He tore his gaze loose from the screen and looked at me with a feverish frenzy in his eyes. "Of course it's impossible to transmat ships from one star system to another." His eyes wandered back to the screen, he stared at it, transfixed, knitted his eyebrows and arched over the console to get a better view.
„These are …."
He turned to me, with a look of terror on his face. „Tardises!"
...
He clutched his head with both hands, slowly sinking to the floor, staring into space with an odd, absent expression. Alarmed, I kneeled down beside him.
„What's wrong, Doctor?" He reluctantly broke away from his fit of reverie, rubbing his temples and squinted at me. „No... no! Its just... they are... they are..." He stuttered, „They are alive!" He stared at me in wide eyed wonder.
Suddenly a loud clanking noise echoed through the Tardis. On the monitor appeared a human (was it really human?) face.
„Doctor, I think, they are hailing us." Slowly he composed himself, got up, still holding his head with one hand and turned to the screen.
„Unidentified Tardis, prepare for docking and boarding!" The face ordered brusquely. „Don't try to dematerialize. Resistance is futile!" Then the screen turned black.
Now my jaw dropped.
„Is this some kind of Tardis space marine?"
„Looks very much that way... I'd say..." He hunched, with a painful expression on his face and shrugged.
„Time Lords?"
He nodded uncomfortably.
„Oh my god, you said, your people were completely above interfering with us lowly creatures."
„Yeah, erm... they were... But apparently not here...Not in this reality!" He looked up at me, "This here is not our universe. Not our history!"
I tried to digest this news. „How parallel are parallel universes then? Will there be another me or you? Will they help us?"
He ran a hand through his hair, ruffling it, his usual gesture when he was at wit's end and answered pensively. „No idea, really. Could be.. But maybe not."
Another clank echoed through the Tardis. A moment later the doors flew open and with loud shouts a squadron of soldiers in red combat armour stormed the console room, took position and aimed the barrels of their weapons at us. Some of them jumped the Doctor and me. They forced me to the floor. I yelped in pain when they twisted my arm onto the back, immobilising me to search me for weapons. I held my breath, a knee painfully between my shoulder blades. Then I was handcuffed. They were doing the same to the Doctor. All his attempts to appease them and talk himself out of it was utterly useless and just caused one more eruption of rude shouting.
Next, two senior officers in dress uniform entered the console room and took a look around.
One of the soldiers saluted, "Sir, the place is secured, we found these two terrorists, one Time Lord, one human. Scanner indicates no more higher life forms. The reading of the Tardis shows strange malfunctions. But nothing that poses a threat. They were unarmed, but we found this here with the Time Lord." I could see, that he handed his superior the sonic screwdriver. The Doctor and I were pulled up to our feet.
„Welcome on board, this is a misunderstanding, I can assure you, I'm not a ..." The Doctor greeted the officers, but the soldiers just readied their guns. The square built officer cut the Doctor short, barking at him „You only talk when you are ordered to. One of the renegades, ha? Turned to traitor, haven't you? I am telling you one thing. This is not going unpunished! So. Who are you!"
„I'm the Doctor and this is.." He didn't come any further. The expression of the second officer turned from haughty distaste to to blatant hatred. „You rebel scum dare!" He grabbed his rifle and brutally rammed it's handle it into Doctor's guts. The Doctor went down with a wince of pain. The officer kicked him in the back. Hard. I wanted to aid him but the guards seized me. I gasped when they twisted my arm to the back again.
„That isn't necessary" the superior interfered, reprimanding his subordinate.
„No. But it serves those bastards right", the other spat.
The superior frowned. „Dev, stop it! You can't hold that one personally responsible for Aktios 3, just because he is insolent and a renegade." He turned to his men.
„Take them into custody and inform engineering and intelligence that they can turn this Tardis upside down. And get the surgeon for that one." He pointed at the Doctor. Then he turned on his heel, and disappeared in the gateway. Two guards were dragging the Doctor there, too. I found myself at the point of a gun inviting me cordially to follow them. My head drooped. Indeed. Resistance was futile. With hanging shoulders I trudged after the Doctor. I hoped that all this was just one big misunderstanding that could be put right with a little chat and reasoning, and then they were so kind to help us get back into our version of universe. Well, regarding travels with the Doctor I was not overly optimistic that it turned out to be so easy.
