And here it is! After 2 more months of writing than I'd thought that I would need, here are the final 16,000 words of my first complete novel-length story. I'd had no idea when I started writing that this story would grow to 63,000 words (my initial estimate had been closer to 40k), let alone that this one chapter would be longer than my first 4 chapters combined, but all of those extra words happened and I have finally finished writing them.
This grand finale resisted all of my attempts to break the text into multiple chapters without interrupting the narrative tension, but I was able to split this into 4 sub-chapters with the breaks marked off to make it easier for anybody to find their place if they need to take a break and come back to this later.
Enjoy!
Kyra could feel the Judoon commander – Yorta – trying not to cry in front of his lieutenants.
The technician, another Judoon named Corx, had made the testimonial procedure sound so clinical. Commander Yorta and half a dozen lieutenants and sub-lieutenants would take Kyra and Skeerse to a brain-scanning station. Kyra and Skeerse would then lie down inside two of the scanners, their memories would be uploaded to the Shadow Proclamation's computers, and anything not directly related to the crimes in question would be deleted. Finally, Yorta and his officers would lie down to experience the same memories, toned down enough to avoid overwhelming them but not enough to lose important details.
Kyra's impression, both from Corx and from the officers, had been that this was routine for them. She'd been promised that, over the course of their careers, every one of the officers with her had experienced dozens of crimes from the perspectives of all sorts of criminals, victims, and/or bystanders. She'd been promised that they'd been trained to handle the psychological toll of re-living others' memories of violence, and she'd been promised that even if an officer started to feel overwhelmed, Corx would then administer an emotional tranquilizer to make the officer comfortable enough to keep going.
Now none of the officers were holding up as well as everybody had thought they would.
Granted, none of them had broken quickly. Each of the officers had re-lived individual crimes before that had been worse than any one experiment done to Kyra, worse than any one experiment that Kyra had seen or heard about being done to any of the other captives with her. Even most of the murders that Kyra had been forced to watch had been merciful compared to some of the murders that the officers had experienced.
However, none of the officers had ever experienced 5 years worth of constant torture and murder in a single session before.
Even if the computers were operating at full speed, this would still have been worse than anything the officers had been trained for. The fact that the battle outside was taking up so much of the ship's computer power meant that the memory download was drawn out even longer than it was supposed to be.
Sub-Lieutenants Tun and Cor, the two newest in the group of officers, had broken first, each a little before the 1-month mark of the download: Tun when he'd gotten to one of the times when Kyra had been electrocuted for failing a test of her psychic ability, Cor when she'd gotten to one of the times when Kyra had been forced to watch a Time Lord being executed – in this case, drowned – in a failed attempt at triggering regeneration.
Sub-Lieutenant Tun had also been the first officer to receive a second dose in the same session: Kyra being infected with a flesh-eating virus about a year and a half in as a test of a new anti-viral serum.
Lieutenant Kah had held out the longest without tranquilizers, but she'd broken about two and a half years in when a Dalek ship had been captured and psychic prisoners had been forced to read the crew, either from a distance like Kyra or from a personal connection like The Agent, Kathryn – back when they were "TL-13-Alpha" and "TL-13-Beta" – and the other Time Lords.
The whole time Kyra had felt the officers re-living her captivity, she had wished there were something she could do to comfort them beyond simply waiting for Corx to administer the tranquilizers. She wished they could stop the procedure then and there, or at least fast-forward to the part where Captain June Harper and her crew had been sent by Allah to end the cruelty.
But no: from what she'd read of Corx's and the officers' minds so far, Judoon felt the same pain from broken rules and procedures that Malmooth felt from rudeness and isolation, or that Humans felt from injury and death. If Kyra tried to force Corx to stop the download before everything was finished – or even tried to do it by herself – then she'd just be hurting the officers even worse than her memories were hurting them now.
She wished she'd known ahead of time that the procedure wasn't designed for experiences like hers, or at least not at times like this. She could've suggested that the testimonial process be saved until after the battle so that the computers would be unimpeded. Or, if her information were crucial to the battle itself, then she could've suggested that the ship return to the Time Vortex for the same reason, re-joining the battle after the Judoon had all of the information they needed.
At very least, she could've insisted that Skeerse be scanned instead of her. The procedure wasn't designed for his experiences under these circumstances either, and his four years of being forced to torture others against his will would certainly not have been easy for the Judoon to re-live either. But it would still have been easier than Kyra's five years of being tortured herself. Not only would they have been done by now, but the officers could also have gone longer before needing any doses of tranquilizer.
Now they were a little over four years into the download, and Commander Yorta was about to get his second dose. He had first broken a little more than one year into the experience: Kathryn, back when she was "Beta," had tried to organize an escape with two of the doctors; they'd gotten caught; Kyra had been forced to feel the doctors being incinerated, then to mind-meld with Beta to pass along the agony that the doctors had endured as they died. Now Yorta was at one of the times that Kyra had been taunted with several soldiers' fantasies of torturing her purely for recreation.
This left Lieutenant Jing as the only officer left who'd only needed to be dosed once. Her breaking point had been about two years in when Kyra's hand was amputated without anesthetic for testing a new healing procedure.
Corx checked the time, praying to his gods that the procedure would not take much longer. It had already taken a little more than seven minutes to get through the first four years of Kyra's experience, meaning it would take almost another two minutes to get through the last year.
Neither Corx nor Kyra found much comfort in that estimate. Sure, the officers weren't experiencing the memories in real-time, so they wouldn't feel afterwards that it had taken the entire five years to get through for themselves. Still, Kyra couldn't imagine that they would feel it had only taken about nine minutes.
And then they would have to go through Skeerse's memories after all of that.
Kyra lost all feeling in her legs. Would a new plan really hurt the Judoon officers worse than having to go through all of this a second time? "Corx, they don't need to go through Skeerse's memories after this is over, do they? Aren't mine enough?"
Skeerse paled when he realized the same thing that Kyra had. She hadn't even known his species could do that.
Corx shook his head. He'd already completed a binding schedule that the officers would receive Skeerse's memories as soon as Kyra's were finished. The officers would receive a one-minute break to catch their bearings, but that was all.
Skeerse jumped in before Corx could say that out loud. "Well are there rules in place that say when this procedure would need to be put on hold? Maybe there's a time limit, or perhaps you've used too much tranquilizer in one sitting, or too much computer processing?"
Corx wished that the fleet used the contingencies that Skeerse had listed, but to his knowledge they did not. He shook his head again.
