AN: And here it is! The LAST chapter of the Manifest arc that's been ongoing for almost the entire fic, since December 2013. Thank god.
Heroes & Cons: Curtain Call
The hangar of the Valiant Mk.2 was a mess. Debris was scattered all over and an enormous hole had been melted through the floor. Amy and Rory Williams were there playing mind games with the enigmatic and evil Dr Klein and his five indistinguishable duplicates; Adam Mitchell and Clyde Langer were struggling to think of a way to crawl back out of the aircraft's bowels together. It was Donna Noble and Mickey Smith who returned first.
Bright blue light punctured a hole through the fabric of reality, spreading out into an opening big enough for Donna to fall straight out of, landing hard on the metal. The legion of Kleins and the Ponds all turned to see what all the fuss was about, as Donna saw something above her and shrieked, rolling out of the way just in time for Mickey to come tumbling out second. Both of them were soaking wet and fuzzy sounds of screams drifted out of the blue-edged portal hanging in the air, before it closed like the blink of an eye.
"What happened to you two!?" Amy exclaimed, Rory too confused still by Project Crystal and Amy manipulating his mind to do much other than stare. The Kleins became agitated by two people they obviously didn't intend to come back, well, coming back.
"She threw a plane at me! And then we were on the Titanic – we nearly drowned!" Mickey said, scrambling to get away from Donna, though Donna wasn't under the influence of Klein's drug anymore. It clearly didn't affect people for as long as he thought it would. Fifteen minutes would still be enough for plenty of chaos to be cause by the Manifests living in the cities, though, Manifests with powers far more damaging than water-breathing and seeing the immediate future and superhearing.
"Did he say Titanic!?" Clyde Langer shouted up from the hole in the ground. Below deck, Adam Mitchell's foot was so injured he could hardly manage to walk, let alone clamber up busted steam pipes to get back onto the main level. That was assuming there even were pipes in good places to make footholds, and that they were cold enough to actually touch – which they were not.
They were joined then by more returners. Two golden shapes appeared like they were made from dust, stepping out of nowhere and into the present Valiant again. It was less dramatic than how this pair had left, with Rose Tyler clean tackling Clara Oswald out of the air and out of spacetime, and they were both filthy. Rose was just muddy, but Clara had blood in her hair and around her nose, and was very gingerly putting weight on one of her feet, like it was stinging.
"Enough of this," Klein said.
"I told you – you underestimated us," Amy said, "You don't know who any of us are, and all that power you thought we unleashed on each other is gonna be unleashed on you in a minute." Klein, the Main Klein, laughed coldly.
"You think that scares me? I can make twice as many of me than the lot of you," Klein said, "Eight miscreants, sixteen Kleins."
Lightning struck the inside of the Valiant – at least, that was what it looked like to people who didn't see in light-speed. A streak of horizontal electricity came zooming into their midst, closely followed by a blur of shape, both of which quickly reformed into humans – Esther Drummond and Rani Chandra.
"Did you say eight of us? Better make that ten," Rani said, looking around. Then she frowned. "Where's Clyde?"
"I'm down here!" Clyde shouted up from where he stood, supporting the enfeebled, chronic nerd Adam Mitchell, keeping him upright in case one of the others cared to come down and drag the pair of them back up so that they could actually help in the fight that was going to break out any minute.
"What are you holding?" Clara asked Rani who, sure enough, was holding something that looked a little bit like a gun in one hand. After their earlier, shared, unpleasant experience with Klein's jet injectors, though, it only took a few seconds to figure out that that was what she was holding. Another injector. This one filled with bright blue liquid easily recognisable as Oswin's cure.
"It's the cure for Manifesthood," Rani said, speaking to Klein directly, "One shot from this and you're gone, Klein, no way for you to become the most powerful man in the world anymore." And now Klein was getting worried.
