they were going home to Gallifrey. Between being a society hostess, Julia was going to teach at the school for Caretaker children on the Lœngb?rrow estate. Chrístõ, had accepted an occasional job with the diplomatic corps as a roving ambassador, attending intergalactic treaties and conferences. Inbetween he had also volunteered to help Paracell Hext train Celestial Intervention Agency recruits. He had also promised to spend some time in charge of the Prydonian scouts on outward bound weekends, mainly to spend quality time with his brother.

And between all that he still had to come back to Mount Lœng House and be the patriarch, in control of a vast estate.

And somewhere amongst all that activity he and Julia were expected to produce a new heir to the House of Lœngb?rrow.

An occasional fortnight spent enjoying an ageless year on Alapas would be a rest from all that activity.

It was a good party. When it was over, Julia and Chrístõ both walked back to the jetty to wave off their friends, then strolled on the lakeside in the dark, together.

“I feel a little guilty about leaving the clearing up to the servants,” Julia admitted. ‘It IS very late and they’re still working while we’re at our leisure.”

“I pay them extra for working late,” Chrístõ said. “And when we get home, there is a night butler and three maids whose job it is to be available.”

“Well, I won’t be making them work if I can help it,” Julia said determinedly.

“Just wait until there are children and you’re glad of the help during the night.”

"No wet nurse,” Julia insisted. “I already talked to Valena about that, and she agrees with me.”

“She had one with Garrick,” Chrístõ pointed out.

“Then there was a war, and she had to look after her child by herself, and she realised what was really important. I don’t mind having properly paid servants, but I’m not going to just drop clothes on the floor and expect them to be picked up, and I won’t let our children think they can do that, either.”

“I was NEVER allowed to do that,” Chrístõ assured her. “If Caolin reported to my father that I was doing anything lazy I’d have been punished. I tended to behave. It wasn’t the punishments so much as the disappointed look from my father.”

“You don’t have a disappointed look,” Julia told him. “So we’d better hope our children are well-behaved.”

Chrístõ laughed and out his arm around her shoulders as they turned back to the villa.

It was then that they became aware that the lights were extinguished along the path, leaving them in near total darkness. At the same moment, they noticed the movement of shadowy figures in front of them. Chrístõ turned his head and saw that they were surrounded.

He fought, of course. So did Julia. He had taught her a few things over the years. But there were too many of them, and he heard a voice say the very worst thing he could imagine.

“There’s a knife against your wife’s throat. Keep still or she’ll die very quickly.”

After that he had no choice. He didn’t know where Julia was in the darkness. Even if he did, he couldn’t risk trying to reach her before a threat like that was carried out. He had to let himself be taken. His hands were bound behind his back and a hood of thick fabric was pushed over his head. He heard a muffled cry from Julia that told him she was being treated the same way. At least that meant the knife was no longer at her throat, but that was the only comfort he could have in this situation.

They were taken back along the lakeside. The sandy gravel was unmistakeable underfoot. Then they were pushed into an open boat with an outboard motor. For a brief time Chrístõ felt Julia pushed against him and he grasped her hand reassuringly, but this was obviously only going to be a short journey. Soon the boat was silent and they were pushed onto gravel and sand again and made to walk. Chrístõ tried to memorise the different surfaces he stepped on, but since he had no idea where on the lakeside they had been taken it was probably of limited use.

They were taken into a building of some kind, and down uncarpeted steps to what Chrístõ immediately thought of as a cellar. There was a feeling of being below ground with the weight of a building above.

The hood was pulled off his face and the bonds released. Chrístõ blinked once in the light of an old fashioned ceiling bulb. He saw several other hostages – among them Jake Danbury and Addison Drey-Farrah who was wearing the same silver dress but moulded strangely around his male gendernorph form. Stress could sometimes bring on the switch from one state to the other, and this was a stressful situation.

But their spouses weren’t here. Nor was Julia, he realised with a shock. They must have been separated after they were taken from the boat.

“Keep quiet,” Chrístõ was told when he tried to speak to his friends. “All of you behave or your wives and…” The kidnapper, his face disguised by a sort of kefir that revealed only his eyes, laughed as he looked at Addison. “Your significant others…. They will suffer if any of you attempt to escape from here or inconvenience us in any way.”

“Who exactly are ‘us’?” Chrístõ asked.

“No questions. You will be compliant or face the consequences.”

Those consequences were perfectly clear. Chrístõ sat on the hard floor next to his two friends, knowing that he had no other choice.

“What about food?” Addison asked. “You can’t starve us.”

