Text Key

"Audible speech."

'Directed thought, telepathic speech.'

Rise of the Cybermen / Age Of Steel

Chapter 19 – Cutting Edge

I hated every part of this. The reason we were here, the outfit, the waiting, and the constant condescension and objectification were all things that I could have done without.

Did Rose Tyler need to see this 'verse's version of the Tylers? Not really. Sure, I could understand wanting some sense of validation, but 'understanding' and 'thinking it was a shit idea at every point in the conversation' weren't mutually exclusive actions. Everything after that decision I could lay at her feet, even if the exact plan for infiltration technically came from the Doctor. Her expectation of coming in as celebrities nobody had ever heard of was too stupid to actually work.

…I'd hold the dress against him though. There was no reason why I couldn't have worn a tux. Given five minutes and a knife, not even the excuse of my hair being too long could have been held against me.

'Whine, whine, whine. You should try serving it with the champagne instead of keeping it all to yourself.'

I slid in between two clusters of gossipy rich people. Very few of the people at the party were wearing Earpods. If that was a concession to the black tie nature of the event, the equivalent of turning cell phones off during a movie, or simply because the people they would usually be talking to were there in person, I couldn't say, but it would explain why Lumic had sent a group of Cybermen to the event instead of just taking over everyone in the first place.

'Seeing as you're all so clever, do you have any ideas on how to make this evening as unpainful as possible?'

'Punch a robot.'

'Already on the docket and anywhere from ten minutes to an hour off.'

'Punch a capitalist,' someone else offered.

That was tempting and not just because of the boredom. With the Rider back after weeks of being without its influence and years since I was last in the proverbial driver's seat – not that I'd ever really desynced from it when I was in control –, there was little to keep me from getting a proper 'look' at everyone around me and, once you had the ability to see every horrible thing a person has done in their lives, the impulse to start swinging was a little difficult to hold back on.

To be fair, most of the people here had casual sins; being accessories by inaction or the sort of offhand cruelty that most people committed and forgot thirty second after the fact, like cutting ahead in line or taking a parking space that someone who couldn't afford private parking could have used. Those sort of things could be glossed over easy enough.

A few others, though, were real pieces of work; willfully employing sweatshops, embezzlement, extortion, abuse of every possible stripe, fraud… oh, even a couple murderers in the crowd, that was nice. Maybe I'd jostle them so they'd spill their champagne, if getting a low level Penance Stare in on them was too much to ask for. Do a little telekinetic pinch on some sensitive nerve cluster, nothing more than what would come across as a perfectly ordinary random stab of pain.

Just as I was going to attempt a little remote activated karmic hotfoot, someone brushed shoulders with me.

"You look like you're having fun," the Doctor murmured into my ear as he matched my pace. Was that a touch of the Scottish brogue he used during the werewolf adventure that I detected? It was an improvement – anything was an improvement on not being reminded of Kilgrave –, but why was it there in the first place? "You holding up alright?"

"Ha. I haven't murdered anyone yet, have I?" I replied, breaking my focus away from my intended victims. It wasn't like I could really do anything now and getting angry at their continued escape from karma wouldn't help my primary goal of 'lay low'. "For future reference; if you ever make me do this again, I'm going to do you a violence."

He raised an eyebrow. "A violence?"

I showed my teeth in what was either an unconvincing smile or a very convincing threat display. "Just one. For the sake of it being memorable."

The Doctor didn't seemed bothered by the threats. Probably because he figured I wasn't going to hurt him. Which was true, but probably not for all the reasons he imagined. "Mmm. And nobody else is going to be done a violence?" he asked.

Oh, while I would love to do that, it just wasn't in the cards today. "I can think of a few deserving individuals, but I am more than capable of controlling myself," I muttered, casting half a look towards some choice assholes.

"I'm sorry."

My eyes flicked back to the Time Lord. "About what? I think that I've explained that I'm disinclined to hold you responsible for anything you didn't do."

The Doctor reached up to rub at the back of his neck. "I put you in this situation, didn't I?" he said lamely.

What did he think was going on? "I've been in worse," I said, brushing off his concern and then mentally kicking myself for giving him more fuel for it in the attempt. "How's blondie holding up?"

The awkwardness took a sharp turn towards sheepishness. "Ah… I'd say that her pride took a bit of a sting finding out that, er, this universe's Rose Tyler is in fact a little Yorkshire."

The opportunity was too good to let slip by. "Don't terrier yourself up too much over it," I quipped.

The Doctor managed to close his mouth before his guffaw could properly escape, though the sound that escaped wasn't much of an improvement; an incredibly loud snort cut short a few conversations as people turned to look for the source of the noise.

The Time Lord forced his face into a straight expression and the searching gazes skipped right over him before disappearing completely.

"I didn't realize puns were Kryptonite for Time Lords," I said.

This was a lie. It'd taken one week of enduring Zeke to know that, even with death hanging over his head, the opportunity for bad jokes and innuendos was one the Doctor rarely passed up.

"No, that would be aspirin," he replied. "I just happen to enjoy wordplay."

I rolled my eyes. "The corny kind, it seems."

"What's the point of being a grownup if you can't be childish sometimes? Besides, everyone knows the bad ones are the best," the Doctor grinned. "Anyway, anything interesting happen whilst you were wandering the floor?"

