‘No.’ Smith let his hand drop to his side. Whatever he’d been trying to remember, it had been swept away. ‘I’d rather I changed mine.’

Benny and Alexander were being manacled by the wrists to a pair of upright metal sheets in the aliens’ dome. The metal was stained with old blood and showed the signs of heat and hard impacts. Benny took the chance to look around the dome. A central woven green mat, presumably where these people slept, lay in front of a metal frame covered by a sheet. Bags of equipment and ordnance lay scattered about on the leafy soil floor and sensor equipment stood around everywhere. The dome itself was obviously some kind of a field; there must be a generator somewhere. The place had an offhand aura of violence and the smell of a slaughterhouse.

‘You can ask me to talk if you like,’ she told the occupants. ‘It’s one of my things. The trouble is, as you’ve fortunately discovered, I won’t be able to tell you anything useful.’

‘Yes, I’m aware of that,’ August told her. ‘You thought we had the Pod, we thought you had it. Since Dr Smith doesn’t seem to have it either, what we’ve got to find out is: who has got it?’

‘Beats me. Don’t take that as a hint. Who are you lot, anyway? Why do you want the Pod?’

‘Typical Interventionist training.’ Greeneye stepped out from behind a screen, back in his normal form again. Aphasia, similarly transformed, followed him. ‘We tie you up, you get us to explain the plot.’

‘Well,’ Benny glanced at her boots, ‘I haven’t been trained by anybody, as I have to remind myself at intervals, and I had in mind a sort of a deal. I rather like it here. The Doctor’s fallen in love and is blissfully happy. I don’t call all that a fate worse than death, to be honest. If you can find this bloody Pod, you’re welcome to it. I’ll even help you find it. But I do like to know who I’m dealing with.’

‘Now she’s pretending to side with us!’ laughed Greeneye. ‘This is classic!’

‘Yes, but I think we should observe the formalities.’ August indicated the others.

‘We are Aubertides, Professor Summerfield, from the planet Aubis. We’re shape-changers, as you may have gathered. We can eat anything organic and can duplicate the appearance of anything that we take in that has its genetic material reasonably intact. If we have so much as one complete cell, we can take on the memory of what we eat, also.’