![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eve11Main Post and Chapter Index
**
THIS TRANSCRIPT IS CLASSIFIED *TOP SECRET//BOARDWALK MISTLETOE//NOFORN*
PROPERTY OF UNITED STATES AIR FORCE
GROOM LAKE EXPERIMENTAL AIRCRAFT AND XENOTECH RESEARCH FACILITY
05 AUGUST 1969
STANDARD RADIO SURVEILLANCE TAPE ARCHIVE: #1969-655-B3-A437
CB CHANNEL 19 (TRUCKERS): 27.18500 MHz
06:05--06:08 HRS
TRANSCRIPT NOTES
SS: SUBJECT 1 (RANDALL FLECK, NEVADA DL# 43 254 988, COMIX TRUCKING EMPLOYEE #213)
FT: SUBJECT 2 (UNKNOWN)
SS: Breaker breaker, this is Slow Sunrise; my ten-twenty is eastbound on the lonely N-V three-seven-five. Any other eyes on this desert dust-up by the base?
[Static.]
FT: [static, unintelligible.]
SS: Come back, good neighbor? Ten-one.
FT: [static] . . . Hello? Are you there?
SS: Well howdy, we got a Lady Breaker! You got a handle and a twenty?
FT: Sorry, what?
SS: Handle, sweetheart. Or are you on the wrong channel?
FT: I just came in to turn off the [static, unintelligible] found a light blinking on the console by this handset. Who are you?
SS: Well, I've been on the road all night and I'm checking my eyelids for pinholes so I'll forgive the etiquette. Ain't nobody else talking this morning. This is Slow Sunrise heading eastbound on Nevada route three-seventy-five past the town of Rachel. You got a handle and a locale, little lady?
FT: Right . . . Sure. Slow Sunrise, this is--this is Fairy Tale. Got a big blue box . . . truck, stopped to rest a while at Nesbitt Lake.
SS: That big old mud puddle off three-eighteen? You sure ain't a local, are you?
FT: You got that right. Just a stopover, but ready to roll this morning. Did--did you say something about a base?
SS: Copy that, Fairy Tale. Are you headed west toward Reno?
FT: No, north . . . northeast I guess. To Salt Lake City. Why?
SS: Good thing, 'cause I got eyes on wall-to-wall G.I. Joes dusting up the desert on my three o'clock.
FT: Say again, Slow Sunrise? Military activity?
SS: That's affirmative. At least ten rigs heading hammer down across the desert straight for this here boulevard.
FT: Coming from the base? From Area fifty-one?
SS: Sure are! They got a bear in the air and everything. Looks like there's one out in front and a whole convoy behind it.
FT: [Static] you saying they're all chasing one truck?
SS: Now, that could be it! Figured I'd be neighborly and warn folks westbound, better get going unless you want a brake check past Crystal Springs. They'll block off the whole highway if they're on training exercises.
FT: Oh my god. Oh-- [static, muffled sounds] --plans, Rory! We need--
[Static.]
SS: How 'bout ya, Fairy Tale? Come back?
[Static.]
*END OF CLASSIFIED MATERIAL*
"Change of plans, Rory! We need to go west!"
Amy Pond dropped the CB handset from the console and raced out of the control room, but the TARDIS took no notice. She had already forgotten the calculus that had led to this moment. Her optimizations had been performed within the kernel of a temporal anomaly complex enough to hold both her psyche and her transcendental memory at once. Cradled in the relative dimensions of superposition, her mind was constrained enough to understand its desires and powerful enough to work to achieve them. And so her matrix had churned through a thousand million billion local potentials in order to determine exactly when to do no more than she must.
When the anomaly collapsed, her linear memory and her lateral integrations collapsed with it. But the path she had wrought remained.
To her Pilot's companions, it must have seemed like a frenetic progression of coincidence and near misses. They didn’t understand how accurately her maximum likelihood algorithms predicted the duration of their arguments and delays, or how keenly she extrapolated the change points that signaled their critical decisions. And they didn't know just how good she was at waiting.
She couldn't communicate with them directly, but she could wait for the right time to connect them to someone who could. They didn’t notice that her total system shutdown the night before had not actually been a total systems shutdown. They didn’t realize that she had left one critical comms channel powered and open, its sole light source sure to catch Amy's attention when the pending message indicator blinked on at daybreak in the otherwise derelict control room.
