4

The papers had been delivered, laid on the bed Jenny had taken. The Doctor pounced on them.

"About time!" Turning on his heel, he paced around of the room, reading as he walked. He finished with a scowl.

"Humans! They can take a simple discovery and make something threatening to their own existence out of it, every time. Every time! Find copper, make swords. Figure out fossil fuels, fill the air with poison. Do they ever learn?" He glanced at two pages of figures again, and shook his head in disgust.

"Look at this! Bloody mess. Stupid bloody bumbling single-minded mess, no sense for the effects their actions have, no sense at all. Just look!" He thrust the papers at Jenny, who read through the mathematical figures showing the speeds and distances at which the protons were being moved.

"This is faster than warp-shunt technology." She noted in surprise. "Faster than transmat too. Damn. How can they keep it controlled at this speed?"

"They can't." The Doctor replied grimly, "And that's the problem. But they've let themselves believe it, with this shoddy math. This is where they're going wrong-"he jabbed a finger at the page, "Here, here and here. It's gibberish calculations, just barely holding the few good bits they've got together. Look, if you redo the math…" he whipped out a pen and scribbled down calculations-"And there. And…Oh. This is bad. Very very bad."

"How bad?" Jenny asked. Her father glanced at her sharply.

"Take how bad you think it is, and add another load of bad on top. That bad. They're accelerating particles, right?"

"Right." Jenny nodded, watching her father pace as he spoke.

"And every particle they accelerate and smash gives off energy. Waaaay too much energy. Now, you get that much energy in a small space and things start to go haywire. Timelines start being knocked loose 'cause their artron energy parts company with their matter and spins off, and that lets what we've been seeing happen; it lets slices of time-space slide into other slices, because there's no artron cross-bonding and no quantum chains to hold them in place. That's actually how you open up the planes too, enough energy in a small space to break the bonds that keep them wrapped round each other…" His dark eyes widened for a moment. But he shook his head. "Nah, they haven't got it going fast enough for that. Just fast enough to destabilize space-time. It'll start with the simplest timelines first, already has actually, then move up in complexity, start affecting the sentients…" The Doctor glared at the sheaf of papers in his hand. "Idiotic irresponsible humans! How'd they ever get out of their trees?!"

"How long's this going to take to start affecting things?" Jenny asked. The Doctor shrugged, eyes still on the paper.

"No idea. I can't tell, not with everything moving around like Disney on Ice. It's like a tear in cloth; right now they're worrying the fabric of time-space, wearing it threadbare, loosing strings all over the place. If they keep worrying at it the tear's going to get longer and wider. Might open a rift, might get so temporally scrambled that it attracts Reapers. Might just muck with this rock's infrastructure enough that it falls to bits. But I do know one thing for sure."

He looked his daughter in the eye, his face tense.

"If they turn on that third collider, it'll be like taking a pair of scissors to the fabric of reality. All bets are off on what happens then, lots of possible outcomes, and none of them pretty. We can't let that happen. I'm going to draw up these figures, redo the math and take it upstairs, see if I can't prove it to them that way. But if that doesn't work…"

He frowned to himself. Then the Doctor squared his shoulders, and gave his daughter a grim smile.

"If that doesn't work, we may have to get creative."

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

By four o'clock the rips in time and space had spread, extending misplaced moments throughout the building. Cups dropped to the floor and broken were picked up whole. Foods set down were rotted in a moment. People found themselves walking down the hall that they had already traversed. And they had begun to notice. Several people had been taken to the medical bay as they reported seeing 'ghosts', others grew nearly blind with what they thought was double vision.

By six o'clock the Doctor had shown his calculations to half the senior technicians, and each of them had read the work and rebuffed him or denied it outright. By six-thirty Jenny was wishing she hadn't promised not to hit anyone. She crumpled a page of the paper she had just tried to deliver, dropping into a chair beside her father. He glanced at her sourly.

"What'd he say?"

