AN: This storyline kind of has two halves, the first half is a lot of these 'necessary evil' chapters with them actually having to make headway with the Manifest Crisis (which I find dull, which is why the chapters are probably dull.) The second half is the bit I'm excited about, and if my perfectionism has anything to say in the matter, there should be some very good chapters coming up.

Infiltration and Investigation

Clara

It was just adding insult to injury that the new Hazard Control Corps headquarters were built in the remains of UNIT's old base; the Tower of London facility gutted and refurbished to bear those glaring, yellow logos of the HCC on every pristine, clinical surface. Clara didn't like seeing one of London's oldest historical landmarks turned into a base for an immoral paramilitary organisation, not at all. She wasn't even keen on the idea of UNIT clinging to it – didn't the National Trust have anything to say on the matter?

They were dropped in London near the HCC, but not quite close enough that she didn't get a good look at London's once-bustling metropolitan centre. It wasn't bustling anymore, though. There were warning posts across all the walls, the old mantra Silver Eyes Full of Lies plastered on most of them. Clara was glad that, when her teleportation had begun to manifest, that whole glowing-eyes business had stopped. The posters decayed and the walls decayed and the entire city had become a hub of fear-mongering anti-superpower propaganda. They didn't even see anyone out and about, Rani claiming that most citizens were too scared to leave their homes anymore, especially in London (the epicentre for the entire Manifest Crisis.) And it had been that way for sixteen years.

Walking along the edge of the Thames bank, Rani halted them. She was treating them as though they were children, and even if she was now quite a few years older than Clara (which was giving her no end of internalised grief), there was still no need for it. Apparently Rani just didn't like them. Or possibly just her. Regardless, she was used to it – she got enough meaningless shit from Rose Tyler on a daily basis to be too offended. Oh, and the vast majority of everybody she had ever met. It was a wonder she had a husband (so said her Aunt Fiona, that spinster…)

"Wait here," Rani ordered them, then she glanced around carefully, "I'm going to scout the area." And she disappeared. Well, she didn't disappear, she just ran off. But very, very quickly, turning her entire self into a blur which promptly vanished in a whoosh of noise. The force of the speed of her dashing away nearly knocked Clara off her feet. It did knock Rory off his feet, which Donna found amusing.

"Can you hear any people?" Clara asked Rory, now it was just the three of them, as he stood up. She didn't know how long it would take Rani to scout the Tower of London, or if she would get caught – but surely the HCC didn't quite have the means to catch someone so fast? Did they?

"No," Rory answered after a pause, "Doesn't mean anything, it's probably all soundproof. Especially if they're keeping people locked up inside." Rory had refused to wear an earpiece, saying that he could hear everybody else's earpieces just fine and he didn't need to be deafened. It was a good thing Adam Mitchell remembered that the earpieces even existed, courtesy of Oswin, of course, and went to fetch them out of her laboratory on the TARDIS for field use. No doubt she would be happy to hear about her inventions being legitimately utilised, for once – she'd been overjoyed when Eleven, Jenny and Amy had taken those spacesuits out for their first proper run three days ago.

"How much do you hear at night?" Donna inquired.

Rory cast a scathing look at Clara, and said, "Everything."

"My sister made you special earplugs, stop whining," she rolled her eyes. She was getting really tired of Rory Williams having a bone to pick about her sex life, and she was ninety percent sure the whole thing stemmed from an inherent bitterness he and his wife both shared about the notion Clara was, somehow, 'stealing' the Doctor from them. The Doctor was a thousand years old, he could spend time with whomever he liked. And it wasn't like they ever asked him to do anything with them.

Rani shot back into their midst, coming right out of nowhere, making Clara jump.

"What did I miss? I move too fast to hear the comms properly," she said.

"The usual daily update on Clara's sex life the rest of us have to be subjected to," Donna said, annoyed, then to Rory, "I'm beginning to think you have a bit of an obsession."

"Right, whatever, I'm pretty sure nobody cares about that," Rani shook her head.

"You'd be right," Luke Smith interrupted over their comms. In the Sanctum it was just him, Adam and Mickey, "Did you find anything while scouting?"

"No, it's weird," Rani answered, "I didn't see any guards. Have you bypassed the security yet?"

"No, but Mickey's already made more progress than I ever did," he said, and the comms cut. They were very fine-tuned now, Sarah-Jane's gang, didn't get distracted by saying more than what was necessary. Not like whenever Oswin was on comms and she spent the entire time eavesdropping, not letting you know crucial information until the most dramatic moment possible, when she would suddenly let slip that she had hacked all the doors in some anonymous facility at least half an hour ago and 'forgot to mention.'

"Which way is the way in, then?" Clara asked.

