Jack ficathon entry
Oct. 10th, 2005 08:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
owlWritten for ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
calapine for the Jack Harkness ficathon. She wanted Jack as a criminal and Cybermen, so here they are, for what it's worth. It seems to be massively longer than everyone else's. Woe.
Title: A Brief Experiment in the Life of Jack Harkness
Rating: PG-13 (for Jack being Jack and the general dystopia of the fic.)
Archive: Yes, ask please
Thanks tobook_addict for beta-ing this!
Jack was lounging against the console, playing the seasoned traveller to Rose's impression of an excited kid on a school trip.
"Where are we going?" she asked, prancing around the console.
"You'll find out when we get there, won't you?" said the Doctor, and grinned at Jack. "All right, here we go."
The TARDIS came to a halt and Rose opened the door. "Not bad," she conceded. "Where is it?"
Jack stepped out after her. "Oh."
"Earth, the year 2638," the Doctor said. "What's the matter with you, Jack?"
"He kissed someone here and ran, I bet," Rose said.
"Well, something like that," Jack admitted.
He looked around. Considering the circumstances when he'd seen it last, the place was looking pretty good. There were tall new buildings, it was more or less clean and the people walking in the street looked reasonably well-fed and happy.
"You know," the Doctor said, "I'm glad to see this place looking so shiny and free of invading forces."
"Why, what happened?" Rose asked. "You save the world again?"
"Something like that, yeah."
Jack squirmed uncomfortably, and when the Doctor added, "Maybe I'll look up some old friends while I'm here," he muttered, "Save us."
"Was it a he or a she that you dumped, Jack?" Rose asked mischievously.
"It was a none-of-your-business, nosy Rosy."
Earth, 2626
Things were not going according to plan for Jack Harkness. Normal procedure was: get in, find the mark, pull off the con, and get out before he was found out, and in the meantime have any fun there was for the taking, of course. Having a vital sensor array stolen from the hull of his ship wasn't on Jack's list. He stared at the gap, ugly as a broken tooth, where it should have been, and swore at length. Without feedback from that array, his ship's propulsion system wouldn't even get her off the ground, let alone move her in space-time. And this culture was too primitive for him to replace the missing parts with local tech.
His prime suspects were the gangs of grimy street kids he'd seen hanging about this area of the city. Little brats probably didn't even know what they'd got or how valuable it was. They'd sell it for a quick fix of whatever chemicals they were killing themselves with. Jack sniffed in indignation. He had stolen the ship, himself, but that was totally different, of course.
Well, he couldn't stay stuck in this gloomy corner of history forever. He would have to do something. He hated this time, the twenty-seventh century. If—when—he got out of here he definitely wasn't coming back. He rather liked the late twenty-sixth; it was a shame to think that, in less than a lifetime, a megalomaniac or two had brought the world to this. He wasn't sure if the state was actually at war at this point, but a more-or-less permanent national emergency seemed to be a good excuse for a hundred and one petty regulations, injustices both large and small, and a grinding poverty and shabbiness.
The gangs generally hung out in a wasteland area a few streets over from where Jack had parked his ship. It seemed as good a place to start as anywhere. As he strode down the half-dark street, he saw a figure in the shadows, motionless and watchful. To Jack it had the air of a sentinel. When he turned towards it, it took flight, scudding off into the darkness. One of those brats! Guilty conscience, huh? Jack said to himself, and took off after the kid. He had the longer legs and was in better shape, but the child was on its own ground, knew where the treacherous patches of road were and what alleys to duck into.
It was in one of these alleys that Jack lost his chase. He jogged on in dispirited fashion, not really expecting to find the child again. The first thing to do was to get hold of one of those brats. There was no way of tracking down the sensor array otherwise. If they all had such a turn of speed, though....He was thinking of plans with such concentration that he almost missed the sounds of a struggle ahead of him. Almost; not entirely. He was still a trained professional, and he too knew how to hug the shadows, how to move as soundlessly as possible, how to not draw attention.
The noise came from a three-person team of the current law enforcement, known as Redshirts. Jack had disliked them on sight, and had had a minor run-in with them earlier. He had managed to flirt his way out of that situation, but he considered them arbitrary, unjust and illiberal. He'd almost been thrown into gaol just for breaking a curfew he couldn't possibly have known about, although explaining that he hadn't heard about it because he'd just arrived from the four-hundred-and-seventy-ninth century probably wouldn't have helped the situation.
He craned his neck to see what helpless citizen had caught it this time. It was the child he'd been chasing. That's mine! Jack had already been dithering with the idea of knocking out the Redshirts out of sheer frustration and boredom, and now he only hesitated long enough to pull a gun from his pocket.
Seven seconds later, the Redshirts had all gone quietly to sleep in the gutter. Jack had seized the child by the upper arm, but as soon as the last Redshirt had gone down, the kid writhed in Jack's grip, trying to twist away, and then sunk its teeth into Jack's hand.
"Ow! None of that, now!" Jack's slender store of patience was entirely exhausted. He fired another stun blast, and in a second or two the kid sagged, limp. Jack picked up his—rescuee or prisoner—over his shoulder and headed back to his ship.
-----
The scrawny frame, cropped dark hair and multiple layers of clothing combined to baffle a guess at the kid's sex, although in the bright lights of the ship Jack was inclining to girl. Whichever, she or he looked skinny enough to be prepubescent anyway, an age of human Jack had no idea how to interact with. He dumped the kid on the table to come around, and went to eat his long-delayed dinner.
Most people came out of a stunner dazed and disorientated, but the first indication that this kid was awake was a scrape of metal. He turned around to see the child conscious and crouched back against the galley bulkhead, a table knife in one hand. Jack pulled out his gun again.
"My weapon's better than yours," he said pleasantly. The kid's dark eyes flickered sideways.
"You won't get out the door, neither," Jack continued in conversational tones. "I locked it when I came in." He was still annoyed over the stolen sensor array, but it had occured to him that you could catch more flies with sugar than vinegar, as his mother used to say. Besides, it was always a good idea to be nice to people holding edged weapons.
The knife-point was weaving in uncertain figure-eights. Jack moved his gun aside a little. Blue eyes and dark ones met briefly.
"Who are you? Where are the Reds?"
"Should be coming around in the road round about now," Jack said cheerfully. "I rescued you and you bit me. Remember that?"
The kid shook—her?—head, the knife's tip drooping. "You shot the Reds?"
"Only stunned. Less messy, in several ways. It's silent, for one thing. Though I have no objection to dead Redshirts. Hopefully someone ran them over while they were out."
The knife dropped. "I smell food," the kid said.
"Want some?" Jack asked. He pocketed his gun, as friendly relations seemed to have been established. He had never seen anyone so small eat so much. The kid finished Jack's dinner, and tomorrow's dinner, and started on the odds and ends. Jack sat and watched, rather impressed.
There was very little food left on the ship when, without preamble, his visitor propositioned Jack in as blunt a way as he'd ever heard. Jack raised his eyebrows. If the colloquialism meant what it usually had in his experience, this was the sort of offer he didn't often refuse. "Do you do this sort of thing often, or am I just irresistible?"
"You are conceited! You saved me from the Reds. I have to give you something in return, and I don't have anything but me." She said this in a flat tone without emotion. Not exactly gratifying, to Jack's mind.
"They that terrible, huh?"
"Where did you come from?" the kid asked scornfully.
"A long way away," Jack replied.
"Must be. Do you want me, or don't they have sex where you come from?"
Jack started to laugh. "Oh, believe me, they do. You mightn't think it, kiddo, but I do have some standards. How old are you, thirteen?"
There was an indignant-sounding squeak. "I'm almost seventeen!"
"Ah, well, sorry," Jack said, only half believing it, although when conscious the kid did look much older than before. He cast around for a polite way of saying, "Not until you've had a bath and a medical check-up, either," and decided that there wasn't one. His guest was rather pretty in an undernourished way, he thought, and the offer would be tempting, if one didn't mind shagging dirty and possibly disease-ridden skeletons. Anyway, he had for once a more urgent priority.
"You could do something else for me, though," he said, leaning forward. "Do you have a name, by the way?"
"Nathalie," said the girl, after a hesitation.
"Jack. Nice to be introduced at last. Anyway, Nathalie, do you know anything about a part of my ship that was stolen this afternoon?"
Nathalie flushed and dropped her eyes.
"Look, I really would like it back," Jack said. "And I did rescue you from the Reds."
She sighed. "Vico will know about it. He finds out about everything the squads do." There was a note of pride in her voice.
"Vico?"
"My boyfriend," Nathalie said. Her face had a blazing, intent look of affection and protectiveness on it now.
"Right," Jack said. That could have been a slight complication had he taken Nathalie up on her earlier offer. Nothing he couldn't have handled, though. Probably. "All right. Should we go and speak to him, then?"
Nathalie's face looked troubled for a moment, and then cleared. "Is that really what you want, in exchange for saving me from the Reds?"
"I want you to do everything you can to help me get that equipment back," Jack said, covering loopholes.
"Fine," the girl said, holding out her hand. Jack shook it.
-----
The route to wherever the boyfriend hung out was tortuous, leading through wasteland, part marsh and part landfill, through a maze of dark alleyways, and at one point underground through the sewers. Jack could see now why Nathalie looked dirty. Their ultimate destination was an apparently derelict house, its windows blocked with boards and overgrown trees pressed up against it. Nathalie opened a door at the back and pulled Jack inside. He walked straight into a heavy black curtain that was hanging across the doorway.
"Don't let the light show," Nathalie hissed. "It's long past curfew."
There were a couple of young men playing cards by candlelight in a kitchen a little way up the passage, and by the time Jack had disentangled himself from the curtain they were on their feet and looking at him in a way that made him close his hand around his gun.
"It's okay, he's with me," Nathalie said, serenely, opening a door beneath the stairs to show the start of another staircase. "Come on, Jack."
They groped their way down the narrow staircase in almost total darkness. The passage at the bottom was lit by another single candle. Nathalie opened a door and said, "Vico?"
