Charley flew forward, her hand on the door almost an instant after it was shut, but it wouldn’t budge. He’d already latched it behind him. “Doctor! Let me in, damn you!” She pounded until her fists ached on the red-painted metal, but was ignored. “You can’t just leave me here!”

The only answer was the faint, reverberating echo of the beating she’d given the door.

“Oh!” Charley gave the door one last exasperated thump then turned away, her mind whirling. Frustration quickly gave way to determination. Whatever quarrel the Doctor might have with her, whatever it was that had apparently kicked his martyr complex into overdrive in this incarnation, she had no intention of letting either get him killed. The universe still needed his particular brand of meddling.

If she couldn’t get to him, then maybe she could get to the TARDIS. She still had the key her first Doctor had given her, and she’d learned just enough about piloting it that she ought to be able to make the short hop inside the store.

Of course, that required finding the TARDIS, and quickly, before the Doctor had time to do anything particularly foolish. It wasn’t in the alley she’d been dumped in, but it ought to be close if he had any thought of surviving at all.

Charley reached the end of the alley at a run and paused there. Her eyes darted back and forth in indecision. Left, right, or straight ahead? It was impossible to try to anticipate where the Doctor might have parked the TARDIS when the TARDIS often had its own ideas of where and when to land. A feeling of helplessness nearly swamped her for a moment. But then – there! – in the headlights of a passing vehicle, she caught a glimpse of something blue tucked discreetly into an alcove across the street.

She darted across, heedless of the late evening traffic even when a taxi nearly ran her down and the driver hammered the horn. There wasn’t time to be cautious.

Reaching the alcove, Charley let out a sound almost like a sob of relief. She’d been right. There was the TARDIS, just as she remembered it. Her hands shook as she fumbled in her handbag for the key.

There. Now all she had to do was push aside the false keyhole to reveal the real one beneath…only it wasn’t moving. The lock had changed. For a moment, Charley almost felt like sitting down and having a good cry. Of all the stupid things, to be defeated by a bloody Yale key!

Behind her, the night was split by the familiar light and sound display of an explosion. Charley spun around just in time to see the blast take out the entire top floor of shop windows; the roof of Henrick’s was already on fire.

People were running about and shouting. Somewhere in the distance, she heard or imagined sirens. All of it faded into the background. Charley had eyes only for the alley where the Doctor had left her. She barely felt her strength give out, only noticing that her legs had buckled beneath her when she reached the ground.

For a long, breathless moment, Charley just sat there, her back against the TARDIS. She watched people running towards and away from the building, not truly registering what any of them were doing. She was so intent on watching the alley that she didn’t even hear the footsteps approaching her until a newly-familiar voice spoke.

“I thought I told you to go home.”

Charley looked up at him from her seat against the TARDIS door and gave him the plainest answer she could. “I did.”

The Doctor’s expression softened. “Come on, then.” He slipped his own key into the lock and opened the doors. Only after Charley had clambered to her feet and slipped inside did he silently follow.

The cavernous control room within had changed even more than the Doctor himself. Struts that had once resembled nothing so much as the massive steel ribs of the R-101 now sprouted tree-like from the floor as though they’d grown there. Gone entirely was the gothic cathedral. Instead, Charley rather felt as though she were standing in the centre of a submarine Jules Verne might have designed. The walls had roundels like they had when she’d travelled with his sixth incarnation, but they were smaller and more deeply set. They looked more like gigantic screws than the large porthole shape she’d never quite grown accustomed to.

Charley considered making some flippant remark about redecorating, but the intense frown on the Doctor’s face as he marched over to the console killed it on her lips. “What are you doing?” she asked instead.

“Trying to lock down a signal,” he answered. The Doctor took the arm from her, laid it down on the TARDIS console and attached several wires to it. “Probably won’t work. An arm’s too simple. But as I haven’t got a better alternative, it’ll have to do for now.”

“I thought you blew up the relay signal,” she stated, feeling a bit slow and not at all happy about it.

The Doctor looked at her. “Surely you don’t think the Nestene Consciousness came all this way just to take over one shop.”

“Well…no, of course not,” Charley answered sheepishly. “But aren’t you the least bit curious how I wound up in London in 2005 if you supposedly left me in Singapore in 2008?”

“Oi!” He looked insulted. “Trying to stop an invasion here.”

It’s not as though it were that urgent. Surely if the Brigadier could tell the Autons weren’t yet ready to make a move, the Doctor could also. Charley sighed. “Right.”

Not the talkative sort this time ’round, then. That was a bit maddening, but then she supposed one had to be somewhat mad to put up with the Doctor for long. In any incarnation. She watched him tinker for a moment, slowly growing curious. “What exactly are we looking for?”

“A transmitter. The relay station on the roof of Henrick’s was just that, a relay station. It passed the signal on, but it has to have come from somewhere. The Consciousness is controlling every single piece of plastic so it needs a transmitter to boost the signal.” The Doctor paused, frowning. Then he glanced over at Charley, his curiosity clearly getting the better of him. “Come to think on it, how did you wind up here when I left you in 2008?”

Charley’ mind, however, had been a little too successfully shifted to the more immediate problem. “What would the transmitter look like?”

“Big,” was the curt, concise answer before he went back to pondering the conundrum she’d posed him. “It’d be simple enough if it were the other way ’round, but last I checked, nobody in twenty-first century Earth goes about experiencing time backwards.”

“Could you be a bit more specific?”

The Doctor blinked. “Knew a chap once, somewhere about the Middle Ages. Lived his life backwards. Could tell you all about his future, couldn’t recall a thing about his past.”

Charley rolled her eyes. “About the transmitter,” she clarified, exasperated. “What exactly would it look like?”

