- what Ancelyn didn't tell Ace, Battlefield
this is the face of silver
The Doctor is coming, thought Rose, the Doctor is coming.
He had to be, and she had a very good, very rational line of reasoning for believing this. Somehow, between when she had been put in that camp and when they had plucked her out, they had discovered that she was connected to him.
Wasn't the first time it had happened. Seemed to be general practice for her to be used as some glorified bargaining chip in this sort of situation. And the Doctor must have done something pretty spectacular for them to bother searching for her. Find her. Take her away.
And he'd be coming for her now. He would.
This was Rose's very good, very rational line of reasoning. And she clung to it as she was marched through the silent corridors.
Metal gave way to earth stripped bare of any plant life, and Rose caught her first glimpse of the full-scale of what the Cybermen had done to her country, to her world.
Great spirals of steel rose up from the flat ground like cities, dark and sharp against a fading sun. The harsh, unwavering edges of alien architecture stretched as far as she could see. A jarring burr of machinery cut through the air, and the wind brought with it a faintly unpleasant chemical smell.
Lines of silver, moving. But as she got closer the lines broke into dots, into individuals, and each one was a silver giant.
She flew across it all, the slim platform transport landing in a gleaming courtyard of another giant, sprawling building. And she was very quiet, very co-operative. Reason told her that resisting would be likely to do nothing more than give her a broken arm - the steel grip of the partially converted human was still wrapped around her wrist like a vice.
But there, in the courtyard, faced with a single one of those silver giants - those Cybermen - she felt reason leave her. She wasn't sure at which point she started screaming and struggling and trying to tear her arm out of its socket to get away, but it didn't matter. It changed nothing. They didn't react, didn't hesitate, didn't try to silence or speak to her.
Later she'd believe that it was the tear duct that did it. Looking up into that blank metal face with its monstrous parody of human features and seeing a notch at the corner of each eye that they couldn't possibly had had any use for. Like some engineer's last, desperate plea, weeping for the humanity that he had taken. A tear duct that could never hope for tears.
That could never hope.
And so she screamed and she cried and she pleaded and begged.
They brought her into the factory and fixed her into the wall. A coffin, one of thousands.
Rose grew tired, Rose grew quiet. She couldn't move, but her eyes were alive. Not that that mattered to them. They had gone, leaving her here alone. Silence, except for her own breathing. The beating of her heart.
She felt a sting in the back of her neck, her vision clouded. She did not fall away into unconsciousness, but she fell back, somewhere deep inside herself. Looking out, but trapped. Time changed little bit by little bit and though she could think - she could think - it was not as it was before.
Very carefully, very slowly, these were the thoughts that Rose formed before she felt the second stab into the back of her neck:
Is this what happened to Mum?
Why was I so mad at him?
The Doctor is coming.
This was dangerous driving.
The headlights hadn't been turned on as night fell and the Doctor was relying on the fact that his eyesight was a good deal better than the average human's and that his reactions were ten times as fast. In theory.
Hotwiring a car had been simple enough, as had installing the stealth generator and he had made it across the London perimeter without catching sight of another living, or cyberised, soul. Sergeant Conrad, on the other hand…the Doctor assumed that he had gone back to the UNIT bunker, but he couldn't quite convince himself that that was the case.
Something was wrong here. Every sense that he possessed, that had served him so well for over a thousand years, told him that he was missing the point.
But right now, it didn't matter. All that he was concerned about was finding Rose, and if that meant taking corners at eighty miles per hour and running no small risk of flying off the road, then so be it. He knew where he was going, and with the stealth generator active there was no way either the humans or the Cybermen could track him.
He started singing. It didn't help.
Concentrating so much on keeping the car on the road, he barely noticed the time pass, or the miles. And determined not to be shot at without a very good reason, he left the car a half mile from his destination, walked the last leg of the journey along the old country road. It was rather pleasant in an eerie post-apocalyptic kind of way.
Pleasant until he was close enough to see what had happened.
The land had been levelled; the base destroyed. Recently too.
A few hours too late, a few minutes, it didn't matter, if Rose had been here, then she wasn't now. The trail was cold.
He wasn't willing to turn back, not to London, and not without knowing what had happened to her. The Cybermen were efficient, logical and ruthless, but humanity had always had a knack for survival. Surely there must have been survivors here too?
He began to walk, circling round the perimeter of the bomb craters, not sure he what he was looking for.
But he knew that he had found it when he saw a flicker of movement on a nearby outcropping of rocks. Far enough away to escape the bombardment, close enough to give an excellent view of the devastation. And if he had spotted them, then they had probably seen him. He wasn't making any effort to hide himself in the moonlight.
