"You might as well talk to me, you know," said the Doctor.

He'd been pacing up and down the aisle in front of the holding cell with his hands clasped behind his back, directing the occasional stern glance at the door. Now, though, he stopped and faced it, his head held high as he glared at the creature inside.

"Why have you drained the power cells?" he demanded. "There's a thousand times more energy there than you could possibly need."

"More is required," said the Cyberman.

"For what?" asked the Doctor, angrily. "You've put everyone on this ship in mortal danger, including yourself. Your friends won't get here in time, you know!"

Jamie, watching the confrontation from his perch on a nearby crate, frowned in puzzlement at what seemed to him to be a clumsy attempt to goad the Cyberman. Though he maintained the façade of a genial clown, the Doctor never wasted words; if he was occasionally garrulous, it was always part of some overall plan of action. But there couldn't be any possible gain in trying to provoke a soulless thing with no human feelings whatsoever. The Cybermen had their weak spots, true, but emotion wasn't one of them.

If that was indeed the purpose of the Doctor's observation, then it failed. The creature did not deign to answer. The Doctor stood and stared at it for a few seconds more, one eyebrow hiked, then planted his hands on his hips, hung his head and sighed harshly.

The sound of the door interrupted his evident aggravation, and as he looked up, Argus materialised from the shadows beyond the feeble circle of light.

"Any luck?" she asked.

"No, it won't listen to reason," said the Doctor, ruefully. "Still, it was a bit of a long shot." He paused fractionally, and then changed tack, tapping his chin in thought. "May I ask you a question, Lieutenant?"

"Of course."

"You said that the Cyberman was completely dormant when it was discovered. If that's true, why did you feel the need to chain it up and lock it in the holding cell?"

"It didn't stay dormant for long," she said, and suddenly, her expression was suffused with profound unease. "It showed signs of life from the moment it was brought aboard, so at first we took it to the infirmary and strapped it to a table. Within half an hour even that wasn't enough, so we brought it down here and locked it up. And it's been there ever since."

"Yes, well, I'm not at all surprised," said the Doctor, sharply, "given that the entire ship is effectively one giant electrical conductor. The moment it made contact with the deck it had access to all the power it could possibly want, and now it's seized control of your ship."

Argus blanched. Even in the low light, they could both see that her face had suddenly drained of all colour. At first Jamie was inclined to believe the Doctor's words had caused this reaction, but then the woman put a hand to her head and swayed slightly. He leapt down at once and tried to take her arm, but she shook her head and stepped away.

"I'm fine. It comes and goes," she said. "The radiation's worse down here than it is on the upper decks, that's all."

"Then you really shouldn't be here," said the Doctor, kindly but firmly. "Go back to your quarters and get some rest."

"No," she insisted. "I have my duties. While the captain is incapacitated, I'm in command of this ship, and I don't take that responsibility lightly."

"I'm sure you don't," the Doctor told her, "but there's nothing you can do down here, is there? Someone has to go through Engineering and find a way to re-route the electrical conduits. With any luck, that should stop the Cyberman from being able to siphon power from the ship via the superstructure."

Argus looked the Doctor up and down. "That 'someone' would have to be extraordinarily hardy," she said, in tones of heavy irony, "considering that by now, the engineering decks are saturated with enough radiation to fry an egg."

"I wasn't planning on doing any cooking," said the Doctor, through a wry grin.

"I'm serious. You won't last two minutes down there, you idiot!"

"Do you have any other suggestions, Lieutenant?" asked the Doctor, with a distinct edge to his voice. "If you do, I'd be only too happy to consider them."

Jamie felt a nasty lurch in his stomach. He wasn't sure he understood the scientific concepts involved, but it was clear to him from the context – and from the frightened gleam in Argus's eye – that going down to the lowest deck of the ship was, effectively, suicide.

"Doctor, can we talk about this?" he said, nervously. The Doctor promptly ushered him away a few paces and then lowered his voice to a velvet whisper.

"Don't you trust me?" he asked.

"O' course I do, but I – "

"But nothing. Really, Jamie, do you think I'm silly enough to go down there if I weren't perfectly confident of coming back again?"

"Yeah, I know," said Jamie, still not at all convinced, "but she said it's fair dangerous."

"She's quite right. It's very dangerous indeed," the Doctor said. And then he adopted a small, faintly self-satisfied little smirk and added: "To humans, anyway."

"Aye? Ye mean it won't affect ye?"

"Certainly it'll affect me," said the Doctor, "but not as fast as it would a human being. If I'm quick about it, I should be able to get in and out of there without any ill effects. You needn't worry about me."

"Well, I do worry, and if it's all the same tae ye I'll keep on' worryin' until we're off this ship," said Jamie, quietly but fiercely.

The Doctor nodded and patted his arm. "Good man," he said, cheerfully, and then turned back to Argus. "I'm sorry," he told her, lifting his chin. "I don't see any other option. I have to try, at least."

