Probable Impossibilities

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.”

“I can’t believe it,” Charley murmured as the doors of the TARDIS closed once again behind them. Albion Hospital was still on the other side: they weren’t going anywhere for the moment. “That poor animal. And to think it’s nothing more than someone or something’s cruel idea of a joke.”

“It’s definitely cruel,” the Doctor agreed with a frown. He pulled up a piece of grating next to the console and stuck his head in it. Within a pair of heartbeats he was fiddling with the wires that ran from it to the other parts of the TARDIS. “Not so sure it was a joke.”

“But you said it was, inside,” Charley pointed out.

“I said it was a fake,” he clarified. “The whole crash landing was. I thought so. It’s just too perfect. I mean, hitting Big Ben? Come on.” A frown, then he added. “But that doesn’t mean it mightn’t have had a very serious purpose.”

She decided not to point out he’d seemed rather enthusiastically convinced it was the genuine article only a few hours ago. But then again, perhaps that had merely been for her benefit. Perhaps he’d meant to leave her with the Brigadier and go of to investigate on his own. She’d not put it past this Doctor, although she’d thought – she’d hoped – they’d gotten beyond that.

Charley sighed. “That’s just it: what purpose could it possibly have? You said yourself, the technology that augmented that poor pig’s brain is definitely alien. But that doesn’t make any sense. Why would aliens be faking aliens?”

“That’s what I intend to find out.” He fiddled for a few minutes more, then the console suddenly shot off a shower of sparks. “Got it! Ha ha!”

The Doctor scrambled to his feet and moved around to where a small screen had been attached to the console, presumably to replace the ceiling-wide one they’d had in the last model. “Patched in the radar, looped it back twelve hours so we can follow the flight of the spaceship, here we go…hold on…” The screen flickered, so he gave it a whack. “Come on!”

Charley leaned in over his shoulder as a digital diagram of the Earth appeared on the screen, with a curved line extending from one side of it to the other.

“That’s the spaceship on its way to Earth…see?” the Doctor pointed to the trajectory on the screen. “Except…hold on…see, the spaceship did a sling shot round the Earth before it landed.”

Charley stared at the unbelievable truth in front of them. “That means it came from Earth in the first place, doesn’t it?”

The Doctor nodded proudly. “It went up and came back down. Whoever those aliens are, they haven’t just arrived. They’ve been here for a while. The question is: what have they been doing?”

“Aside from genetically engineering pigs to crash land in the middle of London.”

“Aside from that, yeah.”

They were interrupted by a knock on the TARDIS door. The Doctor just looked up, annoyed, then went back to what he was doing. That left Charley to go and answer it. There was a young soldier in UNIT black on the other side of the door, one of several who’d been assigned to guard the “alien.”

“Excuse me, Miss, Doctor, but there’s…” His voice trailed off suddenly, eyes going so wide they looked about to pop out of his skull, as he took in the interior of the TARDIS. “Oh my God…”

“Yes, yes, it’s bigger on the inside,” the Doctor snapped, coming to stand beside Charley. “Get used to it. You were saying?”

The soldier swallowed hard. “There’s a car outside for you, Sir. And a helicopter. They say they have instructions to escort you and Miss Pollard to Ten Downing Street.”

“Right,” the Doctor answered with false cheerfulness. “Is this the part where I say, ‘take me to your leader?'”

+++

Charley didn’t know what it was like on a normal day, but on this day the inside of Number Ten Downing Street was in chaos. It was packed with people: ministers, soldiers, and the aforementioned alien experts, all waiting around to be told what to do. None of them looked twice at the Doctor, although one or two of the UNIT people seemed to recognize Charley, greeting her with a smile and a polite “Miss Pollard” as she and the Doctor stepped into the room.

Into the midst of it all waded a young Indian gentleman giving instructions at the top of his voice. “Ladies and Gentlemen, could we convene? Quick as we can, please. It’s this way on the right and can I remind you, ID cards are to be worn at all times.” He spotted the Doctor and Charley then and approached them. “Doctor, Miss Pollard, we’re so glad you could join us. Here are your ID cards.”

He handed them both laminated photo IDs hung on long narrow chains. Charley couldn’t help but notice that the Doctor’s had a picture of the wrong face on it: an aristocratic older man with silvering hair and a ruffled collar. She smiled. They must’ve been told about that peculiar facet of the Doctor’s life, or else surely he’d have been turned back at the door.

“Excuse me,” an unfamiliar voice interrupted. “Are you the Doctor?”

Charley turned to see a woman with short grey-brown hair standing behind them. Their young host noticed her as well, and turned with an exasperated glare. “Not now, we’re busy,” he said. “Can’t you go home?”

“Hang on,” Charley objected. “It might be important. What’s your name?”

The woman flashed an ID badge of her own at them. “Harriet Jones, MP for Flydale North. I just need a word in private.”

“It’s not important, it’s some bill about cottage hospitals she wants introduced.”

“No, it’s not about that, not this time,” Harriet corrected quickly.

“We haven’t time and you haven’t clearance,” the young man snapped at her impatiently. He grabbed the Doctor and Charley both by the arm and began to steer them down the hallway. “Now leave it!”

Charley shook off his arm. “Maybe you haven’t time for her, but that doesn’t mean we all have to be rude. Doctor, you go on, hear what the experts have to say. I can stay here with Ms. Jones.”

“You sure?” he asked.

The young man shook his head. “I’m sorry, Miss Pollard, but I have strict instructions to see that everyone on this list attends the meeting. Ms. Jones can wait.”

Harriet Jones stepped back, a rueful but still polite smile on her face. “I suppose you’re right, saving the planet really ought to take priority.” She turned to Charley and squeezed her hand with surprising desperation. “Do come find me when you’ve finished, though?”

“Of course,” Charley promised before allowing herself to be shepherded into the conference room.

It was just about full already, so the Doctor and Charley found seats at the very back. At the front of the room stood two people she recognized from the news broadcasts: General Asquith and…oh, what was his name? Some MP who the reporter’d thought a rather odd choice to be sent for in an emergency.

The General started. “Ladies and Gentlemen, I’d like to have your attention please. As you can see from the summaries in front of you, the ship had one porcine occupant -”

The Doctor, naturally, interrupted. “Now the really interesting bit happened three days ago, see, filed away under every other business. The North Sea – the satellite detected a signal, a little blip of radiation at one hundred fathoms like there was something down there…you were just about to investigate and the next thing you know, this happens: spaceships, pigs, massive diversion. From what?”

Charley was only half paying attention. She’d suddenly noticed that the ID badge she’d been given had begun to slide down the front of her dress. Apparently the chain had broken, or come loose somehow. Of all the times!

“If aliens fake an alien crash and an alien pilot, what do they get?”

Charley grabbed the badge in one hand and pulled it all the way free, turning it over to inspect the chain and see where it had broken. There was an unexpected moment of silence, the Doctor probably turning something over in his mind. Then he said, “Us. They get us. It’s not a diversion, it’s a trap.”

Still fiddling with the chain, on the word “trap,” Charley’s head nevertheless flew up.

“This is all about us,” the Doctor repeated, sounding amazed. “Alien experts – the only people with knowledge how to fight them gathered together in one room.”

All of a sudden, there was a noise. An all too earthly and rather disgusting noise. “Oh, ugh!” Charley muttered, covering her nose with one hand which left the ID badge dangling from the other.

The Doctor appeared to take it as a personal insult. “Excuse me, do you mind not farting while I’m saving the world?”

“Would you rather silent but deadly?” the MP – Green, that was his name – answered smugly. Then he and the general both began to laugh.

Laugh? Why on Earth would they laugh? Did they think this was some sort of joke?

A joke…oh, no. Oh, no. It couldn’t be!

Then the general took of his hat and there could be no further doubt. He reached up and began to open his forehead as though it were a dress with a zipper. Light poured out from inside, and as he slowly shrugged out of the human skin as though it were a suit, the entire room just stared in horror. What emerged was a monster. Too enormous to have fit within the body of even the rather large general, it was a sickly shade of green with gigantic but somehow still beady black eyes and something like a collar around its long neck.

“What are you?” Charley breathed, horrified. She probably ought to have run, shouted for help, done anything besides just sitting there, but she was too floored to move.

“We are the Slitheen,” the former-general answered in a distinctly alien voice.

Still smiling, Green – or rather, the green creature inside him – reached into a suit coat pocket and pulled out what looked like some sort of remote control device. “Thank you all for wearing your ID cards. They’ll help to identify the bodies.”

He pressed a button, and suddenly Charley knew what it must feel like to be struck by lightning. Pain suffused her body, as if every cell had been set on fire. The last thing she felt before darkness claimed her was the ID card slipping from her fingers.

“Harold Hill,” the Doctor remarked as they stepped out of the TARDIS on the pavement outside Charley’s flat. “Of all the council estates in London, and you choose the one without a Tube station.”

Charley folded her arms across her chest and raised an eyebrow at him. “Says the man with the time-travelling police box,” she pointed out dryly.

The Doctor shrugged and followed her up the pavement. “Haven’t always had the TARDIS. She didn’t work most of the time I was with UNIT, remember?” He glanced around them. “These are houses, not flats.”

“I let the first floor,” Charley explained. She pointed to a narrow iron staircase around the side of the house, which they promptly ascended to reach the door at the top. Charley pulled a key from her handbag and slipped it into the lock. She tried to turn it, but the lock didn’t budge.

“You sure this is the right place?” the Doctor asked wryly.

Charley glared at him. “Of course I am.” She tried the key again, but it was no use. “It’s probably the wrong time: when did you say you brought us back to?”

“Twelve hours after we left, that’s all,” he protested.

“Right,” was the disbelieving answer, Charley’s grimace expressing her skepticism far more eloquently than any words could. “Good to know your TARDIS driving abilities are still in top form.”

