The Partnership falls apart.
The Pirate grinned as she raced through the ship, her transcendental bag full of the loot as she dodged the blaster bolts being fired at her as she raced back to her TARDIS. The Pirate was in heaven, this was her element. True, she didn't like being involved in an interstellar war, but if it helped her with her piracy, then who cared? Besides, after being in this part of the universe - dreary as it was - for a few months, the Pirate had learnt very early on that a war would have broken out in this part of space anyway.
While she didn't like the new methods her old friend had started to resort too, she had to admit to herself it was a joy to flex her piratical muscles and get some good experience. She had never imagined using a war to stoke the fire and get races sending more and more ships out in supply lines and then board them, kill a few of the crew, and steal their cargoes.
But like all things, the partnership had soured.
At first, it wasn't so bad.
In the four months since she and the Master had become partners, the Master had launched his fleet of robot ships and began conducting attacks on the various local races, bringing his more advanced technology onto them though he always held back from shattering them; the Master had an annoying habit of playing with his enemies, and although he could effortlessly wipe out his enemies he invariably played with them, but in this case the Pirate was grateful because it meant those powers were frightened and they were gathering materials, building supply lines that made it easier for her to mount attacks.
A bolt whizzed past her, the glowing pulse of energy so close to her skin that it tingled, and her muscles felt numb for a moment as it flashed past her and smashed into a bulkhead. Rivulets of molten metal and plastic trickled down the wall, the acrid stench of melted metalloplastic filled the air as she rushed past the wall.
She fired a few bolts from her own weapon before rushing onwards, not bothering to stop and turn back to see if she'd killed or injured one of the soldiers behind her as she raced for her TARDIS. The soldiers were larger than she was, and their bulk slowed them down compared to the comparatively skinnier Time Lady, who raced ahead for the TARDIS.
The Pirate had just reached her ship and had pressed the remote lock she'd placed on her key to unlock the door so then whenever she was in a hurry she didn't fumble with the key, but just as she was getting inside one of the soldiers fired his weapon towards her, but she managed to get inside and rushed to the console.
Once the TARDIS was in the Time Vortex again, the Pirate set the controls to take her to the next location of a supply line. As the TARDIS headed towards the new destination, she knew that she would have to face the Master again eventually. Things between them were not going well. The pair of them had changed since they had left Gallifrey, she knew that and could delude herself, but something had happened to the Master that had changed him way beyond that pretentious title of his.
Although the pair of them were supposed to be partners, they had quickly found out their different experiences had shaped them just as different, and the pair of them had come to blows a few times.
What the Pirate really disliked about the arrangement was how the Master seemed to believe he had the right to tell her what to do; it was okay in her mind if he told her where the ships and planets would be, and what they contained to appease her and make sure that she knew he was upholding his own part of their partnership arrangement, but she was frustrated by the Master's need to control everything that she did.
Their arrangement had also branched out onto a more sexual side, but the Pirate was always grateful to get away from the Master's control freak attitude, and now the Time Lady was doing all she could to spend time away from the planet that had been made into the base (she wasn't going to call it their's) and used it to stash the loot there.
The Pirate shook her head and checked the latest messages the Master had sent to her. It wasn't much - the Master had used his fleet of ships to launch an attack on one of the planets belonging to one of the races unlucky enough to live in this part of space. The Master wanted her to go to the planet and plunder it while the fleet of ships battered it's defences down, something that she didn't really like. She preferred the element of surprise, personally, but ever since this partnership had begun and she had begun working with the Master, she had quickly seen some of the benefits of having a distraction like an attack occurring while you did the work.
Idly the Pirate checked the TARDIS's files on the planet in question - it was a colony world, rich in minerals and the colony had branched outwards into the rest of the solar system and began to industrialise it. Yes, it was a good place to plunder. The Pirate set the coordinates for the planet.
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A few days later, the Pirate multitasked between having sex with the Master and thinking about the last few days she had been plundering the worlds that her fellow Time Lord had conquered. While the Master was biting her neck, leaving behind love bites while massaging her breasts, the Pirate moaned in bliss, remembering how she had plundered the first planet.
Ordinarily, the Pirate didn't like stealing anything from worlds that had been battered down after a war, but at that point with the Master's android army keeping the inhabitants busy, it had been easy to take anything they had wanted.
While she didn't like the thought of using near mindless machines on a planet, the Pirate had to hand it to the Master for constructing such an army in the first place.
She gasped when the Master none too gently forced her legs open, and thrust his way into her - she was surprised by the lack of kindness, but she guessed the Master was still annoyed by her earlier remarks to him, and how she had called him up for being so childish and petty, and since he had worked out arguing was not going to work, he had decided to take his anger out on her when they were having sex.
His pettiness was becoming beyond a joke.
The Pirate turned her mind back to the numerous raids she had conducted recently, keeping one part of her mind aware of what the Master was doing to her so if he stopped then she would be aware of it.
