Funny things, time wars.
Where do they begin?
A tortoise crosses the finish line, his dusty skin gray in the sunlight, his shell warm and scented with exertion, the hare panting and desperately late, far behind.
Which is all fine and good.
Until the time wars come to town, Cyber-style.
Then how does the story end?
Does a cyber-enhanced, silver-furred trans-temporal hare flash ahead of the tortoise, soaring across the finish line, his long, twitching cyber-enhanced ears perky in the sunlight, triumphant?
Or, once harvested himself, does the tortoise go back through time and set a trap for the hare: a hole deep and wide, covered with leaves that will break under the soft, furred foot.
Round and round, over and over again. Silver meets flesh, takes bone, swims through the timelines, punching holes, gouging out new realities, any reality, any reality it takes to win.
Does the race begin at the finish line? Does it end at the start?
And you thought it was confusing before:
A police box that was not a police box, a TARDIS that was not the Doctor's TARDIS, hung in space, slowly orbiting station that was once Terminus. Silver worms, slimy and sentient, wiggled their way across the blue, oblong box, searching for a way in, their tiny serrated teeth probing the hull for a weakness.
Inside the vessel, Nyssa stared at the scanner screen. Around her, the Master's TARDIS had dimmed, quietly, subtly growing darker. The cheerful, white interior that had tricked her into thinking it was her old home was gone, shifting down into a faded gray. Even the console itself seemed shadowed, as if attempting to coordinate with the Master's eternal wardrobe of black on black.
She didn't trust him. But, as she took in the data that flooded the scanner readouts, she realized it didn't matter if she didn't trust him. It didn't matter what she believed.
Because everything else was just so impossible, nothing seemed to matter any more. Good, evil, life death. They seemed so tiny; so silly.
And what the Master was trying to do- what she was helping him do – was even more impossible. He was on the other side of the console, intent upon preparing his TARDIS for the event. The pink band on his wrist was completely out of place on his black velvet sheathed arm. She wore one on her own arm, unsure of its design. She knew only that it held her in this moment, kept her from the cyber-corruption from affecting her from an earlier timeline. He had only the two, apparently a gift from someone he was unwilling to acknowledge. She presumed that meant it was the Doctor, but she couldn't be sure. The Master wasn't exactly being particularly chatty of late.
She'd seen the Mara pounce on the station, slipping out from the dark void in a single, terrible motion, wrapping around Terminus with her tremendous coils, her jaws gobbling up the docked silver vessels and ripping out great jagged chunks of the station, dusting space with puffs of debris and twitching bits of Cybermen. The Mara flared her cobra-esque hood, with something akin to glee, then rammed into the station, head first, her body swelling even larger, if that were possible, as she burrowed deeper in a gluttonous rampage.
But the Horde grew larger, still responding to Kamelion's signal, clustering around the exposed tail of the Mara like a swarm of gnats… from everywhere they came, and alighted on her skin, layering an ever-shifting silver mass, accreting thicker and thicker.
Nyssa stared in disbelief at the readings, a slow dread filling her, as she began to realize what she'd help to create. The Horde wasn't just Cybermen anymore, not just the harvested bio-population of the Universe from all across time. They'd incorporated, with her help, not just silicon-base life forms but all inorganic matter, the very planets themselves. They'd harvested moons and worlds and suns. From all across the universe and all throughout time. All matter in the universe was coming to Terminus, converging on the station, converging on the Mara.
The great snake reared up once more, her giant head smashing out of the station to stare at the creatures that dared to soil her skin. She attempted to shake them off, as one might snap a towel, but the creatures remained crusted to her hide, a seething veneer of silver. She howled again and began to feed on them, on everything around her, devouring them all. But still they came, from every region of space, time warping around her. And still she fed, growing larger and larger as the universe around her dimmed, as the stars worlds pressed closer about her.
The mass readings of the Mara were taxing the TARDIS's ability to process the data. And still the Horde kept coming.
Nyssa frowned the image on the screen seemed to bleed and shift. "What's happening?"
The Master glanced up, his fingers tapping furiously on the keyboard. "They've changed their attack, time shifting…" his muttering trailed off for a moment. "The TARDIS will try to track the progression in a linear path; we need to wait for just the right moment."
Nyssa watched as the TARDIS scanner compensated, attempting to provide a coherent narrative.
The Mara pounced on the station, slipping out from the dark void in a single, terrible motion, wrapping around the station, only to find the Horde was there, waiting, swarming around her, drilling into her, pummeling her from every angle of the time spectrum.
Still the Mara fought eating in a frenzy, leaving nothing behind but saliva and excrement, silver black and vile.
At some point, Nyssa knew not when, the Horde managed to penetrate the Mara's hide; it began to convert her, her green skin was blistering from silver from the inside out and the snake howled a terrible scream that Nyssa knew she could not possibly hear.
But something was wrong.
The silver infusion seemed to slow, then reverse. The Mara tossed her head back and then bent to feed again, the meal was a feast now as nearly all the matter in the Universe was laid before her.
"It's not working!" Nyssa pecked anxiously at the controls, willing the readings to change.
The Master brushed her aside and took control of the panel, trying new codes, new programs.
Nyssa stared at the screen again, her voice muted with awe. "They're not just machines; they're composed of organic matter, of living matter of all kinds… The Mara feeds off of fear…" She grew cold, thinking of what Adric may have thought in those last few moments, if this meant that they could still feel something, however small, even if it was just instinct, after conversion. She turned back to the Master. "They still fear her, deep down, at their very core. She's going to win."