"Nothing useful. Wouldn't even look at it. Sorry."

"Don't be. Neither would mine. And I can't get a meeting with Bourma until after the meal." The Doctor stuck a fork into his dinner, baring his teeth in frustration. "Idiots. Bloody idiots, the lot of them."

Jenny tapped her fingers against the table. "What do we do now?"

"Well…can you not do that? Thanks. We can finish up with the rest of that lot. If we can find one who'll listen to us, just one, we'll be doing better. Otherwise, we're rather at odd ends. Best we can do is get down to the TARDIS and try to stabilize the situation, then do what we can to reroute some of the power, see if we can take some of the juice out of the reaction. And we've got to talk to Bourma again; he's their head technician, if we can convince him the problem'll be solved in no time at all. Bit of a long shot on that little beauraucrat, but it's a shot worth taking, might work we'll be lucky, which is pretty rare I grant you. And then…" He sighed, raking a hand through his hair. "Then, if that doesn't work, maybe we can do a bit of midnight monkeying, tweak the machinery to slow it up. I don't want to shut it down completely, not if I don't have to. People are depending on this as a fuel source. But it's not worth their lives to have their own petrol station, so if it comes down to it…" He stared ahead, his eyes losing focus, then squeezed his eyes shut, shaking his head.

"Gah, what a mess. No way to look into that." Opening his eyes, he glanced around the room.

"We're not going to get through to anymore of these blockheads tonight, and I'm tired of trying. Bourma's office, then."

Walking down the hall, Jenny glanced at the people who passed by them, huddled in small groups. Listening, her ears picked up snatches of conversation.

"How could you take three hours to get the coffee?"

"I keep telling you I was only in there for a minute! How many times do I have to say that?!!"

It's spreading fast.

Tell me about it.

"I swear, I swear I saw Tally walking down the hall."

"Tally went to Earth a month ago, you know that."

"I know, that's what's so weird."

Glancing over her shoulder, she absently stopped behind her father. The flash of his annoyance made her snap to attention. Her father was staring at Bourma's door, which was dark. The Doctor smacked the doorframe.

"Aah! I can't believe it. He's turned in for the night. Of all the times to take the night off!" Spinning on his heel, the Doctor strode down the corridor.

"Fine. We'll snag him in the morning and shake some sense into him. Right now we've got seventeen hours before they try to turn that thing on. Let's get down to the TARDIS and get something done about the mess here."

Marching through the hall, the Doctor led the way into the stairwell, lower and lower into the building. Jenny steeled herself as they passed the second floor where the collider sat. The Doctor paused for nothing. He had it figured out, or almost figured out, she could tell by the way he moved. He was driven now.

The Doctor pushed open the TARDIS door and strode up the ramp, hands already flickering over the panels, working switches that Jenny had hardly ever seen him use. He glanced up, then took off into the corridors without a word. Jenny stared after him, her brow furrowed. Stepping up the console, she ran a hand over the time rotor.

"What's he doing?" she murmured. A ripple of warm emotion ran up her hand, comforting, but not very enlightening.

After a moment, the door opened, and her father was back, a handful of objects in his hands. He spread them out across the floor, pulling more from his pockets, glanced over them, then plucked several and hurried back to the console.

"First things first, got to stabilize these lines. Can't do anything without doing that or the whole thing might go sky high. That is if there was a sky. Got to get this straight...come on old girl. Just got to pull them back…" He stared up into the time rotor a moment, then back at the controls, hands flickering with frenetic adeptitude.

"Can I help?"

"At the moment, no, not really." Her father said, dark eyes riveted again on the time rotor. "But you can plug that doohickey into the displacement conduit. Then…"

The next hour passed without a word. Jenny took a place in the console chair, watching as the Doctor's expressive face darkened, winced and brightened while he manipulated the controls. He'd opened two panels to view monitors Jenny had never seen him use before, and his eyes flickered from them to the time rotor. By the end of the hour, his brow had creased, his body tense as he worked. His only pause was an occasional moment taken to push his glasses up his nose or mutter something under his breath.

