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The Dying Days - Chapter Seven

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Work, Rest and Play

By eight o'clock in the evening, British Summer Time, on Tuesday, May 6th 1997, everyone in the world knew that there was an alien spacecraft hovering over London.

Back in the late sixties the United Nations had agreed what would happen if mankind encountered alien lifeforms. The experts agreed that the "First Contact", as they called it, would be a faint radio signal from deep space. It followed that the First Contact would almost certainly be with a radio telescope facility somewhere in the world, or perhaps a military listening station. The alien radio signal might be many hundreds of years old: radio waves travelled at the speed of light, and so even those from the nearest star would be over four years old. That meant that the human race would have time to carefully compose its response - this wouldn't be a conversation with aliens, more like an exchange of letters.

So it was agreed: the staff of the radio telescope that picked up the message would pass it on to the Secretary-General of the United Nations. A team of experts would translate the message (any aliens trying to contact us would have considered the language barrier, and would keep the message straightforward - using basic mathematical or geometric concepts, perhaps, or a series of simple pictures). This translation would then be made completely public. The world would decide what response to send, and the world would send only one reply, leaving aside all cultural, political and economic differences.

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Few of the people drawing up the First Contact Protocol thought that it would work like that in practice, and when the time came it didn't. For many centuries there was some debate about exactly when "First Contact" between mankind and aliens took place. The Martian Invasion of 1997, of course, was always cited as the definitive moment, but it had become clear years before then that the major governments had positive proof of the existence of extraterrestrial life. Aliens had visited mankind for thousands of years, leaving their trails across the archaeological strata and their subtle influence on human development. Visitors from other worlds were worshipped as gods or hunted down as monsters through the centuries.

In the late twentieth century, as the human race began to venture out into space, they had reached a level of scientific understanding that allowed them to interpret the old legends and superstitions. They also now possessed a level of technology that allowed aircraft and radar to sweep the skies for unidentified flying objects. Alien spacecraft and other artefacts began to arrive on Earth with alarming regularity.

The year that the United Nations drew up the First Contact Protocols, the governments of half a dozen of its member states were already concealing the existence of aliens from their citizens and from each other. The UN realised that such insularity was dangerous, and that if one country were to acquire alien weapons or other technology, then this would destabilise the carefully balanced world order. During Waldheim's term as secretary-general, restricting access to alien science became just as much a priority as preventing the proliferation of nuclear technology. A policy decision was made at the very highest levels of government that the public should not be informed about any alien 'incursion', regardless of its significance.

This level of secrecy means that historians were never able to reach a consensus over when what they call 'The Real First Contact' was made. Some still preferred to count the Arcturan Treaty of 2085. That had been an official, peaceful contact. The first time that human and alien sat down and talked, rather than attempted to commit genocide.

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The Martian Invasion was yet another demonstration of the shortcomings of the First Contact Protocols, not least because the designated Contact Group, the local UNIT contingent had just been suspended. With the Prime Minister in the United States, there was some confusion among the British authorities about who exactly was meant to initiate contact with the aliens.

The result was chaos for the first hour. A million people descended on Trafalgar Square, desperate to see the alien vessel. A million more attempted to flee the city, convinced that the world was about to come to an end. The authorities were caught in the middle as two million of their citizens stampeded.

The scheduled editions of Wildlife at One and The Cook Report had been postponed. BBC1 and ITV were both showing the same image from different angles: the prow of the UFO hanging over Nelson's Column, pointing down the Mall straight at Buckingham Palace. The main body of the vessel was hanging directly over the Strand. Learned commentators and experts tried to find the words to match the image. They failed.

'What are our options, General?'

'We can do little to contain the information, Mr President. Every station has been broadcasting pictures of the object for the last half hour. The FCC are pulling as much as it as we can, but the word is out.'

'I'm not worried about the damn coverage, General, I'm worried by the alien spaceship. A nuclear strike is out the question, I know, but - '

'With respect, sir, I don't think we should be ruling out the nuclear option at this stage.'

'It's a hundred metres above London, General.'

