Text Key

"Audible speech."

'Directed thought, telepathic speech.'

Rise of the Cybermen / Age Of Steel

Chapter 21 – Mother of Sorrows

Tsela Keiyouma was old. Not that that marked him out as being particularly special among the others he was probably going to spend the rest of eternity with, especially given that there was a fair list of Alters who'd had had decades if not centuries worth of experience under their belts from before he was even involved, but he couldn't quite shuck off that sense of age in the same way the others could when the mood took them. Maybe that's because he'd lived his first life from beginning to a what he would consider a satisfactory completion compared to so many of the others who'd simply been snapped up somewhere around their prime and spent every other life after that repeating the same loop of adolescence and young adulthood without getting any further than that.

It would account for his chronic inability to fake youthfulness, even when he woke up wearing the body that he'd sent off to war in so many years ago. Too many strange habits for a person to develop in a scant twenty years of life, too many figures of speech too old for his looks, too many pauses as he appreciated the lack of protest a young body came with.

Not that it bothered him – the Navajo had long given up any interest in the opinion of John Q. Public concerning anything about him. The looks as people stared at his missing parts, the condescension whenever he chose sign language over speech, the disregard for a soldier who'd been torn to pieces by an unpopular war and everything that followed it… all of it washed over him like water over a river stone. After a life filled with everything from war crimes – child soldiers, unwilling cyborgs, giant robots outfitted with nuclear ordinance, biological warfare of every possible stripe, and a dozen different combinations of each – and things that would have been better explained by 'magic' than the explanations he did get, there really wasn't much novelty to explore when it came to the depravities of war and the men who made it.

But, despite all that, just looking at a factory made for the express purpose of shaving a person down to the barest material required to make a mindless cyborg soldier was more than enough to rile up the same indignant rage that Tsela had felt looking at the depravities of his first life.

He shoved the impulse to go in there and reduce the entire thing to rubble away. There was a mission. A plan that, while it was still being formulated, required him to put those objectives above his immediate desires.

Objective One – disable and/or destroy the Cyberman army.

Objective Two – disable and/or destroy the factory making the Cybermen.

Objective Three – recover Jackie Tyler.

The first two would be easy between the accumulated brain and firepower on today's duty roster – if they got just one of the three alien polymaths to the right console and the whole mission would be wrapped up in minutes. The last… well, Tsela had seen this show before and he sure as hell knew how often rescue missions ended up turning into a joint study in disappointment and field burial. If the woman wasn't converted yet – he doubted it; these places were built on cold and cruel efficiency and she'd been MIA for at least two hours –, she would be making her way to the front of the line for it shortly.

So, that left the first two and the usual addition to any hairbrained scheme ever cooked up – try not to die in the process of completing the mission – to focus on. Fine. He could work with that. Maybe not happily, seeing as his usual solution for this was to get as many victims out alive as possible and send them on to someone else that could help, but being happy had nothing to do with getting shit done.

Tsela stepped away from the overlook that he had been studying the factory from and back towards the group, barely paying any attention to the laptop they were clustered around. It had a map of the building, one that gave a few details that were important – entrances and exits tended to be that – but anything outside of that likely couldn't be relied on if Lumic's dispassionate dismissal of Tyler's subversive efforts back at the mansion was any indication.

"For those of you just joining this meeting, we'll be attacking from three different angles. Above," the Doctor turned away from the computer to point at the massive zeppelin tethered to the factory's roof, "between," he said, dropping his finger to point at the main door, where a line of people could still be seen entering in at a zombie's pace, "and below, through the service tunnels Mrs. Moore so kindly brought up off of the blueprints."

"Tsela will join the tunnel group," Zeke said immediately, glancing over to the cyborg soldier. "He has the most experience in such territory."

Mickey – or was that his duplicate? Tsela was fairly sure that Ricky was supposed to be dead by now, but asking why that wasn't the case would probably be rude – raised his eyebrows. "Oh?"

The cyborg soldier rolled his shoulders. "Not exactly 'Nam, but I'm flexible."

'Insert joke about your boyfriend here.'

He was almost tempted to roll his eyes, but with his mask off, the risk of someone who wasn't in on the telepathic conversation misinterpreting the expression wasn't worth it. 'What, you couldn't be bothered to come up with one yourself?'

Delaine, wearing a helmet as she was, wasn't so restrained, even going so far as to transmit the sensation of eyes rolling across their telepathic connection. 'Something something Snake Eater. Joke delivered, moving on.'

'You could have put a little more effort into that,' Zeke murmured before switching to speaking aloud. "And I will assist with the zeppelin takeover."

Good. The small one – small, Tsela thinks with a laugh, like he's any taller than Zeke himself – is well adapted to the sky in so many forms that it's more a question of why he hadn't been born with wings in the first place. Probably some silly Time Lord rule about sticking to humanoid forms.

The Doctor's eyes turned towards the disguised Delaine. "And the Rider?"

"Will be escorting the Tylers. Unless they would prefer to enter the building full of killer cyborgs without backup?"

"I have no complaints on that front," Pete said, looking around the circle with eyes that filled with equal parts determination and tiredness. Tsela figured that out of all the people present, Pete Tyler probably would trust Delaine over most of them, even in the absence of knowing her true name. After all, in the company of strangers, the one that offers kindness and honesty – even when it came from someone like Delaine, who was almost entirely made up of rough-edges and social awkwardness – is the one that loses the title first.

Rose Tyler, on the other hand, seems less certain. "Are you sure that's a good idea? I mean, you're not exactly subtle and it's not like you can… just take off your helmet and pretend to be a normal, hypnotized person. T-Tsela at least looks a bit like a Cyberman."

Hm. So the girl got a good look at the Rider in full fiery fury. An interesting nugget of information delivered alongside a very good point, one that Delaine recognized as well, if Tsela was reading her right. Delaine's growl, warped by both the presence of her helmet and the Rider into something that sounded like something more akin to a combustion engine than mere human frustration, wasn't anything new – the girl had a habit of hissing like a steam engine when blowing off steam even on a good day – but it was easy enough to see what the problem was; someone that Delaine was naturally inclined to clash with had made an observation that she couldn't argue with but also couldn't immediately solve, even with all the powers at her command.

