No Control
Chapter Ten: Harsh Lessons
The Doctor burst into the TARDIS console room, and flung his weight against the wooden doors to shut them. The low moaning wind, the cold and the Cybermen were all finally shut out. The Doctor slumped to the floor slowly as the exhaustion struck him after the siege. He was the last one, the only survivor, he realized blearily. Hols, the Guardian, Tharby, Phen and poor, poor Julreth... all dead. Lives over before they'd really begun, condemned to be the internal lining of Cyberman armor.
He'd tried to save them all, and he'd failed... worse, perhaps, because he had honestly done his best. There was literally nothing else he could have done. Even if he'd somehow drawn a gun (the thought of him with a gun was so ridiculous that, even now, slumped under the console and on the verge of collapse, the Doctor let out a weak laugh) and ordered them back in their ship, it wouldn't have worked. Antola would have become more determined than ever to get here, to wake up her Cyberons. At least this way the rest of the galaxy had a fighting chance to stamp out the Cybermen once and for all.
A black thundercloud seemed to pass over the Doctor's face.
A truly horrific thought had occurred to him, as he remembered Antola's words – if the message got through... She, Hols and Tharby had been all day on this nameless planet, setting up that prank. What if Antola had sabotaged the transmitter somehow? Had the alert signal traveled further than the living quarters? Did anyone know about what was happening here?
Antola hadn't given Julreth a second thought as she scrambled back into the ruins of her ship. Her hand smacked the door control and the airlock hatch swirled shut... only for the leading Cyberman to manage to jam itself in the gap before the gap was closed. Its hydraulic muscles flexed, fighting against the hatch mechanisms. Antola could already hear the limitless other Cybermen helping it wrench the airlock apart.
It was then she remembered the Cybermen already had destroyed the secondary hatch. She whirled around to see a swarm of Cybermen lumbering through the hull breach, turning one by one to face her. They weren't hurrying. She was trapped. There was nowhere left for her to run.
Antola ignored the Cybermen already in her ship, she ignored the Cybermen fighting to gain entrance, and she ignored the body of Cy the CyberLeader lying at her feet. She turned to the ruins of the flight console, barely recognizable first from the Doctor's sabotage and then his repair attempts. Her eyes ran over the few undamaged controls. There had to be something there that could help her, some bargaining chip that could save her. Because there had to be. Because otherwise she was dead.
Because otherwise she was worse than dead.
The Doctor considered himself an optimist at the best of times, but the defeats he'd suffered in the last few hours made him more cynical than he had been in centuries. If he was right (and how dearly he wished he wasn't) then that meant the rest of humanity was in blissful ignorance the Cybermen were awake. Only he knew the awful truth. Him alone.
The Time Lord sagged against the coral-lined base of the console. Alone. He couldn't remember feeling this isolated before. He reflected bitterly he had turned aside looking for a new companion for solitude and now he had it in abundance. The bitterness galvanized him. He alone knew of the Cyber threat, which made the responsibility his. He would alert the theocracy. The despair returned – he had no proof, no evidence they were awake... He remembered the information bubble in his pocket. That evidence could just as easily convict him of being the one who woke the Cybermen up. He shrugged. He was the ultimate escape artist. Getting out cells and dungeons would be a breeze after today.
Some confidence slightly returned, the Doctor grabbed the console edge and hauled himself to his feet. He twisted the scanner monitor around to face him, revealing the blank face of a Cyberman. Behind it were many more, surrounding the TARDIS. There was no trace of the disorientation they'd suffered moments before. The blank eye holes with the peculiar teardrops seemed to stare into the control room, and three metal fingers reached out as if to tap the inside of the screen.
The Doctor fiddled with the console controls that made up the dematerialization sequence, throwing the switches that give the Cyber Race a sudden sharp demonstration of Gallifreyan temporal mechanics. He glanced up at the huge shapes on the scanner and his lips curled in contempt.
"You didn't get everyone," he muttered. "Not today."
Trying to concentrate over the heavy metal tread of the approaching Cybermen and the scream of the airlock servos as they fought a losing battle against the intruders, Antola scanned the controls. A small square hatch caught her eye and she desperately flipped it up to see the small red control underneath. It was marked AUTOMATIC SECURITY PROTOCOL – EMERGENCY USE ONLY in large, magnetic letters.
