Part Eight: Of Comsats and Crashes

When the hovercar stopped, twilight had fallen outside. Imogen lay on the seats opposite, clutching Teddy, sound asleep. The driver, a Law Officer unknown to me, got up and stretched enormously. I shouldered my trusty FN, then ferretted around in the underseat storage bins for a copy of the foil-leaved, laminated gazetteer.

'Here we are. Imogen, your mum is waiting outside.'

"Outside" happened to be the parking stands at the rear of the Law Officer's building. I carried the dozy girl down the steps, to have her snatched from me by Isobella, who wept furiously over the child, and both of them hugged each other as if fearing separation again. The crying mother tried to thank me – me, of all people.

'Hey now, not I! You need to thank the seniors at Frangipani – Minerva Corrigan and Eleutha Gluck, they risked going back to the ruins at Sittangville.'

Also there to greet us were Tad and Clara, the former looking hollow-eyed with fatigue yet faintly pleased with himself, Clara looking - hmm. A touch aggrieved, perhaps.

'Come on, conquering hero. Let us return to the Doctor,' said Tad. Clara nodded, and the pair fell in beside me. Tad returned my .45, holster and boot-knife, so I swapped him the FN.

'There is food in the guest house now. We have gone up in people's estimation,' explained Tad. Clara nodded and kept an eye on me without speaking. It was unusual for her to be so quiet.

Once past the Law Officer's building, I spotted damage done to the Grand Piazza. Scorch marks on the flags, and the shabby bubble-buildings opposite were gone, replaced by a great shallow crater.

'The Sontaran destroyer,' nodded Tad. I muttered a string of expletives under my breath.

'How was your exile?' asked Clara suddenly. I shrugged in return.

'Rather dull. I did quite a bit of hard physical work around the farm, you know, earning my keep. The only excitement came at the end, when the stumpies arrived and we departed.'

'Tad's exile was different,' said Clara, looking at my colleague briefly and fiercely and then back at me. I directed a questioning look at Tad, who turned the corners of his mouth down in embarassment.

'It was terrible. Terrible. Do you know, Poland no longer exists? And being a Catholic earns you the death penalty. It was terrible.' His voice faltered. 'So I, er, found solace with one of the women.'

Tad you roguish rascal!

'She was curious, you see, about - '

'Never mind, never mind, Kapitan Komorowski. The details of your little – ah - fling can remain secret.'

Clara was still looking at me, and the penny suddenly dropped: jealousy! She wanted to know if Captain Walmsley "found solace" with the women at Frangipani.

'Tad,' I said, loading the word with meaning, nodding at the guest house.

'Having now embarassed myself, I shall absent myself. See you inside,' he replied, getting the hint instantly. Quick on the uptake, thankfully.

My green-skinned girlfriend looked expectantly at me, and once again John's Tongue developed intelligence before John's Brain got into first gear.

'Come on, let's get going. I know what you're wondering.'

'No you don't. You're not telepathic,' she retorted.

'Figure of speech,' I said, putting a hand on her shoulder, which she shrugged off. 'I am very fond of you, Clara, and I don't want to upset you. So, with that in mind, I did not chase, embrace, wed, bed, dance or romance any of the women at Frangipani.'

'Okay!' she beamed, threading her arm through mine.

Wait a minute, it was that easy?

'You believe me? Just like that?'

'Yes!' she replied.

Now, if only women back on Earth were that easy to convince, I began, before catching myself, because of course Clara wasn't human. After catching my thoughts, I sent them on their way with a kick in the pants - what the hell, she was as good as human.

'Is it true you put yourself in mortal danger to kill Sontarans with a giant bomb of nails?' she asked.

'Not quite – hang on, how do you know that?'

Radio, of course, radio communication between garths and Hollandia. Remember, John, these people have technology.

We pushed the front door open and were greeted by the Doctor, who looked tired. I didn't realise then what a responsibility he'd taken upon himself and the possible consequences if his planning went wrong.

'Hello, John, pleased to see you. And to hear that your surrogate family didn't come off too badly.'

For a few minutes he asked me about the defensive measures taken at Frangipani, wincing a little when I mentioned flash-frozen tractor fuel. More dangerous and unstable than I realised, according to him.

Part of his acquiescence in getting Tad and I exiled was our ability to help the Amaltheans we'd be exiled with, and also to get a pair of humans sworn to kill Sontarans out of the way when they arrived in Hollandia (except I hoped he wasn't aware of my agreement with Tad), and to split the attention of the Archate.

After that I remembered to pass him the gazetteer.

'There's a selection of photos stuck to the inner back cover, taken when they still had satellites. Dunbavin mentioned them, I thought you might be interested.'

The Doctor's face registered surprise, then realisation, followed by alarm.

'Eureka!' he almost shouted. 'It's all so obvious now! Don't you see?'

He split the spine of the book and flattened it on a table, telling us to look at the photographs. The definition wasn't high, and the viewpoint was isometric, showing what seemed to be the base of Blackpool Tower under construction.

'Eifel Tower?' guesed Tad, giving the Continental version.

'Blackpool Tower,' I added. Privately I doubted that Sontaran renegades would kill thousands and thousands of slaves in order to build a tourist attraction.

'Neither! A tower, most certainly, yet not for display purposes. No, this is a broadcast tower, one constructed on such a large scale that it can broadcast to the entire planet. Look, that building nearby must be the power-plant. Aha, and just visible in it's entrance is the nose cone of a Sontaran cruiser. That's how they intend to power the tower, by using their spaceship's main drive.'

Silence fell. A broadcast tower, eh? The swine! How dare they!

'Broadcasting what?' I asked, recalling Sarah Jane and John Peel. 'Rock music? I hardly think so.'

Sitting on the table edge, stroking his chin with a finger, the Doctor pored over the photographs.

'What indeed,' he mused, mostly to himself. Salamander, yawning and clutching a cup of coffee, entered the big downstairs lounge area.

'John. Tad,' he acknowledged, coming over to have a scan at the photos on the table. 'What's this? It looks like a planetary beacon. Or a hemisphere broadcast array.'

'Could it be for sending a threat? "Obey us or the hostages die"?' I asked. Snap! went the Doctor's fingers. He produced paper and pen, sketched the outline of the tower, extrapolated the completed version, did a quick schematic of Amalthea with diameter, equator, atmosphere and temperature measurements from memory, then scribbled out a series of equations and notes. When he stopped, minutes later, he hed an air of grim satisfaction.

'Well done, John – your first two words of the threat were correct. "Obey us" and no more. This tower, if completed and powered-up to broadcast, will transform the entire population of Amalthea into mindless, obedient Sontaran slaves.'

Oh dear. A broadcast version of the Sontaran slave-creating conditioning process, able to turn two and a half million people into drooling vegetables instantly.

'These photographs are old, Doctor,' said Tad. 'Their tower must be nearing completion.'

'Why not use satellites? Much more efficient,' put in Salamander, prosaically scoffing a sandwich.

The Doctor shook his head.

'Human technology simply isn't able to cope with this kind of signal, while the Sontarans lack the resources to create sophisticated satellites of their own. This broadcast tower is a compromise that might work, I'm sorry to say.'

My imagination reconstructed the scenario to date. The Sontaran renegades arrive in Magellenia and discover humans living there. The mono-gender female civilisation on Amalthea seems to be the weakest, with no armed forces and little to no weaponry, but lots of iron ore and trace elements for mining. The stumpies land, kidnap and process their slaves, snaring the Archate along the way. End plan is to have a planet consisting of two and a half million slaves, who live or die at the slightest whim of their masters. Along the way they retrieve Salamander from the time-space vortex, and hope to entrap a Time Lord in their "Doctor"-baited ambush. As a sub-plot, they also want to lay their mis-shapen three-fingered hands on the Rutan who displayed symptoms of individuality.