She was beginning to have second thoughts about working with the Master. While things had been going well, and the amount of loot was looking nice, the Pirate had found several reasons to want to get away from the other Time Lord. For a start, she didn't like the thought of pummelling down planets and cultures that couldn't fight back, she had encountered several of them. Some of them had been barely out of the time when they had only just learnt their worlds were round, or they were too busy fighting their own internecine conflicts so the Master considered them ideal for conquest since the chances were they would be too weak from fighting to do anything when the Master's army arrived on their planets.
The Pirate had easily plundered those planets after the Master's army was finished, but she didn't have to like the way they were brought down. After the Master emptied inside himself for the last time, making her pretend to moan in delight, the Pirate couldn't help but see the Master for the madman he was shown to be.
When she was sure the Master was asleep, she got out of bed carefully and quietly, making sure all of her telepathic barriers were up, thankful that Time Lords needed little in the way of actual REM sleep, and walked over to one of the massive windows showing space as the ship travelled at warp.
The Master had moved the majority of his base off the planet he had adopted as his own, so he could lead offensive after offensive against the races and planets in this part of the galaxy before he moved onto bigger things.
Looking out of the window, the Pirate studied the lines of the ship. It was massive, it's shape reminding her of those times she had been on Earth and witnessed sharks and killer whales swimming through the ocean, but this thing reminded her of a massive Star Destroyer or Battlestar from Earth's science fiction.
A massive moving gun platform, bristling with heavy-duty weapons and yet equipped with smaller weapons which were still deadly enough to shatter a small world like an egg. Leaning against the port window, she became lost in her thoughts as the Master's flagship travelled slowly through space, alongside the fleet as they moved in a giant warp bubble towards their destination.
Her thoughts led her to keep on thinking about the reasons why she didn't like being with the Master anymore. At first, it had been a partnership, and while she had seen with her own eyes the Master even following her advice grudgingly, but the Master had quickly grown tired of her opinions and now he just refused to listen and heed what she was saying.
Sometimes she would see the Master get quite violent. He would throw the breakfasts prepared for him by the robots and computers enslaved by him away if he had been confronted by news or advice he genuinely did not want to hear. To make matters worse, more than once the Master had even seemed to be on the verge of physically harming her. It was only the threat of being shot with the blaster she carried that kept the other Time Lord at bay, but the Pirate knew it would not be long before he moved beyond that fear and would probably try to harm her.
The Pirate had learnt self-defence and she had visited worlds like Venus to learn a bit about their fighting arts, but her knowledge of the subject was a bit rushed. She had no idea how much the Master had learnt, even at this point in time since he was keeping the majority secret from her.
But then that was the Master for you.
When they had been growing up on Gallifrey, the pair of them had come to the Academy with different mindsets (which didn't even involve whatever brainwashing and potential mental trauma caused by the Untempered Schism), but where she had quickly become as apathetic as some of the others in their classes. As Theta, she had been a good student, but after a while, she had behaved much like a schoolgirl. She had joined the Deca, which had members like Drax, Vansell, Millennia, Rallon, Mortimus, Magnus, the Rani, and of course the Master.
They had been the creme de la creme of the Academy, everyone envied and hated them because of who they were - each one of them brought new ideas to the table, be it social connections, simple wealth, or just brain power. The Pirate brought a mix of all of them, though when it came to wealth and social connections she didn't have that much, but she had it. That was the problem with the Academy, really - the Time Lords were so determined to make their young students into politicians when there was more to life than arguing with each other on matters which revolved again and again like the orbit of a planet.
And then there were the ceremonies; Runcible the moron loved them, he had been inspired to remain on Gallifrey, to spend the rest of his life, and Rassilon only knew how long that would be, filming one dusty ceremony after another, simpering around the exquisitely robed Time Lords and Ladies, either at a Presidential resignation day, or when the President's birthday turned up and the entire High Council turned out to honour it.
But the members of the Deca and those other Time Lord groups who wanted to usher their planet out of the stagnation it had fallen into centuries ago. Thinking about Gallifrey saddened the Pirate, though the thought of the rest of her people sickened her since they had been so convinced of her guilt with that mess with Anzor, though if she ever saw the slimy piece of crap out here, in the universe, she would kill him. But Gallifrey and her people used to be great. Now they were content to just stand and watch as the universe went on, and they seemed happy and content to just do that, just continue doing the same things like sitting around all day dressed in those robes while changing the desktop theme of their citadels once every six millennia, training their new generations to do the same thing and just….live for centuries and centuries without regeneration.
After graduating from the Academy, all of her friends had left. But first of all, the Master and Magnus had supported Morbius's attempts to take over Gallifrey and the High Council before he was finally driven off the planet. Magnus managed to remain on the planet for a little while longer, Rassilon only knew how, but the Master had escaped. The Pirate hadn't bothered to get many of the details; she had had zero interest in the activities of the political groups.