“You all had a good dinner tonight,” was the answer. “None of you will hurt to go hungry for a while.”

That was the last word. A heavy door was closed and the hostages were alone.

“Is everyone all right?” Chrístõ asked. “Nobody was injured when you were taken?”

“My arm,” said a middle aged man Chrístõ recognised as Tobin Walsenburg, another of the long term offworlders who lived around the lake. “I fell when they took us out of the boat. It… wasn’t deliberate. I think they know we need to be unscathed if we’re worth anything for ransom.”

“You think that’s what it’s all about?” Chrístõ asked as he felt Tobin’s arm and noted a clean break to the ulna, the narrower of the two lower arm bones. He concentrated carefully and felt the break knit together easily even while he was talking to the others.

“We’re all wealthy people,” said another of the lakeside neighbours, Dietri Forenz, a retired Venturan politician. “What other purpose would this serve?”

“It might be political,” Jake Danbury pointed out. “We’re all offworlders. “SabeTha and ThaTred Han-set are our neighbours and they haven’t been taken.”

“We’re NOT offworlders,” Addison protested. “Araya and I have been naturalised Alapans for more than five hundred years. We’ve paid our taxes every year. We’ve contributed to the local economy. I resent that idea very strongly.”

“You’d better tell them that,” Tobin told him. Then he looked at Chrístõ with a relieved expression. “That feels fine, now. Whatever you did… at least I don’t have to be in pain as well as sleeping on a concrete floor.”

“Least I can do,” Chrístõ answered.

“I don’t know what they have in mind,” Jake continued. “But its obvious none of us can do anything while our spouses are under threat.

Chrístõ said nothing in answer to that. It went against the grain to submit to threats, but until he knew more he couldn’t do anything.

“If there really is a movement that resents offworlders owning property then this is no way to get sympathy for their cause,” Dietri pointed out.

“I’ve never heard of such a thing,” Addison argued. “Why would there be? There is no shortage of jobs or housing to cause resentment. Every citizen has free education, and healthcare in the rare cases that they need it. Even the working classes have the means to raise themselves to a better status. I know plenty of self-made Alapan millionaires. There is no reason for any of this.”

“Then it must just be ransom,” Chrístõ responded. “That’s slightly better. Political fanatics are much more willing to kill hostages to make their point. There’s no sense in killing people you want to ransom.”

“That’s only a small consolation,” Tobin pointed out. “And now I’m slightly concerned about how experienced you are at being kidnapped.”

“That’s why I intend to settle down to being a wealthy landowner when the honeymoon is over,” Chrístõ answered, making light of those experiences. As everyone laughed as best they could he looked around the room with the practiced eye of one who had been locked in escape proof places quite often.

Cellar was the best description of it. There were four bare concrete walls, one with a strong metal door in it, a concrete floor and ceiling. There were no windows of any sort, though a grating near the ceiling probably allowed air in.

There was also a tap in one corner with a drain below. Chrístõ turned it on. There was a clanking and grumbling sound, then rather unpleasantly rusty water before it came clear. He tasted a drop carefully.

“We have drinking water,” he announced. “If they were serious about starving us, we can last longer if we have water. I expect the chance to wash our faces will be welcome by the morning, too.”

It wasn’t much comfort, but his fellow hostages took the news philosophically.

“We should try to sleep,” Addison suggested. “If there is any chance for any of us, it would be better if we weren’t exhausted.”

They were none of them accustomed to sleeping on hard floors, but they did their best, using coats as pillows. Chrístõ had put his leather jacket over his dinner suit to walk down to the jetty. He gave the jacket to Addison, who looked oddly vulnerable in the evening dress.

He only wished his sonic screwdriver had been in the pocket, but he tended to leave it on the bedroom dressing table these days when it wasn’t needed.

“I’m not going to lie down,” he explained. “I have this Gallifreyan technique of meditation that will do me just fine.”

In fact, he didn’t do that, either. He was too worried to properly clear his mind. He sat with his back firmly against the wall with the door in it and closed his eyes. He reached out mentally. If he COULD do what he hoped he WOULD have to sleep later. It would exhaust him. But he had to try.

His mind easily reached as far as the steps behind the door. He knew there was a guard at the top. He was surprised that there WAS only the one man. He was watching the stairs and a locked door beside him.

The door to the room where the women were being held.

He let his mind pass through that door and found Julia among the women. She was scared, but resolute, doing her best to comfort and reassure the others.

“Chrístõ will help us.” That was the belief firmly fixed in her heart. She said it out loud to the others, but she believed it wholeheartedly herself, first of all.

