DOCTOR WHO/SCC FIC: Lifelines [Martha Jones, Derek Reese | 7/8 | PG]
Title: Lifelines
Author: jinxed_wood
Rating: PG, for language and Armageddon
Characters:Martha Jones, Derek Reese
Disclaimer: Doctor Who belongs to the Beeb, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles belongs to Fox (I think) all I have is my Microsoft Word…
Summary: Martha needs to spread the message... but in order to do that she needs to stay alive - something Derek Reese is very good at.(Set during the year-that-wasn't)
Previous parts: PART ONE| PART TWO | PART THREE | PART FOUR | PART FIVE | PART SIX
LIFELINES: PART SEVEN
Lake Mead was a damp morass, the Hoover dam a jagged ruin; in retrospect, Martha guessed they should have expected that. Vegas, after all, had been a ghost town. “I guess the Master likes to discourage loitering in the south west,” she said softly.
“Looks like,” Reese said, his face wary. “We need to move on.”
Martha eyed him, noting the set of his shoulders. “Trouble?”
“Of a sort,” he said, as he headed for the bike.
Martha squinted her eyes against the sun, and looked down the hill. “Is that a dust trail?”
“Yup,” he said shortly, as he threw her helmet at her. She caught it.
“Friend or foe?” she asked.
“Out here?” Reese asked. “Hell, Jones, this is the Mojave desert. Nowadays, even your friends can turn nasty in a place like here, trust me on this.”
Martha frowned as she put on her helmet. “You sound like you’re speaking from experience,” she said.
“I spent some time around here when I was younger,” he drawled. “Fun stuff.”
“But surely it was different, then,” Martha said. “You know, before the Master.”
Reese looked at her. “C’mon, Jones, I thought you’d have figured it out by now.”
Martha sighed. “You weren’t here before the Master came to power, were you?” she ventured.
“Give the girl a cigar.”
Martha wrinkled her nose. “So, what’s your story, then? Time agent? Because I’ve met one of those…well, he was an ex-time agent, but you get the drift.”
Reese raised an eyebrow. “What kind of life, exactly, did you lead before all this?”
“Before I met the Doctor, or after?” Martha asked.
“Like that, is it?” Reese drawled.
“You haven’t answered my question.”
“I hadn’t realised you’d asked me one - and we really need to get a move on, Jones.”
Martha looked over her shoulder as she hopped on the bike behind him. The dust cloud had become larger. “You think they’re the Master’s men?” she asked, wrapping her arms around his waist as he revved the engine.
“Nothing so simple, I think,” he shouted back. “Hold on, they’re close enough to see us on the ridgeline - that was sloppy of me - I may have to do some fancy driving.
Martha rolled her eyes, and hung on tighter. She’d had first hand experience of Reese’s cross-country driving. “Try not to kill us!” she yelled, as the bike accelerated.
The bike ate up the ground, and Martha tucked her head behind Reese’s back as the debris flew. After the TARDIS, pretty much any other form of transportation was tame in comparison, but the bike was still pretty rough.
She tried to look on the bright side; at least this time she wouldn’t fall off at the end of the universe.
Thinking of the TARDIS, made her think of the Doctor and Jack, and her family on the Valiant, and a familiar knot of worry formed in her chest. She tried to push away the images her overactive imagination always summoned when she thought of them; of what the Master was doing to them. It didn’t bear thinking about.
The bike swerved, and Martha clung on as they suddenly dipped into a narrow ravine. She looked up, curious. How had he known this was here?
Oh, right, he’d been here before.
The ride along the ravine’s bottom was bumpy, and Martha feared that the suspension might go, like it had in the Rockies. Somehow, she didn’t think Reese would be lucky enough to find yet another deserted garage in the middle of the Mojave Desert.
“Hold on,” Reese shouted, and Martha wondered what he thought she’d been doing until now. Suddenly, the ground seemed to disappear underneath them, and Martha bit down on the scream that bubbled to her lips as she realised they were flying midair over a very deep crevice.
They hit the other side, and Reese braked the bike, looking over his shoulder with an air of satisfaction. “They’ll need to know the area pretty well to know that’s there,” he said.
“Nobody would survive a fall like that, Reese,” Martha said shakily.
