When I awoke, I found myself being dragged by my hair through a place that looked like a quarry. A glimpse of hairy female legs and a blinding reflection of sunlight on chrome colored panties told me I had been rescued by my crazy wife.

When I noticed a tiny suited figure walking alongside her, I glanced that way and decided all was right with the world. Right-ish. I was alive, Riversong was alive, and she only had two eyelids. The laser cannon was cradled in her arms, but she seemed to be carrying it okay.

I grabbed at my wife's hands and she let go, smiling at me.

"I thought I lost you," I smiled.

"I thought I did too." I stared at the piles of rocks. The quarry seemed to go on for miles in all directions. And me without any shoes.

"You were right about the black hole," she sighed.

It was a hollow victory. "It'd be nice if I wasn't. Are we safe?"

She shrugged. "We're out in Sector A65B-33-4, and I blocked the exit with a rock slide. I think we'll be all right. It's not like they can fly or anything."

The thought made me uneasy, but it calmed me to hear the Queen of the Daleks report that that Daleks couldn't fly. If the damned things actually could fly, we would have been in serious trouble.

Riversong wrinkled her face as she stared at the half naked figure standing above me. "You need some clothes."

Eve only shrugged. "I didn't have time to dress." With a grin, she added, "You should have seen what I had on before this!"
And then she must have noticed me staring at her cleavage, because then she was cinching her bra up higher and winking at me with her big cyclops eye.

I got up and brushed myself off, pretending to be searching the quarry for...anything survival related. "Was I dead?"

"No. Stunned." She stuck out her arm. "Hand."

I unthinkingly obeyed, wincing as needles stabbed through puncture wounds that were just beginning to heal.

After she'd `vamped' me for a bit, she let go, marching barefoot across the sharp and jagged rocks.
I followed her.

The rocks cut my feet, but what was I to do? I had stupidly tried to make myself comfortable in bed, and I had the nerve to chase after my adopted daughter without stopping for my boots.

"Where are we going?"

"To where you wanted to go."

"Where I wanted? What about you? Don't you want to see what it's like out there? Don't you want to live in a world free of killer robots? Away from where they stick...(I didn't want to offend her with words like `ugly') creatures in your skull?"

"I want to be where our son is," she said quietly.

I could have fainted. "Your what?"

"Our son. He's back there. With them."

"No!" I moaned. "Please no!"

She dropped to her knees on the painfully sharp rocks and wept.

Out of obligation, I held her close, trying to comfort her, but I had none to give her.

I pictured a young boy about Riversong's age. A companion. A playmate. Maybe, sometime when he got older, something more.

Imagine my relief when she said, "Yes, Robert. While I was on the table, they stole my fertilized eggs."

I started breathing normally again. "So...there's no little John Connor that needs rescuing? There's just an egg, right?"

"Yes," she sniffed. "But it's fertilized. Did you really want to name him John?"

I smacked my head. "Look. I know that life begins at conception and all that, but he doesn't even have le-" That reminded me of another thing that bothered me about the whole thing. "How did you know it's a boy?"

She shrugged, wiping her face. "How do they know what's in those other test tubes is a Dalek?"

"Genetics," I said.

She nodded.

I sighed. "Look. We can fertilize other eggs. It's not even a fetus yet, is it?"

"No."

"Well then." Technically I was off the hook. I breathed an even heavier sigh of relief.

She clutched the top of my jumpsuit with a terrified expression on her face. "But don't you see? They could use our DNA to create some horrible abomination!"

I thought about saying we didn't need any help in that department, we already made one, but I held my tongue, silently staring at her.

"I'm not talking about just one! They could make an army of soldiers with that DNA! Thousands of...mutant things, all with your face!"

"Our faces," I corrected.

She wept on my chest. "What do we do?"

"Relax," I said. "They'll have an army of soldiers that can't do math, can't hold a job, and can't get the nerve to ask someone to the prom." I frowned. "And may be kill a dinosaur with a pair of scissors."

