Tin Soldier

[jjpor]

I’ve written quite a bit about Daleks in my fic, and a bit about the Master, but haven’t really touched any of the other classic Doctor Who enemies. On my to-do list, the obvious ones are the Cybermen, the Sontarans and the Ice Warriors. This is just a scene I wrote; maybe I’ll use it in a story one day, when I think of a good Cybermen story, but I’ll just put it out there in the meantime. I don’t even know who “she” is, a companion presumably, encountering something nasty in one of the storage rooms of a space ship or station, which seems to be the natural environment of these beasties. Tell me who you think “she” is and whether you like my take on the Meanies from Mondas; probably a bit too gruesome and Borglike to be suitable for NuWho, but for some reason I find the all-metal rock ‘em sock ‘em robots of the new series a bit characterless and sterile. Which I suppose is actually appropriate for Cybermen! :-) Obviously, I do not own Doctor Who or the Cybermen; they belong to the BBC and/or their original creators.
 

She heard it even before she saw it; a wheezing mechanical rhythm, clacking valves and hissing gases. Like an intensive care ward. When the hulking silver figure lurched into view from behind one of the equipment racks, she jumped backwards, breath catching in her chest. For a moment, she just stared in horror and revulsion; it smelled like a hospital ward too; the sharp chemical odour of lubricants and preservatives masking something unpleasantly organic. It was like something out of a horror movie.

 

“Oh my God,” she whispered, involuntarily. With a whir of servos, its head snapped towards her, a jerky, inhuman movement. Instinctively, she backed away; but that only seemed to encourage it to advance upon her. It was well over six feet tall, and broad too, but most of that bulk seemed to be add-ons and prostheses. There was a human body in there somewhere, a human corpse, covered in tinfoil and wrapped in tubes and cables. The tubes were semi-opaque; she could just make out the dark, greenish fluid that surged through them with every wheeze of the life-support pack wired to the creature’s chest. There were bellows and pumps moving there, behind an observation panel of thick armoured glass; that was what was making the rhythmic hospital-bed noise. The tubes curled around the thickly-muscled limbs like ivy; where there were gaps in the tinfoil, she could see how they were threaded into the flesh, between exposed bones and muscles, how they sprouted from the bald skull to the chest pack. The face, though, was somehow the worst thing about it; an expressionless, angelic metal mask, with gaping black holes where there should be eyes.

 

“What are you?” she wondered aloud as she continued to back away, not really expecting an answer. Deep in the black eyeholes, she saw the glint of optics as it focused on her. And then came the voice, issuing from the grilled-over slot that took the place of a mouth in the silver mask. Not the voice of a living creature; there were no lungs or larynx involved there; fully synthesised. It was a singsong electronic whine:

 

“We are Cybermen. You will be like us.”

 

It lumbered towards her; one hand was a dully gleaming metal claw, jointed like a lobster, clutching something like looked like a flashlight, boxy with a big lens at the front; the other was still organic. Twitching dead white flesh, livid around the blackened fingernails, and with more of the tubes and wires threaded through and through the various bones and muscles.

 

“How can I be like you?” she asked, trying to buy time with words as she edged backwards towards the door; for some reason, she thought that taking her eyes off the thing would be a bad idea, but she was also conscious that she was not entirely sure where the door was; she did not want to end up backed against the wall. “How could I be a Cyberman?” she asked. “I’m a woman, for one thing.”

 

“Irrelevant,” it sang. “Population growth is attained by cyberconversion. Gender distinctions are unnecessary. You will be like us.”

 

She reached the door and flung herself through it, slamming it shut even as she saw the flashlight in its hand snapping up into a firing position with cobra-speed; she dived to one side just before the beam blew a hole in the door the size of her head, and smashed a crater into the far wall of the corridor. For a second, she lay on the floor, stupidly staring at the wrecked door; there were rivulets of glowing molten metal dribbling from the edges of the hole. Then she got up and ran.