It seemed to happen with each graduation from the Academy, she thought to herself as she looked out over the massive vista as the fleet moved in the gigantic warp bubble - it was being generated by a small number of ships with 'mirrors' which shaped and controlled the flow of energy that generated the warp bubble - as they continued to head towards the unlucky solar systems that the Master planned to smash, so many Time Lords were prepared to try to 'change' Gallifrey, but it never happened.
Oh, sure the groups might talk about change, but after a while, they ducked their heads and joined the crowd. That was the fact she didn't like politics were two of the reasons why she had not bothered to get involved.
But truthfully…..
The Pirate sighed as she remembered the Consolidator, the starship the Time Lords had constructed to contain all the evilest technologies and races, like the Sild, and how the Time Lords had locked them inside the ship, either in suspended animation or in stasis. The early Time Lords had created it after they had achieved time travel and used that power to shape history. From all across space and time, across the aeons, across millions of light years, the Time Lords had drawn on their wisdom and influence to collect weapons and technologies, but also entire races that were pure evil.
The Time Lords didn't destroy them. They were too clever for that; you didn't have a history spanning a billion years and spend 10 million years of that time frame as the Lords of Time without learning how to become more crafty. They also sought entombed races and technologies that had been fought to a standstill and had either retreated into being locked up by their enemies, or they had voluntarily hibernation so then they could awaken once more in a galaxy where time itself had been used as a weapon to destroy their enemies, so then they could have another go in the future against the races of the new galaxy, races who were more primitive than themselves, and cause death and destruction on levels reaching in the trillions.
That was a nice piece of forward thinking for you.
Rather than just leave those entombed races to still remain at large, risking discovery because of a newer race stumbling upon them by accident, the Time Lords simply scooped them up and put them into the limitless dimensional depths of the Consolidator. They would never be free, they were being left to rot like toxic waste in the depths of that mighty ship. The Consolidator was the most powerful and the most well-designed prison ship ever devised. It could protect itself, make sure its cargos could not break free suddenly or escape, and it was armoured against intruders; a fleet of ships could attack the ship, and their weapons wouldn't even dent the sides, and their best shot would hardly damage a single atom of the hull.
It was autonomous, self-repairing, but it wasn't enough.
Once the Time Lords had the ship, there had been a debate. Many believed that since they had collected all of the most ancient evils in the universe, along with a load of new ones, though how they had managed to miss the Daleks or the Cybermen was beyond her comprehension, it should be destroyed.
Smash it into a star.
Push it into a black hole. But others argued back, saying that the technologies and sciences which had been considered barbaric by even some of the most warlike races, like the Sontarans, in the modern universe, could actually be made into a benefit and have benevolent applications. Some even suggested the possibility of being able to rehabilitate the aliens locked inside.
The arguments had gone on and on for centuries. No agreement was made, and surprisingly the Time Lords couldn't even reach a simple compromise.
In the end, the Time Lords had decided to just foist the problem off to their descendants. Send the ship off into the future, and when it emerged in a future timezone, it was hoped the Time Lords of the far future would have had the time needed to ponder their decision concerning the Consolidator.
Since it would be travelling through the centuries, the ship would pose no threat at all to Galactic stability.
But the Time Lords hadn't thought the problem through because their plan to send the ship off into the future was a good one, they didn't stop to remember one simple facet of temporal physics.
The larger the mass, the greater the amount of energy needed to create a time field; the Time Lords had solved the problem when they had created the first TARDISes, simply create a pocket universe for the Time Lords to exist within the ship, and make the new reality large enough to house the sheer engine size needed to send the ship into the Time Vortex. The Time Lords were good, but even they didn't know how to solve the problem of creating a temporal rift and powering it to send the Consolidator into the future.
After the failures to approach the problem, the Time Lords had turned to two of their students to solve it for them. Those Time Lords were promising graduates of the Academy, both of them completely different. One of them was a risk-taker, a maverick, but always trying to think a few moves ahead, and the other was a logician.
They were the Pirate and the Master, and at the time they had been firm friends, lovers, even and rivals. Both of them had doubted the wisdom of the Consolidator project from the moment it was dropped into their laps. In time the pair of them changed their approaches. The Master had decided to use a black hole, ripped open to provide the sheer amount of energy needed to create such a rift. His maths on the idea was watertight, and he had needed to answer for the entire project.
But she had had a different approach to the problem. Instead of simply sending it off into the future, the Time Lords should put it into a Time Loop. They had the science and the power needed to lock a world away, and the Consolidator was infinitely smaller than a planet. In the end the Time Lords, desiring the more complex needs, just went with the Master's approach. It had ended up in a failure, though whether or not that was positively true, she didn't know.
What she did know was that the incident in question had caused a wedge to be driven between her and the Master, and judging by the time since they'd been separated (Omega, she made it sound like they had been married) he had had plenty of time to just see her as a nuisance, though where he got that idea from she had no idea.
The Pirate stood by the window for a long time, trying to see how fast they were going - it was a simple enough equation for a Time Lord to make in their minds, but with so many ships blocking the view, it was hard for her to get a clearer view of the starfield.
