Chapter Text
"GPR in Johannesburg shows no subsurface movement." On the stuttering video feed, the last ring of Tractators vanished in a purple flash. Dust eddied up after them, winking in the floodlights, and fell again to the open pit floor. Captain Price looked up from the screens. "The nest is empty."
"And that's the end of them," said Jack. "I wish cleanup was always this easy." The transmitters had been simple to build, and the control codes—fortunately—the same worldwide.
"Don't forget the moon." Martha peered over the screen of a commandeered laptop. "We'll need to send a cleanup squad up though the transmat, just to make certain. And down into all the mine workings."
"That's a matter for the local commands. Or for Geneva, in the matter of the moonbase." Captain Price stretched in her chair and cracked her knuckles. "Captain Harkness, thank you for your assistance. I think you'll find the debriefing is already under way. Down the pub."
"Best place for it." A corporal appeared with his coat; he shrugged it on. "Doctor Jones—you coming to be debriefed?"
"I'll join you." Jack craned his neck; the laptop screen was full of calligraphy. Martha made shooing motions. "Five minutes, really. Go on."
The debriefing had spilled out of the pub into the square. Luke Smith perched on the plinth of the war memorial, explaining hyperspatial navigation to the UNIT noncoms. Inside, Sarah Jane and the Doctor stood at the bar, both watching the scene through the open door. "The collective wisdom of ten thousand humans, in one package," the Doctor was saying. "Brilliant. Utterly brilliant, that is."
"If you mean Luke, yes he is. If you mean the idea..." Sarah shrugged. "Rather a lot of trouble to go through just to get a focus group." She said it fondly. "Hello, Jack."
"Waiting for your pints to settle?"
"I am. And I think the barman would welcome a distraction from the Doctor's drink." Jack followed her look down the bar, to a half-constructed folly of layers and swirls in half a dozen colors.
He caught the beleaguered bartender's eye and asked for Irish coffee. "So you told him about Luke."
"Did everyone else know about my godson's marvelous brain?"
"Godson?" The bartender set out their drinks. The Doctor's was on fire. Sarah took her glass in both hands, turned it as if seeking the best grip.
"We-ell, yeah, I thought—I mean, if you don't mind. I could be a godfather. I was a consigliere once." The Doctor watched the flames die down in his glass. "And I've got fifteen years of catching up to do! Birthday presents, godfatherly advice, maybe a few questions—you know, my people did something very similar." Sarah tensed at that "my people"; Jack felt himself doing the same. The Doctor volunteered so little about the Time Lords; it was hard not to hoard the scraps he let drop. "Not with imprints of the living. But the mind patterns of the dead got combined in a panatropic network. We used it for prognostication—scientific projections, local reality forecasts..." He prodded his drink with a straw, drawing waves at the layer boundaries. "Never thought to use it as an aesthetic arbiter, though; that's fantastic. Have you ever asked—"
"No, I have not," sputtered Sarah. "This is why I didn't tell you—I knew you'd just interrogate Luke on all sorts of—"
"Interrogate! Sarah, Sarah. I just—you can't deny he's uniquely poised to resolve some of your species' great questions—justice or mercy! Guns or butter, Team Edward or Team Jacob, Abbey Road or Sergeant Pepper..."
"All right, all right." Sarah shook her head, trying to hide a smile. "He's your godson; he knows how to tell you to butt out." She cast another glance out the front door, just as Martha and the Brigadier walked in. "Here comes that jurisdictional dispute. Come on; Ianto's holding a table in the garden."
He and Mickey and a local girl Sarah introduced as Laura were all on at least their second round. "Ianto!" Jack slung an arm over his shoulders. "Lethbridge-Stewart's on his way in—remind me why we have dibs on the Master's ship again?"
"Actually, Jack, we don't." He a slid a stack of documents down the table. Half of them appeared to be in Icelandic. "It seems while we've been gone, there have been some changes in Despex's corporate holdings."
