Chapter 10 - Grand Theft TARDIS
"Oi! Are you two coming along or not! We have a TARDIS to steal!" the Doctor shouted as he stomped down the hallway. "Move it!" Rose was right behind him, grinning broadly. Koschei smiled back and climbed to his feet, helping up Adie as well.
"Come on," she called. "We have an adventure waiting!" Koschei shook his head, amused by how very much alike the two of them were. He often wondered if the Doctor had consciously arranged that when he regenerated, or if he'd merely imprinted on her, taking on so much of who she was because she was the one person he really cared for back then.
Adie stood there, looking startled and a bit scared, which puzzled him, the Doctor was hardly a threat to her, nor was Rose.
"I'm all right now. Doctor… I am very sorry for going to pieces like that. Please accept my apologies." She bowed to him and Koschei frowned at her extreme deference.
"Did you? I thought you'd forgotten your toothbrush or something," the Doctor answered, looking puzzled, while Rose just sighed behind him. Adie blinked in surprise, obviously not sure if he really had been oblivious to her distress, or was merely joking. Koschei and Rose grinned at each other, but neither bothered to enlighten Adie, she'd just have to learn how to manage the Doctor on her own.
"Your Majesty, are we keeping you waiting?" Koschei snarked and rolled his eyes. "So terribly sorry that we've delayed your trek through a howling blizzard!"
"As you should be!" the Doctor retorted with a lofty air. "Allons-y!" he shouted and then they were all heading outside again.
They exited the ship and Koschei was very glad for the insulated uniform. Even trudging across this icy plain, he was shielded from the cold. The blizzard was already dropping off, making visibility better and allowing them to talk without having to scream at each other.
Now, if only his wife was here, everything would be good.
"For my own curiosity," Adie asked. "How do you steal a TARDIS if you are not keyed for entry?" She had been puzzling over that ever since she'd spotted the Master's TARDIS on the scans.
The Doctor chuckled, a low throaty sound of enjoyment.
"So, Adie my dear, I knew from a young age that I really wanted to get off of Gallifrey. I mean, really! That place was utterly stifling! Until Susan came along, I lacked an impetus to launch myself forward. However, I'd been contemplating that very question for a rather long time. A TARDIS can only be flown by the pilot that it is bonded to psychically and who's TNA has been fed into the recognition system. The thing is, sometimes a pilot dies. So, how does one fly a TARDIS without the bonded pilot, how do you transfer ownership, as it were?" The Doctor was grinning, eyes alight, cheeks red from the cold, but radiating a warmth and gleeful amusement that were infectious.
"You are obviously dying to tell us, Theta," Koschei drawled. "So tell us!"
"The High Council has a reset code that works on all TARDIS, setting them to be ready to accept a new pilot!" he announced, ignoring Koschei's snarking. "All I had to do was to steal that code and any TARDIS I wanted to pilot would be mine!"
"You hacked the Protected Files," Koschei murmured in wondering awe. "How in all the hells did you ever manage that?"
"That secret, I will keep," the Doctor answered, his eyes twinkling.
"Along with all the others," Koschei murmured, but Adie wasn't sure that she had been meant to hear that, so closed her mouth on all of her questions.
"Wait, you could have stolen any TARDIS?" Rose asked him suddenly.
"Yeah," the Doctor replied preening visibly.
"Then why," Koschei asked, exchanging a look with Rose. "Why did you steal the oldest and most unreliable TARDIS in the universe?" he asked, baffled.
"Well... I'd stolen the code... but, I still didn't have an actual TARDIS key. So, I stole the only one that was unlocked," he admitted, looking a bit less proud of his achievement.
"Wait, you stole the code, but couldn't steal a key?" Adie asked.
"They are biolocked, you know! You can't just steal a TARDIS key and make it work! You need one that matches your own TNA, or has been coded for guest entry to that particular TARDIS!" he snapped back, a bit peevishly.
"So, how did that Chinese boy get into your TARDIS, or Tegan, or all the other ones who just wandered in?" Rose asked, hands on hips.
"Ah, yes, you see, my girl was very old and a bit... capricious," the Doctor replied, his tone evasive.
