No Control
Chapter Eight: Events Escalate
The atmosphere inside the ship had lightened slightly as the cheerful song did its best to lift their spirits. Antola was standing in a corner, running her necklace between her fingertips, lost in thought with a troubled expression on her face. Tharby was sitting on a flight couch, head in his hands. Phen was peering out through a porthole at the lights outside, now so bright the moors were illuminated as clear as day. Julreth was trying to help the Doctor, but was ultimately little more than moral support.
Finally the ruined flight console vomited sparks and suddenly the light through the windows suddenly seemed to cut out. "There," the Doctor said, pleased. "The filter lens is working again," he explained to Julreth, referring to the systems that cut out the harmful spectrums of light encountered during space travel. Now it was activated, the blinding searchlights were filtered out and the Cybermen could clearly be seen standing outside, as still as statues.
"What good did that do?" asked Julreth, blinking.
"Apart from us being able to see properly?" the Doctor replied. "It means the Cybermen can't see us."
"Big deal," Antola growled. "They know we're in here."
"But now they can't read our lips and know what we're going to do," the Doctor retorted. "We still have another three and a half hours of oxygen and some privacy. Now we just need to work out a plan to let us get inside the TARDIS safely and we're home and dry."
"Have you seen how many of them are out there?" Phen complained. "Hundreds! And more of them are turning up every minute."
"Yes, I had noticed, thank you," the Doctor replied with insincere politeness. "We need to think things through laterally. The one thing we have the Cybermen don't is imagination." He clapped his hands in a businesslike manner. "There are thousands of Cybermen out there between us and the TARDIS. On the bright side, they won't be expecting us to try to flee to a British police telephone box. On the down side, they won't give us the chance, they'll shoot us down as soon as we go outside. So, that's our objective."
"What is?" groaned Tharby, still looking at the floor.
"We don't have to get rid of the Cybermen per se," the Doctor explained, his confidence returning, "all we need to do is stop them harming us for a few minutes, long enough for us to escape."
"Like what?" Antola challenged. "Ask for a head start?"
"A distraction maybe?" the Doctor shrugged.
"All right," said Tharby giddily, raising his face again. "I'll put on my helmet and distract them! They'll think I'm a Cyberman and I can get to your ship."
"You're drunk," sneered Phen, and not without reason.
"Those Cyber outfits didn't do Hols any good," Antola pointed out brutally. "And how would it help us, you getting away in the Doctor's ship? The rest of us would still be trapped!" She stepped forward and jabbed a finger into Tharby's shoulder. "Are you running out of us?"
"Hah!" shouted Tharby, leaping to his feet. He was tall, part of the reason Antola had chosen him to impersonate a Cyberman in the first place. "Run out? Like you did with Hols? She'd still be alive if you'd teleported her here with us!"
"I didn't know they'd get her!" Antola retorted.
"Didn't know?" laughed Tharby. "You spent a fortune on that bubble just so you could wake them up!"
"Wait!" the Doctor shouted and was pleased when – for once – he was listened to. "The teleport! You have a teleport function in this ship! I should have remembered?"
"It's no good," Antola scowled. "It's a one-way emergency recall, to bring the crew back aboard."
"It must be on a different circuit to the navigation systems, then," the Doctor said, leaping to his feet and crossing over to the console. His confidence was returning and he didn't spare the CyberLeader's body a second glance. "If we reverse the bioenergy polarity, we can turn it from transmit to receive! We can teleport ourselves outside the TARDIS and be inside before they notice..."
"No, no, no, no, no!" Tharby was laughing at an uncomfortably loud way. "My plan is better than yours! I'm better than all of you! I'm the one who looks like a Cyberman! They're not going to hurt me! I'm going to get out of here!" he giggled, as perspiration dripped down his face. The tension, his grief over Hols, and all the alcohol he had binge-drunk had driven him past breaking point.
"Don't be stupid," said the Doctor calmly, concentrating on the ruined console. "And stop wasting oxygen! I'll get us out of here in minutes. Just calm down..."
"YOU CALM DOWN!" cackled Tharby insanely, grabbing his faux Cyberon helmet and jamming it at the wrong angle on his head, so it appeared the creature was permanently looking at its own shoulder. One armored arm flung out, knocking Antola off her feet and onto the couch Tharby had just vacated. Her startled cry caught the others' attention and they looked up as the 'Cyberon' sprinted to the secondary hatch and stabbed at the controls with a gloved hand.
"Stop him!" shouted Phen, but it was too late.