Reese shrugged. “It isn’t as if we’d be pushing them in,” he pointed out. “And if they follow us down here, Jones, you know as well as I, they won’t be well wishers.”
Martha sighed as she tried to come up with an argument Reese would understand. She wasn’t having any success. “How far is it to San Diego,” she eventually asked, changing the subject.
“The route we’re taking? About four days.” Reese started up the engine once more. “But we should make the Californian border by sunset and, if we keep to our south westerly direction and find a working pump before we hit the desert properly again, we-”
“Wait a minute, what’s that about a south westerly direction?” Martha interrupted. “Won’t we miss Los Angeles completely if we do that?”
Reese eyed her. “You’ve got an objection?”
“Hell, yeah!” she said. “You know what I’m trying to do, Reese; I need to spread the word to as many different areas as possible, and the population of the greater Los Angeles region is huge-”
“Not anymore it isn’t,” Reese said shortly, revving the engine.
Martha leaned forward and turned the key, snatching it out of the bike’s lock. “Is there something you need to tell me, Reese?”
“We’re both going to die from bullet wounds if we don’t get out of this ravine in the next ten minutes?”
“Derek.”
He turned on the bike and looked down at her. “I was in Los Angeles when they hit, Jones. It was a bloodbath. He might as well have dropped an A bomb on it, and gotten it over with.”
“But you survived?”
His smile was more like a sneer. “Yeah, I survived. Go me.”
“But maybe there were others, then.”
“There’s nobody left, Jones.”
“How can you be so sure?”
"Because, in the end, the Master didn’t have to drop on A bomb on Los Angeles; somebody else did it for him.”
Martha stared at him, not resisting as he wrestled the keys out of her hands and started up the bike. The engine roared, and Martha broke free of her shock and caught his wrist, holding it tightly. “Was it you, Reese?”
He looked at his wrist, and then looked at her. “No,” he said simply. “But it was someone like me.”
~~~*~~*~~*~~~
They crossed the border a little later than Reese had predicted, but Martha was okay with that. She had needed the time to think. For the last three months, she had travelled with Derek Reese, and had even let him protect her; it was a situation that she'd never felt comfortable with, but she had tolerated it because she understood where he was coming from… to a certain degree.
And that was the catch, wasn’t it?
Oh sure, Reese knew about the Doctor, and knew the tale she'd told to every ragtag group of humanity they'd come across, but other than that? Dribs and drabs, nothing much... as if they'd both been too afraid to talk of their past because that's what it was - their past.
So he didn’t ask her, and she didn’t ask him; and they fed each other sops when they felt the other needed it... and the darkness got too much.
She looked up at the starry sky that seemed to almost blaze above the desert air. The landscape was already becoming dry again, away from the dam; raw sienna and burnt umber under a yellow sun, a silvered grey under the stars. It was so beautiful; it was a pity she couldn't enjoy the wonder of it.
“Are you just going to stargaze all night?” Reese drawled, as he threw a dead rabbit by the unlit fire. “Or are you going to actually light that?”
“Where were you born?” Martha asked softly, ignoring his words, as she watched him prowl around the unlit fire and sit, cross-legged.
He eyed her. “Are we really going to have this conversation?” he asked, as he began to skin the rabbit.
“I think we need to, don’t you?” she asked.
“Where were you born?” he countered.
“London, England,” she replied promptly. “You?”
He smirked. “Los Angeles, California.”
“Really?” she looked at him, up and down. “Don’t take this the wrong way, Reese, but I would never have pegged you for a native Californian.”
“What? I ain’t Hollywood enough for ya?”
Martha tugged at her lip with her teeth; what wasn’t he telling her? She knew that there was something, but she couldn't quite put her finger on it. She remembered her guess from earlier, and bit the bullet. “Reese, what year were you born?”
He smiled humourlessly. “You sure you want to know the answer to that?” he asked.
“I wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t.”
Reese put the rabbit and knife aside and looked at her. His face looked harsh and cold under the starlight, and Martha wondered if she’d done the right thing in asking. Maybe she should have left well enough alone… but, then again, she had never been very good at that. “Reese?”
“1995,” he said softly.
“What?” Martha blinked. “But that can’t be right - that would make you only thirteen years old!”