"Only if you can find the right one," he said. A fair point. They had come too late to see him duplicate himself, when they had arrived on the scene there had already been six Kleins putting the finishing touches on their masterplan. And he just had to go and complicate things even more, when all six of him flickered like images on a television with bad reception. Then the Kleins split apart into twelve, multiplying like germs. Rani didn't have enough cure to zip around and give each of them a shot from the injector, it was all or nothing.
"Well then," Rose said, "I suppose we'll just have to pummel all of you until there's only one left."
"Good luck trying," one of the many Kleins said. And that was when he revealed his second power. It was nothing fancy, but neither was Rose's superstrength or Rory's invisibility. It got the job done. He raised his hand straight at Rose and, before she knew what was coming, a blast of pure concussive energy shot from his palm and blasted straight into her. Rose was knocked off her feet and sent skidding back a few metres, and after that, the first blow had been struck. There was no room for peacekeeping. The Doctor would be ashamed. Good thing there weren't any Doctors there.
Down on the engine deck below, though, Clyde and Adam were still trapped, unable to do anything to aid their cohorts and just listening to punches and explosions and funny, whooshing sounds from above. While this was all happening though, something else was going on, elsewhere on the Valiant, which was free of any HCC staff aside from Klein himself. He had cleared out all the Hazard Control Corps' personnel before taking the Valiant up; aircraft were advanced enough that one hardly needed training to fly them. And half a dozen didn't needed training to fly them, either. Why hire an army of un-augmented humans when he could just spawn an army out of himself?
The Valiant Mk.2 had, until then, been hovering harmlessly just a few metres above the Irish Sea, but now it was beginning to journey on its pre-plotted course. A course which – though none of them, as of yet, knew it – went straight over London. And they were all too distracted fighting Klein to notice.
Rose was throwing punches at whatever enemy was closest, hitting the Klones so hard they exploded into bright nothingness. Who was to say the real Klein was even in the room with them? Esther flitted left and right, surprising those who hadn't seen her pull off her electrical tricks before; Rani ran around hitting their adversaries at a hundred miles an hour and sending them flying around all over the place; Donna was screaming every which way, Clara was telekinetically blasting and turning intangible to avoid getting hit. Rory and Amy were, wisely, staying out of the action, while Mickey could do nothing except hope his Torchwood combat training was enough to battle off Klein's explosive blasts that kept throwing him onto the floor.
But the Kleins kept making more of themselves, all of them able to duplicate until the hangar was swarming with his doppelgängers (and they thought hanging out with Clara's Echoes was bad.) The Valiant was getting higher and higher, escaping the notice of everybody there except for Adam and Clyde, who were acutely aware of the engines around them increasing their output. Above deck Mickey ducked a punch from a Klein, slugged him around the face until he fell to the floor and burst apart into smoke before he hit the metal. Then he glanced to his right and met Donna's eyes.
"LOOK OUT!" she yelled, but she yelled it a bit too much. Mickey saw a Klein about to hit him over the back of the head, but then the power of Donna's wail hit the both of them and he was taken off his feet. That Klein evaporated as well, so did all of them who got hit too hard, only for the smoke to collect around their feet and slide away to reform again into Klein and his concussive hive-mind.
Mickey was falling, and thought he would hit the deck, but he didn't, he just kept going. Adam and Clyde were taken hugely by surprise when Mickey came crashing into the engine room where they were stuck.
"What are you two doing hiding!?" Mickey demanded, scrambling to get back to his feet.
"We're not hiding, we just can't get back up, it's too high," Adam explained, "And I've hurt my foot."
The same time they were having this argument about how to return to the surface and the fight, Esther Drummond was speeding around, viewing everything in slow-motion to try and deduce which one of them was the real Klein. She would be at one end of the room, then the other, then the middle, bringing up shock bubbles and flitting to safety at every opportunity, occasionally forced to zap one of the Klones. Rani was doing a similar thing, running between, popping Klein after Klein, but they just kept reforming and multiplying. By that point there must have been over thirty of him and now, with Mickey thrown elsewhere, only seven of them.