"What he means," drawled Turlough, "is that once the owner vanished without trace, the company's only product was banned in ninety countries, and most of its real estate was undermined by giant insects and then shelled by UNIT—oddly enough, after all this, Despex's creditors suddenly became much less forgiving."
"Many creditors," added Ianto. "The banks have taken Despex to pieces."
Sarah giggled into her drink. "They repossessed it. They repossessed our spaceship."
"But who did?" Jack rifled through the papers. "This—" he scanned the pages for an expansion of the unpronounceable acronym—"Akureyri Maritime Loan Company and Fisherman's Benevolent Society?"
"Briefly," said Turlough. "Of course, they've been acquired several times over since that was written. Big fish eating little fish. And as it turns out, even the biggest fish have been having some difficulties lately—"
"Yeah, not a surprise, if they've been writing spaceship loans," snorted Mickey.
"—and, to cut a long story short, it's amazing what you can pick up for pennies on the pound, if you know where to look." He smirked triumphantly while Jack flipped to the bottom of the stack, to ownership papers made out in the name of Vassily Turlough.
Martha and Lethbridge-Stewart set down drinks, and dragged chairs over. "Sir Alastair," Sarah said, "we're out of luck."
Jack passed over the papers; the Brigadier read them and grumbled. "Dare I ask what else you've salvaged from receivership, Mr. Turlough?"
"Oh, this and that. I sold the American properties on to a historical buildings conservancy. But I'm keeping the Hyderabad office building. And warehouse—with its contents."
Jack thought of Carbry's London warehouse, piled high with coffee and silk and grand pianos. "Including a cargo transmat?"
"And enough goods to cover—" Turlough's face fell. "Well. Maybe half of the fines I'll be liable for. But it should keep me afloat."
The Doctor spoke, carefully toneless. "You're going to back to Trion, then?"
Turlough nodded. "I've negotiated a confessional resolution— a plea bargain, essentially—with the judicial custodians. They won't pursue criminal penalties, and I'll take an official reprimand." He rolled his empty pint glass between his palms. "It will bar me from ever taking the oath of service; I can't pursue a political career again, or a military one. That's rather a big deal on Trion."
"Doesn't sound like much of a loss," said Jack. "Suits with epaulettes—you're better off without them."
Turlough smiled fleetingly. "There's also the matter of several million corpira in fines. I'll have to sell the flat and sleep on my ship for a while; and I'll almost certainly have to trade the ship in on something cheaper." He shrugged. "She's not really built for cargo anyway."
The Doctor arched his eyebrows. "You planning on getting into the freight business?"
"Staying in it. Despina was financing the whole Trion end of her empire on tea. It's a lucrative trade—"
"—tea?"
"—and I've already got warehousing here, and a whole sales network on the Trion end. I'm not selling anything sensitive on the Terran market," he clarified. "Just carbon gems; it's not like an influx of cheap diamonds will hurt anyone but DeBeers."
"Tea," mused the Doctor. "How very respectable of you."
"I'll make up for it in my private life, I promise you." They exchanged a look that Jack had to look away from; he was sure he'd worn it himself on occasion.
"When you go back..." Martha reached across the table to pat Jack's hand. "Can you see that the Turlough militia are recognized, for their part against the Tractators? As the Thane, I mean?"
"Actually, the title's another thing I'll need to give up," said Turlough. "But I'll make sure Malkon does."
"Of course; thank you." Martha went on, graver: "Unofficially—can you convey our personal regards to the family of one of your pilots? I never got his surname—a man called Sunny, of the Governor's Star. He lost his ship and his life defending us, and the planet. I'd like his family to know."
She squeezed Jack's hand, rather harder than she needed to. "A good man," Jack agreed. "We're grateful for his sacrifice."
"I'll see to it," said Turlough, and that was the end of it, for a while. But at closing time, they all adjourned to the Master's ship, to drink up her liquor cabinet before Turlough was constrained to sell it, and Martha fell into step with him. "Don't you ever take a moment to mourn?"
