“Doctor, they’ve stopped!” Rose hissed.

A moment later, the Cybermen began pounding on the door.

“Thank you very much,” the Doctor growled.

“It’s all going according to plan,” the War Brain said.

Rose tripped over something in the dark and winced loudly.

“Stand still,” the Doctor said, stroking the wall beside the door, looking for a light switch. He used the blue glow from the end of the sonic screwdriver to find it.

A garish hard white light swelled overhead.

“Rose!” the Doctor cried.

She was sitting on the floor amongst several small cases, nursing a foot. It was the one she’d twisted; the one she’d lost the shoe for.

“I’m all right,” she said. “Just get us out of here, Doctor.”

“Right.” The Doctor looked around.

They seemed to be in a small maintenance storage room, about fifteen feet by ten. There were several dirty engineer’s coveralls hanging up; the kind that would have had an orange plastic sheen had they not been caked in grime. There were a few boxes of rudimentary tools on a shelf: screwdrivers, mallets. The Doctor rummaged through, but quickly gave up on those. He crouched before the cases that Rose had tripped over and started flipping the lids. He found handheld welding tools, precision laser cutting devices, even a palm-sized drill with interchangeable drill-bits.

Suddenly there was a hissing behind him.

“Doctor, look!” Rose pointed.

He turned round. The Cybermen were cutting through the door.

“Just to save you the bother of wasting your time,” the War Brain said quite amiably. “Fighting them with hand-tools doesn’t work.”

The Doctor looked at the small cutting device in his hand.

“Doctor?” said Rose.

He tossed the little laser aside.

“Doctor, look; up there! It’s a camera!” Rose cried.

The Doctor looked. Sure enough there was a tiny pencil nub of a closed-circuit video camera on the ceiling in the corner, pointing down on the room.

“Well spotted, Rose!” He ran beneath it.

Rose pushed herself up onto her feet and hobbled over. Both of them began waving their arms into the lens. The Doctor promptly stopped.

He sighed. “This is a waste of time. There are thousands of cameras and no guarantee anyone’s looking at this one. What can they do, anyway?”

Rose didn’t stop. “Somebody help us!”

The Doctor turned round.

The Cybermen reached the top right-hand corner of the door.

He began pacing the lengths of the room’s four walls with his hands tucked into his armpits. When he was on the second circuit, he suddenly stopped.

The room was a mess. The coveralls hadn’t been washed, the tools had been left to rust, and cases were dumped haphazardly around the floor. There was a large crate sitting beside the wall with a few smaller cases piled on top.

The Doctor slapped the smaller cases out of the way and started pulling the large crate away from the wall. It was very heavy.

“Rose, I need you!” he cried.

The Cybermen reached the top left-hand corner of the door.

“Rose!” the Doctor snapped.

She was still waving at the camera, but he finally managed to move the crate on his own. When he saw what it had been hiding on the wall behind, he grinned.

It was a hinge, a small pneumatic hinge.

“Fantastic!” he championed.

There was a second pneumatic hinge nearer the floor.

“Rose, come look at this!”

Rose finally gave up on the camera and turned. The Doctor was feeling the edges of a square panel on the wall. She glanced at the door.

The Cybermen were halfway down the third and final length of it.

“Whatever you’re gonna do, Doctor, do it fast!”

“I think there’s some sort of air duct behind this wall,” he was saying. “Come here, put your hands round the edges. Can you feel the cold air?”

“Yeah; great; can we go now?”

“Oh. Right.” He pulled that cylindrical glowing thing out of his pocket and waved it over the wall. Suddenly the square panel swung open.

The hissing stopped. They both turned.

The Cybermen had reached the bottom of the door.

“Go, Rose! Go!” the Doctor shouted.

Then he grabbed her wrist and shoved her toward the duct. The square panel was barely three-foot square, and the duct was smaller. Rose crawled into the dark, tight space and immediately felt like she had been swallowed.

The Doctor started crawling in after her.

“Doctor, wait!” she cried.

“Move, Rose!” he insisted as he tried to close the panel again.

“Doctor, the War Brain!”

The Doctor glared at her, shocked. He’d forgotten. She had forgotten it, too, but then she’d noticed the absence of its annoying laugh.

“Go!” He pointed at her. “I’ll catch up!”