The room was unpainted and overcrowded with furniture that must once have been valuable. A young man in close-fitting black was sitting at an antique twenty-first century desk, papers spread out in front of him. He turned and got up as Nathalie and Jack came in. He was fairish, with rather attractive narrow features and the sort of light eyes that look different colours in different lights. At the moment they were grey.
"What did you bring him here for?" he demanded.
Nathalie cringed. "He's all right, Vico. He saved me from a Red patrol."
Vico's face changed, but only from angry to angrier. "You were picked up? I don't believe it! How could you be so stupid?"
"I ran around a corner and there they were. It could have happened to anyone," Nathalie protested.
Vico grabbed her coat lapel. "I don’t know why I bother, sometimes. Now go and get cleaned up; you stink."
"Hey, let her go," Jack said. He wasn't liking Vico at all. If he was the main example of Nathalie's taste in men, then Jack should be flattered if she didn't actually fancy him.
Nathalie said, "No, wait—" and drew Vico aside, talking hastily in a voice too low for Jack to hear. Vico nodded, his face intent, asked a few concise questions, and ruffled her back hair in an off-hand gesture. As she slipped out of the room again, Vico turned to Jack.
"I'm Jack Harkness. I think I've worked out who you are."
Vico smiled thinly. He was older than he'd seemed at first sight, nearer Jack's age than Nathalie's, even if she were almost seventeen, as Jack was coming to believe.
"I'm sorry for the inconvenience Nathalie put you through," Vico said formally, watching Jack closely.
"It was a pleasure to assist such a charming young lady in distressing circumstances," Jack replied, matching the formality and turning on the charm.
"Nathalie tells me that you possess a weapon which can render a person unconscious, without noise," Vico said. Jack was to find that these sudden switches in topic were characteristic of Vico, but for now it was disconcerting.
"So?" he countered warily.
"She also told me that you want to retrieve some of your property, which was stolen today."
"Yeah, I do. Do you know where it is?"
"Yes. Some of the younger squads have a regrettable tendency to steal anything that's not fastened down. I know who did it, and if I say the word it will be returned. I thought we might arrange a bargain. We each have something the other wants: that weapon for the stolen equipment."
"Wait a second," Jack exploded. "Why should I buy back something that was mine in the first place? Of all the frackin' nerve—"
"You wouldn't have to give up your gun if you came along with it." Vico interrupted smoothly. "We could use all the help we can get, in fact."
"I already helped you once tonight. I saved your girl from the Reds, don't forget that!"
"But she never would have been out tonight in the first place if you had not been here. She was part of a squad assigned to watch you."
"Spy on me, you mean? Who the hell do you think you are?"
"Oh, it's nothing personal. We keep an eye on everything that goes on in this part of the city." Vico gave his thin smile again. "Tell me, what do you think of the Reds?"
"Not a lot. Oh, don't tell me, you're the bloody freedom fighters."
Vico's face flushed, became animated. "The Military Council has destroyed this place. If you so much as breath wrong, they'll have you. And in return, we don't even have safety, we have a thousand shortages and—"
"Now, look here," Jack interrupted. "Let's get this straight. I'm not going to be some sort of martyr; I don't get involved in this sort of thing. I won't bother the Military Council alone as long as they leave me alone."
Vico took a few restless steps. If he had been a cat he would have been lashing his tail by now. "That makes you only a step above them. Don't you see that they only survive because of their collaborators?"
Jack sighed. "Look, I don't like what goes on, but I don't belong, I don't come from here. It isn't my affair."
Vico sat down on the edge of his desk. "You don't have to do anything, of course. You are free to leave if you wish to do so. But in that case I'm afraid I shall be unable to return your equipment."
Jack paused. "You are one frag, you know that," he said, and added a few more choice epithets in several languages. Vico had him by the short hairs; of course he couldn't leave without his sensor array. He could do any number of unpleasant things to Vico right now, but that would get him no farther. Even the chance of retrieving the array on his own, by force if necessary, would require staying here, which would mean Vico had won. His anger surged.
"I should turn you all over to the Reds," he snarled, knowing it was an empty threat even as he said it.
"Oh but you wouldn't do that, would you?" Vico said softly, still smiling. Jack had to acknowledge the hit; whatever else Vico was, he was an accurate judge of character.
He threw himself down on one of the decrepit armchairs. "What do you want me to help with?" he asked, not bothering to keep the ironic tone from his voice.
"We're planning to blow up Government House."
Jack sighed. "Ever heard of Guy Fawkes?"
"That was a thousand years ago. We are different; we are going to succeed."
"Oh, yeah? Hey, how do I know you won't go back on me, after I help you? What's to stop you holding out on me for ever, giving me more and more little jobs to do?"
"I give you my word," Vico said haughtily, as though he were a patrician. "This is our great work. We have been working towards it for months. Years. Anything we do after this will not need your expertise."
Jack couldn't help seeing an echo of his own sarcasm in this. "Tell me," he inquired gently, "How many people are going to be murdered in this? Ordinary people, not Reds or politicos?"
Vico sighed, suddenly looking tired and almost, Jack thought, human. "As few as possible. That's why we need that stunning gun of yours. We don't plan to kill civilians. We are freedom fighters, not terrorists. It is a shame that we can't simply wipe out the political scum in their nest, but doing it by day is utterly impractical."
The door opened and Nathalie came in, very scrubbed and wearing a black suit similar to Vico's, but with subtle feminising differences. She had made up, too, in the slightly bizarre fashion current here: two beauty marks on each side of her forehead, eyes rimmed with black, their orbits a dusky gold, her top lip painted scarlet and the lower deep pink. Her short dark hair was sticking out, damp, at odd angles. She went to sit beside Vico's chair, leaned her head confidingly against his knees. Jack watched her, beginning to regret that he'd refused her earlier.
"Well?" she demanded.
"I've been suckered into your revolution," Jack replied wryly.
"Oh, good."
------
Jack showed them how to use the stun gun.
"I have three more back on my ship," he told Nathalie privately. "What would you have done if you'd known that a couple of hours ago?"
"Taken them."
Jack grinned down at her, recognising a ruthless pragmatism equal to his own. The only difference was that his was in his own interest, while Nathalie's was in Vico's.
"Where did you get this, Jack?" Vico asked, coming out of absorption. "I've never seen tech like this before."
"From the future," Jack said incautiously.
"Ah. So you are a time-traveller. The Council wouldn't like that. They can't spread their regime through time as well as space." He sighed. "Apparently it's happened before. The person in question ended up declared insane, which isn't a good thing to be under this administration."
"I'm starting to think that you have to be mad to come here," Jack said.
Vico smiled thinly. "Tell me, do we succeed? Is the dictatorship overthrown?"
Jack said nothing, racking his memory of far-off history lessons he'd never paid much attention to at the time. This was a big no-no in the Agency; telling people about their own futures could really muck up causality as they attempted to fulfil or to avoid them.
"Would you act differently if you knew you do, or not?" he asked, genuinely curious.
"No, I wouldn't," Vico said, with barely a pause. His face had tightened to a curious intent look. He was a fanatic, Jack thought, utterly dedicated to his goal. He had no time even to love Nathalie, who was now looking at him with that blazing tenderness again. He wouldn't think much of Jack's philosophy of life at all.
"I honestly can't remember," Jack said, disliking him more than ever.
-----
Jack spent the next few weeks barely putting his nose above ground. Vico conscripted him into the planning details of the bombing. Jack gathered that flexibility was a plus, as the situation changed rapidly. Tactics he had learned when he had been with the Agency or picked up in various times and places since all came in handy. In all Jack's chequered career, he'd never yet been a terrorist; to his secret amusement, he was rather good at it. Not being convicted of the cause, he wouldn't mince words, even though he hated the Redshirts, and the Military Council who'd screwed up the place, as much as he hated anything.
There wasn't a lot of other amusement to be had. The "squads"—Vico's organised gangs of feral-kids-turned-troops—were composed of serious grim young men and slightly fewer serious grim young women. Even those of them that Jack considered old enough were mostly unresponsive to his flirting technique. He was getting bored.
The date they eventually decided on for the attack apparently held some significance for the group; Jack didn't bother to find out what it was. The team was decided on—"No-one too clumsy, no-one too scared, no-one too fat," Nathalie had said. That evening, they all dressed in dark clothing, with their faces black and matte eyeshades on. The effect, to Jack, was that of a heliophobes' support group trying to look trendy. The rearguard included Vico, Jack and, naturally, Nathalie. Vico had one of Jack's guns, but Jack had a few bits of extra tech up his sleeve. And in other places.
They moved through the streets at first, and although eventually they did dive into the sewers, these were larger and better built than the ones in Jack's previous experience. They were still stinking, though. Vico and some of the others produced masks and tied them over their mouths and noses. This trying journey, on catwalks suspended about the foul flow, ended at last at an access ladder, which led to a long-forgotten manhole beneath shrubs in the gardens outside Government House. Jack tumbled up on to leaf mould and broken stems, taking deep grateful breaths of night air. It smelled damp and wonderfully clean.
"I've just thought of a flaw in the plan," he said.
"Do tell," Vico snapped, his voice sharp with tension.
"They'll be able to smell us coming."
"Tsha!"
Jack grinned, hoping that Vico could see the flash of his teeth in the darkness. Someone pinched him with startling viciousness; he flung out his arm and made contact with someone so small it could only be Nathalie. He grimaced, wishing she wasn't so obsessed with Vico, and that Vico wasn't so obsessed with anarchy or revolution or whatever it was. Crouching in the middle of a wet bush, stinking of sewers, his pockets full of explosives, was far, far down on Jack's list of fun ways to spend an evening.
His mental grumpings were cut short as Vico marshalled his troops and motioned them out beneath the stems of the shrubbery and onto the dew-soaked lawn. The looming bulk of Government House, surrounded by walls and smaller buildings, seemed to press down on Jack. Well, whatever we do for freedom and democracy and all that jazz, we're certainly striking a blow for architectural aesthetics tonight. High up in one of the end towers lights burnt into the night. Nathalie pointed and poked Vico, her face wearing that fierce joy that rather frightened Jack.
