Cyber 1.4
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That last strike gave me access, punching through the material of the pillar, creating an open hole through the cracks. Golden-orange energy wisped out the hole an through the cracks as my swarm, my cybernetic bugs, moved around, trying to make the hole wider. The skittering of their feet along the metal made a comfortable chittering sound, and a dull roar came from within the pillar. I smiled as I exerted my control further, drawing them in. Mine.
My swarm writhed under my control. Each one of them teemed with nanomachines that could be used for upgrades, could be used to create more Cybermen. They'd convert someone without a chamber, and they'd be able to do it to multiple people right after one another. They slithered and skittered up my prosthetic arm, turning it silver, and down my body in a wave, completely under my control. Not a single one touched one biological part of me. Under my control, I could unite them, give them new purpose, and lead them into a new age of prosperity. They would have no need to spread further than those that chose to attain it, and they would be mine. All Cybermen created with these Cybermats would be mine, and all others would fall.
"Taylor, you need to get away from there!" The Doctor. I saw it now. He wasn't human, nor was he Cyberman. He was ultimately useless for what we needed, what we all needed. Worse, he was a Time Lord, something that filled me with dread that echoed into my swarm, even with the energies flowing through them, that continued to flow out of the pillar and into me. "It isn't safe!"
"Safe?" I asked, my swarm echoing me in a robotic voice. "It's safe enough to do what needs to be done."
"While I managed to redirect a good portion of the energy in the time rotor, there's still enough arton energy there to force open a link to the Time Vortex." The Doctor moved closer to me, but I moved my swarm between us, noting a small discrepancy. Normally they moved instantaneously, within the limits of their speed, but there was a slight lag.
"Doctor," I said. "I'm perfectly safe. They won't harm me."
"Interesting," he said, but then our attention was drawn to the TARDIS entrance, where the whirring of servos and clanking of metal boots indicated they were close. Cybermen. There couldn't have been much more of them here, but that didn't make them any less dangerous than the Doctor was trying to claim this area was. "But we need to go, now."
I stepped forward, and my swarm moved with me, squirming and crawling along the ground in a pile around my legs, climbing the walls of the room, and I moved past the Doctor who gave me wide berth. More accurately, the Time Lord gave my swarm wide berth, and he stared after me, waving his sonic.
"Don't worry, Doctor," I said, my swarm voice echoing me as the doors opened once more, revealing more Cybermen. "I've got this."
Five Cybermen. I was almost expecting this to be a challenge, something to rival the capabilities my swarm had at their metaphorical fingertips. They were the defective ones, giving up on emotion, on their physical forms to have a life without pain, without hardship. They worked together though, and I could respect that. It took far too much to get people working together back home, but here they were, a race of people working toward a common goal. It just happened that the goal of the current Cyberman leadership was one that was against Earth, and after all I'd given to protect this planet, that was just unacceptable.
I let the first Cyberman make it all the way through the doors before I set the swarm upon him. One thousand three hundred fifty-seven Cybermats converged on him, tearing into the metal armor that covered his biological parts. I stepped forward too, moving so that he could see me as I ripped him apart.
"ALERT! CYBER-MATS COMPROMISED!" His voice rang out, just as loud as it would have been without my attack. "INITIATE COMBAT PROTOCOLS! DELETE INFECTED CODE!"
"DELETE!" The Cybermen behind him raised their arm cannons, but I was ready, and I sent my swarm out to meet them, keeping only five hundred eighty-two near me. They fired their cannons, hitting some of my Cybermats, but my swarm was legion. Five of them versus sixty-five hundred Cybermats that were resistant to most of the problems my previous swarms faced? Oh, it was no contest.
The Cybermen shot their blasters at swarm clusters, which I countered by sending my Cybermats up their legs, biting into the joint connections at their ankles. They skittered up to their arms, doing much the same. These Cybermen were not my Cybermen, and they'd be removed, their software would be repurposed, and we would make sure that they would not impede our goals. The loss of two hundred seventy-nine Cybermats per Cyberman death was nothing of importance. Replacing them would be as simple as repurposing the cybernetic parts within the Cybermen. Three down, two to go.
