The sound of the Tardis grew fainter as it slowly vanished into the time vortex.
Jack Harkness stood in the doorway to the Control Room of the Game Station, formerly known as Satellite 5, and watched her leave. Incomprehension and confusion edged on his face.
Why was she leaving?
"Doctor?" Jack asked warily. Of course, there was no one there to give him an answer.
"Huh," he looked around. Jack was alone in the large room filled with monitors and computer consoles. Whatever the Doctor had done, his plan had worked since the station was completely silent, and all the Daleks seemed to be gone.
Why did he leave so suddenly?
He didn't even come looking for me. Disappointment crept into his heart.
Another emergency, Jack thought and nodded, trying to find an explanation. Yes, that was most likely the reason. And he thought I was dead.
The fact that the Doctor was gone and had left him behind sank in just slowly.
This was it. The adventures were over. There was no way for Jack to contact the Time Lord through time and space when he didn't even know where he went. There was a slight chance he would come back later to pick him up. In a few minutes, a few days, a few years.
It wouldn't do any good to sit around and wait.
He opened this vortex manipulator and checked the station for life signs. At first, he got some strange readings, but the scan levelled out when he made a few adjustments.
According to the results, he was the only living being remaining on board. To be absolutely sure, Jack also checked the consoles, but the information stayed the same. A feeling of loneliness settled over Jack's heart.
He needed to get out of here.
Jack tapped impatiently with his fingers on the console and tried to swallow his frustration. He'd tried to reach earth via comms for hours now, but he couldn't get in contact with anyone.
While waiting, he scrolled through the TV stations. Most of them were offline. He found one interesting channel with a crude attempt at a live transmission from earth.
Watching the transmission, it dawned on him that earth had other problems to worry about than a space station full of dead bodies. The planet had been hit hard by the Dalek Invasion. Half of the planet's main cities had been flattened, and the death toll went into the billions.
He kept trying.
A while later, he was finally able to make contact. It was only an automated system, but better than nothing. He explained his situation and roughly sketched what had happened with the Game Station.
The friendly but artificial-sounding female voice responded: "We are very happy to hear there are survivors on the Game Station. Thank you for contacting Central Control. We will launch a clean-up shuttle as soon as one becomes available. Right now, search & rescue protocols estimate a waiting period of five days. Please stand by for further instructions. In the meantime, please make sure the casualties are taken care of, registered and ready for transport when the shuttle arrives."
"How..." Jack tried to respond, but the connection was already closed. "Hey, guys! Earth! You can't let me hang like this! Hello?" It was useless. The contact was blocked. He punched the console in frustration. "I don't believe this!"
Five days! Almost a week by himself, surrounded by death, was not something he wanted to do. He stared at the live transmission for a while, his mind racing.
Should he really sit around and wait this long? He could use his vortex manipulator, program a new destination and hop off somewhere else. He could do that.
Or he could stay.
The fact that he survived the Dalek Invasion against all odds felt like a sign. Jack couldn't shake the feeling that there was a reason he was still alive.
It was a second chance.
He had hoped he could do this with the Doctor, but maybe he was supposed to do this on his own.
He'd never cared much if he lived or died, especially during his time with the Time Agency. It had all been about adventures, getting laid and having fun.
If he was honest with himself, he'd been lucky to have lasted this long.
Maybe this was his signal to slow down. He could do this here on earth. Settle down, minding his own business for a while, helping to rebuild. He needed some time for himself to figure out his life.
Jack looked down at his Vortex Manipulator wrapped around his arm. He fiddled with the controls but couldn't bring himself to set new coordinates.
Somebody needed to coordinate with earth and ensure the deceased would not be disposed of like trash. From what he had witnessed on the Game Station, human life had little value in this society. The fallen deserved to be treated with dignity.
That thought decided it. He would stay and see this through till the end.
While he was still lost in thought, the metallic floor of the Control Room started to shake, and a growl grew louder that seemed to come from deep within the station.
"What the hell is going on? "Jack cursed. He grabbed the railing close to where he stood and tried not to lose his balance.