Skeerse resisted the urge to compare Corx to the criminals who'd created the horrifying memories in the first place. "OK, then maybe the massive artillery battle outside means that these people would be more valuable elsewhere?"
Kyra asked Allah to let Corx go along with this suggestion.
Corx certainly wanted to do something, but Skeerse's specific solution seemed incredibly dangerous to him, dangerous in the same way that Kyra or Skeerse would see a plan as incredibly dangerous if Corx had suggested risking somebody else's life for the sake of the officers.
Kyra tried to make the idea more Judoon-friendly. "Maybe you should focus on the fact that the memory scans were already a change of plans that interrupted the officers' normal duties? Putting the second download on hold would be removing the change of plans rather than adding one."
Corx appreciated the thought, but didn't feel that he had the authority to make that decision.
Kyra felt her hands reach to pull an imaginary tuft of hair out of her bare scalp. "Then who does have that authority?"
Corx started to suggest that they wait to ask the Commander himself whether the second session should be put on hold.
A Judoon voice came through the computer. "Corx, do you copy?"
Corx recognized it as a Lieutenant Commander Ket. "Yes, Ma'am."
"I have decided that the witnesses are correct; we have risked enough by removing Commander Yorta from the chain of command for this long. I am sending an officer to relieve him."
Just him? What about the others?
At least Ket's quick answer meant that she was listening in. Kyra wouldn't need to worry about asking Corx to relay questions for her. "Excuse me, Ma'am, why not the rest of the officers?"
"If their abilities to carry out other duties have been compromised, then we cannot risk compromising other officers in the same way. We will tend to them when the battle is over."
Skeerse's mind again compared the Judoon leadership to that of the facility they were supposed to be fighting against; supposed to be better than. Kyra was tempted to agree with him.
Still, Ket's reasoning did make this sound like the least bad option. At least, it would be from the perspectives of the officers experiencing the download; not Kyra's or Skeerse's perspectives, but they weren't the ones enduring this, the Judoon officers were.
In any case, it sounded like Ket was already bending a few rules just to make this much happen. If she was the kind of person who was willing to bend rules for the greater good, then she was the kind of person who considered exactly how far the rules could be bent and how far they could not; at least Kyra hoped she was.
Did Kyra – who, despite her psychic exposure, still only had about a half hour's experience with Judoon psychology – truly have the right to expect that Ket would go even further than this? No, Ket was the one who understood where all of the specific rules had come from; Kyra would just have to trust her judgment. Maybe she'd been allowed to question the Judoon's procedures, but that didn't mean she was allowed to reject the answer she'd been given. She whispered, "Alhamdulillah."
Skeerse didn't share Kyra's acceptance. Even if she couldn't hear the derogations churning through his brain against the Lieutenant, she would still have noticed that his tail was jittering like crazy behind him.
She walked over and put a hand on his back. "It's better than if they weren't helping anybody. Let's be thankful they're risking this much."
Skeerse cursed at Kyra in his mind for calling the Lieutenant Commander's decision a "risk."
He immediately apologized for lashing out at her when she wasn't the person he was angry with.
Kyra asked Allah to help her make Skeerse understand. "Skeerse, when you had personal time at the base, did you only spend it with Humans and other – " What was Skeerse's species called again? "Carscanglians, or were you close to people of other species?"
Skeerse hadn't actually spent much of his personal time with anybody. He'd always find some isolated corner of a room, lie back against the walls, and escape into the world of his own mind.
Kyra could use that. "If Shanjik did the same thing, would you think there was something wrong with him?"
Skeerse realized where Kyra was going with this: yes, from what he'd been told, the social instinct in Shanjik's species was even stronger than their survival instinct, and clearly Kyra was trying to make the same point about the Judoon's organizational instinct.
Kyra nodded.
She remembered Corx seeing that the download would take less than two more minutes. That had to have been at least a minute ago, maybe it would help Skeerse to know that the first download was almost over. "Corx, how much time is left?"
Corx checked again. "20 or 30 seconds."
Skeerse tensed all over again at the reminder of how soon the second download would start.
Kyra wished she could take her question back.
A Judoon officer outside – Sub-Lieutenant Ko – approached the testimony room to relieve Commander Yorta.
Kyra fought the urge to run and open the door for her. She focused her attention back to Skeerse. "Look, I'm sorry I brought that up. Can we just focus on how your experience won't be as bad for them as mine was?"
Ko opened the door and walked in. She first looked to her right, said, "At ease, Petty Officer Corx," then she turned to her left. "You are Kyra Sylvan and Doctor Skeerse?"
Kyra nodded. She felt Skeerse do the same.
"The Shadow Proclamation thanks you for your cooperation in this matter. You have my condolences."
Kyra felt Corx's surprise at the Sub-Lieutenant for adding that last part.
Corx's computer rang the signal that the download was complete. Kyra felt Commander Yorta and the Lieutenants snap back to the present. Each had been marginally aware of the world around them during the memory download, but it was still disorienting for them to come back completely.
Sub-Lieutenant Ko stood at attention. "Commander Yorta. Under Section 5506, I hereby relieve you to your duties on the bridge."
Yorta struggled to climb out of the scanner bed.
Kyra asked, "Do you need a hand?"
He felt that he did not, but he thanked her for asking anyway. He dug his knuckle into his eye so the pain would sharpen his senses, then he rolled his legs out of the bed and stood up.
As his thinking cleared, he realized – with Kathryn and The Agent's deep familial love, Damien and the rest of the crew's deep companionate love, and with Damien and The Agent's fledgling romantic love – there was a strong chance that Captain June Harper could convince the Time Lords to join her crew instead of going with the authorities.
Kathryn and The Agent might not be treated as victims for much longer. They might soon become fugitives.
Kyra couldn't tell whether her heart was beating too hard or not at all. Ko was already climbing onto the scanner bed. Kyra decided to try getting a quicker psychic answer from Ko in person, rather than trying first to get a slower, spoken answer from Ket over the computers. "Sub-Lieutenant Ko, do you know if Captain Harper and her crew have escaped yet?"
Last thing the Sub-Lieutenant had heard about them, Arachne was maintaining air support against the base's defenses. June and Damien were presumed to still be inside, fighting their way back out.
Kyra hoped that was still right. "Commander Yorta, is there anyway that we can contact Arachne?"
He doubted that. Every time he had run into the Captain's crew, Arachne had resisted his experts' attempts at opening communications with her, either for negotiating with her and/or overpowering her with secret computer viruses.
Kyra tried to ignore the mind-control implications of trying to hack into Arachne's brain. "But she is at least listening?"
