The Six Cybermen.

If there was one good thing about the TARDIS being fitted with the inhibitor which stopped her from travelling in the Time Vortex freely again, the Doctor decided, it was how easy it was to control the time-ships' movement through space. Granted the only place he could travel to was if the next location was on Earth, but with some doing it was possible for him to get the TARDIS to Mars, the local moon, or one of the other planets in the solar system.

The Doctor took a deep breath, smiling as he took in the sea air which reminded him of those visits to Northumberland in 1066 and Cornwall in his first incarnation. But he wasn't here to admire the scenery. A few days ago, an alien ship had crash-landed in this part of Britain, close to a small fishing town not far from Hastings. The Doctor had been busy with other matters at the time when he had heard the news, so he had come down here on a late start, but he knew nothing had left Earth. He would have known if something had left or even arrived thanks to the TARDIS, but nothing had left the planet.

But the Doctor was hopeful that if he made contact with the aliens and provided them with some degree of help, they might be willing to take him away from the planet; the TARDIS had detected the ship used a basic warp field engine configuration which gave them basic faster than light capability so they were advanced enough for interstellar travel, and he was hoping if they could be persuaded to take him and the TARDIS to a spaceport somewhere where he could find a hyperspace capable ship that would allow him to continue his travels through space before he found something, some way of travelling through time and space again.

But where he was optimistic and hopeful, at the same time the Doctor knew full well the aliens could be hostile. The ship had been crashing down into Earth's atmosphere and even the TARDIS had problems identifying the alien ship by its engine configuration or any other sign. He knew he would need to be extra careful, but he was hopeful that he could persuade the aliens to help him. The Doctor stepped out of the TARDIS doorway and after closing the door to the time machine he strode with purpose in the direction of the village, mentally reviewing everything that he knew of the place. The first thing he knew about it was the name, Two Cliffs; named because it was tucked away in a small dent between two cliffs with a bay leading to a natural harbour which made it a particularly excellent fishing village. Established in 1640, it wasn't a particularly large village, reached only by road since it was in tucked away little corner of the coast although they were close enough to Hastings for their rail connection, so the village was hardly isolated and it was only two hours away from Hastings by road. It was a surprising place for an alien ship to crash-land, but the Doctor knew when you crashed, you could hardly be picky about where you actually smacked into the ground or sea.

Thanks to his long stride (he was actually beginning to enjoy his current incarnation; while he had originally been resentful towards the Time Lords for forcing this incarnation upon him, it had grown on him especially since the benefits of a new body became clear), it only took the Doctor half an hour to reach the village.

As he walked into the village, spotting a few of the local people he was about to greet them when he was forced to blink as he took in their appearances. There was something ghostly about their features. It was barely noticeable, the Doctor thought as he watched the villagers go about their daily lives working; the only reason he could see it at all was that the ghostly imagery he was getting happened to be telepathic in nature, perception filters by the look and feel of it, and he could pick it up. The moment he realised what he was dealing with, the Doctor's Time Lord mind and perception - blanketed a little bit by the blocks on his mind imposed by his people following his trial - instantly began to break through them and he started to think.

While he instinctively tried to break through the telepathic barriers surrounding the villagers, the Doctor approached them while he tried to keep his innermost fears to himself. His optimism was starting to slip; he had no idea what the aliens were doing, and he knew it was them since perception filter technology was unknown to humans of this time, but he knew whatever it was to result in such a camouflage screen must be bad.

But as he continued to study the villagers, the Doctor noticed something worrying now he was starting to observe them more closely thanks to the perception filter screens placed on them; the villagers seemed to be moving stiffly while they carried on with their daily lives, but there was something inhuman about how they moved.

"Excuse me," the Doctor called out to one of the closest villager, who turned to him, his expression blank.

"Yes?" the villager was dressed like a normal fisherman or seaman of this time period, wearing a heavy jersey and a black hat while he wore tough, but durable boots. The man's face was thin and he had a weather-beaten face, typical of most seamen. But the perception filter was clearing, and the Doctor was beginning to see the outline of something alien on the human's face. His voice, however, was another big giveaway something was wrong.

