Not that Rose could ever imagine the Doctor in speedos.

And not that she’d want to, either.

“We’re nearly there,” Private Doherty said. “Just over this rise.”

They were going uphill and had slowed down, but when this announcement came, it gave the group its second wind. Captain Hamilton and Sergeant Cameron overtook Rose and the Doctor, leaving them at the back.

“I could kill a Big Mac right now,” Rose said breathlessly.

“Come on,” said the Doctor, grabbing her hand.

Rose looked over her shoulder to see how far they’d come. To be honest, one scrap mound looked much like any other, but she knew they’d started on the other side of that metal mountain; she thought she could see the last plumes of white smoke drifting over the crash-site, though that may have been mist sweeping in.

Suddenly, Rose’s foot slipped and her ankle splayed out.

“Bugger it!” she cried through gritted teeth.

It was only the Doctor’s grip on her hand that stopped her falling palm-first onto the sharp metal in front of her. He caught her and pulled her upright.

“Not again,” he said cheerfully. “Same foot?”

“No,” she growled. “Other one.”

He chuckled. “It’s not far; can you walk it?”

“Everything okay?” said a voice.

Rose looked up. Sergeant Cameron had obviously heard her cry out and was heading back to them, holding the barrel of his rifle prone against his shoulder. None of the other soldiers had bothered to stop and were still climbing.

“I fear madam’s had a little too much to drink,” the Doctor told Sergeant Cameron as Rose swayed painfully at the end of his arm.

Rose glared at him, but Sergeant Cameron was grinning.

“Well, madam would be well advised to remember heels and evening dress are not appropriate attire for Erebus,” he said with a wink.

“Everyone’s a comedian,” she said.

Sergeant Cameron beamed. “If you want to rest here for a moment, I’ll send a couple of the boys down in a minute to carry you up; if you like.”

Feeling her face go hot and red, Rose nodded.

“I’ll stay with her,” the Doctor said, then to her, “Sit.”

Rose perched herself on a smooth hunk of junk that might have been a robot’s head once upon a time for all she knew, and Sergeant Cameron turned round.

The Doctor squatted down and pulled off her shoe.

Rose watched Sergeant Cameron follow the rest of his men up the hill. “I bet they’ll leave without us now,” she grumbled.

By the time Sergeant Cameron caught up with the other members of his platoon, most of them had reached the top of the rise. They were standing along the summit of the bluff in a straight line; nobody said anything until he arrived.

When he saw beyond the rise, Cameron let out a deep sigh.

“What the hell is this?” he uttered under his breath.

The Doctor was massaging Rose’s twisted ankle.

“Can’t you use that magic wand-thing?” she asked him.

“Sonic screwdriver,” he began correcting her.

“Sonic screwdriver,” she butted in halfway through, rolling her eyes.

“That doesn't work on human bodies, Rose.”

She grunted. “Some doctor you are.”

He chuckled. “How’s it feeling now?”

“Fine; just wait until I try and stand up on it, though. I could walk with one foot; I could just put my weight on the other one. Now I’ll need a piggy-back.”

“I’m sure Sergeant Cameron will oblige.”

Rose grinned. She was about to say something when she spotted someone over his shoulder and cocked her head; the Doctor turned and saw Sergeant Cameron coming back down the hill, and faster than he’d gone up it.

“Doctor,” he called. He was using his gun to steady his descent.

“Is your rescue ship here yet?” the Doctor asked.

Sergeant Cameron reached them, slightly out of breath, and shook his head.

“Great,” Rose grumbled to herself.

“Doctor, I’ve already picked up on the fact that you know more than your fair share about machines; what do you know about GPS?”

“Global positioning systems?” The Doctor frowned. “A bit; why?”

“We seem to be having a few problems.”

The Doctor leaned down. “Will you be okay here?”

“Yes; fine; go; leave me here; alone.” Rose rolled her eyes again.

“Fantastic.” Then he gave her a pat on the head and stepped past her. She had probably meant it sarcastically, he thought; she usually did.

