The Master found Aulksama in the first floor drawing room, staring out the window. It was raining again, and she never seemed to tire of watching the precipitation. It was a tiresome habit and one that caused her to become easily distracted from her work.
He coughed lightly and she spun around, glanced guiltily at the papers on the desk. "I'm sorry, I..."
He held up a hand, not wishing to hear any feeble excuses. "Have you located a suitable target?" he asked.
She nodded. "In one of their northern settlements. It has the correct time period and the correct style of artefact." She picked the table from the paper and handed it to him. "But I don't understand the relevance of this to locating the correct artefact."
The Master raised his eyes from the paper, looked at her for a long moment. She was uncomfortable under his gaze, and he had noticed she was becoming less and less able to maintain the cool emotionless façade that she had perfected on her home planet. Stress, of course, and perhaps elements of shock settling in. The most interesting effect had been her reaction when she had left the TARDIS: the sudden pain that she had felt on this over-populated little world.
She had not asked a question, so he did not have to refuse an answer. She had been willing to come with him, willing to work, but now that she had escaped from the devastation of her home planet, he was unsure how she would react to a new world, one where she might imagine she could start a new life. Information was the key to control here; so far he had told her only what she needed to know.
"I am seeking to attract the interest of a group that operate in this county. And one individual in particular."
She shook her head. "But why?"
"My dear Leto, that would take several hours to explain, suffice to say that when I take that artefact from this miserable little planet, I want him to know it was I who stole it and there was nothing that he could do to stop me."
She almost covered the reaction to the use of her name. Her people had some strange ideas regarding names, what they meant, how they should be used. But it amused him to see how unnerved she was simply by the use of her first name, and it served as a constant reminder of all that she had lost.
She didn't inquire further, and he wondered whether it was empathy or political skill that allowed her to determine when to speak and when to drop a point.
"Come with me," he ordered.
They walked downstairs, a single flight, though the house had three floors, not including the cellar, which boasted an impressive selection of wine that the Master had casually made use of. It was an old country house, with big draughty rooms and solid ancient furnishings. The owner had left the country for several months, a doddering old man by the name of Percival Baldwin, to go on an expedition in the Amazon. His sense of security could easily be calculated by a quick look in the garage where he had seen fit to leave two classic cars with the keys neatly kept by the front door of the house itself. It was a perfect base of operations for the Master.
On the ground floor he unlocked the library and pushed the door open, inviting Leto to enter first.
Inside, every wall was covered with books, neatly stacked, most leather bound. It was a beautiful collection. Across the centre of the room ran a long conference table and round the edges sofas and armchairs softened the heavy wooden panelling and beams overhead.
"This," said the Master, waving a gloved hand at the nearest shelf, "is probably the best that humanity has to offer. As a species, they are lamentable, but they have produced the occasional acceptable writer across the millennia."
"This is how they store their information?" asked Leto, taking a book from the shelf at random and flicking through it.
"For most of their history. This century they have managed a primitive form of computer technology. Now listen; it is very likely that you will have to pass as a human at some point in the next few weeks. It isn't enough to look like one, you will have to act like one too. Read, and learn the best of what humanity has to offer. There'll be a television set around here somewhere, where you can learn the worst. And there is a great deal more of that."
"And where will you be?" asked Leto mildly, glancing cautiously up from her book.
"I shall be conducting another little trip. One more clue for their dull minds to play with."
With that, he left the room and Leto sat down to read. Since she had left her homeworld a strange sort of blankness had clouded her mind. It was easy to function, easy to accomplish tasks that had been set and the Master had had no shortage of those. She knew that she should grieve, but that would be impossible for now. She never knew how long she had alone, and for him to find her in that vulnerable state was unacceptable.
From having all the choices in the world, she had come to having none at all, if she wanted to live. And she did so very much want to live. A desperate, pitiable sort of existence, she mused, but at least there was no shortage of home comforts. This world boasted a vast array of foodstuffs, and she had little doubt that other aspects of human life matched this variety, if only she were allowed to see it.
Allowed. How bitter she found that word. But she knew how ruthless Keller was. It had been a horrific situation those last few days on homeworld. The civil unrest had burned whole cities before its wrath and she had ordered extreme measures to control the situation. Measures which, in the end, had merely hastened the world's destruction. There had been objections, of course, and a slew of assassinations in the senior echelons of government. Leto knew which ones she had ordered, and which ones she suspected the good Professor of carrying out. The only thing that had kept her safe was her constant support of his research.
There would be people left, perhaps, in the rubble, a natural immunity was not impossible in a minute percentage of the population. Strange sort of thing to hope, she thought, perhaps it would be better that they were all dead.
When Keller returned he was in an uncharacteristically good mood, and Leto wondered who had paid for that. He came into the library with a tray and strangely shaped pot as well as two mugs.
He caught Leto's curious look and said, "Tea, my dear, an Earth delicacy and arguably the single most important contribution they have made to the galaxy. Does any of this catch your interest?" he asked, indicating the books.
"I understand that these are all fiction," said Leto carefully. "But I would very much like a frame of reference as to which stories have some bearing to reality, or are there really humans no taller than a thumb?"
"Ah," said the Master, arching an eyebrow, pouring the tea. "It's fortunate then that we will be retrieving the correct artefact tomorrow afternoon. UNIT seems to finally have caught on to the unusual nature of the break-ins, and the Doctor will be following straight behind them."