Nathan was already starting to wish that he'd better savoured the good times while they'd lasted; Captain Harper was starting to wake up. Hopefully, she would remember that they had an actual problem to finish dealing with, and Nathan wouldn't need to worry about her first waking words being a question about why she was still dressed or anything like that.

"Hey, guys, is everybody done, or do you need me to go back to sleep?"

Nathan hoped that the impact of his face-palm would be strong enough that he would get to sleep through Rip van Kirk waking up. "No, Harper, you're not at an orgy, we were kidnapped by an Army patrol. With soldiers."

That seemed to help Harper cut through the grogginess a bit faster. "Wait, when you say 'kidnapped,' do you mean the good kind or the real kind?"

Nathan just glared at her.

Her eyes were still mostly closed, but she nonetheless pulled herself up and sat to face him. "OK, Nathan, right? Where are Damien and Arachne?"

"Well as far as I know, Damien could still be unconscious – from drugs that I'm told you suggested, I might add – and Arachne might or might not have been cannibalised into a bunch of garbage incinerators and tank treads by now."

Harper stood up, the second attempting being the more successful. She said, "OK, let me think," a bit louder than her previous near-whispers had been, and started pacing. "Let's see: if they were going to kill us, or even just let us go but Retcon us first, then they probably would've done it before we woke up from the truth drugs, since they don't exactly seem big on things like 'fair trials for POWs' or anything like that."

Nathan thought that that made sense.

"If they were going to draft us into service against our will, then they probably would've kept us separated lest we formed an escape plan together. No, no, no, they kept us here, left our memories of the facility intact, and they let you wait here with me while I woke up, so I'm thinking they want to offer us jobs here 'voluntarily' with death or Retcon as 'acceptable' back-up plans. Did I miss anything?"

Actually, Nathan hadn't thought nearly that far. "Um, sorry, Harper, nothing I can think of."

"Actually Nathan, come to think of it, there is: if they had us under truth serum for any reasonable amount of time, then we probably already told them our codes for talking to each other about possible escape plans, and we should assume that they already know about Arachne's hacking abilities. I'm guessing that you've been looking for anything in here that she could use to talk to us but didn't find anything?"

"You're right, I didn't."

"OK, so they clearly don't think that the 'mere AI' deserves to be part of this, this is obviously a 'real people' conversation to them." Every second, Harper was looking more and more like a venomous snake.

She glanced at the walls. "OK, now since we should assume that the guards were listening to that whole thing through the mikes in the room, I think that our best bet is to –"

And, speak of the devil, the door opened. Damien came in first, followed by the officer that Nathan had come to think of as "Colonel Scarface." Leeson closed the door behind them and spoke up before anybody else could. "See Damien, they're awake, are you –"

"That still doesn't answer my question about Arach –"

Next thing Nathan knew, Damien was on the ground and Leeson had her fist in the air where Damien's spine had been. Nathan started to run to them, but Harper signaled for him to wait.

Leeson picked Damien up by the collar. "For your information, First Officer, Arachne appears to have been shut down since back when everybody was still on the surface. Our technicians have had no luck re-booting her, and we have no idea what her sensors are capable of or how to make her delete the memory from the same time you've asked to be Retconned."

Nathan started to get scared again. How exactly had they gone about trying to hack into her mind?

He prayed that she wouldn't be allowed die here.

"Well, if she's still asleep," Damien managed to get out between breaths, "she couldn't have learned anything we didn't, and we just shan't wake her up until you drop us somewhere safe. Why couldn't you have just told me while we were walking here?"

Leeson didn't seem to buy that, but she didn't say so. "Because I wanted to talk to the Captain first, now would you please tell her what I told –"

"Don't worry, Damien, Leeson just wants you to relay us the job offer," which Harper finished by dramatically holding her arms out to pantomime blocking an attack. Clearly she too had been exposed to Scarface's policy of accepting the first interruption, then inflicting physical violence to punish all interruptions afterwards.

Leeson stood still for a few seconds, seeming to stare at some constellation behind the wall at Harper's back.

Damien broke the silence. "Oh, yeah, Leeson, did I forget to tell you by the time we got here, Captain Harper would've already figured everything out you wanted to tell her?"

Harper grinned. "Occupational hazard of venturing into the real world, luv, you pick up these nasty things like 'experience,' 'skill-sets' or 'competence.' Did Damien already give you our answer?"

Leeson stared back and forth between Damien and Harper with such venom that Nathan got the impression she would've given worlds to turn into a Gorgon then and there. "What the Hell is wrong with you people?"