Most likely. The Judoon's system of wormhole-communications was supposed to be impenetrable, and yet all of the Shadow Proclamation's – admittedly limited – records on Captain June Harper showed that Arachne was more capable of evading law enforcement than should have been possible if she had simply been guessing their tactics.
Good. One the whole, it was unfortunate that Captain June Harper had escaped justice for years of sadistic murders, but in this moment, it meant that Kyra could make Arachne talk to the Shadow Proclamation for the first time. "Could we broadcast that Kyra Sylvan would like to speak with the ship of Darico Cava?"
Everybody in the room wondered who "Darico Cava" was.
Which meant that the computers had automatically deleted that memory from Kyra's upload.
No time to get into that now. Kyra braced herself for Yorta's imminent surprise. "That was Captain June Harper's name before she joined the Time Agency."
Yorta almost passed out. The adrenaline from his almost heart attack kept him awake.
The Time Agency was infamously efficient at destroying any records of their agent's old lives, and Arachne had been equally efficient at destroying the Agency's records of their rogue agent's brief service. The Time Agency and the Shadow Proclamation, both through separate efforts and through joint task forces, had since devoted trillions of officer-hours and googabytes of computing to the search for any information that might have escaped destruction. How had this girl learned June Harper's real name in just a few hours?
Kyra pointed tapped her head. "Psychic, remember? June still thinks about her old life from before the Time Agency."
Yorta forced himself out of his shock. Kyra was right: Shadow Proclamation knowledge of this information might be enough to make Arachne risk opening a connection to the Judoon ships. He asked if Kyra knew Arachne well enough to join him on the bridge and help draft a message to entice her.
"I would be happy to." Kyra turned to Skeerse. "Are you coming with us?"
Skeerse asked who "us" were and where they would be going.
Kyra couldn't believe she'd started taking psychic communication for granted so quickly. "With Commander Yorta and I to the bridge. We're hoping to make sure that Arachne sends the Time Lords with us instead of letting June recruit them."
Skeerse hadn't considered that risk either. He wondered if Shanjik was in the same danger.
Kyra shook her head. "No, he's not as attached to the others as The Agent is to Damien. Shanjik will probably leave them without issue."
Skeerse decided against going. This was a matter of person-to-person communication; he never felt he'd been good at that. He shook his head and took a breath. "No, I don't think I'd be very useful."
Lieutenant Commander Ket spoke again through the computer. "Commander, our intra-ship teleportation is back online. Are you well enough to be taken directly to the bridge?"
Yorta gave a quick once-over to his current health and function. He couldn't find any pressing issues. "I am. Kyra?"
Kyra felt all right. "Let's go."
Her body tingled as the room around her changed into the bridge of the ship.
A Judoon officer – the Lieutenant Commander Ket from the earlier conversation – stood at attention. "Commander Yorta, we have drafted a message to broadcast, sir." The last version of the message that she had seen was "Kyra Sylvan would like to speak with the ship of Darico Cava."
Kyra had assumed that her quick summary would be expanded for the actual message, but both Yorta and Ket seemed confidant that this short version would suffice. She saluted Yorta, hoping she wasn't making any serious errors in the Judoon custom. "Thank you, Commander."
Yorta noticed that Kyra had turned her hand in the wrong direction, but felt that this was minor enough to let go. "Broadcast the message."
Petty Officer Tho sent the message to the other ships. This was the first time in his career as a communications officer that he had ever done so with the hope that a fugitive would be listening, rather than the hope that one wouldn't be.
Tho's computer showed a signal coming from Arachne.
Tho couldn't make himself say the words.
The wormholes that Judoon ships communicated through were supposed to be unbreakable, Arachne had broken in to them, and now she was sending a response. One which, for all they knew, contained the same sorts of computer viruses that the Judoon had tried countless times to overpower her with.
Yorta wondered why the Petty Officer wasn't giving an update, be it positive a negative. "Is the Morningstar responding, Petty Officer Tho?"
Kyra hoped that it wouldn't hurt them too much if she answered for him. "Yes, Commander, she is. He just can't wrap his head around how she could possibly be doing that."
Neither could the rest of the bridge when Kyra said that. Initial discomfort at Kyra answering for the Petty Officer was quickly overshadowed by the bewilderment that their wormhole-communiqués could be intercepted.
Yorta snapped out of speechlessness first. "Petty Officer Tho, does the Morningstar's message appear to be infected?"
Tho started analyzing the signal. It appeared to be a request for an open channel of communication rather than a self-contained message, but he couldn't force himself to say so.
Kyra felt that the other Judoon had handled it well enough the first time she'd answered for him. She decided to try it again. "She wants to open a channel so that she can talk to us directly, sir."
The officers again felt uncomfortable that Kyra had answered for the Petty Officer, but again they felt more uncomfortable with what she'd said. If they opened a channel to connect with the Morningstar directly, then she could send whatever viruses she wanted, and the fleet's computers would not be able to scan her messages quickly enough to protect themselves.
Kyra didn't think that this scenario was as worrying as the officers were making it out to be.
Still, Kyra had only known the crew for a few hours. She may have discovered specific pieces of information that the authorities had missed, but that didn't necessarily mean that she knew the bigger picture as well as the others did. "Commander Yorta, sir?"
"Yes, Kyra?"
"To your knowledge of June Harper and her crew, is Arachne more ruthless than the Captain or less?"
Everybody on the bridge who had heard of the Morningstar crew felt that the ship was far less ruthless than the Captain, not more. The Captain killed others the second that she judged them to be villains unworthy of life, but the Morningstar tried to avoid lethal force against the same offenders for as long as possible. The Captain took great pleasure in killing, but the Morningstar took no such pleasure. The Captain went out of her way to make her kills as torturous as possible without sacrificing efficiency, but whenever the Morningstar was forced to kill a person who was threatening another, she always tried to do so as cleanly and mercifully as possible.
Yorta decided that the Morningstar could be trusted. She would eventually need to be charged with and sentenced for aiding and abetting a serial killer, but she was not one herself. "Petty Officer Tho, open a channel with the other ship."
Tho managed to force out a quiet, "Yes, sir." He accepted Arachne's request for computer access.
Arachne's voice came through Tho's computer. "Kyra?"
Kyra hadn't thought this far ahead. How was she supposed to start the conversation? "Arachne, what are you going to do when all of this is over?"
"My friends and I will get out of here as soon as we can, but first we'll need to talk to The Agent about whether he wants to come with us or not."
