Author's Note:
Hello, lovely people! Big thanks to the folks who were kind enough to "water the plant" with their wonderful reviews – GuesssWho, SophieQueenOfTheWorld, MayFairy, TheWritingKat, EmmaMarie, CelestialValkyrie, MountainLord-92, sailormajinmoon, SawManiac211, Freya, Push To Shove, Ahsilaa, Imorgen, Lost Moon (x 4), TheWickedHeart, MisplacedLevity, Aietradaea (x 3), DoctorWhoFan93, irishartemis, Theta'sWorstNightmare and JantoXDrose.
To Freya – Hi there! So nice to hear from you, and believe me, your lovely comments could not have been more well-timed this week. So, let me tell you, you also SHINE! Thank you so much :)
To Push to Shove – Thanks for your review XXX. She certainly does have a name, courtesy of the Daleks, although it's not one she's particularly proud of.
To Lost Moon – I appreciate your wonderful catch-up very much, it's terrific to have you back on board!
To DoctorWhoFan93 – Thanks for the feedback! Sorry to make you wait a little while for the update, but here it is at last :)
- Chapter Twenty Nine -
"Dawn has broke, the time has come,
Move Your Feet to a Marching Drum
We'll win the war and pay the toll,
We'll Fight as One in Heart and Soul
Midnight mare and blood red roan,
Fight to Keep this Land Your Own
Sound the horn and call the cry,
How Many of Them Can We Make Die!"
Heather Alexander – The March of Cambreadth
The room was vast and packed to capacity. Platoon after platoon of young Time Lord warriors, proudly standing to attention, each of them dressed in black military uniforms, each of them with their eyes fixed avidly on the raised dais at the end of the room, where their leaders stood. On the wall behind the dais, an enormous holo-screen, filled with star-maps and battle plans, everything the soldiers needed to know before the Battle of the Ramah Phalanx commenced on the morrow.
And, standing on the platform, facing her men, stood a single, slender upright figure, garbed in a grey Elite Strike Force combat suit. She looked young, in her early twenties at most, pretty and feminine, with wide hazel eyes and a short cap of nut-brown hair. But appearances could be very deceptive, as every Time Lord in the room knew. Closer examination would reveal that the pretty face was as cold and emotionless as stone, the hazel eyes hard and alert and dangerous. This was their commander, her courage and cunning against the enemy beyond all question, proven in battle over and over again. Their trust in her was absolute and they would follow her wherever she led, to the death, if that was what was necessary.
"For too long, we have allowed the Daleks the initiative," she said, her clear voice carrying throughout the room. "For too long, we have accepted battle on their terms. But no more! Tomorrow, we take the battle to them! Tomorrow, we will teach them what going to war with the Time Lords really means! Tomorrow, we will wipe the Dalek Imperial Fleet from the sky, once and for all!"
A tumultuous roar of approval filled the room, a thousand Time Lord warriors cheering her words in aggressive anticipation.
The Commander thrust her small fist into the air, her eyes glittering with bloodlust and hate. "Sound the horn and call the cry..." she shouted, repeating the savage litany she always used to inspire them on the eve of every battle. "HOW MANY OF THEM CAN WE MAKE DIE?"
A thousand fists rose in response, a thousand voices crying out, "HOW MANY OF THEM CAN WE MAKE DIE?"
"Death to the Daleks!" she screamed.
"DEATH! DEATH! DEATH! DEATH!"
A tsunami of sound, the chant rising and rising, swelling and swelling, until there was nothing else in the entire Universe, just death, death to every last Dalek...
"Kat! Kat, are you all right? Come on, you have to wake up!"
The strange voice penetrated inside her mind like a knife, the tsunami of memory receding in a sudden rush, leaving her behind, stranded and disoriented.
She moaned. Her head hurt and she didn't know where she was. She had been somewhere outside her body, back in that briefing room on board Jelpax's command ship, watching herself address her soldiers, just as she had done long ago, stirring the battle fever inside them, urging them on to victory.
Now she was lying on the stony ground and someone kept pulling at her arm and patting awkwardly at her cheek, calling out to someone named 'Kat'.