“I’m not giving up, sweetheart,” he whispered. But just now he wasn’t quite sure how he could live up to her expectations.

And this was no time to disillusion her. After all they had been through, since the day he found her alone on that ship, and they had fought the vampire creatures together, through all sorts of dangers, all kinds of obstacles, she had put her faith in him. Now that they were married, he couldn’t let her down.

If it had just been the two of them, he could have risked some kind of heroic, Errol Flynn style escape with Julia in his arms and the hostage takers falling at his feet. But there were two dozen people in the two groups and the death of even one of them was too high a price to pay for his pride o Julia’s belief in him.

He cast his mind further, trying to feel the shape of the building they were in, and equally importantly, where the rest of the hostage takers were, and how many there were.

This seemed to be a large house of the sort that were built all around the lakeside, and the length of time walking from the boat to indoors strongly supported that. Even after six months of socialising with the expatriate population, though, he really didn’t know the interiors of the houses well enough to identify this one.

Not that it mattered particularly. The important thing was to work out where all the doors were in case an escape was possible.

He found the main body of the hostage takers in one of the ground floor rooms. He couldn’t exactly read their thoughts from a distance, but he could sense their mood, their emotions. And those were very interesting, indeed.

The ‘gang’ - for want of a better word were eating a meal. It was a good meal. They seemed to find it an amusement and a triumph that they were eating somebody else’s food.

They were drinking somebody else’s wine, too. A lot of it. Chrístõ could see that in their increasingly disjointed minds.

Getting drunk was foolish and suggested strongly that the kidnappers were not especially professional or well disciplined. They had taken their hostages in the dark with the element of surprise that gave them a false sense of triumph. With their captives safely locked away they thought they didn’t need to provide more than that one guard who presumably had to go dinnerless.

That was going to prove their biggest mistake.

He withdrew from that room carefully and sought out the women again.

“Julia,” he whispered inside his head. “Can you hear me?”

It was a long shot. Many birthdays ago, now, he had given her a brooch with some quite mysterious properties that allowed her to communicate telepathically with him, but he was quite sure she wasn’t wearing it tonight. It didn’t match the pearl set she had chosen to go with her dinner dress. Even so, he hoped he might reach her. Seven months of marital intimacy might just have rubbed off a little.

He could feel her mind, but she wasn’t responding.

“Hello….” He was a little surprised when he DID feel a telepathic voice reaching out to him.

“Who is that?” he asked.

“Tamara Duval,” the lady answered. “My husband is with you, I think. Martiz Duval.”

“But Martiz isn’t telepathic,” Chrístõ answered. “I’d have noticed.”

“He’s a human from the Hydra system,” Tamara answered. “I’m from Amia. I don’t know if you know it?”

“In the Cassiopeia sector. I didn’t know its people were telepathic.”

“We keep it quiet. Especially those of us who marry humans from Hydra. You know how fundamentalist they are. Telepathy is practically a burning offence. Telekinesis is worse.”

“You can do that?” Chrístõ asked.

“I haven’t done it for years. I got used to hiding it, even after we moved here to get away from the pogroms. But once learned, never forgotten.”

“Now is the time to get in some practice. Or it will be in a little while - once I’ve got my plan together. Meanwhile… perhaps you could give my wife a message.”

“You love her madly and miss her every moment you’re apart?” Tamara asked.

“Well… yes. That goes without saying. But I was thinking of something a little more pro-active. I’ve found out a few things about our captors. They may not be so impossible to deal with as we first thought.”

“Count me in,” Tamara said. “All of us, for that matter. We’re not keen on sitting back like helpless little women hostages. If our men are going to fight, so are we.”

That was something the hostage takers hadn’t taken into account. Nor had he, for that matter. But now he knew better.

“All right,” he said. ‘I have a plan, now.”

He outlined the plan. Tamara passed it on in whispers to Julia and the rest of the women.

“Julia says ‘don’t worry, she’s not a Scooby Do heroine. She can look after herself,’” Tamara reported when he was done. “Scooby Do?”

“I’ll explain later,” Chrístõ promised. “I’m going to talk to the men, now.”

Few of them had managed to sleep after all. They were alert and ready to listen to what he had to say.

“I don’t want to put the women at risk,” Martiz Duval said. Chrístõ laughed softly.

“Your wife asked me to remind you that chivalry is an outmoded concept,” Chrístõ told him. “The ladies are with us on this. In fact, my plan depends on them getting stuck in. But first, I’ve got to do what MY wife calls Time Lord stuff.”

He closed his eyes and concentrated, reaching his mind out again towards Madame Duval, telling her that it was time to do what they had talked about.

