The Crucible seemed to shudder with those words, or maybe it was just the Doctor shaking. Because he had suddenly realised the truth: the other man's nose, the line of his jawbone - he had seen them before, but old and twisted and - no. No, it could not be, if there was anything more obscene and blasphemous than this he could not imagine it. Davros the mass murderer, the manipulator, the destroyer of life, with the powers of an Eternal? It made his eyes sting with fury, and more: with a totally irrational urge to kill, to destroy.
In the background, the shattered remains of Dalek Caan wailed from the cup of its casing. "I - I cannot see! I cannot see!" It writhed its tentacles in something approaching ecstasy. "I - am - blind - at - last!"
The two strange living shadows returned, and hovered beside Davros.
"No sign of transdimensional equipment," one spoke, in a clipped voice.
Sarah Jane inhaled in almost a sob.
"And this is a Dalek ship," the black shadow continued, drifting towards Sarah Jane. It seemed to be looking at her, even though it had no eyes or face.
Then it did have eyes and a face. It congealed, into a man with a black uniform, black gloves and boots and jodhpurs and jacket, and a thin pale face and curious eyes behind rimless glasses-
Sarah Jane screamed, a shriek that seemed to tear its way out of her throat. Jack and Mickey lunged and then froze as the man in black seemed to blur, great sharp spines or quills rising out of his flesh like a barrier of thorns or wings of ebon steel.
Davros swerved on his heel and threw his arms wide (one arm went right through the red smoky entity, which made an apologetic coughing noise). "I'd know that scream anywhere," he said, happily walking over to stare at her as though she were a particularly interesting laboratory specimen. "Sarah Jane Smith, we meet again."
"Get away from me," she said, eyes too wide. "Both of you."
"How long has it been?" said the man in black, his form contracting back to - oh no, the Doctor realised who it was. It was Commander Nyder, Davros' second in command. He had seen the man die, burnt down by the Daleks - but then, he thought he had seen Davros die as well.
"Not long enough," Sarah Jane retorted.
The Doctor touched his tongue to his upper lip, his eyes darting between his companions, wondering: was there any way to destroy the Reality Bomb, or cripple it beyond its ability to function, now that the Daleks had crept away and left them here. But then - he blanched - wouldn't that leave the dozens of captive planets stranded? It seemed unlikely that the equipment had been designed to just have the planets be put back into their proper orbits if it was turned off, after all. Jack cut his eyes at the control panel, and the Doctor nodded, slightly; Jack responded by starting to work his way back into the shadows.
Right now, though, the Doctor had to distract Davros from Sarah Jane; she looked ready to pop.
"It's me you want, not her!" he shouted, touching his hand to the containment field around him and making it flare with blue sparks. The red smoke billowed in front of him, and then congealed into another figure.
A man in a long red robe with epaulets and shoulder pockets (sort of a cross between a cassock and a uniform), and a red sash and headband woven with little red hexagons all through the material. The face was young and eerily calm, light brown hair and high cheekbones and - and -
And he would know this man, if he were wearing a blue uniform instead of a red robe. The smile was the same, just not as crazed. He had met him. On Skaro. Long ago...
The Doctor nearly swallowed his tongue.
The robed man looked at him and arched an eyebrow. "No greeting for an old acquaintance?" he asked in a nasal voice.
"You know all of them?" Rose said dubiously.
"This - is - another associate of Davros'. Ah, that man over there with the glasses is Commander Nyder, and this is General Ravon-"
"Please, just Ravon," he said, waving a languid hand that seemed to leave a red flickering shadow behind it. "Eternals need no titles."
"You're an Eternal too? How? I mean this is all ridiculous, it makes no sense! You can't make an Eternal out of an Ephemeral, any more than you can turn sound into fluid, I mean, I mean-"
Ravon smiled, his eyes narrowing. "You mean that the Time Lords never did it, therefore it's impossible. But I'm not a Time Lord."
"What are you?" Rose said.
"The closest thing to a god you'll ever meet," he said with a self-satisfied air, and then frowned at her. "Or maybe not..."