She thought of something else to do, and ran full-speed (not full speed, of course, but much too fast for anybody to do anything about it) to grab one of the Kleins, electrocuting a few as she went past just by the amount of lightning spinning around her at her velocity. She tackled him around the middle like Rose had tackled Clara, all five-feet and one-inch of her, and knocked him down through the hole in the floor as well, joining Adam, Clyde and Mickey.
They were shocked – not literally – by her appearing there with the speed and power of a real-life thunderbolt, scorch marks on the floor where her feet had connected with the metal, a Klone in her grasp. She threw Klein against the wall, not knowing if he was real or not, and stood on tiptoes to threaten him with a fistful of lightning.
"Which one's the real one!?" Esther demanded, not knowing if he would tell her or not. Now it was just six people above fighting against the army of Klones, Rani still struggling to determine which was which, Donna still disorientating all of them with her screaming. Rose and Clara were actually working together, though, Clara throwing Kleins telekinetically in Rose's direction, Rose kicking them into smoke as they came towards her. But in the long run it was no good, like fighting ghosts. Ghosts who shot energy out of their hands that threw Clara to the other side of the room so she smacked against the wall and slumped down uselessly.
"Why should I tell you?" Klein said to Esther, then he laughed, "It doesn't matter what you do, anyway, haven't you noticed?"
"Noticed what?" Mickey, staying behind Esther and keeping his distance from her electricity, asked.
"The Valiant is flying. It's locked into autopilot; you'll never stop me now. The government who control the HCC don't even know I'm a Manifest, what difference would it make if I was 'cured'? I'd still have Project Crystal, I can still control them all," he explained.
And all of this Rory Williams could hear, him invisible and uselessly lurking at the side-lines of the fight, sometimes trying to hit any of the Kleins who strayed near him as they threw their concussive blasts this way and that. Clara was getting pummelled quite badly, but she was probably used to it. Rose grabbed two of them and smashed their heads together, reducing them both to dust. Rory looked out of the back of the hangar, still open from where Donna had lobbed Mickey earlier, where Rani had left to chase Esther to the ends of the Earth. But he couldn't see the ocean anymore, just the clouds. They were now miles off the ground, and clearly moving very quickly.
In the valve room Esther sent a thousand volts through the Klein at her fingertips, him exploding like the other Klones.
"He's right," Esther said, "We've been wrong this whole time – the real Klein probably isn't even up there! This is a distraction."
"You can't give up so easily," Adam said.
"Says you, Mr Gammy Foot," Clyde, still holding him up, remarked, "Or should I say, Cryolator?"
"Don't call me that…" Adam mumbled. Clyde was amused. They all winced when Donna screamed above.
"Cryolator? That's the name of the rare freeze gun in Vault 111 in Fallout 4," she said.
"Yeah, alright, you're both nerds, but that's really not important right now," Mickey said. He saw somebody get thrown across the hole they were trapped in, but whoever it was (it was Donna) landed on the other side, rather than within it. "What's the plan? Do we have a plan?"
"Crash the Valiant," Esther declared.
"We can't crash the Valiant, we're on the Valiant," Clyde argued.
"So we'll just let him cover London in his Project Crystal, then? We'll find a way out, but the Valiant and all the Project Crystal has to be destroyed. I'm sure between the four of us we can figure out a way to blow something up."
Everything that had happened throughout the day was really taking its toll on those of them still in the hangar itself. Clara was woozy, vastly outnumbered, her head throbbing from the effort of using so much telekinesis. This was why she tried not to use it to do 'big' things, because it was dangerous and exhausting. But now she was having to try and make forcefields and throw people away from her, and her teleportation reserves had dried up.
Donna didn't know how to fight, and screaming again and again and again was becoming harder and harder and harder. She couldn't punch or kick well, could only try and turn around fast enough to yell in the general direction of all her assailants. She wished she had enough mastery over her portals to bring something else through from another dimension. A second aeroplane would be good, perhaps. Just as she was thinking of trying to bring a meteorite through, but worrying about the state of the Valiant if she did, there was an explosion from somewhere beneath them.
