Whispers in the Wind of Time
"It isn't that he doesn't believe you. It's just that he finds it difficult to go against his scientific facts."
"I know..." she whispered, replying to an old, old echo. How long ago had that been? Decades of subjective time... so many years. Barbara... What would she say now, after so much had changed?
But the question that burned brightest in her mind was whether Barbara could still say anything at all. The Time Lords... where were they? Why hadn't they done anything? Where was he when she needed him most? Gone... long gone.
She opened her clenched fist and stroked her palm across the cool, smooth surface of the inactive control panel. She wondered briefly if he had felt this way when he made his decision that day to lock the doors against her and abandon her to what he thought she had always wanted. A great weight pressed down on her, making it hard to breathe.
What had Barbara and Ian said to him? Had they berated him, demanded he return? Or had they resigned themselves to his decision, knowing that they couldn't possibly change his mind? In all those years they had never returned...
...but then it appeared, with her name clearly marked. A blessing and a curse, a horrible revelation that only deepened the most painful mystery of her life. It was the day David had died of the wound he had suffered fighting a delaying action against a troop of those horrible silver metal monsters that had once been people.
"Delete! Delete! Delete!"
Over and over the same word, a duosyllabic death sentence somehow colder and more soul-killing than the "EXTERMINATE!" cry of the heartless Daleks. They hadn't even recognized the life of those they slaughtered, treating their foes instead like aberrant data to be expunged from a system that must run smoothly.
They came out of thin air in the middle of the ruins of London, through a rift in spacetime that she hadn't had time to analyze before the shooting started. The humanoid monsters had been momentarily taken aback by the ferocity of the attack launched by David's security troopers, but something, some calculating evil had collected their cybernetic wits and turned the rout into a meat grinder. And then the monsters started to win.
"Fall back!"
A stray blast caught David in the back. At first he hadn't even noticed, adrenaline driving him forward. But the shot had been telling, and though he fought bravely and well against the invaders, he had died, and he was never coming back.
They buried him that same evening, and that night, as she wandered a barren field and cursed the stars in the sky, she had been blinded by a single flare of white light. Lying on the frigid earth at her feet was an irregular sapphire crystal the size of her palm, and attached to it by a tied thread was a rolled sheet of paper. By the residual glow of the crystal she could see writing on the paper: For Susan, it had said.
Numb, Susan Foreman Campbell had taken up the crystal and unrolled its attendant message. There isn't paper enough in the universe for me to begin to explain everything I must tell you, she had read, so instead I send you this. Though it must still be fresh in your mind, I pray you can forgive me for what I did, and for not returning. Use the crystal.
Fresh in her mind... Typical. The old codger had missed. The message had been intended for her younger self, perhaps newly married.
"But only now can I read it," she said aloud, more to dispel the march of memory than anything else. Behind her, something whirred faintly, then clicked to a stop. "Never mind that," she told it.
Once, perhaps twenty years back, she had conceived of using some of the remaining captured Dalek technology to construct a ship that would take her in search of her grandfather, the Doctor. Steeling her heart against leaving behind her husband and their two children, she had begun her research, only to find that what was left was not enough to build such a device. She was still trapped here in the ruins with the man she loved, in the world they were trying to build.
The Cybermen, as the invading monsters had called themselves, had provided the missing key. A mere month's work had revealed that Cyberman technology could indeed be husbanded to that of the Daleks, and that compatibility bridged the gap.
She sat within the final fruit of her labor, aching inside as she had only twice before in her life. Only now, she was the one leaving.
Behind her, the whirring again. A mechanical, synthesized, wholly artificial voice spoke, each syllable distinct. "Vortex core charge at one hundred percent capacity. Departure recommended."
"Oh, it's so easy for you," Susan spat. For a moment she was reminded of her grandfather, the tetchy git. She could almost feel the stare, boring into her back, but when she turned her chair to face away from the control panel, the single blue eye was pointed elsewhere on its stalk. "I really shouldn't have built you."
The dome supporting the eyestalk swiveled until the eye pointed directly at her like a weapon. "You doubt your own capability?" it intoned.
"I question my judgement in uniting two beings of surpassing evil for the expedient of an intelligent interface."
"You are the Maker," it said to her, and the monotone made her wonder whether it was a benediction or a condemnation. "I obey."
"You'd damn well better obey. I'll strip you apart with my bare hands the moment I even begin to consider thinking that you might be plotting something." A movement on one of the external monitors cut her off. Someone was outside the rickety, rusty, rotting warehouse she was using for a hangar. No... Too many things could go wrong. She had kept her work secret for a reason, and now if someone found out... If someone found it, they would misunderstand, and her entire life here would be rendered in vain. "Engage all power systems. Immediate liftoff."
"I obey."
All about her raw power thrummed through the fuselage of the vessel she had constructed. Not quite a TARDIS, it was something less... but more. It would dive into the Vortex, but it held a few surprises would-be attackers would not enjoy. She had not been able to construct a Chameleon Circuit -- that would have to wait. This ship would have to rely on... other capabilities.
She checked the monitor again as the controls flickered to life, a hundred measurements demanding attention. She could see more clearly now the figure prowling around the perimeter of the warehouse. Light from the full moon played over dark hair and handsome features intimately familiar to her.
Ian... Forgive me. You and your sister would never understand.
The hardest words she would ever say spilled from her lips. "Access the Vortex. Take us away from here."
And there it came, the rushing, grinding sound that was one of her earliest memories. But it was modulated, more sibilant, somehow more... sinister. Whispers in the wind of time. The monitor caught one last image of her son Ian desperately smashing in a window with a bent piece of steel rebar, and then the exterior images went blank.
The unblinking eye of her most wicked creation stared at her from its position within the heart of her timeship, but she did not care. The tears she wept were bitter and hot, the tears of an old woman with little left to take away.
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Author's Notes:
This is the first thing I've uploaded to in almost four years and will probably be the last. I've moved on from fanfiction, for the largest part, but something inside me has wanted to put this image to text for some time. Perhaps it's a hidden romantic deep inside me; I've always wanted to see dear Susan get a chance to really shine, somehow. I doubt this will turn into anything more than this brief image, but even with just this, I feel I have done my part.