No Control
Chapter Three: Playing With Fire
The Doctor stared expressionlessly at Antola. She was laughing, all but hysterically, with genuine amusement in her face. She was doubled over, trying to inflate her lungs only for the air to escape as another peal of giggles.
The Time Lord turned his head to watch as the revived Cyberman struggled to keep Phen in the kneeling position, but the large man was seemingly the stronger. Instead of pushing forward against the grip of the Cyberman's hands, he threw himself backwards, pulling the Cyberman with him. The silver figure stumbled, tried to keep its balance and then toppled over with a clatter of plastic on metal.
The Doctor sighed and crossed over to the remaining Cyberman, who was still holding Julreth who had been seemingly frozen with fear since the attack started. The Doctor reached out and grabbed the helmet of the Cyberman with both hands and, Antola's laughter ringing in all their ears, twisted and lifted.
The helmet slipped easily away.
"Traditionally," the Doctor said, regarding the helmet in his hands. "This usually happens the other way round." He casually threw the helmet to the floor. It bounced off the ice. "Monsters pretending to be ordinary people rather than ordinary people pretending to be monsters."
And the face of the figure holding Julreth was indeed ordinary – long, flushed, with a narrow nose, beady eyes and curly blonde hair damp with perspiration from the inside of the suit. His full lips twitched in a feeble smile, and the ersatz Cyberman released Julreth, who was still frozen with shock.
Phen stared at the newcomer in shock. "Tharby?" he mumbled in confusion, the name almost lost over the laughter of Antola, who had still yet to control her laughter. Phen rounded on the Cyberman that had attacked him and was now struggling to get a purchase on the icy floor. Muffled grunts of pain emerged from inside its armored form, which now Phen realized was just a plastic-covered suit.
"Hols?" he asked, baffled.
"You nearly killed me, you uncouth thug!" the muffled female voice complained. The Cyberman grabbed its helmet, twisted it and lifted it off to reveal a tangled mess of brown hair, and a round face splattered with blood. "You gave me a nose bleed!" she fumed. "Actual blood! From my body!"
Phen stared at the socialite he had last seen only a few days ago on his home planet, and the realization that the Cybermen had not revived and attack made him chuckle with relief – it didn't compare to Antola, who had degenerated into wheezing giggles.
"This wasn't half as fun as you said it would be," Tharby tutted, giving a stern look to Antola.
"This... was all a prank?" whimpered Julreth, still whiter than the snow around her.
"No, no, children," Antola managed to choke through her chuckles, "these are real, genuine Cyberons!"
"Cybermen," the Doctor corrected, but no one paid him attention.
"They've just had a change of heart and want to be our friends, that all!" Antola continued, sniggering.
"You have a perverse sense of humor," the Doctor informed her.
"That's what anyone would say," Antola jeered, "who didn't have any sense of humor!"
Phen looked suspiciously at them. "Did he know about it?" he demanded, jabbing a pudgy finger in the Doctor's lapel with enough force to make the Time Lord rock on his heels. "Are you another part of the prank? What stunt are you going to carry out?"
Antola wiped tears of mirth from her eyes. "No, no, Phen," she said, finally calming down. "He's seemingly the real deal, a wandering space tramp. And you didn't so much as flinch when my compatriots made their entrance," she added, frowning at the Time Lord. "What gave it away?"
The Doctor rolled his eyes. "Your homemade Cyber armor looks good, but doesn't match with the period. Besides which, your CyberLeader there," he said, nodding towards Hols who was now having her nose bleed fussed over by Tharby, "was breathing through a respirator. Cybermen don't need oxygen, especially when they've been frozen for the best part of three centuries."
Antola stared at him, her voice and expression cold. Whatever fun the stunt had given her, it was all seemingly gone now. "Touché," she said with palpable contempt. "But you didn't say anything at the time, I notice."
"Nor did you," the Doctor pointed out. "And you are the 'Cyberon' expert."
"When did you set all this up?" Phen demanded.
Antola shrugged. "Hols, Tharby and myself traveled here this morning and set it up. Then I returned home to collect the pair of you. The wild alien stalker and the sleeping beast," she said, waving at her accomplices. "Truly, only a mind such as mine could have conceived of such a scheme."
"There we agree," the Doctor smiled insincerely. "Where's the genuine CyberLeader then? The one you had to take out of his tomb?"
"That thing?" Tarby shuddered with mock horror. "We dumped it in the living quarters with the Guardian. The frightful pair were made for each other."
"So... they didn't die?" said Julreth in a whisper.
"Not that one," Hols sniffed. "Just fainted when we turned up. Being here on your own drives you mad, apparently. I don't blame her."
"See," Antola beamed. "A grain of truth to make the lies palatable. Phen, Tharby, go and collect our beloved CyberLeader and bring him here," she commanded, taking out her interface bubble.
"You've had your fun!" the Doctor snapped. "Call it a day."
"You're still under the delusion you have some kind of authority here," Antola complained, for the first time sounding genuinely annoyed. "You don't. You're an unwelcome extra who can get lost for all I care. So why don't you either shut up or go away! My apotheosis is nigh!"
"Oh I'll stay," the Doctor shrugged, not at all intimidated by her. "Miss the chance to watch you make even bigger fools of yourselves? Antola, as if!"
Julreth gave a feeble chuckle. Until Antola glared at her. "Based on past performance," she remind them, "the end results should be amazing!"
"You can't live through old reviews," the Doctor retorted. "As Shakespeare once told me."
Antola ignored him.
