That would work. It would exhaust him, and stave off another argument for at least a few days. She wished that it wasn’t necessary. No matter how hard she tried to explain, he never understood.

Thirty years was a drop in the ocean of her life. But it was half of her husband’s. And that was where the pain came in. She loved David, and watching him deteriorate for the next ten or twenty or however many years he had left would be torture beyond endurance. David’s hollow offer of divorce might actually be better. If she could go away, ignore him, and live her life… But it wouldn’t work. Susan knew that. For one thing, she loved David too much to hurt him by abandoning him. But not, she admitted to herself ruefully, too much to avoid hurting him by arguing with him.

And, anyway, even if she could somehow put David out of her life, it would only begin again. She’d meet someone, fall in love, and be doomed to repeat this dread in another thirty years. She couldn’t live her life like this, forever chained unevenly to people whose lifetimes were so ephemeral compared with her own. It hurt too much.

‘Grandfather,’ she breathed, for the thousandth time, ‘why did you abandon me?’

She was wallowing in self‐pity, she knew, but she was beyond her ability to climb out of it. Blaming her grandfather for leaving her here was the simplest way to avoid taking the responsibility on her own head. After all, she’d been the one who’d fallen in love. She had begun everything. Her grandfather had simply made her decision for her, one that she would otherwise have had to face herself. She could imagine how much it had hurt him. Was that why he’d taken the decision for her? Had he condemned her to a life of loneliness in revenge?

He had promised to return, too, and see how she was getting along. But he never had. In thirty years, she’d never even seen him. She knew the TARDIS was erratic, but surely, after all these years… the Ship had always loved visiting Earth, after all.

Susan knew she was being foolish, but she felt abandoned. As if he’d banished her from his life and now ignored her. It was hard to believe how close they had once been, and now…

Tears were trickling down her cheeks, but she ignored them. She needed a good cry right now. It wouldn’t solve anything, but at least it would make her feel better when it was over.

The phone bleeped at her. Susan cursed and threw a pillow at it. She didn’t want to talk to anyone right now. It bleeped again.

‘Hold all incoming calls,’ she snapped.

‘Priority override,’ the phone informed her, in its somewhat prim voice.

Frowning, Susan crossed to it, and looked at the message pad. It was from Peace Headquarters, of course. Nobody else she knew had a priority override. And she couldn’t ignore this. ‘Voice only,’ she ordered. She didn’t want the duty officer seeing her like this. Then she laughed, ironically. She’d meant without her full makeup on, so she appeared to be fifty. She’d almost forgotten that she was wearing nothing but underwear. There was something odd about that being her second concern, and not her first.

‘Susan.’ It was Don Spencer. Susan liked the younger man: efficient, intelligent and gentle, he reminded her of a younger David. ‘Is something wrong with your phone?’

‘No,’ she answered, wiping away the tears at last. ‘With me. I’m not dressed.’

‘Oh. Well, you’d better get dressed, and fast. There’s a priority alert from DA‐17.’

That made her forget her problems. ‘Does it check?’

‘As well as it can from here,’ he answered. ‘I’m downloading coordinates to your runabout now. We need you on the spot.’

‘Understood.’ There was no begging off from this, of course, but the idea didn’t even cross her mind. ‘I’ll report in once I arrive. Out.’

The phone switched off, and Susan hurried to her wardrobe. She’d worked as a Peace Officer for more than twenty years, patrolling and checking out the Dalek Artefacts. It was astonishing how many stupid people there were who wouldn’t stay out of them, no matter how often they were warned, or however many people were killed by booby traps the nasty little vermin had left behind. If someone had managed to get into DA‐17, it was Susan’s duty to extract them and seal the place off again. She grabbed her uniform from the wardrobe and pulled on the dark coveralls. She reached for the padding she normally wore to simulate an extra twenty pounds in body weight, and then hesitated. It was night, and she wasn’t going into headquarters. There really wasn’t any compelling need for her normal disguise. Disgusted as she was with it, she was happy for any excuse not to wear it. She’d just be herself tonight. The chances were that whoever had intruded in DA‐17 was already dead, but if they weren’t, they weren’t going to know that Susan should look a lot older than she did.

She hurried down to the garage, sealing the house behind her. She left a brief message for David, telling him where she was going in case he arrived home before she did, and then slipped into the runabout. It was a small model, electrically powered, of course. She brought it on line, and checked the computer. The location and information about DA‐17 were still downloading, but they would be ready by the time she was. The fuel cell was fully charged, and the Artefact was within cruising range. Not a problem.

The runabout moved silently off into the night, its headlights picking out the way from the city. Susan estimated a trip time of about thirty minutes. As she drove, she had the computer play back the data on DA‐17. It was – no surprise! – an unevaluated site, just a few miles from the main Dalek mining camp in Surrey. Basically a tunnel leading into the ground, with blast doors at the base. There had been no power readings after the invasion was over, so it had been locked and sealed and left for later. And, as with so many other sites, later had never come.

Still, the information was reassuring. It meant that there was very little chance that the intruder had managed to get inside the Artefact. Very few people could break Dalek encryption codes. And the chances that the tunnel entrance was booby‐trapped were pretty small. By the time Susan arrived, the intruder or intruders would be either frustrated or long gone.

This wasn’t going to be much of a problem at all. Still, it would serve to clear her mind of her own problems, at least for an hour or so…

The TARDIS was too large, and too small. The Doctor stomped through the corridors, not really paying attention to what he saw. The skin on his face still itched from where he’d restored it, and his memory still pained him from the causes of those scars.

He and Sam had become mixed up in the plans of the deadly Kusks on the dying planet of Hirath. Struggling to contain the damage the creatures had managed to inflict, he had narrowly escaped with his life. It had been a long time since he’d been raked over the coals quite so nastily, and it wasn’t easy getting over it.

Especially alone.

To be honest with himself – and he hated to be other than that – it was the loneliness that hurt the most. He knew his own failings, and one was the fact that he loved an audience. It wasn’t simply that he liked to astound his companions with his brilliance – though there was a certain measure of that in his personality – but that he genuinely enjoyed talking to other people. It was no fun at all being alone.

He needed a new companion.

No. He needed Sam. He stopped still in the corridor, absentmindedly scratching at the regenerating skin.

He didn’t blame her for leaving the Kusk base as its life‐support shut down – and yet she’d held his body, he’d smelt it on his clothes. Had she thought him dead? Had she gone to help Anstaar? The Kusk ship had gone and he prayed she had been safely on board, but he had no way of knowing where she might be.