My flash of good humor flew away as I eyed a slick-haired man in a tuxedo from across the room. Sexual exploitation and harassment, blackmail, extortion, hired assassins on three separate occasions to eliminate 'inconvenient individuals' and dropped choice information to certain parties to insure the deaths of others for free. Completely unrepentant, the crimes hovered around him like targets I should have been taking shots at.

"Does the not-so-surprising discovery that a good third of the guest list are among the most disgusting individuals humanity has to offer count as 'interesting'?" I'd seen worse, but that was to be expected in my sort of lifestyle and, by the measure of most 'normal' people, my assessment was wholly accurate.

The Doctor followed my gaze before looking back to me. There was a concern there, faintly pitying and distinctly protective. "Someone bother you?"

I'm joined at the metaphysical hip to a being that can see every horrible underhanded thing they've done to any other person in their lives and a desire to see those wrongs returned in full. 'Bother' is something of an understatement.

"They are so… casual about their disregard for everything other than themselves. It's –" Enough to make me want to give them a taste of what they've done, except carbonizing people is the exact opposite of keeping a low profile. "– aggravating," I finished, carefully unclenching the fist my free hand had curled itself into and pulling my voice back to a neutral tone.

For now, I was only here to observe.

"The 'elites' of any given society tend to be that way. It's one of the reasons why I left mine," the Doctor said. He looked ready to say something else when something caught his eye and he switched tracks. "Anyway, I've lingered long enough. We'll talk more later. For now, behave… and keep an eye out for that dog," he murmured as he slid back into the crowd, his tuxedo proving just as good a camouflage here as a ghillie suit was in a marsh.

Not that such a thing could make me lose track of him, because I'd learned to see without my eyes millennia ago and through that lens, there was little chance of mistaking the Doctor for any mundane human. After all, willingly or not, the Time Lord had hurt plenty of people over the course of his lifetime and, while most of those hurts were the mild kind, some were the sort of sins that would haunt him for the rest of his lives.

And unlike the unrepentant slime I'd been looking at before, the Doctor was painfully aware of that fact, even if he'd never see it with eyes like mine.

The Doctor tried to shake the sense of eyes watching him as he mounted the staircase, following Peter Tyler's odd escape. He was practically invisible, no more remarkable than any other member of the wait staff. There was no reason for someone to watch him, not when he had yet to break the pattern he was supposed to be following.

'Yet that sense of being watched persists.'

He shoved that disconcertion along with the rest of him to the side as he evaluated the information he'd gathered so far.

The economy of this world was relatively stable – at least from the point of view of the wealthy –, though certain parties were beginning to move in suspicious directions. The fact that all of those parties seemed to be tied to a single company reinforced that suspicion in his mind, but perhaps that was merely the paranoia of a Time Lord at work, though Lumic's short-lived appearance made the Doctor loath to discard that suspicion so easily. Too many coincidences piling up in all too familiar configurations.

On a smaller scale, Rose had finally stopped following her father's counterpart around, though trading him off for this universe's Jackie wasn't much of an improvement. Still, the lack of screaming seemed a good indication that she hadn't done anything too out of line with his request for wallflower behavior. Probably still a bit miffed about the whole maid business as well, though it wasn't as if they had any other options.

Delaine… well, she clearly wasn't pleased with the situation either. Part of it he had figured out earlier – dresses clearly weren't her thing, either in the style itself or the sheer amount of skin exposed – but the subservient and often sexualized nature of the role she was playing chaffed at her just as badly, an aspect of the situation that he'd failed to appreciate until she'd left his question about someone bothering her hanging with little more than a general statement and swallowed complaint. The only good thing in that was that she was acting on her best behavior as requested rather than doing anyone that harassed her 'a violence'.

Mickey, on the other hand, was in the wind. Whether or not he would rematerialize was uncertain, but the Doctor had a feeling the boy would. Mickey Smith was… the sort of person who naturally fell into a satellite position, he supposed. Never the one to start a project, but quick to take up the work of another once inspired to do so. So long as nobody 'inspired' him while he was here, it would be easy to return him to his home universe.

The Doctor refocused as he watched Pete Tyler ascend the stairs. There was a sense of urgency around the man, like he was trying to sneak away from his own – well, his wife's, technically – party and, oddly enough, he was succeeding. Almost nobody seemed to notice his disappearance.

'Latent psychic ability on his part or lack of situational awareness on theirs?' the Time Lord wondered as he followed Tyler away from the crowd.

'Psychic doesn't need to be your answer for everything,' his Second muttered.

Upstairs, the crowd thinned out, taking the high class clamor down to an inconsistent hum of activity. Most of the entertainment and refreshments were on the ground floor, but enough guests had ventured up to the next floor that the presence of a waiter with drinks was entirely unremarkable.

Perfect conditions for snooping.

The Time Lord looked around an empty hall, trying to get a trace on his initial quarry. Pete Tyler was hiding something. Possibly something to do with John Lumic. If he could just –

The sound of a lock turning sent the Doctor scurrying backwards into an empty guest room.

Pete Tyler abruptly reappeared from a side room, eyes darting around for any signs that he'd been followed. Apparently satisfied with the empty hallway – and not even giving half a mind to the room with its door hanging open, how serendipitously careless –, the man bustled off in the direction of the party once more.

The Doctor made another quick check of the hallway – still empty – before sneaking into the room Tyler had so quickly vacated. There wasn't much in there to speak of; it was a small office type that would have been more appropriate for a small apartment rather than a mansion and it was outfitted as such, with a desk – easily unlocked and largely empty –, a filing cabinet – containing actual files, almost all of them boring, along with a few hidden flash drives that likely weren't –, and one laptop that Tyler hadn't bothered to turn off.

