Land of the Free

by Metal Dog

The Doctor and a new friend find themselves aboard a pirate ship off the coast of Madagascar in 1695, but the pirates are not the only danger they face. Warning: Some rough language.

Land of the Free

by Matthew Schoaff

-=Chapter One=-

I didn't mind dying. I really didn't. Life was just so much pain, and it wasn't worth living any more. I wondered if they would be there when I got to Heaven; my wife and son. I hoped so. It wouldn't be heaven if they weren't, right? But would I even make it to Heaven? Did this count as suicide? Just laying here in the alley as the beer put me to sleep, slowly freezing to death; was it still suicide if the weather killed me? If it was God himself pulling the trigger?

It was too late, though. I couldn't even feel the cold any more. I couldn't feel anything.

As the wind rushed around my ears, I listened to my heart beat. It was so loud, and yet so slow. But then I could only hear the wind, and the wind had a rhythm like a heart. I thought I saw a light flashing through the snow, in front of me, but it was so dark now. The wind filled my head with its rhythmic clamor, and I tried to lift my frozen hand to my ear.

But then there was silence.

---

The light was so bright.

I held my wife in my arms, and she was so warm that it felt like I was holding fire. My son grabbed me by the belt and pulled. He was so strong! I knelt down to give him a hug, and looked at him, lovingly. I could recognize my own features in his baby face, and those of his mother as well, and I crouched down to kiss him on the forehead. He smacked me, and I fell on my back side.

His face changed, then. It wasn't my son's face any more. Suddenly, he began to age, bursting out of his high chair and sprouting a full suit of clothes. My wife vanished without a trace, and standing before me was a young man whom I had never seen before.

"It's all right," he said, in a British accent. "Everything's going to be all right. You're going to be all right."

But then he changed again. He turned into the doctor who had told me about my wife and son. The doctor who had told me about my arm and my leg. I was laying on the gurney again, holding the stump below my left elbow, the nurses trying to restrain me. I was screaming again, blaming God for taking my family, the pain in my heart worse than the pain in my body.

Then I felt an arm across my chest, holding me down on the gurney. No, it wasn't an arm, it was a seatbelt. It wasn't a gurney, either. I was driving. I was driving and it was raining and there was an old song on the radio and Katey was singing again.

"Baby you can drive my car... yes I'm going to be a star... Baby you can drive my car, and maybe I'll love you... beep beep, mm beep beep yeah!"

I looked in the rear-view mirror, at our son in his car seat. He was just over a year old, and this was his first ride in the car facing forward. He clapped along with the music. I reached back to him to beep his nose, trying to time it with the next time the "beep beep" line came up in the song.

"Oh my GOD!" Katey screamed. I jerked around to face forwards, and a truck hit me.

Time slowed. I could see every detail of the front of the truck as it smashed through the left side of the car. The big word "MACK." The little chrome dog that broke loose from its perch on top of the hood and scuttled across the roof of my car. The glass of my window as it sliced my face. The door crushing in, my left hand still on the wheel, my left leg shattering, as I felt my chair being lifted and pushed through the rest of the car.

But suddenly it wasn't the driver's seat any more. It was the big, wing-backed chair from the orphanage, the one in the Director's office. I was in trouble again, but then again, I was always in trouble. I remembered that there were two chairs like this in his office, and I looked over at the other one. There she was, Katarina. My Katey. She smiled at me with her most mischievous smile and I remembered why we were in trouble. I could hear the Director ramble on about responsibility and drinking and laying in alleys in the wintertime and freezing to death, but I was lost in Katey's eyes. Then I realized what the Director was saying. Freezing to death?

I turned my gaze from her unblinking beautiful orbs to his scowling countenance, and realized that it wasn't the Director who was speaking to me. It was the young man with the British accent. The room vanished around him and was replaced with bright light. I closed my eyes. I felt very warm and comfortable, and as he droned on, I stopped listening and drifted into a dreamless sleep.

---

I woke up in a big, wing-backed chair. A blanket made of some kind of silvery cloth was covering me, and when I pulled it off, I was shocked to realize that I was naked.

I moved to pick up the blanket with my left hand, forgetting for a moment that it was no longer there. I was still wearing my prosthetic arm and leg, though, which I never did when I slept. I picked up the silver blanket with my right hand and noticed that it was extremely warm, like an electric blanket. But this blanket had no cord. And then the rest of the room hit me.

It was some sort of domed room, with circular lights all over the place in a regular pattern. In the center of the room, on a metal platform, was a big, blue-green, glowing column. It widened out at the base and was festooned with buttons and levers, like the control console of a machine.

Next to the chair in which I sat, there was a small table covered with books. Next to that was another chair, on which my clothes were laid out. I sorted through them and quickly got dressed. With only one hand, and one foot, I only owned clothes that were easy to put on. I was able to slip into my slightly damp outfit in only a few minutes.

I looked around the strange room for an exit. There were three doors. Two of the doors blended in with the weirdly curved walls. The third door was white, and looked like it was double doors that opened inwards. I pulled on the handle and hobbled through.

I found myself knee-deep in long, un-mown grass. I was on top of a hill, facing a picturesque valley with a stream running through it. It was warm, like summer, but there was a gentle breeze that smelled like wildflowers. Some kind of insect flew past my ear, and I turned to go back into the room.

What I saw behind me was impossible. The doors were still open, leading into that strange room, but they were framed by a blue box that was no larger than an outhouse. I limped around it, trudging through the thick grass, patting the sides of the wooden box. It had to be some kind of illusion, but I didn't understand it. How could that huge room be inside this little box? It was impossible!

I came back around to the front of the box and stepped inside. I noticed an immediate change in temperature as I crossed the threshold. I stood at the doorway and held my hand outside. It was definitely warmer outside than inside, but that wasn't the only sensation. Right where my arm crossed the threshold, I felt a strangle tingling. It was slightly unpleasant, so I pulled my arm back in.

I closed the doors and turned back into the impossible, vaulted room. It didn't make any sense; how could this big room fit inside that box? What was that control panel all about? Was this some kind of machine? Maybe it was a science experiment. Maybe I had been picked up off the street and used as a guinea pig!

Then I remembered. I was on the street. It was winter and I was about to die. But it wasn't winter any more, so if this was some sort of experiment, it could have been going on for months! Frantically, I patted myself all over, checking for fresh scars, and managed to smack myself in the testicles with my fake hand. Well, at least I knew they were still there. Any worries about missing kidneys were also vanquished when I realized that I had to use the toilet.

I considered the possibility of just going outside and watering a tree, but a grumble in my lower intestine informed me that I needed to find an actual toilet and sit down. I carefully climbed up the metal stairs to the first level of the platform, and circled around to the door on the right. I pulled on it, and was amazed to find a hallway stretching out before me, gently curving to the left. I stopped worrying about how all of this fit inside of that box, and started worrying more about finding that bathroom.

The first door I found in that hallway led to another huge room, which held an extravagant hydroponic garden. I didn't recognize all of the plants that were growing under the huge lights, but there was a wide variety. I heard a chicken clucking, and noticed a hen-coop stuck between two vats marked "fertilizer." There was no bathroom in sight, though, so I shut the door and continued down the hallway.

The next door opened onto another hallway, which curved to the right, somehow impossibly intersecting the room with the garden in it. The first door in that hallway opened onto another hallway, which curved back towards the first hallway but somehow didn't seem to intersect it. I wondered if I was still dreaming. I reached over with my fake hand and flexed my shoulder muscles to work the spring-loaded hook and pinch my flesh arm. It hurt, so I knew I was awake.

I went back to the original hallway and hobbled down it as quickly as I could, pushing open doors as I came upon them. Some led to other hallways, some were locked, and some led to rooms. I found a bedroom, a kitchen, a room full of clothes, a science lab, a couple of closets filled with weird junk, and then, finally, a bathroom.

As I burst into the bathroom, I heard a splashing noise from the bathtub, and a voice said "Excuse me! Do you mind?"

I turned to face the bathtub. It was filled with bubbles, and only the head of the man was visible above them. "Down the hall, second door on the right, down that hall, third door on the left," he said, with a British voice that I recognized from my dream.

"What?"

"Guest bath." He splashed a bit of soapy water out of the tub as he gestured underwater.

"What?"

"Second door on the right. Then third door on the left. I'm not going to draw you a map, you know! Now go!" He splashed some more, and got some soapy water on my prosthetic leg. Dumbstruck, I stumbled backwards out of the bathroom.

I forgot all about my need to use the toilet as the questions filled my head. Who was that guy? He was in my dream, so it couldn't have all been a dream. But the details of it were fading. All I could remember was that it was almost the same dream I always had: waking up without my limbs, reliving the accident in slow motion. There had been something about when we were both in the orphanage, Katey and I, before they sent us away to foster families, before we found each other again, but I couldn't remember.

I stumbled down the hallway to the left, and bounced up against a door. I opened it and found myself back in the room with the control console. I recognized the two big chairs near the white doors, and suddenly remembered that part of the dream. That man in the bath had been lecturing me about something, but what was it? Freezing to death!

I looked at the fingers on my right hand, and touched them one by one to the tip of my thumb. They were all slightly frostbitten and sensitive. I kicked off my right shoe and looked at all five of my toes. They were also frostbitten, but not too badly. So, despite the weather outside, I had only been here for a day at the most, and not months.

I went back down the hallway, trying to remember the instructions the man in the bath had given me. Eventually I found the other bathroom, which looked identical to the first one. After I used the toilet, I eyed the huge bathtub with its ornate taps. I wondered if there was any hot water left.

---

I crawled out of the bath and flopped onto the cold, hard floor. My clothes were missing, but my prostheses were laying where I had left them. A pair of fresh socks were tucked into the cuff of my leg, and I slipped one onto the stump of my arm before strapping on the mechanical hook. At the Veteran's hospital they had told me that eventually I would build callouses where the straps chafed my neck, but until that happened I would just have to put up with the pain. I flexed my shoulder muscles to make the hook open and close, and adjusted the straps until I was able to pick up the other sock with it.

The other sock went on the stump of my leg before I put my foot on. I was lucky that they saved my knee, or so they told me. My fake leg was really nothing more than a metal rod with a rubber foot on the end. I stood up and put my weight on it, grimacing at the pain, before I wrapped a towel around myself and hobbled out of the bathroom. It took me a few seconds to remember how to find that room full of clothes.

A few minutes later, I was in the wardrobe, looking for clothes that had easy fasteners. I immediately found my own clothes, which looked like they had been laundered. They even smelled fresh, which was surprising, considering that I hadn't owned a washing machine for several months. I tied my clothes into a bundle and started poking around for more clothes that I could wear. I found a loose black shirt with long sleeves, that I could pull over my head. There was a pair of matching pants on the same hangar, which fastened with very large buttons. Inside of a chest of drawers I found several pairs of underwear that looked like they would fit, and another drawer yielded socks. I found a pillowcase and filled it with underwear and socks and t-shirts. You never know when you're going to need an extra layer, I told myself.

"Of course, you're more than welcome to any clothes you find in here," the man in the doorway surprised me by saying, "but you don't have to take them all at once."

I spun around to face him, the corner of the pillowcase firmly grasped by my hook. The weight of the sack almost pulled my arm off, as I pivoted on my leg. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I'll put them back!" I started pulling clothes out of the bag and shoving them back in the drawers.

"It's all right!" he said. I kept shoving clothes into the drawers until he placed his hand on my shoulder. "It's all right. Keep them. I have plenty. And those probably don't fit me any more, anyways. I used to be skinnier. I used to be fatter, too. And older."

I looked at him, trying to make sense of what he was saying. Older? He looked like he was around my age, maybe a little older, but not by much. He was dressed to go golfing, with those funny golfing pants and one of those silly Scottish hats. His accent wasn't Scottish, though.

"Who are you? Where am I? Why are you dressed like that? What kind of a place is this, anyways?" The questions poured out of me.

"The Doctor, Scotland, going golfing, the TARDIS."

"Wha-"

"I'm the Doctor. The. Doctor. With a capital 'The'. And we are in Scotland, in the year nineteen sixty-something. I'm going golfing. Would you care to join me?"

I shook my head, speechless. "The year what?"

He sighed and bent down, pulling down his sock to reveal a wristwatch on his ankle. "Nineteen Sixty... no, sorry. Sixteen ninety two! Three! Sixteen ninety three." He pulled his stocking back up and straightened up quickly, losing his hat in the process. It flew across the room, revealing a messy clump of dark hair.

"Sixteen ninety three? By whose calendar?"

The Doctor (or whatever his name was) scratched his head, noticing that the hat was gone. He started looking for it as he answered. "Julian? Gregorian? I can't remember. It's the year ten million, seventy-two thousand and thirty-seven according to the Calendar of Rassilon, though. Preposterously huge number, isn't it? So much easier to use Earth calendars." He found a bowler hat and plopped it on his head. "Oh, dear. This isn't a golfing hat. I'll have to change my clothes, now!" He vanished behind a rack of clothes and instantly reappeared on the other side, in a tweed suit and skinny tie. "Is this better? Does it match the hat?"

I didn't know what to say, so I nodded my head.

"You're confused. I can tell by the look on your face. That and the fact that you're still naked, despite being surrounded by clothes. Don't worry, the TARDIS will provide you with clothing you can put on without both hands."

I looked down at myself and realized that he was right; all I had put on so far was the shirt. I was still naked from the waist down.

He walked past me and out the door of the room. "Meet me outside when you're done," he said, as he tipped his hat.

I got dressed.

---

As I stepped through the double doors, the temperature difference wasn't as noticeable any more. The sun was going down, and the sky was filled with brilliant shades of red and orange. The Doctor was sitting on a little folding chair, watching the sun go down. There was another chair next to him. I sat down in it.

We sat there silently for a few moments before he started to talk. "Time for me to ask some questions," he said.

"I still have plenty," I replied.

"But it's my turn," he said, turning sideways in his chair to face me. "Name?"

"Rick. Richard. Richard Henderson. Junior."

"All right, Rick Richard Richard Henderson Junior. Do you mind if I just call you Rick? That's an awfully long name you've got there." He said it so seriously that I wasn't sure if he was joking or not.

"Rick is fine."

"And who are they?" He pulled a picture from his waistcoat pocket. I recognized it immediately.

"Hey! That's mine!" I tried to snatch the picture from him, but he held it away from me.

"Who are they?" He looked at the wrinkled photograph.

"That's mine, give it back!" I reached around him with my prosthetic arm and then quickly shifted my balance to my flesh foot and grabbed the picture with my right hand. It tore in half, and I wailed in despair. "No! You ruined it! You killed them!" My eyes filled with tears, and I collapsed to the ground. "You killed them," I whimpered, clutching the half of the photograph that I held.

He stood up from his chair and put his hand on my shoulder. Then he reached down with his other hand and gave me the other half of the picture. I grabbed it and squeezed the two halves together as I rocked back and forth in the damp grass. He walked away, taking his chair with him to the other side of the box.

"You're going to miss the sunrise," he said, as he sat back down, facing the opposite direction.

"Huh?" I wiped the snot from my nose, not caring that it was getting all over the ruined picture.

"This isn't Scotland. Wrong planet entirely. I keep doing that; don't know why. Maybe I've lost my touch. But Scotland only has one sun; I'm sure of it." As he spoke, a line of red light appeared on the horizon, directly opposite from where the sun was still setting. "How old are you, Rick?"

"What?"

"You say 'what?' a lot, don't you? How old are you?"

"Twenty-three," I gasped, as I stared at the second sun rising.

"Well, you'd be one hundred and thirty seven by the time this happens again. This planet's so small, it's hard to get both suns on the horizon at the same time. I was here the last time it happened. It reminded me of home."

I picked myself up from the ground, pushing off with my good hand. "Home?"

"My home planet, Gallifrey. We had two suns, and the sky was always orange. Just like this sky is, right now."

I sat down in my chair, facing backwards toward the Doctor and the sunrise. "You're not from Earth?"

He turned to look at me, and said, simply and sadly, "No." Then he looked back at the sunrise. "I miss my home, sometimes."

"What happened?"

"There was a war. Everybody died. So did I." He turned his face away from me, but I thought I saw a tear on his cheek. "My family's gone. Friends, gone. Old enemies... gone. And I can never go back."

I struggled to stand and then stumbled over to him, holding out the pieces of the ripped photograph. "They were my family. They were my home."

He grabbed my hand, crumpling the photograph between our fingers, and squeezed tight. We both cried a little as we watched the two suns rising and setting at the same time.

---

The Doctor cooked up some vegetable omelets. It had been a long time since the last time I had an omelet, even longer than it had been since I had last eaten at a table with chairs and forks and knives and real cloth napkins. I ate two of them greedily, finishing them before the Doctor sat down with his meal.

"You were hungry!" he said, as he sliced up his omelet. "Ready for thirds yet? I could make another. Clive is a very good hen. I should get a cow. What do you think? A cow in the TARDIS?"

"TARDIS. You keep calling this... thing that. What's it mean?" The omelets were doing a little dance in my stomach, and I belched loudly.

"Time and Relative Dimension in Space. Dimensions. Dimension. Which sounds better? -unssss or -un?" He stuffed some omelet in his face and made a "yummy" noise.

"Time? So you weren't kidding when you..."

"Nope. It's 1693. Actually, it's 1694 now. Happy New Year!"

I shook my head. "Time travel... that's not possible!"

"There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio... well, actually, more things in Heaven than on Earth but sometimes they like to pop up on Earth just to mess with you lot."

"What?"

"There you go again. 'What? What?' You sound like a light bulb." He shoved another hunk of omelet in his mouth.

I tried not to laugh at his feeble joke, as my head spun. Time travel! But that meant...

"Take me back."

"What?" He swallowed his mouthful of food.

"Take me back to nineteen eighty-seven! August twentieth. About five months ago."

He put down his fork and knife, and wiped his mouth carefully with his napkin. Then he straightened the napkin and returned it, neatly to his lap. He looked up from it and looked me in the eyes. "I can't."

"Why not? All I have to do is stop my family and I from going out that night. Or stop the truck driver. Or throw myself in front of my car before I ran that stop sign! Whatever I have to do, I'll do it! You can take me back!"

"No, I can't. I can't change history." He pushed the remainder of his omelet away and folded his hands on the table in front of him.

"Yes, you can! At least let me save my son. They said if he was still sitting in a rear-facing seat, Ad-Rick might have survived!"

The Doctor stood up, his eyes wide. "Adric? Did you say Adric?"

"Ad-Rick," I said, separating the syllables. "Adam Richard. I'm Rick; he was Ad-Rick. Please, Doctor. Take me back!"

He stood there, silently, for a couple of seconds. It felt more like a minute, though, before he started picking up plates and silverware. "Maybe we can try. For Adric." He went over to his kitchen sink, and stared into it as he let the water run.

I started to cry, again, and poked myself in the eye with my hook as I tried to wipe away the tears. It hurt like hell.

-=Chapter Two=-

"So, Rick, you're a sailor?" the Doctor asked, from under the control console.

"I was. Spent four years in the Coast Guard. How'd you know that?"

"From your tattoos."

I pulled up the sleeve on my left arm and looked at what was left of the tattoo on my forearm. All that remained of the dancing girl was her head and shoulders. Katey had never liked the tattoo much. She had wanted me to get some clothing inked onto the girl, before Ad-Rick got older. But now, only the top of her head stuck out from under the pink plastic cuff of the prosthesis.

"So what are you doing down there?" I asked. The Doctor had been under the console for several minutes.

"Trying to fix the inertial stabilizers. They've been offline since... well, for a while now. Which is all fine and dandy for short rides, but I'm getting tired of sweeping up broken crockery. Besides, the TARDIS doesn't have seatbelts, and I wouldn't want you to... YOW!" He scuttled out and sat up, sticking his fingers in his mouth. "Whah if wif me an' erectrifity?" he mumbled around his fingers.

"You okay?"

"Yup! And," he jumped up and pulled a lever on the console, "smooth as glass! Can't even tell we're moving, can you?"

"We're moving?" I grabbed onto the railing with my right hand. I could feel the machine humming, but I couldn't feel any signs of motion.

"We're moving!" he said. He closed his eyes and spread out his arms. "Slight wobble, still. Barely noticeable. Just a few minor adjustments, that's all!"

"Where to?"

"To the inertial stabilizers, of course! Weren't you paying attention?"

"No, I mean, where are we going? Are you taking me back to save my family?"

"Of course I am! I said I would, didn't I? Let me just check the... oh, dear." He wiggled a knob back and forth, then flipped a switch up and down repeatedly. "No, I didn't! No, no, no, no, NO!"

"What?"

"The TARDIS is a precision instrument. When I reconnected the inertial stabilizers, I must have disturbed some of the more delicate systems. We're flying blind."

"So you don't know where we're going?"

"Even worse. I can't control where we're going. We could land in the middle of a sun, or go back to the Big Bang... or even worse, we could end up in the Deep South!" He grinned at me, then mimed a banjo as he sang "dum de dum da de da dum da dummm." I recognized it as the banjo song from that movie with Burt Reynolds.

"So what do we do now? Can you fix it?"

"Can I fix it? Of course I can fix it!" He picked up a rubber hammer from the floor next to the console and started pounding on the console as he hummed a song I recognized from some old cartoon. I think it was called the "Anvil Chorus" or something like that.

"Stop! What are you doing?"

"Fixing it! Don't worry, this always works!" He pounded a few more times, until suddenly sparks shot out of the console and that side of the console went completely dark. "Well, maybe not this time," he said, as he dropped the hammer on his foot. His eyes went wide and he started hopping around on one foot, obviously trying not to swear.

"Doctor!" I shouted, but he kept hopping around. "Doctor!" I repeated.

He stopped hopping and turned to face me. "Yes?"

"Did you fix it?"

He looked at the smoldering console. "No. No, I'm afraid that it's burnt out. I'll have to replace half the parts in that section. And as I have no idea where or when we're headed, I'm not entirely certain that I'll be able to."

"Great." I limped over to one of the big wingbacked chairs and collapsed into it. "Now what?"

"Well... I suppose we'll have to wait and see where we land. Once we're there, I can take apart the console and figure out exactly what went wrong. But there is good news!"

"Oh, really? What's the good news?"

He spread his arms out again, making a bit of a polishing motion as he said, "Smoooooth as glass!"

---

The Doctor tinkered about under the burnt-out section of the console for what seemed like hours. I sat next to him on the metal floor and handed him various thingamajigs. None of them actually looked like tools, but he had tool-like names for all of them. Laser spanners and magnetic vises and sonic screwdrivers... none of them made any sense to me, but he seemed to know what he was doing. Or, at least, he seemed to think that he knew what he was doing.

Eventually, he got the console to light up again. He climbed out from under the console and flipped a few switches back and forth, until he finally erupted with a loud "a-HA!"

"What? Is it working now?"

"Well, no, but at least now I know where we're going! Which is good, but I still don't know when, exactly, we're going to arrive there."

The lights on the column dimmed slightly, and I heard a distinct thumping noise come from under the floor. "What was that?" I asked.

"We've arrived."

"Well I guess that answers the question of when, doesn't it?"

"Not hardly. Time machine, remember?" He gestured around the room as though I had forgotten that we were in the TARDIS. "But at least I know where. Sort of."

"Sort of?"

"We're still moving."

"So we haven't landed?"

"Oh, no, we've landed. But we're moving. North-by-Northwest, at a steady clip of ten miles per hour. And slightly up and down and side to side, but that's irrelevant... maybe. You know, judging by our position... I think we're on a ship!"

"A ship?" I pulled myself up from the floor, using the railing like a ladder. "What kind of ship?"

"No idea. All that I know for certain is that we're on Earth, somewhere in the Indian Ocean. Shall we go outside and find out?"

"I don't think that's a good idea," I said. "One time, when I was stationed in the Caribbean, we found a small craft that looked like it was abandoned. Turned out to be filled with drug smugglers. We lost three men from the boarding party. You know what I learned from that? Never, EVER, board a ship until you know exactly who and what is on board."

"Really? I prefer to announce my presence and see how people react... and then figure out who's who and what's what." He strode out the doors of the TARDIS without pausing. A moment later he walked back in, with his hands held above his head.

He was followed by a man dressed in ragged clothing, and carrying a sword, which was pointed at the Doctor's back.

---

The man lowered his sword, his mouth gaping wide at the sight of the interior of the TARDIS. In a flash, the Doctor disarmed him and knocked him unconscious.

I limped over to the steps leading down to the doorway, and almost fell down them. "I told you so. You're going to get us killed, you know that?"

"You were dead when I found you. Frozen solid for half a night. Death shouldn't scare you, any more." He examined the sword, testing its sharpness by attempting to shave his face with it.

"I was... I was dead?"

The Doctor quickly changed the subject. "It would appear, judging by the quality of this man's clothing and the overwhelming power of his personal aroma, that we have arrived in the 17th Century. Although, the quality and design of this cutlass would suggest early 18th Century. What do you think, Rick?"

I stared at the man on the floor. He definitely stank, like the Doctor had said. Not only of sweat, but also of rum. "He looks like a pirate," I said.

"Hmm, yes, could be. Hard to tell the pirates from everybody else, sometimes. One man's pirate is another's privateer, you know." He placed the sword in an umbrella stand next to the door. "Some of your world's greatest explorers and admirals were considered to be pirates by somebody."

"Yeah, but... look at him! He looks like he should be handing out tickets at that pirate ride in Disneyland!"

"And look at me. Do I look like I'm almost a thousand years old?"

"Well, no, of course not."

"And yet I am. Even older than that, in Earth years. Point made, I think." He skipped up the steps towards the hallway door. "I'll be right back!"

My head swam. A thousand years old? He said he wasn't from Earth, but... how could he be a thousand years old? He didn't look any older than I did. My thoughts were interrupted when he came bounding back into the room, wearing a tricorner hat and a long coat with frilly cuffs.

"Arrr!" I called out, when I saw him. I waved my hook in mock menace.

"That's the spirit, Rick! Or should I call you..." He plopped a huge, floppy hat on my head, "Captain Rick!"

I looked up at the ridiculous hat on my head. "Captain Rick? I'm not the captain; you are."

"Oh, no," he said, grabbing his lapels. "I am the Doctor! You can be the Captain. That way, we'll be on equal footing." He glanced at my rubber foot. "Sorry."

"Yeah, but... Captain of what? We don't have a ship."

"We have the TARDIS. It doesn't roll about on wheels, you know."

"Does it float?" I stepped forward into the Doctor's personal space. He moved half a step back.

"Erm... No. Well, it could, if I could change it into a boat, which I can't do right now so... No, it doesn't float. Not very well, anyways."

"Then we can't call it a ship. We're in the 18th Century? On a pirate ship?" He started to raise his hand in protest, but I continued, "... or not-pirates. Whoever they are, they're not going to believe that this is a ship of any kind. We can't just waltz out the doors and say 'Hi, everybody! It's Captain Rick and the Doctor! We just popped in for some tea and crumpets!' They'll kill us."

"Tea and crumpets?"

"Whatever. Here's my plan. We hide out in here until the ship makes port. Then we sneak out in the dark and figure out where we can find a science lab or whatever you need to fix this thing and get me home."

"Well, Rick, there's a few flaws in your plan."

"Yeah? Like what?"

"First of all, I don't think we'll be able to find any scientific laboratories with compatible equipment anywhere in this hemisphere, much less in this century. Secondly, we can't stay in the TARDIS that many days. Normally, it would be quite safe, but unfortunately I had to borrow a few parts from the radiation shielding to get the console working as much as it is. And third... look behind you."

I turned around to face the door of the TARDIS, which the Doctor had left ajar. Two men were standing there, with their swords drawn. A tall woman stood behind them, dressed in a long coat like the Doctor's and wearing a floppy hat like mine.

"Kill them," she said.

The Doctor took a few steps away from me, to the side, dividing our approaching attackers into single units. "Wait, wait, wait!" he said, raising his hands above his head. "You can't kill us!"

"Why can't I?" said the woman.

"We haven't been properly introduced! I'm the Doctor, and this is Rick Richard Richard Henderson Junior. We've just popped in for a spot of tea and crumpets."

"Just Rick," I said, as I raised my hand in front of me. I let my hooked arm hang by my side.

"The Doctor? Doctor who?" she asked him.

"Just the Doctor," he said.

"With a capital 'The'," I chimed in.

"He's right," she said, to her two crewmembers. "We can't kill him; we need a doctor." She turned her eyes to me, then. "Kill the other one."

-=Chapter Three=-

The effect was mesmerizing. As the ship's deck beyond the TARDIS' doors reeled back and forth, the interior of the TARDIS remained perfectly stable. What was even more interesting was the way in which my attackers' legs reacted to the suddenly stable floor, as they walked through the threshold. The fat one fell immediately; the other staggered back and forth a few times as he approached me.

"I said kill him!" the woman commanded, pointing at me.

"Sorry, Cap'n!" the man on the floor said to her, "me legs just gone all wobbly! It's like stepping onto dry land, it is."

The other man grinned as he found his balance, and leveled his sword at me.

"No!" the Doctor yelled, as he snatched the sword from the umbrella stand. "You won't hurt him; I won't let you!"

The swordsman's eyes turned towards the Doctor, only for a second. It was all the time I needed. With a swift upward motion of my left arm, I clamped the blade of the sword between the tines of my articulated hook. Then, with a swift upward motion of my left leg, I placed my rubber foot between his testicles. He dropped the sword and fell to the floor, groaning in pain.

I yanked the sword out of my hook and held it in my right hand, pointing its tip at his neck. He leered upwards at me, silently.

"Ramsey!" the captain cried out. She reached for her own sword and carefully stepped through the doorway. "Drop yer swords, both of ye!"

The Doctor dropped his sword willingly, but I held mine firmly. She drew her sword and stepped towards me.

"Drop yer sword or I'll skewer ye where ye stand. Or worse yet, I'll just take yer other hand." She leered at me. She was an ugly woman, with rotten teeth and black, matted hair, and she stank like raw sewage. I believed her threat. I dropped the sword to the floor, where it clattered against the legs of the chair. She put her blade against my throat and stepped close to me. Her breath stung my eyes as she said, "Welcome aboard the Black Rook. Ye've just joined my crew, both of ye."

"And you are..." the Doctor asked.

"Captain Smythee, to ye, Doctor!" she said, taking a step back to sheath her sword, but she remained facing me. She stepped back in close to me as she said, "but ye can call me Petunia."

My throat went dry and I barely coughed out the word, "Hello."

---

The pirates escorted us out of the TARDIS, which the Doctor locked behind us. It was considerably warmer outside, and the sun shone down harshly on the forward deck of the brigantine. The TARDIS faced starboard, and was tucked neatly beneath the rigging of the forward, square-rigged mast.

"What is this box, Cap'n?" the fat pirate asked her. "It's bigger on the inside, you saw that. It's the Devil's work, if ye ask me."

"I didn't ask ye, did I?" the Captain snarled. "Everybody knows what that is! It's Davey Jones' locker, it is! Come to bring these poor lost souls back from the dead. Now let's give it back to Davey Jones, shall we? Before he takes any more of us back with him to the salty grave. Throw it overboard!"

"No! You can't..." the Doctor was suddenly silent as a pirate knocked him unconscious.