There was a jolting crack as the air seal broke and the hull plates jerked apart to reveal darkness beyond. Julreth and the Doctor sprinted across the chamber but the disguised Tharby was already shambling through, his limbs shaking uncontrollably as he ran out of the ship – if there was a less convincing Cyberman impression, the Doctor dreaded to think what it looked like.
By the time he and Julreth were at the hatch, Tharby was outside, sprinting through the grass as the deranged giggles emerged from his helmet. In the gloom, they could see that the Cybermen were scattered on this particular side of the ship, and Tharby was able to weave his way through the first few waves of cyborgs as he headed in totally the wrong direction to the TARDIS. The Doctor saw some kind of scuffle break out in the darkness between silver figures, but the only noise was Tharby's chuckling which was undaunted even as he seemed to be captured.
"Tharby," Julreth whispered as the landscape outside was briefly lit by a blue lightning flash.
A silver shape toppled backwards into the grass as Tharby's peal of insane laughter turned into a long, low agonized moaning that came to a painful and drawn-out stop. Before they could see any more, something huge and silver loomed out of the darkness, blocking their view. The Cyberman stood before the hatchway, its lantern flooding the interior of the ship with an acidic white glow. The behemoth paused as it regarded a doorway built for normal humans – too narrow and low for the silver giant to easily access. There had been more than one reason Antola had teleported the CyberLeader inside her ship.
The delay as the Cyberman regarded the dimensions of the door allowed the Doctor to aim his sonic screwdriver through the glare at the lock. The portal began iris shut in front of the giant, but it managed to fling out its arms to stop the hatchway closing completely. The servo mechanisms whirred loudly and painfully as they fought the strength of the Cyberman, whose chest unit glowed brightly, turning into was a shimmering square of electric blue. The discharge slammed into the far wall, just missing Antola, with enough force to rock the whole ship and jolt the Cyberman back out from the narrowing entrance.
The hatch closed completely with a resounding clang.
For a moment the occupants of the ship lay where they were thrown, and the Doctor let out a sigh. The brief gust of fresh air only emphasized how stale and stuffy the interior of Antola's ship was becoming. "And then there were four," he sighed, helping Julreth to stand up. "That was too close," he announced to Phen and Antola sternly. "Anyone else want to try to their own plan, or are you willing to follow my lead for once?"
Phen whimpered and rubbed his eyes until half his face was red. "That light, it blinded me," he sobbed.
"Keep blinking and stay calm," the Doctor ordered, crossing back to the console. He poked a gaping blackened hole in the console and started using his sonic screwdriver. "I need to rig up a pentallion driver subroutine to get the teleport reversal working..."
"How can that help?" groaned Antola miserably. No one had bothered to help her out. "Even if you get us outside your ship, they'll shoot us down right away. Or do you have a distraction that doesn't rely on sacrificing all our lives?"
The Doctor stopped working and turned to stare at Antola with wide, staring eyes.
"Blinding," he whispered, and then grinned.
The crumpled and smoldering remains of Tharby were by now plugged into a tomb opposite the one that had transformed the Guardian's corpse into a new Cyberman. The same process was under way as Tharby's fresh brain was reprogrammed and the body cored out and lined with alloys.
Tharby was no longer a mock Cyberon, as what was left of his body was made two metres tall, eyes replaced with blank viewing lenses, mouth replaced with a rectangular slit, and the thick flexible tubing running up and down the body were genuine, as each movement from the silvery body was accompanied by faint mechanical buzzes. The completed Cyberman emerged from the tomb, its movements jerky and spasmodic at first but as the newborn creature strode up the shaft to join the Cybermen on the surface, it became smoother and suppler.
Tharby was gone, suffering the same fate as his beloved Hols.
Despite only four people remaining in the ship and one of those not requiring the usual amount of oxygen, the air was getting noticeably thin and it was becoming an effort to breathe. The Doctor was now lying beside the body of the CyberLeader, half-buried in the wires and components he'd hauled out of the guts of the craft. The sonic screwdriver was hot from overuse in his hands as he fused two circuits together.
"The Cybermen have only been revived for an hour," he was explaining patiently. "They're moving and thinking, but it will take some time for all their systems to reactivate. They're technically half-asleep," he concluded, wiping the perspiration from his face as he rewired the circuit into the console.
"How does that help?" asked Julreth, sounding exhausted.
