The Doctor, Martha and Jack found themselves locked inside some kind of storage room aboard the Cybermen's spacecraft. Since being dragged from President Lohan's office, they had been knocked unconscious, dressed in white boiler suits and their possessions confiscated. From the vibrations, they knew that they were moving.
Of the three, Martha was the most frightened. In her time with the Doctor she had been in a great number of sticky situations but this was one of the worst. What made it so bad was being stranded on a ship moving ever further away from the one thing that she could rely on for safety: the TARDIS. She had grown quite attached to the strange looking blue box when she was effectively on her own in 1913. She looked across to the Doctor for reassurance, but he was deeply troubled and sat silently in a corner of the room, deep in thought.
"There must be a way to stop them" he murmured to himself "But how?"
Back in the government compound, the two armies were still watching the spacecraft ascend into the heavens. After a brief moment, Rhea called out to her opponent.
"Mr Valli" she called "What's happening here?"
Charles Valli looked worriedly back at the red haired woman who had addressed him. He paused for a moment before uttering a very tense reply:
"I don't know. I don't know anything anymore"
Rhea looked at him in bemusement. He had clearly been under a lot of stress. Her main concern was not for him, but the state of the robotic Policemen.
"What's happened to your robot army?" she asked
"They've stopped working. All of them have stopped working. Except…"
He stopped; unsure whether he wanted to tell his opponent what he had witnessed in the President's office. Charles Valli felt vulnerable – the most vulnerable he had ever been in his life. The Golgafrincham he knew up until ten minutes ago had been replaced with something new and very terrifying.
By mutual agreement, a ceasefire was agreed by both sides a few minutes later. As neither side knew what had just happened, they decided to join forces, if only temporarily, to find out what was afoot in the Presidential palace. As they walked around the palace they found it eerily silent. Charles, who was expecting several patrols of the new, advanced robotic Policemen, felt incredibly tense. Rhea had never been inside the palace before so was having an interesting time strolling down the corridors, looking for anything of interest.
The party finally came to a halt outside the laboratory.
"I wonder what's in here" said Rhea in a rebellious tone as she opened the door.
The lab was empty. Almost. In one corner of the lab sat a large and unusual blue box. Rhea looked at it quizzically whilst Charles stood silent, deep in thought.
"What is it?" she asked.
"I don't know" replied Charles. "As far as I am told, it's a classified piece of Earth government property. President Lohan thinks it's a kind of spaceship"
"Belonging to the Doctor?" Rhea added
"Yes".
They left the lab, slightly disappointed with the lack of information gained from it, and headed towards President Lohan's office. Charles knocked on the door. There was no reply. Tentatively, he pushed it open. Like the laboratory, the President's office was deserted. After checking that the room was indeed empty, he marched over to the President's desk. Rhea was outraged when she saw that Lohan was not there.
"Where is Lohan?!" she roared at Charles.
Charles ignored her completely as he fumbled under the desk looking for the switch that would reveal the secret entrance. After two minutes of searching, he found it.
President Lohan was sitting on the bridge of the Ark. Working busily around him at shiny, new controls were his elite Cybermen. He had never seen space this close and personal before and felt truly excited at the prospect of spending the next thirty days in its presence. It felt, at that moment, as though the reason for the voyage was unimportant. Just as his grandfather had dreamed of leaving Earth for a new life, so he was leaving Golgafrincham, albeit temporarily, to realise his.
Whilst he was admiring the view, a Cyberman walked over to him and raised its right arm in salute. Devoid of speech, it pointed to the control panel it had been working at. Lohan got out of his chair and walked over to it. A light was flashing urgently: the hanger had been opened. Turning to the Cyberman, he ordered it to animate its colleagues laying wait, inconspicuously, in the colony. With another salute, the Cyberman acknowledged Lohan's command and took the appropriate actions. Confident that the problem had been dealt with effectively, Lohan leant back in his chair and admired the view of space once more.
The Doctor, Martha and Jack jumped as the door to the store room opened. A tall dark haired man, wearing a lab coat and spectacles, walked in alongside two Cybermen.
"I trust you are all of good health?" he asked officiously.
They nodded. The man asked an unseen Cybermen to bring three plates of food in. Upon receiving the food, the Doctor encouraged Martha and Jack to say thank you, which they did. Seeing that the prisoners were content, the man and the three Cybermen left the room and locked the door behind them.
Martha and Jack looked at the Doctor suspiciously, concerned that he was not the real McCoy.
"Doctor, what were those things?" Martha asked
"They're Cybermen" replied Jack. "Real Cybermen; not those ones they've been using as Policemen"
"Doctor" Jack continued "Why are you acting so calm? They're going to invade Earth. Shouldn't you be worried?"
The Doctor sat in silence for a while before he answered.
"I'm not so sure they are real Cybermen" he replied "More advanced than those rent-a-thugs we encountered before, but real Cybermen wouldn't take this level of control lying down. There's something more to them than meets the eye. I wonder what it is".
Holding that thought, the Doctor tucked into his meal.
On Golgafrincham, Charles, Rhea and their party looked around in awe at the strange room they had just entered. Rhea managed to find a light switch, which illuminated the large spacecraft hanger. Amongst the fuelling rigs and dirty steel workbenches was a collection of mystical engine parts. None of them had ever known space travel. In the establishment of the colony, it was agreed that communications with the Earth would be cut and that the inhabitants would not experience space travel ever again. For the new settlers, it was a one way journey. Their descendants had been told a little of Golgafrincham's establishment, but the space travel part was always overlooked as an irrelevance. For their descendants looking in awe at the hangar this was an incredible site.
In one corner of the hangar, the tubby member of Rhea's party found a second door. On it was an electronic lock that required a key card to open. He called over to her.
"Wonder what's in here" she said. "Got a card Charles?"
He shook his head.
"If I'd have known about this place, I'd never have let her in" he thought to himself.
Rhea was weighing up the use of explosives on the door. Whatever was beyond it, she didn't want to destroy it. This discovery was too great a one to destroy.
Just then, the door between the hangar and the President's office slid rapidly and violently shut. The lights dimmed, and the door at which Rhea stood began to slide open. Out of it walked an army of Cybermen.
In horror, Rhea ordered everyone back to the main door. Nicola tried frantically to open it, but it was in no mind to let them out.
"Do not resist" barked a Cyberman "If you resist, you will be deleted. Resistance is futile"
End of Chapter Six