Chapter 11: Jack's Toys

Inside the Weapons Development Lab, tension rippled through the room. The twenty-five or so Torchwood workers were scattered throughout the room, not looking at each other. A few, like Ianto and Lisa, were huddled together in hushed conversations. A grizzled guard sat at a desk, running his fingers along the barrel of his useless machine gun. A woman in a lab coat was openly weeping in the corner. Hartman sat with her back leaning against the far wall, eyes closed and rubbing the sides of her head. And Jackie was pacing back and forth. What had she been thinking, letting her daughter go off to face a bunch of robots? What if Rose needed help? And here she was, sitting here, waiting for something to happen!

The silence was more than Jackie could bear. With some difficulty, she stood upon one of the desks and cleared her throat. A few heads glanced up at her.

"This is ridiculous," she proclaimed. "I thought you people worked with aliens! And here we are, sitting here useless while those metal things are about!"

"Well, what do you expect us to do?" snapped a man in a lab coat.

"I dunno!" yelled Jackie, throwing her arms up in the air. "Just do something! My daughter's out there, and she might very well need us! Aren't we in a Weapons Development Lab or something?"

"Bullets don't work on them," said the guard at the desk dully. "We've only got the two guns that even work against them, haven't we?"

"She's right," said Hartman, standing up. All heads in the room swiveled towards her. "I hate to say it, but the screechy old bat is right." Jackie glared furiously but remained silent as Hartman continued. "We're supposed to be defending the British empire from aliens, and we're cowering in here while our alien prisoner runs around freely, trying to stop them." She whirled to face the guard at the desk. "Yes, bullets don't work on them. But not every weapon in here uses them. We don't even know what half of these do. For all we know, they melt steel. So for Queen and country and the good of the British empire, I order you all to pick a weapon." Her face hardened. "We're going after them."


So it was back to his original plan, the Doctor thought as the Cybermen marched him up the stairs. Just him, on his way to the Cyber-Leader, at gunpoint. Although no guns would have been nice. Really, they couldn't use any nicer weapons, could they? What about ray guns that tickled you mercilessly? That could be nearly as fierce as energy blasters, and a lot more polite….

Anyway. Jack would wake up in a bit, and Rose was hopefully holed up somewhere safe with Jackie. Nothing to worry about there.

What was worrying was what he had neglected to mention to the others. The electromagnetic pulse tucked away in his breast pocket was tiny – so tiny in fact that it would only take out the Cybermen within a ten foot radius, for about fifteen seconds.

He would have to get right next to the Cyber-Leader, activate the EMP, and plug Rose's phone into the outgoing signal circuit, all within fifteen seconds. He might actually have less, if some Cybermen were far enough away to escape the EMP when it went off but close enough to attack him.

Under normal circumstances, hacking his way into the Cyber-Leader's outgoing signal circuit would take twenty seconds.

He would have to work very, very fast.

The Cybermen finally stopped in front of a familiar wooden door, which slid open as they approached, allowing them entrance to the room where the bronze void ship had been housed until a few hours previously. Somehow, an obnoxiously large throne of sorts had been procured for the Leader to sit upon – a throne upon the void ship's platform, which was ten feet off the ground and only accessible by a ladder.

Oh, bugger.

"What is this upgrade?" boomed the Cyber-Leader from its lofty throne.

"Ah, I see you're more of an ask-questions-first type of person…thing," said the Doctor nonchalantly. "Much wiser than your predecessor. He was more into dissect-first, ask questions later."

"Sensors detect a binary vascular system. What gives you this difference?"

"Time Lord," the Doctor declared ominously. The Cyber-Leader showed no recognition. Oh, right. Alternate universe – never heard of Time Lords. Used to be he'd have people trembling in fear just by mentioning he was a Time Lord. And they were quite right to be afraid, too.

He missed his people.

The Cyber-Leader interrupted his musings. "You produce higher level readings on brain activity and brain functions."

"Suppose so, yeah," The Doctor casually reached his hand into his breast pocket to grab the EMP.

"You will be upgraded to the new Cyber-Leader."

The Doctor froze, EMP in his hand, but hand still in his pocket. "What? Nononono, bad idea." He made a face that suggested he had eaten something nasty. "Bleh."

"Your higher brain functions will give the Cybermen better leadership and lead us to victory. Is this not a good idea?"

"My higher brain functions would disagree," said the Doctor, taking his hand from his pocket. The EMP lay hidden, clutched in his fist. "Besides, look at you! You're doing such a lovely job already! You've taken the tower, you've got all of Torchwood lined up patiently waiting for you rebuild your upgrading machine. You'll go from what, eighty or so to seven hundred? Quite an achievement! Wouldn't you rather stay Leader, keep your power, stay overlord over all?"