“I’m thirty two.”
Martha did the math. “2027.”
“Yup.”
“Time travel?”
“Yup.”
“I don’t understand,” Martha said. “I didn’t think humanity would discover that sort of technology for centuries.”
“Who said anything about humanity?”
Martha stared at him, as he went back to skinning the rabbit. “Reese, what are you telling me?” she asked.
“I’m telling you that this should never have happened,” he drawled. “And I’m also telling you that I shouldn’t be here… weird, huh?”
Martha frowned. “I don’t understand.”
“Yeah, well, welcome to my world, Jones. I should be thirteen years old; hell, I was thirteen years old… and then, three months ago, I got killed by a Toclafane.”
“But that doesn’t make sense,” Martha pointed out
“Story of my life,” he muttered, as he leaned down and started the fire with a match, blowing on the dry twigs to encourage a blaze. Martha watched him as she turned his words around in her mind.
“You still haven’t told me why you came back in time,” she said.
“Trust me, Jones, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“Try me!”
He looked up from the fire, his eyes inscrutable. “I was sent back in time to protect the saviour of the human race.” The words came out flat, as if he wasn’t sure he should believe them himself.
“You’re not talking about the Doctor, are you?” Martha asked hoarsely.
“No, Jones, I’m not talking about the Doctor.” He put the rabbit on the spit.
“Should I be worried?”
“How should I know?” he asked. “It wasn’t supposed to go down this way, remember?”
“And the bomb in Los Angeles, what happened there?” Martha asked, feeling her mouth go dry.
He looked at her. “He probably thought he was saving the world, too,” he said.
~~~*~~*~~*~~~
They were less than an hour outside San Diego when they saw the convoy on the horizon, and Reese halted the bike so he could get a good look at them through his binoculars. “Ten Jeeps, high end,” he said. “Mounted artillery, dark fatigues - definitely mercs.”
Martha pulled the binoculars from his hands. “Let me have a look,” she said, as she put them to her eyes. “They’re heading right this way.”
“Yeah,” he said, in that way he did when he suspected something more.
“You reckon they’re after us?” she asked.
“I reckon that more than a few people knew our next main destination was San Diego,” he said.
Martha nodded; they’d had to grease a lot of palms to arrange transport out of San Diego and into South America, and a lot of them of them were smugglers, pure and simple. That was why Reese had made multiple transport arrangements; he had hoped to muddy the waters a bit. It hadn’t worked as well as they’d wished, apparently.
“Should we try for the Mexican border?” she asked.
“Not a chance,” Reese muttered. “Security was good there before the Master took over, now it’s just plain homicidal.”
Martha frowned as she focused on the lead jeep. “You know, there’s something familiar about that…. Oh…”
“What?”
“Promise you won’t blow a gasket?”
“Jones!”
“It’s that Colonel guy.”
“What? Give me those!” He snatched the binoculars from her, and looked through them. “I told you, you should have let me take care of him.”
“And I told you, I wasn’t going to let you go around assassinating people just because you find their existence inconvenient!”
He threw her a sardonic glance. “I guess we should consider ourselves inconvenienced, then,” he drawled. “Shall I slice up the cucumber sandwiches while you make the tea?”
She punched him in the arm. “That’s not funny!”
“Damned right it ain’t,” he muttered. “We need to make a move, fast. Those missile launchers attacked to the jeeps will be in range soon and-”
“And?” Martha asked, tugging on his arm. “And what?”
“Never mind, change of plans,” he muttered.
“What?”
“Get on the bike, Martha!”
Martha blinked at the urgency in his voice, and got on the bike. “What did you see?” she asked.
“Toclafane,” he said grimly, as he revved the engine to life.
~~~*~~*~~*~~~
They made it to the outskirts of San Diego, and Martha had actually thought they were going to make it to cover, when the first Toclafane seemed to come out of nowhere.
“Shit!” Reese yelped, swerving the bike out of the way. The Toclafane sped after them as Reese manoeuvred into a narrow alley, and Martha held on for dear life as the bike careered down the alley.
“You’ve got to jump, Jones!” Reese said. “Without me, they won’t be able to focus on your whereabouts.”
And without me, they won’t miss you next time!” Martha yelled back. “You know it’s the TARDIS key that’s confusing their aim!”