"So, she just let in anyone she rather liked?" Koschei pressed and the Doctor frowned at him.
"Something like that, I suppose," he retorted and began walking faster.
"So, all those times I broke into your TARDIS?" the man who had once been the Master asked with an innocent tone. "She was what? Cheating on you?"
For some reason, the Doctor seemed not to hear that comment, stomping off through the snow with his hands shoved into his pockets, glaring at nothing. Rose and Koschei grinned at each other and Rose winked at Adie.
"It's very important, you see, Adie," she whispered to her. "To keep his ego from getting too out of bounds."
"He has so much of it you see, it might get to be a problem," Koschei teased, but Adie could sense something behind it all, a concern, even a fear that both of them shared, as they turned and hurried off after the Doctor.
Adie moved more briskly after them, wondering what was behind those walls the Doctor had erected and why the people who loved him most in the universe were also so terribly scared of him. She stopped suddenly in her tracks as another possibility occurred to her. She stared after them all, mulling this over in her head and still not understanding it, completely.
Maybe, they weren't scared of him, but for him?
Leia-76 was chewing on a pencil end, as Zoi-29 worked through the schematics.
They were sitting, side by side, in the stone igloo. The winds of the Dust Loop were howling, but in that cosy shelter, they barely heard it. Diana-37, Jake-77, and several of their sisters were working out the next mission, figuring out the route by which they would rescue the next few Mashas.
"I know that there has to be a way to create a bridge from inside the Loops," Leia-76 grumbled. "I understand the principles, of course, the physics is dead easy, but the maths are proving elusive," she sighed out.
"Well, if it was easy, one of us would have figured it out before," Zoi-29 responded with a small smile.
"True," Leia-76 agreed. "Still, it's theoretically possible, I've got the proofs," she pointed at the scattered papers around her, all filled with equations in her cramped handwriting, and Zoi-29 grinned up at her.
"I'm sure that it is, but I'm working with bone knives and bearskins here," Zoi-29 reminded her and Leia-76 bit back a snort of amusement.
"What I wouldn't do for a proper computer," Leia-76 mused and Zoi-29 looked up dreamily at the sky.
"A workshop, a proper one, with an ion lathe," she murmured.
They looked at each other and burst into giggles, amused by their unrealistic dreams.
Susan lay curled against the Master, but her mind was split in two. As happy as she was that had been able to get through to him, she was worried about Koschei.
She loved Koschei, was bonded to him so deeply that she could feel his confusion and the fight inside of him with every fibre of her being. The same war was being waged in her own hearts.
She opened her eyes and looked at the deep circles under the Master's eyes, the lines of pain etched into his face, and felt an aching tenderness inside that drove her to care for him, to love and tend to him, but the conflicted feelings in Koschei made her wince as well.
Koschei was fighting to accept and that made her love him even more. The compassionate generosity in him, the desire to keep her from pain, she couldn't help but respond to that. She missed him desperately, with a painful ache in her chest, even as she found herself unable to release the Master. They were both so hurt, so in need of her, and she needed them as well.
/What's wrong?/ Koschei's mind touched hers as he picked up her conflict and distress.
/I don't know how this is going to work,/ she admitted.
/However you want it to, wife,/ he replied, his mental voice very gentle.
/We can't leave him behind, Koschei, he's falling apart already,/ she sighed and could feel his agreement. /Could we give him a place on the TARDIS?/ she asked, wondering if she was asking too much of Koschei. A sudden gust of relief came over her from him.
/Of course. I was going to suggest it, but I wasn't sure...,/ he replied and she felt a wave of joy rush through her.
/We can give him the chestnut bureau, and the middle drawer in the bathroom!/ she decided and Koschei laughed.
/We'll talk to him about what he wants, Susan, going slowly, as he's very badly hurt, okay?/ Koschei replied and Susan chuckled softly, breathing easier now.
/Yes, of course. I'm going too fast again, aren't I?/
/No, you want us both to be happy, that's never wrong, love. I want that too, but we don't yet know how he'll feel about all this. Wait until he wakes up and see if he's okay with it all, then we can make plans, okay?/ Koschei murmured to her and she nodded, her cheek rubbing against the Master's shoulder.
