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Yates turned to the Doctor. If the Waro are going to attack, they'll do it soon.'

The Doctor nodded. It's certainly their best chance to take the cobalt.'

Yates scanned the sky, but saw nothing. Dusk was falling, grey clouds trailing across the dark sun. 'No word yet on Rose,' he said.

'He's long gone,' said the Doctor. 'Wealth can buy so many things. It can influence, persuade, cajole. You know, Karl Marx once told me that -'

Without warning something flew over the convoy. Yates had been told to expect flapping goblin creatures, not aircraft.

He quickly reached for the binoculars resting on the back seat.

'What was that?' exclaimed the Doctor, keeping his eyes on the road.

'A plane of some sort?' said Yates, trying to find the craft in the binoculars. 'Very fast. I didn't recognise it.' Even the faint glow of the engines had faded from sight, so he turned his attention in the other direction, trying to see if there were any more of them. 'What can you see?' asked the Doctor.

'Nothing,' said Yates. 'Perhaps it was one of ours... '

'Captain Yates,' said the Doctor with a smile, 'I never thought I'd find you clutching at straws.'

'Well,' said Yates, 'I don't think we -' He stopped, catching sight of something in the binoculars. 'No, there they are. An attack formation!' He reached for his radio. 'What are those things?' he asked rhetorically.

'Alien craft,' said the Doctor quietly. I've been analysing the sound of the engines since the first one flew over. They aren't using jet turbines.'

'All units!' snapped Yates into his radio. 'Prepare for attack from the west. Deploy anti-aircraft batteries now. Other vehicles...' He paused, a light smile passing across his lips.

'Don't spare the horses.'

The convoy began to pick up speed just as the alien craft shot overhead. Yates saw a number of matt-black dart-shaped craft, still maintaining a tight formation. He estimated their speed to be at least Mach 2, but somehow they made little more noise than a group of light aircraft puttering through the skies.

Then the craft stopped - no hint of slowing, just a sudden absence of forward motion, as if they'd hit an invisible wall -

then rotated back towards the convoy, and started firing.

Crackling bolts of green light stabbed out from the alien planes, hitting the trucks at the heart of the convoy. In an instant the cargoes seemed to wink out of existence, leaving the lorries virtually unscathed.

The first salvo of heat-seeking missiles flew from the ground towards the vessels, but they darted off at dizzying speed, twisting and turning around each other like fireflies.

The green bolts stabbed out towards the missiles, vaporising them in eerie silence.

The Doctor was shouting something, but Yates couldn't hear it above the noise of more anti-aircraft missiles streaking into the air.

A stray beam from one of the alien aircraft snaked out towards the vehicle in front of Bessie, hitting the truck's cabin rather than its cargo. The entire vehicle exploded in a black-and-orange ball of smoke.

'Watch out!' shouted Yates as Bessie flew towards the fireball.

SIXTH INTERLUDE:

DREAMTIME

'You seem unusually pensive tonight,' said David Boyd, pushing a stick into the embers of the fire. The shimmering heat sent tiny sparks spiralling up into the air.

Maurice Fisher smiled. 'And you're not normally up this early,' he said, pointing towards the faint glow that seemed to come from within the pale, ghostly gumtrees and the deep-red earth. It was rakarra-rakarra -'dawn-dawn' - that mysterious period just before sunrise. The old Aborigine brushed dirt from his Jeans, and stared at the white man.

'What is bothering you, Boyd?'

Boyd observed the man closely. In the fitful, spitting light of the fire he seemed young again, the fissures and caverns that wrinkled his skin becoming less visible. Boyd had been with the Kukatja people for two years, and from the outset the old man had been able to read him like a book. But for all Boyd's seeming sophistication, his knowledge of