Thank you to everyone for your readership and reviews! - TemporalPhoenix
Chapter 9: PYRAMID Calling
[The Night Market]
Leaping across a narrow gap between the roofs of two deteriorating buildings, Agent 35 kept his eyes trained on the blonde human dashing down the alley below him as he landed on the far rooftop with a hard jolt. He stumbled, nearly tripping over a rusty pipe before he found sure footing again and kept running. He his newly assigned mission partner Agent 52, who was keeping pace with him along the rooftops on the other side of the alley, were nearly parallel with their target now. Soon the Anomaly-infested criminal known as the "Bad Wolf" or Rose Marion Tyler would be in Charter custody.
The edge of the force field generated by Charter Shadow-class fighters lay directly ahead. 35 could hear the faint, pulsing hum of it despite the occasional bursts of gunfire in the distance, and he knew Tyler could hear the barrier as well. She kept frantically glancing down each road she came to, searching for another route away from the barrier, but in the end, she never really changed course for one reason or another.
From their higher vantage points, 35 and 52 could see the tell-tale signs of enforcement and suppression agents quietly barricading the roads and buildings around Tyler, and making a few secondary arrests in the process. Everything was still going to plan, though 35 personally found the whole show of force from the aerial strike teams excessive and unnecessary. The Anomaly Crimes Division had rarely needed their help to capture one Child of the Anomaly before, no matter how dangerous.
The wild chase Tyler had led 35 and 52 on had gone on long enough. It was time to stop the Wolf from wrecking more havoc on the Multiverse. Or rather, it would be time as soon as the agents' backup arrived. They were so close to finishing this assignment. They just had to push the Wolf a little closer to the barrier and then the Enforcement Division would take—
35's watch suddenly vibrated twice against his wrist, alerting him to a new message.
Silently cursing the terrible timing of his superiors, he ground to a halt at the edge of the roof, panting for breath as he yanked back his right sleeve and swiped two fingers across the screen of his watch to unlock it. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw 52 do the same on the other side of the alley.
A short message expanded into a holographic projection a few millimeters above each watch face.
[New Message]
From: Head Security Officer 8
Subject: Reassignment
35 & 52,
Effective immediately, you are both reassigned to your primary duties at the Selig House. Return directly to the Pyramid for further instructions. Enforcement Team #15862 will apprehend Bad Wolf in your place.
**35, you have been selected for a secondary assignment. Report to my office immediately.
Agent 35 gulped.
52 gave him a questioning look. 'What did you do?' he signed in Charter Standard, the movement of his gloved hands just barely visible in the Night Market's dystopian twilight. The two agents didn't dare speak yet, not while the Wolf was still within hearing distance.
'No idea. It's always something, with 8,' 35 signed back, watching Rose Tyler dart around a corner down the block and disappear from sight. He growled under his breath, scuffing the sole of his boot against the rough metal rooftop. He was itching to go after Tyler, to finally capture her and turn her over to the Charter prison wardens for processing. The multiverse would be a much safer place without someone as powerful and dangerous as her crashing through it; but the Bad Wolf wasn't his problem anymore.
As usual, the Charter officers had changed their minds at the worst possible time. Every agent that survived their rookie years came to lament this tendency sooner or later. 35 had reached that point long ago, but he knew better than to voice his opinions about the officers' decisions. He just had to resign himself to whatever fate awaited him at the Pyramid.
'Let's go,' 52 signed impatiently at him.
35 squared his shoulders, mentally preparing to face Officer 8 like any self-respecting agent should (confidently subordinate), and nodded.
He and 52 each turned the small dial on the sides of their watches, changing the holographic interface from Officer 8's message to the teleport controls. As they activated the long-range teleports that would take them back to headquarters, 35 couldn't help but wonder what kind of "secondary assignment" could possibly be more important than catching the Bad Wolf. Whatever it was, he had a feeling he wasn't going to like it.
He barely had time to wince at the frigid, tingling sensation that always accompanied travel between universes before he felt solid ground beneath his feet again, and then he and 52 were standing in the massive teleport bay inside the Pyramid.
Covered in a noticeable layer of Night Market soot and grime, their presence was a veritable eyesore against the backdrop of the bay's pristinely polished white walls. Bright flood lights lit the room from a high obsidian ceiling, mercilessly illuminating the hundreds of agents teleporting in and out of it.
Agent 52 dashed off to the Pyramid's residential sector to collect any items he would need for another long-term assignment on Earth. Agent 35 was left to force himself in the direction of the lifts so he could report to Officer 8 on the top floor of the facility.
As it turned out, she was waiting for him in the foyer outside the teleport bay's doors. Dressed in her usual black and white formal uniform, with piercing amber eyes and reddish-bronze scales gleaming under the unforgiving foyer lights and reptilian wings folded tightly against her back, the Head Security Officer cut an imposing figure amid the orderly droves of agents scurrying around her.
35 hastily did up the zip of his black uniform jacket and ran his fingers through his blond hair a few times, attempting to force it into a state that didn't make him look like he'd just lost a fight with an Anomaly-born monstrosity.
He gave a stiff salute as he came to a halt before his commanding officer. "Officer 8," he greeted. He dearly hoped that he didn't reek too much of the fishy smell permeating the entirety of the seedy pocket universe that made up the Night Market.
"Agent 35," Officer 8 acknowledged stoically. If she was dissatisfied with his less than standard-protocol appearance, she didn't comment on it. Everyone in the Charter knew that agents sent to the Night Market for assignments always came back smelling of fish, and often displayed signs of trauma related to the Market's questionable food or its bewildering excess of Earth pests. (35 counted himself lucky that he had only been there long enough to smell of fish.)
Officer 8 turned on her heel and strode toward the numerous lifts lining the far wall of the foyer with a curt, "Follow me."
