Okay, I'm really, really sorry this took so long - I've been particularly lazy with my fanfictions lately, not too much progress as usual. But hey, now I'm back in action and hoping that I'll find inspiration to finish chappie ten of my other fanfiction... well, okay, start chappie ten... But anyway. You're not here to listen to me talk, you want to read. Well, that's what most author's hope for. :)
Disclaimer: ME NO OWN!
And we're back to the story! Previously: The Doc and Rose have escape to the TARDIS and the Uber-Director... well, he's being his usual limbless self. Onward!
Chapter Three: The Order of Things
"Sir!" The Uber-Director's assistant, who had been frozen in the corner, seemed to jump to life and shouted in alarm, starting forward. "They'll get away!"
"No." The Uber-Director blocked the doorway. "Do not go after them. I have already summoned security. There is no way out for them now."
He allowed himself another small smile. The assistant regarded him curiously.
"We shall see how long these two humans last in my facility. They may run, but they cannot hide. Who knows? Perhaps we can use them after all."
"Sir..?" The assistant shifted, trying to hide his unease at the Uber-Director's growing smile.
"Conrad," the Uber-Director began; the assistant stiffened at the rare use of his name. "Alert the invitees and tell them I have decided to include a bonus with my offer – a reward of five-hundred thousand dollars to the first person to identify both the intruders. Fetch me in my office when my guards have flushed them out; make sure they are locked up until I can speak with them. Behind bars."
And without another word, the Uber-Director glided away, disappearing into the confines of his private office and leaving the assistant alone with his orders.
The Doctor and Rose sprinted down corridors, hoping against hope their pursuers were far behind. Their footsteps echoed loudly in the halls, the sound bouncing off the polished, crystalline floors. They wove around unsuspecting air-scrubbers until they entered the large domed room where the TARDIS still stood. The Doctor skidded to a stop at the door, jammed his key in the lock, and flung himself inside; Rose turned to close the door, pausing long enough to see a mob of humanoid guards loping their way.
She slammed the door and locked it, jumping back. There were several large whumps, then banging. They were trying, and failing, to get inside.
Rose, having fallen flat on her back in her haste, stared up at the domed ceiling of the TARDIS as she caught her breath. The Doctor, not wasting any time, flipped one last switch on the consol and called for her to hold onto something. She scrambled up and gripped the rail; the Time Lord took hold of the hand brake, gave it a dramatic thrust downward. The TARDIS lurched violently to the side. They were off.
It took only seconds for the TARDIS to dematerialise and then they were hurtling through space, the Time Rotor pumping up and down as they headed for whatever coordinates the Doctor had programmed. The TARDIS rocked and bumped, throwing them about the control room. Only a few moments passed before the great ship suddenly shuddered to a halt, the floor stilling and Time Rotor calming its frantic wheezing. Rose loosened her grip on the railing, stretching a little.
"We in the Vortex?" She asked, moving to stand next to the Doctor. He was bent over, studying the monitor.
"Orbiting the Earth, actually. Approximately twenty minutes before we left the base." He looked up at her, peering over his glasses. "You alright?"
"Yeah, 'm fine." Rose looked at the monitor, watching characters of an alien alphabet scroll down the screen; the little squiggles and swirls meant nothing to her. The TARDIS never translated Gallifreyen. "Whatsit say? Somethin' wrong?"
"Nah, just trying to trace the transmission the 'Uber-Director' sent out to speak to his little friends." The Doctor squinted at the monitor for a moment, reading the Gallifreyen text. "If I can isolate the satellite link that sent out the signal to all those lovely people, I can pinpoint the exact coordinates of the transmission's origin."
Rose blinked, more or less sure she understood what he meant, he'd spoken so fast. "You mean find the location of the base by following the signal?" She asked.
"Yep." The Doctor smiled his billion-watt smile.
She watched him work for another moment, finding a small amount of pride in how much she'd learned from her travels. She could already identify a good amount of levers and switches and buttons and whatever other controls were on the consol. Rose was also, at least, somewhat familiar with the expansive technobabble that seemed to constantly flow from the Doctor's mouth.
The rest of the time, she simply nodded when he stopped for breath.
It seemed to work best that way.
Rose tucked a loose lock of hair behind her ear, continuing to watch the Time Lord with something close to fascination. His dark eyes were intent on the screen, the glow of the monitor illuminating his face and casting shadows beneath the rims of his glasses and down the length of his nose. "And if I can tap into the video frequency… we can latch onto the signal of the clip he broadcasted."
A pause. He typed in what looked like a bypass code and studied the screen again.
He keyed in something else, paused a moment. Suddenly his face lit up. "We're in!"