'Not very good at this whole secrecy thing, is he?' Four noted as the current incarnation disturbed the screensaver and discovered that the man hadn't even bothered to log out before making his exit. Perfectly daft, but the Time Lord wouldn't complain about the convenience too much. There was no call for the situation to be a plant, no reason why Tyler would suspect someone was spying on him in his own home.

'Unless there are events taking place that we have not been apprised of,' Seven added.

'Which, given our track record, there probably are,' the Doctor agreed as he accessed the Cybus corporate network. The design was crisp and clear-cut, with what little there was in elaboration being a sense of aesthetics that, while sterile, was easier on the eye than what the default settings on these sort of things tended to be. 'But I suppose we'll have unraveled the whole mess by the end of it.'

'That or the planet will be consumed by a supervolcano and we won't have to bother.'

'That happened one time.'

The Doctor slid through the various sections of the network, taking in every scrap of information. Blueprints, factory plans, mission statements, invoices… taken as singular documents, there wasn't anything to be concerned about. Just medical supplies and experimental science with the odd exploration into more conventional money makers.

But taken as pieces to a puzzle…

The Earpods, made to respond to exact brainwave fluctuations and mass-marketed to the public. Lab grown nervous tissue and organs, made to last longer than a normal human's at the cost of less sensitivity. Braces for every possible part of the body, wired into cybernetics that responded to brainwaves and pre-programmed motions. Blood replacements and ultra-compact iron lungs. Cold storage facilities all over the globe for the preservation of deceased individuals to be revived at a later date…

And no actual plans for anything in the business quarter past today's date. No shipments coming in, no shipments going out, no concerns as to profits or public relations.

"Because there won't be any need to bother with those things anymore," the Doctor murmured, closing out the computer with a calmness that was purely superficial. "Not after the Cybermen take over."

Separating myself from the party was ridiculously easy, but I wasn't surprised. To them, I'm just a server; a pair of arms carrying a platter on top of a pair of legs in a skirt. Utterly replaceable and completely forgettable until I do something outside of their expectations.

I gave a small curtsey as a pair of fashionably dressed – not politicians, too young and too pretty, not scandal mongers, not enough sin, and not old money, not enough history – celebrities accepted two flutes of champagne from my soon to be empty platter.

There are a few people on the second floor. If the Doctor was one of them – ah, and there he is, heading back downstairs with a focused expression that implies he just found out something rather dire. Well, he wouldn't be looking for me right away at least.

That meant I could get a little privacy and, given a little luck, make a subtle exit to do a little percussive preventative maintenance. I slipped through the door that would put me on the perfect balcony to do both of those things, only to find company.

Pete Tyler was standing out on the balcony, looking lost. Which was fair; his wife was ready to leave him, the man who made him what he was doing despicable things, and he's been spying on that man in the vain hope that the information he was sending out was getting to a party who could actually do something about it. As far as reasons to despair go, Tyler had a wide range to choose from.

"Oh? I seem to be getting cornered by the wait staff a lot today," he said once he noticed my presence. "You happen to know the blonde girl? Rose, I think her name was? What do you make of her?"

Irritation welled up for a moment – why did everything have to come back to Rose Tyler? – before I exhaled the frustration in the form of a light heat haze. Now is not the time to blow up, even if I have had more than my fill of this… inanity for one evening. "I'm not here to think, I'm here to carry things from one room to another and be an understated, yet tasteful accompaniment to the furniture."

And that didn't sound painfully sarcastic every other syllable for a sentence that was supposed to be coming across as 'perky with a light seasoning of sass'. However, it wasn't my tone that got his attention.

"You're an American?" Tyler asked. "If you had the money to come over, why're you working as a maid?"

"I prefer the term 'citizen of the universe' and, as everyone knows, money comes and goes. I seem to be on the tail end of a 'going' phase." I then made the switch to honesty. "If I'm perfectly frank, being a maid wasn't high on my list of things to do before I die."

Tyler made a face that implied he knew what I was talking about before taking a sip of his champagne. "Going to ask me how I got rich?" he asked after a moment of savoring the high-end liquor.

No, because I know exactly how the game works. "You either got lucky, sold your soul for riches, someone figured you'd make a good patsy, or any combination or the above," I answered. Ignoring the sudden serious turn to Tyler's expression, I set down the platter on a table so I could focus on looking out into the dark forest on the outsides of the estate.

The Cybermen were already out there. Not traceable by most forms of sensing I had – no hearts to beat, only the bare minimum of original material retained to maintain structure – but they still made noise. Not as much as the TV show had played – the earth was soft enough to cushion anything remotely resembling a stomp –, but there was still the wheeze of hydraulics pulling their limbs through old motions and the odd grind of joints assembling quickly and without care as to getting a perfect fit. Unfortunately for my plans, I didn't have exact numbers. There had to be twenty at least if they wanted to keep everyone herded together, but there probably wouldn't be more than sixty, that would be overkill for a building of this size.

Of course, I thought as the first glimmer of steel began to become visible through the tree line, I didn't know Lumic's mind. Maybe he was the sort that subscribed to excessive force, just to make sure that whatever had crossed him was in no condition to do so ever again.

"What's wrong?"

Right. Tyler was still here. Just because my attention was on one thing didn't mean that everything else just disappeared until they were convenient again.