Kyra's legs almost buckled under her. Why would Arachne let The Agent make that decision for himself? "But why would you let him do that? Having a crush on Damien doesn't justify letting him live on the run with a serial killer!"
"It's not just him and Damien. When I mind-melded with Kathryn, I showed her that Nathan and I have a plan to rehabilitate Captain Harper."
Rehabilitation? Was that possible for a serial killer?
Arachne continued, "I couldn't go into a lot of detail, but she knows how sure I am that it will work, and she wants to help."
Kyra looked around the Judoon officers gathered on the bridge. "Is it possible to do that?"
Most of the officers agreed that it was possible, but not likely. Both the Time Agency and the Shadow Proclamation had found thousands of witnesses who'd unwittingly interacted with Captain June Harper when she was not in the middle of a murder spree. Analysis of her behavior in their memories had always shown that she genuinely enjoyed their company, shown that she recognized them as people in their own right and not as resources for her own use, and shown that they had been perfectly safe from the cruelties of her mind.
Captain June Harper's brain was biologically aroused by murder – both in fantasy and in action – to a degree that no healthy brain would have been, but clearly she was not controlled by this biological defect in any way. She was in complete control of her homicidal urges, and she would never kill anyone for the pleasure itself, she would only kill if she was certain that the person in question was going to kill somebody else if she didn't kill him first. Every time the Captain tortured someone to death, it was because she believed that she was fighting against evil to make the universe a better place for innocent people to live without fear of being hurt themselves.
De-programming a murderer driven by ideology was nowhere near as straightforward as medicating a murderer driven by neurology. If a lunatic were medicated against her will, freed from the impulses that had been beyond her control, and if she could then look back on her actions from a place of sanity, then she would want to continue treatment so as not to revert to the person she had been previously.
A zealot on the other hand, one such as Captain June Harper, would actively resist any attempts by her "enemies" to "brainwash" her into abandoning her "righteous" crusade against evil.
More importantly, the criminal in question would need to be kept under absolute control during the course of her treatment. The Morningstar, on the other hand, had left hundreds of mangled corpses in her wake. Whatever she and her crew thought they were doing to keep their Captain under control, clearly their plan had failed.
Kyra couldn't see any way for Arachne to not already know all of this. How could she think that her plan to control Captain Harper was working? "Thank you everybody. Arachne, what makes you think you can rehabilitate Captain Harper more effectively than professionals could?"
"She sees me as a fellow rule-breaker. She doesn't shut me out the way she would a doctor appointed by the authorities."
That was not even close to answering the question that Kyra had asked. "Thank you for telling me why your plan might work, but can you tell me whether it is working or not?"
"It hasn't worked yet, but I know that we are getting closer to a breakthrough."
"And how many more people have to die before you decide that you've sunk too much cost into your gamble?"
Yorta told Kyra that the Time Agency and Shadow Proclamation had tried repeatedly to turn the Morningstar and her crew against their Captain with the same negotiations that Kyra was trying now, but that negotiation had always failed. Yorta wanted to believe as hard as Kyra did that the Captain's friends would come to their senses someday and surrender themselves and their Captain to the authorities.
Right now, however, Kyra's focus should be on trying to save Shanjik and the Time Lords from being forced down the same path. No reason to make the same mistake with the Captain's crew – trying to reason with the unreasonable – that the crew were making with the Captain herself.
Kyra decided Yorta was right. Kathryn and The Agent had to be the priority. "Arachne, are the Time Lords with you?"
"Just Kathryn. We're trying to get my teleports back online so I can evac' the team that's still planet-side."
"And when that's done?"
"Kathryn will psychically share the rehabilitation plan with Shanjik and I'll share it with The Agent. We'll ask if either of them want to help us, but if The Agent doesn't want in, then Kathryn will stay with him instead of coming with us."
How could Arachne say that? Her brain was far more powerful than Kathryn's or The Agent's, more powerful than the combined brains of thousands, possibly even millions of Time Lords. If Kyra had only ever been exposed to her captors these past few years, not to the other prisoners – or, on second thought, to the sadists who didn't care about their comrades' super-soldier research – then the sheer force of their conviction would probably have even convinced Kyra that her own suffering was a necessary sacrifice.
Did Arachne really think that the Kathryn and The Agent would be making their final decisions freely, rather than being overwhelmed by Arachne's force of personality? "Have you emphasized what happens if the plan doesn't work?"
"I know it will."
"But you can't –" Kyra froze, mouth still open.
Arachne was a time machine. This entire escape had revolved around time travellers coming from the future to give the best possible information to their own past selves.
Kyra prayed for the strength to ask her next question. "Arachne, are you saying you've already seen June Harper rehabilitated?"
Arachne answered, "That's classified."
Two of the Judoon fainted. Most of the other officers fell mentally silent.
Yorta started trying to work out what it meant if Kyra was right about Arachne's plan. For all of their careers, they'd both heard rumors that many "unsolved" cases had actually been solved and that many "uncaught" culprits had actually been caught, just in ways that required the majority of law enforcement personnel to believe otherwise.
Ket didn't share the same enthusiasm for conspiracy theory. If she was assigned to bring in one criminal and other officers were assigned to bring in other, then she would bring in her criminal and the other officers would bring in their. If any of the other arrests were kept secret from her, then it wasn't her place to know about them, and she didn't bother wasting time wondering about hypotheticals. To the best of Ket's knowledge, Captain June Harper would never be officially brought into custody; therefor Ket would not be bringing her into custody. Why should she care whether the reason was "nobody will ever arrest June Harper" versus "somebody else will secretly arrest June Harper"?
Yorta, on the other hand, had always enjoyed spending his free time studying unsolved cases and "uncaught" culprits, coming up with ideas for how some of the cases might have secretly been solved, how some of the culprits might have secretly been caught, and why such victories were required to be kept secret from the majority of law enforcement.
Now most powerful accomplice of Captain June Harper, number 7 on the Shadow Proclamation's list of Most Notorious "Identified, But Never Arrested," had claimed that the Captain might be one of law enforcement's secret victories.
Yorta's mind churned with possibilities. Would the Captain's allies set her up to be arrested, the arrest kept secret, and the Captain rehabilitated in an asylum? Would her allies rehabilitate her, convince her to turn herself in, and her surrender would be kept secret? Would she go into self-imposed exile to protect the world from her own homicidal urges? Would she continue her outlaw campaign of vigilante "justice," but without the bloodlust that had traumatized so many crime scene investigators?
Or was the Morningstar lying, letting the present authorities trick themselves into letting the Captain escape to continue her crime spree until she got herself killed?