Not changing pace at all, he changed direction, headed quite calmly towards the hillock.
He was entirely unsurprised when someone shouted, "Halt!"
The Doctor did as he was told and waited, careful to keep his hands in plain sight. A moment later a figure approached, cautious but confident, and holding, not a gun, but a sword.
He was a few steps away when the Doctor realised that he recognised him, but the figure spoke first, "Merlin! It is you! I suspected as much, but the others would not let me approach until they were sure you were not with our enemy."
"Ancelyn?" asked the Doctor. "You recognised me?"
Ancelyn bowed, sheathed his sword. "Aye, while your face is no more familiar to me now than it was before, your manner is quite recognisable. It is good that you are here, lord, this country has fallen upon dark times."
"I'd noticed. What're you doing here?"
"We are stationed close-by to guide those who were not aware of the destruction of this place to our second retreat in these moors."
"That wasn't exactly…" The Doctor shook his head. "I thought you'd decided to go back to your own dimension."
"It was my intention," admitted Ancelyn. "But when the moment came, I could not bear to be parted from my beloved. So I stayed. And she generously consented to be my wife."
"You married the Brigadier?"
"As you say, Winifred is my wife, and we were deeply fortunate to both survive the horrors that have swept across this place."
The Doctor felt a strange sort of melancholy settle over him, but managed to smile, said, "Congratulations."
"Thank you, m'lord. And, if I may ask, why are you here? Have you come to deliver us from the silver beast?"
For a moment the Doctor felt distinctly uncomfortable. "I'll do what I can. In fact, there's a friend of mine working with UNIT back in London-"
"-they have survived the purges?"
"Looked like it."
"This is good news, indeed, Merlin. My lady will be delighted."
"Yeah, well, they're getting some help now. But I'm looking for a friend of mine - Rose Tyler - and I was told she came through here."
Ancelyn nodded. "It is as you say. The girl was here while we were attacked, but was lost in a cave-in."
"Lost?" demanded the Doctor. "D'you mean dead?"
"It is…not known what fate befell her."
"Yes, it damn well is." Ancelyn and the Doctor looked up to see another figure approaching. A woman in army camouflage, a gun holstered at her hip. "Ancelyn, who is this?"
"This is Merlin." He looked back up at the hill. "Has there been some change to our situation?"
"No, the captain's just getting edgy. Wanted to know who this guy was."
The Doctor stared at the newcomer. "I'm the Doctor," he said offering her a hand. She gave it a terse shake.
"Livia," she told him, glanced behind her, threw a quick hand signal up at the outcropping. "Heard a lot about you, Doctor."
"What happened to Rose?"
"I was…" she paused, ran a hand through her hair. "Damn it, I was the one responsible for getting her out of the base. We were meant to be heading back to London, to find you, in fact."
The Doctor's voice was cold: "What happened?"
"We left Bambera's office, and were on our way to the south garage when the bombardment started. She was caught in a rock fall."
"And what did you do?" It was almost a sneer.
"I got out of there." Livia folded her arms. "Why? What would you expect me to do? Dig her body out from under a few tonnes of rock with my bare hands? That what you'd have done?"
The Doctor looked away. "You sure she was caught in the fall?"
"Pretty sure, yeah."
He took a step forward. "How sure?"
Livia tilted her head up, met his eyes with a cool gaze. "The tunnel came down on top of us. I got caught at the outside of the fall." She shrugged. "If she wasn't under there she'd have been trapped on the other side. We didn't catch her amongst the stragglers though, and the Cybermen don't leave anyone left alive when they attack."
"But they do take prisoners," said the Doctor.
"In that case, she'd be better off dead."
"I don't think so."
"Good for you, Doctor. But the point's academic, she's gone. I'm sorry."
"Yeah, you sound it." He looked at Ancelyn. "If she was still alive where would they take care?"
Livia and Ancelyn exchanged a glance. "Merlin, I think that-"
"Help me, Ancelyn, or don't help me, but make up your mind."
He gave a slight smile. "My apologies. If the girl were alive and captured, they would have taken her to the camps on Salisbury plains. That is where they take their souls and paint them silver.
"Thanks. You don't happen to know the way, do you?"
Ancelyn nodded, turned to Livia, "Tell my lady that I will see her soon."
Livia started. "You have just got to be kidding me. You're abandoning us? To go swanning off looking for some girl who's probably buried below us? With this…this individual?"
"This is Merlin," said Ancelyn, expression serious, eyes calm. "It is he who guided Arthur, and he who brought Excalibur to my world. I would follow him to death."
