The Time War
by Andrew K Lawston (LJ
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Art by Barbana (LJ | comment), Erisinia (LJ | comment), and Van Donovan (LJ | comment)
Part Two
She'd been at it longer than she could remember, but Ace still wasn't quite sure what to make of this time travel lark.
It was the perspective shifts that got her, every time. One moment you're facing down Evil from the dawn of time which has perverted your entire life and possessed your man-in-uniform; then you blink and you're confronting the Doctor's tubby ex-boyfriend, who seems to think that hanging around a West London park in the evenings with sweaty young men makes him Top Cat.
But you could never, ever laugh. That spoiled the fun.
She looked around, shaken out of her reverie by a change in the tone of the TARDIS engines. Her room was unchanged, a teenage warzone beyond the sterile confines of the workbench at which she sat. Something was up though, a landing perhaps, or more anomalous bloody readings.
There'd been a lot of anomalous readings lately. Ace had still not managed to get even halfway through something called OK Computer that she'd found in the TARDIS toolkit. Every time she tried, the Doctor came charging in before track three to twiddle her tape deck's holographic image until it showed another desolate rock in space. This always lead rapidly to a bout of stamping over scorching/freezing alien plains, waving detectors at rocks and humming jazz tunes.
Ace sighed, and carefully screwed the cap on to the Lynx canister she was holding. Daydreaming while making explosives and while the Doctor might need her? She was going soft!
Swinging her rucksack jauntily on to her shoulder, Ace strolled out of her room, looking for adventure.
There was an angel in the console room. Ace stopped dead in her tracks, transfixed by the slim, cheekboned figure that hovered over the central column radiating pure white light that bleached out the walls' roundels and reduced the Doctor to a mere silhouette standing before it.
She felt her legs quiver suddenly, her left foot straining almost of its own accord to genuflect before this apparition. As if sensing her turmoil, the angel tilted its head and smiled beatifically at her. Ace felt her heart swell with pride at the angel's approval, and hastened to kneel.
Then the Doctor half-turned, and she saw his normally doleful brown eyes spark with sudden fury. 'Ace,' he hissed, 'always act as if you own the place. Especially when you do.'
Ace shook her head to clear it, and found herself in an awkward crouch on the floor of the console room. Had she been about to pray? Or sprint? She frowned and looked again at the apparition. It was still blazing brightly, but it was just a woman, after all.
'Ace, meet my friend Romana,' the Doctor said, and Ace's heart still throbbed with awestruck pride as Romana bobbed a polite courtesy in her direction.
'I am sorry about the light and fuss, Ace,' she said. 'I'm here as a non-corporeal form of pure intellect and, well, I'm afraid I've always been a bit bright.'
Ace began to stammer a response, but Romana had abruptly turned to the Doctor. 'Look, there's no debate. You're summoned.'
Grasping the lapels of his brown jacket firmly, the Doctor stared straight back at her. 'I'm a renegade, an exile, you know that. The High Council long lost its last vestiges of influence over me. Perhaps that's why they sent you.'
Romana's eyes glinted dangerously but her voice stayed level. 'The High Council has nothing to do with this, Doctor. Rassilon himself commands an audience. Even you can't refuse such a request.'
'What part of "exile" don't you understand?' Ace asked loudly, but Romana ignored her and the Doctor's thoughts were clearly elsewhere.
'A message from the Tomb? The heroes are restless.'
'You must come, Doctor. Even the Agency doesn't know what's going on.'
The Doctor tapped his fingers together rapidly. 'They're nervous,' he muttered. 'Actually nervous. And confused. Throw my sudden arrival into the mix and they'll leap to the usual conclusions.' He looked up, and pulled a chunky lever on the console. 'Lady Romana, inform the Academy that the Doctor is coming. And that no one is to put him on trial.'
Romana tossed her hair with a bit of a flounce, but Ace was fairly sure there was a smile playing over her lips. 'You've burned to death at least two prosecutors, Doctor. Don't put us on trial.' And she vanished, leaving the normally surgically bright console room looking almost dim by comparison.
Feeling Ace's stare burning into the back of his neck, the Doctor turned from the console with his hands half-raised helplessly. 'Trials irritate me,' he protested.
Ace put aside thoughts of burning lawyers (wicked!), consumed by a sudden wave of excitement. 'So we're going there? To your home? She was a Time Lord too, wasn't she?'
'Yes, no, and yes,' the Doctor replied, winking. 'After all, the ghost of Gallifrey's King Arthur walks abroad, the Matrix is crumbling and the Patrexes want to use circular script on their collars...'
'In other words,' Ace said smugly, 'sometimes weird shit happens, and who you gonna call?'
The next morning, Ace felt icy water filling her boot and decided she was quickly going off Gallifrey. She'd been expecting flying cars and soaring towers, but after an hour's wandering, they were still stuck in the basement.
At least, the Doctor kept insisting on calling it a basement. To Ace, the flooded murky chambers looked more like empty train stations – lofty arches and high, intricately carved ceilings. The most optimstic, idealist architecture, punctured cruelly by the brackish water through which they waded. Had the designer of this underground world lived to see his masterwork clogged with skittering rodents and mouldering piles of detritus? Ace supposed he had; Time Lords lived ages, didn't they?