It was flat, toneless.

Hiding his concerns which were growing by the minute, the Doctor decided to play for time while his mind worked on breaking through the perception filter screens. "I am here to visit the village-."

"We do not want visitors," the fisherman's cold, emotionless tone silenced the Doctor instantly. "We want a quiet life."

"Oh, that's alright, old chap," the Doctor smiled, hoping whoever had done this to the humans in this village they did not have enough observation of human/humanoid emotional states to see whenever someone was worried. "I'm not interested in causing problems, I'm just a wandering traveller who wishes to see your village-."

"We do not want visitors," the fisherman was not alone in the chant; three other humans with perception filters ghosting over their own faces, although one of them seemed to be covered with perception filter screens over her body which covered her arms and one of her legs, and a good portion of her upper torso. No matter. He was nearly through the filters; it shouldn't have taken him this long to break through, and he was starting to wonder just how much damage his people had done to his mind when they'd exiled him to Earth. "We want a quiet life."

The Doctor backed away, seeing what was through the perception screens now his mind had filtered through them. He could now see the silver cybernetic implants clamped to the heads of the villagers, and looking around he could see through the blurry haze of the filters used to hide the damage done to the humans living here; suddenly he could see the cybernetically-enhanced limbs attached to the human flesh, and he could see that when it had been done the flesh had been hacked off and quickly replaced.

But the implants had been badly gouged into the humans' faces; for some of the villagers, the skin and muscle had been ripped away, and the implants just seared or stitched into place. It was such a primitive and brutal job he was amazed the villagers were still walking.

The Doctor realised that this was a lost cause; the only way he could solve this mess would be to force his way through, but since some of these people had been clearly cybernetically enhanced, especially their arms and legs, it meant they were incredibly strong.

"I see," he said, hoping they hadn't picked up on his horror. "Perhaps I'll try against later."

He walked away before they could begin their chanting again, but as he looked around the villagers, who were gazing at him with such cold, inhuman scrutiny (the sight of children staring at him in such a way was horrifying, but seeing a small human girl who had half of her features underneath a webbing of cybernetic circuitry was worse), the Doctor could see that while some of the circuitry and cybernetic augmentations inflicted on these villagers had been gruesome, it looked like the Cybermen had improved their approach.

Cybermen…

There was no doubt in his mind it was the Cybermen, but there weren't that many races within the Milky Way at this point in history who had access to cybernetic implants like this, and those that did would not have blocked off emotion to this degree. Yes, they might be masked, but not blocked off like this. The implants were primitive, yes, but that couldn't be helped especially if the Cybermen were at the point in their history he thought they were. He didn't have any proof, but he was sure Mondas was drawing closer and closer to Earth after hundreds of centuries of travelling through space.

Mind made up, the Doctor decided to return to the TARDIS and come up with a better scheme, but as he walked through the village, he noticed something; the villagers, alerted to his presence, had stopped what they'd been doing, and now they were staring at him as still as statues, but the Doctor took it as a good sign they were not coming after him directly, and he guessed the implants were so crude the Cybermen's control was intermittent, but he didn't want to test his theory by staying.

He had almost left the village when he noticed one of the cybernetically-enhanced villagers begin to shake. He stopped, just as the villager collapsed to the ground, letting out a terrible, almost machine-like scream of pain and terror.

The Doctor quickly rushed over to the fallen villager heedless of the danger and he held the villager in his arms. The unfortunate chap was looking at his cybernetically augmented hands in horror - the emotional inhibitor was clearly malfunctioning, and he was staring wide-eyed into the Doctor's face.

"P-p-please, kill me!" The villager begged, speaking like an ordinary human at first before he opened his mouth and the last words emerged from his throat.

The Doctor was chilled by the sound of the sing-song computerlike voice, it brought back memories of his encounters with the Cybermen before his first regeneration. His mind raced as he tried to consider what he could do to help this man, but he found there was nothing except to do as the man suggested.

He hated that, but he couldn't drag the man away from the village; the humans here would likely be instructed to chase after him and this man, and there was a strong possibility the Cybermen would regain their control over their victim and force him to attack.