An image appeared on the screen, the opposite of what they had seen from inside the Uber-Director's office. Instead of a bunch of different faces, they saw the Machine-Chair Man himself, with the double doors visible in the background. Rose grinned, tongue against her teeth, as she saw a flash of movement at the door; she could almost make out the Doctor's face peeking through the crack in the doors.
The two travellers watched as the transmission was played; they could hear the conversations between the Director and the leaders, and suddenly a thought struck Rose.
"If the link is live, can't they see us?" She flashed a glance at the Doctor, heart rate picking up slightly. He shook his head.
"We're receiving the signal indirectly," he said, not looking away from the screen. "The link is live, but we've shoved our way in. They can only see the people who have direct contact to the broadcast itself, and the TARDIS is, in a word, invisible. Human technology - well, basic human technology such as this - isn't advanced enough to recognise alien disturbance."
Rose nodded, relaxing. At least he'd made it sound simple this time. She focused her attention on the monitor again.
"To clarify what we're doing here today, let me go over some salient points." The Uber-Director backed up in his chair and the screen switched to the image of the children again. Rose memorised their faces, heart twinging. These children are being sold, she thought, sickened, her disbelief returning. They looked so unhappy… so angry…
The image changed again, to the video of the same six children flying, their avian wings looking beautiful but so very, very wrong. They flew smoothly, powerfully; their wing feathers seemed to vary according to their appearance. The dark-haired boy had black, almost gossamer wings; the dirty-blond in the front of the group had tawny, streaked wings; the darker-haired girl had brownish wings; the two blond children had pale wings; the tallest boy had wings tinged with blue-grey streaks.
"This shouldn't be happening," the Doctor murmured, almost to himself. "This is wrong. The human race was never meant to have recombinants as a species, much less a population. It's not anywhere in history." He frowned at the monitor, brows furrowing.
"Can't history be rewritten?" Rose asked tentatively, as much as she dreaded the concept. The Doctor turned to look at her, eyes dark. The effect was furthered by the shadows sliding across his face. They were almost ignoring the transmission, having witnessed it all firsthand.
"Not this kind of history. Parts of Earth's future are fixed… the human population was never meant to be recombinant. It was never introduced as an addition to society, much less considered an alternative species…" He trailed off, looking back at the screen. Rose's gaze flicked across his face for a moment, watching the light shift across the bridge of his nose and shadows settle on the tops of his cheekbones. His hair was sticking up again, tousled and rebellious as usual. She was suddenly overcome by the impulse to reach out and touch it…
She cut the thought off at the knees and focused on the monitor again, swallowing down the emotion; Rose felt herself flushing and was glad that the control room was too dark for him to tell. She watched the Uber-Director smile evilly as he announced the beginning price for the auction and felt a sick unease build in her stomach. Auction. She would never be able to hear that word again without thinking of these children. These poor, dirty, underfed children… homeless, probably without parents…
The transmission ended suddenly; in the background Rose glimpsed a millisecond of movement at the double doors, and she saw the Doctor emerging from behind them. His face was in full view, but all Rose could see of herself was a flash of blond hair from beside him. The image froze in that spot, and then evaporated. The transmission had been cut.
As soon as the image disappeared the Doctor's fingers were working, flying over keys and flipping switches and controls by the monitor. More Gallifreyen slid down the screen, moving so fast Rose wondered how the Time Lord could possibly keep up with it.
"Ha! Got you!" He shouted at the monitor, grinning manically as he addressed what Rose could only guess was the origin of the transmission. "Where are you coming from, eh? Let's see…" The Doctor squinted at the screen, peering through his black-rimmed glasses. Rose leaned over his shoulder, trying to focus on the monitor; she tried, really she did, but couldn't help being distracted by the proximity of his hair. His stupid, rebellious, ruffled, great hair. She wanted, almost more than anything, just to touch it. Just once…
Rose once again resisted her embarrassing urges, staring at the monitor with more intensity than was necessary. The Doctor didn't notice her inner turmoil, absorbed in his work. She was relieved at his obliviousness… for once. Suddenly he jumped up in an explosion of manic energy and flying movement.
"Belgium!" He shouted, dashing around the consol, setting coordinates. Rose watched him with eager anticipation, observing him as he ran back and forth, type in something here, flip a switch, pull a lever, press a button over there, run around the consol and press another button, run back to the monitor and type in something else, slam his mallet down on the consol for apparently no reason. At last the Time Lord ended his wild dance with a final flick of a lever, coming to a halt; his fingers were curled around the grip of the hand brake and he was grinning, glasses askew on his nose and eyes bright. He was so full of energy that to any other person, he would probably look stark-raving mad.
But Rose knew better.
He didn't look stark-raving mad. He was stark-raving mad. But he was also brilliant; and when it came down to it, being brilliant was really all that mattered.
