He didn't even bother to greet them as he marched into the top most room in Torchwood Tower, cluttered with boxes and wiring from the current efforts to convert it to a lab. Miles was already there, along with Singh's team, Jake, and Mickey, scanning through a tablet furiously. It was Jake who spoke up first, glancing at Pete from over Mickey's shoulder, where he too had been reading through the data.
"It's not just that the Cybermen are appearing as ghosts, Torchwood is controlling it all," he growled, nodding at the screen that Mickey's eyes ran over quickly. "They have shifts set up, like clockwork or something?"
"Why?" Pete glanced at Miles and Singh, neither of whom appeared to have a clear answer.
"I do," Mickey intoned, stilling as his face turned gray in the light of the tablet screen. Wide eyes turned to Pete with a grim expression. "It's all a trap."
"A trap? For who?"
"For the Doctor."
Pete simply blinked at Mickey mutely.
"The Doctor?" Singh glanced at the group in clear confusion. Out of all of them, he was the only one who wasn't clued in on the true hero of the Battle at Battersea so long ago. Pete didn't even know where to start to describe him, but thankfully he didn't have to. Jake stepped in quickly enough.
"He's this bloke from this other universe, from where Mickey is from. This time traveling, genius alien. And he was the one who knew about those Cybermen and how to stop them."
Singh looked doubtful, dark eyebrows arched dubiously as he looked to Pete. "This all true?"
"Met him myself," Pete assured him, shoving his hands in his trouser pockets. "He's mad...and a genius. But what does Torchwood want with him? And how did you find out about it?"
"Found it in the data dump," Jake replied, waving towards the tablet screen. "Mickey and I've been secretly copying as many of Torchwood's files as we could lay hands on, and anything else we found interesting. Schematics, plans, designs for all sorts of crazy things, records, you name it."
"I had them doing that, sir," Miles cut in smoothly with a grim expression. "After all a different world, a different Torchwood, I didn't want a resource to go to waste. We may never be able to have an opportunity like this again, and I wanted to get as much information as I could."
"Anyway," Jake continued. "We found out that they were the ones controlling the ghosts. They have these levers in their version of this room. They let them go at certain times, and then ghosts appear."
"And all to try and lure the Doctor to them?" That was the mad part of all of this in Pete's mind. Playing with something this dangerous, all to convince a half-mad alien to show his face? "What do they want with him?"
"With them," Mickey corrected, his full mouth pulled tight. "They want the Doctor and Rose Tyler."
Pete ignored Singh's surprised reaction, scrubbing his face in distraction. "What in the hell would they want with the pair of them?"
"It's in their charter. You know, just like Torchwood here has, except in my world, Queen Vic wasn't bitten by a werewolf and didn't abdicate She was saved."
It wasn't hard to figure out how that change in events occurred. "Let me guess, Rose and the Doctor?"
Mickey nodded his dark head. "They told me about it, once. Thought it was funny, kept trying to tease her, and she got right annoyed. Decided to banish them from the kingdom." He sighed, worried gaze flickering to the screen. "Guess they never took her seriously. Didn't know that Torchwood was after them."
All of this havoc, just to draw the attention of one alien and a girl barely older than a teenager?
"Bloody hell, what's Yvonne playing at?"
"Perhaps it's not just about the Doctor and Rose," Miles offered thoughtfully. "Mickey, pull up the information you have on the room at the top of their Torchwood Tower?"
With quick flicks of his fingers, Mickey pulled up a file, turning the screen so that the others could see. All the screen held was a blurry image of a giant sphere. "Jake and I took to trying to figure out what this room was used for."
"They were keeping bloody tight lipped about it. But I chatted up one of the detail," Jake smirked. "Turns out that the reason there's a ship in there, some sort of round one. They don't know what's in it, but they think the ghosts are coming from there."
"The Cybermen. It's how they are getting through." Pete looked to SIngh for confirmation.