/Yes, love,/ she sent back to him, wrapping her mind around him, embracing his hearts from a distance, her love for him so vast and deep that there was no end to it. He curled back inside of her as well, reassuring her and loving her and she fell back asleep, wrapped in Koschei's love and the Master's arms.
Rose was tired, cold, and rather hungry, as she trudged through the snow. They'd been following the Doctor's sonic for hours, the monotonous beeping guiding them unerringly forwards.
She came around a pile of strewn boulders and saw a hill rising up in the direction they were headed. With a weary sigh, Rose began climbing up visions of steaming cups of tea at the end of this sustaining her. Ahead of her the Doctor was waving his sonic, behind her, Koschei was helping Adie walk on the slippery surface.
There was a jolt under her feet, a sensation of movement and the hill upon which they were walking suddenly sprouted a head and was now looking at them rather quizzically, its long antennae rising some thirty feet into the air.
"Get off the hill! Get off the hill!" Adie shouted and Rose thought that that was excellent advice.
The Doctor fiddled with his sonic sent a quick burst of EMP out at the giant metal insect they were standing on.
Suddenly, the big bug fell apart into its smaller selves and Rose fell through a rain of metal insects, landing hard, and rolling to her feet quickly. Behind her, she heard the tinkling clatter of the insects starting to reform and she took off running, following the Doctor as he sprinted onwards.
A swarm of Wasps rose around them and several of the tank-like Beetles shook the snow off of themselves and trundled after them. The Locusts seemed uninterested, nothing much about them was useful for conversion, flesh was of no use to them, and the Ants were milling about, looking for materials.
The Wasps shifted into formation and Rose glanced back.
"Run!" she screamed as they charged. Koschei grabbed Adie's hand and yanked her out of the way of a diving Wasp, then they both tumbled down a snowbank, struggled to their feet, and kept running.
Rose was using every ounce of her Time Lord strength to put on more speed. The Doctor was just ahead of her, his trainers brilliantly red against the snow.
She hit a slick patch, her feet going out from under her. She screamed, as the shock of pain from landing on a hidden rock, jolted through her body. The Doctor turned and looked back at her, his eyes going huge and wide.
She felt a sudden jarring impact, as though something heavy had struck her in the back. Looking down, she saw a jagged, metallic spike pushing through her stomach. She tried to take a breath to scream, but couldn't. The Doctor was shouting, but she didn't hear anything.
Blackness overcame her.
The Doctor raced towards where an Ant the size of a pony had impaled Rose, his hearts pounding madly from sheer terror.
"Rose!" he shouted and used the sonic to short out the bug, it collapsed into thousands of tiny insects, leaving Rose lying in the snow, with a gaping hole in her abdomen. Koschei and Adie turned back and he heard their shouts of dismay.
He fell into the snow beside Rose, trying not to cry, or panic. He wished Susan was there, with her medical tools and knowledge. He wasn't sure what to do and there were more bugs coming. He thought fast, though his brain felt like pudding and his legs were trembling.
He wrapped her quickly in his coat, packing her wound as tightly as he dared and lifted Rose's unconscious body in his arms. He began running as fast as he could towards the TARDIS and saw Koschei, with Adie hidden behind him, standing there with the sonic the Doctor had dropped, disrupting bugs as fast as he could.
The Doctor ignored everything; his only concern was Rose, his only thought to get her to safety, to make sure she was alive.
He could not lose her, not after everything they had gone through.
"Get the door open!" Koschei shouted. "I'll cover you!"
The Doctor didn't spare the breath to answer; he just kept running while Koschei kept disrupting the bugs around them.
He reached the TARDIS, which sat there looking like a large boulder on the snowy plain, and leaned his forehead against the door.
"Adie, I need you to enter the code," he told her, his arms filled with Rose.
"Okay," she replied, her voice a little shaky, but her fingers quite steady.
He recited the string of numbers and letters to her and she tapped it into the door lock.
There was a long moment, as the TARDIS considered, and then the door opened and he shoved into it, looking around wildly.
"Adie!" he shouted. "Where's the medi-bay?"
"This way!" Adie called, darting inside.
The Doctor raced after Adie, pounding down the darkened corridors with no thought to spare on anything but Rose.
