The Doctor's TARDIS pulls into a service station in 1950s Nevada, in the shape of a vintage Cadillac. A squad of soldiers, led by Colonel Rhodes, are nervously anticipating an attack by flying saucers, but instead their unknown enemy lifts an entire section of the desert out of the landscape and transports it to a waiting shuttle, which in turn takes it to a much larger warship. Cybermen dig up through the ground and attack the service station, killing most of the soldiers; only the Doctor and Ace escape. The other survivors are taken prisoner, and Rhodes is electronically brainwashed to believe that he is fighting the Red Chinese; thus conditioned, he shoots and kills the rest of his squad. The Cybermen decide that he is a suitable acquisition, and wire him into their warship's control pod. The Doctor explains to Ace that the Cybermen intend to use this ship to attack Earth, but first they need an aggressive, warlike pilot. He steals one of the interface mechanisms the Cybermen used to connect Rhodes to the ship, and Ace uses it to interface through the TARDIS to the shuttle which brought them here. The Cybermen pursue the escaping shuttle, and when an escape pod is launched, the Cybermen use a tractor beam to bring it back aboard the warship - but the Doctor and Ace are still on the shuttle, and the escape pod contains an overloading reactor. The reactor explodes, destroying the warship, and delaying the Cyberman invasion until the historically accurate 1986.