I plopped down on a boulder. "Even so, they will be too moody to enjoy their victory. They'll probably commit suicide before attempting any invasion."

Eve frowned at me. "What are you trying to say?"

I rolled my eyes. "All I'm saying is, your bad decision might just save the universe. I'd like to see them try to use my DNA!"
"Gee, thanks." At least she wasn't crying, I thought.

She stood up. "Let's go."

And so I followed her.

"I'm tired," Riversong moaned. "Here. Take your gun back."

Eve slung it over her shoulder, stomping carelessly over the jagged rocks.

The little girl smiled at me. "That was really brave of you back there."

"Thanks, kid."

"And really stupid."

"That too."

She sighed. "You remind me of Roary."

"Really? How so?"

She shrugged.

"How did he die? Did a Dalek kill him?"

"No, it was...the Weeping Angels."

"What are those?"

"Spolers," she said with a smirk.

I wasn't sure what was being spoiled. "So, what, they're a biker gang or something?"

She gave me this look like I were stupid. "Be glad you've never met them," she said.

All of a sudden, my wife silently set down her gun, motioning us back with one hand as she drew a sharp piece of scrap metal out of her bra with the other.

I caught a glimpse of something like a snake disappearing behind a bounder, then watched as mutant cavegirl quietly stalked barefooted across the gravel in her shiny underwear like a character in some late night B movie.
In a bound, she leapt across the boulder, and as the snake thing reared up to strike her, I heard her let out a feral scream, slamming the knife down in a spray of black blood.

The combatants fell behind the boulder.

The silence that followed worried me, so, fearing the worst, I followed, only to find mutant cavegirl peeling the skin off the thing's carcass.

I don't know what it was she killed, but it looked like a rattlesnake and a giant centipede had an overgrown baby together.
The thing had a head like a cobra, and she'd severed that part from the body.

"I removed the poison sacs," she said as she peeled more skin back. "We only need a fire and it'll be ready."
I frowned at the pile of rocks that surrounded me. 'and how, pray tell, do we do that? I don't see any sticks, do you Riversong/"

The child shook her head.

"I smell petrol fumes. Some of these rocks are semi flammable so you should be able to coat them with the stuff to make coals. There are also dry plants growing behind some other boulders."

A short foot injuring walk on some sharp stones led to a giant pool of black sludge. It didn't smell so good, like hot asphalt and burning tires, but I dipped the rocks in it anyway, piling them next to our kill.

I also found the dry plant she mentioned, a sort of tumbleweed with eyes, but its thorns cut me every time I tried to pull one up.

When I told her about it, I expected advice on how to grab them, but instead she just yanked it out of the ground with her bare hands, throwing it on the rock pile. "Here," she said, handing me the piece of metal and a flinty looking rock. "Start the fire."

I stared at her. "Who told you I was in Scouts?"

"What?"

I shook my head. "Never mind." Maybe she just assumed I was a firebuilder because all cavemen knew that stuff.

I knelt by the alien tumbleweed, striking sparks into it until I had tiny glowing embers. The knotted structure of the plant was ideal for tinder, and with a little blowing, it smoked and burned, only growing dim when my woman dropped a pile of tumbleweed things on top of it.

The rocks caught fire, releasing a cloud of black smoke that made me gag, then the semi flammables caught, lighting up like Kingsford briquettes.

An hour passed, and we were eating alien snake-apede jerky.

It wasn't that good. The stuff tasted like doughy undercooked sausage, old brussel sprouts and the flavorless lump of gristle you often find in a block of cheap ham. I ate until I was full, but only because I was starved and there wasn't any pepperoni supreme pizza snakes laying around.

The robots apparently couldn't move without a smooth level surface, so we ate in unmolested silence.

The sun went down, and Eve found us a cramped little animal burrow (its deadly owner lay dead on a nearby rock-breakfast) and the three of us got in and curled up together to keep warm.

