Part Four: Skulldiggery

Not right now, we needed rest before setting out. The other bedrooms were occupied, so I popped in to see how Isobella was taking her new freedom, a strangely constricted freedom in the bottom drawers of a pair of dressers. Tragedy, farce and Monty Python – this adventure had it all.

Clara sat up in the big king-sized, gesturing "shhh" when I looked in, obscuring the wedge of light from the landing. Then she gestured me in. Those dresser drawers weren't quite shut, allowing Isobella to peer out if she wanted.

'Very tired, very sick in her soul,' whispered Clara. 'Not a happy woman.'

I sat down on the king-sized, feeling tired from my disturbed sleep, and the Perry Crush.

'Can't blame her, not after hearing what the Sontarans did to her friends and daughters.'

Clara put a hand on my shoulder in reassurance.

'They are wicked bad, yes?'

I chuckled silently, making her hand bob about.

'You're biased!' The humour vanished. 'Yes. Yes they are. Deserving of death.'

'Good,' she slurred, lying down again. 'Tired, sleepy, don't talk.'

A huge yawn overtook me, making my jaw creak. Sleepy, you're not kidding. Still, I need to get to an empty room, or chair, or somewhere.

'How sweet,' said Tad, squeezing my ear to wake me. I had, of course, fallen asleep sitting up against the headboard, and Clara had curled up next to me.

'Never mention this to Marie,' I whispered, tiptoeing downstairs. Thank God Sarah Jane hadn't come along, this news would be all over Aylesbury in minutes if we had her with us!

The Doctor walked us boldly out of the pre-fab, only to encounter a very suspicious Officer Headon – no "Julie" about her this morning, she was a Law Officer on duty and no mistake. She eyed us and the golf bag in a very policewoman-like manner.

'What did you get up to last night?' was her first greeting.

'Good morning, Officer Headon,' said the Doctor, very politely and calmly.

'I slept off the after-effects of the Perry Crush,' I replied.

'We got a map from TARDIS,' added Tad.

'As exciting as it gets round here, don't you think?' I added. Steely gaze from Headon.

'Someone abducted an inmate from the city Mercy House last night, and left a member of the Archate dead on the floor.'

'Oh? What were they doing in there at night?' asked the Doctor, inquisitive and innocent all at once. Officer Headon mumbled an answer.

'If you aren't responsible, then you won't mind me checking your quarters.'

Five minutes later she reappeared, looking grumpy.

'Alright, no sign of her. Where are you off to now?'

Speaking enthusiastically, our time-travelling plotter got interested in the rotary-engined transport aircraft out on the field at Darien, chatting incessantly to Headon until our group were walking off the self-driving train and onto the tarmac stands.

'Remarkable!' he said, pointing out single-engined, dual-rotor models, and VTOL short-range heavy lifters, and a twin-rotor personnel version, and a stand of two-person runabouts. 'All imports from Andromache? Oh, they arrive crated, I see. Really, given the general technological level of Magellania when your colonies were first founded, to have such a sophisticated trading and barter structure in place across twelve star systems is nothing short of outstanding - '

By which time we were standing in the cargo bay of the big, twin-rotor helicopter, which smelt of metal and paint and the plastic webbing strung everywhere.

'Oh – just a minute,' said the Doctor. He vanished behind a door in the forward end of the cargo hold. The big rear clamshell door closed, the engines fired, the rotors whirred and we were aloft.

'What's going on!' asked Headon, scandalised and worried. Tad up-ended the golf bag and tipped our collection of guns across the helicopter's floor. 'What! are those weapons?'

'This is a petrol-powered potato peeler,' replied Tad, utterly deadpan, picking up the M79 and loose rounds for it.

'And this is my dual-cylinder chemically-powered Thingummybob,' I tried, hefting the Nitro Express.

'I'm being abducted by a pair of lunatics,' muttered the officer, slumping against the wall webbing.

'HELLO THERE!' exploded interior speakers, set far too loudly. 'Sorry. Is that better? This is your pilot speaking, which is to say, the Doctor. Gentlemen and lady, please secure yourselves against the webbing in order to avoid injury when we manouevre abruptly.'

"Abruptly" meant being thrown around the sky in punishing ways, without warning. During these abrupt flight variations, I tried to explain to Officer Headon what we wanted to do: to locate the Sontaran mine, and have a look see at what there was. She deserved to be brought up to speed, and I needed to keep my mind off my churning stomach and the way the Doctor threw the big aircraft around like a Spitfire.