“Oi!” he protested indignantly.

She ignored him, turning to race down the steps. “Let’s just hope it’s not before I took the flat!”

A short rap on the front door of the house soon revealed the familiar face of Charley’s landlady, Mrs. Hollingsworth, a woman in her middle with light brown hair only lightly salted with grey. She watched them both with a wary expression as she stepped onto the front stoop, shutting the screen door behind her. “Can I help you?”

“Mrs. Hollingsworth, it’s Charley.” When the woman’s expression didn’t change, Charley asked tentatively. “You…do know me, don’t you?”

“Sure, I do,” was the careful but utterly uninformative answer.

“Oh, good.” Truthfully, that wasn’t terribly encouraging, but there was nothing for it now. “I was wondering if you could let me into my flat. The key doesn’t appear to be working.”

Mrs. Hollingsworth snorted. “I’ll tell you why it’s not working. ‘Cause it’s not your flat anymore.”

All right, now that she’d not been expecting. Charley stared. “What?”

“That’s what happens when you swan off without paying,” Mrs. Hollingsworth informed her pointedly. “‘Course, that nice older gentleman, Mr. Lethbridge-Stewart, paid it up for a couple of months, but after a bit even he said you likely weren’t coming back.”

“‘A couple of months’?” Charley echoed. “Why, how long have I been gone?”

Mrs. Hollingsworth just stared at her and Charley blushed, realizing how utterly inane that must sound to someone who couldn’t possibly know she’d been time travelling. “I was, erm, in hospital. In a coma. And when I woke up, I couldn’t remember anything for the longest time. I’ve only just found my way back.”

“Oh.” Whatever undercurrent of hostility there’d been in her landlady’s bearing, it drained away quickly in light of this particular revelation. Charley felt a bit bad lying to her, but then it was just about as close to the truth as she’d likely believe. “Why, I’d say it’s been almost twelve months, give or take.”

Twelve months? They’d missed the mark by an entire year? But then, she oughtn’t to be so surprised: she knew how long it had taken the Doctor to successfully bring them to Singapore. She’d long suspected that couldn’t be entirely attributed to the paradox of her survival. That didn’t stop her, though, from casting a token glare in his direction.

Mrs. Hollingsworth turned to the Doctor. “I almost didn’t notice at first. She keeps to herself, this one.” Then back to Charley with a motherly frown. “It’s a shame, a pretty girl like you, holing herself up so much. You’d have found your way home a lot sooner if you had more friends.”

The Doctor cast a sharp look in Charley’s direction and she squirmed under the piercing light of those blue eyes. “Yes, well. Did Sir Alastair happen to mention what he meant to do with my belongings? If, that is, you gave them to him?”

+++

“It’s not like she made it sound, you know.” Charley wasn’t sure why she felt the need to explain, but the words came tumbling out almost without her consent. Nor was she entirely certain why she suddenly needed something to do with her hands.

The Doctor looked back at her, his key already in the TARDIS door. “What isn’t?”

“I have made friends. Through UNIT mostly, and not just the Brigadier. I’m not some sort of hermit,” she grumbled as the Doctor opened the door and ushered her in.

“‘Course you have,” he answered lightly, but as with most things he said these days, there was an edge she couldn’t quite define beneath it. Obviously in the mood to be enigmatic, though, the Doctor didn’t look at her before opening to the door, striding to the console and setting the coordinates for the Brigadier’s London house. They’d try the one in the country if he wasn’t in.

“But you of all people ought to understand why I have to be careful,” she persisted as she followed him inside. “I don’t belong in this time. I oughtn’t even to be alive.”

“So, no boyfriend then?” the Doctor asked a little too casually.

“No.” Charley frowned. “I didn’t dare. Suppose I fell in love with a boy and we got married, maybe even started a family. What if he was meant to fall in love with someone else? And what if one of their children was meant to discover the cure for cancer or some such? I’d be changing history. It’s the same with friends. The people at UNIT, some of the people I’ve met through there…their lives have already been changed, often by you.”

They were both silent for a long moment. The Doctor had a look on his face that she knew well, though she’d never seen it on these features before. It was the look he usually wore when he was deciding how much to tell someone. Or whether or not to ask the question that might confirm the certain doom that faced them.

Charley held her breath.

Whatever the question might have been, it never came, for just then they landed and the Doctor was already headed for the door. Letting out a deep sigh, she followed him and emerged from the TARDIS just in time to hear a familiar voice say, “Oh, dear. You’ve gone and done it again. Hello, Doctor.”

The Doctor, grinning, bounded across the small back garden to enthusiastically pump the arm of the bearded old man sitting on a bench with a book in one hand and a resigned look on his face. “That’s right,” he announced cheerfully. “Did you miss me?”

Former Brigadier General Sir Alastair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart just shook his head. “That rather depends which ‘you’ we’re talking about, doesn’t it? Although, come to think on it, the answer would be the same regardless: no.”

There was an affectionate twinkle in his eye, though, that belied his words. “My life is a good deal less eventful when you’re not about, Doctor.” He then looked past the Doctor and spotted Charley. “Ah, Miss Pollard. I had a feeling you might have taken up with this lout again when I heard you’d vanished without a trace from Henrick’s just about the time it blew up. Were you two involved with that mess down by the river, as well?”

Charley just smirked. “What do you think?”

He huffed briefly but was still smiling. “Yes. I might have known. Where you go, Doctor, trouble invariably follows.”

If it were a cue in a play, it couldn’t have been timed better. No sooner were the words out of the Brigadier’s mouth then they all heard a loud roar from overhead and looked up just in time to see a ship of some sort zig-zag through the air above their heads, trailing a long cloud of black smoke.

Sir Alastair sighed. “Right, then.”

Charley stared in horrified fascination at the ship’s trajectory until it dipped below the horizon. “Doctor, it’s headed for the city centre!”

The Doctor darted towards the door of the house without even a by-your-leave. “Come on! Up to the roof – view’ll be better there.”

“Doctor!” Charley scolded, glancing helplessly back towards the Brigadier.

He just waved them on with a rueful smile. “You two go on; I’m far too old to go racing up and down stairs any longer. If any of the servants give you trouble, just tell them he’s the Doctor. They’ll understand.”

The Doctor was right, the view from the roof was much better. They arrived just in time to see one of the strange craft’s wings clip the Clock Tower, cutting a deep gash into the gigantic, iconic clock face. Charley cringed. “Oh, that’s bad!”

“What are you talking about, bad?” the Doctor asked. “This is fantastic! I can’t believe I’m here to see this. First contact! History in the making! This is why I travel.”

“So, you knew this would happen?” Charley demanded in disbelief. She watched as the ship disappeared once again from view. Based on the angle of descent, though, and the fact that there was no explosion, no cloud of dust, smoke or ash that followed a moment later, it seemed logical to assume it had crash-landed in the Thames.

“Course not,” the Doctor scoffed. “Even I don’t know every little detail of your planet’s history, now, do I?”

“You’ve known littler ones,” she grumbled. “So, what do we do?”

“Nothing.” He shrugged. “That’s not an invasion, that was a genuine crash landing: angle of descent, colour of smoke, everything. It’s perfect! Besides,” he added, almost as an afterthought. “They’ve already got one space ship in the middle of London, don’t want to shove another one on top.”

“Well, maybe you don’t want to know what’s going on, but I do,” Charley retorted. “So I’ve been gone a year, UNIT ought to be used to that by now.”

She headed for the door that led back into the house, not really surprised when the Doctor followed. Downstairs they found Sir Alastair already in front of the TV, switching channels until a news broadcast came on. “Ah, there you are,” he announced as they strode into the parlour. “I suppose you’ll be wandering off to get in the middle of things, Doctor.”

“Not this time,” the Doctor insisted, taking a seat in an armchair and staring at the television.

“The Doctor doesn’t want to expose the TARDIS, or himself I imagine, to that sort of scrutiny.” Charley and the Brigadier exchanged sceptical smiles. “What’s going on?” she asked. “What are they saying?”

“They’re sending divers down to the wreck,” the Brigadier answered, his voice dry. “Not UNIT men, naturally, who might actually know how to deal with whatever they find, but police divers.”

“For the best,” the Doctor shot back over his shoulder. “Knowing UNIT, they’d likely deal with whatever they find by shooting it.”

“And you think a policeman who’s never seen aliens before is going to do better?” Sir Alastair shot back. “Really, Doctor.”

The Doctor surprised them both by remaining focused on the news programme. What wasn’t a surprise, though, was when he looked about for a moment then pulled out the sonic screwdriver and promptly began using it as a remote to flip from one channel to another, some of them probably not even normally accessible in this country. His interest piqued, though, when reporters began to say that a body had been found in the wreckage.

“The body has been transferred to a secure UNIT mortuary…” the reporter on the telly announced. “The whereabouts is yet unknown.”

“Albion hospital,” the Brigadier announced confidently. “It’s closest to the river. Particularly with all the roads closed off except to emergency personnel.”

“Can you get us in there?” Charley asked. “Or, sorry, me in there?” she added with a sly glance at the Doctor.

He gave her a dirty look.

“Right. Us it is, then,” she concluded triumphantly.

The Brigadier huffed in mock offence. “You lot always seem to conveniently forget that I’m retired. What makes you think I’ve any sort of pull with UNIT any longer?”

“You’re the Brigadier,” Charley pointed out. “UNIT wouldn’t exist without you.”

The Brigadier sighed and looked them both over before finally allowing a smile to creep through. “Right. Not that you need my help to get into Albion Hospital: just use that infernal blue box. I suppose you’ll be wanting an invitation to Downing Street as well?”

“Ten Downing Street?” Charley echoed, amazed. “Why ever for?”

