“Rose!” he cried.

The girl had fallen beside him and was already lying in a quasi-recovery position. As he spoke, her fingers flexed and she began to moan.

“Rose, are you okay?” he said.

“How much did I have to drink?” she slurred.

The Doctor helped her to sit up as the others began to stir. There were only three marines left. The Doctor saw Private Wells was badly injured.

And then he saw the Cybermen.

“Get up, Rose,” he said in a low voice.

There were about a dozen of them further inside the cave. They too had been knocked off their feet, but they were gradually picking themselves up and reclaiming their weapons from the floor. They didn’t look damaged at all.

“You son of a bitch!” Sergeant Cameron suddenly shouted at him.

The Doctor turned his head as Cameron came flying at him with a punch. The Doctor ducked away from it, and Cameron fell back onto his knees.

“That was a one-shot weapon!” he cried.

The Doctor noticed the sergeant’s eyes were almost tearing.

“It was our only chance! You wasted it!”

“We couldn’t let you destroy the turbine; Rose has had a better idea.”

“A better idea?!” Cameron was nearly hysterical.

“Sarge!” Private Ellison cried.

They turned to look at him. He was lying on his side, clutching an oozing black wound on his side. He was pointing behind the Doctor, toward the ship.

Six more Cybermen were coming down the ramp.

“Oh, shit,” Wells said under his breath.

But Wells was looking at the dozen coming out of the cave.

“We’re finished! Are you happy now?” Cameron glared at the Doctor.

The Doctor didn’t say anything. Rose tugged at his coat.

“Doctor, look at that!” she hissed.

He followed her finger, pointing into the cave.

“Is that... Doctor, is that a tunnel?”

The Doctor peered into the darkness, and when the light from the Cyberman turbine swelled up brightly, he saw a dark opening in the rock-face where the rocket had exploded. The opening was a rectangle, a peculiarly regular one.

“Looks like a doorway.” Rose said it for him.

“I knew the Cybermen didn’t have the means to burrow a cavern this size out of the rock! It must be an old Thrukstone construction! Fantastic!”

Then he leapt to his feet and pulled Rose to hers.

“Don’t just sit there!” he told the others.

Then he took Rose by the hand and started running toward the opening.

When he glanced back, he saw the injured Ellison and Wells were helping each other, and Sergeant Cameron was backing away rapidly from two encroaching fronts of Cybermen, fending them off with one of their own guns.

The entrance to the tunnel was beyond a patch of large boulders that had been shifted and shattered by the force of the explosion. When the Doctor reached the opening, he stopped, frowning, and helped himself to a handful of the rubble blown away from the cave wall where the rocket had revealed the tunnel.

“Doctor, come on!” Rose cried, pulling his arm.

The Doctor squeezed the debris in his hand. The brittle material, which was a different colour and texture to the rock around the doorway, crumpled.

“This isn’t even rock,” he murmured. “It’s clay.”

“Move it!” Cameron ordered as he darted away from the Cybermen.

Ellison and Wells arrived, went straight into the tunnel.

“Why seal the tunnel up with clay?” the Doctor wondered aloud.

“Doctor, let’s go!” Rose yelled, tugging his sleeve.

Pulses meant for Cameron hit lumps of clay near the Doctor’s feet. The lumps exploded into dust. The Doctor started, and Rose dragged him into the tunnel.

“It’s a dead end!” Wells cried.

“No; there’s a door here!” Ellison shouted.

The Doctor and Rose ran toward the dancing beam from the gun that one of the marines was still carrying. The tunnel was about fifteen yards deep, slightly curved so that one end couldn’t be seen from the other. The walls were smoothly cut.

The sounds of Sergeant Cameron firing back at the Cybermen sounded distant, but he was right behind them, and came stumbling through the opening.

“They’re right on our tail!” he hollered.

Wells and Ellison were hammering fists on the door.

“Let me through!” the Doctor demanded.

He pulled Ellison out of the way and ran his hands over the door, feeling for a handle, a lock, anything. The door was made of metal, but wasn’t smooth. It felt weathered, but not rusty. Hopefully the same could be said for the lock.

The Doctor pulled the sonic screwdriver out of his pocket and set it straight to the highest setting. “No time to mess about,” he murmured.

Cameron arrived, still firing.

“Doctor, they’re coming!” Rose cried.

The Doctor could hear the voices of the Cybermen as they reached the other end of the tunnel, but they were drowned out by the squeal of the sonic screwdriver a second later. He waved it swiftly across the length and breadth of the door.

Something deep inside clunked loudly.

“Aha!” the Doctor went, and pushed the door.

It didn’t budge. He pushed again.

“Everyone push!” he cried.

Then he and Ellison threw their shoulders, their entire combined weight against the metal door, and Rose and Wells pushed from behind.

Suddenly Cyberman pulses started ricocheting around the tunnel.

And then the door started to move.

The Doctor was gritting his teeth and Ellison was groaning with effort. The door was several inches thick, several inches of seemingly solid metal. The door was extremely heavy and stiff, but it was moving, moving.

“Go, Rose, go!” the Doctor cried, as soon as the gap was wide enough.

Rose squeezed through, followed by Wells.

The Doctor and Ellison kept pushing, and by the time Cameron abandoned his fight with the Cybermen, the gap was wide enough to run through. Of course, it was just as hard to get it closed again, but they had Cameron’s help with that.