'I suppose you can't just go invisible,' Tsela mused. 'Given that we haven't 'established' that as within the Rider's range of abilities…'

'Probably because it isn't.'

'…and because it plays poorly with lesser magics, it's probably better that we don't even try it. It's much less simpler to trade positions. My Octocamo is more than capable of imitating a Cyberman.'

'If by 'plays poorly', you mean 'burns through them like thermite on pig iron', you've got it right,' she groused. Her frustration was clearly mounting, the Rider's fire intensifying along with it. It was only a matter of minutes before something that wasn't attached to her caught fire. 'On any other day, I might agree with you on trading off, but I'm shit in tunnels. Not to mention that I'd show up on any heat sensors like a human-shaped slice of hell and I'd eat my hat if Lumic didn't have any installed down there. Hard to think of a better form of detection when your own guys don't have body heat.'

All logically reasoned. 'Perhaps you could improvise a Cyberman suit? It isn't like there isn't enough scrap left over from our various encounters around town and you're fast enough to put one together without messing up our timetable.'

'…that's stupid enough to work and now I'm mad that I didn't think of it myself.'

He couldn't stop himself from smiling, though the expression was small enough for anyone who wasn't looking for it to miss it entirely. 'Hágoshį́į́.'

The seconds long exchange finished, Delaine's helmeted head turned a few degrees towards the two Tylers. "I'll be back in a minute." With that, she blurred out of sight, leaving nothing but a gust and wide eyes in her wake. Then, she was back. "Forgot something."

She reached over to Zeke, and before the psychic could react with anything more than widening eyes and a spike of surprise through their mental connection, grabbed him by his coat and – with a yell of "YEET!" – threw him bodily into the air, the small man tumbling head over heels as he rapidly gained altitude.

Completely disregarding the looks and exclamations of alarm around them, Delaine took the time to deliver the quip, "Say hi to the sky for me, bitch," just as Zeke's distant silhouette rearranged its humanoid shape into something with wings and the sensation of laughter came down his line of telepathic contact.

'400 meters before he took over,' Tsela said as his visor fed him the numbers. 'Good throw.'

Delaine's grin, though hidden by her helmet, was completely visible through her mental presence and tone. 'Like I told him, it doesn't matter if he can fly, it's the principle of the thing.'

The Doctor wouldn't deny that there was a part of him that wanted nothing more than to just run. Run back to the TARDIS, wait until she recharged enough power to break through the dimensional barrier, and leave this universe with its lack of Time Vortex and horde of Cybermen – and other unnamable, unknowable things – behind. Another part of him, one that he liked only marginally better, was snarling for vengeance. Vengeance for dead companions, vengeance for people he didn't know the names of, a vengeance that would see everything Lumic built in the name of the Cybermen burnt to the ground.

For now, however, he'd be happy with shutting it down without losing anyone else.

The two other members of this team weren't who he would have picked first – though seeing as one of his ideal choices was more than likely dead or Cyberconverted by this point, his ideal team wouldn't have happened in the first place – but he could make do with what he had.

Mrs. Moore – what were the odds of an assumed name there? Very, very high – was an interesting case at the very least. While Mickey's counterpart – Nine was still amused every time they recalled the boy's name as being 'Ricky' – might have acted the part of fearless leader, it was clear that Mrs. Moore was the brains behind the operation. She also seemed like the only one of the 'Preachers' that seemed to know what they were doing, though that wasn't exactly a position to attain between Mickey's thorny but still identical in every practical way counterpart and his shouty, gun-happy boyfriend. Under different circumstances, he might have even considered asking her to come travelling with him.

The cyborg, thankfully, seemed to be a fairly straight forward case of 'what you see is what you get'. A melding of man and machine, the former bringing in the history and the skills while the latter merely made those skills more effective. Even the stranger things – like that harmonic scalpel sword – were built on ideas the Doctor could recognize. So far as he could see, there was nothing there that would change form or break physics as the Doctor knew them, which was fantastic after Seven's doppelganger repeatedly did just that.

'And you're still blaming me for that?' Seven asked in exasperation.

'Because he knows that if you had the means and ability to get away with those sorts of dramatics, you absolutely would have done all of those things,' Five replied. 'Right down to turning into… whatever that last thing was supposed to be.'

The Doctor still wasn't sure what that had been. He'd tracked the Professor's 'flight' for about 400 meters – was it wrong if he found the entire situation faintly amusing? – and then the small man had shifted. He'd caught a twisting of the body, fingers turning into talons, the clear development of wings… and then Seven's doppelganger was gone, save for a vague flicker that would occasionally register to the Time Lord's eye before disappearing from his senses again. There had been wings – white, polished, and wide compared to the black, shadowy wisps from earlier – and all the other trappings one would expect from a bird, but the specifics beyond that were impossible to pin down.

A form of camouflage? Dimensional shifting? For the umpteenth time this evening, the Doctor was forced to admit that without more information, all he had were shaky guesses.

'It's a bit fun though, isn't it? Not knowing,' his Second said, rubbing his imaginary hands together in excitement. 'We so rarely stumble across new things these days.'

True. There was a bit of novelty in it, novelty that was disproportionately outweighed by crawling unease.

"Right, this is the cooling tunnel access," Mrs. Moore said as they approached a manhole set in a square of grey cement. There was little to mark it otherwise – no signposts or fences to say 'keep out'. A good sign… or not. Sometimes the last was a physical demonstration of 'show, don't tell'. "Shouldn't have too tight security on this end," she continued as Tsela effortlessly pried it open. "But I wouldn't go so far to assume it is completely unguarded. Lumic is… thorough in that sort of way."

"Bit dark down there, isn't it," the Doctor noted as they looked down the dark shaft.

"I've got headlamps," Mrs. Moore said, opening up her duffle bag. A few moments of rummaging finally saw the equipment appear. "Here." She then turned to the last member of their party. "Do you –"

Tsela's faceplate closed. "Vision mods are built in. I'll take point."

The cyborg dropped down the hole ahead of them, falling into a crouch as he touched down and started looking around the room. "All clear," he declared after a minute of searching.