The little band moved inwards. As far as Jack had gathered, one of the guards of this particular gate was one of Vico's lot,which was why this route had been chosen. With their fifth-column ally, the struggle was brief and practically noiseless. The stun guns soon took care of the extraneous civilians who inhabited the outer gate like a warren, and the unconscious bodies were all moved head outside. The Red guard who was part of Vico's group was busily feeding old footage into the security recordings, obliterating the evidence of their entry.
"Hurry up," Vico ordered, his voice sharp, as they stripped the guards of their access keys. Beyond this point, Jack was only familiar with blurred, grainy photos of the surroundings, but the route had been drilled into his head by Nathalie. They moved fast, though not running, through an elaborately decorated sunk corridor, three access ducts and a bewildering maze of cellars filled with omnipresent damp, arcane machinery and bizarre smells, although the sewer stench that clung around everyone muted this last. Saying this lot is the Underground isn't just a figure of speech, Jack thought.
They spread out to their assigned places, pinpointing the structural weaknesses. Jack had already been impressed by the research that Vico and his teams had managed to do under less than academic conditions. His assignment was a long beam set flush with the ceiling; it was too high for him to reach and he had to set Nathalie on his shoulders to set the explosives. She was entirely competent, he found; he'd been trained to do her job in case of accident, but actually all he had to do was stand where she told him to and pass gear up to her.
"Are you not done yet?" Vico said, appearing from wherever his patch had been. "Most of the other teams are already moving out."
"Almost," Nathalie hissed. "Give me more tape, Jack."
"You want to go a bit easier on Nat here," Jack said warningly as he passed up the tape. "She's had more to do than almost anyone else."
Vico ignored him. The girl's weight shifted slightly on his shoulders as she leaned sideways, and Jack steadied her with a hand on her thigh. It hadn't escaped him that their positions gave him an unparalleled opportunity for feeling up Nathalie's legs; he'd already been taking advantage of that, but Vico seemed determined not to notice. Jack's favourite method of dealing with boy- or girl-friends was to include them, too, he really didn't think this would work with Vico. His loss, Jack thought, sliding his hand farther up Nathalie's leg.
"Finished," she announced triumphantly, and slid down Jack's back to the ground. "Let's get out of here."
Their escape route led, not surprisingly, through a drainage channel that ran outside the Government House complex, into the river. They had to wade through knee-high water, the run-off from the roofs and courtyards, and then crawl with the water swirling about their elbows and thighs. Jack half-expected every moment to feel the explosion behind, although he knew that the timers had been set to allow them time to escape. It wasn't that he was short of courage, he just preferred not to have to exercise it.
The gurgle of water grew louder ahead. The grille that separated the drain from the river had already been cut through by the rest of the team. Jack looked at the river gliding past less than a foot below the level of his nose. To make matters worse, the bank above overhung the grille so that one had to go through it backwards. It was a tight squeeze; Jack saw now why the team had all to be fairly slim; fortunately, with the food shortages, there hadn't been a lack of choice. Vico was undaunted, and there Nathalie followed, lithe as a cat, so Jack wriggled out of the narrow gap, water splashing his back, immensely relieved that this imbecile enterprise was nearing its end. Dripping wet, he inched his way along the steep slope of the concrete bank, Nathalie a soft-breathing shadow ahead of him.
Suddenly a voice from the top of the bank rang out: "What's that?"
Jack froze. Nathalie pressed against the bank, still and silent, a shadow among shadows. When he looked away and back, he couldn't distinguish her figure.
But it wasn't enough. The investigator was standing on a flight of steps leading to the water's edge. The dim light from the city that deepened by contrast Nathalie's shadows picked out the top of the back. A woman and a Redshirt, Jack was able to see, before she stepped forward and switched on a powerful torch.
Jack's breath hissed between his teeth. He and Vico were both probably out of sight from the steps, but Nathalie would be skewered any minute by the beam as it scanned the water margin and quartered the bank above. In the resulting hoo-ha Jack and the others would probably be caught too. The Red must be blind to anything outside the torch beam, Jack reasoned as he pulled out his gun and moved to get a clear shot—
Nathalie leapt up the bank and out of the shadows, something glinting in her hand in the torchlight. There was a muffled cry and the sounds of a scuffle, a return to darkness as the torch was dropped, then the sharp report of a gun firing. Jack panted up the steps just as the limp body of the Redshirt went sliding down the bank and into the dark waters of the river. Nathalie came pelting helplessly down after it and cannoned into him, swearing under her breath.
"Where's Vico?" she asked urgently.
"Ran for it," Jack replied, his ears stretched for the sound of more Redshirts. The steps led to a small jetty with three boats moored to it. Red patrol or private taxis, Jack didn't care. He tugged Nathalie down the steps and into the nearest boat. She was shaking with cold or reaction, but she saw at once what was needed and began hacking at the nylon mooring rope with her knife. Jack thought he saw blood on the blade, but if it had been there, it was quickly washed off in the water, and he couldn't make sure. He shoved off violently with the boathook, and then poled them out to the dark centre of the river where an island hid them from Government House.
"You hear anything?" Jack asked, sitting down and letting the current carry the boat. "Hopefully they should have something else to worry about in a minute or two. Sit back and enjoy your romantic boat trip."
Nathalie giggled, rather more quietly than the chattering of her teeth.
"Come here and let me warm you up," Jack offered, the relief of their escape surging in his blood and brain. He was keen to forget what they'd just done, in flippancy or anything else offered. "The Reds will track us by the sound of your teeth."
Nathalie giggled again and, to his gratification, climbed onto his lap. She sat, shivering and unresponsive to his hands, as the boat swung slowly in the drift. "I do hope…" she muttered. Jack's hand in its wanderings suddenly found her upper arm warm and wet instead of cold and wet.
"Nat, I think you're bleeding."
She touched the spot. "It must have happened when the gun went off. I didn't even notice at the time."
Jack started to tear pieces off his shirt to bandage her arm. "No, I imagine you were a bit preoccupied."
"I've never killed anyone myself before," she said, shivering again.
"She would have killed you, and worse," Jack said, offering this for what it was worth. Not enough, but in his opinion Nat should have thought of this before she had gone off planting bombs. "Hold still."
The boat's slow drift had carried them from behind the island, and Jack could see the glitter from the posh areas where curfew wasn't enforced, and the bulk of Government House with its tower still blazing into the night. There was enough light to make a reasonable job of the bandage. Nathalie's eyes were firmly fixed upriver, and when he let go her arm, she squinted at her watch.
Boom. There was a distant rumble, a series of explosions, and Jack thought he saw the façade of Government House crumple, and those arrogant lights enveloped in a cloud of dust, but then the boat rocked so violently that he had his hands full to keep them both aboard it. When he could look up again the flames were shooting skywards, filling the horizon with bloody light. Nathalie's face, lit in the red glare, wore that expression of fierce joy he had only seen when she was with Vico.
"We did it!" she screeched, and flung her arms around his neck. The ensuing kiss, and accompaniments, lasted for quite some time. Jack groaned in frustration as Nathalie pulled away at last.
"Well," he said, waving an arm to indicate the racket upriver, "I think we could risk the engine now."
----
The streets were empty of Redshirts as Jack and Nathalie made their way to his ship. Not without ulterior motive on his part, although it was much nearer than Vico's HQ. The streets were filled with civilians, apparently not caring that they were breaking curfew. They all must have heard the explosion or rumours of it. Reactions seemed to be mixed, to Jack's eyes.
The interior lights of Jack's ship seemed overly bright as he and Nathalie entered it. He looked at her, dripping river water and blood and other unspeakable things on to the pristine deck.
"You need to get that arm cleaned up. I'll bet you haven't had your shots, have you? And I'm longing for a shower."
The previous owners of the ship had thoughtfully provided it with a state-of-the-art medical bay. Jack had found it useful more often than he liked to admit. When Nathalie reappeared after her shower, he was able to give her a full scan.
"Huh," he said, looking at the readouts. "Nasty case of incipient Perlemain's flu you have there, so it says. I'll get you a shot for that. And a coupla vitamin deficiencies. You need to go out in the sun and eat more red meat."
Nathalie threw back her head and laughed, a nice clear laugh without giggles. "Perhaps it will be easier to go out in the light now," she said, sobering.
"Why?" Jack asked. "Hold out your arm."
"Did you see those lights high up in the West Tower? Ow!"
"What about it?"
Nathalie hugged her knees, pressing her face against them, grinning. "That's where the Military Council hold their late-night meetings. Very cloak-and-dagger. Vico hoped to be lucky enough to get them too, but it was a great secret. Hardly any of us knew. And now we've done it!"
Pillow talk, Jack thought. "Well, either them or some helpless cleaner," he said, unwilling to bring her to earth, but feeling compelled to, somehow. He didn't like the unqualified glee on Nathalie's face.
"Stupid, Government House is—was—all cleaned by machines, for fear of spies." She chuckled. "They should have remembered the sewers. It's where most of them belong, after all."
"You're a scary woman, sometimes, Nat."
"Was that a compliment?"
Jack raised his eyebrows. "Do you want it to be?"
"Perhaps," Nathalie said, with a tilt to her head that was definitely flirtatious. Jack leaned over and kissed her again, and this time she didn't pull away.
----
The HQ had an air of morning-after-the-night-before. A sour organic smell now overlaid its general dankness, and a couple of hung-over bodies were sprawled in the kitchen. Jack decided that he preferred his own method of celebration.
Vico and a few of his lieutenants, looking rather seedy, were watching a news broadcast with the sound turned low. The bombing was, naturally, the headline story.
"Full of fatuous propaganda, of course," Vico said to Nathalie as she sat down beside his chair. "The Reds are out in full force, was the implication."
"Too right," she returned. "We were almost caught three times on the way here."
"Was that counting the one on the riverbank, or not? How did you get out of that one, anyway?"
"I jumped the Red and threw her in the river," Nathalie said hardily. From the angle Vico was to her, he couldn't see, as Jack could, how her fists clenched till the knuckles were white.