Kat. Who was Kat? Whoever it was, she wished they would hurry up and answer the person calling to them. Then they might stop shaking her and leave her in peace.
"Try the name 'Ana'," another voice suggested.
"Why on Gallifrey would I want to do that?"
"Well, that's what you were calling her when you had your little psychopathic fit just now!"
"For the millionth time, Theta, I've got no idea what you're talking about! There's nothing wrong with me!"
"Yeah, well, tell that to the bruises on my bruises, Kos!"
Tejana warily cracked open an eyelid and inspected the two boys leaning over her, busily bickering with each other, each of them handsome in very different ways - one dark-haired and arrogant-looking with navy-blue eyes, the other with tousled blonde hair and sky blue eyes that looked made for mischief.
Slowly, as they argued back and forth, apparently oblivious to her return to consciousness, everything began to come back to her.
Koschei. Theta. Gallifrey. Daleks. Oh, gods, DALEKS!
She sat bolt upright, clutching violently at their arms, startling them both. "What happened?"
"Kat!" Koschei exclaimed in relief. "You're all right!"
"Never mind me,what happened to the Daleks?"
Theta pointed solemnly behind her. "That happened."
She spun around. The bottom half of each of the Daleks was completely intact, still sitting exactly as they had during her confrontation with them, their laser weapons still pointing towards her threateningly. However, of their top halves, there was nothing left. Acrid smoke seeped from the blackened, twisted casings; foul, green slime oozing and dripping from the shattered vents like blood, the gory, melted remains of the mutated, many-tentacled creatures that had once existed inside the armoured shells.
"You shouted out, 'I am the Executioner!' and then there was this tremendous...surge...in the psychic link," Koschei explained excitedly. "It was amazing, I've never felt anything like it before. They just seemed to overheat. They were screaming. Smoke came pouring out of their neck vents and then they exploded. You collapsed on to the floor and we couldn't wake you."
Tejana stared at the lifeless hunks of mutilated metal and felt a terrible sickness rise in her throat. Sound the horn and call the cry...how many of them can we make die? Somewhere inside her, an idealistic little child was crying bitterly at what she had grown up to become. She had performed the ultimate act of evil, the one thing she had sworn never to do – she had used the psychic link to kill. Yes, she had saved Gallifrey, possibly even the Universe. But the personal cost had been incalculable, her sense of loss beyond any retrieval.
"I used the psychic link to cut them off from their shared consciousness, the Pathweb," she whispered brokenly. "They can't survive independently. They were forced to self-destruct."
"So you killed them," Theta said flatly.
Tejana could hear the condemnation in his voice and hysterical laughter bubbled up through her despair. He was so young. Right now, everything for him was so black and white. He had so much still to learn about good and evil, love and hate, sacrifice and loss; and he had no idea of the choices life was going to force him to make. An image flashed before her eyes of the fire of the Moment raining from the skies of Gallifrey, incinerating everything in its path...
"I killed three of them," she replied, her voice cold and bleak. "In the future, both you and I will kill so many more."
Dismayed and horrified, Theta shook his head. "No," he said passionately, the word laced with disgust. "No. That will never happen. I don't care what possible reason you might come up with, whatever happens, I will never kill! They said you were called 'the Executioner'. Is that the title you chose when you became a Time Lord? Is that what we've been risking our lives for – nothing but a stone-cold killer?"
She heard it again, echoing behind his words, her own voice, screaming out her personal catch-phrase during the War...'HOW MANY OF THEM CAN WE MAKE DIE?'
"NO!" The word tore jaggedly out of her throat in absolute rejection of the person she had been back then, someone so full of hatred that the Daleks had come to admire her, the ultimate shame and degradation. "That's not my name. It never was my name, nor will it ever be."
She struggled to get to her feet, only to fall back with an exclamation of pain, her hands clutching at her stomach as a white-hot bolt of agony lanced through her abdomen.
"Oh gods," she gasped. "The baby. Not the baby!"
Koschei caught her, easily supporting her slight weight in his arms. "Baby? What baby?" he demanded.