“Which way do I go?”

“In the direction the cold air is going.”

Then the Doctor climbed back through the panel.

As the Cybermen began to pound on the door again, Rose licked her finger and held it up. The cold air was coming from the left. She headed right.

“Sir, I think I’ve found them!”

In the Operations Centre, the security officers were clearing the bodies whilst the command crew had returned to their consoles.

Sergeant Cameron and Commandant Fletcher rushed to the console where the young female officer who had just spoken was hammering keys.

“Where are they?” Cameron demanded.

“There’s been an unauthorised service hatch opening on level 40. I’m patching through to the security camera now.” She paused. “There.”

Cameron and Fletcher looked up.

On the large screen above their heads they saw the over-exposed footage from within the room. Cameron recognised the Doctor instantly.

“That’s them!” he cried. “Where is this place? Show me now!”

“Wait; look!” Fletcher hissed.

As Cameron watched, the door of the room on screen burst open. The Doctor grabbed what Cameron later realised was the War Brain and threw himself toward the wall. He vanished through an opening that the camera couldn’t pick up at this angle.

Then a dozen Cybermen poured into the room.

“Good god!” went Fletcher.

Cameron hefted his gun. “Where is that room?”

“They’re not going to make it.”

“Where is that room?” Cameron hollered.

Fletcher swallowed. “I’ll take you there.”

The Doctor sealed the panel shut with the sonic screwdriver just as a dozen pulses from Cyberman guns struck the other side of it.

“How could you forget me?” the War Brain said, mock hurt.

“Wasn’t that hard,” the Doctor retorted.

The Cybermen started banging on the wall panel.

The Doctor started crawling after Rose, rolling the War Brain in front of him.

Rose heard the Doctor and the War Brain’s voices behind her. She peered over her shoulder and saw the yellow glow of the War Brain thirty yards behind.

She didn’t wait for them to catch up. She kept on crawling, which became increasingly more difficult. The duct being three feet in diameter, Rose couldn’t crawl on her hands and knees; she was basically doing alternating one-handed press-ups. She was probably just imagining it, she told herself, but the duct seemed to be getting narrower too. Fortunately it was quite cool; the fresh air stopped it getting stuffy.

After less than a minute, Rose suddenly banged her head.

“Ow!” she went. “What the hell’s that?”

She rubbed her forehead with one hand, and reached out with the other.

It was a wall, a dead end.

“No,” she said under her breath.

With two hands now, she felt in front of her. It was blocked. She felt to the sides of her, in case she’d reached a corner. There were no turnings here.

“Doctor!” she cried worriedly.

Then she reached overhead. She felt nothing but air.

The Doctor spotted Rose in the light from the War Brain. She had stopped, turned round, and was looking at him apprehensively.

“Keep going, Rose; don’t stop!”

“There’s a bit of a problem with that plan, Doctor,” she said as he reached her, then she cocked her thumb over her shoulder.

He saw she had reached the end of the duct.

“What?” the Doctor hissed.

“There’s more.” She stood up. She was able to stand up.

The War Brain began to chuckle quietly.

The Doctor squeezed into the space where Rose was standing and stood up beside her, holding the War Brain above his head. They were pressed back to back without much room to move. When they both looked up, their heads banged.

“Watch it, Doctor,” Rose said.

“Oh no,” the Doctor was saying. “Oh no.”

In the yellow light emanating from inside the War Brain, he could see about forty yards straight up. Beyond that, the duct continued in darkness.

“I’ve made a big mistake,” he said slowly.

The War Brain laughed merrily. “I knew you would.”

“I thought the cold air was being channelled by an air conditioning system, but the station must have thermal self-regulation, Rose.”

“I don’t understand!” Rose cried.

“I told you to head away from the air because I thought the other direction would lead to a fan propelling the cold air, but the cold air is heading this way because the hot air is rising up this vertical duct, so the cold air is rushing in.”

“What are you saying, Doctor?”

“That we should have gone the other way, Rose.”

The War Brain chuckled. “It’s a bit late for that now, Doctor.”

From back along the duct came the sounds of the Cybermen breaking through the panel in the wall, then the creaks of them squeezing into the narrow gap.

“Maybe they’re too big to fit,” Rose suggested.

“Can you climb?” the Doctor asked.