"Doctor," said Jamie, as a thought occurred to him, "could we mebbe not jettison the Cyberman? Y'know, just toss him out the airlock?"

"Ah. A sound suggestion, yes, but with two little flaws. For one thing, the ship's trapped in the tremendously powerful electromagnetic field generated by the pulsar. If we opened the airlock right now the shields would collapse, and everyone on board would be dead in seconds." He paused, and cast a dark glance at the Cyberman before continuing. "In any case, I very much doubt it would go without a fight, and I'd rather not find that out the hard way."

"You're sure about this?" said Argus, regarding him dispassionately, although Jamie saw that the subtlest hint of admiration had nonetheless crept into her expression.

"Perfectly sure, yes." The Doctor set his shoulders and straightened his lapels, looking determined. "And now I think you'd better go, don't you? Look at you, you're exhausted."

She didn't argue this time. In fact, she didn't even appear to have heard him; her gaze had lost focus and wandered away into the middle distance. He turned aside and whispered to Jamie.

"Take her back upstairs and keep an eye on her," he said. "She's far sicker than she'd have us believe. Don't leave her alone."

"Is there nothin' I can do tae help ye?" asked Jamie, earnestly.

Even though the Doctor's logic was sound, he didn't like letting the man wander into danger on his own. For Jamie, this reaction had nothing to do with logic, in any case, but was something bred in the bone and etched on his soul. When he reached the age of manhood he'd sworn fealty to the Laird McLaren, just as had his father and his grandfather before him. And when he left Scotland in the TARDIS, for some time afterwards Jamie had felt a great weight of quiet guilt for – as he saw it at first – betraying his oath.

Gradually, however, and so naturally he hadn't thought to question it, Jamie found that his staunch allegiance had transferred itself to the Doctor instead. For better or worse, the strange traveller in the blue box was his Laird now, and commanded all the loyalty that that entailed even if it meant facing certain death.

"You can help me," said the Doctor, smoothly, "by doing as I ask. Now please, Jamie, we really don't have time for questions."

Jamie still had one more spark of rebellion left, and he opened his mouth to protest, but the Doctor raised a warning finger, and he subsided.

"All right," he said. "But I'm no' happy about this, ye ken? No' happy at all."

"Oh, I don't expect you are," replied the Doctor, his voice quite cool. "But what will be will be. Off you go now."

Once the young Scot had left, escorting Argus back to the relative safety of the upper decks, the Doctor simply stood in silence for a moment, head bowed as if collecting his thoughts. When he finally looked up once more, he caught sight of the Cyberman through the bars of its cell, and in the eerie green light his eyes seemed to shine like a cat's as he gazed, unblinking, at his old foe.

"We can still end this peacefully, you know," he said. "It's not too late. If you release the ship and let these people live, I promise I'll find a way to return you to your own kind."

"Your assistance is not required," it said.

"Is that your final word on the matter?"

"Yes."

"Then no further truce will be offered," said the Doctor, and turned away.


Victoria had remained with the Captain, feeling – as she'd put it – that someone ought to keep watch over the poor gentleman.

His stupor seemed to have lifted, but only to be replaced by abject confusion. He was painted with sweat, and his head turned this way and that on the pillow. While his eyes were open, she doubted that he was seeing anything clearly, if at all; his barely coherent mumblings seemed to suggest that he was suffering visions of some kind instead.

While searching the spartan room for a clean cloth which which to mop his face, she had earlier come across a half empty bottle of whiskey in his bedside cabinet. Victoria, while admittedly innocent in many of the ways of the wider world, was not so naïve that she missed the implications of this discovery, and had put the bottle back where she found it, shaking her head sadly.

"I thought I'd lost you," said Prentice, softly. She returned to the moment to see that he'd come to his senses and was now gazing up at her with a weak little smile. He raised one trembling hand, and Victoria, out of instinct, grasped it gently between her own. In contrast to his earlier fever, she noted, he was now unnaturally cold instead.

"How are you feeling, Captain?" she asked, trying to keep her tone as light as possible.

"Much better now," he said, and as she watched, she saw tears gathering in his eyes. "Sarah, I missed you. I missed you so much."

For a moment, Victoria couldn't think what to say. She was by no means unkind, and it seemed callous to disabuse him of his comforting hallucination for the time being. But he was now hanging on to her hand like a lifeline, and this sudden intensity was beginning to unsettle her.

"You should get some sleep. Everything's going to be all right," she said, wishing that someone would reassure her in turn. "The Doctor will be back very soon. He's gone to talk to the Cyberman."

At once, the captain's hand clamped down on hers, so hard that she whimpered. As she watched, his peaceful expression twisted out of all recognition, becoming an ugly snarl of bitter fury, and he sat bolt upright, his chest heaving.

"I won't have my orders disobeyed!" he snapped, releasing his hold on Victoria at last. She shied away in the face of his sudden and inexplicable rage, retreating to the far corner of the room as he shot to his feet and strode out of the door.

In her fright, she quite failed to notice that he had drawn his gun as he left.