"I was hoping you'd be able to sort that out," Rani remarked, and she narrowed her eyes, "Aren't you supposed to be infamously good at finding a 'way in'?"

"Oh," Clara began sarcastically, "You mean that, because I can walk through walls, I'll be helpful – but you made an implication about sex. Very funny. But pointing out that I'm good at seducing people isn't really very insulting," she turned cold at the end of that sentence.

"Do people actually say 'seduce' anymore?" Rory questioned.

"I do, and I'm the one who does it. Anyway, it's my job to get us in, is it?" Suffice it to say, it was Clara's job to get them in, having to very awkwardly drag the lot of them through one of the walls, going backwards and forwards because she couldn't psychically project intangibility onto those around her. Well, actually, she didn't have to drag Rani, because that girl had learnt how to use her superspeed to just vibrate herself through solid objects (and then Clara had been caught up imagining the pleasures of being with a girl who could literally vibrate her anatomy at will, until Donna had elbowed her in the ribs when she noticed Clara was completely zoned out.)

They ended up in a room that might as well just be an office, rows of desks, but the odd thing was that the desks were empty. Clara was painfully reminded of the frozen, wintry office where Liam Kent had made his home, and felt a psychosomatic twinge in the bandaged burn across her left arm.

"This place should be full of people," Rani said.

"Maybe they close for the night?" Donna suggested, since it was night out, "Or is it Sunday? Or a bank holiday?"

"The military don't get bank holidays," Rani said dismissively, to Donna's disappointment, "No, something's off. Look at this." She stooped down to pick something up from the floor, something which initially looked like a piece of paper, though she quickly showed it off to them and revealed it as being a large sticker with FRAGILE emblazoned on it in red, one which movers used, which was now gathering dust on the back. "They've moved."

"We'd know if the HCC moved, Rani," Luke said.

"I'm telling you, they've moved. This place is cleaned out," Rani persisted, zipping over to the door and leaving the sticker fluttering down to the ground in her wake as she tried it and found it to be locked, much to her frustration. "That's why there aren't any soldiers around."

"What are you trying to hack, exactly?" Clara asked, "This facility or the entire Hazard Control Corps? Maybe they left their servers here." And then she got laughed at, and Donna and Rory gave her funny looks for having what she thought was a legitimate suggestion about computers. Just because she had been banned from them for the better part of a hundred and forty days didn't mean the things downloaded into her brain from the Great Intelligence didn't still exist.

"It's 2029," Luke said, "Their micro-servers won't be anywhere near here, they'll be in an untraceable location – that's just the usual protocol now. They are a maximum security organisation."

"Untraceable? Seriously?" Clara asked. Luke sighed.

"Maybe not after we break through the firewalls."

"You're right," Adam Mitchell interjected, "We're trying to break into the whole HCC, not just the Tower of London."

"We'll keep working on it," Luke added.

"You'd better hurry up," Rani said, "As soon as Silver Watch get wind of what the others are up to, the HCC will scatter completely, and thousands of people will die."

"We know. In the meantime, have a look around and see if there's anything left behind," Luke suggested, and then the comms cut. Clara nearly wished that her little sister wasn't confined to bedrest that day and that she had actually come with them, because no doubt she would be legitimately handy in this situation. Rani, the self-proclaimed leader, thought for a second, then looked to Rory.

"Can you still not hear anything?" she asked, "Well, apart from the noise of Clara's ego."

"What do you mean the 'noise of my ego?'" she questioned, "Oswin isn't here." Donna laughed.

"It's all quiet," Rory said, shrugging, "Like we're the only ones here."

"It's hard to keep a proper watch on this place," Rani began explaining after Clara was made to telekinetically break the door down (because of its fancy electronic lock, she couldn't just psychokinetically pick it, like she could with a Yale lock) and send it flying into the white wall on the opposite side of the corridor. "It's a bit of a blind spot."

"So, what was your plan?" Donna asked, "If you don't know anything about this facility, you can't hack into it, and you expected it to be full of professional Manifest-hunters?"

"Well I'm the fastest woman alive," Rani argued (though Clara sort of doubted that she was the only speedster), "And if these two ran around holding hands they'd be invisible and able to walk through walls. And you can make portals to anywhere, can't you?"

"It's complicated," Donna said.

"You could help us escape. It's much harder to get out of here than Silverstorm, that's why you needed to come with me instead of Clyde. Aren't you all used to walking into danger, anyway?"

"Fair point…" Rory mumbled, though he seemed annoyed that she was right. Again, Clara's mind was drawn to the burn on her arm. Yes, she thought, they did walk into danger a lot. And sometimes danger walked into them, and pumped them full of a million volts of electricity. For god's sake – she was supposed to be an English teacher! And this was what her life was now? Feeling a sudden nag of uneasiness, she fidgeted for a moment with her wedding ring, contemplating. She wanted a cigarette.