"Good for you. I thought you were a goner that time. It was worth your using the message system to know you were okay."
Nathalie gave a rather uncertain smile and settled against Vico's chair to watch the news broadcast. Jack thought that now was the best time to ask for his belongings back. Vico made no objections, and returned the guns and the sensor array immediately. He was pleasant all round that morning, and Jack was prevailed upon, largely by Nathalie, to stay in the celebration and congratulation, rather than returning to his ship. He had long ago decided to leave as soon as he was able to put the ship back in order, but there was no harm in waiting until the first flurry of suspicion had died away a little. Not that he oughtn't to be safe enough, as there had been no hostile witnesses of his presence the night before, but to go back now would only be asking for more trouble with the Redshirts.
He was beginning to regret this, towards evening; he had had no chance to be alone with Nathalie, and the friendliness of everyone else was wearing off. As the time approached the hour, they were preparing to watch the same news broadcast again, with no signs of boredom. Perhaps Vico would organise a court-martial for yawning, Jack thought idly.
The same anxious-looking, dishevelled newscaster appeared on the screen. Jack paid it no attention until someone exclaimed, "Turn it up! This is different!"
"…already cruelly attacked, now faces a new and even more terrible threat. An invading army—"
The image cut to a new scene: an ordinary street filed with dozens of humanoid figures, their silvery faces flat with an inchoate eyes and mouth, like a child's drawing, mere gestures towards facial features. The newscaster's voice was drowned in the cries of horror and surprise from everyone in the room. Jack stared at the screen, his mouth slightly open. Cybermen! He'd thought them half-legendary, a story to frighten children into nightmares, as unreal as Daleks. It began to enter his consciousness, like a chilly little wind, that everything he'd heard about them could well be true.
------
HQ was nearer to whole-scale anarchy than at any time Jack had seen it. The "fight" and "flight" camps almost came to blows at one point. Nathalie was, not surprisingly, for fighting, but she called truce tersely and disappeared into Vico's room. No-one knew much about the Cybermen, not even the newscasters and commentators. Apparently they hadn't been heard of on Earth for a long while. Vico's most obvious reaction seemed to be resentment of the Cybermen for muscling on his coup. He forbade anyone to leave HQ and closeted himself with his lieutenants.
Jack could never be bothered with elaborate plans; he preferred prompt action. Sneaking out in the early hours, he thought that he had succeeded undetected, but Nathalie had evidently been on the alert and had followed him out. The streets were empty of both citizens and Redshirts, and it was impossible for Jack to give her the slip, or to pretend that he hadn't seen her. He stopped and waited for her to catch up with him.
"So you're just leaving, then?" were the first, indignant, words out of her mouth.
"So would you be, if you had the sense you were born with," Jack retorted. "Didn't you watch the newscast? Earth is being invaded by extremely hostile aliens. They'll be in this city next. I'm not planning on sitting twiddling my thumbs till they get here, whatever Vico's going to do."
"We shall fight, of course! Oh, please, Jack—"
"Nothing you say is going to persuade me to stick around and get shot at."
They walked rapidly through the deserted streets, neither of them budging an inch in the dispute. Jack thought that Nathalie would leave when they reached his ship, but she pulled out a gun and sat down with her back to him, scanning the street. This silent treatment Jack found to be more guilt-inducing than argument. He couldn't simply leave her vicinity either, because he had to reattach the sensor array to the ship's hull.
"You should come with me," he told her eventually. "I like you too much to let you to be killed by Cybermen."
"Oh, thanks," she snorted.
"I could take you anywhere, any time you want," he offered. "It's not like you had to stay with me."
Nathalie stamped one foot. "Here is where I want to be! Can't you understand that? This is my place and I shan't let it go, to Reds or anybody!"
"You don't know what you're talking about, Nat!"
Jack went back to his work, exasperated. He was aware of Nathalie in the periphery of his vision, her back very straight and her head high. I don't see what she's so affronted about, he thought. It's not like I wasn't leaving anyway.
A patrol of Reds came around the corner suddenly. Jack spun around and was just in time to stop Nathalie from shooting over their heads. This action was evidently taken as that of a law-abiding citizen in trying circumstances.
"You two should get out of here," the leader said—dark and thin and interesting-looking rather than handsome.
"Can't," Jack said concisely, wondering how to explain the spaceship they didn't seem to have noticed up the alleyway.
"We can get you transport if you come with us," the Red replied.
"No," Nathalie said flatly.
"Most people are glad of it," the Redshirt said. "You do know the aliens are actually in the city, don't you?"
They hadn't, but Nathalie said brazenly, "Where's there to run to?"
"You'd need to get a lot farther than your transport would take you," Jack amplified. "My name's Jack Harkness, by the way. What's yours?"
"Amil Penn, but—look, you can't stay here."
"Yes we can," Nathalie said violently. Jack said nothing. There was a crackle from one of the Redshirts' communicators. The resulting conversation was too full of jargon for Jack to understand it, despite his Agency training. Then the Red turned to Penn: "Sir, they're in Thanaren now."
That was where Vico's HQ was. Nathalie made a small wounded sound and started forward, but Jack stopped her with a hand on her arm.
"Well, that just about puts the lid on it," Penn was saying. "We'd better—"
"I should never have come here—I have to get home—let go of me, Jack!"
"Excuse me, miss, but you'll never get into Thanaren," Penn said. "It's too much cut off."
"Oh, I can!" Nathalie exclaimed.
"Nat," Jack said, in case she went on to explain how.
"Well, so long," Penn said. "I shouldn't go near Thanaren, if I were you. Nor do I want to find you here later. Good luck!"
"Good luck to you," Jack returned, and watched the Reds as they moved off down the street. Nathalie pulled away from him and ran in the opposite direction.
"Nathalie, wait! Hang on a minute!"
Her running didn't last long, and he caught up with her as she trudged along the street, head down.
"Last night I'd have been afraid of the Reds," she said. "Funny, isn't it? What was the point of it all?"
"I often wonder that myself."
"The very day after! You'd think they'd done it on purpose to mock us." She lifted her head; there were tears dripping from her chin. "We were going to fix it. We could have made it so much better!"
"It does get better eventually. I was born into a good time." Jack didn't tell her how many centuries separated their births. "No-one grabbing all the good stuff and clamping down on everyone else."
"How do we get rid of the what's-its, then?"
"Cybermen." Jack had been half-consciously trawling for submerged memories since he'd seen the newscast, but he couldn't even remember the Cybermen invading Earth as late as this. Perhaps they'd discovered time-travel. Oh, joy.
"Gold," he offered. "They're allergic to it or something, you can use that to fight them."
Nathalie gave a short laugh. "Where do you expect us to get gold from? The national stocks are under government control."
"Nat, you blew up the government."
"Still. You cut off the head and the body goes flapping about like a chicken. We should have waited and let the Reds and the Cybermen wipe each other out."
"It doesn't work like that. Innocent people would have died just as much the other way. I don't see the Military Council sticking their necks out to protect them."
"No. But I can't help wondering what would have happened if we hadn't done what we did last night."
"Nathalie, look here. Are you completely certain that you don't want to get out of here?"
She stopped and turned to face him. Jack watched the conflict that showed on her face, guessing which way she would choose and wishing that she wouldn't.
"No, I can't, I can't just go off and leave Vico and everyone!"
She swung around, and Jack watched her little indomitable figure trudge the length of the street. It stirred him so deeply that he called out, "Nat!"
"What?"
"I'll take you to Thanaren in my ship. It's got to be safer than walking. Hurry up."
The Cybermen were on the west side of Thanaren. Near HQ they found Philo, one of Vico's inner circle.
"We're fighting side by side with the Reds over there. Damn' ironic, isn't it?" he said to Jack when he arrived.
Ironic, Jack thought, was the word Nathalie had been groping towards earlier. He told Philo about using gold as a weapon.
"If another person says that, I might start to believe it. Oh, d'you know that Vico's copped it?"
Nathalie, who had been stripping weapons a few yards away, went very still. "When, Philo? Where?"
Jack didn't really listen to the following narrative, which involved Reds and a mysterious blue box and the Cybermen being beaten down between the university and the river. He was too busy wondering what Nathalie was going to do when she looked at him again.
She took him aside, her grip on his arm strong enough to bruise. "Jack, your ship, that's your time ship?"
"Yes. But, Nat, no can do. You'd be crossing your own time line really close to where you are now. It's too risky. And if you saved his life, that could really screw things up. The last thing we need here is a time rip."
"Please."
"Nathalie, I really can't. It could mess things up worse than the Military Council and the Cybermen put together."
Her face went grim. "It's not usual of you to be so altruistic. I think you're scared for your own skin."
"And that, too, of course."
Nathalie snapped the gun she was holding back together. "In that case, you can get out of here. I don't want to see your face again."
She picked up a magazine and pushed it into place. Jack wondered if it was intended for him, but she tucked the gun into her belt and walked over to Philo. The last Jack saw of her was as she bent over the map that was spread out on the ground, her clear voice ordering where the squads should go. Well, he'd had his dismissal. He'd try the 102nd century. Time for some fun, for a change. Take his mind off all this.
Eleven years later
The Doctor had found a rather nice little restaurant, and spent the meal telling Rose about the Cybermen's invasion.
"—and they had been having a revolution of some sort at the same time, you can imagine the confusion—"
Jack, listening to something he knew too much of, raised his eyes to a pair of workmen sticking up posters outside. They showed a good-looking woman of about thirty. She'd changed, but Jack would have recognised her anywhere. The writing beneath said: Vote Nathalie Takoska for the Liberals, the People's Choice. Jack gave a sudden swift grin.
"—really, the lot they had had in charge weren't much better than the Cybermen, and once the soldiers and uncle Tom Cobbley and all had started fighting together, the more sensible ones realised that there are worse things than people who don't agree with you—"
"Like aliens who shoot your heads off when they don't agree with you?" Rose asked.
"Exactly. I don't think they've made out too badly, all things considered."