“There’s nothing to hold onto!”

“Here; I’ll give you a bunk up.”

He lowered the War Brain beneath his legs, then cupped his hands for Rose’s feet. She put her hands on his shoulders, and launched herself up.

“Can you see anything?”

“Doctor, there’s a hatch up here!”

“Where? Describe it!”

“It’s round, on the wall, there’s like a dial on it.”

The Doctor frowned. “A dial?”

“No, not a dial, like a dial, it’s round, like a handle, you turn it.”

“Then turn it!” he cried.

“We want the Timelord identified as the Doctor,” came along the duct.

“Hurry, Rose!” the Doctor said.

“Doctor, it’s stuck!”

“Take this.” He let go of her legs, grabbed the sonic screwdriver from his pocket and switched it on. He thrust it up toward her.

She took it. “What do I do?”

“Just wave it around a bit. That always seems to work.”

He knew it had worked when Rose let out a little yelp, and he suddenly found liquid was trickling off of Rose and onto his head.

“Doctor, it’s a water pipe!”

He looked up. Her face and hair were soaking wet.

“How wide is it?” he asked.

“There’s water in it!”

“How wide is it?” he repeated.

“Wider than the duct, but not by much. I can’t see where it goes.”

The War Brain gave the Doctor’s ankle a shock. “I didn’t want to tell you before, Doctor, but seeing as you’re currently considering it anyway, I suppose I should warn you that I know how Rose dies, and suffice to say, drowning is a pretty bad way to cop it after you’ve been halfway around the galaxy and survived.”

“We want the Timelord identified as the Doctor.”

“Rose, get in the pipe,” the Doctor said.

Sergeant Cameron and Commandant Fletcher were in an elevator.

“Come on, come on,” Cameron said under his breath.

Fletcher was still wearing his headset. The radio crackled in his ear.

“What is it?” he said, holding a hand over the headphone.

Cameron looked up at him, watched his face.

“She says someone’s opened a pressure hatch to access one of the water pipes on 39,” Fletcher relayed. “You can get to that pipe from the service duct.”

“Is there any water in it now?” Cameron asked.

The commandant shook his head. “It’s part of the station’s cooling system; it flushes automatically whenever it gets too hot.”

“Can they get out that way?”

“Sergeant, the system flushes at least once every seven minutes.”

“Well, shut it down!”

Rose was crouching in several inches of water. It was cold and fetid, and the sides of the pipe felt slimy. Noises in the pipe had a French horn-like echo.

The Doctor hauled the War Brain through the hatch. It landed in the water beside Rose and the yellow light of the submerged part flickered.

“We want the Timelord identified as the Doctor.”

Rose stuck her head out of the pipe. She could hear the bangs and creaks as the Cybermen squeezed through the duct below. “Hurry, Doctor!”

The Doctor was scowling. It was a determined, focused look. He leapt up from the bottom of the vertical shaft, but missed the edge of the hatch.

He tried again. He missed again.

“What I really need is a bunk up,” he growled.

“We want the Timelord identified as the Doctor.”

He snorted. “Was that an offer?”

He leapt a third time, but his reaching fingers still missed the hatch by a foot.

“Bend your knees before you jump,” Rose said.

Not everyone had been a high school gymnastic champ.

“There’s not enough room!” he cried.

“Oh, god!” went Rose.

She leant out of the pipe, as far as she could without falling out. She stretched her arms. The Doctor jumped again. Their fingers touched.

“It’s pointless,” he snapped. “You can’t pull me up, anyway.”

Rose sighed. She sat down in the pipe, locked her legs on either side of the hatch and then leaned forward all the way. This time their fingers touched without the Doctor having to jump to reach them.

He frowned. “How’re you doing that?”

“Stop asking questions, Doctor! Start climbing!”

“We want the Timelord identified as the Doctor.”

The Doctor grabbed her wrists. She grabbed his. Then she pulled back. She took the strain in the lower back, not pulling him up the shaft, but giving him the necessary leverage to be able to shimmy up the sheer wall of the vertical duct.

“We want the Timelord identified as the Doctor.”

The Doctor let go of Rose when he reached the hatch. She fell back into the water with a splash. The War Brain flickered.

“Oi,” it said.