At the other end of the gateway, they loaded him onto some kind of hover transporter. Then I mounted. Four guards squeezed onto the remaining seats and trained their guns at us. We were transported through seemingly endless corridors, they looked very unlike the corridors of the Doctor's Tardis, and were filled with soldatic life. This was indeed a military vessel... A most impressive one. The Doctor hunched in his seat, his gaunt face had turned from contorted with pain to gloomy brooding. He made no attempt to say anything. I knew one thing about the Doctor. Gloomy brooding silence was not a good sign.
They unloaded us at a prison compartment, we could hear the shouting of other prisoners and barked orders of the soldiers. The Doctor gasped when the two guards dragged him into a cell and yelled in pain, when they let him slump onto a cot. I was shoved into the cell after him, then our handcuffs were removed.
The cell had no door. But when I made a few steps in the direction of the entrance, the guard mumbled with a haughty grin. „Wouldn't try out the force field if I were you." He laughed and they left.
I went to look after the Doctor, but he had turned to the coarse stone wall of the cell and was covering his head with one arm. He obviously tried to hide it, he was crying and I felt, it was better to leave him alone. I made myself as comfortable as possible under the given circumstances on one of the other cots, leaning my back against the warm stone wall. Great! THIS was meant to sort out my problems? The Doctor had to be kidding me! I sighed and rubbed my still aching temples. After some time he calmed down and just lay there, eyes closed but I had the distinctive feeling, that he didn't want to talk.
On board a Tardis it's always difficult to determine, how much time passed. What felt like maybe half an hour later, two guards entered the cell. They were followed by a stocky man of middle age, dressed in some greenish robes, which gave an odd contrast to the red armour of the soldiers. Once more weapons were aimed at us. The green clad man went over to where the Doctor still lay motionless on his cot, set down the little chest he was carrying with him and sat down at the Doctor's bedside.
The Doctor looked up for the first time, addressing the man with acrid voice. „So Gallifrey recruits human soldiers for the dirty work..."
„Sorry. I'm a physician, I'm here for medical examination and treatment. Not to discuss politics with a prisoner."
„Go to hell and leave me alone!" He spat in outright disgust.
„Sorry. I won't" The man replied dryly. He opened his box and took out several small white balls. He laid something on the Doctor's chest and threw the balls into the air. They started to circle over him and slowly, a three dimensional hologram of his body structures formed in the air.
„Hm... Kidney contusion. A cracked rib. And very unusual energy readings. Brain is okay... Tell me, what's your name, and what is the last thing you remember before you materialized."
„I'm the Doctor. That's my name. And the last thing that happened before we materialized was a dimensional rift in the time vortex. We were sucked into it and ended up here. In the midst of this battle. In your version of reality. From the looks of it, a very bizarre version..."
"Mmh. That's what you believe?" He kindly asked.
„That's what happened!" The Doctor snapped back.
„That's maybe what somebody manipulated you into, to make us believe... You know as well as I do that your genetic make up could have been rewritten with a chameleon circuit, so apart from being a Time Lord, I can't tell, who you really are... But we'll find out." Raising an eyebrow he gave the Doctor, a calculating glance. Who just looked away. He sighed, plucked the balls out of the air and pocketed them. Then took something that looked like a metal tile from his medical kit and slid it under the lower back of the Doctor.
„Two hours. Should be enough to fix your kidney and rib. I have to apologize. You know, some of the men really bear a grudge against the traitors... We will deal with that behaviour."
„You think, we are saboteurs, then?" I addressed the physician.
He turned to me and looked me right into the eyes. „It doesn't matter what I think. You could be. Wouldn't be the first attempt. It is quite possible to manipulate you to believe your story. With a human, no problem there. Even with a Time Lord it's possible." He pointed at the Doctor. „Has been done before, although it's a very, very cruel process to brainwash a Time Lord. Maybe you are just used for this. It seems to be true, that you are from a parallel reality. But you could still be brainwashed and used as a bait. Probably you both will be mind probed to determine, if you memories are true or false and if anything was implanted into your minds."
"I will never share my mind with you. Just over my dead body you will do a mind probe on me, he shrieked back. Hatred and something I identified as sheer panic rang in the Doctor's voice.
