'Hello,' said the Doctor cheerily. 'I'm the Doctor.

Still holding Martha's hand, he stepped forward into the room. And into an invisible wall of electricity. Martha didn't have time to scream as the energy tore through her. She just had time to feel the Doctor's hand burning up in hers, and then they were both gone.

NINE

'I've got my eyes shut,' she heard the Doctor say. 'Are you there yet?'

Martha opened her eyes. She was sat on the floor, her back against the cold and unyielding wall of scrambled egg, and facing the horseshoe of computers. The Doctor sat next to her, his eyes tightly closed. His suit was torn in places and blackened from where the invisible wall of electricity had cooked it. The skin around his nose and ears looked raw and pink and painful.

A thought struck Martha and she quickly lifted the hem of her vest top. The scar from the knife wound had gone.

'Yeah,' she said. 'I'm here.'

He opened his eyes and grinned at her. 'That was exciting,' he said, as if they'd just stepped off a rollercoaster.

'Yeah,' she said. 'But let's not make a habit of it.'

'Chicken,' he replied.

'Ahem,' said a new voice above them. Martha looked up to see a handsome bloke with a cool, handlebar moustache. He gazed sternly down at them from where he stood a couple of feet away, keeping the wall of killer electricity between them. His tight grey uniform only emphasised his impressive muscles.

'Urn,' said Martha. 'Hi.'

'You survived,' he said, sounding disappointed. His voice was warm and rich, like in an advert for coffee.

'Sorry about that,' said the Doctor easily. 'Don't know what we were thinking.'

The handsome man turned back to his handsome colleagues. 'Captain,' he called. 'They survived.' Yeah, OK, thought Martha, people coming back from the dead was unusual. But for all he looked lovely, his voice was a bit whinging.

Martha turned to the Doctor, hoping he'd know what to do. They were trapped between the cold scrambled egg and the invisible wall of electricity. The Doctor pulled a face at her and shrugged. They would just have to see what happened next.

The tall, well-toned captain came over, one of those lucky women whose bone structure meant she could be anywhere between thirty-five and sixty. Her long, sleek hair was heavily layered and helped emphasise her cheekbones. It reminded Martha of the 'Rachel' look, fashionable when she'd been at university. It also reminded her of the kind of rich students who had so much time to spend on styling their hair.

'They're human,' said the captain, with surprise and another coffee-selling voice. Closer now, Martha could see the fine worry lines etched into the skin around her steely, determined eyes. She looked fierce and brave as well as beautiful.

'And so are you,' said the Doctor. He turned to Martha. 'I just knew there'd be some of your lot somewhere round the place. Doing your thing, all being in space. Just look at you! You're brilliant.'

'Doctor,' said Martha sternly. 'Don't do that, it's embarrassing.'

'Don't do what?' said the Doctor.

'That. Talking down to the Homo sapiens.'

'Sorry,' he said. And then he grinned. 'Though really, you're Homo sapiens sapiens. There's a whole sub-species thing. And you've got this—' He noticed the way she was looking at him, arms folded, one eyebrow raised. 'Sorry,' he said. He turned his attention to the starship's captain. 'I was just saying to your mate,' he said, 'how we didn't mean to live through your clever wossname. Can only apologise, really.'

The captain scrutinised the Doctor as if he wriggled in a test tube. 'He speaks standard,' she said. 'Of a sort.'

'What should I do with them?' said the handsome man beside her, stroking his handlebar moustache.

'Oh,' said the Doctor to Martha, making a great show of ignoring the two fearsome people standing right in front of them. 'I imagine they'll want to interrogate us. Find out what we know.'

'We do know a lot,' agreed Martha.

'We do,' said the Doctor. 'The war, the pirates, the experimental drive and what's gone wrong with it...' He looked up at the captain and grinned.

The captain bit her bottom lip as she considered. 'We could run the wall of electricity closer to the door,' she said simply. 'Fry them again.'

'It's really not going to make any difference,' said the Doctor. 'We're very hardy. Like dandelions.'

'We could shoot them, sir,' the handsome man suggested to the captain. In fact, he was so good-looking with his eyes and moustache and twinkling smile that Martha didn't really mind too much about what he was suggesting. She supposed people were always going to be better looking in the future, just as she'd found Shakespeare a bit unwashed and smelly. Oh, she thought; perhaps this handsome bloke looked at her, a girl from the distant past, with the same kind of horror.

'Or you could say how helpful it is to have someone turn up who knows what's going on,' said the Doctor.

'What is going on?' the captain asked him. She didn't, Martha noted, try to use her beauty on him. Her good looks were a side issue to the job in hand. The captain expected to be taken seriously.

'Well,' said the Doctor. 'Why don't you let us out of this thing and then we can chat about it?'

The captain considered. 'I suppose they are human,' she said, as if humans had never done anything bad, ever.

'Captain?' asked the handsome man.

'Let them out,' the captain told the handsome man. 'But keep them covered.'

Two other handsome men in uniform hurried over with elegant, little guns, which they trained on the Doctor and Martha. The handsome man nodded to one of his well-toned colleagues working at the horseshoe of computers. The colleague, a beautiful brunette, operated some of the controls in front of her, but nothing much seemed to happen as far as Martha could tell. Still, the handsome man beckoned her forward.

'Come on,' he said. 'Move.'

With the guns pointing at her, Martha made to move forward but the Doctor grabbed her hand.

'I'll go first,' he said, and took a step through the space where the wall of electricity had been. Nothing happened to him. He looked himself up and down, just to be on the safe side, then looked back at Martha, smiling. 'Easy,' he said.

The bridge was more like an office than the control deck of a spaceship, thought Martha as she stepped forward. There was no big view screen or anything like that. Instead the handsome, uniformed people each had a place at the horseshoe of computers. Each individual computer screen was also projected onto the wall behind the person manning it, so everyone could see what everyone else was up to. For a moment Martha thought this meant they couldn't get away with skiving – there'd be no online shopping or Facebook when everyone else could look round at your screen. But then she realised that the captain need only stand in the gap of the horseshoe to see all the wall screens at once.

The Doctor was gazing at the wall screens, too, lapping up all the information. His eyes flicked from screen to screen, comparing the different sets of data. One screen showed a complex bar graph all in different colours, another, which held the Doctor's attention, showed some kind of blobby spaceship out in space. It looked, thought Martha, like a giant, spiky peach, the spikes all kinds of guns and space weaponry.

'That's beautiful!' enthused the Doctor.

'The pirate vessel?' asked the captain – like Martha, she thought it really ugly. A spherical pod jutting from the front of the peach seemed to be the badger pirates' bridge and living quarters, and two small bumps on either side of the peach looked like nippy little engines. From the back, there was what looked like a frozen plume of spray, hundreds of tiny droplets frozen in an instant. Martha realised with a start that each droplet was a boarding capsule, like the one that had brought Archibald, Dashiel and Jocelyn aboard.