The Target books are generally very good at making everything very clear indeed, but two things from this one still niggle.
First is the whole set of scenes around Secker's locker. When the Doctor first finds the locker, he takes the one phial of Vrax (or containing remnants of Vrax) that's in it and leaves. Following Secker's mauling, the Doctor races back to the locker only to find it emptied. He consoles himself: ‘He had arrived too late - but at least he knew that Secker had a confederate in his drug smuggling. Someone else on the ship was involved as well - and that someone had lost no time in getting hold of Seeker's supply of Vraxoin’. In other words, he might not have caught whoever it was this time, but at least he now knows they definitely exist. Trouble is, it's Stott who takes that Vraxoin and he's there to try and find the smugglers. He in turn, as a result of this encounter, thinks it's the Doctor who's smuggling because of his presence at the lockers. Not only is nothing achieved by this whole set-up, there's no indication that Tryst was ever going to retrieve this Vrax from Secker's locker in the first place. I suppose there's not actually anything I don't follow here, but I was quite taken aback when I realised that this is just a very convoluted mechanism for getting Stott and the Doctor to meet.
My second niggle - has Tryst made the CET deliberately porous? It would make sense that he has, because that's surely the only way he and Dymond are going to be able to extract the Mandrels and make Vrax, but then Stott only seems able to escape the Eden sample once the ships have collided - 'Just after the accident. Something must have gone wrong with the CET machine. The edge of the projection was shimmering. I discovered I could walk right through it' - and the Doctor also thinks the accident is the crucial catalyst - 'And without a dimensional osmosis damper, everything got mixed up together after the accident, and we can just walk straight into the projection'. I don't think the accident was deliberate and, even if it was, that would mean Tryst and Dymond's plan was to transmit the Eden segment over to the Hecate and then release all the Mandrels there before restabilising the ships. I don't think the Hecate's that big. How were they ever planning to get the Mandrels out of the CET?
Anyway, they're minor things but I suspect I'm missing something obvious. Here's a less bemused look at Doctor Who and the Nightmare of Eden...
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