Don't stop it now. The best is yet to come (also a great song, especially in the series finale of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine).

Chapter 4

It was after midnight when news reached the SHIELD HQ that the attack on a HYDRA-cell had been successful. Valentina had stayed with the two scientists, Fitz and Simmons, in the laboratory, and was awoken when Agent Mei entered to tell them about the success of the mission.

"Great," Fitz mumbled and re-activated the holographic computer. "Then I can file away the data on the Tesseract weapon." He started opening and re-locating folders on the hard drive.

"Can't you do this tomorrow?" Simmons asked.

Before Fitz could answer, Valentina interrupted, "what's this?" she asked and pointed at a hologram at the edge of the screen.

"Those are stones we found in two caves in Cairo and Shanghai, why?"

"Nothing…they just looked…familiar," Valentina muttered. "I better go home. Mr Saxon won't valid the excuse of having hung around here for coming late tomorrow morning for work."

While she was taken home by a SHIELD agent, her thoughts circulated in her mind. There was so much memory that she needed to sort… so many faces…so many…faces. It suddenly hit her with surprise. Mr Saxon. She knew him. She knew him very well. Very, very well. Why hadn't Theresa told her when she had activated her? He was The Master, The Creator's son. The Creator's oldest child. And she was The Master's sister.

"We're there," the SHIELD agent said and turned to her.

She was torn out of her thoughts by surprise, thanked the agent, and left the car. She felt like in trance when climbing up the stairs to her flat. She didn't even realise when she was turning the key, and turning on the lights. She dropped her bag, her jacket, and shoes and went straight to the bed room. The only thing that made her come back to reality was her surprise of seeing that Xi was still awake and sitting with her laptop in bed.

"I couldn't sleep while you were still working," she explained and closed her laptop.

Valentina nodded. Without speaking, she changed for the night clothes, and joined her fiancée in bed. They exchanged 'Good night's, and doze off.

The next morning, Xi was surprisingly silent. Valentina feared that she might have noticed that something was going on with Valentina, but she didn't see how Xi should have known. During breakfast they only talked about the weather, and who was going to read which part of the newspaper first. They were of course both tired, but even when they had played too long and only had had three or four hours sleep, they at least talked the next morning during breakfast.

A quick good-bye kiss was all that Valentina got when they both took their cars to drive to work. Work felt awkward for Valentina today. She knew that Mr Saxon was her brother, but he was also her boss who she respected. She did not dare talk to him about it, and she wondered what kind of evil Master plan he had thought of for Earth this time. On one hand, she felt responsible and wanted to tell The Doctor, especially after he had helped her to find herself with meditation, but on the other hand, The Master was her brother and they had always held together.

The rest of the day, Valentina tried to distract herself with work, and she had not too little to do. She had requests from SHIELD and UNIT and wondered how all of sudden so much paperwork was dedicated to aliens and super-humans. Five years ago nobody had believed in aliens – and now she was even living amongst them.

During dinner, neither Xi nor Valentina spoke more than during breakfast. One could hear a needle drop, and after a while, Xi asked her how her day had been. Usual small talk followed, but somehow the situation felt weird. They had just done the dishes, when Valentina's phone rang.

"Not again a long night of work?" Xi asked, but her voice sounded tired.

Valentina shrugged and picked up her mobile. "It's an unknown number." She answered. The call took only thirty seconds, then Valentina told her fiancée she's be back in five minutes and left the flat. She jumped down the stairs and nearly bumped into the woman waiting on the ground floor.

"Wow, you have changed!" the woman exclaimed.

"Master," Valentina said in surprise. "Missy, I mean," she corrected herself, and Missy laughed.

"Missed me?" she asked and hugged her sister. "How come you remember me? I wasn't sure. I have only heard from the Doctor that you have been partly activated, and that I should avoid you under all circumstances." Which of course she had taken as an invitation to go straight for calling her long-lost sister.

"I have mind-melded with Theresa, and she had mind-melded with the Doctor. I possess both their memories."

"Aah," Missy understood. "Of course… I hope not *all* of my common memory with the Doctor."

"No, I guess not…fancy to enlighten me?"

"Better not. I see you haven't told my younger me yet?"

"I… wasn't sure," Valentina explained. They walked out of the skyscraper building and along the street. "Do you know about the stones?" she finally asked.

"I do. But you are not supposed to…?"

"Well, I have been a naughty girl," Valentina answered with the same smile of the current Master-incarnation. "Can you steal the other two for me?"

When Valentina returned, Xi was already in bed, reading a book. She smiled at her, but still this night nothing happened, and Valentina started wondering whether she should tell her fiancée about what had happened to her.

At half five, they got up together, Valentina tried to start some conversation, but somehow Xi seemed to block her. Finally, she decided to just go to work. She was already on the motorway, when her Agent Coulson rang her on her mobile phone.

"Yes?" Valentina answered using the speakers of her car.

"We've got a situation regarding the DC operation. The ministry of foreign affairs and the CIA say we haven't arranged a cooperation."

"I did call them yesterday, and I sent a mail."

"We've got the deputy head of the CIA here. Would you mind coming over? I've already called Mr Saxon and he agreed."

"I can be there in forty minutes," Valentina said, ended the phone call and left the motorway on the next possibility. When Valentina arrived, she was firstly alerted by an increased amount of security guards running around.

Agent Johnson came to great her.

"What's going on?" Valentina wanted to know.

"We've had a break-in."

"Oh my god, what has been stolen?"

"Alien artefacts. The stones that Fitz had mentioned. A well-known criminal, The Master, broke in just two hours ago."

"How is that possible?"