Jenny pulled her kelosite from her pocket, focusing on it. Nothing, still nothing. Tucking it back in her pocket, she got to her feet.

"Want a cuppa?"

"No thanks." He pulled out several sheets of paper, covering them in quick, scrawling writing.

Half an hour later, Jenny stepped to his side.

"Anything I can do?"

"Nope." Her father answered, adjusting several controls. She'd only seen her father this concerned four times, and three of those four events were some of her nastiest memories. She watched him take up three wires in one hand and a harmonizing device in the other, working them simultaneously.

"I'll hold one of those if you want."

"No, I have to do most of this individually."

Jenny watched him work, trying to balance everything on his own shoulders.

"You're going to get fatigued. I can work something."

For a moment the Doctor glanced at her, taking his gaze from the monitors, eyes dark, frustrated, tense.

"Jenny, you can't help work with something you can't see. If you want to be of use go work up the siphoning calculations, we'll be needing those."

Jenny stepped back from the controls as if they had burned her. She gave a sharp nod.

"Sorry sir. I'll have those calculations ready soon."

Before her father glanced up, she was out of the room.

Neither of them slept that night. Neither of them felt the slightest bit tired. Around five o'clock the Doctor stood back with a sigh. The situation was worse than he'd thought, but he'd done what he could. The TARDIS was stretching itself awfully thin, yet it had managed to throw out lassoes and loops of relatively stable time to anchor the broken threads. It would help. But it was a tenuous cat's cradle of time, as delicate as an egg shell. Any disturbance would tear the work to bits.

He stretched luxuriously, shook himself, then glanced around the room. Jenny wasn't there. Was she still at the calculations?

Jenny was sitting in the kitchen, a bowl of cereal in one hand, a sheaf of papers in the other. She glanced at him, then back to her work.

"Okay, I got the siphoning started, pinpointed it around the current reactions rather than the stored energy down here. I think I got it to balance so they won't notice much. The TARDIS is moving kind of slow today, we should run a diagnostic when this is over. Otherwise ready for the next move." She took another bite of her breakfast, and looked her father over appraisingly.

"You should eat. You look awful."

He rolled his eyes. "Thanks. That really helps."

Jenny shrugged, wolfing down her food.

"Tea's on the counter for you. So now we go see Bourma?"

The Doctor nodded. "Yep. And won't that be a fun visit. 'Sorry, I know this is the plant's big day and all, but could you just shut it down for a bit before you punch a hole in reality?' I can imagine the response we're going to get."

"He can't be so thick that he hasn't noticed something's off." Jenny said indistinctly. The Doctor shook his head.

"Never underestimate a human's capacity to be thick, Jenny. You almost done?"

Jenny raised the bowl to her lips, draining off the last of her meal, then pushed her chair back.

"Yep. Let's go."

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Dr. Bourma bustled into his office, humming cheerily off-key. Today was going to be quite a triumph, if he did say so himself. He paused a moment to yawn; hadn't gotten much sleep last night. Probably the excitement of the day getting to him. Opening a desk drawer, he checked his appearance in the little mirror he kept there one more time. Had to look good for the holos, after all.

There was a knock on his door, and the two inspectors came striding into his office, the man holding a sheaf of papers in his hand.

"Dr. Bourma, I'd really like a word now, and this time I'm afraid it can't wait. My partner and I went through your working math last night, we found a few discrepancies that have us pretty concerned."

"Discrepancies?" Bourma squeaked. "But that's not possible. We've run and rerun the math for almost a year now."