The whole Valiant rocked and on the other side of the room Amy, who kept seeing blips of the future and was trying (and failing) to warn her friends about when they were going to get hit and where the hits would come from, nearly fell over. A Klein staggered towards her and in a panic she grabbed his arm, intending to push him away from her, or maybe even hit him. At her touch, though, he froze up, and his eyes rolled back into his head. In her panic, she realised she had used her power.
She quickly ordered, still holding onto his elbow, "Fight against your other selves." And lo and behold, he did, holding up both of his hands to shoot a tremendous force in the direction of two of his doppelgängers who were about to go after Rose, momentarily too distracted by another Klone to defend herself. Could Amy turn more of them? Even the odds now that they were apparently disappearing, since Mickey and Esther had apparently vanished?
A second explosion from below. The entire Valiant tipped backwards. Some of them tripped and begin to slide towards the hangar's open rear, the Turned-Klein blasting three more of his duplicates right out into the sky as the ship righted itself. But now, outside, she could see plumes of black smoke trailing behind them through the clouds and the distant sea.
"What's going on!?" Clara shouted, wobbling.
"Why blow up your own ship!? You'll kill us all if it crashes!" Rose shouted at the nearest Klein.
"This isn't me," he said.
"It's you," another one added.
"Your friends are trying to bring down the Valiant," a third finished. The third one Rose subsequently decked.
A flash of blue light and a whole bunch of Klones were stunned, electricity pulsing and arcing between until they all simultaneously exploded into black clouds. Behind them stood Esther Drummond, returned to the main group, shouting for Rani, who quickly appeared by her side.
"It's no use, I have no idea which one of them it is," Rani said to Esther.
"Are you trying to crash the Valiant!?" Donna yelled at her.
"It doesn't matter if we cure him," Mickey said, clambering out of the hole on a very bumpy staircase made out of rapidly-melting ice Adam Mitchell had eventually managed to scrape together. Clyde was still downstairs, trying to blow up as much machinery as possible, creating energy like mini nuclear bombs in the palms of his hands and throwing it chaotically at the engines. "The Valiant will disperse Project Crystal over London no matter what we do to Klein, we have to bring it down."
Clara went to check if Adam Mitchell was okay, freeing up Mickey, who had taken over helping Adam along after Clyde had gone off on his own mission.
"You're not supposed to be able to destroy the Valiant!" Donna argued.
"And you're not supposed to be able to sink the Titanic," Mickey countered Donna. Esther had become the one allowing them all to talk to each other, hurling lightning bolts at any and all of the advancing Kleins, the others wondering when her aim with those things got so good. Sometimes Clara would have to help with a wave of psychokinetic energy to push back the hordes of Klones, keeping them away from her and the injured Adam. "Rani – you have to get me to wherever the controls for this thing are so I can override the autopilot." Rani nodded.
"I'll go find them." Adam was nearly knocked over from the force of her running off, just a streak of colour bashing down doors in her search for the Valiant's controls. Another explosion, courtesy of Clyde, below, as he went around and made all the individual engines go kaput. Then red warning lights began to flash and shrill sirens began to ring.
"You don't know what you're doing!" Klein yelled, one of him, all the duplicates now distracted by the destruction of the Valiant and their precious, brainwashing cargo along with it.
"No, we never really seem to," Amy admitted, losing her hold over the Turned-Klein in the chaos.
Remarkably, the clones were still trying to fight, still shooting at them and flinging Rose into one of the metal walls, her crashing into the invisible Rory nobody even knew was there. He groaned and turned visible again underneath her as she struggled to her feet, teleporting right in front of the Klein who had shot her, crushing his head between his hands until he was just smoke running through her fingers.
"I've found the controls," Rani whizzed back from her search, skidding on the metal and leaving hot scorch marks behind her. And speaking of hot scorch marks, there was a male scream from the melted hole in the floor and another explosion, this one catapulting Clyde Langer back out of the engineering deck where Rose had to catch him.