Kyra's mind went in a different direction. If Arachne's plan was based on a time loop where a future June Harper would give instructions for redeeming per past self, then the plan depended on the different parts of the plan not changing as everybody cycled through the loop of events.
That would be easy enough if it were just Arachne and her friends. Even Arachne's temporal technology wasn't powerful enough to alter timelines to any serious degree, so a trio of humans couldn't possibly derail the plan that Allah had already established for redeeming June.
But perhaps the Time Lords could.
Every cruelty that the military and scientific personnel had come up with had been done to create super-soldiers capable of fighting the Daleks, and the core focus of their research had been the finding power to change the timeline as easily as the Daleks could.
The Time Lords that had been created before Kathryn and The Agent had not been able to change timelines as well as the researches had hoped, but neither had they been able to regenerate from life-threatening injuries. The Agent was the first time that the researchers had gotten regeneration to work, and presumably his identical twin would have the same power. Could they also be the first time that the researchers had gotten the power of changing timelines to work?
The Agent hadn't changed anything between the two halves of the current escape plan, but that didn't mean that he and his sister couldn't change part of the June Harper rehabilitation plan.
Now Kyra had another reason why the Time Lords shouldn't be allowed to stay with June. "Arachne, if your plan involves what I think it is, then shouldn't you keep the Time Lords as far away from it as possible?"
"Actually, it would be a lot harder without them."
Harder? "You need them?"
"Not 100%. If The Agent doesn't like the plan, then he and Kathryn can leave and I'll just try to find someone else to do their part. It'll just take a lot longer and there'll be a lot more casualties in the meantime."
What did Arachne mean "their part"? "Wait a minute, are you saying that you knew about them before you came here?"
"I wasn't here specifically to look for them, but yes, I already knew about them, and every time my friends and I found a facility like this one, I'd always look for Time Lords."
So her crew would've worked to free the other captives even if Kathryn and The Agent hadn't been among them. Kyra hadn't even noticed that she was asking herself that question, but she still recognized her relief that it had been answered.
In any case, it didn't look like the Time Lords would be free for much longer. Kyra had gone into this conversation committed to saving them from going with June Harper; now even she was starting to feel that it might be their duty to go with, that Allah had organized their creation specifically to save June from herself. How could The Agent possibly resist the same idea, even if Kathryn weren't already on board with it?
Kyra forced herself to breathe. "Arachne, could you at least tell them I said good-bye?"
"Would you like to tell them? Kathryn and I have the teleports working again."
Kyra looked around the Judoon officers. "Would you trust me to come back?"
Yorta did. He'd just re-lived 5 years of Kyra's life, so he felt confident that Kyra was not the kind of anarchic person to run off with a serial killer, no matter how strongly the Captain and her crew tried to persuade her that they could handle murderers better than law enforcement could.
However, Chief Petty Officer Vo – the technician overseeing teleportation to and from the ship – worried more about the logistics than about Kyra's character. The Judoon couldn't teleport Kyra over to the Morningstar because their computers were too preoccupied for the precision required, but the Morningstar couldn't lock onto Kyra without the Judoon letting her scan their bridge.
The only solution Vo could think of was for the Judoon to teleport Kyra from the ship into some patch of air for the Morningstar to scan, then for the Morningstar to teleport Kyra from the air into herself. Vo couldn't imagine that even the Morningstar could manage such a stunt.
Clearly he didn't know Arachne's crew as well as Kyra did. Captain June Harper had done this with Arachne dozens of times.
Then again, Arachne was probably busier now than she had been any of those other times. "Arachne, if they teleport me into the open sky, would you be able to catch me?"
"Yes."
Vo grumbled in his mind about how this wasn't what he signed up for. He turned to the subordinate beside him. "Petty Officer Mir, find the safest place to teleport Kyra, then send the coordinates to Petty Officer Tho's station. Tho, send the data to the Morningstar when you receive it."
Mir looked for the two Judoon ships that appeared to be taking the least enemy fire, then scanned a position somewhere between the two. She sent the coordinates to Tho, and he sent them to the Morningstar.
Arachne answered almost instantly. "Message received. Everybody ready?"
Kyra answered, "I am." She didn't hear any objections from the officers. "Let's do this."
The room transformed into Hell.
The floor fell out from under Kyra's feet. Her stomach wrenched as the emptiness below grabbed her and dragged her down. The wind roared across her ears as she plummeted, joining the cacophony of rockets and cannons and explosions. Her vision flooded with the blaze of hovering warships bombarding the ground facility with cannon-fire and vice versa. The air reeked of metal buckling and burning against the barrages, of Arachne's engines choking the sky with radioactive exhaust. Even the most distant explosions battered Kyra's body from the inside out.
Kyra tried covering her eyes, her nose, and her ears. Nothing she did could drown out the force of the destruction before her.
The barrage against her senses petered out. Kyra's feet settled on solid ground.
She opened her eyes; she was inside Arachne again, second story.
Kyra dropped to the floor and vomited.
Nathan asked if Kyra needed some water.
Kyra hadn't realized that he would be awake again. "Yes, please."
Nathan walked over and knelt down to pick Kyra off the floor. He handed her a thermos of ice water.
Kyra took a sip. It didn't settle her insides completely, but it certainly helped.
Kathryn was working on a section of wall off to Kyra's left.
Kyra jolted in surprise.
She hadn't noticed she was there. She'd never been able to understand Time Lords' minds, not unless one was melding with somebody other than another Time Lord, but at least she'd always noticed when one was present. Had double-teleporting messed up her power's range?
She would have to ask about that later. "Is anybody else here?"
Nathan told her that they had got The Agent back first; he was mind melding with Arachne on the second storey – what Kyra would've called the third story – to see if he liked the rehabilitation that Arachne was planning for Harper. Shanjik had come after him, and now Kathryn and Arachne were trying to get a lock on Damien. Harper was the strongest, so she was being saved for last.
"Thank you." Kyra looked over to the Time Lord. "Kathryn? Are you busy?"
Kathryn looked into the exposed wiring in the wall. "Arachne, are you good for now?"
"Yes Kathryn, go."
Kathryn ran over and knelt down to hug Nathan and Kyra.
Kyra's eyes stung with saltwater. When she had first seen that "Alpha" and "Beta" were out of their cells because of Captain June Harper, Kyra had assumed that they were being freed. It hadn't once occurred to her that the Time Lords would be trading one environment of murder for another. She prayed that Kathryn and The Agent wouldn't be put through too much worse than they already had been.