“The Emergency Protocols,” he answered plainly. “Which you and I helped to compose, if I recall correctly, Doctor. The government of the United Kingdom is not authorized to take any action regarding an alien incursion onto Earth territory without first consulting the leading experts in the field to determine if the action is warranted.”

The Doctor grinned. “And who’s the biggest expert of the lot?”

Alastair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart shook his head in resigned amusement. “Very well, Doctor. Just do me one favour and keep my name out of it, there’s a good lad. Last thing I need is to get called out of retirement again. Let the younger generation deal with its own problems.”

Truth be told, it was a terrible plan. For one thing, it depended entirely too much upon the Gelth trusting them. Considering what liars they’d already proved themselves to be, Charley thought it unlikely they’d be too trusting of others. There’d also been the part where Mr. Sneed’s home and livelihood would likely be destroyed. Sneed hadn’t cared for that part at all, but the Doctor had persuaded him by pointing out it was either his house or his planet, and the latter would render him dead as well as homeless.

What concerned Charley more, though, was that once again the plan involved the Doctor remaining behind to blow things up whilst she and the others escaped to safety.

They were nearly to the house again when Charley caught the Doctor’s arm. “Doctor, I don’t like this,” she confessed, unable to keep the concern from her voice.

Whatever understanding they’d reached earlier in the TARDIS now apparently at an end, his eyes narrowed and his voice came out snide when he answered her. “You can stay behind safe in the TARDIS if you’d rather.”

“Oh, that’s not what I mean and you know it!” she snapped in return. “I just…Doctor, be careful.”

The smile he gave her wasn’t warm, but it was determined and that was nearly as reassuring. “I saw the fall of Troy. World War Five. I pushed boxes at the Boston Tea Party. I’ve no intention of dying in a dungeon in Cardiff.”

He held out a hand to her. “Ready?”

Two answers to that question leaped to mind. One was “always,” the other was “never,” and both were equally true. So, instead she just accepted the offered hand and followed the Doctor down to the morgue. Sneed turned the key to let them in.

It was just the three of them now. One thing they’d decided early on was that it was far too great a risk to allow Gwyneth so close to the Rift. The Gelth might find some way to manoeuver her where they wanted her before the plan could be put into effect. So she and Dickens had been sent upstairs to turn off as many of the lights as they could, thus allowing the house to fill with gas.

“Talk about Bleak House,” the Doctor murmured as they stepped into the dim room with its plethora of corpses.

Charley shivered and not just at their surroundings. The temperature in the room had dropped by several degrees in the time it took them to step inside. It was almost as though the Gelth drew all the warmth out of the air with their presence.

And here they came. The Gelth flooded into the room like some sort of ethereal river of souls. You’d never guess the threat they posed just to look at them, Charley admitted to herself. Particularly not the leader, who looked like a little girl with long, flowing hair. She positioned herself beneath an archway and spoke in the same echoing, childlike voice that had pleaded for help during the séance.

“You have come to help! Praise the Doctor! Praise him! But where is the girl?”

Charley held her breath but the Doctor didn’t blink.

“Had a bit of an upset stomach,” he told them blithely. “Nerves, most like. Not to worry, she’ll be down presently. Where’s the weak point?”

“Here, beneath the arch,” said the leader. “Hurry, please! So little time. Pity the Gelth.”

“‘Course,” the Doctor agreed readily. “Sorry to take so long. Some of us took some convincing. Not long now.”

He shot a premeditated glare in Charley’s direction and she scowled in return, also as planned. “I’m still not entirely convinced, if you must know,” she grumbled. They’d all agreed it wouldn’t do for her to seem too enthusiastic. Not as adamantly distrustful as she’d been earlier.

The Doctor stepped over to the arch, withdrawing a gadget from his pocket and laying it on the stone.

“What is this machine?” the Gelth leader asked warily. Without realizing it, she slipped just the smallest bit out of the innocent, eager persona she’d projected so carefully.

“Rift monitor,” the Doctor answered. Which was true: what he neglected to tell her was that the monitor was primed to overload. “Can’t go trusting something so important to human technology, particularly this century.”

He straightened up and looked the Gelth right in her transparent eyes. “I’ll take you somewhere else after the transfer. Somewhere you can build proper bodies. This isn’t a permanent solution, all right?” Then the Doctor turned to the mortician. “Mr. Sneed, if you’d be so kind as to bring Gwyneth down to us?”

Mr. Sneed bobbed his head nervously. “Of course, Doctor.” He then turned and fled up the stairs in obvious terror.

Too obvious, Charley thought. The Gelth were suspicious, they had to be. But that was the signal. Sneed would get Gwyneth and Dickens out of the house while she and the Doctor took care of the Gelth.

Charley moved quickly to one of the lamps in the room and turned down the flame.

“What is she doing?” the Gelth cried out in alarm, fortunately distracted from the Rift monitor.

“Not to worry,” the Doctor said in the same calm voice. He crossed the room to another lamp. “Thought it might help the rest of your people cross over, turning up the gas.”

“No!” the Gelth leader cried in alarm. Whatever element of surprise they’d had, it was lost now. “Give yourself to glory. Sacrifice your lives for the Gelth!”

“No! You’ll not take this world away from its people,” the Doctor informed the leader matter-of-factly, dropping all pretence. “Not while I’m alive!”

“Then live no more!” the Gelth hissed, her form shifting and changing as though it had caught fire. In reaction, the other Gelth sprang into corpses, which immediately rose from their slabs and began moving towards the Doctor and Charley.

Charley turned up the gas. A heartbeat later, the Doctor did the same.

The reaction was almost instantaneous. Shrieking in defeat, the Gelth were one by one drawn from their hosts back into the increasingly poisonous air. As the corpses collapsed empty behind them, the Doctor grabbed Charley and pulled her towards the stairs. “Go!” he shouted.

Charley ran. Up the stairs, out of the house, out into the snow. Behind them, the rift monitor overloaded, igniting the gas in the air. The mortuary exploded, the windows blowing outward in a fiery shower of glass.

The Doctor crowed triumphantly. “That’s it, then. We all here? Everybody alive?”

Sneed looked as though he were about to cry. “You may as well have ended my life, Doctor,” he answered bitterly. “You’ve certainly ended my livelihood.”

“So pick yourself up and start over,” the Doctor answered without sympathy. “A man can build a livelihood over again. Not many get another life.”

“It’s not that, Sir,” Gwyneth explained more respectfully. “I can find another position, sure enough, but Mr. Sneed…what folks will entrust a man with their dearly departed after such a scandal as this?” She gestured to the flaming building.

Dickens turned to Gwyneth and took her hands in his own. “My dear girl, I shall personally see to it that neither you nor your master find yourselves consigned to the work house. On that you have my word.”

Charley smiled at Gwyneth. “And there’s that butcher’s boy you mentioned too. If he’s half so sweet on you as you are on him…”

Gwyneth blushed. “Yes, Miss. And thank you, Sir. That’s very kind of you.”

“See?” the Doctor answered gleefully. “Happy endings all ’round.”

+++

It was a euphoric pair that made their way back into the TARDIS. But then, saving the world was a bit like that, Charley’d noticed. There was no other high quite like it. No wonder the Doctor couldn’t give it up.

And no doubt he’d be name dropping Charles Dickens to all and sundry now they’d met. Charley couldn’t help but smile at that. When she’d first met him, she’d thought he was just full of it. Now she knew he was, but she also knew that he really had met most of the historical figures he’d claimed to meet. Or at least, judging by how many she’d met whilst travelling with him, he probably had.

“So, that was Charles Dickens,” she voiced the thought. “I’d always read in biographies that he was quite the friend to the poor, so I think we’ve left Gwyneth and Sneed in good hands, at least for now. It’s a pity he won’t live to tell his story, though. You did say it was December, 1869, right?”

“Yup,” the Doctor answered, although far too cheerfully, if you asked her, for a conversation about a man who was dying. “Never quite recovers from that stroke back in April of this year. Wouldn’t worry about that, though. He’s more alive now than he’s ever been.” He grinned at Charley. “Let’s give him one last surprise, shall we?”

He threw a switch and the rotor began to move. The TARDIS shuddered and they were off, leaving Charles Dickens and Cardiff and Christmas and the nineteenth century behind. “So. Where to next?”

Where to? There was a question she could spend a lifetime answering. Honestly, she could probably live to be a hundred, die a feisty old woman and still not have finished answering it. But she wasn’t eighteen anymore, and as such had responsibilities and people she’d no choice but to answer to. “Oh, God. I think I’d probably best go home.”

Immediately the emotional temperature in the TARDIS plummeted. “So, that’s it then? Couple of adventures, and then back home, nice to see you again, Doctor? Whatever happened to not leaving whilst I needed you?”

It took Charley a moment to realize her mistake, so bewildered was she by the 180 degree turnabout. “I meant to pick up a spare change of clothes and see to the lease on my flat. Besides which, I really ought to let the Brigadier know I’ve swanned off with you and not been killed by Autons. I don’t mean to stay.”

“Oh.” The Doctor looked embarrassed, then defiant. Once again, he huddled in that jacket as though it were a shell to protect the vulnerable turtle inside. “And why not? Maybe you should. You were right not to trust me, back there. I nearly gave the world to the Gelth. Stick with me and I’m liable to get you killed.”

Circling around the console to his side, Charley laid a hand on the Doctor’s arm. “I’ve been living on borrowed time since I was eighteen. I’m not afraid to die.” His muscles tensed beneath the heavy leather of the coat and he refused to look at her. “But you saved me. Time and again, even back when it might’ve still unravelled the fabric of the universe. It’s not me I’m afraid for, Doctor.”

She fumbled for his hand and gripped it tightly. “But that’s why you need me. And as long as that’s true, you’re not getting rid of me, not unless you were to open up the TARDIS doors and shove me out into the vortex.” A little smile caught the corner of her mouth and tugged it upwards. “And even then, I’d probably just grab hold of Ramsey or another of his kind and follow you anyway.”