"The Cybermen's sensors are working at less than half their normal capacity," the Doctor replied. "So if we were blind them with interference then they wouldn't be able to switch on their secondary detectors. They'd be utterly blind, deaf and dumb for a good, ooh, ten minutes. And the TARDIS is only a minute or so away. We'd be inside and dematerialized before any of them start to see anything. And with them all blinded, they'll automatically keep still so as not to damage each other."
"You really think we've got that chance?" Phen asked, dubiously. His eyesight, as promised, had returned and now seemed to have more respect for the Time Lord as a result.
"I'm betting my life on it," the Doctor told him honestly. "But just to be on the safe side, we'll use the teleport to take us right up to the door. We should be outside for about ten seconds or so. With there being no Cybermen guarding it and all the others frozen and senseless, we'll be perfectly safe." He sighed. "If only Tharby had stayed here..."
"But even if we get away," Phen continued to protest, "what about the Cybermen?"
The Doctor paused in his work, surprised that, for first time since they'd met, Phen seemed to be thinking of something other than his own safety. "Well, the Cybermen are confined to this planet. That's why they're so desperate for this ship. Presumably the theocracy stripped this hive world of all their weapons and technology, so when the armed forces get here they'll have the advantage."
"If the message got through," Antola brooded.
"Yes, Antola," the Doctor smiled patronizingly. "That's very positive thinking, just what we need."
The Time Lord began to solder some more broken circuitry, causing a violent discharge of sparks. In the cacophony, no one noticed what was happening over at the secondary hatch that, not long ago, the Cybermen had struggled to break through. At first there was nothing by a faint throbbing sound, but then a small patch of the bulkhead changed colour, turning a dull red. The patch began to spread out across the hatch, becoming more vivid in colour.
Oblivious to the encroaching danger, Antola was still complaining. "You still haven't explained how you're supposed to flood the Cybermen's senses with interference," she pointed out. "And that is a rather big part of your plan, it appears!"
The Doctor wasn't concerned as he continued to reset the teleport protocols. "This ship has an isotronic drive, doesn't it? So," he continued, not waiting for a reply, "there must a boosted radiation flare shield woven through the hull. Without the stabilizer systems, it's very easy to turn the isotronic drive into an isotronic bomb..."
"You're going to blow us up?" Julreth asked anxiously.
Back at the rear of the cockpit where no one was looking, the red glow had completely engulfed the secondary hatch. It began to glow brighter as the faint throbbing became louder and faster.
"No, I'm not going to blow you up!" the Doctor replied irritably. "I'm going to divert the isotronic radiation released from the chain reaction through the flare shielding. There won't be any kind of an explosion, just a rather bright flash."
"How does that work?" Phen asked. He was beginning to trust the Doctor, but was not prepared to sanction a course of action he didn't himself understand, if at least in principle.
"It's very simple," the Doctor lied, hauling out a fresh batch of damaged circuit boards. "When the radiation goes through the flare shielding, it is released into the atmosphere as a kind of electromagnetic power wave, right? That wave expands in all directions, forming a very, very powerful distortion field through which all sub-and-supra-beam signals cannot travel – at least until the wave spreads so thin they cease to have an effect. That way all the Cybermen are blinded, and stay blinded until their sensors declog themselves. Rather messy, I know, but I'm not exactly working under ideal conditions here..." The Time Lord broke off, frowning. He sniffed the air. "Can you smell something burning?" he asked.
The others sniffed the stale atmosphere, trying to identify the scent over the stench of perspiration, flat alcohol and soldered components. But by now the throbbing pulse became even louder, and as one all four turned to see secondary airlock gleaming with ominous crimson light. "They're burning through!" shouted Julreth in terror.
"Not quite," the Doctor corrected. "Sonic waves, the frequency is vibrating the molecular structure of the airlock apart! It's shaking apart atom by atom!"
Antola stared vacantly at the angry red haze. "How long before they break through?" she asked.
"Minutes," the Doctor said helplessly. Even as he spoke, the haze became brighter.
"How long before the teleport's ready?" Antola called, raising her voice above the throbbing noise.
"About an hour," the Doctor mused. And that was a conservative estimate, he knew. He'd barely finished wiring up the receiver into a transmitter, and hadn't even started on the directional control. Assuming that undergoing transfer wouldn't be fatal, there was no saying where or when they might turn up. His whole plan had relied on the Cybermen playing the long game, but he'd miscalculated and now he had until the structure of the airlock gave way before everyone in the ship was executed and their bodies taken for Cyber conversion.
As the airlock blazed a dazzling pink, the Doctor numbly realized that the CyberLeader's prophecy seemed to be coming true...