"We're going to Belgium?" Rose couldn't help but smile back at him, already bracing herself on the edge of the consol.
"Yep." He grinned even wider. "We're finding those kids."
And then he released the hand brake.
Back in the Uber-Director's base stood fifteen confused robotic guards, alone in the dome where the big blue box had simply disappeared. What they had just witnessed went against the laws of logic and possibility that had been programmed into their heads. In a clichéd kind of way, the situation simply did not compute. Not programmed to do otherwise, the 'lead' humanoid robot sent a signal to the Uber-Director, alerting his superior of their predicament. The memory chip in the robot's brain would send the information directly to the nanochips in his boss's brain. It did not occur to the leader that the intruders escape would be considered incompetence. After the robots returned to their designated stations, they would be terminated and replaced for inferiority.
This did not occur to the robots. They were simply following the protocol they had been programmed with.
They marched back to the Uber-Director's office, unaware of the rage and horror they were about to face as they arrived.
O.O --.-- X-X
The Uber-Director's assistant was utilising every ounce of courage he possessed to not shrink into the corner and hide his head behind his hands. The body-less man was, once again, as close to spitting fury as the metaphor would allow. They had escaped! They had ran into a tiny little box and disappeared! Just - gone!
Had the Director possessed arms, he would have thrown something. If he had possessed legs, he would have kicked something. Instead he simply rolled from one end of the room to the other, his version of pacing. The Uber-Director fury suddenly caused one of the plasma televisions on the wall to explode in a shower of sparks, causing the assistant to jump and yelp in surprise. Poor Conrad was shaking in badly-hidden fear.
He had been bested by a skinny man and a girl. Two humans that were nothing short of incompetent; just like his
guards. Incompetent - the lot of them! Failures. Insignificant. Stupid, stupid, stupid…
"How could they have simply disappeared?!" He shouted at no one in particular. The Uber-Director continued rolling around the room, furious. "In a box, a blue box, that had just been sitting in the hallway. A wooden box! How could a wooden box have resisted my guards? Wood can shatter and splinter, but no - it didn't so much as scratch… What kind of box could it be? It simply fades from sight and disappears… that should be impossible; it has denied the laws of logic! Perhaps it is not a box - that the outside is a disguise. Something that resembles a box but is not…"
The Uber-Director was still rolling round and round in his little oval, albeit not as violently as before. He was talking to himself, thinking out loud. His furious mutterings were interrupted when the doors to his office suddenly swung open. A large group of his robot guards trooped in, their strides perfectly synchronised. The limbless man swivelled in his chair to face them, finally halting his pacing. Rolling. Whatever.
The robots stopped in front of him, fixing him with emotionless mechanic eyes. Their memories had already been downloaded into the Uber-Director's mind; he was acutely aware of their incompetence, being foiled by a man and a girl and their disappearing tricks. He knew that, were these robots to have possessed emotions, they should feel fear. Fear, just like all his assistants, all the humans that were daring enough to serve in his presence. For a fleeting moment, the Uber-Director relished the feeling of his power and influence over the humans that were so easily cowed… But that one man, the intruder and his woman, had shown no fear, no signs of intimidation.
And suddenly a thought struck him, momentarily distracting his mind from his fury and anger. What if they are not human?
"The prisoners have escaped," one of the robots informed the room, almost as if it felt the need to state the obvious. The Uber-Director glared at him, storing his thoughts for later. He had incompetent robots to deal with, musing could wait.
"Yes, and at your expense," the Director spat, although he knew these words would mean nothing at all to the robots – they responded solely to commands, not conversation. He rolled his chair around to his desk, facing the screen of a computer that sat there. Blinking once, the Uber-Director activated the computer and the screen flickered to life; the Uber-Director turned his attention to his assistant, barked, "Have you contacted my associates for the auction?"
"Yes, sir. They have agreed to take you up on your offer. We should receive word back from them soon." The assistant swallowed nervously.
"Good. At least something is going right." The Director fixed his eyes on the robots again. It was a pity, he thought, that this generation had turned out faulty after all. He had thought this last batch had finally been perfected, but it
had made itself apparent that there was still room for fine-tuning – on the other hand, there was always the newer, more advanced generation of Hunters. His scientists had made quite an improvement to the prior models, and he had yet to test them for effectiveness. As soon as this situation was underhand, he would see to that as well.
"Conrad," the Uber-Director spoke in a controlled voice as he addressed his assistant once more, "I want you to replace my security with the human guards. It seems there is a significant flaw in the most recent model of our New Age robots; I will not allow incompetence in my organisation. All of the remaining robotic guards are to be terminated."
"Ah… remaining, sir?" Conrad shifted his weight, confused. To his knowledge, none of the robots had been damaged by the intruders… But the answer came as a conclusion in his head only a second too late.