"Which is exactly where you'll be going." She shook her head. "Bambera will be furious."
"My lady will understand."
"Well, I don't," she said quietly. "But I won't try to stop you." She shot a look at the Doctor. "What about everyone else in the camps? Are you going to rescue them too?"
"I'm looking for Rose."
"I see." She gave a tight smile. "Very heroic of you."
The Doctor turned, walking away. "Come on, Ancelyn."
"Wait!" called Livia. "If you're going…the Cybermen hold on their records in a central registry, and they take a DNA sample of all prisoners. We've never been able to crack it, but you…well, I don't doubt that it's not beyond your abilities. That's probably your best chance for finding her."
"I doubt many humans will have been travelling in time," said the Doctor. "Usually causes a minute amount of harmless DNA mutation…should be enough to locate her." He met Livia's eyes. "Thank you."
"Good luck." She paused, sighed. "And I suppose you'd better take some supplies. Put them to some good use."
"Harry," said Jack, giving him a slap on the back, "we make a beautiful team."
Harry grinned, and Jack grinned back. In an odd sort of way, Harry reminded him of Algy, what with all that courtesy and old world charm.
But then the fun of working with him alone in the laboratory was over, and Jack found himself put in charge of a production line. Several dozen soldiers, all set-up in a nice warm room near the heart of the compound listening very carefully to his every word.
It was slow at first, with Jack and Harry having to look over everyone's shoulders and make sure no mistakes were made, but after a few hours things got easier. Every soldier knew exactly what he had to do and they were making a good fifteen proto-glitter guns an hour.
"Well, this is all looks very impressive," said the Brigadier, inspecting their progress as they worked through the night. "How's it going?"
"Very well, sir," said Harry. He picked up one of the finished models, handed it to the Brigadier. "And we've enough salvage for almost a thousand units."
"What about ammunition?"
Jack stepped forward. "That's a little trickier."
"How so?" asked the Brigadier.
"Well, these aren't exactly glitter guns. They'll do the job, but we're working with twenty-first century technology, and that's been augmented with alien tech. So not exactly standard stuff."
"So what precisely is the problem, Captain?"
"They need a lot of gold."
"I thought you said-"
"Yeah, they use up hardly any when they fire, but that needs a critical mass inside the gun."
The Brigadier rubber his forehead, nodded. "Alright. So right now, how many can we load?"
"Thirty," Jack told him. "If we're lucky."
"First priority is more ammunition then. And that's going to be a problem."
"Not such a big one as you think, sir," Harry chipped in.
"Oh?"
Jack grinned. "Well, I thought if we're going to give you weapons from the future, may as well get some of the accoutrements too." He picked a small grey box from the desk and passed it to the Brigadier, who held it as though it were a bomb.
"Very nice." He raised his eyebrows at Jack. "What is it?"
"A metal detector. A very advanced metal detector that should be able to pinpoint any gold within a radius of ten miles or so."
The Brigadier nodded. "Harkness, you might just have given us what we need to get our planet back."
"Certainly hope so. It's my planet too."
When the Brigadier had left and Wood had determined that he understood the construction of the guns well enough to oversee their production, Jack dragged Harry to the mess hall, ignoring the mutter of "bloody civilians" as he left the room.
He sat Harry down and went to get some food and a pot of tea. He didn't understand the fascination with the stuff, but the English seemed to be firmly convinced that it could cure all ills, and Harry certainly seemed in need of curing.
"Here you go," Jack said, taking the seat opposite.
"Thanks." He downed the cup of tea as though it were a cheap brand of whisky.
Jack picked at his food, leaving Harry to his own thoughts for a few moments, before he said, "You been here long then?"
"I was picked up by UNIT as soon as they found out who was attacking us." A slight smile, self-deprecating. "I'd met them before, you see, off travelling with the Doctor. The Prime Minister seemed to be under the impression that that made me some sort of an expert."
"Well, you do know more than the average human from this era."
"I suppose so."
"You didn't want this job, I take it?"
Harry stopped eating, gave Jack a long look. "I'm a doctor. They brought me here to help figure out ways of killing people."
"They're not people."
"How do we know that? How do we know there isn't some way of turning them back? But nobody's even bothered to try. It's shoot to kill." He stopped, tried to take a drink from his empty tea cup. "I'm terribly sorry. I'm just really rather tired. Hasn't been easy, you know."
"War never is."
"Sounds like you've had some experience."
Jack shrugged. "Nothing like this." He leaned over the table, put his hand on Harry's arm. "We did a good job today, okay? We're gonna save a lot of lives."