She’d had an inkling from the start, but after that whole business with dropping in the day the Earth blew up, Charley was certain. The Doctor was trying to get rid of her. Why else would he ask her to endure that self-important bit of skin calling itself the last pure human, even for a few hours? There’d been something eminently satisfying in the fact that “Lady Cassandra” had turned out to be the villain in the end.

She didn’t know if it was conscious – if he really wanted her gone or just meant to push her away before she could choose to leave on her own – but his actions spoke volumes either way. A lifetime ago, she might have given in, too wounded by his rejection to understand the motivation behind it. Charley knew better now, and she was every bit as stubborn as any old Time Lord.

That was probably why they were currently having one hell of an argument in the parlour of a mortuary in Nineteenth Century Cardiff.

“They’re dying. This could save their lives. Save an entire species, and you’re being squeamish.”

“I am not ‘squeamish,'” Charley protested indignantly. “How do we know the Gelth can be trusted? Are they really as weak, as few as they say? We’ve only their word. It could just as easily be a trick, a prelude to an invasion.”

The Doctor frowned at her. “You don’t trust them, you don’t trust me – have you always been this cynical and I just missed it somehow, or is this a recent development?”

“Oh, let’s see now, shall we?” she answered, deeply facetious. “Disembodied aliens in need of a human conduit to cross a dimensional rift…what could I possibly find to mistrust? Especially once you bring the Time Lords into it.”

The Doctor squirmed inside that shell-like leather jacket of his, giving her some small satisfaction. She’d have been really angry if he failed to catch that particular drift. “It’s not the same.”

“Why?” Charley demanded. “Because this time the conduit’s not me? Because you’re carrying some great load of guilt over this Time War business? If you want to know what I think, I think these aliens have found just the right button to push to make you dance to their tune. And that, Doctor, is what frightens me.”

“Don’t I get a say, Miss?” Gwyneth’s voice snapped Charley for a moment out of her single-minded vision of the Doctor allowing an invasion he’d never forgive himself for. One that could cause a paradox even worse than her survival had: if these creatures came through, and if they weren’t as benevolent as they claimed, why, she’d never be born at all.

But that wasn’t a burden she ought to lay on the shoulders of a Nineteenth Century Welsh serving girl. Unbidden, a snatch of their conversation earlier, in the larder, came back to Charley.

“I bet you’ve got dozens of servants, haven’t you, Miss?”

“I did have, once,” Charley admitted reluctantly. Memories of Edith flooded her mind, making her shiver. “And I never saw them. Not really. Not the way I should have, until it was too late, and one had killed herself for want of kindness.”

She still blamed herself for that. Probably always would, unless the Doctor would agree to nip back and discover if their actions in Edith’s past truly had made a difference. Could that be why she felt so protective of Gwyneth?

Gwyneth was apparently reading her mind again. “I’m not her, Miss,” she pointed out gently. “I’ve had a good life, even considering. I’ve no wish to throw it away, but the angels need me.” She turned to the Doctor. “So tell me what I have to do.”

“You don’t have to do anything,” the Doctor clarified.

“They’ve been singing to me since I was a child. Sent by my mum on a holy mission. So tell me.”

Charley frowned. “And in all that time, you never once stopped to wonder if perhaps they were softening you up, making you sympathetic for just such a moment as this?”

Gwyneth shrugged. “Not really, no. How could anything that makes such beautiful music not be on the side of the angels?”

That hadn’t stopped Mama from declaring jazz music to be of the devil, Charley thought wryly. “I just wish there were some way to verify their story, that’s all. Is that so much to ask? If the Gelth have waited this long, surely a few moments more won’t make such a great difference.”

“The young lady does have a rather excellent point,” Dickens said. He had apparently recovered enough from the shock of discovering ghosts were real (well, sort of) to contribute to the conversation.

The Doctor scowled, looking from Charley to Dickens to Gwyneth and back before finally admitting, “The TARDIS data banks may have a history or some such. If it was in the Matrix before it went down, anyway.” He held up a cautionary finger in Charley’s direction. “But we’d best be quick about it.”

+++

“Good God in heaven!”

“Gracious! Why I never seen such a thing.”

“What is this ungodly place?”

Charley bit back a laugh. “It’s not ungodly, just a bit…unearthly is all,” she addressed Mr. Sneed first. “It’s the TARDIS, the Doctor’s ship. Come on, there’s nothing to be afraid of. I promise.”

Promise or no, she still had to prod the three a bit to get them though the doorway and into the console room proper. Once they were all inside, staring wide-eyed about them as Jonah might’ve in the belly of the whale if he’d had proper light, Gwyneth exclaimed, “Why it’s like a doorway to another world!”

“Not exactly,” Charley hedged. Somehow it didn’t seem a good idea to reveal to their guests that the TARDIS could, in fact, travel to other worlds. The Doctor, of course, was no help whatsoever, having gone straight to the console and begun tapping away at the computer keyboard that he’d attached to it at some point after her initial departure.

“The world is still out there, same as it ever was,” Charley explained, opening the door again just a crack to afford them a reassuring glimpse. “The TARDIS is just…bigger on the inside, is all.”

A rather dazed looking Dickens murmured, “Will wonders never cease?”

“I understand now,” Gwyneth stated solemnly, turning to look back at Charley. “Some of the things I seen in your thoughts. The great air ships, the metal monsters. The children who never were.”

The children who never were. Charley shivered. That was as apt, and as chilling, a description of the Neverpeople as any the Time Lords or Sentris had come up with for them. “Gwyneth, please,” she begged, her voice pained. “Stop. Believe me, you don’t want to see the rest.”

Gwyneth had looked into the Doctor’s mind and seen how he liked his tea this time around. It was a mercy she hadn’t found Zagreus in there. Or possibly worse, whatever it was the Doctor seemed to have become in the aftermath of Gallifrey’s destruction. Charley herself was still sorting out the answer to that one, and his general refusal to talk to her didn’t help.

Gwyneth shook herself and the dazed, faraway look left her face. Just in time, too, because the Doctor was going to hurt himself if he tried any harder not to react to the secrets she cast about so carelessly.

“Here we are,” the Doctor interrupted. “‘Gelth, the.’ From the planet Gel in the Haptid cluster.”

“And where’s that?” Charley asked, moving to his side to look over his shoulder at the screen. Not that it did her any good; the words were written in modern Gallifreyan, which despite her time with the Doctor still looked to her like a lot of random circles and lines.

“Other side of the universe, like I said.”

“And?” Charley asked pointedly.

The Doctor frowned. “Got hit by a chemical weapon at the height of the War, one that poisoned the atmosphere with unbreathable gasses. The planetary government had been mucking about with experiments designed to create a perfect soldier by converting the body to pure energy, so they were able to save the population by transforming everyone into this gaseous state.”

“Oh,” Charley stated in relief. “So, pretty much exactly what they told us.”

“There’s more,” the Doctor warned, and from the grim tone of his voice, she could tell it wasn’t good. “See, the one thing the Gelth government failed to do was to ask the people if they wanted to be turned into ghosts. A good number weren’t too happy about it. Demanded their leaders give ’em back their bodies. Only they couldn’t, because the bodies had all been burned up in the conversion process. Every last one of ’em.” He looked up at Charley. “You can guess what happened.”

She swallowed hard. “So now they want Earth to provide what their own world couldn’t.”

The Doctor nodded in confirmation. “And based on these figures, the population of Earth in 1869 is just about enough for each and every single surviving Gelth to have their very own walking corpse to animate. How they discovered the Rift, how they were able to anchor their end of it so it would always bleed through to this particular time, I don’t know. But you were right, this isn’t some errand of mercy. It’s an invasion.”

Strange how it took the Doctor admitting she’d been right to make Charley realise how very badly she’d wanted not to be. A heavy, uncomfortable silence fell between them, broken only after what seemed an eternity by Gwyneth’s voice.

“So. Not angels, then.” She sounded disappointed as well.

Charley didn’t blame her. She was doing a bang up job of ruining everyone’s day, it seemed.

“Not remotely,” the Doctor answered. There was still anger in his voice, though Charley was fairly sure that it wasn’t directed at her any longer. No, it was the Gelth who had incurred his wrath now, not only by having designs on his favourite planet, but in trying to use him to execute them.

“So, what then?” Mr. Sneed demanded nervously. “Tell us, Sir, you’ll not leave us to the mercy of these things!”

“‘Course not!” the Doctor sounded indignant at the very suggestion. “The Rift’s already widening. If the Gelth can’t get us to open it all they way for them, doesn’t mean they won’t find some other way of punching through. No, we’ve got to seal the Rift, at least temporarily.”

“How? What would you have us do, Doctor?” Dickens asked.

There was only one sure way Charley knew to close a dimensional doorway with a human key and, for rather obvious reasons, she didn’t like it one bit. Then the Doctor looked at her, and for one shining moment it was as though all the time apart had never happened. Without a single word passing between them, she knew: he wouldn’t give up or take the easy way out, not this time. He wouldn’t allow Gwyneth to be sacrificed unless there was no other option.

Fleeting as it was, that brief connection nearly made Charley’s heart turn over in relief. Perhaps the man she’d known – the man she’d loved – was still in there after all.

“First we need to find the Rift.” He turned to Mr. Sneed. “This house is on a weak spot, so there must be a spot that’s weaker than any other. What’s the weakest part of this house?” When Sneed just stared at him blankly, the Doctor clarified. “The place where most of the ghosts have been seen?”

Finally understanding, Sneed nodded. “That would be the morgue.”

Of course it was.