The Doctor had to keep Rose away from them. If they found out that she had been travelling between dimensions, they might do anything. Davros had sounded - very angry.
Far away in space, another angry man was waiting. A man who was the Doctor in mind if not in flesh watched from the battle-scarred TARDIS, with a very confused Donna Noble at his side. At his other side, he clutched a - a tool, a weapon, not a gun, no surely not a gun - that would wipe out the Daleks forever.
"Why aren't they energising the alignment array?" he wondered aloud. "I mean, what are they waiting for?"
"Yeah, and what are we waiting for?" Donna asked.
"Ravon, did you find anything?" Davros asked.
"A warpstar."
"Really? You mean in a containment field?"
"In a piece of jewellery, actually. Very pretty. But no transdimensional equipment."
"Still, these are the people who are most likely to have done this damage to the walls around the Howling." Davros' mouth thinned. "The Doctor's companions are always extraordinary. But it should be easy enough to spot; whichever one of them is contaminated with extra-dimensional energy is-"
Davros' eyes started to glow; not his pupils, but the whites seemed to burn, as did those of the other Eternals. The humans and the Doctor could feel those gazes physically sliding over them, looking for-
"Me." Mickey Smith stepped forward; face set and determined, hands a little out from his sides. "I'm the one who was crossin' the dimensions, looking for the Doctor. We needed him."
Davros' eyes narrowed.
"And yet you are not the only one contaminated," he said softly. His eyes darted to Jackie and Rose, and then returned to Mickey.
"Yeah, well, these ladies here are with me," he said. "But I'm the one who did it. I mean, I knew that it was causing damage, but I didn't know...I didn't know..."
Mickey stuttered to silence, because Davros had come and stood very close to him. Close enough that the unnatural heat of his body could be felt through Mickey's heavy clothes; close enough to see that the churning colours of his eyes seemed to be rising out of some bottomless pit of blackness.
"You are not familiar with Eternals, I take it," Davros finally said.
"Can't say that I am," Mickey gibed, and Rose felt a little sting of sweetness in her heart. He was so brave: even though his hands were shaking with tension, his gaze was rock-steady.
"We are very powerful, and sometimes very - whimsical. And we read minds."
"Oh." Mickey did not physically slump, but his tone suddenly weakened.
"And you are not the one who broke the walls between the dimensions."
Mickey said nothing, keeping his eyes from turning to Rose.
Davros smiled, softly. "But it was very brave of you to say so." And with the most natural gesture in the world, he took Mickey's hand in his and squeezed it. Martha flinched, watching: she could actually see the glow of Davros' flesh through Mickey's skin. She wondered if he would have radiation burns, sooner rather than later.
But he didn't look hurt. He looked - blessed.
"No, Doctor," Davros turned on his heel and stepped towards the Time Lord, white hair seeming to crackle, his eyes fixed on the woman pinned beside him. Ravon and Nyder followed, one to each side of Davros, their attention equally focused. "No, the one that I am seeking is-"
The impossible interrupted him. An impossible noise, a whooping groan, the sound of a machine that had been destroyed. A breeze fluttered suddenly, and the oil-saturated air of the Vault seemed to crackle with ozone. They all turned, even neglected Dav in his chair, as a tall blue box materialised by the control panel.
"The TARDIS!" Davros actually beamed, his glow turning up several notches. "Oh, it is so good to see you!"
The door of the TARDIS opened, and another impossibility stepped out. It was - it was the Doctor. Same face, same hair, but a different suit, blue rather than brown. The Doctor shivered; this must be some paradox, deadly dangerous. Had he - already been here, and forgotten? Had he ever had so mad a face?
The blue-suited Doctor took three fast steps out of the TARDIS and then froze, his eyes widening even further, the gun-like object in his hands suddenly hanging limp. Then his mouth firmed, and he brought the weapon up.
"Enough!" The man who had thought he was Davros had lost all his weapons: his bomb was apparently never going to be set off, his Daleks cringed in the corners and burbled, but he still had one weapon left. He used it.
A line of light shot from Dav's metal hand, lashing into the Doctor in blue, and he collapsed.