"She possesses the skill to control minds… and although our men are usually trained for such occasions, she was successful."

Valentina kept up the play for the rest of the day and helped the SHIELD team as much as she could regarding the DC operation. It was not as late as she had expected when she could finally return home. She had decided to talk to Xi, even if it meant not to tell her who she actually was, but she needed to at least talk to her fiancée again. Having arrived at her flat, she unlocked the door.

"Xi?" she asked, but got no response. Valentina had a look in both bath and bed room. Kitchen and living room were one room in their tiny flat, and it had actually been only Valentina's when she had decided to move out from the house in which Xi had previously lived due to a huge argument. Xi had only decided to move into Valentina's house, as her own house exploded a week later – terrorist attack; and since then Valentina had noticed even more what it meant to live with a field active CIA agent, constant night calls, bruises and worrying for that Xi would return from small operations.

But now, Xi seemed to be gone for all. When Valentina had a look into the bathroom, she noticed that Xi's toothbrush was gone. She looked into their wardrobe in the bedroom, and most of Xi's clothes were gone as well. Confused, she picked up her phone and called her. Her phone rang nearby; Valentina found it in a drawer of the kitchen. What the hell was going on?, she wondered.

She sank down on her bed. She hesitated to call Akiva, her contact. Finally, she decided to do so, and asked whether her mission operator knew anything about where Xi was. After all, Xi and Valentina were supposed to constantly hand in reports on how their mission went. Xi had been undercover in the CIA for over six years now, being a double agent. The CIA had put Xi into high school for an undercover drug operation as she looked rather young, especially because she was Chinese, and this was where Xi met Valentina and had fallen in love with her. Valentina, having been used as a child by the FBI (cf. Alex Rider and CHERUB books series), had of course quickly found out that Xi was an agent, but only after they had only been together for over a year, Xi had admitted to be a double agent, and persuaded her girlfriend to switch sides. As Valentina had the perfect background story, which was also supported by the FBI, no one would have ever thought she might have been turned.

Akiva, her contact in DC, did not know anything either, but assured her to watch the surveillance video of the cameras that Valentina had installed in their own flat. Valentina also switched on her laptop, but when she wanted to access the last 24 h logs, she found the last five hours to be deleted. She skyped with Akiva, and their mission operator in Tel Aviv, but neither knew any news related to Xi.

Valentina ended the call coincidentally at the same time that her phone rang. Her hopes were up, but she was disappointed when she recognised Missy's number. "Give me a minute," she answered, and left her flat. She felt weird, a bit numb, a bit angry with Xi for not having told her anything. Missy directly noticed that something was wrong with Valentina. "I've got something to cheer you up," she answered and locked onto the phone connection. Three seconds later, Valentina stood in Missy's TARDIS whose interior reminded her on the 8th Doctor's TARDIS, just… darker.

"There's something I've… found," The Master said hesitating.

Valentina raised an eyebrow. She did not ask for permission, but grabbed Missy's neck, pushed her to her and started a mind meld. It was not a profound one, but Valentina grabbed all the memory she could easily get, not only those that Missy wanted to tell her about now. Once she had absorbed all the information, she stumbled backwards, her eyes wide open.

"These two stones contain the rest of your memory… The Doctor had found them to be so dangerous that they had to be stored at a different place," Missy explained the obvious.

"The stone in Asgard is easy to obtain," Valentina said and started programming the TARDIS. "But how do we get to Gallifrey's High Archive?"

"Well, while you always liked to show yourself when intruding, I always preferred sneaking."

"I was… am a Warrior. There is no point of sneaking around during war… not if you want to fight, if you want to kill." Valentina hesitated but started the TARDIS. There were moments where she was not sure whether she was still Valentina Riddle, the ex-FBI agent and secretary of the president, or The Warrior, one of the most feared creatures in the universe.

As she had anticipated, the second last stone, half a ying-yang symbol of 25 cm diameter, was easy to find. In opposite to her sister, Valentina had mastered the mind control skill and could simply walk past the guards who did not react to her presence. Back in the TARDIS, Missy explained, "your memory was taken on the morning of the very last day of the war. The Doctor never interfered, he wasn't even at your court martial hearing, but he swore to take care of your memory. He placed the stone in the high archives at the same time as he stole The Moment. If we travel back to a time where Gallifrey was not quantum-locked yet and we wait, we can steal the stone right after the Doctor left again."

"And how would we leave again?" Valentina asked while activating the cloaking device.

"Well, we would have to wait until the quantum-lock is gone and Gallifrey is transferred to the end of time. By the way, once we are there, would you mind if we pick someone up?"

It went all as smoothly as Missy had suggested – it always went smoothly when the Warrior was in charge. Valentina carried the second stone back into the TARDIS. She was waiting for Missy who told her she had something important to do. It did not take long, and she came back – followed by a man who looked exactly like her boss, the president.

"Oh my god," Valentina muttered. Of course! She had had the memory since the mind meld with Missy, but it had been all blurry.

"Missy said you could bring me off Gallifrey," the Master said. His hair was still blond and he was unshaven, but he appeared calmer than before. Valentina rushed to hug her older brother.

"I had no idea," she said and hugged him deeply. How could she have never remembered that she had missed him so much?

"We'll drop you off Earth," Missy explained. "That's at least what I remember myself doing… although only now my memory is coming back… it's strange, I have the feeling we meet again."

After the Master was dropped off on Earth earlier, Valentina and Missy returned to her own point of time on Earth. "Well, I hope I could be of help," Missy said.

Valentina nodded. "Thanks, Missy." She hugged her and left the TARDIS.