"I hope so."
Logic was on their side. More or less.
The Cybermen wouldn't expect a single, virtually unarmed individual to try and penetrate one of their factories to retrieve one particular person because it was a very stupid, very illogical thing to do. Unless, of course, they'd taken account of the generally illogical nature of humans and made their own counter plans for any instances of outright stupidity. In which case, the Doctor was in a lot of trouble.
He and Ancelyn had retrieved the borrowed car and driven on to Salisbury. The Doctor took them as close to the factories as he dared before they stopped.
The Doctor didn't bother to comment on the sight before him, instead got out of the car and began dismantling the stealth device.
Ancleyn's head appeared above the other side of the car a few moments later. "If I may ask, Merlin, what are you doing?"
The Doctor glanced at Ancelyn, changed settings on the sonic screwdriver then continued working. "A few adjustments. I need to get into that factory. And you need to make a diversion. But I'd rather that we both got out alive."
"You have a plan then?"
The Doctor grinned. "I always have a plan. This thing can dissemble into about six smaller units. Good old flexible Cybertech. So we're going to borrow two of them to hide ourselves and hope that the other four still hide the car. And then we're going to go stir things up down there. It's still gonna be pretty dicey though."
"I have faced the Cybermen before." Ancelyn drew his sword, let it catch the blue light of the sonic screwdriver. "And I have killed them before."
The Doctor frowned. "That gold?"
"It is plated with the soft metal, aye. The professor treated it with chemicals so that the gold would not so easily be worn away in battle. She is a women of great knowledge, not unlike your own."
"Thanks. I think." Another flicker of blue light. "Right, I think that's done it. Take this. You know how to use explosives?
"My lady insisted that I learn the ways of this world's weapons."
"Fantastic." The Doctor popped the boot open and opened the crate secured in the back. "Very nice of Livia to give us these. Timers and everything." He began to unpack the explosives. "Now listen Ancelyn, when the first one goes off they're going to react very quickly, so you need to be out of there by then. Don't try to fight them, just get back here. If Rose and I don't join you within a couple of minutes just leave."
"How much time should I allow before the first explosion?"
The Doctor took a deep breath, and made some very quick, very rough calculations. "Give me twenty minutes. I know my way around these sorts of places but I've got to find some way to access the central computer first, then crack a lock, avoid whatever guards they have, find Rose and get out."
"A heroic mission," said Ancelyn.
"Bloody stupid one too," said the Doctor.
She knew her name. Her name was Rose.
Rose was not sleeping. Rose wanted to sleep. Rose was….Rose was…she tried to shut her eyes. Tried to remember. Tried.
Dislocation. This wasn't her. But then she didn't know who she was.
Chemicals. Chemicals inside her, inside her brain, inside her head, changing her. She knew that. And she clung to it.
It was so very cold.
She could no longer fell her fingers, her toes. Reminded her of a rhyme, for children. She had been a child once, she was almost certain of that. Who had she been?
There were noises in her ears and she wondered if that was what it was like to hear as a machine. She wondered if their hearing was so much better that they could hear noises all that time, every little creak and crinkle, no more silence ever again. A world of the shriek and clang of metal. Straight lines and perfect circles and sums that all add up.
Maybe she couldn't feel her fingers because they weren't there any more? She hadn't felt them take her hands. Perhaps that was their mercy. Though they could not feel perhaps they knew of mercy and dulled her mind and her body so she would not feel what it was that they changed.
And stole her memories so that she would not know what it was that she had lost.
Would she even know that she had been human, once? Would she want to?
She was still there, somewhere inside her head, somewhere deep down where she couldn't hear her screaming, couldn't feel her clawing at the walls, scraping bloody nails against the prison of her mind. Fighting and losing and falling away from herself, a little at a time.
She was still in there. Waiting. Waiting for someone. Someone.
"Rose."
The voice again. Somewhere in her memories, surfacing like a phantom. A taunt of everything she could not reach.
"Rose."
It was very insistent now. Very demanding. A certainty that had no place inside her head. Not sluggish at all, not like her -
Something dark swam in her vision. Was that them? Were they going to take her somewhere new? Had they killed her already?
"Rose, it's alright. You're going to be alright." Something tilted, outside, inside her head, she wasn't sure. A burning on her cheek, the five fingers of a warm-blooded hand. "I've got you."
The world fell sideways. "S'okay now, Rose. Gonna get you out of here."
Her eyes were open or her eyes were closed. She didn't know. She didn't care.
She thought.
Rose, she thought, what is rose?