Nobody could stop them. Until we arrived.

'Destroying the Amalthean satellites was a major mistake,' commented Salamander, chewing his sandwich. 'It bespeaks haste and imprudence.'

He needn't sound so sorry for them.

'I wonder, I wonder,' mused our Time Lord, tapping his lips with a forefinger. 'How do we know the satellites were destroyed?'

Officer Dunbavin told me so; using the guest-house's microwave link, the Doctor called up the Law Officers and asked them. Finished with his call, he pointed at me.

'Military judgement, John. How would you go about destroying that broadcast tower?'

Good question, long answer.

'Meaning you want to know what the stumpies expect? Well, it's a very large structure, so you'd need a large explosion to destroy it. Not only that, it's mostly open girderwork, which is rather difficult to destroy with any explosion merely nearby. In my opinion, given our lack of large, guided missiles with warheads in excess of a ton – I think you'd need to get access to the tower itself, in order to place large quantities of explosives physically upon it If you can't get hold of proper demolition charges then you'd be talking several tons of improvised ones.'

Which would be an impossibility. Tad's answer amounted to flying a helicopter loaded with explosives into the tower, which was even more impossible.

'Frankly, Doctor, I think it's impossible. It would take a large armed force, and one armed with forty-second century technology, to assault that site and take control of the tower, and a force that large would be able to kill or capture the Sontarans anyway. We don't have a fraction of the people here to manage it.'

'Could we ask Philandros to send us an armed force?' asked Salamander.

'No. It would take too long to arrive, and risk interception en route. No, we need to deal with this threat now and with what resources we have,' answered the Doctor.

Sensible reply. The resources we had didn't seem sufficient to dismantle a single girder of that tower. That was all I knew; the Doctor knew differently.

'Look, I know we could all do with a rest, but it's important that I find out about the Amalthean's satellite network, and if any of it survives. That means a visit to their Communication Satellite Terminal here in Hollandia.'

I shrugged.

'I've just spent ten hours sleeping. I'm up for anything you suggest.'

Salamander cried off. He'd spent all day in the Assembly, being granted diplomatic status, then honorary sisterhood, and then getting elected to the Archate. Tad agreed to go, only to be gently rebuffed by the Doctor and told to go lie down for a few hours. The remaining three of us walked across the Grand Piazza, then into wide boulevards beyond that were new to me, and then into an area of anonymous buildings, boxy and functional, many sporting large antenna arrays. Further down the access road, towards the Piazza, a smashed building lay collapsed partly into the street, victim of the brief Sontaran bombardment.

'Voila. The CST,' indicated the Doctor, indicating a large double-doorway, with a plaque that on closer inspection said "Communication Satellite Terminal". The doors were locked, there were no lights on inside and no lights behind any of the windows to be seen above us.

Thanks to the sonic screwdriver, it took us about ten seconds to get inside, without having to worry about alarm systems either – the Amaltheans not being big on breaking and entering or burglary. Firstly I got sent to the basement to locate the isolator for incoming power and turn it on. Creepy, being down in the dusky basement of a strange building, utterly deserted or so you hoped. With the handily labelled "Incoming Power" lever turned to on, lights came back on in the CST and the Doctor could begin examining.

The first floor hall had what the Doctor was looking for – he hadn't informed Clara or I what was going on yet – in the shape of dozens of large monitor screens arrayed on each wall, a chair set in front of a control panel under each screen. None of the screens were active. In fact the whole place smelt musty and unused. More tables sat in the middle of the room, many covered with plastic dust-sheets.

'Abandonded when their satellites were all destroyed?' half-asked, half-stated Clara. The Doctor nodded.

'My best guess is that the Sontarans neutralised most of the satellites they found in orbit around Amalthea as soon as they arrived here. A few survived, perhaps the ones on long, elliptical circumpolar orbits, until they too were detected and neutralised.'

He carefully chose the word "neutralise" instead of "destroy". His implication was that the stumpies might not have blown up all the Amalthean satellites.

'You think they kept a couple of satellites intact, orbiting as before, just working for the Sontarans now,' I ventured. 'Give them a rudimentary eye-in-the-sky ability.'

'That's my working hypothesis. It would explain how they knew the Law Officers were going to assault their landing site so exactly and precisely. The trick is to determine if my hypothesis is correct, which I will begin straight away.'

The trick was to power up each control panel, then check the status of the satellite it monitored and controlled. There were at least forty stations to check, and it took me ages to operate even the more basic controls, while Clara and the Doctor simply waltzed away with them. Once the monitor had come on, the control panel needed to be activated, and an attempt made to contact the dedicated satellite. "NO SIGNAL" came up on the five I managed, before the Doctor gave a loud "Ha!" of triumph.

Naturally I beetled over to have a scan. The monitor he stood in front of had the message "SIGNAL RECIPROCAL INTERRUPT" halfway up the screen, and a pulsing green line along the bottom of the screen. He chased me away to other monitors and the checking continued.

Eventually all forty five monitors and control panels had been checked, revealing four that gave the "Interrupt" message. One of these displays lacked the pulsing green line at the screen bottom; the Doctor ignored that one. Out of power, according to Clara: the satellite was still up there, not responding to messages from the ground and not sending any back, either, and the internal power plant had died.

So that left three satellites the Sontarans hadn't destroyed. Amidst the maze of horizontal tables and screens in the middle of this floor was an especially large table, about fifteen feet square, which the Doctor headed for. It had a three-dimensional display of Amalthea set inside, a kind of projected image that the Doctor managed to set rotating.

'Can I ask at this point what you're doing, Doctor?' I asked, having been dying to ask for a couple of hours already.

'Hmm? Oh, yes, sorry, didn't I explain? I want to see whereabouts those satellites are positioned in orbit. Let's see – Clara, read off the satellite classification on the control panel, will you.'

' "Ocean Weather Watch Athena Two".'

'Thank you, just wait a minute. Athena Two, Athena Two – oh, here we are.' A press of a button caused a bright blue dot to flash in orbit around Amalthea, another button press showed the satellite's orbit, remaining static in position above a single point on the planet's surface.

'Aha. Look at that,' burbled the Doctor, taking it for granted that I knew what he meant. 'Geostationary, but not over the ocean. Athena Two has been repositioned to spy on Hollandia.'

Unconsciously, I flexed my back muscles. The Doctor caught the movement from the corner of his eye and grinned.

'A spy in the sky, eh? Don't worry, John, it's image resolution won't be very high. It was designed to detect large-scale weather patterns, not small moving objects. Next!'

' "Solar Observatory Helios.'

The corresponding flashing blue dot was very far from Amalthea this time, in a great lop-sided orbit.

'No good. Too far away – that orbit looks like a five year one. Probably why the Sontarans merely jammed the signal. Next!'

' "Northern ComSat Link Eagle Three".'

This blue dot sat in a low orbit, one that took it across the whole Amalthean surface in a criss-cross of lines.

'Bingo. We're in business!' declared the Doctor.

Oh good. Even if I had no idea what kind of business we were in. An arm draped itself over my shoulder and Clara stood next to me.

'Clever, isn't he?'

'I already know that. Any idea what he plans to do?' I asked, quietly. Not quietly enough to fool the Doctor.

'I am going to attempt piracy amongst the heavens, young man! Now, please be quiet whilst I carry out some calculations.'

Clara tugged me away to a corner, taking advantage of the seclusion to ask questions that had undoubtedly been fermenting since walking into the guest house.