"Did you?" She was silent. "When you were walking the Earth, when every person—every city, every nation you met—was being bombed into dust behind you, did you stop to mourn every one of them?"
It wasn't fair—it wasn't what they did, to argue with That Year, to attack with it—and he didn't have to look at her face to know he'd hurt her. "Afterward," she protested. "I did. Why do you think I left, after that?"
Left needed no context, between them. "And I can't leave, any more than the Doctor can. This is my life now. Every person I meet, I will outlive. Every person I love, if I stay with them, sooner or later, I will watch them die. All of them," he said. "All of you.
"I don't have that much grief in me."
"And so you don't grieve anyone? Not Sunny, not Owen? Not Tosh? Jack, how long can you keep this up?"
"Long enough," Jack said, quellingly. "Long enough to deal, in my own way, in my own time. That's one thing I'm not short of." He laid a hand on her shoulder in mute apology. "I'll be all right."
"If you say so." But she smiled; apology accepted.
"Now come on, before they drink up all the good stuff." He swept her up in the folds of his coat and ran down the hill to the ship, to where Ianto waited on the gangway.
~*~
Turlough had been quite sure he was sober, mostly, when they'd left the pub; but either he'd somehow got drunker on the ramble out to the landing site, or else Despina's galley had grown a lot more cabinets. Several of them were impervious to all his keys and all Sarah Jane's, but the drinks locker eventually sprang open to reveal a gratifying expanse of bottles.
They carried out anything that was already open, and as many mixers as they could find, and stacked the bottles on the lip of the gangway. Harkness turned off the loading bay light, to bring the stars into view.
They passed the bottles around, Terran wines and Cyrrhenian liqueurs and a few swallows of strong Gheschi mead. The Doctor turned out to be quite a wine critic, once you got him going; Martha insisted on trying everything put before her in the spirit of science. The boy, Luke, had the same impulse, until his mother put her foot down. "I've spent three weeks tracking giant killer insects all over Europe and the galaxy. I would very much like one chance to get completely hammered with my friends without feeling like I am being a bad example to you."
"I don't think you're being a bad example," Luke protested.
"No, but I will be being a bad parent if I let you drink—" she squinted at the bottle, but it was labeled in Androzanian— "drink alien green stuff when I'm not competent enough to keep an eye on you. Which I think I'm already not." She squeezed his shoulders. "So I need to ask you keep an eye on yourself tonight. Will you do that?"
Luke agreed. He hadn't outgrown the thrill at being given a new responsibility, even an unpleasant one, thought Turlough; and then he thought of what awaited him on Trion, and wondered if one ever really outgrew it.
"Nice of Daine," he observed. "Letting me turn myself in."
"When are you taking off?" Ianto asked. He passed Luke a few bottles—the ones they'd determined, by taste and experience, to be largely non-psychoactive.
"That's pure moressi attar there—that stuff's fifty corpiras the sip back home." Turlough groped for a jug of Minimar water and shoved it into the boy's hands. "Dilute it with something, unless you're trying to surpass our last few emperors in decadence."
Martha perked up, more at the mixer than the decadence, and peered over Luke's shoulder while he poured attar drop by drop into one of Despina's good snifters full of water. "You were always the one who hid in the kitchen at parties and made everyone else try your blender drinks, weren't you?" said Jack
"Probably tomorrow," Turlough answered the sky, having temporarily forgotten who had asked him. "I don't suppose there'll be a reason to stick around."
"We've rented a car, Jack and I," Ianto said. "We're driving back to Wales. And Mickey, I think."
"Mickey! Weevil hunt!" Jack reached down and shook his shoulder. "You in?"
Mickey was sprawled against the base of the gangway. "Think I'm going to be spending some time up north for a while, actually," he said, rather smugly.
"Laura?" asked Sarah. To Jack, she explained, "Short, blond, good survival instincts."
"Not a bad type to have," said Mickey.
Ianto looked up from his consultation with Martha; they both had a look of mixological calculation about them. "Whose type is this?"