We found the mine site in thirty minutes, marked by the big helicopter having to descend three thousand metres as fast as possible.

'Anti-electronic sweep measure. Good job I brought my stick of tricks,' the tannoy told us. With a loud and gradually-diminishing chop from the rotors, the big helicopter settled on a firm surface. 'All out.'

Outside exhibited rough, broken landscape, with scrubby bushes and shattered boulders. A rushing sound indicated hidden water moving at speed nearby. The helicopter had landed on a vast shelf of rock that slanted down into purple shadows to the east, the whole vista encompassed by walls of massive boulders and broken hills. In effect, we were in a giant rock basin, where nobody outside could see in.

'Bad lands,' was our pilot's comment. 'From which we can see our enemy, while they cannot see us.'

The four of us toiled over broken ground, gulleys, sliding slopes of shale and succulent bushes that smelt of liquorice when their leaves were bruised. After an hour's progress we were rewarded with a view of the landscape beyond our landing zone; more bad terrain, rocky flats cut by fast-flowing streams, opening out into a plain beyond, where the smashed hills became smoothly-forested uplands.

And in the middle distance, like blight on a leaf, or a planetary disease, stood the Sontaran mining encampment. Great scars stood out against the landscape, gouged into the hills and forests. Spindly towers could be seen at this distance, along with spoil heaps, smoke columns and big, low-slung vehicles lined up along the middle of the plain.

The Doctor took a long, slow perusal via his telescope, sucking in his breath once or twice. He passed on the brass instrument to Tad, who likewise hissed at what he saw. After Officer Headon declined to view, I eagerly took the telescope.

The resolution was fantastic, far better than a nineteenth century artefact had any right to have. Thanks to that I saw the ugly, white, sprawling pile of corpses dumped in a pit outside the mine, a pit full of dead female abductees. Thirty yards by a hundred, at a guess. Ruts or rails ran up to the edge of the pit, allowing bodies to be trucked there for more efficient disposal. Other objects were noticeable thanks to their absence.

'No watch-towers. No fences. No guards. Nothing to stop people escaping.'

'If they're all progs, they won't want to escape,' explained Headon, dully.

'Makes our job easier,' I said, counting rounds for the Nitro, whilst Tad secreted the giant bullet rounds for the M79 about himself. The Doctor couldn't allow us to behave like this, so he forestalled me.

'John – how would you go about attacking that mine?'

Stock response. I didn't need to even think about this reply.

'One – reconaissance. Have a look-see, find out what we're up against. Two – rescue all the abducted women, bring them back here. Three – kill all the Sontarans. Four – blow up and destroy everything in the mine, using whatever we have to hand.'

The Doctor's eyebrows rose in inimitable fashion.

'Thank you, John! Knowing that, I have to generate an alternate paradigm.'

I shrugged.

'Well, we could just jump to Item Three on my list if you like.'

Tad nearly laughed at that, and Headon shook her head.

'Live Sontarans, John. Alive. I need a live Sontaran to interrogate.'

My recommendation about a reconaissance was the only thing the Doctor took to heart. We sat and took turns looking at the mine, entering our observations into the Doctor's white cube. With a bit of jiggery-pokery, he turned our observations into a scaled floor-plan, and that into a three-dimensional projection laid over a big flat rock.

The Sontaran mine occupied several square kilometres, beginning far up the valley sides and gradually working southwards. At least a dozen galleries had been driven into the hills, at right angles to the valley floor. Various workings sat on the valley floor, running along it, to service the mine galleries and the ore they produced. At what constituted the very middle of the middle, stood a solid concrete building: Sontaran headquarters. Squat and powerful, like it's creators. Being situated where it was meant being able to see in all directions. However –

' – no visible weapons mounted,' I observed, to be backed up by Tad. 'If you've taken ten thousand women prisoner and only one escaped, what need for big bad guns?' My point was that the Sontarans ought to be complacent by now about security and access. Headon mentioned trenches and weapon pits – on the far side of the mining encampment, luckily for us.

'Excuse me!' interrupted the Doctor. 'I take full credit for landing on the undefended side of the mines.'

'Do we simply stroll in?' I asked.

'Yes,' he said. 'Headed by Officer Headon. Ah – Officer – you will need to look suitably – worsted.'

That walk for an hour to reach the mine was Officer Headon's worst moment – being transformed from smart officer about planet to half-clad, mud-smeared, zombified peon. The Doctor gave her a dose of his magic-mirror on a stick and she went ahead of us, followed by Tad and the M79, the Doctor and myself bringing up the rear with my elephant gun. I also had the boot knife and .45, and any Sontaran who got in my way would regret climbing out of the cloning vat.