The Doctor slid down the ladder and held out a hand to the last member of their party as she climbed down as he looked around the room. Dark, gloomy, rather sparsely decorated, a few shallow puddles of water from where water vapor had managed to condense instead of simply escaping… exactly everything that he'd expected from the words 'cooling tunnel'. In front of them, a tunnel snaked out, almost perfectly dark except for the miniscule dots of guidelights built into the walls.

They turned on their headlamps at that. Better to see where they were going rather than run into an enemy in the dark.

"Right. Let's get on with it. Wouldn't want to show up late to the festivities."

Tsela nodded and immediately went ahead, never once glancing back at the others as they started to make their way towards the factory, though he was clearly taking the time to check as much of the tunnel for traps as was practical, humming under his breath as he went.

The Warrior in particular seemed particularly appreciative of that thoroughness, though that incarnation had yet to make any voiced comment since they'd entered the tunnel. The snatches of song… perhaps not so much.

"What do you get for pretending the danger's not real," Tsela was singing just loudly enough for his words to be heard and understood as song. "Meek and obedient you follow the leader, down well-trodden corridors into the valley of steel…"

Pink Floyd's Sheep. Lovely. Especially when there were so many other songs that the man could be singing that didn't fit the situation nearly so well. Was it some crack about the fact that Lumic's factory was once the Battersea power station that was featured on the cover of that album?

"You wouldn't have any hot dogs in that wonderful bag of goodies, would you, Mrs. Moore?" the Doctor asked over the faint singing as they lost what little outside light was coming from the exit at their back, leaving just the wavering light of their headlamps to light the way. "I'm feeling a bit peckish."

He could just feel the woman rolling her eyes. "Of any possible food you could ask for, you pick the Cyberman of meats?"

It wasn't the best analogy – if anything, the cobbling together of whatever wasn't used up by other cuts of meat was the opposite of the Cyberman philosophy of getting rid of everything they couldn't use – but for the sake of not starting an argument over semantics, he'd roll with it. "The Cybermen of meats, yes, but also quite tasty."

"I have a couple curry MREs," Tsela offered, dropping out of his song as he produced a vacuum sealed packet that could just be read through the gloom. The words 'Future Curry' was underscored by a second line that said 'Extra Spicy', and the Time Lord wasn't sure if the label 'Legendary Taste Series' was supposed to be a joke or not. The fact that the brand logo was the image of a shattered skull with a banner bearing the words 'Soldiers Without Borders' didn't exactly inspire confidence either.

"I said 'peckish', not 'desperate'."

Despite Tsela's faceplate being back in place, the Doctor could swear the cyborg was rolling his eyes as he tucked the packet back in the pack that lay in the small of his back. "Suit yourself," he said before picking back up where he'd left off on the song.

They creeped further down the tunnels, only the occasional splash of water from those shallow puddles, the almost inaudible whirr of Tsela's robotic components, and the faint sound of the same cyborg singing under his breath breaking the silence. They'd yet to run into any sign of Cybermen yet, but they were likely only half the way to the factory.

"What was that you mentioned about 'Nam' earlier?" Mrs. Moore asked after a few minutes. It wasn't clear if the question was out of curiosity or a desire to break the song before it hit the verse about bright knives, hanging hooks, and conversion into lamb cutlets but the Doctor was very much in favor of the last.

Regardless of the motive behind the question, Tsela thankfully dropped the song as he answered, "Vietnam. I was a tunnel rat. First Engineer Battalion."

"Really? That would… that would put you in your seventies. Sixties at the very least."

"I was born in 1946, if that's what you're asking. Enlisted when I was… 18? It's hard to remember if I fudged the numbers on my papers or not – I can tell you it was a pretty close thing, though," the cyborg answered. "Anyway. Got sent over in '65. Did everything from scouting to sabotage and even some straight soldiering. Being a tunnel rat usually meant doing all of them at the same time. Stayed there… eh, years longer than I probably should have, lost my legs and an eye enjoying some enemy hospitality, and then got picked up and patched up by some friends. I'll spare you the rest of my life story, but I can say that 'Nam set the tone for the rest of it."

There was an implication there, the Doctor sensed, that Tsela's cyborg conversion had been a gradual process. Otherwise, why make specific mention losing his legs and an eye when it was so obvious that everything from the chin down was artificial?

As the Time Lord began to guess at what sort of technology would go into something like that – can't point at Cybermen, they were dealing with this universe's first wave of them now –, Mrs. Moore focused on something else.

"So what does it mean, being a 'tunnel rat'?" she asked before correcting herself. "I suppose that's a bit of an invasive question, isn't it? It's alright if you don't want to–"

"Ah, it's fine. Old men are the best at telling tales anyway," Tsela said before launching into history that the Doctor already had the shape of from history books and secondhand accounts. "The Viet Cong had a network of tunnels all over Vietnam from back from World War II that went all over the place. Entrances all over the place, blended into nature like it was meant to be there. Perfect for ambushes and moving around in general. Had just about everything they could want or need down there – with the right supplies, the V-C could stay underground for months."

"Well, the brass didn't think too much of that homefield advantage, so they decided to get proactive. They'd pick the smallest guys out of the lineup, give us some gear, and point us at whatever hole they wanted us to scurry down. Sometimes, they were nice enough to wave goodbye to us as we went down."

They turned around a corner, the cyborg tracing the details of the wall – all smooth cement and metal paneling instead of the lightly decayed materials near the entrance – as he continued telling his story.

"Those tunnels were nothing like these ones. They were small, close, damp, dark, and had all these tight and crazy turns that you couldn't see anything from around, so you never knew if you were right on top of a guy until you stepped on him. Even without the Cong, there were vermin – venomous and not – and boobytraps all over the fucking place. Spikes coated with poison, tripwires strapped to grenades... sometimes the tunnels were set up to be flooded on command, to keep poison gases from traveling further down the line, but they'd work just as good against people. Sometimes you'd find what was left of the guy who went down before you. That was never a fun surprise to run into."

"Sounds positively delightful," Mrs. Moore muttered, her breath hazing out in front of her face in a mist. "I imagine that cold wasn't much of a problem for you back then, was it?"

