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‘Me? Which chamber was it?’

‘403.’

The Doctor pursed his lips and shook his head. ‘Off the beaten path. Despite that, I don’t ever recall going there. Not for centuries, anyway.’

‘I brought you this casket,’ Peltroc said smugly. ‘It came from the cabinet.’

The Doctor eagerly set about opening it and examining the contents.

‘There wasn’t anything special in there,’ Raimor observed.

‘Well no. If there had been anything special in there it wouldn’t have been in there, would it? Now, the key to the mystery must be in here somewhere.’ The Doctor opened the box, fished out what he found, laying everything on the table beside him. ‘Interspatial protractors. The last time I saw one of these was at school.’ He turned one over and over in his hand, rotating it through its five dimensions. Next he found a couple of translucent discs.

‘Are those data cards?’ Raimor asked.

‘Yes,’ the Doctor sighed. ‘But you can tell just by looking at them that they’ve been corrupted for centuries. Only a hard burst of radiation could do that. Which means they were wiped before they were put away in this box.’

Right at the bottom of the casket was the hilt of a knife.

‘Careful with that,’ Raimor warned.

‘What is it?’ the Doctor asked. Peltroc looked equally blank.

‘A force knife. Works on the same principle as a forcefield, creates a blade.’

The Doctor flicked it on. The blade shimmered into existence, solid as metal. The Doctor examined it. ‘Why not just use a proper knife?’

‘Try it,’ Raimor suggested.

The Doctor weighed the knife in his hand and then stabbed it down at the table. He was clearly surprised when it went straight through the tray and the tabletop. It had slid through the silver and wood as if they weren’t there, right up to the hilt. Now it looked as though it had always been there, and no force in the galaxy could remove it.

‘That’s a sharp knife,’ Peltroc observed.

‘The blade can be anything from a quark to a metre long. It adjusts itself so it can cut through anything, even at the molecular level. If you’ve got a death wish, you can split an atom with it. It was designed as an all-purpose tool.’

The Doctor glanced down at it. ‘I’ll stick with the sonic screwdriver, I think. It’s more my style.’

He rummaged around in the box for a minute, producing a bunch of keys, a handful of treazants and a couple of cracked exitonic circuits before he looked up sadly. ‘It’s all junk.

Nothing valuable. There’s no reason why we couldn’t have just thrown it all out millennia ago. There are no clues here.

I…’ his voice tailed off, as he had just found a slip of paper, one that was brown with age and folded in half.

There was a single word on the paper, handwritten, in capitals.

WHO

The Doctor was wincing, screwing up his eyes as though someone was shining a bright light at him.

Raimor and Peltroc glanced at each other. ‘Are you all right, my Lord?’

‘Can’t you hear it?’ he said. ‘It’s coming towards us, but all around us.’ The Doctor shook his head, as though he was trying to dislodge something. Then he looked up, fixing Raimor in his sights.

‘I’m fine,’ he assured them. ‘A headache, that’s all. Not enough sleep.’ He straightened. ‘There’s nothing more that you can do here. Return to your patrols, I will make the necessary arrangements.’

The guards snapped to attention saying, ‘Sir!’, before marching from the room.

It was Seven Bells, two hours to dawn, and there had been enough excitement for one night, so Raimor and Peltroc skipped the last part of their patrol. They returned to barracks, changed out of their uniforms into their day-tunics, checked in their weapons and communicators and released their lights into the luxquarium.

Tonight had been eventful, and tomorrow would be a long day. Both men were going to be on duty when the aliens arrived, and would be spending most of the day beforehand in the Panopticon, practising their drill. Raimor grumbled about this before heading to his berth. Before he went, the Captain handed Peltroc the copy of