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Blue light seared his eyes, he felt himself smashed backwards into the bannisters. Wood splintered. There was a moment of agony before everything faded to black.

Now I’ll finish it, thought the Doctor.

He walked towards the Dalek, which swivelled to face him. ‘Dalek,’ he called, ‘you have been defeated. Surrender

– you have failed.’

‘Insufficient data.’

It was strange, this impulse among organic intelligences to turn themselves into machines and ape the form and mannerisms of robots. Daleks, Cybermen and Sontarans all sought perfection, but what did they find in the end?

‘Your forces are destroyed, and the planet of your birth is a burnt cinder circling a dead sun.’

‘There is no data.’

In the end they found nothing – nothing at all.

Ace flinched as blue light filled the doorway. There was a sharp smell of ozone. In the corner the television set turned itself on. Ace backed away from the doorway – the back of her knees banged into the sofa. The lightbulb overhead flared into double brightness, then shattered.

Glass cut her cheek. Tinny music began to blare from the radio on the ironing board.

The girl stood in the doorway. In the flickering light of the television screen, Ace could see the girl’s eyes glitter.

‘You will have no more commands from your superiors,’

said the enemy of the Daleks, ‘because you have no superiors.’

The Dalek Supreme could feel the triumph leaking through from the girl. It was like a whirlwind battering at the Dalek’s mind, and at the storm’s eye, the Dalek could feel an icy bleakness.

Ace saw the girl move and threw herself backwards.

Energy crackled over her as she tumbled over the back of the sofa. Glass shattered over the mantlepiece.

If you are going to lie, thought the Doctor, make it a big one.

‘No inferiors,’ he told the Dalek, ‘no reinforcements, and no hope of rescue. You are trapped a trillion miles and a thousand years from a disintegrated home.’

He watched the Dalek carefully. Its gunstick twitched and its eyestalk described tiny circles in the air. Easy does it, thought the Doctor and stepped closer.

‘I have annihilated the entire Dalek species,’ he said.

The whirlwind of the girl’s emotions stormed the ramparts of the Dalek Supreme’s mind. A lifetime’s conditioning, from incubator to the present, was swept away by a child’s despair.

For a microsecond, the girl and the Dalek became one personality, both in the room of the house and both in the road outside Ratcliffe’s Yard. The girl shared the taste of power of the killings done under alien skies. The Dalek Supreme was assailed by the moment of birth, the scream of the newborn, the warm comforting arms of the female.

The commonality of mind and purpose that is the Dalek race.

The isolation and loneliness that is the human being.

The Dalek thrashed in its life support chamber, random neural sports shot through its control systems. A logic gate closed. A failsafe was bypassed. The remaining power reserves were released.

The Dalek Supreme exploded.

Ace was hiding behind the sofa when she heard the girl scream.

It went on for a long time, rising over the noise of the radio. Thtn it stopped. The radio went quiet. The television turned off. It went very quiet. Ace tried to catch her breath.

Then she heard it. A low whimpering sob, the hiss of an indrawn breath and then another sob. The sofa quivered.

In the darkness, the girl was crying.

Ace got to her feet and walked around the sofa. In the light from the hallway she could see the girl curled into a tight ball on the cushions. Ace sat down and took the girl in her arms. Through the doorway she could see Mike’s legs. They lay unmoving on the lino floor.

‘It’s all right,’ she told the girl, ‘it’s all over now.’

The girl buried her face in Ace’s shoulder and wept.

The tears were easier and cleaner now. Ace looked away from the doorway and began to cry with her.

Nothing was left of the Dalek Supreme but ashes. Efficient to the last, thought the Doctor as he looked down on the remains. From nothing you came, to nothing you aspired,