"…no, it wasn't. The heat and the humidity…" Tsela seemed to shudder for a moment, the motion distinctly uncanny as it played across that artificial frame. "No, you couldn't get me to go back into that jungle and those tunnels for anything short of world peace. Just thinking about it brings back the smell –"

The smell of what? The Doctor had some unpleasant suspicions about the answer to that question and he would be more than happy to leave the answer unspoken. The fact that this was an old man speaking about jungle warfare was more than enough to feed the imagination, even without experience in any aspect of the subject – not that the Time Lord was short of that.

"Will you be alright in there?" the Doctor asked.

Tsela started a little before turning to stare at the Time Lord, his exact expression mostly hidden by his faceplate. For the Doctor, body language was more than enough to convey disbelief. "What?"

Was the concern that unexpected? Wait, he shouldn't ask that question aloud, considering that it had surprised him as well. "Well, this is only guesswork, but I'm assuming that whatever whoever did to you wasn't too far off of what goes into Cyberconversion… And even if it isn't at all like it, I've seen what they do in places like this and it isn't pretty."

"I'm well acquainted with the ugliness people inflict on one another. What's one more atrocity?"

There was a rueful, almost broken laugh hidden beneath the obvious weariness, one that made the Doctor's instinctual dislike of soldiers a source of guilt for a moment. He knew what it was like to see too much, to be jerked around by people one simply couldn't refuse, to be witness to something when everything was telling him he should be doing something about it instead. He'd seen enough of that 'ugliness' to understand how heavy the knowledge of its existence was and to know how desperate one could be to get away from it, even for a moment.

It was one of the reasons he kept running, after all.

Running around London in search of usable Cyberscrap, with the occasional diversion to destroy a still mobile unit? One-hundred and sixty-eight seconds.

Assembling that scrap into a passable Cyberman costume? Eight minutes at most, even though I was assembling it as we went.

Regretting the decision to put that costume on?

Instant.

"Are you sure this is a good idea?" Rose asked for the third time since we started moving towards the factory. We moved quickly where we could, but switching from a surreptitious run to hiding every time a real Cyberman happened to cross our paths took time.

Not really, but… "Going in there without backup is stupid," I grit out, the Cyberman faceplate giving my displeasure a robotic tone as I slipped it on over my burning skull, motorcycle long shoved back into storage. As soon as it was in place, I turned the Rider's fire down to the lowest efficient level. No point in a disguise if it ended up with a… unique hellfire, rust, and, ruin finish that no other Cyberman would have. "Once they figure out that you weren't under Earpod control, all it would take is one tag and you'll be dead… unless someone felt like revealing his grand design like a James Bond villain."

Odds were that Lumic would be the type to do that sort of thing, regardless of if he had been converted or not, but fuck if I was the type to gamble lives that weren't mine on that.

"'suppose that makes sense…" Rose admitted. "Still, I think we'd be better off moving faster."

"With a little over fifty percent of a Cyberman escorting you? Would be worse than going in alone," I said, snapping another piece into place. It was a delicate balance of care and force, putting the pieces together on the fly, but so far, the only sign of that assembly were the occasional dents left by my fingers after a particularly difficult fit. Hopefully the Cybermen didn't have eyes for that sort of detail. "But don't worry, blondie – I work fast."

Rose didn't seem particularly convinced by that, but I didn't particularly care. Her discomfort with my – or rather, the Rider's – presence was plain to see and adding in the unknown status of this universe's Jackie resulted in a clear case of anxiety over every aspect of the situation.

I could understand that. Heck, I could even respect it. I remembered being young and powerless and worried over the fate of loved ones who I didn't have the option of being honest with.

We finally met the road, switching to that path as I continued putting up my disguise. I was working faster now that I was almost done with the larger sections, leaving just a few parts of the torso and the arms to deal with. Rose had turned her attention ahead of the group, occasionally pointing out any Cybermen that she saw ahead of us.

Pete hung back a moment, giving Rose a moment to get ahead just far enough to be unable to catch his whisper. "Do you really think that we'll…?"

Ah. Well… "No," I replied honestly as I slid the last pieces of the chest plate into place. With everything but the lower arms left to go at this point, the illusion would be complete before we were in range of the factory. "It's been quite some time since we lost track of her and I've got no reason to assume that Lumic's Cyberconversion is a slow, methodical process. There's a fair chance that the best we'll be able to do is…"

I let the words trail off because how the fuck do you tell someone that the best option was killing their loved one as painlessly as possible, but Pete's tightening expression told me he'd understood what my silence meant.

"What are the other options?"

"Well, if she has only been partially converted, I could repair the organic material or make the necessary prostheses." I'd put Mickey's barbecued nervous system and stopped heart back to factory new condition without much effort, a few missing bits weren't going to slow me down much. If too much was gone, I could just build a replacement. "If she's fully converted and," sane, "mentally intact, I could try assembling a cyborg body. Bit of a time crunch for me, seeing as I'm only going to be available for a few more hours, but I could leave instructions. Assembly, maintenance, that sort of thing. You probably have a few connections with people that could help with that."

"I don't know how I feel about that, trading one cyborg body for another."

"It'd more than likely be visually identical to a regular human's, barring cosmetic preferences," I say, falling easily into one of my realms of interest. "Might not be dependent on the same processes for survival, but I try to put as much of the sensory experience in as I can. Plus, I don't play with mind manipulation. It's an insult to my profession as a mechanist."

"You make robots that accurate?" Pete asked, surprise written all over his face.
"Make, repair, modify. Anything mechanical, technical, robotical… been working with the stuff since I –" first got into this universe-hopping nonsense, "– was just a young thing. Always enjoyed pulling things together, making moving, living art. No point in doing something you love unless you take it to the highest level you can reach."

The last line was punctuated by my flexing the fingers of my Cyberman gauntlet. A clunky thing, but ultimately livable for the duration. The dents in it were a bit regrettable, but again, there wasn't enough time for perfection.

"I suppose motorcycles fall under that purview as well," he said conversationally as we caught up with Rose.

A smile spread over my face, not that anyone else could appreciate it from behind the Cyberman helmet. "First real mechanical work I ever did. Drove my mother to distraction, having me zipping about while she was stuck at work, but she knew I'd just go nuts if she tried fencing me in."

A small ghost of a smile crossed Pete's face. "I can imagine. Never had any children myself, but the very idea of a daughter of mine doing something like that… oh, I'm not sure if my hairline would have survived that kind of stress."

