Chapter 1 - The Nature of War

The Black Guardian frowned and snatched his fingers back from the board in surprise.

The White Guardian' brows rose as he too watched the flames leap up and consume the silver insect.

"You've made Her angry," the White Guardian murmured and the Black snarled at him.

"Me? You're the one who put the second knight out there!" He pointed out. "You know how attached She gets to the Lovers."

The White Guardian leaned back and sighed. Perhaps he had been playing with fire there, but the pawns were in play again and that was not a small thing.

"Perhaps then, you should be cautious in your own play," the White Guardian pointed out with a touch of smugness and the Black Guardian frowned suddenly, as though he was rethinking some of his moves.

As powerful as the Guardians were, there were powers greater still and the Prime Spark was one of them. She rarely paid them much heed and they preferred it that way, neither of them wanted to be swept from the board, after all. The White Guardian's smugness faded and he began to wonder if the two of them had moved a piece too hot for even them to handle.

"Your move then," he sighed, waiting to see what the Black Guardian was going to do.

From an ebon sleeve was pulled a tiny, silver, metallic Queen. She was crowned with a filigree circlet of insects and carried a rod of command in her hand. The White Guardian sucked in his breath, irritated that he hadn't seen that move coming. Black placed her on the board with a pleased expression that he found quite irritating.

"Very well," he conceded and put out his hand for his own next move.

In the medi-bay, the green patterned walls were flecked with blood. A number of the Mashas were lying on medical beds, bandaged and already healing, despite terrible wounds from the Manifold.

Susan turned back to work on Guinn, laying the last sheet of skin protectant on his burns and checking the life support monitors with a desperate urgency. She was shaking like a leaf as she worked and Tomoko stepped up beside her, propping her up when she faltered.

She turned next to the Mashas, going over each one carefully, mending badly healed wounds, cleaning off the silver goop, and re-breaking and re-setting several limbs. She could barely think straight, but her training carried her through it all, her body so programmed to respond to each crisis that she hardly had to concentrate. K-9 was on one side of her and Tomoko on the other, each supporting her in their own way, Tomoko by quite literally holding her upright, K-9 by bringing her the things she needed as she needed them.

When she was done, she dragged herself to the bed next to Guinn's and crawled up onto it.

"Tomoko, K-9, wake me if I'm needed, all right," Susan mumbled.

"Yes, Mistress," he replied.

"You are not waking her unless someone's dying," Tomoko told the robot dog, as Susan fell asleep. She stood over the Time Lady with a frown on her face, wondering what had happened to her hair. She looked like she'd been in a fire... which she probably had, she suddenly realized. She'd nearly burned up.

"I'm serious, K-9, let her rest."

"Yes, Mistress Tomoko," he replied and whined a bit as he settled on the bed next to Guinn.

"Is he okay now?" she asked softly, not wanting the others to hear her.

"He has gone into a Healing Coma, which is a positive occurrence, but does not negate the possibility that he might cease to function," the dog replied.

"When will we know?" Tomoko asked and the dog whined softly again.

"Unknown," he replied and she sighed and looked down at Guinn.

"Don't do this to them, you!" she scolded and frowned deeply. "Which reminds me, where's the other one?" She turned and left the medi-bay, realizing that all three of them must be falling apart and only two of them were resting.

"Koschei!" Tomoko grumbled as she came into the console room. "You look like a bag of drowned weasels." She scowled as she took in the bloodshot eyes, the bruised look to his face, the way he was nearly staggering as he moved around the console.

"Have to keep going, the Manifold... not gone yet," he explained, still flying the TARDIS and she hesitated.

"He's an idiot," Moira said, as she stepped up beside Tomoko. "He's not going to be able to keep this up."

"Moira's right, you can't pilot like this, you're falling over!" She hit her earpiece, switching frequencies. "Doctor! Doctor, can you hear me?"

"Quite loudly and clearly, Tomoko," he replied with an audible wince.

"I'm on my way over, Koschei's done for, Guinn may not pull through, and Susan is out cold. We're out of pilots!"

"What do you mean, he's done for? Is he injured?" the Doctor replied in a panicked tone.

"Not sure, he's passing out at the console, I think it may be exhaustion, since his vitals seem stable."

"I'm fine," Koschei muttered, wobbling as he moved around the console. "Just need to get free of this swarm..." He continued to move, his eyes glazed and his voice slurring his words.

"How many fingers am I holding up?" challenged Tomoko.