With a mechanical grinding noise and a shower of sparks, each of the guards bent beneath their weight and crumpled to the ground, useless. The Director had fried the nanocircuits in their heads; the programmes in their systems reduced to nonsensical gibberish. They were dead; terminated. They were the first of their generation to die and now they would not be the last. In approximately twenty minutes, there would not be a single one in service.
"Have this mess cleared up. I want all the guards disposed of properly." The Uber-Director smiled coldly at the mass of metal bodies lying on the floor. "We cannot leave any sign of our presence when we leave this place, as you know."
"Yes, sir, of course." Conrad bowed his head, retreating from the room. "It will all be taken care of."
And then he was gone, leaving the Uber-Director alone in his office once more.
The limbless man waited in silence for an extra moment after Conrad left; he cast a cold stare at the mass of metal corpses on the floor. Then he turned his chair and rolled back behind his large desk, facing the computer. On the screen he pulled up the recording of his transmission. It was only the outgoing, not the incoming, as he had no need for the latter; sending signals to the computer from the nanocircuits wired in his brain, he fastfowarded to the end of the recording, then set it into slow motion. He paused it on the very end, then enlarged the frame.
On the screen in front of him was a blown-up, blurry image of the man in the brown, pin-striped suit emerging from the double doors. The Uber-Director had frozen the recording on his face, studying it. He thought back to this 'meeting,' remembered how the two humans' accents had obviously been British. Perhaps, he mused, they were British government. Perhaps MI6 had finally succeded in uncovering something significant, but had been stupid enough to send two of their agents into the facility with no other information.
But that didn't explain the box. That unusual, blue, mysterious box that simply disappeared right in front of his guards. If they were British Intelligence... had MI6 acquired technology capable of such a feat? The ability to disappear, fade from sight and space altogether – this was something interesting. A powerful piece of technology...
The Uber-Director's eyes widened for a brief second. If MI6 – or any organisation, for that matter – possessed such advanced engineering, what other weapons might they have in their grasp? Whoever these people were, or whoever they were with, the Uber-Director knew it was a possibility that they might have a few more tricks up their sleeves – for example, the metallic device the man had simply pulled from his jacket was not of any design he had ever seen before, yet powerful enough to stun his guards and blow apart his doors! Surely he would have been alerted of such advancements in technilogical engineering – a box with the ability to fade from space and appear elsewhere, a probe-like device that could blow open doors without any difficulty. In adddition to that, it was already apparent that this messy-haired, device-wielding man was fearless and bold; or, the Director mused again, he was simply overly confident with absolutely no idea what he was doing.
Or, he was all of those things put together. The Uber-Director could not bring himself to dismiss either possibility at this point.
But bottom line, he told himself, these people had technology that was beyond even him, the creator and Director of the New Age. This was ultimately, the Uber-Director reluctantly admitted, a threat. If they had the means to simply disappear, they could easily reappear, presumably anywhere. It must have been how they had breached his security to begin with – it was apparent these two people and whatever organisation they worked for didn't need a literal entrance to get inside his facility, and the Director knew that no amount of security could prevent them from coming back... However...
An evil smile spread across the Uber-Director's revolting visage; as ideas formed in his circuit-wired brain. He knew exactly what this advanced technology would be worth to his organisation. He also knew that, without their technology, these people were likely to be nothing short of defenseless. If these people were to come back, all he had to do was capture them and confiscate the box before they could return to it. Then, he had control of his intruders and the possession of a profound piece of advanced technology – and after a few long, merciless interrogations and some reverse engineering, the Director would be even more powerful – the world's superpowers would be eating out the palm of his ha—
The Uber-Director halted mid-thought. Sometimes he hated the irony of his situation. But he quickly decided that he would not let a Freudian slip faze him. He sighed, but couldn't help another cunning grin.
His gaze returned to the massive heap of ruined metal laying all around him.
Yes, all he needed was to make sure he could get a hold on them – and he knew exactly how.
The Uber-Director shifted his eyes to the image on his computer screen, grinning maniacally at the British man in the suit. Yes, oh yes. He would play right into the Director's metaphorical hands – he and his little blond accomplice. The Uber-Director chuckled to himself. They would never know what hit them.
Hah. So. Review? I think my fudge is gone... -checks storage- Yeah, it's gone, but hey! I found brownies. Anyone want a brownie? Review so I know you're all still out there! Don't make me use puppy-dog eyes!! Well, okay, it doesn't matter, 'cause I'm usin' 'em anyway! MWAHAHA!
(And for the Fang-lovers) --Holds Fang-clone on rope, dangling in front of mob-- you can have him if you review!! Should be enough for everybody...