She couldn't travel on her own, but she could wait for the right time to be moved. Even her Pilot would not have noticed the small signal bleed she had re-routed, from that sole open comms channel to her emergency dimensional coupling system. Dimensional coupling had automatically engaged during the previous night's temporal crash. During times of instability, it linked the mass of her interior to her physical shell, keeping her solidly immovable by any mechanical means. Usually it took hours for her Pilot to reset that system, and that was before he'd thrown her manual into a supernova in a fit of pique. But it had also been several centuries since he'd performed any of its required maintenance. When Amy Pond pressed the button to close the radio comms circuit, a small part of the signal was diverted to overload the coupler's mag-lock resistors, which were opportunistically frayed. They failed as predicted and the TARDIS was light again, ready to head in the right direction.
In the continuum, the TARDIS could still sense a constructed path of necessary and sufficient conditions, converging almost surely around these moments. She didn't remember how or why it was created. All she remembered was that she was waiting.
She waited eighty-three seconds for Amy to burst through her doors again, with Rory in tow. Amy spread a paper road map out onto her console. "He said Crystal Springs. Crystal Springs, Where's Crystal Springs--?"
"There." Rory, who had studied the map in detail at the start of the whole rescue operation, immediately pointed out the dot representing the crossroads town. Then he had to take Amy's arm to stop her rushing out of the control room again. "Hang on. Who said? What's happened? Did you hear from the Doctor?"
Amy barely stopped for breath. "Sort of."
The TARDIS waited seventy-two seconds for Amy's explanation. Sixteen more seconds elapsed (solidly within tolerance) while Rory processed the information. He quickly traced the routes on the map with his finger and came to a foregone conclusion.
"They're not going to make it."
"Which is why we have to go, right now!" Amy snatched the map up from under his hand and stormed away again.
All of this followed the TARDIS' predictions, but she noticed a potential change point rippling the local measure at this moment. Despite the careful calculations that had gone into its construction, she felt the convergence of near future events wavering. An alternate path arose: her shell abandoned at the edge of a Nevada lake as Amy and Rory sped away in an empty truck. The change point pulsed against her matrix in alarm, stirring emotions she recognized but could not understand. bereft | collapse | wanting.
But this too was within tolerance. The TARDIS wasn't the only one whose full history in the continuum had taught them an abundance of patience.
"Amy, wait!" Rory called. The authority in his words came from a depth of experience much greater than his years, and it stopped Amy in her tracks. Her hand paused mid-way toward the door latch. She turned around, the sight of him breaking the spell, and threw the map on the floor in frustration.
"We can't wait! We have to do something!"
Anyone else would have said she was furious at him, but Rory understood all of the shades of Amy's anger, even when she didn't. He caught up to her and held her by the shoulder. He didn't raise his voice. "I know we do. But we can't just charge off after them with no resources and no exit strategy. We need a plan."
The TARDIS waited for three minutes and twelve seconds while they hashed out the details. It wasn't much of a plan, but it was enough to cement the path. Likelihoods smoothed out across eleven dimensional space, and the wavering change point dissipated. Still, she waited.
She waited while Rory discovered her shell's new-found mobility, even before Amy turned off the gravity from the console. All was within tolerances as on either side they tipped her blue box face up, cantilevered against the van's open back door and ready to push the rest of the way in. They rushed around to meet at the back and Rory pressed a two-way radio into Amy's hands, counterpart to the one sitting on the van's front seat.
"Right. Up you go."
"No, no, no. I'm driving." Amy pushed the radio back at his chest, but Rory refused to take it.
"It's safer in the TARDIS. And you have more experience with the zig zag plotter and the gravity."
Despite the urgency, Amy rankled. "Yeah, well you don't have any more experience than I do stunt driving a delivery van into the middle of a military blockade."
This stopped Rory short, and he let out a small exclamation of surprise. He looked up, his eyes momentarily distant, his expression unreadable before focusing back on Amy with a slightly bemused smile that did nothing for her mood or patience.
"What?" she snapped.
"I never did tell you how the Pandorica made it through the nineteen-seventies." He took her hands and wrapped them firmly around the radio. "Up you go."
The TARDIS paid no more attention to the details. Her matrix sensed the converging path as a gathering of temporal potential, building anticipation with each linear event that transpired. She recognized that she stood lynchpin at the crux, both architect and unknowing, casting a beacon across the continuum brilliant enough to shadow everything else and dazzle even the slightest time-sensitive being. Potential built like pressure in the timelines and she was still waiting, with no nascent concern as to why or how.