"Let's go," Mickey said to Rani, who was briefly distracted checking if Clyde was alright. Smoke and fire was spitting out of the hole now, the entire deck underneath them burning as the engines exploded. Mickey nearly punched Rani to knock her out of her trance, but she realised before he needed to.
"Get back to the Sanctum," Rani ordered, "We'll meet you there, don't wait for us, I can bring us back safely." Then she grabbed Mickey, whisking the both of them away from the larger group to wherever these controls were. The Valiant was really coming down fast now.
"Well how do we do that!?" Donna exclaimed.
"Make a portal!" Rose shouted to her.
"Right!" Donna agreed, remembering only when prompted that portals through the multiverse were her speciality. That and screaming. But the Klones were still coming, probably wanting to stop them from escaping, to force them all to die together in the flaming wreckage of the Valiant Mk.2.
Mickey nearly threw up from the velocity once Rani let him go in a dark, hot room, hot from the fires burning below and dark from smoke curling up through the floor. He saw panels and computers and all sorts of fancy controls and went straight for them, but found himself grabbed from behind by someone very obviously trying to break his neck.
"Let him go!" Rani shouted, and Mickey's assailant was suddenly gasping for breath and making an odd, gurgling sound. He released Mickey, who stumbled around to see that it was Klein, another of him, but this one was alone, lurking away at the controls. When Klein stopped trying to kill Mickey, Rani freed him from the grip of her nasalkinesis.
"He must be the real one," Mickey said.
In the hangar, Donna was desperately trying to make a portal. Little breaches kept growing between her palms, but a Klone always came out of nowhere and made them flicker and die, the Valiant heading downwards in the air. There couldn't be more than a few minutes until they collided with the ocean.
"Donna! Hurry up!" Amy shouted at her, possibly trying to use her persuasion, but persuasion wasn't going to work when it came to Donna making her portals. Rose was still punching, Esther still electrifying, Adam now managing to freeze the Kleins all the way through until they shattered into silvery dust; and all the while Donna was panicking too much to be efficient. They really needed to actually practice with their powers.
When Mickey and Rani realised this Klein was the Klein, the original sin, it took a split-second for Rani – who had been carrying that jet injector holding the blue-coloured cure around this whole time – to grab him again and stick him right in the jugular with the needle. Klein's eyes lit up bright silver, all of them rather than just the irises like in the other non-corrupted Manifests. Injecting the cure meant it worked almost instantly, it didn't take a while to kick in, like it did when it was drunk.
Rose's fist was about to connect with yet another Klein, all of them getting exhausted now from the constant, endless fighting, when he vanished in a puff of smoke before she even managed to touch him.
"What the-?" she gasped, wondering if somebody else had ended this Klone's 'life.' All around them, though, the Kleins were backing away, were holding their heads in their hands, until one by one they were all evaporating into black nothing.
"They must have found and cured the real one," Clara realised, "Rani was still carrying the injector." Now all they had to worry about was the fact the Valiant was going to crash and blow up and kill them all with it.
"Donna!" Rory pleaded with her.
And then the blue-tinged portal, black and white, static-y images fuzzing around in its centre, burst into life in front of Donna Noble, and the crackling, panicked form of Luke Smith was visible on the other side. That was the way to safety; it was called the 'Sanctum', after all.
"Your plans are over, after more than ten years, the Manifests will be free," Rani said to Klein. Mickey had his palms pressed against the central computer screen, the largest one, deducing that the biggest was probably the most important. There, through the machines, he could see the Valiant's course plot, and cut off the ship's remaining, struggling engines without any resistance from the encoded protocols designed to stop people from just switching it off in mid-air.
There was silence, just for a few moments, until the enormous, heavy ship went into free-fall.
"Get us out of here!" Mickey yelled at Rani, who grabbed both he and the dishevelled, barely-conscious Klein and took them speeding away, Mickey nearly deafened by the sonic boom Rani created in her wake.