“Right.” The Doctor nodded. He had a thoughtful look on his face, one just familiar enough that it gave Charley another thrill of hope. “Once we’ve found the Rift, we’ll need to close it. But the Gelth aren’t gonna make that easy on us. They’re not going to just give up their one way out. And in the morgue, they’ll have dozens of corpses to animate and send after us if they think we’re not on the level. Which means figuring out a way to prevent them from using the corpses long enough to get the job done.”

Charley frowned. “Here’s what I don’t understand. As you’ve said, the Gelth aren’t likely to take any chances we might deceive them. So why didn’t any of them follow us back here to the TARDIS? If they heard any of our conversation inside, they have to know we’ve our doubts.”

Dickens’ head snapped up quite suddenly as though inspired with a thought for a new novel. “Gas! Doctor, you said they live in the gas?”

The manic grin reappeared. “Of course! Fill the room with gas, it’ll draw them out of the host. Suck them into the air like poison from a wound!”

“Only trouble is then we won’t be able to breathe,” Charley pointed out. “And I rather think porting a gas mask about might look a bit obvious, perhaps give the game away altogether. Particularly in 1869.”

As if to prove her point, Dickens looked at her and asked, “What, pray tell, is a ‘gas mask’?”

The Doctor shrugged. “So we’ll have to work quickly.”

A good deal more sober now that they were face to face–so to speak–with the enemy, the Doctor slowly descended the steps until he was standing on a metal grate almost directly above the vat where the Consciousness…well, rippled, really. Charley hung back a bit. Someone had to watch the Doctor’s back, after all.

“I seek audience with the Nestene Consciousness under peaceful contract according to convention 15 of the Shadow Proclamation,” he announced.

The Consciousness let out a burbly roar, but as was usually the case when she’d spent a bit of time in the TARDIS, Charley understood as well as though it had been speaking perfect English.

So did the Doctor. “Thank you. Then I might have permission to approach?”

When the Consciousness indicated its cautious agreement, he stepped forward to the railing. “If I might observe, you infiltrated this civilization by means of warp shunt technology. So, may I suggest, with the greatest respect, that you shunt off?”

On the other hand, Charley thought, perhaps talking his way out of a scrape was a talent restricted to her first version of the Doctor. Bad puns? Really? And he expected that to work?

The Consciousness burbled indignantly this time, and Charley didn’t blame it. She felt rather the same way. Well, except for the part about it having some sort of constitutional right to invade. It must’ve gotten that bit from the Americans.

“Oh don’t give me that, it’s an invasion! Plain and simple! Don’t talk about constitutional rights!”

There was something oddly soothing about listening to the Doctor carry on an argument with a gigantic blob of…something. Most people likely would have found the experience a mite surreal, but for Charley it was confirmation that the leather-clad man was indeed the Doctor.

The Nestene Consciousness, on the other hand, didn’t appear to find it at all soothing. It reared angrily, roaring something about having every right not to starve, but the Doctor cut it off sharply.

“I am talking!” He allowed a sufficiently dramatic pause for the Consciousness to settle back down to a simmer before going on. “This planet is just starting. These stupid little people have only just learnt how to walk, but they’re capable of so much more. I’m asking you on their behalf: please, just go.”

He was so engrossed in this plea that he didn’t notice two of the Autons creeping up behind. Charley barely noticed them herself, and not until they were nearly on top of the Doctor.

“Doctor! Behind you!” she cried out a warning, but it was too late. The Autons seized him by both arms, holding him with mechanical implacability while one searched his pockets, producing at last the sonic screwdriver.

“Let him go!” Charley leaped at them, onto the back of one of the Autons, but it shrugged her off as though she were no more than an inconvenience. She landed hard on the grating, the wind knocked solidly out of her. The Consciousness ignored her, too busy accusing the Doctor of being its enemy, despite his vehement protests to the contrary.

Struggling to catch her breath and jump back into the fray, Charley was only peripherally aware of the conversation. Until the Doctor asked in a voice both bewildered and terrified, “What do you mean?”

There was a noise above them, and Charley looked up to see the TARDIS revealed behind a panel of some sort, bathed in blinding white light as though to draw particular attention to it.

The Doctor was almost babbling now, but not in the manner she was accustomed to. He was frightened, almost hysterical. “That’s not true. I should know; I was there. I fought in the War. It wasn’t my fault! I couldn’t save your world! I couldn’t save any of them!”

He didn’t sound as though he expected to get out of there alive.

Her own heart pounding with terror – for if the Doctor thought they were lost, what chance did they have? – Charley struggled to her feet.

The Doctor looked at her, desperation like she’d never seen in his eyes. “It’s the TARDIS! The Nestene has identified its superior technology. It’s terrified! It’s going to the final phase. It’s starting the invasion! Get out, Charley! Just leg it! Now!”

He’d given up. The world was ending, and the Doctor just wanted her to run away, to save herself. Charley could hardly believe what she was hearing. But this was the Doctor. He was the one who’d taught her that there was always a way. And she’d seen Earth’s future, she knew it wasn’t meant to fall to this monster and its army of mechanical men. Which had to mean they’d stopped it.

The Consciousness writhed, energy waves like rings of light pulsing outwards and upwards. The signal.

There wasn’t time to call UNIT, though heaven knew the Brigadier might’ve done so already when she’d failed to contact him with her findings. But even if he had, they’d likely never make it through the hordes of Autons to find this place, let alone reach it. Which meant if the Doctor had given up, then it was up to her to save them.

He’d once said she made a better Time Lord than he himself did. They’d soon know if he were right.

Charley took a deep breath, opening her throat to make sure her voice carried, and said sharply: “Stop this puerile squabbling at once! You sound like children, not fully grown representatives of two technologically advanced sentient species!”

The Doctor shot her a wary look and the blob below them wobbled an appendage that might’ve been a face in her direction. Well, she had the Consciousness’ attention now, at least. Now to see if she could bluff it long enough for the Doctor to escape. “I see that allowing my assistant to conduct this negotiation was an error. It is not one that I will repeat.”

The Consciousness seethed. And who was she that it ought to pay her any heed? it demanded.

“My name is Charleyostientashus, and I am here representing the High Council of Gallifrey. You are disrupting the Web of Time by your presence: a thing we cannot and will not allow!”

“Charley, no,” the Doctor whispered urgently. It was too late, though: she was committed to the ruse, even if it meant she wouldn’t escape.

“If you know the TARDIS, then you know what it means to face the might of Gallifrey. I advise you to depart peaceably while you still can.”

The Nestene Consciousness laughed. The bloody thing laughed at her! Whatever fear it had shown a moment before seemed to have vanished, causing Charley’s face to burn hot with shame.

Did she truly think it was so ignorant as that? the Consciousness taunted. Gallifrey’s might had died with Gallifrey.

Gallifrey’s might died with Gallifrey. It was everything Charley could do not to look at the Doctor for confirmation. Gallifrey, dead? No…it couldn’t be. It couldn’t be! They were the Time Lords. There was no race in the universe more powerful. She ought to know; it had taken beings from another universe to truly threaten them before.

She didn’t dare turn, though. To do so would expose her ignorance, and any hope she had of her bluff being effective would fail. “Do you think it’s just for show that our people call ourselves Time Lords?” she improvised instead. “That just because in your time, Gallifrey has ended, she cannot act just as easily from the past as the present or the future?”

When the Consciousness appeared to visibly pause, Charley felt a thrill of excitement. The Autons holding the Doctor loosened their hold just a little as well. She continued talking, even while one hand crept into her purse to discreetly withdraw the little vial of anti-plastic. “There are other worlds, just as rich in the resources you need, but uninhabited.”

She uncapped the stopper and palmed the vial so the Doctor could see it but the Consciousness could not. Since she daren’t look at him, though, she could only hope he’d caught her drift.

He did. Throwing off the Autons in the moment of the Consciousness’ distraction, he leaped forward, seizing the vial from her hand and hurling it over the railing. The midnight blue liquid sizzled as it struck the Consciousness below. The creature shrieked as cracks of light appeared in its surface and the foundations around them began to quake.

Casting only a brief glance in the direction of his handiwork, the Doctor proclaimed cheerfully, “Now we’re in trouble!” He grabbed Charley’s hand and the two of them raced up the stairs to the TARDIS. The grating collapsed behind them, fireballs erupting from above and below both.

Once the TARDIS door closed behind them, Charley let out a breath she’d not known she was holding. She grabbed hold of a strut as the Doctor raced to the console and began throwing switches, then a few rumbling moments later everything went still.

Only then did Charley open her eyes and look at the Doctor. “Did we do it?” she asked.

“Yup,” was the brisk answer. “With the Nestene Consciousness dead, all those Autons will go back to being what they were before it arrived. Ordinary plastic.”

She shivered. It had been close, though. Probably closer than she knew. She’d managed to buy the Doctor just time enough, but even that had nearly failed. The Consciousness’ words came back to her in a rush.

“Doctor, what did it mean, ‘Gallifrey’s might died with Gallifrey’?” Charley blurted. “Gallifrey can’t be dead.”

“And you’re the authority on what can and can’t be?” he answered harshly, not looking at her. He was looking anywhere but at her, which was an answer in itself.

Charley started to shake. “Romana? Leela? K-9?”

“Dead.” The word was as clipped as though he’d physically cut it off with his teeth. “All dead.”

“How?” it came out as a whisper.

For the first time, the Doctor met Charley’s eyes. Suddenly she understood why he seemed to have changed so much. “There was a War,” he answered simply. “A War that stretched across time and space. Against the Daleks.”

“And you lost.”

“Everybody lost.” He was silent for a long moment. Charley could almost feel him weighing how much to tell her. “My people went mad towards the end. They resurrected Rassilon. Downloaded his consciousness from the Matrix, built a new body, complete with a whole new set of regenerations.”

She was shivering uncontrollably now. Rassilon. The founder of Time Lord society, who’d been a bigot and a despot so vile, he’d tried to use the Doctor’s efforts to save both her and the universe to wipe out whole species that didn’t meet with his approval. If he’d been so dangerous as a memory stored in a computer, she didn’t want to imagine what he could have done as flesh and blood.