The fat pirate and the silent man she had called Ramsey got behind the TARDIS and pushed it over easily. With another quick shove it toppled over the side and splashed into the sea. I scanned the horizon for clues as to where it had gone over, and saw land to our port side. There was a long beach that fronted onto thick jungle, but just ahead of us I could see that the beach gave way to high cliffs, atop which a primitive-looking watchtower stood. I suspected that it doubled as a beacon for navigating at night, as the jagged rocks by the cliff face looked treacherous.

"Mister Jacobi! Bring us around the northern coast! And don't hit any rocks this time!"

"Aye, mon Capitan!" said the man on the poop deck, as he spun the tiller wheel towards the rocky shore on our port side. The boat responded by turning to starboard and further from land.

"We have us a doctor, now," she said, contemplating the Doctor's unconscious body. "Surely, they'll let us in now."

"Let you in where?" I asked.

"Libertania, of course! Where else do ye think we're heading?"

"Liber-what?"

She stood close to me again, and I tried not to vomit from the smell. "Ye'll see, my handsome lad; ye'll see." She sauntered off towards the stern of the ship, and I was instantly surrounded by the rest of the crew. Two of them drew their swords, and placed them on the ground in front of me with the blades crossing.

"Right, now. Name?" A tall man in the ragged remains of a naval uniform stood directly before me.

"What?"

"What is your name, sir?" He spoke in a neatly clipped british accent, like the Doctor.

"Richard Henderson Junior."

He opened a tube that one of the other crewmembers had produced, and withdrew a yellowed scroll. He unfurled it, and I saw that it was covered with illegible writing in dark brown ink.

"Blood," he said, like a mechanic requesting a tool.

"What?"

One of the crew grabbed my right wrist and yanked it forward. He then grabbed my hand in his, and the tall man pricked my thumb with the point of a knife.

"Sign," he said, holding the scroll in front of me. My bloodied thumb was pressed against it. I smeared a capital letter "R" with my blood, and the scroll was snatched away.

"Welcome to the crew of the Black Rook. I am Mister Albright, your Quartermaster. You will obey my every order. If you do not, you will face my whip. Do you understand?"

"Yes, but..."

"Do you understand?" He glared menacingly.

"Yes."

"Good. I don't know what use you'll be to us, though."

The fat man piped up, "Put him in the basket!"

"An excellent suggestion, Mister Davies! To the basket with him!"

"Hey, now, wait a second..." I tried to protest, but I was shoved forward towards the starboard side of the ship. The silent man called Ramsey stood waiting for me with a large basket, connected to two ropes that hung from the middle spar on the foremast. I was shoved into the basket and quickly lowered over the rail, where the basket bumped against the slimy side of the ship.

"You'd better get that hull clean, Mister Henderson!" I heard Albright yell down to me. I heard the other pirates laugh as they went back to their usual duties. I wondered how I was supposed to clean the hull when a young man with blond hair appeared at the rail.

"Here, use this," he said, hanging the handle of a harpoon off the edge as he carefully held the blade. It was just barely long enough for me to reach it. "It helps a lot, especially with the seaweed," he said, in a weird accent, before he disappeared from view. I started scraping slime off the ship, and wondered when the Doctor was going to wake up.

---

After an hour in the hot sun, I was exhausted. My shoulder muscles were at the breaking point, and my stump was chafed raw from using my hook so much. I had removed my black shirt, and my skin was sunburned to the point of blistering. The spray of the salt water was excruciatingly painful, and I was glad that we weren't traveling at full sail.

I laid back in the basket and balanced the slimy harpoon across my lap. I had removed every bit of seaweed and every barnacle that I could reach, and I felt that I deserved a rest. I closed my eyes against the cruel sun and drifted into a fitful sleep.

I awoke to the sound of a clanging bell and shouting. Half-awake, I rolled out of the basket. I realized that I was on the deck almost instantly, but it was still a surprise to discover that I had been hauled back aboard. I grabbed the rail and hauled myself up.

The sun was setting directly ahead of us, but in its reddish glow I could discern the outline of a ship. But there was something wrong with it... it was moving around too much. I closed my eyes for a moment and looked again. It was definitely a large ship, probably a galleon. And something huge was attached to it side, something that was moving.

I heard the sound of wood cracking, clear across the open water. The ship ahead of us, growing closer by the second, had split in half. As it started to sink, the wriggling mass slipped beneath the waves, leaving the ship to sink on its own. I could see sailors pouring out of the breaches in the hull, and heard their screams as they floundered through the wreckage.

"Mister Albright! Man the launches and prepare to rescue survivors! Mister Miercoles! Man the port side guns! Mister Jacobi, bring the tiller hard to port!" I heard the Captain shouting orders from the poop deck.

The Doctor popped up beside me. "Come below decks, I need your assistance with a patient," he said. He seemed very nonchalant, despite the frantic state of the rest of the crew. I hobbled after him over to a hatch. The Doctor went down the ladder first, and I followed him carefully.

"So where's this patient?" I asked, looking around the hold. We were surrounded by the crew's bunks and personal effects, but everyone was above decks. We were alone.

"You are," he said, as he produced a small jar from his pocket. He unscrewed the lid and put a dab of cream on his fingers. "Turn around," he said.

I turned around, and he applied the cream to my sunburned shoulders. The pain instantly vanished, and the knotted muscles started to loosen. "Wow! Good stuff! What's in that?"

"It's just some off-the-shelf sunburn cream."

"May I see?" He handed me the jar, but I couldn't read the label. I sniffed at the open lid, but the cream was completely odorless. I studied the label again, and a cluster of numbers grabbed my attention. "23-10-2310? What's that mean?"

"Eh? What's that?" He took the jar back from me and inspected the label. "Oh, that's the expiration date."

"Well then it should last a long time." I put my shirt back on and noticed that the cream wasn't sticky or greasy against the cloth. "Hey, can I get some of that on my stumps? They're rubbed raw."

"Here, just take the jar," he said, handing it to me. "I think it's expired anyways. I'm pretty sure I picked it up in 2311. Maybe. Hard to tell sometimes... 2310, 2311... boring years, both of them. Now, 2312... that was a party!"

"Why, what happened in 2312?" I asked, as I rubbed the cream on my leg. The sores seemed to heal almost instantly as I applied it.

"Oh, nothing much. Alien invasion, humans on the brink of extinction... standard fare for a Tuesday night."

I looked at him as he laughed to himself. He was way too relaxed, in my opinion. "So what night is this?" I asked.

"It's Thursday, I think... why do you ask?"

"Because I think I saw an alien attacking that other ship. Some sort of huge monster, anyways."

"Yup, could be. Or maybe it just looked like a monster. Maybe it's just a creature native to these waters protecting its territory... or it could be a robot! Oh, yes, that would be wonderful, wouldn't it? I hope it's a robot... so much easier to destroy a robot than a living creature, in my opinion."

"I think you're being a bit too cavalier for the situation, Doctor! Whatever attacked that ship is still out there, and we're sailing right for it! And instead of helping with the survivors, or doing something about that creature, we're down here talking about robots!"

"Oh, believe me, Rick, this is the safest place for us at the moment. We need to get off this ship and retrieve the TARDIS, and we can't do that if we get killed by a giant robot."

"I really don't think it's a robot... and how are we supposed to get off the ship if we're below decks?"

"Listen."

"What?"

"Listen."

I stopped talking and listened. Something large bumped against the hull of the ship, and the yelling above board increased in volume. The creature, or robot, or alien... whatever it was, it was here. The ship lurched beneath our feet. I gripped the ladder with my right hand and looked up, just as some sea water splashed through the open hatch and drenched me.

We were suddenly cast into darkness as a huge tentacle blocked the dim light that shone down from the hatch. The suckers pulsed as the tentacle wriggled about, and splinters of broken wood rained down on us.

"Bad news!" the Doctor shouted, over the noise of destruction. "I don't think it's a robot!"

-=Chapter Four=-

The ship suddenly jerked sideways with a series of loud explosions and a splash, and my foot slipped out from beneath me. More seawater came through the hatch as the tentacle suddenly vanished from sight.

"What the hell was that?" I yelled over the din, as I tried to haul myself back up.

"Cannons! They're shooting it!" The Doctor scrambled up the ladder like a crazed monkey, narrowly avoiding my fingers as he stood on the rung I was holding. "Oh, I hope they don't hurt it!" he said, as he stuck his head through the hatchway.

"I hope they kill the fucking thing!" I yelled back.

"What?" The Doctor glared down at me from the top of the ladder. "It's a living creature! How could you say that?"

"Because it's trying to kill us! Don't you think that's a good enough reason?"

"Is it really trying to kill us? Really? I think if it was, we'd already be dead."

"Oh, that's a great philosophy! Let it try to kill us and see what happens? I swear, Doctor, if you get me killed, I'm going to haunt you for the rest of eternity!"

"Well, you wouldn't be the first," he said, as he climbed back down the ladder. The ship was still bobbing around like crazy, but the noise had quieted down. There was still plenty of shouting going on, but the creature had gone quiet.

"What?"

"I said you wouldn't be my first ghost! People die, Rick. People I've cared about. And I've had to watch them die, when there was nothing I could do to change it!"

I staggered over to a bunk, and sat down. "But you have a time machine, you can change it. Can't you?"

He sat beside me. "Not always, Rick. Time has laws, just like anything else. Let's say you drop an apple... can you stop it from hitting the ground?"

"Of course! Just catch it!"

"But what if your hands are tied, and you only have two hands. Or one hand, as the case may be. How do you catch it then?"

I tried to picture the scenario. I supposed that I could kick the apple, if I had two feet, but that wasn't really catching it. Maybe if I had placed a sack under the apple... but I'd have to know that I was going to drop the apple before I dropped it, and put the sack there before being tied up... "You can't."

"Exactly. Sometimes time is like that. Once I've been somewhere, I'm part of the time line, and my hands are tied. No second guesses, no do-overs, no doubling back and installing an anti-gravity device beneath the apple."

"So what are you saying? Time is like gravity?"

"What I'm saying is that I can't save Ad-Rick. Not your Ad-Rick, and not mine. I'm sorry."

I looked at him. There was pain behind his eyes. Pain and sad memories. I recognized that look from the mirror. "I guess... I guess I'm sorry, too. I'm sorry I asked you to try."

"Don't be sorry. If I could have gone back to save them, I would have. You know I would have. But..." His expression turned to one of embarrassment and guilt. "I was already there. I caused the accident. I'm sorry." He got up from the bunk and climbed up the ladder to the deck before his words had a chance to register. He had caused it?

I jumped up from the bunk too quickly, and fell on the floor. I slithered over to the ladder as quickly as possible, and used it to pull myself up to a standing position. If he really meant what he said, that he had caused the accident that killed my family and took my limbs... I was going to kill him.

I started up the ladder, hopping onto each rung as I pulled myself up with my right hand. Back when I had two arms and two legs, I could do a hundred pull-ups in ten minutes. It was much more difficult with only one hand, though, and it took me almost a full minute to reach topside.

I crawled out onto the deck, trying to avoid the splintered wreckage of the masts. Crew members were running back and forth, either shouting out orders or hurrying to obey them. I rolled over onto my back, looking for something to grab on to so that I could stand, but found nothing.

The shadow of a man fell across my face, and I looked to see who it was. It was Albright, the quartermaster. He reached down and grabbed me by the collar of my shirt, and hauled me upright.

"Well, now, what do we have here? A coward, by the looks of it! I don't know why the Captain didn't kill you the moment you stepped out of that box. And don't tell me that it was Davey Jones' locker; I know better than that!"

"I... I fell! I only have one leg, you know!"

Albright sneered at me, then dropped me back on the deck. He bent down and pulled up his pant leg over the top of his boot, revealing a wooden leg. "Aye," he said, "one leg. And yours looks fancier than mine, so don't give me any excuses, you lazy whelp!"

He straightened his pant leg, tucking the end into the boot, and drew a pistol from his belt. As he pointed it at me, I could see the rough iron ball in the barrel. "Rule number seven! Cowardice during combat is punishable by death!"

Before I could react, the gun was knocked out of his hand. The Doctor stood there, holding the harpoon I had used to scrape the hull, and he leveled the slimy point at Albright's chest. "If I were you, Mister Albright," he said, his eyes glowing red in the sunset's glow, "I'd think twice about hurting this man. He's my responsibility."

Albright and the Doctor stared at each other silently for what seemed like several seconds. Albright's hand was on the hilt of his cutlass as he seethed with anger. Then, suddenly, his expression went blank and he turned and walked away.

He took a few steps, then quickly spun on his fake leg, his whip lashing out towards the Doctor. The end of the whip curled around the harpoon, and Albright tried to yank it out of the Doctor's hands. The Doctor held onto it tightly with both hands, and it did not move. Albright pulled harder, and the whip stretched out with a creaking sound.

I could almost predict what would happen next, having watched a lot of Saturday morning cartoons. The Doctor let go of the harpoon, and it flew towards Albright, impaling him in the chest. I watched in horror as he fell to the deck, choking on blood, his hands clawing at the wooden shaft.

I felt a hand on my shoulder, and reached for it. The Doctor grabbed my hand and pulled me upright, without making a sound. Then he draped my arm over his shoulders and walked me over to a barrel that had somehow survived the squid attack. I sat on it, still looking at Albright. Something about the position he was in... it reminded me of one of the boys who had died on that ship, before I quit the Coast Guard. The boys who had been the reason I quit.

The Doctor patted my shoulder, and I turned to look at him. He was staring at Albright's body, as well, with a blank expression. "I didn't mean to... I couldn't..." he said.

"Thank you, Doctor," I said.

He looked at me with a relieved expression. "Well, I couldn't let him kill you, could I? It wouldn't be right. You couldn't have possibly been able to read that contract they made us sign. He even misquoted Rule Seven! 'Anyone who is fit for combat shall join in combat, or be executed for cowardice.' That's what it said. But I didn't mean to kill him."

"It's all right, Doctor. You did what you had to do." I looked around the deck of the ship. Albright's was not the only corpse present. "Where's the Captain?" She wasn't among the dead, so far as I could see.

"I don't know... oh, there she is! Hello, Petunia!" He waved enthusiastically, with a huge grin.

I looked out across the water, in the direction he had indicated. A giant squid sat on the surface of the water, its tentacles wrapped around something that looked like a gigantic clear balloon. As I watched, a second squid dropped something into the balloon. Whatever it was went right through the outside of the balloon, but did not fall out the bottom. There were more things inside the balloon already, and as the latest item was added, they squirmed around. I squinted my eyes and shaded my brow with my right hand. "What the hell is that?" I asked.

"The bubble thing? Or the giant squid?"

"The bubble thing."

"It's a bubble thing of some kind. But what's really important is what's inside the bubble."

"Okay, what's inside the bubble thing?"

"Women... our Captain included. I wonder where they're taking them?"

As we watched, the two squids vanished beneath the waves, taking the bubble thing with them. "So what do we do now?"

"Rule One: Every man has an equal vote, except Captains, Quartermasters, and Doctors, who each have two votes."

"Huh?"

The Doctor stood a little straighter and brushed his hair back with his hand. "It means I'm the Captain now. Well, pending a vote of the crew, of course. I can count on your two votes, right?"

"Two votes?"

"Yes, you're my quartermaster, now. Unless you'd rather be Captain, of course."

I looked around the ship. She was still sea-worthy, if we could retrieve the sails and repair the masts. About half the crew was still alive, maybe, and half of the carcass of a giant squid was draped across the bow. "Doctor," I said, "I'm going to need a floppy hat. And a parrot. I can't be Captain without a parrot."

The Doctor gave me a mock salute and a huge grin. "Aye, AYE, Captain!"

I grinned back. It couldn't be any worse than in the Coast Guard, right? "The last time I commanded a boat, we lost three men. But on this ship... " I waved my hand at the damage and corpses, "I don't think I can fuck things up any worse than they already are."

"That's the spirit!" the Doctor said, slapping me on the shoulder. "Wait, what?"

"You heard me. Now, what happened to those launches Albright was supposed to send out? Where are the survivors?"

The Doctor pointed over the rail. I leaned over, and saw nothing but splintered wood and shark fins. "There were no survivors," he said, sadly. "Well, except for the women. I think the galleon must have been a slave ship."

"A slave ship!?" I stood up, carefully balancing myself. "They were slaves?"

"Probably liberated by the pirates before the squids got them, I'd wager. Otherwise, they wouldn't have been here. Pirates have no love for slavers, and would never tolerate them sailing through their waters. Speaking of squids..." The Doctor left me alone by the rail and sauntered over to the dead squid. I sat back down, thinking about the slaves who had died on that ship. I wondered if my own ancestors had been on a ship like that.

"Ah-HA!" the Doctor cried out, as he examined the squid. He pulled something off the carcass and ran back to me. "You see this?" He held some sort of high-tech gizmo in his hands.

"What's that?" I asked. I didn't recognize it at all.

"Some sort of control device. Somebody is using these squids to attack ships! Completely against their nature, usually. But I wonder who... I don't recognize the design. It does seem vaguely familiar, though. Definitely not of terrestrial origin."

"Doctor," I said, looking at the slowly sinking wreckage of the galleon, "What if... what if my ancestors were on that ship? Am I going to just fade away or something? Like in Back to the Future?"

"Don't worry, Rick. You're not going to vanish. I would know if you were."

"Yeah? You'd know?"

"I'd know. Just like I knew what would happen if that truck hit the naval base. The one thing I didn't know was if the bombs would go off when it hit your car. You're lucky they didn't."

"Lucky? Lucky?" The anger swelled back up inside me, and I stood to face the Doctor. "Ad-Rick was lucky! Katarina was lucky! I only wish I was as lucky as they were!"

"You survived..."

"No, I didn't, remember? I was dead when you found me! You should have left me that way!" I suddenly realized that my hand was at his throat. He was leaning backwards over the rail, and was letting me push him back, without offering any resistance at all. I let go of him and staggered a few steps back, ashamed.

"I'm sorry," he said, as he cleared his throat. "I'm so sorry..."

"Well, sorry don't cut it. I don't care what you say about time laws and apples and bullshit like that. As soon as we get the TARDIS back, I'm catching that apple. You hear me, Doc? I'm catching that motherfucker in mid-air!"

He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. I waited for him to tell me that it was impossible. I waited for him to tell me that I couldn't do it. I waited for him to say something, anything, about apples or oranges or bananas or whatever, because when he did I was going to kill him. But he didn't.

He opened his eyes and locked his gaze on mine. Then he raised his hand to his brow in a formal salute. "Aye, aye, Captain," he said.

-=Chapter Five=-

"Doctor, look!" I said, pointing across the water, "One of our boats made it!"

"Oh, my goodness gracious, yes they did!" the Doctor said, as he pulled a telescope from his coat pocket. "It appears to be our silent friend Ramsay and the swedish boy. And they've got some survivors!"

"Good, at least somebody made it." I looked down into the water at the circling sharks. I suddenly realized that the sharks weren't swimming in circles; they were swimming in squares. "Hey, Doc, you think these sharks are being controlled, too? Or is this normal behavior for this kind of shark?"

"Well, I suppose they could be," he turned the telescope downward. "Yes, definitely! I can see some sort of device attached to their craniums, just in front of the dorsal fins. Hmmph. Sharks and squids... what's next? Radio-controlled scallops? Perhaps a school of drone trout?"

"Maybe it isn't limited to fish," I said, as I looked at the sea birds that were circling the wreck. I looked up to see more birds above our ship, but I couldn't see anything unusual about their behavior. They were probably just normal birds. I turned my attention back to our ship.

There were five dead pirates on the deck, and two other men who were busily stripping their former comrades of their possessions. I limped over to Albright's body and started going through the pockets of his coat.

"What are you doing?" the Doctor said. I looked up at him and saw that he was watching me through the telescope.

"This guy was the quartermaster, right? Maybe he had some charts or something." I found a key in one pocket, and in another I found a small leather bag that jingled slightly when I shook it. I used my teeth to loosen the string that held it shut, and dumped the coins out onto the deck. There were eight gold coins, and in the light of the setting sun they shone as red as blood.

I poked the coins with my hook, admiring the intricacy of the arabic script and the simplicity of the designs. I was entranced by the color and the shape of them. Gold had a way of hypnotizing a man, and I was not immune. I looked up only when a shadow fell across the coins.

"Rick," the Doctor said. He nodded towards the two pirates, who were walking towards us across the deck, with their swords drawn.

I stood up straight and turned towards them. With my hook, I pointed at Albright's coins on the deck. "A gold coin for every man who votes me Captain!" I said.

They stopped, and looked at each other silently. Then they looked back at me.

"Did you just speak Portuguese?" one of them asked.

"No, no, no, it was Spanish!" the one on the left replied.

The Doctor whispered in my ear, "Instant translation of all languages. It's a power of the Time Lords... and it's my gift to you."

I nodded, and addressed the men again, "The Doctor and me, we beat death. We escaped from Davey Jones' locker. You saw that when we got here. Death speaks all tongues."

The men dropped their swords and started crossing themselves. The one on the left recited the Hail Mary while the other mangled the Lord's Prayer. "Now I'm going to say it again; a gold coin for each man who votes me Captain of this ship!"

The Doctor reached down and picked up a coin. He held it up and turned it slowly between his fingers, then bit the edge of the coin. Then he held it high and said, "A vote for Captain Henderson!"

One of the men, the Spaniard, stopped praying and knelt down. He picked up a coin and considered it. The other man joined him, and they nodded to each other. They stood up, and each held his coin aloft like the Doctor had. "Henderson! Henderson! Henderson!" they chanted.

"Right, then," the Doctor said, rubbing his hands together. "First order of business, I think, would be to dispose of these dead bodies, yes? Something to keep the sharks busy while we bring the survivors on board." He stepped to the shattered rail and frowned down at the water.

"What are your names?" I asked my crew.

"I am Enrico Miercoles," the Spaniard said, "and this is my mate, Alonzo Vascalensa. Don't mind him, he's Portuguese. Barely civilized, but he knows how to load a cannon."

"But I'm a better shot than you," Vascalensa said. "It was my cannon that felled this beast." He indicated the giant squid that was still on our bow. The Doctor had rolled a barrel up against the squid's cadaver and was wandering around the deck, inspecting the wreckage. He picked up a long wooden board and eyed it like a pool cue, then walked back over to the barrel. He placed it across the barrel like a lever, and shoved the bottom edge beneath the squid's torso.

"Go help the Doctor," I commanded my crew, as I shoveled the rest of the coins back into the pouch with my hook. They ran down the length of the ship and started pulling down on the top end of the board. The Doctor sat down on the deck and shoved the beast with his feet. I grabbed onto the short ladder that led to the poop deck as the weight shifted off our bow and fell into the sea, sending our ship bouncing backwards.

I hopped up the three rungs and saw a man on the deck behind the tiller wheel. There was a gash on his forehead and he was laying in a pool of blood, but he appeared to be breathing. "Doctor!" I yelled. "Up here!"

The Doctor appeared at my side almost instantly, and set to work reviving the man. I remembered that his name was Jacobi. "Jacobi!" I said, and his eyes opened.

"Where is the Captain?" he said, looking confused. As he lifted his head, the Doctor wrapped a cloth around it, and the man winced in pain.

"She was taken," the Doctor said. "but we're going to find her, I promise."

"I'm the Captain now," I said, as I leaned on the wheel above him.

"She was taken? Taken how? Was it slavers?" He tried to stand up, but lost his balance. He held his head and groaned.

The Doctor picked him up and put Jacobi's arm across his shoulders. "We're not sure," he said. "There were these giant squids..."

"Giant what? Squids?"

"Giant squids," I said. "I ain't never seen one before, except in that movie with Captain Nemo."

"Movie? Nemo?" He looked even more confused.

"I think maybe you should go below decks and rest your head, Mister Jacobi. I'm your Doctor, you should do as I say. Now go on with you!" He let Jacobi stand on his own, and patted him on the shoulder. Jacobi steadied himself against a railing, then climbed carefully down to the deck and disappeared through the hatch.

The Doctor sidled up to me and spoke quietly. "The original story was much more interesting before I talked Verne into using a giant squid. But then again, Zygons are kind of squiddy. They even smell squiddy. Is squiddy a word? Squiddy squiddy squiddy..."

---

"We should get those survivors on board," I said. The sun had finished setting and it had gotten very dark, very quickly. The Doctor pulled something out of his pocket, and pointed it at one of the oil lamps at the stern of the ship. It made a whistling sound, and the lamp lit by itself. I saw Miercoles light another lamp down on the deck as Vascalensa threw a rope overboard. Moments later, Ramsay climbed aboard, followed by two robed figures. The swedish boy came aboard last.

I stepped forward to the railing at the front of the poop deck. "I am now Captain of this ship! Do I have your support, or shall I give you back to the sharks?"

Ramsay looked around at the damaged ship, and the corpses of his crewmates that were still at his feet. He seemed especially interested in Albright's body. He stood over the quartermaster's remains and scowled, then inhaled loudly through his nose and spat out phlegm onto Albright's cold face. He then turned to me and saluted, smiling without parting his lips. The boy mimicked his salute, but had a much bigger smile.

"Then get these dead bodies off my ship!" I hobbled down the little ladder to the deck. "Mister Ramsay! Let's see who you brought on board!" I made my way over to the two survivors, who were huddled on the deck beneath their concelaing robes.

Ramsay grabbed one by the arm, and pulled it upright. I heard a muffled cry of pain and fright, and it sounded like a woman's voice. Ramsay pulled the hood back on the robe, revealing the face of an old black woman. She screamed in fright as she tried to pull her hood back over her face. Ramsay pulled it back again, and twisted her arm.

"Easy now, Ramsay," the Doctor said. "Don't worry, my dear, everything will be all right," he said to the woman, as he gently took her from Ramsay's clutches. He led her to a barrel, on which he instructed her to sit. He continued to speak softly to her, and she calmed down visibly.

Ramsay then reached down to the other robed figure, and tried to grab an arm, but the person fought against his grasp. "No! Don't touch her!" the old woman cried, and I gestured to Ramsay. He stood back and let me move closer to the woman, who I could hear crying softly beneath her hood. I spoke gently, "It's okay, it's all right, you're safe now. You're safe with me." I bent over and reached towards her, touching the fabric of her robe with my right hand. She flinched away from me. "You're safe with me," I repeated, as I reached out again to pull her hood back from her face.

I fell to my knee, stunned. She looked exactly like Katarina! I waved to Miercoles, who handed me the lantern. I held it up to her face and saw the tears shining on her cheeks, and the fear shining in her dark eyes. I reached out to touch her cheek, and she flinched away from me again. "Katarina!" I said, and the look in her eyes changed from fear to confusion.

"How... how do you know my name?" she said, meekly.

"It is you! Katarina! How did you get here?" I lunged forward and tried to hold her, but she screamed and scrambled away.

"Rick," the Doctor said, placing his hand on my shoulder. "It isn't her."

"Yes she is! Katarina!" I cried, reaching for her again. She shied further away from me, but then bumped into the body of the fat pirate, Davies. She screamed and pushed it away, but only managed to push herself closer to me. She scurried away again, and almost fell over the side of the ship where the rail had been smashed.

"She isn't your Katarina, Rick! She's dead! This poor girl just looks like her!" The Doctor stepped between me and Katarina, and spoke softly to her.

I watched her face, that beautiful face I knew so well, as she listened to whatever the Doctor was saying. Eventually, she accepted his proferred hand, and let him lead her away. The old woman tried to follow them, but the swedish boy stopped her.

I looked up at my crew, who were standing around staring at me. "Get back to work! Leave me alone!" I yelled, swinging my hook at them. Ramsey and Vascalensa each grabbed an end of Davies' body and heaved it overboard, silently. Miercoles rolled Albright's body over, and started to remove the man's coat. I pulled myself up and looked to see where the Doctor had taken Katarina. I saw a light shine from the door of the Captain's cabin, as it slowly closed.

I started towards the cabin, but stopped at the door. She wasn't my Katarina, but why did she look just like her? How could she have the same name, the same face, but not be her? I turned to my right and grabbed the top rung of the ladder to the poop deck, then hauled myself up. I stood on the poop deck and surveyed what I could see of the ship in the dark. Both masts had been sheared away by the squid, and had taken our sails with them. Barrels and crates were strewn about, some of them broken. Two of the cannons on the starboard side were missing, as well.

We were adrift, and the current was pulling us further from the shore and the wreck of the larger ship. I looked around but couldn't make out an anchor in the dark. I spun the tiller wheel around to the right, and watched as the nose of the ship pointed back towards land. I hoped that the current would push us back to land, or at least send us back around the little island towards the spot where the TARDIS had been thrown overboard. Without sails, however, we were at the mercy of the sea.

The Doctor appeared at my side. I hadn't heard him come up onto the poop deck. "Get some rest, Rick," he said. "Go to your cabin; the Captain's cabin. Try to remember that she is not your Katarina, will you? But she needs protection, if you know what I mean. I think I can handle the ship... it's the opposite of a car, isn't it? Clockwise for port and counter-clockwise for starboard? It's been so long since I've been sailing. This reminds me of the time I landed on a ship in space... not a spaceship, mind you, a proper sailing ship, but in space..."

I ignored the Doctor's ramblings as I staggered towards the ladder. The Doctor took the wheel and spun it around randomly. I hopped down one rung at a time. At the door to the cabin, I hesitated. What was I doing? What would I do if she told me to leave? What if she rejected me completely? I pushed on the handle of the door, and limped inside.

---

Petunia Smythee had apparently enjoyed taxidermy, as the Captain's cabin was abundantly decorated with stuffed specimens of several different species. It was downright creepy, with their glass eyes all staring at me. I pulled my attention away from the animals and checked out the rest of the room.

There was a large table, on which a chart was laid out. A small, but intricately decorated desk occupied the far corner, with a matching chair that looked like a small throne. In the middle of the room was the bed, which was decorated with peacock feathers. The lamp, still lit, was on a small table by the bedside. A lump beneath the blanket belied the presence of the girl.

"Get out of bed, come here," I said. The lump moved but she did not leave the bed. "I said come here!" I was beginning to realize that this was definitely not the fearless, independent woman I had known and loved. The girl slowly crawled out from beneath the feathery blanket. She was still wearing the robe which concealed her face.

"Take off your hood," I said. "I want to see you."

"No..." she said, meekly, pulling her robe tighter.

"I said take it off!"

"No!" she said, more forcefully. "I am a muslim..." She started to cry, and I felt guilty for speaking harshly.

"Okay, then. Let me explain. My wife..."

"You are married?" she interjected.

"My wife and child are... they're dead. My wife, she looked... just like you. She had your name, too. Katarina. Katarina Maria Del Gato."

"I am... I am Katarina Isabella De Madrid y Medina." She pulled the hood back, revealing her face. "Do I really look like your wife? Your Katarina?"

"Yes," I gasped, stunned once again by the resemblance. "We met when we were kids..."

"You were baby goats?" she asked, with an exaggerated look of confusion on her face.

"Huh?"

"You said you were kids. A kid is a baby goat."

"It is? Well, I ain't no goat..." I smiled broadly, and felt a bit shy as I realized that my hook and fake leg might seem frightening to her.

"I don't know about that. You look like a goat to me." She smiled sheepishly, and I couldn't help but laugh a little.

There was a soft knock on the door. I opened it a crack, and saw the swedish boy standing there.

"Yo, what up?" I asked. The boy furled his brow and looked at me funny. "Yes, may I help you?" I said, using my churchy voice.