Turlough looked down at the Doctor, head to head with Lethbridge-Stewart and deep into reminiscence of old times, old friends. "Several people's, I think." Jack followed his gaze, and then leered up at Ianto, fondly and deliberately.
Martha handed round glasses of something experimental, and the subject was dropped, but drunken conversation tended ever toward the circular, in Turlough's experience. Mickey received a text from Laura and made some very hasty farewells; Luke drifted into the Doctor and the Brigadier's conversation, which seemed now to mostly be about music, and books Turlough hadn't read. Ianto went back into the galley to hunt up more mixers, leaving Sarah and Martha sprawled along one side of the gangway, and Jack and Turlough on the other.
Martha was the one who said it, looking from Turlough to Jack and turning her ring on her finger. "So is it better? To have—well. To know?" Her quick glance at the Doctor was longing and bitter, and superfluous.
"You already know," said Jack. "He loves you best—both of you."
"That's not an answer, Jack," said Martha. Sarah opined, "He's got a funny way of showing it. All of him."
Noises echoed from inside the ship—a door, heels ringing on deckplates. "'He never touches anyone, except to distract him from someone else,'" Turlough repeated. "The Master told me that."
"And what about you," Jack said, "going back for seconds before everyone else had got their firsts. That's not fair."
"Fair doesn't enter into it," said Sarah. "He loves who he loves, and he—well."
"Sometimes they even overlap." Jack had a far-away look.
More noises from within, rippling through the hull this time, and Ianto appeared, arms full of bottles. "If I could hear you all the way from the galley, I shudder to think how much of this conversation the Doctor has heard." They all looked guiltily down the gangway, but the Doctor was still deep in a discussion of Harry Potter with Luke.
Lethbridge-Stewart looked like he'd been listening to every word, though; Sarah mouthed "Sorry," and then giggled. "Trip to HQ should be fun," she whispered to Martha, which set her off, too.
Ianto pulled away from Jack in mock affront. "I am not wearing that coat again."
.
The stars spun on toward dawn, and the bottles emptied, and eventually the Brigadier detailed a soldier to stand guard on the ship and stalked back off to his room in the village. Turlough followed him, only tripping a few times on his own feet. He'd been sorely tempted to crash on board with the others, but they'd already claimed all the bunks, and Turlough wasn't young enough to sleep off a night like that on the floor—or in the brig, which was just as bad. But he dragged himself back out to the landing site far too early the next day; the mobile HQ was packing up, and Martha and Jack and their crew were unloading their things from the ship—and cleaning up the party debris, which was terribly decent of them—and then there was nothing left for any of them to do but say their farewells.
Jack and Ianto went first. Ianto loaded their bags into an electric blue convertible—heaven only knew where Jack had managed to rent it— and they exchanged handshakes (Ianto) and bear hugs and kisses (Jack) all around. The Doctor got all three from Jack, plus a salute.
Jack hugged Turlough last, and tucked a card with a stylized T into Turlough's pocket. "We operate out of Cardiff," he said. It was an invitation—and one he suspected might include Ianto. There was too much potential for drama there, Turlough thought; and then he caught sight of the Doctor and almost laughed.
"I'll keep that in mind," he said instead.
They drove away much too fast, Jack at the wheel. The UNIT troops got the HQ trailer back on the road, and their jeeps followed in convoy. Colonel Mace rode shotgun in the first one, frown deeply engraved. "I am rather glad to be retired," observed Lethbridge-Stewart. "I don't envy him the report he's just had to make."
A soldier drove up with a commandeered jeep and surrendered the keys to the Brigadier. "We'll give Harry your love," Sarah said, embracing the Doctor. Martha, when her turn came, pressed a card into the Doctor's hand. "Now, I know it's not engraved or anything—" in fact, it was printed on UNIT letterhead, folded twice over—"but it has the time and place. So I want to see you there," she said sternly.
The Doctor stared down at the invitation. "Will—who else have you invited?"
Martha shook her head. "She'll still be in Africa, Doctor. We're taking care of her. Trust me. And come to my wedding."