'So where is everyone?' she asked again. The Doctor didn't answer straight away, he was peering sadly at a grimy statue half-submerged to their left. It had probably been an impressive piece originally, an armoured warrior waving a broken sword. '-NYOS UNBOWED' read the sash draped over its powerful shoulders.
'Everything fades,' the Doctor muttered, nodding respectfully to the statue, 'One day's news is the next day's eBay packaging. One epoch's city becomes the next one's mortar. Indifference increases. Perhaps only in my head can all Time burn brightly.'
Ace sploshed up to her friend, having long ago resolved to call him on his portentous bullshit at every opportunity. 'My head too, Professor. You're doing your solitary God act again.'
The Doctor frowned irritably, not taking his eyes off the statue for an instant. 'I've lived so long, Ace. I feel Time. I know her ways. I can feel something coming and I already know I'll be at its centre.' He looked anguished. 'I think... I might have to do something terrible.'
With a sigh, Ace rested her chin on his shoulder. 'Time will tell,' she whispered, and he smiled as she spoke.
The travellers jumped as a resounding boom sounded from the vaulted ceiling and a thin trickle of dust hissed down on to the Doctor's hat.
'Be you friends of Gallifrey? Or art thou aught that Time Lord may question?' the voice echoed all around them, and Ace rolled her eyes as they began to rise up into the air.
'Gordon Bennett, cheesy or what? If I don't see a hovercar soon, I'm going to stamp my foot.'
The Doctor didn't reply, but cast his eyes downward one last time, as the ancient sculpture melted into the gloom beneath their feet.
The hovercar burst down through a cloudbank into clear orange skies. Ace whooped, ignoring her stomach's hollow lurching as the pilot flicked a lever to level out the plummeting craft.
From the air, Gallifrey was beautiful, no question about that. Gloomy Peakesque corridors and cloisters had given way to sprawling mountain ranges, psychedelic tracts of woodland and architectural dreamscapes. As she glimpsed a range of crystal-tipped peaks slip from the hovercar's field of view, Ace turned to the driver, no longer caring that she'd been shuffled out of the way like a kid.
'So, is your engine the only thing you got to impress me with?' she asked in her best throaty whisper.
Her driver grinned. It was a nice grin, although there was a certain cold glint to the man's eyes that suggested it didn't get out much. He was still well hunky though, with a bear-like torso and a riot of gorgeous curly hair. If only he'd take off that ridiculous hat!
'Lady Ace,' he replied in curt, clipped tones, 'You've just left the Capitol of Gallifrey, which encompasses all seven wonders of this Universe. If that left you uninspired, I hesitate to think what else could impress you.'
Their vehicle was zooming out over a vast lake, languid waters of purest amber. The water beneath them barely rippled as a massive emerald worm erupted from the depths, jaws arcing towards the car's fuselage.
The jaws snapped shut just a couple of metres from the speeding hovercar, and Ace's fascination increased as her driver barely flinched. They were flying lower now, a range of mountains filling the windscreen as they approached the lake's far shore. She couldn't wait to see what stunt her new friend was about to pull.
'We both have our guardians, Ace,' Maxil said quietly, 'We're both pawns of immense forces for good. Forces of such absolute morality that they do – and ask us to do in their name – the most terrible things.'
Ace stretched in her seat. 'Don't fancy yours much,' Ace could make out specks of vegetation on the mountains now, far above Earth's hardiest treeline.
'The High Council? Hah, the Chancellery Guard's allegiance lies with a far older authority, through few among its ranks guess at it.'
Alert now, and more than a little nervous, Ace sat up, noticing as she did so that they were accelerating again. 'What authority?'
'I'm glad I met you, Ace.' Maxil took his hands off the controls and closed his eyes.
The hovercar smashed into Mount Antonym at roughly twice the speed of sound. The craft crumpled on impact with the sheer rockface, the wreckage tumbling almost gently to the snowfield some hundred metres below.
Ten seconds later, the chunk of twisted metal was buried under the resulting avalanche.
There was no explosion, no noisy ball of flames, no fitting epitaph to the bomber of Perivale. Just an odd scent of roses lingering over the fresh snow.
The Doctor paced Romana's study rapidly, to the point where she was worrying about the wear on the carpet. 'It's a long time till nightfall, Doctor. I'd really try to relax if I were you.'
She was rewarded with a furious scowl, but the Doctor threw himself into an armchair anyway. His glance flicked briefly over Romana's tall bookcases and holographic flutterwing collections, but couldn't bring himself to small talk.
'How long has this been happening? And why can't your precious Matrix help?'
Romana sighed, her high collar sagging in time with her shoulders. 'The Matrix is giving us rather too much information to deal with these days, most of it contradictory. How long? A couple of months now, on and off. He's even been seen near Mount Lung, but mostly He sticks to the rooftop. He needs you, it seems.' She grew irritated by the Doctor's silent stare. 'Look, it's not as though any of this is my fault? You think the High Council tells me anything?'
Suddenly, the Doctor smiled. 'No, I doubt they do. How did you get back from E-Space, anyway?'