No, Jack thought. He raised his glass silently. Good luck with the election, Nat.
calapine for the Jack Harkness ficathon. She wanted Jack as a criminal and Cybermen, so here they are, for what it's worth. It seems to be massively longer than everyone else's. Woe.Title: A Brief Experiment in the Life of Jack Harkness
Rating: PG-13 (for Jack being Jack and the general dystopia of the fic.)
Archive: Yes, ask please
Thanks to
book_addict for beta-ing this!Jack was lounging against the console, playing the seasoned traveller to Rose's impression of an excited kid on a school trip.
"Where are we going?" she asked, prancing around the console.
"You'll find out when we get there, won't you?" said the Doctor, and grinned at Jack. "All right, here we go."
The TARDIS came to a halt and Rose opened the door. "Not bad," she conceded. "Where is it?"
Jack stepped out after her. "Oh."
"Earth, the year 2638," the Doctor said. "What's the matter with you, Jack?"
"He kissed someone here and ran, I bet," Rose said.
"Well, something like that," Jack admitted.
He looked around. Considering the circumstances when he'd seen it last, the place was looking pretty good. There were tall new buildings, it was more or less clean and the people walking in the street looked reasonably well-fed and happy.
"You know," the Doctor said, "I'm glad to see this place looking so shiny and free of invading forces."
"Why, what happened?" Rose asked. "You save the world again?"
"Something like that, yeah."
Jack squirmed uncomfortably, and when the Doctor added, "Maybe I'll look up some old friends while I'm here," he muttered, "Save us."
"Was it a he or a she that you dumped, Jack?" Rose asked mischievously.
"It was a none-of-your-business, nosy Rosy."
Earth, 2626
Things were not going according to plan for Jack Harkness. Normal procedure was: get in, find the mark, pull off the con, and get out before he was found out, and in the meantime have any fun there was for the taking, of course. Having a vital sensor array stolen from the hull of his ship wasn't on Jack's list. He stared at the gap, ugly as a broken tooth, where it should have been, and swore at length. Without feedback from that array, his ship's propulsion system wouldn't even get her off the ground, let alone move her in space-time. And this culture was too primitive for him to replace the missing parts with local tech.
His prime suspects were the gangs of grimy street kids he'd seen hanging about this area of the city. Little brats probably didn't even know what they'd got or how valuable it was. They'd sell it for a quick fix of whatever chemicals they were killing themselves with. Jack sniffed in indignation. He had stolen the ship, himself, but that was totally different, of course.
Well, he couldn't stay stuck in this gloomy corner of history forever. He would have to do something. He hated this time, the twenty-seventh century. If—when—he got out of here he definitely wasn't coming back. He rather liked the late twenty-sixth; it was a shame to think that, in less than a lifetime, a megalomaniac or two had brought the world to this. He wasn't sure if the state was actually at war at this point, but a more-or-less permanent national emergency seemed to be a good excuse for a hundred and one petty regulations, injustices both large and small, and a grinding poverty and shabbiness.
The gangs generally hung out in a wasteland area a few streets over from where Jack had parked his ship. It seemed as good a place to start as anywhere. As he strode down the half-dark street, he saw a figure in the shadows, motionless and watchful. To Jack it had the air of a sentinel. When he turned towards it, it took flight, scudding off into the darkness. One of those brats! Guilty conscience, huh? Jack said to himself, and took off after the kid. He had the longer legs and was in better shape, but the child was on its own ground, knew where the treacherous patches of road were and what alleys to duck into.
It was in one of these alleys that Jack lost his chase. He jogged on in dispirited fashion, not really expecting to find the child again. The first thing to do was to get hold of one of those brats. There was no way of tracking down the sensor array otherwise. If they all had such a turn of speed, though....He was thinking of plans with such concentration that he almost missed the sounds of a struggle ahead of him. Almost; not entirely. He was still a trained professional, and he too knew how to hug the shadows, how to move as soundlessly as possible, how to not draw attention.
The noise came from a three-person team of the current law enforcement, known as Redshirts. Jack had disliked them on sight, and had had a minor run-in with them earlier. He had managed to flirt his way out of that situation, but he considered them arbitrary, unjust and illiberal. He'd almost been thrown into gaol just for breaking a curfew he couldn't possibly have known about, although explaining that he hadn't heard about it because he'd just arrived from the four-hundred-and-seventy-ninth century probably wouldn't have helped the situation.
He craned his neck to see what helpless citizen had caught it this time. It was the child he'd been chasing. That's mine! Jack had already been dithering with the idea of knocking out the Redshirts out of sheer frustration and boredom, and now he only hesitated long enough to pull a gun from his pocket.
Seven seconds later, the Redshirts had all gone quietly to sleep in the gutter. Jack had seized the child by the upper arm, but as soon as the last Redshirt had gone down, the kid writhed in Jack's grip, trying to twist away, and then sunk its teeth into Jack's hand.
"Ow! None of that, now!" Jack's slender store of patience was entirely exhausted. He fired another stun blast, and in a second or two the kid sagged, limp. Jack picked up his—rescuee or prisoner—over his shoulder and headed back to his ship.
-----
The scrawny frame, cropped dark hair and multiple layers of clothing combined to baffle a guess at the kid's sex, although in the bright lights of the ship Jack was inclining to girl. Whichever, she or he looked skinny enough to be prepubescent anyway, an age of human Jack had no idea how to interact with. He dumped the kid on the table to come around, and went to eat his long-delayed dinner.
Most people came out of a stunner dazed and disorientated, but the first indication that this kid was awake was a scrape of metal. He turned around to see the child conscious and crouched back against the galley bulkhead, a table knife in one hand. Jack pulled out his gun again.
"My weapon's better than yours," he said pleasantly. The kid's dark eyes flickered sideways.
"You won't get out the door, neither," Jack continued in conversational tones. "I locked it when I came in." He was still annoyed over the stolen sensor array, but it had occured to him that you could catch more flies with sugar than vinegar, as his mother used to say. Besides, it was always a good idea to be nice to people holding edged weapons.
The knife-point was weaving in uncertain figure-eights. Jack moved his gun aside a little. Blue eyes and dark ones met briefly.
"Who are you? Where are the Reds?"
"Should be coming around in the road round about now," Jack said cheerfully. "I rescued you and you bit me. Remember that?"
The kid shook—her?—head, the knife's tip drooping. "You shot the Reds?"
"Only stunned. Less messy, in several ways. It's silent, for one thing. Though I have no objection to dead Redshirts. Hopefully someone ran them over while they were out."
The knife dropped. "I smell food," the kid said.
"Want some?" Jack asked. He pocketed his gun, as friendly relations seemed to have been established. He had never seen anyone so small eat so much. The kid finished Jack's dinner, and tomorrow's dinner, and started on the odds and ends. Jack sat and watched, rather impressed.
There was very little food left on the ship when, without preamble, his visitor propositioned Jack in as blunt a way as he'd ever heard. Jack raised his eyebrows. If the colloquialism meant what it usually had in his experience, this was the sort of offer he didn't often refuse. "Do you do this sort of thing often, or am I just irresistible?"
"You are conceited! You saved me from the Reds. I have to give you something in return, and I don't have anything but me." She said this in a flat tone without emotion. Not exactly gratifying, to Jack's mind.
"They that terrible, huh?"
"Where did you come from?" the kid asked scornfully.
"A long way away," Jack replied.
"Must be. Do you want me, or don't they have sex where you come from?"
Jack started to laugh. "Oh, believe me, they do. You mightn't think it, kiddo, but I do have some standards. How old are you, thirteen?"
There was an indignant-sounding squeak. "I'm almost seventeen!"
"Ah, well, sorry," Jack said, only half believing it, although when conscious the kid did look much older than before. He cast around for a polite way of saying, "Not until you've had a bath and a medical check-up, either," and decided that there wasn't one. His guest was rather pretty in an undernourished way, he thought, and the offer would be tempting, if one didn't mind shagging dirty and possibly disease-ridden skeletons. Anyway, he had for once a more urgent priority.
"You could do something else for me, though," he said, leaning forward. "Do you have a name, by the way?"
"Nathalie," said the girl, after a hesitation.
"Jack. Nice to be introduced at last. Anyway, Nathalie, do you know anything about a part of my ship that was stolen this afternoon?"
Nathalie flushed and dropped her eyes.
"Look, I really would like it back," Jack said. "And I did rescue you from the Reds."
She sighed. "Vico will know about it. He finds out about everything the squads do." There was a note of pride in her voice.
"Vico?"
"My boyfriend," Nathalie said. Her face had a blazing, intent look of affection and protectiveness on it now.
"Right," Jack said. That could have been a slight complication had he taken Nathalie up on her earlier offer. Nothing he couldn't have handled, though. Probably. "All right. Should we go and speak to him, then?"
Nathalie's face looked troubled for a moment, and then cleared. "Is that really what you want, in exchange for saving me from the Reds?"
"I want you to do everything you can to help me get that equipment back," Jack said, covering loopholes.
"Fine," the girl said, holding out her hand. Jack shook it.
-----
The route to wherever the boyfriend hung out was tortuous, leading through wasteland, part marsh and part landfill, through a maze of dark alleyways, and at one point underground through the sewers. Jack could see now why Nathalie looked dirty. Their ultimate destination was an apparently derelict house, its windows blocked with boards and overgrown trees pressed up against it. Nathalie opened a door at the back and pulled Jack inside. He walked straight into a heavy black curtain that was hanging across the doorway.
"Don't let the light show," Nathalie hissed. "It's long past curfew."
There were a couple of young men playing cards by candlelight in a kitchen a little way up the passage, and by the time Jack had disentangled himself from the curtain they were on their feet and looking at him in a way that made him close his hand around his gun.
"It's okay, he's with me," Nathalie said, serenely, opening a door beneath the stairs to show the start of another staircase. "Come on, Jack."
They groped their way down the narrow staircase in almost total darkness. The passage at the bottom was lit by another single candle. Nathalie opened a door and said, "Vico?"