Sergeant Cameron led the Doctor over the top of the rise. The soldiers were standing on the edge of a precipice, looking down on the valley beyond. It looked like a natural valley; the Doctor was sure he could see scorched earth where the robotic effluence was thinner, particularly on the sheer slopes around the edges.

The soldiers were shaking their heads and muttering.

“What am I meant to be looking at?” the Doctor said quietly.

“Give him the GPS, Doherty,” Captain Hamilton ordered.

Private Doherty handed him the terminal; that wasn’t what the Doctor had meant.

“We’re in the wrong place,” Sergeant Cameron explained.

“Oh?” the Doctor said, flipping the device over.

Doherty tried to explain what was what, but the Doctor was already ahead of him; he took out the sonic screwdriver and probed at the terminal’s innards.

“The other ship didn’t land here,” Cameron said.

“How can you tell?” the Doctor asked, focused on the terminal.

“Because I’m a pilot, and I wouldn’t land here; look.”

The Doctor glanced up as Cameron pointed. A geyser suddenly erupted in the distance. The jet of super-heated gases shot thirty feet in the air, tossing loose shrapnel out of its way. It died down almost as quickly as it had sprung up.

“Landing zones are carefully co-ordinated during mission prep to avoid these kinds of environmental extremes,” the sergeant explained.

The Doctor frowned. He knew the planet’s tectonic plates had been dormant during the Thrukstone era; perhaps they were now becoming unsettled again. As if to confirm his theory, a second geyser erupted a few moments later.

He returned to the GPS terminal. After about another minute he sealed it up, switched it on and handed it back to Private Doherty.

“So what’s your diagnosis, Doctor?” Cameron asked.

“A clean bill of health,” he replied.

“What?” Captain Hamilton said.

“As far as I can tell, there’s nothing wrong with it. I’d even go so far as saying it survived the crash in better condition than some of us.”

“That can’t be,” Cameron murmured.

The Doctor shrugged. “Unless there’s something wrong with your global positioning relay satellites, then we are where it says we are.”

“The GPS terminal receives its signal directly from the Orbital,” Private Doherty said. “So the problem has to be with the terminal, not the relay. If there was a problem on the station, they’d sort it out; they know we’re relying on it.”

The Doctor sighed. “Then perhaps they’re both fine.”

Captain Hamilton and Sergeant Cameron exchanged glances.

“Doctor, nobody who’d performed even a partway adequate environmental survey would have given a ship an LZ in a geyser field!” Cameron said.

“Well, you did say the other ship was destroyed.”

“But they wouldn’t land here in the first place; that’s the point.”

“Yeah, and where’s the wreckage?” said Hamilton.

“Yeah; and the crater,” said someone else.

“The observation team came down on the same type of ship as we did; you saw what happened to that. So where’s the rather large hole in the ground?”

The Doctor scowled. “Look, you asked me up here to fix your GPS terminal, Captain; all I’m saying is that it doesn’t need fixing.”

Another geyser erupted nearby. Everyone watched and for a few moments nobody said anything. Eventually, Captain Hamilton sighed.

“TSI?” he said, throwing his hands up.

“TSI?” the Doctor mouthed at Cameron, frowning.

“Theories, suggestions and ideas,” the sergeant muttered.

“We got given the wrong LZ to begin with?” someone suggested.

“The ship didn’t land here after all?” said someone else.

The Doctor realised that Captain Hamilton had just offered his men an open invitation to bail him out. “There was no ship?” he said.

It was Sergeant Cameron who saw it first.

He was turning to ask the Doctor what he meant when he saw a red dot streak horizontally across the man’s chest. It was less than four millimetres wide, and after the Doctor it swept over Corporal Carlisle, who was standing beside him.

“Doctor; look!” he hissed, pointing his finger.

The Doctor turned round; so did Corporal Carlisle. Precisely seven seconds later, the red dot returned; the exact same trajectory, but this time it crawled over the corporal’s turned shoulder, flitting in and out of every nook and cranny in his body armour like a tiny, silent, almost imperceptible beetle made of light.

“What’s going on?” Captain Hamilton demanded.

Cameron and the Doctor swapped looks; they had both guessed what it was.