For three days, we existed similarly, eating nasty snake-apedes, drinking the ooze from plants, and sleeping in animal burrows (that was murder on my back). One day, we didn't even go out on account of the acid rain.

On the fourth day, Eve pulled me in front of a giant pointy pillar of rock, calling it a Type 39 TARDIS.

"It's a rock," I said. "It looks like something that would be standing in a Utah valley somewhere."

She brushed an area of the rock clean, placing her palm against it, and a square piece of the mineral slid open, revealing a circular panel that looked best suited for interaction with a toilet plunger.

She placed her hand on it, turning it around like a combination lock, then jerked her hand back just seconds before two metal panels tried to guillotine slice her wrist into a toilet plunger handle.

The rock obelisk let out a rumbling moan, throwing small stones and gravel down on us as its surface split open like a shale outcrop on the San Andreas fault line. I'm not sure if that mineral exists on the fault, but you get the idea.
The crack widened into the shape of a door, and I was again looking into a console room.

This one looked like an antique. The fittings were all in brass, and the lights seemed to be dying, the controls all designed to resemble the old style dials and levers the guy used in that H.G. Wells Time Machine movie I saw on TV awhile back. The inverted Frisbee things in this model provided very little illumination, being the color of old gold, and there was a layer of thick dust covering everything.

The moment I stepped through the door, I wanted to step back out again.

There were two Daleks, one on either side of the console, and they had the appearance of battle tanks.

I relaxed when I saw the cobwebs. If these things were alive, I thought, they obviously aren't the most active robots on the planet. They should have at least exterminated the bugs.

My woman casually strolled into the room, placing her hands on a pair of circular console panels. They glowed blue, and the big plastic column in the center of the device started glowing and rising up and down.

The lights got brighter, and I heard the grinding of machinery and air conditioner equipment kicking on.

"Dalek 47 report!" Eve barked.

No answer.

"Dalek 48 report!"

I waved a hand in front of one of their eyestalks.

"48 REPORTS UNSUCCESSFUL COMBAT WITH ARACHNID," I mocked.

When I saw the bulbs on its dome flicker like the top of a child's light up fire truck with a loose wire, I jumped back and shut up, but the thing wasn't moving.

I led the little girl up to the console, then picked her up in my arms when I noticed the kid couldn't see anything.

"You know something about this thing, don't you, kid?"

"A little," she said. "It looks a little different, but-" She pointed to a crank and a set of dials. "I think that controls the time period." She pointed to some switches and levers. "And those are planetary controls..." She flipped a switch, and a section of one of the walls slid open, revealing a monitor displaying the world outside. "And somewhere around here is the-"

"STA-TUS," a mechanical voice groaned at what seemed like a speed of 25 RPM. "RE-PORT. TEM-PORAL FLUX COM-PO-NENT DAM-AGED. PLACED ON STAND-BY TO AWAIT RE-PAIRS."

"HUMANOID UNITS," the other croaked. "IDENTIFY YOURSELF."

"Dalek Queen 3 and prisoners, sent here for repairs. Dalek 47, state mission objective."

"REPAIR TARD-IS AND RE-TURN TO STRA-TE-GIC LO-CA-TION 5455-5477-85289 IN SEC-TOR 5186-15-4562189 TO DE-STROY BE-ING KNOWN AS GEORGE WASH-ING-TON."

The other robot said, "TO WIN THE TIME WAR AND DESTROY ALL TIME LORDS."

"Right!" I said with an uneasy smirk. "Now that we're all on the same page...how do we get this thing to work?"

"We can't," Eve said. "We don't have a temporal flux component."

With a sigh, I set the girl down. "So we need a flux capacitor or it won't go."

"It's a temporal flux component, but yes."

I slumped on the floor. "Great. We're stuck here. Now what?"

"Now?" Eve smiled. "Now we go home."

"No!" Riversong shouted, pressing herself against me in a tight little ball. She curled her arm around mine, clutching it tightly as she folded her legs to her chest, squeezing herself between me and the console.

