Snatching her night-vision binoculars from her rucksack, she’d scrambled out of her tent, and begun scanning the clear night sky. To her surprise she had spotted the UFO almost immediately, a brilliant pinpoint of light moving low and fast over the peaks of Wasdale Head, the Typhoons in close pursuit. With a thrill, Dorothy had realised that she had a ringside seat for the imminent engagement.

The lead fighter was virtually level with her when it unleashed the first of its Advanced Short Range Air-To-Air Missiles, the infrared seeker locking on to the UFO and streaking away into the night with a blaze of flame. Triggered by its proximity fuse the warhead exploded, the detonation sending shockwaves racing across the surface of the lake. Dorothy had shielded her eyes as flaming wreckage cascaded down from the night sky, the bracken on the hillside bursting into flame as each piece made contact. Then she’d caught sight of something else plummeting towards the ground. Using the falling debris as cover, a smaller craft was making a powered descent. Fascinated, Dorothy had watched as it arced away from the main debris field, hugging the side of the scree slope and vanishing beneath the dark waters of the lake. It had been using the fallout from the explosion as camouflage, presumably banking on the fighters’ infrared instrumentation being overwhelmed by the fires that now blazed on the fells.

Dorothy had known that UNIT would be searching for every single piece of the downed UFO. That was fine with her. What she wanted was the tech they didn’t know about.

She wanted the pod.

It had been nearly three weeks before the last of the military trucks finally departed and the area was opened to the public once more. Sanaul had made a big show of announcing to the press that A Charitable Earth was testing a new generation of inflatable boats and specialised diving equipment for use in remote areas of Malaysia and India that were increasingly being affected by catastrophic flooding due to rising sea levels.

Given the depth of the lake, Sanaul had been sceptical of finding anything. It had come as something of a surprise, therefore, when the experimental underwater search-and-rescue drones located the pod on only the second night of searching. It had come to rest on an underwater ledge, only ten metres or so below the surface. Scans showed that it was empty; the pod must have misfired as the mother ship suffered huge systems damage.