Antola pressed it before she even registered what the label read.
A loud, harsh mechanical whining noise began. Antola whirled around to see what her last, desperate gamble had won her – for now, even she couldn't pretend there were any remaining options.
The airlock had finally given up the ghost. Cybermen were silently easing themselves through the low, narrow gap and joining those present. The others were standing, staring at her with their black eye holes, their searchlights bobbing uselessly. None of them made any approach.
Understanding unfolded in Antola's brain and she laughed. The automatic security protocol was to protect the pilot and/or owner should the ship be either boarded or holed. The area around the controls was covered by an impenetrable force wall to keep out pirates or hard vacuum, protecting all the vital control systems. Of course, that meant that the air inside the field would run out, but Antola was confident there was an emergency oxygen supply at the base of the console. As she turned to inspect the area, the Cybermen's chest units all began to glow... but the lasers struck the force wall in mid air, spreading blue tendrils of power in a brief, blinding wall between her and her assailants.
Was it her imagination or was the whine of the force wall now very strained? Come to think of it, with the damage she'd had the Doctor inflict on the engines, there was no telling how efficient the emergency system would be... especially with the Cybermen trying to break through...
Antola shrugged off the thoughts. It would last for a while, certainly long enough to hold the Cybermen at bay until the theocracy forces arrived and rescued her. Let the Cybermen do whatever they wanted, they'd be taken by surprise when the troops arrived and dealt with them all. She felt a wave of smugness wash over her. In just a few hours the Cybermen would be dealt with and she would be safe and sound, this nightmare behind her. No, why should she leave it behind when she could use it?
Adrenaline surged through her at the thought. Yes, it would be her miraculous tale of survival – fighting against the odds and the endless hoards of Cybermen using only her wits! Yes, her wits! Was it not her who came up with the idea of detonating the engines early rather than face certain death? And the fact she was alive when the others were dead, surely that was proof of her survival skills? Yes, she and she alone had survived while the rest panicked, floundered and died. And why was she here? Why were the Cybermen awake and alive?
The Doctor, she decided. After all, who was left to contradict her story? Yes, she decided. She and the others had been lured here by that strange and insane reactionary, some working class oik determined to throw aside the status quo – probably one of the ones who kept arguing that "theocracy" didn't describe the government of the galaxy properly any more. Yes, the Doctor awoke the Cybermen as his own private army, and Antola had at great personal risk set off the warning. She began to think out a scenario where her selflessness trying to sneak into the complex left the others alone to perish at the hands of the Cybermen and finally join their ranks. She would be the hero who single-handedly saved the cosmos, and her compatriots would either totally forgotten or remembered as the worthless scum they were.
Only she had survived. It proved what she'd always believed, that she, Antola, was better than absolutely everyone else alive today...
Her self-aggrandizement was interrupted by the straining howl of the force field as it struggled to hold back dozens of Cybermen firing simultaneously. Antola was not concerned. Her ship was expensive for a reason, and no amount of firepower would break through. The troops were probably already landing...
The first faint streaks of dawn were breaking over the horizon. The TARDIS stood in the tall grass, surrounded a ring of thirty Cybermen, and beyond the ring countless more, some busy examining the remains of Antola's crippled space craft. The Cybermen guarding the TARDIS shone their lanterns at the police box, bleaching the colour of its tattered paintwork. The only noise was the faint humming coming from behind the wooden walls of the box. Had anyone listened to them they might have heard a voice challenge the Cybermen:
"Catch me if you can!"
And then the lamp atop the police box's stacked roof began to flash on and off in some mockery of the Cybermen's helmet searchlights. From deep within the TARDIS came a strange, mechanical, wheezing and groaning sound, rising and falling in time with the flashing lamp, shattering the silence of the dark. The police box bleached even further, losing colour and substance until it shimmered into translucency, then transparency. The Cybermen did not react in any way, even as they became visible through the ghostly shape of the police box, which grew fainter and fainter until it had disappeared completely. For a moment the light continued to flash in the air, but that faded too. The noise echoed and died away, leaving silence.