"Honey," my wife said to her. "You don't want to live in this little cave for the rest of your life, do you?"

"It's not a cave, it's a TARDIS."

"I used a metaphor."

"I know. If this is a cave, the place back there is a tomb. I don't want to go back. At least here I can go outside."

"You can go outside all you want back there." She knelt beside her, smiling. "All of Skaro is ours, honey. But if you want to live here, we can live here. This is your home too. We'll just be...camping!"

Riversong relaxed somewhat. "Okay."

I frowned. "We're stranded here, aren't we?"

Eve nodded sadly. "I'm sorry. We don't have TARDIS production facilities at our base."

"Are there others?"

She shook her head. "The Doctor destroyed them all. With Davros and our human leaders overthrown, the surviving units gathered together at Site B26A51E84 and tried to rebuild society from the ashes."

"Who is Davros?"

"A misunderstood genius." She stood up. "The Type 39 is not as impressive as the 40, but it has a kitchen and sleeping quarters. Anyone for lunch?"

Riversong slowly stood up. "Wait. I think we can fix the TARDIS." She pointed to a panel on the side of the console. "Open this, please."

Eve humored her, removing the bolts, and the girl pulled the panel off, disappearing inside the machinery.

She was gone for several minutes, tossing wires, silver cubes and metal circuit boards all over the floor as she rooted around.

My wife took this opportunity to attempt getting me out of my spacesuit, and I almost let her had I not heard the girl calling to her.

I noticed that she had found a tool kit somewhere within the compartment, and one of her hands clutched the silver socket wrench-like thing she called a sonic screwdriver.

We stopped kissing to stare at her as she cautiously poked one of the robots. "Can I take a look inside this one? For parts?"

Eve climbed out of my lap, smiling at her. "Of course you can, honey." And she strolled up to the Dalek, placing a hand on its shell.

I heard the thing groaning something about resenting being used for scrap parts, but it was in a tone of resignation.

"Dalek 47, we require your assistance. We believe we can help accomplish your objective to destroy Washington if we can remove a part from your vehicle. Will you do this for the glory of all Daleks?"

After a minute's delay, it bowed its eyestalk and said, "YES, MY QUEEN."

"I will hold you," she said, offering her arms.

After a long delay, the eyestalk raised. The dome elevated, and the front of the machine unfolded to reveal a tentacled creature surrounded by tiny pieces of computer equipment, life support devices, and a myriad of miniature controls.

Below this little space pod of sorts, I could see the heart of the machine, wires, batteries, a motor, and a lot of other machinery I couldn't guess the purpose of.

My woman gently placed her hands in the space pod, and the creature crawled up her arm.

With care, she brought the thing to her bosom and held it like a newborn baby, gesturing for Riversong to do her examination of the device.

She quickly did so, peering into the inner workings, tugging wires and pulling things out.

The thing clutched to Eve's chest jerked violently in response, but she cooed and petted it, and the thing closed its eye.
Riversong pulled some wires and cylinders out of the shell, disappearing inside the console again.

My wife offered me the creature. "Would you like to pet him?"

Pushing away my squeamishness, I put my hand on the creature, stroking its squid body. It was as pleasant as petting an eel. "You think if we had kids, they'd look like that?"

She grinned. "Gee, I hope so!"

I rolled my eyes. All this snuggling up with the Daleks made me want to dump her somewhere and go home, or jump ship at the next available safe...whatever, and leave her with the robots.

Seriously, I had no good reason to stay with her now. Sure, we slept together outside wedlock, so we're kind of obligated to each other in that respect, and we did have the marital scarification, but she didn't even remotely resemble the girl I married. As I watched her cuddle the creature like a baby, I formulated plans for abandoning her, taking the little girl and going away somewhere. Someplace safe and normal.

But then I got to feeling guilty about letting the Daleks operate on her brain, and burying her dad, and I thought back to all we went through together, and I kinda felt obligated to stick with her.