As soon as they got into the cold, dark medical bay, Adie started prepping a bed and he settled Rose into it. The bed made a slight wheezing sound, as it struggled to power up. He carefully removed the coat, watching the bed struggling to apply patches to her, to try to stop the bleeding.
"Can you handle things here? Are you a medical doctor?" Adie asked.
"No, I am not a bloody medical doctor, I'm a temporal physicist and I have a PhD in Cheesemaking!" He gave the monitor a thump and the bed powered up, sealing the gaping wound and stabilizing Rose's vitals. He had gotten a medical degree as well, but that was in the 19th century, and he didn't think it would do him much good just then.
"Me neither," Adie said, "I'm going to help Koschei get the TARDIS going, you take care of Rose, all right? We'll try to get to Susan!" She was out the medi-bay, running full out.
Koschei slammed the door to the TARDIS and ran to the console. The power was minimal, but it was enough to throw up the shields. He began frantically re-routing power, trying to bypass damaged systems.
"Koschei!" Adie called through the intercom. "The Doctor has Rose in the medi-bay, engineering is a mess, how much power do we need for you to do a hop? And where are the locusts?"
"Good, yes, more than we have, outside," he rattled back and dived under the console.
The sound of scratching and the view on the scanner confirmed the Locusts' location, they were bumping off the shields for now, but that wouldn't hold them for ever. Koschei was working in complete silence, no energy to spare even for swearing.
Within a minute, the console began beeping at him warningly. The shields were already going down under the locusts, and more were swarming at them every second.
"We need to get into the Vortex!" he shouted. "You keep oscillating the shields, I'm going to engineering!" he called and ripped up a trapdoor in the floor that Adie hadn't ever seen before, then he dropped through it, and out of sight.
It was immediately possible to tell when the first locust had gotten all the way to the hull of the TARDIS; the sound of crunching was awful. The oscillation of the shields knocked a few off, but it wouldn't buy them much time.
"We could do a burn?" She called down through the trapdoor. "Pick some rooms, disintegrate them, convert the mass to enough energy for a hop, what do you think?"
"No, no! That won't work! The engines are down, without them we're going nowhere! Give me five minutes!" he shouted back, but it came from the console, not the trapdoor, there was a comm system somewhere.
Adie looked at the scanner with a pale face.
"Koschei… I seriously doubt that we have five minutes."
The console brightened and began to hum, power flowing into the boards. There was a smell of ozone and the crackle of something and then the console began to rise and fall. They were de-materializing. The TARDIS was reacting as though it were driving itself and she realized that he must have a secondary console in engineering somewhere.
It didn't stop the sound of crunching: but it helped. Those locusts that had managed to latch onto the outside of the hull remained there, even through the de-materialization, they had been designed that way. Thankfully, there weren't very many that had managed to slip past the shields. She tried oscillating the shields again to shake them off and it took a number of tries to finally pry them loose. The exterior of the TARDIS probably sported a number of deep holes, she knew, but at least the trans-dimensional interface remained intact. They weren't trapped inside the TARDIS for all eternity.
"Quarantine field is going up," Koschei called to her and there was now another hum underlying the rest of the sounds. "Just to make sure that the tiny ones aren't able to get in."
He climbed out of the trapdoor, filthy and covered in soot and ash, brushing futilely at his clothes and shaking his hair out.
"Are you all right?" Adie murmured.
"Aside from nearly becoming bug chow, having my best mate nearly killed, and almost getting fried by the TARDIS, cause I did something stupidly dangerous to restart the engines?" he asked and shook his head. "No, I'm not."
"If you want go to help, with the Doctor and Rose I mean, I can probably handle repairs," she said shyly.
"No, the only thing that will help Rose is getting us to Susan as fast as we can," he sighed. "She's a brilliant doctor and Rose looks like she needs a brilliant doctor."
"Agreed. How can I help?"
"Get down to Engineering and let's see what we can do to get the architectural reconfiguration system up and running, meanwhile I'll hit the wardrobe and grab something to wear that isn't smoking," he sighed.
Koschei stroked the console softly, remembering all the things he'd done in this TARDIS and then looked around, thinking about what he needed to be fixed once the architectural reconfiguration system was up and working again.
