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‘No, Ace. Let him finish,’ said the Doctor quietly.

Ace looked at him – the Doctor’s face was dark, intense.

Pained. She gave a look of disgust and pulled away from Claire.

‘I’ll finish alright, Doctor. I’ve been wanting to meet you for a very long time. D’you know that? I’ve wanted to give you that message for months now – and if she hadn’t jumped in, I’d have given you the same message from a dozen other people.’

‘Ace...’ the Doctor warned, almost inaudibly, as he saw her tensing.

He stepped forwards until he was only a foot away from Michael and stared up at him. ‘Why?’

Michael laughed, coldly. ‘Can’t you guess? Are you really so detached from it all that you don’t know?’

‘Michael –’

He turned away from the Doctor and spread his arms wide.

‘This, ladies and gentlemen, is a man responsible for hundreds of deaths. Or would thousands be nearer the mark?’

The Doctor remained silent, a tiny figure at the centre of a growing maelstrom of hatred and bafflement, bemusement –

and, Ace sensed – fear. She stepped forward.

‘OK Michael. Leave it there. I don’t know what this is about, but haven’t you done enough? Look at him. Hardly a fair fight, is it?’

Michael looked back at the Doctor and saw what Ace couldn’t help but see: a small, puzzled man in a hat, blood all over his face and total bewilderment in his eyes.

Ace was tired. And cold. Very, very cold. The wind had picked up, scudding the fat, slate clouds across the dark Orcadian sky.

Within minutes she felt the first fat raindrops on her face. She’d wedged herself into a deep, grassy crack in the convoluted ground and discovered an overhang which she hoped would hide her. But the wind and the rain still whipped against her. For the first time since she’d surfaced from the spaceship, she felt really down – planless, friendless and hopeless. Megan couldn’t be so stupid that she wouldn’t realise that John and Alexander were her only hope for rescue: all she had to do was wait until Ace came out of hiding to attract their attention, and she’d be shot down. Unless, of course, Megan had teamed up with the tweedies, and at this very moment they were closing in on her.

Ace shivered and stared up at the moon.

‘I stuck up for you – d’you know that?’ Michael’s face was a tight knot of anger and bitterness. ‘When I joined UNIT and they found out that I was the son of Doctor Joyce Brunner and General Terrance Ashworth, friend of the infamous Doctor, I got so much stick you wouldn’t believe it.’ He took a heavy drag on his cigarette and blew out a thick, bluish cloud. ‘And because I didn’t know any better, because I believed all the crap Mum had told me about you – how the Doctor was a good man, a clever man, a friend to the universe and its dog, I argued your case.’

‘And what’s wrong with that?’ asked Ace, bristling.

The Doctor sat in shadowed, thoughtful silence, occasionally touching his nose and wincing. To Ace, it seemed like Michael’s attack had thrown the Doctor back to that confused little man that they had rescued from Graystairs a few hours earlier.

‘It got me marked out,’ Michael answered. ‘From then on, I was... oh, you don’t want to know the actual phrases they used. I was the Doctor’s chum, his pal. His apologist. And then I heard the stories. From the Yeti to the Cybermen; Daleks, Autons, Talichre, the Waro, the Brotherhood of Beltane. All the things the Doctor had gotten involved in, and how, whenever he stuck his nose in, people died. Ordinary people, troops, soldiers whose names the magnificent, legendary Doctor never knew. He had his fun, swanning around with the top brass, saving the world over and over again. But people died.’ He stared into the past, eyes glued. ‘And they kept on dying. And one particular person...

died.’ Michael’s voice dribbled away.

‘Who?’ asked Ace.

Michael paused. When he spoke, his voice was thin and distant. ‘His name was Andy. My only real friend in UNIT. We signed up at the same time, similar backgrounds, that sort of stuff. We got a lot of ribbing about it from the others, but we stuck together.