Plus that silver underwear really looked good on her.

"I'm going to fix 47's chariot," she said, holding the Dalek creature out to me. "Here. Hold him."

I didn't really like the idea of holding a one eyed squid creature to my chest, especially one that probably wanted to rip my face off, but I figured the key to handling any deadly animal was to show no fear, so I picked up the nasty thing and held it to my chest, kind of cradling it in my arms while Eve worked on its metal shell.

I just stared in disgust at the creature, and it stared balefully at me.

After about five or ten minutes of this, the creature got bored and fell asleep.

When Eve saw me, she gave me this look like I was the greatest father in the world, which really embarrassed and sickened me.

With a grin, she connected a few wires and held out her arms. "You can hand him back now."

"What, and wake Junior?" I remarked with sarcasm. I handed the thing back double quick.

"So, what, you can fix those Dalek machines, but you can't fix a TARDIS?"

"Exactly." And Eve put the creature back in its little compartment.

Its shell closed and the thing didn't do anything for a long time.

"What did you do to it?"

She shrugged. "The motivator and voice modules were taken to replace components in the TARDIS. I just reconnected the life support systems and enabled other auxiliary operations."

The lights on the robot flashed on and off like it were speaking.

"Please tell me you disconnected the firing system."

She looked at me like I were crazy. "Then how would we kill George Washington?"

I smacked my face. "George Washington is the founding father of (I wanted to say `our country', but, frankly, it wasn't hers)...America. My country. Now, Eve, I'm very fond of America, and I don't like the idea of someone coming along and vaporizing George before my constitutional rights have been established."

She rolled her eyes. "I know who George Washington is, Robert."

"Then do you know who Hitler is? Because if you're going to wipe out one of the founders of a notoriously free country, you're probably going to have a totalitarian state where they execute people for having political opinions."

She silently stared at me for a few minutes.

At last she said, "One time Qardug spoke words that brought the curse of evil down upon our village. He was stoned to death. When he died, the curse was lifted."

I was understandably disgusted. "So that's a good thing to you? You think it's some great thing for a person to get shot and killed for just saying words?"

She swallowed. "One time Rinarg and Wiungab were challenging each other for hunting and water rights. Wiungab said those rights belong to everyone, but Rinarg did not agree. Instead of discussing it rationally, Rinarg poisoned him to death. It was a cowardly way to solve the problem."

"And what are these Daleks doing, exactly?"

She gave me a nervous sidelong glance. "You don't understand. This is different."

"How so? They're going to vaporize any species that isn't a Dalek, aren't they?"

She frowned. "Maybe?"

"And you don't think that's wrong."

Eve sighed. "Robert, it's just one man."

"Yeah? Then why do I have the sneaking suspicion that someone else is going to wipe out Jefferson and all the other signers of the constitution?"

"It's fixed," said a voice behind me.

I frowned at her. "What do you think, Riversong? They want to kill President Washington. Don't you think that's wrong?"

She nodded. "That's like killing the Queen! You can't do that!"

Oh you limey, I thought. But I smiled.

"Riversong, dear," Eve said. "Don't you want to live in a world with no racism, no disagreements? Don't you want to eliminate all differences so we can all be the same and live in harmony together?"

She saw right through the attempt. "No."

Eve petted her on the head. "We're all tired. We should sleep on it."

That sounded like the best idea I heard all day, and so I set about exploring the T39 in search of a bed.

The place wasn't all that much bigger on the inside. A narrow hall led down to a pair of tiny bedrooms, and bathrooms connected to them. There was a kitchen, a room Eve described as a recharging room for the Daleks' chariots, a storage room and a hydroponics section to provide air. That was it.

The food in the freezer was flavorless and canned. We had the oatmeal stuff, some spam like canned meat and something that tasted like vegetable matter, presumably supplying lacking vitamins.