"Do you not know where we're going, then?" Clara asked Rani, whom she suspected was just leading them through random doors in search for anything, but they just found a whole lot of empty rooms.

"I'm trying to find a way downstairs," she said, "Into the basement. We know there's something big down there from when Esther looked around and figured out they were routing huge amounts of power into the cellar – she thinks they have their own private nuclear generator down there."

"Well, why don't I go downstairs and look around? Scout, or something?" she suggested, and Rani frowned at her. "I'll just, you know, go through the floor."

"It might be a good idea?" Adam suggested down the comms. Clara kept forgetting he, Luke and Mickey were listening. She didn't remember if the other four, in Silverstorm, could hear, but she assumed not. The boys in the Sanctum probably kept switching between different lines. "Think about it – if there's anything dangerous down there, she'll heal if she comes into contact with it."

"I don't think your girlfriend would be happy about you risking my life like that," Clara remarked. Even though he was right. It didn't take much more than that to persuade Rani to just let Clara drop down, and so – to escape the somewhat hostile atmosphere – Clara slipped through the tiles.

It was a wholly bad idea. She thought that underneath them would be another corridor or office room, and she could just creep on through the rooms. Truthfully, she wasn't expecting to find much of anything, she just sort of wanted to smoke without them having a go at her. But, immediately, she was falling, tumbling through the air in a cavernous, dark room. She managed to slow her fall with telekinesis, but she still landed unpleasantly on her back with a thud.

"What was that? I heard feedback," Rani now spoke to her through the comms. Clara groaned.

"I fell. It's a long drop," Clara said, getting to her feet, her legs now aching a little, brushing off concrete dust from her tights. She went to the pockets of her jacket to get out her newest lighter and freshest pack of Marlboros before she even tried to look around, holding the lighter far away from her earpiece so that they wouldn't overhear what she was doing. Nobody ever just let her smoke, there was always a frequent and completely pointless argument.

Only when she took a long, relieving drag on the death-stick did Clara actually look around at the room and see it for what it was, and when she did she nearly dropped the stupid cigarette on the ground at her feet.

"Can you see anything?" Rani asked.

"Uh… yep…" Clara said, "It's like cells. This huge room and just cells lining all the walls." It looked like a mechanical beehive, one made of glass and metal instead of syrupy honeycombs. It was empty, though; no soldiers, no Manifests, no anything except for some small, empty boxes. From the mysterious move, she wondered? "There's a lift down, I can see, if you can get it to work," she said, spying such a thing at the other end of the room. But she also spied a door, the only other door in the whole room, and she walked up to it to see it had the name KLEIN written in silver letters across it. Silver – was that some sick joke? She found it was locked; typical. It didn't stop her from being able to phase through it in an instant though, to see that it was an office.

"Have you found anything?"

"Oh, yeah. Klein's office is down here," Clara answered, biting her cigarette between her teeth to pull out all the drawers in the desk. And lo and behold, she actually managed to find something, some handwritten papers. Even in 2013, when she came from, it was still an unusual thing to find people working high-up in government organisations to write things by hand. But apparently, this enigmatic Dr Klein had done exactly that, and he hadn't covered his tracks. "What did you say that thing you want to find information on is called?"

"Project Crystal," Rani answered, "Did you find out what it is?"

"No, but there are notes here about how Project Crystal is the 'final phase' of the Crisis," Clara was explaining as she skim-read, "It's apparently replaced Project Populace. That's what he calls the Tower of London facility," she flicked through the stray pages.

"What were they doing here?" Donna questioned.

"Making more Manifests, I think, just using Simmonds' formula, the coffee," Clara said, "I think these are journal entries, or something, rather than official documents… listen to this: 'If the HCC is allowed to continue this way, the population will soon be entirely converted to Manifests, this cannot happen. Project Crystal is my new solution.'"

"But does he say what it is?" Luke asked.

"No, but there's something here about, uh, 'Valiant Mark 2,'" Clara said, "Not much else."

"Did you say Valiant? As in the Valiant?" Mickey asked, "The aircraft carrier UNIT used to use, about twenty years ago now?"

"That makes sense, Kate Stewart told us her old colleagues informed her of plans to build a new one," Rani, Kate Stewart's chief informer, said, "After the Daleks destroyed it."

"Oh, brilliant. So that's where they are?" Donna asked, annoyed, "In the sky? The sky's massive."

"Nice observation," Clara remarked dryly.

"It's a huge, futuristic aircraft carrier," Adam said, "It can't be that hard to find."

"Right. I think we should leave, then, and wait for the others," Rani said, "We'll have to move quickly after they get out of Silverstorm. If we have to go for the Valiant, the more of us, the better."