Adie had her hand forwards, about to make the exact same gesture that Koschei had just made. She gave him a deer-in-the-headlights look, blushed madly, whipped her hand behind her back, and left the room at once.
Koschei watched her go in some confusion, but his attention was immediately claimed by the lab. The console room opened up almost directly into it, which made it rather hard to ignore. Koschei glanced over and then away quickly, not wanting to think about what his other self had used some of that equipment for. He had enough nightmares about the things he'd done himself without adding more. In the dimness of the emergency lighting, the equipment lurked like monsters hunkered down, light glancing off of straps and probes that made him shudder.
He ignored the lab for a moment and went to the wardrobe room. He needed something to wear that wasn't smoking or covered in ash. He stripped and stepped into the fresher unit and out again. It wasn't as pleasant as a shower, but they were short on time. He went to his wardrobe and pressed a palm against it, flinging it open.
Shirts, ties, jackets, all still here. He pushed through, but it wasn't there. He frowned. Where was it? Looking up, there was a box. He pulled it down, opened it, and there it was. His favourite shirt, the one Susan had worn that first time on Gumphus. His fingers stroked the fabric lightly and he went to pull it out, only to freeze.
Underneath it, folded carefully, was a torn and dirty white Acolyte's robe from the Tower of the Visionary. He shivered, remembering what Adie had said before. Susan had died in that other timeline. She'd died and never gotten into the Academy, never been a doctor in the War, never regenerated into the lovely blonde haired, blue-eyed girl he'd saved from her own collapse. She'd never helped the others to escape from Gallifrey, or found him again in the ruins, bringing him back to life. All that they had gone through had never happened to the other him. He shuddered at the thought of it.
The box had the neckties and shirt, her robe and a small vial, with a lock of Susan's hair from her second regeneration in it, a single chocolate brown curl. This was all the other him had of her. Tears in his eyes, he sealed it back up carefully and replaced it.
Choosing a different shirt and trousers, he shut up the wardrobe and leaned against it, shoulders shaking. He'd been jealous, hell, he still was, but now he also felt a surge of desperate pity for his alternate self. He let go of some of his selfish desire to keep her all to himself and moved on to work on the TARDIS.
If there was anyone in the universe who could understand what the Master had lost after all, it was Koschei, who had gone through it too.
The Doctor stood helplessly by as Rose fought for her life. The power had come up and the Medi-bay had gone into action, working on her with its full range of machinery, but she'd lost a lot of blood, had already been weak from the crash, and had gone into shock.
He hit the intercom.
"Koschei, we need Susan, or Rose might not make it," he called.
"Already on it," Koschei told him. "I need to repair a couple of systems and then we'll have navigation back online.
He leaned down and kissed her brow and then just held onto Rose's hand and prayed to every power he could think of, hoping that at least one of them was listening.
Koschei upgraded Adie's permissions to full co-pilot, so she'd have access to everything, and then called down to engineering.
"Adie, do you have the architectural reconfiguration system online, yet?" he asked.
"Almost. Once it's up, what would you like me to build?" she replied, her voice a bit tinny through the half destroyed wiring.
"They Zyton-7 crystals are fried, but I will have spares, the Hadron Power Lines are not going to last much longer and life support is going to need new components... Well, start with the replacements for the Hadron Power Lines, I guess." He was opening the console and pulling out the crystals, even as he was directing her. "It would be rather awkward if the Protyon Unit failed after all." It was an understatement, of course, but he didn't want to alarm Adie with just how badly damaged the TARDIS was.
"I'm nearly done," she told him. "And done!"
"Right, get the Hadron Power Lines patched up and after that, the Life Support Systems, we're going to need them," he sighed. He dropped back under the console and got to work. They didn't have a lot of time.
"What will you be doing?" Adie asked.
"Well, until I get the Directional Unit repaired, we can't re-materialize, so I figured I would fix that," Koschei replied. There was a long silence.
"Yeah... that sounds like a good idea," Adie squeaked and Koschei went back to work.
Adie began her chores rather sadly.
It was a bit amazing, really, the number of assumptions which had somehow crept into her life, things she had never looked at or thought about until the present circumstances had required her to do so.