The room was unpainted and overcrowded with furniture that must once have been valuable. A young man in close-fitting black was sitting at an antique twenty-first century desk, papers spread out in front of him. He turned and got up as Nathalie and Jack came in. He was fairish, with rather attractive narrow features and the sort of light eyes that look different colours in different lights. At the moment they were grey.
"What did you bring him here for?" he demanded.
Nathalie cringed. "He's all right, Vico. He saved me from a Red patrol."
Vico's face changed, but only from angry to angrier. "You were picked up? I don't believe it! How could you be so stupid?"
"I ran around a corner and there they were. It could have happened to anyone," Nathalie protested.
Vico grabbed her coat lapel. "I don’t know why I bother, sometimes. Now go and get cleaned up; you stink."
"Hey, let her go," Jack said. He wasn't liking Vico at all. If he was the main example of Nathalie's taste in men, then Jack should be flattered if she didn't actually fancy him.
Nathalie said, "No, wait—" and drew Vico aside, talking hastily in a voice too low for Jack to hear. Vico nodded, his face intent, asked a few concise questions, and ruffled her back hair in an off-hand gesture. As she slipped out of the room again, Vico turned to Jack.
"I'm Jack Harkness. I think I've worked out who you are."
Vico smiled thinly. He was older than he'd seemed at first sight, nearer Jack's age than Nathalie's, even if she were almost seventeen, as Jack was coming to believe.
"I'm sorry for the inconvenience Nathalie put you through," Vico said formally, watching Jack closely.
"It was a pleasure to assist such a charming young lady in distressing circumstances," Jack replied, matching the formality and turning on the charm.
"Nathalie tells me that you possess a weapon which can render a person unconscious, without noise," Vico said. Jack was to find that these sudden switches in topic were characteristic of Vico, but for now it was disconcerting.
"So?" he countered warily.
"She also told me that you want to retrieve some of your property, which was stolen today."
"Yeah, I do. Do you know where it is?"
"Yes. Some of the younger squads have a regrettable tendency to steal anything that's not fastened down. I know who did it, and if I say the word it will be returned. I thought we might arrange a bargain. We each have something the other wants: that weapon for the stolen equipment."
"Wait a second," Jack exploded. "Why should I buy back something that was mine in the first place? Of all the frackin' nerve—"
"You wouldn't have to give up your gun if you came along with it." Vico interrupted smoothly. "We could use all the help we can get, in fact."
"I already helped you once tonight. I saved your girl from the Reds, don't forget that!"
"But she never would have been out tonight in the first place if you had not been here. She was part of a squad assigned to watch you."
"Spy on me, you mean? Who the hell do you think you are?"
"Oh, it's nothing personal. We keep an eye on everything that goes on in this part of the city." Vico gave his thin smile again. "Tell me, what do you think of the Reds?"
"Not a lot. Oh, don't tell me, you're the bloody freedom fighters."
Vico's face flushed, became animated. "The Military Council has destroyed this place. If you so much as breath wrong, they'll have you. And in return, we don't even have safety, we have a thousand shortages and—"
"Now, look here," Jack interrupted. "Let's get this straight. I'm not going to be some sort of martyr; I don't get involved in this sort of thing. I won't bother the Military Council alone as long as they leave me alone."
Vico took a few restless steps. If he had been a cat he would have been lashing his tail by now. "That makes you only a step above them. Don't you see that they only survive because of their collaborators?"
Jack sighed. "Look, I don't like what goes on, but I don't belong, I don't come from here. It isn't my affair."
Vico sat down on the edge of his desk. "You don't have to do anything, of course. You are free to leave if you wish to do so. But in that case I'm afraid I shall be unable to return your equipment."
Jack paused. "You are one frag, you know that," he said, and added a few more choice epithets in several languages. Vico had him by the short hairs; of course he couldn't leave without his sensor array. He could do any number of unpleasant things to Vico right now, but that would get him no farther. Even the chance of retrieving the array on his own, by force if necessary, would require staying here, which would mean Vico had won. His anger surged.
"I should turn you all over to the Reds," he snarled, knowing it was an empty threat even as he said it.
"Oh but you wouldn't do that, would you?" Vico said softly, still smiling. Jack had to acknowledge the hit; whatever else Vico was, he was an accurate judge of character.
He threw himself down on one of the decrepit armchairs. "What do you want me to help with?" he asked, not bothering to keep the ironic tone from his voice.
"We're planning to blow up Government House."
Jack sighed. "Ever heard of Guy Fawkes?"
"That was a thousand years ago. We are different; we are going to succeed."
"Oh, yeah? Hey, how do I know you won't go back on me, after I help you? What's to stop you holding out on me for ever, giving me more and more little jobs to do?"
"I give you my word," Vico said haughtily, as though he were a patrician. "This is our great work. We have been working towards it for months. Years. Anything we do after this will not need your expertise."
Jack couldn't help seeing an echo of his own sarcasm in this. "Tell me," he inquired gently, "How many people are going to be murdered in this? Ordinary people, not Reds or politicos?"
Vico sighed, suddenly looking tired and almost, Jack thought, human. "As few as possible. That's why we need that stunning gun of yours. We don't plan to kill civilians. We are freedom fighters, not terrorists. It is a shame that we can't simply wipe out the political scum in their nest, but doing it by day is utterly impractical."
The door opened and Nathalie came in, very scrubbed and wearing a black suit similar to Vico's, but with subtle feminising differences. She had made up, too, in the slightly bizarre fashion current here: two beauty marks on each side of her forehead, eyes rimmed with black, their orbits a dusky gold, her top lip painted scarlet and the lower deep pink. Her short dark hair was sticking out, damp, at odd angles. She went to sit beside Vico's chair, leaned her head confidingly against his knees. Jack watched her, beginning to regret that he'd refused her earlier.
"Well?" she demanded.
"I've been suckered into your revolution," Jack replied wryly.
"Oh, good."
------
Jack showed them how to use the stun gun.
"I have three more back on my ship," he told Nathalie privately. "What would you have done if you'd known that a couple of hours ago?"
"Taken them."
Jack grinned down at her, recognising a ruthless pragmatism equal to his own. The only difference was that his was in his own interest, while Nathalie's was in Vico's.
"Where did you get this, Jack?" Vico asked, coming out of absorption. "I've never seen tech like this before."
"From the future," Jack said incautiously.
"Ah. So you are a time-traveller. The Council wouldn't like that. They can't spread their regime through time as well as space." He sighed. "Apparently it's happened before. The person in question ended up declared insane, which isn't a good thing to be under this administration."
"I'm starting to think that you have to be mad to come here," Jack said.
Vico smiled thinly. "Tell me, do we succeed? Is the dictatorship overthrown?"
Jack said nothing, racking his memory of far-off history lessons he'd never paid much attention to at the time. This was a big no-no in the Agency; telling people about their own futures could really muck up causality as they attempted to fulfil or to avoid them.
"Would you act differently if you knew you do, or not?" he asked, genuinely curious.
"No, I wouldn't," Vico said, with barely a pause. His face had tightened to a curious intent look. He was a fanatic, Jack thought, utterly dedicated to his goal. He had no time even to love Nathalie, who was now looking at him with that blazing tenderness again. He wouldn't think much of Jack's philosophy of life at all.
"I honestly can't remember," Jack said, disliking him more than ever.
-----
Jack spent the next few weeks barely putting his nose above ground. Vico conscripted him into the planning details of the bombing. Jack gathered that flexibility was a plus, as the situation changed rapidly. Tactics he had learned when he had been with the Agency or picked up in various times and places since all came in handy. In all Jack's chequered career, he'd never yet been a terrorist; to his secret amusement, he was rather good at it. Not being convicted of the cause, he wouldn't mince words, even though he hated the Redshirts, and the Military Council who'd screwed up the place, as much as he hated anything.
There wasn't a lot of other amusement to be had. The "squads"—Vico's organised gangs of feral-kids-turned-troops—were composed of serious grim young men and slightly fewer serious grim young women. Even those of them that Jack considered old enough were mostly unresponsive to his flirting technique. He was getting bored.
The date they eventually decided on for the attack apparently held some significance for the group; Jack didn't bother to find out what it was. The team was decided on—"No-one too clumsy, no-one too scared, no-one too fat," Nathalie had said. That evening, they all dressed in dark clothing, with their faces black and matte eyeshades on. The effect, to Jack, was that of a heliophobes' support group trying to look trendy. The rearguard included Vico, Jack and, naturally, Nathalie. Vico had one of Jack's guns, but Jack had a few bits of extra tech up his sleeve. And in other places.
They moved through the streets at first, and although eventually they did dive into the sewers, these were larger and better built than the ones in Jack's previous experience. They were still stinking, though. Vico and some of the others produced masks and tied them over their mouths and noses. This trying journey, on catwalks suspended about the foul flow, ended at last at an access ladder, which led to a long-forgotten manhole beneath shrubs in the gardens outside Government House. Jack tumbled up on to leaf mould and broken stems, taking deep grateful breaths of night air. It smelled damp and wonderfully clean.
"I've just thought of a flaw in the plan," he said.
"Do tell," Vico snapped, his voice sharp with tension.
"They'll be able to smell us coming."
"Tsha!"
Jack grinned, hoping that Vico could see the flash of his teeth in the darkness. Someone pinched him with startling viciousness; he flung out his arm and made contact with someone so small it could only be Nathalie. He grimaced, wishing she wasn't so obsessed with Vico, and that Vico wasn't so obsessed with anarchy or revolution or whatever it was. Crouching in the middle of a wet bush, stinking of sewers, his pockets full of explosives, was far, far down on Jack's list of fun ways to spend an evening.
His mental grumpings were cut short as Vico marshalled his troops and motioned them out beneath the stems of the shrubbery and onto the dew-soaked lawn. The looming bulk of Government House, surrounded by walls and smaller buildings, seemed to press down on Jack. Well, whatever we do for freedom and democracy and all that jazz, we're certainly striking a blow for architectural aesthetics tonight. High up in one of the end towers lights burnt into the night. Nathalie pointed and poked Vico, her face wearing that fierce joy that rather frightened Jack.
