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'The Martians won't stop at Dover, you know. The world is at stake here.'

Captain Ford pointed to his charts. 'Brigadier, as soon as we know the full extent of the Martian plan, we can begin to sabotage it. Guerrilla tactics: block their convoys, blow up their factories. Ferment civil unrest ... '

'Until?' Lethbridge-Stewart asked.

'What do you mean?'

'Why are we playing at being the French Resistance? Who are our allies, who will help us?'

'No-one is happy with the Martian presence,' Bambera reminded him. 'The EU imposed trade sanctions to prevent the export of Martian technology. The UN would have passed that Alien Non-Proliferation Resolution if it wasn't for the Chinese veto.' With only six weeks to go before the British were due to leave Hong Kong, the Chinese were going out of their way to stay on good terms with the Martians. The United Kingdom's membership of the UN was officially 'under review', but in reality little had changed. They hadn’t even lost their seat on the Security Council.

'The government-in-exile are rallying support for us. The Queen is in Washington at - '

'The US Congress has already agreed not to interfere in Britain's "internal affairs". They want the Martian technology. The EU members haven't withdrawn their embassy staff. Bambera, we are on our own. We have to take the lead.'

'How?' she said scornful y.

Lethbridge-Stewart began to explain the plan that he had formulated on the way back from town. 'The Provisional Government is based in London, but we know that their military forces are al in the north, or heading up there.

They are going to secure the northern cities - Manchester, Leeds and York are all Royalist strongholds. At the moment, the Provisionals can't even think of moving north of there, and so Scotland's almost untouched, apart from the air-raid on Edinburgh.'

'One snag here, Brigadier,' Bambera reminded him. 'The Martian ship is hanging over London. It would make short work of anyone that tried to attack the capital. That's why we've not moved before now.'

'We're not just at war with one ship, Brigadier, we're at war against an entire planet,' Captain Ford reminded everyone.

'Not the whole of Mars,' I corrected. 'Just one clan: the Argyre.' They noticed me for the first time.

Lethbridge-Stewart hadn't finished with Bambera. 'The lads in Portsmouth damaged the Martian ship. It can be done, with surface-to-air missiles and heavy artillery. They are not invincible.'

Bambera straightened and faced me. 'You know your Martians, Professor. Did we really manage to sting them?'

I thought about the question for a moment, realising that the lives of all the men in the camp depended on my answer. 'Yes,' I said finally, 'They don't have forcefields or anything like that.'

'So an air strike could knock the Martian ship out of the sky?' Ford asked.

'In theory, if they could get close enough. The Martian gunners wil know the planes are in the air before your own radar operators and they'll be able to keep better track of them once they are flying. If you could get around that somehow, the big problem would be the magnetic engines: they don't emit heat, so heatseekers wouldn't work, they do generate magnetic flux, which would play merry hell with your guidance systems.'

'What about a nuclear strike?' the Brigadier asked.

I grimaced. 'Thinking of calling your old friends on the Revenge? Hobson, wasn't it?'

He narrowed his eyes. 'How the devil did you know about that?'

I smiled. 'It's a long story. Yes, a nuclear strike would work, and I doubt the Martians would have any more of a defence against an ICBM than you have. It would also kill about a million Londoners straight away and another two or three million over the next ten years.'

'I was only speaking hypothetically,' Lethbridge-Stewart told me.

'Glad to hear it.'

'We won't have to fight the Martian ship,' Lethbridge-Stewart announced. 'Not until we've re-taken London.'

Bambera was rubbing her forehead. 'How are we going to do that?' she asked wearily. 'No. Cancel that. Alistair, I appreciate that you're