"I... uh..."

"Speak up, kid." I said. Katarina giggled a bit at the word "kid".

"The old woman, she..."

"She what?"

"She wants to watch you, or something. I don't know what she means. Her english is not good. My english is not good." He shrugged, and waved his hands towards the old woman who stood by his side. I opened the door all the way, and she moved quickly into the cabin. I nodded to the boy and closed the door.

I turned around to see the old woman pulling Katarina's hood back over her face. She was whispering something to Katarina, and Katarina responded "No... no... no."

"I take it you're her chaperone," I said, to the old woman. She turned to face me.

"She is my responsibility. Her virtue is in my care, until she is delivered to her husband."

"Her husband?" The word shocked me.

"Her marriage has been arranged since she was a child." She stood between me and Katarina. "She must be a virgin on her wedding night! You will not rape her!" She pulled back a fold of her robe to reveal the blade of a dagger pointed at my midsection.

I stepped back, but the closed door behind me prevented me from moving more than half a step backwards. She stepped closer to me, holding her dagger tight. She was pointing it, quite disturbingly, at my crotch.

"I assure you, madam, I have not touched her," I said, as clearly and politely as possible. I raised my arms defensively in front of me, and my hook shone menacingly in the lamp's light.

"You will not rape her... ever! You will rape nobody, ever again!" she screeched, as she lunged at me with the knife.

---

I'd like to say that it was instinct and reflexes that saved my genitals from her dagger, but it was my fake leg that did it. When I had stepped back into the door, I only did so with my flesh foot. My metal leg was still slightly in front of me, and when I instinctively turned my body to avoid her blade, I lost my balance and fell to my left, landing on my butt.

As I fell, the old woman tripped over my fake leg, and went head-first into the door. Katarina squealed and rushed to her side. As she turned the unconscious old woman on her back, she grabbed the dagger and tucked it into her robe. I could tell that she was hoping I hadn't seen her do it, but I did.

I dragged myself backwards, still sitting on the floor. "Is she okay?" I asked.

"Okay? What is 'okay'?" Katarina cradled the old woman's head in her lap.

"Uh... it means good. All right. Fine and dandy. You know... okay. Is she okay?"

"You speak very strangely." She looked at me with a bit of fear in her eyes. "Where do you come from? Who are you?"

"I'm... I'm from the future. Like, four hundred years from now."

She became more fearful. "You are insane! Are all pirates insane?" The old woman moaned, and Katarina dabbed at her forehead with a corner of her robe.

"I'm not insane, and I'm not a pirate. My name is Richard. I'm not going to hurt you."

She looked at me again, confused. "You are not a pirate? But this ship... your crew..."

"I just got here. The Doctor and me, we had a time machine, but they threw it overboard. If the squids hadn't taken the Captain and killed most of the crew, I'd still be in the basket, scraping shit off the ship."

"But you are Captain now? How?"

"I guess you could say that a pirate ship is like an equal opportunity employer. Ain't nobody called me a nigger since I got here. I like that."

"There is another word I do not understand."

"Which word?"

She repeated my words, "Ain't nobody..."

"Oh, yeah, sorry. My bad english. The Fathers taught me better than that."

"That was not the part I did not understand."

"Oh? What was?"

"Nigger."

It was my turn to look confused. "You don't know the word 'nigger'?"

"No, it is a strange word. Is it Latin?"

"No, it ain't Latin." I wondered for half a moment about the origins of the word, but gave up. "You really don't know the word 'nigger'?"

"Yes, I do not know it."

I smiled. "I like that. I really do. It's a bad word."

She smiled. "Then I shall not use it, if it is an evil word. Allah forbids it."

Suddenly, somebody pounded on the door. We both flinched, startled by the sound. The old woman moaned again. I tried to get up from the floor, but I couldn't find anything to grab on to.

Katarina gently lowered the old woman's head to the floor and stood up, brushing the dust from her robe. She pulled the door open, and the Doctor leapt through the doorway, narrowly avoiding the old woman. In order to avoid kicking her, he hopped in on one foot, and landed on the bed. Katarina sat back down by the old woman, and took her head back into her lap.

"Hell-O! Am I interrupting anything?" the Doctor said, as he assumed a lounging position on the bed.

"No, Doctor, nothing at all," I replied from the floor. "Could you help me up?"

He bounced off the bed and onto his feet. "Of course, my good man! Here, give me your hand." I reached up with my right hand and he said, "No, your other hand... oh, never mind, silly me." He grabbed the collar of my shirt and easily lifted me from the floor. I got both feet under me, and steadied myself against the edge of the bed.

"So what's up, Doc?" I asked, as he patted the dust off me.

"Eh? What's up, Doc?" He raised an eyebrow at me. "Do I look like a cartoon rabbit?"

"Yeah, well, now that you mention it..." I smiled broadly at him. He made a sound like "Harrumph" and put his hands on his lapels, scowling at me like an old man. "No, seriously, Doc... what's up?"

"Don't call me 'Doc'."

"Okay, Doctor. Don't you have a last name, at least? Or a nickname?"

He held one hand up, with his index finger raised, as though he was about to start a long speech, but stopped himself before saying anything. He put his left hand down at his side and stuck his right hand into his coat pocket. "Just 'The Doctor'. Haven't we already had this conversation?"

"I guess so. So..." I raised my eyebrows at him and gave him an expectant look.

"So?"

"So what's up? Doc!" I held an invisible carrot up and made a fake nibbling sound.

"Oh! Yes! Well... I've just had an interesting conversation with Mister Ramsay..."

"Ramsay?"

"Yes, the tall chap with the red bandanna on his head. You really should learn the names of your men, if you're going to be their Captain." He wagged his finger at me.

"I know which one is Ramsay. I thought he couldn't talk?"

"Oh, yes, he can talk. Just not... in a normal way. You'll see. But it turns out that he knows exactly who took our fair Captain and where they took her. And I warn you; he's very keen on retrieving her! I'd watch my back around him. It's hard to say with whom his loyalties lie."

"Okay, then. Spill."

"Spill?" He looked confused.

"Spill?" Katarina echoed, from the floor.

"Spill the beans."

"Ah, I understand," the Doctor said, even though he looked like he didn't.

"I don't," Katarina said.

The Doctor walked over to the door, gingerly stepping over Katarina and the old woman. "Perhaps I should have Ramsay spill those beans for you. He has such a way with words..." He opened the door. "Ramsay! I say, Ramsay! Come here!" He turned back toward me, "He's coming, one moment."

Ramsay stepped through the doorway, banging the Doctor with the door on his way through. He looked around at the women at the floor, then at me.

"Ramsay," I said. "I understand that you know who took Captain Smythee, and the other women from that galleon. Tell me."

Ramsay shook his head, his lips clenched tightly together.

The Doctor stepped out from behind the door. "Go ahead, Ramsay. Tell him. Tell him who took your Captain. You can do it."

Ramsay looked at the Doctor, who nodded at him reassuringly. Then he looked at me and opened his mouth wide. There was something shiny inside his mouth; something metal. Then, without moving his lips, a strange sing-song voice came out of him.

"The Cy-ber-men," he said.

-=Chapter Six=-

Ramsay placed the old woman on the bed, and left the cabin when I told him to. Katarina tended to her, and the Doctor and I went to the far end of the room by the desk and the chair. He leaned on the windowsill as I sat in the chair.

"So what the fuck are Cybermen?" I asked him.

"No need to use such harsh language, Rick! For shame!" He shook his finger and tut-tutted at me.

I blushed a bit (not that anyone would notice, but I could feel the blood burning in my cheeks) and muttered an apology. He reminded me, for a moment, of one of the Jesuit Fathers who had taught at the orphanage school. I almost expected the Doctor to suddenly whack me with a yardstick and send me off to do ten Hail Marys, but he didn't. He looked very seriously at me, and whispered, "Can you keep a secret?"

"What?" I whispered back.

"So can I." He patted me on the shoulder, and winked. Then he put his finger on the side of his nose and bent over so he could nudge me with his elbow. Then he raised his eyebrows and gave me a knowing nod.

"Doc, just... what are you trying to tell me? I don't get you."

"Just keep everything quiet, Rick my boy. Very quiet. If the crew knew what you knew about the blue shoe... wait, what?" He tapped the air and silently repeated himself. "If the crew knew what I knew about Cybermen, they'd run off in a panic at the very mention of them. Or worse, they'd mutiny and take the ship... and we can't have that."

"So what do you know about Cybermen?"

"Quite a bit, actually." He blinked a few times, then examined his fingernails. He started to nibble on a hangnail.

"Are you going to tell me?"

"About what?" He finished nibbling the hangnail and examined his fingernails again.

"About the Cybermen." I was starting to lose patience with him.

"I thought you'd never ask!" He jumped down from the windowsill and stood next to me. "Let me see your arm," he said.

I held out my right arm. "No, the other arm," he said. I held out the hook.

He grabbed my hook and twisted. The harness slipped right off my shoulder, and the entire prosthesis came off in his hands. He held it up and examined it.

"Now look at this thing," he started.

"Hey, give that back!" I yelled, grabbing for the hook with my right hand. He held it aloft, out of my reach.

"Now look at this thing," he started again, waving my arm in the air, "Simple, isn't it? Plastic and steel and a couple of springs. Now imagine if you could replace your arm with a robotic arm. Make it ten times stronger, make it bulletproof, stick a ray gun in the wrist... whatever. Now do the same thing for your legs. Now make better eyes and better ears and replace all of your organs with machinery. Nothing left of you but your brain, sealed forever in the body of a metal monster. That's what they are. That's Cybermen."

"Give me back my arm," I said.

He looked at the fake arm he had been waving around, and handed it back to me. "Yes, of course. I'm sorry. I get a bit carried away at times."

At precisely that moment, the tentacle of a giant squid smashed through the wall of the Captain's cabin. I was knocked to the floor and covered with splintered wood and broken glass. I heard Katarina screaming and the Doctor yelling, but I had landed on the stump of my arm and the pain was blinding. I took a few deep breaths and rolled off my stump and onto my right side, and tried to get off the floor. I felt something wet slap across my chest, and then suddenly felt myself being squeezed tightly and pulled through the shattered wall. Just as suddenly, I was released, and fell several feet in the dark before landing on something soft. The something I landed on screamed and kicked me, and I realized that it was Katarina. As she scrambled out from beneath me, I realized that I was sitting on a spongy plastic surface. It reminded me of bubble wrap. After a few seconds, my eyes became more oriented to the darkness, and I could see the shape of the squid all around us. We were inside one of those bubble things.

I could vaguely see another squid next to us, with several human shapes wrapped in its tentacles. I heard a popping sound, and Ramsay fell into the bubble, narrowly missing both me and Katarina. Then another popping sound heralded the arrival of the swedish boy, who was rapidly followed by the Doctor.

"Doctor!" I yelled out to him, "How nice of you to drop in!"

"Very funny," he said, clearly not amused. "Oh, I'm terribly sorry, Master Johannsen, I appear to be sitting on your head!"

"Mmmph-mmph mmph mmph!" the swedish boy tried to say.

"What's that?" the Doctor said, as he rolled forward off the lad.

"I said get the bloody hell off of me!" the boy said, in a surprisingly british accent. "If I wanted your bollocks near my face, I'd bloody well ask, wouldn't I?"

"Hey, wait a second..." I said.

"Oh, don't tell me you didn't know, Rick!" the Doctor said, smiling.

"Know what?"

"Our Mister Johannsen isn't really a Mister Johannsen. Probably not even a Johannsen, for all we know."

"It's Rebecca Johnson, if you must know," she said, pouting. She sat with her knees folded to her chest. "I just pretended to be swedish because I sounded more like a man with that accent."

"You brought this on us. Wo-men are bad luck at sea. I should have known," Ramsay said in his sing-song robotic voice. He pounced on the girl and started to shake her violently. The Doctor grabbed him from behind and pulled him off her, and they both collapsed into a heap in the middle of the bubble.

"If women are bad luck at sea, then what about Captain Smythee?" I challenged him.

"That is dif-fer-ent. She was Cap-tain." he said. He pulled himself up and then sat back down along the side of the bubble, across from the girl. That's when I noticed that the bubble was submerging beneath the water.

"Hey, we're sinking!" I said, feeling slightly panicked. "We've got to get out of this bubble! Anybody got a sword? A dagger? Anything?" The other occupants of the bubble responded with negative grunts and murmurs, except for the Doctor who was rapidly pulling things out of his pockets and handing them to Katarina. He pulled out a teddy bear, an alarm clock, a yo-yo and a banana before he found a small folding knife. Katarina stared at the other objects curiously as she ate the banana.

The Doctor unfolded his knife and started poking the wall of the bubble with it. "Okay, everybody, get ready!" he said, as he closed his eyes and thrust the blade into the plastic. I heard the popping sound again, but it was immediately followed by an anti-climactic "shwumping" sound.

"Oh, bother. I seem to be stuck," the Doctor said. He opened his eyes and leaned backwards. His hand, and the knife he held, were stuck part way through the plastic wall. He continued to lean backwards as he walked up the rounded side of the bubble, eventually straddling his arm as he crouched on the wall like Spider-man. I heard the popping noise again, and he fell backwards onto the soft floor.

"You okay, Doc?" I asked.

"Yes, yes, I'm fine. I lost my knife, though." He stood up and looked around at the bubble. "I guess we're well and truly trapped in here. Nothing left to do but wait."

"Wait for what?" I asked.

"Wait until we reach our destination, wherever that may be," he said. "And I'm guessing that it's right about... here." As he said the word "here," the bubble hit something hard, and we were all tossed into a heap in the center of the bubble.

With a repeat of the popping sound, the bottom of the bubble suddenly vanished, and we all fell into what seemed to be a large, angled tube, kind of like a waterslide. As we slid down the tube, I noticed that Katarina and Rebecca were suddenly missing. Then I saw Ramsay fall into a trap-door in the bottom of the slide. I was about to tell the Doctor what was happening when a trap-door opened beneath me, and I found myself falling down a separate tube.

Unlike the first tube, which was somehow lit up from within the walls of the tube, this tube had no lights. I fell in complete darkness for at least a minute before I suddenly emerged from the bottom of the tube and landed on a large, thick and soft mat in a brightly-lit room.

I tried to slide off the mat, but realized that I couldn't breathe properly. There was some sort of gas in the air in this room. It smelled like strange chemicals, and made my head spin. I rolled off the edge of the mat and fell onto the floor, unconscious.

---

The dream was the same. It was always the same. Reliving the accident, second by second. Sitting in that chair, helpless, as Katarina was taken away by some foster family. But this time it was a bit different. I remembered my own foster family. I remembered the fat lady who always smelled like shit and perfume. I remembered her bastard husband who hit me with his belt. I remembered the pain. And I remembered the last time he did it, the time I had grabbed the belt from him and gave him a taste of his own pain. Then the cops that had come for me, in their dark sunglasses. Round little sunglasses. Their round little sunglasses and cold metal hands.

I woke up, my heart pounding in my ears. I sat up suddenly and banged my head on a lamp that hung low over me. I was on some sort of operating table. I rubbed my head and pushed the lamp away with my other hand. It rolled across the room on a wheeled stand and smashed against a wall. I looked around the room as I sat up again. There was a tray full of strange instruments next to the table, several of which were covered with blood. For a few moments I wondered whose blood it was. Then I realized that it was probably mine.

I jumped off the table, dazed, and staggered towards the door. My left leg felt longer than usual, for some reason. I looked down at the silver boot on my left foot with surprise. That's when I noticed that I was wearing some sort of silver mitten on my left hand, divided into two big fingers and a thumb. I moved the fingers around for a few seconds before reality hit me like a brick.

I had a new arm. And a new leg. Beneath the bottom hem of the silvery smock I was wearing, I could see that the entire lower half of my leg was encased in some sort of metallic cloth. Where it met flesh, above the knee, I couldn't find the seam. The same was true of my arm, where the silvery fabric began just below my armpit. I ran my hand over the edge, and realized that I could feel every time I touched the material. It was like it was some sort of synthetic skin, complete with nerve endings. I pinched my left forearm, and felt the pain just like it was real flesh.

One of the walls of the operating room was a huge mirror. I hobbled over towards it and considered my reflection. It didn't look as though they had done anything else to me. I rummaged about beneath the smock with my right hand and took inventory of my male anatomy. Everything in that department was where it belonged, so I turned my attention back to escaping.

I looked around quickly for some clothes. I found what appeared to be a closet, next to the door. It was filled with several sets of coveralls, hanging on unusually-shaped hangars, all made from the same silvery cloth that served as the skin to my new limbs. I put one on, as quickly as I could. My new limbs responded just like real limbs, and I was even able to work the front zipper with the two big fingers on my left hand. From the bottom of the closet I took a right boot that matched my left foot, and I finally found myself standing without difficulty.

I tried the door, but I wasn't sure if it was supposed to slide open or swing open. I decided to see how strong my new limbs were. I put my weight on my left leg, and braced my left arm against the door. Then I pushed as hard as I could. I heard a humming noise come from both limbs, and felt a bit of a vibration coming from them. The metal of the door screamed under my two-fingered hand, and the door crumpled like tinfoil. I tossed the hunk of metal effortlessly to the side as I stepped into the hallway.

"oooo-WHEE! That's what I'm talkin' about!" I said, making a fist with the metal hand. I considered the hand as I held it before my face. It was beautiful, in a weird way. "I gotta paint this shit black," I muttered to myself.

A man in a silver suit suddenly appeared at the end of the corridor. His hands looked normal, but his head was encased in grey cloth. He looked like he was wearing some kind of round goggles under a ski mask, and there was something that looked like a headlight on the top of his head, held there by a bracket that stuck out of his ears. He opened his mouth wide and said, in the same sing-song voice as Ramsay, "Stop! Stop! Ex-per-i-ment Ze-ta Se-ven is es-ca-ping! Ex-per-i-ment Ze-ta Se-ven is es-ca-ping! Stop! Stop!"

I ran the other way down the hallway. My left leg was much more powerful than my human leg, but it was much heavier, and I wasn't able to run as fast as I thought I could. I quickly fell into a rhythm of swinging my metal leg far in front of me and letting its momentum carry me further and faster. I was going at a pretty good pace when I slammed into the Doctor.

As I knocked the Doctor to the ground, I tumbled past him and slid down the metal floor of the corridor for a few yards. I realized then that the corridor was just another section of tube, which gradually curved to the right but was perfectly level. I scrambled back to my feet and ran back to the Doctor. I knelt by his side as he lay motionless on the floor. I turned him onto his back and noticed a large red bump on his forehead. He had probably hit his head when I knocked him down. I carefully cradled his head in my left hand while I snapped my figers by his ears and gently slapped his face with my right hand.

"C'mon, Doc, wake up! We gotta get outta here!"

"Mmmm... not now River...." he muttered.

I snapped my fingers some more and slapped him slightly harder. "Doc! Yo! Snap out of it!"

"Eh?" He suddenly opened his eyes and looked at me. "Toberman?"

"Who?"

He looked at me again, blinking a few times. "Rick! Oh my goodness... Rick! What have they done to you?"

"Just what you were saying, Doc. I got me a new arm and leg. Just like new... better than new. They didn't do anything else to me. The rest of me's all human; they just replaced the parts I was missing. See?" I waved my silvery hand at him.

He stared at my hand with an expression of horror. "Oh, Rick! It's all my fault. I never should have brought you here! I should have stayed with you; protected you!"

"No, no, no, no, no Doc. It's all good! Look!" I did a little dance. "I'm not too happy about the silver color, but beggars can't be choosers, right?"

"We can only hope that's all they've done to you," the Doctor said, as he reached out towards my face. He placed his right hand along the side of my face. "I just need to check something," he said.

Then I felt him in my mind. It was like he had climbed in through my ear and was rummaging about. It tickled a bit. Strange, unrelated memories popped into my mind. Then another memory appeared, a strong memory that overwhelmed me with its detail. I remembered the day my parents died. I remembered standing in the airport terminal with my grandfather, waiting for the plane that never landed. I remembered my grandfather! I could feel tears streaming down my cheeks as I traced every wrinkle on his face in my mind's eye. I was only seven when he died. I had never remembered him before.

"Whoa, that was quite a mental block. Not the one I was expecting, though," the Doctor said, as he dropped his hand from my face and stepped away.

"Thank you," I said. "I forgot so much about that day."

"What happened? What was so terrible that you blocked it out of your memory?"

I looked at him, tears in my eyes. "Didn't you see? You were in there; in my head."

"No, it would have been rude. All I did was open the door; I didn't look inside."

"My grandfather..." I started to sob. "He died right there in the airport. Right after they told him about... about..." I suddenly remembered everybody who had died that day. "My Mom and Dad... they weren't alone. My Aunt Polly and Uncle Ben were on that flight, too. And my cousin, Rani. She was just a baby. I lost everybody that day."

"Is that when you went to the orphanage?"

"No... it was the next day. I didn't know what happened to my grandfather. I didn't know he was dead. So I waited for the plane. I sat there and waited all day. The ambulance guys who took my grandfather away didn't know I was with him. I was all alone in the airport, waiting for that plane. And it never came." I broke down in tears. "I didn't know what happened. I just sat there waiting. I was so afraid that I'd miss the plane I didn't dare leave my seat. I remember pissing my pants because I was too scared to go use the bathroom by myself." I rolled into the fetal position and rested my head on my metal knee.

"Rick, I'm sorry."

I kept crying. I couldn't stop. I don't think I ever cried when I was a kid. I didn't remember ever crying, for that matter.

"Rick, I'm sorry," the Doctor repeated himself.

"It's not your fault," I blubbered.

"It's not that. Look."

I blinked through the tears as I lifted my head. We were surrounded by four of the men in the silver suits and the weird headgear.

The one closest to me grabbed my metal arm and held it tight. My grief was quickly replaced by anger. Another one grabbed the Doctor's arm, and he cried out in pain.

One of the men opened his mouth to speak. "We are the cy-ber-men," he said, "and you are our pri-son-ers. Re-sis-tance is fu-tile. There is no es-cape."

"Hey, buddy, do me a favor real quick," I said to the cyberman closest to me. "Say this line: 'Would you like to play a game?' Go ahead, say it. Just once."

The cyberman stared at me with its round glassy lenses. "Ex-plain," it said.

"It's from a movie. C'mon, say it!"

"I will not com-ply."

"Man, you're no fun," I said, as it pulled on my arm and led me down the corridor. "You remember that movie, right, Doc? WarGames?"

"Remember it?" The Doctor snorted, "I lived it."

-=Chapter Seven=-

"Now that I have you gentlemen alone, I demand some answers!" the Doctor said, as he pulled against the Cyberman who held his arm. "What are the cybermen doing on Earth at this point in history? Mondas is nowhere near the solar system right now!"

We came to a dead stop in the curving, tubular corridor. "What do you know a-bout cy-ber-men?" the Doctor's guard demanded to know.

"I know quite a bit more than the humans do," the Doctor said. "Maybe I can help you, if you just tell me what you've come here for. You didn't come all this way just to give poor old Rick here a new set of limbs, did you? Because that was awfully nice of you to do so."

"I'm starting to wonder," I said. "This leg is really heavy. Are you sure you don't have a lighter model?"

"Si-lence!" my cyber-guard commanded. "You will get your ans-wers from the Cy-ber-con-trol-ler."

"Excellent!" the Doctor said. "I insist that you take me to see him immediately."

"In due time," the cyberman responded. "Your ge-ne-tic ma-ter-i-al is u-nique. You are to be ta-ken for ex-am-in-a-tion."

"What about me?" I asked.

"Your ge-ne-tic ma-ter-i-al is a-bove av-er-age for hu-mans. You are to be ta-ken to the pro-cre-a-tion cham-ber."

"Oh, no! You're not splitting us up again! Where he goes, I go!" the Doctor demanded.

The two cybermen escorting us did not respond immediately, nor did they move. I heard a clicking sound come from inside of the head of the one holding my arm.

"It is de-ci-ded. You will be ex-am-ined in the pro-cre-a-tion cham-ber." the cyberman holding the Doctor finally responded. They both started marching again, in lock-step, and we scrambled to keep up.

---

We reached an oval door that seemed to be made of clear plastic. The cyberman holding the Doctor reached forward with its free hand and touched the plastic. With the same distinct popping noise I had heard earlier in the bubble, the plastic split down the middle. We all stepped through it, and the plastic re-sealed itself behind us.

We were in another tube-shaped structure, but this one was huge. The corridors had only been about eight feet in circumference, but this tube was at least five times that size. Along one side of the chamber was a line of curved cots, matching the curve of the wall and stretching the entire length of the room. In almost every bed, I saw naked women with metal helmets covering their faces. Large machines hung from the ceiling above each of the beds, and various tubes and wires extended down to the women. I could see that some of the tubes led directly into their flesh. I also noticed that most of the women seemed to be extremely pregnant.

"Oh... my... giddy... AUNT!" the Doctor exclaimed. "What is this? What are you doing to these poor women? Making them carry cyberbabies? It's inhuman! Absolutely evil!"

"In-hu-man. Ex-plain."

The Doctor sneered. "It's a word that sums you lot up. Inhuman. That's you in a nutshell." He shook his arm free and walked over to one of the nearest women. He started to examine the helmet over her head.

"Man, that's a lot of pregnant women. You guys must be going crazy fetching pickles and ice cream," I said.

The two cybermen ignored me, and marched back out of the room through the plastic door. After the second one was through, the first one placed its hand against the plastic. It suddenly turned opaque, and appeared to become as solid as the rest of the walls.

"I don't think they need any pickles and ice cream," the Doctor said. "These women are all in chemically-induced comas. To the cybermen, their only value is as incubators for their young."

"Wait, wait, wait. They're called cyber-men. So, what, they're all men? There's no cyber-women?"

"On the contrary, Rick. Cybermen have no gender whatsoever. Not any more, at least. They used to be very much like humans, at one point in time." He turned his attention to the machinery above the beds.

"So how are they making babies, if they don't have any... you know." I grimaced at the thought.

"You heard them. Your genetic material is above average. My guess would be that, for the next batch of cyberbabies, you're expected to be the daddy."

"So who fathered all of these babies?" I asked, waving my hand at the hundreds of pregnant women.

"Whoever they could find who matched their genetic criteria, I suspect. Speaking of which, we'd better get out of here before they take a closer look at my genetics. They might come up with a new set of criteria." He rubbed an x-shaped scratch on the back of his hand as he muttered, "Funny how they always take it from the same place..."

I walked over to the oval door and touched it with my metal, two-fingered hand. The plastic did not respond to my touch. I made a fist and pounded on it, but didn't make a dent.

"Huh. The other room I was in, the one where they gave me these limbs, it had a metal door on it. I ripped right through it. But this plastic doesn't budge."

"A metal door, you say? Must have been part of the original ship." The Doctor finished examining the machinery and came over by the door with me. "I don't think I can do anything for these women. These machines aren't controlled from here. There must be a separate control room somewhere."

"Wait a second. Is this where all of the women ended up? Is Katarina here?"

"Hard to tell, with their faces covered up. I can't really tell humans apart, otherwise. Not easily, anyways."

"Well, she wouldn't be pregnant yet, for one thing. And that Johannsen kid is here somewhere, too. Or whatever her name was. We've got to find them!"

"There's no time, Rick! We must find a way to escape!"

I started to walk down the line of women, looking at each one. From my 20th-century perspective, they were all badly in need of some leg-shaving. The wild and untrimmed pubic hair on each of them reminded me of old pornography from the 1970's. "We've got to find Katey, Doc! We can't leave her here!"

He ran to catch up with me, and spun me around by my shoulder. "She's not your Katey, Rick. You know that."

"I know. She's not my wife. But she is my Katey. I'm Captain of the ship now, remember? She's a member of my crew. So's the kid. I'm not leaving either of them behind."

"What about Captain Smythee? She's here, as well."

"They're her crew, too. If we find her, she can be Captain again, I guess."

"That's very generous of you, Rick. She's right over there." The Doctor pointed at one of the unconscious women, a little bit further down the line. I ran over to the bed and looked at her.

"How can you tell? Her head's covered up." I looked at her body. She didn't look quite as old or as unattractive as I had first thought. In fact, she looked pretty good.

"Her tattoos. I recognized the rose on her breast."

"Doctor!" I smiled at him, lecherously. "When did you notice that?"

He blushed a bit. "I like roses. And it's not as though she kept her bosom well-covered, even when she was wearing clothes. Now the question is, what do we do with her?" He looked closely at the machinery that hung from the ceiling above her, and followed one of the tubes to where it entered her helmet. "Help me get this helmet off her, will you?"

I reached towards her with my metal hand. "Gently!" he cautioned, as he worked his fingers beneath one side of the metal mask. I used my right hand to grab the other side, and we eased the helmet off her head. She looked like she was sleeping, despite the various tubes that were stuck crudely into the sides of her neck. The Doctor took the helmet and hung it from the side of the machine, where it dangled from its wires.

"Those tubes don't look like they're going to come out easily," I said, as I gestured towards her neck. "I guess they never heard of IV's huh?"

"Oh, please," the Doctor said. "Cybermen don't know the first thing about medicine. They're not doctors, they're mechanics. You're lucky they didn't put your leg on backwards!"

"Hell, I'm probably lucky they didn't cut my balls off when they did it."

"Oh, they won't be doing that any time soon. They want your genetic material, remember? Of course, once they figure out that my genes are superior..." he made a scissors-snipping motion with his hand.

"Yee-oouch!" I shielded my genitals with my hands. "So the clock is ticking, huh? I vote we leave Captain Smythee where she is and get my balls somewhere safer."

"Too late," the Doctor said, as he nodded towards the door. Two cybermen had just entered the room. They marched in lock-step towards us.

"Oh, crap," I said. "What do we do now?"

"Wait... step over here." The Doctor had sidled away from Petunia Smythee's bedside, and was waving me over. I joined him, and we took a few more steps away from the bed. The cybermen marched directly to her body, ignoring us completely.

"Mal-func-tion i-den-ti-fied," one of them said to the other, as it pointed towards the dangling face-mask.

"Cor-rec-ting err-or," the other one said, as it replaced the mask over her face. I noticed a little purple light on the machine that changed to yellow. The cybermen both turned 180 degrees clockwise, and marched back towards the doorway.

"That was weird," I said. "It's like they didn't see us."

"We were irrelevant," the Doctor said. "Cybermen obey orders, to the letter, and nothing else. They consider that to be one of their strengths. Unfaltering discipline and obedience, no original thought, no ability to react to random variables. Of course, if we keep removing these masks, eventually they'll figure out that we're the problem."

"And then what?"

"And then they would eliminate the problem... by eliminating us."

"Ah."

---

We kept checking the bodies of the various women in the Procreation Chamber, hoping to find Katarina and what's-her-name. I referred to her as what's-her-name one too many times, though, and the Doctor lost his patience.

"Rebecca!" he shouted. "Her name is Rebecca! Rebecca Johnson!"

I thought I heard a voice, but then dismissed it as an echo of the Doctor's shout. "Okay, okay, I'm sorry. It took me half a day to remember Johannsen. I still don't remember what the first name was."

"Actually, neither do I," the Doctor mused, quietly. I heard another noise that definitely sounded like a woman's voice.

"You hear that?" I asked the Doctor.