'Sir, a pre-emptive nuclear strike might prove to be the only effective method of destroying the Hostile. I am not recommending that at this stage, but we can't rule it out.'

'Understood. What do you recommend?'

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'Firstly, sir, we need to mobilise the National Guard. We need troops in all the cities, and additional forces in the air, ready to deploy them wherever there is trouble.'

'You think that the aliens are going to attack us?'

'That I don't know, sir. So far, there's no evidence either way and the situation seems contained in London. What I know is that at any moment riots are going to break out from here to Los Angeles.'

'I think you're underestimating the American people. There was a study done under the Carter administration which concluded that when confronted with indisputable evidence of alien life, most people's reaction would be one of awe and quiet contemplation.'

'That report was wrong. Mr President, our system of government operates on a very simple principle: the people trust the authorities to keep them safe. They can wake up every morning, believe what they read in their newspapers, take the kids to school, drive to work, earn some money that they can spend how they want, go to the park without being bombed, eat their lunch without being poisoned. They pay us taxes, we keep them safe. Now, what we have there on CNN, in glorious colour and NICAM stereo sound, is proof that we can't protect them. We don't know what it is, what it can or will do, who's in there, where they even came from. Mr President, our people aren't safe anymore. When they realise that, a lot of them will get angry, a lot of them will get frustrated. Some of them will take to the streets.'

The President rubbed his chin. 'Mobilise the guard.'

They'd been forced to abandon Bessie halfway up Whitehall, the streets were full of people and it would be quicker to get to Trafalgar Square on foot.

'This is madness!' the Doctor shouted back to Benny over the noise of the crowd. 'All these people, heading towards the Martian ship like moths to the flame.'

Benny apologised to the Rastafarian girl whose foot she'd just stood on. 'Doctor, I hate to point this out, but we're trying to get there, too.'

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The Doctor turned around, continuing to walk backwards without even slowing. Unlike Benny, he wasn't having any problem slipping through the throng. 'We are doing so out of scientific interest, and because we might prove invaluable as impartial negotiators in this little dispute.'

Benny squeezed past two of the fattest men she had ever seen and came up alongside him. 'How do you propose to start the negotiations, Doctor?' she asked sweetly. 'By shouting up at them?'

'I don't think my voice would be loud enough,' the Doctor said in all seriousness.

They could see the ship properly for the first time.

It took Benny a couple of seconds to realise that the reason the hull was strobing with bright blue light was that it was being photographed by thousands of people, all using flashbulbs. She hoped that the Martians, from a planet in perpetual twilight, didn't take the bright light as some sort of attack. The flickering glare of the flashbulbs made the Martian ship appear even more nightmarish than it already was. The ship was too large to take in at one attempt: it just left impressions of a surface like that of a seashell or a snail, fins like a deep-sea fish.

Despite that, Benny recognised the basic design of the spacecraft - Martian rockets had remained unchanged for a hundred thousand years. The Martians had followed the pattern of technological development familiar on ten thousand worlds throughout the galaxy, and they had evolved many millennia before the human race. The Martian Industrial Revolution had taken place at the same time as the Pliocene on Earth. On her expedition, Benny had discovered the remains of documents a million years old that were evidence of Martian space travel.

The Martians, the Ice Warriors as the Doctor insisted on calling them, would have conquered the solar system, even the galaxy, but for the lack of resources on their home world. Energy sources were scarce, few of the necessary metals were present in sufficient quantities. Martian astronomers knew that both the Earth and the asteroid belt were abundant with mineral wealth, but other planets remained tantalisingly just out of reach.

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One of her contemporaries had suggested that another reason why the Martians never developed their space travel was that their military culture was never geared to rocketry. The Martians lived in nests and cities deep underground, and such dwellings were scarce and impossible to attack from the air. Wars were fought to capture such possessions and territory, not to destroy them. The Martians favoured sonic guns and germ warfare, not 'dishonourable' bombs that destroyed civilian populations and turned whole cities into radioactive craters.

'Why aren't the Martians doing anything?' Benny asked.

