Egyptian Tahtib: Cyberspeak
"YOU ARE NOT AUTHORIZED TO BE IN THIS LOCATION" The flat, inflectionless metallic tone of the Cyberman crashed through Jared's ears. "YOU ARE NOT UPGRADED"
"I..." He began to answer, then just shut his mouth. What could he say? He stared up at the metal man towering over him, mentally frantically scrambling for a way out, registering out of the corner of his eye a large black cube sitting by the outer doorway – apparently brought for transport through the portal.
"YOU WILL STAND AND REPORT FOR UPGRADING"
Typical Cyberman. Never ask questions, flittered through his mind. He pulled his feet up closer and began pushing himself slowly up off the floor, walking his hands up the wall behind him.
Then, suddenly, another voice came bubbling up from his own memory. Rose's voice, whispering in the dark, extracting his promise to protect her from the Nazis in ReichWorld. "And you'll fight them off if we're cornered? Instead of automatically surrendering, like y – like he always did?"
As the accusation replayed, he realized: technically, his promise had been fulfilled when they made it back to Beta. But in reality, he'd never let it go. And it had cemented itself into his psyche, melded and tempered by the redheaded fire he'd inherited from Donna, as much a part of himself as it was the wild beast for which he was named.
No, he thought, his mind crystalizing. Jared Blue Wolfe does not surrender to evil. Ever. Not even momentarily.
The edge of his left hand brushed the hilt of Jack's gift, the ruby-hilted offworld sword, leaning against the wall beside him, and the sensation threw him into overdrive. Without conscious planning, he crumpled a bit, theatrically, stamping his right foot slightly to distract the metal man, then in the same motion he scooped up the sword with both hands, whipped it out of the scabbard, and attacked. The magnificent blade flashed in the dim, flickering lights, and seemed to move in his hands of its own accord, pulling him along as it slashed a lightning-fast figure eight in the air. Jared's jaw dropped open wide as he watched the durantium blade, the hardest known substance in the universe, twirl its lethal dance ...
… and it sliced through the Cyberman as if his steel shell were made of tinfoil.
Before Jared could draw breath, his opponent was clattering to the floor in pieces, the head bouncing with a resounding clang and skittering across the black marble. He stood gaping at the sight, his eyes huge, the sword still poised above his head. Slowly, slowly, he lowered it and stared at the deadly silver weapon. Finally managing to close his mouth, he swallowed hard, then said in a tiny voice, "Thanks, Jack."
He leaned over and picked up the scabbard, slipping the sword home again, then buckled it around his waist once more, not wanting to be parted from its protection. Then he made himself pick up the pieces of the Cyberman and pile them in a corner, placing the head on top with a final shudder.
At last he turned back to the job at hand. While working on the portal enhancement, he thought he'd located the projection circuits which made the pyramid appear and disappear in the desert. He ran a cable to connect it to the enhancement, which he hoped would reinforce it back in Alpha. He'd just finished it and flicked it on when Rose's voice came through to his mind again, telling him of her arrival at the oasis, and he was able to test the projection circuit by making it appear for her.
Once she was inside the mirror chamber, he used their stronger psi connection to lock the portal's transport circuits onto itself there. A few nerve-wracking moments more, fine-tuning the settings and feeding as much power as he dared, then a split-second coordinated move, and at last she was back in his arms once more.
^..^
"Cybermen!" Rose squeaked, then nervously called Tock away from the crumpled heap. "Where did they come from?"
"I don't know," he admitted. "I haven't had time to think about it. They might be from the group we sent into the Void, or they could be from somewhere – somewhen – else. That wasn't the only time they'd been invented.
"The important thing, though," he went on, "is figuring out what they're doing now. And stopping it." With that, he turned back to the black cube his erstwhile accoster had brought in, seeing now that it was perched on an anti-gravity sled (which said a little about their origins; they probably weren't Lumic's bunch but from much further ahead in time – but he didn't bother sharing that observation with Rose). On closer examination, the cube, about a meter on each side, resolved into neatly stacked bricks of some heavy black substance, each block small enough to sit on his hand.
