Disclaimer: I own nothing from Doctor Who. The story itself is mine, and I retain all rights to it.
A/N: Thanks everyone for your patience. Stick with me please, I promise I will finish this story.
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Chapter 8.
Ian Chesterton had a splitting headache.
This morning he had gone to work without a care in the world, and now barely 12 hours later, his life had been turned upside down by the reappearance of not one, but two, different incarnations of the cantankerous old time traveler he had grown to respect and admire.
But even though he still respected these Doctors, at the moment they were leaving him very little to admire.
Ever since they had left the Royals with the P.M., the two of them had done precious little other than argue over anything and everything that the other said, and Ian's headache had grown until now he had finally reached the breaking point.
"Shut up!" he cried, slamming his fist down on the Tardis' console. The two Doctors both stared at him wide eyed with shock. "I am sick to death of hearing the two of you bicker and argue! I realize things may have gotten a bit confused what with you meeting yourself and all, but that's no excuse for all this animosity! Either start behaving like gentlemen or take me home!"
Both Doctor's looked chagrinned.
Jack, who sat in one of the antique chairs, with his feet propped up on an ottoman, began clapping.
"Bravo, Ian, bravo! Getting a little tired of it myself." He stood up and looked the elder Doctor square in the face. "All this solves nothing. Besides what would Martha say if she could hear you two now? Or Rose?"
The younger Doctor looked confused. "I'm sorry? Martha? Rose?" He looked at his older self. "I assume these must be your companions. Where are they now?"
The elder looked uncomfortable. "Martha went home. I…lost Rose."
"What do you mean, you lost her? She died?"
Jack shook his head. "No. She got trapped in a parallel world."
The younger Doctor laughed. "Well that's no problem. It's a simple trip."
"Not anymore." quickly interjected the elder. "The Time Lords…stopped controlling inter-dimensional travel. The pathways have all sealed themselves. She got sent there accidentally."
"What do you mean 'stopped controlling'? Why would they?"
A little louder than he meant to, the elder shot back his answer. "There were problems, ok? Certain things happened and they decided to close them all! Now just leave it, alright?"
The younger held up his hands. "Alright! Let's not get our knickers in a twist, shall we?"
"Right. Now, first thing we've got to do is find the Daleks again."
Ian looked confused. "Won't they still be at the palace?"
The elder shrugged. "Maybe, maybe not. It depends on how much damage I did to their plans when I smashed that temporal control unit."
The younger leaned forward resetting a dial the elder had just set. "What are the Daleks doing here anyway? And if they cannibalized their time devise, what are they building?"
The elder re-reset the dial and continued flipping switches. "They're trying to free the rest of the Daleks from the void. When I imprisoned them there I thought it would be forever, but four managed to escape, and now they're trying to free the others."
"I managed to destroy one of them in an ambush, but they seem to have upgraded their shielding now." said Jack as he walked over to the Tardis' central column. "What are you doing? Going back to Buckingham Palace?"
"No, I'm scanning for the weakest point in the wall of the void. I don't know why yet, but that's probably what they're looking for too. That machine they were building was obviously some sort of temporal scanner, but there's no way to open a portal to the void with it."
He stopped for a moment, and turned to Ian. "That Dalek said that they had adapted the technology to open the void from the humans on the other side, right?"
"Yes, it did." said Ian, who had sat down and poured himself a cup of tea. "Is it important, Doctor?"
"Maybe. It must have been a very short lived portal if it only allowed four Daleks to escape."
Ian set down his cup. "Maybe the other humans cut it off when the Daleks emerged. I know I would have."
"No. It must be time limited because they used it to cross back over to this side instead of just opening it up and freeing all the rest. But why cross back over? It doesn't make sense."
"Maybe they needed to come back for some reason, or maybe it was a test of some kind." suggested Jack.
"Well, they didn't bring the equipment across with them, just their own time device. Why leave the opening devise on the other side?"
The younger Doctor stepped around to the other side of the column. "It sounds like they may be trying to build a time bridge."
The elder glanced up from another resetting of the controls. "You can't bridge the void. The two sides are temporally out of phase with each other. Even if you established a control point on both sides you couldn't lock the two separate time fields together."
The younger Doctor twisted a dial, and nodded his head in agreement. "True, not without a sub-harmonic stabilizer."
The elder stopped abruptly. "What?"
The younger looked at him from across the column. "A sub-harmonic stabilizer." He stood up straight and crossed his arms over his chest, and looked at his elder self like a schoolmaster at a lazy student. "To synchronize the two time phases with. Don't you remember anything from Barusa's temporal mechanics class? In order to hold open… "
"Oh snap!" interrupted the elder. "I know what they're up to! That's why they're looking for the weakest point! They're not going to bridge the two universes, they're going to merge them!"
Whew! Another chapter finally done! Ok friends, if anyone is still there, then please review and tell me if it was worth the wait.
