Consciousness came back slowly. The first thing Charley became aware of was that she was still alive to be aware of anything: she’d been relatively certain she was dead. The next thing to reach her was the Doctor speaking:
“Whatever you lot have planned, I’d give it up if I were you. Get as far away from this planet as you can and then keep running. Because if you’ve harmed her, I promise you there’s nowhere in the universe you’ll be safe from me.”
Charley opened her eyes, then groaned as the light that hit them felt far too bright. At once, the Doctor was at her side, kneeling. “Charley,” he exclaimed. He offered her a hand, placing the other behind her head to help her sit up.
“I thought I was dead,” she told him, pressing one hand to her head as though it could stave off the massive headache.
“You would have been,” was the terrible answer. “If you hadn’t dropped that card when you did.”
Charley looked him up and down. “But you…you’re all right?” It was a stupid question. Of course he was all right: he was still him, he’d not regenerated again.
The Doctor smiled grimly. “Whatever that thing was, it was designed to overload electrical activity in the brain. But it was designed for a human brain, so…”
Charley nodded in understanding. She looked past him, then, to the two Slitheen who were now writhing in the same sort of electrical field. It took a moment, but she soon saw that the Doctor had apparently fastened his ID badge to the, erm, unclothed one’s collar. “So, they – ?”
“Will shake it off soon enough too. Come on!”
Pulling Charley to her feet, the Doctor took off running down the hallway. He ran straight into a group of riot police or soldiers, or whomever they were meant to be. It was hard to tell when they were all wearing black with no insignia. “Oi! You want aliens? You’ve got them. They’re inside Downing Street.” He clapped his hands briskly. “Come on!”
Then he turned and raced back the other way. The troops followed him, all looking a bit surprised. Whether by what he’d said or by the mere fact that they were following this complete stranger, she couldn’t be sure. Charley just knew that in her present state, she was having a hard time keeping up.
She stopped, dizzily, to catch her breath just in front of the lift, and would have gone on if not for the fact that only a minute later, the Doctor came tearing out again with the soldiers/police/whomever once again on his heels. Although this time it didn’t look like he was leading them so much as being chased.
Another troop of…whatever appeared round the corner, boxing him in until the Doctor was finally backed up to the lift next to her, about twenty machine guns in his face. He glanced at Charley, shrugged, and then put his hands up with a smile. Except for the smile, Charley reluctantly followed suit.
The alien, now safely tucked back into his disguise as General Asquith, came panting around the corner. “Under the jurisdiction of the Emergency Protocols, I authorize you to execute this man!”
“Execute him?” Charley exclaimed. “Why? For catching you out?”
Asquith didn’t answer her, only barked, “And the girl too!”
“Hang on, you can’t just go executing people without a fair trial,” Charley demanded indignantly.
“Actually,” the Doctor half whispered. “Under the Emergency Protocols, he can, if that individual is determined to be a threat to planetary security.”
Charley stared at him. “What?”
“That was the Brigadier’s idea, not mine,” the Doctor answered quickly. “But you know what, Charley? I shouldn’t worry about it.”
Her eyes narrowed. He was buying time, but for what? “Why’s that?”
“Because these brilliant folks have done something I personally would never do if I were going to execute someone by backing them up against the wall.” Behind them, the lift doors pinged open and the Doctor pulled Charley inside with him. “They stood us against the lift!”
All the soldiers surged forward but the Doctor was already waving his sonic screwdriver at the control panel, so the door slid closed before even one of them could finish cocking their weapon. Charley let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. “Well, that was close. What’s to stop them, though, from just running up the stairs and catching us at the next floor?”
The lift dinged again and the doors opened to reveal another Slitheen in all its alien glory menacing the woman Charley’d met downstairs, Harriet Jones. The alien’s head swiveled around towards them at the sound, giving Harriet just the opportunity she needed to slip away. The Doctor waved, called out a cheerful, “Hello!” and hit the button for the next floor. “And that would be why,” he answered after the doors had closed again. “They won’t be wanting anyone to see that.”
“That was Harriet Jones,” Charley exclaimed. “I mean, behind the Slitheen. Doctor, we can’t just leave her to that thing’s dubious mercy.”
“We’re not going to,” he answered. “Harriet Jones…why does that name sound familiar?” The doors parted again, this time to an empty hallway, and he stepped out. “Come on!”
+++
It didn’t take long to figure out exactly where Ms. Jones had been cornered. All they had to do was follow the Slitheen. Nor was it difficult to affect a rescue: apparently the reaction to being sprayed in the face with the contents of a fire extinguisher was universal. Getting out of Ten Downing Street, however, proved impossible. There were soldiers on the floor below, Slitheen on this floor, and no TARDIS anywhere in the building. Which was how they’d wound up here, sealed inside the cabinet room with the Slitheen waiting outside and no way of communicating with the rest of the world.
A thorough exploration of the room revealed two bodies – one of them the Prime Minister, the other the impatient young man from downstairs – but no way out. As they dragged the bodies into a small cupboard, Charley couldn’t help but feel regret for how short she’d been with him. Of course, he’d been short with her too, and if he’d listened to Harriet Jones in the first place he might still be alive, but still…no one deserved to go like that.
After ascertaining that they were well and truly trapped, the next logical step was to try to discover if they could at least talk to anyone outside. The speaker phones on the long table didn’t work, and after three attempts, Charley put down her mobile with a sigh. “It’s no use. They must’ve blocked communications somehow. We can’t get out.”