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Things between her and the Master became tenser around breakfast. She had been eating her usual light but filling meal, doubtful that the Master would try to poison her because while he was capable of it, it wasn't a stylish way for him to murder someone. At least she hoped that was true, but she was incredibly cautious nonetheless.
"I felt you get up," the Master didn't take his eyes off his own meal as he slowly ate.
"I wanted to admire the view," the Pirate replied. "I don't normally get a chance to travel in a ship travelling in a warp bubble."
The Master chuckled, but whether he believed her or not she didn't know, but she doubted it would make any difference. "I know," he looked up at her, "I spend a lot of time watching it whenever I'm onboard this ship, admiring the warp bubble as it contorts space and brings the targets closer. Another world in my grasp."
Licking her lips, trying to hide her trepidation at hearing that and how dismissive he was about taking another world over, the Pirate did her best to be nonchalant as she tried to find something to say as a reply.
"It is glorious," she said.
The Master nodded, almost uncaringly and continued eating. The Pirate watched him for a second before she realised he was going to change the subject.
She was right.
"I wanted to talk to you about the upcoming attacks. There won't be any time for you stick around to pick up much, we're going to go through the region, so you are going to have to pick up what we leave in our wake."
Although she kept her features neutral and even a bit curious, the Pirate hid the nervousness she was feeling all of a sudden. This was new to her, and she wondered what the Master was doing.
"Why the change of plan?" she asked him.
"I want someone organic and can think outside of the box instead of a robot or a computer to lead the attacks, but you should have time to do your thing afterwards," the Master's voice was silky and yet dismissive as though he were bored about accommodating her and with his part of the bargain. The Pirate was going to ask him why there had been a sudden change of plan - she could understand why the Master would want a living, thinking to be and not some tinpot machine using logical reasoning all the time, but she couldn't understand why he was doing it now.
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A few hours later, the Master was safe in his palace-ship, while the Pirate used her TARDIS to travel to one of the other ships, landing her ship on the bridge. It hadn't been a problem moving through the Vortex when the ships were travelling in a warp bubble, but the moment her TARDIS materialised onboard the robot warship, she found herself confronted with a dozen of the Master's androids.
They weren't really anything special - they were just tall, lightly armoured humanoid machines with legs and arms and a spherical head like a matte black egg with an optical scanner built in. They didn't speak. As soon as she arrived on the bridge, they stopped what they were doing and regarded her for a moment as she left the safety of her TARDIS, and stood on the bridge silently and waited for their optical scanners to check her out, and see that she was a Time Lord like the Master; she had gathered that the Master had programmed his armies of machines to not harm Time Lords like himself, though she knew the program was only there to stop one of the robots malfunctioning and trying to kill him.
The scanning matrix was simple; the robots would be scanning the organ and brain structure first. Time Lords had many differences in their anatomy compared to other aliens, but the Master had included a genetic scan as well.
The Pirate had never liked androids or robots; she had encountered her fair share of defensive systems and mechanisms on various ships. Robots came in various sizes and types. Some of them were built into a ship, sometimes they activated when the computer turned them on and sent them on their way if the computer's automated surveillance systems detected something that shouldn't be there. On one of the very first ships she raided, she didn't bother to check the TARDIS's scanner readings and had gone out. When she returned, she was nursing a truly bad burn to her back that scarred parts of her back, her shoulders, and went as far down as her right ankle. She had treated the injuries, but she hadn't tried to remove the burn damage.
It served as a grim reminder to her she shouldn't become too cocky and overconfident, and it was a lesson that she followed to this day. True, when she regenerated for the first time, she would lose the scar damage, but the memory alone should teach her not to be stupid.
Another encounter with a robot security system she had was when she had travelled to a planet where she raided a massive warehouse. The place contained a security system called an automated intruder grid, which was basically a spiders-web of interconnecting metal pylons and rods that crossed and crisscrossed the floors, the ceilings and the walls. They were armed with all kinds of weapons; laser bolters, magnetic pulse guns, gas guns, steel mesh crossbows, and there were a host of other traps the Pirate had been lucky not to be trapped in. It had been a nightmare because there had been another thief there in the warehouse, and he hadn't had the precautions that she had had.
She had had a number of other truly bad experiences with other robots and computers over the years since she had left Gallifrey, but that didn't make her any less nervous at this point.
Once the machines had scanned her body - she didn't like the thought of these things knowing what her genetic structure was like, but she knew if she wanted her life to go much, much easier, she would have to accept it - they turned around and went back to their tasks as though she wasn't there. Happy there wouldn't be any problem, the Pirate walked up to the rail which had the ship's master computer installed. There were two other robots nearby, linked into the ship already.
The robots and the ships connected to each other, and when they did they became a single unit, like an artificial intelligence gestalt. Each robot's computer was plugged into a different system, inputting commands the Master fed into them from his ship. The Pirate found the system a bit basic, but then again so was the idea of a computer-controlled ship. It didn't matter really what type the Master used, and besides, she didn't really give a damn if the robots did most of the ship's work for them. She was just thankful that the Master had been thoughtful to include atmospheres to his ships because he might want to use one of them as a flagship using his own security code.