The Guardian sat on the floor of the en suite hygiene chamber, gagged and bound and staring disinterestedly at nothing. The isolation of the long months followed by the shock of her attack, followed by yet more isolation tied up next to the cold lifeless shape of the Cyberleader, had lead to a mild spell of catatonic insanity. Nothing was real and nothing mattered.
She didn't so much as blink when the door slid back to reveal the two Cybermen who'd attacked her (though now with human heads) accompanied by a famous and glamorous woman ripped from the visprints. Of course, the new arrivals didn't spare her a glance either.
Antola's attention was focussed on the CyberLeader.
The genuine article was considerably larger than either Hols or Tharby, its thick silver limbs covered with snaking striated tubes that spread out across its body from a large power pack built into the back of the creature's shoulders. There was also exoskeletal supports with rods and at the joints, the hands ending in three stubby fingers with blunt thimble caps at the end. The helmet was partially black but of a completely different shape and size to the other Cybermen to be seen in the tombs. The cranium was enlarged, an egg-like dome instantly conveying the idea of increased intellect. The dome was veined with red and orange, and dimly visible within the filigrees of glass and metal was an organic brain.
Most disturbing of all was the face-plate. Although moulded with the same slits and holes as a normal Cyberman face, the material was completely transparent, revealing a wizened, almost shrunken head within. It was covered in cracked skin stretched tight, and the eye sockets covered with large ruby-like diamonds that linked to the holes in the mask, even the teardrop shape at the corner of each eye pod. The hanging jaw with its few remaining teeth was a macabre contrast to the resolved horizontal slit in the mask.
Hols, Tharby and Phen looked at it with nausea. Antola, however, seemed to be comparing the cadaver to some kind of ideal in her own mind. "Good, good..." she said at length. Then, with a hint of admiration, she added, "he's magnificent. Time to take him back to the cavern."
Grimacing with distaste, all four were needed to pick up the CyberLeader and carry it away, while the Guardian was left behind, lost in her own world and free from the horror about to happen.
The Doctor remained in the cavern with Julreth. The girl was still in slight shock, but she was able to laugh at his several failed coin tricks. Her voice was the only noise in the silence until the others arrived, each one carrying a limb of a CyberLeader. Antola was chuckling with delight. "Beautiful, isn't it?"
"It's hideous," Julreth gasped.
No one disagreed with her.
Awkwardly, they managed to prop the CyberLeader up in front of its violated tomb. As the Doctor watched, Antola took the thermal lance from Phen and prized open a panel at the base of the CyberLeader's helmet to reveal a mass of cables, circuitry and gooey strands. Antola tore free a couple of ganglia that were impossible to define as organic or artificial, and began to wire it to the information bubble.
"Are you sure you know what you're doing?" asked Hols when she got her breath back.
"I wouldn't be here if I wasn't sure," snapped Antola as she began to link the bubble to another wire she had somehow found in the base of the tomb. "The Cyberon Leader's interface with the hibernation systems is more powerful than the average foot soldier. They are revived first. Through that interface, the information bubble will be able to access the mainframe."
"You hope," the Doctor sneered. Deep down, he doubted anyone here had the capacity to override what had been done to trap the Cybermen in their stasis. But he was worried they might manage it completely by accident. All he knew for certain is that, whatever the result, the silver giants would have absolutely no interest in Antola beyond harvesting her flesh.
The maybe-doomed teenager finished checking up her crude-looking link up. "Now we begin," she said reverently, stepping back so she was right before the lifeless CyberLeader who still loomed over them all, head forward as if asleep. "They will rise," she whispered.
"If they do, we're all worse than dead," the Doctor cut in. "This isn't needed!"
"Silence," said Antola briefly, now completely serious. She took a hand-held control remote from her hand and studied it absorbedly. "From this time onwards, you must all be silent."
Antola twisted the main control on the remote. The information bubble started to blink and flash brightly, casting a glow that made the hulking CyberLeader a silhouette. The Doctor cast a glance at the others. Julreth was breathing sharp and rapidly, Phen was watching with his arms folded, Hols seemed more worried about her nose and Tharby still looked exhausted from the exercise.
Antola twisted the control again and the lights flickered rapidly, casting dancing shadows on the tomb walls. The Doctor looked up at the catwalks and the hundreds of tomb units each one allowed access to. The shapes behind the frost were still and silent. He turned to sweep his gaze over the rest of the chamber, quickly calculating that at least five thousand Cybermen were in this chamber alone. And that didn't include the ones in the corridors between here and the surface.
The Doctor returned to look at the CyberLeader, perfectly still and all the lights from the interface seeming to have no effect at all. The flashing lights became irregular, faster yet dimmer, longer yet brighter. Antola, eyes wide with excitement, turned the dial in the opposite direction again and again and was rewarded with a low ticking, buzzing noise from the bubble as it flickered with intense light. The others screwed their eyes up in the light, but an air of resigned boredom was falling over them. Only Antola and the Doctor focussed their attention on the static CyberLeader. The whir from the overtaxed interface grew louder.
Julreth tried to peer through the glow at the tombs, but the contrast in light made it impossible to see inside them. If the Cybermen moved, no one would be able to spot it before it was too late. The stencil drawings of the Cyberman faces stared out unblinkingly into the light, unchanging and expressionless.
Antola activated three buttons on her remote and returned the dial to zero, shouting to be heard over the information bubble which was even now overheating and steaming in the cold air. "And now, children, watch in awe as the last of the Cyberon arise and meet their new master!" she screamed.
They all lifted their gaze to the CyberLeader's static, towering form as the bubble died down with only the Doctor knowing that success meant a fate far worse than death for everyone in the chamber...