'Where did you get that jewel? Did one of the women give it to you? Were they very fond of you? What were they like? Were they more attractive then me? - ' and the stream would have carried on if I hadn't put a finger on her lips.

'Shh! One at a time. I got it from the whole of Frangipani, I think for helping to make sure they all got away from the Bucketheads. "Bucketheads" – what the children nick-named the Sontarans. They weren't fond of me, more like a bit scared and wary at first, and then resigned and watchful later. The last man out there, you see, had been an Andromachean, and the Andromachean males behaved very badly on Amalthea.'

I lost the thread there, before recalling.

'What were they like? Just people, really. Some nice, some nasty, most of them in-between.' And the crunch question! 'Of course they weren't more attractive than you. No makeup and dull clothes, you see. They certainly didn't try to impress a mere male, especially not Fat John the Human.'

Clara wrinkled her shapely green nose.

'My vocabulary is better now. I meant "large", not "fat".'

Big John is my nickname, aptly enough.

'And now, Clara, my sweet, you can answer a question.'

She paid close attention.

'You're a Rutan. You can alter your appearance to any form you choose. I, on the other hand, am a human. This is what I'll look like forever, or until middle-age spread gets me.'

Big open-faced nod from Clara.

'So, why do you like me?'

Like a coquettish schoolgirl, she sat back on a table and swung her legs.

'You don't know?' she teased.

'You two! Can you stop canoodling and help!' called the Doctor, impatiently. Inwardly I groaned, another question begun and not answered after me getting up the courage to ask it.

Our tetchy mentor had abandoned the display table and now sat at a computer screen, masses of data streaming by on the display, pages of scribbled maths formulae scattered on the desktop and floor.

'John, I need you to get back down to the basement and see if you can increase the power coming into this building. If you can, do so in five minutes from now.' I checked my watch and left running.

How the hell did I manage to increase power? Venturing beyond the cubbyhole with the junction box and Incoming Power lever, I came across a securely locked door. Very secure, a resounding kick didn't shift it at all. A couple of rounds from the .45 smashed the lock apart sufficiently for me to get inside a dark room that smelt of dust and oil and sounded muffled and full. Scrabbling around revealed a lightswitch, which revealed a couple of big generators, for "Emergency Use Only". There were only a few controls, contained in a locked plastic box at the front of each piece of machinery. A good hack with the knife and I got into the box and pressed the big green button in each.

Coughing, rumbling, clunking and then whirring, the two generators came to life and began generating. A bit before the five minute deadline, perhaps, but I reasoned they'd take a little while to generate electrical power. The shielded bulbs in this dingy room seemed to glow brighter within seconds of the big plant starting up, revealing cobwebs a-plenty.

My job was done, so I headed back to the first floor, where the Doctor now sat at the control console for Eagle Three, the signal satellite. Above him, the screen flashed and danced in patterns of static.

'Excellent work, John! Just the energy boost I needed. Now, look at that. What do you think!'

'A sootball fight in a coalmine?' I guessed.

'Silly! That's the satellite signal!' scolded Clara.

At that moment, with a fine sense of theatrics, the screen cleared into a complex scrolling pattern of lines and dots, set against a background of graphs.

The Doctor rubbed his hands together in delight.

'Perfect! Now - '

'Excuse me, but could someone explain this to me?' I asked, plaintively.

The Doctor rubbed his nose and darted a glance back at the big display table.

'Very well - quickly, then. I wrote a computer program that will over-ride the Sontaran control of Eagle Three – I hope! To manage an over-ride initially we needed to boost our signal and increase the gain, or the new programme wouldn't have worked – that was your increased power – and this display now indicates that we have control of the satellite.'

Coloured traces crawled and scrawled across the various graphs. The Doctor gave up his seat and headed off for the controls that operated Athena Two.

'This is more complicated. I need to piggy-back the signal from Eagle Three to Athena and back again, and then re-integrate it for display.'

Above us, the monitor screen began to flash and strobe, throwing up monochrome images of clouds or continental land-masses at irregular intervals. That, I guessed, was what Eagle Three was detecting, filtered via Athena.

'I'm going back to the Eagle Three station. Clara, I want you to call out azimuth - '

Giant bells went off in my head. At least, that's what it felt like. ClangClangClangClangBangBangBangBangBang, resounding around my head for whole minutes, turning my legs to jelly and brain to sponge. When I could focus again, past the taste of blood in my mouth and the burning in my throat, I could see the Doctor leaning against a table. I got upright from all-fours, half-noticing the vomit I'd left on the floor.

'No sudden moves!' cautioned the Doctor, calmly. His eyes rolled in one direction and I saw Clara, back in her native Rutan form, jerkily moving towards the Time Lord.

'Killthedoctorkillthedoctorkillthedoctor,' she bubbled, in her electronic monotone, moving towards him from the control station. 'Killthedoctorkillthedoctor.' Her tentacles writhed across the floor.

Wiping my chin, dribbling blood and spittle, I staggered in front of the Doctor.

'Careful, John! The Sontarans have activated their control tower,' whispered the Doctor. 'That must be their primary command – kill me.'

'Killthedoctorkillthedoctor,' droned Clara, edging closer.

Desperate times, desperate measures.

'Clara,' I said, spreading my arms wide. 'Don't you recognise me?'

The giant flourescent green gooseberry stopped advancing.

'John! You are John. Please – please get out of the way. I have to kill the Doctor.'

'No you don't,' I tried. 'You have to help him, not kill him.'

One of those tentacles writhed forward, contacting my foot. I braced myself for an electric shock, only for nothing to happen.

'I don't want, but I have to. John! Get out of the way!' burbled the strange electronic modulation from Clara, accompanied by a second tentacle.

'Are we friends? Are you my girlfriend?' I tried, aware of blood slowly dripping from my nose.

'Yes,' burbled the big green blob, sending another tentacle around my feet.

'The Doctor is my friend, too. How will you feel as a friend if you kill one of my friends?'

Clara lashed back and forth in torment for the space of several heartbeats. Finally she came to a decision, and not a good one. An invisible force from outer space hit me all over and threw me aside, to end up lying next to a dusty computer table.

Ouch, was as far as my thought processes went. A green flash assaulted my eyes and if it hadn't been so painful where I lay I might have passed out.

The Doctor hauled me upright, single-handedly. Strong fella, that chap, deceptively so.

'Well-played, John. You've bought us valuable time.'

Whilst I'd been trying to fend off Clara, the Doctor had pulled together the anti-stastic dust sheets from abandoned computer tables, tying them together into a large single sheet and throwing it over Clara. Earthed, she now lay quiescent under the plastic canopy, back in human form.

'I'm so happy about that,' I gasped. 'My last moments flashed before my eyes, you know.'

'Faugh!' he exclaimed, striding back to the Athena control table. 'She could have killed you ten times over if she wanted to. You got a mild shock, that's all.'

My knees didn't quite agree. Nor my nose, still leaking.

'What knocked me silly, then?'

'Quiet, please! I need to re-orient this satellite.'

The Sontarans, obviously, had powered-up their broadcast tower. I realised that. What I didn't know was that the side-effects of it's operation were haemorrhage and death for half-a-percent of the target population, thanks to crude application of watts over pico-volts. My symptoms came particularly severe; most Amaltheans suffered less. Clara lay still and quiet under the plastic sheeting,

Sulkily sitting in silence perched on a computer table, I watched the Doctor dash between the Eagle Three and Athena controls, which caused a gradual shift in the perspective and display to be seen on the monitors.

Gee, great. Television of the forty-second century.