"About thirty, but who's counting," he snapped. "We can't stay here, the goo is toxic."

"I'm coming to get you, Doctor," Tomoko shot back over the radio. "Or Rose, incoming five minutes, one of you be ready!"

The Doctor looked at Rose and she shrugged.

"You need to get over there, Koschei will never listen to me, you know," she informed him and he nodded. The console was sparking where the overloaded shields were fighting to keep the Manifold off of them and he wasn't happy about leaving her alone there.

"Right," he sighed. "I'll get my things." He ran to fetch his coat and was back a few minutes later, looking grim.

"What's wrong?"

"I wish we could be absolutely certain that we got them all," the Doctor replied.

"Nothing to say we've even won yet!" Rose pointed out. "There's still plenty out there."

"The maths are on our side, the weight of the numbers is turning," he muttered. "The probabilities are collapsing nicely." She stared at him.

"Right. If you say so," she snarked and rolled her eyes, looking at a viewscreen filled with chaos and mayhem. He chuckled softly and shook his head.

"I may be counting my eggs, but even so, I don't want even one insect to escape!" he replied, staring at the screen with a fierce expression.

"Yeah, well, with all those billions of teeny tiny things, I don't know how you'd be able to tell."

"That's what's worrying me as well," he agreed.

The screen showed a rather irritable looking Tomoko standing outside, glaring at the camera, and he quickly opened the doors.

"Right, you ready?" She flipped up her faceplate for a moment.

"Of course," he replied and put a helmet on. He was already wearing a spacesuit, but now he swirled his long brown coat on over it.

"Radio check. Stay close, I'll keep your path clear." Tomoko dived back out the door, clearly expecting him to follow.

"Humph," he muttered. "You stay close on me child, you might learn a thing or two." He gave her a cheeky grin and then launched himself off of the TARDIS, his EMP gun at the ready.

There were still countless numbers of the insects everywhere. The entire sky was filled with clouds of rust and silver. He spun across the sky, his gun sweeping devastation out from him in an elegant arc. He twisted around a cluster of insects, grinning and laughing, and she was fairly certain he was insane.

She jetted after him, watching his back. A small swarm rose up and she took it out in a series of short pulses.

"On your twelve, Doctor, I have the six." She concentrated mainly on taking care of the gaps that occasionally appeared between firing arcs.

"This is fun!" he replied, doing a swan dive right through a large concentration of them, scattering them with three short bursts of the gun. "Whooooo!"

"Whoop! Doctor, better book, look at Susan's TARDIS!" The other TARDIS was wobbling severely. A number of Mashas had taken off out of it and were pulsing around its immediate area, shaking off insects by hand.

"Playtime is over!" he snapped back and he arced upwards, like a dolphin breaching, bringing himself into alignment with the other TARDIS. He snapped off a few shots, clearing a path for them and then rushed straight at the TARDIS, braking only a few metres before he would have smashed into it. He fired the gun at full at the TARDIS itself, causing the external shell to fluoresce and pulse. The insects attached to it were instantly blasted free and he tapped the muzzle of the gun to the faceplate of his suit, like he was saluting the Mashas.

"The surface is EMP proof, but highly conductive," he told them and then grabbed the top of the door and swung himself into the TARDIS, rolling to a stop and bouncing up with a bright smile.

Tomoko was on his heels. She arrived just in time to see Koschei drooping, semi-conscious, Moira supporting the bulk of his weight. She and Tomoko looked at each other. Tomoko nodded.

"Come on," Moira told Koschei, "Bed."

The Doctor moved smoothly to the controls and gave Koschei a look as he struggled to remain.

"Susan needs you now, go to her," he instructed and Koschei nodded, giving in instantly, and left with Moira.

"Big bug is gone, smaller bugs are about half cleaned up, should be mop-up from this point," Tomoko told him, flipping up her faceplate, "But it's going to be a slog for the next few hours."

"Noted," he replied as he ran the boards. "Susan and Guinn? Adie?" he asked.

"Susan's resting. Guinn…" She shook her head. "Well. We certainly have the best medical care available for him, it's possible he may pull through. But if we weren't in a hospital ship with a top notch doctor like Susan?" She shook her head. "No way."

"I don't tend to worry about the 'ifs'," he replied. "The Mashas? Everyone accounted for so far?"

"No one is missing, heavy wounded, most of them sleeping it off in medi-bay, it's stuffed to the gills. Adie was in the zero room, last I heard." He looked up at her sharply at that.