"I will," the Doctor said regretfully, "but first tell me what happened. What did the Cybermen do to you?"

The villager looked up into his eyes. "Y-you know the Cybermen?" He asked in a purely human tone for once.

"Indeed I do, in fact, you could say I know them better than they'd imagine... if they could imagine. What happened?" It was primarily the Doctor's insistent attitude that made the villager speak.

"There was….a…sound like thunder in the sky," the villager said, his voice alternating between being purely human and then issuing the inhuman sing-song voice of a Mondasian Cyberman despite his best efforts, "it…came down off the coast…. And then they attacked…they came up the beach, like demons from the…sea. We tried to fight…call for help…but they stopped us, and then… pain."

"They augmented you," the Doctor said.

"Yes….Flesh will…always fail," the villager's voice changed pitch until the only thing that came out of his mouth was the sing-song computer like voice of a Cyberman.

The Doctor dropped him and jumped away from the villager, who suddenly got up stiffly like a Cyberman, but the Time Lord escaped before the cyber-converted villager could act. The Doctor just ran as fast as a jack-rabbit away from the village, and he ran all the way along the coast. He didn't stop until he reached the TARDIS. When he saw the first sign of his TARDIS, the Doctor plunged his hand into the pocket of his jacket and he drew out the key and pushed it into the lock.

But he never got inside. A large pink rubbery glove like it was covering a damaged hand clamped down hard on the Doctor's wrist in a crushing grip. The Doctor gasped with agony as he felt the hand squeeze the bones in his wrist, but he managed to get enough of his self-control back to glance down at the hand, and his eyes flew wide open in horror when he saw the hand was connected to a baggy silver clothed arm.

"You will not resist," the sing-song although still, emotionally flat computer voice of a typical Mondasian Cyberman boomed over the sea air, although the Doctor noticed dimly the seabirds still chirped in the air regardless.

"Oh, of course not," the Doctor ground out, gasping while the Cyberman continued to squeeze.

The Cyberman was clearly not satisfied. "You will come with me."

"Oh, please, lead the way," the Doctor knew the irony would be lost on the Cyberman.

It was.

Without a word the Cyberman began to move away, pulling on the Doctor's wrist. The Doctor yelped as he was tugged back to the village but he did not resist as he was pulled away from the TARDIS, and he spared the old girl a longing look as he was being led away.

X

The Cyberman said nothing as it tugged the Doctor back to the village. The Doctor had considered asking it questions, but in the end, he had decided against it. He knew the Cyberman had others of its kind in the village somewhere. He could wait. But what he really wanted to do was think of a way of getting out of this.

The Cybermen's base was built into one of the fish stores. The stench of fish taken out of the sea and left to rot mingled with a stench the Doctor had smelt before.

Human blood.

The Doctor's nose wrinkled as he took in the stench, but he pushed it aside. It didn't surprise the Doctor that much the Cybermen had set up a base in a place that was large enough for their use. The Cyberman took the Doctor through the storerooms to a large part of the store which he couldn't tell nor did he really care what it was for. The Cybermen had made themselves at home. There were power cables all over the floor connected to large consoles and displays; one look showed him graphics of human anatomy. The Cybermen were collecting information on humans for when Mondas made its appearance decades from now.

But what chilled the Doctor the most was the sight of the conversion machine. It resembled a futuristic iron maiden connected to numerous consoles, such as the one which contained the graphics on human anatomy. Suddenly the Doctor had a good idea of what was going on. The Cybermen were gathering information about the humans via cyber conversion, and they were conducting experiments on the people in the village to gather their materials.

"Cyberleader. The intruder is here," the Cyberman who had escorted the Doctor announced, making the Doctor take stock of the Cybermen in the room. There were only six of them. One of them stepped forwards.

"I ordered him not to be captured. We do not currently have the resources needed to ensure our security while the ship's engines regenerate," the Cyberman said.

"He would have revealed our presence to the authorities," the Cyberman argued back.