"No!" shouted Donna from the door of the TARDIS, leaping out and reaching for the dropped weapon. Dav's second bolt took her just below the heart, and she flew backwards, out of sight behind the control panel.
"Tut-tut!" Davros gestured, and the energies that shot from Dav's hand sputtered into silence. He gestured with his other hand, and the strange weapon rose and disassembled itself, dribbling onto the floor in a pile of components. The second Doctor saw this, and groaned. "So much for interruptions. Now then."
He walked towards Rose, and bumped into the containment field. It crackled blue against him, and he looked upwards with a sour expression. A popping noise, and the barrier vanished. Davros dropped his eyes to Rose, and they were cold eyes, very cold. Nyder and Ravon raked their gazes over the watchers, as though daring them to interfere.
Behind the control panel, Donna was rising to her knees, shuddering, feeling like a great dam had broken in her head and filled her mind with fire. She looked at the control panel and she saw it: saw its function, its purpose, deduced what every lever and knob and Dalek-designed entry key was for, and knew how to manipulate it. She rose to her feet, hands hungry to get to work. So many choices! So many things to do! But as her hands flew, she looked up and saw - strangers? Here? Were they from one of the abducted planets? And how had they got here?
"Oi!" she shouted, her eyes flickering like lightning, taking in the whole room in fits and starts. "Where's the fourth one?"
"The fourth what?" the man in white asked, turning towards Donna.
"Well I mean, here you are, one dressed in red and one black and one white, am I right? And there's that hole there," she freed one hand from its labours just long enough to point at the glowing puncture in the side of the Vault, "your most likely entry point, with four sides: one red, one black, one white and one sort of - multicoloured. So there's three of you and four sides, so where's the fourth one?"
There was a sudden silence, broken only by the sound of Donna's fingers still thundering on the input keys. Then a sound: the soft sound of booted footsteps.
"You are a very impressive woman," said a voice out of nowhere. Another figure in black appeared, moving in quick steps to where Donna stood. It was short, almost stocky, but with a distinctly feminine curve to the hips.
When the figure stopped on the other side of the control panel, it seemed to condense into a woman. She was short and pale, with dark hair that fell straight down over her shoulders. She rather resembled the other strangers: almost certainly the same race. She wore a plain black uniform with a red armband; the uniform's collar bore embroidered hexagons that seemed to bleed redness into the air around them.
She was not beautiful: her face was too serious, her forehead too high, her nose too sharp. But her eyes were endless depths of lacquered darkness, the same eyes that shone in the face of -
Donna stopped, and looked at the people she didn't know, and realised that she knew two of them.
"Ravon. Nyder." She stared at the man in white and said, "And I don't suppose that you're Ronson, and you've just had a face lift."
"No," he answered.
"Gharman, only you've gone all grey - no." Her shoulders slumped as she correlated the angle of jaw, shape of shoulders, tone of voice; compared them to millions upon millions of people and matched them to one. "Davros."
"I'm still impressed," the woman said. "To deduce my presence, to recognise Davros ... you are more than just a companion."
"You!"
The woman looked down at Dav, who had just wheeled himself to her elbow.
"A Kaled female. A female!" Dav was focused totally on her; the lines of her face and body were so familiar, even though he had never seen her before. She was a woman of his species, at last. And she looked perfect, without deformity. Perhaps she was from a time before war had poisoned Skaro and all its inhabitants. In his mind he was already sectioning her ovaries, preparing a new and complete DNA extraction, creating a new race of Daleks more perfect and controllable than ever. But first -
"Strip," he ordered. "I wish to examine you."
She turned away from Donna and the console, putting her black-gloved hands behind her back. She stared down at the battered remains of a man before her, and then cut her eyes at Davros.
"He's got your bedside manner," she murmured, and her clothes vanished.
The Doctor had the strange impression that her clothes had somehow parted at the seams and flown backwards, hiding behind her. Whatever the method of her stripping, however, the body revealed was quite well-constructed from a strictly aesthetic point of view. She was not stocky; she was just firmly built, muscles round in her arms and legs, her torso solid. The body of an athlete or a soldier.
