I don't own Doctor Who.
Void Ship.
A Doctor Who One-shot featuring the Tenth Doctor.
By TimeTraveller-1900.
The Doctor kept very still with Yvonne Hartman and Jackie standing really close to him in the Lever Room at the top of the Torchwood/Canary Wharf tower, wondering how things had spiralled out of control so easily, and so quickly. Deep down he knew it was his own fault, his and Rose's, playing that stupid bet, trying to make Victoria say she was not amused, and laughing in the face of death.
They had played a stupid game by acting so flippant and blasé in the face of the death at Torchwood House in Scotland during the werewolf mess, and they had offended Queen Victoria so much she had banished them and set up Torchwood, declaring him an enemy of the crown as well.
Now, face to face with the same race of Cybermen he, Mickey and Rose had encountered in that parallel world recently after he had stupidly played that joke on Mickey which caused the TARDIS to fall into that parallel world, the Doctor knew the entire world was going to pay the price for his arrogance.
But the ultimate insult was it was not the only time he had been arrogant, was it?
Try as he might, a voice in the back of his mind, actually several voices belonging to some of his previous incarnations, was yelling at him for what he had done to Harriet Jones, and the Doctor had to admit that if he had just left Harriet alone, then she would have tried to do something to stop this; she had known about Torchwood somehow, but the Doctor guessed that after that mess with the Slitheen, Harriet had immersed herself in the hidden history of UNIT, the Intruder Counter-measures group, and as many organisations in the world that frequently investigated and dealt with aliens and other unknowns.
That sort of knowledge would have told her what Yvonne was doing with Torchwood, their careless arrogant meddling, was dangerous. And Harriet would have tried to shut it down. What did he do? He brought down her government, and as he stared at the Cybermen as they stood like statues in front of the crack in the fabric of reality, the Doctor realised his hubris in believing humans didn't have the right to defend themselves was one of his worst mistakes.
A mistake his previous selves were likely remonstrating him for in his mind.
And now the Cybermen had invaded Torchwood, and they had taken the world. And the Doctor knew what that meant for the human race. Upgrading. Their brains would soon be removed and placed into similar suits. Harriet was right, the human race should know how to defend themselves; wasn't that what he had preached for so long?
The Doctor wondered if there was a version of Torchwood in their own reality, but he suspected there was a similar set-up to this one, but he wondered how they had come here, and what had happened in their fight against the Preachers; with Rose's phone containing the code to the Emotional Inhibitor and with Lumic dead, the Preachers had likely struck dozens of blows against the Cybermen.
"They're invading the whole planet," Yvonne said.
The Doctor closed his eyes.
Didn't the stupid woman realise just how big this was?
"There are millions of Cybermen all over the planet, helped by you when you could not leave that rift alone. It's not an invasion. It's too late for that. It's a victory."
"Don't blame us for this, Doctor," Yvonne hissed, the presence of the Cybermen preventing her from really losing her temper. "If you want to blame someone, blame yourself. If you hate Torchwood so much, don't forget you are the one who helped create it, with your arrogance. And don't think I don't know what you did to Harriet Jones.."
The Doctor didn't even have a second to respond to that, the computer nearby raised an alarm. "Sphere activated. Sphere activated. Sphere activated. Sphere activated," a female voice repeated with coloured icons and displays showing the Sphere had suddenly gained mass, an electromagnetic field… it was gained existence.
The Doctor wasn't entirely surprised. He had known at some point the Sphere would shift itself into phase with this universe. But as he looked at the displays, he asked himself how the Cybermen could have done this…But then he stopped when the voices of his previous selves remonstrated him yet again, and he heard what they were saying to him.
He sighed and shook his head in frustration. "How did they do it?" He asked in frustration.
"What do you mean?" Jackie asked.
"These are the same Cybermen that Rose, Mickey and I saw in that parallel universe; I recognised the earpiece technology the moment I saw it. There are Cybermen in this reality, but this lot is from another world. But this lot is primitive. They couldn't have built the Sphere," the Doctor looked down as he went through the list of races and groups who could have done it, "The Monan Host are dead, killed in the Time War. The Nekkistani had only discovered the basics of the Void. The Ux wouldn't have done it. The Time Agency of the 51st century is only capable of grasping basic temporal knowledge. The Warpsmiths wouldn't even know how. The Parallel Sect didn't need a Void ship since they could pop to and fro from one parallel universe the same way we'd just walk through a door. None of the other races in the universe even have the knowledge of building a Void ship, except….," suddenly a thought entered the Doctor's mind. "Oh no."