Ragged clouds vanished abruptly on the monitor, and a great flat expanse of landscape unrolled beneath the satellite. The colours looked strange to my eyes, almost like a colour-film negative.

'Infra-red with false-colour enhancement,' said the Doctor to me between dashes. 'Tell me when you see the broadcast tower.'

That wasn't difficult, the damn thing put out so much power it was visible from whatever height the satellite was at, as a pulsing white glow on the horizon.

Wait a minute, I told myself, finally realising. We know the tower's complete, because it's sending out that signal. Why do we need to spy on it?

'Doctor - ' I began, to be forestalled by an upheld hand.

'Hang on, I need to work out this declination. Okay, yes, I know why you're asking. Athena Two is much more massive, at least two and a half times larger than Eagle Three. Is that perspective changing at all? Do keep an eye on it, there's a good chap. Yes, over twice the mass, but next to no fuel left for attitudinal correction.'

Quite! This must be how the Brig feels, out of his depth with someone who only verbalises a fraction of his thought-processes.

The big glowing blob denoting the broadcast tower had moved into the middle distance. Nothing altered for several long minutes, except that the glowing blob glowed even harder. Could it be getting bigger? No. The satellite must be getting closer, which didn't seem right and proper, since satellites sat in orbits whirling above us in the heavens, and didn't get close to earth, or Amalthea.

'Not only that, but I have to contend with the probability of the Sontarans realising that their hijacked satellite has in turn been hijacked. Whoops! There we go!'

The image on the monitor shivered, broke into static and reformed.

'Per ardua ad terra,' muttered the Doctor, mangling an RAF motto. 'My program is resisting Sontaran attempts to re-assert control.'

The glowing blob got larger, and began to display detail, resolving into a large spike.

'Damn! You're going to fly the satellite into the broadcast tower!' I finally realised. This might appear slow, but those damn bells had left my brains seriously jumbled. My nose had only just stopped bleeding.

'I think the technical term is "de-orbit", John,' corrected the Doctor. 'And in fact I am aiming the terminal impact point a good kilometre short of the tower.'

Those gears ground slowly around in my mind. Satellite. Sontarans. Broadcast tower. Hijack.

'Errr – Doctor? Doctor – if the Sontarans know that you're fiddling with what they think of as their satellite, and they have legions of slaves here in Hollandia, might they not try to interfere?'

My matter-of-fact intrusion on his academic mental landscape impacted on the Doctor with all the effect of a howitzer shell.

'Good grief! John, you're absolutely right! You need to get down to the entrance and warn me if anyone tries to gain access.'

I half-congratulated myself on stealing a mental advance on the Doctor, before cold hard reality interrupted – our electric lady killer was hors de combat, there were only six rounds left in my pistol and this building didn't lend itself to defence in any way. The entrance was two large glass doors, and the first floor access was via a wide stone stairway.

Tip-toeing as best as my bulk allows, I got down to the entrance doors and looked left and didn't bother to look right, because a crowd was making its way over the rubble-strewn street and collapsed building nearer the Piazza. Thanks to the purple twilight, I spotted two Sontarans leading the crowd, silhoutted atop the pile of dead building. Not leading very quickly, more sort of limping at speed.

Oh – they would be the prisoners released from the Law Office, guaranteed. Now leading a whole horde of Amalthean slaves determined to kill the Doctor.

Great! Just great! How the bloody hell do I end up in situations like this? That clinging atmosphere of farce and tragedy had vanished for the moment.

'Company approaching, Doctor,' I warned him, bounding back up the stairs and making my nose bleed again.

Damn this place was wide open! All the Bucketheads needed to do was kick the doors in and walk up the stairs into the first floor mezzanine.

'Can you keep them busy for a little longer?' he asked. 'Eagle Three is down to fifty kilometres.'

'Can I keep them busy – with what! Throw desks at them?'

The words were no sooner out of my mouth than I grabbed a desk and heaved it over, landing it worktop-down on the floor with an incredible crash (the Doctor never so much as blinked). Heave-ho, I grabbed the legs and pushed, creating a scraping and squealing as bad as scraping your nails down a blackboard. The desk went clattering down the steps to end up in front of the doors. Instant barricade.

A good idea, John, but it was hard work and my legs were still wobbly from that brain-boggling attack. Aha! Brain in second gear, I picked up a fire-extinguisher and sprayed foam on the floor all the way from the inner hall to the steps. The second desk almost glided over the lubricant, pitched itself end-over-end down the steps and joined the first. I added another desk, and a fourth and fifth, sweating heavily and feeling fifty years old. More spray from the fire extinguisher, and another two desks joined the collection in the lobby, which now looked awkward and fully occupied by desks.

A shotgun went off outside, shattering the glass in the entrance doors, at which point I went back into the computer hall at the best speed I could manage, stopping to get some more fire extinguishing equipment.

'Our guests have arrived,' I gasped to the Doctor.

'Just a little longer,' he cheerfully announced. My comments were not repeatable and more a growl than speech.

Deep breath, John. I stood a computer table on end, making a seven-foot barrier. Not bad. Smashing and curses in Sontaran could be heard coming from the lobby as the intruders tried to climb over the temporary barrier there.

If one barrier was good, how about more? I stood another desk on it's end, and another. This partially-shielded the Doctor at his control station from anyone walking into the hall. More desks followed on end, creating an angular forest of upright desks, me feeling too exhausted by now to do more than sweat and swear.

The two Sontarans came stumpily into the hall, one favouring his leg, the other with an arm in a canvas sling. Both wore helmets, and behind them the clatter of desks being pulled apart warned me that a horde of killer slaves were about to arrive.

Putting my shoulder to the underside of a desk, I gave it a good hard shove. It fell over, and hit another desk that fell over in turn, making the Bucketheads dodge aside. That gave me long enough to spray fire-extinguisher foam over the nearest Sontaran's helmet, then dart back under cover. The sprayed Buckethead took off his helmet, covered by his friend with a rheon pistol, which demonstrated the ability to practically cut my protective desk in two with a single shot.

I clattered and rolled away across the floor, behind the other, more normally arrayed desks and tables, pursued by a tremendous explosion as a computer blew apart.

'Bullseye!' crowed the Doctor, which was followed by a chorus of groaning and wailing from the stairs. I rolled behind the big square three-dimensional display table and risked a glimpse over the top. Buckethead One had his helmet off, to clear away the foam. This was awkward for him, with one arm in a sling. Buckethead Two, the one wielding a rheon pistol, now faced toward the stairs, covering a threat I couldn't see from here.

Fire-axe in my right hand, Icrawled back around the table and aimed left-handed at matey's unprotected head, resting my arm on the table edge to get a more stable firing position. I give him points for speed, he dropped the helmet instantly and tried to pull a rheon pistol from his holster. He wasn't quick enough, the range was short, the lighting good, and I got him above his right eye. Down he went.

Buckethead Two whirled around, so I got under cover before he cut me in two with that ray gun of his.

'John!' called the Doctor, mingling elation and worry in his voice. 'The broadcast tower has been destroyed!'

'Gar!' swore the Sontaran. He shot a hole in the display table, then decided to go for the Doctor. I popped up long enough to shoot him in his back. The bullet knocked him off his balance, his shot went wide and blew a great hole in a monitor screen, sending a spray of sparks clear across the room. He swung back at me, I presume, since I was now rolling at floor level well away from my firing position.

Stumpy finally used his wits and jumped on a desk top, getting a better view of the entire hall, the better to shoot big holes in me. He got as far as levelling his pistol before the desk top collapsed under his weight, leaving him trapped and writhing in the middle, his gun dropped and bounced off to who knows where.