Repeated blaster fire struck at the swarm from the fourth and fifth Cybermen. Their armor appeared unscratched, unfazed by the swarming Cybermats on them. I had the Cybermats bite down at the joints, seeking to separate it, but they reached up smoothly and pulled them off before I could do more than cosmetic damage.
"UPGRADING," said the Cyberman. "CYBERMATS ARE BEING CONTROLLED BY AN UNKNOWN SOURCE. ELIMINATING HOSTILE CYBERMATS."
It slammed its arm to its chest again, and a burst of electricity ran out along the floor, and as much as I had my Cybermats move away from it, two thousand and fifty shut down on impact. No. I wouldn't let it end here.
"Taylor, you need to stop," said the Doctor. "What you're doing, it's hurting you."
"No, they need to be stopped," I said, the Cybermats echoing me. The Cybermen turned toward the Doctor and I. "I'm fine!"
"DIMENSIONAL ANOMALY DETECTED!" The Cyberman slammed its hand to its chest again and reached out toward me, stomping the whole while. I threw a wall of Cybermats between the two of us, and I pushed outward with my power, pushing out with the golden connections between me and each of the Cybermats. I just needed a little bit more. Just another connection.
A fleshy hand was placed on my good shoulder, gripping it. "Taylor, let it go. You know this isn't right."
Not until they were stopped. They were a blight on what a true Cyberman should be. I just needed to get access to them, to fix them, to upgrade them to what they were supposed to be. I had an ideal in mind, Cybermen that would help humanity, not harm them. No, upgrading to Cybermen would be a choice, one that humans would make for their own good, but it wouldn't be forced upon them. I just needed to take. To take these two and show them the way.
"CYBER-PLANNER DETECTED!" Yes, the Cybermen were mine. I was worming my way in. They would never harm anyone on Earth again.
"Taylor, whatever you're doing, you need to let it go, let it fade." The Doctor knew nothing of what was to come. He wanted to send them away, where they could do whatever they wanted. I knew better. "Listen to me. You're tapping into the psychic field inherent to the Cybermen, and your will is being broadcast along their network, but it isn't just one way."
"Doctor, they need to be stopped," I managed to force out. "All of them who harm humanity need to be deleted."
"Oh, Taylor..." The Doctor looked at me with a pitying face. "I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry..."
What was he apologizing for?
He squeezed my shoulder and pulled me away from the swarm, just as a Cyberman fired on our position without my permission. He pulled one of the levers on the console, and I heard a whirring sound that sounded almost like someone breathing, in and out. With each pulse of the sound, the world faded around us, the Cybermen faded, and so did my Cybermats. I started to fade as well, but the Doctor squeezed my shoulder and used his sonic on my prosthetic, causing it to fall off my body. He then wrapped me in a hug as the noise began to fade.
When it had stopped completely, we were in the middle of what appeared to be a supply closet, and the Doctor was still hugging me. The room seemed much smaller than the room we'd been in. I didn't have an explanation for that, but powers could be good enough. Just...
"Doctor, what did you do?" I couldn't feel any of them. No swarm, no Cybermen, no Cybermats… they were all gone, taken from me all at once. My head throbbed as thousands of things under my control suddenly weren't there. It wasn't entirely like the bank robbery, but the sudden disappearance hurt. It was like my power was trying to act on thin air, but it couldn't latch onto anything. Normally it'd just grab onto the bugs in my radius, or later the people, but it didn't here. It didn't switch itself off, it just… lingered, looking. "What did you do?"
The Doctor reached his hands up and placed them on either side of my head, rubbing at my temples. The pain abated some, and he stepped away. "Well, that's better, isn't it?"
I nodded, but I narrowed my eyes at him again. The pain had practically faded completely. "What, exactly did you do?"
"Well… I reconfigured the trans-mat so that it would target the non-Cyberman occupants of the TARDIS and make sure that we ended up outside once I flipped the switch." The Doctor smiled, looking me over. "And then, I sent the TARDIS on its way, activating its emergency return protocol. It should be halfway across the universe to the constellation of Kasterborous by now, assuming its rotor isn't too damaged from your hit."