The grass it had been flattening slowly began to straighten up. In a few minutes there was no evidence it had ever been there at all. The ring of Cybermen did not move, staring at the spot the time machine had stood as if they could not comprehend its disappearance – or perhaps they were expecting it to reappear. Hours passed, and while the other Cybermen began to disassemble the abandoned spacecraft nearby, the ring of Cybermen remained exactly where they stood, immobile as statues.
Perhaps it was coincidence that one of those Cybermen was mere hours ago a woman known as the Guardian... but then again, perhaps it wasn't.
Antola rocked on her feet unsteadily. Suddenly the field screech was so loud, the thumping of her heart threatening to shatter her ribcage, the roar of the air into her lungs deafening. Yes. Air. She realized the air sealed in with her was starting to run out. No wonder she was starting to get dizzy. She hadn't found the oxygen supply yet, she scolded herself. She wondered if it would be more dramatic to be found unconscious or wide awake by the rescue teams. Either could change the whole emphasis of her soon-to-be-infamous-and-award-winning experience...
Antola turned to look at the flight console.
The CyberLeader was standing by the pilot's chair, staring at her through its transparent face plate. The translucent red dome of its head was glowing with inner light, its internal veins throbbing and pulsing with energy. The greatest of all Cybermen was once again alive, its neural cores having finally repaired itself from the Doctor's attempts at sabotage.
Antola stared up at the giant Cyberman, unable to comprehend what she was seeing. She saw herself reflected in the ruby ocular circuits wired up to the skull inside the helmet – her reflection stared back in open-mouthed helplessness. She could hear the whining of the force field grow pained and sluggish.
Antola had nowhere to run, nothing to offer, no one else to sacrifice.
She was all alone. More alone than she ever had been.
On a world of cybernetic ghouls after her flesh.
Keen despair rose up inside Antola and she suddenly felt so heavy and tired. This couldn't be how the life of Antola Jaloosku came to its end – where were all her adoring, sycophantic fans? Her passionate, loving family? She couldn't die, just another victim of the Cybermen, especially without an audience to appreciate the pathos of her passing! She was important! She mattered! She was better than this! That was why her survival outweighed all the others dying! Not even Antola could justify what she'd done to Julreth if it hadn't ultimately saved her life... where was the justice in that?
There was no justice, she realized, and now death awaited her. Death of body, death of spirit, and the knowledge her remains would be tinned and forged into just another Cyberman, totally unaware of the genius and nobility that had spawned it.
This isn't fair.
The thought filled her oxygen-starved brain as the CyberLeader drew closer, and closer, seeming to grow gigantic, until she was craning her neck back to peer up its metallic hide. The death's head grinned down at her through its transparent cage. The CyberLeader had no in-built weaponry; it was built for strategy, not combat. Its steel limbs, though, were as strong as any other Cyberman's.
The cold metal gauntlets slipped with surprising gentleness around her shoulders, sliding and locking into place, and slowly began to tighten. Antola barely noticed as she stared, entranced, into the two faces of the creature about to end her life.
The CyberLeader spoke. "MY LEGIONS ARE AWAKE," it boomed, the vibrating chord so strong that the air in Antola's lungs seemed to shake. "THE UNIVERSE THAT IS KNOWN DIES TONIGHT."
The grip tightened until the bones in her shoulders began to buckle under the pressure. Antola registered the force wall spluttering and finally dying, and four Cybermen striding into the exposed area to aid their Leader. Suddenly Antola found a wild hope, that if she stayed alive for a few more minutes, just a few more seconds, the rescue crews might reach her in time. She struggled against the crushing force with all the strength she could muster – kicking, punching, biting, clawing – but she couldn't break away.
Even though oxygen was swirling around her when the field broke, she couldn't find enough to breathe. Her bones were grinding, splintering under the CyberLeader's grip as he forced her against the ruined console with enough pressure to bend her spine in two...
As the TARDIS was vanishing from the Cyberman-infested grasslands of their tomb world, it was re-materializing several hundred million miles in high orbit. The shriek of its engines was silent in the vacuum as it slid back into reality. Inside, the Doctor watched the time rotor sink into the console once more, then turned his attention to the scanner: the expressionless masks of the planet's inhabitants had been replaced by the murky sphere of the planet itself.
The Cybermen would get Antola's ship working eventually, or cannibalize it and build their own with what they could use from the Guardian's escape capsule. But with no real resources, that would take the Cybermen some time – at least a couple of days. That gave the Doctor a couple of days grace to contact the theocracy while the Cybermen were contained on their world.
