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It has been . . . perhaps a few hours, in subjective time . . . since he and his TARDIS vanished into the Vortex in the wake of his latest defeat at the Doctor’s hands, and the Master has gathered enough of his wits to reflect on the aftermath.
When will I learn? he asks himself. All the pieces were in place – an armada of Cyberships poised to strike from above, a host of Silurians ready to erupt from below, a flock of Weeping Angels positioned to deal with any survivors – and somehow the Doctor yet again sweeps them all off the board in one absurdly improbable stroke. It should have been a perfect victory, a masterpiece of subtlety, a true demonstration of my diabolical genius—
He interrupts himself in mid-thought. Hah. And therein, of course, lies the rub. Such intricate subtlety is of little use if the Doctor perishes without perceiving my hand behind it – and too often, my pawns prove less than capable of executing my plans with the precision needed to fully occupy the Doctor’s attention until the proper moment.
It is, he acknowledges, a dilemma. He may be the Master – the one being in all the cosmos with the will, the intellect, and the ruthless temperament best suited to impose order on the billions of lesser beings scattered across the galaxies – but as a practical matter, imposing that order on even a planetary scale requires some degree of assistance. And so: The larger one’s army, the Master reluctantly admits, the more difficult it becomes to control.
This is most accurate, of course, where one’s army is composed of intelligent beings – be they human, Sontaran, Zygon, or any other individually conscious life-form one might encounter throughout the (more or less) civilized galaxies. Even with the greatest mesmeric ability in the immediate cosmos, there are practical limits to one’s control. Robots and hive-minded life-forms are easier to program – but at the same time, likewise easier to counter-program or otherwise disrupt.
At the least, I have learned never to rely on the accursed Daleks. If that idiot Davros is present in the timeline, they will defer to his orders over mine – but without his influence, they cannot be dissuaded from their own overriding courses of action.
The Master sighs, a sound only his own TARDIS’ internal sensors will ever hear. And of course, there is little point in masterminding a conquest, whether merely planetary or properly pan-galactic, without forcing the Doctor to acknowledge the brilliance of the achievement.
And yet . . .
There is, the Master realizes, a reason he has resorted to lurking behind a metaphorical curtain so often in his seemingly eternal struggle with the Doctor. Confronting the Doctor directly, he observes, has virtually never achieved the desired result. It is not, in the end, so much a matter of evil versus good as it is a question of methodology – and often as not, the discovery of a fatal flaw in the technology underlying the scheme in which one is presently engaged.
Mind you, “flaw” is not perhaps the most accurate word. Rather, the experimental nature of one’s research often fails to account for all possible side effects of fully deploying the relevant substance or device – especially in the face of sufficiently creative opposition. And the Doctor is nothing if not extraordinarily creative.
For the briefest instant, there is complete silence in the console room, followed by the sharp yet somehow delighted SNAP! of the Master’s fingers.
And there, perhaps, is my answer. I must seek out a weapon, or perhaps an old enemy, with the ability to turn that very creative genius against the Doctor. Then at last I shall be able to use the Doctor’s damnable gift of improvisation to my own benefit.
With the satisfied click! of leather soles against the floor, the Master steps to the main console and sets in motion a new and thorough search of the TARDIS memory banks.
And although the Master either doesn’t notice or declines to acknowledge it, a very soft instrumental melody begins playing on the TARDIS’ internal speaker system . . . .