For a moment the Doctor just dangled there as he fought to get a sure enough grip. Then he started to haul himself up. He got two elbows into the pipe, lifted a leg and then kicked against the far side of the air duct.

“Pull me in, Rose”, he said, breathless.

She got hold of his leather jacket and heaved.

“We want the Timelord identified as the Doctor.”

The Doctor looked back down. In the semi-darkness he saw the groping arm of the first Cyberman to reach the bottom of the vertical shaft.

“Pull, Rose; pull harder!” he cried.

Rose pulled harder, then suddenly he was in.

“Attention Cybermen!” the War Brain said loudly. “The Timelord identified as the Doctor is trying to escape through a water pipe above you.”

“We want the Timelord identified as the Doctor.”

“Shut up!” Rose slapped the thing.

The War Brain gave her a nasty shock.

“Ow! Which way now, Doctor?”

He looked both ways along the dark, dank pipe.

“I really don’t think it matters,” he murmured.

There was a scraping noise in the duct. The Doctor held the sonic screwdriver up like a candle and peered out through the hatch.

The first Cyberman was clawing its way up the shaft.

“Maybe this wasn’t a great idea, after all.”

Rose glared. “What are you saying, Doctor?”

“He’s saying this is where I leave you, Rose,” the War Brain said.

In the Operations Centre, Ensign Lucas suddenly had an idea. She got up from her console and leant over Ensign Campbell’s, the engineering station.

“Campbell, I just had a thought,” she said. “Aren’t there monitoring cameras inside the pipes to check for blockages and leaks?”

The man nodded. “Yeah, every hundred yards or so.”

“Show me the cameras on 39.”

“Where are you going, Doctor?” Rose cried.

“Not him!” the War Brain said. “Me! Where I leave you!”

“This was all a trap,” the Doctor said quietly.

“It’s nothing personal, Doctor. The Cybermen will recognise my potential, whilst you fear it. You have been useful, though. For that, I am grateful.”

Rose was disgusted. “The Cybermen don’t even know about you. They’re after the Doctor. You’ve been using him as bait all along!”

The War Brain chuckled. “You know, you’re a bit like a War Brain in reverse, Rose. While I see what’s going to happen before it does, you don’t realise what’s going on under your own nose until it’s already over.”

“It’s not over yet!” she snarled. “Doctor, close the hatch!”

The Doctor didn’t move. He was staring into the War Brain’s yellow light, as if mesmerised by its glow, which still flickered where it was submerged.

“Doctor!” Rose grabbed for the hatch herself.

“Wait.” The Doctor seized her wrist.

The first Cyberman had almost reached the hatch.

“Doctor, what are you doing?”

“Bait.” He enunciated it perfectly. “Bait.”

“What?” she cried.

“Don’t even think about it, Doctor,” said the War Brain.

“Let’s move!” he said. “Hurry! That way!”

Rose didn’t need telling twice. She started splashing along the pipe. When she looked back, the Doctor was close behind with the War Brain.

“Doctor, you left the hatch open!” she cried.

“You can’t go fishing without getting your hands wet,” he said.

Rose screwed up her face. “Huh?”

Suddenly, the War Brain started caterwauling behind her, and louder than she’d ever heard it shout before. Rose jumped.

“Attention Cybermen!” it was saying. “Danger! Danger! This is a trap! Do not follow the Timelord identified as the Doctor! Danger! This is a trap!”

Then it started repeating itself.

The Doctor laughed. “Oh, do shut up. You’ve told them where we are and as far as they know you’re just my naughty pet cuboid.”

The War Brain didn’t stop.

“It’s too late. And I know that you know that,” the Doctor said.

One by one the Cybermen emerged from the air duct. One by one they started climbing up the vertical shaft, their sharpened talons getting a perfect grip on the sheer metal wall. One by one, they reached the open hatch and climbed into the pipe.

“We want the Timelord identified as the Doctor,” they chorused.

The doors of the elevator chimed as they opened, and then Sergeant Cameron and Commandant Fletcher ran into the corridor.

“This way,” said Fletcher.

Cameron followed him along the passage, around a corner, across several junctions, right at another intersection, then down a few steps.

He heard Fletcher’s radio crackle.

“Say again?” Fletcher slowed down, pressing the headphone into his ear.

“What is it?” Cameron said.