Or they would as long as the Doctor was looking the other way. Besides, he wanted live Sontarans.

'Let me reason this through,' I whispered to the Time Lord. 'The Sontarans land. They enslave any nearby garths. Then they – oh, I don't know, manage a stealth mission close to Amalthea. Land, enslave any Archate members they can find, use them to enslave others.'

A quiet hummed approval was all I got.

'So they can carry on with their mining operations, mining and enslaving. Except thanks to their ham-fisted brutality, Alamthea will reject it's own Archate in a year's time. By which time the Sontarans will have managed – what, exactly?'

'That, John, is what this little trip is intended to discover. Quiet now!'

Walking backwards is a trick acquired for tours in Ulster, which came in useful now. Not that I expected the toadies to creep up on us – with their technology and mindset, they'd simply blast us into blackened rags.

Or they might have done, had they not been settled in a comfortable routine of torture, murder, enslavement and living off immoral minings. Familiarity and contempt breed sloth, indolence and gaps in your perimeter defence. Not only that, this time the toadies weren't warned by their Archate slaves that an attempt was going to be made on their slave operation. The four of us literally walked into the mining operation.

Clearly, from what I could see and comprehend, the Sontarans were using human muscle to carry out what would be done by mechanical operation in conventional mining. The most sophisticated equipment on display were big bulk-ore carrying vehicles, which the Doctor recognised as adapted Amalthean tractors. Everything else was built from timber or shoddily-made metals and plastics – crude trolleys for hauling ore, pulley systems for transporting it out of the galleries, courduroy roads made from felled trees, a huge tumbril that carried corpses to the death pit. Currently there were a few ragged bodies lying upon it, abandoned and utterly undignified.

This was the mighty, galaxy-spanning Sontaran Empire at work? They must be down on their uppers if this was the best they could manage. Third world countries back on Earth could muster better equipment than this sorry-looking blight on the landscape.

Headon waved a warning hand and we ducked back behind a sprawling spoil heap, as two dirty, blank-faced women moved past, pushing a poorly-made truck half-full of rock and earth. They dumped it on the spoil heap, right in front of us, never paying the slightest attention even when the Doctor stood up in front of one. She went back to the truck, getting ready to push it.

'Stop them!' whispered the Doctor, so I got the one nearest us, arm round the throat from behind, pressing up to compress the jaw and stop any sounds, pulling her right arm up and behind her back, then dragging her backwards behind the spoil heap. She didn't weigh much, and didn't even struggle.

'Not like that!' hissed the Doctor angrily, having re-directed the other woman by turning and leading her by the hand. My victim was a bit blue in the face by now, so I guiltily released her. She turned to go back to the truck, so I grabbed her left hand and pulled her back.

The Doctor had Tad and Headon hold the other woman still, inspecting her. She was filthy, her denim coveralls ripped and torn, revealing bruises and contusions underneath. Her eyes were completely lifeless, set in a gaunt face where her jaw drooped in a vacuous way.

'Abominable!' muttered the Doctor. 'Higher functions completely shut off.' He produced his mirror gadget and proceeded to zap the detainee, who gave a huge gasp a minute later. She looked around us, combining wonder and worry in her expression. The Doctor gave the other woman a similar treatment, and she fell to weeping and sobbing.

'No time to explain fully,' said the Doctor. 'I want you to take this device back into the mine and use it on as many of your colleagues as you can. Meet us by the spoil heap furthest from here – no, actually, make that by the tractors. If you hear any gunfire, head due west for a mile and into the badlands. We have a helicopter hidden down there.'

Nodding dumbly, swallowing, the two women went off with their truck. Not before I'd gotten the weeper to dirty her face again – tear tracks in the grime might cause any watching or patrolling toadies to get curious.

'Tad – I want you and Officer Headon to get into one of these mine galleries and sabotage the equipment.'

Aha, and also oho. I did wonder how we were going to lay hands on a single live Sontaran when there were twelve of them loitering around. The trick was to get one or two on their own, all unsuspecting, and then do them over.