The Doctor had been leaning on the table, staring at in deep thought, but at this he straightened up. “Hold on. I can fix that. Give me your phone.”
With a quizzical look, Charley tossed it to him. He opened it up and pulled something from his jacket pocket about the size of her battery. Replacing the battery with whatever he’d taken from his pocket, the Doctor tossed the phone back to her. “There. Now try it.”
Charley dialled the same number, and almost sobbed with relief when Sir Alastair’s voice answered. “Hello?”
“Brigadier? Oh, thank God. It’s Charley.”
“Miss Pollard,” he answered with obvious relief. “I must say, it’s good to know you and the Doctor are alive. The only news out of Downing Street is saying that the people we sent in are all dead.”
“That’s because they are all dead,” Charley answered miserably. The Doctor gestured for the phone. Charley handed it to him and he plugged it into one of the speaker phones, allowing them all to hear. “All but the Doctor and me. We’re trapped inside Downing Street and the Prime Minister’s dead, and the acting Prime Minister is an alien in disguise. What’s going on out there? How bad is it?”
“Very bad,” the Brigadier answered grimly. “The acting Prime Minister, that would be Joseph Green, correct?”
“That’s right,” the Doctor interrupted. “Why, what’s he done?”
The Brigadier explained in typical brisk, military fashion. How supposedly there was an entire alien fleet hanging about the Earth, and how Mr. Joseph Green had requested that the UN release missile launch codes for a pre-emptive strike.
“What does that mean?” Charley asked, bewildered.
“The British Isles can’t gain access to atomic weapons without a special resolution of the UN,” Harriet explained. “Given our past record – and I voted against that, thank you very much – the codes have been taken out of the government’s hands and given to the UN.”
“But there’s no space fleet up there,” Charley protested. “What could they possibly want the codes for?”
The Doctor’s head snapped up, eyes widening in horror. “That’s it.” He pivoted to Harriet. “Big Ben – why did the Slitheen hit Big Ben?”
Harriet looked puzzled. “You said to gather the experts. To kill them.”
“That lot would’ve gathered for a weather balloon,” the Doctor disagreed. “You don’t need to crash land in the middle of London.”
Charley shivered suddenly, beginning to catch his drift. “To cause a panic. To make the world believe we were being invaded so the UN would release those codes. But they’re not going to fire at some nonexistent space ship, are they? They’re going to fire on some other country.”
“Exactly.” The Doctor’s eyes were burning darkly. “And that country retaliates, the entire world starts shooting off nuclear bombs at each other, and within hours the entire planet’s been reduced to radioactive slag.”
“Oh dear,” Sir Alastair’s voice from the phone startled all of them; they’d got so focused on sorting out the problem.
“That’s putting it a bit mildly, don’t you think?” Harriet exclaimed in horror.
Charley smiled ruefully at her. “When you’ve seen the things the Brigadier has, one can’t afford to react to every world crisis. It’s bad for the heart.”
“Quite,” the Brigadier’s dry voice confirmed from the telephone. “Doctor, I think I’d best get on the wire, get the word out to as many as possible. All the way to New York, if possible.”
“They won’t act without proof, though,” Charley pointed out. “And we haven’t got any.”
“We’ll keep working on that part,” the Doctor stated, stepping close to the table so his finger hovered over the button that would hang up the call. “Good luck, Brigadier.”
“You too, Doctor.”
The call disconnected, and the only three people who knew the whole truth about the threat facing planet Earth stared at each other in dismay. “Now what do we do?” Charley asked. “There has to be some way of stopping them.”
The Doctor’s face shuttered. He turned away, striding to the windows and staring at the steel plates guarding them for a minute before turning back. “There is a way. There’s always been a way.”
“Then why haven’t you mentioned it?” Charley asked, exasperated.
He looked at her then, and the expression in his open blue eyes was one she’d seen only once before, when she’d begged him to kill her to seal the breach between universes. “Because two of the three of us couldn’t possibly survive it. I can regenerate, but you two can’t.”
“What’s he talking about, regenerate?” Harriet asked, bewildered.
The Doctor answered without looking at her, his eyes never leaving Charley’s. “We could launch a missile – not a nuclear missile, just an ordinary missile – straight at Downing Street. Take out the real threat. Only problem is, we’d take ourselves out with it.” He let silence hang in the air briefly before coming to the crux of the matter. “I could save the world, but lose you.”
Charley stared at him dumbfounded for a moment then her eyes flashed. For an instant, she seriously considered leaping across the table and striking the Doctor. “Don’t you dare!” she told him instead, her voice impossibly tight with anger and tears. “I realise it’s just one measly planet at stake this time, not the whole of time and space, but it’s my planet, damn you! And I’m not likely to survive if it gets turned into radioactive slag now anyway, am I? I won’t let you sacrifice the billions of other lives for mine.”
“Charley, I can’t -”
“Oh, don’t give me that!” This time she exploded. “Yes, you can! You don’t have to like it – I didn’t very much like the idea of killing you to stop Zagreus either – but I did it because you asked me to. Because it was the only way!”
She’d been watching them quietly, looking a bit confused, but now Harriet Jones drew herself up and looked the Doctor right in the eye. “It’s not your decision, Doctor. It’s mine. As the only elected representative in this room, chosen by the people, for the people, and on behalf of the people I command you. Do it.”