Nathan decided to answer first. "Well, Scarface, on one hand there are people who respond very positively to being abducted. On the other hand, there are doctors for those kinds of people. I take it we didn't get the job?"

At this point, he felt it was a miracle that Leeson's heart and brain weren't going supernova.

"By the way, when you say 'I wanted to talk to the Captain first,' but made sure all of the humans were in the room when you asked her, did you mean 'I don't want Arachne involved in the discussion,' or was it –"

"Just shut up." Leeson turned around and walked out the door, gesturing for them to follow her and visibly stopping herself from doing something violent. "I'm done here. If the bosses want you so bad, then they can fire me for this, but I refuse to work with such juvenile anarchists, and I would be surprised if anybody here feels differently. You want to get out of here? Let's go. Guards? Cuff them again. Freaks? I am getting you the Retcon you want so desperately, you are recording a message telling yourselves that you shouldn't come back, and you are getting the Hell out of here before I get dishonorably discharged for shooting prisoners."

In spite of this, Nathan was suspicious that they would not actually be allowed to leave. If Harper was right that their captors knew how powerful Arachne's brain was, then they probably wouldn't take the risk that she didn't know anything. They would probably worry that she would just make it look like she had deleted something when she really planned to tell the rest of the crew later. In their defence, they would be right, but Nathan didn't think that being executed by an unusually intelligent firing squad would be much consolation.

Nathan didn't think they'd be able to fight their way out. They certainly wouldn't be able to get out of the handcuffs quickly enough, and even without counting the entire rest of the hornet's nest, there were too many guards shadowing them as it was: Leeson and another one in the front, 3 more on each side, and 3 in the back. Even with Harper's 51st century superhuman training, the three of them would never be able to take on all 11 soldiers at a time without anybody dying. 7 or 8 maybe, but certainly not –

He heard a siren screeching from the soldiers' headsets before seeing them drop to the ground, clutching their ears from the noise that even Nathan could hear from his distance away from any of them. He couldn't imagine how explosive the noise must be for the soldiers getting it directly.

Leeson grabbed the radio off of her belt. She was probably about to request backup, but before she could,

"Captain Harper, do you copy?" Arachne. Arachne was still alive.

Leeson's eyes magnified as she looked at the radio.

Nathan silently thanked God for keeping Arachne safe. "Arachne, you beautiful angel, are you all right?"

Leeson started to draw her firearm, but Harper – still handcuffed – tripped her and knocked her out with a head-butt. Harper then stood up, held her handcuffs against the wall, and hit them with her own cranium until they broke off.

Even Nathan hadn't known she could do that.

"Thank you for asking, Nathan, but you guys need to take a headset or the radio somewhere safer."

"Anything for you, beautiful," Harper said into the radio. "Guys? Over here." When he and Damien got to her, she snapped their cuffs off as easily as she had broken her own. "You two check the doors here to see if anywhere here is unlocked. Whichever of you find's somewhere first, stay on the door; whichever of you doesn't, cover the next corner while I carry Leeson over to the door. She seems higher up on the food chain than these other guys and I don't want her unsupervised when she recovers."

Nathan saw Damien get started checking the rooms on the right of the hallway, so Nathan took the left. Damien found a usable room first, and Nathan ran ahead until he heard Harper get "Toni Montana" into the room. When he ran back and closed the door behind him, darkness swallowed them, and the sounds coming from the door told Nathan that it was auto-locking. Within a few seconds, the lights in the room came back on. Nathan saw Damien tying Leeson's hands behind her back.

Arachne spoke up from the radio again. "Cliff-notes: I can talk through and listen to the communicators that the soldiers are wearing, but that's it. The cameras, data storage, and power distribution are all physical, nothing wireless. I can't see you, I can't guess where anybody is beyond what they're telling each other, I can't control the electricity beyond another EMP that I can't use again for about another hour, I have no idea when the auxiliary generators are going to start, and – this is embarrassing – I can't shoot through the walls yet; I wasn't protecting my cannons from the EMP as well as I thought."

Harper looked at the ceiling. "Well, the lights are back on if nothing else, so that's probably not good." Leeson – having apparently recovered from her head injury in the hallway – tried to stand up, but Harper pushed her back to the ground. "Listen, Ari, even if you've not as much information as you would like, do you at least have something resembling an exit strategy that we can work from, or do we need Nathan to make the physical systems more accessible for you first?"

"I'm actually not sure you want to leave yet, Captain. A few minutes ago, a soldier was told he was supposed to shoot a prisoner this week. They're testing genetic modifications to let people recover from fatal injuries, but only 2 subjects of that program are still alive because it hasn't worked yet."