The Doctor nodded. "All right." He kept nodding, as if trying to impress a yes into his mind, even as he glanced over his shoulder, through the outskirts of the village, straight to where the TARDIS stood.
And then it was more handshakes as the Doctor made his goodbyes, hasty as ever. It didn't bother Turlough, not really—they'd been saying goodbye for a week; there was no need for anything but the words now. "Good-bye, Doctor," he said. "Travel well. Find someone to take with you."
The Doctor shook his head at that, but all he said was "Name a blend of tea after me; I'll come by and have a cup someday."
The day could be long after he was dead and Malkon's children were running the business, but Turlough rather thought he would. He watched the Doctor retreat down the road, coat flapping, dust leaping at his heels.
Martha came up silently beside him. She really was tiny, when she wasn't speaking. She silently offered him another folded card, and watched him read it, though he knew what it said. "There's a lot of us on Earth, you know," she said. "People who've traveled with him. If you want to meet more of us—well. A lot of them will be there."
"It's a rather exclusive club," Lethbridge-Stewart added. He offered his hand. "Well, best of luck with the trial. Don't doubt you'll do fine."
"Thank you, sir. And, thank you, Martha." He tucked the invitation into his pocket. "If I'm on Earth, I will come—I know that's not a proper RSVP—"
"It's as proper as I can get from most of the guest list," she laughed. And then they were off as well, and Turlough was alone, in the middle of an empty road, looking down at his ship with its single sentry.
It was Sergeant Patel, as it turned out. "Got stuck with clean-up duty, did you?"
"Yeah. The rest of my team's down the mine, making sure none of those Tractators got away. Carnot's group pulled the moonbase cleanup." He sounded disappointed. Thank heaven, whatever lay in store for Turlough, it was not a life where a trip to a ghastly industrial moonbase was an exotic perq.
"Do thank them for me—and tell your higher-ups I'm willing to extend UNIT docking privileges in exchange." Turlough didn't actually have title to the moonbase— he hadn't been able to track down which of Despex's creditors had walked off with it—but he thought he had a good chance of finding it before UNIT's accountants did.
He walked the ship making his take-off inventory. Fuel, sufficient; engine status, good; volatiles inventory, adequate. Control systems in good repair; medical bay covered with sticky labels in Martha Jones's neat English handwriting, but otherwise restored to order.
The freezers were full of food, though the party or the cleanup had disarranged the galley in some obscure way. And the crew cabins were all topsy-turvy, with beds hastily remade and cabinets still hanging open; it took Turlough a second walkthrough to find the thing that had nagged at him. Despina's cabin safe was gone from its wall niche. There were marks of a pry bar on the bulkhead.
Turlough thought about the noises from onboard ship last night, and how they had echoed. Thought about how the ship hadn't been empty since; and about how one, tell-tale sound would have rung out clear and unmistakable to that terribly exclusive club.
He went back to the galley. There were still too many cabinets; and one of them still wouldn't open to any of the ship's keys.
"Despina," said Turlough. "I know you're there."
The cabinet door opened, inward, with a familiar sound. Inside was big and bright; Despina's safe stood open in the middle of the console room. "My dear Turlough. Do come in." She was all in black, as ever, but affecting no feminine trappings: her hair was pulled sharply back, and her long tailed coat buttoned to the chin.
"Thanks, but I'll stay right here, if you don't mind." He leaned on the counter, trying to look casual. "How long have you been here?"
"Since last night. I overheard your fascinating conversation—I must say I'm gratified that you took my words to heart." She circled the console, setting and locking the destination parameters. Preparing to flee. "Where is the Doctor?"
"He left. Just now."
"Naturally," the Master huffed. "It's what he does."
There was no answer to that; she wasn't wrong. "And why are you still here?" said Turlough instead.
"To collect a few things." She gestured to the safe; her ring was back on her hand, worn outside the glove now. "And, of course, to see you."
"I don't think we have anything left to say to each other." The galley was space-ready; there was nothing ready to hand on the counter, nothing sharp or heavy or even just loud.