Nathan asked if Kyra wanted him to leave her and Kathryn alone for their good-bye.
Kyra nodded. "Kathryn, could you let Nathan go?"
Kathryn relaxed her arm. Nathan got up, stopping himself from remembering details of the rehabilitation plan as he left.
Kathryn embraced Kyra again. "Do you want to come with us?"
Kyra's stomach wrenched all over again. "Kathryn, I can't. I hope this works, I really do." She shook her head. "I just can't be part of it."
"Because you don't want to, or because you think somebody's stopping you?"
How could she ask that? "Why would that matter? If I wanted to be involved with a serial killer, then that would mean that somebody needed to stop me."
Kathryn recoiled.
Shit. Kyra didn't need to read Kathryn's mind to realize that she'd probably taken that personally. "That's not what I meant, you need to be here to stop her. That's different."
"You don't think you can help?"
Kyra jerked her head around. Damien was standing not 20 feet away, but she couldn't hear his mind.
She would need to talk to Arachne later. "When did you get back?"
"Just a few seconds ago."
Kyra let go of Kathryn and stood up. "I think that you, Nathan, and Arachne all think that you're helping, but I haven't seen any evidence that it's working for you. I just can't make the same mistake you are."
"What would you do differently?" Damien's thought's slipped out as he walked closer. In the year he'd travelled with the Captain, he'd heard dozens of people call him and his friends out on protecting her, but he'd always come to the conclusion the crew's current arrangement was the least bad option.
A lot of people had told him every victim of the Captain was his and his friends' failure to stop her. Damien had felt that way at first, but even legitimate law enforcement agencies couldn't save everybody from murderers with the Captain's dedication.
Others had told him he and the crew should appoint someone other than her as their leader so she would have to ask permission to kill anybody. Those people hadn't met the Captain themselves. Everybody who did recognized neither Nathan nor Damien nor Arachne had the force of personality to coerce the Captain directly.
Kyra wanted to believe him. More for Kathryn and The Agent's sakes than for Damien's own, he'd already made his choices, but she did. "Did you ever have plans to turn her in if all of this failed?"
People had suggested that too. Damien feared this was giving the authorities too much credit; the Captain was strong enough and persuasive enough she'd just escape custody whenever she wanted. Without a team of handlers to occupy her time, she'd just go out and find new friends. With her force of personality, it wouldn't take long for her to gather a following of vigilantes who shared her passion for bloodshed and destruction.
This had always been the deal-breaker whenever Damien found himself wondering if Nathan and Arachne's rehabilitation plan was unrealistic. Even if they couldn't stop the Captain herself from being a serial killer, they could still distract her from building an army of serial killers, one with the potential to inflict thousands of times the damage the Captain could inflict on her own.
Kyra hadn't thought of that. She'd been horrified enough at the idea of June as a lone wolf serial killer, but now Damien was showing how easy it would be for June to start a massive terrorist movement. Were her friends really better at keeping her under better control than Kyra had thought they were? Should she be thinking of them as "successfully stopping a terrorist leader" rather than "unsuccessfully stopping a serial killer"?
No, Kyra couldn't accept that. Damien's explanations made sense in his own mind, but he'd had about a year to rationalize the life he'd chosen. How was she supposed to trust that he wasn't lying to himself? "And what if you're wrong?"
Damien asked if Kyra didn't think his logic made sense.
"Anybody's logic would make sense if they've been doing something long enough! How many villains can you think of who would say 'I've already started, it's too late for me to stop'?"
Which Damien felt brought them back to the original question: what did Kyra think they should do if the current arrangement wasn't working?
"I don't know, and you've had an entire year to think about this! Why haven't you tried coming up with backup plans instead of settling for just this one?" Kyra realized that she was saying the exact same thing about Damien that Shanjik had already tried saying about himself.
She grabbed her forehead with one hand. "Oh, crap." Did this mean that she was supposed to be letting Shanjik judge himself as harshly as she was judging Damien, or did this mean that she was supposed to be judging Damien as leniently as she'd wanted Shanjik to judge himself?
Damien asked what Kyra's problem was. He caught himself and rephrased his question to ask what was bothering her.
Kyra shook her head. "I just lost the point I was trying to get at."
In the sense she forgot where she was going?
"No, I remember exactly what I was saying. It's just that I'd said the exact opposite thing to somebody else today, and I don't know which one I was wrong about."
Damien hated that feeling too. Sure, he loved arguing as many sides as possible regardless of which side he agreed with, but he still didn't like finding out he didn't know what he believed as well as he thought he did.
Still, he found it was very common for two contradictory ideas to fit together better than they looked at first. He asked if it was possible Kyra had been right both times.
Kyra didn't think so. "Shanjik felt guilty for not trying to resist the murderers he worked for, only I told him it wasn't his fault, and now I'm saying it is your fault for doing the same with June."
Damien hadn't made that connection.
"Is the difference that Shanjik is my friend but you and I just met? I don't see how that could make me come across any better."
Damien wondered if her brain was making a distinction between how Shanjik had to be forced to serve the murderers versus how Damien served the Captain voluntarily.
Phrasing it that way made Damien wonder if maybe Kyra did have a point; but, again, him and his friends helping the Captain was still far less destructive than them not helping her.
On the other hand, how many people like Shanjik and Skeerse and worked at the super-soldier facility for exactly that reason?
Now Damien was wondering if Kyra could be right he, Nathan, and Arachne were lying to themselves. Had they rationalised their service to a serial killer for so long they weren't judging themselves objectively anymore?
Kathryn looked at Damien over Kyra's shoulder. "Are you OK?"
Damien wasn't any more sure than Kyra had been a second ago. He'd always felt the most disgusting villains were those who knew what they were doing was wrong, who bragged about how much they hated what they were doing, but who insisted "it's too late for me to stop doing it." Was he on his way to becoming the same kind of person? One who supported a serial killer not because he thought he could control her, but because he didn't remember how to live any other way? "No, I really don't think so."
Kathryn looked back and forth between Kyra and Damien. "Why, what happened?"
"Oh, nothing serious. Kyra just made me wonder if the driving force behind the last year of my life has been a vicious lie." Damien meant that as a joke, but he couldn't shake the feeling he might someday get to the point he really didn't see anything wrong with living around the Captain.
Kathryn started staring at the back of Kyra's head.
Kyra turned around the face her. "What is it?"
"Are you sure you don't want to help us?"
Not as sure as she was a minute ago, but yes, Kyra still felt sure that she couldn't help them. "Yes, why?"
"I think you just did."
What. "How so?"