Romana took an abrupt interest in the reports crowding her desk. 'You, Ace and Benny gave me a lift.' She risked a glance upwards, and predictably the Doctor's face was suffused with anger.
'You've corrupted our timelines? Why?'
She took a long sip of tea to compose herself before replying. 'Something to do with Ace, with your plans for her. There's some sort of crisis on the cards and I could do with your friend being a little less resourceful than she'll turn out to be.'
The Doctor leaned back in the armchair and steepled his fingers, his eyes shadowed. His old friend was playing her own games, he realised, and knew more than she was letting on. How many centuries had it been since they'd trusted each other with their lives on a weekly basis? What had she been through in the meantime? Come to that, could she still see him as her old friend with all the new burdens he'd heaped on his old shoulders?
You were the noblest Romana of them all, he sent, and was pleased to see her blush, flashing that deceptively innocent smile that had gained such depth on the face far older than the Princess on which it was modeled.
Doctor, she began to reply, but was interrupted by a sheet of holopaper coalescing in the light from her desk lamp with a discrete chime. She glanced down, and her face froze.
Ace, she sent without thinking, Oh Doctor, what have I done?
The Doctor stood silently on the ancient flagstones, staring into the still night. He didn't bother to check the alignment of Omega's Ruin, just gazed straight ahead, his umbrella held up to ward off non-existent rain.
A sudden gust of chill air failed to stir him. He ignored the looming presence at his shoulder. His grip tightened on the object in his left hand, a faded and battered Blue Peter badge. Hours passed.
'We are Rassilon,' the apparition insisted eventually.
The Doctor sighed, but did not move. 'Yes, you are, aren't you? Still flouncing around like a widowed Queen Mother. Most legends have the decency to stay dead.'
Rassilon laid a translucent hand on the Doctor's shoulder, and he flinched in spite of himself at the icy touch. 'But you know the privilege of the dead?'
The Doctor looked down at the flagstones. 'To die no more,' he growled.
'War is coming, Doctor. I know you've felt its shape... in the Time Winds. Gallifrey will need you, before the end.'
'I don't care,' the Doctor retorted, knuckles whitening around the badge.
'This War could wipe out the Time Lords forever. You will be needed.' If anything, Rassilon sounded amused.
Finally the Doctor whirled round to face the ghost, and roared into its shadowed face. 'I understand, I just don't care! This world is so long dead to me, yet you keep dragging me back! How many more friends will I lose in your name, Lord Rassilon? Sarah Jane, Romana, Peri, Ace, Jamie, Zoe, Leela – all separated from me at your behest! I desire nothing but silence from the Time Lords.'
Rassilon was calm in the face of the Doctor's fury, although he drifted back a couple of feet. 'Even though you're responsible for this war?' He held up a hand mirror as the Doctor opened his mouth. The younger Time Lord bit back his retort as his reflection melted into a new image.
A man with impossibly curly hair held two wires, almost touching, his expression pained.
Instantly the view dissolved to the same man, bent low over a microphone on the TARDIS console, which belched smoke. After a few seconds this was replaced by a younger man, slowly raising a hefty gun to point at a man in a wheelchair.
When the view became that of the Doctor leading a floating coffin through suburban London streets, it faded slowly back to the Time Lord's grim reflection.
'They wouldn't dare...' the Doctor whispered, his face almost as pale as Rassilon's own.
'They would. They have. They are closer than you know. We need Time's Champion.'
Casting his eyes to the flagstones once more, the Doctor shrugged. 'Time's Champion? Or history's slave? I've caught echoes of what is to come, the clawed fist clenched around this world's timeline. It will be ugly.'
'War usually is,' Rassilon agreed, and the stars blazed through him a little lighter as he began to fade into the night. 'We ask much of you, Doctor, and will ask still more before the end, I have no doubt. When the time comes for you to act, know that you carry my absolute authority to set matters right.'
When he was alone again on the bleak rooftop, the Doctor managed a morose half-smile. 'The Game of Rassilon. I'm a chess piece being played across a thousand boards.'
Ace fell through the history of worlds. She blinked, and plummeted through the life of a Cyberlieutenant, backwards. She shuddered, and passed through the timeline of the Tudor dynasty, then exploded in glittering pink fragments across a drifting nebula. She gloried in her insignificance, and whooped with joy at Time's barrage. Within a minute, Ace became older than any human who'd ever lived. She'd seen civilisations, even whole worlds, blossom and, inevitably, shrivel. The majesty of the Universe flickered behind her mind's eye.
Slowly, the Universe faded, and Ace threw up her arms in sudden panic as a pair of shiny steel gates rushed up to meet her from the heart of a black hole.
'A War is coming, Ace,' a voice boomed, 'probably the biggest war this Universe will ever see. And you are already at its centre. Are you prepared for war?'
Ace shrugged. 'I was born... prepared. Who are you?'
Suddenly Ace was walking between banks of pink roses in an ornamental garden, next to a man in purple hooded robes. Birds were suspended in mid-flight, and just above her there was a spherical mass of feathers, an explosive meeting of pigeon and sparrowhawk, frozen in time. 'I'm the first of the Time Lords. They named the Rod of Rassilon after me.' His voice became a little gloomy. 'I understand every single Academy student in Gallifreyan history has found that terribly amusing.'
