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Why did she look at me as if I were rubbish? Mike wanted some answers.

‘Tea?’ asked Corporal Grant.

‘Yeah,’ said Mike, ‘thanks.’

Grant pushed his chair away from the table. Mike watched him as he got up. The corporal, like all professional soldiers, had his tea-making gear stashed nearby. As Grant turned and walked to the corner of the cellar Mike stood up and stepped away from the table. His chair scraped against the floor, and alerted by the sound Grant turned and said: ‘Come on, Sarge.’

It was funny that Grant knew what Mike intended, before he knew himself.

Grant went for his pistol, but Mike got to him first.

Rachel was dizzy from sliding down the rope. She tried to look round as Gilmore hustled her through a hatchway, but it was all a dark blur. She touched the doorframe as she stepped through. The metal had a weird texture, almost like plastic. Rachel sniffed her fingers and gingerly tasted one with her tongue. It tasted tinny.

Inside the next chamber was a Dalek, set into a podium.

The Doctor was beside it, holding a long thin tube. Rachel recognized it as a Dalek manipulator arm. Ace was tapping the inert Dalek with her forefinger.

‘What did you do to it?’ she asked the Doctor.

‘I short-circuited it,’ said the Doctor. He turned to look at Rachel. ‘Daleks are such boring conversationalists.’

Rachel looked around. Bulkheads of the strange metal sloped inwards, the ceiling was bare and of the same metal.

Apart from the Dalek and what she assumed was a control podium, there were no other fittings.

‘I can’t see any controls,’ said Rachel.

‘What would a Dalek do with a switch?’ said the Doctor.

He slotted the plunger end of the manipulator arm into a shallow depression in the side of the control podium. ‘The Daleks plug in direct.’

The Doctor twisted the arm. There was a series of clicks and the plunger was locked in. The Doctor started to sort through the fine cables that hung out of the free end of the manipulator arm.

‘It’s very functional,’ said Allison.

‘Daleks are not known for their aesthetic sense,’ said the Doctor. He made an adjustment to the wires. There was a low hum. A wide rectangle of light formed in front of the inert Dalek, hanging in space two inches from the front bulkhead.

A television picture, thought Rachel, projected on to thin air. Rachel remembered the extruded glass fibre cables they found in the destroyed Daleks. She had a sudden vision of bursts of coherent light carrying digitized information at the speed of light. A picture built up of digital information, spat out of an electron gun. No, not an electron gun, she realized, a light-maser through a flat prism decoded into the thin air. Gods, a three-dimensional image.

Rachel snapped out of her thoughts to find the Doctor had turned his head towards her. His eyes were grey and intense. Rachel felt them peeling away her face, looking into her mind.

‘No,’ said the Doctor, ‘not for twenty years.’

Rachel blinked. The Doctor had his back to her, working on the manipulator arm. Rachel shook her head to clear it.

‘Now,’ said the Doctor, ‘let’s see if we can find out just what they are up to.’

The screen flickered, a grid of white lines formed.

Bright points of light scattered across the picture, tiny symbols in red and green labelled them.

A starmap, decided Rachel.

The Doctor made some more adjustments and different patterns formed – a blue and green planet symbol. It was the Earth. Now a complex pattern of’short, angular arrows wove its way through the starmap. ‘What are those?’ asked Rachel.

‘Four-dimensional vectors,’ said the Doctor. ‘They mark the path the imperial Dalek mothership will take.’ He pointed to a cluster of lines. ‘See, they’re shifting to compensate for the Earth’s orbital shift and the passing of time – I did mention that these Daleks can travel in time.’

‘Yeah,’ said Ace, ‘but it’s very crude and nasty.’

She’s doing it again, thought Rachel, I hate it when she does that.

‘That’s the Earth,’ said the Doctor, pointing. ‘That must be