That was my opening. I came leaping across the desktops myself, gun back in holster, swinging the fire-axe overhead and bringing it down on Buckethead's helmet across the visor with force enough to strike sparks from the metal.

Sturdy fire-axes with a sound handle don't break easily, so I must have really walloped him for the head to break loose. To judge from the squawk Buckethead made, the helmet didn't protect him totally – my guess at hitting the narrow visor was that it would be the least-armoured bit of the helmet.

Matey proved to have plenty of fight left in him. He ripped the desk apart and came at me, staggering a bit on his gammy leg, which I hit with the fire-cudgel, provoking a howl.

'No taunts about my puny weapons?' I jeered at him, managing to dance away from his clumsy shuffle. 'Mohammed Ali would wince to see you. Pathetic!'

I wondered where the Doctor had gotten to by now. All I needed was a distraction from another quarter and my trusty club would dance disco on his probic vent. Or, if he was rash enough to take off his helmet, I'd shoot him in the eye.

Buckethead didn't give up, pulling out a tetrahedral dagger and lunging at me, which he had to stop within seconds, his breath coming sharply through the helmet mouthpiece. Instead he tried to box me in, which didn't work when I could jump onto and off the desks. Not that I wasn't pretty knackered myself by now, but pride and anger would not let me stop. Besides, taunting Sontarans is such easy malicious fun.

Just to keep my aim in, I picked up what looked like a telephone with an embedded miniature television screen, swung it by the wiring and smacked Buckethead on the helmet with it. That annoyed him, I could tell by the number of snarled "Gars!" that came afterwards. Snapping the wires off, I carried on swinging and hitting whilst retreating until the device broke apart, by which time my moving, snarling target was barely moving forward.

Suddenly, the dead Sontaran, lying dead on the floor, being dead and still, stopped being dead, sitting upright with a loud groan.

'Really, John! Stop playing with that wretched creature and stun him,' snapped the Doctor, striding back into the hall, only stopping to swiftly kick the probic vent of the previously-dead Sontaran, who promptly collapsed backwards in a heap again.

Stun him? Great idea, but how! Tired and injured the toadman might be, he was still wearing bulletproof armour. Bulletproof armour – bulletproof, not kinetic-energy proof. Aha.

Clever John backed up a little more, switching the fire-club to my left hand, holding the .45 in my right, waiting until the Sontaran tried to move forward in pursuit.

'Pah! Foolish human creature! Your feeble weapon is no threat to advanced Sontaran armour!' he boasted, the effect spoilt by the great wheezing breaths he drew in between every third word.

I needed to be accurate with this shot – it got him in the shin, low down, and knocked him off-balance before his other foot landed. Another shot on the ankle and he fell forward, heavily and awkwardly, making the floor shake when he hit.

'Gravity one, Sontaran nil!' I shouted at him. 'Who feels foolish now?'

He shook a bit himself, when I started to whack his probic vent with my bright red club. I doubt he was feeling the pain and reacting, it was more likely simply the energy I transmitted through beating his unconscious body.

'That's enough,' sternly ordered the Doctor, removing the big red club from my grip, giving me a warning look.

'You bet,' I gasped, sitting down gracelessly on a table.

Whilst I sat and panted, a bloodied, sweaty blob, Amalthean women were brought staggering into the hall, to be seated wherever a space could be found. Many were Law Officers, carrying shotguns, knives or the odd rheon weapon. The Doctor, as flatteringly explained to me later, deemed me able to deal with both Sontarans on my own, whilst he went to check on the now freed women.

The first Sontaran, the one I'd shot, proved to possess a skull thick enough to stop the bullets from a Colt .45. A call to Nick Munro for some special armour-piercing ammo might be an idea when I got back. The more aware ladies amongst the crowd in the hall tied our uninvited guests up, nice and tight.

'Ladies – oh, and gentleman – may I show you what the Sontarans have been doing with the minerals their slaves mined at such human cost?' announced the Doctor like a ringmaster. Taking our assent for granted, he fiddled around with the controls of a monitor screen and projected the final fall to Amalthea of Eagle Three across all the displays around the hall. Firstly the broadcast tower appeared on the horizon as a white, pulsing mass.

'A broadcast tower – constructed of girders manufactured from the ore that Amalthean slaves mined,' declared the Doctor. 'Designed to transmit a controlling impulse to every human on this planet.'

The display sped up and the shapeless white mass became a definite spiked shape, broad at the base, tapering to the top. A large boxlike structure nearby came into view. Behind were other spindly shapes denoting the Sontaran Valt destroyers.

'That building is the power hall, housing the Sontaran cruiser. You can see how large the tower is by comparison, several hundred metres tall at least.'

The tower loomed larger and larger and shifted upwards in perspective, Eagle Three seemingly aiming for the ground beneath the tower , until the picture wobbled badly, seconds before the viewpoint shifted abruptly upwards.

'I anticipated the Sontarans regaining control of their satellite, and attempting to boost it away from the tower,' explained the Doctor. 'So I deliberately used a lower-declination de-orbit. The Sontarans merely shifted the satellite into a direct collision course.'

The mass of girders constituting the broadcast tower got closer, then narrower, as the satellite aimed for the upper part of the structure, where the girderwork had the least gaps. A pair of interlocked girders rushed suddenly at the satellite –

- and then the picture was gone. Later that morning we got pictures from Athena Two, showing the girder missing it's top fifty metres, and a tangle of other material collapsed around the base.

'That's when the Sontaran control over you was broken.'

A quiet murmur of discussion broke out as the ex-slaves talked about their predicament, and about the women who collapsed and died from cerebral haemorrhages. This was the first I'd heard about the symptoms of over-driven Sontaran broadcasts, although the Doctor nodded grimly, unsurprised.

With a great deal of rustling and crumpling, Clara stood up, wrapped in opaque plastic non-static sheeting for the sake of modesty – her human clothes were destroyed when she reverted to Rutan form.

'How interesting,' mused the Doctor, joining me in seeing how she was. 'She adopted human form whilst unconscious. Fascinating!'

Clara rested her head on my shoulder and snivelled miserably, both as a result of being hammered by the Sontaran broadcast and also, she confessed, at stunning me rigid.

'Chin up, old girl,' I tried, adopting Harry Sullivan's cheery line in chit-chat. 'Shifting the desks was worse. I feel rather wrung-out.'

Various women donated bits and pieces of clothing and Clara was able to drop the plastic sheeting.

'Er – hello?' asked one of the survivors, tapping my elbow gently and recoiling when I rounded on her. Dripping with sweat, grime, blood and bits of smashed desk, computer and phone, I looked a fright.

'Yes?' I asked, having slumped onto a desk.

'There were two other Sontarans, you know,' she whispered, almost cowering back.

The only other target the Bucketheads might have tried was the guest house, since the TARDIS would shrug off any attack they made. At my insistence, we took rheon pistols borrowed from the Law Officers in the ComSat Terminal and jogged over. Dizzy, concussed-looking women were standing about in the Grand Piazza, wondering what they had just endured and what to do now. Bodies, either of those who passed out – no, that wasn't right, they'd been shot dead by those Sontaran ray guns.

Not a good start – our front door lay inside, smashed off the hinges. Furniture had been tossed around, and several of the risers on the stairs were fractured, which meant the stumpies had been up to the first floor.

Of Salamander, no sign, whilst Tad lay unconscious and bloody on a bed. The Doctor rapidly checked for a pulse, then breathing, then pupil dilation.

'The Sontaran broadcast. It seems to have hit harder here than at the CST. I think we must have been partly-shielded by the building structure.'