By the time they were barreling down the motorway toward the convoy, the TARDIS had decided that she must be waiting for a memory.
THIS REPORT IS CLASSIFIED *TOP SECRET//BOARDWALK MISTLETOE//NOFORN*
PROPERTY OF UNITED STATES AIR FORCE
GROOM LAKE EXPERIMENTAL AIRCRAFT AND XENOTECH RESEARCH FACILITY
25 SEPTEMBER 1969
DS-#234-8H FACILITY BREACH INCIDENT, INVESTIGATION FINAL REPORT
AIR FORCE INTERNAL AFFAIRS
ATTESTED BY: HARRIS, MAJOR REGINALD D (IA INVESTIGATOR)
Section 24.7.7.2: Root Cause Analysis: Conclusions
It is clear in hindsight that the hostile alien prisoner DS-#234-8H ("Doctor") was one of the most technologically advanced, unpredictable and dangerous species encountered by any US military branch. Nonetheless, the failure to contain or recover the test subject for further live study during the extraordinary events of 03-05 August, 1969, stems from much more mundane sources. The major contributors are:
*END OF CLASSIFIED MATERIAL*
Rory had once told the Doctor that his memories of the Centurion were like a door in his mind that he could keep shut. But if the Doctor ever had the chance and inclination to ask again--if he were here now--Rory would admit it wasn't that simple. He would say that it was less like a door, and more like depths of silt layering a false floor at the bottom of a pond. The Romans. The Autons. The guilt, patience and penance that accompanied the Centurion through every day of his long shadow existence, punctuated by furious action whenever the box--whenever Amy--was in even more danger than he'd put her in the first place.
He never shut those memories out, not exactly. It was just that most times, his thoughts skimmed too near the surface for them to matter. Occasionally something happened that sent him deep enough to stir things up. Something like, for instance, whatever had caused the TARDIS to shut down the night before.
Even then, remembering wasn't as clear cut as walking through a door from this life to that life. Instead, everything was intermixed. It was the same pond--and of course the Doctor would stop him there anyway, to point out it was a Pond with a capital 'P' and then likely miss the rest of the point. So yeah, it was the same Pond, but murky, deep and unsettled instead of shallow and clear. He was always Rory Williams, but suddenly he knew what the cottage looked like that had stood in their new home's space seven hundred years before Leadworth was incorporated. Or he knew the best way to disarm an intruder with a blade in a confined space, or he remembered what a particular pub smelled like back in the nineteen eighties, decades before the nationwide smoking ban. Or back in the seventeen eighties for that matter, decades before the advent of indoor plumbing.
Settling things down again took more than just shutting a door. Truth told, it was generally cause for a cuppa and a good lie-down for the day. Perhaps a relaxing drive.
Rory gripped the steering wheel tighter. The fact that he was currently hurtling toward danger with his wife tucked inside an incomprehensible vault in the back wasn't exactly helping on that front. He sped up, swerving the step-van into the opposite lane to overtake a slow-moving sedan. An irate horn blared and he shouted a quick "Sorry!" out the window on the way past. Because he was still the polite Rory Williams that his parents had raised. But right now, he also remembered just how much speed was required to break through a vehicular barricade on a roadway. Not to mention, he had a good idea of the best spot and angle to hit it in order to conserve momentum and keep himself in one piece. He checked his seatbelt for the third time. It wouldn't be long, now.
Ahead, the road cut a bend through the middle of a swell of rocks. Rory accelerated through the curve with the practiced ease of muscle memory, despite the unwieldy weight distribution of TARDIS-in-delivery-van and the fact that he hadn't had actual muscles at the time those memories were formed. The rock walls receded and he finally caught a glint of metal and glass in the shimmer on the roadway from the morning sun. He flicked a glance away from the road to confirm that the radio buckled in to the passenger seat was still set to send.
"There's the blockade!" he announced. Once he made it past the perimeter, it was Amy's turn to do her part.