"Oh, but I never had the chance to finish my story." She leaned on the console and spread her hands behind her, mimicking Turlough's posture. "Don't tell me you aren't curious about how it ends."
It was the story the Doctor wouldn't tell, or one of them. "If you want to talk, talk."
She arched her eyebrows. "You never used to be such a demanding audience. But very well. I crossed paths with the Doctor during his exile on Earth." It was almost the tone the Doctor had used, back in Despina's stateroom: flat and challenging. "He's told you about that, I hope?"
"Some." Turlough shrugged with one shoulder. "Though less than I've heard from Lethbridge-Stewart just this week."
He smiled conspiratorially; and she matched the look. "Between us, I believe the Time Lords might have sent him there as a pawn against me. I may have been somewhat... indiscreet with my plans." So this was the game they were playing—one-upping each other not just with privileged knowledge, but with revelation.
Turlough wondered if there was anything he could have shared with the Doctor that would have inspired the same frankness.
"Well. We saw rather a lot of each other, in those days. Timestream entanglement—a TARDIS will take you to place it remembers, or a person. Particularly if you're as poor a pilot as the Doctor was in those days.
"So imagine my surprise when he sought me out on purpose—and found me, though I shudder to think how many false starts he must have made." She chuckled warmly. "We met in Venice; I was in the retinue of the Doge, investigating certain alchemical researches—purely for scientific interest, you understand; no danger in any of it—"
"Oh, certainly not."
"—and for once in his lives, the Doctor agreed with me. And yet he wouldn't let me be; it was like being at school again."
"Really? Now I had always pictured you as the hanger-on."
The Master stood up straight, nostrils flaring. "If you would prefer to tell this story yourself, I needn't finish."
"Oh, no, go on." Her face was flushed redder than he'd seen it before. She had never let him get this far under her skin, on so little provocation; and she had not been well-balanced before her trip through the Time Locks.
"Thank you. As I was saying—the Doctor sought out my company. And we kept company—" her lips curved around the euphemism—"for no little time, before he finally deigned to tell me about dear Miss Grant."
She paused, as though Turlough were expected to know more of the woman than just her name. "His traveling companion?"
"The UNIT agent assigned to assist him. Josephine Grant. I was rather fond of her myself—she was really quite charming. So brave. So loyal. So quick to chase after anything in trousers, and even quicker to drop the poor sods the moment the Doctor called." She tutted under her breath. "She was really quite devoted. I believe the Doctor was actually surprised when she married.
"Well. I laughed in his face, and he stormed off to his TARDIS, and that was the last Venice saw of him. But when I attempted to apply the fruits of my researches, on Carcarrica Prime, who should I find waiting for me but the Doctor, one step ahead of me."
"It was a reasonable place to look," allowed Turlough, who knew nothing of Carcarrica beyond its galactic coordinates. "Even theoretical alchemy isn't exactly a popular subject."
"True." Turlough held in his sigh. "It was a logical deduction. The first of many such. My little laboratory on Carcarrica, my judicial appointment on Herculon, my mercenary fleet off the Arjun Drift-- every time I had some matter in hand, the Doctor would be there to put a stop to it."
"Yes," said Turlough, "I've seen him do it."
"You never saw either of us in our prime, boy. We were—" she shook her head. "We were young, and the universe lay at our feet. And its conquest—or the conquest of whatever portion of the universe I could effectively rule—was my sole object. The Doctor objected—on purely philosophical grounds, you understand—"
"Naturally."
"—and he tried to keep me from it. I came to expect him—to lay little traps, just for his benefit, in all my endeavors. And, I confess, the Doctor defeated me quite fairly—oh, more than once.
"But I almost didn't mind, at least the first few times. Because it was almost like being at school again— the give and take, the... adversarial struggle to perfect one's argument—and the winner, claiming his prize afterward. I had missed that part more than I cared to let on." She recalled herself to the present, caught Turlough's eye in shameless conspiracy.