The little band moved inwards. As far as Jack had gathered, one of the guards of this particular gate was one of Vico's lot,which was why this route had been chosen. With their fifth-column ally, the struggle was brief and practically noiseless. The stun guns soon took care of the extraneous civilians who inhabited the outer gate like a warren, and the unconscious bodies were all moved head outside. The Red guard who was part of Vico's group was busily feeding old footage into the security recordings, obliterating the evidence of their entry.
"Hurry up," Vico ordered, his voice sharp, as they stripped the guards of their access keys. Beyond this point, Jack was only familiar with blurred, grainy photos of the surroundings, but the route had been drilled into his head by Nathalie. They moved fast, though not running, through an elaborately decorated sunk corridor, three access ducts and a bewildering maze of cellars filled with omnipresent damp, arcane machinery and bizarre smells, although the sewer stench that clung around everyone muted this last. Saying this lot is the Underground isn't just a figure of speech, Jack thought.
They spread out to their assigned places, pinpointing the structural weaknesses. Jack had already been impressed by the research that Vico and his teams had managed to do under less than academic conditions. His assignment was a long beam set flush with the ceiling; it was too high for him to reach and he had to set Nathalie on his shoulders to set the explosives. She was entirely competent, he found; he'd been trained to do her job in case of accident, but actually all he had to do was stand where she told him to and pass gear up to her.
"Are you not done yet?" Vico said, appearing from wherever his patch had been. "Most of the other teams are already moving out."
"Almost," Nathalie hissed. "Give me more tape, Jack."
"You want to go a bit easier on Nat here," Jack said warningly as he passed up the tape. "She's had more to do than almost anyone else."
Vico ignored him. The girl's weight shifted slightly on his shoulders as she leaned sideways, and Jack steadied her with a hand on her thigh. It hadn't escaped him that their positions gave him an unparalleled opportunity for feeling up Nathalie's legs; he'd already been taking advantage of that, but Vico seemed determined not to notice. Jack's favourite method of dealing with boy- or girl-friends was to include them, too, he really didn't think this would work with Vico. His loss, Jack thought, sliding his hand farther up Nathalie's leg.
"Finished," she announced triumphantly, and slid down Jack's back to the ground. "Let's get out of here."
Their escape route led, not surprisingly, through a drainage channel that ran outside the Government House complex, into the river. They had to wade through knee-high water, the run-off from the roofs and courtyards, and then crawl with the water swirling about their elbows and thighs. Jack half-expected every moment to feel the explosion behind, although he knew that the timers had been set to allow them time to escape. It wasn't that he was short of courage, he just preferred not to have to exercise it.
The gurgle of water grew louder ahead. The grille that separated the drain from the river had already been cut through by the rest of the team. Jack looked at the river gliding past less than a foot below the level of his nose. To make matters worse, the bank above overhung the grille so that one had to go through it backwards. It was a tight squeeze; Jack saw now why the team had all to be fairly slim; fortunately, with the food shortages, there hadn't been a lack of choice. Vico was undaunted, and there Nathalie followed, lithe as a cat, so Jack wriggled out of the narrow gap, water splashing his back, immensely relieved that this imbecile enterprise was nearing its end. Dripping wet, he inched his way along the steep slope of the concrete bank, Nathalie a soft-breathing shadow ahead of him.
Suddenly a voice from the top of the bank rang out: "What's that?"
Jack froze. Nathalie pressed against the bank, still and silent, a shadow among shadows. When he looked away and back, he couldn't distinguish her figure.
But it wasn't enough. The investigator was standing on a flight of steps leading to the water's edge. The dim light from the city that deepened by contrast Nathalie's shadows picked out the top of the back. A woman and a Redshirt, Jack was able to see, before she stepped forward and switched on a powerful torch.
Jack's breath hissed between his teeth. He and Vico were both probably out of sight from the steps, but Nathalie would be skewered any minute by the beam as it scanned the water margin and quartered the bank above. In the resulting hoo-ha Jack and the others would probably be caught too. The Red must be blind to anything outside the torch beam, Jack reasoned as he pulled out his gun and moved to get a clear shot—
Nathalie leapt up the bank and out of the shadows, something glinting in her hand in the torchlight. There was a muffled cry and the sounds of a scuffle, a return to darkness as the torch was dropped, then the sharp report of a gun firing. Jack panted up the steps just as the limp body of the Redshirt went sliding down the bank and into the dark waters of the river. Nathalie came pelting helplessly down after it and cannoned into him, swearing under her breath.
"Where's Vico?" she asked urgently.
"Ran for it," Jack replied, his ears stretched for the sound of more Redshirts. The steps led to a small jetty with three boats moored to it. Red patrol or private taxis, Jack didn't care. He tugged Nathalie down the steps and into the nearest boat. She was shaking with cold or reaction, but she saw at once what was needed and began hacking at the nylon mooring rope with her knife. Jack thought he saw blood on the blade, but if it had been there, it was quickly washed off in the water, and he couldn't make sure. He shoved off violently with the boathook, and then poled them out to the dark centre of the river where an island hid them from Government House.
"You hear anything?" Jack asked, sitting down and letting the current carry the boat. "Hopefully they should have something else to worry about in a minute or two. Sit back and enjoy your romantic boat trip."
Nathalie giggled, rather more quietly than the chattering of her teeth.
"Come here and let me warm you up," Jack offered, the relief of their escape surging in his blood and brain. He was keen to forget what they'd just done, in flippancy or anything else offered. "The Reds will track us by the sound of your teeth."
Nathalie giggled again and, to his gratification, climbed onto his lap. She sat, shivering and unresponsive to his hands, as the boat swung slowly in the drift. "I do hope…" she muttered. Jack's hand in its wanderings suddenly found her upper arm warm and wet instead of cold and wet.
"Nat, I think you're bleeding."
She touched the spot. "It must have happened when the gun went off. I didn't even notice at the time."
Jack started to tear pieces off his shirt to bandage her arm. "No, I imagine you were a bit preoccupied."
"I've never killed anyone myself before," she said, shivering again.
"She would have killed you, and worse," Jack said, offering this for what it was worth. Not enough, but in his opinion Nat should have thought of this before she had gone off planting bombs. "Hold still."
The boat's slow drift had carried them from behind the island, and Jack could see the glitter from the posh areas where curfew wasn't enforced, and the bulk of Government House with its tower still blazing into the night. There was enough light to make a reasonable job of the bandage. Nathalie's eyes were firmly fixed upriver, and when he let go her arm, she squinted at her watch.
Boom. There was a distant rumble, a series of explosions, and Jack thought he saw the façade of Government House crumple, and those arrogant lights enveloped in a cloud of dust, but then the boat rocked so violently that he had his hands full to keep them both aboard it. When he could look up again the flames were shooting skywards, filling the horizon with bloody light. Nathalie's face, lit in the red glare, wore that expression of fierce joy he had only seen when she was with Vico.
"We did it!" she screeched, and flung her arms around his neck. The ensuing kiss, and accompaniments, lasted for quite some time. Jack groaned in frustration as Nathalie pulled away at last.
"Well," he said, waving an arm to indicate the racket upriver, "I think we could risk the engine now."
----
The streets were empty of Redshirts as Jack and Nathalie made their way to his ship. Not without ulterior motive on his part, although it was much nearer than Vico's HQ. The streets were filled with civilians, apparently not caring that they were breaking curfew. They all must have heard the explosion or rumours of it. Reactions seemed to be mixed, to Jack's eyes.
The interior lights of Jack's ship seemed overly bright as he and Nathalie entered it. He looked at her, dripping river water and blood and other unspeakable things on to the pristine deck.
"You need to get that arm cleaned up. I'll bet you haven't had your shots, have you? And I'm longing for a shower."
The previous owners of the ship had thoughtfully provided it with a state-of-the-art medical bay. Jack had found it useful more often than he liked to admit. When Nathalie reappeared after her shower, he was able to give her a full scan.
"Huh," he said, looking at the readouts. "Nasty case of incipient Perlemain's flu you have there, so it says. I'll get you a shot for that. And a coupla vitamin deficiencies. You need to go out in the sun and eat more red meat."
Nathalie threw back her head and laughed, a nice clear laugh without giggles. "Perhaps it will be easier to go out in the light now," she said, sobering.
"Why?" Jack asked. "Hold out your arm."
"Did you see those lights high up in the West Tower? Ow!"
"What about it?"
Nathalie hugged her knees, pressing her face against them, grinning. "That's where the Military Council hold their late-night meetings. Very cloak-and-dagger. Vico hoped to be lucky enough to get them too, but it was a great secret. Hardly any of us knew. And now we've done it!"
Pillow talk, Jack thought. "Well, either them or some helpless cleaner," he said, unwilling to bring her to earth, but feeling compelled to, somehow. He didn't like the unqualified glee on Nathalie's face.
"Stupid, Government House is—was—all cleaned by machines, for fear of spies." She chuckled. "They should have remembered the sewers. It's where most of them belong, after all."
"You're a scary woman, sometimes, Nat."
"Was that a compliment?"
Jack raised his eyebrows. "Do you want it to be?"
"Perhaps," Nathalie said, with a tilt to her head that was definitely flirtatious. Jack leaned over and kissed her again, and this time she didn't pull away.
----
The HQ had an air of morning-after-the-night-before. A sour organic smell now overlaid its general dankness, and a couple of hung-over bodies were sprawled in the kitchen. Jack decided that he preferred his own method of celebration.
Vico and a few of his lieutenants, looking rather seedy, were watching a news broadcast with the sound turned low. The bombing was, naturally, the headline story.
"Full of fatuous propaganda, of course," Vico said to Nathalie as she sat down beside his chair. "The Reds are out in full force, was the implication."
"Too right," she returned. "We were almost caught three times on the way here."
"Was that counting the one on the riverbank, or not? How did you get out of that one, anyway?"
"I jumped the Red and threw her in the river," Nathalie said hardily. From the angle Vico was to her, he couldn't see, as Jack could, how her fists clenched till the knuckles were white.