Ace tried to keep a straight face, but couldn't resist asking. 'So is it true people can become immortal by fingering your ring?'
Rassilon stopped dead in his tracks. Ace worried she was about to get a smiting, but instead he sat down on the path and crossed his legs.
'OK, let's stop messing about,' he said, 'You're here because I need to get a message to the Doctor, and if he came to this place himself, we'd be showing our hand a little too early.'
Ace sat down next to him, although the gravel was far from comfortable. 'So what's the message?'
President Vorlaar had not enjoyed his Presidency much, on the whole. A nasty slip on the way back to his stateroom after his inauguration had forced his ninth regeneration, and in an instant he'd lost his venerable mane of silver hair and enigmatic crinkly twinkly eyes. Gallifrey's President was now fifteen hundred, going on nineteen.
Now the Doctor stood before the High Council's closed session, not bothering to conceal his surprise at Vorlaar's smooth hands and acne-scarred forehead. Vorlaar shuffled in his robes and tried not to think about how many presidents this wretched renegade had managed to depose, one way or another.
'Doctor,' he implored, 'War is impossible – we don't bother the wider Universe, we don't want it bothering us.'
It was awful. The Prydonian maverick stood in the centre of the circular chamber, overlooked by the hovering oak seats of the High Council, and he still somehow seemed to be looking down on them.
'War is upon you, Lord President, convenient or not. This enemy will track you, lay siege to you, hurt you any way they can. You can't hide, can't observe, can't manipulate. You must fight.'
Far away, a single snowflake fluttered down from a cloudy orange sky, the last straggler from a brief flurry. A gentle breeze blew over the slopes, tossing the flake back into the air several times before it could complete its fall.
Eventually it settled on the packed snow, unique among millions of its kind. The ground beneath it was far warmer than a snowfield had any right to be. And it was shaking.
A hand punched through the snow from beneath, fingers uncurling like petals to face the sun. A stream of golden energy flared from the palm, the surface of which was shifting and blurring in the morning light.
Shivering and flaring, Ace hauled herself out of the snow. Blinded by the infinite possibilities that boiled before her eyes, she crawled hesitantly from the snowcave formed by her revival.
'Professor, I'm never going to take the piss again,' she said fervently, and collapsed into the snow.
The Doctor paused in his haranguing, suddenly aware the High Council's attention was elsewhere. Cardinals and Chancellors were frowning and rubbing their temples, muttering to each other in confusion. He hesitated, probed his own dormant telepathic link. A huge release of artron energy. Someone had regenerated, somewhere in the wilderness.
'This can't be right,' Vorlaar mumbled, his brow furrowed in concentration.
Swinging his umbrella listlessly, the Doctor rolled his eyes heavenward. 'How refreshing that some things can still rouse your interest where interstellar war and unimaginable desolation fails so spectacularly.'
Professor Sparthiel piped up, in a voice like dead leaves. 'Oh, we know your tone by now, young Doctor, hectoring and smug. Yes, we know it very well indeed – you sound the alarum, cry doom unto the Universe and then scurry off to sort it all out. It's ever been your way, and I'm sure your primitive friends are suitably impressed. This is different.'
The old academic pushed a bong finger from his voluminous sleeves and jabbed at the air emphatically, to general murmurs of approval. 'This is prophecy, young Doctor.'
Even Cardinal Darshana, a firebrand only two hundred years older than the Doctor himself, was nodding in awe. 'Just as the Matrix said.'
'A rebirth in fire and ice, on the slopes of Mount Antonym.'
'Immaculate regeneration from one not of Gallifrey born.'
'The Time Lord to make flesh Great Rassilon's will! The legend walks in the ice!'
Wild savage hope swelled the Doctor's leaden hearts. An alien regeneration? Surely Ace had been the only offworlder?
He crushed the impulse mercilessly. Even if true, he was needed. He had to be the Doctor now, however amusing these patronising patriarchs found his ways. And he knew them well enough, they'd play on any mad hope, pounce on any weakness – not out of malice, but through sheer force of habit.
'And what does this manifestation portend?' he asked drily.
Sparthiel bared his brown teeth in the rictus he believed to be an indulgent smile. 'It's the herald of war, young Doctor. The last Great Time War is upon us, and the legend will point the way!'
The Doctor's mouth, hung open, indignant. 'But I've just -'
'Oh, don't sulk.'
Ace forced herself to take another step forward. Her DM boot sank deep into powdery snow. Strange, her mind was soaring through the stratosphere, buoyed by clouds of pure mathematics bursting in clouds of helium beneath her. Her body was leaden, sluggish, a flesh prison for her quicksilver thoughts. Only the memory of a dozen disaster movies (two of which would never be filmed) was stopping her from curling up to sleep in the snow.
Where was she going anyway? Like she knew the way back to the TARDIS, over half a crappy super-evolved continent away. She blinked as her vision blurred, and swore as she realised the snow was starting to fall again.