"Possibly. We've never been sure how they teleported. Perhaps that's the device that did it, and their Torchwood has it."
"In which case they could be sitting on a ticking time bomb, waiting to go off," Miles interjected. "If they figure out how to open that thing, there could be Cybermen all over the place there. And it could be the signal for all their little buddies from this side of reality to go and join them."
"And if that happens, the pull on the gravitational forces in this dimensional hole could destroy us all," Singh finished, glumly.
No matter how you looked at it, Pete realized, they were screwed.
"How do we stop it, then?" He looked to Miles for this. "Is there a way we can prevent them from opening that ship?"
"Maybe, but doubtful. They've been trying for a long time now, years. It might just open on its own. But we could be ready for them if they do succeed. Stop the Cybermen before they can signal to the rest to join them?"
"Be waiting with guns ready to blast them out of existence," Mickey chortled, high fiving Jake, who looked inordinately pleased by the idea.
"Do we have anything that will blast that many Cybermen out of existence," Pete mused, unimpressed with the younger two men's schoolboy antics.
"That I would trust Mickey with? Sure," Miles murmured with a doubtful eye to a now wounded Mickey. "The key is when? We don't know when they will open that thing, and if we can get Mickey in there."
"Except we do know that's why they are trying to get the Doctor in there," Mickey pointed out, snippily, shooting his superior a dark look for questioning his weapons capabilities. "They can't open it, but I'm betting that they think the Doctor can. And they know the Doctor can't resist a good mystery. That's why they are doing the thing with the ghosts. They lure him in with that, trap him and Rose, and use her to force him to open it for them."
"Years of trying on their own and failing, and they would go to all that trouble to get one man in there to open it for them?" SIngh was the only only one who sounded doubtful about this. The other four men all glanced at each other and nodded, knowing that's exactly what they were doing. They all knew what the Doctor was capable of.
"Dr. Singh, if you are ever given the chance, I hope you meet the Doctor," Pete replied. "Not that you'd get a word in edgewise. If there's anyone who knows what he's dealing with, it's him."
"And he'd willingly just put all of us in peril?" Singh still wasn't convinced.
"No, but if they had Rose, he could be made to do anything," Mickey muttered darkly. He spun on Miles. "Let me be the one over there. My guess, if they are amping up these ghost sightings, the Doctor will show up soon. He'll have to notice."
Something vague tripped at Pete's memory, the half-remembered conversation between Jackie and Rose that he'd overheard on his one, brief visit to Mickey's world. "Jackie told her she wanted her to visit soon."
All eyes turned quizzically to Pete. He cleared his throat, nodding at Mickey pointedly. "Jackie's been seeing a ghost of her dad, yeah. You said it yourself. She wants Rose to come home so she can see him. And if Rose comes, the Doctor will, and he's going to want to check this out."
If anyone thought his references to Jackie were strange, no one said anything, least of all Singh.
"I can't just pop in on Jackie. She might think I was dead." There was more than a hint of regret in Mickey's voice. "I've spied on her enough, a wonder she hasn't noticed."
"No, but you go to the old neighborhood enough. Think you can keep an eye out for the Doctor's ship?"
"The TARDIS? You can't miss it. Wonder you can't hear it across the city."
Pete looked to Miles. "If they are going to act, it's soon. Have Jake monitor Torchwood, Mickey, you hang about the estates. The minute you see the Doctor and Rose, you let Jake know. You come back here. We'll arm you up and send you back, and hopefully you can stop whatever they are trying to do."
It was a half-assed plan at best. But it was better than not having one at all. He thought of his conversation with Harriett Jones, how confident he sounded. Got, what a git he was. This was all patched together with tape and twine, and if they all didn't die at the end of it all, it would be a small wonder.
"I hope that the Doctor is in this madness," Pete sighed, studying Mickey's tablet screen. "He's the only one in the universe, I suspect, who can fix this, close that breech. Maybe with him in it, we won't all end up killed."
"Me too," Mickey sighed, quietly.