"Good for you. I thought you were a goner that time. It was worth your using the message system to know you were okay."
Nathalie gave a rather uncertain smile and settled against Vico's chair to watch the news broadcast. Jack thought that now was the best time to ask for his belongings back. Vico made no objections, and returned the guns and the sensor array immediately. He was pleasant all round that morning, and Jack was prevailed upon, largely by Nathalie, to stay in the celebration and congratulation, rather than returning to his ship. He had long ago decided to leave as soon as he was able to put the ship back in order, but there was no harm in waiting until the first flurry of suspicion had died away a little. Not that he oughtn't to be safe enough, as there had been no hostile witnesses of his presence the night before, but to go back now would only be asking for more trouble with the Redshirts.
He was beginning to regret this, towards evening; he had had no chance to be alone with Nathalie, and the friendliness of everyone else was wearing off. As the time approached the hour, they were preparing to watch the same news broadcast again, with no signs of boredom. Perhaps Vico would organise a court-martial for yawning, Jack thought idly.
The same anxious-looking, dishevelled newscaster appeared on the screen. Jack paid it no attention until someone exclaimed, "Turn it up! This is different!"
"…already cruelly attacked, now faces a new and even more terrible threat. An invading army—"
The image cut to a new scene: an ordinary street filed with dozens of humanoid figures, their silvery faces flat with an inchoate eyes and mouth, like a child's drawing, mere gestures towards facial features. The newscaster's voice was drowned in the cries of horror and surprise from everyone in the room. Jack stared at the screen, his mouth slightly open. Cybermen! He'd thought them half-legendary, a story to frighten children into nightmares, as unreal as Daleks. It began to enter his consciousness, like a chilly little wind, that everything he'd heard about them could well be true.
------
HQ was nearer to whole-scale anarchy than at any time Jack had seen it. The "fight" and "flight" camps almost came to blows at one point. Nathalie was, not surprisingly, for fighting, but she called truce tersely and disappeared into Vico's room. No-one knew much about the Cybermen, not even the newscasters and commentators. Apparently they hadn't been heard of on Earth for a long while. Vico's most obvious reaction seemed to be resentment of the Cybermen for muscling on his coup. He forbade anyone to leave HQ and closeted himself with his lieutenants.
Jack could never be bothered with elaborate plans; he preferred prompt action. Sneaking out in the early hours, he thought that he had succeeded undetected, but Nathalie had evidently been on the alert and had followed him out. The streets were empty of both citizens and Redshirts, and it was impossible for Jack to give her the slip, or to pretend that he hadn't seen her. He stopped and waited for her to catch up with him.
"So you're just leaving, then?" were the first, indignant, words out of her mouth.
"So would you be, if you had the sense you were born with," Jack retorted. "Didn't you watch the newscast? Earth is being invaded by extremely hostile aliens. They'll be in this city next. I'm not planning on sitting twiddling my thumbs till they get here, whatever Vico's going to do."
"We shall fight, of course! Oh, please, Jack—"
"Nothing you say is going to persuade me to stick around and get shot at."
They walked rapidly through the deserted streets, neither of them budging an inch in the dispute. Jack thought that Nathalie would leave when they reached his ship, but she pulled out a gun and sat down with her back to him, scanning the street. This silent treatment Jack found to be more guilt-inducing than argument. He couldn't simply leave her vicinity either, because he had to reattach the sensor array to the ship's hull.
"You should come with me," he told her eventually. "I like you too much to let you to be killed by Cybermen."
"Oh, thanks," she snorted.
"I could take you anywhere, any time you want," he offered. "It's not like you had to stay with me."
Nathalie stamped one foot. "Here is where I want to be! Can't you understand that? This is my place and I shan't let it go, to Reds or anybody!"
"You don't know what you're talking about, Nat!"
Jack went back to his work, exasperated. He was aware of Nathalie in the periphery of his vision, her back very straight and her head high. I don't see what she's so affronted about, he thought. It's not like I wasn't leaving anyway.
A patrol of Reds came around the corner suddenly. Jack spun around and was just in time to stop Nathalie from shooting over their heads. This action was evidently taken as that of a law-abiding citizen in trying circumstances.
"You two should get out of here," the leader said—dark and thin and interesting-looking rather than handsome.
"Can't," Jack said concisely, wondering how to explain the spaceship they didn't seem to have noticed up the alleyway.
"We can get you transport if you come with us," the Red replied.
"No," Nathalie said flatly.
"Most people are glad of it," the Redshirt said. "You do know the aliens are actually in the city, don't you?"
They hadn't, but Nathalie said brazenly, "Where's there to run to?"
"You'd need to get a lot farther than your transport would take you," Jack amplified. "My name's Jack Harkness, by the way. What's yours?"
"Amil Penn, but—look, you can't stay here."
"Yes we can," Nathalie said violently. Jack said nothing. There was a crackle from one of the Redshirts' communicators. The resulting conversation was too full of jargon for Jack to understand it, despite his Agency training. Then the Red turned to Penn: "Sir, they're in Thanaren now."
That was where Vico's HQ was. Nathalie made a small wounded sound and started forward, but Jack stopped her with a hand on her arm.
"Well, that just about puts the lid on it," Penn was saying. "We'd better—"
"I should never have come here—I have to get home—let go of me, Jack!"
"Excuse me, miss, but you'll never get into Thanaren," Penn said. "It's too much cut off."
"Oh, I can!" Nathalie exclaimed.
"Nat," Jack said, in case she went on to explain how.
"Well, so long," Penn said. "I shouldn't go near Thanaren, if I were you. Nor do I want to find you here later. Good luck!"
"Good luck to you," Jack returned, and watched the Reds as they moved off down the street. Nathalie pulled away from him and ran in the opposite direction.
"Nathalie, wait! Hang on a minute!"
Her running didn't last long, and he caught up with her as she trudged along the street, head down.
"Last night I'd have been afraid of the Reds," she said. "Funny, isn't it? What was the point of it all?"
"I often wonder that myself."
"The very day after! You'd think they'd done it on purpose to mock us." She lifted her head; there were tears dripping from her chin. "We were going to fix it. We could have made it so much better!"
"It does get better eventually. I was born into a good time." Jack didn't tell her how many centuries separated their births. "No-one grabbing all the good stuff and clamping down on everyone else."
"How do we get rid of the what's-its, then?"
"Cybermen." Jack had been half-consciously trawling for submerged memories since he'd seen the newscast, but he couldn't even remember the Cybermen invading Earth as late as this. Perhaps they'd discovered time-travel. Oh, joy.
"Gold," he offered. "They're allergic to it or something, you can use that to fight them."
Nathalie gave a short laugh. "Where do you expect us to get gold from? The national stocks are under government control."
"Nat, you blew up the government."
"Still. You cut off the head and the body goes flapping about like a chicken. We should have waited and let the Reds and the Cybermen wipe each other out."
"It doesn't work like that. Innocent people would have died just as much the other way. I don't see the Military Council sticking their necks out to protect them."
"No. But I can't help wondering what would have happened if we hadn't done what we did last night."
"Nathalie, look here. Are you completely certain that you don't want to get out of here?"
She stopped and turned to face him. Jack watched the conflict that showed on her face, guessing which way she would choose and wishing that she wouldn't.
"No, I can't, I can't just go off and leave Vico and everyone!"
She swung around, and Jack watched her little indomitable figure trudge the length of the street. It stirred him so deeply that he called out, "Nat!"
"What?"
"I'll take you to Thanaren in my ship. It's got to be safer than walking. Hurry up."
The Cybermen were on the west side of Thanaren. Near HQ they found Philo, one of Vico's inner circle.
"We're fighting side by side with the Reds over there. Damn' ironic, isn't it?" he said to Jack when he arrived.
Ironic, Jack thought, was the word Nathalie had been groping towards earlier. He told Philo about using gold as a weapon.
"If another person says that, I might start to believe it. Oh, d'you know that Vico's copped it?"
Nathalie, who had been stripping weapons a few yards away, went very still. "When, Philo? Where?"
Jack didn't really listen to the following narrative, which involved Reds and a mysterious blue box and the Cybermen being beaten down between the university and the river. He was too busy wondering what Nathalie was going to do when she looked at him again.
She took him aside, her grip on his arm strong enough to bruise. "Jack, your ship, that's your time ship?"
"Yes. But, Nat, no can do. You'd be crossing your own time line really close to where you are now. It's too risky. And if you saved his life, that could really screw things up. The last thing we need here is a time rip."
"Please."
"Nathalie, I really can't. It could mess things up worse than the Military Council and the Cybermen put together."
Her face went grim. "It's not usual of you to be so altruistic. I think you're scared for your own skin."
"And that, too, of course."
Nathalie snapped the gun she was holding back together. "In that case, you can get out of here. I don't want to see your face again."
She picked up a magazine and pushed it into place. Jack wondered if it was intended for him, but she tucked the gun into her belt and walked over to Philo. The last Jack saw of her was as she bent over the map that was spread out on the ground, her clear voice ordering where the squads should go. Well, he'd had his dismissal. He'd try the 102nd century. Time for some fun, for a change. Take his mind off all this.
Eleven years later
The Doctor had found a rather nice little restaurant, and spent the meal telling Rose about the Cybermen's invasion.
"—and they had been having a revolution of some sort at the same time, you can imagine the confusion—"
Jack, listening to something he knew too much of, raised his eyes to a pair of workmen sticking up posters outside. They showed a good-looking woman of about thirty. She'd changed, but Jack would have recognised her anywhere. The writing beneath said: Vote Nathalie Takoska for the Liberals, the People's Choice. Jack gave a sudden swift grin.
"—really, the lot they had had in charge weren't much better than the Cybermen, and once the soldiers and uncle Tom Cobbley and all had started fighting together, the more sensible ones realised that there are worse things than people who don't agree with you—"
"Like aliens who shoot your heads off when they don't agree with you?" Rose asked.
"Exactly. I don't think they've made out too badly, all things considered."
No, Jack thought. He raised his glass silently. Good luck with the election, Nat.