"Eh? Hear what?"

"It sounded like a voice." I looked around the huge chamber at the hundreds of female bodies. "It could have been any of them."

"No, I don't think so, Rick. They're all in comas. If any of them were conscious, those cybermen would come back to fix the problem." He wandered away from me and started to climb up one of the rounded walls. "What do you make of that?" he said, pointing at a spot above us.

"Looks like a vent. They have to pump air in here somehow, I suppose. Wait, do cybermen even need air?"

"Actually, yes they do. But they can go for days without breathing. That respirator unit on their chests separates the oxygen and stores it. It's a very efficient system, actually, but then again the atmosphere on Mondas doesn't have as much oxygen as Earth's does."

"So could they live underwater? There's oxygen in water."

"Only if the water was clean and fresh. Sea water would corrode their systems in no time. Give me a boost, would you?"

I crouched beneath the tiny vent and let the Doctor step into my metal hand. I could feel my arm humming as it took his weight. Then I put my weight on my robotic leg and lifted him clear above my head. He teetered as he stood on the palm of my hand, but managed to keep his balance.

"Hell-O!" he yelled into the vent. I could hear a faint reply. "It's the Doctor and Captain Rick! We're on the other end of the vent! Can you hear me?"

"Doctor? Captain?" I heard a woman's voice, more clearly now. It sounded like Katarina.

"Katarina? Rebecca? Is that you?" I yelled.

"Yes, we are here," the voice replied. "Where are we? What kind of a place is this?"

"Never mind that," the Doctor said. "We're coming to get you!"

"How?" I whispered to the Doctor. "We're just as trapped as they are."

"Well, they don't know that," he said, as he started to lose his balance. "Where there's life, there's..." he fell onto my chest, and we both landed on the floor. "...hope," he groaned.

I pushed him off me and struggled to take a breath. "You'd better hope I don't just drop you next time," I croaked.

"Oh, that wasn't so bad," he said, as he picked himself up and brushed his coat with his hands. "Hmmm, no dust. No dust at all. Interesting," he muttered.

"Oh, yes, quite fascinating," I said, with a bad British accent. "Today on Lifestyles of the Robotic and Infamous, we'll be visiting the remarkably dust-free home of the Cybermen of Mondas..."

"Oh, really, Rick. This is no time for jokes." He pouted indignantly. "I don't really sound like that, do I?"

"Hey, it's how I cope. It's either that, or I start biting my nails." I placed the two big metal fingers of my left hand near my mouth, and pretended to gnaw on them. He smiled.

"Very well, then! On to the next order of business: Escape!"

"Yeah, and then what?" I said, as I pulled myself up from the floor.

"Eh? 'And then what?'?"

"Yeah, 'and then what?'. The TARDIS is at the bottom of the ocean, it's still broken, and our ship is probably in splinters. Even if we do find a way out of this place, we're still underwater, and I don't think I'll be doing any swimming with these." I raised my left arm for emphasis. "So what's our plan?"

"Two things to remember, Rick," he said. "One," he lifted his index finger, "I never lose hope." He raised his middle finger and waved them both at me in the British version of "flipping the bird". "And, Two, you can just... oh, dear, I'm terrible at expletives. You can take your 'and then what' and place it in your excremental orifice. There! What do you think of that?"

I laughed a bit. "Man, I think I'm a bad influence on you. Almost got you cussing."

"Actually, I was hoping I would make you angry enough to smash your way out of here."

"All you had to do was ask," I said, as I balled my metal hand into a fist. "Now step back." I stepped close to the wall near the vent, and started punching it. After a few blows, the plastic wall started to crack. Encouraged by my progress, I hit the wall harder, until a large section of it shattered. Through the new opening, I could see a smaller, rounded room. Katarina and Rebecca were huddled against the far wall, near a metal door. The room was almost identical to the operating room where I had first awakened.

"Rick! Doctor!" they both cried out, as they jumped to their feet and ran towards us.

The Doctor blocked their path as he stepped through the broken wall. "You don't want to see what's in there," he told them. "Rick? Door?"

I stepped through the wall and approached the metal door. The women gasped as they saw me, obviously frightened by my new limbs.

"Don't worry, my dears," the Doctor reassured them. "Rick will have us out of here in no time. I think that arm came with a can opener attachment."

"Ha, ha," I said, sarcastically. "Now who's joking around?"

"Oh, just open the door, will you? Before the cybermen realize that we made a mess of their nice, clean Procreation Chamber?"

"Gladly, Doctor." I grabbed onto the large handle and pulled the door off its hinges.

We stepped out into the tubular corridor. "Which way?" I asked.

"Hmmm," the Doctor said, as he stepped around me. "I have a strange feeling that we should go..." he pointed to the right and faced the right, but then changed his mind and spun to the left. "...this way!" He strode down the corridor, and I followed.

I glanced behind me to make sure that Katarina and Rebecca were following us, and was surprised to see that they weren't. I turned around and headed back to the room we had just left. As I reached the door, I heard Katarina crying.

She was sitting on the floor, looking through the broken wall at the hundreds of pregnant women in the chamber. Rebecca stood next to her. As I came up behind them, Katarina screamed and scurried away from me. Rebecca just turned and looked at me blankly.

"Is that what they were going to do to us?" she asked. "Strap us down and make us have their babies? It's horrible. Just horrible." I noticed a bit of Scottish in her accent.

"Yeah, looks like it. And it's still their plan if we don't get the hell out of this place." I looked down at Katarina, who had curled into a ball on the floor. "She going to be okay?"

"Okay?"

I bit my lip and silently reminded myself about that word. "I mean, is she going to be all right?" I knelt down by her, and she flinched away from me. "Katarina? Katey? It's okay... I mean, it's all right, we're going to get out of here. You just have to get up and follow me. Come on, you can do it." She didn't respond.

"You'll have to carry her," Rebecca said. "Which way did the Doctor go?"

"Left," I said, and she ran out of the room. "Come on, Katey, don't make me carry you. You can do it." She whimpered a little, and sat up. "That's the way, here we go," I said, as I helped her to her feet.

She locked her eyes on my metal hand, and stared at it in fear. "Don't tell me you liked the hook better," I said. I wiggled the fingers around. "At least it has fingers. This foot they gave me doesn't have any toes."

She looked up to my face, and I smiled down at her, trying to reassure her with the look in my eyes. She collapsed into my chest, crying. "Oh, Rick! I was so scared! And then you came through the wall like that..."

"Hey, hey, hey. I wasn't gonna let no wall stop me from finding you. I'd smash my way through the gates of Hell to save you!"

"Why?"

"Why? Because... well, just because."

"Is it because I look like your dead wife? Is that the only reason you care for me?" She wiped the tears from her right cheek. With my right hand, I cradled her face, and wiped the tears from her other cheek with my thumb.

I thought about her question for a second. Was that all it was? Did I still think, somewhere deep down inside, that she was my Katarina?

"No," I replied, sounding more sure than I felt. "You don't look that much like her. And you certainly don't act like her, neither. No, I care about you because you're you, not because you remind me of her. You're nothing like her, really. Nothing at all like her."

She looked up at me again, studying my face. Then, without warning, she kissed me.

-=Chapter Eight=-

We heard the sound of metal legs marching through the rounded corridor. The way sound echoed around in the tube, it was difficult to tell from which direction they were coming. I hoped, for the Doctor's sake, that the cybermen were coming from the left. I considered the ruined door, and wondered how we were going to avoid recapture.

"Rick! There!" Katarina said, pointing across the corridor. There was another metal door, identical to the door of her room, but slightly ajar. We ran across the corridor and through the other door. I closed the door and discovered a simple latch that held it shut. We listened to the voices of the cybermen as they discovered the damaged door, and the hole in the wall that led to the procreation chamber.

As I listened carefully to the conversation between the cybermen, Katarina turned away from the door, and grabbed my arm in fright. I turned to look, and was startled by what I saw. We were in another operating room, exactly like the one where I had been given my arm and leg, but on the table there lay a cyberman. Katarina almost screamed, but she placed her hand over her mouth and looked up at me, fear filling her deep brown eyes. I put my right arm around her to comfort her, and I took a step closer to the inert form on the table. I could see that this cyberman's head was made of metal, and the side of the metal head was open, with several wires hanging out. The wires were connected to a machine that sat on a cart, and I could read the display on its tiny screen. Whatever it was doing, it was only 3% completed, but as I watched the 3 turned into a 4.

Suddenly, I heard an electric crackle inside the helmet. I leaned closer, and made out a voice that was apparently coming from a tiny speaker.

"...-silon cyberunits are to report to the procreation chamber for infrastructure repairs. Security Group Alpha cyberunits are to search all laboratories and operating theatres for the missing subjects. Security Group Beta cyberunits are to patrol corridors one through six...."

"What is it, Rick? Is it speaking to you?" Katarina asked.

"Shhhh!" I shushed, waving her back. I returned my attention to the tinny voice.

"...two Science cyberunits from aquatic lifeform control are to report to the genetics analysis laboratory to replace the missing cyberunits and repair damaged equipment. Security Group Alpha to be advised that the missing subjects may have been responsible for the damage and deletion of cyberunits in genetic analysis, and should proceed with caution. Instructions are to capture the female subjects without any damage to organic matter. Genetic anomaly Theta Sigma is to be captured by any means and taken immediately to the Cybercontroller. Experiment Zeta Seven is to be deleted and salvaged. Repeat, this is Cybercontroller. Maintenance Group Epsilon cyberunits are to report to the procreation chamber for infrastructure repairs..."

"Rick? I think I hear someone coming..." Katarina said.

"This is weird," I said. "This sounds like a human voice."

"Yes, I hear a voice!" she said, pressing her ear to the door.

"No, I mean the voice coming from this speaker. It's human, not cyberman."

"That cyberman has a human voice? It is human?"

"No, of course not. This cyberman has no voice..."

"RRRICK!" the cyberman said, as if to prove me wrong.

I staggered back, startled by the voice. It wasn't a voice like the other cybermen, the ones with the cloth faces. But what startled me most was that it knew my name.

"What the... How do you..." I stammered.

"RRRRAMMMMZZZEEEEE" it said, as it tried to get up. Its arms and legs were held to the table with some sort of metal bands, and its struggles were futile. That's when I noticed that it had hands like mine, with only two fingers, and that its feet looked exactly like my left foot.

"Wait, what? Ramsey?" I realized that what they had started to do to me, they had finished on Ramsey. This was my crewman, inside this metal shell.

"HELLLP MMMMEEEEE," Ramsey said.

Behind me, Katarina opened the door, and let in the Doctor and the swedish boy. Well, I knew she wasn't really a boy, or swedish, but she was still wearing those clothes and that silly hat.

"Doctor! Thank goodness you're here!" I said. "It's Ramsey," I said, pointing at the struggling cyberman.

"Ramsey? Oh, my goodness, my dear fellow. I never would have recognized you! Now just calm down, and we'll see what we can do about these restraints, shall we?"

Ramsey stopped fighting against the metal bands and laid still. "HELLLP MMMMEEEE," he moaned.

"Well, I see you've got a different voice now, eh, Ramsey? A definite improvement on the last one they gave you, when you were first captured. Speaking of which, how did you escape the first time?" The Doctor turned his attention to the machine connected to Ramsey's head. "Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear, six percent already? I hope they haven't wiped out that tidbit of information just yet." He flipped a switch on the machine, and the screen started to flash red.

"What'd you do? What's that thing doing to him?" I said.

"It was reprogramming him, of course. Fortunately for us, it's a terribly slow process. He might still remember the way out."

"IIIIT HURRRRRT," Ramsey replied. "THHHHANK YOUUUU."

"Ah, well, then perhaps it was unfortunate that it was a slow process. But it's over now. Now let's see if I can put you back in one piece, shall we? Then we'll get you free, and then hopefully we can all get free." The Doctor started poking around inside of Ramsey's metal head, tracing the wires to their origins.

I heard Katarina and Rebecca whispering to each other behind us. Rebecca seemed to be trying to explain genetics to Katarina, but I don't think either of them really knew anything about it.

I pressed my ear to the door and listened for cybermen. There was no sound from the corridor. I turned back to the table, giving Katarina a reassuring pat on the shoulder as I passed her. She smiled at me. Rebecca had joined the Doctor at Ramsey's side, trying to poke her nose into what he was doing. He didn't seem to mind that she had draped herself over his shoulder, and when he stood up suddenly and she fell on the floor, he looked back and smirked at her.

"Hey, Doc," I said, "I think I overheard the cybermen getting instructions from their leader, whoever he is. There's going to be security teams searching all of these rooms, and more of them in the corridors. Can't you just shove the wires back in and close the hatch?"

"No, Rick, it's a bit more complicated than that," he replied, as he wiggled two of the knobs on the reprogramming machine. The screen still flashed red, but apparently he knew what he was doing. "I can't disconnect these wires from his brain without doing damage to it, and that's the last thing I want to do. But these aren't just wires, they're cybercables. Just tell them where you want them to connect and they slither right in. Now if I can just tell them to slither back out again..."

"Cybercables? Cool. I remember, in the house that Katey and I bought when we got married..." I looked over at Katarina, who was listening at the door. "Well, anyways, there was this doorbell. I had to run new wires to it; up one wall, across the ceiling, down the other wall. Pain in the ass. I could've used some wires that just slither wherever you tell them to."

"You should have just moved the doorbell closer to the door," the Doctor said, peering into Ramsey's head. "Ah! That's it!" He turned back to the machine and wiggled the knobs furiously.

"I also overheard something about some damage to a genetics lab. You have anything to do with that?"

"Oh, yes! Rebecca and I had such fun smashing things. Pity you weren't there, you would have loved it." He finished wiggling knobs and started flipping switches. "There, that should do it. We'll have you good as new in no time, Ramsey!"

"I've always liked breaking things," Rebecca said, with a huge smile. She was trying to pull up one of the metal bands that held Ramsey to the table, but gave up quite quickly. I decided to give it a try. I grabbed onto a wrist restraint with my left hand and pulled up. I could feel the metal grow warm as it bent, but it did not break.

"Rick, stop, you'll damage yourself," the Doctor said. "Obviously they took the increased strength of this upgraded form into account when they designed the restraints."

"UPPPGRRRADED FORRRRMMMM?" Ramsey asked.

"Yes, my dear Ramsey, you're an upgrade. A dramatic improvement on the old model, actually."

"WHATTTT... WHATTT AMMMM IIII?"

"Don't you know? Oh, dear. Perhaps I shouldn't tell you just yet..." the Doctor said, as he punched a button on the machine. The cables slithered out of Ramsey's head and plugged themselves into the side of the machine. The side of Ramsay's head slid shut automatically, and a handlebar-shaped tube clicked into place over where his ear would have been.

"NNNOOOO. WHATTT HAVVVVE THEEEY DONNNE TOOO MMMMEE?"

"Now, Ramsey, I need you to relax. This is going to come as a bit of a shock, actually. Are you relaxed? Just take a deep breath... no, that won't do any good, you don't breathe any more... never mind that, just... just stay calm..." The Doctor seemed very nervous as he paced back and forth by the table.

"I looked inside your head..." Rebecca said to him, "I... I looked inside this metal thing's head and I didn't see you in there, Ramsey. Doctor, how can this thing be Ramsey? It's some kind of machine that just looks like a man."

"Well, you see... I'm sorry, Ramsey, but you are in there. Just your brain, I'm afraid. A human brain encased in a metal body. I'm... I'm terribly sorry." The Doctor stepped back a bit from the table, as though he knew what to expect.

"You're a cyberman," I said, bluntly. I motioned to Rebecca to move back from the table, and we all stood near the door, watching Ramsey.

Ramsey let out a high-pitched electronic scream as he started flailing about again. The wrist restraint that I had weakened quickly snapped, and he got his arm free. With his free hand he quickly ripped through the other restraints that held him to the table. The table had a number of levers on its side, and in his rage he must have hit one of them, and the table tilted forward. He stepped from the upright tabletop with a few unsteady strides, still screaming like a modem trying to connect.

As he turned towards us and raised his two-fingered hands before his camera-lens eyes, I heard the door swing open behind us. We all turned sideways and backed into a corner of the room as two cybermen entered from the corridor.

"You know, I was really hoping to avoid getting killed for a while," the Doctor said. "There goes that plan out the window."

-=Chapter Nine=-

The cybermen ignored the screaming, cyborg Ramsey as they turned, pointing strangely-shaped guns at us. "You have been i-den-ti-fied as the es-caped test sub-jects," they said. Anything further they had to say on the matter was interrupted when Ramsey grabbed their heads and smashed them together. We were showered with broken glass from one of their headlamps, and I instinctively raised my left arm to shield Katarina from it.

One of the cybermen fell to the floor, with a disturbing electronic moan. It was his headlamp that had broken. The other reeled around to face Ramsey, and fired its weapon. Ramsey's chest exploded with a bright flash of sparks, and he fell backwards into the slanted table behind him.

I noticed the Doctor searching frantically in his pocket for something as I engaged the remaining cyberman. With one quick sweep of my cybernetic arm, I knocked the weapon out of its hands. I allowed the weight of the arm to spin me around, and lifted my right leg to deliver a roundhouse kick to its head, pivoting on my heavy metal left leg. The cyberman, surprisingly, ducked my kick and grabbed my leg as it passed its face. I was off-balance and it easily threw me to the ground.

As I quickly rolled to the side and tried to regain my feet, the Doctor rushed up to the cyberman and shoved his hand into the big thingamajig on its chest. I saw something shiny in his hand, and the cyberman started to wheze like an asthmatic. He continued to grind whatever he was holding into the respiratory unit, until the cyberman collapsed onto the floor.

I heard another wheezing noise and turned to see Rebecca doing the same thing to the cyberman with the broken headlamp. I pulled myself to my feet and shuffled over to where Ramsayhad fallen, in a seated position. A small amount of white foam was seeping from the hole in his metal chest.

"RRRRIIICKKK," he said. "KILLLL MMMMMEEEEEE."

"No can do, buddy," I said, as I put my hands over the hole in his chest. "Doctor!" I cried out for help. Then, to Ramsay, I said, "Don't worry, Ramsay, Doc's gonna fix you up. He'll fix you up good."

The Doctor appeared at my side, and surveyed the damage done to Ramsay. "Oh, dear," he said, "Oh, my. That's... that's not good. I'm sorry, Ramsay, but I think you're done for."

"What?!?" I exploded at the Doctor. "What the fuck? Why the fuck would you tell him that?"

"It's a test," the Doctor said. He knocked on Ramsay's head. "Hello? Anybody home?" he said, in a falsetto voice.

"What kind of test?"

"It's designed to provoke an emotional response." He looked at me, expectantly. "I'd say it worked."

"What do you mean?"

"It means I still wasn't sure about you, Rick. The Cybermen have a nasty habit of controlling a person's mind in ways that they don't even know about. You passed the test."

"What the fuck? What about Ramsay?" I took my hands away from the jagegd hole. The white foam flowed freely out of his chest.

"Oh, he's dead. Pity."

"What the... where the fuck is your emotional response? The man's dead!"

"He's not a man anymore. He's a machine. And we're better off without him." I could feel the Doctor's eyes burning into my robotic arm.

"Oh, so that's how it is, huh? You don't kill them because they're evil alien cyborgs, you just don't like the color of their skin, is that it?"

"What?!?"

"You just don't like silver. Silver people freak you out."

"What?!?"

"Anyways, how the fuck did you kill that cyberman? With your bare fucking hands? Show me how you did that. Looked to me like you already taught Becky."

"Ah, yes, well..." He dug around in his pocket for a moment, then pulled his hand out and shook his finger at me. "I'll have you know... Well... Well, if you knew what I know about cybermen, you wouldn't..."

"Spit it out, go ahead. I deserve it. It was a test."

"What?!?"

"You know, to provoke an emotional response. Like in Blade Runner, remember?"

The Doctor smiled at me and said, "Exactly."

"You ever read the book? Or just see the movie?"

"Ummm.... pfaugh! I don't remember. It's been a few hundreds years since I saw the movie, anyways. What are we doing talking about movies? Let's get a move on, people! Before more cybermen show up!"

"Right, but you still gotta show me how you kill them," I reminded him.

"Oh! Right, easy enough." He pulled half of a gold coin from his pocket. "Two votes for Captain Rick, remember? Well, it's down to about one, now."

"Right! So's mine!" said Rebecca, as she held up her gold coin. "I voted for ya, Captain!"

"So... what? Their coin slots don't take gold coins?"

The Doctor smiled. "Actually, you shove it into the grill of the respiratory unit. That's the big thingamajig on their chests. You might have noticed," he pointed at Ramsay's robotic body, "that's where Ramsay got shot. Vital piece of machinery, there. The planets the cybermen inhabit are all very cold and extremely dusty. The respiratory unit breaks the dust down to atoms. For some reason, it doesn't work on gold. In fact, if you get enough gold in there, the whole system shuts down."

"You're kidding. Gold? The only thing that kills them is gold?"

"Well, that or a big gun." The Doctor picked up one of the rifles that the cybermen had been carrying. "Want one?"

"Sure, I..." As I reached for the other gun, where it lay on the floor, it was suddenly snatched up by a faster pair of hands.

"I got it," Rebecca said, as she shouldered the weapon. She quickly marched out into the hallway, and the rest of us staretd to follow her out. The Doctor shot me a funny look.

"She's certainly an interesting young woman," he said to me, quietly, as we stepped through the door.

"You can say that again," I said, as I watched her backside moving in front of us. Katarina smacked my arm and scowled at me, but I smiled lovingly at her until she smiled back.

"I said," the Doctor said, slightly louder, "She certainly is an interesting young woman."

"Dude," I said, "Shhh. Be cool, man."

"I am being cool, man. It's actually quite chilly in here. Maybe I need someone to keep me nice and warm."

"Yeah, well, stop that. If you're trying to hit on the girl, you're doing it all wrong. You were doing better back there when you weren't even trying."

"Ah, yes, well..." The sound of metal feet marching towards us interrupted our conversation. "Becky! Rebecca! Psst!"

"I can hear you just fine. Both of you. Just fine." She looked through one of the various metal doors that lined the corridor. "Nope, not this one. Check that one." She opened another door, and I looked through the one that was closest to me.

The door opened onto a scene from some horror movie. Bits and pieces of human bodies were neatly stacked and sorted in various large metal bins. I looked over the lip of the bin closest to the door and almost vomited. It held heads. Ramsay's head was on the top of the pile, the eyes strangely sunken into their cavities. Then I realized that they looked that way because his brain was gone; his brain was back in that other room inside of that thing.

Rebecca pushed past me into the room. "This is it. Everybody in. Close the door."

The Doctor closed the door behind us, leaving it open a crack so that he could peer out. He shushed us as some cybermen marched past, then gave us a thumbs-up when they had gone. Then he dropped his cyber-rifle on the floor, like it was something dead.

I stood and stared into Ramsay's sunken eyes. That could have been me. That could have been my head on the pile, with my brain scooped out and shoved into some damned robot. I knelt down to vomit, but nothing came out. I wondered when the last time had been that I had eaten. Omelets. On the TARDIS. Two days ago? Or was it three? I couldn't remember. My head was spinning, and everywhere I looked I saw arms and legs and heads... and blood. Blood everywhere. I sat down on the floor and closed my eyes. Katarina sat beside me and held me. It suddenly occurred to me that this room was probably just as horrifying to her as it was to me, and I returned her embrace.

"Rebecca, you're just full of surprises, aren't you?" the Doctor said. "You take me to the nicest places," he added, in a feminine tone, with his hands clasped beside his face and fluttering his eyelashes. Rebecca giggled at him.

"Seriously, though," he continued, "What is this place? And why would you bring us here? And how did you know where it was? And how many fingers am I holding up?" He held three fingers above his head. She looked up at his hand, and he suddenly stepped very close to her.

"Um..." she shied away from him, but found herself backed up against a bin of body bits. "This is their garbage room, I guess. This is where I found these clothes," she plucked at the fabric of her shirt, then, suddenly becoming more body-conscious, she crossed her arms across her chest. "Ramsey and I were both prisoners here. It was his idea that I should pretend to be a boy. He said the pirates would rape me..." she burst into tears. "I thought he was trying to protect me but he just wanted to keep me to himself! He said he'd tell everyone I was a girl if I didn't let him have his way with me! And then they'd all want to..." she stopped talking and collapsed into the Doctor's chest, sobbing uncontrollably. "He made me cut my hair," I heard her say, through the tears.

"There, there, now, my dear," the Doctor crooned as he stroked her hair. "It's all right now. I'll take care of you. I promise."

She looked up at him, with her arms wrapped around him. "You promise?"

"Yes, of course I do." The Doctor smiled at her. "Cross my hearts."

She smiled a bit, wiped away some of her tears, then put her hands back around him. "I believe you. So many people said they'd take care of me, said they'd protect me... but they were all liars. I believe you."

"I never lie," he said, and he kissed her. She returned the kiss, eagerly. I smiled at Katarina, and she laid her head against me.

Suddenly, the Doctor pushed her away from him, and stepped back, pointing at her accusingly. "I should rephrase that. I hardly ever lie. Unlike you, my dear Rebecca, if that even is your real name!"

She staggered a bit, blinking at him. "What?"

"You've had laser surgery on your corneas, your dental fillings taste like composite resin, and your hair color is not natural. Who are you? Where did you come from? What are you doing here? How did you get here? Who's on first? I don't know... THIRD BASE!"

Katarina exclaimed, "He is insane!" I just laughed. Rebecca started to cry again, and rolled herself into a ball on the floor. The Doctor marched across the room, weaving his way through the various bins and peeking into each one.

"Yo, Doc!" I said, as I took off after him. "Yo, Doc!"

"Don't call me 'Doc'!" he yelled back.

"Doctor," I said. He stopped walking and turned to face me. We had reached the far end of the cylindrical room. The wall behind him looked like a gigantic hatch, and it sweated with condensation.

"Yes, Richard, what is it? What can I do for you?" He seemed impatient.

I shook my head at him. "Man, don't you think you were a bit harsh on her? Look at her; she's a wreck!"

He looked past me, with a twinge of regret on his face, then looked back at me with steel in his eyes. "She lied to us, Rick. She lied to me. Have I ever mentioned that you should never, ever, lie to me? I get very cross."

"Yeah, well, you still didn't have to do her like that. Why'd you kiss her if you were just going to break her heart?"

"Her teeth. They're... beautiful."

"What? You got a tooth fetish or something?"

"No!" He looked at me twice, then reiterated, "No! They're just... really nice. Which is very odd for the 17th Century. You know, I should ask her where she keeps her toothpaste. I'll bet she's got some floss hidden somewhere, too. I've got a toothbrush," he started to rummage through the pockets of his purple pirate coat, "...somewhere."

"Doctor, listen, forget about the toothbrush," I said.

He looked at me as though I were crazy. "I haven't brushed my teeth for over thirty hours. And neither have you, I should add. Dental hygiene is important!"

"C'mon, Doc, focus! Now what were you looking for in these bins?"

"Ah, yes." He looked around him. "When we first met Rebecca, she was pretending to be a boy. Even after revealing herself as a woman, she failed to mention that she is from the 21st Century... maybe late 20th, but I doubt it."

"Yeah, I know all that, and I'm cool with it. So she didn't tell us who she really was. The girl's scared, man. We're all scared."

"My point is, you should never be deceived by outward appearances. I'm not human, but I look like one of you. The TARDIS looks like a Police Box, but on the inside it's the most amazing machine in the Universe. And when I first met you, you were taking the coward's way out of life, but now, my boy... now I think you're turning into a bit of a hero, if I do say so myself."

"You may look like a human but you sure as hell don't act like one sometimes. What the hell are you babbling about?"

"This room, you see. What does it look like?"

"What?"

"What does it look like to you? At first glance."

I looked around at the blood and gore that filled the room. "It looks like Hell. I mean, literally. Hell. No demons with pitchforks, though."

"Actually, Daemons aren't what they look like at first glance, either. No, my friend, what this room is... it's opportunity!"

"Opportunity? For what? Is your last name Frankenstein or something?"

"No, no, no. Rebecca said that she found her clothes here. Now I ask you, Rick: where are your clothes? Not that the silver overalls and smock look isn't fashionable or anything; after all, it matches your shoes. But where are the clothes you were wearing when we got here?"

"Uh... here, I guess. The cybermen would just throw them away with the rest of the garbage."

"Precisely. Which also presents us with the second opportunity this room affords us. What do you do with garbage?"

"Uh... you throw it out."

"You throw it out. You throw it. Out." He pantomimed the action of tossing something with both hands.

"Out."

"Out. Which is where we want to be. But first, let's find your clothes, shall we? And maybe something more fitting for Rebecca? There's bound to be some of the women's clothes here somewhere."

We fanned out and poked our noses into all of the bins, until we found one filled with clothes. The Doctor hopped in, and started rooting through the pile like a dog searching for a buried bone. My coat landed on the floor in front of me with a jingle. I picked it up and retrieved the small bag of gold coins from the pocket. I tried to put it on, but my left arm got stuck in the sleeve. I pulled it back off my arm and checked the other pockets. I found Albright's key, and stuck it in my overalls pocket. It was probably useless now; whatever lock it had fit was probably sunk with the Black Rook. I decided to keep it anyways.

A large, white silk shirt landed on my head. "Try that on," the Doctor said from the bin. "It has billowy sleeves and nice ruffles. I used to have a shirt like that. Hmmm... maybe I can find another one in my size..." He resumed his rummaging. The shirt smelled like sweat and the sea, but I pulled off the smock and put it on anyways. The sleeves were just large enough to accommodate my bulky left arm.

I finished putting on the shirt and turned around to see the Doctor hopping out of the bin, clutching a dress. He held it up in front of him and said, "What do you think?"

"It's uh... It's very nice. Looks really fancy. And the color matches your eyes."

"What? No! It's for Rebecca. I like it." He started to waltz around, holding the dress like his dance partner.

"Well, I don't know if she'll like it. I think she's kind of angry with you at the moment."

"Ah, yes, of course." He stopped dancing, and draped the dress over one arm while running his fingers through his hair with the other hand. "Um... you give it to her. Please," he said, uncomfortably.

"Okay, gimme the dress. But you should talk to her."

"I will, don't worry. I will." He gestured to me that it was time to go, and I started walking back towards the girls. He followed close behind me. I could see that Katarina and Rebecca were sitting together on the floor near the door, talking. I suspected that girl talk was the same, no matter what century you were from. Women were weird like that.

As I looked at the girls, wondering whatever I was wondering, I noticed a red light on the wall near the door. It started to blink. Then it started to blink faster.

"Doctor? You see that light?"

"Eh? What light?" He peered around me, and grabbed my shoulder. "Rick! Run!"

I started to run towards the girls, who stood up when they saw us coming. Suddenly the room was filled with a terrible noise, and I felt the air pressure change dramatically. I felt myself being sucked toward the far end of the room. Rebecca and Katarina both tumbled past me, knocking me off my feet as they rolled. The Doctor was holding on to one of the bins, and I grabbed a bin near me with my left hand. The three fingers clamped down like a vise, creasing the edge of the metal bin.

The contents of the bins were flying through the air, and some of them bounced off me. I was pummeled with arms and legs and hands and feet and various internal organs. I clenched my eyes shut and held on. Through the din, I thought I heard my name. I opened my eyes and saw the Doctor, still holding on to his bin. He was yelling at me, but I couldn't hear him. He mouthed his words carefully. Rick. Let. Go.