Agent 35 followed. He desperately wanted to ask why he and Agent 52 had been stopped from arresting Rose Tyler, but he preferred to keep his job and new promotion, so he held his tongue.
Given her earlier message, he expected Officer 8 to take him to her office. Instead, she took him somewhere he was far more familiar with.
He had spent countless hours in the Anomaly Crimes Division's research labs over the course of his career, along with all the other investigative agents. Recently that time had been spent in Lab 1190, the largest and newest lab the Pyramid had to offer. Given the staggering amount of evidence collected from the Selig House so far, 35 couldn't help but feel a little entitled to the use of Lab 1190, since it was chock-full of the latest and fastest Charter-approved equipment.
The agents hard at work in 1190 snapped to attention when the two of them entered.
"As you were," Officer 8 ordered.
The agents quickly returned to their tasks, though some of them flashed curious glances at 35 as he followed the officer to the back of the lab. 35 was relieved to see mostly familiar faces throughout the lab (a good sign, it meant no one had seriously disappointed Officer 8 recently) and gave the agents he knew best a slight nod in greeting behind the officer's back.
Officer 8 led him past row upon row of shelves crammed with evidence that had yet to be recorded, where 35 noted with some satisfaction that Rose Tyler's so-called "dimension cannon" was no longer on the shelf where he'd put it nearly a week earlier. Someone in the lab must have finally gotten around to studying it in depth. He would have to find out which agent had analyzed it, and ask them what they had learned. He was quite curious to know how Tyler and her Torchwood associates in a parallel universe had been able to build such a small and crude, yet ultimately effective trans-universal device.
Officer 8 took him to a far back corner of the lab where a section of floor space had been blocked off with temporary containment walls. It was then that 35 realized something significant had happened within the Selig Investigation, something he hadn't been notified about at all despite being the case's leading agent.
He couldn't begin to guess what kind of evidence his team at Meow Wolf might have found that was so dangerous it needed to be specially contained in what was already the second most secure sector of the Pyramid. He'd only been away from his main assignment in Santa Fe for a week. (In retrospect, he should have expected something out of the ordinary to happen while he was gone.)
Officer 8 stopped in front of a door along one of the containment walls and fixed her stern, amber gaze on him. "For reasons you will understand soon, the secondary assignment being given to you today is highly classified. You were selected for it only because your new position as a lead investigator can provide both this and your primary assignment with an extremely rare opportunity," she said.
He gave a swift, short nod. "I understand, Officer." That wasn't quite true. He had no idea what sort of advantage he could possibly offer to an assignment, let alone a secondary one that would undoubtedly make his duties in the Selig Investigation harder than they already were.
"I assume I don't have to remind you what the consequences will be if you fail to complete your assignments."
35 forced a shallow breath of air into his lungs. "No, Officer."
"Good." Officer 8 unlocked the door to the contained section of the lab with a swipe of her watch over the handle. 35 stepped through it after her, and his eyes instantly widened.
He had studied countless images and grainy video clips of the object before him recently, even briefly observed it from a distance. He thought he knew exactly what the exterior of the Doctor's TARDIS looked like.
He'd been wrong.
For an old time ship that had survived impossible odds over and over again, there was nothing particularly impressive or intimidating about the blue police box surrounded by scanners and detectors in the middle of the containment area. It looked just as inanimate, weak-walled and vulnerable as the simple wooden box it had adopted the form of long ago.
This was a far cry from the state the TARDIS had been in the last time 35 had encountered it. He had glimpsed it in Mendocino two days after the Selig Incident while tracking down the first of many temporal echoes of the house. Back then, the time ship had exhibited a sort of lifeforce and pervasive sentience all its own that had been so obvious to a trained agent like 35 that he'd been able to sense it from a block and an overgrown field away.
35 had left Mendocino shortly after that, recalled to Santa Fe to deal with an incident involving a new portal at Meow Wolf. He hadn't seen the Doctor's ship somehow frighten off two Charter scouts who had been assigned to trail the Time Lord and Donna Noble from the moment they arrived in California. (Unfortunately, the methods the TARDIS had used to terrify the scouts remained undetermined, since the scouts assigned to leave a letter of deterrence at the ship's front doors still weren't ready to talk about it.)
In any case, whatever lifeforce the TARDIS had possessed then was almost unnoticeable now. The multitude of suppressive energetic and telepathic blockers built into the Pyramid from its ancient foundations to its tallest obsidian spire were clearly doing their jobs well.
All of this led 35 to wonder what the officers had finally decided to do about the Doctor and his red-haired companion. He knew the Time Lord would never part with his ship or companion willingly, just as he knew Rose Tyler was determined to rip holes in the Multiverse to find the Doctor.
Whatever his secondary assignment was, and however it related to the Doctor and his TARDIS, Agent 35 knew then and there that things were going to be very different. He hoped the assignment letter in the white envelope Officer 8 handed to him then—with instructions to memorize the contents and promptly destroy it—would clarify everything her cryptic explanations hadn't.
One thing he was certain his assignment letter wouldn't explain was why Enforcement Team #15862 hadn't returned to the Pyramid with Bad Wolf yet. Every member of the Charter would be notified the moment they captured her because she was such a high-profile fugitive, yet their watches remained silent. The enforcers were taking an awfully long time to do something that should have been relatively easy. Tyler had almost been surrounded when 35 and 52 had been recalled to the Pyramid.
35 knew without a doubt that if the officers hadn't wanted him to simply observe her for days on end, and if Officer 8 hadn't ordered him and 52 back to the Pyramid when she had, the Bad Wolf would already be locked away in the cell built specially for her, deep within the maximum security prison hundreds of feet below the rest of the Charter headquarters.