"What?" Yvonne asked. She had recognised some of the aliens spoken about just now, thanks to translated databases scavenged from various ships, but some of the others had gone over her head.
"Doctor, what is it?" Jackie demanded.
"I think there are two possibilities about who and what could have created that Void ship," the Doctor said quietly, unable to mask the horror in his voice. "My own people, the Time Lords, and the Daleks."
"The Daleks?" Jackie whispered. "Rose talked about them," she added. "She was terrified of them."
"She had good reason to be," Yvonne put in. "Torchwood has dealt with Daleks in the past and we've followed UNIT's battles with them, and the Shoreditch incident."
The Doctor swung around. "You know about that?" He asked, hoping that they didn't know anything about the Hand of Omega and what it could do.
"Yes, but in both of those accounts, you told others the Daleks didn't have advanced time travel technology," Yvonne pointed out.
"The Daleks changed. Their technology evolved and they became powerful enough to fight against my own people," the Doctor replied, "and believe me, fighting against the Time Lords would mean you had to be good, really good at time travel."
Driven by desperation, the Doctor stepped forward and addressed the Cyberleader. "How did you get here? I know you're from a parallel universe; I visited it. There's no way you could have the technology to come here on your own, so how did you do it."
"The Torchwood of our world was studying an identical breach. It detected the wake of the Sphere. We only followed," the Cyberman replied in its toneless computer voice. It didn't seem interested in asking him about the previous visit to the parallel world either.
Another breach? The Doctor wondered just how many holes this Sphere had knocked into the fabric of different universes. But as the seconds turned into minutes, the Doctor was starting to question whether or not the Daleks or the Time Lords could have created the Void ship in the first place; it had been a while, and he would have sensed the presence of another Time Lord by now.
But there was nothing.
X
Days later, the Doctor was in orbit above the supernova. The TARDIS communication projector was already focused on the one tiny little gap in the universe that was about to close, sealing itself shut as the Universe healed itself after Torchwood's meddling. He had come here to speak to Rose, to make amends and to say goodbye.
But as he stood in the TARDIS console room, the Doctor just could not find it within himself to tune in and speak to Rose.
When he had realised that the Cybermen couldn't have built the Void Ship, it wasn't long before the Cybermen detected the signals of advanced and unknown technology within the Sphere Chamber, so they sent two Cybermen to investigate. They didn't get too far before they encountered a Dalek. The sight of his oldest, bitterest enemy here was enough to make him ill, and the Doctor wondered why he even bothered saying the Daleks were gone for good. Davros's programming of them to survive made them harder to kill than a million cockroaches thrown into a nuclear blast.
The Doctor was kept in the Torchwood office when the Cybermen were given a threat by the Daleks in the Chamber. Everyone else was sent to be upgraded, including Jackie and Yvonne. The Cybermen had questioned him about the Daleks after realising he knew of them, but the Preachers had hopped from their reality into N Space.
After meeting Pete and getting the story of how the Preachers and everyone had gone to war against the Cybermen created by Lumic as a last-ditch attempt to save himself before he turned himself into a Demigod and believed he had the power and the right to turn everyone into a soulless tin can, before sealing them inside their factories, taking advantage of the endless debates put forth by people who wanted to help them to get into their Torchwood and follow the Void Ship's wake into N Space, the Doctor had come back with the alternate Pete with him and they'd devised a plan to deal with the Daleks and the Cybermen.
The Doctor had been horrified that Rose was so arrogantly blasé in the face of being exterminated after she mocked the Daleks by telling them she had killed the Emperor with the Time Vortex, but he hadn't said anything when he was introduced to the Cult of Skaro. Discovering they existed was horrifying, discovering the Genesis Ark they'd brought with them was a dimensionally transcendental prison ship created by the Time Lords which contained billions of Daleks, the Doctor had hoped he was in the middle of a truly horrific nightmare.