He said it again. Let. Go. Then he let go of his bin, and flew into the vortex of wind and water at the far end of the tube. I watched him go, and saw the swirling water advancing upon me. I had only a few moments left before the tube would fill with water. I closed my eyes and let go.

I was lifted into the air and into the water. I flailed about helplessly as I was propelled through the gigantic hatch and into the sea. Now I knew what a torpedo feels like, I thought to myself. As my momentum slowed, I opened my eyes. The salt water stung like a bitch, but I needed to know which way was up. Seeing the sunlight, I started swimming towards the surface.

I started to panic as I realized that my new, robotic limbs were too heavy. I was sinking, fast. No matter how hard I could kick with my left leg, I couldn't swim with it. It was like the leg hadn't been designed with swimming in mind.

Now in a full panic, I thrashed the water with all of my limbs, but kept falling towards the bottom of the sea. The water around me was red with blood, and the limbs of dead pirates littered the sea. My lungs begged for air as my hand smacked something solid and my feet touched bottom. I chanced to open my eyes again, and wasted half a lung of air when I realized what I had just touched.

It was the TARDIS.

My lungs felt like they were on fire, but I willed my legs to move me closer to the TARDIS. I reached out for the door handle, and pushed against the door. The door did not budge. The TARDIS was locked.

I struggled against the door, but it was no use. In anger and frustration I let out one last groan. My lungs were completely empty. I resisted the urge to breathe... five seconds... ten seconds.... How much longer could I extend my life? Another few seconds? My chest ached with the need to breathe. It was becoming unbearable.

With an immense sense of relief, I surrendered myself to the sea.

-=Chapter Ten=-

I was four years old the first time my father dropped me in the ocean. I thought I was going to drown then, but he didn't let me. He held me by the back of my nappy hair and made me tread water until I wasn't afraid of it any more.

By the time I was six, he had taught me how to use his scuba gear. I have a vague memory of scuba diving with him off the coast of Jamaica. I think it was just before he died. Just before the day everybody died. Father, Mother, Aunt, Uncle, Cousin, Grandfather. My Grandfather had a Jamaican accent. I could remember that now, thanks to the Doctor.

The Doctor. Yelling in my face. Pinching my nose for some reason.

The orphanage was connected to one of the local high schools. The same group of Jesuits ran both of them. I had full access to the high school swimming pool the whole time I was in the orphanage. I spent almost every day in the water. That's where I first met Katarina, on the day she came to live at the orphanage. When she found out they had a pool, she went straight to it. I remember that she had to borrow a swim suit from one of the other girls, and she didn't have a towel so I loaned her mine. I walked her back to the dormitories, soaking wet. I think that's when I fell in love with her.

The Doctor, again. Treating me like a punching bag. It makes no sense to me.

Most of my memories of my teenage years were unhappy ones, but I found myself remembering the happy times spent on the swim team. I could even remember some of the names of the guys on the team. Shorty and Red and Jo-Jo... of course they were nicknames, but that's all I remembered. They called me Little Richard. Sometimes I'd sing "Tutti Frutti" in the shower, just to humor them.

And then there was the scholarship I'd thrown away when I decided to beat the crap out of my foster dad rather than let him beat the crap out of me. But they sent me to a Juvenile Hall that had a pool, so it wasn't too bad. When I got out, I headed straight for the Coast Guard. My father had patrolled Boston Harbor for fifteen years, so they were willing to overlook my youthful indiscretions and set me on the path to command.

There was the Doctor again. Shining a light in my eyes. I blink my eyes shut against the light and he yells some more. I shut him out and went back to wherever I was.

In the Coast Guard, I remember teaching newbies how to swim. Of course, they all thought they knew how to swim, but I was there to set them straight. One of the guys I trained left the Guard to swim in the '84 Olympics. He got a bronze.

I also taught CPR. Singing "Stayin' Alive" while doing the chest compressions always got a laugh out of the newbies, but it helped me keep my rhtyhm.

Funny, I could hear somebody singing that song. But with a british accent. And there was some sort of pressure on my chest.

I turned over and coughed the sea water out of my lungs. It hurt like a motherfucker. It was even more painful to take a breath. I breathed slowly and deeply, face down on a metal grill, still coughing out bits of water. My mouth tasted like fish shit.

"Thank goodness you're all right," the Doctor said, kneeling beside me. "You didn't seem to want to come back this time."

"Ack!" I said. It was as close as I could get to actual speech at that moment. I coughed out some more sea water, and cleared my throat. "Actually, I never thought I'd drown," I managed to say, feebly. "Of all the ways a man can die, I never thought I'd drown."

"Oh? How did you think you'd die? Don't tell me that freezing to death behind a bar in Boston was really how you wanted to go."

I turned over, sat up, and looked around. I was surprised to see that we were in the TARDIS. "How'd we get here?" I asked.

"I have you to thank for that, Rick. You sank right down to it. Funny thing, that. When we first materialized here, we must have been directly above the cyberman complex. Either that, or the cybermen found the TARDIS and chucked it out with the trash, same as us. Either way, there are no coincidences. I'm sure of that much."

I remembered now. Sinking in the bloody water. Finding the TARDIS. Breathing in the sea. I shuddered, and wrapped my right arm across my chest. The wet silk shirt I was wearing wasn't very warm.

The Doctor fiddled with some of the controls on the console. I noticed that he had changed his outfit, again. Now he was wearing a tweed jacket with a bowtie, and a striped shirt that didn't match either. His pants were too tight, and he held them up with suspenders. The bottom cuffs of the pants were rolled up over the tops of his big, black boots.

"Whatcha up to?" I asked, as I pulled myself up off the floor. My ribs ached from the CPR, and I hobbled over to a big chair by the door. It was soaking wet, but I didn't care; I sat in it anyways. In fact, everything near the door was soaking wet.

"Just making a short hop to the beach. The old girl ought to be able to handle it. I just need to be careful not to overload the one remaining circuit in the guidance module. If that blows, we're sunk."

"I think we're already sunk, Doctor. We're at the bottom of the Indian Ocean."

He rolled his eyes at me. "I know. I was trying to make a pun. The least you could do is laugh."

"It hurts to laugh. I think you broke one of my ribs," I groaned.

"Oh? I'm terribly sorry. Just lie there and rest, and I'll tend to you in a moment. I am a Doctor, after all." He pulled a lever on the console, and the ship started to hum loudly.

"Where's Katarina? And Rebecca?"

"Hopefully, on the beach, which is where we'll be in a few seconds. Actually, I'm allowing a slight drift into the past, so we'll arrive before they do. A little bit of an overlap in the old time line, but nothing I can't handle. I just need to shunt off some of this excess vortex energy into the structural power reserves..." he slowly turned a knob, and the pitch of the hum deepened and softened. Then the humming stopped. "There we are! Perfect landing! Precisely one quarter mile on the y axis and three hundred feet along the z axis, and negative thirty-seven minutes along the time axis. And a slight shift in space..." He tapped at a gage on the console. "Strange. Either the TARDIS just got slightly larger, or the Universe just got ever-so slightly smaller. Could be one or the other, never can tell." He stroked a section of the console, absent-mindedly.

"Are you sure we're in the right place? That guidance module held up okay?"

"Yes, absolutely! Here, I'll open the window. Well, not really, but you'll see." He flipped a little lever on the console, and a large, black, flat rectangle descended from the ceiling.

"What the hell is that?"

"That, my friend, is a fifty-seven inch, high definition liquid crystal display flatscreen television. I picked it up just in time for Super Bowl Forty-Five. Mind you, I'm more of a fan of real football, not that American football stuff, but it was a great game. I was actually at the game the first time I saw it, but I was little too busy to watch the action on the field. You know how it goes. Some power-mad human makes a deal with some aliens to help them take over the world... I've seen it happen a hundred times."

"Hey, that reminds me..." I was stunned into silence as the television turned on. An incredibly realistic image of a beach bombarded my eyes with its beauty. The sun was rising over the water, silhouetting palm trees with pink light. I gasped as the Doctor poked me in the ribs.

"Did that hurt?" he asked.

"Yes!"

"Sorry. How about this time?" He poked me again in the same spot. There was no pain.

"Nope, it's fine."

"Then I guess that was the cracked one. It's all better, now. You can get up."

"What do you mean, it's all better? You just said it was cracked."

"Yes, but it's healed now. I sped up time around the bone. Your rib is now two weeks older than the rest of you, and it's completely healed."

"What? How'd you do that?"

"I'm a Time Lord. It's not just a title, you know. I suppose I could give you a technical explanation of precisely how I do it, but we have guests to attend to. If you'll excuse me..." He stood up from his crouched position beside the chair and started scurrying around the room.

"What? Guests?" I stood up from the chair, surprisingly without pain. I looked up at the huge television screen and saw two female figures on the sand near the TARDIS. The smaller of the two was dragging the other up onto the beach.

The Doctor produced a couple of large towels from somewhere under the floor, and tossed one to me as he strode out the door. I followed.

"Ah, there you are, ladies," the Doctor called out to them, as he marched through the sand. "I'm your host, Mister Roark. Welcome to Fantasy Island!" He sounded exactly like Ricardo Montalban when he said it, too.

"Zee plane! Zee plane!" I said, trying to sound like Herve Villechaiz. It was the only line I knew.

"Eh? What plane?" the Doctor turned to face me and tripped in the sand. He stumbled about, spinning around, but then managed to keep his balance.

"Mister Roark never tripped over his own feet," I said, joshingly. The Doctor made a noise like "hmmph!" and kept walking.

"Rick? Doctor?" Katarina rose from the sand at the sound of our voices. Rebecca rolled over and just smiled up at us.

"Hello, ladies," I said. "Beautiful day for a stroll on the beach, isn't it? I'll have one of the cabana boys fetch us some drinks."

Rebecca laughed, but Katarina just stared at us, unbelieving. "How did you get here? And you are dry!"

"Nice outfit, Doctor!" Rebecca laughed. The Doctor gave her a smile as he dropped the towel on her face, and she giggled uncontrollably through the terrycloth.

I knelt down beside Katarina and started to dry her off with the towel. Her robe was soaked through, and clung tightly to the curves on her body.

"Rick," she moaned, "It was terrible. All of those parts of dead bodies in the water, and we had to swim through it! And the sharks! Those terrible sharks! I thought we would die for certain! And I couldn't find you! And then Rebecca... I don't know how but she saved me. I couldn't swim any more..."

"You blokes missed out on seeing me and her snogging," Rebecca teased. "Okay, so it was more like mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but you missed it. She had half a lung full of sea water and wasn't breathing. Good thing for her I took a summer course with the RNLI when I was seventeen."

I smiled at her. "You know, I used to be in the Coast Guard. Same thing as the RNLI, but on the other side of the pond. Thank you for saving her life." I extended my hand, and she shook it heartily.

"Coast Guard, eh? So are you really a Captain, or was that just part of playing pirates?"

"Well... no. Lieutenant. Dishonorable discharge. The only boat I captain nowadays... well, the bank took it. I guess I really am a pirate Captain, now."

"If you ladies have sufficiently recuperated, perhaps we should all retreat to the TARDIS for a bit of refreshment," the Doctor suggested, offering his hand to Rebecca.

"What did you say?" she said, not taking his hand.

"Eh?"

"Did you say TARDIS?"

"Well, yes. That's the name of my ship. Time and..."

"...Relative Dimension in Space," she finished. "No. No, it can't be." She stood up and stepped quickly away from the Doctor. "It can't be. You don't look anything like him."

The Doctor looked at her, confused. She looked scared. "I'm sorry," he said, "Have we met? Maybe we just haven't met yet."

"No, no, no, no, no," she continued to stammer. "It can't be. It simply can't. Who are you?"

"I told you: I'm the Doctor. It's okay, Rebecca, I won't harm you. I do have a lot of questions I'd like to ask you, though."

Katarina turned to face me. "What is happening? What is a TARDIS?"

"I think maybe they've met before," I said. "But he's a time traveler, so maybe it hasn't happened yet."

She shook her head. "I still do not believe this talk of traveling through time. How can it be possible? Yesterday is gone, and tomorrow does not yet exist. You can not just walk through a door and visit another day!"

"Actually, yeah, it's a lot like that," I said, smiling. She shook her head at me and rolled her eyes.

Meanwhile, Rebecca was still retreating from the Doctor, walking backwards along the beach. "Who are you?" she kept repeating.

"Rebecca, please. Just come with me to the TARDIS and we can sort this all out there!" the Doctor implored.

"TARDIS! TARDIS! TARDIS! How can you have a TARDIS if you're not him? He said it was the only one left, that there were no more TARDISes."

"Rebecca, remember when Rick and I appeared on board the ship? We stepped out of the big blue box?"

"I didn't see it; I wasn't there! I wasn't on deck! I was below decks... I was being raped, for Christ's sake!. That fat bastard rolled off me and I ran up the ladder and there you were and I had no idea where you came from. I was hoping you had come in a ship and I could escape but there was no ship and I was so scared..." She started crying, and turned away from the Doctor to march deliberately through the sand, towards the water's edge.

"Rebecca, I... I'm sorry. If some future incarnation of myself left you to the mercies of the cybermen, and then failed to save you from the pirates... I'm sorry. I'll try not to let it happen again. Just one thing... was I ginger?"

"What?" She stopped walking.

"This... future me who brought you here. What did I look like? I'm thinking tall, handsome, bright ginger hair... curly? No, straight hair I think. I've been curly before, don't care for it much any more. Am I right?"

"What?" She turned to face him, now, with her back to the sea.

"It's a simple question. Just describe to me the man who brought you here. You know, to satisfy my curiosity."

"He... he was short."

"Short, yes, good. I've been short before."

"And... bald on top. Just on top."

"Oooooo-kay." He made a face. "Bald on top, got it. That's... fantastic." He ran his fingers through his hair, then waggled them in front of his eyes as if he was checking to see if any hairs had come out in his hand.

"And he dressed like a..."

"SQUID!" the Doctor yelled.

"What? Why would he dress like a squid?"

"I said, SQUID! Look out!" The Doctor started to run towards Rebecca. Suddenly, a giant tentacle rose from the water and wrapped itself around her waist. Before the Doctor could reach her, she was quickly snatched away and pulled beneath the water.

"Rebecca!" the Doctor shouted, in vain. He splashed into the water up to his waist, calling her name over and over again, but she was gone. The giant squid had vanished completely, and taken her with it.

---

-=Chapter Eleven=-

The Doctor ran down the beach towards the TARDIS. "C'mon, Kat, we'd better catch him," I said, to Katarina. I put my cyberman leg under me and quickly bounced to my feet, then offered her my hand to help her up from the ground.

"Oof!" she said, as she tripped over her wet robe and fell back to the sand. "Leave me," she said. "Go. Save her."

"I'm not leaving you behind!" I put my arms under her and easily lifted her, then started running towards the TARDIS. The light on top was already starting to flash, and I could hear the engines groaning. I put her over my shoulder as we approached the door, and leapt forward with my robot leg. We were both catapulted forward, and smashed through the unlocked doors just as the TARDIS started to dematerialize.

"Rick! Katarina! Hold on!" the Doctor yelled, as he pulled a lever on the console. The TARDIS started to lurch about randomly, and we rolled randomly across the floor. Katarina whooped and laughed every time she bounced off me.

"Doctor! What's happening?"

"I had to take the inertial dampeners back offline so that I could stabilize the temporal lock. I need a precision landing, this time!" The TARDIS gave another unexpected bounce, and he fell across the control room. "Rick! Hit the blue button!" he cried.

I reached up towards the console, but Katarina rolled into me and knocked me away from it. She landed on top of me, sitting on my chest. "Kat! The blue button!" I yelled, from under her.

"You mean this?" She touched a blue light on the console in front of her, and the TARDIS gave us one last bounce, like a ship hitting a hidden rock. The Doctor was thrown back to the console, where he stood up straight and started casually flipping switches. Katarina and I were wedged up against the railing, with her posterior firmly planted against my face. It was not altogether unpleasant. I turned my head and kissed her bare foot, which I was using as a pillow.

"Very cool, Kat. Good job," I said. Cool cat. Cool... cat.... An old memory bubbled to the surface of my mind. I must have been a baby, because I remembered sitting on somebody's lap. Big hands helping my little hands clap. I could remember the smell of smoke and booze and my grandfather playing drums up on a stage. I remember somebody talking into a microphone between songs and saying something about a cool cat.

"Whoa. That's weird," I said.

"What is weird?" Katarina asked, as she crawled across the TARDIS floor towards one of the chairs. Her robe was still soaked through, and I admired the way it clung to her curves as she crawled.

"I just had a flash of memory. Something I never remembered before, about my grandfather. He was a jazz musician. He played the drums."

"What kind of musician?" she asked.

"Jazz. It's... it's American. You'll see, when we get home."

"Home? What do you mean, home?" She gave me a look that told me that I was making assumptions again. I didn't know how to respond. I knew darn well that she wasn't my dead wife; she just looked a lot like her and had the same first name. But I guess part of me still hadn't accepted her death. Part of me wanted this Katarina to take the place of my dead Katarina, and that was the part that had spoken.

I started to stammer out a response when the Doctor interrupted. "Sorry about that, Rick. Those memories, that is. If I had known that you put that mental block there yourself, I never would have broken through it."

"Oh, that's okay, Doc. I'm an adult now; I can handle it. But now I've got this song stuck in my head..."

"Oh, which one? I've always got some song stuck in there. One time I actually found a tiny little orchestra living in one of my ears..."

"Yeah, sure." I rolled my eyes at him.

"No, really! But I had to get rid of them. They had such a short playlist." He waited half a second before he started laughing at his own joke. "Get it? Short playlist?"

"It wasn't that funny," I said, rolling my eyes again. "Don't you know any good jokes?"

"Hmmph!" he snorted. "They're all good jokes. You're just a tough audience."

"Right. Now, where are we?"

"In the TARDIS, of course! This is the console, that's the scanner, and over there is a chair with a soaking wet young woman sleeping in it. Shall we see what's outside?"

"Um, yeah. That's kind of what I meant when I said 'where are we'." I looked over at Katarina, who had curled up into a ball on the chair. She looked so small and helpless.

"Of course." The Doctor operated the lever once again to lower the gigantic flat television screen. Once it reached the end of its cables, the screen came to life. It was filled with brightly-colored fish, swimming back and forth.

"Aw, man! We're underwater again!"

"Not so fast, Rick. Observe!" The Doctor twisted a knob on the console and the view on the screen rotated by ninety degrees. I could see that we were inside of a large glass dome, and the fish were on the outside of the dome. The TARDIS had apparently landed on a ledge next to the wall, because I couldn't see the floor on the other side of the TARDIS.

"Turn it again," I directed the Doctor, and he did so. Now the scanner was pointed away from the glass wall. In front of us there seemed to be a large tank, and something was splashing around in the water. Across the tank from us, there was a large room filled with huge computers. Two cybermen were standing in the room with their backs to us, pushing buttons on the machines.

"What the hell? There's cybermen right there! Why didn't they notice us arrive?"

"I suspect that they're not programmed to respond to the sudden materialization of a blue box," the Doctor said. "Whoever programmed their cybercontroller certainly didn't have much of an imagination, did he? Ah! I have an idea!"

"What?"

"I'll pretend to be the cybercontroller, and order the cybermen to leave the room. Then we can get to the other side of the tank without being discovered."

"And how are you going to do that? The moment we step outside the TARDIS, they'll notice we're here."

"Have faith, Rick!" The Doctor pushed a few buttons on the console, and a small microphone popped out of a receptacle. He caught it in mid-air, ran his fingers through his hair, and started to sing like Frank Sinatra:

"You have the cool, clear eyes of a seeker of wisdom and truth,

Yet there's that upturned chin and the grin of impetuous youth,

I believe in yoooou, I belieeeeve in yoooou...

"I hear the sound of good solid judgment whenever you talk,

Yet theres that bold, brave, spring of the tiger that quickens your walk,

I believe in yoooou, I belieeeeve in yoooou...

.

"And when my faith in my fellow man all but falls apart,

I've but to feel your hand grasping mine,

and I take heart,

I take heart...

to see the cool, clear eyes of a seeker of wisdom and truth,

Yet theres that slam! bang! tang, reminiscent of gin and vermouth,

Now I believe in yoooooou, I belieeeeeve in yoooooou."

I stood, stunned. That was the song stuck in my head. "How did you..." I started to say.

"Eh? What's wrong? My Frankie a little off? Great singer, by the way. I taught him everything he knew. He even made me an honorary member of the Rat Pack."

"No, I mean... how did you know that song? That's the song that was stuck in my head!"

"Really? That's fascinating! Maybe I gleaned a little surface information from those memories I unlocked for you. I was just remembering it because of that comment you made earlier about a 'cool cat.' That's what Frankie always called me. He'd say, 'That Doctor, he's one cool cat.' Which is funny, because I don't particularly like cats now. I used to, though, back when I knew Frankie. But I was a different man then. A very different man."

The memory suddenly hit me with greater clarity. "Doc! I remember now! The guy with the microphone... it was Sinatra! And Grandpa played drums and there was some guy dressed like a clown with a crazy coat who was dancing all around the stage..."

"Oh, yes! I remember that night! You must have just been a little baby at the time. Yes! Yes! I remember you now! Your Grandfather was filling in for the regular drummer, and I remember thinking that the nightclub was no place for a baby, but you were with your mother. Awww, you were such a cute baby, too!" Without warning, he reached out and pinched my cheek. "What happened?"

"Hey!" I moved to slap his hand away, but it was already gone. "What do you mean, 'what happened?'"

"What happened to all that cuteness?" The Doctor switched off the scanner screen, and I could see my reflection on the flat surface. He was right; I looked terrible. I had dark circles under my eyes, and my hair was sticking up in weird places. Also, I needed a shave. I ran my robotic hand across my face, amazed by the detail with which I could feel every bristly bit of stubble. In the light from the console, some of my beard looked like it was gray.

"Hey, Doc? What day is it?"

"Eh? Oh, I don't know. What day was it when we arrived? It's been thirty-seven hours and sixteen minutes since then. Why do you ask?"

"Oh, nothing," I said. Except that it wasn't nothing. I wasn't hungry. I hadn't needed to pee or take a crap since waking up in the cybermen's ship. I tried to feel my pulse, but couldn't find it.

"Hey, Doc?"

"What is it now, Rick?" he asked, impatiently. "I'm trying to reconfigure this karaoke machine to broadcast on the cybercontroller frequency, and I really must concentrate!"

"I was just wondering... how many different kinds of cybermen are there, anyways?"

"What do you mean?"

"Well, the ones in that room look slightly different from the ones we met earlier. And Ramsey..."

"Ah, yes. Well, in my travels, I've encountered no less than seventy-three variations of cybermen... and that's not counting cybermats or cybershades... or cyberllamas for that matter. Those llamas were nasty." He made a face. "I haven't been to South America since..." he added, wistfully. As he spoke, his hands never stopped pulling wires out and reconnecting them.

"Why so many different kinds? Are they specialized for certain tasks or something?"

"Well, yes and no. These cybermen, for example, are technicians." He turned the scanner back on, and pointed at the cybermen in the room. "Notice the enlarged cranium and skinny little fingers. Now, the other cybermen were rough brutes in comparison. However, both are variations upon the same theme. These cybermen are all made from lightweight materials, and have an extra-large respiratory unit. Definitely designed for underwater work, or to endure the rigors of space travel. Ramsey's body wasn't designed to be used on Earth, I think. I recognized that model from the planet Telos, which has high gravity and no liquid water whatsoever."

"What about... well, what if they wanted to design a cyberman for use on Earth? What would it look like?"

The Doctor stopped rewiring the karaoke machine. "Actually, they have."

"What did it look like?"

He looked me in the eyes and said, "Like you."

I stared at him, dumbfounded. Did he mean what I thought he meant? I ran from the room, not wanting to believe what I believed. Halfway down the corridor, I stopped, and tried to remember where to find a mirror. The wardrobe! I turned around and counted the doors I had already passed, then backtracked to the one that led to the corridor that took me to the wardrobe. Just when I thought I had forgotten where it was, I opened a door, and there it was. I stumbled into the wardrobe, pulling off my clothes and throwing them aside. A moment later, I stood before the full-length mirror, naked.

I touched the edge of the silver material that started at my shoulder. There was no seam at all. It was like the fabric and the skin were the same stuff. I pressed against my flesh just above the silvery stuff and felt an electric hum. I ran my hand across my chest and breathed deeply. At least that was still normal. My ribs felt normal, as well, but under them I could tell that not everything was human.

I examined my genitals again, just to be sure. There was nothing out of the ordinary there, thank goodness. But just below my scrotum, I noticed a twinkle of silver stuff. I turned around in front of the mirror to look at my back side. The cyberman skin extended all the way up from my leg to my shoulder. My entire left buttock was silver, and as I bent over in front of the mirror, I could see proof that the cybernization had gone beyond mere limb replacement. With both hands and a flashlight, I would never be able to find my anus. I no longer had one.

"Excuse me, Rick," the Doctor said, as he barged in through the door. "Oh! Uhh... I'll come back later. Take your time."

"Doc! What the fuck? What did they do to me?"

"I'm sorry, Rick. I knew you'd figure it out sooner or later. I thought it was better that way."

"What did they do?"

"Well, they improved you. At least, that was their thinking. Personally, I preferred you when you were all human, but it's too late for that now."

"Well, what the hell am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to eat like this?"

"Actually, you're not. As far as I can tell, you run on sea water. And you got plenty of that when you nearly drowned, so I don't think you'll need to recharge for a while."

"Sea water?"

"It is the most plentiful substance on Earth. Well, that, and ammunition. Think on that for a moment. And while you're in here, maybe you can find yourself some decent clothes to wear, hmm? Join me in the control room when you can." He gave me a little wave and shut the door.

I stared down at my penis and thanked God that it wasn't silver. I didn't know if I could handle that kind of thing. The fact that I would never shit again seemed trivial compared to that. I wondered, when I eventually needed fresh sea water, if I would dispose of the old water through my urethra. I hoped so.

I looked at myself in the mirror again, but this time I didn't look at the changes that had been made to me. I looked at my face, and I looked in my eyes. I was still Richard Henderson, Junior; no middle initial. I was still the guy who grew up in an orphanage outside Boston, Massachusetts. I was still the guy who had stood up to his foster father and beaten him down. I was still the guy who had needed to be so much better than the white boys just to be good enough to be in their Guard... and then rose above them in the chain of command. I could beat this.

But I was also the guy who had tried to kill himself. I was the guy who had cried for three days when they told me my wife and son were dead. I was the little boy who had pissed himself in the airport because I was too afraid to go by myself and I was too afraid to tell the paramedics that the dead man was my Grandfather. Could I really beat this? Could I really live with the changes that had been made to my body?

I heard the wardrobe door open behind me. I kept looking into the mirror, because I didn't want to talk to the Doctor right then. And so I was surprised when Katarina wrapped her hands around me. She was as naked as I was.

Without saying a word, she led me to a pile of clothes on the floor, and laid down upon them. I hesitated for a moment. "Kat..." I said, but she placed her finger to her lips to hush me.

I laid down beside her.

-=Chapter Twelve=-

I was rooting through a rack of shirts when I heard Kat crying. I knew that I should go back to her to comfort her; after all, it had been her first time with a man, and it was the right thing to do. I circled back around the shirt rack and tried to find the rack of pants that I had just passed, but couldn't. I tried to locate her by the soft sound of sobbing, and started weaving my way through the racks towards her. After a few minutes, I found my way back to the clearing amidst the clothes. She was curled up in a ball, sitting atop the pile of clothing we had used as a bed, still naked.

As I drew near, my left foot gave me away with a loud clanking sound on a rare piece of bare floor. The wardrobe was like a cross between a teenager's closet and a gigantic department store. You could probably find any style of clothing from any era in the history of any planet, if you could find it. But when Kat heard me approaching, she put her head between her knees and cried even harder.

"Kat," I said, "Uhh... are you okay?" Words failed me. I felt like an idiot. I knew that I should say something wise and reassuring and loving and kind and supportive and wonderful, but all I could come up with was 'Are you okay?'. I took another step towards her and reached out towards her, but she huddled herself tighter.

I sat down near her, but not too near. "I'm sorry," I said. "We... we should have waited."

"No," she sobbed.

"No?"

"No. It was me. I should have waited. But now..." she started crying harder, and threw her head back to wipe the tears from her eyes. She looked beautiful as she did it. "Now I can never be married!" she wailed, and buried her head between her knees once more.

"What are you talking about? Of course we can be married!"

She was still crying, but I edged myself closer to her and she didn't flinch away. I scooted over again until I was right next to her. I started to put my arm around her but realized that it would be my left arm, and I hesitated. That arm wasn't me. I wanted to touch her with my own hand. I started to get up, so that I could sit on her other side, and she grabbed me by the robotic hand. "Don't go!" she cried, as she looked up at me. I could see terror in her eyes.

"I'm not going anywhere," I said, as I circled around her and sat back down. "I'm not going anywhere, ever. I love you."

She burrowed herself into my arms, and melted into me. I felt like I was a house in which she could live, where I could shelter her and love her and keep her forever. It felt good. Maybe I had found the right thing to say.

---

"I still can not be married," she said, after laying in my arms for a while.

"Why not?" I said.

"Because, I am impure. I am no longer a virgin."

"So?"

"So I am a Muslim! I can not be married if I am not pure!"

"So, we'll have a non-Muslim wedding."

She sat up and looked me in the eye. "Rick, if God does not approve of our marriage, then I can not approve of it."

I smiled at her. "I was thinking maybe we could have a Christian marriage. They're not so strict about the whole sex-before-marriage thing. Well, not where I come from, anyways."

She pushed herself away from me and stood up. "Then we can not be married," she proclaimed, and she strode into the labyrinth of clothing racks.

"Kat! Wait!" I bounced up from the floor on my cyberman leg, which seemed to have springs built in for just such an occasion. "Okay, so forget the Christian wedding! I'm sorry!"

"You'd better think of something, Richard Henderson Junior," came a voice from the doorway. The Doctor stood there, leaning against the door frame, with his arms crossed. "It seems to me that you two have been a bit... preoccupied, shall we say? While I've been busy trying to save Rebecca's life, your lives, and the lives of all of the women still being held prisoner inside the cyberman ship!"

I stood there, embarrassed, and feeling guilty. "I'm sorry, Doctor. It's just that..."

"Don't worry about it. We're in Hover Mode."

"What? What's Hover Mode?"

"It just means that although we've arrived at our destination, we haven't actually materialized yet. And I took us out of the flow of time, so no time is passing outside the TARDIS. Sometimes it's the only way I ever get any sleep." He yawned and stretched his arms wide. "But this time I've just been rewiring the karaoke machine. Wasn't too difficult, even though I did somehow manage to delete all of my Barry Manilow lyrics. Not a big loss, in my opinion, but I used to like him quite a bit... back when I liked frilly shirts and velvet jackets..." He stroked his chin and stared into space for a moment, then suddenly snapped back. "But enough about me, let's see what we can do about your problem, shall we?"

"I don't know what we can do, Doctor. I love her, but..."