Instantly, the accusing look fell away from Theta's face, to be replaced by acute trepidation. "Kat? Kat, what's happening? Is the baby all right?"
"WHAT BABY?" Koschei repeated, more stridently this time.
"She's pregnant, Kos, all right!" Theta snapped. "She's going to have a baby. How hard is that for you to understand?"
Tejana hardly heard them, concentrating as she was on the burning screw of agony in her stomach. She had pushed herself too hard, she realised now, to the limit and beyond. Was this the price she had to pay for using the psychic link to kill? The life of her precious child in exchange for the lives of the Daleks she had destroyed?
No, she thought savagely. I won't let this happen. I won't let the Daleks take this from me too!
Desperately, fighting back the pain, she searched her consciousness for the Master. Koschei, help us, oh gods, please help us! But there was no response from her life-mate, no familiar stirring in her mind, nothing but an icy emptiness. She couldn't feel him anywhere. Suddenly, she remembered the surge of energy he had given her, the way his hands had wrapped around hers when she had lifted the psychic sword to sever the Daleks from the Pathweb. He had taken the brunt of the impact, shielding her from the terrible mental conflagration. What had happened to him? Where was he? Cold fear trickled through her hearts. Physically, he had been little more than a ghost. If she had been pushed to the limit, what about him? Had she lost him forever?
Forcing back her rising panic, she began to channel all the energy she could muster through to the baby, doing her best to stabilise his failing life-force. Her newly-regenerated body was young and strong. But after her recent mental exertions, she was so exhausted, she could hardly summon more than a trickle.
To her horror, the tiny light in the psychic link was flickering like a candle flame in the wind, teetering on the verge of going out.
Hurriedly, Amy and Rory climbed down the metal ladder leading from the roof, followed closely by the Doctor. In the distance, they could hear the muffled sound of River's blaster, firing over and over again.
"We can't just leave them up there!" Amy protested.
"Right now, they're probably safer up there than we are down here," the Doctor responded, striding away through one of the darkened museum galleries. "They've only got a few mummies to deal with. We've got the Chaos-Master."
Amy and Rory broke into a trot to catch up with him, as he wove an erratic path through the exhibits.
"How are there mummies suddenly running around the museum anyway?" Rory demanded. "Have I missed something? I know I shouldn't be surprised, since you're involved, but this place just gets crazier every minute!"
"It's the light from the Pandorica," the Doctor said tensely, without slowing the cracking pace he was setting. "Only, it's not really a light, it's a restoration field. Never mind, call it a light. That light brought Amy back. And, now that he's free, the Chaos-Master is using it to reanimate those mummies. Not only that - he also used it to bring back those three Daleks. The question we need to ask ourselves is, how could he bring back the Daleks when the Daleks have never existed?"
Amy pulled a face behind his rapidly-retreating back, guessing he already knew the answer, but unable to figure out what it might be. "All right, tell us."
"When the TARDIS blew up, it caused total event collapse. A time explosion. It blasted every atom in every moment of the Universe. Except..."
Sudden understanding lit Amy's eyes. "Except inside the Pandorica."
"The perfect prison!" the Doctor nodded. "Inside it, perfectly preserved, a few billion atoms of the universe as it was. In theory, you could extrapolate the whole universe from a single one of them, like cloning a body from a single cell. And we've got the bumper family pack."
Rory rolled his eyes heavenward. "Nope. Too fast, I'm not getting it."
The Doctor stopped dead in his tracks and spun around to face him. "The box contains a memory of the Universe," he said slowly and succinctly. "And the light transmits the memory." A wide grin crept gleefully across his face. "And that's how we're going to do it."
"Do what?" Amy demanded.
"Relight the fire! Reboot the Universe!" With that, the Doctor whirled away again, striding through the entrance into another gallery. Amy noticed that the sign beside the door read 'The Middle Ages'. "Come on!"
Amy and Rory looked at each other in bewilderment, before hurrying to catch him up again. The long gallery stretched away in front of them, dim and shadowy, full of eerie, indistinct shapes. Amy stared anxiously into the gloom. She didn't like it in here. It was creepy, full of foreboding, as if something very bad was about to happen, and she wasn't going to be able to stop it. Cold prickles ran up and down her spine. Twenty two minutes, the Doctor had said. Twenty two minutes until he died. And that time was already more than half gone.