The Doctor glanced between them. "Well, now that I am here, what are you going to do?" He asked, deciding he didn't want to be stuck listening to a pointless debate between the Cybermen. "Are you going to experiment on me as you've experimented on the villagers?"

The Cyberleader turned to face him. "We will not experiment on you."

"Oh, why not?" The Doctor asked, probing deeply into the Cybermen's plans with what he had found out so far about their presence.

"It is unnecessary."

"But who are you?" The Doctor asked, pretending to be a clueless human so he could learn what the Cybermen were doing on Earth and why they were here so early. It usually worked to help him understand what was going on, and besides, he needed to know just how bad the damage to the Cybership was. He knew that if he could deal with the Cybermen somehow, repair the damage to the villagers as much as he could, and repair their ship then he could leave Earth for good.

In any case, the Doctor knew that in this current point in the Cybermen's timeline he wasn't on their record yet, and considering he had regenerated it would be some time before the Cybermen gained the information about his other selves to recognise him on sight. The Daleks had only just started to gain that insight, but the Cybermen were a close second although they were more focused on his second incarnation who had defeated them more than once, it would be many years before they knew about him from this point and the Doctor planned on it staying that way.

"We are called the Cybermen. We were originally like you once. We come from another world."

"Another world?" The Doctor hoped his acting lessons which he had received thanks to Shakespeare himself as well as working with actors like Alan Rickman, Patrick Stewart, and so many others allowed him to appear convincingly shocked and frightened although he doubted it would make a shred of difference. Cybermen ignored emotion.

"Yes. We come from a planet known as Mondas, which is Earth's twin. Millions of years ago, our worlds were separated from one another in a cosmic disaster. We drifted away from your world to the edge of space, and now we are returning," the Cyberleader explained.

The Doctor knew this already, but he felt if he could continue to lay down the groundwork he could learn just what the Cybermen were doing here. There were a few clues already in front of him, but he needed to be sure. He was positive the Cybermen had come to Earth in order to collect information about Earth and its people to help the Cybercontrollers on Mondas finalise their invasion plans.

"But you don't look like us."

"We were like you once," the Cyberman didn't seem concerned with telling the story. "But as we drifted through space, underneath life-support domes which trapped the atmosphere of our world in, our lifespans were getting shorter so our scientists and doctors devised spare parts for our bodies until we could almost completely replace our body parts."

"So… what are you doing here?"

"Our planet has been fitted with a propulsion unit. We reset our course to take us back to our original stellar system. Mondas will arrive in this system in another hundred years. When we arrive your people will become like us."

"Never!" The Doctor declared. "I cannot believe you, sir, would be able to do that-."

There was a cold promise in the Cyberman's voice. "We will. One day we will arrive at your world, and you will become like us."

"Yes, but today is not that day, is it? How did you get here? Why are you here?" The Doctor countered, hoping that he could persuade the Cyberman to keep talking. The more he learnt from it, the more chance he would have in the future before Mondas reappeared although he hoped not to be anywhere near the planet for when his predecessor encountered Tobias Vaughn.

Fortunately, the Mondasian Cyberman saw nothing wrong with the conversation. It was clear the early Cyberman hadn't yet realised or even programmed themselves to be more discreet.

"We were dispatched from Mondas to survey Earth as we approached the solar system," the Cyberman answered, confirming the Doctor's theory of why they were here. "Using one of our prototype faster-than-light ships, we approached the atmosphere. But due to a fault in our navigational computer, we were drawn into the atmosphere."

"So you have crashed?"

"No," the Cyberman countered. "Our ship landed, but its tachyon shunt drive will need time to regenerate."

"And what about the village?" The Doctor went on, hoping the Cybermen didn't call him out for his lack of questions about their faster-than-light ship. Tachyon shunt drives were one of the easiest forms of warp ship in the universe, and everyone who discovered the tachyon inevitably developed one early on before finding hyperspace or something higher on the scale. But he wasn't interested in listening to the Cyberman lecture him on science he himself only knew the basics of since the Time Lord academy only taught tachyonics because of the tachyon's relationship to time and physics. "You've been mutilating the people there, why?" The Doctor asked.