Fletcher looked at him, and Cameron could see the whites of his eyes.

“There’s a man in one of the pipes,” Fletcher explained.

“The Doctor!” Cameron hissed.

Fletcher sighed. “Sergeant, they say the guy’s standing in front of one of the monitoring cameras, mouthing something over and over.”

“What? Mouthing what?”

Fletcher swallowed. “‘Flush the pipe’.”

Cameron inhaled sharply. “Are you sure?”

Fletcher shook his head. “They’re low quality night-vision cameras designed to monitor water levels, that kind of thing. They don’t have sound.”

“They’re just reading his lips?!”

Fletcher nodded slowly.

Cameron drew a hand down his face. “Do it.”

“What?”

“Tell them to do everything that man says!”

“We want the Timelord identified as the Doctor. The human female identified as Rose will not be harmed if the Timelord identified as the Doctor surrenders.”

“Danger! Danger! This is a trap! Attention Cybermen! This is a trap! Do not follow the Timelord identified as the Doctor! Get out of the pipe! Now!”

The two shouts echoed back and forth along the pipe. The noise was terrible; Rose clapped her hands over her ears and shut her eyes.

“Flush the pipe,” the Doctor said clearly in front of the tiny monitoring camera built into the roof of the water pipe. “Flush the pipe.”

“Make them stop!” Rose cried.

They were about thirty-five yards from the hatch. The Doctor could hear the Cybermen coming. Then he started seeing the yellow light from the War Brain reflect off their silver bodies. It made them look gold.

“We want the Timelord identified as the Doctor.”

“This is a trap! Danger! Attention Cybermen! Get out of the pipe! This is a trap! The Doctor wants you to follow him! You’re all going to die! Danger!”

Then the Doctor heard another sound, mounting in volume and intensity. Soon it was so loud it managed to drown out the Cybermen.

The War Brain stopped calling to them.

Then the Doctor began to feel the vibration in the pipe.

He grabbed Rose’s hand away from her ear. “Wedge yourself against the side of the pipe. Hold on tight. Wait until the last moment. Take a deep breath.”

Rose stared into his eyes. She was petrified.

“We want the Timelord identified as the Doctor.”

The Cybermen loomed out of the darkness.

The War Brain laughed. “What a waste of my potential. You will regret this one day, Doctor. I’ve already foreseen it.”

“I’m not listening to you.”

“You have no idea what’s coming. I do. The Time War isn’t-”

And then the water engulfed them.

NOTES:
The War Brain was about to say "isn't over". One of my favourite chapters. I wanted to bring in more of the Time War theme that ran through the ninth Doctor stories, and indeed, it does get a proper mention in the last chapter. I was looking for opportunities to have Rose see the words "Bad Wolf" somewhere, but kept forgetting. At one point, as she was running around the Cyberman spaceship, she would happen across data read-outs she doesn't understand, and one would be "DAB Flow" ('bad wolf' in reverse). I didn't write as much of her running around (thankfully) that I originally envisaged I might have to, so it never got written. You can just assume she finds it whilst the narrative eye is following the Doctor or Sergeant Cameron. Actually, on second thoughts, I might yet work it into that final chapter, where it'd be most appropriate.

When the Doctor says "And I know that you know that" to the War Brain, he is using the same line on it that it used on him when it pointed out the Timelords would have won the Time War had it had a War Brain in charge, several chapters ago. I thought that would be a neat way to give the Doctor the final word over it. That the War Brain should have seen what was going to happen to it a thousand years ago is explained in the next chapter. The other line of dialogue imbued with significance is "Whatever you're going to do, Doctor, do it fast!", which is lifted pretty much verbatim from Vasquez's line near the end of "Aliens", also from a pretty much identical scene: the characters are trapped in a room, with aliens pounding on the other side of the door, and the humans escape the room using the air ducts.

Ensign Lucas was named in honour of Gamegossip poster Interpol (aka Alphax). I promised (or threatened, depending on how you look at it) to name a character in the story after him if he sent me a photo of himself. I said I'd call one of the Cybermen Luke, but Cybermen don't have names (except, for the benefit of trivia fans, in the original 1966 script for debut story, "The Tenth Planet", in which they were called Krail, Talon, Shav, Krang, Jarl and Gern, not Luke).