Tad and Headon chose a gallery opening on the other side of the valley, one not calculated to draw attention to the "progs" who'd be escaping from the nearby mine. They went sneaking over, moving from cover to cover and finally vanishing into the mine. We revisited the big converted tractors, where the Doctor nimbly scrambled up into the carrying body and scooped out samples of ore.After that, we headed off for the mine gallery to be sabotaged. I didn't know what my inventive Polish friend would come up with. Given his air of quiet, malevolent concentration, it would involve Sontarans falling into bad fortune at the very least. The occasional corpse encountered on our way hardened my resolve. Nobody ought to die like this, worked to death, denied the slightest bit of human dignity, slaving away and dying unmissed and unremarked.

No sooner did we reach the gallery entrance when the overhead pulley system jerked to a stop, the cable parted with a dull twang somewhere inside the mine, and the buckets carrying ores crashed to the ground. Echoes danced across the valley. Within minutes, four Sontarans emerged from their bunker and looked around, trying to spot the source of sonic upset. Pointing at our mine gallery, they began to work their stumpy way upwards.

'Oh dear,' muttered the Doctor. 'I only anticipated one or two.'

'Much as I respect you, Doctor, I don't intend to take on four of those squat little swine. We need to get further inside the workings and surprise them.'

The mine gallery consisted of crudely-worked timber shorings, with an overhead pulley system, and a rough-hewn corridor through the earth and rock. Guttering candles gave a low quality of light to the proceedings as we went along. The route twisted a bit, before ending in a big cavern, where listless slaves hacked ore from a far wall thirty yards high, excavated in great terraces, with wooden ramps between. The exvacated material went into a truck, which was dragged across the floor and up an inclined wooden ramp, to be tipped into the buckets suspended from the roof. A trough of water stood to one side of the echoing chamber, hung around with ladles and bowls. Since the pulley system no longer worked, the assembled slaves stood waiting for instructions.

Both the Doctor and I jogged down the inclined entrance into this cavern, looking for Tad and Headon. Nowhere in sight. Still, the light was bad. Could they be hiding?

'Hsst!' I hissed, which went winging around the cave in fine sibilant style. Two heads poked up from the ore truck. 'Four Sontarans coming.'

Time to think quickly. I grabbed a spade lying loose, and dragged one of the drooling slaves from her position regarding the cave wall at a range of five inches. Standing near the entrance, I warned the Doctor with a look: watch out, and keep clear!

So much for my plans. I expected a single Sontaran to come this far into the cave. Instead two of the stumpy beggars came trotting into the cavern, muttering to each other. My involuntary camouflage – the zombiefied slave – concealed me from the nearest Sontaran, who promptly got a whack on his probic vent with the spade and collapsed.

Slight bonus – neither were wearing helmets, which implied their fellow Sontarans wouldn't be, either.

Toady the Second whirled round to face me, drawing his pistol. The Doctor did his magic with the electric stick and matey found his wonderful forty-second century technology wouldn't work. Instead he lunged at me, in a variety of falling tackle that Wigan might expect to see at the league match on Saturday afternoon. My boxing reflexes got me out of trouble, bouncing nimbly backwards over the floor.

'Aid required!' bellowed the Sontaran wretch, drawing one of those peculiar tetrahedal daggers from his belt and making a ferocious swipe at the Doctor, who only avoided being slashed in two by leaping backwards.

By now I was in trouble. The beefy little bugger opposite me didn't allow me any leeway, advancing rapidly, and putting me in the line of fire of Tad, who had popped up from his hiding place. I did have the Nitro, but it was still slung, and to unsling, cock and fire would take long enough for the Sontaran to disembowel me with his pig-sticker.

'Aid - ' started and stopped my opponent, gasping loudly and pitching to the floor. Twenty yards behind him, juggling a rock the size of a grapefruit and only slightly smaller than the one that hit my enemy, the Doctor gave me a winning smile.

'Cricket skills – never wasted!' he chortled, having managed to hit the Sontarans probic vent from sixty feet, in bad light, and on a moving target to boot. Probably a demon darts player, too.

'Get busy with your sapphire string!' I whispered. 'There's two more on the way.'

In fact the other two toadies turned up whilst the Doctor was still stringing up his fallen foe. They nearly tripped up over the first Sontaran I'd walloped, and one wore a helmet. Ah. Yes.

That was the bad news for us. The good news for us was that I'd unslung and cocked the Nitro.

'Drop your weapons and lie flat on the floor,' I warned them. Tad and Headon clambered labouriously out of the ore truck, Tad cradling his M79.

'Foolish humans!' sneered the unhelmeted Sontaran. 'Your puny shotgun cannot harm us!' and he struck his cuirass defiantly, whilst drawing his knife.

My tongue took over, working at Sarcasm Plus.