"The Cybermen would benefit greatly with you as our Leader."

"Ah. No emotions means no greed. Hold on, I thought all Cybermen were the same? I'm not even human, I won't be the same. I'm different! 'Higher brain functions' and all that."

"You will be the same."

"But you aren't all the same," declared the Doctor, slowly advancing. "Just look at you! The Cyber-Leader before you, he saw me and decided to cut my hearts out. You saw me and decided to make me your leader. If Cybermen were really all the same, wouldn't you have both tried to do the same thing, come to the same conclusion?" He edged further and further away from the guards and closer to the ladder leading up to the Cyber-Leader's platform.

"You've failed," he continued, "Your great scheme to make all people identical is a total mess! You haven't made yourselves the same, you've only hidden the differences! Maybe the outside ones are gone, looks and size and race and ginger hair and all that. But the differences that count, the really important ones, the differences that matter, they're all locked up here," he tapped his temple, "In your brains. Creativity, personality. Repressed, but still there."

"Cybermen are the same!" proclaimed the Cyber-Leader in a tone that almost approached anger.

The Doctor bounded up the ladder in three quick jumps. He stood on the platform, facing the Cyber-Leader, hands casually in his pockets.

"Cause see, underneath all that circuitry and steel, you still have just a glimmer of humanity left inside that trapped, festering brain. Because you can't extinguish the human spirit, that wonderful human spark – not completely."

"Cybermen do not have spirit! We are free of difference!"

The Doctor shrugged. "Yeah, well – "

He charged, leaping straight at the Cyber-Leader with sonic screwdriver in one hand and EMP in the other. He activated the EMP just as his shoulder came in contact with the Leader's steel chest, knocking them both over. Sprawled on its back and paralyzed from the EMP, the Cyber-Leader was helpless as the Doctor straddled its chest and pried off its metal face mask with the sonic screwdriver, revealing a pulsing brain interconnected with a mass of wires. Sonic-ing furiously, the Doctor dropped the now-useless EMP and extracted Rose's phone, shoving it close to the Leader's skull and connecting it to the outgoing signal circuit.

He was four seconds into his work when the first blast flew over his head. Bending lower in hopes of not being hit, the Doctor continued, wiring Rose's phone more and more into the Leader's cybernetic nerve center. The other Cybermen were climbing the ladder, aiming for a better shot at him….There! The code was downloading….hurryhurryhurry – yes! Now he just needed to –

The blast hit him squarely between the shoulder blades, and both the screwdriver and Rose's phone tumbled from his hand.

He hoped he was ginger this time.


"He's moving…." Jack kept his focus on his wrist strap.

"That's good, though, right? Means he's fine?" Rose bit her lip. As far as they could tell, the Doctor had been taken inside the room where the void ship had been, but they couldn't follow after him. Five Cybermen were patrolling the hallway nearest the entrance, and with Jack's gun dead, they had no weapons. Unable to get any closer, they both were crouched behind the corner nearest the patrolled hallway.

Jack still hadn't answered Rose.

"Moving means he's fine, right? Jack, answer me already!" She repressed the urge to claw his wrist strap off and check it herself. They'd followed the Doctor this far, and watched him moving around the room. But then he had stopped and not moved for a few long minutes. Now he was moving towards the door.

"I don't think he's moving," Jack said slowly, "I think they're moving him."

They faintly heard the swoosh of the sliding door open a hallway away, and the stomp of synchronized steel boots marching towards them.

"Hide," ordered Jack, and they rushed in the opposite direction towards the T-shaped fork in the hallway. They crouched behind the corner of the right wing of the T just as the boots turned the corner where they'd been a few seconds before.

The boots neared closer and closer, and Jack nudged Rose behind him. If the Cybermen turned right when they reached the end of the hallway, they were done for.

The Cybermen turned left, not even noticing Jack and Rose behind them. The first was the Cyber-Leader, clearly marked by the black rods on the side of its head. The remaining two marched in synchronization behind him, each dragging the Doctor's motionless form by his arms.

Rose stifled her gasp until the doors to the lift the group entered slid shut. "Where are they going?"

Jack checked his wrist strap and leaned back, softly banging his head against the wall repeatedly. "Up."

"What's up?"

"Upgrading chamber. Or where it was, anyway." Jack hit the wall with the back of his head again in frustration. "They're going to upgrade him, and we've got nothing to stop it."

"Well, don't give up! We don't need your little toys, we've still got our brains, yeah? We know where they're going, we can do something!" She paused, thinking. "We'll, I dunno, set the upgrading machine on fire or – "

"Rose, I wasn't giving up," said Jack irritably, "I was thinking!"