'The same reason that there was a delay when the human astronauts landed on Mars,' the Doctor shouted back at her, 'the ship's crew are acclimatising to the gravity and the temperature. They are probably a little confused by their reception - they will want to assess this crowd, try and work out whether it's an army or not.'

'What made them pick London?' Benny asked.

The Doctor slipped through a group of German tourists. 'They must have tracked the source of the radio transmissions to the Orbiter: the Martian ship took a direct course for the National Space Museum. Something of a coincidence, otherwise, isn't it?'

The mass of people was almost stationary now. Most of the men and women had began to realise that they weren't going to get much closer. Or they had chosen not to - the object filled the sky, and every detail on its hull was visible from this distance. Sections of the flank were covered in wicked-looking spines. People were hesitating, holding still.

So, as the crowd became denser and denser, it became easier to move through it. Benny realised that she and the Doctor were the only people really trying. Everyone else stood staring at the sky. Benny found herself following the Doctor right into the Square itself.

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Benny was tall enough to see over most heads, and by the time they had reached the crowd-control barriers she had built up a picture of what was happening. The police were clearing groups of people from around the Column itself. They'd also cleared the Strand, and a steady line of emergency vehicles was streaming up the long road. Benny wondered idly what the Martians made of the convoy of large vehicles swarming beneath them with flashing lights and wailing sirens. The TARDIS was still sitting in the middle of the Square where they'd left it. Its technology was way beyond that of the Martians, so there was little chance they could detect its true nature.

The Doctor was pointing past it. 'Over there, Bernice. The army.'

A couple of army vehicles were also there: large trucks, personnel carriers, nothing like a tank or even an armoured car.

'Excellent,' he enthused. 'They're thinking. They are trying not to antagonise the aliens. The helicopters are keeping their distance, too.'

Benny cocked her head. Over the burbling of the crowd, the wailing of the sirens and the ever-present noise of the traffic in the distance, she could hear helicopter rotor blades.

'Good, good.' The Doctor whirled around, scanning the rooftops.

Bernice looked up. The Martian ship blocked out a quarter of the sky, its stern almost, but not quite, disappearing over the horizon. 'This is good?'

'Well, the Martians have been here half an hour and they haven't wiped us out yet - that's got to be a promising sign.'

'The big ship-mounted Martian sonic cannons take thirty-five minutes to power up.'

The Doctor looked up at the ship and then back down to her. 'Really?'

She nodded, biting her lip. They were right up against the crash barriers now. The chains securing them together were rattling.

The Doctor bent down to examine the phenomenon. 'Magnetic repulsion. Fascinating - a side effect of the magnetic flux that keep that ship afloat, no doubt.' He held the nearest padlock still and unfastened it with the sonic screwdriver and ushered Benny through the new gap. All this was achieved without drawing any attention from either members of the crowd or the nearest policemen.

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Before she had time to worry about that, they were heading across the Square. Like the crowd, the policemen and soldiers were all looking up at the ship. Here, they were directly underneath it, watching the winking lights at various points along the hull.

One group of policemen was standing right in front of the TARDIS door. Even if the Doctor had wanted to get inside he couldn't. It wasn't on the agenda, anyway, in fact the Doctor seemed unaware of the presence of his time machine.

'That's Eve, isn't it?' he asked. Benny followed his line of vision.

Lord Greyhaven's Aston Martin drew up just outside the Scotland Yard mobile command centre. A police officer opened the door for him, a young Army lieutenant for his passenger.

Staines was there already, waiting for him.

'What is it, Teddy?' he asked, glancing upwards.

Greyhaven raised a finger to his lips. 'Have you met Miss Evelin Waugh?'

She was young and blonde, and wearing a clinging silk dress. He remembered her from before at the Space Museum. Most of the men there would remember her. 'You're a lot prettier than your namesake,' the Home Secretary giggled.

'Gee, thanks,' she replied. She had an American accent.

'Miss Waugh is a journalist,' Greyhaven said, the merest hint of a warning in his tone of voice.

'Oh, the place is crawling with those,' the Home Secretary joked. 'There's a Yankee cameramen over there.' He gestured vaguely towards the outside broadcast vans that were massing by the National Portrait Gallery.