"Something's coming," I said.

He looked out into the dark. "I don't –"

Words would take too long to illustrate the situation, so I grabbed his shoulder and let him 'borrow' my sensory capability for a moment. His eyes immediately widened as he processed what I'd been looking at in the dark. As I let the moment pass and withdrew my 'gift', Tyler turned to stare at me.

"What – who are you?"

It was an unexpected show of manners, recognizing me as a person rather than a thing even after the illusion of humanity was disturbed, and it was enough to make me put him in my good books. "Angrir. Dellingr. Raguel. The Rider. Whichever you prefer, though I guess 'the person who's going to deal with the killer cyborgs' is the most relevant to this conversation."

"Cyborgs." He looked out at the forest again, even though his own eyes couldn't hope to see anything beyond the vaguest outline of trees against the night sky. "Why?"

I glanced at him. "Why wouldn't I? If I don't stop them, it's not like there's anyone in the building that can." The Doctor, maybe, but he was a cerebral threat and not built for hand-to-hand scraps, and everyone else had read as flat-scan. If this universe had magic, maybe a few of them had more to offer than screaming, but I couldn't rely on someone else's 'maybe'.

I waved off Tyler and the tangent. "Anyway, you better get going. It's your wife's party, it's not like you can disappear. And when the Cybermen come… run. Take anyone you can with you. We'll do what we can to stop them, but there's enough that at least a few will get through."

"We?"

I didn't have time for lengthy explanations. There was only so many robots I could break in so much time without breaking the world around them. "Don't worry about it. Get."

"What?"

God I hate the language barrier. "Go. Away. Tyler," I ground out. "We both have things to do."

Ignoring whether or not he obeyed my order, I pulled a suit of armor from my Warehouse, replacing the maid outfit with fitted leather and metal in the Asgardian style. While not ostentatious, it wasn't particularly subtle either – halfway between motorcyclist and movie superhero – and it would only become more memorable with the next step in the transformation. Not to mention it was infinitely more comfortable than a skirt.

Jumping up onto the ledge of the balcony in preparation of a further leap, I exhaled a cloud of smoke. Yes, the Rider was right with me, itching to be let off the leash. It didn't suit us to take it slow, much less stand still while the world moved around us. We were creatures of action.

Still, there was still preparation to do before we could start moving.

I pulled on one of the others and a heavy weight landed on the railing next to me, the sound of nearly silent servos and wood splintering under the grip of steel fingers confirming what I already knew.

"Tsela."

"Ąąʼ?" the Native American cyborg replied. The artificial voice box, likely designed for English only, made the Navajo nasal emphasis sound strange, but that didn't stop the old man from speaking his native language whenever he had the opportunity. Made sense, considering how long he'd been stuck not speaking at all, but it didn't stop his silvery hands from flashing through the same sentiment in sign language despite not needing to do so.

I never made a secret of the fact that I enjoyed mechanical work. There was a pleasure in making things work, in making lifeless material jump into motion just by building the right shapes out of the right parts. A good machine was the answer to a physical riddle – how does one lift what is too heavy for their hands?

Answer; make a lever and find a place to stand.

Tsela's cyborg body went far beyond mundane mechanics, even if I could trace familiar shapes within it. That was to be expected – after all, what was the point of making a life-long soldier into a machine if that machine wasn't in a shape his skills could be applied to? But there was no mistaking it for human.

It was, however, a lovely piece of work, even if he never let me tinker with it. Considering what he'd gone through and how many times his 'upgrades' had been consensual, I couldn't blame him. Still, I could admire it from afar.

Carbon fiber muscles and white artificial blood hid under a thin skin of Octocamo armor and sections of silvery plate covered the outer edges of the body, looking like nothing more than a little extra armor until they started shuffling themselves into different shapes that could do anything from plate an entire limb or scatter the outline of his body, when combined with the Octocamo, would make the cyborg invisible to everything short of a psychic.

The weapons – a sniper rifle across the back, a sword strapped to hip, and an antique Winchester rifle slung into an unoccupied spot between them by a handwoven three-point sling – were more ostentatious to look at, with turquoise and touches of old school Navajo silverwork popping up wherever they wouldn't be a hazard to grip or the integrity of the weapon itself. The only other sign of a human hiding beneath the steel chassis was the greying black hair that swept out and back from the face-concealing visor only to be tied in a close, minimum-nonsense bun.

The weapons were just as easily covered by the stealth technology as his body. The hair… well, it was rare for a person to see that part of Tsela in the first place, especially if they were on opposite ends of both the battlefield and the sniper's rifle, and if he really wanted to, he could rearrange the plates to cover it.

'I'd say it's going about as well as twenty plus cyborgs converging on an unprepared civilian target usually does,' I replied telepathically. Smoother, faster, and silent without room for misidentification. 'I need backup, you're good at cyborgs, and we're both fast.'

'All true statements,' Tsela thought back. His voice was more natural there; worn and superficially-soft, like sandstone smoothed over by desert winds. He reached back for the sniper rifle, sliding it into a ready position, already drawing a bead on the tree line while his finger rested on the trigger guard. Until he had a target, it would stay there too. 'Silent operations?'

'For starters. Take out as many as we can without alerting anyone in the house and, ideally, without alerting their controllers and panicking the civilians.' The last would be damn near impossible, depending on how well they were being monitored and no group of Cybermen operated without some form of electronic guiding force in play. The only advantage we had in that was that this was early enough for this one to lack a proper command hierarchy. 'Once they hit the house, we can start the party for real.'

