Collateral damage
It was a small, black, shiny pebble, of irregular shape, like a splinter of metal broken from a sword forged out of darkness. It was dangling, next to the dog tags, at the end of a thin steel chain that Adessa clutched between her fingers.
"Take it with you." she said.
Tironne observed it, fascinated. They should have rushed outside in less than a minute; the noise around them was deafening, and the chain kept oscillating back and forth as their airship rolled and shook in the turbulence, most of it caused by the shockwaves of the blasts all around them. A particularly strong bump signalled that a nuke had gone off somewhere under them. Probably one of their own; the bombardment was preparing the terrain for a landing and hopefully establishing a beachhead in enemy territory.
"What is it?" he finally asked. He had never seen such a material.
"They call it star-steel." answered the other "It's exceedingly rare, and no one knows when or how it forms, really. It is amazingly durable. This one fell as a meteorite, I think. Supposedly it looked like this before hitting the atmosphere already. It may have looked like this since it was born, billions of years ago."
Tironne whistled. That was something. Wish you could have enough and somehow craft body armour from it.
It was like Adessa read his mind. "It can't really keep you safe." she said "But, well... it has survived for so long. Maybe it's lucky."
They smiled, and then laughed. It was pretty ridiculous, really. They knew their odds once that door opened and they stepped outside. One out of fifty will make it to the ground, said the commander. That was the expected casualty rate. And nothing ever went as expected with these horrible murderous tin cans.
"EXTERMINATE!" came a chorus of metallic voices from the ground, growing stronger. They probably were still glowing with the heat of the nuke that had just hit them. They still. Wouldn't. Shut up. "EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE!"
"WE KNOW, YOU LITTLE BASTARDS!" screamed back Tironne "JUST WAIT AND SEE!"
A few laughs and cheers around them, from the tightly packed, geared soldiers. It was a matter of seconds now. Everyone pulled down their visor, clutched their rifles, and grabbed with one hand the parachute's chord.
"I'll take it." said Tironne "I trust you won't need it. With luck on your side too, it would just be unfair for those little bastards."
"You said it." chuckled Adessa.
She let the chain go, and Tironne grabbed the stone and tags with his left hand. The man in sunglasses was rocking an electric guitar despite the fact that no one was watching him (or perhaps exactly as you would if you knew that to be the case), in the middle of an otherwise almost silent circular room, with a rail around it and a pillar covered in command consoles in the centre. The only other sound was a faint background humming.
Tironne blinked.
No Adessa. No airship. No bombs. Still the man with the electric guitar.
"...wait, what?"
"So let me get this straight. You were surrounded by your comrades, in a military airship, about to launch a fundamentally suicidal attack against an entire invading armada of Daleks, on the ground zero of a nuclear bomb, armed only with a rifle and a parachute?"
"Yes."
"Well, you've got guts." said admiringly the man.
It was hard to tell if he was being genuine or sarcastic. Tironne has been talking with him for just ten minutes and this already was the most surreal conversation of his life. He was prepared for almost certain death, not so much for this.
"Thanks, I guess." he sighed "What about the part where I disappear and suddenly find myself here without any apparent logic?"
"Oh, yes, that part. Well, yes, that's unusual."
"Unusual? Someone being spirited away through space and appearing in a completely different location is just unusual?"
"By my standards. By yours, I reckon that was quite mind-blowing."
"Your standards." Tironne repeated in disbelief "What kind of life do you lead?"
The man grinned: "Unusual".
He sprung up brusquely (he would always move like that - as if he was trying to catch you by surprise) and ran to one of the command consoles. He looked very agitated, perhaps worried. He quickly started typing and furiously pushing buttons or turning knobs. Tironne didn't really think he could help or understand, and a tremendous wave of tiredness overcame him as the tension he had built up before the battle finally released. He stayed sitting. As he lay his back against the bench, he realised he was still encumbered by his parachute, and took it off. It did not look like he was going back at any moment now anyway.
"So, what is your name?" he asked "I'm Tironne."
"Nice to meet you. I'm the Doctor."
"The Doctor? Doctor... what?"
"That wasn't quite right." said the other, turning to face him "Just the Doctor, anyway."
"Well, okay. So what are you doing, Doctor? Can you help me?"
"I'm snooping! I'm snooping for trails." he said, and pointed to a screen in front of him. "You're describing a full scale Dalek invasion, and that ought to show up somewhere. Would help trace you back to your planet, though if Daleks have taken it, I don't really know whether you want to go back there."
A moment of realisation dawned on Tironne, and suddenly he clutched his rifle with renewed strength: "You call them Daleks. And yes, that is how they refer to themselves - but how did you know? I never told you."