His gun hand fumbled briefly with the gearshift, an echo of the trouble he had with its grip in those later years. He flexed his fingers, chasing the feeling away with a physical reminder of sinew and bone. Which reminded him again just how rubbish this plan was. There were a million ways it could go wrong, starting with the possibility that Rory Williams was a bit more breakable than his living plastic alter ego. But it was all they could come up with, and it was better by far than going in empty handed. Because Rory couldn't quite shake the feeling that the TARDIS still had a part to play in all of this. The depth of her memory spanned so much more than a few aborted millennia in the eye of a temporal storm; there was no knowing what she was capable of when that pond was stirred.
And after all, if Rory had learned anything in the two thousand years currently clouding his reality with otherworldly time, it was never leave the box behind.
"Here goes. Amy, get ready--"
He floored the pedal. The soldiers manning the barricade had only moments to decide whether to raise their rifles or scatter. As the last man dove out of harm's way, Rory took aim for the back end of the nearest military jeep, and broke through.
**
Part 11 | Part 13
**
THIS TRANSCRIPT IS CLASSIFIED *TOP SECRET//BOARDWALK MISTLETOE//NOFORN*
PROPERTY OF UNITED STATES AIR FORCE
GROOM LAKE EXPERIMENTAL AIRCRAFT AND XENOTECH RESEARCH FACILITY
05 AUGUST 1969
STANDARD RADIO SURVEILLANCE TAPE ARCHIVE: #1969-655-B3-A437
CB CHANNEL 19 (TRUCKERS): 27.18500 MHz
06:05--06:08 HRS
TRANSCRIPT NOTES
SS: SUBJECT 1 (RANDALL FLECK, NEVADA DL# 43 254 988, COMIX TRUCKING EMPLOYEE #213)
FT: SUBJECT 2 (UNKNOWN)
SS: Breaker breaker, this is Slow Sunrise; my ten-twenty is eastbound on the lonely N-V three-seven-five. Any other eyes on this desert dust-up by the base?
[Static.]
FT: [static, unintelligible.]
SS: Come back, good neighbor? Ten-one.
FT: [static] . . . Hello? Are you there?
SS: Well howdy, we got a Lady Breaker! You got a handle and a twenty?
FT: Sorry, what?
SS: Handle, sweetheart. Or are you on the wrong channel?
FT: I just came in to turn off the [static, unintelligible] found a light blinking on the console by this handset. Who are you?
SS: Well, I've been on the road all night and I'm checking my eyelids for pinholes so I'll forgive the etiquette. Ain't nobody else talking this morning. This is Slow Sunrise heading eastbound on Nevada route three-seventy-five past the town of Rachel. You got a handle and a locale, little lady?
FT: Right . . . Sure. Slow Sunrise, this is--this is Fairy Tale. Got a big blue box . . . truck, stopped to rest a while at Nesbitt Lake.
SS: That big old mud puddle off three-eighteen? You sure ain't a local, are you?
FT: You got that right. Just a stopover, but ready to roll this morning. Did--did you say something about a base?
SS: Copy that, Fairy Tale. Are you headed west toward Reno?
FT: No, north . . . northeast I guess. To Salt Lake City. Why?
SS: Good thing, 'cause I got eyes on wall-to-wall G.I. Joes dusting up the desert on my three o'clock.
FT: Say again, Slow Sunrise? Military activity?
SS: That's affirmative. At least ten rigs heading hammer down across the desert straight for this here boulevard.
FT: Coming from the base? From Area fifty-one?
SS: Sure are! They got a bear in the air and everything. Looks like there's one out in front and a whole convoy behind it.
FT: [Static] you saying they're all chasing one truck?
SS: Now, that could be it! Figured I'd be neighborly and warn folks westbound, better get going unless you want a brake check past Crystal Springs. They'll block off the whole highway if they're on training exercises.
FT: Oh my god. Oh-- [static, muffled sounds] --plans, Rory! We need--
[Static.]
SS: How 'bout ya, Fairy Tale? Come back?
[Static.]
*END OF CLASSIFIED MATERIAL*
"Change of plans, Rory! We need to go west!"
Amy Pond dropped the CB handset from the console and raced out of the control room, but the TARDIS took no notice. She had already forgotten the calculus that had led to this moment. Her optimizations had been performed within the kernel of a temporal anomaly complex enough to hold both her psyche and her transcendental memory at once. Cradled in the relative dimensions of superposition, her mind was constrained enough to understand its desires and powerful enough to work to achieve them. And so her matrix had churned through a thousand million billion local potentials in order to determine exactly when to do no more than she must.