When we retired to our beds, Eve tried to get me out of my spacesuit, but again, to my relief, Riversong got scared, so we just squished together the best we could on the narrow mattress.

Riversong wrinkled her nose and said I stank, so I tried out the shower.

Daleks, or whoever it was that owned the thing, did not have our standard shampoo, just some sort of hand soap of some sort, and the water pressure sucked, but I made do.

I had just rinsed the soap out of my eyes when I noticed a naked body kissing and pressing up against me, and I felt something like mass of wiggling snakes engulfing my manhood. It was like getting a lap dance from an octopus.
I should have been disgusted, but my body had other ideas. I slid down to the shower floor, letting her do whatever she wanted with her tentacles, obliging her with my body whenever it seemed appropriate.

We made a lot of noise as we had sex in the spray. I can't imagine what the little girl thought about all this, but I guess she probably covered her head with a pillow or something.

The ugly cyclops eye was a turn off, but I had gotten used to it, and I thought the hair tentacles were kind of cute and played with them as we kissed.

What I couldn't handle so well were other things, like, how sticky suction cups suddenly popped out of her tailbone area and raised in an arc around the curve of her buttocks, and how, as we neared climax, a long row of little mouths popped open from her neck to crotch, erupting in small tentacles and suckers.

I tried to make myself think they were aloe vera or cactus in tiny pots. In fact, I said it quite a few times out loud, which made her laugh.

I laughed too, but when we passed the point of no return, it wasn't so funny.

Immediately, as we reached the inevitable, I felt something like teeth clamping down around the base of my genitals. I screamed, thinking she was going to...cut it off.

I thought for sure I'd be spending the rest of my life as an eunuch, but then, whatever it was just stayed there.

"Sorry," she giggled.

"It's all right," I groaned.

And then some sticky green liquid gushed all over my lap.

I fell flat on the shower floor.

I had to shower again to get all that stuff off of me, and then I washed my hands again. Touching the suckers on her butt was like touching the back of a slug. I had to wash my hands three and four times to get the sticky sludge off of them, and even after all that my hands still felt sticky.

When we dried and got dressed again (I had to convince Eve to put on a jumpsuit), I found Riversong sitting on the bed, staring at an instruction manual.

"What's an aloe vera cactus?" she asked.

I blushed. "You don't want to know."

"It helps daddy to think of plants when we're trying to make babies," Eve grinned.

The girl looked as disgusted as I was embarrassed. I changed the subject. "Are you sleepy, hon?"

She nodded.

"C'mon, then." I crawled into the bed, and she got in with me, my wife sandwiching her from the other side.

The bed really wasn't designed for that. Twice during the night, I rolled off the single person bed, falling on the floor.
Once, when Riversong had left for the bathroom, I found my hand resting on those disgusting suction cups, the clothes apparently not to my woman's liking.

And then, toward what felt like the early hours of dawn, as I felt myself reaching the most comfortable levels of unconsciousness, I suddenly noticed the whole room shaking. That, combined with the disturbing sensation of not being in danger of falling off the bed, caused my eyes to fly wide open.

I jumped out of bed, threw on the boots I swore I would never go anywhere without, and bolted to the console room.
My worst suspicions were confirmed.

One of the Daleks was missing, and the front doors of the TARDIS were wide open, overlooking a room bearing a striking similarity to the Oval Office of the White House.

It looked like a log cabin. The flag was the old kind with thirteen stars. The Presidential Crest was painted on the floor, because old Betsy wouldn't have been able to sow a huge eagle for people to step all over like they did later. It didn't look like any of the pictures I'd seen, but then a lot of stuff I'd experienced didn't match up with the history books.
In the center of the room, a charred skeleton in colonial garb lay slumped over a large wooden desk. Dalek 48 had literally blown off his wig.

My wife stood on one side of the desk, clad only in her chrome underwear, with those radio antennas poking out the sides of her neck.

"This is the Dalek Queen," she said with an air of pride. "Objective 15-C6146M accomplished!"