“Damn it, Jones, will you jump, or do I have to push you?” She felt him pry at her fingers just as another Toclafane flew in front of them and, this time, Reese couldn’t keep control of the bike.
It flipped onto its side, throwing Martha free as Reese held onto the handlebars. She fell onto her back, jarring every bone in her body. For a moment, she thought she was going to lose consciousness, and she counted to three before she opened her eyes. Everything was a blur. She tried not to curse as she realised what that might mean. The last thing she needed right now was a concussion.
Then her eyes focused, and Martha wished she could close them again, as she looked at the two Toclafane hovering over Reese, their blades extended.
“Where is she?” they asked.
He lay on his back, looking up at them, stubbornly silent, and one of the Toclafane dipped and sliced through his jacket, cutting through cloth and skin.
“Tell us where Martha Jones is?” it asked. “Or we won’t stop.”
And Reese laughed, he actually laughed at them. “You think you’re the first metal bitch that’s cut me open?” he asked. “Trust me, you’re nothing but a damned amateur!”
Martha’s nails bit into her hands as she realised he was trying to goad them into killing him. She looked around, searching for something she could throw, something that would distract them, and then she saw his fingers tapping on the ground.
D-O-N-T-Y-O-U-D-A-R-E.
He still didn’t look in her direction, but he knew where she was. He always knew where she was.
The sound of engines became louder, and the Toclafane floated upward as the convoy of Jeeps turned onto the street. “We found him for you, Colonel!” one of them chirped. “Aren’t we good?”
The Colonel stepped out of the Jeep and slowly walked towards Reese. He favoured one leg slightly and moved carefully; he hadn’t come out of the crash in Sparta unscathed, then.
“I didn’t catch your name, last time we met.” The Colonel said, as he approached Reese. “Although, of course, I’m fully aware of your friend’s name.”
“Who?” Reese bit out.
The Colonel sneered, before calling over his shoulder. “Search the area, classic sweep formation; she’s around here somewhere,” he said. “And as for this one…” the Colonel tilted his head, eying Reese speculatively. “We’ll bring him along to base camp with us.”
~~~ PART EIGHT~~~
Author: jinxed_wood
Rating: PG, for language and Armageddon
Characters:Martha Jones, Derek Reese
Disclaimer: Doctor Who belongs to the Beeb, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles belongs to Fox (I think) all I have is my Microsoft Word…
Summary: Martha needs to spread the message... but in order to do that she needs to stay alive - something Derek Reese is very good at.(Set during the year-that-wasn't)
Previous parts: PART ONE| PART TWO | PART THREE | PART FOUR | PART FIVE | PART SIX
LIFELINES: PART SEVEN
Lake Mead was a damp morass, the Hoover dam a jagged ruin; in retrospect, Martha guessed they should have expected that. Vegas, after all, had been a ghost town. “I guess the Master likes to discourage loitering in the south west,” she said softly.
“Looks like,” Reese said, his face wary. “We need to move on.”
Martha eyed him, noting the set of his shoulders. “Trouble?”
“Of a sort,” he said, as he headed for the bike.
Martha squinted her eyes against the sun, and looked down the hill. “Is that a dust trail?”
“Yup,” he said shortly, as he threw her helmet at her. She caught it.
“Friend or foe?” she asked.
“Out here?” Reese asked. “Hell, Jones, this is the Mojave desert. Nowadays, even your friends can turn nasty in a place like here, trust me on this.”
Martha frowned as she put on her helmet. “You sound like you’re speaking from experience,” she said.
“I spent some time around here when I was younger,” he drawled. “Fun stuff.”
“But surely it was different, then,” Martha said. “You know, before the Master.”
Reese looked at her. “C’mon, Jones, I thought you’d have figured it out by now.”
Martha sighed. “You weren’t here before the Master came to power, were you?” she ventured.
“Give the girl a cigar.”
Martha wrinkled her nose. “So, what’s your story, then? Time agent? Because I’ve met one of those…well, he was an ex-time agent, but you get the drift.”
Reese raised an eyebrow. “What kind of life, exactly, did you lead before all this?”
“Before I met the Doctor, or after?” Martha asked.