The Pirate was just…annoyed that she didn't have any way of knowing how the 'battle' if it could be called that since, thanks to the Master's Time Lord mind where he would have access to technology beyond the unfortunates fighting him, it would be more like giving a machine gun to a peasant and telling him to shoot down an army of medieval knights. Short-lived and very bloody. The Pirate knew the Master didn't care.
She had known that the computers and the robots on the ship had access to the external monitors but she didn't have any access to what the Master used to monitor the battles he participated in, so she had prepared for that by joining a small palmtop scanner with the scanning equipment in the TARDIS.
It was just as she thought; the alien ships, primitive as they were, made from a mishmash of chunks of metal held together by metal girders, but they were bristling with batteries of weapons' lenses and missiles. The Pirate's eyes only needed to scan the ships to tell how they worked, and she knew that the ships were just no match for what the Master had.
The Master, who liked the thought of being a so-called sporting gentleman, let the aliens fire first, but none of the weapons managed to make any contact with the hulls of the robot ships. They were shielded with the same technology as a TARDIS forcefield, nothing short of a spike from a supernova could get through that. These aliens didn't have a chance.
The Pirate watched grimly as they were picked out of space. The battle computers had been programmed to believe they were invincible and backed by advanced technology, it would not take long. As she watched the battle unfold, the Pirate was surprised when three of the robots detached themselves from the computer connection.
"What are you doing?" she asked, her hand automatically going to her blaster…..
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On the bridge of the flagship, the Master was standing a little further away from his robots as they silently conducted the battle. He knew from his personal palm scanner which helped him to control and survey the robots that his creations were quickly overcoming the battle - and while some of the fighter's loss was frustrating, it didn't pose a problem; the fighter's cybernetic technology would be sending the fighter's 'memories' back to the factory worlds, and they would be integrated into the new fighters, so the aliens wouldn't be able to play the same tricks again.
Part of the Master felt a little bit sorry for the aliens in this part of the universe, but truthfully they were in the way of a power base he wished to set up for himself before he moved outward. He had learnt to begin small and it had worked so far. It would take time to truly solidify his power base here, but it would happen in time. After all, he was a Time Lord, and he had a long lifespan. But the rest of his time was taken wondering what to do about his fellow Time Lady.
The Master had been in two minds about what he had planned, but ever since the Pirate re-entered his life his plans to use her had fallen through. She was just too dangerous, but while the Master would have been happy to try to convert her to his way of thinking he knew it would have been impossible.
The Pirate spent most if not all of her time away from him, so there wasn't much of an opportunity for him to either try to manipulate the Time Lady's mind or spend time with her to get through the hardened persona the woman had. It was possible though difficult for Time Lords to manipulate the minds of their own people, but it took plenty of time for that to take place, and the Master hadn't been able to find that time in the case of the Pirate.
She wanted to separate from their 'deal' though the Master genuinely didn't care about what she did since he thought it kind of beneath her to just steal from ships and planets. The only reason he had even given her the deal in the first place was so then he could find an opportunity to broker an agreement that would see them rule together.
But alas, she was simply not interested, and the Master had to see that he hadn't helped in that regard with his controlling and demanding manner, and she had simply gone out of her way to stay away from him.
The Pirate had become boring for him, so she had to die. It was regrettable, but it had to be done. She had been sent to a robot ship where the robot crew would deal with her.
He stood on the control deck of the flagship, watching as his victory unfolded when suddenly one of his robot ships exploded. The Master, surprised by the blast, threw a hand over his eyes to protect them from the glare. When the glare receded enough for his eyes to adjust to the light, the Master slowly lowered his hand, befuddled and confused. What had just happened? The robots had been programmed to kill the Pirate, not blow their ship up.
Confusion turned quickly into horror when all of the robot ships blew up or lost power, and since the robots within received their energy directly from the ship itself, they were hopeless to do anything to stop it.
The horror of the Time Lord felt only became worse when the aliens, detecting the weaknesses of the enemy robot ships began increasing their barrages against his ships. The Master staggered around the bridge of his flagship as the blasts impacted against the hull, but the alloys the ship was made from was too strong, and it deflected the greater majority of the energy produced by the weapons being fired against the ship. The Master had known what he was doing when he designed the ships, and he had used everything short of Block Transfer computations to make his fleet indestructible.
But they were vulnerable.
What was the point of having a space war if he didn't lose a few ships, and besides he needed to have a crack army of robots that had their knowledge downloaded into their computers by the master battle computers, but only if a few ships and robots were destroyed, not an entire fleet!
The Master desperately checked the controls and the computers - the flagship was the only ship in the fleet designed to be operated by the robots and the battle computers but also had the facilities for him to use to control and direct their actions. A few desperate minutes later, and the Master was close to screaming in anger, fear, and frustration. Nothing was working! And then the Master realised, to his ever-increasing horror, that the central computer core that ran through the ship had been crippled. It was as though the control hubs were no longer there. The ship rocked again as another blast impacted, but the Master had no idea where it had hit.
