After loading their prize into the back of a Range Rover, Dorothy had headed back south to her workshop at Kirkwood Farm, leaving Sanaul to wrap up the testing that had formed their cover and dispel any suspicions that their arrival might have caused. Her hope had been that the pod would be in a fit state to fly – her wealth allowed her to afford the best forms of transport that Earth had to offer, but sometimes she just wished that she had access to something more.

As far as she had been able to tell, the entire ship was powered by a small, spherical device, humming softly to itself. Having located what she assumed to be the links to the engine controls, she was about to start dismantling it when a low, burbling chirrup from deep inside the workings of the ship made her stop.

The links weren’t just mechanical, they were alive. Connecting the power unit to the controls of the ship was some kind of semi-biological entity, a symbiotic engineer.

‘A squidgy gadget,’ Dorothy murmured, looking at it now. ‘Squidget.’ She reached out a tentative hand to the creature, just as she had when she’d first discovered it. The thin, pulsing tentacles shimmered at her touch.

Of course, she was no closer to finding out how it worked than she had been on day one. The power source seemed inexhaustible, and adaptable to virtually any scenario – she’d been using it to power all the lights and equipment here at the batcave for years, and as far as she could tell the thing was barely ticking over.

The one thing that she had discovered was that the Squidget responded to voice control and that had made what she was about to do at the Space Defence Centre an awful lot simpler.

‘Power down and disconnect,’ she said sharply. There was a chirp from the Squidget and the hum from the power source stopped. With the briefest of flickers from the lights, the backup generators took over. Dorothy had several projects in the laboratory that required constant refrigeration, so whilst the alien power supply took care of most of her needs without drawing to attention to what she was doing here, there were occasions when she needed more conventional generators.

In a blur of motion the Squidget withdrew its tentacles, clinging to the side of the sphere like some kind of strange coral growth. Dorothy lifted the propulsion unit from its housing and transferred it to an aluminium flight case, the Squidget giving an unhappy burble as she closed the lid.

With a last look around the workshop, Dorothy hoisted the flight case into her arms and crossed back to the door.

‘Lights off.’