“Like that, is it?” Reese drawled.
“You haven’t answered my question.”
“I hadn’t realised you’d asked me one - and we really need to get a move on, Jones.”
Martha looked over her shoulder as she hopped on the bike behind him. The dust cloud had become larger. “You think they’re the Master’s men?” she asked, wrapping her arms around his waist as he revved the engine.
“Nothing so simple, I think,” he shouted back. “Hold on, they’re close enough to see us on the ridgeline - that was sloppy of me - I may have to do some fancy driving.
Martha rolled her eyes, and hung on tighter. She’d had first hand experience of Reese’s cross-country driving. “Try not to kill us!” she yelled, as the bike accelerated.
The bike ate up the ground, and Martha tucked her head behind Reese’s back as the debris flew. After the TARDIS, pretty much any other form of transportation was tame in comparison, but the bike was still pretty rough.
She tried to look on the bright side; at least this time she wouldn’t fall off at the end of the universe.
Thinking of the TARDIS, made her think of the Doctor and Jack, and her family on the Valiant, and a familiar knot of worry formed in her chest. She tried to push away the images her overactive imagination always summoned when she thought of them; of what the Master was doing to them. It didn’t bear thinking about.
The bike swerved, and Martha clung on as they suddenly dipped into a narrow ravine. She looked up, curious. How had he known this was here?
Oh, right, he’d been here before.
The ride along the ravine’s bottom was bumpy, and Martha feared that the suspension might go, like it had in the Rockies. Somehow, she didn’t think Reese would be lucky enough to find yet another deserted garage in the middle of the Mojave Desert.
“Hold on,” Reese shouted, and Martha wondered what he thought she’d been doing until now. Suddenly, the ground seemed to disappear underneath them, and Martha bit down on the scream that bubbled to her lips as she realised they were flying midair over a very deep crevice.
They hit the other side, and Reese braked the bike, looking over his shoulder with an air of satisfaction. “They’ll need to know the area pretty well to know that’s there,” he said.
“Nobody would survive a fall like that, Reese,” Martha said shakily.
Reese shrugged. “It isn’t as if we’d be pushing them in,” he pointed out. “And if they follow us down here, Jones, you know as well as I, they won’t be well wishers.”
Martha sighed as she tried to come up with an argument Reese would understand. She wasn’t having any success. “How far is it to San Diego,” she eventually asked, changing the subject.
“The route we’re taking? About four days.” Reese started up the engine once more. “But we should make the Californian border by sunset and, if we keep to our south westerly direction and find a working pump before we hit the desert properly again, we-”
“Wait a minute, what’s that about a south westerly direction?” Martha interrupted. “Won’t we miss Los Angeles completely if we do that?”
Reese eyed her. “You’ve got an objection?”
“Hell, yeah!” she said. “You know what I’m trying to do, Reese; I need to spread the word to as many different areas as possible, and the population of the greater Los Angeles region is huge-”
“Not anymore it isn’t,” Reese said shortly, revving the engine.
Martha leaned forward and turned the key, snatching it out of the bike’s lock. “Is there something you need to tell me, Reese?”
“We’re both going to die from bullet wounds if we don’t get out of this ravine in the next ten minutes?”
“Derek.”
He turned on the bike and looked down at her. “I was in Los Angeles when they hit, Jones. It was a bloodbath. He might as well have dropped an A bomb on it, and gotten it over with.”
“But you survived?”
His smile was more like a sneer. “Yeah, I survived. Go me.”
“But maybe there were others, then.”
“There’s nobody left, Jones.”
“How can you be so sure?”
"Because, in the end, the Master didn’t have to drop on A bomb on Los Angeles; somebody else did it for him.”
Martha stared at him, not resisting as he wrestled the keys out of her hands and started up the bike. The engine roared, and Martha broke free of her shock and caught his wrist, holding it tightly. “Was it you, Reese?”
He looked at his wrist, and then looked at her. “No,” he said simply. “But it was someone like me.”
~~~*~~*~~*~~~
They crossed the border a little later than Reese had predicted, but Martha was okay with that. She had needed the time to think. For the last three months, she had travelled with Derek Reese, and had even let him protect her; it was a situation that she'd never felt comfortable with, but she had tolerated it because she understood where he was coming from… to a certain degree.