"So, you sent the Cybermen, and that swarm of Cybermats to somewhere across the universe?" I'd been in some sort of space ship? Strange, but no less strange than an army of mechanical bugs that I'd been able to control. Even that wasn't less strange than Scion, and I'd killed him.
"No, I sent the TARDIS there," said the Doctor. "I expect that the Cybermen would be ejected into the Time Vortex or into one of the stars of the constellation along the way. Each and every one of them, destroyed."
Well, that was a small comfort, at least. "And my arm?" I asked, gesturing to my now empty stump. "Why did that stay on the ship?"
"It had started to undergo some Cyber-conversion. I couldn't reprogram it in time to save your arm, and for that I'm sorry."
I waved him off, and I started for the door. Wait, he'd said Time Vortex… and he was a Time Lord. I gave an involuntary shudder. I didn't know why, but I was pretty sure whatever connection I had with my passenger, it was the one feeding me that feeling. I stopped, turning back toward the Doctor. "So that was a spaceship, then?"
"Well… not exactly," said the Doctor. "Yes and no, really. It's not just a spaceship." The Doctor opened the door of the supply closet, revealing the hallway we'd entered the room from. There were no tables, no arms, nothing in the way between us.
"Which you know how to work on," I said, following the Doctor down the hallway. I could have walked away from him then, but he'd… helped, there at the end. He'd taken away the influences on my thoughts, and then he'd done something else. I could only vaguely feel my power, but even then, it still didn't have something to grab on to. "You said before that you were a Time Lord. An Alien, just like the Cybermen."
"No, not like the Cybermen. I might not be human, but I care what happens to Earth." It was strange to hear him confirm it. I mean, I knew that Scion had been alien, and my thought processes toward the end there certainly weren't anything close to human, but it was strange to have someone so human-looking genuinely confirm what he was.
"So, what are the differences then?" I asked. "The Cybermen were human, but you aren't. However, they look less human than you do."
"They look less Time Lord than you do, too," said the Doctor with a smirk as he opened the door at the end of the hall. "There's a lot of differences that you won't notice from just looking."
We looked out the door to the main train station. The central platform had been devastated. There hadn't been all that many Cybermen, and once I'd taken control of the Cybermats, they hadn't had the ability to make more. Instead, they'd chosen to scare people, corral them away from the platforms. Some had died due to blaster fire, others had died due to electric shock, but the bulk of the people that had died had done so to trampling. Those alive were huddled together and being tended to by the emergency service officers that had arrived. There were about twenty of them, each wearing black and green fatigues with a red beret situated on their heads. They held assault rifles, but some of them had them slung across their back. Three of them came over to us, two men, one fair-skinned and one a bit more tan and a fair-skinned blonde woman. The woman appeared to have a higher rank than the other two, and she seemed to be a bit older too. If I'd had to guess, I would have placed her at about Dad's age, maybe a little older. When the three of them reached us, they simultaneously saluted.
"Oh no, don't do that," said the Doctor. "I hate it when you do that.
"Sir, UNIT is on site, containing the threat," said the woman. "The attack was by Cybermen, correct, sir?"
"Yes, yes," said the Doctor. "It's all taken care of but the clean-up."
"UNIT?" I asked, cocking an eyebrow, and the woman looked to me, frowning. I took a closer look at her and returned the frown. Something about her seemed familiar, but I couldn't place my finger on it.
"Stands for Unified Intelligence Taskforce, and it used to be United Nations Intelligence Taskforce." The Doctor waved at them. "They're the government getting involved with aliens. And sometimes they grab things they shouldn't. Be back. Oi! You!" The Doctor walked after a UNIT officer carrying a suitcase of some kind.
Ah. So they were the local version of the PRT. That made some sense. Having this kind of organization was almost necessary, and hopefully they weren't as corrupt as the PRT. Their deference to an alien actually was a good idea in some ways. It's what I'd hoped for Brockton's PRT after Tagg's removal, only switch out alien for parahuman.
"So, they're going to clean up whatever the Cybermen left behind and deal with..." I glanced to the bodies.