"Is she regenerating?"

"Haven't had time to check, but probably."

"Bugger, that complicates things," he replied. "The Möbius Loops collapsed, from the energy readings, I think that was Susan shunting the Arkytior's energy away from anything alive and inhabited,"

"I think it is gone now, the Arkytior, I mean."

"Obviously, or else we'd all be dead already," the Doctor pointed out absently, his hands flying over the boards.

"Where do you need me, Doctor?"

"In about twenty places at once, but I think your talents would be most effective outside, leading your sisters," he answered, looking up at her with a small smile and she nodded.

"Done. I'm on twenty-one. Just whistle me up if you feel like it," she said, flipped her faceplate back down, and headed outside without another word.

"I'll be here, working out the next thing," he muttered, his mind already far away.

In the Zero Room, five dimensions collapsed and reformed and the energy from that transformation was a golden supernova, contained within the fragile boundaries of three dimensions. Her energy scattered, flowing through her, as it accessed TNA chains, picking and choosing new expressions to the same amino acids. When it finally settled, she had changed outwardly, even though her energy, the flow by which other Time Lords recognized her, was unchanged.

The hole in her soul was still there too, nothing could cure that, but a true death, or a meeting with her bondmate, after all. She thrashed for a minute under the pain of that, as if she had been impaled, writhing until she was curled up in a ball with her hands around her chest, gasping, sobbing.

She was somewhat taller, and a bit less gangly and more curvy than she had been. Her hair had lengthened, taking on a dishwater-blonde colour. Her eyes, when she opened them, were brilliantly blue.

She was in a Zero Room, she realized. This was the first time she'd ever regenerated, but she'd heard the engineers talk about their past ones, so she knew what to do. She ran hands over her face, a tongue along her teeth, and tried to feel her own energy and how it was flowing through this new form.

She knew she ought to have felt something about regenerating, but she was just numb. The shroud of loneliness draped over her by the encounter with the Arkytior was so thick she could almost see it. She thought of Susan, Koschei, and Guinn, who had borne this for two hundred years and closed her eyes for a moment, trying to block out the rest of her life.

But there was nothing to be done about it. She knew that, had known it for some considerable time. At length, when she felt strong enough, she climbed to her feet and then found the door. The battle was still going on, as became apparent the moment she opened the door and heard the doleful ringing of the Cloister Bell. There was work to do.

The Doctor was standing by the console, flying the ship by himself and she could see the brilliant flares of energy streaking out away from him, as though by sheer willpower alone, he was twisting the outcomes to a thousand dice rolls. He looked up at her and smiled.

"You look lovely, my dear," he told her.

"I haven't had time to look," she said, and moved a little awkwardly to the console; her legs were longer and she was having trouble sorting them out.

"You ought to have a second pilot, it's still very thick out there."

He gestured her to the console and she moved to shift the oscillation pattern on the shields again.

"They keep adapting, you have to keep changing it," he warned her and she nodded.

"What is our status?"

"Only you, Rose, and I, are still on our feet. Susan is working to keep Guinn alive, he's rather badly burned. Koschei and Susan are dead on their feet, but too stubborn to collapse." He looked at her. "Runs in the family."

Adie didn't answer immediately, working on the shields.

"Guinn stepped between Susan and the Arkytior," she told the Doctor.

"That doesn't surprise me in the least. I knew he was going to do something impossibly noble and stupid," he grumbled.

"Do you think that he'll make it?" Her voice was very quiet.

"Susan is working on him," he temporized.

"We could have lost this system," Adie pointed out.

"System? Oh Adyra, the last channel for the Arkytior took out half a galaxy! The one before that nearly obliterated our race! The first one caused cataclysms so great that the Eternals went to war with us over it! Her death was the only thing that saved us from their wrath." He was watching her with a great deal of sadness. "I am ... concerned about how they will feel about two of you running about."

"Merely concerned? I find myself quite petrified by that question."

"Well, I've dealt with them before, so, I'm not petrified," he chuckled. "Merely concerned."

"Well, how do you think they will deal with it, then?"

"Poorly," he answered and set the TARDIS spinning quickly, shaking the goop off of it using centrifugal force to disperse them. Adie oscillated the shields, discouraging yet another batch of locusts.

"Could you elaborate on, 'poorly'?"