And that was the catch, wasn’t it?
Oh sure, Reese knew about the Doctor, and knew the tale she'd told to every ragtag group of humanity they'd come across, but other than that? Dribs and drabs, nothing much... as if they'd both been too afraid to talk of their past because that's what it was - their past.
So he didn’t ask her, and she didn’t ask him; and they fed each other sops when they felt the other needed it... and the darkness got too much.
She looked up at the starry sky that seemed to almost blaze above the desert air. The landscape was already becoming dry again, away from the dam; raw sienna and burnt umber under a yellow sun, a silvered grey under the stars. It was so beautiful; it was a pity she couldn't enjoy the wonder of it.
“Are you just going to stargaze all night?” Reese drawled, as he threw a dead rabbit by the unlit fire. “Or are you going to actually light that?”
“Where were you born?” Martha asked softly, ignoring his words, as she watched him prowl around the unlit fire and sit, cross-legged.
He eyed her. “Are we really going to have this conversation?” he asked, as he began to skin the rabbit.
“I think we need to, don’t you?” she asked.
“Where were you born?” he countered.
“London, England,” she replied promptly. “You?”
He smirked. “Los Angeles, California.”
“Really?” she looked at him, up and down. “Don’t take this the wrong way, Reese, but I would never have pegged you for a native Californian.”
“What? I ain’t Hollywood enough for ya?”
Martha tugged at her lip with her teeth; what wasn’t he telling her? She knew that there was something, but she couldn't quite put her finger on it. She remembered her guess from earlier, and bit the bullet. “Reese, what year were you born?”
He smiled humourlessly. “You sure you want to know the answer to that?” he asked.
“I wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t.”
Reese put the rabbit and knife aside and looked at her. His face looked harsh and cold under the starlight, and Martha wondered if she’d done the right thing in asking. Maybe she should have left well enough alone… but, then again, she had never been very good at that. “Reese?”
“1995,” he said softly.
“What?” Martha blinked. “But that can’t be right - that would make you only thirteen years old!”
“I’m thirty two.”
Martha did the math. “2027.”
“Yup.”
“Time travel?”
“Yup.”
“I don’t understand,” Martha said. “I didn’t think humanity would discover that sort of technology for centuries.”
“Who said anything about humanity?”
Martha stared at him, as he went back to skinning the rabbit. “Reese, what are you telling me?” she asked.
“I’m telling you that this should never have happened,” he drawled. “And I’m also telling you that I shouldn’t be here… weird, huh?”
Martha frowned. “I don’t understand.”
“Yeah, well, welcome to my world, Jones. I should be thirteen years old; hell, I was thirteen years old… and then, three months ago, I got killed by a Toclafane.”
“But that doesn’t make sense,” Martha pointed out
“Story of my life,” he muttered, as he leaned down and started the fire with a match, blowing on the dry twigs to encourage a blaze. Martha watched him as she turned his words around in her mind.
“You still haven’t told me why you came back in time,” she said.
“Trust me, Jones, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“Try me!”
He looked up from the fire, his eyes inscrutable. “I was sent back in time to protect the saviour of the human race.” The words came out flat, as if he wasn’t sure he should believe them himself.
“You’re not talking about the Doctor, are you?” Martha asked hoarsely.
“No, Jones, I’m not talking about the Doctor.” He put the rabbit on the spit.
“Should I be worried?”
“How should I know?” he asked. “It wasn’t supposed to go down this way, remember?”
“And the bomb in Los Angeles, what happened there?” Martha asked, feeling her mouth go dry.
He looked at her. “He probably thought he was saving the world, too,” he said.
~~~*~~*~~*~~~
They were less than an hour outside San Diego when they saw the convoy on the horizon, and Reese halted the bike so he could get a good look at them through his binoculars. “Ten Jeeps, high end,” he said. “Mounted artillery, dark fatigues - definitely mercs.”
Martha pulled the binoculars from his hands. “Let me have a look,” she said, as she put them to her eyes. “They’re heading right this way.”
“Yeah,” he said, in that way he did when he suspected something more.
“You reckon they’re after us?” she asked.
“I reckon that more than a few people knew our next main destination was San Diego,” he said.