I dropped onto the bed, making the springs creak madly. "Partly-shielded"? It had felt like the Devil dancing on my brains in hobnail boots. Poor Tad, if he got it worse than me.

'How bad is he?'

'It looks worse than it is. He's still not going to feel well when he comes to.'

Clara went up and down the house, then outside, and came back with news that the Sontarans had marched Salamander away, witnessed by the women outside. Anyone failing to get out of their way was promptly shot, as was anyone who looked like interfering. Within minutes of Salamander's abduction one of their dumpy little ships took off from behind the Law Offices, where they had been stored.

'Doctor, I really have come to dislike these Sontarans. They've just killed another two thousand Amaltheans in trying to enslave the entire population. I want my elephant gun.'

True, it didn't blow big holes in the stumpies, but it did kill them at a distance.

'Wicked bad,' agreed Clara.

The Doctor sighed.

'The real reason, the prime motivator for coming to Amalthea, was to release Salamander. Now he's been recaptured. I blame myself, really,'

'Don't!' blurted Tad, vomiting blood onto the bedclothes from the recovery position. He wiped his face clean with a shakey hand and struggled upright, clutching his head and groaning.

'Holy Mother, what hit me? A concussion weapon?'

One potted explanation later he shook his head when told that Salamander had been abducted.

'He went willingly! He pleaded with them to take him, or he'd be returned to Earth for trial and execution for his crimes.'

Like I said, once a rotter, always a rotter. Not a gentleman, so you couldn't trust him. Still, pleading to be taken away by the stumpies perplexed me. Between him and the Doctor, a quiet retirement to Magellania seemed on the cards for Salamander.

'He offered to be a substitute for the Doctor, but a willing one this time, able to convince anyone that he really was the Doctor. After spending so long with you, he felt capable of managing a persuasive act.'

The Doctor tutted crossly. Me, I'd have been breaking things. Travelling across two thousand years, risking death or injury, the Doctor already having been beaten silly, and this was how the effing twod repaid us. Oh, but it would be a difficult decision, deciding who to kill first!

One possibility, that the Bucketheads might mount another bombardment of Hollandia, or smaller communities closer to the Sontaran encampment, did occur to me. I mentioned it to the Doctor, who simply pursed his lips and nodded. More of his wheels within wheels in motion, I supposed, and left to have a shower. Cleaned up, I certainly looked better, or less frightening. Tad got to his feet and shuffled pale-faced to the bathroom, swilling his mouth ou, turningt the basin pink. Clara came and sat next to me on a threadbare couch in the downstairs lounge. She cried on my shoulder again, a combination of anger at Salamander, frustration that the Sontarans had escaped and the remains of her guilt at attacking me. The Doctor caught us in this pose and smiled in quiet amusement, passing Clara a salt cellar for an unfathomable reason.

'Thank you for not being horrid,' she said. 'I might have killed you. Or the Doctor.'

She got a comforting hug.

'Come on, come on, this adventure's all but over. I expect we'll be moving on soon, and you need to cheer up.'

Wrong, John, verrrry wrong! Fallible, that's me. The Doctor, too, for once. He swept through the guest house, very obviously searching and not finding.

'I hid it!' I joked, only to get an unamused glare.

'Most amusing. Have you seen my electronic suppressor? Or the audio over-ride projector?'

The magic stick and big silver golf ball. No, I hadn't. Nor had Clara.

'How annoying!' complained the Doctor. Not to me, I was more bothered about a Sontaran meson cannon blowing up Hollandia and us along with it. Having felt the unpleasant crawling of skin at the back of my neck when the only worry was a Sontaran-controlled satellite, I now had an even more unpleasant feeling, that of having a bullseye painted on my head.

Tad managed to lurch downstairs, and dropped into a chair. Taking pity on him, I dug around in the kitchen cupboards and made him a robust sandwich two inches thick. He looked more substantial and less ready to depart this life after that sandwich.

'The Doctor is still searching upstairs,' he informed us. 'Would it be possible to have a cup of coffee?'

I sighed exagerratedly and went back into the kitchen to find what passed for milk and sugar. The wonderfully-advanced kettle boiled water in less than half a second, even six or seven pints, so I set that off first and rinsed out a cup.

'Er – hello?' asked a tinny voice, making me jump and drop the cup. There was a radio in the kitchen, which wasn't turned on – Amalthean radio broadcast nothing but the spoken word, plays, documentaries, novels, all worthy stuff guaranteed to send you to sleep, and only for a limited period morning and afternoon.

'I'm presuming that someone can hear me,' continued the radio that wasn't switched on, making the hairs on my forearms stand up.

'Hang on,' I muttered to myself. 'That sounds like Salamander. Doctor!'

He came downstairs in a flash when I carried the radio into the lounge, still broadcasting Salamander's voice.

'You must have realised by now that I have the Doctor's wonderful technical toys. Sorry, but I just couldn't resist taking them. They also give me a bargaining chip.'

'Why does he need a ship?' asked Tad, only to be hushed instantly by the Doctor.

'You see, Doctor, I overheard your little gambit in that Sontaran hemispherical ship. You really shouldn't try to communicate in secret when there are holes in a vessel's hull'.

Frowning, I tried to work out where he might be broadcasting from. The signal didn't seem weak. Salamander's voice sounded tinny only because the radio speaker was small.

'And this Sontaran destroyer is already space-borne. I explained your plan to them, Doctor, and they promptly abandoned their comrades. No honour amongst thieves!'

'And you should know,' I muttered darkly.

'They did take me along, which is what I really wanted. Their other destroyer isn't fit for space travel any longer, and the cruiser's terrulian plant is now in pieces, having been taken apart to power the broadcast tower . So this was my last route off the planet.'

The Doctor could be heard wondering why?

'Yes, I was most persuasive, Doctor. I suppose that unfortunately I have confirmed John's opinion of me as a "rotter". Well, I can't stand around all day chatting, got to get back to the bridge. I came down to the drive room to give my little farewell speech – the Sontarans probably wouldn't appreciate it very much.'

The sound cut off with a snap.

Loud curses could be heard rolling around the room for a while, Clara listening in with great interest. The only person not dismayed was the Doctor.

'I don't like the way that broadcast cut off,' he mused, not really talking to any of us. 'The audio projector wouldn't - '

He stopped suddenly and strode to the door, throwning it open and looking outside, where the surviving women still present on the Grand Piazza were staring at the skies. A low murmur went around the vast square, enough of a noise to make me get up and saunter over to stand beside the Doctor.

'They're talking about a new star,' explained the Doctor, pointing at the heavens in a redundant gesture. The new star overhead grew still brighter whilst we watched, twinkling and radiating.

'I'm not big on astronomy, Doctor. However, a new star like that doesn't occur every day, does it?'

'No,' he agreed. 'No. A star, certainly not. The terrulian-powered pile of a Sontaran spaceship - that's another matter.'

Slowly, the new star faded in the heavens, dwindling and dying until it vanished entirely. Tad and Clara wanted an update on the astronomical phenomenon outside, which came from the Doctor, not me. I was still wondering what happened up there, out in deep space beyond Amalthea.

'It would appear that the Sontaran destroyer's terrulian drive blew up. Nothing will survive that, not even vapours.'

'Wasn't the drive where Salamander was broadcasting from?' asked Tad. He got a nod in answer.

'Yes. Yes, quite. By accident or intent, Salamander turned the power plant's systems off with my purloined electronic suppressor. The plant subsequently went critical and exploded.'

That scenario raised more questions than it answered. As we all knew by now, that magic electric stick would turn things back on if you pressed the big button for a second time. All Salamander needed to do was press it again.