'Look who's foolish. The Doctor's not human, I have a degree, and this is a Nitro elephant gun.' I gave him both barrels.

Now, that Sontaran armour is pretty strong stuff. The Doctor told me it's interleaved layers of ceramic, wire and polymer, very strong indeed, certainly proof against knives, fists or low-velocity shotgun pellets. It didn't fracture under the impact of my elephant gun's bullets, but it did deform inwards by a good foot, which ruptured every single one of the Sontaran's internal organs and killed him. Not instantly, either, to judge by his agonised gurglings.

Sontaran Number Four, by this point, lay quivering on the floor. Good hearing, you see – to mix metaphors once again – in fact excellent hearing, which had just experienced point-blank fire from a hideously loud weapon, in a confined space. My own ears were ringing in protest, and trickles of dust came from the cavern roof.

The Doctor tugged my arm, leading me to the prone prisoners, and between the four of us, we dragged them clear of the cavern. Tad tried to speak to me, but gave up when I indicated my currently humming eardrums.

At this point another improvisation struck the Doctor, and he pulled that big silver golf ball from one of his pockets. I can't tell what he spoke into it, not being able to hear anything except an artillery barrage properly, but the effect was to get all the slaves moving out of the cavern, plodding down the terraces, across the floor and past us, along the gallery to the outside world. This took a good few minutes, their pace not being that of Olympic sprinters, exactly. I remained behind to keep an eye on the last Sontaran, since my battered eardrums meant instructions in anything else were hopeless. Tad passed me his grenade launcher, needing both hands to drag the massive Sontarans - my bulk in the narrow gallery was more a hindrance than a help, so he and Headon took towing duties, dragging our sapphire-bound beauties to the outside.

'That cavern needs to collapse and bury the dead Sontaran,' said the Doctor, coming back to enunciate very clearly in my ear from an inch away. 'That way his comrades can't retrieve the body or find out what happened to him.' He passed me two rounds for the M79.

'What about the unconscious one?'

He chewed his cheek for a second, before replying.

'Drag him clear before blowing up the cavern.'

Damn the Doctor and his conscience! And damn John the big softie for even asking.

'Okay – you get on your way, just in case this bang-stick brings the whole roof down. No, no, don't argue, Doctor! My humble rifle nearly caused a cave-in.' I tapped the barrel of Tad's surrendered weapon. 'This thing could collapse the whole mine. Go – you can trust me with the sleeping beauty.' Spoken ridiculously loudly.

Allowing a whole minute for the Doctor and everyone else to get outside, I put a round into the grenade launcher, ready to drag our sleeping Sont to safety before collapsing the cavern on his friend.

Turning back to the cavern, my surprise at seeing the previously-flat Sontaran now upright and moving was considerable. He had dark blood leaking from both ears, and his eyes didn't focus properly, but he was upright and staggering at me, wielding his rheon pistol.

Oh dear. My blood ran chill in my veins. That thing would blow a hole in me big enough to drive a car through.

'Foolish human!' he slurred. 'Your puny shotgun cannot harm me!'

What? That insult again?

'Are you taught this stuff out of a book?' I sneered back. 'Get a new edition!'

He stopped, wobbling.

'You are not female. What are you?'

John's tongue took over again.

'Bad news on a stick.'

I swear he tried to look behind me for the stick, which gave me enough time to point and fire the M79.

The previous bang from my rifle was loud. This explosion, however, blew the Sontaran apart above the waist and knocked me back down the gallery, to the sound of falling rocks.

Seconds later, Tad and Headon were dragging me out of the collapsing gallery to the outside air, where my pounding head stopped me from being interested in anything.

Okay, how do you transport two prisoners weighing nearly four hundred kilogrammes, which is about a hundredweight in proper measurements, when those prisoners don't want to be transported?

Why, you stick them in a mine truck, and you use gravity to speed down the slopes to your rendezvous at the tractors. You also use your prisoners as cushioning, by dumping them on the bottom of the truck, and standing on them. Okay, kicking them as well, when the Doctor wasn't looking. Tad managed to look innocently out of the truck whilst administering painful kicks to the ears of both prisoners, only turning to nod at me.

Twelve freed women were waiting for us at the tractor, not many considering the time we'd been gone. These, however, were all the survivors in that particular gallery. They were told to climb into the carrying body and remain there whilst we travelled. The two prisoners were lashed to the vehicle's suspension, and the four rescuers clambered into the cab.

First order of business was for the Doctor to overcome the Sontaran remote-control guidance system installed to direct the tractor back to their main encampment. That took him all of ten seconds. After that he fired up the engine and drove us away.

