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'So she built a kiln.'

'How long has she been here?' asked the Doctor.

'You should know.'

'Well,' said the Doctor, 'you know how it is. Time and relative dimensions in space. You can lose track.'

'Three months,' said the drone.

The Doctor removed his hat, stared into its depths for a moment and then replaced it on his head. 'I presume you've been scanning her?'

'Oh yes,' said aM!xitsa.

'And?'

'A grade thirty-six technology you said.'

'Thirty-five going on thirty-six.'

'Remarkable.'

'They're an inventive race,' said the Doctor, 'especially when it comes to weapons technology.'

'Do you want to see the details?'

'Yes, please,' said the Doctor.

AM!xitsa projected a discreet holograph behind the bole of a tree where it wouldn't be visible from the beach. It quickly filled up with complex three-dimensional shapes, spiky bundles of molecules that rotated slowly for inspection, phase space graphs on time/event axis. The drone's voice assumed a more studied, professorial tone. 'Most of the non-indigenous organic forms were broken down and expelled within the first thirty-six hours. I recovered some samples from her faeces and urine but the damn stuff wouldn't grow in culture.'

The hologram displayed the characteristic flat and undifferentiated cells of the ship's invasive cellulose. Even in abstract representation they were coloured a virulent and unhealthy green. The Doctor's hand drifted uneasily to his left shoulder, remembering.

'And the residual organic material?'

AM!xitsa displayed a flayed cross-section of the brain. 'A concentration in the hypothalamus, smaller structures in cerebellum and occipital lobe. I believe she may have assimilated the foreign material.'

The Doctor said nothing, remembering the pain. The lawnmower smell. The ship dying. Ace shouting out in fear and anger. All those minds going into the dark. Paris burning. A human body of animate mahogany veined with virulent green.

'I'm particularly interested in the nature of the design modifications incorporated into her original geneset,' said aM!xitsa. 'Normally when the technologically challenged build fighters they stress the amyglada, building for aggression you might say. The primary centre for modification in this one is not in the limbic system at all. The "kill instinct" is all in the forebrain. Damn unusual and very subtle. It's the cognitive perception of danger that triggers the response, not the emotion.'

The drone rotated until its forward sensor array was directed at the figure in the water. 'She's a stone-cold killer.'

'Does she speak?'

AM!xitsa wobbled its body from side to side, drone body language for 'no'. 'She displays no social behaviour at all when she's awake. She does vocalize during her sleep, sometimes complete sentences, but I can't translate the language. Would you like a recording?'

The Doctor shook his head, human body language for 'no'.

The woman standing in the water still hadn't moved. By now even the smartest fish would have ceased to see her as a possible threat. Piscine brains lulled into complacency by her world-famous rock impression.

'There's something very strange about her genetic structure,' said aM!xitsa. 'Even stranger I mean.'

'Yes.'

'Dormant sections in certain DNA strands that look as if they should be operating but aren't.

Other sections that look as if they are just there as temporary markers. As if there were pieces of the jigsaw still missing.'

'Yes.'

'Her cytoplasmic DNA shows multiple redundancies. Very strange stuff indeed. I couldn't decode them, even with God's help.'

'You didn't tell God what you were working on?'

'Of course not,' said the drone. 'I told it that the samples had been passed on by some friends in XCIG.'

'Did it believe you?'

'God's very smart. I think it's probably suspicious. Now it knows you're here it'll have this whole area under very tight surveillance indeed.'

'There was a lot of remote drone activity near iSanti Jeni this morning.'

'The coding in her cytoplasm,' said the drone, 'information encrypted by her designers?'

'No,' said the Doctor,