Nobody brought up the fact that he'd gone whining to the Sontarans about being prosecuted for crimes, crimes that were two thousand years old and that no-one in Magellania knew or cared about.

Yes, yes, I know, did he jump or was he pushed. Did he deliberately kill the Sontaran's engine, or was it an accident? Who knows! I think the Doctor might know, but he won't tell.

What we were left with in the aftermath of such excitement was an encampment full of desperate Sontaran renegades, on the other side of Amalthea. I use the term "we", when it ought to be "everybody except the Doctor" because he knew what plans he'd set in motion.

Those plans came to fruition in the early dawn of the next day, when the sun rose in the east.

This was both unusual and unreal. The suns on Amalthea rose to the south, in sequence. Passers-by on the Piazza pointed and stared, and pointed at a shooting star that came soaring from the false sunrise, falling to earth in the hinterlands beyond Hollandia.

This slightly-poetical description was given to me when I was scoffing a bowlful of porrige after having a quick, nervy sleep. Clara came and lay next to me after I'd gone off, looking for sympathy perhaps, which I apparently provided by talking in my sleep.

'You did!' she insisted. 'Very nicely, too.'

Sitting down to drink a cup of strange Amalthean tea, I looked at her over the table, trying to look stern and forbidding, just in case she was pulling my leg.

'This feels like the end of a seaside holiday at Blackpool,' I tried. Clara shuddered.

'What a sinister place! "Black Pool". Ugh!' and she shivered.

Tad put in an appearance, looking pale around the gills. I had him sit and made a cup of extra-strong, extra-milky, extra-sweet tea, which perked him up considerably.

'Do they have coffee?' he asked wistfully. 'I would fight a Sontaran barehanded for a nice cup of coffee.'

'Fat chance!' I scoffed. 'They didn't bring pigs, coffee or anything aquatic to Magellania.'

Tad looked over my shoulder with surprise, as the door swung open and Officer Headon burst in, looked excited.

'Sontarans! They managed to get away from their encampment before it blew up!' she shouted, almost jumping up and down with frenzy. 'We got them on Athena Two.'

' "Blew up"?' queried Tad.

'The unexplained extra sunrise, I presume. I also presume the Bucketheads didn't put their cruiser back together in the proper order and it went pop,' I guessed. Completely wrong, but not a bad guess nevertheless.

'We need help in dealing with them,' added Officer Headon. 'I have three hovercraft but not enough people able and willing. Their spaceship crashed well outside the canton.'

'Count me in!' I replied, getting up and realising that the Doctor, spoilsport, hadn't brought my elephant gun out of the TARDIS. 'D'you have any rheon weapons?'

She nodded.

'Good. I'll have one for each hand. Tad, are you capable of wobbling in the direction of the Law Offices? Clara, you need to stay here and tell the Doctor what we're doing. No! Don't argue.'

Shepherding Tad outside, I made sure Clara remained in the guest house. Sontarans and her in close proximity were two bad things waiting to happen. She would put herself at risk by trying to grill Sontarans like hamburgers.

Of course, the Doctor came out of the TARDIS exactly when we passed by. A mixed blessing, this, because he would interfere if I mentioned the imminent demise of a lot of Bucketheads.

'Off to round up the survivors?' he asked. 'If there are any.' He gave a short explanation. The "shooting star" appearance of the Sontaran spaceship meant its hull had suffered extensive damage and the whole thing might well disintegrate when it hit denser air in the lower atmosphere, falling back to earth.

'Yes. And if they so much as squint at me, then they will cease to trouble the world of the living,' I replied. 'And, whilst you're out of your box of tricks, can I get the hardware Tad and I brought along?'

Surprisingly, he agreed, without any great argument. This was out-of-character enough for me to wonder what he planned.

'There may well be no survivors when you reach the impact zone. At all costs you must recover their bodies, and bring back any live Sontarans.'

Tad scratched his forehead.

'Bring them back here, alive or dead?' He sounded puzzled. 'Why should we do that?'

Infuriatingly, the Doctor wouldn't tell us.

'Gentlemen, I can only assure you it is vital that the Sontarans who escaped are returned, alive preferably, dead only in extremis.'

By this speech we could work out he wasn't coming with us. No, he explained, there was more useful work he could do here in Hollandia, repairing, fixing and communicating, and would we mind taking away our noisy toys?

Our three-hovercraft convoy whistled out of Hollandia, Tad and myself sorting out weapons in the lead one. I clipped the barrel back home on the Jimpy, walloping the stock home and presented it to him.

'Short bursts only. There's no spare barrel.'

I kept the Nitro, and gave the M79 to a Law Officer, who felt pleased to get a better weapon than a shotgun. There were lots of rheon pistols shared between the Law Officers, which made me apprehensive. They were the kind of weapon that didn't allow you to make the same mistake twice. The stated plan was to drive east until within visible range of the Sontaran's crashed ship, then stop and take stock of the situation. If I was along only as an extra gun, it wouldn't do to go sticking my nose in and offering advice they didn't want. All the same, I couldn't just let them run madly en masse at any Sontaran survivors, causing a massacre.

Officer Headon, stern and grim, acted as co-driver, making it absolutely sure that she was Officer Headon, not Julie, and not available for light chit-chat or waffly banter. The half dozen of us in the rear compartment chatted a bit, watched the scenery pass outside, then chatted some more. Officer Headon got fed-up as the co-driver and came into the rear with the rest of us.

'Still a good three hours to go,' she warned us, then cosied up to me. This didn't fool me, she was after gossip.

'Do you have any plans for the attack?' she asked in a low voice.

Okay, not gossip.

'Not until we see what the crash site looks like. It may simply be a giant smoking crater in the ground or a hundred whole healthy toadmen running around. The Doctor insisted that we return all Sontarans, even the dead ones, back to Hollandia, which might be a problem if the crash site survivors are a cloud of vapour.'

Without a trace of warning, she shifted conversational topics.

'Clara's very fond of you. Did you know that?'

'You are so like women on Earth! Gossip and – and – ' and I couldn't think of what came after gossip, except more gossip. 'Yes I know she likes John the Fat Human. Which, according to the Doctor, places a responsibility upon me.'

Instead of being offended, Officer Headon smiled like a cat after washing the cream down with caviar and truffles.

'Yes I am fond of her, Officer Headon, despite or because of what she is. I can't explain any of it, so go and see the Doctor if you want reasons. I'm only Fat John.'

In a huff, I curled up and went to sleep.

Shadows outside were lengthening when I abruptly awoke, shaking sleep off and sitting bolt upright. A quick peek out the porthole revealed more rolling, craggy countryside, with clumps of fantastically-coiled bushes dotted here and there, and lone stands of those enormous trees only ever witnessed at a distance.

'Oh!' said one of the Law Officers, a part-timer denoted by her grey uniform banding. 'We slowed down just this instant.'

'It's only just First Sunset. There's still at least an hour of light left,' assured the driver. I got up behind her seat and craned forward for a better view.

'The smoke – see it?' she asked, pointing directly ahead. A vast, vague curtain hung in the air before us, becoming more solid and apparent at ground level. 'Once I saw that, it was time to slow down.'

Our lead hovercraft boasted a set of extremely hi-tec electronic binoculars that brought the crash site into sharp focus: a long furrow ploughed in the earth by the wrecked vessel, with the battered hulk piled up in a mass of earth and boulders. Small groups of Sontarans clustered at the side of their ruined ship, looking aimless and lost.