Is this it? I wondered? We can get away that easily, in broad daylight, with a dozen freed captives and two Sontaran prisoners?

The Doctor seemed to think so. From the pursing of his lips I could tell he was whistling a refrain, one of his light operatta librettos, no doubt. He turned to flash a grin at me.

'All's well,' he mouthed at me. 'And yes, we can get away that easily.'

Whoops. I didn't realise I'd been thinking aloud.

Later on, when I could hear properly, he explained. The Sontarans were complacent and arrogant about their slave-mining operation, and they didn't get any expected warning from their Archate slaves. So they didn't expect trouble. When that trouble arrived, it took the place of an accident in a mine gallery that killed and buried four Sontarans, who had ordered their slaves out before attempting repairs – or so they would think. All that gunfire took place underground, where nobody outside would hear it. The tractors were programmed to travel automatically, without any prompting, once they had been filled to a certain level of ore, so our journey was utterly routine. As for the missing mine shift of de-programmed women, well, they probably just died on the job. There were sufficient bodies lying around to account for them.

The tractor bounced across the valley floor before making heavy weather of the more broken lands beyond it, jolting from side to side.

'Tractors. Helicopters. Is there any form of transport you can't manage?' I asked, hearing gradually returning to my senses.

'Well, I always found the Sopwith Camel to be an unforgiving brute of an aircraft, despite what Captain Bigglesworth has to say about it!' cheerily replied the Doctor.

I ought to point out here that "Captain Bigglesworth" is a fictional character. However, the Doctor once got extremely hot under the collar when I described the plot of "Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons" to him, and since the good captain of the scarlet variety is a marionette, I did begin to doubt the Time Lord's sanity. Perhaps he was only mocking me in that condescending manner he has. On the other hand – well, luckily for me I didn't have time to wonder too much. Our tractor crested the boulder-strewn rim of the giant sinkhole and bashed it's wheels to bits on the rocks and gulleys beyond. Such mechanical sacrifice meant we got to the helicopter in minutes, instead of the hour travelling on foot would have entailed.

The two Sontaran prisoners, both rather battered and the worse for wear after their journey at suspension-level, were untied and hauled aboard the helicopter, getting a good few kicks, curses and punches from our freed mining captives.

'Alive, please, ladies, alive!' scolded the Doctor, before heading off for the cockpit. 'We need to find out exactly what these Sontaran rogues are planning, and for that I need live Sontarans to interrogate.'

Snap! went Tad's fingers. I looked at him blankly.

'No waiter service here,' I replied.

'No! "Rogues"! I know what these Sontarans are now!'

'Footballs?' accompanied by a kick at, and a hiss from, the helpless Sontarans. Tad clambered away to the cockpit, to try his theory out on the Doctor. Around me, the rescued women wove themselves into the webbing to withstand the takeoff and manouevring of our helicopter. Tad came back from the cockpit, beaming from ear to ear.

'Lash yourself down, you Polish poltroon,' I told him. 'The Doctor doesn't fly – oof! – doesn't fly like Lot pilots.'

My involuntary exclamation came when the helicopter practically leapt into the air sideways. Tad slewed across the cargo bay, to be snagged by a woman and dragged into protective custody amid a tangle of webbing.

'Sorry!' said the woman. 'I'm not making a pass at him.'

'Excuse me?' I replied, my best British officer training coming out.

'Your partner,' continued the woman, nodding at Tad. 'Your lover? Your boyfriend?'

Tad burst into one of the loudest guffaws I ever heard him make. My jaw adopted a position it occupied frequently whilst in Magellania, that of stunned surprise.

'Oh! You're not – ah. Yes. We thought you were commandoes from Philandros,' continued the woman, now plainly embarassed.

'The truth is too long and complicated to go into here,' I tried. 'But we don't come from a Mono-Gee world.'

One of the dirty, smelly, ragged women wrapped in webbing next to me gave me a slap on the shoulder.

'Gaia bless you, man. Whoever you are, thank you.'

'Oh. Not at all. My pleasure,' I replied, all typical British understatement. 'All humans together,' and that phrase of the Doctor's came back to bite me, remembering Clara. 'That is, all humanes together.'

Clara and Salamander had the cushy part of the job so far. Lying in bed, either in the Mercy House or the unprovisioned guest house. Of course, I got this wrong, since the Doctor had been working on their part of his plan since yesterday. He didn't tell either Tad or I about it, just to keep it a big fat surprise.