When the anomaly collapsed, her linear memory and her lateral integrations collapsed with it. But the path she had wrought remained.
To her Pilot's companions, it must have seemed like a frenetic progression of coincidence and near misses. They didn’t understand how accurately her maximum likelihood algorithms predicted the duration of their arguments and delays, or how keenly she extrapolated the change points that signaled their critical decisions. And they didn't know just how good she was at waiting.
She couldn't communicate with them directly, but she could wait for the right time to connect them to someone who could. They didn’t notice that her total system shutdown the night before had not actually been a total systems shutdown. They didn’t realize that she had left one critical comms channel powered and open, its sole light source sure to catch Amy's attention when the pending message indicator blinked on at daybreak in the otherwise derelict control room.
She couldn't travel on her own, but she could wait for the right time to be moved. Even her Pilot would not have noticed the small signal bleed she had re-routed, from that sole open comms channel to her emergency dimensional coupling system. Dimensional coupling had automatically engaged during the previous night's temporal crash. During times of instability, it linked the mass of her interior to her physical shell, keeping her solidly immovable by any mechanical means. Usually it took hours for her Pilot to reset that system, and that was before he'd thrown her manual into a supernova in a fit of pique. But it had also been several centuries since he'd performed any of its required maintenance. When Amy Pond pressed the button to close the radio comms circuit, a small part of the signal was diverted to overload the coupler's mag-lock resistors, which were opportunistically frayed. They failed as predicted and the TARDIS was light again, ready to head in the right direction.
In the continuum, the TARDIS could still sense a constructed path of necessary and sufficient conditions, converging almost surely around these moments. She didn't remember how or why it was created. All she remembered was that she was waiting.
She waited eighty-three seconds for Amy to burst through her doors again, with Rory in tow. Amy spread a paper road map out onto her console. "He said Crystal Springs. Crystal Springs, Where's Crystal Springs--?"
"There." Rory, who had studied the map in detail at the start of the whole rescue operation, immediately pointed out the dot representing the crossroads town. Then he had to take Amy's arm to stop her rushing out of the control room again. "Hang on. Who said? What's happened? Did you hear from the Doctor?"
Amy barely stopped for breath. "Sort of."
The TARDIS waited seventy-two seconds for Amy's explanation. Sixteen more seconds elapsed (solidly within tolerance) while Rory processed the information. He quickly traced the routes on the map with his finger and came to a foregone conclusion.
"They're not going to make it."
"Which is why we have to go, right now!" Amy snatched the map up from under his hand and stormed away again.
All of this followed the TARDIS' predictions, but she noticed a potential change point rippling the local measure at this moment. Despite the careful calculations that had gone into its construction, she felt the convergence of near future events wavering. An alternate path arose: her shell abandoned at the edge of a Nevada lake as Amy and Rory sped away in an empty truck. The change point pulsed against her matrix in alarm, stirring emotions she recognized but could not understand. bereft | collapse | wanting.
But this too was within tolerance. The TARDIS wasn't the only one whose full history in the continuum had taught them an abundance of patience.
"Amy, wait!" Rory called. The authority in his words came from a depth of experience much greater than his years, and it stopped Amy in her tracks. Her hand paused mid-way toward the door latch. She turned around, the sight of him breaking the spell, and threw the map on the floor in frustration.
"We can't wait! We have to do something!"
Anyone else would have said she was furious at him, but Rory understood all of the shades of Amy's anger, even when she didn't. He caught up to her and held her by the shoulder. He didn't raise his voice. "I know we do. But we can't just charge off after them with no resources and no exit strategy. We need a plan."
The TARDIS waited for three minutes and twelve seconds while they hashed out the details. It wasn't much of a plan, but it was enough to cement the path. Likelihoods smoothed out across eleven dimensional space, and the wavering change point dissipated. Still, she waited.
She waited while Rory discovered her shell's new-found mobility, even before Amy turned off the gravity from the console. All was within tolerances as on either side they tipped her blue box face up, cantilevered against the van's open back door and ready to push the rest of the way in. They rushed around to meet at the back and Rory pressed a two-way radio into Amy's hands, counterpart to the one sitting on the van's front seat.
"Right. Up you go."
"No, no, no. I'm driving." Amy pushed the radio back at his chest, but Rory refused to take it.
"It's safer in the TARDIS. And you have more experience with the zig zag plotter and the gravity."