The Cybermen were filing into the tunnel.

“We want the Time Lord identified as the Doctor,” the metallic voice of the lead Cyberman with the black trim echoed down the tunnel.

“Well, you can’t have him!” the Doctor retorted, as they pushed the door within inches of the frame. He got ready with the sonic screwdriver.

Suddenly four long metal talons shot through the gap like knives and got an iron-grip on the side of the door. The Cybermen had reached the door, and now they were pushing on it from the other side. The door began to open again.

“We want the Timelord identified as the Doctor.”

“Can’t...hold it...back!” Cameron groaned.

“We want the Timelord identified as the Doctor.”

“Rose, the gun! Shoot it!” the Doctor cried.

“We want the Timelord identified as the Doctor.”

Rose spotted the pulse-gun Cameron had dropped. She struggled to pick it up, let alone aim it. She pressed it against the metal talons. She fired. The recoil threw her against the rock wall, but the talons vanished from the side of the door instantly and there was an angry roar from the other side.

“PUSH!” Cameron hollered.

They pushed, harder than ever, and in another few seconds the door was shut again. The Doctor brandished the sonic screwdriver. He couldn’t hear whether the lock turned or not, the din of the Cybermen slamming on the door was so loud.

But the door wasn’t budging. It was locked tight.

For a few moments, nobody said anything.

“Don’t worry,” the Doctor said, panting. “They won’t get in.”

“Won’t?” said Cameron.

“Can’t,” the Doctor corrected himself.

Cameron sighed. “Not that it really makes any difference if you’re wrong; we’re definitely not going anywhere now, from the looks of things.”

Nobody spoke for perhaps half a minute, as they all caught their breath and listened to the muffled sounds of the Cybermen trying to get through.

“Doctor, what is this place?” Ellison asked.

The Doctor took a deep breath. “I’m not sure. If the Thrukstone people built structures underground, then they would have survived the atomic war.”

“Then perhaps that’s why they built them underground,” said Rose quietly.

The Doctor frowned. “Rose, are you sitting down?”

In the pitch darkness, they only had the light from the end of Ellison’s gun to see by, and he was shining it on the Doctor. He pointed it toward Rose.

“Kinda,” she said, as the light fell on her. She was sitting with her back against the wall, legs spread out, one hand on the gun in her lap, the other on her scalp.

“Well, I did say guns are best left to those trained to use them.”

“Yeah, and you also said ‘shoot it!’,” she said, putting on a squeaky voice.

Cameron and Ellison laughed. After a moment, so did the Doctor.

The noise of the Cybermen showed no sign of abating.

“Why don’t they just give up?” Wells said.

“They didn’t get where they are today by doing that,” the Doctor said, putting his hand on the door and feeling the vibrations of their thumping.

Cameron helped Rose pick herself up.

“Hey, Doctor, what’s that?” she said.

“What’s what?” he said.

“Down there; look.”

Ellison shone the light on her, then aimed the end of the gun in the direction she was pointing. Not that he needed to.

“There’s a light down there!” Wells cried.

“Impossible,” the Doctor said.

“Ellison, switch that light off,” said Cameron. “Maybe it’s like the reflective surfaces on the Cyberman ship, reflecting our own light back at us.”

Ellison turned the beam off, but they weren’t plunged into total blackness. The tunnel continued for about thirty yards into the rock, and at the end of the passage was a single doorway, from beyond which came a soft, yellow glow.

“Where’s that coming from?” Rose hissed.

The Doctor was shaking his head. “The Thrukstones have been extinct for over ten thousand years. Nothing could still be working down here.”

“Then perhaps this place isn’t Thrukstone, Doctor,” Cameron suggested.

Suddenly, a voice spoke that none of them recognised.

“Well?” it called. “Are you coming in or not?”

“Who the hell was that?” Ellison spat.

“There’s someone in that room!” Wells cried.

The Doctor stood up straight and frowned. “Wait here.”

“Doctor, take this.” Cameron offered him the Cyberman pulse-gun.

The Doctor ignored it. Rose started to follow him.

“You should wait with them,” he said.

“They’ve got guns, but I still feel safer with you,” she whispered.

Leaving the sorry remnants of Captain Hamilton’s platoon waiting anxiously at the door, the Doctor and Rose walked briskly to the end of the passage. Whoever was in the room didn’t call to them a second time. The tunnel was silent except for the sounds of their shoes on the hard rock, and the distant hammering of the Cybermen.

As they went through the doorway, the voice spoke again:

“Welcome, Doctor. I’ve been expecting you.”

NOTES:
Not much to say about this chapter, seeing as it was written as part of the last one. The idea of a group of people finding the underground fallout shelter of a long-lost civilisation is one I've toyed with in an independent story, attempts at starting the writing of which were lost when I put them on a USB drive for safe-keeping that promptly crashed. Funnily enough, what the Doctor and Rose are about to find down here is similar in concept to what would be found in the fallout shelter in my other story, except whereas it would be the crux of that story, here it's just the final twist. And it's not Davros, the Master or anything like that. Nothing so unoriginally fanboyishly cheesy. Also, it might seem uncannily good luck that right when they need to escape, a tunnel miraculously appears in the cave wall, but as you will read in the next chapter, it appears at that precise moment (and location) for a very good reason.