The driver halted the hovercraft, which settled lower until it's skirts creaked against the ground. I borrowed her electronic bins, which thoughtfully gave me the range in kilometres to the wreck: two point six six kilometres. At top speed we could get there in three minutes.

'Time for talk about how to tackle the Bucketheads,' suggested Tad. The trio of vehicle's back up and the occupants got out. Normally, soldiers "debus" from a vehicle but this lot weren't soldiers and they simply got out.

Problem One: how to get within range of the Sontarans without getting this lot killed. They sensibly deferred to the two males present, since we had experience.

Plan One: keep it simple. Tad would sit in the lead hovercraft, after unseating the front window, acting as fire support with the Jimpy. The three vehicles would drive full speed at the Sontarans in column formation, and the lead would flash it's rear lights to indicate when the toadies spotted them. At that moment the other two hovercraft would swing out, flanking the leader, getting to within three hundred yards of the wreck. All three would drop their crews there, the outer two groups skirmishing forward whilst we in the middle provided covering fire. Tad wanted the skirmishers to drop after a hundred paces and swap roles, which I thought was pushing our luck rather.

'There's what appears to be a heavy weapon in the middle of the central group of stumpies. Make sure you give them plenty of rounds with the Jimpy.'

He eyed me with the Nitro Express.

'Make sure you hit them with the dinosaur gun, eh? That's the only long-range weapon we have that kills Sontarans.'

My plan was indeed to kill Sontarans at long range, then to get close and kill Sontarans with the two rheon pistols stuffed into a musette bag. Tad reminded the women that our enemies were doubtless desperate, stranded on Amalthea, the last of their group, much battered after being wrecked and with nothing to lose. A fight to the death was in the offing.

With a last pause for any witty comments, of which none were forthcoming, our little command got back into the hovercraft and set off.

Moving relatively slowly, to raise less dust and create less engine noise, we closed the distance to less than a kilometre before the stumpies recognised the threat approaching. When they began to mill around in alarm, all three hovercraft powered forward, out of alignment and at different speeds. So much for the co-ordinated assault!

When our vehicle stopped and we stormed out, I estimated the distance to our enemy as no more than a hundred yards, while the hovercraft on our left had stopped further back and the right-hand one was off to the east, and still moving.

Well, you make do with what you have. Short streaks of tracer were already zipping into the Sontaran crew at their presumed-laser-death-ray, ricocheting around. Tad at work.

Crouching down and moving, I shouted to the five others with me to spread out. Next I went down into a prone position, took aim at the still upright, if battered, enemy crewman at his laser and hit him with both barrels.

One of my best shots ever, hitting him right in the visor, even if I had been aiming at his upper chest. When the body got collected later, the visor hadn't actually broken, merely been propelled inwards by the Nitro rounds, which had bounced round the inside of the helmet until their kinetic energy was spent. Wisely, the helmet was left unopened.

Breaking and reloading, I saw our comrade with the M79 point it, close both eyes and pull the trigger. The round impacted on the hull of the wreck, making plenty of noise.

I picked out another of the supposed crewmen, who went head over heels when a couple of Jimpy tracer rounds hit him. He got up, then went down for good with a couple of Nitro rounds in his middle, which mostly projected out of his back.

I checked left and right. The other two groups were almost on the Sontarans now, with little firing going on.

'Skirmish forward! Keep five paces apart!' I yelled. My troop of enthusiastic amateurs dashed forward, far too fast. I slung the Nitro, pulled out both rheon pistols and prepared to commit bloody execution.

Not just little firing going on, I realised: no firing at all. The Sontarans generally clumped together, bracing hands behind necks – their gesture for surrender.

What a dispirited, lacklustre and down-at-heel lot they were! A few had tried to fight back, ineffectually, getting picked off by the Amaltheans. The rest gave up.

'Some no-holds barred struggle, eh?' I commented to Tad when he lurched up, toting the Jimpy and helped by the driver. 'Must be forty of them, and they gave up. Wimps.'

I looked at the proud Amalthean victors and shook my head.

'The worst section assault I've ever witnessed.'

'It worked,' replied Tad, shrugging in a manner Marie would envy.

'Er – yes. Yes, it did. Perhaps I should take credit for that.'

Half a dozen Bucketheads were dead, including the two I shot. One Law Officer was dead, and another had lost an arm from the elbow down. One of the part-timers had paramedic experience and stabilised the injured woman. The rest of us disarmed Sontarans, removed helmets and sent them to stand under an armed escort, until a shriek of rage and distress went up from futher west, towards the nose of the wreck.

When those of us not guarding prisoners got there, we found a dirty, ragged, blank-faced group of a dozen Amalthean slaves, all staring mindlessly to the horizon. Sontarans nearby edged away.

'Release them!' shouted a Law Officer.

'De-condition them now!' shouted the officer with the M79, pointing it at the nearest stumpy and keeping her eyes wide open this time.

None of the Sontarans spoke. They might be aliens, with alien modes of expression and communication, but I knew exactly what they were thinking: if I undo that condition, the humans will assume I did it originally.

Doing a fancy twirl with my .45, which by the way is silly and dangerous, but a great way to get people's attention, I cocked it and shot the nearest helmetless stumpy in the head. Yes, I knew the bullets weren't powerful enough to kill, not with Sontaran skulls as thick as they were. Stumpy wouldn't be in any condition to explain that fact to his comrades for a few minutes. Besides, maybe it would kill him. Either way, I didn't care.

'You!' I snapped, pointing at a random prisoner. 'I'm going to leave you alive to de-condition these women. The rest of your charming chums are going to die.'

One of the charming chums gave in and agreed to de-condition the women, with me holding the Nitro to his ear in case of any silly business with the rheon wand device.

Ten minutes later the shot Sontaran regained consciousness, staggering upright and clutching his head.

'Good,' commented Tad. I cocked an eyebrow at him. Good? A live Sontaran was good? 'He can move under his own power. Otherwise – well, we have a problem, no?'

Too many prisoners. Forty-two live bodies, and six dead ones. Far too many to carry in the hovercraft.

One of the part-time Law Officers solved the problem with towing cable. The Sontarans were tied to the cables, which were attached to towing eyes on the hovercraft. Simple and effective.

There were complaints, of course, which were resolved by the resourceful Tad.

'If any of you protests, my friend here will kill you. If any of you tries to escape, my friend here will kill you. If any of you attack the Amaltheans, my friend here will kill you. In fact, if you breathe too loudly or frown, my friend here will probably kill you. All that stops him from killing you all is the difficulty of transporting forty-two corpses back to Hollandia.'

Hey, he wasn't kidding that much. Seeing those wretched slaves brought back the memory of that giant corpse pit at the mine.

The dead Sontarans didn't protest, although one of the live ones asked why we had slain their field plasma-oven catering crew? indicating the two Bucketheads I'd dropped with the Nitro.

Memo to self: Sontaran cookers look like laser-death rays.

'Because they looked at me funny!' I shouted, going for the rage-covering-a-mistake gambit.

Despite earlier tough-talking, the hovercraft used their lowest gearing and moved pretty slowly, certainly slowly enough for the stumpies to keep their feet. There was a water stop every hour for five minutes. Part of this consideration came from what the Law Officers worried about what the Traveller might say about mis-treating captives.

Our progress was so slow that night came and went before we reached Hollandia in the light of First Sunrise. Dawn camouflaged the silence and stillness of the city which would otherwise have warned us of things gone awry.

Arriving on the Grande Piazza to what ought to have been a heroes and heroines welcome, instead we found ourselves under the guns of a compact warship that had landed in the square.

Stamping down the landing ramp came a welcome party you don't see every day – the Doctor, on seemingly good terms with an escort of Sontarans.