"Oh, come on, really?" the Doctor sighed in exasperation "Tin can, eye stalk, plunger weapon, like to exterminate people, I hardly think there can be two genocidal maniac races that fit the description out there. There's at least five cultures where drawing one is the ideogram for 'mortal danger'. And no one even thinks of using them as boogeymen in their children fairy tales only because they're far too scary for that."
The implications of that information slowly creeped onto the soldier. He relaxed his grip.
"So, you're an alien. There are other civilizations out there - well, this much, we had realised." he murmured bitterly "And you're saying these guys are dangerous even among space-faring, super-advanced peoples like that?"
"Oh, not just dangerous." commented off-handedly the Doctor "The very worst."
"We're in over our head, aren't we?"
"That, you certainly are. Fair bit of advice, for most planets the wise course of action in case of Dalek attack would be to build as many generation ships as possible and run, run for your life."
"We couldn't even do that!" screamed Tironne anguished "We barely... we barely launched satellites to orbit our planet! We were considering whether we should try and send probes to our twin companion stars, and they would have still taken centuries..."
The Doctor stopped himself suddenly.
"Say that again."
"Huh? That we barely launched..."
"No, the interesting bit! The stars."
"Oh. Our system's companion stars, one red, one blue. Both less than a few light-weeks away from us."
The Doctor fell into silence. He seemed like he was gazing into the distance.
"Doctor...?"
Straight into the cold void of space.
"Doctor!"
"Ah, yes! That made me remember something. I may have a trace now."
"Oh, that's... great I guess. So you can bring me back?" Tironne stopped himself, suddenly remembering "...what about the Daleks? We're finished, aren't we?"
"Well..."
"You know them." said the soldier, and his suspicion was turning into certainty "You've dealt with them. And there's not as much fear of them in your voice as you advice of others. You know how to destroy them?"
The Doctor frowned.
"There is no way to destroy them. Delay, defeat, but destroy? No. Believe me, I've tried."
"You've tried. That means you fought them!"
"I do not confirm nor deny that I might be their mortal arch-enemy, the one they call The Oncoming Storm."
"THEN HELP ME!"
The scream echoed through the metallic walls of the ship, making them ring softly.
"Help me defeat them. Help us survive." pleaded Tironne, almost crying.
The Doctor sighed. He got up, walked a bit around, moving nervously. Put his hands to his hair a couple of times. Finally, he went back, and stood in front of the soldier.
"Listen, and listen well." he said, gravely "I think I know where your system is. I will lead you and we will look for it. But some things may have already happened. Some things may be irreparable."
He put his hands on the other's shoulders.
"Do not expect too much. I am not a god."
The shard of rock suspended in space was small - or small for those scales, at least. Just an asteroid a few kilometres across, hanging in the middle of the void. On a planet, it would have been a not especially remarkable mountain. And yet, it had gravity to make walking along its steep slope quite hard; and air that Tironne and the Doctor could breathe in and out, panting, as they climbed to its summit (summit with respect to what? There was no surface to begin with!); and it was warm enough that their sweat didn't freeze instantly on their brows.
"This doesn't make any sense." protested Tironne.
"Why, yes, tell the whole universe about it! We really want it to realise that and strand us in the cold, hard vacuum of space."
"Yeah, right. I may be ignorant but I am pretty sure that is not how it works."
Or is it?, the soldier couldn't help wondering.
"Why are we even climbing this rock?"
The Doctor halted. "This rock," he began explaining "is the Peak of Vigaxxos. They say that from its summit you can see every star in this whole galaxy. And that no matter how far it is, you can see its every detail and feature, as if you were looking at it right from one of its own planets."
"But how can it..."
"Gravity. Air. Warmth." sharply pointed out the Doctor "Trust me and walk."
They kept going for a while in silence. Tironne for the first time truly took the time to look around him. It was surreal and hauntingly beautiful. They were inside a nebula, and the distant space clouds - light-years across in size! - glowed pink and blue with refracted starlight. If neither of them talked, the silence was impossible, stunning. He was only now slowly grasping the meaning of all this, the immensity of the new world he had been thrown in. Now he had a new reason to hope they could defeat the Daleks and survive. Before, they had been afraid that their race would end sooner or later - that they would self-destroy in a nuclear war, maybe, or pollute their planet beyond repair. Now he knew. It was possible to survive, and go beyond, and reach for the stars. Many had done it, countless, seemingly. So why not them? If only they could live through this, they could spread, and come back here, between the stars. Come back to stay.
"You said you fought them." said Tironne "The Daleks."
"Mmm-mm."
"How was it? Did they attack your planet?"
"It's not that. They would not have dared." explained the Doctor "We were... probably the most powerful race in the universe. They were the second, and wanted everyone else dead. It was inevitable, really. Well, at the end, we were all kicked down several notches."
He stretched a hand towards the starred sky around them.
"You've seen war. Well, think all of these stars, and their worlds, burning in that same kind of fire. Think as many deaths as lives this all could hold. That was how it was like. Across space. Across time."