"Now I always intended to be magnanimous in victory. I would have laid half of creation at the Doctor's feet—let him share in my triumphs. The Doctor, on the other hand, confused magnanimity with mercy. He did not understand that, while one of these is a virtue, the other is—a failing. And one he still suffers from.
"So I set out to demonstrate the limitations of mercy.
"I laid a neat little trap aboard the Kreighnon Ancillarium. Rather after your time, I think; it's a deep-space installation of the Terran Imperium. I had operatives in place on every planet of twelve systems, all of them ready to move into position on one signal—the failure of the Ancillarium's navigational beacon.
"I dragged an Ogron ship across the Doctor's trail, and they led him a merry chase to the station, assembling a bomb from components scattered across an asteroid belt and trying to smuggle it in with a volatiles cargo, all quite tedious and simple. I didn't even need to be on hand to watch the Doctor foil it single-handedly. In fact I made sure I wasn't; it would have made me quite sick to watch.
"But he tracked me down planetside, in my bunker on Kreighnon Alpha, to tell me he'd rumbled my scheme. Said he'd refrain from turning me in to the Imperial authorities—there's that streak of mercy again—just told me to clear out and leave the planet. And then he smiled, in that frightfully arrogant way he had—" the Master's tone was beyond lascivious—"and suggested we celebrate his victory in what by then was rapidly becoming our customary way."
Turlough could almost see the other man looking out through Despina's face, the past lives jostling for primacy behind her eyes. The Doctor had had that look, though rarely; it had never frightened him as deeply as it did now. "Letting him win, were you?" he said. The light words scraped in his dry throat, but they brought Despina—his Master; the only one he felt any confidence with—back to the surface.
"I'm sure you'd know all about that," she snapped. "You'd think he would grow tired of unearned victories. Hubristic fool." She smiled fondly. "So. Whilst we were... celebrating... the real bomb, the one I'd gone back to the station's construction to implant in its very skeleton, detected the time-trace of the Doctor's TARDIS and quietly counted down to detonation. Total military control of twelve systems, delivered into my hands," she purred, "just as I was delivered in the Doctor's."
The Master leveled a look at him: mad, beaming, proud. Waiting for some acknowledgement. "How many people were on that base?"
She snorted. "You know, that's exactly what the Doctor said. Oh, he was angry! But he didn't make a grab for my sidearm—no, not the Doctor." She leaned forward to whisper across the TARDIS doorway, fingertips drumming on the console edge. "He didn't even try his Venusian aikido. He went straight for my throat." She spanned her neck in her outstretched fingers, smiling at the memory. "Leapt for me and did his best to choke the life out of me—as though it mattered to the dead where he put his hands—my throat, my... well. It didn't seem to matter much to him, either." She waggled her brow in a motion he hadn't thought Despina's face capable of. "Not what you wanted to hear of your Doctor, is it?"
"Not—" he cleared his throat and tried again. "Not what I expected."
"It was exactly what I had expected. What I had planned. I knew—oh, for lifetimes, I knew—that if I could cut under all his damnable mercies, I could make him touch me, and not think of anyone else.
"And I did. I won." A beatific smile lit up her face, then lost its mirth as Turlough merely stared. "Well? Say it, whatever it is you're thinking."
You're mad seemed imprudent. "A Gallifreyan body would have regenerated," Turlough said. The Time Locks had shaken her mind, but the stolen human synapses had given it no space to settle out again.
"Clever of me to have ditched mine, then, wasn't it?" Her eyes focused on nothing. "That was the second time I won. It gets harder, you see, each time. We keeping learning each other's game..."
She shook her head, straightened her back. "Tell him that, from me."
And that, of all things, made him want to laugh. "Tell the Doctor—"
"When you see him—oh, you will," she cut him off. "He hovers over this planet like a carrion fly. Entangled timestreams, hm? You'll see him before I will.
"And when you do—just remind him of that. That he has forgiven me for killing, and forgiven me for dying, but that even his mercy is not infinite. And that there is one thing I can do that he cannot twist into a victory."