The live transmission from earth flickered and disconnected. All TV monitors in the room went blank.
Silence settled over the room like a blanket when the tremors finally ebbed away. Jack tried to tap into the TV channels again but had no luck. Contact with earth was disrupted. He cursed again and opened the console to see if he could fix the problem. Everything seemed normal. The equipment was working flawlessly. There was just no power flowing through the communication systems. He checked the rest of the consoles. The Transmat Beam suffered identical problems. The rest of the station seemed to run smoothly despite the tremors.
Jack stayed in the blue-lit Control Room for a while longer to do a station-wide damage assessment. The Dalek attack had caused extensive damage on all levels, which led to several power failures. Life support was not working on at least five floors. A hull breach was detected on Floor 310. The automatic decompression warning system had sealed the floor off automatically before the breach could spread further.
He tried to familiarize himself with the floor plans of each level, so he could devise a plan for how to proceed.
About 100 levels down, he found something useful. There was a large freezer area on Floor 400, one level above the one that had been used for shows like "The Great Terran Bake-Off" and various editions of "MasterChef – The Next Level". Some freezing units were stocked with frozen food, ready to be used by the contestants, while others were empty.
Preparing the victims for transport was a vague order. Aside from logistical questions, he had the genuine problem that if he left the dead unattended, he would have to deal with decaying corpses in a matter of days.
The thought alone made him gag.
If he brought all of them to Level 400 and stored the bodies in the freezing units, it would solve his problems. It would also keep him busy. All he had to do was roll up his sleeves and start working.
Jack yawned and stretched his cramped muscles. He'd been sitting in front of the monitor for hours. His new job as an undertaker could wait until tomorrow. It had been a long day. He needed to find something to eat and a place to sleep.
Jack sniffed at his shirt and wrinkled his nose. He also needed new clothes. And he knew exactly where to find them.
"Hey girls, did you miss me?" Jack greeted the two destroyed fashion robots when he entered the 'What Not To Wear' wardrobe about fifteen minutes later. They still stood there as he'd left them a couple of hours earlier.
"Any more fashion tips for me?" he murmured while he flipped through the hangers. If he had to stay a while, he wanted to dress nicely.
After a quick change, he checked the results in the mirror. Black jeans with black trainers, a red sleeveless shirt and that cool leather jacket he had tried on earlier.
"How do I look? "He turned around and posed in front of the robots that used to be Trine-E and Zu-Zana. "I know, I know, you said no colour to the black jeans. Let me tell you something – you robots got no taste. I look terrific in red!"
Satisfied with his new look, he snatched a large bag and packed some more clothes for his sleepover.
When he exited the lift on one of the Big Brother House floors, he came by a door that looked familiar. His steps slowed, and his heart sank. It was the entrance to the observation deck, where he had left Lynda Moss. Her assignment had been to track all Dalek movements.
He'd thought she would be safe here. Far away from the battle, behind an especially strengthened and sealed door. Little did he expect the Daleks to attack from the outside. Their laser beams had shattered the quartz glass window, and she had died in the vacuum of space.
Jack let his fingers trail along the torch marks where the Daleks tried to get in. Then he pressed his hand against the cold metal of the sealed door and sighed.
"I'm so sorry, Lynda. "
"Nice decoration," Jack tried to sound appreciative when he entered the first house he came across but couldn't retain the disdain from his voice. "Totally 1999, turn of the century chic."
At least the violet-coloured couch looked comfy, but what was it with the giant green plastic cactus in the middle of the room? Jack shook his head.
He quickly inspected the other rooms. Full fridge, nice sonic showers and a king-size bed. It could almost compete with his room in the Tardis. Almost.
Jack flopped down on the couch with a plate of sandwiches he had grabbed from the kitchen. It felt good to stretch his legs and relax. After finishing his plate of food, he took a quick shower and returned to the sleeping room.
Sleep claimed him quickly that night, but restful sleep was not an option. Screams of the dying, piercing lasers and the grating voices of the Daleks hallowed through his restless mind.
The following day, he couldn't postpone his self-imposed tasks any longer.