Martha nodded; they’d had to grease a lot of palms to arrange transport out of San Diego and into South America, and a lot of them of them were smugglers, pure and simple. That was why Reese had made multiple transport arrangements; he had hoped to muddy the waters a bit. It hadn’t worked as well as they’d wished, apparently.
“Should we try for the Mexican border?” she asked.
“Not a chance,” Reese muttered. “Security was good there before the Master took over, now it’s just plain homicidal.”
Martha frowned as she focused on the lead jeep. “You know, there’s something familiar about that…. Oh…”
“What?”
“Promise you won’t blow a gasket?”
“Jones!”
“It’s that Colonel guy.”
“What? Give me those!” He snatched the binoculars from her, and looked through them. “I told you, you should have let me take care of him.”
“And I told you, I wasn’t going to let you go around assassinating people just because you find their existence inconvenient!”
He threw her a sardonic glance. “I guess we should consider ourselves inconvenienced, then,” he drawled. “Shall I slice up the cucumber sandwiches while you make the tea?”
She punched him in the arm. “That’s not funny!”
“Damned right it ain’t,” he muttered. “We need to make a move, fast. Those missile launchers attacked to the jeeps will be in range soon and-”
“And?” Martha asked, tugging on his arm. “And what?”
“Never mind, change of plans,” he muttered.
“What?”
“Get on the bike, Martha!”
Martha blinked at the urgency in his voice, and got on the bike. “What did you see?” she asked.
“Toclafane,” he said grimly, as he revved the engine to life.
~~~*~~*~~*~~~
They made it to the outskirts of San Diego, and Martha had actually thought they were going to make it to cover, when the first Toclafane seemed to come out of nowhere.
“Shit!” Reese yelped, swerving the bike out of the way. The Toclafane sped after them as Reese manoeuvred into a narrow alley, and Martha held on for dear life as the bike careered down the alley.
“You’ve got to jump, Jones!” Reese said. “Without me, they won’t be able to focus on your whereabouts.”
And without me, they won’t miss you next time!” Martha yelled back. “You know it’s the TARDIS key that’s confusing their aim!”
“Damn it, Jones, will you jump, or do I have to push you?” She felt him pry at her fingers just as another Toclafane flew in front of them and, this time, Reese couldn’t keep control of the bike.
It flipped onto its side, throwing Martha free as Reese held onto the handlebars. She fell onto her back, jarring every bone in her body. For a moment, she thought she was going to lose consciousness, and she counted to three before she opened her eyes. Everything was a blur. She tried not to curse as she realised what that might mean. The last thing she needed right now was a concussion.
Then her eyes focused, and Martha wished she could close them again, as she looked at the two Toclafane hovering over Reese, their blades extended.
“Where is she?” they asked.
He lay on his back, looking up at them, stubbornly silent, and one of the Toclafane dipped and sliced through his jacket, cutting through cloth and skin.
“Tell us where Martha Jones is?” it asked. “Or we won’t stop.”
And Reese laughed, he actually laughed at them. “You think you’re the first metal bitch that’s cut me open?” he asked. “Trust me, you’re nothing but a damned amateur!”
Martha’s nails bit into her hands as she realised he was trying to goad them into killing him. She looked around, searching for something she could throw, something that would distract them, and then she saw his fingers tapping on the ground.
D-O-N-T-Y-O-U-D-A-R-E.
He still didn’t look in her direction, but he knew where she was. He always knew where she was.
The sound of engines became louder, and the Toclafane floated upward as the convoy of Jeeps turned onto the street. “We found him for you, Colonel!” one of them chirped. “Aren’t we good?”
The Colonel stepped out of the Jeep and slowly walked towards Reese. He favoured one leg slightly and moved carefully; he hadn’t come out of the crash in Sparta unscathed, then.
“I didn’t catch your name, last time we met.” The Colonel said, as he approached Reese. “Although, of course, I’m fully aware of your friend’s name.”
“Who?” Reese bit out.
The Colonel sneered, before calling over his shoulder. “Search the area, classic sweep formation; she’s around here somewhere,” he said. “And as for this one…” the Colonel tilted his head, eying Reese speculatively. “We’ll bring him along to base camp with us.”
~~~ PART EIGHT~~~