"My name is Madeleine Pallas. I was born twenty-eight years ago, eight months, three weeks and a day, in Jacksonville City, Mars. I gained my doctorate in advanced artificial intelligence when I was twenty-five. I've spent the past three years working for the military, on loan from the Torchwood Archive. I helped to develop what may end up being one of the most lethal weapons humanity has ever had the misfortune to encounter.
Today may well be the day I die."
She paused, listened again to the recording, played it back, listened again. This was her first ever diary. A journal, so maybe those who knew her could listen afterwards, and understand why she did what she was planning to do. No loved ones – no family to speak of, no lover to mourn her. Few friends, outside her work, and she doubted they would sympathise with her destruction of their hard work. Even so, Maddie wanted to leave a record behind, if only to ensure the truth was heard by someone.
It didn't matter. She wiped the recording, deleting everything, right down to the crystal memory bank, which she removed from the casing and crushed underfoot until it was little more than blue dust to be swept away.
Why was she doing this? It was six months since her warning had come. A pair of travellers, who had inexplicably set up shop on a patch of ground not far from her apartment near the centre of Triton's capital colony. They ran a diner, but it was bizarrely decorated in a style common only in Earth museums. Chrome legs on the chairs, neon lights everywhere, a strange music player in one corner (with very odd black discs larger than a dinner plate trapped behind the glass), and an interesting preference for soft drinks with ice cream floating on the top. It also never seemed to get any clients, but the girls who ran it didn't seem to mind. In fact, they seemed to actively discourage anyone from patronising their business – and they had come for Maddie. They had been waiting inside their shop, visible through the windows that nobody ever looked inside of, until she happened to walk past one morning.
It wasn't just chance. She'd felt drawn there, but to this day couldn't explain why. It had been a feeling that something important was waiting, that somehow her destiny, if one could believe in such a thing, was calling her to that place, at that time. It had changed everything.
The girls explained who they were – their names, what the shop really was – a TARDIS. Time And Relative Dimensions In Space. Maddie couldn't believe it, until she went inside, and saw how big it was – much larger inside than out. They explained what they knew about her, that she was working on a highly secretive military program, codenamed Ares. They told her that she would have to destroy it, that it was too dangerous to be left in the hands of the government. That she would have a fight on her hands, that she would have to disobey direct orders, a crime punishable by death in the totalitarian regime of the Earth Alliance military. They told her of the Tolstoy. So many things, so many secrets that she couldn't possibly know. She hadn't believed them, not at first.
Two days later, her belief was secure. A single trip to her own past, her own childhood, and she was convinced that time travel was real. She learned so much about the girls too, where they had both come from, and their extraordinarily long lives – but she could never reveal this. When they met, for the first time or the last (Maddie had to admit, time travel could be very confusing), she couldn't say a word. "Spoilers", they told her. They couldn't say what would happen on board the ship, only that she had to be there – time was fixed, her presence was predetermined, and the only thing that could be guaranteed now would be this trip back to let her know. A stable time loop, contained by the power of the TARDIS itself (oh, what she wouldn't give for just a day examining the systems, exploring the infinite potential of whatever intelligence the time travelling vessel must hold!). It wouldn't be long enough, though. Just days after meeting Maddie, the girls left, taking their shop – their TARDIS – with them. One day it was there, and the next, silently gone.
("One up on the Doctor – at least I can find the handbrake..." Clara would whisper under her breath, where no-one would ever hear...)
The moment she met Sergeant Zolner, Maddie knew this would be a mission she was unlikely to return from. The soldier was career military, completely by-the-book... and the book was clear on what to do when civilian consultants rebelled against the establishment. Her orders were without ambiguity – reach Ares, transfer him to her datapad, get the hell out of dodge and let the fleet blow the Tolstoy to pieces of shrapnel. The moment she deviated from that course, she would be met with lethal force from her own colleagues. The soldiers going with her were as much to make sure she stayed on script, as they were to defend against any surviving rebels. Which was why she'd secretly bio-locked the datapad against her own organic signature. Nobody would be able to transfer Ares but her, so if she died the mission would fail. It was her one trump card, but it would only last as long as it took to complete her objective. Once done, there would be no reason to keep her alive. Even the influence of working for Torchwood wouldn't hold much sway – independent as they now were, they had nowhere near the level of power and influence required to hold back the federal government. As far as Maddie could see, it was about time to start writing a last will and testament.
Not that she had anyone to leave anything to. Or much to leave at all, for that matter.
Well, if this was to be her last stand, her final act, then it would have to count. She didn't expect to see the strange girls again, nor breath in the filtered air of Triton's nitrogen-rich atmosphere. She was no longer planning to see another planet-rise in the early hours of the artificial morning, no more trips to the ice volcanoes, by the shores of an ocean that by all accounts should be frozen over, more than two hundred below zero. The wonders she had come to love while living on this otherwise barren, cold rock, all would soon be gone for her. But the mission was paramount.
If only she'd known then just how things would unfold on board the Tolstoy. It seemed hindsight would always be such a wonderful thing.