Jack planned to start with the upper floors. The resistance group had been relatively small, with only eight people. The refugee group down on Floor 000 had been considerably larger.
He cleaned out two of the bigger freezing units that had been almost empty. Maybe they have been used to store the finished cakes of the contestants of the baking show.
Jack closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Time to go. He activated the transport trolley and used the lift to reach the upper levels. The remains of his resistance group lay scattered on Floors 494 and 499. They looked so peaceful, as if they were sleeping or as if they had been blessed with a pain-free death.
Of course, he knew better. It hadn't been pain-free, as his own brush with death had proven. He winced as he remembered the excruciating pain that seared through his body when the Dalek had tried to shoot him.
Jack knelt next to the woman who had been the tech assistant on "The Weakest Link" and carefully brushed a strand of hair out of her face. These people had joined his resistance group because they believed in him. They wanted to make a difference. They had followed his lead, and now everyone was dead. A tear slid down Jack's face. He couldn't understand why he was the only one who'd survived. Angrily he wiped the tear away. Each of them deserved to live more than him.
At least he could always rely on the Doctor. The Time Lord had not used the Delta Wave, or he and everyone on the planet below would be dead too. Whatever he'd done, the Doctor had saved the day. There was not a single Dalek left on the station or earth.
Jack sighed and pushed himself up from the floor. The Doctor would admonish him for idling around with self-pity. He grabbed the first body and heaved her up with a grunt.
Down in the freezers, Jack carefully took each of the bodies off the trolley and carried them over to the resting places he had prepared for them.
He'd found a huge stash of plastic sheets in the "Do Or Die - Dream House Make Over" area. He would use them to wrap the corpses for protection.
He took his time to carefully prep each one, but finally, all eight bodies lay in their new resting places, stacked above each other on a steel shelf.
The lights in the room flickered but stabilized after a few seconds.The Freezers better not break down, Jack thought while eyeing the lights above him. The power flow of the station continued to be unstable due to severe damage to the power generators. So far, the emergency power banks had been able to step in, and he hoped that wouldn't change. Without the cooling units, the bodies would decompose quickly, and everything would be a huge mess.
Jack's gaze turned back to the steel shelf. He wasn't the religious type, but he felt he should take a moment and say a few words.
He cleared his throat.
"I wish... I could... address each and every single one of you, but... I don't even know your names," his voice was full of regret.
"Only Davitch, I'm glad we got the chance to introduce each other. Really would've loved to know you," a pensive smile lingered on Jack's lips.
"All of you. You brave souls. Against all odds, you dared to stand up and join forces with us. I know, at least some of you think you died for nothing. That the bullets have been useless, despite what I had promised. I'm truly sorry for that. I want you to know, that you did make a difference. The Doctor was able to defeat the Daleks. I don't know how, but he did. And I want you to know, you played your part in it. Your deaths have not been in vain. Humanity will survive and earth will rebuild. I salute you, thank you for your courage."
Jack raised his hand for a military salute. Then he lowered his gaze and fell silent for a minute.
His little speech had left him quite upset, and he needed a moment to calm down. He rubbed his nose and blinked away the tears that had started to flow while he spoke.
"Okay, that should be it," he said and breathed deeply, trying to sound cheerful despite how he felt. "Tomorrow I will continue with Floor 000. That's gonna be fun."
His sarcasm wasn't what it used to be.
The next day he took the lift down to Floor 000. Gloomy memories crept into his mind while his eyes inspected the huge room in front of him. The last time he'd been here, he stood on top of the boxes in the middle of the room with a gun raised over his head, trying to convince the crowd to join him in the fight. Now the floor was covered with dead bodies—frightened people in their desperate attempt to flee from the Daleks. Most hadn't made it very far.
It also reminded him painfully of the attack on his home colony when he was just a child. How he'd walked back home on the beach, the ground covered with death. Closing his eyes only intensified the memories. He needed to keep moving. At least the Daleks preferred clean kills. It saved him from scrubbing blood from the floors.
The stench was hard enough to deal with.
It was the third day after the invasion, and the bodies had already started to smell. It would take days to clean the floor since the trolley could transport only three people at once.