'Want Yooznah?'

'Sure.' While I wasn't a gun person, the advantage of range outweighed any dislike. The Winchester changed hands and, as I trace the turquoise flower embedded in the stock, I pulse just the lightest touch of the Rider's power through it. Just as good as incendiary ammunition without risk of damaging the heirloom weapon's beauty. 'Ready?'

'Ready.'

The entire interplay took perhaps five seconds at most, half of it spent on the exchange of the rifle. Then, we were gone, with the only trace of our presence a bit of damaged railing and an imprint on memory of one Peter Tyler.

The party was a buzz of activity. The murmured conversations, scattered interruptions of laughter, and the clinking of glasses and high heels were rendered claustrophobic and deafening by the acoustics of high ceilings and hard floors, which meant when all those things abruptly stopped, the silence that followed made Rose think that she had gone deaf for a moment before she heard a single pair of shoes walking down the staircase.

Her father – no, this world's Pete Tyler was standing there, a champagne glass in hand. There was a slightly odd look to his face, like he'd gone a few shades paler since the start of the party, but his voice hardly wavered as he made his announcement.

"Now, I know I'm not exactly known for speeches…" he began.

A polite titter ran around the room at that sentence coming from a company spokesman, either because it was such a patently false statement or because most of what Rose had seen was short clips and canned phrases.

"…but this is a special occasion and, as the host, I feel like it is my duty to be the one making this toast."

Pete looked up to where Jackie was standing on the second floor balcony, her hand on the railing as she watched her husband down below, and lifted his champagne glass.

"To the woman who has, bar none, held the greatest impact on my life; my wife, Jackie Tyler."

He looked back to his audience.

"I've shared over twenty years of my life with her," he continued. "I can't say they were perfect – after all, nothing really is – and I cannot begin to number the times that I should have been at her side instead of being at the office or the amount of arguments that could have been headed off if I'd just taken a little more care towards her feelings, but I can say that many of the days I've spent with her have been nothing short of fantastic and there is not a force in the universe that could make me regret a single hour of them, except for the fact that some of them weren't spent by her side."

He smiled, the expression gentle and earnest compared to the wide plastic grin of the advertisement that had set Rose on this quest in the first place. "She is a brilliant woman and I am proud to call her the love of my life. May she have as much happiness in her life as she has brought to mine."

Her mum's alternate almost looked touched by the speech, which was slightly disappointing because Rose was almost overtaken by it.

For all there were problems in the relationship – which, to be fair, was sort of a natural thing with her mum and people in general, Rose included, given her temper –, there was an undeniable love there. And, in another universe, Rose Tyler was the product of that love.

A hand on her shoulder interrupted her musings.

"Rose, where's Delaine?" the Doctor asked.

"You don't know?"

"I found you first," he whispered. "I – you haven't seen her?"

Rose thought back. "…I think I saw her go upstairs a while ago. Maybe three or four minutes before d- Pete made his speech?"

The Time Lord hissed. "We need to find her and get out. Now."

"What? Why?"

"Because –"

There was a series of loud crashes as windows broke, metal bodies tearing through the glass and wood like wax paper. The guests immediately fell to screaming, drawing back from the intruders as more of them appeared, herding the humans into the main foyer.

The Doctor pulled Rose behind him, using his body as a sort of shield for anything that might come at her. It should have made her feel safe, but in the face of these machine men, the skinny body felt awfully insubstantial.

Worse, there was a touch of familiarity in their design, something about the structure of the head, but Rose couldn't quite – wait. That 'old enemy' of the Doctor's in van Statten's collection of alien artifacts. It'd been a boxy, disco version of these robots.

"Doctor, what are they?" Rose whispered, her voice almost swallowed up by the screaming around them.

One of the machine men stepped forward before the Doctor could answer the question. "It is useless to resist," it declared in a loud, electronic voice. There was nothing to it to tell age, sex, nationality, or even emotion. A good fit for a face that had less expression than an electrical outlet. "We are stronger and more efficient and, unlike you, we can never die."

"What are you?" a man – the President the Doctor had pointed out earlier in the party – asked. There was a touch of fear in his bearing, but it was outweighed by an obvious… pity?

"We are Human 2.0," the machine man recited. "We are –"

"– the Cybermen," the Doctor finished along with it.

"They're people?" Rose asked.

The Time Lord swallowed and looked away. "They were," he said quietly.

A projector popped up out of 'lead' Cyberman's shoulder and a blue hologram of a man all bound up in metal braces appeared before it.

"I suppose a remark about crashing the party would be appropriate," the hologram said in a dull, droning voice. It was a hair more human than the Cybermen's, but not by much. A small smirk seemed to play around the man's mouth, but that might have been an error in the transmission because nothing about him seemed to indicate any emotion at all.

"Lumic," the President hissed, looking ready to lunge at the flickering image, for all the good the pointless action would do. "I told you that this project was not to go forward –"

A Cyberman reached forward to grab the man by the shoulder, holding him in place.

"And who are you to deny progress, Mister President?" Lumic replied, enunciating each syllable of the title in the same painful style as the Daleks. "I took the derelicts, the castoffs, the abortions of society and uplifted them into something more than mere base flesh."

"You kidnapped them off the streets. Subjected them to inhumane experiments."