Every face in the room paled with horror. Nathan's own, Damien's, and Harper's came from them finding out what kind of people they were dealing with, but Leeson's looked more like it came from getting caught. She was part of this. She knew what was happening, and she didn't want anybody to find out. Nathan wondered what could possibly have happened to her that would make her think that this kind of cruelty was the only possible solution. He prayed that she would be shown mercy for her crimes. By Harper if no one else, so that Leeson would at least live long enough to come to her senses and repent on her own.

Harper broke the silence first. "All right, change of plans. Arachne: keep an ear out so you can do the siren thing again in case the reinforcements are still wearing the same kind of headsets when they come after us. Nathan: find a router or something that you can use to give Arachne access to the rest of the systems; we need her to be able to see where everything is. Damien: do you have any ideas for how you and I should cover him?"

Leeson interrupted before Damien had a chance to say anything. "You people can't be serious! Are you actually telling me that you –"

Harper slammed her head into the wall. "You've not the right to speak except to beg for your life. I'm sure innocents have begged you for theirs; do you think you have a better chance than you gave them?"

"And what chance do you think the Daleks would have given them? You have heard of the Daleks, haven't you? They still have those in the 2800 years into the future that you're from? That's right, we lied to you. We have heard of time ships, because we've seen them being used by genocidal psychopaths to destroy entire systems worth of civilizations!"

Daleks.

Nathan's mind flashed back to the first time he had ever borne witness to the Extermination of a world by the locusts of Abaddon. He only barely held the tears back; this wasn't the first he'd seen a Dalek massacre drive the survivors to such sociopathic desperation that they would feel the need to mistreat fellow victims.

He saw Harper kick Leeson in the gut. "And it didn't occur to you to try fighting the Daleks instead? I know that when I was in the military, we didn't keep the Daleks from killing innocent people by killing the innocents first, we did it by killing the actual Daleks!"

"Do you think we're supposed to take that as encouragement? When time travellers from thousands into our future tell us there will still be Daleks thousands – if not millions – of years into theirs, is that supposed to tell us that people will ever be safe from them? Of course not, it tells us that we lost before we were even born! That the entire history of the universe has been written by the Daleks, dividing the civilizations that deserve to live into either 'we massacred their children, their sick, and their elderly' or 'massacring them would've been a waste of time'!"

Nathan gestured at Damien and Harper to help him find something to use as a gag, but Harper countered for them to let Leeson keep talking for a while longer.

Leeson certainly wasn't showing any signs of slowing down anytime soon. "And even that probably won't last! The Daleks we've captured have been more saturated with temporal energy than any living thing we have ever seen! Not only is it theoretically possible for them to re-write history without falling victim to paradox themselves, but they have confirmed under truth serum that they have actually been doing so! How long, from their perspective, do you think it will take them to finish erasing the entire universe's memory of every other species that could've ever evolved without them?"

Harper seemed to be fighting the urge to spit in Leeson's face. "And you think that using same power to kill the survivors yourself is better than letting the Daleks do it first?"

Nathan just hoped it wouldn't have to go further than spitting.

"Of course it's easy for you to say that: you can't change anything! Even the temporal energy you've exposed yourself to isn't enough let you change established timelines anywhere near as much as the Daleks have! You are completely stuck in the history that you happen to have been written into, with no free will to do anything different!

"But us, here, we can! We can create a new race of people who are not tied to whatever timeline the Daleks have deigned to leave us with; people who can actually fix the problems that mortals cannot! You use temporal rifts like the ones above us as fucking service stations, but we are using them to create soldiers that are biologically not bound by the same laws of time that we are! Soldiers with the true, perfect free will that you and I will never have! The free will to change the fight into something other than what the Daleks decided for us!"

Time Lords. Nathan felt his heart stop when he finally processed the fact that Leeson was describing Time Lords. He'd spent so much time thinking that he would be prepared for whatever circumstances God saw fit to trust him with, and he still almost broke down in disbelief when he realised that the base was manufacturing Time Lords.

"And not even just to change the way they die fighting the Daleks, but the power to actually beat them! You find out that we're trying to breed soldiers that will survive the injuries that they will sustain, and you're mad at us because it hasn't worked yet? If we don't try to make our soldiers stronger, then the Daleks will just kill them anyway!"

Nathan was starting to wonder why Leeson was being allowed to monologue for so long after being told to stay silent.

Harper put her hand Leeson's head. Then snapped her neck.