"I'm sure you have, but I'm also pretty sure you didn't run it at the full speeds, and that's where the problem is. Look…" the young man pushed aside several of Bourma's papers, spreading the sheaf he held across the desk. He pointed at several calculations. "Here, and here, and here. These figures, once they got redone a bit, they predict some pretty nasty outcomes at anything over this speed. If you turn on that third collider, see, you'll destabilize the quantum bonds for most of the matter, and not just in the reaction chamber. Here, have a look." He pushed over the papers. Bourma studied them. The calculations were strange, eccentric, even, but he could see what they predicted. Twenty miles of atomic destabilization due to the increase of energy between particles. For a moment, he stared at the figures. Could this be…

"This is impossible." He blustered, pushing the paper aside. "This just can't be right. We've run tests, we've worked it over, and none of the twenty senior technicians I've had the honor to work with has ever expressed findings anything like this."

"Yes I know that." The man across his desk said, exasperated, "I've already talked with your technicians. But look, it wasn't hard to miss the way you were going about it. If I'm right-and I'm always right-then this third collider would at least kill a lot of people in your town, and that's at the very least. It could get a lot worse. I'm showing you this because I'm asking you to postpone turning the collider on, just until I can go through the figures with a few of your fellows and work out the kinks. Call it technical difficulties, call it anything, just put this off until it can be done right."

Bourma looked into the man's dark eyes- and looked away again. He ran a hand over his mustache.

"Well, I see no reason to postpone such a momentous occasion on the basis of a few new calculations, especially since they are the work of an amateur…"

"Amateur?" The dark-haired inspector stared at him, his eyebrows high. Bourma nodded.

"Yes, well really, what credentials, exactly, would a general inspector have?"

"How about experience?"
Bourma crossed his arms. "You have prior experience with quantum theory and sub-atomic particle calculations?"

"Trust me." His blonde assistant said, "He's probably got more experience than your senior technicians put together."

"And experience tells me that if you do this, people are going to die. Do you really want a planet-wide Three-Mile-Island because you're a bit impatient?"

Bourma ran a hand over his balding head. "I don't…do you have anything else to back up your claims?"

"Oh loads. Look around." The man said earnestly. "The earthquakes, the sicknesses filling up your medical quarters, strange things happening at every turn, when did it start? Five or six weeks ago. When did you start testing the next collider? Five or six weeks ago. Don't you see?"

Bourma's little eyes narrowed. He'd heard that speech before, heard it often from critics and protestors.

"What I see" he snapped, "is two inspectors taking a great deal of authority on their shoulders. What would your superiors say?"

"And what will they say when we tell them that you blatantly ignored our recommendations?" the young woman asked sharply. "Maybe they'll say this facility needs a change in staffing, or complete closure."

Dr. Bourma stood up, his mustache bristling. "How dare you!" he spluttered. "How dare you walk in here and try to threaten me! How dare you try to interfere with a groundbreaking project! Now I have no more time to waste on this nonsense, I have a very important day ahead of me and I need to-"

"Will you listen to me, you little hysteric?" the man nearly shouted, leaning across the desk. "If you go on with this, people are going to die. Your coworkers. Your neighbors. Unless you stop this now."

For a moment, the two men stared at each other across the desk, eye to eye. The inspector's eyes bored into his, those great, dark, cold eyes. He swallowed.

"I'm not shutting down this program under any circumstances."

The dark-haired man drew back, standing to his full height. He towered over the technician, who suddenly, for all his age and his important position, felt very small.

"Then I'll have to make you."

Then the man turned, nodded to his assistant, and swept out of the room.

After the door closed Dr. Bourma sat for a moment, staring, his breathing harsh in his ears. Then his mustache began to bristle, his face darkening.

"How…how dare they?!" he spluttered to himself. "How dare they! The nerve! In my own office…hysteric!! Oh, I'll show them!"

He snatched the phone from his desk, and snapped into it.

"Rata, get me our contact in the Tri-Sol Energy Beauru. I want to speak with one of their head inspectors. Now!"

After a moment of impatient waiting, the little man shot into animated speech.