"You humans are our distant cousins. Our assignment was to study your anatomy and genetic structures to determine compatibility with our conversion methods," the Cyberman answered.

"So when you arrive in force, you will have the means of conquering the planet and transforming all of humanity into Cybermen," the Doctor stated, realising with a cold feeling which settled through his body there was nothing he could do. While he had little doubt the Cybermen would be sending more and more of their kind to Earth to conduct surveys much like this one while Mondas drew closer towards its sister planet. This was history and it was the future of the human race - it was distant but it was still the future - and there was nothing he could do about it, and since the Cybermen were linked to his timeline, he could not dare risk his own history. "And those villagers out there are test subjects for your experiments."

"Correct. They will not live long enough for it to matter."

"What do you mean by that?" The Doctor asked, chilled by the sound of the cold declaration in the Cyberman's voice.

"We have finished our experiments on this village," the Cyberman replied, the Doctor knowing how unmoved and unaware it would be if it knew where his thoughts were going, the disgust he felt at how the Cyberman dismissed the people in the village. "Now we shall return to our home planet with our knowledge."

There were moments where he hated being a Time Lord and hated the overwhelming responsibilities that came with it. But what he hated the most was how he was expected to just ignore this.

"You will remain here, in our base. On take off our ship will vaporise the village and kill everyone in it including yourself," the Cyberleader's sing-song voice which was grating at the best of times was even more chilling for the Doctor now he knew what they were going to do.

"You're just going to destroy the village and everyone in it. Why can't you undo the damage you've caused? Or better yet why are you just leaving them?" The Doctor knew the Cybermen could never undo the damage they've done, but he hoped the implants they'd placed on the people would be more easily removed than their more in-depth conversions.

"We cannot. It is beyond our powers. Our mission was to survey and experiment on the subjects before they were disposed of."

"You mean you can't because your technology is primitive. You can't because you know that you'd be leaving traumatised people. You call emotion dangerous and weak, but you know as well as I do that emotion can drive people to discover the truth. If you left these people alone, repairing the damage you've caused, and wipe their memories, many of them would work out what you'd done to them but you're trying to bury the evidence," there was sheer disgust in the Doctor's voice as he glared at the Cybermen and their technology. But what he couldn't believe was they were just going to leave them on Earth, and he guessed the Cybermen back on their own world were so new to space travel they had those primitive restrictions on space and weight.

The Cyberman was clearly becoming more bored with the entire argument. It wasn't concerned about the morality of his argument, the Doctor knew that. It was because the Cyberman was truly concerned about the precious time being wasted right now.

Lifting its head with its bulky emotional inhibitor, the Cyberleader turned to one of its fellows. "Take this prisoner to the back. Keep him there and then continue with the preparations for take-off."

The Doctor didn't bother resisting as he was taken out of the main control room and he barely did anything more than groan in protest as the Cyberman ordered to take him away roughly pushed him into a small place strewn with hay, old lobster pots and barrels just dumped in the confined space and forgotten, and chained him to the wall. The Doctor spotted a rat moving around, minding its own business before quickly rushing out in a panic when the Cyberman's boots stamped heavily near it.

The Doctor sat down on one of the barrels and he rubbed his face. His hearts were heavy with pain and regret he couldn't do anything for the people in the village. While he could possibly do something to repair the damage done to their bodies, he didn't know just how extensive the cybernetic surgeries had been beyond a few legs and arms, and he couldn't repair that kind of damage. He wasn't a miracle worker, and then there was the damage done to their brains and their minds. He wouldn't be able to clean that up.

What he couldn't believe he hadn't asked them was why they were planning on burning the village to the ground in the exhaust blast of their takeoff. Wouldn't that merely attract attention from other human settlements nearby?

But as he thought about it, the Doctor realised something about the Cybermen's dilemma. The takeoff would likely attract attention, but the Doctor knew that despite the Cybermen's likely orders to be discreet, they didn't have a choice but to destroy the village. There was simply nothing else they could do and they knew it.