Swallowing his anger, the Time Lord headed for the alcove where his TARDIS had been placed when he heard a familiar sound of another TARDIS materialising right in front of him. The Master turned in surprise, he had thought that the Pirate had been dealt with..
But no, the TARDIS she used materialised right before him, blocking his path to his own TARDIS. The door opened and the Pirate stepped out. The moment he laid his eyes on her, the Master knew she was in a bad way. Her appearance, usually so neat, was bedraggled, and there was an almost ethereal glow to her face.
The Time Lady glared at him, pain showing in eye move she made, the grimace she had on her face as she tried to hold back the pain she was clearly feeling. "I want a word with you."
The Master had been stunned by the sudden arrival of the Time Lady he had ordered to be killed, but he had quickly recovered. "What happened? The robot ships are deactivating-,"
"I know. I deactivated them," the Pirate interrupted as she drew out her blaster and pointed it at her.
The Master was too stunned to notice the blaster. To him, it may as well have been a torch or a flower. "You did what?" he hissed. "Do you realise what you've done?"
"Oh, believe me," the Pirate coughed out, "I do. Just like I know you tried to have me killed. Do you want to know what happened on that death trap you sent me too? Alright, I'll tell you…."
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The Pirate was surprised by the robots detaching themselves from their consoles. "What are you doing?" she asked, her hand automatically going to her blaster…. Just as the robots began to fire on her, but using the reflexes born of practice, she dodged the first laser bolts fired as she ducked down by one of the consoles before the firing stopped.
The Time Lady paused, her senses going haywire as she tried to work out what was going on. For a moment, she wondered if this was some kind of computer glitch because the alternative was too horrible to contemplate. Even for the Master, that was going too far.
None of the robots had fired since she had ducked down by her console and none of them seemed remotely interested in approaching her, though she couldn't understand what kind of logic they were using, but then she thought that it was hardwired into their systems to never destroy any of the consoles and computer interfaces.
That made sense. The robots and the computers interfaced together, and if they were damaged then it wouldn't be possible for them to do so, and the Master would want them to be interfaced properly so then their tasks could be carried out. But if the Master was behind this attack on her, then his orders and their programming must be warring with each other.
She didn't want to believe the Master wanted her dead, even though things between the pair of them had not been going great. She knew he was a bit mad, in a driven kind of way, but she had never imagined he would try to murder her.
The Pirate had spent enough time around the Master and his robots to know that every command he entered was directed by a command hub on his flagship so he would have direct control. The Master's technology may be beyond the scope of the local aliens in this distant, primitive galaxy, but they wouldn't be much of a problem for her.
If she could get on the flagship, access the computer, then she would find out if her suspicions were true. But it was hard for her to move - the console was protecting her, but as soon as she moved, one of those robots would fire at her. Or all of them…
Actually, that gave her an idea….
The Pirate closed her eyes and concentrated on the local time, moulding it and slowing it down. She stepped up slowly, keeping her eyes closed and felt her way around the console, but keeping a tight grip on her blaster.
She opened her eyes and time resumed. The robots were momentarily taken aback by her sudden appearance, but their confusion did not last too long.
They began to fire on her again, and she threw herself to the deck even as their laser bolts whizzed over her form and smashed into the console and the wall interfaces, destroying them instantly. The robots began to shake as they registered what they had done, but the Pirate didn't give them the chance to do anything about it. From her position on the deck plating, the Pirate didn't have any trouble pointing her blaster up at the robots, and she targeted their most vulnerable points, taking care not to damage their chest units because there were hydrogen fuel cells inside them. Here and there, one of the robots would find their knee joints shot out followed closely by the blasts to their optical sensors.
Finally, when it was over, the Pirate stood up cautiously, and she looked around the bridge quickly in case one of the robots had managed to hide somewhere without her knowledge, but there wasn't anything there. The Pirate finally breathed a sigh of relief, and she hurried to her TARDIS.
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After a short-hop, the Pirate's TARDIS materialised onboard the Master's robotic flagship, in the computer hub. The scanner view gave only a small 360 degree view of the place the TARDIS had materialised in, and while the controls of the scanner could move the view up she knew that her ship had landed in a small part of a massive horizontal computer core that ran through the ship. The computer system was an enormous collection of trays containing memory acids and ordinary hard drives lashed together to provide the ship and the robots that crewed it with the processing information that they needed.
The Master had made the system extremely easy to get into, mostly because he would sometimes use his TARDIS to communicate with it, so it wasn't too difficult for her to hack into the computer. The moment she checked the system and went through the databank of the computer, her worst fears were confirmed.