“I can’t believe Romana would allow such a thing,” Charley said numbly.

The Doctor shook his head. “She wouldn’t. She didn’t.” He offered no further details, but he didn’t need to. Charley knew now that the Lady President she had met had died long before her world, and no doubt Leela and K-9 had both perished in her defense.

“I had to stop them.” Charley wasn’t sure who the Doctor was trying to convince, her or himself. “There was no one else left who could.”

The Doctor – her Doctor, who couldn’t bring himself to sacrifice her, even when it seemed the only way – had destroyed his own people to save the universe? It was appalling: not the act itself so much as the fact that he’d found himself in a place where there truly was no other option. For if there had been, she knew him too well to believe he wouldn’t have found it.

He’d have sacrificed himself first, if he could.

The Doctor dropped his eyes again, turning his attention back to the TARDIS console. “I’ll take you home. Where do you live?”

Charley didn’t hesitate. “Doctor, I meant what I said earlier. As far as I’m concerned, I am home.”

He bristled. “I’m not some puppy dog that needs looking after lest it start to chew on the furniture.”

Aren’t you? Charley thought, studying him. The Doctors she’d known before, she’d have trusted the fate of the universe to his hands without thought or hesitation. This one, she wasn’t quite so sure about. Especially not now she knew why he seemed so damaged. “Look, I admit: at the time I wrote that letter, I had every intention of leaving, but…”

“But?” he echoed when she hesitated.

“Things changed,” Charley answered simply. She didn’t know why he didn’t remember their last adventure together – his last adventure with her, rather – but ultimately what did it matter? He hadn’t died, at least not permanently, as she’d thought he had. That was the important thing. The same couldn’t be said for too many people she’d come to know and care for while travelling with him.

“So, what then?” the Doctor asked, his voice bordering on snide. “You gonna stay with me forever?”

“No,” Charley answered carefully. She studied his face and was surprised to discover that the sneer didn’t hurt as much as it once would have. Whether it was because he wore a different face or because she’d just grown up, she didn’t know. “I don’t think you would really want me to. I’ve seen how you deal with the mortality of your companions.” Or rather, how he didn’t deal with it, but she’d opened that wound enough as is.

He looked away for a moment, back to the console.

“But you have to know,” she insisted. “That I would never leave you when you really needed me.”

“And you think I need you now, do you?”

Charley looked at him, heard the silent corollary to his words in what he wasn’t saying, and answered both questions. “I know you do.”

Another long silence stretched between them, reminding Charley a little too vividly of that endless white corridor where they’d found themselves when they first arrived in the divergent universe. This silence seemed just as oppressive, yet the possibility of speech equally dangerous. They might not inadvertently spawn a sentient being made entirely of sound who wanted them to sacrifice themselves so it could survive, but that didn’t mean there was no danger of monsters.

Then as suddenly as though none of it had ever happened, the Doctor was in motion again: toggling levers and pressing buttons on the TARDIS console. “Best be off, then.”

Charley flew forward, her hand on the door almost an instant after it was shut, but it wouldn’t budge. He’d already latched it behind him. “Doctor! Let me in, damn you!” She pounded until her fists ached on the red-painted metal, but was ignored. “You can’t just leave me here!”

The only answer was the faint, reverberating echo of the beating she’d given the door.

“Oh!” Charley gave the door one last exasperated thump then turned away, her mind whirling. Frustration quickly gave way to determination. Whatever quarrel the Doctor might have with her, whatever it was that had apparently kicked his martyr complex into overdrive in this incarnation, she had no intention of letting either get him killed. The universe still needed his particular brand of meddling.

If she couldn’t get to him, then maybe she could get to the TARDIS. She still had the key her first Doctor had given her, and she’d learned just enough about piloting it that she ought to be able to make the short hop inside the store.

Of course, that required finding the TARDIS, and quickly, before the Doctor had time to do anything particularly foolish. It wasn’t in the alley she’d been dumped in, but it ought to be close if he had any thought of surviving at all.

Charley reached the end of the alley at a run and paused there. Her eyes darted back and forth in indecision. Left, right, or straight ahead? It was impossible to try to anticipate where the Doctor might have parked the TARDIS when the TARDIS often had its own ideas of where and when to land. A feeling of helplessness nearly swamped her for a moment. But then – there! – in the headlights of a passing vehicle, she caught a glimpse of something blue tucked discreetly into an alcove across the street.

She darted across, heedless of the late evening traffic even when a taxi nearly ran her down and the driver hammered the horn. There wasn’t time to be cautious.

Reaching the alcove, Charley let out a sound almost like a sob of relief. She’d been right. There was the TARDIS, just as she remembered it. Her hands shook as she fumbled in her handbag for the key.

There. Now all she had to do was push aside the false keyhole to reveal the real one beneath…only it wasn’t moving. The lock had changed. For a moment, Charley almost felt like sitting down and having a good cry. Of all the stupid things, to be defeated by a bloody Yale key!

Behind her, the night was split by the familiar light and sound display of an explosion. Charley spun around just in time to see the blast take out the entire top floor of shop windows; the roof of Henrick’s was already on fire.

People were running about and shouting. Somewhere in the distance, she heard or imagined sirens. All of it faded into the background. Charley had eyes only for the alley where the Doctor had left her. She barely felt her strength give out, only noticing that her legs had buckled beneath her when she reached the ground.

For a long, breathless moment, Charley just sat there, her back against the TARDIS. She watched people running towards and away from the building, not truly registering what any of them were doing. She was so intent on watching the alley that she didn’t even hear the footsteps approaching her until a newly-familiar voice spoke.

“I thought I told you to go home.”

Charley looked up at him from her seat against the TARDIS door and gave him the plainest answer she could. “I did.”

The Doctor’s expression softened. “Come on, then.” He slipped his own key into the lock and opened the doors. Only after Charley had clambered to her feet and slipped inside did he silently follow.

The cavernous control room within had changed even more than the Doctor himself. Struts that had once resembled nothing so much as the massive steel ribs of the R-101 now sprouted tree-like from the floor as though they’d grown there. Gone entirely was the gothic cathedral. Instead, Charley rather felt as though she were standing in the centre of a submarine Jules Verne might have designed. The walls had roundels like they had when she’d travelled with his sixth incarnation, but they were smaller and more deeply set. They looked more like gigantic screws than the large porthole shape she’d never quite grown accustomed to.

Charley considered making some flippant remark about redecorating, but the intense frown on the Doctor’s face as he marched over to the console killed it on her lips. “What are you doing?” she asked instead.

“Trying to lock down a signal,” he answered. The Doctor took the arm from her, laid it down on the TARDIS console and attached several wires to it. “Probably won’t work. An arm’s too simple. But as I haven’t got a better alternative, it’ll have to do for now.”

“I thought you blew up the relay signal,” she stated, feeling a bit slow and not at all happy about it.

The Doctor looked at her. “Surely you don’t think the Nestene Consciousness came all this way just to take over one shop.”

“Well…no, of course not,” Charley answered sheepishly. “But aren’t you the least bit curious how I wound up in London in 2005 if you supposedly left me in Singapore in 2008?”

“Oi!” He looked insulted. “Trying to stop an invasion here.”

It’s not as though it were that urgent. Surely if the Brigadier could tell the Autons weren’t yet ready to make a move, the Doctor could also. Charley sighed. “Right.”

Not the talkative sort this time ’round, then. That was a bit maddening, but then she supposed one had to be somewhat mad to put up with the Doctor for long. In any incarnation. She watched him tinker for a moment, slowly growing curious. “What exactly are we looking for?”

“A transmitter. The relay station on the roof of Henrick’s was just that, a relay station. It passed the signal on, but it has to have come from somewhere. The Consciousness is controlling every single piece of plastic so it needs a transmitter to boost the signal.” The Doctor paused, frowning. Then he glanced over at Charley, his curiosity clearly getting the better of him. “Come to think on it, how did you wind up here when I left you in 2008?”

Charley’ mind, however, had been a little too successfully shifted to the more immediate problem. “What would the transmitter look like?”

“Big,” was the curt, concise answer before he went back to pondering the conundrum she’d posed him. “It’d be simple enough if it were the other way ’round, but last I checked, nobody in twenty-first century Earth goes about experiencing time backwards.”

“Could you be a bit more specific?”

The Doctor blinked. “Knew a chap once, somewhere about the Middle Ages. Lived his life backwards. Could tell you all about his future, couldn’t recall a thing about his past.”

Charley rolled her eyes. “About the transmitter,” she clarified, exasperated. “What exactly would it look like?”

“Oh.” He looked sheepish for a moment. “Like a transmitter. Round and massive, and somewhere central. A huge circular metal structure. Like a dish. Like a wheel. How could you hide something like that slap bang in the middle of London? It must be completely invisible.”

Like a wheel… Well, she didn’t know about any invisible giant wheels in London, but she damned well knew about one that was quite visible. “What about the London Eye?”

The Doctor looked at her. “Pardon?”

“The London Eye? The Millennium Wheel? You know, gigantic Ferris wheel ‘slap bang in the middle of London’? Generally regarded by persons of taste as a public eyesore?” Well, all right, perhaps not, but she certainly found it to be so.

The Doctor stared at her in wonder for a moment before finally breaking out into a wide, manic grin. “Fantastic!”

He immediately began racing around the console, throwing switches and pulling levers. That, at least, was familiar. Almost painfully so. “Hang on to something!” he shouted an instant before the TARDIS began to buck and rumble.

Charley didn’t need to be told. She knew this part by heart. Grabbing the edge of the console, she hung on for dear life. For a ship that simply dematerialised one place and rematerialised at another, the TARDIS certainly could be a bumpy ride. But she wouldn’t have it any other way.

