The Cervovores face the Oncoming Storm... even if right now it's just in the forecast, not yet in the sky. Heh, heh. Enjoy!
THIRTEEN
Alain slept for another hour, and when he woke, Martha and the Doctor did as asked, and saw him off in London, crossing the street toward Tom's flat. The Doctor had relayed to him Tom's suggestion that perhaps Alain might like a flatmate, and Alain's face had lit up, if not with happiness, at least with relief. Alain had said he would talk with Tom and consider it. At the very least, he wanted to lay low for a day or two before returning to the whirlwind of Gregoire's death, and doing so with a somewhat kindred spirit like Tom, might not be the worst idea. The Doctor said that he and Martha would return in the TARDIS, and give him a lift back to France whenever he rang, using his new phone.
By now, the sun was coming up on London. It seemed odd to see the neighbourhood bathed in brightening gold tones, when the night had been so bloody and bleak.
Although, for Martha and the Doctor, it was a new day, indeed.
"And then there were two," the Doctor said, as he shut the door. Then, with exaggerated mock-enthusiasm, he asked Martha, "Fancy a trip back to Nîmes?"
Martha, who was leaning against a railing on the ramp, adopted his tone and said, "Boy, do I!" The two of them walked up the ramp and got into travel mode round the console. "Back to the nest?"
"Yep," he said, popping the P. "I've got to go back and be all earnest and threatening for Sylvie's benefit."
"Cool. I like when you do that."
The TARDIS did its thing, and when it stopped, he said, "Let's see how much I have to bluff them." He typed a command or two into the keyboard on the console, waited for data to come back, and said, "Okay… I guess now I know."
"Know what?"
At that, they heard a blood-curdling scream outside the doors, and recognised Sylvie's shrill, inhuman voice, loosely pronouncing the Doctor's name, and expressing its displeasure at seeing the blue box again.
Martha's question had to wait. They looked at each other with resigned faces and stepped out.
And when they did, they were right back in the electrical room of the carpark in Nîmes. A bulbous, grey, alien life-form was traipsing over the wires and cables, back and forth like a maniac. Two good-looking men, nude from the waist-up, were sitting nearby, on the floor, backs to the wall, looking despairing and exhausted.
"Where'd François find trousers?" Martha whispered.
"Dunno," the Doctor whispered back. "Broke into a car, maybe?"
"You," Sylvie snarled when she saw them. Then she snorted, and started pacing again.
François got to his feet. "Hello," he said, rather awkwardly. His eyes were fixed on Martha, and he walked straight for her, completely ignoring the Doctor. He stopped about five feet from her. "Martha, is it?"
"Erm, yes."
"I hope you can forgive me for before."
Her jaw dropped open, and she was frozen for a moment as she tried to respond, and found that she could not.
"Hello?" François said, with a little smile, seeming to search her face.
"Erm, yes, hello. Are you apologising for shocking me? With God knows how many volts? Like, an hour ago?"
"Yes," he said. He feigned dismay, looking at the floor and shaking his head. "I am – I'm so, so sorry. I'm so embarrassed – I don't know what came over me."
In the background, Jean-Marc groaned. "Ugh. Really?"
She narrowed her eyes in disbelief. "You don't know what came over you? Are you mental?"
"So it would seem," he sighed. "I hope that won't stop us from being friends."
"What?" she asked, totally and completely incredulous. "Sorry, I mean… what?"
He smiled affably. "I'd like us to be friends," he told her.
"You would?"
"Of course. I'd like to make amends for what I did, and maybe get to know you. You seem like someone who would be worth my while."
The Doctor had been watching the exchange between a desperate François and a surprised Martha with a measure of intellectual curiosity. He was a bit horrified, a bit surprised, but his brain-wheels began to turn a bit more.
Part of him wanted to scream, Can you not see me standing here, you prat? Do you not know who I am and that I can see clear as day what you're doing? And probably so can Martha? Do you not realise that we were just here an hour ago and saw you transform from an alien toad into this humanoid thing, with very bad seduction skills?
But part of him also realised, a) that this moment was awkward and weird, but the phenomenon could potentially be used as a tool, should it come to that and b) that he, the Doctor, did not one-hundred-per-cent understand the seductive powers of the Cervovores, and his effect on Martha should not be entirely discounted. Something had kept Tom and Gregoire coming back to them time and again, for more abuse. He rather hoped that the enthralling qualities of the Cervovores were something that would develop over time, and were every bit as clumsy as they seemed now, on François' first night as a ladies' man.
"Okay, okay," the Doctor said, getting between François and Martha, just as the desperate Cervovore was reaching out to touch her. "We didn't come here to get schmoozed, or whatever the hell you're doing. We came here to talk to you. All three of you."
François seemed nonplussed to have had his ridiculous wooing of Martha Jones cut short, as though he'd forgotten the Doctor was there.
"Okay, this is the part where he threatens us," Sylvie said, her flipper-like arms flailing, somehow almost conveying sarcasm. "Offers us a chance to back off, or else!" Then she and Jean-Marc laughed.
François did not laugh. He looked at Martha soulfully, as if he was taking her seriously, at the very least.
"Well, yeah," the Doctor said, tugging at the hair on the back of his head, and making his way a bit closer to the mass of cables and wires over which Sylvie was stalking. "I reckon you've got me."
Sylvie and Jean-Marc laughed again. "Why the hell would we leave before our mission is accomplished?" Jean Marc asked.
"Because all three of you are starting from scratch now," the Doctor said, rather affably, with a hard-as-nails tone just beneath the surface. "It's going to take you years to get your hooks back in, enough to take a head, and until then, you're vulnerable. And as you may have heard, I'm not your average handsome bloke in a blue box. I'm actually quite clever. Jean-Marc and François, I reckon you'll go after a pair of choice humans now, but my friends and I most definitely have a plan for your undoing. And over the coming weeks, we intend on undoing all the cells of Cervovores on this planet. We will find wherever the India cell went, and unravel their work, just like we unravelled Sylvie's, and will unravel Jean-Marc's and François'. If there are other nests, we'll get them too. And so, it is futile, at best, for you to stay here."
Sylvie and Jean-Marc laughed again. "Starting from scratch will be such a pleasure," the former said to the latter, as though the Time Lord weren't there.
"In order to do that, Sylvie, you'll have to shock someone first," said the Doctor. "Sorry, love, but looking the way you do, it'll have to be the shock, before it can be the shag. And with my TARDIS dialled into your power centre as it is, and has been since we first landed here, I will know when you begin firing it up for the attack. And I will stop you."
Sylvie put her hands on her hips and stared at him sideways, with one fish-eye. "You can't stop me."
"Oh no?" he asked. He stalked back to the TARDIS, and kicked open the door. He aimed the sonic screwdriver at the console, and send feedback through its consciousness, causing the power centre on the wall to spark.
Jean-Marc crawled away from it in surprise, as both Sylvie and François jumped, and gave a surprised yelp.
"I think I can," he said, his eyes cold as ice. "If I can do that, then that means I can stop the electrical current. And, I can route it back through you. I could do it to any one of you. Or all of you. Now, I don't have confirmation on what the feedback would do to you, Sylvie, but I'll take an educated guess: it will make you even less corporeal than you already are. Your liquid-like body will be much less like liquid and more… well, actual liquid. Good luck getting anything done then!"
"You don't have the power to do that," she protested, meanly. "You can't feed the electrical current back through to me. You're not a Cervovore."
"No, but my TARDIS is awfully versatile," he reminded her. "If it can extract Tom Milligan's energy signature from the power centre, and thereby from you, what makes you think I can't duplicate the process backwards, with something a lot less pleasant? All I'd have to do is reverse the polarity. I'm brilliant at reversing the polarity."
The frog-like creature stood, huffed, puffed, and drooled in anger. "I'm not afraid of you!" she insisted.
"Sylvie, or whatever your name is," the Doctor said, shoving his hands into his pockets, and sauntering further forward coolly. "That's the second time you've said that to me, yet all of the evidence points to the contrary. In fact, do you know what I've found in my long, long years of knocking about this great old universe?"
"What?" she spat.
"That no-one who is actually not-afraid of me ever feels the need to tell me so," he answered.
"Arrogant," she hissed.
"Well, you're not wrong," he conceded. "But it's only because I've got prior experience with rubbish like this, and I'm still alive."
This was the part of the dance that Martha enjoyed the most: the Doctor and the bad guy, right on the precipice of falling into the abyss, yet the Doctor is cool and collected, and the adversary is trying to visibly force down panic. The Doctor's arrogance did indeed show though, because he knew how this show would end, and so did she.
She smiled subtly.
The Sylvie-thing spent a few more seconds huffing and puffing. Jean-Marc stood behind her, glowering at the Doctor, and François stood by, trying to look sensitive, but betraying fear, just like the other two.
Then, she stalked up to the Doctor, her fin-feet squishing along the floor. The top of her head came no higher than his sternum, but she craned her very thick neck, and looked up at him, her breath shallow and shaky. "I am not afraid of you. You are not a threat."
"Keep saying it, maybe it will come true," he said to her, his voice low and growl-like.
"You. Are. Not. Scary," she insisted.
He smiled delightedly, and gave a giddy little giggle. "Okay! Want me to get scary? How about this: with my TARDIS dialled into your power centre, I can empty it. I could burn out the inside and create a vacuum, clearing it of all evidence that there was ever human energy inside, and I can send the empty signature back to the High Senate on your home planet."
François' breath hitched subtly. Sylvie and Jean-Marc simply gaped at the Doctor.
"I know you'd like to think I can't do it," the Doctor continued. "But let me reiterate: you experienced what my TARDIS can do with energy signatures, Sylvie. You used to be a foot taller, had a torso and head that were separate from one another, and legs that could turn heads in a good way. I got hold of a panting, sweaty, worked-up Tom Milligan for a minute and now…"
"Oi, there's no need to be insulting," François cut in. It felt, to everyone in the room, like a total non-sequitur. He wasn't up to his full smooth-guy powers yet… and that was a relief.
The Doctor paused for effect, to let what he'd said sink in. And then, "I mean, I would rather just have you stop what you're doing and leave this planet of your own volition, and failing that, I'd rather sap each one of you of the energy that keeps you humanoid, and basically just neuter you," he shrugged, walking around in a circle. "But if you want me to, I can do the thing that would force your High Senate to have you involuntarily transmatted home, and vaporised. I mean… your decision."
"Doctor…" Sylvie hissed. It sounded like neither a protestation, nor an expression of shock. Just a trying-on of his name in her mouth, as though it disgusted her.
"I'm the guy who will always go the non-violent route, if you let me," he continued. "But my priority is keeping the Earth, and every person on it, safe. So, you know, ultimately, I'm good with whatever."
There seemed to be a stand-off while the Cervovores seethed, and the Time Lord stood with one leg bent, and his hands crossed over his chest. Martha Jones stood by, letting her eyes drift back and forth between all of the beings in the room…
"Why don't you just do it then?" Sylvie finally shouted, with a ragged voice, filled with out-of-control rage. "Do it! Do it!" By the end, she was screaming.
Jean-Marc and François advanced, grabbed her by the arms, and pulled her away from the Doctor, trying to shut her up.
"Why don't I just do it? Because," the Doctor said, flipping the sonic screwdriver in the air, then depositing it back in his suit jacket's inside pocket. "I'm giving you a chance. You can't become humanoid again without the TARDIS knowing about it. And your friends, well… their days are numbered, if I have anything to say about it. And I do. So, you can go back to your Senate and say that you tried your best and failed, or you can get hauled home in shackles with all of your evidence destroyed, and face execution. Think on it. Come on, Martha."
Once the TARDIS' door was shut and locked, Martha turned her back to it, and sank against it.
"That was brilliant," she said. She was aware that she sounded like a teenaged girl swooning over a boy band, but she didn't care.
"Thanks. I needed to hear that," the Doctor muttered, going straight for the console, dematerialising the vessel, then pulling the computer screen round to view. "Because I can't do what I said I can."
"I don't care," she sighed, amidst the familiar, homey grinding sound of the universe slipping through and around the TARDIS.
He looked up at her for a moment, and smiled subtly. "Well, let's hope I'm at least believable."
"You know you are," she told him. "You've bluffed your way up and down the universe, seventeen times, and eighteen on Sunday. And you're still kicking."
"I suppose that's true. But it's the truths that have allowed me to bluff, the times when I did do what I said I would do…" he trailed off.
"Don't go there, Doctor," she said. "Count this as a victory. I believed what you said. I know you, and yet I had no idea that you can't do the things you said."
"Okay, well, don't get me wrong," he corrected. "I can reverse the polarity in their power centre and send voltage back through to the Cervovore administering it, if one of them is actually brazen enough to try shocking a human now."
"Oh. Good."
"It really is part of the same mechanism that allowed me to do what I did with Tom's energy signature, and Sylvie's connection to it," he told her. "But the part about scrubbing out the power centre… I don't think that could be done without partially destroying the TARDIS' inner workings. It would have to insinuate too much of itself into the Cervovores' power centre, and therefore their consciousness, in order to really scrub it clean, in a way that would get them all executed. The TARDIS would come back to itself corrupted, almost by something like a virus, which would do God-knows-what to her."
"It won't come to that," she assured him. "They'll pull out. Either that, or Alain will come through with his taking-down of Jean-Marc, and you can use me to get François."
He looked at her, with a mixture of surprise and confusion. "Use you? Is that how you…"
"No," she corrected. "Come on, you know what I mean. Use my energy signature… not me."
He swallowed hard, and nodded, returning to the console screen.
They were silent for quite some time, while Martha sat on the lone seat in the console room, and the Doctor seemed to fret over data. It was Martha who broke the reverie, when she said, "This is weird."
"Isn't it always?" he asked.
"No, I mean, it's the first time I've come to a lull in an adventure with you, knowing it could be years before we get satisfaction. Usually when the eye of the storm comes, it's just that. This feels more like… a hiatus."
"It happens this way once in a while," he sighed. "Every time I meet a Dalek, I reckon, it'll be a while, but I'll see them again, and someday maybe… well, I'll use your phrase: maybe I'll have satisfaction."
"It's a little hard to live with."
"Too hard?"
"No," she shrugged. "Just another thing I've got to get used to, in the world of the Doctor. It's all right – I've got prior."
"Plenty of things you don't have prior for, you know," he muttered, rather shyly.
"I know," she said, hopping off the stool, and wrapping her arms around his waist. He responded by wrapping his around her as well. "I'm looking forward to that bit, as well."
As always, please review! The story is starting its descent at this time... what are your thoughts?
Thank you for reading!