Rose flinched a little at that.

As for me, I laughed. "I don't need a Magic 8-Ball to tell you that all signs point to yes. Your scalp's halfway ready for a wax polish as it is."

Was that too familiar? Probably. Still, the fact that Pete snorted at the jab meant that it was taken as the joke that it was. "Haven't heard any jokes like that since I stopped going to the pub."

I finished with the last gauntlet, sliding it into place with only a touch of struggle. "Didn't get quite the same treatment from the jetsetters, I take it."

"What's a jet – oh, never mind. No, the upper class don't do that, unless its intended to be an insult on some level or another. Getting close to another person is just another way to end up with greasy fingerprints on your good suits," Pete said before sighing. "Sometimes I regret catching Lumic's eye. Wouldn't have become a wealthy man, but I would have at least had something of a life before the world ended."

I looked up at the heavy blanket of clouds above, which were outlined by a bit of red-tinged light from the city below them. How much of that was light pollution or the regular kind was unclear but considering that this was the city that managed to kill upwards of 10,000 people with a single pea-souper that lasted less than a week, but it would likely be safe to say that both probably played a part. "Oh, I wouldn't call it an apocalypse yet. A first-class shitshow, sure, but I'd say that this world has more than a little bit of fight left in it. Humanity is nothing if not determined – after all, we started out as persistence hunters. We aren't designed to roll over and die just because the going is a little tough. Nah, we just pick up whoever falls behind and keep going after whatever it is that we're chasing."

"'We'?" Rose murmured under her breath, too low for Pete to catch but still audible to my ears.

Ah. So she wasn't expecting that. Well, I've always loved sideswiping people who underestimated me.

Conversation cut off as we drew closer to the factory. Hypnotized people and wary Cybermen were lining up near the gates, the Earpod controlled people zombielike in both their movement and silence. From this distance, it was almost like watching a chain of sluggish ants going into their anthill.

"Right now is your last chance to turn back," I said. "Because once we pass through those doors, there's no way we can escape without drawing a whole lot of attention we don't want."

While I seriously doubted that Lumic had anything that could scratch me, the Cybermen were very capable of hurting everyone else. And, as I and the others have realized time and time again, I can only be in one place at a time. Fast as I was, strong as I was, I couldn't protect everyone.

I could destroy everything – I'd killed planets before, I could destroy a couple factories easy – and I could fix dead under a very limited and specific set of conditions – five minutes, no missing parts, soul still present, Rider available – but I knew exactly how easy it was to fail even with all that power at my back.

Living creatures were fragile and even if I could put them back together, there'd always be lines to show where I'd worked. It was better to not break them at all. But you couldn't just pack people away in cupboards either, all wrapped up in newspaper and bubble wrap to keep them from being hurt.

You had to give them the choice.

"I'm not running away," Rose said, her eyes going hard.

"Right," Pete said, squaring his shoulders before beginning to walk towards the front gates of the factory. "Once more unto the breach."

Of course, they would manage to set off a trap. The tunnel had turned into Cyberman cold storage long before they were even close to their intended point of entry – it would have been more improbable for there not to be a trap with that sort of firepower at the ready. The setting off of the trap wasn't even something the Doctor could blame on Tsela – the trigger was a heat-based sensor that had been positioned at the very end of the hall behind the ladder they needed to get into the factory itself, which meant that it was ultimately unavoidable unless someone had prior knowledge and the means to get around such a thing… like a cyborg body that didn't produce body heat.

From anyone else, the Doctor might have called it 'clever', but he was loath to give Lumic anything resembling a complement at the moment, what with the depravity of making Cybermen for no apparent reason other than a desire to escape death and, slightly more relevant to the moment, the fact that a small horde of those very same Cybermen had just woken up from stasis to attack them.

'Yes, that,' his Second said dryly as a Cyberman tried to grab at the Time Lord's leg. 'I do hate it when they do that.'
"Move! Move!" Tsela yelled as he pushed them up the ladder towards the access hatch above, kicking out at any Cyberman that managed to come close enough. One of them had already had its helmet caved in by the cyborg soldier's assault, but that didn't deter the rest from swarming as quickly as their bulky frames would allow.

Ramming open the access hatch onto the hard surface of the factory floor – if they hadn't lost all illusion of stealth with the Cybermen in the tunnel, that noise had finished the job –, the Doctor leapt out of the hole and pulled Mrs. Moore out after him. As soon as they were clear, Tsela jumped straight up and out, slamming the access hatch shut on the grasping metal fingers of their pursuers. A sharp kick deformed the metal into a makeshift lock that likely wouldn't last for more than a few minutes, but that was valuable time they could use.

"Let's keep moving."

The hallways that made up the factory were and were not like the tunnels that had led them to it. They were like them in that they were sterile, cement bricks that seemed to ooze clamminess into the air, but the cooling tunnels weren't even close to this level of florescent brightness even with the aid of the headlamps.

There was also the fact that there were doors and stairs that could house so many unexpected enemies all over the place.

"What's the plan?" Tsela asked, jarring the Doctor's train of thought.

Mrs. Moore made a faint hiss as she sighed between her teeth. "Weren't you listening? We were going to –"

"Yes, yes. Infiltrate from three different angles, collect Jackie Tyler, destroy Cybermen army. First part is done, second is established, third is a broad concept. But now that we've gotten in, what's our group's target? Lumic? Whatever he's controlling the Cybermen with? Which target gets us what we want?"

"Both," the Doctor answered. "If we get rid of the control matrix, there's nothing stopping Lumic from building another. Get rid of Lumic and the Cybermen are only slightly slowed down by the loss of their primary innovator and commandant. Both need to be gone to have any hope of defeating the Cybermen in any lasting fashion."

He'd leave out how big a hope that was, because who knew what safeguards and backups the man might have made, but so far as Plan As went, it seemed to be a pretty sturdy plan.

"Alright. Then where are those things?"

"…alright, so there were a few wrinkles in the plan." While the Time Lord doubted that Lumic – likely converted to a Cybercontroller by this point – wouldn't be far from the control matrix, the question of 'where' was still relevant. "Find me a computer and I'll be able to get some information we can use."

"Nothing out in the open."