What was back for her there anyway? The Doctor was supposed to watch her back, not pack her off in rocketcars with suicidal nutters. Had he taken his eye off the ball? Or did he just not give a toss now her was back at home with his snooty bloody BFF?
She froze mid-step. In that case, why keep going? She'd die on Gallifrey, one way or the other. Even the loftiest of her new thoughts plummeted back towards their cold meat shell crawling over the planet's most inhospitable peaks. She felt her knees trembling, her thighs straining to lower her gratefully back to the blinding snow from which she'd crawled.
The landscape blurred again, and no amount of blinking brought the world back into sharp focus. Ace's vision was growing dim, a circle of snowy wilderness glimpsed through a long tunnel of the most profound darkness. She sank to her knees, scarcely noticing the plume of golden energy that poured from her mouth as her cheek hit the snow.
To die by your side, well the pleasure the privilege is mine... She winced as her life began to flash before her eyes. She'd been, she realised, almost insufferably pretentious. Perhaps this was for the best.
Just as Ace's eyes could stay open no longer, a figure, robed, appeared in her limited eyeline and stalked towards her across the snow. If he tells me to go to Dagobah, I'll give him such a slap...
'What is the privilege of the dead, Ace?' The figure's voice was honeyed and warm, but persistent like a drillbit in her frontal lobe.
'Dunno,' she replied, frowning.
'Then live until you find out, daughter of Rassilon.' The figure pointed at its feet, where grew a single flower. Ace summoned her last speck of strength to focus on it, to home in on the petals, the intricate stamen. It was, she realised, just a daffodil! But in the depths of her blackest day it somehow shone, it looked like the... daffodilest...
A heavy boot crushed the bloom, and the figure vanished into the blizzard.
'Gay,' said the boot's owner in a bored sing-song voice. Ace felt strong warm hands on her shoulders, pulling her up. 'Lady Ace, your status precludes such pedestrian epiphanies.'
Ace shook off the firm grip as soon as she was steady on her feet, but a smirk lingered trembling at the corner of her mouth. 'It's all that's stopping me from kicking you down this mountain, sunshine. Regeneration?'
Maxil nodded, a mass of chestnut curls bobbing around his slimmer features. 'I have to confess to a fair deal of surprise, Lady Ace. I was convinced that my painful demise up on the peak would be sufficiently definitive to preclude this embarrassing conversation.'
'You'll wish it had been once we get indoors, bogbrain.'
So the reborn West London warrior continued her stroll through Antonym's foothills with her newly Byronic beefcake buddy in tow. And it was the strolliest stroll she'd ever strolled.
The High Council scurried excitedly down the Capitol's corridors, winged collars clipping each other in the Gods' haste. The Doctor followed grimly, measuring his pace with his umbrella, his brow dark with approaching tempests. He glowered at the corridor's fittings – still concrete, still art-deco. He'd promised Ace a tour of the galaxy's most revered seat of knowledge, and it still looked like an East Midlands polytechnic.
Romana appeared at his elbow, wreathed in smiles. 'So your Mockney is a born-again Time Lord prophet, who saw that coming?'
The Doctor's eyes flashed with anger, and Romana changed tack. 'Oh, don't be like that. I keep telling you, I'm so far out of the loop I got more intrigue in E-Space.'
'Why's there an ancient and exciting Time Lord prophecy that I've never heard of?'
She shrugged. 'The Panatropic Net churns them out almost weekly these days. Prophecy On Demand, I called it. No one laughed.'
On the lower steppes of Mount Antonym stood a ramshackle hut. Once it could have been the archetypal gingerbread cottage, all intricately-carved porticos and trellis windows. Now, however, all but one pane of glass was smashed, and the chimney had collapsed into a pile of rubble.
Ace was more worried that in the midst of a vicious blizzard, no snow was settling on it. Even her Mum's old place was better insulated than that. Still, it was shelter, and judging by the weight Maxil was putting on her shoulder, his regeneration hadn't gone as smoothly as her own. It would have to do.
Propping Maxil up against a snowdrift, she aimed a precise kick at the door's latch. The impact was awkward, and jarred up her ankle painfully. She put her weight back on to both feet gingerly – there was no harm done. Had her legs grown a bit longer? Wicked – not that she'd let on, of course.
She was just steeling herself to boot the latch again, when the door creaked open a crack. Ace nodded with satisfaction, and hauled Maxil over the threshold...
... and into a ballroom the size of a warehouse, full of crystal chandeliers that dangled mere yards over the dancefloor, heavy with twinkling sapphires. All around, the dancers were frozen mid-step, in elaborate robes and animal masks. Ace was too exhausted to do anything but shake her head.
There was a mechanical rasp from over her left shoulder. A golden-wigged doorman in a blue tunic and tafelshrew mask had stepped forward.
'The Lady Dorotheamcshaneperivalum and companion,' he announced in a voice full of grinding gears. There was a faint click and music swelled up from the floor as the dance resumed.
'A clockwork ballet?' Ace grinned as she threaded her way through the frenetic scene. 'Do they do the one from the chcolate ads?'
Maxil's expression was stony. 'They're only supposed to announce guests with funny enough names,' he muttered.