Damien wondered if this was about Kyra making him less confident in the plan to rehabilitate the Captain. Damien had been completely committed to the plan, but a few sentences with Kyra had been enough to make him doubt himself. Maybe Kathryn thought Kyra should stay on board as the outsider less invested in the plan than everybody else was, more capable of looking at the plan objectively than they were, and uncomfortable enough with the plan she wouldn't let anybody else become comfortable?
Kathryn put a hand on Kyra's shoulder. "You just got Damien thinking that he might not want to be part of this anymore. Do you think you might be able to help the rest of us in the same way? Looking for problems that the rest of us don't notice because we like the plan more than you do?"
So Damien had been right.
Underneath his new cynicism about his own motives and judgment, Damien thought the idea sounded hilarious. The Captain had taken it upon herself to police the universe in the most bloodthirsty way imaginable, and the rest of the crew had taken it upon themselves to police the Captain as damage control. Now Kathryn was asking if Kyra wanted to come on board, not just to police the Captain directly, but also to police the way everybody else policed the Captain. "So who exactly would police Kyra if we do this?"
Kyra ignored that last part.
Could Kathryn and Damien be right? If Kyra went off with the authorities and left June's friends to work on the plan on their own, would that mean that – instead of Kyra protesting the problems in the plan – Kyra would be allowing the problems to go unchallenged?
No, that was exactly the same thing that Nathan, Damien, and Arachne had been telling themselves about June this whole time, but June was still killing whomever she wanted, however she wanted, whenever she wanted. But Damien had made a compelling case that they were preventing more damage than it looked like they were. Had Allah brought Kyra here because He wanted her to do the same thing? Not to stop all of June's violence, but to do more than simply leaving June to her own devices. But that was exactly how Shanjik's overlords had gotten good doctors to commit evil against their will, by insisting that the damage to the innocent prisoners would be worse if the doctors didn't help the captors…
Kyra felt herself go dizzy from the back-and-forth in her head. When had coming to a decision ever been this hard for her?
Acting on her decisions had certainly be hard at different points in her life – converting to Islam and telling her fundamentalist Christian family on Earth about her conversion had been the two hardest – but making the decision itself had always been easy. Why didn't she know what to do now?
She asked Allah to show her the right thing to do, apologizing for having so much trouble finding for herself.
Damien noticed Kyra shaking her head in frustration. Or at least, what he thought was frustration, but he'd never been good with facial and/or body language. He asked Kyra if he was reading her correctly.
Kyra nodded. "Yes, yes I am frustrated. I know for a fact that one of my two options is absolutely evil, but not which one is which."
Damien made a snark in his mind about whether that meant both options were evil.
He reminded himself that line probably wasn't helping anything. He asked what Kyra normally did when a decision was this hard for her to make.
"I don't know. I've never had this much trouble." She turned to Kathryn. "Have you?"
Kathryn shook her head. "No, but I've always imagined I'd ask a friend for advice, so," She gave a thumbs up, "Good for you, I guess?"
Damien tried not to laugh at the image of Kathryn and Kyra asking each other infinitely, "I don't know, what would you do," "I don't know, what would you do?"
He forced himself to focus. He'd always believed, when faced with a few options and no idea which one was the best, people should take the more flexible option just in case they did find out at some later point which one was better. In this case, if Kyra went with the authorities now, but found out later she'd been supposed to help rehabilitate the Captain the whole time, she wouldn't be able to find Arachne and the rest of the crew later and she would fail her responsibility; whereas if she stayed with Arachne and the crew now, then found out later she wasn't supposed to be involved, they could always drop her off somewhere else before she got in too deep with them. Not a perfect option – if Kyra got entangled in crimes she wasn't supposed to, after leaving she would still have to either turn herself in or hide from the authorities the rest of her life – but better than taking the risk the Captain's bloodshed would go on longer without Kyra than it would with her.
Damien realized he'd just talked himself into thinking The Agent had to stay on board for the same reason. He'd heard Kyra mention Kathryn "needed" to be involved, he'd had no reason to believe her brother would run off without her, but he hadn't put it together until just now The Agent would be sticking around because she was too. Now the fact he was dreading The Agent's inevitable involvement made Damien feel maybe the idea wasn't as good as he'd made it out to be when he was defending it to Kyra.
Damien's legs went numb.
Kyra ran over to catch him. She got her arms under his shoulders just as he started falling.
He was a lot heavier than she would've guessed. Kyra didn't think she could lower him to the floor without losing her own balance. "Kathryn, could you give me a hand?"
Kathryn wrapped her arm under Damien's left shoulder from behind. She put his left arm over her own shoulders. "We helping him sit here or carrying him somewhere else?"
Kyra hadn't though of that. As she worked her way to Damien's right, she asked, "Arachne, would it be OK if Kathryn and I set him down against the wall?"
"Of course."
Carrying Damien 10 feet was harder than Kyra had thought, but she felt she and Kathryn managed well enough.
As they set Damien down, he apologized for almost fainting.
"It's OK, Damien, you're OK now."
Kathryn looked over. "Did he just say something?"
"He just wanted to apologize for making us carry him like that."
"What is he talking about? He didn't 'make us' do anything, we wanted to help him!"
Damien made himself say, "Actually, I was thinking about it the way she was."
Kathryn rolled her eyes and stepped back. She looked back and forth between Kyra sitting against the wall and Damien leaning against her. "Kyra, I really hate to keep going after everything else we've said, but I really think you're a good influence on us."
Kyra looked up. "Are you sure?"
"Damien's been working on this plan for about a year, and you made him question himself in a few sentences."
"Yeah, but you said that already. Don't you think he'll remember this next time?"
Kathryn shook her head. "That's exactly the problem. He couldn't have lost confidence that quickly unless he was already doubting the plan on some level, but he's never let that stop him until now."
Damien almost regained feeling in his legs. He lost it all over again. Had he not only missed potential signs the plan wasn't working, but been actively ignoring them?
Kathryn went on. "If he's had these doubts this whole time, but always been able to ignore them, then don't you think it might be easy for him to go back to ignoring them without you? Sure, me, him, and Arachne will remember this whole thing –"
Kyra felt confident she knew what Kathryn was getting at without being able to read her. "But you're afraid that if Damien has been able to ignore his worries about the plan before, then maybe the bunch of you will be able to keep ignoring them later?"
Kathryn nodded. "If it would really be a bad thing for us to grow comfortable with June Harper, then are you sure you wouldn't want to be the outsider who keeps us uncomfortable?"