"Why not?" Mrs. Moore asked as a small group of Cyberman turned around a corner. As soon as the cyborgs saw them, they lunged, sparks already dancing around their metal hands.

Tsela dipped back around one of the strikes, a clean swipe seeing that Cyberman's arm cut off just beneath the elbow and both of its legs just above the knees, its beheading added almost as an afterthought as Tsela moved towards his next target. He turned back towards the rest of the group as the last Cyberman – now cut in two thanks to a diagonal cut that ran across its frame from left shoulder to right hip – fell to the floor.

"I'm fast, but I can't be everywhere at once," the cyborg solider explained as he sheathed his sword. "Not to mention that working around you two means I have to slow down and account for you as occupying a space I can't move through, shoot through, or cut through. This place is a rat warren of passages and potential storage units, so it's not like I can get proactive about cutting down the numbers because that means leaving you undefended. Best option is finding a that has what you need that I can barricade and defend while you work."

"Logical," Mrs. Moore said.

"I try."

Suddenly, a new swarm of Cyberman rushed them, this one many times larger than the solitary pair Tsela had just cut down. From behind them, the sound of another horde – what were the odds that it was the set they'd 'trapped' in the tunnels? – was clanging down the hall as well.

"Right! I think we've entered part of the plan that's dedicated to running for our lives," the Doctor said, pulling Mrs. Moore into motion as Tsela cut down the first line of Cybermen. So they needed a room that could be secured? The Time Lord pulled his sonic screwdriver out of his pocket as they reached a door that looked fairly sturdy. That it didn't want to open immediately was a good sign, probably.

Finally, the sealed door opened with a hiss, allowing the pair to jump inside, their cyborg companion right on their heels. As soon as the door was shut and locked behind them, the Doctor finally turned around to see what their safe haven actually looked like.

The room was small and clearly disused, though that was more apparent through the presence of older technology than any mundane signs like dust or rust. Still, there was a chance that the terminals present were connected to the main network of the factory, which meant that the Doctor could use them.

Less helpful were the Cybermen standing in the docking stations that were built into the walls.

'Just where we wanted to be,' his Eighth said with a cheery tone that only came out when he was being painfully sarcastic. 'Right in the middle of even more Cybermen.'

There had to be about twenty or so and in such different designs that it was only by long familiarity with the evolution of his own universe's Cybermen that the Doctor recognized them as such. Most of them were built like the first Cybermen he'd ever encountered, all cloth faces and convoluted tubing, but there were others that were 'further' down the line of development, slowly decreasing until there were only two with designs that were like the ones prowling around the factory.

"These are…" Tsela breathed.

"Prototypes," the Doctor finished, flashing his sonic over one in a quick scan. There was so much… less in it compared to the ones that Lumic had marching around outside. More organic material, in this case, but it was almost… crude, how that material was preserved. Effective, but primitive by Time Lord standards. Not that a lot of things on Earth counted as 'advanced' by that same meterstick, if he was being fair. "Trial and error attempts at creating an 'ideal' Cyberman design. They're deactivated for long-term storage, so they're no danger to us."

Why these Cybermen weren't good enough for Lumic wasn't much of a mystery – he remembered how well these designs moved, how sturdy they were compared to Lumic's armored, hydraulic powered versions –, but as to why the man would keep them around after finding them flawed…

'Sentimentality?' Six offered.

'He doesn't seem the type,' Five noted, 'And holding onto the old and useless isn't a traditional Cyberman belief. There's no practical reason for Lumic to keep these 'defective' models around, not when they could be using this space for something more important.'

That was true, which made the fact that this room was here being used for this purpose all that more interesting. The Time Lord could only hope that he'd find something on the computers here that would cast some light the subject.

"Are there any tripwires you can detect?" the Doctor asked Tsela.

The Cyborg looked around and, after a cursory search, started poking around the corners. "Nothing I can find out in the open, which means that there's no physical traps. Beyond the Cybermen, of course."

"Of course," Mrs. Moore said, casting a caustic eye at the deactivated cyborgs. "How could one forget such a small thing as that?"

The Doctor grabbed one of the office chairs in front of the computers – old material creaked from age under his fingers, giving another tell to how long this room had been ignored – and, spinning it around under his hand, sat himself down in front of the most likely suspect. He waggled his fingers above the keys as the computer ran through its boot.

"Now, absolute best case scenario, I can deactivate the Cyberman main control units and end this situation right here. That's likely not going to be the case, if the condition of this room is any mark of its importance, but chances are I can get some information that we can work with," he explained as he moved through the log-in information. The first walls were easy to breach and the next set only posed the lightest difficulty, but almost all the information available there was stuff he'd already seen on Tyler's home computer. Public information, meaningless numbers and technical babble, the barest tease of technology that was actually interesting…

"Worst case scenario, Lumic detects my invasion and sends Cybermen to kill us all." At Tsela's sharp exhale – was that a laugh? –, the Doctor shrugged. "Not to say that I doubt your destructive capabilities, but like you said, having to defend us limits what you can do."

"True."

The Time Lord turned his attention back to the system. More passwords to dig through, now going into more particular protections that actually required some thought. If he cared to go the long way around the process and pick apart the code strand by strand, maybe he could make his way through without disturbing anything but that would take time that he didn't have.

"Right, right. Of course this wouldn't be easy. Let's try… this," the Doctor said, punching in a password that he'd seen written on a note in Pete's office.

"WARNING – UNLISCENCED ACCESS. ACTIVATING SECURITY MEASURES," a mechanized voice announced as the whirring of activating machinery began to come from where the Cybermen were housed.

'Maybe we should have considered the fact that Lumic fired Pete Tyler a little over an hour and a half before we got here,' one his previous incarnations said a little too late to be helpful.

The activated Cybermen twitched, heads turning towards the intruders… and then away again as they began to wander around the enclosed space, some even going so far as to attempt to take over office chairs of their own, though that stopped soon after one of the heavier models managed to collapse one. If not for the silvery shells encasing them, they could have been mistaken for regular humans milling around a waiting room.

'Well, that was underwhelming," Four said. "Not to say that I'm complaining about not being attacked by Cybermen, seeing as not being attacked is almost universally a good thing, but from a purely dramatic standpoint, this is kind of…'

'Lackluster? Disappointing? Wildly unsatisfying?' Six offered.