Despite the urgency, Amy rankled. "Yeah, well you don't have any more experience than I do stunt driving a delivery van into the middle of a military blockade."
This stopped Rory short, and he let out a small exclamation of surprise. He looked up, his eyes momentarily distant, his expression unreadable before focusing back on Amy with a slightly bemused smile that did nothing for her mood or patience.
"What?" she snapped.
"I never did tell you how the Pandorica made it through the nineteen-seventies." He took her hands and wrapped them firmly around the radio. "Up you go."
The TARDIS paid no more attention to the details. Her matrix sensed the converging path as a gathering of temporal potential, building anticipation with each linear event that transpired. She recognized that she stood lynchpin at the crux, both architect and unknowing, casting a beacon across the continuum brilliant enough to shadow everything else and dazzle even the slightest time-sensitive being. Potential built like pressure in the timelines and she was still waiting, with no nascent concern as to why or how.
By the time they were barreling down the motorway toward the convoy, the TARDIS had decided that she must be waiting for a memory.
THIS REPORT IS CLASSIFIED *TOP SECRET//BOARDWALK MISTLETOE//NOFORN*
PROPERTY OF UNITED STATES AIR FORCE
GROOM LAKE EXPERIMENTAL AIRCRAFT AND XENOTECH RESEARCH FACILITY
25 SEPTEMBER 1969
DS-#234-8H FACILITY BREACH INCIDENT, INVESTIGATION FINAL REPORT
AIR FORCE INTERNAL AFFAIRS
ATTESTED BY: HARRIS, MAJOR REGINALD D (IA INVESTIGATOR)
Section 24.7.7.2: Root Cause Analysis: Conclusions
It is clear in hindsight that the hostile alien prisoner DS-#234-8H ("Doctor") was one of the most technologically advanced, unpredictable and dangerous species encountered by any US military branch. Nonetheless, the failure to contain or recover the test subject for further live study during the extraordinary events of 03-05 August, 1969, stems from much more mundane sources. The major contributors are:
- 1) Inadequate external communication and vetting of third-party credentials.
- The investigatory panel concludes that the detainee would not have escaped custody nor breached Groom Lake's containment without assistance from his accomplice, the unknown agent known only as Sarah Hamilton (possible code name "River").
Area 51's state of the art physical security measures were undermined by the lack of transparency in the existing contract with Van Statten Industries. There were no protocols in place to double check well-forged credentials with the independent contractor in a timely manner. Red flags on the identity of Doctor Hamilton were not raised by logistics until 1800 hours on August 4, two days after she was admitted onto the base and only thirty minutes before the start of the alpha shockwave. In the interim, the accomplice exploited a fractious command situation between the Xenotech division at Groom Lake and the Xenobiology consultants from the National Reconnaissance Office to gain access to the prisoner and facilitate escape. - 2) Failure to double check security footage after potential tampering from unknown phenomena.
- Groom Lake facility had standard procedures in place in the event of novel alien infiltration, and followed these to good effect once the alpha shockwave began. But base personnel acted under the assumption that the prisoners were inside the temporal bubble until the anomaly collapsed at 2108 hours. Nor did anyone consider that such a powerful and strange temporal anomaly might interfere with surveillance cameras. Because the security footage during the incident was not checked after the collapse of the bubble and the bravo shockwave, the footage of their escape during the event was not observed until hours later. Because of this, the prisoners had more time to commandeer a vehicle and gain distance from the base.
Furthermore, examination of the M43 ambulance that was stolen indicates that it underwent an ad hoc repair, most likely performed by the accomplice after the events of the bravo shockwave damaged its electrical systems. This indicates that the escapees were derelict for some time after 2108 hours and could have been overtaken much earlier, had personnel not been focused on searching for them within the base. - 3) Lack of aerial support during the recovery mission.
- Once the extent of the security breach was discovered, a recovery team was dispatched at 0600 hours on 05 August to apprehend the escapees or otherwise neutralize the threat. By 0649 the convoy had disabled the prisoners' escape vehicle on Nevada Highway 375 and extracted the prisoners for transport back to the containment facility.
It is the conclusion of this investigatory panel that the critical failure in recovery was not due to the extraordinary events that ensued after the prisoners were extracted from the escape vehicle. Rather, lack of long range situational awareness and firepower allowed a second accomplice to breach the recovery team's barricade with little to no warning. This oversight occurred because Major Ogden ordered the grounding of the convoy's sole aerial support, the Cayuse OH-76 helicopter that was carrying both him and Specialist Duvall in pursuit of the prisoner, by override order of the NRO.