Only a few short jarring seconds later, they landed and the Doctor raced out. Charley ran after him. He’d parked very nearly beneath the enormous wheel, but rather than looking up at it, seemed to be staring thoughtfully at the ground.

“Hold on a tick,” Charley said as she reached him. “Oughtn’t we to have a plan before we go barging into an alien stronghold?”

The Doctor shrugged. “Never needed one before.”

“Right, because that generally works out so well for us.”

The Doctor stopped, turning to Charley with an exasperated glare. “I plan to talk to it. Give it a chance to leave peacefully.”

Oh. So, the usual then. Granted, the Doctor did have a way about him when it came to talking his way out of scrapes, but still, if that was the best he’d come up with… “And if that doesn’t work?”

The manic grin reappeared as he pulled a vial of blue liquid out of the pocket of his leather jacket. “Anti-plastic.”

“Anti-plastic?” Charley echoed sceptically.

“Anti-plastic!” he repeated. “Got a problem with that?”

She shrugged. “It just seems rather a leap to go straight from ‘give it a chance to leave peacefully’ to anti-plastic in one go. Haven’t you got any in-between plans?”

The Doctor shook his head and frowned at her. “There’s just no pleasing you, is there?”

“Well, if you must know, I think I liked you better in curls and a necktie,” Charley muttered under her breath as she followed him towards the Ferris wheel. To herself, she silently added, Both versions.

He ignored her. “So we’ve found the transmitter. The Consciousness must be somewhere underneath. Look around.”

Charley obeyed. “What if we negotiate with it?” she suggested over her shoulder. “I mean, if it’s invading, there’s got to be something it wants. Territory? It’s not as though we’re using the moon at the moment.”

“What it wants is this planet. Lots of smoke and oil, plenty of toxins and dioxins in the air. It’s just what the Nestene Consciousness needs. Its food stock was destroyed in the War, all its protein planets rotted. So Earth…” The Doctor stopped briefly to mime eating with a knife and fork. “…dinner!”

Well, that would certainly explain why the Consciousness’ two previous attempts at invasion had been back in the nineteen-seventies. Not that Earth was by and large an extremely healthy planet at present, but almost invariably when she began to complain about the air quality when compared to her own time, her UNIT colleagues would rejoinder with something about, “You think it’s bad now, you should’ve seen it during the ‘Seventies…” Of course, most of the environmental legislation that had been past in the last half century was generally decried by scientists as “too little too late,” but to at least some degree, things had improved.

“Perhaps it would be willing to share the planet, then. After all, without humans to keep on pumping pollution into the atmosphere–“

The Doctor shook his head. “It’d just eat its fill and move on.”

Right. So much for that idea. “Have you got a spare vial of that anti-plastic stuff on you?”

“What for?” he asked.

Charley just looked at him. The Doctor rolled his eyes, but pulled the vial he’d shown her out of his jacket pocket and tossed it to her. “You used to trust me, y’know,” he told her pointedly.

“You hadn’t a death wish then,” she retorted.

Charley slipped the vial carefully into her handbag while the Doctor bent down to examine the hatch he’d found. It took only a moment of fiddling to get it open, at which point red light and smoke promptly poured out. “Hellfire and brimstone,” Charley remarked dryly. “I take it this is the place?”

“Probably,” the Doctor agreed. “You coming?”

She almost asked, ‘Have I ever not?’ but remembered just in time that as far as he knew, she’d done exactly that. Which made her all the more determined to get to the bottom of that particular gap in his memory once this adventure was over. At a guess, she supposed it probably had a great deal to do with the Cyber control signal she’d thought had killed him.

Since now seemed hardly the time to ask, and he likely wouldn’t answer anyway, Charley instead followed him down the ladder and a brief flight of stairs into the belly of the beast. Below them in some sort of vat was a great seething mass of…something. “Is that the Nestene Consciousness?” she asked in a whisper.

“Probably,” the Doctor answered. “Looks a bit different from the last time I defeated it. Must’ve mutated during the War.”

That was the second time he’d referenced a war in relation to the Consciousness. And not just any war, but a War with a capital ‘W.’ She could hear the capital in his voice, just as when her parents and other elders had spoken with grim nostalgia about the Great War. That was something else she’d have to ask him about once this was over. If she could persuade him to talk at all.

Well. Charlotte Elspeth Pollard was nothing if not stubborn. Whatever the matter was, she’d get it out of him one way or the other. Provided they survived this, of course.

“To be trusted is a greater compliment than being loved.”
– George MacDonald

She was in dresses when it happened. One of the dummies moved.

Oh, it didn’t move much, and she only saw it out of the corner of her eye. Most people would have likely chalked it up to their own overactive imaginations, but Charley had spent far too much time travelling with the Doctor to take anything for granted.

By the time she turned her head, the figure had stopped moving of course. Charley stepped closer to investigate. It was a standard shop window dummy. No signs of life at all, not even the flutter of a heartbeat. Which meant that if it had moved, it hadn’t done so on its own. Someone–or more likely, something–was controlling it.

“Pardon me,” Charley interrupted a passing sales clerk, a blonde girl barely older than she herself had been when she boarded the R101. “It was…Rose, wasn’t it?”

Rose stopped, offering her a small smile. “Yeah. You’re the new girl, right? Charlotte.”

“Call me Charley,” she corrected with an answering smile. “Look, I know it’s my first day and I’ve no right whatsoever to be making any sort of demands, but would you mind terribly keeping an eye on things for me for a moment? I really must make a telephone call.”

“Sure, go on,” Rose answered.

With a quick but heartfelt thank you, Charley ducked into the back and dug out her mobile. It had taken nearly a year living in this century before she finally gave in and got one, but as it was increasingly difficult to find a public telephone when needed – even of the red, non-time-travelling variety – she really hadn’t much choice.

“Brigadier?” Charley spoke as soon as the other end of the line was picked up. “It’s Charley.”

“Miss Pollard,” Sir Alastair greeted her. “What can I do for you?”

“It’s regarding that matter at Henrick’s department store. You can tell Benton he was absolutely right, there is something odd going on.”

“Shouldn’t you be placing this call to your superiors, then?” he asked, amused.

Charley rolled her eyes, even though he couldn’t see it. Granted, she didn’t know much of anything about how UNIT had functioned during the Brigadier’s time, but under the present chain of command it was far too likely to shoot first and ask questions later. This inspired her more often than not to do her own threat assessment before actually bringing anything to their attention, even if they were her employers. “In good time. But first, I had wanted your opinion.”

She could almost see the old man snap to attention at the other end of the line. “I’m listening.”

Casting a quick glance around to be sure she was alone, Charley dropped her voice and quickly recounted what she’d seen. When she’d finished, she asked, “Well?”

“Oh dear,” was the rueful reply.

“So then it is something you’ve encountered before.”

“Indeed,” he agreed grimly. “It sounds rather like an Auton.”

Charley frowned. The name didn’t ring a bell, but she’d encountered so many monsters on her travels with the Doctor that after a while, they all began to run together. “What exactly is an Auton?”

“Dashed difficult to kill, is what. Seeing as how they’re not quite alive. In simplest terms, Miss Pollard, they are items of everyday, ordinary plastic controlled by an alien consciousness. The Nestene Consciousness, to be precise. It attempted to invade on two separate occasions whilst I was with UNIT.”

Charley’s heart sank. “So they are hostile.”

“Very,” the Brigadier confirmed. “It does puzzle me, however, that thus far you’ve only seen one in action. It rather makes me wonder that they’re not yet ready to mobilize. In which case, it might be unwise to alert them that we know of their presence: don’t want to speed up their timetable before we’re prepared to deal with the consequences.”

“So perhaps for today I should just keep an eye on things here?”

“By yourself? Absolutely not.”

Charley smiled. He meant well, but when one had learned this defending-the-universe business at the Doctor’s knee, well…charging into danger with little to no back-up was all rather part of the job. “Thank you, Brigadier.”

He sighed. “You’re going to do it whether I say so or not, aren’t you Miss Pollard?”

“I learned from the best,” she quipped in return. “But don’t worry, Brigadier. If I do get myself killed, I promise to come right ’round and apologise, abjectly, for not heeding your words.”

He chuckled ruefully. “That is exactly what I’m afraid of. Be careful, Miss Pollard.”

Charley hung up the phone with another smile. Slipping it into the pocket of her skirt, she ducked quietly back onto the floor.

The remainder of the work day passed without incident. No other dummies appeared to move or jump out at her, so Charley carefully concluded that the Brigadier was probably right. Only one question still remained: why had that one allowed itself to be seen? Had she somehow aroused its particular curiosity? Or rather, the curiosity of the thing that controlled it?

That question lingered with her after the last customer had departed and the employees began the process of closing. She wanted to investigate further, but with so many other people about, it was hardly convenient.

The opportunity didn’t arise until she and the other girls were on their way out. Colin, the doorman, handed Rose a small plastic bag containing the day’s lottery money, which the younger girl took with a sigh and started to turn back.

“Why don’t you let me?” Charley intercepted her, holding out a hand for the bag. “You’ve got plans for the night.” She nodded towards the other girls. The three of them had been nattering on about going out for drinks together for probably the last two hours. “I haven’t.”

Rose gave her an odd look. “You sure? Do you even know where Wilson’s office is?”

“I can find it,” Charley answered with a shrug. Truthfully, she’d studied the layout of the store in detail before she’d gone undercover, but she could hardly admit that, could she? “I’ve got to learn my way about sometime.”

Rose glanced at Colin, who shrugged. Then with a tentative smile, she handed the bag to Charley. “Thanks. I owe you one.”

