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Roz perched on a comfy-field to the right of the visitors making it impossible for the woman to watch her and the Doctor at the same time. Bernice thought this was unnecessary and rude, but Roz was probably doing it automatically. Bernice made a point of sitting opposite the woman and smiling nicely when she was introduced. AgRaven smiled nicely back.

'I think,' said the Doctor, 'that you should recap for my associates.'

AgRaven licked her lips but it was the drone kiKhali who spoke first. 'Thirty hours ago,' it said,

'a drone was struck by lightning and killed. Myself and agRaven here are doing the initial assessment on behalf of IDIG.'

'It's extremely unusual for a drone to die in this manner,' said agRaven, 'especially a drone like vi!Cari who was built to defensive specifications.'

'It was a combat-bot?' asked Roz.

AgRaven looked at the Doctor as if expecting a translation. The Doctor's face was impassive, his eyes guarded. Roz opened her mouth to speak.

'A robot built for combat,' said Bernice.

The 'mouth' of kiKhali's face ikon turned down at the corners.

'We don't like to use the R-word,' said agRaven diplomatically, 'when we're talking about people.'

'Vi!Cari was a drone with full defensive capabilities,' said kiKhali. The machine's voice sounded tight, almost angry. 'The same basic configuration as myself. It was capable of levelling a small town and surviving a direct hit from a twenty-kiloton nuclear device.'

Roz yawned. KiKhali's face ikon showed obvious anger.

Could a machine get angry? Bernice wondered. SaRa!qava swore they had genuine emotions.

More to the point, was it really wise to provoke one considering what kiKhali had just said about levelling small towns. Bernice had met her fair share of aggressive machine races. Or perhaps that was barbarian thinking?

'Tough enough to survive a lightning strike?' asked Roz.

'Of course,' said kiKhali.

'Then how was it destroyed?'

'We don't know,' said agRaven. 'That's why we're doing an assessment.'

'Have you reconstructed vi!Cari's casing yet?' asked the Doctor.

'Just a moment,' said kiKhali.

What Bernice thought was a hologram appeared in the centre of the lounge. It was the image of a drone but at one-third scale. It was obviously exactly the same design as kiKhali, except that kiKhali didn't have a hole burnt through it from top to bottom. The image rotated so that Bernice could see the inside of the drone through the hole in the top: there were no wires or circuits but she got the distinct impression that the machine had been built up in layers around a small central sphere.

'God assembled this model from the fragments that it recovered from the sea-bed,' said kiKhali. 'As you can see death was caused by a massive intrusion through the upper hemisphere, through the boundary layer of the brain and out through the lower hemisphere.'

'Surely God has a sensor record of the event,' said the Doctor.

'God was only running basic surveillance of the area at the time,' said kiKhali, 'so we only have a data record down to the micrometer level and the storm itself was generating a stupid number of gigawatts. That means we only have a partial sensor record.'

'Maybe it malfunctioned,' said Roz.

'Does that look like a malfunction?' said agRaven. To Bernice's surprise agRaven plucked the model from the air and handed it to Roz. Not a hologram then, something else.

'A solidigram,' said the Doctor.

'Clever,' said Roz in an unimpressed voice.

'May I?' asked the Doctor. Roz casually tossed the solidigram across the room to the Doctor.

Bernice saw agRaven wince.

'So you think robot boy here was struck by lightning?' asked Roz.

'Its name was vi!Cari,' said kiKhali angrily. 'We're talking about a person here.'

'No sentient machine has ever suffered a catastrophic failure without an external cause in over two thousand years,' said agRaven. There was a tense note to her voice: Roz was beginning to get to her too.

The Doctor turned the solidigram over in his hands, feeling