"If time is locked," Dorothy reasoned, "how are we going to get in?"

The Doctor had spent about an hour explaining as much as she could understand to his human passenger, figuring he'd need all the help he could get. She was surprisingly intelligent, though perhaps not surprising, considering Cara had at some point chosen to travel with her.

"Those things chasing you," the Doctor explained, "they're like vultures. Whenever there's a part of time decaying, they come to that spot. They could smell the decay from the Time War, which means that whatever she used to punch through left a hole, probably big enough for a TARDIS to squeeze through, and what were you doing on that planet anyway?"

"After Cara…when I saw her come back to life as someone else, it…scared me," Dorothy looked ashamed, "I ran away, intending to hitch back to Earth, thinking I could see some sights along the way. But I ended up marooned here at an abandoned spaceport a half-mile away from here. Luckily, they had abandoned fully stocked vending machines. But I was getting lonely. And once those apocalyptic vultures appeared, and then I heard your ship…"

"And you thought Cara had come back for you," the Doctor finished.

"I guess it was a bit self-centered," Dorothy smiled sheepishly, "I already got her killed once." She looked down, "still, I could be home now if I hadn't run away. I was just…she changed."

"We do that," the Doctor gave Dorothy a quick, kind smile, and then ducked under his console, sonic screwdriver in hand.

"So how is she?" Dorothy asked quietly, "aside from being brainwashed by ancient secret societies?"

"She's doing well," the Doctor replied, "though I only just found her again, myself. That should do it." He crawled out from under the console and closed the panel, "never thought I'd be trying to break into a time lock."

"What's in there?" Dorothy asked.

"Death, destruction, war." The Doctor gazed at her tragically, "locked in place. Unchangeable. Normally impenetrable because a time that can't be altered can't be visited, but the ship that Cara has, it's been modified. It can bypass the material laws of temporal physics. She and the Infinity Syndicate spent a hundred years perfecting the design and integrating it into her TARDIS."

"A hundred years!" Dorothy gasped, "I wasn't gone that long!"

"No," the Doctor realized, "so I must have gone back in time when I landed here."

"Your past is my future," Dorothy sighed, "but our presents are the same. I'll never get used to this."

"Don't worry, Dorothy Dike," the Doctor reassured her, "after all of this is over, I'll get you home."

Dorothy managed a brave smile, "Don't worry about me, Doctor. I'd gotten used to the idea of being stranded in space. Let's go help Cara. And please call me Dodi."

Cara worked while Gallifrey burned and un-burned three times more before she let her ship walls turn opaque again. She must concentrate on her work. The TARDIS rocked back and forth across time, trying to compensate for the effects of the time lock. The result was billions of lives being snuffed out simultaneously, over and over, as the ship attempted to hover over the single event. Cara guessed that at least this would give her a better opportunity to calibrate the psionic wave emitters to the exact instant when all the Time Lords started to die.

And the Daleks, too, Cara smiled grimly, But I've calculated a less than 0.00014% chance of any of them surviving the emission. Stupid trash cans can't handle that much brain activity at once.

The thought of the entire Dalek battlefleet with exploding brains gave Cara greater speed in working on the adjustments to her ship's equipment.

She was unaware that someone else in a stolen ship had noticed her existence and was keeping its eye on the TARDIS zig-zagging in time.

"TARRR-DIS DE-TEC-TED!" said one Dalek to the stolen ship's illegal captain.

"IS IT THE DOC-TOR?"

"NO. BUT IT DID COME FROM BE-YOND THE TIME LOCK."

"OB-SERVE. DE-TER-MINE THE MISSION OF THE TARRR-DIS," commanded the commanding Dalek.

"SCAN IN-I-TI-AT-ED," reported another Dalek, "SCAN COM-PLETE. CON-FIRMED, THE TAR-DIS IS NOT FROM THIS TIME. IT CON-TAINS AR-MA-MENTS SU-PER-I-OR TO THAT OF THE TIME LORDS."

"BUT NOT SU-PER-I-OR TO THE DA-LEKS," the commander Dalek yelled smugly, "EX-TER-MIN-ATE! EX-TER-MIN-ATE! EX-TER-MIN-ATE!"