Jack and Mickey had been helping the second Doctor to his feet; they paused and stared with extremely interested expressions. From their vantage point, it was clear that this woman had some of her best assets behind her, to coin a phrase.
"Perfect," Dav whispered, moving towards her. He raised his metal hand as though to touch one small pink-nippled breast, and then dropped it.
"Thank you," she said, raising and crossing her arms with a casual air. She gave no sign that she was shielding herself from his gaze; if anything she seemed amused by his attention.
"What are those marks on your arm?"
She looked down at her right arm, which was striated with pale marks that were almost luminescent against her skin. "Those? Burns from a Dalek gun, coincidentally enough. It was not at full power of course-"
Dav ignored the impossibility of a Dalek shooting someone non-fatally. "Why do those scars glow?"
"Scars?" She turned her head a little to one side. "I'm sorry, did you think this was my body that you were looking at?"
The marks on her arm started to glow brighter. "That this was flesh and blood and bone? That I was a woman?"
The glow suddenly ramped up, enveloping her in fire, burning like white-hot coals, searing her shape into the air, and her words were a bellow of flame as well. "BECAUSE I AM NONE OF THOSE THINGS. I AM AN ETERNAL, AND IF I WERE TO BRING ONE THOUSANDTH OF MY GLORY INTO THIS VESSEL I SHOULD BURN YOU ALL INTO LESS THAN DUST!"
The glow faded, burning down into her arm, and the woman's clothes reappeared. She winked at Dav, ignored the awed expressions of the watching humans.
"You know," she said familiarly, leaning closer to him, "I was part of the surgical team that - restructured - several of the Davros clones. Perhaps-"
"Clones? Plural?"
"Of course, no point in having just one when they kept being abducted. Perhaps I'm the one who removed your legs." She smiled at his wordless fury. "Or burnt out your eyes. Or snipped off your-"
"Esselle." This from Davros, and the woman stood straight and turned to him.
"Your orders?" she asked.
"We will be scanning this volume of space to determine how much damage has been done. You will assist with neutralising the Reality Bomb," he ordered, and Esselle nodded and went to the control panel. Her fingers danced over the keys, and then slowed.
"You are almost halfway there," she said in surprise. "But - you have never seen this equipment before."
"Nope," Donna said, raising her head and aiming a rather manic smile at her. "It just came to me."
"You - have you always been like this?"
"Nope again," Donna said, and laughed. "But it feels great!"
"It doesn't seem - quite stable, though. Davros."
"Hmm?" Davros said, his eyes darting between Rose and Sarah Jane.
"Please come look at this one's brain."
Donna watched him turn and come towards her as though through some terrible thick liquid. Her mind was moving so quickly: could she drop a containment field around him? No, he'd break it at once. Her fingers leaped to another part of the panel, and with a few quick passes turned off the containment field that held the Doctor. Because she didn't have much time. The man in white was coming, Davros, his face was coming closer, his eyes, great dark eyes. He looked - so much younger than she had ever seen him. Whole and young.
Her arms seemed to be a thousand miles long now, her fingers moving fumblingly on the horizon, but she forced them on. She had to completely disable the bomb, wind its code into such knots that the Daleks would never unwind it. She had to ... had to...
"Hello," said Davros, his face filling the world. "I don't believe we've been introduced."
"Donna Noble," she said, dazzled.
"Donna Noble," he replied, his lips lingering on the words. "Truly named."
The Doctor had gone to his double, and after a brief and rather horrific exchange of information (the words "metacrisis" and "Eternals" figured prominently in the conversation), he was now trying to work his way around the other side of the panel, to stand by Donna. If he could grab her, get them all into the TARDIS...but then he recalled that Eternals could certainly remove the TARDIS from his control.
Davros' eyes went from Donna to the Doctor, and then back. Then again back and forth, and he was growling, a deep rumbling noise that seemed to come from the bottom of his chest and vibrate in the back teeth of everyone in the room.
"What?" said Nyder and Ravon at one, snapping to attention.
"No," said Esselle, backing away from the three: the Doctor and Davros and Donna, all locked into some strange tense confrontation without words. "No! Get them!"