"I still don't get it!" Rory was saying breathlessly. "So the light restores whatever it touches. Amy, a couple of Daleks, a few mummies...but it's a bit limited to the immediate area, isn't it? How the hell can we use it to restore the whole of reality?"
The Doctor paused again. "What if we give it a moment of infinite power? Transmit the light from the Pandorica to every particle of time and space simultaneously?"
"But...that's impossible, isn't it?"
"Ah, no, you see, it's not!" Reaching out, the Doctor tapped Rory on the nose in an affectionate gesture. "It's almost completely impossible. One spark is all we need!"
"For what?" the young man queried in exasperation.
"Big Bang Two!" the Doctor responded. "Isn't that right, Chaos-Master?"
From out of the darkness came the malevolent sound of a single pair of hands clapping in mock appreciation. All at once, bright spotlights blazed into life at the far end of the room, illuminating a raised platform. Blinking against the glaring light, Amy realised that it was supposed to be a historical tableau of Henry VIII, sitting on a golden throne, surrounded by his six wives. However, the waxwork dummy of the rotund king had been unceremoniously tossed to the ground, where he lay like an abandoned rag doll, with both of his arms broken off. In his place, the Chaos-Master lounged on the throne, looking completely at his ease, wrapped in Henry's ermine robes, the King's jewelled crown sitting jauntily on his white-blonde head.
"Oh, very good, Doctor!" he sneered, still slowly clapping. "Very clever, as usual. Always so good at saving the Universe, aren't you? Such a pity you won't get a chance to put your innovative plan into action!"
Theta's hands cupped her face, tilting it up to him so that her eyes met his. "Kat! Stay with me here! Tell me what's happening!"
"I've...over-extended myself," she replied hoarsely. "Destroying the Daleks...took too much energy. I need to rest, or I'm going to lose the baby." Tears streaked down her cheeks. "It may already be too late. He's only just holding on."
Theta exchanged a grim glance with Koschei.
"We can't stay down here," the dark-haired boy warned. "There's not a chance in the world the High Council would have missed what she just did. They'll know exactly where we are. And as soon as they discover the secret entrance to these tunnels, the Chancellery Guard will be on their way to arrest all three of us. We need to move, and soon. The question is, where?"
"There must be somewhere we can go!" Theta replied. "Somewhere safe, where Kat can rest, without interruption. Somewhere they won't think to look!"
Tejana winced as another devastating cramp seized her belly. Her head was swimming. Trying her hardest to stay calm, she searched her brain for a way out of this debacle. She had been in some terrible situations in her time, but never anything as bad as this. She had lost the Master – whether permanently or temporarily, she did not know. And now that the crack had closed, she had no escape route from Gallifrey. With the timey-wimey detector destroyed, and no resources available to make another one, she had no way of telling when, or even if, another crack would ever arrive. Besides, the chances of another one magically turning up before the Time Lords managed to track her down were next to nothing. Worst of all, she had now irretrievably dragged Theta and Koschei into the whole mess. The Time Lords were closing in on her. It was only a matter of time before they caught her. She knew she should send the two boys away, to distance herself from them completely, both for their own protection and for that of the time-line. But she was so weak...without their help, her unborn son was going to die. And that wasn't a sacrifice she was prepared to make. Every way she turned, the situation seemed impossible. Unless...
"There's only one hope left," she whispered, making her mind up. "It's a long shot, but we'll have to try it."
"What?" Theta demanded. "Tell me, Kat, and we'll do it, whatever it is, I promise."
"You need to help me get to Borusa's study. If I can talk to him...if I can make him understand...maybe he'll be able to help, before it's too late. He's our only chance!"
Her young father stared blankly at her and then flashed a questioning look at Koschei, who shrugged.
"Um, okay," Theta said dubiously. "One little problem, though."
Weary to the bone, chilled with fear for the Master and their unborn son, Tejana closed her eyes. "What problem?"
"Who's Borusa?"