The woman looked up at Lord Greyhaven. 'Brilliant: that's Alan, my cameraman. Edward, I've got work to do: I'll see you later,' she told Greyhaven quietly, brushing against him as she hurried away.

'I say, Teddy, have you and she... ?'

Lord Greyhaven was staring up at the vast belly of the spacecraft. 'Is that really the most pressing question on your mind, Staines?'

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'I asked you what that was before, and you didn't tell me.'

Greyhaven glanced up, nonchalantly. 'That is a Martian spacecraft.'

'However do you know?'

Lord Greyhaven looked at him witheringly.

Staines rounded on him. 'This wasn't the plan, Teddy. The Martians were just meant to send back the plans for the equipment in the Mars 97. They weren't meant to kill the astronauts in the Orbiter, they certainly weren't meant to come here in person.'

'Why wait four months? And why settle for blueprints? I agreed that it would be easier all round if they brought samples of their technology themselves. They can provide moral support for our little venture. Don't you want to meet our friends from Mars? Besides,' he chuckled, 'they didn't kill the crew of the Orbiter, that was a terrible accident.'

It took the Home Secretary a few moments to decipher Greyhaven's sarcastic tone. 'You opened the airlocks?' Staines asked, with a mixture of anger and incredulity. 'From here, by remote control?'

He remembered Greyhaven leaning over an instrument panel at Mission Control, to shake a man's hand. Had he brushed against one of the controls then?

Lord Greyhaven chuckled. 'My dear chap, what sort of a fellow do you take me for?'

Staines straightened. 'But why?'

'They would have died soon anyway. This was the most humane way.' Staines imagined the astronauts in space, trying to breathe frozen nothing, millions of miles from the nearest human beings. 'But I read that people explode in space. The vacuum.'

'Nonsense,' Greyhaven said dismissively. 'Staines, it needed to be done. We need the Orbiter there. Think of it as our insurance policy. Better still, don't think about it at all.'

Greyhaven checked his watch and looked up.

There was a bellowing noise from the Martian craft, which squealed around Trafalgar Square, bouncing of the buildings, making everyone jump. There was absolute silence, absolute stillness. After a couple of moments, nothing else had happened and the relief from the crowd was audible. A couple of groups began laughing.

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Then the message started. It echoed down from the ship, from a public address system, and on a number of radio frequencies:

'WARRIORS UNDER THE BANNER OF THE UNITED KINGDOM HAVE VIOLATED THE TOMB OF OUR GREAT MARSHALL KYRUUL OF THE ARGYRE CLAN, UNDER THE SACRED SANDS OF THE MARE SIRENUM. THESE CRIMINALS ATTEMPTED TO STEAL THE TREASURES WITHIN. THEIR SHAMEFUL ACT IS ONE FOR WHICH THE WHOLE CLAN MUST BE PUNISHED. IN ACCORDANCE WITH OUR LAW, ALL TERRITORIES, MINERAL RIGHTS AND THE SOVEREIGNTY OF THE CLANS OF THE UNITED KINGDOM ARE NOW FORFEIT. THE UNITED KINGDOM IS NOW UNDER THE RULE OF THE HEAD OF THE ARGYRE CLAN, THE LORD XZNAAL, AND ALL ITS CITIZENS ARE SUBJECT TO MARTIAN FEUDAL LAW. YOU HAVE ONE HOUR TO AGREE TO THESE TERMS. AT THAT TIME, YOUR LEADER SHALL COME HERE IN PERSON AND SUBMIT TO OUR REGENCY.'

There was silence.

The Doctor squinted up, something on his mind. The crowd was getting louder.

'The voice... ' he said.

It hadn't been the usual Martian grunt, it had been beautifully modulated, a little quiet, perhaps, the hint of a lisp, but it sounded almost human. 'That's because the speaker was in his native atmosphere,' Benny explained. 'He wasn't gasping for carbon dioxide.'

The Doctor turned back to her, his mouth open. 'I know that,' he said, almost scathingly, 'what I want to know is where he learnt English. Specifically the human names for Martian geographical features on Mars.'

'Good point.' Benny looked over at him. This Doctor could rush in where angels fear to tread, he could drop everything at a moment's notice without a plan or a scheme or a hint of a master plan, but that didn't make him a fool. 'Could they have monitored human radio transmissions?'

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The Doctor was staring up at the ship again. 'That's probably it.' The question no longer interested him.

'Are you looking for a way in?' she asked. The Martian ship was two hundred feet above them, its hull was five-metre thick alloy, there was a gun port every ten metres behind which a sonic cannon was powering up. But the Doctor could get in anywhere if he wanted to.

'No,' the Doctor stated.

Benny's face fell. 'No?'

He turned to her and grinned, showing all those teeth. 'Why look for something you've already found?'

The emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council sat back and listened to a replay of the Martian declaration. One of the members was a great deal more agitated than the others.

'Surely we must seek clarification?'

The French delegate leant forward and began speaking. The translations took a moment to catch up. 'The message is clear, Ambassador Campbell. The Martians' only dispute is with "the clans of the United Kingdom".'

There was a babble of discussion around the huge crescent-shaped table.

'Does this mean that the Martians are not threatening the human race, only Great Britain?' one asked.

'It would certainly seem so,' another agreed.

The British ambassador straightened. 'Am I to understand that you are considering this a domestic United Kingdom matter?,' he asked incredulously. 'Are you seriously suggesting that these creatures will stop at targeting my country, and that yours will all be safe?'

'That would certainly seem to be a conclusion that we can draw from the Martian declaration.'

'We have no intention of the whole world being dragged into an interplanetary war.'

'Do you think that the Martians can distinguish between the British and the rest of humanity?'

'You mean they might attack us through ignorance?'

'Or they might think that we are all part of the United Kingdom.'

There was further murmuring around the table.

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After twenty minutes of debate, the United Nations agreed to broadcast a request for clarification. They used the radio frequency that the Martians had. The Martian response was almost immediate:

'OUR ONLY DISPUTE IS WITH THE CLANS OF THE UNITED KINGDOM. WE HOPE TO LIVE IN PEACE WITH ALL THE OTHER RACES OF THE EARTH. HOWEVER, SHOULD OTHER HUMAN CLANS ATTEMPT TO ATTACK MARTIAN TERRITORY OR INTERFERE WITH THE INTERNAL AFFAIRS OF THE MARTIAN DEPENDENCIES, THEN THIS WILL BE TREATED AS AN ACT OF WAR AND WE WILL RESPOND IN THE APPROPRIATE MANNER.'

The television commentators and their pundits weren't sure what to make of the announcement. The relief of those outside the British Isles was tangible, and the message of peace was taken as a very encouraging sign. The crowd in Trafalgar Square were more ambivalent. Over the objections of the British contingent, the European Parliament issued a statement welcoming the Martians, and stressing that the EU had no hostile intentions towards 'our Martian neighbours'.

The President of the United States found himself outnumbered by people advising him to appease the Martians. Many countries issued statements that renounced violence as a general principle, and hoped that the Martians would not resort to it. Most didn't make any statement at all, hoping not to draw attention to themselves. Across the world, harassed politicians appeared on television screens, declaring that their own countries were not under immediate threat, but that all was being done to defend their borders if the Martians did attack.

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Throughout the world, military leave was cancelled, bases were put on full alert and units were mobilised. Tensions mounted, and the areas prone to rioting did indeed riot. Television commentators from Utah to the Ukraine assured their viewers that there appeared to be one Martian ship and it was staying firmly in London. Within the hour, the tone had changed to one of wounded pride: why hadn't the Martians chosen to come to Paris, New York or Moscow?

Brigadier Bambera had spent the last three-quarters of an hour on the telephone, calling up as many senior military men as she could. Most seemed to know that UNIT's activities were officially suspended, but in the light of recent events, they were talking to her anyway.

The Martian ship hovered on the video screens, each showing a different TV channel, each showing a slightly different angle of the vast spacecraft. All but one channel showed the ship itself: ITN had resorted to 'artist's impressions' of the aliens.

While the eyes of the media were on the enemy, the Army were dusting off their invasion plans. There was a lot of dust on them. it was over fifty years since there had been any realistic possibility that a foreign power would invade Britain rather than obliterate it with nukes. During all that time, the British Army had kept itself busy with minor skirmishes, training exercises, Northern Ireland and peacekeeping for the UN. The theorists and strategists had spent a lot of their time running war games, planning what they would do in the unlikely event of an invasion of British soil. The computer simulations had proved that the war time plans had been broadly along the right lines.

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It was a simple idea, borrowed from the terrorists, guerrillas and mercenaries that the Army had spent its time fighting. Elite soldiers would, as the sexist phrase had it, 'kiss their wives and disappear', heading underground to carefully prepared safe houses and secret hideouts. Caches of weapons and other equipment were buried around the country. These soldiers would continue the fight behind enemy lines, helped by carefully-vetted locals with good knowledge of the terrain of their area. Each group would operate like a terrorist cell, to prevent infiltration. These 'Auxiliary Units' would sabotage bridges and railway lines, monitor enemy troop movements, blow up strategic targets.

All around the country, men were kissing their wives goodbye and disappearing.

Captain Ford was on his way to UNIT HQ in Windmill One-Nine. Because of their unique position, the staff at UNIT HQ would liaise with other countries, provide an 'underground railway' for men and materials. Ford would remove the communications equipment from HQ and take it to the rendezvous point outside Windsor.

Bambera's husband Ancelyn had been in Durham, on a pilgrimage to the tomb of St Cuthbert. Now he was heading to Balmoral with an SAS team to evacuate the Queen and Prince Phillip. The submarine Prometheus was waiting to take them to safety. The Prince of Wales and his sons had been on the royal jet when the Martian ship entered the atmosphere. Instead of London, the jet had ended up in Madrid. Other members of the royal family were also being accounted for. Ancelyn would be going with the Queen to Canada, protecting the rightful sovereign and the descendants of the rightful sovereign as his sacred oath demanded.

Bambera would never get the chance to kiss her husband goodbye. She put the phone down.

'We are with you,' Lethbridge-Stewart said. Alexander Christian nodded his consent.

'With respect, gentlemen, no. Go home to your family, Alistair. We'll manage.' Bambera couldn't look them in the eye as she said it.

'No.' Lethbridge-Stewart said firmly. 'This is our fight, too.'

She smiled. 'Good.'

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The Foreign Office was being deluged by messages from around the world, all of which welcomed the Martian's peaceful intentions towards the rest of the world. The Cubans were the first to welcome the new administration and hope for future co-operation. Emergency sessions in parliaments, congresses and palaces around the world concluded that a 'wait and see' policy would be most prudent.

Greyhaven consulted his watch.

'A quarter past eight. It is time.'

'Time?'

'With the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary in Washington and the Chancellor of the Exchequer in bed with a nasty bout of food poisoning, you're in charge, Staines.'

'M-me?'

Greyhaven nodded. 'And the Martians did say that they wanted the leader to go up in person.'

'Er... Teddy.'

'I'll accompany you if you wish, Home Secretary.'

'You're going up there?' It was Veronica Halliwell, the head of MI5.

'There's little choice, is there, Director General?'

'Will you be armed?' she had done her homework. Greyhaven had done his National Service, and still practised his marksmanship from time to time.

'No, thank you, commander. That's a big ship, and one handgun won't make too much difference in the lions' den, will it?'

She nodded. 'As you wish.'

'Have you raided the UNIT Offices yet?' the Home Secretary demanded.

'Sir, we need everyone at our disposal here. Besides, it's complicated. UNIT facilities have special status, we can't just wade in.'

'Director General, they have Alexander Christian in there. They are harbouring a multiple-murderer. Criminal acts don't get much more clear-cut than that. Now, I want you to raid their office, and I want you to do it now.'

'Sir!' a young soldier was running over with a radiophone. 'It's Washington, Home Secretary.'

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Greyhaven leant over the soldier and unplugged the telephone's battery. 'Oops, we seem to be having technical difficulties. It must be interference from the Martian ship. Are you coming, Staines?'

'Yes, I suppose so.'

Greyhaven walked over to his car, and unlocked the boot. He pulled out an Adidas sports bag.

'Are you going to challenge them to a game of squash?' Halliwell asked witheringly.

Greyhaven didn't reply.

'Get Christian,' Staines ordered her sternly, before he followed Greyhaven across.

'What's going on?' Benny asked.

A hatch was dilating open on the underside of the craft. The light inside wasn't that bright, but it stood in stark contrast to the gloomy metalwork of the rest of the ship. The crowd were getting agitated, perhaps thinking that it was a weapon of some kind. A black disc appeared in the hatchway, and it began descending in a perfectly straight line.

The Doctor stared up. 'They are sending down a platform. A lift car, I would imagine.' He checked his pocket watch. 'Dead on time. The message said that they wanted the British leader to surrender in person.' The crowd were pointing and muttering.

Benny was looking down at the ground. 'I don't see the Queen or Mr - Hang on, that's the Home Secretary. And that rocket man, er... '

'Lord Edward Greyhaven,' the Doctor supplied.

'Who died and made him boss?'

The Doctor considered Bernice's question for a moment, before he remembered that it was a figure of speech.

'This is no time for flippancy, Bernice,' he chided her.

The disc had reached the ground. Lord Greyhaven and the Home Secretary walked over and stepped onto it. Before they had stopped moving, the disc was rising steadily into the air. There were appreciative gasps from the crowd.

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The floor closed underneath them, like the iris behind a camera lens, shutting off the dizzying aerial view of Central London. Greyhaven and Staines stepped down from the magnetic disc.

The chamber they were in was quite pleasant, bland almost. It was large. The high ceiling was the first thing that Staines noted. That and the lighting, which was a sort of diffuse pink. The room reminded the Home Secretary of the Commons Chamber. It was about the same size, and great swathes of a green tarpaulin-like material lay neatly folded along the walls. The colour was almost the same shade as the benches that lined the Commons.

'This isn't too bad, is it?' He called over to Greyhaven nervously. Teddy's attention was fixed on the only door. Slowly he began walking towards it, that sports bag of his in his hand. Staines followed. Around them the air was filled with the whirring of mechanisms, the rattling of pipes. The door was almost the size of a garage door, and it was made from frosted glass.

A deathly red light was glowing on the other side, almost like firelight at the end of the evening, when only the embers remained.

Something shifted behind the glass, a great, square shape moving slowly through the gloom. A machine of some kind, he thought. It was impossible to see it clearly.

'Do they know we are here, do you think?' Staines felt nervous again.

The door retracted.

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Standing framed in the doorway, bathed in red light, was the worst thing that Staines had ever seen.

It looked like a barnacle encrusted deep-sea creature, a monster from the depths. It hissed, struggling for breath as it dragged itself forwards out from a bank of mist.

It was well over seven feet high and was as broad as Staines was tall, with vast shoulders, like an American footballer or a medieval knight. It was a hunchback, with a mass of thick plating piled up onto its shoulder blades. It was skin, though, not armour. Crocodile skin, with ridges and bumps all over it. The torso and stomach were covered in a curved carapace like a tortoise's or turtle's.

It moved towards them, lumbering on legs as thick as a human torso and bulky, flipper-like feet. Wiry green-black hair sprouted from the gaps in the armour-plating - tufts of thick fur at the ankles, the elbows and the shoulders.

Its head was bigger than a motorcycle helmet, was roughly the same shape, and looked like it had been carved from a block of stone. Its eyes were red, the colour of burning coals, but they were concealed far behind two plates of thick, protective glass, like semi-visors. Staines peered up at the face, unsure whether what he was looking at was the creature's head or some kind of space-helmet. There was a gap in the faceplate below the eyes, and through it, softer, gnarled skin was just visible. This parted, revealing two rows of fangs packed together between thin lips. A red tongue, forked like a snake, flickered over the front teeth.

Staines screamed.

NEXT WEEK: Meet the Martians.