“Oh.” He looked sheepish for a moment. “Like a transmitter. Round and massive, and somewhere central. A huge circular metal structure. Like a dish. Like a wheel. How could you hide something like that slap bang in the middle of London? It must be completely invisible.”

Like a wheel… Well, she didn’t know about any invisible giant wheels in London, but she damned well knew about one that was quite visible. “What about the London Eye?”

The Doctor looked at her. “Pardon?”

“The London Eye? The Millennium Wheel? You know, gigantic Ferris wheel ‘slap bang in the middle of London’? Generally regarded by persons of taste as a public eyesore?” Well, all right, perhaps not, but she certainly found it to be so.

The Doctor stared at her in wonder for a moment before finally breaking out into a wide, manic grin. “Fantastic!”

He immediately began racing around the console, throwing switches and pulling levers. That, at least, was familiar. Almost painfully so. “Hang on to something!” he shouted an instant before the TARDIS began to buck and rumble.

Charley didn’t need to be told. She knew this part by heart. Grabbing the edge of the console, she hung on for dear life. For a ship that simply dematerialised one place and rematerialised at another, the TARDIS certainly could be a bumpy ride. But she wouldn’t have it any other way.

Only a few short jarring seconds later, they landed and the Doctor raced out. Charley ran after him. He’d parked very nearly beneath the enormous wheel, but rather than looking up at it, seemed to be staring thoughtfully at the ground.

“Hold on a tick,” Charley said as she reached him. “Oughtn’t we to have a plan before we go barging into an alien stronghold?”

The Doctor shrugged. “Never needed one before.”

“Right, because that generally works out so well for us.”

The Doctor stopped, turning to Charley with an exasperated glare. “I plan to talk to it. Give it a chance to leave peacefully.”

Oh. So, the usual then. Granted, the Doctor did have a way about him when it came to talking his way out of scrapes, but still, if that was the best he’d come up with… “And if that doesn’t work?”

The manic grin reappeared as he pulled a vial of blue liquid out of the pocket of his leather jacket. “Anti-plastic.”

“Anti-plastic?” Charley echoed sceptically.

“Anti-plastic!” he repeated. “Got a problem with that?”

She shrugged. “It just seems rather a leap to go straight from ‘give it a chance to leave peacefully’ to anti-plastic in one go. Haven’t you got any in-between plans?”

The Doctor shook his head and frowned at her. “There’s just no pleasing you, is there?”

“Well, if you must know, I think I liked you better in curls and a necktie,” Charley muttered under her breath as she followed him towards the Ferris wheel. To herself, she silently added, Both versions.

He ignored her. “So we’ve found the transmitter. The Consciousness must be somewhere underneath. Look around.”

Charley obeyed. “What if we negotiate with it?” she suggested over her shoulder. “I mean, if it’s invading, there’s got to be something it wants. Territory? It’s not as though we’re using the moon at the moment.”

“What it wants is this planet. Lots of smoke and oil, plenty of toxins and dioxins in the air. It’s just what the Nestene Consciousness needs. Its food stock was destroyed in the War, all its protein planets rotted. So Earth…” The Doctor stopped briefly to mime eating with a knife and fork. “…dinner!”

Well, that would certainly explain why the Consciousness’ two previous attempts at invasion had been back in the nineteen-seventies. Not that Earth was by and large an extremely healthy planet at present, but almost invariably when she began to complain about the air quality when compared to her own time, her UNIT colleagues would rejoinder with something about, “You think it’s bad now, you should’ve seen it during the ‘Seventies…” Of course, most of the environmental legislation that had been past in the last half century was generally decried by scientists as “too little too late,” but to at least some degree, things had improved.

“Perhaps it would be willing to share the planet, then. After all, without humans to keep on pumping pollution into the atmosphere–“

The Doctor shook his head. “It’d just eat its fill and move on.”

Right. So much for that idea. “Have you got a spare vial of that anti-plastic stuff on you?”

“What for?” he asked.

Charley just looked at him. The Doctor rolled his eyes, but pulled the vial he’d shown her out of his jacket pocket and tossed it to her. “You used to trust me, y’know,” he told her pointedly.

“You hadn’t a death wish then,” she retorted.

Charley slipped the vial carefully into her handbag while the Doctor bent down to examine the hatch he’d found. It took only a moment of fiddling to get it open, at which point red light and smoke promptly poured out. “Hellfire and brimstone,” Charley remarked dryly. “I take it this is the place?”

“Probably,” the Doctor agreed. “You coming?”

She almost asked, ‘Have I ever not?’ but remembered just in time that as far as he knew, she’d done exactly that. Which made her all the more determined to get to the bottom of that particular gap in his memory once this adventure was over. At a guess, she supposed it probably had a great deal to do with the Cyber control signal she’d thought had killed him.

Since now seemed hardly the time to ask, and he likely wouldn’t answer anyway, Charley instead followed him down the ladder and a brief flight of stairs into the belly of the beast. Below them in some sort of vat was a great seething mass of…something. “Is that the Nestene Consciousness?” she asked in a whisper.

“Probably,” the Doctor answered. “Looks a bit different from the last time I defeated it. Must’ve mutated during the War.”

That was the second time he’d referenced a war in relation to the Consciousness. And not just any war, but a War with a capital ‘W.’ She could hear the capital in his voice, just as when her parents and other elders had spoken with grim nostalgia about the Great War. That was something else she’d have to ask him about once this was over. If she could persuade him to talk at all.

Well. Charlotte Elspeth Pollard was nothing if not stubborn. Whatever the matter was, she’d get it out of him one way or the other. Provided they survived this, of course.