Where to start though? He turned to the data bank and was about to read up on this particular time period when he noticed a winking light on the next control panel. He crossed to the light, frowned as he remembered what it signified and then looked up at the scanner. Beyond the planet, barely visible in the glare of the rising sun, was a triangular formation of lights inching closer and larger.
The Time Lord adjusted the scanner and the image zoomed in on the fleet of ships – they were roughly the same design as Antola's ship but far less aesthetically pleasing, far larger, and bristling with weapons. Beyond the flotilla, the Doctor could make out more lights from another battle fleet.
Antola hadn't wrecked the signal. It had got through, and it was believed.
The Doctor felt as if a weight was off his shoulders. The human race hadn't broken its promise to do what was necessary to stop the Cybermen, even after 253 years. Even the Doctor would be hard-pressed to maintain a five minute alert after that long. He watched proudly as the fleets hurtled towards the planet. At their current speed they would be around the planet by midday. It struck him that, although he'd been right help was coming, there would have been no way for him and the others to wait that long for help. On the bright side, there was no way the Cybermen could flee the planet in so short a time, and with this particular point in time about to descend into a warzone, it was time to leave.
The Time Lord returned to the console and began to set coordinates for his next destination, a deliberately-chosen landing site this time. He had decided he was sick of being lonely. Turning down companions was one thing, deliberately leaving himself miserable and isolated was another. He had traveled before with no one else in the TARDIS, and he could do so again. Permanently this time, he decided. But he wouldn't be any kind of isolated emotional island. He could still make friends, help people, change things for the better.
He remembered Julreth, the frightened, meek little girl who had saved his life and believed what he'd said. Phen, the unfriendly young man who had willingly sacrificed his life on the faintest chance his friends could be saved. The Guardian, who had managed to break from her fugue state to warn the others. Tharby whose love for Hols had given him such courage.
They'd made mistakes. Fatal ones. But perhaps Antola was right: they were children. And what we adults but children who had learned from their mistakes. It was a tragedy he hadn't been able to save them, but he had definitely been right to try. The rude, disbelieving arrogant teenagers had banded together, fought for survival beyond their own, achieving in one night so much more than any Cybermen could.
The Doctor activates the temporal drives and the TARDIS slipped into the time space vortex, aiming for the Casablanca Bar in 1944. He wasn't sure if he'd get there, but if he did it would allow him a nice place to chill out and relax, acclimatize to his newfound solo lifestyle. And he'd be able to see how his old friend Hubert Laroche was getting on...
As the TARDIS engines trumpeted, the Doctor let his eyes close from weariness. In his mind's eye he saw Phen's smoking corpse, and the Cybermen storming Antola's ship. He hadn't seen what had happened to her or Julreth, but he didn't need to. Five teenagers on a quest to have fun and games would ultimately just disappear – would their friends and families connect their disappearance with the abandoned ship and the revival of the Cybermen? Would it remain a baffling disappearance? Only the Doctor knew what had really happened to the group, how their final hours had unfolded. Of the terror they'd felt, and the maturity some of them had gained, and in the order they'd died.
What was the convention in all space travelling species for when you're forced to leave companions to certain death? the Doctor wondered, before the traditional answer came to him: you just let it be, don't talk about them and then get blind drunk about them later, when you're not in mortal danger.
Yes. He'd get drunk over them, commit them to memory, celebrate in the Casablanca bar that even the most spiteful and selfish of children could become a brave and compassionate adult.
The Doctor remembered Antola.
Well, he thought sadly. Maybe not all children.
It was only when there was blood in her mouth and when her dimming vision was filled with a sea of Cyber helmets that she began to realize that she was slipping away from life. When she awoke, she would no longer be Antola Jaloosku, or anyone. She would never know the stranger she was to become, just as the Cyberman would never remember who she was now.
The ruins of her cockpit and all the Cybermen contained within blurred and faded, and only the CyberLeader lingered on in the cloudy darkness, as if it was clutching at her, stopping her from sliding away... like the friend she'd described him as... good old Cy...
...it had been a brilliant party until the Doctor ruined everything...
...it was all the Doctor's fault...
...didn't he know who she was?...
Everything went black and then there was nothing.