"Hello? Who's this? Well, Inspector Eveas, I have a serious matter to discuss with you. Two of your inspectors have been seriously overstepping their bounds at the facility I run. They've been upsetting my staff and now they've gone so far as to insult…My facility base? Sedna. Now-you what? You WHAT?!! Oh no no no, you must be mistaken, they have badges and…are you sure?!! Well, well thank you very much. Now I've got to go." He slammed down the long distance phone and picked up a small radio.

"Trakel! Trakel, get your Watchers together this instant! Those two inspectors are a pair of frauds. I want them arrested and in the cells before they can cause any more problems today. I mean right now, do you hear?!!"

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Jenny marched beside her father, their feet eating up the corridor. "We bollocksed that, didn't we?"

"Yep." The Doctor said shortly.

"We got a plan B?"

"Nope."

"We going to do something?"

"Yep. And fast."

"Good." They were on the second floor now, and her hand clutched unconsciously around her key.

"Is it me or is it-"

"A lot worse, yep. We need…" The Doctor froze, staring in the direction of the reaction chamber. He dug both hands into his pockets, pulling out a small device and his sonic screwdriver. He held the sonic screwdriver up, then placed the tip on the device. His eyes widened.

"Oh, every time I think this can't get any worse it does…maybe…oh no. Faster than…Oh no no no no…Jenny, we've got to get down to the TARDIS right now and…"

But Jenny wasn't listening. She was staring up the corridor, her brow furrowed.

"Ah, Father…"

Then he heard it. The sound of feet on the corridor floor.

"Ah. Right, time to…"

Jenny turned on her heel. Too late. The corridor on either end was filled with red-clad guards, their long weapons held out in front of them like spears. Father and daughter moved in, back to back.

"Back to square one." Jenny muttered, ramrod straight.

Beside her, her father's eyes ran over the crowd of guards. Far too many to fight, too many to slip by, and there was absolutely no time for this. His eyes flickered, searching for an exit.

"Jenny." He murmured quietly, "You still got that kelosite?"

Jenny nodded, eyes fixed on the guards.

"Pull it out."

She glanced at him sharply. But she put her hand into her jean pocket, and pulled out the small pebble.

"Good." The Doctor said softly. "Hold it out. And shut your eyes."

The hallway lit up in a blast of white fluorescence that made spots dance behind her eyes. A hand grabbed hers, and a voice rang in her ear.

"Run!"

They took off blindly down the corridor, Jenny blinking as her eyes cleared. Apparently they cleared faster than the guards', as they were still reeling. Her father shot her a grin as they dashed.

"Brilliant! Now all we need is-" his sentence ended in a gasp, and his hand ripped out of hers. Jenny spun on her heel, backhanding the guard who had her father by the waist. Someone grabbed at her, and she kicked out, impacting with a solid crack. Two guards had her father by the arms now, and Jenny turned on them, but another enemy was at her back. She lashed out, whirling, limbs flying. They must have called reinforcements, because there were definitely more than there had been. Leg to head, block that pole, and that one, quick punch, roundhouse, rabbit punch…

"Jenny!"

Jenny spun around, kicking another guard's pole out of the way.

"I'm coming!"

"No!" the Doctor yelped, "Jenny, get out of here! Get to the TARDIS, find the calculations for…" He wrestled with the guard, and Jenny was hit with a maelstrom of information, numbers and images flashing in front of her eyes, almost knocking her off her fighting stance.

"Now run! Run!!"

A soldier obeys orders.

Jenny took off down the corridor, barreling through the guards. She was dashing flat out, down the corridors, down stairs, through the halls. There was the door to the lower chamber. There was the TARDIS, the only thing that was real and stable in this whole place. She crashed inside, slamming the door behind her. She leaned against it, catching her breath.

Okay, in a minute Father will be here, and then….

The sound of the ship made her head shoot up. The time rotor moved, giving off its creakingly ethereal noise. Jenny's eyes widened.

"What the hell?! Why are you moving?! Don't move!" She raced up to the console, pulling levers, inputting calculations that instantly changed. The rotor moved faster, Jenny staring at it in shock.

"No!"