The robots had received orders to kill her from the Master, and for a moment the Pirate was too stunned to believe what she was reading… She had known things were rough between her and the Master, and while she had suspected her old school friend had something to do with the attack on the robot ship, she had hoped it wasn't true. She had known that the Master had gone a bit sick in the head, which had already begun when he had lost his marbles looking into the Untempered Schism as a child but when he had joined those revolutionary maniacs on Gallifrey…. But to go this far.
Once she was over her surprise and sadness that her old friend would want to have her killed, the Pirate checked the rest of the information.
The Master had placed the command into the robot command circuit not long after they had reunited - wait, that was ages ago! The Pirate gasped in surprise at just how many contingencies the other Time Lord had, and after getting over THAT shock, though truthfully when she had a few more seconds to process the matter, she could see why the Master had done it, she checked over the displays showing the linkages she had set up between her TARDIS and the computer core.
The Master had placed the command into the network, but he had carefully inputted it so when he added a new piece of computer code the robots wouldn't react. The Pirate felt absolutely cold when she realised that all the time she and her old friend had been together since their reunion, though whether she could still think of him as a friend after what he'd done and what she'd just learnt, she couldn't say, he had been planning to kill her if she didn't tow the line.
The cold the Pirate had been feeling faded, and pure rage shot through her. He had tried to kill her when she crossed the line in his mind, he hadn't cared about her at all.
Now he was going to pay.
The Pirate knew she couldn't access the Master's computers from the TARDIS - even if she could somehow find out what codes he'd placed into it in case the robots failed him or things became too hot for the Master to handle, she knew they'd probably be locked by his isomorphic code. There was nothing else for it, she would have to leave and destroy the computer from there. The flagship controlled and governed the entire system with the Master in the centre of it all.
So all she would need to do was destroy it.
The Pirate took out the blaster from her holster and checked the charge before she took out the power cell and replaced it with a fresh one (she hoped that what she had in mind meant she didn't need to use it) before she triggered the door control and left the TARDIS. She had never been in the flagship's computer core before, but when she stepped out of the TARDIS she could see that this was going to be easier than she imagined it to be. The Master clearly thought that his weapons and the metals his ships were made from would protect his little empire. Typical arrogance, really.
The Pirate walked over to one of the consoles and examined it. It was clearly designed to be used by both the Master and the robots, so she had no trouble with it. The first thing the Time Lady did was take the console apart by breaking open the maintenance panel and peering inside to get an idea of what she was dealing it. For the next five minutes she examined the circuitry to get an idea how it all worked, and then when she was finished she went to the console itself and began accessing it before she inputted the commands to shut down the robots and their battle computers. Or at least tried too.
It took her only a moment to realise that the Master had locked the entire system with his own isomorphic print, and there was no way she could get through that.
Well, that meant the old-fashioned way.
Somehow the Pirate didn't mind that method, and she took out the blaster and she began to fire at every computer that was nearby. Consoles exploded, and tanks filled with coolants burst, sending sparks and fluids all over the place as alarms began to blare as the computers began shutting down. But the Pirate was distracted when she heard the sounds of scuttling behind her, and she turned around and found a number of robots there. They were like spiders, spheres mounted on segmented, boneless metal legs ending in solid points. The Pirate lifted her blaster and began firing at them, and she managed to destroy a few of the robots, but they learnt quickly. They swarmed over the blackened and blasted remains of the consoles and coolant tanks trying to reach her and pushing her away from the TARDIS.
As they drew closer to her, the closest robots opened fire on her and she fired back. The robots were comparatively tiny compared to the humanoid variety she had encountered so far, which meant they could fit in smaller nooks and crannies near her, so she was quickly surrounded but she fired more blasts.
But then…. she was shot in the back by one of the robots. The Pirate screamed and fell to the ground to her knees. The robots nearby didn't do anything, they just observed her, scanning her threat level while she was downed.
The Pirate was shaking, the pain in her back burned through her body, and she could feel the adrenaline in her veins making her muscles tremble before she felt another burning feeling in her body. She looked down at her hands and spotted a burning ethereal glow under the skin.
She was regenerating.
For a second the Pirate was virtually paralysed as she took in the glow, but then she remembered where she was. She was in the computer core of the Master's flagship, and she was trying to destroy the place. There were hostile robots all around her that would kill her if she made any further hostile movement. She lifted her head up, stopping when she heard the sounds of the robots' sudden clicking that they made whenever they moved and saw a narrow gap between a cooling tank and a computer databank. She gasped hoarsely in pain as she tried to move towards it, and she felt the blaster still wrapped in her hands. She looked down at the weapon numbly, the pain fogging her mind as the regeneration began to take hold of her consciousness.
It was getting hard to concentrate, but there was something about the blaster that was calling to her…
She looked down at the blaster, the glow in her hands glowing brighter and brighter as the regenerative energy began to build up, and then she looked up when she saw a monitor that she had missed. The monitor was connected to the external monitoring system, and she could see the crude spacecraft outside the hull firing nuclear missiles at the Master's ships -
That was it!