"Thinking what?"

"Well, now I'm thinking I like the fire-in-the-upgrading-machine idea."

"But what were you thinking?"

Jack grinned, eyes glinting mischievously. "I was thinking it's time to play with my little toy."

Before Rose could tell him off for thinking about that at a time like this, Jack held up his wrist strap.

"Mind out of the gutter, Rose," he said cheerfully. "Let me introduce you to my friend, the teleport."

"You've got a teleport?" Her eyebrows flew upwards. "What, seriously?"

"Well, sort of," Jack admitted. "It's a vortex manipulator, supposed to be able to travel through time and space."

"Like the TARDIS."

"Like the TARDIS. But it broke when I got back to Earth from the Gamestation. It's taken me a long time to get any of it working at all, because I was missing a part. A part that happened to be sitting in one of those crates in the warehouse."

"So let's use it!" Rose said eagerly.

"Not yet. I only just got it assembled last time we were in the TARDIS. Haven't had the chance to test it. Let me try it, and if I live then you can hitch a ride, okay?"

Rose bit her lip and nodded.

"Okay then, here goes nothing!" Jack said cheerfully, smacking his palm down on the wrist strap. He vanished with a flash of blue light, and reappeared behind Rose.

He looked down, checking for missing limbs. "Yep, still all here! Let's see how far this thing'll go!"

Before Rose could say anything, he smacked his wrist strap again, and disappeared. Rose anxiously looked around for him, but he did not reappear. Her heart pumped faster in worry as a thousand possibilities danced through her head. Maybe he'd ended up far away in the middle of nowhere. Maybe he'd accidentally traveled in time instead of space. Maybe the teleport broke as soon as he arrived. Maybe his atoms hadn't rearranged properly and he was scattered in the air around her. How far did the immortal thing work, anyway? Could he come back to life from being completely vaporized?

Jack reappeared right in front of her, scowling at his vortex manipulator. "Very short-range. Won't go further than a floor up at a time. But I don't think it'll leave parts of you here, anyway." He opened his arms and grinned mischievously. "Come on, let's have a hug."

Rolling her eyes and smiling, Rose wrapped her arms around Jack tightly.

"You ever teleported before?" Jack asked.

"Does transmat count?" she said nervously.

"Nope. First time's the hardest," said Jack, "And we've got to go up a couple floors, one at a time. Ready?"

Rose squeezed tighter, shutting her eyes. Jack smacked his wrist strap, and they both vanished in a flash of blue.


Ianto Jones tentatively stuck his head out of the Weapons Development Lab. "Coast is clear."

He stepped from the lab and strode down the hall, gun strapped to his shoulder. The remaining members of Torchwood and Jackie followed behind him, each similarly armed.

"So how do we find them then?" a man in a lab coat asked, wielding his bulky weapon uncertainly in one hand and a laptop in the other.

"Rajesh, isn't it?" said Hartman. She herself was fearlessly carrying a gun half her size. "I expect we'll be going up. The Cybermen seemed to be more concentrated on the higher floors."

Jackie clutched her small handgun with one hand while the other drew a mobile from her pocket. "I'll just call Rose," she said confidently, punching the speed dial.

"But there's no signal in here, not in this entire building!" protested Rajesh.

Jackie glared at him, hand not holding the phone on her hip. "If my daughter can call me from the far reaches of the Fruit Loop Nebula or whatever it's called, I can ruddy well call her from here!" She pressed the phone to her ear desperately. "Oh, I got her voice mail. What a time for her to have her phone off!"

"Here," said Rajesh, opening his laptop, "I can try and track the signal." Jackie handed over her mobile, and Rajesh fiddled with it for a moment before turning to his laptop, typing furiously one-handed. The Torchwood survivors huddled around them in a mass, eyes darting anxiously around for approaching Cybermen and fingers wavering near their triggers.

"Found it!" declared Rajesh.

"Excellent work, Rajesh!" Hartman smiled in satisfaction. "Where to?"

"Sphere room. But what are they doing in there? The sphere's gone."

"Well, we'll just find out, won't we?" Hartman flicked a strand of hair out of her face, and hoisted her gun at the ready. "After you."


A/N: Dr Rajesh Singh was the scientist working in the sphere room in the original Doomsday. He's the one Rose tried to use the psychic paper on, and it didn't work. Later he got his head plung-eed by Daleks.

Was going to be more of a cliffhanger, but I ended up sticking that scene at the beginning of next chapter. Of course, now that I've told you that, isn't that a bit of a cliffhanger in itself?

Now looks like the story will be between 13-15 chapters. We're nearing the end, folks! I'm thrilled and amazed that so many people like this. =)