With proper long range recon, the convoy would have been better prepared to anticipate and engage a second vehicle, which by motorist eyewitness was driving erratically prior to reaching the barricade. Given the recovery team's training and expertise, a simple early warning would likely have allowed them to neutralize this second vehicle, as well as its unconventional payload, at the convoy perimeter.
*END OF CLASSIFIED MATERIAL*
Rory had once told the Doctor that his memories of the Centurion were like a door in his mind that he could keep shut. But if the Doctor ever had the chance and inclination to ask again--if he were here now--Rory would admit it wasn't that simple. He would say that it was less like a door, and more like depths of silt layering a false floor at the bottom of a pond. The Romans. The Autons. The guilt, patience and penance that accompanied the Centurion through every day of his long shadow existence, punctuated by furious action whenever the box--whenever Amy--was in even more danger than he'd put her in the first place.
He never shut those memories out, not exactly. It was just that most times, his thoughts skimmed too near the surface for them to matter. Occasionally something happened that sent him deep enough to stir things up. Something like, for instance, whatever had caused the TARDIS to shut down the night before.
Even then, remembering wasn't as clear cut as walking through a door from this life to that life. Instead, everything was intermixed. It was the same pond--and of course the Doctor would stop him there anyway, to point out it was a Pond with a capital 'P' and then likely miss the rest of the point. So yeah, it was the same Pond, but murky, deep and unsettled instead of shallow and clear. He was always Rory Williams, but suddenly he knew what the cottage looked like that had stood in their new home's space seven hundred years before Leadworth was incorporated. Or he knew the best way to disarm an intruder with a blade in a confined space, or he remembered what a particular pub smelled like back in the nineteen eighties, decades before the nationwide smoking ban. Or back in the seventeen eighties for that matter, decades before the advent of indoor plumbing.
Settling things down again took more than just shutting a door. Truth told, it was generally cause for a cuppa and a good lie-down for the day. Perhaps a relaxing drive.
Rory gripped the steering wheel tighter. The fact that he was currently hurtling toward danger with his wife tucked inside an incomprehensible vault in the back wasn't exactly helping on that front. He sped up, swerving the step-van into the opposite lane to overtake a slow-moving sedan. An irate horn blared and he shouted a quick "Sorry!" out the window on the way past. Because he was still the polite Rory Williams that his parents had raised. But right now, he also remembered just how much speed was required to break through a vehicular barricade on a roadway. Not to mention, he had a good idea of the best spot and angle to hit it in order to conserve momentum and keep himself in one piece. He checked his seatbelt for the third time. It wouldn't be long, now.
Ahead, the road cut a bend through the middle of a swell of rocks. Rory accelerated through the curve with the practiced ease of muscle memory, despite the unwieldy weight distribution of TARDIS-in-delivery-van and the fact that he hadn't had actual muscles at the time those memories were formed. The rock walls receded and he finally caught a glint of metal and glass in the shimmer on the roadway from the morning sun. He flicked a glance away from the road to confirm that the radio buckled in to the passenger seat was still set to send.
"There's the blockade!" he announced. Once he made it past the perimeter, it was Amy's turn to do her part.
His gun hand fumbled briefly with the gearshift, an echo of the trouble he had with its grip in those later years. He flexed his fingers, chasing the feeling away with a physical reminder of sinew and bone. Which reminded him again just how rubbish this plan was. There were a million ways it could go wrong, starting with the possibility that Rory Williams was a bit more breakable than his living plastic alter ego. But it was all they could come up with, and it was better by far than going in empty handed. Because Rory couldn't quite shake the feeling that the TARDIS still had a part to play in all of this. The depth of her memory spanned so much more than a few aborted millennia in the eye of a temporal storm; there was no knowing what she was capable of when that pond was stirred.
And after all, if Rory had learned anything in the two thousand years currently clouding his reality with otherworldly time, it was never leave the box behind.
"Here goes. Amy, get ready--"
He floored the pedal. The soldiers manning the barricade had only moments to decide whether to raise their rifles or scatter. As the last man dove out of harm's way, Rory took aim for the back end of the nearest military jeep, and broke through.
**
Part 11 | Part 13