The Doctor groaned as he rested his head against the wall, wincing as the old wood touched his head. He heard a squeak and he looked around and he found a rat gazing at him, the ambient light gleaming on its slick, greasy fur and on the length of its incisors. "You'd better get out of here, old chap," the Doctor said sympathetically. "This place won't be around very long."

The rat squeaked.

"The Cybermen will blow this place up. I don't know where their ship is," the Doctor paused as he heard a faint vibration which seemed to shake against the wood of the warehouse and grew louder in pitch, "except that it's close by and it's powering up. You'd better get out and hurry before this village becomes a smoky hole in the ground."

The rat squeaked again and rushed off in a panic, presumably to tell its fellow rats of the danger. The Doctor shifted himself around to test how long the chains were. They weren't much of a problem except he had to spend a minute shifting around experimentally until he got into the right position. With his sonic screwdriver, he melted the metal of the chains until he was freed. Once he was out he hurriedly looked around for some way out. As he looked upwards he spotted an open recess like a window, and once he found a ladder the Doctor quickly climbed it before he found himself on the roof.

The Doctor slipped, but he managed to grasp the weather-beaten tiles quickly before he lost his balance and he looked around for some way of getting back to the ground before he realised there was nothing he could use. There wasn't even a pipe he could slide down that he could see and that he could get through quickly before the Cybermen's ship took off.

The engine noise had risen in pitch and he knew it would continue getting louder and louder before it was ready for blast off. There was nothing else for it, he would have to jump down.

Wincing at the necessity and preparing himself for the pain, the Doctor leapt down out off of the roof. The Doctor cried out in agony despite preparing himself for the pain as it shot through his leg. Forcing himself to calm down, the Doctor closed his eyes and concentrated, focusing on the damaged leg. Reaching into his regenerative energy, the Doctor pushed it into his leg - it was rare he did this considering how finite the regenerative energy in his body was, but with the Cyberman's ship about to blast off, he needed to escape.

He winced as his leg bone snapped back with a glow of orange-golden light. Without giving himself time to recover, the Doctor pushed aside the lingering discomfort, and he ran out of the village. He came across a number of bodies on the ground, and he quickly bent down to examine them. But it was too late as he looked down at them sadly.

The villagers were dead, and judging from his quick examination of the corpses, they had been dead for a short time, perhaps ten minutes.

The Doctor gazed down angrily as he looked down at the bodies, finally realising that the Cybermen must have worked out their hold over the villagers through the implants would be disabled when they began to focus on their ship and they would likely try to escape the village. In a cold sense that would be perfectly in line with the kind of thinking of a Cyberman, the Doctor could see where the Cybermen were coming from. The Cybermen did not want word of the operation getting out, although they would be destroying the entire village when they blasted off, the Doctor hoped the explosion would not be as bad as he suspected it would be.

He continued to look down at the corpses with sorrow. He wished there could have been something he could do but there wasn't.

X

The Doctor managed to reach the TARDIS just as the Cyber-ship blasted out of the Earth's atmosphere like a giant cannonball passing through a blast furnace on its way out of the gun. The blast-off seemed to incinerate the landscape, burning the air around the village until the houses were alight. Soon, he knew the fires would burn themselves out, but he would still be in the area for as long as he could in order to get to the implants and remove the worst of them so the technology wouldn't linger around.

A lot of the reason was that he had to make sure history wasn't suddenly changed because some idiot who had enough intelligence and creativity to understand the technology but lacked the common sense to take the implants left in the village and use it to create weapons of war, but more importantly he didn't want someone to make the same mistakes made by the people of Mondas and so many other worlds who created their own version of the Cybermen.

Despite his bad experiences with Cyber technology, the Doctor acknowledged the technology did great good in the right hands and with the right people, but right now all he wanted to do was smash every piece of cybernetic technology he could find.

The Doctor smacked the outside of the TARDIS in anger at being helpless to do anything to stop this.

Author's note - There are plenty of stories of how the Mondasian Cybermen dispatched ships to Earth to study the planet before their world came close to Earth as seen in The Tenth Planet. One of these was the Eighth Doctor audio story The Silver Turk.