'Anti-climactic.'

'I was about to come to that one.'

'After making your way through the rest of the thesaurus, I'm sure,' Three muttered with an unsubtle roll of the eyes.

One of the newer 'rejects' lurched forward out of its docking station, stumbling over its own feet as they caught on a nearly invisible lip between the dock and the floor. It was almost adorable and most definitely pathetic, even before it started crying. The fact that it seemed to be, against all odds, physically crying, with rivulets of black liquid running down its face, made the Doctor feel worse than he normally would when presented with a malfunctioning Cyberman.

The fact that its crying quickly picks up a loop of the words, "I want my mom," didn't particularly help.

'And we've moved past 'disappointing' to just plain 'sad'.'

"I'm sorry," the Doctor said to the Cyberman as he crouched down to its level. Instinctively, he found himself reaching up to brush some of the tears away from its face. It didn't matter if they were 'true' tears, made of salt and other human secretions or just leaking oil; the fact that they were there and the person – a child? It can't be anything but a child under that metal exoskeleton and doesn't that knowledge just burn – shedding them was clearly in pain made them authentic enough for him. "I'm so, so sorry."

The Cyberman abruptly lunged, wrapping those thick metal arms around the Doctor's body, squeezing him in a bearhug that sent his spine and ribs crackling. On a child, it would have been mere desperate affection. On a cyborg with hydraulic powered arms, it was much more life threatening.

Thankfully, Tsela was able to pull the Time Lord free before any permanent damage could be done, prying the arms apart before pushing the other cyborg back to a safe distance. "Kid. Kid. You gotta be careful. You could hurt someone if you don't watch yourself."

Immediately, the Cyber-converted child fell into crying again, this time with its looping wail taking the form of, "I'm sorry, don't hate me," – or was that 'hit'? – the words so tightly clustered together, they almost became a pleading drone as it fell back into rocking on the floor, hiding as much of its head as it could under its hands as it raked its fingers across its face and neck, the blunt gauntlets occasionally gaining enough purchase to score in the metal underneath.

What the hell had this child done to get Lumic's attention?

As the cyborg soldier comforted the Cyber-converted child, murmuring something that quickly quieted the young one, the Doctor turned his attention elsewhere.

The other Cybermen that had activated were similarly non-violent, instead opting to either curl up on themselves or shuffle around in a haze. The last, he supposed, could have been anything from being almost entirely mindless to simply wandering through a haze of shock. Shock at their revival, shock at their surroundings, shock at their current state of existence…

"Are they here because the control software didn't work?" Tsela asked quietly. The child he'd been comforting had found a comfortable corner where, while still not displaying anything that could be described as 'confidence', they had finally dropped the attempts at self-punishment.

Good. That was… good, that the child wasn't suffering any more than they had to. The knowledge may not have put the Doctor's urge to do something, anything to rest, but at least it had calmed it for the time being.

But Tsela. His words implied a familiarity with that type of Cyber-tech and his actions implied a familiarity with children who had gone through similar procedures. Those scraps of information filled in another piece of the Time Lord's mental sketch of the man behind the machine.

"No… I don't think Lumic even tried to install it until later," the Doctor said as he quickly browsed the files, brushing past the atrophied firewalls like so many cobwebs. "The only mentions of it only come up a decade after the first tests and even then, it's only regulating the extremes. It's only about five years ago that he started on the complete mental straight jacket."

A few of the Cybermen here were from after that point and each of their files explained why the control software hadn't taken. Brain damage, mental illness, extended trauma… the fact that Lumic had bothered to gather his victim's medical records, major and trivial, prior to their conversion was another oddity – why did he care about them? –, but at least it explained why so many Cybermen had been put here rather than in the main army.

Almost all of these Cybermen had been 'broken' before their conversion had even taken place.

The Doctor stole a glance at the Cyber-converted child that had almost crushed his spine, taking note of the scuffed serial code on its shoulder. Three of the numbers were scratched past recognition – though with how the child clawed at itself, it wasn't exactly hard to guess what had happened –, which meant that he likely wouldn't be able to look its specific file up, but he could guess from its behavior that it fell under the 'brain damage' or 'extended trauma' categories of 'why is this Cyberman not acting like Cyberman', though the Time Lord wouldn't have excluded the possibility that the answer was all three.

Multiple disabilities weren't exactly rare, especially where humans were involved, otherwise they wouldn't have the word 'comorbidity' to explain how so many happened to overlap. Besides, he knew from long experience with human nature – though how accurate was that phrase when so many non-humans did the same thing? – child that was already 'difficult' would just encourage an abusive parent's worst qualities.

Another Cyberman – older model but much closer to the modern set than the majority, save for a few features that were bizarrely first generation – hung back to the side, turning its head slowly as it swayed on its feet, looking around its surroundings. In any other context, on any other body, he could have mistaken it for a dazed look. On a Cyberman…

'Do you think that the fault with this one is in the hardware, the software, or the wetware?' Eight asked.

Could have been any of the three or any combination of them. There was a delicate balance that was required to keep a Cyberman working and even if it was difficult to disturb after the fact, something going wrong internally was the most reliable way of taking down one of the cyborgs without making use of gold.

"It looks like there's a body underneath," Mrs. Moore noted, walking over to the Cyberman. Its model was somewhat 'middle of the road' between the old and new designs; it still had the mylar skin rather than the heavy armor of the current generation, but the helmet was closer to Lumic's design than the boxier shape of the older models and the life support machinery was almost entirely internalized. But what the woman had likely locked onto were the hands.

Instead of them being replaced by the clunky, one-size fits all robotics that Cybermen after the earliest generation favored, the original organics had been almost lovingly preserved and reinforced with the bare minimum of cybernetics, the silver of which curled around the skin like jewelry rather than armor while the rubbery 'sheath' encasing them was as thin as it could be while serving its purpose. The hands themselves weren't what a person would call beautiful or flawless, but they were almost… familiar in their size and shape, the long, thin fingers almost conspicuous for the presence of scars and callouses.

Mrs. Moore traced the lines of one of those hands. "They're so cold and lifeless… who do you think this used to be?"

