The vault door had been easy enough to open from the inside by following the Master's detailed written instructions, and Jasmine peeped cautiously around its massive steel bulk out at the empty room beyond.
Quiet. Very quiet. She hesitated. It hadn't been made clear, but she'd been assuming the Master would be out here waiting for her. She tiptoed forward a few steps, far enough that she could see through the open door into the next room, where she had seen the men working on an android earlier in the day. The dismembered android was still there, the bright lights illuminating it from every angle, but the scientists were all gone.
Jasmine shrugged. She turned back to the Anthropos, standing watching her from inside the vault.
"Come on."
Wordlessly it obeyed her instruction, and together they walked out, through the deserted chambers and passageways, past carelessly abandoned briefcases, files and lab coats, all the way out of the maximum security area without meeting a living soul. At the final door, standing open like all the others, she paused at a scorched ring burnt into the armour-plated wall. She touched it, and rolled the crumbling soot between her fingertips.
"What's happened here?" she asked the unresponsive Anthropos. "It looks like the aftermath of a battle."
She looked around in confusion.
"M-Master?" she called out. It was difficult to get used to calling someone that. "Master? Where are you?" She sighed, with a sense of exasperation. "Typical. That's Time Lords for you. Right, come on. Change of plan."
It took time. She avoided the lifts and took the stairs, which was tiring. Once on the correct level, she frequently had to draw her mute companion into the shelter of a side passage or closet when the sound of energy cannon flared up again somewhere near, and they would crouch motionless, until the sound faded or at least moved further away. It was a complicated route, but she knew where she was going because the maps the Master had shown her were emblazoned on her memory. When she stood at the nondescript storage room door, she knew exactly where she was. She pressed the door control and felt light headed. For a moment, she honestly thought she was going to faint for the only time in her life. That solid, sturdy rectangular blue box said home and sanctuary to her like no place she had ever known. She stumbled forward and leaned against the Tardis door to save herself from falling, the material cool and rough under her palms.
"Doctor!" She struck the door weakly with her fist. "Doctor, are you there?"
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A sentinel droid stood motionless in one of the main viewing lounges, facing the great window and the dazzling starscape beyond. But it was not looking through the window, it was looking at it, and at its own reflection. It was confused. Its programming was sophisticated enough to cope with the concept of reflective surfaces, but its programming was also telling it that the image in the window was an enemy, to be apprehended or, failing that, destroyed. It raised its forearm cannon, then lowered it again. It stood there for a moment longer, then raised the cannon once more with an air of decision.
--------------------
A light breeze was detectable flowing along the corridor.
"Feel that?" said the Doctor leading his charge along by the hand. "Means there's been a hull breach somewhere, and it won't be the last. This station's soon going to be a very unhealthy place to be."
"Yes, Doctor."
"I'll confess I'd hoped for a little more applause for the rescue," he added in mock irritation. "Perhaps next time I'll just let you find your own way out."
"Yes, Doctor."
"'Yes, Doctor,' 'Hello, Doctor'. I'm afraid a month spent in the company of these military types hasn't improved your powers of conversation."
"No, Doctor."
He frowned, this time for real, and stopped to turn and take a look at her.
"What's the matter with you, Jasmine? You seemed all right yesterday. Have they done something to you?"
"No, Doctor."
He looked closer, directly into her wide, dark eyes, then closer still. He pressed his thumb to her eyelid and rolled it back while she stood meekly still. He brought his face almost into contact with hers to stare hard into the pupil of her right eye.
With a gasp he stepped sharply back.
"Android!"
Jasmine's mechanical double looked back at him with an expression of bland curiosity.
"What android is that, Doctor?"
"Shut up!" He jammed his palm against his forehead and tried to think. "This is the Master's doing. And I thought I'd got him out of the way." He looked agitatedly up and down the corridor. "Right. Back to the Tardis. I'll find her."
"And what shall I do, Doctor?" asked the robot placidly.
He looked round at her, and opened his mouth to reply before realising what he was doing. With an impatient gesture he turned and stalked off without a word. From a distance he could be heard muttering:
"I'll find her. I will find her."
The android watched him go, and stood and waited patiently for further orders while the din of battling sentinels drew ever nearer and the breeze grew stronger by the second.
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Fretting outside the locked, silent Tardis, Jasmine cast repeated anxious glances at the storeroom door. Already once she had heard the sounds of battling sentinels pass directly in front of the sole entrance to this confined space and she was acutely aware of how vulnerable and trapped she would be should anyone or anything chance to blunder in.
"Wait here," she told the Anthropos, though she doubted it would do anything else unless prompted. Then she slowly squeezed herself into the narrow gap between the Tardis and the wall, and sidestepped carefully into the cramped and gloomy space beyond, safely hidden from any chance visitors. A blinking red light and a flickering viewscreen caught her eye.
Jasmine smiled to see the Doctor's handiwork. A hole had been drilled in the wall, and a loop of silvery, semi-transparent cable had been tugged out and hooked onto a second cable which led down to a tangle of compact technological gadgetry all clustered together on a rickety looking camping table. The viewscreen, the quality of its reception fluctuating erratically, showed an image of her old cell, or one just like it, now empty. She steered clear of the complex array of touch-sensitive keys, but there was a little black button, on its own on a walnut-sized plastic bulb connected to the viewscreen by a wire, that she just couldn't resist tapping.
The image on the screen changed instantly. Now it showed a corridor, quite nondescript, could have been any one of a hundred on the station. She touched the button again, and started at the sight of two of the hulking sentinel robots standing toe to toe in the centre of a deserted lab, struggling like frenzied gorillas, their claw-like fingers tearing at one another's armoured sides, demolishing priceless scientific instruments with each sideways lurch and crushing them underfoot.
Jasmine shook her head in bafflement at all that had happened during her relatively brief incarceration in the vault, and changed the image again and again. She saw more battling sentinels, gaping holes torn in the station's outer hull, and not a single living being, anywhere. Eventually an exterior view showed her a flotilla of shuttlecraft and spherical escape pods, all making speed into the far distance.
She looked further. More empty rooms and corridors, more high-powered shootouts between sentinel droids, and then she froze with a gasp.
It was the Master. He was sitting in the centre of the floor in some kind of padded cell, his legs spread out before him, and in a repetitive, monotonous motion he was clawing and clawing at the cushioned floor with his fingernails, dragging and scratching at the material like a rodent trying to gnaw its way out of its cage. She stood there for a moment, watching him pursue his pointless, meaningless task and then couldn't watch any more, and turned her head away.
Jasmine thought, and her eyes flicked from one to another of the objects on the table: the notebook covered in the Doctor's incomprehensible handwriting, the hand-held communicator just like the one on which he had spoken to her when he tried to get her out in the escape pod, the floorplans with each room labelled with an alphanumeric code, and lastly back at the viewscreen, the code of the location clearly displayed in the top right hand corner.
She looked at the Master again. Scratch, scratch, scratch at the floor. He looked insane, and his surroundings seemed to back that up, and she really didn't want to meet him in that condition. But she thought of the mayhem caused by the sentinels, the fleeing escape craft, and the great yawning rifts blasted in the station's hull, and a firmness came to the set of her jaw.
"Right."