When Pete announced they would be leaving Earth for the ensuing fight both Cybermen and humans were destined to lose to the Daleks, the Doctor had come up with a plan. The Cybermen and the Daleks were saturated in background radiation from the Void, but so too were the Doctor, Rose, the Preachers, and the TARDIS, although her capabilities would keep her rooted to the ground, so the Doctor decided to open the Breach and suck the Daleks and Cybermen all in like it was a trans-dimensional vacuum cleaner.
But when Rose realised they were also saturated with the Void radiation, she had no hesitation in pointing it out, and he hadn't hesitated in pointing out his plan to send them away. It was the safest thing to do, but Rose hadn't liked that. Where had the girl who had tried to get the alternate Pete and Jackie to see her as their child gone? Suddenly she was prepared to abandon Jackie and the chance of her happy little ending with Pete as her dad, just to remain with him….
X
"Why are you sending me away?" Rose demanded.
The Doctor frowned. "Rose, you have to. I made a promise, okay it wasn't much of one, to your mother, to keep you safe, and that's what I'm doing. If you stay here, then anything could happen."
"But that could happen to you as well," Rose pointed out.
The Doctor knew she was right, but he didn't let her get under her skin. "Rose-," he began to say, but she interrupted him. "Why can't my dad stay here with mum and me, and then we can visit them?" She asked brightly.
"Pete in this universe is dead, Rose. You know that. You tried changing history to bring him back," the Doctor harshly pointed out. He was starting to lose his temper in the face of this pointless debate. The longer this took, the more people were going to die. Why couldn't Rose see that? "Everyone from his family and friends knows he is dead, if he suddenly turned up here it would upset the balance in this universe. In his world, you don't exist, and that Jackie was turned into a Cyberman. Why are you fighting this, I assumed you wanted to be with both your parents, even if one comes from another universe?"
But then Rose said something really stupid. "Why don't you come with us, then? Abandon this world and come to Pete's world?"
"I can't, this is my universe. That one isn't."
"So? You don't have anyone here. Your world is dead, your people are gone, and I don't want you to leave me," Rose retorted, but her eyes widened when she realised what she had said before she took stock of the Doctor's expression.
The Doctor's body was tense, and his expression was incandescent with rage. "I don't want to go with you. The fact it seems you want to transform me into some kind of….of pet proves I should never have invited you to travel with me, to begin with!
The Doctor was glad when Pete grabbed one of the interdimensional teleports and triggered it, and the Doctor quickly flashed his sonic screwdriver at the teleports so then they would only work once. He knew Rose. He knew the moment she realised what happened, she would try to get back.
X
The Doctor shook his head as he recalled how he had nearly been sucked up by the Void as the Cybermen and Daleks were sucked up very quickly, reflecting that exiling the Cybermen and Daleks to the Void was the only choice he'd had - he knew his predecessors would have tried wiping them out, especially his prior two selves, but the Void was a good enough place for them to be, and with luck, they would either kill themselves or drift forever in the dark, while the Doctor had barely been able to stop himself from being pulled in himself; he wasn't sure if one of the Daleks or Cybermen was responsible for the other lever failing, but he had his screwdriver, and he had managed to right it.
The aftermath of the Battle of Canary Wharf, as they were calling it was horrifying. So many people had died, and because Rose and Jackie's names were not on the list of the dead, they were presumed dead. The Doctor had left, leaving the humans behind. But before he had left he had gone to Harriet to apologise. The human woman had not been happy to see him, blaming him for his arrogance and stupidity, and the deaths of millions all because of his damn pride, and she felt she was right. And he knew she was.
The Doctor had left. He knew she was right as well. He came and went whenever a disaster was fixed, but he never bothered to look at the consequences of his interference because he was scared of what he'd find.
But he had come to the small gap in reality, right next to a supernova. With the TARDIS draining the nova, it would be easy to say one last goodbye to Rose.
Except he realised his hearts weren't in it. He was still angry with the way she had brought up the loss of Gallifrey, and he found it virtually impossible to forgive her. But as he wrestled with his thoughts, it proved academic anyway because the crack closed.
The Doctor had been planning on just heading off on his way when the bride showed up.
A/N Please let me know what you think.