Back on Earth, up on the roof of the museum, things were also not going so well. River and Hart stood back to back, fighting off what seemed like hundreds of silent, shambling mummies. Being more or less dead already, the bandaged monstrosities weren't exactly the easiest things in the world to kill. Once they were hit, they stayed down for a short time, but then they always seemed to get up again, only to rejoin the fray. At first, Hart had relished the challenge, swinging his pipe in a lethal arc, hacking away at his attackers with gusto. At his back, River fired over and over, choosing her targets with care, doing her best to conserve the dwindling power pack in her blaster pistol.
"Just like old times, right, Babe?" he yelled, slamming the pipe into the side of a mummy's head. "We always did work well together."
It was true, he found himself thinking, they always had. Their rhythms had always seemed to fit, both in bed and out of it, each of them instinctively anticipating the moves of the other, long before they were made. It was one of the things that made her so memorable for him. Their relationship had been a practical one, never based on any sort of emotional attachment. Neither of them had been looking for any more than that. But it had been good, while it lasted.
"Why don't you blow it out your ear, Tobias?" she grunted, refusing to grant him the slightest leeway, even as she protected his back.
He laughed. She was still just as sassy and spirited as he remembered. He'd always loved that about her. "You always did say the sweetest things!" he retorted mockingly, striking aside a mummy just before it could reach her.
After that, their assailants just kept coming, and he didn't have any more time to think, let alone indulge in any witty repartee. His damaged arm was aching and he was quickly beginning to tire, his previous injury bothering him more than he would ever choose to admit. It took all his concentration to keep swinging the heavy pipe.
"Holy crap, how many mummies can one museum have?" he snarled, his breath coming in short, sharp pants.
"Too damn many!" River responded shortly. "And my blaster's nearly out."
Three mummies came at Hart at once, three pairs of bandaged hands reaching for his throat. He smashed the pipe into them, but they refused to go down, no matter how hard he struck at them. And in that same moment, while he was preoccupied, two more of them rushed at River. She managed to blast one, but then her pistol jammed, and she couldn't stop the second one. In seconds, it had brutally knocked her to the ground and was looming over her. Swearing, Hart slashed wildly at the mummy in front of him and managed to catch it off balance, smashing it aside. Whirling around, he saw the mummy bending over River. Somehow, she had managed to draw a long knife from her boot and was plunging it repeatedly into the creature's belly, but it made no difference whatsoever. The walking corpse merely slapped it out of her hand. River tried to roll after it, but the mummy's hands were already around her throat, throttling her.
Hart yelled her name and leaped at the mummy. The shock of the impact tore it away from River and they crashed to the floor. He had no chance to break his fall. Landing on his injured arm, he screamed in absolute agony, black spots dancing before his eyes. To his despair, the length of pipe he had been using as a weapon flew from his grip and skittered away from him, across the ground. Twisting and writhing, he did his best to throw the mummy off him, but the creature moved with him, driving him down with its weight. He could smell the overwhelming stench of dust and filthy decay under the thing's bandages, as its left hand clamped around his throat and began to crush his larynx. Then its other hand moved. Hart had one fleeting instant to realise that it was holding the pipe he had dropped, before it thrust the long metal rod right into his belly and twisted it viciously.
Then the mummy was gone and he was left lying there, staring up at the burning TARDIS in the sky, the pipe jutting out of his abdomen. He clutched helplessly at the awful wound. There was blood everywhere, hot and sticky, pouring past his hands, soaking the brand new jacket Tejana had bought him, and pooling on the ground around him.
Somewhere in the distance, he could hear someone screaming in indescribable pain, a long, shrill howl of dying agony.
Then, in a detached sort of way, he realised that it was him.
Another Author's Note: I apologise for the delay in updating this one. However, I'm afraid my updates may continue to be a bit sporadic for the next little while. While I have been fairly well for the last twelve months, my latest news from my doctors has not been good, and it appears my small period of remission is now over. Nevertheless, I love my writing, and I will try to keep up with it as best as I can - I just felt it was only fair to warn you all that I might have a bit of medical stuff on my plate for a while, and therefore I ask that you bear with me. Cheers, Brownbug!