Her face was shuttered. Turlough looked past her, though her—the console room of her TARDIS, her brand new TARDIS, was pristine and empty. The rescued flotsam they had seen from the temporal observatory was gone.
"You've already started." Blood sounded in Turlough's ears. "Rebuilding Gallifrey. You're really going to do it."
"Tell the Doctor," she repeated. "I think he'll be very interested to know. Don't you?" She glanced at the readouts behind her, suddenly all business. "There'll be a place for you there. I need people about me I can trust." She swiped a dust speck from the core housing. "No? I attained your cooperation through deceit at first, but I think I've just shown we can be honest with each other."
"I don't—think I much care for your brand of honesty." It was pathetic bravado, but reflexive contempt washed over the Master's face, and Turlough decided weakness was probably the right tack after all.
"Then step away from the doors," she said, and turned her back, utterly unworried. Well, she'd seen the state of the galley; there was nothing to throw. "Goodbye, Turlough." She threw the lever, and the doors folded in around her straight, black back.
The air shuddered, and the familiar sound of dematerialization rang through the hull, and then Turlough was facing a wall of kitchen cabinets, no more nor less than should have been there.
Footfalls thudded up the ramp, and down the corridors. "What's with the noise?" Sergeant Patel hung panting against the doorframe.
"Just the Master. Oh, don't worry; she's gone now."
"Oh." Patel lowered his weapon apologetically. "I'll just be outside, then."
"Actually, Sergeant, you might as well leave. Get a few hundred yards back; I think I'm ready to start the launch sequence."
"Ah. Going up to the moon, then?"
He'd have to, at least for a while; transmat to Hyderabad, get the cargo transferred moonside, and then load it onto the ship—oh. That was a problem. "I don't suppose UNIT would look the other way if I hired human stevedores to sling cargo in the moonbase."
"Doubt it." He glanced over his shoulder, down the empty corridor. "Though, if it was just me and my team—you know, doing a favor for the locals. Some of us wouldn't mind getting back up there."
"Enough to work cargo? Maybe I should set up a tourist resort."
"People'd pay. Besides, it's not like anything weighs much up there—here, you could bill it as a health spa! Lose seven-eighths of your body weight or your money back."
It was an old joke, but Turlough laughed more than it deserved; it helped clear his head of the Master's echoing last request. "Wouldn't be worth the liability insurance. I'll just have to import freight robots. Or have them built here." They came to the gangway; Turlough took down the broom from its wall bracket and swept the inner hull curve clean of detritus—heather, ants. Pieces of the earth. "Really, what I need is to hire an Earthside manager to take care of that sort of thing. Or bring one in as a partner; I don't think I could make payroll just yet. Do you like your job?"
Patel smiled before answering, the sort of smile that made the answer superfluous. "Wouldn't mind another trip to the moon, but, yeah. Sorry." He shrugged; he had rather nice shoulders, really. "There are plenty of people who don't, though. You'll find someone." And nice eyes—and there he'd caught Turlough staring. "I'll just, ah, leave you to it, then."
He backed down the ramp and took off up the slope at an easy jog, always keeping the ship in his sight. The Doctor should have taken that one with him, Turlough thought. He sealed the gangway and climbed up to the bridge; the viewscreen showed Patel loitering at the roadside, waiting for the launch, face already turned skyward.
Well. He could at least give him a trip to the moon; it would solve his cargo problem in the short term.
In the long term... in the long term, the Master was building some grotesque parody of Gallifrey; and the Doctor had vanished again, before he had to hear about it; and Turlough was about to give up his title and his home and his ship to atone for her crimes; and his future was riding on a single profitable run.
But he had a fast ship, and a warehouse full of tea and treasures, and—he touched the invitation in his pocket—an entree into the most exclusive club on Earth. If he needed a partner— well. One could hardly look in a better place.
Turlough strapped himself in to the pilot's seat, and watched the tell-tales light up green around him. "I wonder," he said, "what Tegan's up to these days."