‘He’s out there, love. Protecting us. And the Martians.

And the Venusians. And God knows who else.’ He took a swig of tea. ‘You should probably get back in the warm, shouldn’t you?’

Sylvia nodded and stood up. ‘You going to be much longer?’

‘Nah, just want to stay here till eleven, then I’ll head back.’

‘Donna suggested a drive out to Netty’s tomorrow.’

Wilf put his tea down. ‘No thanks,’ he said quickly.

‘Dad, you have to see her some time.’ Sylvia reached out and squeezed his hand. ‘For your sake if not hers.’

 

‘You shouldn’t let Donna go,’ Wilf said. ‘It’s not safe.

What if she says something about the Doctor?’

‘That’s not likely. Even if she does, Donna won’t understand and Netty won’t be able to explain it.’ Sylvia stood up and walked back into the rain. Then she looked back at her old dad. ‘We’ve gone through more heartache than anyone should have to, Dad,’ she said quietly. ‘Let’s not bring any more on ourselves. Please come.’

‘I’ll think about it. Now go on, before you get a cold.’

Sylvia pointed up to the sky. ‘The Doctor would want you to,’ she said.

Wilf turned to her with a frown. ‘That’s beneath you, sweetheart. Please don’t.’

Sylvia nodded. ‘I’m sorry, Dad.’ And she walked back out of the allotments and down the hill.

Wilf watched her receding form until she was out of his view, then unwrapped his chocolate and bit a chunk out of it. He turned for another look through the telescope, cross because Sylvia had invoked the Doctor. Cross because it was a cheap shot. And cross because Sylvia was dead right.

A tear rolled down Wilf’s worn cheek.

For so many reasons.

One month after the skies had burned…

FRIDAY

Terry Lockworth checked his mobile, but there was still no signal. Maria was going to be so fed up with him –he’d had to work late but couldn’t let her know. No doubt the spag bol would be in the bin tonight. Again. Poor Maria – it wasn’t her fault she got fed up with him, but what was he supposed to do. They’d been married three months, had a child on the way (please let it be a girl), and money was tight.

Sure, her dad had given them a deposit for the flat in Boston Manor, but there was still the mortgage, the bills, pre-natal classes, food…

Terry shook his head as he pocketed the phone. Stop moaning, he told himself, and get on with the job, then he’d be home in an hour with any luck. More importantly, he’d be out of this mobile phone black spot in half that, so he could at least phone her then.

He picked up his toolbox and took out the wire-cutters,

clipped the plastic coating from the copper wiring and cut the wires. He then yanked the old cables from the junction box and pulled a long thin coil of fibre optics out of the toolbox. These were interesting fibre optics (well, OK, only Terry found them interesting) because they were even finer than normal. A new system, developed by the Americans (aren’t they always), and this building was the first in the UK to utilise them. They’d sent Terry on a course in New York six months back to learn about the system. That’d been fun – lots of nights on the town with Johnnie Bates, discovering that it really was the city that never slept. Frequently they’d only just made it to the training classes the next day, hung over but happy.

Terry was sensible enough to know when to party and when to really knuckle down and get the job done, though, and he and Johnnie had come back to England, certified to work on installing these new fibre optics, which made them both popular with their boss and earned them a bit of a bonus.

They’d been promised another bonus if they got this job done and, frankly, it was money in the bank the way they were going. The cabling was easy, it was the removal of the old copper stuff that was taking the time.

Johnnie was a couple of floors above him, closer to the demonstration suite. They’d flipped a coin to see who hung around with the bigwigs and had the chance to nick a cup of tea off the secretaries and PAs and who got the back stairways and service corridors. Terry had lost, of course. No tea for him.

He pulled a screwdriver out of his tool belt and started

to open the last junction box, whistling something he’d heard on the radio on the drive over. Anything to pass the time.

If he’d glanced back over the work he’d just done, he might’ve been surprised to notice that the fibre-optic cables he’d wired into the previous junction boxes were glowing strangely.

Cables that weren’t actually connected to power sources rarely glowed. Never, to be frank. It just didn’t happen. Why would it? How could it?

But it was happening: tiny purple pulses of energy, briefly flickering up and down the cabling. Almost like blood pumping through the veins of a huge electronic creature.

Terry didn’t notice it because he was looking forwards, looking to see where he was going next, not where he had been.

Which was unfortunate. Not just for Terry Lockworth, whose spaghetti bolognese would indeed go uneaten that night, but also for pretty much the whole human race.

Terry laced the last bit of fibre-optic cabling into the final junction box and screwed it shut for the final time, smiling to himself. Upstairs, Johnnie ought to be receiving proof that the cabling was finished, and his monitors would be telling him that everything was good to go.

As Terry finished tightening up the last screw, a massive bolt of purple alien energy rushed through his screwdriver, his hand, his whole body. It moved so fast that, by the time the miniscule charred flakes that were all that remained of Terry fell to the ground, the screwdriver

was only starting to fall away from the screw head.

Of course, Terry was lucky. By dying so suddenly and violently and efficiently, he was spared what was to come in the next few days.

But he probably wouldn’t have seen it quite like that.

Upstairs, in the penthouse suite, Johnnie Bates was linking all the computers into the main admin server of the Oracle Hotel, shining beacon of the architectural brilliance that was the Western Business District Development, commonly known as the Golden Mile, just on the left-hand side of the M4 motorway out of London.

But to the man who owned the hotel, Johnnie was just a little man in grey overalls doing something with wires.

Dara Morgan had, according to the biographies he carefully maintained on his company websites, made his first million in Derry when he was just 26, by creating a popular music torrent site that enabled cheap downloads at six times traditional speeds and with four times traditional MP3 quality.

The music industry loved him. The punters loved him.

The government loved him. His mum loved him (well, he assumed she did; they didn’t talk so much these days, what with her being kept in a silver urn on the mantelpiece next to his dad).

And the business world loved him. Four years later, and MorganTech was the funding behind the new WBDD, bringing work and development to Hounslow, Osterley and all those other areas of London between Brentford and Heathrow Airport that he’d never heard of prior to buying up the land.

With a personal portfolio of around £65m, he was one step away from being a megastar, already wining and dining with the Trumps, Gateses, de Rothschilds, Gettys and half a dozen more movers and shakers with unpronounceable names from around the world. Actually, the names weren’t unpronounceable, but Dara Morgan couldn’t be bothered to remember them. They just didn’t matter to him enough.

What mattered to him right now was getting the suites of his new hotel ready for the demonstration of his new handheld computer. And the little man in the grimy grey overalls was not going quite fast enough.