He found bodies everywhere on Floor 000. Some of the escapees had made it surprisingly deep into the station. Jack was about to lift one of the corpses when he saw something move in the shadows further down ahead. He let the lifeless arm drop and stared into the sparsely lit corridor.
Nothing. Whatever he had seen, it was gone.
Jack kept listening for a while longer. Then he grabbed the arms of the corpse again and started to slowly drag his heavy burden back into the main area, where the transport trolley was waiting. He wished he could haul the trolley along, but the corridors were too narrow, and manoeuvring would be too difficult. He cursed the fact that dead bodies were so incredibly heavy.
A feeling of unease kept lingering within him. He couldn't shake the feeling of being watched as he looked around while trying to catch his breath. Still nothing.
After he secured the third corpse on the trolley, he signalled the lift to open its automatic doors. He couldn't wait to get out of this death chamber.
Carefully he manoeuvred the trolley inside the cabin and activated the breaks. He scanned the floor with his eyes, looking for anything unusual. The doors started to close.
There it was. All of a sudden, a dark shadow scurried along the wall.
Startled, Jack took a few steps back and bumped into the wall behind him. The doors closed completely, and the cabin started to move up.
"What was that?" Jack whispered, still thoroughly spooked. He checked his wristband, but the vortex manipulator insisted he was utterly alone on the station.
The strange phenomenon he'd encountered while working on Floor 000 kept replaying in his head while he brought the corpses to their interim resting place. Paying the Control Room another visit seemed like a good idea. The monitoring systems of the station were far better than his vortex manipulator or the smaller consoles on the individual levels. He would need to know if something else was alive on the station.
When he reached the top level, his steps slowed for a moment. To reach the Control Room, he had to use the corridor where he took his last stand against the Daleks. The memory of his brush with death echoed hauntingly in his mind.
The moment when he looked into the eyestalk of the Dalek.
How calm he felt when he realized there was no way out.
The searing pain that washed over his body.
How disoriented he was when he woke up.
Jack shook his head to clear his thoughts. Something he never wanted to experience again.
Hesitantly he touched the wall where he had stood in his final moments and shuddered. He'd often been in danger, but never this close to death.
He needed to stop getting himself into such dangerous situations. Next time he might not be that lucky. He had to get off the station. Then he would figure out what to do with his life. His days as a scoundrel were definitely over.
He was grateful the Doctor and Rose had opened his eyes and showed him how to be a better person.
Jack sighed. He missed them both so much.
The data from the Control Room was inconclusive; There were too many power failures throughout the station to provide a reliable picture. So the next time the doors to Floor 000 opened, Jack had brought a long steel club, just in case. He felt incredibly vulnerable without a real weapon. He wished they hadn't run out of bullets while fighting the Daleks.
The lift doors opened with a hiss. Jack immediately noticed the change of atmosphere in the room. Some kind of fog was floating through the air. Without real substance, but dimming the light and increasing the shadows. He didn't see any movement, but it felt like the fog was pressing down on him. Jack slowly stepped outside, trying to keep an eye on everything.
"Hello?" He asked gingerly, the club raised slightly over his head. No response. Then a deep groan floated up from the floor. The whole room started vibrating. At first, not more than a whisper, but the crescendo of sound was continuous. Jack dropped the club and clasped his hands over his ears.
It stopped abruptly and left a deafening silence in its wake. Jack slowly lowered his hands and looked around. Fear tried to take hold of him, but he pushed the feeling back down.
Not the time to be a coward.
There had to be a reason for the noise. He wasn't going crazy, was he?
He picked the club back up and decided to give the ground level a more thorough inspection. Maybe the Dalek attack had damaged parts of the station that did not register with the sensors. It sounded unlikely, but it was worth a closer look.
Floor 000's sole purpose was to be the main entrance and lobby for the Game Station. Every contestant or passenger that did not arrive via transmat had to come through the arrival zone. The ground level was also the heart of logistics. The biggest part of the level was used for storing and repackaging goods.