"But she can't marry you because of her customs. And you're assuming that she'll adopt your customs and just forget about the fact that you two consummated the marriage before the actual marriage takes place."

"Yeah, I guess." I felt like a heel, and rightfully so.

"Never fear, Rick, for I am here." The Doctor bowed to me, with great flourish. "I, and my time machine, are at your service."

"What do you mean?"

"Simple! I take you two back in time, perform a marriage, and then return you to this precise time and place immediately after the... err... immediately after you two were... umm..." He ran his fingers through his hair, then waved both hands in front of him with his fingers wobbling wildly. "You know!"

"How can you perform a marriage?"

"I'm the Captain of the TARDIS, aren't I? She's a ship, of course... she doesn't roll about on wheels, you know. Now where was I... lost my train of thought... ah, yes, there it is! Wrong platform entirely! 9:15 to Islington!"

"What?"

"The old time-travel marriage end-around! Come on, let's find you an appropriate set of clothes. Not that there's anything wrong with a green jumper and purple pants with flares..."

"Hey, they were the only things that fit!"

"You look like Shaggy from Scooby Doo. Come on!" He marched towards the forest of clothing, then stopped suddenly. I stopped, too.

Katarina stood there before us, wearing the most beautiful wedding dress I'd ever seen. Maybe it was just because she was the one in it, but I couldn't imagine a more perfect dress.

---

I stood near the console of the TARDIS, dressed in an old-fashioned tuxedo. It was two sizes too big, to accomodate my robotic limbs, but it still looked good. When the Doctor waved to me from near the doorway, I pressed the button on the console that he had told me to press. Music started playing, but it was no song I had ever heard before. The Doctor walked down the aisle with Katarina on his arm. Her veil almost reached the floor, but through it I could see that she was smiling. They slowly walked closer to me, and I could see that there were tears in her eyes. I could feel the tears in my eyes, as well.

The Doctor left her beside me, then circled around the console. When he came back around, he had put some sort of weird collar on, over his tweed coat. The collar covered his shoulders and rose up behind him like a pair of curved wings. He pulled a shiny skull-cap from his pocket, and placed it on his head.

"Dearly beloved, we are gathered here in the gaze of Rassilon," he began. "Upon the edge of the Vortex of Time, we bear witness upon all of History, as History bears witness upon us."

"Doctor," I started to say, but he shook his head at me slightly and made a bit of a shushing sound.

"These two, Rick and Katarina, are from different times and different places, but through the mystery of Time they have found each other," he continued. "Time heals all wounds, and sometimes the wound is not of the flesh, but of the spirit. As you walk the slow path through History together, may your spirits become one, like a wound that has healed."

Katarina squeezed my hand. I looked at her, and she smiled at me. She shrugged slightly, and gave my hand another squeeze. I squeezed back.

The Doctor spread his hands wide, and started to pace around the console. "For is it not better that a man and a woman, who love each other, to be as one? Can the boundaries of Time and Space possibly dream of holding back their love?" He stood upon a footstool and pointed at the ceiling. "Nay, I say! For there is no mountain high enough, nor river wide enough, nor time vortex... vortexy enough, to keep them apart!" He stepped down from the footstool and tried to run his hand through his hair again, but was confounded by the skullcap. He pulled off the skullcap and dropped it on the floor, then stepped over to me and Katarina. He put a hand on each of our shoulders, and motioned to us to kneel before him.

"By the power invested in me as a Lord of Time, I declare that two have become one. Your destinies are forever intertwined from this moment forward."

I looked at Katarina, and she looked at me. We were both confused.

"You may now kiss the bride," the Doctor said.

---

We consummated our marriage again, but this time in a proper bed. Afterward, she wanted to sleep, but I wasn't tired. I wondered if I would ever be able to sleep again. I decided to wander through the halls of the TARDIS while she slept.

I shambled down the hall, still dressed in my tuxedo. I tried to remember where the wardrobe was again. Maybe I could find a decent set of clothes.

I must have made a wrong turn, because when I opened the door that I thought was the wardrobe, it turned out to be the garden. A chicken clucked at me, and turned its head sideways to consider me. I must have looked pretty strange to that chicken. A metal hand and a metal foot and a tuxedo that made me look like The Penguin. I squawked at the chicken like Burgess Meredith always did, and looked around the garden. There were some watermelons growing near the door, and I could see a small patch of corn growing in the far corner of the room. I looked up at the light in the ceiling, but it was just as bright as the real sun. The rest of the ceiling looked like real sky, too. As I watched, I could see the clouds moving.

I turned back towards the door, but then I noticed that the corn stalks were moving. Something, or someone, was moving through them.

"Doctor? Is that you?"

Whatever it was started moving very quickly between the rows of vegetables, sideways across the room. I stepped back towards the door until I could feel it behind me, and had bare metal under my feet. The chicken ran towards her coop, clucking loudly. I kept my one eye on the garden while I looked around for something I could use to defend myself. I thought there would be some sort of garden tools around, but there was nothing. The thing seemed to be following the wall, as I watched it round a corner at high speed. I still couldn't see whatever it was, but I could see the leaves of the plants moving. When it reached the pumpkin patch, it seemed to actually go under the pumpkins. Whatever it was, it sure as hell wasn't one of your typical garden pests.

The creature suddenly burst from the earthen floor near my feet. It looked like a huge worm, with purple and pink stripes, and two large white dots on its head. Little black dots moved around inside of the white dots, like huge cartoon eyes, and seemed to look at me cross-eyed. The worm tried to lunge at me, but when it touched the metal floor it jerked back as if in pain. I was safe from the cross-eyed cartoony purple worm, and it writhed about in a ridiculous manner. I couldn't help but laugh.

I was just about to leave the room when I saw the chicken lunge for the worm. With a quick snap of her beak, she devoured its head. Then she bucked happily as she dragged the rest of the worm out of the dirt. It was disgusting.

I opened the door and stepped out, then heard a voice behind me say, "Good day, Sir!"

I stepped back into the garden room. The chicken was standing there, next to the worm's body, looking at me. I looked back at the chicken.

"Can I help you with something?" the chicken said. "I should probably say, good sir, thank you greatly for luring the worm out for me. But now that you have, it is incumbent upon me to dispense with its carcass forthwith. So if you have no further business with me, I shall get on with my work. Good day, sir!"

"You can... talk?"

"Yes, sir." The chicken seemed to bow towards me. "I have been told that it is a side effect of my diet, and that my intellect has been increased far beyond that of my former human masters. But it doesn't matter that the worms make me intelligent. What matters is that they are incredibly delicious! Oh, where are my manners? Would you like to try a morsel? I should have offered."

"No, no, that's quite all right," I said. "Uh... what's your name?"

"Clive."

"Clive?"

"Yes, Clive. A rather simple name, but I feel that it suits me well. It was the first word I ever spoke. Of course, that was before I became literate." Clive wagged her little chicken head towards a cluttered bookcase near the coop. It was filled with various different books.

"You've read all of those?"

"Yes, of course. Some of them are my own work. Would you like to hear some of my poetry? I've been told that it's quite good, although my modesty wouldn't allow me to admit it. I have a new poem I would love to recite for you. I just composed it this morning. Would you like to hear it?"

"Umm... no, thank you very much. I've got to find the Doctor." I fumbled at the doorknob, and opened the door clumsily behind me. "But I promise, I'll come back later, and... and then you can recite all of your poetry to me. I promise." I stumbled backwards through the door.

"Very well, then. Until later, I bid you farewell!" She waved a wing at me.

"Okay! Bye-bye! See you later!" I waved at the chicken through the closing door, then breathed a sigh of relief when it clicked shut.

The Doctor suddenly appeared beside me. "If you think her poetry's bad, you should read some of mine," he said, startling me.

"Aaack!" I said, because I was startled.

"Hang on, you haven't even read my poetry yet!" He looked slightly offended.

I put my hand on his shoulder. "You are a strange man, Doctor. And I love you like a brother. But don't ever read me your poetry. Ever."

The Doctor smiled at me. "I promise, Rick. Cross my hearts and hope to... well, something. I don't plan on dying today."

"So what do you have planned for us today?"

"Well, first we're going to mimic the cybercontroller and get those technician cybermen out of the Aquatic Animal Control room. Then we have to jump over a tank of sharks that are being controlled by those same technicians whom we will have dismissed. And then, for the really dangerous part, we have to save the world from a brigade of cybermen armed only with a handful of gold coins. Well, what do you think, Rick?"

"Sounds dangerous," I said.

"Yes, well, there is a chance that we might get ourselves killed, I suppose." He seemed unconcerned.

"I thought you said you weren't planning on dying today?"

"Oh, I never plan on it. It just sort of happens. Shall we?" He gestured down the hallway, and I started walking in the direction he had waved towards. He went the other way, though, and I had to run to catch up with him.

I wasn't planning on dying that day, either.

---

The Doctor and I stood by the console. He picked up the microphone, and flipped a switch.

"Hello? Hello? Is this thing on? Testing, one two, testing..." he patted the top of the mic a few times and I could hear the thump coming through some hidden speakers. "Sussudio... su-su-sussudio. Testing!" He cleared his throat, and the speakers shrieked with feedback.

"Doc, come on now," I said.

"Don't... call... me... Doc!" he said, close into the microphone. His voice boomed from the walls.

I gave him my 'get real, brother' head-wobble and eye-roll, and he straightened up and cleared his throat again.

"Right, now, we need to figure out what the cybercontroller sounds like. You said you heard its voice, right? Inside Ramsey's head?"

"That's right."

"Okay, let's try this." He flipped a switch on the console and spoke into the microphone. "This is the cy-ber-con-trol-ler spea-king. I am the cy-ber-con-trol-ler."

"No, that's not it. He..."

"Wait, wait! Let me try again!" The Doctor flipped another switch. "IIII AMMMM THEEEE YOOOOUUUUU WILLLLL OBEYYYY MEEEEEEE!"

"No, man, you're not listening..."

"I thought for sure that would be it. Same as Ramsey, anyways, right? Pretty close, eh? All right, let's try this one!'' He flipped off a few switches and turned a knob. "Luke," he breathed heavily, "I am your father."

I laughed. "Hang on, man, let me try that shit out." I reached for the microphone, and he handed it to me.

In a British accent, I spoke into the microphone, "This is the cybercontroller. Repeat, this is the cybercontroller. Bond, James Bond. Shaken... not stirred."

The Doctor looked at me, stunned. He took the microphone from my hand, and placed it in a cupholder on the console. "Do you mean to tell me," he said, as he grabbed his hair with both hands, "that the cybercontroller has a human voice?"

"Yep," I said.

"And he has a... a British accent."

"Yep," I said. "He sounded just like... oh, who's that guy? From that TV show Remington Steele?"

"Pierce Brosnan," the Doctor said.

"Yeah, that's him. Well, anyways, that's what the guy sounded like."

The Doctor sat on the steps that lead up to the console, where only a few hours ago Katarina and I had knelt, and he had married us. "Do you know what this means?" he said.

"No, what does it mean?"

"It means..." He jumped up from the steps and ran over to the karaoke machine. "It means I didn't need to rewire this thing at all! I could have just used the TARDIS' communication systems! What a colossal waste of time!" He stated to laugh maniacally as he yanked on the wires that connected the machine to the console, tearing them out and flinging them over his shoulders.

He walked around the broken karaoke machine towards me, grinning maniacally. I got the impression that he had more teeth than a normal human, and his eyes reflected the greenish light from the console. He looked kind of scary.

"Now, then," he said, grinding his teeth, "let's stop wasting time, shall we?"

-=Chapter Thirteen=-

"So when are we doing this?" I asked the Doctor.

"There's no time like the present!" he said.

I shook my head. "Kat's still sleeping. We shouldn't leave her alone in the TARDIS."

"Well, Rick," the Doctor said, placing his hand on my robotic shoulder, "don't you think we probably should? It'll be dangerous enough for the two of us, without dragging her along. The last time we were here, she had to swim through a sea full of blood and sharks to get out. You wouldn't want to put her through that again, would you?"

"Yeah, I guess you're right. Thank goodness Rebecca saved her." I suddenly felt guilty for waiting so long to rescue Rebecca, but then I remembered what the Doctor had said about no time passing outside the TARDIS.

"Yes, well, I wouldn't be too thankful for that. She wasn't as big of a help as she claimed to be. In fact, when we arrived, I think... no, never mind, I'm probably mistaken. I'm sure she was helping... We should hurry up and rescue her!"

"Absolutely." I wondered what the Doctor suspected Rebecca of doing. I had been surprised when he revealed that Rebecca was also from the future... from my future, even. Heck, I had even been fooled by her disguise when I thought she was a dutch boy.

The Doctor pressed several buttons on the TARDIS console, and a little green LED lit up on the handle of the wireless microphone he was holding. He tapped the mic a few times and cleared his throat. Then he straightened his bow tie and cleared his throat again. Then he put the microphone down, ran his fingers through his hair (which made his hair stick up strangely), licked the tips of his index fingers and ran them along his eyebrows, adjusted his suspenders, tucked in his shirt, and then knelt down to re-tie his boots and straighten his mis-matched argyle socks (which I noticed were being held up with a pair of those little sock garters). Then he straightened up, picked up the mic, and started clearing his throat again.

"Doc..." I started to say.

"This is the cybercontroller!" he boomed into the microphone, "Attention all cyberunits! I am now uploading program alpha-one to the database. Program alpha-one is to be obeyed above all previous instructions. I repeat, program alpha-one is to be obeyed above all previous intructions." He then reached over to the console and pressed a big green button. From the speakers I heard a sound that reminded me of one of those things that they use to make computers talk to each other... I think they're called modems. Computers were never really my thing. I was almost glad that I had left the Coast Guard when I did, because all of the new cutters had computers on the bridge.

"What's that?" I asked, pointing towards on of the whining speakers.

"Program alpha-one. From this point on, the cybermen will perform a series of instructions that I have laid out. They will obey without question, or doubt, or even the faintest glimmer of individual thought. Which is one small part of what's seriously wrong with these cybermen... I only hope that I can help them. Terrible way they're being treated, in my opinion."

"Wait... what?"

"The cybermen. These cybermen are being used as slaves, by somebody who is claiming to be their cybercontroller. They have no cyberleaders, no cybercommanders, no cyberlieutenants... no chain of command whatsoever. This somebody, whoever he may be, has removed all free-thinking cybermen from the mix, and replaced them with drone units. It's terrible... simply terrible..."

"Hang on a minute... I thought these cybermen were evil? You told me they've tried to invade Earth before... and you saw what they were doing down here, with all of those pregnant women in comas!"

"That's not their usual modus operandi, Rick. Like I said, somebody is using these cybermen for their own evil plot... but not any more! Program alpha-one just took care of that!"

"Okay, then, who is this 'somebody'? You were acting like you knew who it was when you were talking to Rebecca on the beach..." Rebecca! Why were we just loitering around in the TARDIS when she needed to be rescued? "Doc..."

"Yes, Rick, don't worry, Rebecca will be fine. The cybermen... or should I say, cyberslaves... will find her for us. But I think we should hurry anyways." He pulled a lever on the console and the TARDIS doors swung open. "Shall we?"

We stepped out of the TARDIS and onto a narrow ledge. On my right, a clear, curved wall was all that separated us from the ocean. On my left, sharks swam in formation in a square pattern. The room seemed to be an almost perfect sphere of glass, with the bottom half filled with water. The ledge on which we were standing was at the equator of the globe. I looked ahead, to see if we could just follow the ledge all the way around to the flat wall with the windows, but our path was blocked by a number of huge tubes that passed seamlessly through the wall and into the ocean beyond. I turned around to look the other way, but the path on the other side of the TARDIS was similarly blocked.

"It looks like we have to swim for it," I said, as I turned to face the Doctor. His face wasn't where I expected it to be, though. He was bent over a crossbow, loading it with a plunger that was tied to a rope. "Doc?"

"Oh, I have no intention of getting wet, Rick," he said, as he hoisted the crossbow to his shoulder and took aim at the far side of the room. "My pants would shrink."

The crossbow sent the plumber's helper flying across the room, where it attached itself to the flat wall above the window with a loud "plop." I saw that the other end of the rope was attached to the light on top of the TARDIS. The Doctor reached up and tugegd on the rope, testing the strength of the plunger's hold on the wall. "Right, then, up you go," he said.

"What? You're kidding, right? That thing won't hold me!"

"You're probably right. I'd better go first." He jumped up and grabbed the rope with both hands, then started to make his way across the room, hand-over-hand. I watched the plunger as he swayed on the rope, hoping that it wouldn't slip off the wall. Somehow, miraculously, it held its grip the whole time. When he reached the far side of the room, he hung from one hand and pulled something out of his pocket. The sonic screwdriver whistled loudly, and a large section of the plastic window melted. He put the screwdriver away, and swung into the room feet first. The cybermen who had been in the room were no longer there. I suspected that the Doctor's program alpha-one had taken care of that.

"Okay, Rick, your turn," he shouted across the water.

"You sure, Doc? I'm a lot heavier than you. A lot heavier than I used to be, too."

"Oh, come on, Rick! You can trust me!" He flashed a huge smile that reminded me of a used-car salesman.

Despite my doubts, I reached up and grabbed onto the rope with my left hand. Even though I was only slightly taller than the Doctor, I had no trouble reaching it. I think my arm stretched, because I had felt it humming. I got my right hand onto the rope and realized that it was almost effortless to hang from just the left hand. I put my right hand on top of my robotic left hand and hung from the rope, with my mis-matched feet dangling over the shark tank. I wondered what would happen if I fell into the tank... would the sharks attack me? They were under cyber-control, after all. I wondered if the Doctor's program had any instructions in it for the sharks.

"Come on, Rick! Hurry it up!" the Doctor nagged.

Suddenly, I started to slide down the rope. My cyberman hand was humming, and it felt like little wheels were spinning in my palm. I actually accelerated as I moved along the rope. I hit the wall with a thud, and would have let go of the rope if my left hand hadn't been locked onto it like the machine that it was.

The Doctor grabbed my legs through the hole in the window, and my hand released the rope. I fell through the window and landed on top of the Doctor.

"Ow! Get off!" he cried, as he rolled out from under me. "Why do I always end up on the bottom of the pile?" As he picked himself up and dusted himself off, I examined the palm of my cyberman hand. It seemed exactly the same as it had before, but I knew that something had changed while I was on the rope. My new limbs had abilities beyond the obvious.

"Doc? Did you see that? It's like I was on a pulley."

"Yes, well, that's something I give the cybermen credit for. They're full of scientific innovation and curiosity. Well, usually. When they're not being used as machines."

"I thought they were machines."

"No, they're people. People with machine bodies, but people nonetheless. And as such they are entitled to just as many rights as any other sentient being... except, of course, when they're trampling on the rights of other sentient beings, which is quite often the case..." The Doctor bit his lower lip and stroked his chin. "I wonder if I've done the right thing? Well, what's done is done, and there's work to be done! Vamanos!" He strode out the open round door and into the tubular corridor. I scampered to my feet and followed.

---

"So where to now?" I asked the Doctor, as we walked quickly down the corridor. I had no idea which part of the cybermen's base we were in; every corridor looked alike. I was surprised that we hadn't seen any cybermen yet.

"Back to where we were before!" He stopped suddenly, looked around, and back-tracked to a door that we had just passed. "Does this door look familiar to you?"

"Yeah, it looks just like all the other doors. Do you have any idea where we are? I'm lost."

"Yes, it looks just like all the other doors, but look here... it's brand new. I'd wager that behind this door is the room where Katarina and Rebecca were waiting for us to rescue them. Which means that this next door must lead to the maternity ward..." He walked down to the next door and started fiddling with his sonic screwdriver. "Oh, it's no use. Rick? Could you lend me a hand?"

I walked over by him, and raised my robotic arm to smash the door. The Doctor stopped my hand and said, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, Rick. Hulk no smash. Just... touch it." I nodded and reached out my hand gingerly towards the door. With a gentle touch, the seemingly solid door transformed into a pane of translucent plastic. It then became transparent, and when I touched it again, it parted in the middle with a "pop." I held the plastic door open for the Doctor, then followed him through the gap.

When I saw what was in the room, I almost dove back out into the hallway.

The room, as before, was lined with hundreds of beds, each of which held a pregnant, naked woman. But now, standing by each of those beds, was a cyberman.

"What are they doing?" I whispered to the Doctor.

"Program alpha-one," he replied, smugly. "They'll all be waking up, soon. The drugs that keep them in their comas have been cut off." As I watched, the cybermen were disconnecting the tubes and wires that led into the women's bodies. Some, who had already finished extracting the women from the machines, were carrying their patients towards another door on the side of the room.

"Where are they taking them? And where'd that door come from?"

"They're being off-loaded to a safe location. The squids have their instructions. Come on, let's go take a look before they're all gone."

He jogged into the room, pausing at each bed he passed. I ran to catch up. "What are we looking for?"

"Oh, just looking," he panted as he jogged. "Testing a theory of mine."

"What theory? That even weird aliens like looking at naked women?"

The Doctor stopped running. "Rick! I'm insulted! I'm not getting any sort of thrill out of this! This is very important!"

At that moment, a cyberman walked past him, carrying an especially attractive young woman. "Oh, my word..." the Doctor said, as he adjusted his bowtie. He cleared his throat. "As I was saying, this is very important! I'm looking to see if Rebecca is here!"

"Yeah, sure, Doc." I winked at him. "Of course, if she is here, she'll be naked."

"Yes, well..." he cleared his throat again and wiped some imaginary sweat from his brow. "I hadn't thought of that. No, really, I hadn't. This wasn't some ploy to try to catch her with her knickers down. In fact, I wasn't expecting to find her here at all."

"Okay, Doc. Where do you expect to find her?"

"Well, if we're lucky, she's with me. Not me, me, but a different me. A very different me. Actually, no, that wouldn't be lucky at all, because that would mean that someday I turn into the kind of evil low-life scum who would do this." He waved his hand at the room and the hundreds of women. "No, it's more likely that she's with somebody else entirely, somebody unspeakably evil, who also has a TARDIS... which is a very short list of people, none of whom I get along with very well. And that would be very, very unlucky for us. But not as unlucky as the first possibility."

"Come again?"

"She said he had a TARDIS. I think she was trying to make me think that she's a future companion of mine, but if that was the case, why lie to me? Why would she have this?" He pulled something from his pocket that I immediately recognized. It looked like two tiny gas cylinders connected to a rubber mouthpiece.

"Miniature rebreather."

"Precisely." He gave me a funny look. "How do you know what this is? It wasn't in common use in your time. Come to think of it, it's not from Rebecca's century, either."

"Ever see Thunderball?" It was one of my favorite James Bond movies. I loved all the underwater scenes.

"Actually, I have it on Blu-Ray." The Doctor weaved his way through the throng of lady-laden cybermen back towards the corridor. I wondered what the heck "blue ray" was, for a moment, and then hurried to catch up with him.

---

As we walked down the bending corridor, two cybermen came into view. They were both of the same variety as Ramsey; completely covered in metal, with smaller chest units and three-fingered hands.

I was expecting them to ignore us, like the ones in the Procreation Chamber, but as soon as they saw us, they raised their weapons and started firing. Some kind of energy bolt hit me in the left arm, and I was knocked to the floor.

I heard the whistle of the sonic screwdriver, and the next thing I knew, I was being dragged across the floor and through a doorway. The Doctor slammed the door behind us and knelt by my side.

"Rick! Rick! Speak to me! Are you all right?"

"Yeah, I'm okay. What happened?" I tried to sit up, but discovered that I couldn't move. "Doc?"

The Doctor stood up and started to pace the room. "Those cybermen must be separately controlled... either that, or we've finally found the free-thinking cybermen that I was surprised not to find, in which case I'm both relieved and terrified at the same time, which is not an entirely pleasant combination."

"Doc?" I said again. This time, he could hear the fear in my voice.

"What is it, Rick? What's wrong?" He knelt back down by me.

"I can't move. I'm.. I'm paralyzed." My first thought was of Katarina... how would she cope? She was about to become a widow on her wedding day. Even if I survived this, how would she be able to care for me?

"Rick, you're not paralyzed." The Doctor was waving his sonic screwdriver over me, as it made various beeps. "Try wiggling the toes on your right foot."

I wiggled my toes inside my boot. They worked perfectly.

"Now move your right arm." I did, and once again, it worked perfectly. But I still couldn't sit up or move my torso at all. "Now try to move your left arm," he said. The lump of metal laid there, motionless.

"Oh, shit," I said, as I realized what was happening. I was half machine... and machines can break down. That blast from the cyberman's gun must have destroyed my robotic components... which meant that I was as good as dead, anyways. "Doc? Tell Katarina..."

"Shut up, Rick. I'm not letting you die on me. I'm going to roll you over now." He rolled me onto my front, and I heard the sonic screwdriver again. I suddenly got a terrible itch in my left shoulder, which quickly became unbearable. I groaned a bit, and the Doctor changed the pitch of the sonic. The itch became a tickle that moved from my shoulder to my armpit and down my side.

I had to clench my jaw to resist the urge to giggle, but eventually lost the battle of willpower. I started to laugh uncontrollably, and squirmed away from the Doctor. "Oh... my... God... that... fucking... tickles!" I gasped out, between fits of laughter. I sat up without any problem, and faced the Doctor.

"It tickles?" the Doctor said. He pointed the sonic screwdriver at himself, and pulled the slider down. He laughed loudly. "It does tickle! Oh, I'm going to have to remember this setting." He touched a couple of tiny buttons on the screwdriver and dropped it into his pocket, then patted the pocket to be double-sure. He noticed my smirk, and stood up quickly. "There's a creature on Bellitarius Minor that has the most delicious milk in the entire galaxy, but you have to tickle it to get it. Unfortunately, you have to be within arm's reach to tickle it... and if you get within its arm's reach, it'll rip your head off... and it has very long arms."

"Well, then, how does anybody ever get its milk?"

"Ten-metre pole with a feather on the end, of course." He took stock of the room we were in. "You know, I don't think we've been in this part of the cyberman complex before."

I looked around. The room looked exactly like the room in which I had been given my new limbs, and the room in which we had found Ramsey. "How can you tell? All these rooms look alike."

"The numbers over the door."

I looked at the top of the door, and saw a bunch of circles and a line. "That's a number?"

"Well, yes. The big circle represents twenty-seven, the medium-sized circle is eighteen, and the cluster of little circles are all threes. And the one that looks like a one is a one, of course."

"So we're in room... fifty-five?"

"Very good, Rick! Very, very good!" He beamed with pride. "This is the lowest number I've seen so far. Which means that we're going the right direction, if we want to find the cybercontroller, whoever he is." He pulled a notebook out of one of his coat pockets, and flipped through it. "Here, look at this rough map I've drawn. We're... here, right between the Procreation Chamber and the blank part of the map."

The map was a series of incomprehensible scribbles. I handed it back to him, shaking my head. "Just tell me which way to go," I said. "So which way are we going?"

"Well, out into the hall, through those two cybermen, and make a right at the next junction. That should get us to the command centre. Unless, of course, you can find a door in that wall over there."

I noticed that I was sitting near a cabinet, and decided to look inside. I wasn't too surprised to find surgical instruments; after all, this was one of the many identical cyberman conversion rooms. I picked up a bone saw with my right hand. It was heavy, and I couldn't find any way to turn it on. I put it in my left hand, and it whirred to life. "Somebody order a door?" I said, as I approached the wall. I squinted as the saw bit into the wall, and bits of rigid plastic flew from the gash. Before long, I had managed to cut the outline of a man into the wall. I kicked the wall-man in his imaginary nuts, and the section of wall fell out into the adjacent room. The Doctor immediately stepped through the hole.

I put down the bone saw and followed him, but then almost tripped over him. He was standing motionless, just inside the room, transfixed by what he saw.

In the center of the room, four cybermen were seated around a table.

Their heads were missing.

---

-=Chapter Fourteen=-

"Doc? Where're their heads?"

"Probably in the next room. Come on!" The Doctor waved me towards a door at the far end of the room as he barely broke his stride.

As we passed by the headless cybermen, I could see that they appeared to have been decapitated in the middle of a game of poker. I smiled a bit when I noticed the Ace of Spades tucked into the metallic sleeve of one of the cybercorpses. "Hey, Doc! Look! Even cybermen cheat at cards!"

"Cybermen don't play poker," he called over his shoulder. "But they do have a game which is vaguely similar to Old Maid. Now come along, Rick!"

I pivoted on my heels to scope out the room before leaving it. The room was completely empty except for the table and chairs and headless cybermen. Above the door (the proper door, which we hadn't used) was a small circle. "Small circle... that's 3, right?" The Doctor didn't answer me. He was already in the next room.

I jogged a bit to catch up with him, amazed again at how easily I could run with my new leg after only about a day of practice. When I had first been fitted with a prosthetic leg, it had been several months before I could even keep my balance without a crutch. Holding the crutch with a rubber hand had been even more challenging. But now I had an arm and a leg that could do things I had never imagined.

I found the Doctor standing in the middle of the room. The walls of the room were lined with a variety of huge electronic devices, with flashing lights everywhere. Some of the machines looked like they had been jury-rigged together. On a countertop between two large machines there sat three of the missing cybermen heads, with a number of cables and wires running from the heads to the machines. Interestingly, each one was of a slightly different style. One of them looked just like Ramsey's head, with short handles and a low brow. The middle one, which was covered in cloth and had the huge headlamp, had a rat's nest of red wires connected to each side. The third has another cloth-faced cyberman, but it was missing its headlamp and handles. It also looked more bulbous than the other cloth head, like its brains were larger.

"Look, Doc! It's Larry, Curly, and Moe!" I smirked and pointed at each of the heads as I named them.

"I guess that would make this fellow Shemp," he said, as he faced a fourth head, on the other side of the room. The cyberman head he had found was significantly different from the others. It was shaped like a bullet, and through its translucent, pointed dome I could see a living brain.

"Ewww... what kind of cyberman is that?"

"This, my friend, is the cybercontroller. The real cybercontroller, I should say. I've tangled with his kind before."

"So who are these guys?"

"Cyberleader, cyberlieutenant, chief cybertechnician. So long as those three are under direct computer control, whoever controls the computer controls all of the cybermen."

"And you control the computer."

"Yes, I suppose I do. Which makes me wonder who was controlling those cybermen in the corridor."

"What about that guy? The cybercontroller?"

The Doctor bent down to look the disembodied head in its electronic eyes. "Him? He's in no position to control anything right now. They had to fool him; he's uncontrollable. Also, he has a direct uplink to his superiors on Mondas. Anybody tampers with him, and a million million cybermen descend on this planet."

"So what's that machine doing to him, if not controlling him?" I pointed to what looked like a huge stereo system. A single, thick cable ran from the back of the cybercontroller's head and into the machine.

"Ah, well... have you ever read Descartes? He maintained that even if all of reality was an illusion, he knew one thing for certain: Cogito Ergo Sum. I think, therefore, I am." The Doctor tapped the cybercontroller on its sloped forehead.

"What's that got to do with it?"

"This machine is providing him with an illusion of reality. So far as he's concerned, whatever mission he's supposed to be leading is progressing smoothly and indefinitely." He stroked the cybercontroller's metal face sympathetically. "Poor fellow."

"While the reality is..."

"Coup d'etat. Quite literally." The Doctor straightened up and looked around. "Two!"