Ace ignored him, marvelling at the dance. She could move freely through the packed floor and wondered for a moment whether the crowds were automatically parting before her, but when she looked back to the entrance, she realised her route had been far from direct. She moved not through the dancers, but with them, part of the dance by instinct. She belonged at its heart, and even after all her travels that choked Perivale's lonely daughter. She extended an arm gracefully, and allowed a passing automaton with a fox mask to whisk her away into the music.
On the third circuit of the ballroom, her reborn muscles still fizzing with energy, she realised Maxil was still standing by the door, pouting. 'Wallflower!' she called merrily, receiving a sour look in return.
'Lady Ace, this is an emergency facility. You have to activate it before our artron reserves are depleted.'
Ace let go of her partner, and pirouetted awkwardly, taking in the whole ballroom. The lights were gently but firmly sliding down to blood-red emergency levels, and the dance had a new beat, the heady waltz underscored by a mournful tolling bell. 'Gordon Bennett, it's a bloody TARDIS!'
'Barely, Lady Ace. A small step above a Jade Pagoda, no more. Now please lay in a course!'
She was about to ask how, when it clicked. She found the swell of the music in her head, realising it was nothing more than the music she'd expect to hear in such a place. She smiled softly, searching for the Doctor's song.
Tricky. What music could encapsulate the metronomic double-beat of her very best friend? What chord spoke of the boundless heroism of the clown that cast down Gods? Could any combination of eight notes describe the Doctor and her? She smiled. Yeah.
'I was working as a waitress in a cocktail bar,' she sang in more or less the right key. Instantly, the dance was altered, and Ace flung herself into it. Flashes of light whizzed around the floor as the power came back. The little patches zig-zagged crazily, like a drunken disco ball. Maxil looked up, and snorted.
The chandelier was gently rising and falling in the centre of the room.
The Panopticon was empty when the Doctor and the High Council burst in excitedly. The Doctor's brow was still furrowed, but Romana noticed his fingers drumming on his umbrella handle manically. Same old Doctor, she thought, gearing up for battle.
The President stepped up to the central dais, spreading his arms wide. 'The hour is upon us!' he yelled. 'Our enemy will be revealed, and Gallifrey's oldest hero will lead us into battle!'
There was a cheer, but it was decidedly muted. The High Council were becoming aware that they were all just standing round an empty room while the Doctor smirked at them.
Romana stole a glance at her pocket watch, then thrust her hands in her pockets with a barely audible harrumph.
The old pillars of the Panopticon shook as a wheezing groaning noise split the air. The Time Lords stirred in anticipation as a ramshackle cottage barged its way into being, right next to the President. Vorlaar sank to his knees.
'Niiiimon,' muttered the Doctor, but Romana shushed him with an elbow to the ribs and a reproving look.
The next moment, Ace was charging out of the TARDIS, almost knocking her friend flat with the force of her hug. 'Greatest civilisation of the Universe and it looks a lot like South Wales. You're well rid of this dump, Professor.' She was about to say more, but felt moisture on her face. 'Are you crying?'
'Yes.'
'OK, I'll start too.'
The President had scrambled to his feet, and watched reunion with some dismay, but now he pointed at Maxil as the regenerated guard emerged. 'The traitor returns! Just as was written... just now! Chancellery Guard, arrest this man!'
With a series of thunderclaps of displaced air, a dozen guards materialised in a semi-circle around the cottage, stasers trained on Maxil. He seemed singularly unimpressed. 'I hardly think any of these fellows is likely to lay a hand on me,' he said with a trace of his previous self's swagger.
The guards looked as though they agreed, but raised their stasers anyway at the President's signal. Ace tensed as her murderer and rescuer faced death from a dozen angles. She glanced to the Doctor.
But the Doctor was looking up towards the rafters, where a cloaked figure bobbed in the air a few feet from the crystal domed roof.
As the members of the High Council followed his gaze, they knelt in awe. Rassilon wore his simple robes, but stood on a strange floating disc. It descended slowly, and by the time time he was level with the cottage's ruined chimney, only the Doctor, Ace and Romana were still standing.
'Show us,' President Vorlaar implored. 'Show us the enemy we are destined to fight. We will prove ourselves worthy of your heritage, Lord Rassilon.'
Rassilon just smiled, a mournful grimace that didn't reach his shadowed eyes. 'Time will tell,' he murmured softly. 'It always does.' He pointed down at the cottage, which slowly began to dematerialise. Soon it was gone, except...
Ace realised there'd not been many times when she'd seen a TARDIS dematerialise from outside. But this wasn't right; there was a cloud of twinkling lights in the air where it had been. Twinkling faintly, fading quickly, but definitely there.
The High Council had noticed as well, the Time Lords were nudging each other and pointing excitedly.
Still clutching the Doctor, Ace felt a sneeze building around the bridge of her nose. Great timing, she thought, pinching her nose and squinting to try and suppress the instinct. Until she realised that Rassilon was staring at her expectantly. Oh yeah, the message.
She opened her mouth to speak, but sneezed instead. A torrent of golden energy sprayed out from her, covering the dais in energy. In the middle of the shining cloud, a new shape could be seen.