"And you didn't even care," Lumic said, cutting the man off. "Man is a wolf to man, Mister President, but a Cyberman will never betray his brother. Just one of many improvements I made on mankind. I have made them immortal, unstoppable."

"Someone will stop you, Mr. Lumic," Pete said, stepping forward. "The information is out there. Your Cybermen aren't invincible."

"Peter. How unfortunate. I was almost considering letting you live as one of my Cybermen, but your inability to follow orders… is not a value I wish to instill in my children." Lumic straightened his posture. "And as to the information you released… you do not think that I would share all the secrets of my greatest achievement with a patsy, do you?"

Her father reeled back as if struck.

"Don't worry," Lumic continued, unconcerned with the gob smacked expression of the man in front of him. "You won't have to live with your failure for very long. Goodbye, Peter, Mister President."

The hologram winked out and one of the Cybermen, the one that had taken the unofficial position of 'leader', reached for her da's face –

There was a bang, like a gunshot going off, and the cyborg's arm was simply gone, a dribble of white 'blood' leaking to the floor. It stared at the stump in what could have been surprise before its torso slipped to the side, revealing another clean cut slicing through its torso at a harsh diagonal angle.

And the thing – person? – that had done it was standing just behind where the Cyberman had been standing, a long curved sword – katana? – in shining metal hands.

Robot. Not like the Cybermen, except for the silver bits maybe, but the robot's silver was polished to a high quicksilver shine where the others were just sort of a dull steel grey. Also, it doesn't have a face. Just… uninterrupted mirrored silver where eyes, nose, and mouth should be.

All around, it was shorter, skinnier, and a lot more expensive looking, with every movement – especially when compared to the clunky motions of the Cybermen – as smooth as watered silk. Watching it take its sword and slide it back into its sheath – a boxy, high-tech looking thing that doesn't quite fit with the idea of a 'sword' in the first place – is almost hypnotizing, that's how seamless the action was.

Her father's mouth moved, like he was saying a name, but there was no sound behind it to tell Rose what the name was.

The Cybermen didn't know what to make of the arrival either. "Identify yourself," one demanded in its toneless shout, lifting up a hand.

"Naabeehó nishłį́. Daaztsánée yigáłígíí nílį́," the robot replied with a small bow as its hand slid into a firmer grip the hilt of its sword. The words were strange and, despite the TARDIS supposed to be translating any alien languages they came across, made absolutely no sense. "Doo dadíítsaał da níigo yoochʼííd áyiilaa."

The robot suddenly disappeared, the sound of a gunshot following its absence before three of the Cybermen fell to pieces, screeching as they fell to the floor as another at the back of the room was pulled out of a window by some sort of rope.

Immediately, the party fell to chaos, the guests running in every possible direction as the remaining Cybermen began to attack the guests, electrical currents jumping from their steel hands to kill whoever couldn't get out of reach in time.

Rose ran out of reach of the nearest Cyberman and crouched in an unmolested corner to try to pull together a plan. The Doctor had disappeared, Delaine was god-knows-where, her parents were somewhere, and she didn't know where to go from here.

So, while her brain tried to process the idea of escaping, she watched the brawl.

The robot seemed to fade in and out of vision like a mirage, sections of its body taking on the various colors of the room around it as it moved, but the sword flashing out to remove limbs from Cybermen sufficient reminder of its realness. By its side was another figure, seemingly less mechanical in nature, looking more like an armored motorcyclist than anything else, but that didn't stop it from matching the robot's speed. Dark knives would occasionally catch the light as their wielder twisted, using the chain that connected them as much as the blades themselves to disable and dismantle Cybermen.

Both of them had rifles – the robot's was long, black, and modern while the rider had an ancient looking wooden piece studded with silver and blue-green stones –, but it was the blades they were relying on for the fight. Somehow, that makes them scarier.

Together, they almost seemed to be dancing through the motions of some ultraviolent tango out of an artistic martial arts picture, never accidentally striking each other or the people around them – sometimes actually going out of their way to push or pull someone out of danger, though that didn't stop the people from running right back into it – and even going so far as to use each other as platforms to jump and roll over. Their similar sizes and fighting styles made it hard to tell them apart at times, especially when the robot decided to turn tuxedo black, but the weapons were as good as nametags.

Then, the motorcyclist lost its helmet.

How that one Cyberman had managed it, Rose couldn't say. Maybe the rider had head-butted it and ended up catching its helmet on something. She'd missed that bit, too slow to turn in time to catch the exact moment when it had happened.

But she was more than quick enough to see the burning skull that had been hiding underneath and the fact that it snarled before kicking a hole through – through! – the offending Cyberman's chest, leaving the cyborg to twitch on the floor while white foamy fluid drained from its body.

Then, the skeletal rider was gone again, twisting its knife through the steel 'ribs' of another Cyberman, bringing it to a stuttering halt, fingers twitching helplessly as its foe gutted it of wires and white fleshy webbing.

Rose didn't hang around to see what would happen next. She ran.

The corridors weren't packed, specifically, but there were enough people still standing to make it confusing and enough corpses to make the idea of slowing down ridiculous.

She turned around a corner that she thought would take her to the kitchen, only to run into a Cyberman. Before she could jump back, it had gripped the side of Rose's head, the palm of its steel hand pressed right against her cheek. The feeling of a building electrical charge raised the hairs on the back of her neck as her cheek began to tingle.

This was it. This was how she –

Right as the pain began, something black and blindingly fast kicked the Cyberman away with a thunderous clang, the cyborg crashing through a window down the hall.