She knew perfectly well that TARDIS didn't care about random girls who showed up sometimes to do maintenance. Her name appeared on a list that allowed her to open a few doors, and that was all. Of course it was the Master's TARDIS. Naturally Koschei, as another version of the Master, would feel fond of it. Naturally, now that the Master had awoken, he would take the TARDIS and that would be the end of it.
But, for a hundred years, this ship had been the closest thing she had had to a friend, the only thing to possess anything resembling a presence or intelligence in what had amounted to enforced solitary confinement; the thing that had kept her from going quite mad.
Now it would be leaving her, going with its pilot, of course it would, what else had she expected? But she felt like she was losing her only friend, and the bitterness of that threatened to break her hearts.
Susan woke up and kissed the Master softly, feeling a degree of contentment that had been conspicuously absent for the last few days. She brushed a dark curl from his brow and felt something in her relax, just a bit. Koschei was worried and working on something, but he wasn't feeling the same level of conflict and jealousy that he had been.
As for the Master...
He was himself. Everything between them was still there, intact, just as it always had been, just as it was with Koschei. Her fear that somehow things wouldn't feel the same, that the differences were too great was gone. Things were starting to look up.
/Susan, Rose's been hurt, we're coming to you now,/ Koschei informed her and she slid from the bed and began grabbing up her clothes in haste. She could feel his spike of worry and upset and she moved as quickly as she could.
"Love! There's trouble, time to move," she told the Master, as she zipped herself up.
He was already moving, throwing on another jumpsuit from the medi-bay's locker.
"Who is Rose?" he asked.
"Grandfather's wife," she responded and then blinked at him. "You heard that?" Koschei had been broadcasting only to her, she'd thought.
"The Doctor is married?" He paused, staring at her, his hands on the zipper pull, but the zipper forgotten.
The sound of a TARDIS re-materializing split the air and she ran for the door.
A moment later, the Doctor came in, carrying a slight blonde Time Lady in his arms. He placed her on the medical bed and Susan went to work on her.
The Master stared at him. The energy was the same, a bit deeper and more complex, with vast grief and terrible anguish underlining everything in him, but he was still essentially the same as he'd always been since they were children. It was all coming back to him, as he looked at his oldest and best friend. He wanted to say something, but there were no words left in him suddenly.
"Master," the Doctor turned, nodded at him, then turned back, his face anguished, as he looked at the woman on the bed.
"Doctor," he choked out. Looking the Doctor's face made him feel uncomfortable. There was too much naked emotion there and he suddenly felt as though he was intruding. "I'll just… get out of the way," he muttered, and edged towards the door.
"Please don't," the Doctor asked softly. "I could use the company." He looked up and it was Theta, the little boy he'd played pranks with, the young man he'd laughed with, the best friend turned worst enemy, as he went mad. It was his friend, asking for his help. He was shocked into silence, struggling for words.
"If you like," he said at length. "You want something to drink? It may be a wait." He knew it was an inane question even as he said it, but he was completely at a loss just then. How do you apologize for hundreds of years of trying to kill someone? How do you cross the breach of years of dreadful plots, move past all the deaths, and the horror? What do you say to your best friend after everything you had put him through? He had no idea.
"No, I couldn't swallow," the Doctor sighed. He turned and finally really looked at him. "So, is this what you looked like during the War? I didn't know. I didn't meet you again until afterwards. It's not bad, suits you." he babbled. The Master winced, knowing that the inconsequential chatter was Theta's way of trying not to think about the pain he was in. He put his hand on the Doctor's arm.
"She's going to be all right. Susan will see to that." He wasn't sure where the comforting words had come from, but he was unutterably grateful for his brain having kicked out something useful this time.
"Yeah, she's brilliant, really," the Doctor said, nodding jerkily, his eyes filling with tears. "I just can't lose Rose, we've gone through so much..." He trailed off, looking at his wife, trembling with his fears.
The Master put an arm around his shoulder and the Doctor turned and buried his face in his shirt, shoulders shaking.
After everything, all the drama, the ranting, the monologues, the only thing left was his old friend, who needed him, and himself giving comfort. He held the Doctor as he wept and finally felt like he was doing something right.