The Doctor checked the serial number written on its chest, punching it into the computer in exchange for the answer…

The Cyberman, a woman whose name Lumic had only seen fit to record as 'Del.D.1', was apparently a suicide that Lumic had spirited away from the morgue a few hours after their death, though the file itself put the truth in much more minimalistic terms. Whatever his reason for doing so, the experiment had been a failure – while there was enough grey matter enough to manage motor responses and basic physical function, there'd been too much lost to make the Cyberman more functional than that. It had no ability to speak, listen, or react in any way to anything around it. An additional note finished the story – post-mortem conversion should take place as soon as possible if it is to be done at all and only be done on corpses that had not sustained massive brain damage.

He didn't really want to know the details of what 'massive brain damage' meant in the context of suicide.

"The full name isn't there," he replied. "But she died in 1998 and her name started with D–E–L–"

A clang of metal on hard flooring interrupted his train of thought. "Delora."

Mrs. Moore was standing in front of the Cyberman she'd been so curious about, her hand hanging half open above the faceplate that lay on the floor. The face she was staring at was, again, almost familiar.

Through the corner of his eye, the Doctor could see Tsela's stiffen.

"What?" There was no way of if the word was in response to the name or that face. The Doctor pushed himself away from the computer terminal, coming closer to the Cyberman.

As he had thought, the face was disturbingly similar compared to Delaine's, just like the name had been. Softer around the edges, older in its lines, details thrown in and left out to shake up the resemblance… and an unsettling emptiness in eyes where he expected to find a sharp and biting intelligence. As the Time Lord looked into those empty eyes, he could agree that the name – Latin for sorrow – had been well chosen.

"Delora Deason. She was one of my co-workers ten, fifteen years ago. I was in human resources then, always filing and refiling paperwork. She was one of Lumic's favorite nurses. Caught his attention when he had a medical emergency while visiting the States. Very kind. Very good at her job. Dedicated mother." A brittle smile crossed Mrs. Moore's face. "That's one of the first things I learned about her. She had to make sure that she had good daycare for her girl, that was her one condition for taking the position."

The Doctor tore himself away from that empty, empty face that could have belonged in a wax museum if not for the fact that it was just a hair too real to be an imitation. "Sounds like a good woman."

The smile crumbled. "She was. Always trying to help, never trying to start a fight… though she really should have, with how her ex-husband treated her, claiming that he wasn't the father of their child yet still grasping for custody because he didn't want to pay child support. But I suppose her girl did enough fighting for the two of them – last I heard, she'd bitten her father hard enough to draw blood when he hugged her without asking for permission at the end of one of his visitations. Her reward was a lemon ice."

"What happened to her?"

"She disappeared during one of their custody disputes. A few people said it had been reported as a suicide, even if the… the rumor was that they didn't have a body. Everyone thought that her ex was responsible for it, even if no charges were ever filed." She laughed mirthlessly as the mindless corpse shuffled away, bouncing off of one of the other Cybermen as it failed to move out of the way in time. "Funny to think that he had nothing to do with it."

Missing persons cases. Assumed murdered.

Something about that seemed familiar.

"Oh," the Doctor said, shoving down his immediate reaction – it was just a story, just another human with a common appearance – in favor of asking a question that would answer a suspicion that had been nagging him for a little bit now. "What happened to her daughter then?"

Pete, Rose, and I were making our way towards the main processing floor – and the more than likely Cyberized Jackie – when Tsela pinged me.

'What?'

'Delaine. I think we just found your mother.'

Now I had to ask a stupid question. 'This universe's version?'

'Cyberconverted,' Tsela replied. 'Mrs. Moore made the identification when she took the faceplate off. Apparently Delora worked for Lumic for a time before her…'

'Ah.' I stewed over the information for a second. It fit with what could be expected, even if the fact that Lumic had desecrated the dead wasn't exactly filling me with an emotion that could be considered positive. 'Anything else?'

'Yeah. You.'

That stopped me cold. 'What.'

Author's Notes

Tsela's backstory is getting fleshed out a lot in my notes (partially because I was working on it here but I was also doing some plotting on the Metal Gear jump, among other things) so that's part of why this chapter took so long to get done (though most of it was just writer's block, my own problems, and life being busy)… and why it's a bit longer than the previous ones uploaded. Lot of Doctor focused POV this chapter, but that's just the way the cookie crumbled.

Delaine having to come up with a Cyberman costume was me realizing that I had no other believable way of getting her in the building. Thankfully, it dovetails pretty good with what I have in mind for the climax (no spoilers though).

Getting a satisfactory cliffhanger was kind of tricky, but I think I got us on a good note here.

Still working on editing some earlier chapters but I'm pretty sure I haven't done any replacements yet so that's just for future reference.

Hágoshį́į́ – you're welcome.

The Great Smog was a major weather event of 1952, taking place over about four days in December of that year. It was a remarkably thick example of a London pea souper (a nickname for the thick fog that the city was known for before various environmental acts were passed, not only named for its thickness but also the yellow-black coloring caused by the low-quality coal used by people at that time) thanks not only to local pollution problems but also an anticyclone weather event that prevented the smog from being dissipated. To give an idea of how bad the conditions were, visibility was often limited to around a meter, the streetlights did nothing, and all public transport (apart from the London Underground) stopped. Yes, this included ambulances. It also got in people's houses, which is nightmarish considering how many people it killed.

While initial estimates put the death toll of that week at 4,000 with 100,000 people being rendered ill, a lot of deaths were (wrongly) blamed on influenza, with other deaths from it happening months later. More recent research puts the number of deaths related to this event at around 12,000. Most of the deaths were children, the elderly, and people with pre-existing respiratory problems.

The Cybermen in the storage room – and the identities of two – were slightly teased at during Lumic's section way at the beginning of this arc, though not very heavily. The designs are meant to be pretty close to, if not identical to those from the Doctor's universe. Thankfully, the Cybermen are pretty easy to identify even across decades of design evolution, so you don't really need to be an expert.

Mrs. Moore being familiar with Delora wasn't originally going to be in there, but I thought it worked well enough to provide exposition and some characterization. Same deal with Pete and Delaine's interaction.

Anyway, feel free to ask any questions in the comments / review section. I will either answer them in-story or in the next Author's Notes. Reviews, criticisms, and commentary are, as always, welcome.