Rose didn't wait to see what had saved her was. She ran down the rapidly emptying hall, trying not to focus on the burning that was the entire right side of her face.

She had to get away. That last encounter had been close enough but nobody was ever that lucky twice in the same day. Not even the Bad Wolf girl.

Suddenly, something tall and dark caught her, pulling her into a dark and empty hallway where the only lights were a pair of glowing golden eyes, like those of a cat in the dark, staring through her.

The skull-faced rider. The knives were out of sight along with the chain – had it lost them somewhere? The idea seemed absurd even before it finished crossing Rose's mind – but the antique rifle was still slung over its shoulder, the greyed and cracked wood with its silver studs and turquoise flowers a total mismatch for the hellish creature holding it.

"I'm not going to hurt you." Its voice was just barely understandable; a rumbling growl that managed to sound like a crackling whisper at the same time, while something that could barely be discerned as 'human' – or at least, human-like – hiding somewhere in the middle.

Still, for some reason, Rose didn't flinch as it reached for her face. As it cupped her cheek and ran its thumb over place where she'd been burned, there was a sense of warmth – the pleasant kind, like holding a freshly made cup of tea or curling up under a favorite blanket – as the pain eased and then disappeared completely.

In that moment, Rose Tyler felt absolutely, irrationally safe.

Then, the moment was gone.

"Stay out of trouble, blondie," the skeletal rider told her, breaking the spell as it pulled its hand away from her face. Then, as soon as it took a step back and, with a crack, it was gone. Instantly, as if it had teleported away. If not for the sudden wind that had followed it – that only happened when people ran – she might have called it that. But no, it had ran, faster than Rose could ever hope to follow with her eyes.

There was an uncomfortable sense of familiarity for a moment, like someone Rose could name had just walked over the site of her future grave.

Before she could figure out how running worked again, a hand – not steel, not bone – clasped around her arm.

"Rose!" the Doctor cried as he dragged her along behind him until she got back up to running speed. "Come on!"

A half-glance at a mirror distracted Rose as they ran out of the mansion. The burn wound that had been on her cheek earlier was gone as if it had never been there, leaving nothing but smooth unblemished skin behind, though the clear memory of pain and a bit of ash staining the area proved that the injury hadn't been just a figment of Rose's imagination.

It had healed her? How? Why?

The thought was shoved to the back of her mind as the Doctor pulled her free of one of the shattered windows.

Rose tried to turn back. "But –"

"We're not going back in there, Rose. If we go back in there, we will die!" he snapped back at her, pulling her away.

"But I need to save –"

"We can't save anyone!" the Doctor said as the screaming in the house turned from panic into pain. "We'll be lucky if we can save ourselves!"

He pulled her towards the woods, only for them to be met by a wall of marching Cybermen. The Doctor reversed, bringing them past the mansion again, where a few stragglers from the party had managed to pull themselves from the house. One of them was her father.

"Come on! This way!" she called back to them.

Only Pete listened, the rest running in whatever direction they could. Rose caught a glimpse of one woman running into the wall of Cybermen they'd just escaped, only to be lit up with electricity before being dropped to the ground.

How many people were dead already? There seemed to be too much screaming for how quickly the Cybermen seemed to be working, even with that robot and the rider fighting against them.

"Pete," the Doctor yelled. "Is there another way –?"

"The side gate!" her da replied, pointing in that direction.

They ran for it, Rose trying not to trip in the daft dress shoes she'd been given to go with the outfit. Somehow, she managed not to fall as they got closer to where the gate was…

And there was a van blocking the way, the headlights lighting up the night so brightly that Rose was blinded.

"Get behind us!" a familiar voice yelled.

Mickey? Had he come to rescue them? How –

The sound of gunfire and ricochets surrounded them, drowning out Rose's questions, but the the Cybermen kept marching towards them, not even the slightest bit inconvenienced for the barrage of bullets.

"Guns aren't going to do you any good," the Doctor said, the sound of something mechanical being pulled out of someone's hands and tossed aside accompanying his words. "Even base issue Cybermen are plated with inch-thick arnickelton, which, as far as anyone here is concerned, means 'bulletproof'."

The Cybermen surrounded them, leaving no gaps that they could hope to slip through.

"So what's your plan?" Mickey – was it Mickey? Mickey had never sounded that serious – snapped back. "Talk them to death or maybe let them feel bad enough about killing us that they drop dead?"

"No. There's only one way we're getting out of this."

The Doctor stepped forward.

"We volunteer for the upgrade program!" the Time Lord said, raising his hands above his head. "We're not resisting, there's no point in killing us –"

"What? What are you doing?" Rose hissed.

"Buying us time," he replied before turning back to the Cybermen. "We surrender and will go to conversion willingly."

"You are rogue elements," a Cyberman said.

"We surrender!"

"Anomalous anatomical structure detected. Subject nervous system too deviant to be converted. You are incompatible," the Cyberman declared, raising its hand up. Small arcs of electricity began to dance between its fingers. "Subject will be deleted from conversion pool."

Rose closed her eyes as tightly as she could, digging her hands into the Doctor's sleeve. If there was a time for a miracle, right now would be a great time –

The sound of a gunshot rang out, followed by the song of singing steel.