Seven seconds later the dot returned; Corporal Carlisle turned in time to watch it pan across his chest-plate. The soldier stood rigid, as if paralysed by the red spot.

They waited another seven seconds, but the dot did not return again.

Cameron shot the Doctor another look; he was already looking around the edge of the valley, his head jerking from side to side like a prairie dog’s.

“Give me a scope!” Cameron shouted.

Rose heard raised voices and swivelled on her bum. From this angle she couldn’t see where the others had gone, and she couldn’t make out what they were shouting; all of a sudden the top of the hill seemed a lot further away.

Feeling suddenly vulnerable, Rose looked around where she was sitting for a stick or a pipe or some other sort of crutch; she would climb after them herself.

She didn’t see the metallic figure rise up behind her.

Silently and effortlessly, the Cyberman extricated itself from the entangled mechanical morass like some sort of robotic contortionist with insectile grace. Once it had emerged, it stood to its full height of seven and a half feet behind the girl. Its polished metal skull rotated to regard the back of her head. Deep inside one of the lifeless gauzed-over eye-sockets, the Cyberman’s sole remaining organic eyeball looked the human up and down. Then it reached out with a long, sinewy hydraulic arm and smothered her screams with a hand of metal talons as big as her head.

“Found it!” Sergeant Cameron said suddenly.

The Doctor’s two hearts were racing. Cameron and a couple of the others had been looking for the source of the laser beam with telescopic gun-sights.

“Let me have a look,” the Doctor said.

Cameron held the gun-sight steady whilst the Doctor leaned in beside him, pressing one eye to the lens and squeezing the other shut.

“That’s another proximity sensor all right; and we just set it off.”

Cameron lowered the gun-sight and the Doctor rubbed his eye. The soldiers looked agitated, but none so much as Captain Hamilton.

“Doctor, you sure that droid you destroyed wasn’t sentient?” he said.

The Doctor nodded curtly. “Yep.”

“How positive are you?”

“One hundred percent.”

Hamilton cocked his head to one side and snorted. “That’s good enough for me.” He twisted something on his rifle. “Lock and load, marines.”

Immediately and automatically, the soldiers fell into a practised defensive formation around the Doctor. Rifles were adjusted and ammunition checked.

Soon there wasn’t an angle left unguarded.

Sergeant Cameron grabbed the Doctor. “Get Rose!”

“Rose!” the Doctor cried, whirling round.

As fast as he could, and almost tripping up in the process, the Doctor charged over to the far side of the precipice and started back down the embankment.

“Rose!” he called out. He couldn’t see her. “Rose!”

He stumbled, twisted his own ankle, and fell a few feet, but he picked himself up and kept going with a wince. “Rose!” he cried.

When he finally reached the spot where he’d left her, he tripped again and fell to his knees. He looked up. She was no longer sitting there.

There was no sign of her.

“Rose!” he hollered. “Where are you?”

Bowing his head momentarily to catch his breath, the Doctor saw it between the scrap several feet beneath his reach: Rose’s shoe, the one he’d removed.

And then he heard a peal of gunfire.

NOTES:
This isn't my favourite chapter. After a very talky sixth chapter, I wanted the seventh to have more action, but basically all that happens is they climb a hill, then Rose gets kidnapped. Thankfully it's one of the shortest, then. Structurally speaking, this story is turning out a bit like "Aliens", though this was completely unintentional. It's taken a while to get going, but things are about to go decidedly pear-shaped, and the character that had previously been along for the ride (in this case, the Doctor) will rise to the fore with expert knowledge, just like Ripley. Some things have occurred in a different order, obviously. The marines got stranded before half the characters were wiped out, instead of after it a la "Aliens". Likewise, the Doctor has lost Rose already, whilst Ripley didn't lose Newt until the end (though admittedly she didn't appear in the first hour of the film). I suppose writing about marines, with "Aliens" being my number one influence in that regard, such similarities were going to be inevitably unavoidable. I'll blame it on my subconscious and make serious efforts to divert the course of the subsequent rescue plotline, how's that?