"Eh?"

"The room number. You know, after this is all over, I should write a subroutine into their program, and get the cybermen to put the room numbers on the outside of the rooms, instead of on the inside."

I laughed a bit. "It does make a hell of a lot more sense, if you ask me. So what now? Do we see what's behind Door Number One?" I pointed at the door on the wall opposite to the one by which we had entered.

"Actually, I think it's time to make a deal." The Doctor reached behind the cybercontroller's head and grabbed the cable.

"Doc! Wait! Remember what you said about a million million cybermen?"

"Oh, I think we can avert that. I'm sure he'll be perfectly logical about the situation. I don't expect gratitude, but I'm certain that he'll understand that I'm trying to help him." He gave the cable a good yank, but it held fast. "Rick? I could use a hand. Left, specifically."

I stepped over by him and the head. "I'm still not sure about this," I said.

"Trust me, Rick," the Doctor said. "This is the only way we can free these cybermen from slavery. Independent, they are a force of evil... but a reasonably manageable one. If a Time Lord is using them as a slave army, they could be unstoppable. Whoever it is who managed to take over this cyberman expedition could easily do it again, and again, and possibly usurp control of all cybermen in the galaxy." He paused and rubbed his eyebrows. "And that's something I can never allow happen... especially if it is one of my own kind behind it. I have certain... responsibilities." He looked uncomfortable.

"Okay, Doc, so long as you know what you're doing." I latched my left hand onto the cable. With a mere thought, my hand severed the cable neatly.

My head was filled with screaming, and I collapsed onto the floor.

---

After a few moments, the screams stopped. In my right ear, I could barely hear the Doctor's worried voice. In my left ear, I heard static. Then, two concise words boomed in my ear: "STATUS REPORT."

Behind my closed eyelids, I suddenly found myself recalling everything that had happened since I woke up in that cyberman conversion room, in vivid detail, and on fast-forward. After a moment, I realized what was happening: I was giving my status report. The cybermen must have done something to my brain as well as to my body, even though the Doctor hadn't been able to detect it when he did his "vulcan mind-meld" thing.

There were some things I didn't think the cybercontroller needed to know about, but there was nothing I could do to stem the flow of information. Everything I had seen and heard and done in the past several hours was now known to the cybercontroller. Everything.

As I re-experienced the moment of cutting the cable, the memories stopped. I felt the cybercontroller's hold on my mind loosen. My hearing returned to normal, and I could hear the Doctor's sonic screwdriver making various noises.

"That should take care of the uplink," he said, as he put the screwdriver back in his pocket. "I don't mind this one cybercontroller knowing about me, but it's a bit too early for Central Cybercommand to learn of my existence." He glanced down at me, where I lay on the floor. "Are you okay, Rick? I'm sorry, I had no idea this would happen. Well, I thought it was a slight possibility, but I couldn't tell you that now, could I? Well, I can tell you now, but it would have made things more difficult if I had told you earlier."

"DOCTORRRR," the cybercontroller's head spoke.

I scurried backwards across the floor until my back was up against the computer banks on the opposite side of the room. "Holy shit!" I exclaimed. "It's alive!" It was one thing to hear its voice inside my head, but actually hearing it come from the little coin-slot that served for a mouth was entirely different.

"Of course it's alive, Rick!" He turned to the head. "Hello? You must be the Head Man around here. I'm the Doctor; pleased to make your acquaintance!" He held his hand out, then awkwardly stuck it in his pocket when he remembered that there was no hand to shake.

"DOCTORRRR YOU HAVVVVE DISCONNNNNECTED MMMMEEE FRRRROMMM CENTRRRALLL CYBERRRR COMMANNNNND. YOU MMMMUST RRRRESTORRRE THE LINNNNNK."

"Actually, my dear friend, what we have here is more of a local problem. No need to involve Mondas in this affair, am I right? Of course I'm right. You can handle this on your own, you've a good head on your... well, anyways, you're a smart egg, an independent soul. You don't need CyberDaddy to hold your hand while you sort things out, do you? That's a good chap."

"PRRROGRRRAMMMM ALLLPHAAA-ONNE HASSS BEEEEENNN TERRRRMINNNNATED."

"Hey, hang on now! I was just trying to clean up the mess that your people... yes, your people, made here. I'm not about to reverse all of those pregnancies, but I'm certainly not going to let any of those babies be born into cybermen shells."

"WEEEE DOOO NNNOT NEEEEED THE WOMMMMMENNNNN ORRR THEIRRR OFFSPRINNNNG. HUUUMANNNS ARRRRE TOOOOO DIFFFFICULLLLLT TOOOO CONNNNNTROLLLL. THEYYYY WILLLL BE RRRETURRRNED TO THEEE HUUMANNNN SETTLLLEMMMENT LOCAAAAAATED ONNN THE ISLANNNND."

"Ah, yes, wonderful! Well, I suspect most of them came from there anyways, or were heading for there when they were abducted..."

"Where?" I was confused.

"Libertania. A colony founded by pirates who had no other land to call home. The original 'Land of the Free and Home of the Brave,' so to speak."

"Never heard of it."

"Really? It was destroyed by natives around 1700 or so... wait, that's only a few years from now!" He turned back to the disembodied cybercontroller. "You can't send them there! It isn't safe!"

"THERRRE ISSS NNNO OTHERRRR PLAAAACE TOOO SENNNND THEMMMM. THEYYYY WILLLL BE RRRRELOCAAAATED TOOO THEEEE SETTLLLLEMENNNNT. WEEEE WILLLLL RRRESUMMME OURRRR MISSIONNNN TOOOO TELOSSSS."

"Telos? Of course! That's where I've met you before!" The Doctor was delighted, and patted the cybercontroller's head in a friendly manner. "Well, I wouldn't want to interfere with your mission, so we'll just be on our way..." The Doctor turned towards the door that led to room number one.

"STOPPPP!"

"Can't tarry, ta-ta!" The Doctor waved at me to follow him, as he whipped out his sonic screwdriver again and pointed it at the door. It opened immediately for him, and we stepped through.

With another whistle of the screwdriver, the door sealed itself again. I turned around to face the room.

The room was lined with various computers and workstations, like the previous room, but in the center of the room there was a white wrought-iron patio set, complete with a white umbrella. In one of the chairs, facing us across the table, sat a fat, short, balding man, holding some sort of futuristic-looking ray gun. The gun was pointed at us.

"Hello, Doctor," he said. "What are you doing here?"

-=Chapter Fifteen=-

"Who the blazes are you?" the Doctor said, angrily. "How do you know who I am?"

"Why, Doctor! You've forgotten me? And here I thought that the only reason you came here was to have a visit." The man smiled greasily, and gestured towards the chair opposite him at the patio table. "Come, sit. Perhaps your friend would be so kind as to fetch us some tea? Hmmm?"

The Doctor sat down. "Sit down, Rick," he said. "I said, sit down!"

I sat down, between him and the stranger with the gun, facing the door. On a wall near the door, I noticed a bank of television screens. Each one displayed a different part of the cyberman complex. On one of the screens, I saw the squids leaving, with plastic bubbles full of pregnant, naked women. I hoped they were on their way to safety. On another screen, I saw row after row of the metal-headed cybermen, marching down a corridor with guns in hand. I hoped they weren't on their way here.

"No tea?" the stranger asked. He was still pointing the gun at the Doctor.

"No tea," the Doctor said. He leaned forward across the table, until the barrel of the gun was between his eyes. "I asked you your name, sir. Now I demand that you answer me!"

"You demand? You... demand?" The man chuckled, "By what authority do you make demands of me, Doctor? As President of the High Council of Gallifrey? There is no more Gallifrey! There is no more High Council! And you haven't been its President for hundreds of years, anyways!" He laughed out loud, "I was there, at your trial, Doctor! I was prepared to vote with the Valeyard, and send you to your death! But you weaseled your way out of it that time, with the help of your miscreant ally The Master!"

"Ally?" The Doctor sat up straight, and looked offended. "Well, I never..."

"You never? Tell me, Doctor, what did happen to Gallifrey?"

The Doctor swallowed loudly, and looked at his hands, which he folded on the table in front of him. After a moment, he looked up at the man with the gun. "I did what had to be done."

"What did you do?"

"I destroyed the Daleks, that's what I did! If they had conquered Gallifrey... the entire Universe, all of Space and Time, would be theirs for the taking!"

"So you blew it up." The stranger leveled the ray gun at the Doctor's head. "Tell me why I shouldn't execute you, right now? It's genocide all over again, Doctor! Destroying entire races because you see them as evil... and you saw us as evil, too, didn't you, Doctor? I remember you saying something at your trial, something like 'In all my travelling throughout the universe I have battled against evil, against power-mad conspirators. I should have stayed here. The oldest civilisation: decadent, degenerate, and rotten to the core. Power-mad conspirators, Daleks, Sontarans, Cybermen, they're still in the nursery compared to us. Ten million years of absolute power. That's what it takes to be really corrupt.'"

"Oh, that's very good. Almost verbatim." The Doctor straightened his bowtie. The gun didn't waver.

"It is verbatim. I have an excellent memory. Unlike you, Doctor! Would you have me believe that you still don't remember who I am? Perhaps you'd like a hint?"

The Doctor put his fingers to his lips. "No, no, it's on the tip of my tongue. You've regenerated since we last met, haven't you? A few times? Maybe half a dozen?"

"Not as many times as you, Doctor. What are you on now, your tenth life? Eleventh? This is only my seventh body. But when we first met, we were both in our original forms. Do you remember now?"

The Doctor was about to say something when the door opened with a loud 'pop!'. The two cybermen from the hallway came through it, carrying the TARDIS between them on a pallet. Somehow, they had altered the size of the doorway to accommodate their bulky cargo. I suspected that the walls and doors were actually just one big piece of plastic, and that the doors could even be moved around or added where needed. I wondered if I would ever figure out how to do that.

The Doctor started babbling about how it was his TARDIS and how nobody had the right to move it without his permission... he was just making noise and stalling for time. I was too busy worrying about Katarina. Was she still inside the TARDIS? Did she even know that it had been moved? I realized that we had left her alone in the TARDIS without even leaving a note to tell her where we had gone. What if she had gone out looking for us? What if the cybermen had found her when they went to get the TARDIS? I looked at the man with the gun. He had taken his eyes off the Doctor, and the gun was drooping a bit. Now was my chance.

With lightning speed, my left arm reached out and grabbed the gun by the barrel. With my right hand, I grabbed his left arm and bent it behind his back. The man folded over the table like a rag doll, and I pushed his face down onto the glass surface. He was still holding the gun, but I tightened my grip on the barrel until it bent sideways. He let go of the gun, then, and I slid it across the table and onto one of the chairs.

The two cybermen finished placing the TARDIS on the far side of the room, and turned to face us. The Doctor scurried around the table to stand between them and me. "Don't worry, Rick, I'll deal with these two!" He reached in his pocket and pulled out two of the gold coins.

The cybermen stood, motionless and silent. The man tried to wrestle free from my grasp, but stopped struggling when he realized that nobody could ever escape the clutches of my cyber-arm.

"Uh, Doctor?" I said.

"Yes, Rick?" He was ready to pounce, with a coin in each hand. The cybermen continued to do nothing.

"Maybe they're not programmed to attack you. Maybe they're just... you know, delivering the TARDIS. Maybe they expect a tip."

The Doctor stood straight, looked at me, and smiled. Then he turned his smile to the cybermen. "Good job! Thank you very much! You may go now!" He waggled his long fingers at them in a shoo-ing gesture.

The cybermen continued to do nothing.

"I guess they're awaiting orders... but the cybercontroller should have full control of his cybermen, now..."

"What?" said the man under my grasp. I pushed his face into the table a little bit harder, and he groaned.

"Oh, perhaps I should have mentioned... right before we came in, Rick and I disconnected the cybercontroller's head from the virtual simulation matrix. He's back in charge, and I'll bet he's not happy with you. But why, then would he bring us my TARDIS?"

The man croaked out the words, "I told them to."

"You told them to?" The Doctor turned to look at me and the man, and seemed surprised to see that I was still holding him down against the table. "Rick! Let him up! He's harmless, now."

"If you say so, Doc." I released the man. He backed away from me, scowling indignantly as he straightened the folds of his black robe. That was the first time I noticed what he was wearing. It looked like some sort of monk's robe, with a hood and a rope belt.

"Now what were you saying..." The Doctor looked at the robe, then at the man's face, then back down at the robe. "Oh, no. No, no, no. It isn't."

"Oh, yes, Doctor! You remember me, now?" The man smiled at the Doctor, and the Doctor smiled back.

"You're that Monk! What was your name again? Maurice? Mobius? Mary?"

"Mortimus!"

"Ah, yes! Mortimus! I didn't recognize you, at first. You've lost... ummm...." The Doctor ran his fingers through his hair. "You've lost... weight! Yes, that's it."

"And you've changed quite a bit over the centuries, as well. But I recognized you."

"Ah, yes, well... I am rather spectacular, aren't I? Hard to overlook little old me." The Doctor grabbed the lapels of his coat and beamed at Mortimus. "So what was that you were saying about you controlling these particular cybermen? Hmmm?"

"Oh, Doctor! You underestimate me! I control all of the cybermen of this model. These are the cybermen that I built. They have no uplink to the cybercontroller."

"You built them?"

"Using the resources that the cybermen intended to use to conquer Telos. And there were plenty of humans available to me, for conversion... the colony on the island was due to be destroyed by the natives in a few years, anyways. But even their primitive minds were too difficult to reprogram, which is when I decided to simply... grow my own humans. But you've gone and ruined it all, haven't you?"

"And how many men did you kill, in order to turn them into your slaves? How many women did you abduct for your sick plans?"

"Not nearly enough, for my ambitions." Mortimus smiled as he reached under his robe. "And now, Doctor, for the crimes of genocide, meddling in the affairs of other species, and for being an insufferable nuisance, I sentence you to death!" He pulled out a small box with buttons and lights from beneath his robe, and pressed a button. The two cybermen advanced on the Doctor, threateningly.

I tried to snatch the box away from Mortimus, but he hopped away from me with a whoop and a holler, then bounded through the door. I could hear the cybercontroller's head yelling orders to his cybermen.

On the television screens near the door, I saw what had happened to the army of metal-headed cybermen. They were engaged in battle with the cloth-headed cybermen. I saw explosions and flashes of light and cybernetic body parts flying everywhere. On one screen, the camera was obscured by the head of a dead cyberman. Its lifeless eye stared into the camera lens, as some sort of black fluid dripped from where its head-handle was supposed to be.

I heard wheezing noises behind me, and turned to see the Doctor standing over the bodies of the two cybermen. He smiled at me, and held his two gold coins aloft. "Well, they wanted a tip, didn't they?" Suddenly, he dropped his smile. "Where's the Monk?"

"He got away," I said. I shrugged, in apology.

"He got away?" The Doctor ran across the room, and started fumbling in his pocket for the sonic screwdriver to open the door. "Oh, blast! Rick! Door!"

I reached over to the door, and touched it with my left hand. It opened with a 'pop!' and the Doctor stepped through it, quickly.

Just as quickly, he stepped backwards through the door. "Close it! Close it! Lock it!"

I closed the door. "I don't know how to lock it!"

The Doctor pulled out his sonic screwdriver. "I got it." The screwdriver whistled, and the door vanished completely.

"So what was that about?"

"Ah, this!" He pointed at the television screens. "Civil War, looks like. And if you'll look here..." he tapped one of the screens, "you can see what's going on in the next room."

I looked at the screen he had indicated. Two of the cloth-headed cybermen had brought in the chair that held the cybercontroller's body, and were re-attaching the head. Two more cybermen were standing where the door had been, watching the wall.

"Looks like we're not going out that way," I said.

"Apparently not. Fortunately for us, the cybermen were kind enough to provide us with valet service!" He gestured towards the TARDIS. "We should probably go inside. We'll be safe in there, no matter what happens."

"Yeah, we should make sure Katarina's okay." We both took a few steps towards the TARDIS, when the door opened and Katarina sidled out. "Kat!" I called out, in joy. The Doctor and I stopped dead in our tracks, though, when Rebecca followed her out of the TARDIS, pointing another one of those ray guns at Katarina's head.

"Don't you fucking move," Rebecca said. She had changed into a tight-fitting leather outfit, and actually looked like a woman. "Sit down, both of you. Hands on the table. You, too, sweetheart!" She pushed Katarina towards the patio table, and waved the gun around. "You heard me! Sit!"

I helped Katarina up from the floor as the Doctor sat down at the table. Kat and I sat down in two of the other chairs. Rebecca grabbed the fourth chair, and pulled it across the room. She spun it around and sat on it backwards, straddling it. She rested the gun on top of the chair-back, and sneered evilly.

"We're all just going to sit here, and wait for Morty to get back. Once the cloth-heads are back under control, he'll know what to do with you."

"Will he really, now?" the Doctor said. "Don't you know anything? Or does he keep it all secret from you? For example, do you even know what kind of gun that is that you're pointing at us?"

"What? It's a gun, that's all you need to know. And it's pointed at you."

"Yes, well, it's not the first time I've had a gun pointed at me, you know. But did you know that that particular gun fires a concentrated bolt of photons?"

She glanced down at her gun, then back at the Doctor. "I don't see what that has to do with anything."

"Well, it means that the barrel of the gun is actually a fibre-optic cable."

"And what does that mean?"

"It means that it can still be fired, even if the barrel is bent at a ninety-degree angle!" The Doctor suddenly produced the gun that I had bent in half, and fired it sideways at Rebecca. Her gun exploded with a flash of bright light, and she screamed, falling backwards off the chair.

---

-=Chapter 16=-

Rebecca pouted as the Doctor finished tying her to the chair. "There you are, nice and snug!" he said, as he tightened the last knot.

"You shot my gun," she said, in a childish voice. "I loved that gun. It was so cool."

"Guns are nasty things," the Doctor chided her. "They deserve to be shot." He pulled out his sonic screwdriver, and waved it at her while it gave off a variety of whistles.

"Hah!" she chortled, "But you need a gun to shoot a gun!"

"Touche'," replied the Doctor, as he frowned at the screwdriver.

"Avant garde." She smiled back at him.

"I think you mean 'en garde'." He put the sonic screwdriver back in his pocket and furled his brow at her.

"Whatever." She shook her head and rolled her eyes. "I don't know Latin."

"It's French."

"Same difference." She tapped her foot impatiently. "So are you just going to keep me tied up until Morty gets back with his army of cybermen to kill you all? Or is this a gang-rape kind of situation? Because, if so, could you let the black guy go first? He's kind of cute." She winked and blew me a kiss with her lips.

Katarina stood up and walked over to stand in front of Rebecca. Rebecca pretended to ignore her and kept giving me exaggerated come-hither looks until Kat stood between her and me. Then, with a dramatic display of disrespect, she turned her face up towards Katarina.

"Yes? Can I help you?" She gave Katarina a condescending look.

Katarina slapped her across the face so hard, the sound echoed off the walls.

Rebecca looked back up at Katarina, the red imprint of a hand blazing on her cheek. "That the best you got, pirate wench?"

"That was for looking at my husband. Do it again, and I'll scratch out your eyes."

Rebecca glared up at her. "Fuck you."

Katarina slapped her again.

Rebecca glared up at her again. "Fuck you sideways."

"That's enough!" shouted the Doctor, as he stepped between the two women. "Neutral corners, please!" Katarina retreated, obediently. Rebecca stuck her tongue out at her and made a nasty face.

"Now, we have a very serious situation here, and there's no time for petty squabbles," the Doctor said. "Tell me, Rebecca, how many cybermen does Mortimus have under his control?"

She smiled, confidently. "Over a hundred. They'll make short work of those old cloth-heads you turned against us. And then, they'll come... for you."

"Oh, I wouldn't be so sure, if I were you." The Doctor pointed at the bank of video screens. "Looks to me like the cybertechnicians have your number... or did you forget who designed your little tin soldiers for you?"

Rebecca scoffed, and strained against the ropes. "Our cybermen outnumber them ten-to-one! So they know our weaknesses... we know theirs! They're controlled by a mechanized twit!" She beamed with pride, "Our General is the Great and Mighty Mortimus, Lord of Time and Space! We can never be defeated!" She tried in vain to loosen her bonds, but they held fast.

"Oh, you really drank the Kool-Aid, didn't you?" The Doctor circled her with his finger on his lips. "Where'd you meet up with the old Monk, anyways? Hmmm?"

She stopped writhing in her chair, then closed her eys and smiled. "Oh, he's not a monk... he simply prefers robes." She giggled, then looked a bit puzzled. "He said he's never been able to find a comfortable pair of trousers."

"Taking on the cybermen like this," the Doctor drew in his breath and raised his eyebrows, "I don't wonder why."

I laughed loudly, and the Doctor shot me a look. "What?" he said.

"That was funny!"

"It was?"

"Yes!"

"Really?"

"Yes!"

The Doctor rolled his eyes. "Humans. They always laugh at the testicle jokes. That, and farts."

He shook his head in dismay as Katarina, Rebecca, and I started laughing uncontrollably.

---

"Things aren't looking too good for your friend," the Doctor said, as he stood by the video screens. He looked pointedly at Rebecca, who was sulking in her chair. "Poor old Monk, he never could get anything right, could he? Oh, wait, hang on... was that a... a cybermat! Oh, splendid! He can use those to breach their defenses... oh, no! No! Monk!" He smacked himself in the forehead, and slowly dragged his hand across his face. "Why, why... Why, when you have a deadly infiltration tool like a cybermat, would you use it as an automated repair drone? Hmmm? He'll lose fifty cybermats for every cyberman he restores, and then he'll just lose the cyberman again. How does he live with himself, being that dumb?"

"Sounds like me, when I'm watching football," I joked to Katarina. She didn't get it. "So... Doctor? What's the plan, man?"

"Oh, I don't have a plan. Just waiting to see how this plays out."

"Yeah, well, the way I figure it..."

"I don't want to hear it."

"I was just going to say..."

"Nope, not listening." He turned back to the video screens and started humming.

I raised my voice, "I was just going to say that maybe we should go now!"

"Go? Oh, no, no, no, no, no. This is just getting interesting!" He pretended to take great notice of some small detail in the combat taking place on the video screens. "Oh, look... the cybercontroller's made a vital mistake, there. See?"

"No, I don't see..."

"No, you wouldn't, would you? Never mind." The Doctor waved the back of his hand at me, impatiently.

"Doc, give me one good reason why we shouldn't just leave, and let the cybermen deal with Mortimus. We already know that they have no interest in Earth..."

"Well, not yet."

"Okay, they have no interest in the Earth, yet. As soon as they finish destroying the Monk's bastard army, they're off to wherever... and good riddance!"

"You want one good reason to stay?"

"Yeah."

"Her." The Doctor pointed at Rebecca. "She shouldn't even be here. Mortimus took her out of her time and brought her to this place. She's not supposed to die here."

"Huh? Well, what about me? You took me out of my time. Can I die here?"

"Rick, Rick, Rick..." He shrugged, "Yes, of course you can die here. So can she. So can I, for that matter. But I've learned that it's wise to obey the timelines, and only change the things that should be changed. Her fate is something I have no wish to deny her." He looked around me at Rebecca, then smiled and waved. He turned back to me, leaned in, and whispered, "Brain cancer. I give her two months, tops."

I shook my head. "I don't get it. How do you know what should and shouldn't be changed? Why not let her die here? Hell, what gives you the right to decide?"

He closed his eyes and swallowed, then opened them again and locked his gaze on mine. "I'm the Doctor, that's what. Maintenance Man of the Universe. I just fix what's broken. And she deserves the long, drawn-out agony that awaits her."

I blinked first, then looked down. "Well, this shit is pretty broken. How you gonna fix it?"

The Doctor smiled, and put his arm around my shoulders. "Have faith, Rick! Everything will work out for the best! But do you know what I'm wondering?"

"What?"

"Where the blazes is that Monk? I've been staring at these video screens for hours..."

"Twenty minutes."

"All right, twenty minutes. I've been staring at these video screens... twenty minutes? Are you sure?"

I tapped my left wrist, and a small digital clock popped out of it, right where the face of a watch would be. "It's probably set to Cyberman Central Time, but I'll bet it's accurate."

"Oh, look at that! You've got a watch! Isn't that handy!" He smiled, then looked back at the video screens, the smile vanishing instantly. "What I'm wondering is: Where's the Monk? He's not here, or here, or here..." He pointed at various screens, "He's not anywhere! It's like he's hiding!"

"Well, of course he's hiding."

The Doctor looked back at me and frowned pensively. "Well, yes, I suppose that would be in his nature. He never seemed to type to lead a battle from the front lines. So where's he hiding?" He turned back to the video screens.

As if in answer to his question, the room filled with the sound of a TARDIS materializing. Kat ran to me, and hid in my arms. The Doctor stood with his arms wide-stretched and a matching grin.

Rebecca looked around her, in a panic. "Morty? Morty! Morty, what's happening? What are you doing? MORTYYYYYY!!!!!!" Her yell was muffled by the TARDIS that materialized around her.

I had been expecting it to look like a Police Box, but of course it didn't. It was about the same height and width as the Doctor's TARDIS, but it was simply a white box. On the front of it (at least, I assumed it was the front) there was a round metal door, just like the doors to all of the rooms in the cybermen ship.

Although the door looked like a typical cyberman door, it opened in the middle, and the doors swung inward, just like the doors on the Doctor's TARDIS. As the doors opened, I could hear Rebecca's voice coming from inside. She was still yelling.

Mortimus the Monk stepped out of his TARDIS, shaking his head and holding his hands over his ears. "Oh, whatever was I thinking..." He stopped in mid-stride when he noticed the three of us were in the room. "Oh, hello!" He paused for a moment, then said, "Good-bye!" and quickly dove back into his TARDIS.

"Not so fast!" the Doctor yelled, as he whipped out the sonic screwdriver. Pointing the screaming device at the white box, he ran across the room. The Monk's TARDIS let out a faint groan, and tried to dematerialize, but failed. It tried again, and croaked out two groans, but then let out a noise like the lower decks of a ship in a storm.

"Ha! Got you, now!" the Doctor said, as he pocketed the screwdriver. With a firm kick, he opened the doors of the Monk's TARDIS, and stepped inside. A moment later, he poked his head back out, and waved at me and Katarina. "Well, come on! You don't want to miss this!"

Kat and I hurried across the room and into the Monk's TARDIS.

---

It was, of course, larger on the inside. It was also completely white, and furnished with a variety of antiques, and a large red piano. In the center of the room sat Rebecca, still tied to her white wrought-iron patio chair, and struggling to get free. Slightly off-center was a control console, which was almost completely unlike the Doctor's control console, but was still recognizable as one. Unlike the Doctor's console, this control console was clean and shiny, and all of the controls were color-coordinated. However, at that moment, one of the console's six sides was spewing smoke, and the Monk was hopping around it, batting at it with a towel.

"Here, let me help you with that," the Doctor offered, affably, as he took off his jacket. I could see that he was wearing both suspenders and a belt, and he had garters on his sleeves. He stepped between the Monk and the console, and quickly snuffed the fire (somehow) with his wool blazer.

"Oh, thank you! Thank you!" said Mortimus, clearly relieved. He stumbled backwards into a large, gold-encrusted chair that was positioned conveniently close to the console. He patted his bald head with the towel, and looked gratefully towards the Doctor. It took him half a second to snap back to reality, and then he leapt from the chair, indignant. "How dare you interfere with the function of my TARDIS! Do you realize what you've done?"

"Well, that's appreciation for you! I guess I'll be on my way, then. Good day, sir!" The Doctor picked up his surprisingly undamaged coat from on top of the console, and waved the smoke out of it before twirling it around and onto his shoulders. He did so in a very dramatic fashion, specifically designed to distract the Monk, so that Mortimus wouldn't notice tht he had removed some kind of doohickey from the console. The Doctor slipped the doohickey into his jacket pocket as his other arm was slipping into its sleeve. He did it so smoothly, I almost didn't see him do it.

The Doctor started walking towards the door. "Come along Richard, Katarina. We're not appreciated around here."

"Not so fast, Doctor!" The Monk touched a control on the burnt section of his console, and the doors slammed shut. "You're not going anywhere! You're mine, now!" He smiled and nodded at Rebecca, as if looking for approval.

"Are you going to fucking untie me, Morty? Or were you planing on torturing me? You'd better not play the piano again, Morty! I swear, if you make me listen to Rocket Man one more time, I'm going to shove that piano up your ass!"

"Oh, be silent, woman!" She continued to ramble incoherently about his piano playing and his affinity for Elton John songs. He pretended to strangle her as soon as she looked away from him, but then turned his anger back to us. "Doctor, I still expect you to die for your crimes!" He produced another ray gun from somewhere under his robe, and pointed it at Katarina.

"No! Don't you dare!" The Doctor stepped between him and Kat. I stepped forward to stand next to him.

"Precisely what I expected you to do, Doctor. Now you're all grouped together. Stay that way." Mortimus waggled his gun at us. "One of you, untie the bitch. Or gag her. Your choice. But if you try the gag, you might lose some fingers."

"Oh, really? What'd she bite off of you?" the Doctor said, with a sneer. Rebecca started giggling uncontrollably. The Monk's eyes seemed to flash as he pointed the gun in a slightly more menacing manner. "All right, all right," the Doctor said, as he stepped towards Rebecca.

"No, not you," said the Monk. "The girl. Let her do it."

Katarina stepped out from behind us and glared at Mortimus. "Fuck you," she said. She looked scared for a moment, then regained her confidence, smiled proudly and said, "Fuck you sideways."

Rebecca started laughing harder. "Sideways!" she croaked out, somewhere between a chortle and a guffaw. "Sideways!" she bleated, as she lurched about in her chair. "Sidewaaaaayyyyyysssss!" she practically screamed, as she erupted into a fresh batch of laughs.

"Will somebody shut that bitch up!" the Monk yelled, as he fired his ray gun at the ceiling. Sparks showered down as a lighting fixture exploded.

Katarina stood in front of Rebecca, and straddled her knees. For a moment, it looked like she was about to give Rebecca a lap-dance. Rebecca looked up at her with a hopeful expression, trying to contain her laughter, but failing miserably.

I looked at my wife's face. Her expression was merciful. "This is for your own good," she said, almost apologetically. She balled up her fist and knocked Rebecca unconscious with one punch.

"Oh, thank goodness!" said the Monk.

Katarina stepped back from Rebecca's unconscious body, patting down the wrinkles in her wedding dress as she turned to face me. I beamed at her with pride. She stood behind me, and looked at her feet.

"Well done, Kat," I whispered to her. "She was getting... weird."

"She is sick in her head," Kat whispered back.

"I know," I whispered.

"We can hear you perfectly well; there's no need to whisper," said the Monk. "The acoustics in here are superb. Would you like to hear some music? Mozart's last symphony, perhaps? I have the sheet music. The only existing copy. How about Beethoven's Twelfth Symphony? He wrote it in the 23rd Century, after I relocated him to a better health-care facility in AmeriCanada. He was so happy to be able to hear again..."

"No, no music, Mortimus. I have something I want you to hear."

"Oh? And what's that?"

