The view screen in front of him is blank and white, a wall awaiting a door. He gulps, swallowing the excess saliva. It's not real, he tells himself.

And, indeed, it isn't. The screen is not a window; it is a camera projecting an image into his cubicle as similar cameras are projecting similar images onto the screens of those in the cubicles around him. The white wall is miles away and he is safe in the bunker.

"Ten seconds," says a dispassionate voice through his headpiece. He swallows again.

The ten seconds is gone in five and the wall starts to dissipate, to melt from white to Between grey and finally to streaked yellow.

He looks into another world.

He has seen the images before but, then, they had just been recordings and there had been other men and women at the controls.

His turn now.

When he joined up three years ago he had expected to be battling other people, other nations. Not other worlds.

And this was not even a world in this universe.

He punches the vehicle through into the pallid yellow glare. Ahead, he can see no demarcation between land and sky. Each is festooned with pulsating webs of glutinous mucus. In between them comes the raging, disgusting horde, some morphing as they advance. To his left and right he can see other vehicles begin to engage the enemy. They fire pulses of light and fire - beams whose source of energy is beyond his comprehension. He presses buttons to activate his own beams and the creatures in front of his vehicle are sliced to pieces; the gore that erupts from their torn bodies merges with the slime that pervades this entire world. They and their world are aspects of the same travesty.

The throng before him grows in number but annihilation proceeds as planned.

He keeps his eyes on a dial that indicates how well his cubicle and the remote vehicle are maintaining their communication link. If he allows it to die then the vehicle will be lost forever. The dial indicates over eighty percent – a very good reading. He can venture further.

After fifteen minutes of slaughter the enemy begins to thin. They must finally realise they are taking a battering, he thinks. Maybe this will stop their incursions into our world.

After a further ten minutes the enemy has completely retreated.

"Scout around for hostages," comes the order.

He is momentarily confused. Do they mean for us to take aliens as hostages or are they asking us to look out for humans that have been previously abducted? The latter, he concludes. However, he hasn't heard of anyone being returned alive from this nightmare; but they tell him little else other than what he needs to know.

He activates a scanner that tracks the telltale signatures of human life forms. Some are indicated to his right and, along with two other vehicles, he moves in that direction. He can see human-shaped bulges in some of the hanging tentacles.

Close up, he is sickened by the sights. Those poor people, he thinks, observing the fluids pulsing in and out of their naked, trapped bodies. The few whose eyes remain open are as still as those who appear asleep or dead; the dead are the lucky ones. In front of him are a man and a woman. Vague chivalry suggests he should rescue the woman but her body is shrunken and drained while that of the man is still encased in a reasonable quantity of muscle and fat.

Operating metal waldos, he cuts the man free and manoeuvres him so that he can be clasped to the side of the vehicle. He can only carry one victim so he turns the vehicle and sets it to trundle back towards the gateway.

He has no idea if the man is dead or alive.

"Engage the medic," a voice prompts.

Yes, the medic, of course. He had forgotten. This place disorientates him completely – he cannot think for himself. He switches on the medic and assigns it to check on the man clasped to the exterior.

The gate is in sight as the medic's first readings come through. The man is still alive but his life signs are failing. It's as if cutting him free of the slime has begun to kill him. He increases speed and the gate – a brighter, warmer oasis in this yellow Hell – comes closer.

"Abandon vehicle! Abandon ALL vehicles!"

What? Why?

The controls in front of him go dead and the screen blanks to black for a second. But it revives back to white, grey and then streaked yellow again.

"Repeat. Emergency. Abandon ALL vehicles immediately. Do not attempt to re-enter the gate."

He tries to switch everything off but there is no response. The controls are already dead. Then, the screen in front of him focuses again and he sees the man he rescued inch into view and morph. The man's face exhibits a sneer as all humanity drops away.

He wrenches his headpiece off and in another cubicle he hears screaming.

"They've overridden everything," someone shouts.

"Disconnect the link."

"I can't"

In front of him the screen changes. It is no longer a screen.

It is a window.

The window shatters and he is sucked through it. Tentacles strip away his clothing and his last fully conscious feeling is that of disgust as the pulsating probes invade his body.