"I suspect that the 'golden lady' who visited you was an Eternal," he told her and gave her a bitter smile. "That means that they already knew about a lot of things before they had happened. It also means that either their view of the channels has changed drastically, or that one faction sees an advantage in them over another one in the Great Race." Adie said nothing, varying the oscillation, and commented only after the locusts had again been driven away.

"My education is limited," she admitted. "I don't follow half of what you just told me."

"Ah. The Eternals exist outside of time and space, they dwell in eternity. They use us, 'ephemerals', for our creativity, for our imagination and intuition, since they have none. They are constantly battling back and forth, some on the side of the White Guardian and some on the side of the Black Guardian, while still others choose to better only themselves and choose neither order nor chaos. Do you see?" he asked.

She nodded very slowly.

"And you think that they… orchestrated all of this?"

'No, I told you, they have no imaginations at all. I think that one of them, possibly more than one, decided, for whatever reason, to interest themselves in this little drama. What the reason might be, I don't know. I doubt very much that they came up with the idea on their own though. It's not in their natures." He shook his head. "No, I think the Guardians are moving and we're the pawns again."

She closed her eyes momentarily, as if the words were physically painful to her, then opened them again, choosing a different variation of the oscillation frequency.

"You've been a pawn before?"

"Oh yes, Adie, that's my ... function, I suppose," he replied. "I'm always in play."

She frowned at him.

"In play… how, precisely?"

"I'm the Champion of Time, dear, it's not just a pretty title. I'm the White Guardian's favourite toy," he snarled, sounding very unhappy about it. "I don't get to have a peaceful life."

"Am I in play?" Her voice was small.

"We all are, Adie, every single living thing in the universe is a piece on their board. The only difference is that some of us get shoved into the hottest part of the fire far more often."

"I see," she said, her fingers never ceasing in their movements. She fell silent, minding the shields, but saying nothing else. Her face looked both thoughtful and very sad.

"None of which negates free will, Adie," he told her suddenly. "We all have a choice as to how we respond, how we choose to act. That's why he uses me so much, he already knows I will keep buggering on, no matter how bad things get. I don't like it much, but I never will stop, because that would be so much worse."

"We choose how we act," she repeated. "Yes, I agree. The alternatives being worse… yes, I agree with that too." She smiled at him, but it was a smile that didn't have a hint of happiness or amusement in it. "You have the right of it, as usual."

"I'm afraid so," he told her and his eyes were deeply sympathetic. "Not much fun sometimes though, eh?"

"No," She said, "But I knew that… I believe that the mass is beginning to thin, Doctor."

"It is," he agreed. "We just need to keep whittling away at it and we'll have won." He said the words with no indication of joy or triumph, just a profound weariness.

"Or at least driven them off for the moment," she mused.

"Please don't say things like that," he grumbled. "I want them eradicated. They are far too dangerous to be allowed to live."

Adie's tone was neutral.

"Wasn't that the exact premise behind the entire Time War?" She sounded horribly sad.

"What? Destroying the Daleks? Yes and it was the right thing to do. You can sit there and moralize, but the fact is that people will die. Millions, billions of them if we don't stop them. I had a chance to stop the Daleks once, I didn't do it, and look at the result," he told her.

"I… wasn't trying to moralize, I just…" She oscillated the shields again and didn't speak at once. "Is it always this destructive? Watching so many things die? Watching so many people die? Is it like this… all the time?"

"War? Yes, it's horrific. It's why I don't like them very much," he replied. "The universe is filled with wonders, Adie, but it's also filled with terrors and you can't have one without the other, you can't have love without hate, joy without sorrow, that's life. So, you want people to live and thrive? Then you have to protect them from the monsters."

She didn't respond for a couple of oscillations.

"I believe I am capable of doing that now," she said quietly.

"You have been doing it for over a century, Adie," he pointed out. "Who protected the Mashas if not you?"

"That was why I stayed for so long, to protect them. Everything that happened wasn't their fault. They didn't deserve to die."

"No, they didn't. However, the Manifold are my problem to deal with. The Rani created them, the Time Lords advanced them and our failure released them. I have to clean up our mess."

"Oh, I quite agree. I just wish we had been able to find a better way to do it… foolish of me, I suppose."

"No, not at all. Had I more time I would have let Susan continue and she might have been able to genetically re-engineer them into something less dangerous to us all. The problem is that we ran out of time. This became our only option." He frowned. "I would have preferred a better way as well."

She nodded, and did not speak again.