"Yes, ma'am," said one of the lady's subordinates. Of course, his accent made it sound like he'd said "mum," but I wouldn't hold it against him. "We'll make sure that all bodies get treated properly."
"Good," I said, looking away from them. I hadn't had the time or inclination when we'd faced Scion. A death was a death if it wasn't useful. Maybe this would help make up for that. "Are the trains still going to be on time?"
"I'm sorry, but no trains will be coming to King's Cross for the next day and a half. They'll all be rerouted," said the woman, and I frowned.
"I was supposed to be in Cardiff by tomorrow." I glanced toward Platform Eight. My train was supposed to come in through that. "How am I going to make it there now?"
"Your ticket will get a full refund, of course," said the woman. "But, aren't you traveling with the Doctor? He can get you to Cardiff."
"Not exactly," I said with a shrug. "I was just a concerned citizen who thought she could help."
"Not many do, Miss."
"Taylor," I said, giving my real first name and fighting down the instinct to use my Wards name. Weaver and Skitter were gone. I was left.
"I'm Kate Stewart, director of these operations. If you have any trouble, I'll make sure you get where you need to be." The blonde saluted me, now, and I returned the salute before glancing in the Doctor's direction. He'd started toward that blue box with POLICE written on its marquee that sat between Platforms Four and Five. He was bringing the annoyingly familiar suitcase with him.
"Thank you," I said vaguely as I started off toward the Doctor. I didn't quite make it before he opened the door to the box inward and shoved the suitcase inside. He shut it shortly afterward, and he turned around to face me.
"Taylor. I thought you'd be waiting over there." The Doctor gestured to where I'd been standing.
"I've never been all that much of a waiting person," I said. "So this thing's yours?"
"Yes, she's my TARDIS," said the Doctor, and I cocked an eyebrow. His TARDIS, he'd said, and the Cybermats had been feeding on the power source of another one.
"This is your spaceship?"I asked with an incredulous tone.
"She travels through time too," said the Doctor with a bit of pride.
"Bullshit," I said almost instantaneously. "Time travel takes a lot of power, nearly enough to blow up half of India. That can't travel through time without that."
"Clever, but I've already thought of how to prove it." The Doctor smirked and then he slipped into the Blue Box. That same heaving, whirring sound started like earlier, only this time, it was the blue box that was disappearing without me. I didn't dare to try and comprehend how it did that, but it had literally faded out of view completely, taking the sound with it.
Of course, less than a minute later, the sound started up again, and the blue box started to fade in, about six inches to the right of where it had been. When it fully appeared, the door started opening. "Doctor?"
"Yes, I'm here," said the Doctor as the door opened inward. He looked a little distracted, but the main thing I did notice was that he'd taken off his tie, the one that had been oddly similar to the one he'd taken off this morning and given to me. Perhaps… it had even been the same tie. "What do you think, that proof enough for you?"
"Time travel. And Space travel," I said, just clarifying that in my mind.
"Whole universe full of things to see and do. Plus I owe you a trip to get your arm replaced," said the Doctor. "One trip for certain, there and back. After you've gotten your new arm, we'll get you back here."
"Why just the one trip?" I asked.
"Well, you see… I've lost people before," said the Doctor. "I don't want to lose any more."
I nodded. I knew how that felt. God, I knew how that felt. Losing people was always terrible, and that he'd endured it alone, it seemed. I'd been with everyone at the end there, but with everyone united, it was so lonely.
"You won't lose me," I said, and he nodded, pushing the door to the box open.
"Come on inside." He gestured behind him, and I passed him by on the way in. Despite the size of the box's exterior, it quickly became clear to me that the interior was magnitudes bigger. I'd almost had to do a double-take, but I managed to keep that reaction under control.
"Huh," I said with a smile. "You have your own pocket dimension."
The Doctor looked at me like I kicked his favorite puppy for half a second before going over to the central console and messing with the levers and dials. "All right, are you ready? You might want to grab onto something with your good arm."
"Ready," I said, grabbing onto the railing nearby. The Doctor nodded in acknowledgment, and he flipped a lever on the console. I looked forward to getting a new and better prosthetic than the one I'd lost.
"And we're off! Next Stop? Barcelona."