„We are not doing this for our pleasure...And you will not have much of a choice, I'm afraid..." The physician replied kindly. The Doctor had turned as white as chalk, a vivid mixture of dread and revulsion on his face and I didn't want to hear any more about the subject either. It was best to find out what was actually going on here, so I forced a change of subject. „What happened at Aktios 3? The soldier mentioned it."
The physician turned to me, „You really don't know, do you? Well, Aktios 3 was a galactic commercial center that had been granted membership of the Commonwealth. They were building the facilities to accommodate the transduction barrier generators..."
"The commonwealth? You set up transduction barriers on other planets?" The Doctor snorted, eyes widened in sheer disbelief.
„Yes, of course! We have to grant them protection!"
I had difficulties to follow ... „What are transduction barriers?"
„Shield systems." The physician replied, " They also prevent to be time jumped, they freeze access to the shielded place in one linear time. Actually they take the place out of the normal space time continuum to some extent. All the shields are tuned to Gallifreyan standard time."
„So you prevent time travel?" The Doctor asked, now sceptically curious.
„Yes. We restrict it. Aktios was attacked 2 months before the barrier was ready. Rebel Time Lords brought in Viryan raiders by Tardis while they kept the fleet engaged elsewhere. In a few hours they massacred the population, took hostages and killed the survivors with biological weapons. Then they left. They had no strategic goals there, it was sheer terrorism. Just to provoke the White Lord and scare possible Commonwealth applicants. The man who mistreated you had family on Aktios 3..."
The Doctor looked up. "The White Lord? Who is that? What about the Lord Presidents who ruled Gallifrey since the times of Rassilon?" He asked breathlessly.
"Well, not since the great war."
"A geat war! What great war!" The Doctor asked cautiously, almost as if he dreaded the answer.
"The great time war. He ended the war and defeated the enemies. You could say, he's some kind of emperor now. That Gallifrey lives came with a price. That price is the White Lord."
„What! An emperor?"
„Yes. Well... " The physician was obviously not entirely comfortable to address this subject. He cleared his throat, and paused for a moment, "So, where were we, yes... The rebels. They are led by a mad Time Lord called The Master." The Doctor looked up. „Ah, I see, you know the name. Well, then... ." He sighed and got up
„When we are back to Gallifrey, you will better cooperate." He wanted to turn to leave.
„What year is this here?" The Doctor asked him.
He gave him a pensive look, „It's the 27th cycle, the year 29692."
"And the Daleks?"
"Well... Exterminated. Extinct. As I told you. The White Lord defeated them, once and for all."
The physician was at the door, when the Doctor addressed him once more, still visibly struggling to digest what he just heard, "Wait! Please tell that officer... tell him... I'm sorry for his family. Tell him... I know, what it feels like. And I won't hold against him what he did."
He held the Doctor's gaze for a moment, then he nodded thoughtfully.
"Hm, yes. I´ll let him know." Then he left, along with the guards. For a while I watched the Doctor struggle with the facts, we had just been presented with. I was struggling with something, too. A nagging worry, and finally I voiced it.
„Doctor, what, if we were really brainwashed?"
I jolted him out of his musing and got a puzzled look back, as if it hadn't even occurred to him, that there was a possibility, that what the physician had suggested might be the truth. „Well..." He somehow looked into himself for quite a while before he replied. „Naah, can't be... No, no. I would notice that... hm..." He scratched his cheek, and came to a final conclusion „No. I don't believe it!"
„But could it be?" I insisted.
His self confident attitude crumbled a tiny little bit when he replied, weighing his words, „Well, yes, technically... maybe...could be. But still. I don't believe it."
"And this mind probe procedure is dangerous?"
"It's humiliating. And quite unpleasant. Not so much for you as for me, though. A Time Lord's consciousness has a few layers humans don't have. So the subconscious routines are a lot more complex. The more complex, the more can be disturbed. And it's getting both of us into hot water, if they find anything and try to analyse and remove it. Because that is dangerous. Still." He swallowed hard, "You'll be unconscious during the procedure." He took a deep breath, "I won't"
I had nothing to say to that. It seemed, I wasn't the only one with problems in this room.