Gasping with horror, the Time Lords all took a step back. It was a squat domed shape, maybe five feet tall, bristling with bumps and rivets and one nasty-looking gun. Even defined by pin-pricks particles of energy, it exuded malevolence, slowly rotating in the air above the dais.
Vorlaar's mouth worked soundlessly for several seconds before managing. 'What?'
Triumphantly, Ace beat Romana and the Doctor to the answer. 'It's a Dalek,' she said with a grin and a proud look at her friend. 'It's OK, the Professor wipes the floor with them.'
The Doctor smiled at his friend, but Romana's expression was enigmatic. 'The question is,' she said, 'what is a Dalek doing in the Matrix?'
'Spying,' he replied, swinging his umbrella to his shoulder. 'With a bit of manipulation thrown in, I should think, to soften you up for invasion. It probably started as a speck of mental energy in a dying Time Lord's mind. Check the record for a death caused by a mysterious space plague. They're good with space plagues,' he finished, morosely.
Vorlaar's voice still showed the shock he felt. 'How long?' he whispered.
'Hard to say. We've isolated ourselves from the rest of the Universe, guided our evolution to the point where we're sterile and fatally allergic to aspirin and celery dye, and we rely on a computerised crystal ball to guide policy. I think we can safely say it's a been a while.'
Sparthiel began to splutter indignantly from his knees, but the Doctor hadn't finished, pacing around the dais at top speed, his eyes fixed on the Dalek. 'It's been in there for generations, aeons. Perhaps even longer. So why did Rassilon wait until now?'
A second figure shimmered into being in Rassilon's stead. 'He considered it dealt with, Doctor, through the interception of my Time Scoop.'
The Doctor stopped dead, lost in remembrance. He'd been old, so old in that body. So near the end but still flushed with youthful exuberance. His friends had failed to grasp the source of his bad temper – wrongly ascribing his irritable outbursts to his apparent old age, never once realising the frustration of a virtual adolescent trapped in a near-useless body. In the privacy of his brain, he'd been fizzing with vigour, but even so he'd missed the obvious. Overjoyed at finding his Susan and defeating a Dalek, his old eyes had missed the telltale blue halo that marked the Death Zone as being a separate reality from the Matrix-generated shiny corridor in which he'd battled.
Squinting up at the new arrival, he grinned broadly. 'Lord Borusa, I do believe you're indulging in vulgar fascetiousness.'
Borusa bowed. 'When I left, you were but the pupil, but now I am the Master.'
'Well make yourself useful, bloody Obi-Wan!' roared Ace, pointing at the Dalek, which was starting to take on a metallic colour, growing more solid by the moment.
'They know we've detected them,' Romana noted, tucking a stray wisp of hair behind her ear. 'I'd guess it will manifest in about 57 seconds and kill us all.'
President Vorlaar threw up his arms, transfixed by a scything burst of hard radiation, his face contorted in a silent scream even as the skull beneath grinned at a final joke. He hung there for a long moment before crashing to the cold floor.
Behind him, four Daleks flanked Davros, who scowled at the High Council from the heart of his Emperor Dalek casing. A salvo of staser fire from the Chancellery Guard spattered harmlessly against their energy shielding.
Taking an instinctive step backwards, Romana crashed into Maxil. 'But that's not possible,' she gasped. 'The transduction barriers... we would have been warned!'
'We were abducted and marooned in an infinite ocean aboard a Time Lord craft, then ejected into Event One, where all time and space are one,' Davros wheezed, as the four Daleks began to spread out to cover the Panopticon.
The Doctor tilted his head to one side. 'You mapped the TARDIS's interior space at the Hydrogen Inrush and extrapolated back to locate it within pan-dimensional space. That's very clever.' He looked genuinely impressed.
'And established a time corridor within your craft, Doctor, so that when you returned to Gallifrey we could invade in force.'
'You call this force?' asked Rassilon, a smile playing over his transparent lips. He snapped his fingers and one of the four Daleks disintegrated in a shower of golden sparks. The effort cost the old Time Lord, however, and he and Borusa faded away.
'The rest are outside,' quipped Ace, patting her empty pockets in a fruitless search for explosives.
'Exterminate!' There was another burst of light, and Sparthiel joined his President on the floor. 'In fact, thousands of my Daleks are consolidating the basement levels where your TARDIS materialised, Doctor. We have prepared long for this moment, when you return to Gallifrey of your own free will. Your collision with the Arc of Infinity was too soon for my purpose, and the Death Zone and orbital facility were unsuitable. Now, Gallifrey is ours!'
The Doctor stared at Davros's unblinking third eye. 'You still have absolutely no idea where you are, Davros.' He closed his eyes.
Instantly the Panopticon began to shift and bubble and warp. Ace held on to the Doctor as the entire chamber dissolved into a riot of crazy lights and nasty whooshing sounds. None of the other Time Lords looked too bothered, but Davros looked around wildly, clearly out of his depth.
The world settled into a new shape, and they were back in the Panopticon. Only it was different, a vast arena covered by a crystal roof at least a mile above the central dais. Colossal statues of Gallifreyan heroes lined the eight walls, and the floor was burnished bronze. The Doctor and Romana both blazed with brilliant white radiance.