You’ve no idea. Charley watched Rose link her arm through her mate’s and disappear out the door. Then she took a deep breath and plunged determinedly in the direction of the basement. That was where the electrician’s office was, but more importantly, it was where all of the dummies not in use were kept. If someone were planning to use the shop’s dummies as an invasion force, it seemed as good a place as any to start to look for that someone.

+++

On second thought, perhaps this wasn’t such a good idea after all.

For one thing, the basement of Henrick’s was very large, and very, very empty. And while that was good insofar as it meant there were fewer people likely to be put in danger, the fact that it should be at least one person less empty was not all reassuring. But Chief Electrical Officer Wilson’s office door was shut fast and he hadn’t responded at all to Charley’s calls. Her voice echoed instead unanswered in the cement cavern.

For another, there were quite a lot of dummies about. Many more than she’d supposed, even knowing the area was used for storage. She was surrounded by a vast, sleeping army that might come to life at any moment, which was unnerving to say the least.

Not that the Doctor wouldn’t have been equally likely to wander into just such a scrape, but at least he would have probably had an idea how to get out of it. Looking around at the painted eyes that seemed to follow her, Charley realised that she really didn’t.

At the other end of the vast room, the door she’d just come through banged shut. Charley’s heart sped up as the shadows around her began to move for real. First one, then several mannequins took a few shuffling steps towards her. She took a step back. Well, if they kept on moving at that pace, perhaps they’d not prove too terrible a threat after all.

They sped up. One would think she’d learned nothing about tempting fate.

Charley muttered darkly to herself as she scrambled backwards, trying to get away without turning her back to any of the creatures. “Stay back!” she shouted, trying to sound a good deal braver than she felt. “I warn you, I’m armed!”

Oh, that was intelligent. Perhaps she ought to throw out a few more empty threats. Charley fumbled in her purse for some sort of weapon. Something aerosol, perhaps? No: couldn’t blind what didn’t have eyes. She grabbed a wooden hanger and threw it at them, striking the foremost one. It didn’t even flinch. The rack that the hanger had been dangling from, however…

In a burst of inspiration, Charley grabbed the wheeled metal rack with both hands and pulled, thrusting it between her and the advancing army of Autons. The first one stumbled, causing the others to slow. Charley felt exultant. She hadn’t stopped them, not by a long shot, but at least she’d found some way to slow them down and give herself more time to think of a way out.

As she stumbled onwards and backwards, she grabbed anything else within reach; tossing clothes over their heads, throwing more racks and boxes in their path. So intent was she on her campaign of creating an obstacle course that she failed to notice the biggest obstacle in her own path until she had run right into the wall.

Only then did panic truly set in. The Autons were practically on top of her. There was nowhere left to go.

“Oh, bollocks!” Charley moaned, closing her eyes and throwing up one arm to ward off the inevitable blow. After everything she’d survived, she was going to be killed the basement of a shop, pummelled to death by plastic dummies. How humiliating!

Then, out of nowhere, an unfamiliar hand wrapped itself around hers, and a stranger’s voice said, “Charley, run!”

She reacted on instinct, letting herself be pulled out of the way just as the foremost Auton struck. Its hand knocked apart a pipe on the wall instead of her skull. Suddenly Charley was running, hand in hand with a black-clad figure she’d never seen before in her life. But while the hand holding hers was unfamiliar, the surge of adrenaline was not. They tore down the long corridor, hand in hand, the relative safety of the lift ahead and a phalanx of their plastic enemy behind. Too close, the Autons were too close. They’d never make it in time!

By some extraordinary chance, when they reached the lift, the doors opened nearly as soon as the man in black pressed the button. Without exchanging a word, he and Charley both dove through the opening just as the creatures reached it. A pale plastic arm was thrust in after them, but with a few sharp tugs the man pulled it off and the doors slid closed before any of their other pursuers could make the same attempt. At least for the moment, they were safe.

“There you are,” the man said cheerfully, waving the dead arm at her. “Inert now.”

Charley just stared, her heart pounding in impossible hope. The man opposite her didn’t look a thing like the Doctor had when she’d met him, but then neither had the man in the crazy-quilt coat. He didn’t sound like him, either, with his Lancashire accent, but then her first Doctor had sometimes sounded as though he were from Liverpool whilst her second had been pure London.

It couldn’t be him, could it? She’d seen him die – or at least, she thought she had. Unless this was another earlier one. But no, she’d met several of his past selves – or rather, aspects of them- during the whole bit with Zagreus. She would recognize the others as surely as she’d recognized his sixth persona when he’d answered her distress signal.

But this man knew her name. And he’d taken her hand just as the Doctor used to when his eyes were grey and his hair long.

The object of her observation looked at her. “Oh, don’t give me that look. After the things we’ve seen, living plastic can’t be all that shocking.”

“Doctor?” she asked, her voice twisted with grief, shock, hope and uncertainty all mixed into one overwhelming emotion.

“Hello!” He grinned manically at her but Charley could see the tightness around his eyes.

That was what finally convinced her. How else could she so easily read an unfamiliar face, unless she knew the soul behind it?

But what was he doing here and now? If Byron hadn’t killed him, not permanently, then why hadn’t the Doctor come back for her long before? Why had he just abandoned her after fighting so hard to keep her by his side when she was determined to go?

Confusion clouded her thoughts. “What are you doing here?” Charley asked numbly.

The Doctor looked at Charley. “I should think that would be obvious.” He waved the plastic arm at her. “Living plastic in London? Ring a bell?”

So he hadn’t come for her. Not that she really thought he had. Their meeting had been too nearly arbitrary for that. The reminder of how they’d met, however, jarred her for a moment out of her stupor. “Oh! Wilson, the electrician. He was down there. Is he all right?”

The Doctor shook his head, his voice flat. “He’s dead.”

The bell dinged and the doors slid open, announcing their arrival back at the ground floor. The Doctor strode out and Charley followed, now in a different sort of haze.

Dead. Wilson, dead. She’d never met the man, but Charley grieved him nonetheless. If only she’d listened to the Brigadier and called in back-up. UNIT could’ve had a team in, evacuated the entire store under the pretence of a gas leak or some sort. No one need have died.

“Mind your eyes,” the Doctor warned before holding up a new sonic screwdriver to the lift control panel and using it to short out the controls. That seemed to be the end of the conversation about Wilson, at least so far as he was concerned. Charley was reminded for a moment of C’rizz and of how cavalier the Doctor had seemed about his death.

She shivered. “Now what? How do we stop them?”

“We aren’t going to do anything. I’ve got it well in hand myself. You can go on home.”

There he went, getting all protective again. Really, he ought to know by now that she’d never listen. And that she usually wound up saving his life in the process. “Nonsense. Of course I’m going to help. So what can I do?”

“Nothing,” the Doctor reiterated shortly, and this time he sounded almost angry. “The Autons are being controlled by a relay device in the roof. Which would be a great big problem if I didn’t have this.” He pulled something that looked like a motherboard from his inside pocket and waved it at her.

“And what is that?”

“What’s it look like?”

“It looks like a–” Charley nearly made the motherboard comparison (and blame the Doctor that she even knew what a motherboard was) but stopped a moment before the words left her tongue. The Doctor wouldn’t be warning her off if he were just going to rewire the relay or intercept the signal. “It’s a bomb, isn’t it?” she asked in disbelief.

“Yup.”

“So you’re just going to blow them all up?” That wasn’t like him. Sure, the store was empty now, but to not even attempt to negotiate? What in heavens name had happened to him?

Unless…unless they couldn’t be negotiated with. That thought made her go cold all over.

The Doctor didn’t appear to notice. “Yup. Might well die in the process, but don’t worry about me, no. Go home, go on! Go and have your lovely beans on toast.”

Charley recoiled, stunned and wounded by his answer. “You’re absolutely mad if you think I’m going to allow you to go charging into danger on your own and get yourself killed,” she told him sharply.

“And why not? You’re the one who said you didn’t want to do it anymore.”

Now she was completely baffled. “I…what? When did I ever say that?”

“Singapore, 2008.” He looked at her and his eyes hardened. “You left me a note. Didn’t even have the nerve to say it to my face.”

A note…surely not that note? “But that was before!”

“Before what?”

“Before…the Cybermen!”

“What Cybermen?”

Oh, he really was the utter limit. If it was meant to be a joke, it wasn’t the least bit funny. “The ones who killed you!” Well, sort of. Byron had been half converted at the time, anyway. “Or at least, I thought they had.”

The Doctor shrugged. “No matter now. No time to argue.” He opened a fire door that Charley in her befuddlement hadn’t even realised they were approaching and she found herself abruptly and unceremoniously deposited the other side of it.

“I’d run for your life, if I were you,” the Doctor said before slamming the door behind him.

A Greater Compliment

Author’s Note: This story is not now and never was intended as a slam on Rose.  I’d actually meant for Rose – and Jackie and Mickey – to have a larger role than the cameo I wound up with, but discovered that if I was going to take the Doctor and the TARDIS away from her, I couldn’t rub it in by keeping her on the periphery of the action. 🙁 What I wanted to explore was simply how Charley would’ve done things differently. I also wanted to see how the Doctor would have reacted differently to having along someone with whom he already shared a complicated and not always pleasant history, and what the consequences of those changes would be. That said, if there are Rose fans out there who don’t want to read it without her, I won’t hold it against them. I have a hard time reading stories that write Martha out of season three, too. :-\

Acknowledgments: Thanks to my fantastic beta readers, hanelissar  and biichan, my cheerleader always, debc, and my wonderfully enthusiastic artist, caersmane. I couldn’t have done it without you! 🙂

Disclaimer: All dialogue from Doctor Who as well as the characters of the Doctor, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, Sarah Jane, Harriet Jones and others are property of the BBC. Charley belongs to Big Finish Productions. Transcripts of “Rose,” “The Unquiet Dead,” “Aliens of London” and “World War Three” were found here: http://who-transcripts.atspace.com/

Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine