Pieces of the Puzzle
He waited until she had gone to bed to work on the robot. Astonishingly, she had beaten him at Scrabble. He protested loudly and indignantly, but River insisted that only real human English words were allowed, and however much he wanted the triple-word score, allons-y was still French. He pouted for a little while, but was consoled by the fact that she unintentionally (actually very intentionally, but he didn't know that) set him up to get extra points with the word 'banana'. She still won, but he was pleased enough with his little victory that it didn't much matter. After a quick kiss, she went off to bed and he waited until he was sure she was in their room to retrieve the robot body and get to work.
After thinking about the robot all afternoon, it was a relief to pull out his tools and begin tinkering with the thing. The front panel had been deadlocked to prevent him from sonic-ing it open, so the Doctor borrowed the squareness gun that Jack had left in the Tardis some two years earlier. He knew that it would someday be River's, but right now it was a means to an end. He aimed the squareness gun at the rubbery fake-flesh of the robot woman's chest and pulled the trigger. Immediately there was the smell of burning flesh and singed metal.
"No no no no no!" he shouted, sonic-ing the table the body was on, typing in instructions on the keypad. A force field sprung up over the body and sucked the oxygen and other gasses away from it.
"Ha ha, thought you could get me with that, did you?" he muttered to the body. Through the transparent force field he could see circuitry entwined with human organs. Slumping slightly, he ran a hand through his hair.
"Oh you poor poor thing. Look what they've done to you."
After insuring that the acidic gas wouldn't spray again, he tapped the table's keypad and the force field vanished. Gently, he ran a hand over the robot-thing's hair. It was dark brown and straight. The roots of it were a mousy color—the woman had dyed her hair once.
"You used to be a person and they killed you and used you for parts. Oh I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."
River stood at the door to the lab, dressed in a loose nightgown and looking very like a child except for her pregnant belly. He looked up at her, his eyes tired and worried and sad. Walking over to him, she pulled him into a hug.
"Did you think I didn't know what you were doing?" she asked softly.
"I didn't want you to worry."
"But you would worry, sweetie."
He kissed her hair distractedly and turned back to the robot-human-thing on the table.
"She used to be a person, River. And they killed her and turned her into this."
"I know, my love. And we're going to work out who did this to her."
He looked over at his wife.
"You should get some sleep, River. You need your rest."
"I'll go to bed when you do," she told him, and pulled her hair away from her face with an elastic band. "Now…what have we got here? Pass me the scanner, would you?"
Half-smiling, he passed her the scanner and she took readings, her brow wrinkling.
"Now that's odd…"
"What?"
"Hand me that scalpel, would you?"
Smiling slightly less now, he handed her the laser-scalpel and she made an incision in the woman's liver, revealing a glimmer of silver. She put on a pair of gloves and selected a pair of tweezers from the tray next to the table.
"What do we have here?" The little box she had pulled from the woman's liver had a tiny blinking light on top of it, a tiny blue bulb that flickered.
"Transmitter?" he suggested.
"Looks like it," she agreed.
"Pass me that scalpel?" he asked.
She handed him the laser-scalpel and he carefully cut away a patch of the woman's skull, now reinforced with metal. Her brain was dead now, but it had at least a dozen tiny pins stuck in it, little lights on the tips of the pins dead."
"I think I know how you turned her off," the Doctor remarked, adjusting the squareness gun and aiming it where River's plasma-bolts had penetrated the thing's chest. Her heart, now a mass of destroyed flash, was covered in wires and attached to a circuit board. River leaned over to peer at it too.
"They used her body as a power supply system and just added their own technology," she remarked.
"Yeah, but how did they do that? They had to kill her to install all this, but they'd have to re-start her heart to get her to work again."
"I could have killed her," River whispered, going very white and stepping away from the body.
"No, River. She was already dead, you must understand that. She had no brain-activity. Her body was a shell being used and controlled…like a virus invades a cell."
River nodded slowly, still looking very pale and a bit sick.
"Here," the Doctor said, offering her the tiny transmitter. "Clean this off and we can see where the signal is transmitting to."
Nodding, River took the little transmitter and carefully washed it with a chemical solution that wouldn't damage any of the circuitry. Only after she took it out of the solution, the little blue light had gone out.
"Doctor! It stopped transmitting."
"What?" He washed off his hands quickly and picked up the box, peering at it inquisitively before handing it back to River. Frowning, he pulled out the sonic and aimed it at the box, giving it a three-second burst—nothing. He readjusted the sonic and gave the box another burst. Again, the light remained dark.
"Why have you turned off?" he asked the little box.
"Well the chemical bath turned it off…maybe it broke something inside the transmitter," she suggested.
"That's possible…or…oh I wonder. Are you this clever?" he asked the box, plucking it from River's grasp. Carefully, he dipped it back into the pool of blood in the robot-woman's liver and then sonic-ed the transmitter again. The little blue light flickered back on.
"Oh that's clever. That's very clever. It uses blood to complete the circuit and keep it going, so if you take it out and clean it, it stops working, effectively looking like it's broken and preventing the little beauty from telling us who it's talking to! Ha!"
Bouncing around, he sonic-ed the transmitter and with a flick of his wrist checked the readings on the sonic. His beaming grin turned into a faint frown.
"And that's not polite at all, is it?"
River, now sitting in one of the chairs, watched him with amusement that was slowly turning into drowsiness.
"What is it?" she asked, attempting to cover up her drooping eyelids by opening her eyes wider, trying to look more alert than she actually was.
"It's bouncing me off of other places, just like you can do with internet signals. It's re-routing the signal through a bunch of places to make it harder to track. And the moment that we arrive at one of those places, you can bet that they'll be onto us and stop transmitting."
"Oh," River said, stifling a yawn. "Well can you track it anyhow?"
"Well of course I can," he replied, surprised that there was even a question of his capability. "It'll take a little time though. You ought to go to bed."
"Isn't it still transmitting?"
"Yes, of course."
River took a Petri dish and carefully filled it with the woman's blood, then plucked the transmitter from his fingers and set it in the dish, putting a force field back over the body. She set the Petri dish on another table and plugged it into the computer in the wall, selecting a program.
"There; it'll track the signal automatically." She tapped the screen with his finger, "And it should take five or six hours."
He scrambled over to look at the screen, which was currently charting the signal's course across space and time.
"You're clever, aren't you?"
"My doctorate seems to indicate that I am."
"In archaeology," he muttered, flapping a hand at her.
"Your archaeologist is responsible for tracking the signal back to its source, so you'd do well to respect the doctorate for once."
"I could…"
She tried to scowl at him and ended up yawning.
"You really ought to go to bed," he said again.
"I'm waiting until you go to bed," she replied, "You know that you'll be up all night and get no sleep at all if you don't."
"So I suppose there's only one solution to this problem," the Doctor replied. He scooped up his wife, bridal-style and carried her back to their bedroom. Laying her carefully on the bed, he took a moment to brush his teeth and pull strip down to his boxers, which were black and patterned with swirling nebulae. Pulling off his socks, he climbed into bed.
"Happy now?" he asked, feeling his body relax, feeling it begin to accept its drowsiness.
"Mmm-hmm," she mumbled.
"Goodnight River," he kissed her forehead.
"Don't you get up and go back to tinkering once I fall asleep," she mumbled at him.
"I won't."
"Promise me, Doctor." Only she could sound stern while half-asleep.
"I promise." He wrapped his arms around her, lying so his chest rested against her back, and pulled the covers over both of them. "I'm not going anywhere."
"Good."
It was the last thing she said before she fell asleep. Though the thoughts in his head churned like a stormy sea, he too was asleep in a few minutes, safe in his Tardis, his wife and child wrapped securely in his arms. A fiercely intense expression painted his slumbering face; protectiveness. Even as he slept, nothing would get to River. Nothing would get through him. Nothing could take them away if he only held them tight enough all through the night.