Tironne tried to imagine. It was too much.
"Across time?" he asked, in awe and terror "How would that even work?"
"Tell me. On your planet, do you have a simple, turn-based table top game that's a bit of a mock war, something that generals used to play in ancient times to learn strategy?"
"You mean ganno." said Tironne, surprised "How did you..."
"Almost every culture has one of those. Listen. Imagine two generals playing ganno, except they're not playing, they're writing all their moves on a piece of paper, and they get to see each other's piece of paper, and erase and change their moves until the paper is to thin and smeared you can't possibly do anything anymore or it will rip to pieces."
Considering what this was a metaphor for, this was not reassuring in the least.
"Does that mean," he suggested carefully "that you could win a battle that you would lose? By sending reinforcements back to yourself?"
"You're thinking small." sneered the Doctor "If the Daleks, say, are about to take a star system that would be a powerful base for them, you don't just go back and send reinforcement. You visit that system billions of years ago, as its primordial cloud is forming, and then you grab a single pebble, and suddenly all the chain of future events is destabilised, the planets never form. That system never existed."
"But that's... What if in that system there was someone?"
"Gone too. Well, time needs to adjust itself, so sometimes there are ripples, fluctuations. But in the end, everything settles down, and they're written out of the space-time stream."
He paused.
"If it is any consolation, with the Daleks around, it would have not ended differently, and would have been far more painful."
"That's awful! How many times...?"
"Too many. The Time Lords did this countless times. I did it, once. Only once. I still have that pebble. I didn't know if it was inhabited, I did not want to check. It was the only thing to do, back then. But we would have turned the universe into a desert, that way. That is why I had to stop it. All of it."
Tironne did not say anything. He could not, not any more. That last nuke, the one that had detonated under him, right before he disappeared - could the city have truly been fully evacuated? Had everyone left been killed by the Daleks? They did not know. It needed to be done. And yet, it was odious to do it, and so it should be.
"Sometimes" wondered the Doctor, muttering almost to himself "I ask myself if there truly was someone there. What would they say, if they could look at me in the eyes."
They spoke no more, as they kept climbing the Peak of Vigaxxos.
And then there was no more climb, only the infinite extent of space, laying in front of their eyes like a deep dark ocean from whose bottom brilliant gemstones would gleam and shine.
Standing on the edge of the cosmos, Tironne took a deep breath of that impossible air. The Doctor had said from here you could see the stars as if they were close to you, but he was not sure how that would work. They were incredibly clear, though, sure, their light piercing the darkness all over; a billion suns, a billion planets, a billion lives, perhaps. So much to take in, so much to understand.
"They're beautiful, aren't they?"
"Yes." said Tironne, barely managing a whisper.
"They're all safe now, you know. From them."
The soldier turned around. He saw the Doctor standing in silence, his hand outstretched towards him, something on his palm.
A small, black, shiny pebble, of irregular shape.
"I'm sorry." he said.
I did it, once. Only once. I still have that pebble.
"I can not see my planet from here." said Tironne, his voice trembling "Can I?"
"No, you can't. This is just a weird wonderful rock in space. You can see your star, maybe, if you squint, but not your planet. Not from here, nor anywhere."
Tironne reached under his shirt, grabbed his dogtags, pulled them out. The pebble was there, and it was also on the Doctor's hand. The same, exact, pebble.
Well, time needs to adjust itself, so sometimes there are ripples, fluctuations.
"You said you could help." the voice now was raspy, angry and scared at the same time.
"I said we could look for it. I said some things may have already happened. I said I'm not a god."
But in the end, everything settles down...
"WHY DID WE EVEN COME HERE?" screamed Tironne at the top of his lungs. He gasped, felt his chest tightening; the air was more rarefied than on his planet, he realised.
"Because I couldn't do anything. Believe me, I couldn't do anything. That part of Time is... too overwritten. Paper, thin and smeared. I couldn't do anything, except showing you this. All of this."
Tironne drew in breath. He understood what came next. He composed himself, strived to achieve a look of dignity. He glanced at all of that, and in some way he realised that yes, however terrible it may have been, it was worth it. If it had not been his planet, his people, he would have thought so. He would have done what the Doctor did.
And yet.
It was his planet.
It was his people.
It was his parents, and his city, and his Adessa.
He looked the Doctor straight into his old, deep eyes.
"You're a murderer." he said, calmly.
"I know." replied the Doctor.
...and they're written out of the space-time stream.
The Doctor stood, alone, on the edge of the cosmos. He slowly closed his hand; then he looked through the skies for a triplet of stars - one yellow, one red, one blue. When he found them, he pulled back his arm and tossed something towards them, with all his strength. Then he sat down, on the edge of the Peak, looking at all the life, and all the death.