"A proposition. Richard, Katarina, and I walk out that door, get in my TARDIS, and go on our merry way. We'll drop off this young woman at a decent hospital, where she can receive some treatment for her malady. There's a rather nice one on New Earth that I'd gladly recommend... so long as she's not allergic to cats, that is. What do you say, hmmm?"

"I say that I'm tired of listening to you talk, Doctor. And now, I expect you to die!" He reached under his robe again and pulled out the remote control that he had used with the cybermen. I wondered where he kept all of this stuff, if he didn't have pockets.

The Monk pointed the remote control at me, and pressed a button. My left leg took a step forward, and my left arm raised above my head. I was standing just behind the Doctor, and he turned around to look at me... just as my cybernetic fist came crashing down upon him.

-=Chapter 17=-

My cybernetic arm swung at the Doctor, barely grazing him as he ducked the blow. "Rick!" he cried, "It's me! The Doctor! I'm your friend!"

"Yeah, I know that, Doc! Now tell my arm!" I tried to grab my left arm with my right arm, but it took another swing at the Doctor anyways. "I can't control it!" My leg lurched towards him again, and my arm swung back and forth crazily.

"Fool! Did you think I would replace your limbs out of the kindness of my hearts?" Mortimus chortled, "What better way to destroy you, than at your friend's hands? Now, die, Doctor! Die!"

"Rick! No!" Katarina leapt onto my arm as my left leg took another step towards the Doctor, who was scampering away from me. My arm threw her off, and she landed on the keys of the big red piano with a loud clamor of notes.

"Not the piano!" Mortimus yelled, as he ran across the room towards the instrument. He pushed Katarina off the keys and stroked the front of the lid. "It's okay, baby. It's okay," he murmured to it.

The Doctor ran around to the other side of the control panel. I pivoted on my left foot... literally. The foot remained in place, and my leg pivoted around until my foot was backwards. The Doctor, observing this, made a funny noise. "Doesn't that hurt?" he asked, as my rebellious limbs tried to attack him again.

"Just... stop me! I don't care how you do it, but make this crazy shit stop!" I bit my tongue then, as my leg started hopping towards the Doctor. Mid-way through the third hop, the foot snapped back into the forward position. "Auuuugh! I mit my bung!"

"Hang in there, Rick! I've got a plan!" The Doctor ran completely around the Monk's control console as I hopped after him. "Now, when I say 'go', jack-knife!"

Jack-knife? I wondered what he meant for a few seconds, but then it dawned on me:

He wanted me to take a dive.

I started to get used to the rhythm of my hopping leg and swinging arm. One two three, hop; swing, swing, chop. Whatever instructions Mortimus the Meddling Monk had given to my cybernetic limbs, they were pretty simple. Stick to the Doctor and auto-attack.

The Doctor let me get close, then bolted around the console again. "Go!" he yelled, and he ducked beneath the console.

As my left leg left the ground, I hopped with my right leg, as well. Bending at the waist, I brought my head towards my knees. My robotic limbs tried to put me back upright, but they had to fight the momentum and weight of most of my body. For the brief fraction of a second that I was off the ground, I twisted around like a cat trying to land on its feet.

That's when my arm hit the console.

Sparks flew out of both the console and the arm. I felt a tremendous pain in my limbs, a pain that was actually worse than when they were amputated. My mechanical parts started convulsing rapidly as I fell to the floor.

From the section of console I had struck, beneath which I was laying, I could see a bright, yellow light. I thought the console was on fire, but the light was streaming out of it with incredible force.

I heard a lot of yelling. I'm not sure who was yelling what at whom, because my ears went out of focus as my eyes were deafened by the yellow light. I could taste the texture of the light, and it was alive.

I realized that at least one of the people yelling, was me. I tried to stop but it just got louder.

And then I felt nothing.

---

I'm in the chair, again. In the chair next to me is Katarina. But it isn't my dead Katarina, it's my new Katarina. The Priest is yelling at me as she cradles a baby. The baby is silver.

The chair lifts up with a crashing roar, and I fly through a sky filled with giant squids with beeping antennae and sharks that fly in squares. The chair falls away and I crash through the doors of a spinning, flying Police Box, but it's just a box and the bottom gives way. I'm falling.

I land in the chair again, but now I'm on the planet with two suns. The Doctor is there, standing by a huge barbecue grill. As I watch, he opens the lid and brushes sauce on my arm and leg. He smacks his lips and grins like a shark.

I stand up, but my left arm has turned into my old M-2 rifle and my left leg has become an anchor. I'm back on the fishing boat in Boston Harbor. My men are laying on the deck at my feet, bleeding silver. The hatch opens and cybermen stream out, screaming in spanish. Bullets fly. Somehow they miss me. I mow them down with my M-2, and she churns out the bullets at an impossibly slow speed. I watch each bullet as it finds its mark. Cybermen scream and die, their red blood soaking the deck. Ten seconds after the hatch opened, I am the only one left alive. One bullet has scratched me, on the right arm. I look at the silver blood dripping from my fingertips and watch as the silver covers me, enveloping me, dissolving me. I try to scream but it comes out sounding like a phone modem trying to connect to the internet.

Thrashing about on the deck, ripping off the remaining flesh, revealing the cyberman inside. There goes my penis; just a faucet there now. I twist my right testicle and hot water pours out of me. I pull up on a tab and a shower spray comes out of the lamp that has sprouted from the top of my head. I realize that i have a little shelf on my belly that has a bar of soap and a bottle of shampoo. I reach for the soap but slip on the wet floor.

I'm in a shower stall with big round circles on the walls. The water turns into yellow light, and it washes over me. It washes away the silver from my skin and leaves behind clean, white flesh. It's incredibly hot, like liquid fire, but it feels good at the same time.

Suddenly, I wake up.

---

The underside of the Monk's TARDIS control console looked exactly the same as it had before. I groaned and started to get up, but a hand on my chest stopped me. It was Katarina; she was kneeling beside me.

"Rick?" she asked me, when I made eye contact.

"What happened?" I said. I felt my head; my hair felt weird. It had probably been singed, I thought.

"Rick? Is that you?" she asked, looking concerned.

"What? Of course it's me." I gazed up into her worrying eyes. "You really are beautiful, you know that? It's no wonder I love you."

"Oh, Rick!" she cried, and kissed me. I could feel her tears fall on my face as she kissed me, and it worried me.

I pushed her away, reluctantly. "What? Katarina... what? What happened?"

She answered me by putting her hands on my hands. My hands that had pushed her away. Both of my hands.

Her hands were warm and soft, and I could feel them. Not like I had been able to feel with the cyberman hand, where everything was quantified and digitized. I could feel the warmth of my own flesh and bone.

I looked down at my hands. They were perfect. I looked past them and saw a bare white foot sticking out of my pant leg. I wiggled the toes and laughed.

"Oh, is it really you, Rick? My beloved?"

"Yes, it's me. All of me. I don't know how, but... what the hell happened?"

"Richard," I heard the Doctor say.

I strained my head back to look above me and behind me, and saw the Doctor standing there. "Hi, Doc!"

"How do you feel?"

"Fine! Great! Fan-fucking-tastic!"

"Yes, I would suspect so. Sometimes there are certain... side effects. Changes in personality, that sort of thing. But that's in Time Lords... who knows what it might have done to you."

"What? What are you talking about?"

"This." The Doctor pulled a small mirror out of his pocket, and pointed it at me.

On the glass of the mirror, a stranger's face confronted me.

It was a white man, with blond hair. His bright blue eyes looked terrified, and he grimaced at me with impossibly white teeth. I smacked the mirror out of the Doctor's hand and screamed.

"Scared you, did it?" I heard the Monk say from somewhere in the room, as I curled tightly into a ball. "It certainly surprised the heck out of me. One day, you're the Last of the Time Lords, the next day the blasted Doctor shows up... of all the Time Lords in all the Universe it had to be him... and then the next day, humans start regenerating! What's this Universe come to, anyways? What's next?"

"Oh, will you shut up!" the Doctor responded to him. "The poor boy's just been through the most traumatic experience of his life... er, well, lives... and you have the nerve to complain about it?"

"He's not the one tied to a piano bench," the Monk sulked. "And you weren't exactly being tactful with that looking glass, were you? Don't tell him why he has a new face, just show it to him! Brilliant!"

"I'm still trying to figure out why he has that face," the Doctor replied.

I listened to Katarina's soft coos as she stroked my straight hair, and nestled against her warm body.

---

I must have fallen asleep, because I awoke in a large, round bed with silk sheets. Katarina was sleeping beside me, still in her wedding dress. A sheer canopy over the bed hung from a hook over the center, and formed a cone around us.

I was still wearing the over-sized clothes that I had found in the Doctor's wardrobe, and I easily slipped out of them. I spooned against Katarina's back, wrapped my arms around her, and fell back asleep.

As I slept, I imagined that I was floating.

---

When I awoke again, Katarina was gone, as were my old clothes. I gathered the huge white sheets around me like a shroud and looked around the bedroom. The round bed was in the center of the room, and the room itself was a sort of grayish pink. The walls were covered with the same sort of honeycomb-of-round-holes motif that I had seen in the Monk's TARDIS control room. There was no other furniture in the room. It took me a minute to find the door, as there was no handle. I pulled on the edge of one of the circles and the door opened towards me. Beyond it was a hallway with the same walls, except whiter.

I started wandering down the hallway, clueless. I wanted to find a bathroom but I also wanted to find Katarina. I wondered if she was in the bathroom. Then I wondered where I could find the Doctor.

As if on cue, the Doctor popped out of a doorway right in front of me. "Rick! You're awake! Feeling rested, are you?"

"Yeah, I guess." I ran a hand over my face. I desperately needed a shave, but my beard was shorter than it had been.

"I should certainly hope so! You've been asleep for three days. Ah, I remember one regeneration... I woke up in a morgue! Not sure how long I was dead, that time."

I shook my head. "What the hell are you talking about, Doc?"

"Don't you remember? You smashed the Monk's console! The Time Vortex energy escaped, and the superconductors in your cyberman parts absorbed it all. His TARDIS transformed you; it regenerated you."

"It... what? How?"

"Maybe it feels remorse for all of the evil he's made it do, over the centuries. It gave you a new body. Well, new to you, anyways."

I looked down at myself, at my pale flesh. "It turned me white," I said.

"Well, that's the problem with regeneration."

"What?"

"You never know what you're going to get." He smiled sheepishly. "You think I chose this body? I didn't choose that body when I had it, either."

"Wait, what? What's wrong with your body?"

"Ha! My head's too big, my hands are too big, my feet are too big, my... well, everything's out of proportion." He waggled his fingers around frustratedly. "At least you got one of my nicer faces... one of my favorites, in fact. I was wondering how that happened when I noticed this." He pulled at his collar and showed me a red scratch on the back of his neck. "Time Lord DNA. Specifically, my DNA. You must have scratched me with your first attack. It's a good thing he didn't convert both of your legs, or you might have taken a bigger chunk out of me."

"Wait, what? One of your faces?" I was just starting to get used to the idea that I had been given a new body somehow, but if I was just a copy...

"My fifth face, as a matter of fact. Turn around, let me see the back of your head." I turned around slowly, and he exclaimed, "That clinches it! That's me, alright! I'd recognize the back of my head anywhere. And now, if you would..." I turned back to face him, and he had produced a stethoscope. I parted the sheets a bit, and he listened first to one side of my chest, and then the other.

He stepped back from me with a concerned expression, and looked me up and down. "Yes, it's definite. Two hearts. Do you feel alright? World spinning beneath your feet, flashes of precognition, anything like that?"

"No, I feel fine. In fact, I feel great." I had woken up completely by this point, and I felt full of energy. When the Doctor had the stethoscope on my chest, I had taken several deep breaths, just like the medics had always told me to. My lungs had felt fresh, clean, and limitless. "Why? Is there something wrong? Am I going to start falling apart or something?"

"No, no, of course not. What would give you that idea?"

"I dunno, some movie... so what's wrong?"

"What's wrong is that you're a Time Lord now... but you're not." He ran his fingers through his hair and left it sticking up funny.

"Huh? So... what am I?" I was really starting to get worried, now. What had happened to me? What was going to happen?

"You're an anomaly. This sort of thing has happened before... sort of. But it didn't turn out well. A friend of mine... Donna was her name... well, she was in the TARDIS with my old hand and the TARDIS was about to be turned into fuel for the Crucible... it's a long story, but in the end I had to wipe her memories of me, to keep her mind from burning up. You're sure you feel fine? She felt fine at first, as well."

"Doc, I'm fine." He wasn't helping me feel less nervous, though.

"If you insist." He leaned against the wall and watched me, intently. "Are you sure you're..."

"I'm fine!"

He raised his hands in an exaggerated shrug. "We'll see. Shall we?" He gestured down the hallway.

"Where are we going?"

"Back to my TARDIS. I had to borrow Morty's Zero Room to make sure that your regeneration went smoothly, but now that you're awake, we should visit my wardrobe. Do you like cricket?"

"Cricket?"

"Never mind, just a silly thought. I always thought that body looked splendid in a cricketer's uniform, but I'm sure we can find you something that fits."

I started to follow him down the hallway, then stopped. What kind of clothes did I want to wear? Should I look for something that wouldn't look out of place when he brought me home? What about Katarina?

The Doctor stopped when he realized that I wasn't following him any more. "Rick? What's wrong? Are you okay?"

"I'm fine, Doc... it's just that..."

He rushed back to my side. "Are you feeling dizzy? Do you need to lie down?"

I waved him back. "Doc, I've decided something."

His expression immediately changed from concern to relief. "You're staying, aren't you?"

I nodded my head. "I love her. And she belongs in this world, in this time..."

He put his hand on my shoulder. "You're a braver man than I," he said, and he gave me a reassuring squeeze.

---

We stepped out of the Monk's TARDIS and onto a beach. Not far away was the Doctor's TARDIS. Just beyond it, I could see a ship docked in a port. A small village lay beyond the port, and I could see some people working at unloading cargo from the ship. There was something strange about the people, though, and it took me a moment to realize that they were the women from the cyberman ship.

"Where are we? Is this... what was it called? Libertania?" I asked the Doctor, as we walked towards the Police Box.

"Libertalia, I think. But one of the women kept insisting it was pronounced Libertatia. It doesn't matter much, anyways. This place will be gone within a few years, swallowed by the jungle, forgotten by history... well, almost forgotten. You see that man there, on the ship?"

I squinted towards the ship. I didn't see the man. "Nope. Where?"

"On the poop deck, by the tiller."

I shaded my eyes and looked harder. "Oh, there! Yeah, I see him. What about him?"

"That's Daniel Defoe, the author. Nice chap, but he tends to exaggerate things a bit."

"You know him?"

"He was shipwrecked one time, and I just happened to land on the island he was living on. Kept calling me Friday, for some reason." The Doctor shrugged, and opened the door to his TARDIS.

We stepped inside, and I was surprised to see the Monk sitting in one of the big chairs by the door. In front of him was a small table, with a chessboard atop it. Clive, the chicken, was roosting on a stool across from him.

"Oh, hello, Doctor. Hello, Richard," Mortimus said, without looking up from the board. He gave us a bit of a wave, then triumphantly reached for a chess piece. "Rook to Black King's four! Check!"

Clive squawked, and ruffled her feathers. "I knew you would do that," she said, in her strangely human voice. "Bishop to Black King's three! Check, and Mate!"

The Monk moved her piece for her, and scowled at the board. "You cheated!"

"Did not! Did not!" Clive flapped her wings and fluttered off the stool. "You're just a sore loser, Mortimus. Almost as bad as the Doctor!"

"Bah!" the Monk snorted, as he threw a chess piece at Clive. He missed by a mile, and she strutted towards the door that led to the corridor. "Sore loser! Sorrrrre loser! Bawk!" she said, as she left the control room.

"Care to have a go, Richard? Don't worry, I won't bite." The Monk started setting the chessboard back up. "Oh, my... could you pick up that piece I threw? I think it's a pawn... yes, it's over there by the console."

I sat on the stool formerly occupied by the chicken. "I don't get it."

"Well, I certainly can't get it." He lifted the fold of his robe to reveal the handcuffs that held his left wrist to the chair. "Like I said, I won't bite. Much." He smiled at me, and gave me a wink. His smile was just as toothy and frightening as the Doctor's.

"No, I meant..." I gestured at the handcuffs. "Now I get it. I didn't realize you were a prisoner. I thought maybe the Doctor..." I looked around the control room, but the Doctor wasn't there. "I thought maybe, because he thought he was the last of your race, that finding you..."

"You thought maybe he would forgive me my sins? Not a chance, not that one. He's a real stick in the mud, if you ask me. Now, me, I'm a fun-loving Time Lord." He locked his eyes on mine, and they seemed to sparkle. "Travel the Universe with me, Richard, and I'll make you rich beyond your wildest dreams," he said, without moving his lips.

I blinked, then looked away from him. "I believe my wife already gave you the response you deserve, Mortimus."

He hissed at me, "Free me! We can take his TARDIS, as well! I'll teach you all you need to know to be a Lord of Time and Space! Together we can rule the Universe!"

"Sideways, Morty. Sideways." I stood up from the stool and walked away. As I opened the door that led to the TARDIS corridors, he kicked the chess table across the room and screamed, "Fine! Be that way! See if I care!"

As the door closed behind me, I heard him whimper, "I have to use the loo..."

I let the door close, and left him there.

---

In the TARDIS wardrobe, I admired myself in front of a full-length mirror. "What do you call this suit again?"

"It's a cricketer's uniform," the Doctor replied. "From the Edwardian era... I think I picked it up in 1910? Or was it 1901? It had a one and a zero in it, I remember that much. I just wanted to see how it looked on you, for nostalgia's sake. It's been so long since I looked like you."

"Well, it is rather flattering on me." I admired the way the pinstripes made my legs look even longer. "But, uh... what's with the celery? Was that an Edwardian thing? Or a cricket thing?"

"No, that was a Time Lord thing. Bit of a difficulty with the regeneration when I had that body, I ended up being overly sensitive to certain gases in the praxis range. The celery was my warning system... but you don't have that sensitivity. Probably because you had a proper Zero Room to recover in."

"What's a Zero Room, by the way?"

"Oh, just a place where Time Lords can get away from it all, so to speak. Like a sensory deprivation chamber of sorts. Didn't it seem peaceful in there?

"It was very nice. I've never slept so soundly."

"I should say so! We tried several times to wake you, but to no avail. I even let the Monk play his piano. It was wretched. All he knows is Elton John. Not that Elton John is wretched, mind you, but the Monk is tone-deaf. Normally, I quite enjoy Reggie's music." The Doctor was rooting around behind a clothes rack, and he had to raise his voice to be heard. "You slept right through the fun parts, you know that?"

"Well, what happened? What happened to the cybermen? How did we get here?"

"Well, when you smashed the Monk's TARDIS console, he lost control of the cybermen he built out of pirates and spare parts... not that they really had a chance against the real cybermen, but that was definitely the moment he lost his little war. Approximately fifteen seconds after that, the room we were in was flooded with cybermen. What do you think of this shirt?" He held up a Led Zeppelin concert T-shirt. "Wrong century? Yes, of course, what am I thinking? They don't have zeppelins yet..."

"So, what happened next? Did the cybermen attack us?"

"Not really. We were all still in the Monk's TARDIS, and they couldn't get in. So, they threw us out."

"They what?"

"The garbage bins, again. Both TARDISes, thank goodness. Flushed us out like so much flotsam and jetsam and took off for Telos."

"Where's Telos?"

"Oh, it's a small icy dwarf planet just past Pluto... your people will call it Eris, one day. How about these pants? Too tight?"

"They look fine, Doc. Let me try them on."

As he came around the clothes rack, the wardrobe door opened behind me, and I heard Katarina gasp.

"It's you!" she exclaimed, from the doorway.

I turned towards her and smiled. "Yes, it's me, Kat. It's really me."

She was looking at the outfit I was wearing; the cricketer's uniform. "I must..." she ran out of the room and down the corridor.

"What was that about?" I asked the Doctor.

"Oh, nothing. Nothing at all." He whistled innocently and turned back towards the clothing rack.

"Doc..." I said, in my you'd-better-tell-me voice. My voice still sounded a bit strange to me, but it was only slightly different than it used to be. At least I hadn't suddenly developed a british accent when I grew a second heart.

Katarina burst back through the door, her old robe clutched in her hands. I noticed, then, that the robe she was wearing was newer than the old one, even though it looked pretty much the same. "I must show you this, my love!" she said, as she fumbled with the robe.

"What? What is it?"

She opened a seam near the bottom of the robe and reached in between the layers of fabric. "This," she said, as she pulled out a bundle of oilcloth. She unwrapped the oilcloth, and pulled out a folded piece of shiny paper. She handed it to me.

I unfolded the paper and realized that it was a photograph. In the center of the picture stood a man who looked exactly like I did now, wearing the same clothing that I was currently wearing. There was something about his eyes, though, that let me know that it wasn't me I was looking at. It was definitely the Doctor.

Standing next to him in the photograph was a young boy in a multi-colored shirt with some sort of star-shaped pin on the front pocket. He seemed to be arguing with somebody just out of the picture, while the Doctor ignored them, squinting at the camera, a white hat rolled up in his fist.

"Doctor? This is you, isn't it?"

Katarina looked from me to the Doctor, and back again. "No, it is you! This is the man I was promised to marry, and it is you! It was you the whole time! But now, you have your true face!" She wrapped her arms around me and laid her head against my chest. "It is you!" she said again, smiling. I melted into her.

The Doctor smiled at us like the cat that ate the canary. I swear I could see the feathers between his teeth. "Rick, do you know what day it is?"

"No, Doctor, I don't. What day is it?"

"New Year's Day, 1697. Happy Birthday, Rick."

"Thank you, Doctor."

"Many happy returns," he said, as he sauntered out the door. "Many, many happy returns."

---

"So how'd you do it?" I asked the Doctor, later, when I had tracked him down to the kitchen. he was doing dishes.

"Do what?" he said, innocently. He scrubbed the pan harder, turned on the tap, and started whistling.

"You know what," I said, as I turned off the tap. "How'd she get a picture of you? I mean, it's not like photos are all that common in this century."

"Oh, well... I haven't done it yet, so I'm not sure. Her past, my future, your present... in more ways than one."

"So this was as much of a surprise to you..."

"Yes, of course, Rick! I may be a time traveler but I don't know everything that's going to happen next. If I did, where would the fun be?"

"Okay. Well, I have another question, then..."

"Questions, questions, questions. You humans..." he stopped himself. "You... half humans and half Time Lords, always with the questions. All right, shoot."

"Who's the kid?"

"I'm sorry? What kid?"

"In the photo. There was a kid."

"I didn't see the photo, so I don't know..."

"He had a star on his shirt."

The Doctor stopped drying the plate he was holding, and carefully placed it on the stack of clean plates. "A star? A... badge?"

"Well, it might have been pinned on."

"Adric." The Doctor looked sad.

"Ad-Rick?"

"No, no, no. Not your son, Ad-Rick. My friend, Adric. From the planet Alzarius, in E-Space."

"He's an alien?"

"About as alien as you can get. Not even from this Universe."

"Whatever happened to him?"

The Doctor sighed, and looked down into the big sink. "He died. A long time ago."

"How? I mean, if it's not..."

"No, no. Like I said, it was a long time ago. A very long time ago, in fact. 65 million years... I still think about him, sometimes. I should have spent more time with him. Poor kid... I dragged him away from everything he ever knew, even took him out of his own Universe, and I spent most of our time together running around with a princess and a stewardess and telling him to wait in the TARDIS. Which, of course, he never did."

"So, what happened?"

"He crashed a cyberman ship into the Earth and killed the dinosaurs. Ironically, the same explosion caused the planet Mondas to shift in orbit and slowly leave your solar system, leading to the eventual creation of the cybermen themselves. It was the only way the Mondasians could survive... and yet it never would have happened without Adric."

"No, I mean what happened with the princess and the stewardess? Must have been one heck of a threesome." I smiled lecherously at him.

"Rick! No! I never!" He turned a deep shade of red. "I mean, not with them, anyways. I don't mean that I never... I mean I have, but... Nyssa was just a child, really. Maybe eighteen in human years. And Tegan... my goodness, she never stopped complaining. She even left me, one time, but then Omega came back and so did she... funny coincidence, that was. Besides, they weren't... they weren't really my type. Not like... well... um..." He cleared his throat and fiddled with his bow-tie with his wet hands.

"Okay, okay, I was just kidding. But, uh, Doc?"

"Yes?"

"I look exactly like you used to? I mean, down to every detail?"

"Well, yes, Rick. As strange as it is to admit, you have become an exact duplicate of my fifth self. Except for that horrendous Boston accent, that is."

"Well, then..." I pulled open the front of my trouser waist and looked down at my new set of genitals. "Those girls didn't know what they were missing! This thing is freakin' huge."

The Doctor turned a deeper shade of red. I left him alone then, just in case he exploded from embarrassment.

---

Katarina and I stood on the beach between the TARDISes. Behind us sat a large trunk, filled with all of the chronologically-correct clothing that we could fit into it, as well as a cache of gold dubloons that the Doctor said he had just happened across while he was dusting inside one of his storage lockers. Clive the chicken sat in a small wooden coop, along with a huge stack of books.

"Are you sure we should take her?" I asked the Doctor, as I nodded towards Clive. "I mean, she's not exactly a normal chicken."

"Yes, she is! Of course, she is! Aren't you, Clive?" The Doctor smiled affectionately at the chicken.

Clive didn't respond. She had some sort of wires strapped to her head, and she was clucking rhythmically.

"Blasted iPod... Clive! Turn it down! I swear, ever since she found that thing, all she ever does is listen to that rubbish."

"What is it? An eyepod? What's that?"

"It's a music... thingy. Holds thousands of songs, and you can listen to them all, over and over and over and over again. I think my friend Matt must have left it in the TARDIS, because its his kind of music." He made a face. "Heavy metal. That stuff will rot your brains, Clive! Silly chicken! I'm glad she's taking it with her."

Clive bobbed her head in time with the music and ignored him.

"Not exactly a normal chicken," I said.

"Yeah, well... close enough, right? You folks could use a chicken around here. She's a good layer... two eggs a day, every day. Except Sunday, of course."

"Why not Sunday?"

The Doctor grinned wider. "On Sundays, she lays four eggs. That's omelet day."

I took the Doctor's hand and shook it. "Well, I guess this is good-bye."

"Yes, I suppose so. Take care of yourself, Rick. And take good care of Katarina, as well. And your baby."

"My what?"

Katarina looked up at me and glowed. "The Doctor told me this morning."

I looked into her eyes, overwhelmed by my love for her. I leaned down and kissed her.

The Doctor tried to use that moment to escape, but I noticed, and broke away from the kiss to stop him. "Doctor! Wait!"

He stopped in the TARDIS doorway, one foot inside. "What is it, Rick? Changed your mind? Want to come with me, after all?"

"No, Doctor. That's not it. I just wanted to say... thank you. Thank you for everything."

"You're welcome, Rick. It was the least I could do, for a dropped apple." He winked at me.

"So what are you going to do now? Turn the Monk over to the authorities? Uh, whoever they might be?"

"Rick... I am the authorities. There's no-one else left. His crimes went against the Laws of Time, and that falls under the jurisdiction of the Time Lords. And we're the last, him and me. And you, sort of. You got the body of a Time Lord but the mind of a man, and I'm not sure if you'll age or regenerate, but you've got quite a future ahead of you. You're part me now, like it or not. Semper Paratus."

I nodded, understanding. "So, I guess, I can never really say good-bye to you."

He took my hand, again. "Then we'll say adieu; and I will see you again, my friend. But not here. Remember, you only have a few months before the natives attack..."

Just then, we were both knocked to the ground by a large, balding man in a black robe who came barreling out of the Doctor's TARDIS, screaming like a banshee. Mortimus swung the arm of the chair, to which he was still manacled, at my head and barely missed, The Doctor grabbed onto his foot, but the Monk kicked sand in his face and ran towards his own TARDIS.

"You'll rue this humiliation, Doctor! I shall have my revenge upon you!" he yelled, as he reached the door of his TARDIS. He raised the chair arm victoriously, and seemed ready to launch into a speech, but then merely said, "...someday, but not today. Good-bye!" He slammed his TARDIS door shut, and it almost immediately dematerialized.

"Fuck!" I yelled, into the sand. "Hey, wait a second... where's Rebecca? Did she get away, too?"

The Doctor pounded his fist on the sand. "Yes, confound it! She was in his TARDIS! I had everything configured; his drive systems slaved to my navigation system, his temporal circuits linked to mine.. his TARDIS would have gone wherever mine went!"

"Well, how'd he bypass that?"

"He probably just unclicked the little box on the options screen. It's really simple to do. His TARDIS operating system was so user-friendly, it could practically fly itself!" He stood up and stroked the door of his TARDIS. "No need to be jealous, old girl. I'd never trade you in. Not in a million years."

I stood up as well, and brushed the sand off my clothes. "So, he's escaped now. Just like that. Off to wherever and whenever he wants to go, free to fuck around with history?"

"Well, not exactly. I did swipe a few parts out of his navigational array. He has no idea where he's going, and no way to control it, either..." The Doctor smiled mischievously, "...again."

I remembered seeing the Doctor lift a few bits out of the Monk's console. "You sly dog, you," I said, grinning widely at him.

The Doctor laughed. "Well, at least this time I didn't shrink his control room down to a dollhouse. Now that was funny."

We laughed at the Monk's fate until our sides hurt, as Katarina looked at us like we were both insane.

---

-=Chapter Eighteen=-

Moments after the TARDIS dematerialized, it suddenly reappeared. The Doctor stuck his head out the door.

"Oh, Richard, one thing I forgot to mention..."

"Yes, Doctor?" I was half-hoping that he'd insist we join him in the TARDIS, but I didn't want to ask.

"The Gregorian calendar."

"The what?"

"The Gregorian calendar. You know, Pope Gregory the Thirteenth? He came up with the calendar you're used to, way back in 1582, but it won't be adopted by Great Britain until 1752. In fact, it won't be universally adopted until the 1920's."

"So, what does that mean? It isn't really January 1st?"

"Well, it is, but it isn't New Years' Day. Not yet, anyways."

"Really?"

"Yes, I'm afraid so, Richard. For the next hundred and fifty years, or so, January First is just your brithday, nothing more than that."

I smiled at him. "Good! I've always hated sharing my birthday with a holiday. But, uh..."

"But?"

"Well, when is New Year's Day?"

The Doctor frowned and looked inward. "Hmmmm....."

Katarina pulled at my shirt sleeve. I turned to her and she whispered in my ear, "March is the beginning of the year."

"March? Really?"

"March!" the Doctor said, as though he had just remembered. "That's right, March First!" He frowned and looked inward again. "That reminds me of something, something important, but... A-HA!"

"What? What is it, Doctor?"

The Doctor reached into the pocket of his jacket and pulled out a small coin, which he held up as if it provided an explanation.. "I have a birthday party to attend! Farewell, Richard! Take good care of him, Katarina! I'll be back, someday!"

"Good-bye, Doctor," I said.

"Oh, no, it isn't good-bye. You'll see me again... and not just in the looking glass."

"In that case, I'll say hasta luego, instead."

"Yes, until we meet again. Farewell!" He closed the TARDIS door. Moments later, he was gone, and we were alone on the beach.

THE END