'This is the Citadel of the Time Lords, and we inhabit it completely. Leave this place or be obliterated utterly.'
With a faint whir from their cannons, the remaining Daleks rounded on the Doctor. They fired together and Ace was flung away from her friend.
Instead of falling, however, the Doctor threw back his head and laughed. Flinging his arms wide, he bathed in the lethal energy and began to grow, until he towered at least twenty feet over the Daleks and the High Council. 'I am President of Gallifrey!' he gloated. 'How can guns threaten me in my inner sanctum?'
'This can not be, Time Lord!' Davros shrieked, panicking at the sight of his old enemy wielding such incredible power. 'Your people are decadent, spineless!'
'Tell that to the vampires,' growled Romana, shining ever brighter. 'Tell it to the War Lords and tell it to the Minyans.'
'Who?'
The Doctor pierced Davros with a dark stare, his eyes flashing. 'Exactly!' He pointed at the Daleks and their creator with the index fingers of both hand. There was a blinding flash...
Ace opened her eyes, and found she was lying on the floor of the Panopticon, the slightly snug chamber she'd first found herself in when the cottage materialised. There was no sign of the Daleks or Davros. The Doctor, all five foot something of him, was smiling quietly as the Time Lords cheered.
Romana shook her head in exasperation. 'Look that's just not fair. There's no way you could have known about the time corridor.'
The cheering continued, and she smiled in spite of herself. The Doctor shrugged, a little sheepishly. 'The time corridor was a bit of a nasty shock but I knew something was going to happen. It seemed only sensible to tuck us away in the Matrix, sticking a Seventh Door portal over the entrance to the Panopticon.'
Darshana was still impressed, pumping the Doctor's hand. 'Nevertheless, your manipulation of the Panatropic Net was remarkable, Doctor! Unprecedented control!'
Delighted with the opportunity to point out exactly how clever he'd been, the Doctor was speaking faster and faster. 'Well, it was a bit of a strain until Ace arrived, then all that artron energy she produced gave me a bit of a boost. Then it was just a case of blasting the Daleks through their own Matrix conduit, through the Eye of Harmony link in my TARDIS and back down their time corridor. That should have purged the Dalek influence from the Matrix, by the way.'
'And the thousands of Daleks in the basements?' Romana was still giving the Doctor a rough ride in the midst of the celebration, and it occurred to Ace that she might be jealous.
'I suspect that was a lie, Romana,' the Doctor said with a wink. 'Those were the Emperor's Guard, the most lethal Daleks ever bred, in prototype armour. They could have conquered any world alone. Davros only started bluffing when he realised no one was intimidated by them – he needed something from us or we'd all have been dead within seconds of them entering.'
She sniffed disdainfully. 'Well, so much for the Last Great Time War.'
All sounds of jubilation stopped instantly as the smile fell from the Doctor's face. 'They're Daleks, Romana, they'll never give up. And they've examined me enough times to know that I can't really double my size and bend space around my finger. Stealth has failed, so it will be open war now.'
'Begun this Time War has,' Maxil quipped quietly, earning himself a sharp look from Ace.
On the roof that night, the Doctor and Romana stood side by side, eyes trained on Omega's Ruin as it crawled across the dark sky.
'What will I do with Ace now?' the Doctor asked lightly, though his eyes looked strained. 'Her timeline's skewed, she's hybridised Gallifreyan, what future can I offer her?'
'I've been forced to become a politician, and I've noticed politicians have a brilliant way of solving problems. Why don't you just pretend this never happened?'
The Doctor opened his mouth, then thought better of it. Will she forgive me?
Romana looked out over the nocturnal landscape. You skew all our timelines Doctor, you shape us all a new destiny, she sent with a smile, and we all forgive you with all our hearts.
Come with us.
Of course, Doctor. But... after the War. Gallifrey needs me here.
Omega's Ruin had passed the spire without incident. No restless spirits stalked the Capitol's rooftops that night, and the two friends' sigh of relief was palpable. They turned to leave, but Romana grabbed the Doctor's sleeve.
When the War comes, she started, and then thoughts weren't enough and she pulled the Doctor close, 'Come back for me.'
They crooked fingers.
When the TARDIS was safely away from Gallifrey, and the Doctor had sealed the Dalek Time Corridor, deep in the cloisters, Ace sat down with him in the console room and learned about the Doctor's people. For once he held nothing back and spoke of Looms, cats, owls, and the fear of regeneration. The words spilled out of him as he recounted tales of the Vampire War and the Death Zone, and they cried together over the sad fate of Minyos, before Ace cheered as she heard of its surviving colony.
'Doctor, what happened to me? What am I, now?'
Tears sprang to the Doctor's eyes, but he smiled with fierce pride. 'You're a half-human Time Lord, traveling through time and space in a battered old Police Box, fighting monsters and saving lives.'
It was a long hug.
And when Ace had gone to bed, still grinning from ear to ear at her wonderful new heritage, the Doctor's face clouded with sorrow as he walked to the console and activated the telepathic circuits. Ace needed to remember, but Time needed her to forget. He pressed a button. Alone again.