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'Snap shot,' said Mariko. 'Can he be fixed?'

The artificer peered down at his dead companion and said no.

'Well, at least we know it works.'

'He would have liked that,' said the artificer.

'All right, fit it on all the razvedka krewes, starting with mine. Can you do a concealed version for reps?'

'The load would have to be cut.'

'Fine, fit the reps as well,' said Mariko.

Naran was waving his tongue at her.

'Oh yeah,' said Mariko. 'While you're fitting Naran, change the colour scheme on his carapace.'

'Sure,' said the artificer. 'What does he want?'

'Would you believe go-faster stripes?'

Mariko stood up. It was time to integrate the new material. Busy, busy, busy, she thought. There had been a number of teething troubles in the last batch. One of the new artificers had managed to turn herself inside out and had to be scraped off the walls. One of the conversion jobs had gone wrong and left Mariko with a razvedka with a four-foot mouth. Every time his teeth started spinning he fell over; 3krewe had him lying on his back in a side tunnel and were using him for waste disposal.

The new material was herded on to the eastbound platform ready for Mariko's inspection. With the losses that the razvedka had been taking lately they'd begun to make regular trawls through the more populated sections of the system. That was acceptable and within the parameters of Mariko's mission profile.

Mariko walked down the line, making her selections.

The first three were obvious ravedka; the next was an artificer. As Mariko picked them out they were ordered to stand in separate lines. There was no resistance or outcry; those that had put up a fight were long dead.

Mariko paused in front of her fourth victim, a woman of the correct physical parameters for the special operation that was being planned.

'Specialized rep,' Mariko told the artificer, 'and make sure that she's fitted with weapons.'

The woman was led away and Mariko continued down the line.

'Razvedka, razvedka, rep, razvedka ...'

The House

He got the keyboard from an old Olivetti typewriter that he found hidden in the bottom drawer of the kitchen cabinet under a loose pile of yellowing Dandys. He allowed himself to be diverted for a couple of minutes by the adventures of Desperate Dan before continuing. The CPU was salvaged from two pocket calculators and the disposable personal organizer that came free with the June 2005 edition of Der Speigel. He generated the hex code by pretending that he had sixteen fingers,

The VDU posed a problem until he uncovered the front end of an oscilloscope under the living-room sofa and mated it with the guts of a Betamax VCR. Since he wanted two-wa) communication he incorporated a minicassette recorder, the type that was popular with journalists in the 1970s. Vision wa& tricky so he compromised by building up a compound eye fron, leftover optical fibre.

The bread board was used to mount the silicon. Since he seemed to have mislaid his soldering iron, he stoked up the Aga and used a couple of wooden-handled screwdrivers in rotation. The whole misshapen contraption used up two roll'. of gaffer tape and completely covered the kitchen table. It plugged into the light socket in the larder at one end and the cable to the dish at the other.

He was astonished when it worked.

And he still had the two tin lids that he had pocketed while preparing supper. So much for foresight.

There was a pair of secateur's in the sink drawer, and he used them to cut the tin lids into shuriken while he waited for the program to run.

The first contact arrived while he was filing down the edges of the throwing star. The oscilloscope had a scanning phosphor CRT so the image built up as a series of slow amber-coloured frame updates.

The first image was an extreme close-up of a pair of lips. Tinny incoherent noises emerged from the speaker as the lips jerked open and closed.

'Nearly,' said the Doctor. 'Try again.'

The lips dwindled down to a single orange