"This is probably what they're after," he commented. "I think that one was bring it here to transport it to wherever – whenever – they came from. But what is it?" He picked up one of the bricks – and almost couldn't. It was heavy! "Whoa!" he cried. "Bloody thing weighs a ton!"
"Is it gold?" Rose queried, looking closely at the stack. "Black gold?"
"No, it's even heavier than that. Much heavier." Using both hands, Jared managed to bring the bar closer to his face for examination, sniffing at it, as well. "It's... Nyet, eto ne mozhet byt!"
"What?" She cried, ignoring the unfamiliar language.
He put it back down on top of the stack, then pulled his sonic out again (it had really been getting a thorough workout today!) and buzzed it several times, his expression becoming more astounded with each pass. Finally, he stood up straight again, looking at Rose. "It's oil."
"What, you mean crude oil? Like, what, solidified somehow?"
"Solidified... concentrated... miniaturized. More than that, it's hyper-miniaturized!" He pointed to the single brick. "That one brick contains about a thousand barrels of oil! This stack... could be holding half an oil field!"
"How?"
"They've actually collapsed the molecular structure. You know how atoms are structured, with electrons buzzing around the nucleus at a distance? A great distance? And how anything that seems solid to us is actually mostly empty space because of it?" She nodded, increasingly trepidatious. "Well, somehow they've collapsed the distance between nucleus and electron cloud down to a fraction of what it's supposed to be. So they can pack in hundreds of atoms in the space of one!"
"Wouldn't that be defying laws of physics? And wouldn't that make it... dangerous?" Rose edged away from the sled as if it were about to explode.
Jared shook his head. "They've stabilized it somehow. I don't know how explosive it is – I've never seen this technology before." Now he suddenly wanted another look at what they were building outside – apparently an oil rig. Taking Rose's hand, he led her cautiously out of the pyramid, and, following the cable leading out of the Portal room, slipped over to hide behind an unguarded jumble of crates and machinery at the corner nearer the building site, Tock (always sensitive to their moods) quietly slinking along at their heels.
"Jared?" Rose's voice was breathless. He glanced at her white face, then followed her trembling, pointing hand. To the north of the oil rig, between it and the transformation hub, the hundreds of unconverted slaves were now sitting in rows, perfectly still, staring straight ahead.
"Cyber slaves," he said quietly, then reminded her how the people in Pete's World had been controlled through their ear buds before they were upgraded. "Apparently the oil rig is finished, and they're in standby." Now that they were unmoving, their clothing caught his eye: about half of them were wearing French uniforms, the other half in Arab clothing. "They must have come from Suez."
"So Napoleon is probably among them?" Rose was trying to deal with the shock.
Jared nodded. "If he wasn't already upgraded completely." He turned back to the rig, trying to make sense of it, marking the positions of the Cybermen manning it – there were only about a dozen fully-converted metal men that he could see – and identifying what he could for Rose. "The main processing point is just there, with the controls next to it." Another sled was being slowly loaded with bricks. "We've got to get in there and shut it down."
"Are the words 'distract the guards' heading in my direction?" came Rose's impish question.
It took him a second before he caught it, then grinned at her. "I don't think even the magnificent Captain Jack Harkness could distract these guys successfully." Turning back, he started searching for something – anything – they could use to their advantage.
Rose suddenly went rigid beside him, grabbing his arm wordlessly. He whipped around and froze. "Oh my god," he whispered.
The hundreds of cyber slaves were stiffly standing, turning en masse, and shuffling blindly forward. Not towards them, but towards the little building to the north, standing all alone.
"What are they doing? Where are they going?" Rose asked in a strangled voice.
"That's the transformation hub," he told her through icy lips. "They're going to be upgraded."