Her blaster, it was powered by an atomic power cell. She had replaced the last one because the energy inside needed time to loop back around, and be back to full strength. Keeping her back to the robots, the Pirate's hands went carefully over the weapon, and one of the warning lights lit up. The gun was on overload.
Slowing down time once again, the Pirate threw the blaster into the air to give her the chance to get through the gap and give herself some cover.
Once time resumed the blaster exploded, though she hadn't slowed time down enough for it to be really noticeable but giving her the valuable few moments to get clear. The explosion in the enclosed space ripped through the computer banks and the remaining, if damaged, coolant tanks. The blast threw the Pirate forwards and she groaned as she bumped her head on the ground.
"Ow," she winced but she picked herself up and headed for the TARDIS.
As she struggled to fight the pain through sheer willpower to wrestle the key out of the pocket, the Pirate thought through what she had done. She knew that the Master's computers were all interconnected, like a body where blood was being circulated through the veins and arteries, though in this case the flagship was the centre. Without the signals and the connections, the robots and the automated systems the Master had set up were either shutting down or were being destroyed.
The Pirate found the key and opened the door before heading for the console. She had one last place to go before she regenerated….
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"I set the controls for the bridge," the Pirate finished off her explanation to the listening Master. The other Time Lord seemed almost insanely calm for someone whose plans had begun to crumble around him. "I monitored the battle from the TARDIS, and I saw that the computers onboard your other ships were desperate for instructions, so I provided them."
The Master looked on, unaffected when the Pirate groaned in agony, but she quickly recovered before he could do anything to wrestle control of that blaster off her. "So you lowered their remaining defences, and then let those aliens attack?"
"Yes. You had ordered your robots to attack me, so I thought why not get rid of them?" The grin the Pirate sent his way was grim and pained. "What I don't understand is why you did it in the first place?"
"I had wanted to make you my queen, you would have had power over millions, but you refused my advances-," the Master replied but the Pirate interrupted him impatiently; she was regenerating and she didn't have much time for this.
"That's because I wasn't interested in ruling anything. I never have, but you've never understood that, have you? You decided to kill me simply because I wasn't interested when you could have just accepted the reality," the Pirate snapped angrily, holding down another surge of pain; she wasn't sure how much longer she had left, but it was coming. She could feel it.
She had just about had enough of this.
The Pirate levelled the blaster at the Master's chest.
The Master stepped back slightly, arms raised mockingly. "You don't have the courage to do it, Pirate-," but the Pirate shot him in the chest, angry with the mocking way he'd just spoken her chosen title. The Pirate watched coldly as the Master fell to the ground, gasping in pain and angry surprise, looking at his hands as they began to glow exactly like hers were glowing.
"It's no more than you deserve," she whispered to herself, holding back her own regeneration as she watched the Master, always desperate to save his own neck, immediately opened his arms as if he was about to hug her, but the glare of hatred on his face contradicted that. "This isn't over, Pirate," he said, his face and body glowing with the same type of energy radiating off her. Her hands were beginning to glow even more.
The Pirate stepped back inside her TARDIS and instantly dematerialised. She could have waited for the Master's regeneration and then shot him as soon as he came out of it, relying on the post-regenerative trauma to help her deal with him in his weakened state, but she didn't have the time. She wanted to get away and get her own regeneration out of the way.
Quickly.
Her hands trembling as she set the controls, the Pirate waited until the sounds of the TARDIS's dematerialisation was over before she closed her eyes and stepped away from the console. Her hands were glowing, and the energy began streaming faster and faster. The pain was incredible and unbelievable for her, and she realised why Time Lords tended to try to not think or speak about regeneration.
She took a few deep breaths, mentally saying goodbye to an incarnation that had served her so well - after all, she had been through a lot with this body; she had thwarted Anzor's little plan to frame her, fleeing Gallifrey while unsure if the High Council's sentence was still valid, but she didn't care.
She remembered how she had used her TARDIS to begin her career in piracy, she had learnt so much in this life.
And now she was about to regenerate.
The Pirate threw out her arms when the regeneration surged through her…..
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And then the Pirate, the new second Pirate, stood in ill-fitting clothes, looked around the console room in surprise, clenching her jaw in agony as her newly regenerated body and senses were overwhelmed by the stimuli around her.
"No," she grunted as she tried to hold back the overwhelming overload of information. "Concentrate. Concentrate," she instructed herself and focused on the time rotor of the console. Once it was over, she looked around the console room, taking deep breaths and feeling the double heat beat in her chest.
The Pirate walked around the console room slowly, letting herself become accustomed to her new form. She felt that she was still the same height as her previous body. She examined herself for a moment, and she found some of her hair. It was a dark brunette, no it was dark blonde. Hm, that was new, she thought to herself before she winced. She needed time to recover.
Checking the controls, the Pirate set the coordinates to a random destination. She had a new incarnation and she wanted to relax, but she didn't want to go anywhere that she knew for that. She wanted to be surprised. As her new hands went over the controls, she paused. This would take getting used to, she thought to herself before she finished her work.
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The End.