What she had to do was open the lock on the door where she and the other women were being imprisoned. He had thought of doing it himself, but he wasn’t very good at telekinesis even when he was looking at the subject. Remote and blind telekinesis was just a bit too much.

He had another talent that he was going to use. He felt again for the mind of the guard. This time he touched the mind telepathically, finding the part of him that was tired and didn’t really want to be on guard duty and was resenting being the only one left hungry and sober.

It took surprisingly little inducement to make the man fall asleep. Chrístõ waited for only a little while before the cellar door opened. Araya, in male form, evening dress slightly ripping at the side seams, stepped inside carrying the guard across his back. He was awake, now, but gagged with a silk scarf and hands bound with a satin belt. He was placed unceremoniously on the concrete floor.

“I know him,” Duval said. “He’s a servant at….”

“Yes, he is,” Chrístõ agreed.

“Then it IS some kind of workers revolution?”

“No,” Chrístõ responded. “It’s much more interesting than that.”

“Tamara and Julia are heading up to the master bedroom,” Araya reported having made sure the guard was in no danger of choking on his gag. “You’ll have your bargaining chip. Do you want this?”

He held up the guard’s weapon. Chrístõ shook his head.

“No. We’ll do without guns,” he said. “Duval, Addison, you come with me. We don’t want too much of a crowd. But be ready if any serious yelling starts.”

He led the other two men and Araya, who turned quickly back to female form before the evening dress fell apart, up the cellar stairs quickly and quietly. They were met on the ground floor by Tamara and Julia with a hostage of their own, dressed in a flowing nightgown and shrinking away from Chrístõ as if he was going to deal her a savage blow.

“As if I would hit a woman,” he said contemptuously. He took her arm firmly, but not roughly. “We’re going to talk to your husband. I believe he’s in his study?”

The lady of the house nodded resignedly, knowing that the game was up.

They came to the dining room, first. Chrístõ looked past the closed door with his mind. The diners were awake, still, but inebriated enough not to be a problem.

All the same he let Tamara jam the lock before they moved on.

The leader of the ‘gang’ was on his own in his study. When Chrístõ entered, pushing his wife in front of him as if she were a shield, ThaTred Han-set half rose from his desk then tried to reach for a pistol in the drawer.

“Don’t even think about it,” Chrístõ told him. Julia moved with the speed of a gymnast and grabbed the gun. Martez Duval took it from her and made it safe. His wife, meanwhile, accessed the videophone and called a rather surprised local police inspector requesting a very large prison van for the failed kidnappers locked in the dining room.

“The police will be here very soon,” Chrístõ said. He pressed SabeTha Han-set into a seat. “We’re all going to wait quietly and give our statements in the proper way. But while we wait, I’d really like to know why somebody who was my dinner guest this evening decided to kidnap me and my wife and so many of our friends?”

“For the money, of course,” Han-set answered. “Even one of you is worth a fortune. But it costs a fortune to live on Alapas, and my intergalactic investments have not been what they should.”

“Just that?” Julia asked. “Money. You’re disgusting, both of you. I’ve been kidnapped for way better reasons than that.Even the people who wanted me as a sacrifice to their volcano god had more integrity than you.”

“That’s what I call a censure,” Tamara commented.

“And that’s why I love her so much,” Chrístõ said with a smile before turning back to Han-set. “Since your motive is such a dull topic of conversation, perhaps you’d like to know why your plan failed. First, using your own employees and then letting them celebrate by getting drunk and leaving one inexperienced man to guard all of us. Second, thinking that our wives are a feeble bunch who could be used to prevent us fighting back. Third, using your own house to keep us captive. Shall I go on?”

“I think that will do,” SabeTha responded before her husband could say anything. She glared at him scathingly. “A failed businessman and now a failed criminal. I’ve had it with you.”

“I’m afraid you’ll be answering questions about how much you knew about all this,” Julia told her. “But even if you get away with it, I think your social calendar is going to be light on invitations.”

SabeTha murmured something about going home to her mother, but nobody was really listening. A hovercopter was ruining the lawn in front of the house and a police launch was tying up at the jetty.

“Its all over bar the statements,” Tamara Duval commented. “Still, we’ll all have quite a lot to talk about at our next dinner party.”

“You might have to do without us,” Chrístõ said. “After all this, I’m not sure if we shouldn’t get home. The honeymoon wasn’t supposed to involve kidnapping.”

“No way,” Julia protested. “We’re staying till winter. I want to see the lake freeze up enough for skating again one more time.”

“Welcome to married life,” Martez Duval said as Chrístõ found himself overruled in that way.