Rose opened her eyes to see the robot standing before them, almost nose to nonexistent nose with the Doctor. Its sword had stopped a breath short of cutting the Time Lord's face, the blade humming loudly from the lingering energy of the downward swing. Despite there being maybe less than a centimeter between the tip of his nose and the edge of the sword, the Doctor didn't blink.

The robot held it there for a moment as if staring through its eyeless mask at the Time Lord before finally pulling its weapon back, the silvery-blue blade sliding back into its sheath with a whisper until –

Click.

As if that small noise was their cue to react, the Cybermen started to fall apart at the seams. Hands fell free from arms, arms fell free from bodies, and torsos were cut apart… and the one who had caused it was barely paying attention at the destruction it had wrought.

"Cutting it a bit close, don't you think?" the Doctor asked.

"I don't know," an unfamiliar, softly Scottish voice chimed in as the sound of shoes and some sort of walking stick drew closer. "A stitch in time seems just fine to me."

The Doctor stiffened.

"I'm pretty sure that's not how that saying goes, Professor," Mickey said, sounding a bit more like himself.

"Not sure the old codger knows how anything goes," serious Mickey snapped back.

Wait. Rose turned around.

There were two Mickeys standing there, both dressed exactly the same though only one of them was wearing the right expression while the other wore a scowl. But that's not what the Doctor was looking at. Instead, he was staring at the little man with the brolly and the ugly jumper with an expression that almost looked like horror.

Author's Notes

Ayaya. That took forever to write but I'm largely satisfied with the result (the ending felt a little weak and the action a little hurried but I think I got a decent chapter overall). Anyway, sorry about the delay in updates. My life has been hectic overall (lots of medical and paperwork stuff, so much stress), writer's block has been hitting all my cylinders pretty hard, and most of my 'progress' has been in working on notes and revising earlier chapters of both this and the Pokémon fic.

Several sections of this chapter actually had to be rewritten (I think I've discarded at least 4,000 words) because they either came out too angst or too weighted in favor of one character over another. Originally it was the Doctor who ran into the Rider in the mansion and I went through four versions of that before realizing that it worked better with Rose.

I've got a decent (maybe 1/5 to 1/6) chunk of the next chapter filled out, barring any revisions, so hopefully there won't be such a long time between updates on the next bit. I wouldn't hold my breath on that one though.

Time Lords are allergic to aspirin.

Raguel is the angel of justice and vengeance. Figured they'd would be a good pick for a Ghost Rider.

Developing and writing Tsela has been… fairly difficult, both in that I'm approaching the subject as a white person who grew up in a town as white as cottage cheese and that I only have so much information to work with. Most of my information comes from Navajo websites and bloggers willing to share information on their culture, though a lot of the language comes from Wiktionary alongside the previous sources, and part of my understanding on the cultural front is that actually putting this information out isn't exactly a regular thing (a lot of what I find are familiar points being reiterated and/or given more context).

The last is probably because people who aren't Navajo like to put their hands all over the culture and make a thing out it without actually looking at it in any way that isn't 'okay so it's like [European thing that really isn't like the thing except in a really loose sense of the term] except Indian' – like what's happened with skinwalkers; the few stories I've seen about them that come from native sources online are very different – read; actually terrifying as hell – from the generic 'shapeshifter/werewolf' interpretations popular culture tends come up with.

There are a lot of cultural cues and taboos that I've come across that actively disagree with details I thought I had down pat in the first version of the character (which is being fixed here), so I've been trying to fix them as I find out more so the character is respectful. I do have fun researching things that I'm interested in (and this has been very interesting), so it's not something I consider a chore, but if any readers who know better (Navajo or Indigenous Americans in general) wish to correct any point I make, I'd appreciate the feedback.

Translating Tsela's Navajo

I don't pretend to have a grasp on Navajo (hell, my grasp of English is a little funkadellic at the best of times and it's my first and only language) but whenever I'm working with a language I don't know, I try to do better than find a generic translator, punch in what I want, and assume that it's accurate (because usually, it isn't).

So, most of this is taken from what phrasebooks I was able to find online, including Wiktionary, which I really like for a lot of reasons (homophones and etymology is cool…). In doing this, I hope that the phrases are used in the correct context and grammar, even if I had to bullshit a little bit of it when my dialogue needs became a little too specific…

Ąąʼ – 'Well?', equivalent to 'How's it going?' in English.

Yooznah – he/she forgot about it. In context of fic – an 1873 Winchester rifle styled after the Forgotten Winchester (it's got a Wikipedia page, you should look at it), decorated with silver studs and turquoise. Alternative name – Forget-Me-Not. Not sure if it's a functional name for something, but it fits with the theme I'm going with for Tsela.

Naabeehó nishłį́ – 'I am Navajo'.

Daaztsánée yigáłígíí nílį́ – 'You are zombies' is a bit more questionable on the grammar front, because while I'm 80% sure that I got the right form to make it second-person and that the first part does mean 'undead/zombies', I'm only sitting on an 70% certainty of getting the grammar right based on what little experience I have with the language. Still feels clunky but I tried.

Doo dadíítsaał da níigo yoochʼííd áyiilaa – 'He lied to you saying you would never die.' 100% on this one being correct because I found it on the Wiktionary page for yoochʼííd (which means falsehood or lie) in the examples of the word in various sentences. It was too metal not to use even if I have no idea why they chose that sentence out of every other possible chain of words.

Anyway, feel free to comment or ask questions. I'll try to answer them either in-story or in the next Author's Notes. Reviews, constructive criticisms, and commentary are, as always, welcome.