For two hours, he looked into every corner, checked every locker, and ran diagnostics on the still functional consoles. Nothing. Everything seemed to be completely normal. The strange noise hadn't returned either.
He put the club away with a frustrated sigh and decided to concentrate on his clean-up duties again.
Jack slid to the floor, exhausted, while the escalator rose through the levels.
He started to lose count of how many runs he'd already made. Carrying the corpses had been taxing on a physical, but also on a psychological level. He'd seen dead people before, many times. But the situation down on Floor 000 was worse than a battlefield. There is honour in dying at the hands of your opponents in a fight, but that's not what happened on the ground floor. The Daleks had invaded a room full of hiding civilians and slaughtered them ruthlessly. Wading through the many corpses huddled together caused a suffocating pressure on Jack's soul.
Floor 225
Floor 226
Floor 227
With a jerk, the lift came to a sudden halt.
"What the hell?"
The lights flickered for a moment but didn't go out.
"At least something," Jack muttered and got up from the floor.
He was about to open the lift controls when the floor beneath him suddenly disappeared. Floor by floor, the lift cabin rushed downwards in a free fall. Jack tried holding on to something but was lifted and bumped hard into the ceiling. Then the emergency breaks kicked in. He bounced around and crashed into the floor while the lift came to a sudden halt, and everything went black.
After a few minutes, Jack's mind cleared, and he tentatively started moving. Something heavy lay on top of him. In horror, he realized he got buried under the corpses. The trolleys activated breaks had kept it in place during the fall. The bodies had been less lucky and gotten thrown around like him before they came crashing down on him.
With deep breaths, he tried to calm himself down. Then he pressed his hands on the floor and pushed himself upwards, freeing himself.
His heart was pounding in his ears as he stared at the scattered bodies while he sat on the floor, massaging his aching neck. He'd already pictured himself flattened on the ground some 100 floors below. Thank the makers for emergency brakes.
Slowly he stood up and tapped on the panel's buttons, but nothing happened. The lift was stuck. The cabin creaked and swayed but didn't move otherwise.
He tried opening the doors by hand, but they were locked. The lift had halted between two levels—no way out in that direction. Jack looked up to the ceiling.
"Just great, "he huffed. There was a hatch at the ceiling of the lift. A bit too high to push open from where he stood. Jack's eyes fell on the trolley he used to transport the corpses to the freezers. That would do. He climbed on top of it and fumbled with the hatch's handle. For a second, he feared it might be locked, but it wasn't. He pushed the hatch back and hauled himself up.
When he stood on top of the lift, he found a ladder attached to the wall and immediately started his ascent to the next level.
While Jack continued climbing upwards, the grating sound of strained steel echoed through the shaft. It seemed to come from everywhere.
Then he could hear a bursting sound high above him. When he looked up, he saw the lights go out, level by level. It almost felt like being swallowed by a huge jaw of darkness.
Jack stopped for a moment, grabbed the ladder rungs tightly and looked down. The cabin was shrouded in darkness. The only light visible came from inside the cabin. He quickened his pace, taking two rungs at once. Within a few minutes, he reached Floor 049, where he blindly groped for the emergency latch. He found the panel on the left side of the doors and hastily opened them.
Like on every floor, there was a comm unit steel column directly in front of the lift. He typed in an emergency override and could hear the lift start moving again. Jack sighed with relief. At least it wasn't broken. Probably just more of the power fluctuations that haunted the station.
He stepped back into the lift and began to haul the scattered corpses back onto the trolley. He noticed the poor state they were in while lifting them. One's head was smashed in, a broken spine, and one head dangled at a very odd angle. Did that happen during the fall? Jack rubbed his neck unconsciously while he inspected the damage. The fall must have been worse than it had seemed to him.
After the events with the lift, he'd called it a day. His nerves were too skittish for any more salvage runs. If he were truthful, he would prefer never to set foot into that lift again. With the continuing power malfunctions, the lift could turn into a death trap at any time. Sadly, using the stairs was not an option either.
Jack's tired bones screamed for a good night's sleep, but his mind was running itself into the ground. Exhausted, he lay in bed, his mind racing around today's events, and he couldn't make it stop.