Kyra was starting to like Damien's perspective on this: when two options look equally bad, take the one that you can get out of most easily. She looked at the ceiling. "Arachne, you keep track of your own time, right? Not just where and when you are in the universe, but how long you've been doing something?"
"Yes."
This sounded like a good start. "So if I asked for, say, one Earth week to live here before deciding whether to leave or not, would you know how much time I was talking about?"
"7 days or 10?"
10? Why would humanity switch to a calendar with 10-day weeks? "7. Do you need to pick an easier time frame to work from?"
"Actually, we use the Classical calendar too. All of my friends are all Humans, so their circadian rhythms line up nicely, and Nathan is extremely Christian about when he wants days set aside for just resting."
"Very well." Kyra hadn't thought it would be this easy to reach an agreement. "So one week then?"
"If that's what you want."
"Yes, it is."
Damien wondered if Shanjik and Skeerse would be coming too at the rate this crew was taking on new passengers.
Now that he mentioned it, Kyra felt that was a very reasonable question. "Arachne, is Shanjik staying?"
"Yes. It didn't look like any of you were treating your conversation as a secret, so I kept Shanjik up to date and he said yes for the same reason you did."
Damien realised it would also be a good thing to have a medic on board in case anybody got injured and couldn't be taken back to Arachne in time.
Kyra made a mental note to ask Shanjik if that had also been a factor. "And Skeerse?"
Arachne didn't answer for a couple of seconds. "If we call the Shadow Proclamation and ask for him so you can say good-bye, they'll only agree if they think they can set a trap while we're distracted. Would you like me to try anyway?"
Kyra thought about how offended Skeerse would be if they left quietly.
Kyra would've been offended in his position, but it occurred to her that the two of them had never been particularly close, and he had never struck her as caring much about niceties even with the people he did consider to be very close. Dragging out a long good-bye – one based on Kyra, Shanjik, and the two Time Lords going with a serial killer instead of with the authorities – would probably make the news harder for him, not easier, than hearing about it from somebody else with more distance. "Now that you mention it, I don't think it would be very important to him. Not enough for us to risk it." She turned back to Kathryn. "Were you and The Agent ever close to him?"
Kathryn shook her head. "No, we were just acquaintances, not actual friends. Once in a while, he and The Agent would get the chance to talk about boys, or he and I would get the chance to talk about escape plans, but there was never a lot more than that."
That settled it. "OK, Arachne, I think we'll be good with the way things are. When do you think we'll be able to get out of here?"
"I just need to get another lock on Captain Harper. As soon as we teleport her back, we can leave the compound for the authorities to deal with."
Kyra stood up. "Thank you." She walked away from the wall. Damien's thoughts – mostly about the new people joining the crew and what it might be like to live with them – disappeared when she got a few paces away from him. "Arachne, can I come back up to the sick-bay? I think my power's glitching again."
"Of course. Come on up."
Kyra walked to a ladder and started climbing. No need to use the elevator; Kyra was not going to let her body waste away again.
She wondered how quickly the others would get used to their new relationships. Shanjik and Arachne would have to learn to work together as medics, Arachne being more powerful but Shanjik being able to go to a patient while Arachne depended on the patient being taken to her. Kathryn and Nathan would have to learn to work together as engineers, although Nathan seemed more skilled at computers while Kathryn had been very quick to learn about the machines that the computers controlled. Damien and The Agent would have to learn whether they could grow their infatuation with each other into a true relationship without breaking each other's hearts further down the line. And of course, Kyra would have to keep to herself, to cast her herself as the outsider, to resist every urge in her heart, mind, and soul to connect with the others because she couldn't risk their judgment about Captain June Harper clouding her own.
She prayed for the strength to do the right thing: if her place was with June's crew, then the strength to support them and to aid them; if her place was not with them, then the strength to get out before it was too late for them or for herself.
At the very least, she asked that she be given enough time to figure out what she was supposed to do.
June looked around the corner. The sounds and tremors from outside had been growing louder and louder, harder and harder, as she'd navigated the building. Now the first hint of actual battle was visible through the door at the end of the next hallway.
Ari not being able to teleport June out yet – having to leave June alone with nobody to keep her company – had felt sour at first, but seeing the battle from this close would more than make up for it. No untrained civilians for June to worry about being traumatized, no patronising brothers or sister-in-arms to insist that nobody let themselves enjoy their life's work, just a beautiful soldier left alone to enjoy a beautiful battle.
June made a run for it. She kicked through the door and danced her way onto the rooftop.
She couldn't imagine a more perfect vista than the one before her: the moans of Ari's engines as she flew through the sky, snaking between the Judoon ships and caressing the empty air with the soft breath of her black holes; the thousands of plasma rounds tearing through the clouds in all directions, creating the most beautiful lightshow as the colours danced between the ships in the air and the facility on the ground; the pulsing of the pressure waves from the explosions, distant and nearby, as they massaged her entire body from the skin to the bone; the sweet aromas of the plasma rounds as they burned through air and force fields and masonry and metal.
If cannon-fire had incinerated her then and there, she would not have been disappointed. Withering away in a hospital bed, no matter how many friends and lovers she had surrounding her, could never measure up to the idea of dying surrounded by the spectacle around her right now.
About a dozen metal spheres whizzed past her, each about a metre across. They flew towards one of the Judoon ships, then fired sickly green beam weapons. The ship's defenses couldn't lock on to such small targets.
June wanted to laugh. Even the Rhino Patrol couldn't complain about her saving them from inanimate objects, could they?
She lowered the blaster rifle hanging from her shoulder and took a smaller blaster from around her waist. She fired the blaster at full-speed, not hitting any of the drones but not expecting that she would. Hitting a drone would've been nice, but the blaster itself was the point.
June's face flushed with the sweet perfume of the blaster over-heating. Every centimetre of her body tickled with anticipation, but she kept firing. These drones were further away than any Venkman she'd tried to pull off in her life. If she fired now, the blaster might cool off before it got close enough. The explosion wouldn't be powerful enough even if June was able to hit it perfectly.
The heat of the blaster's discharge spread to the handle. June gave herself one second to enjoy the warmth in her hand.
She threw the blaster into the air. One second went by. Then two. Then three. June drew the rifle again.
The blaster flew closer to the swarm of drones.
June aimed her rifle into the sky and fired at the blaster.
She missed. She fired again.
She missed again.
This had never happened before. Then again, she'd never tried from this much distance before. June fired a third time.
The rifle shot wrapped lovingly around the blaster. The joining exploded into dancing sparks and vapours of blue and white.
The two drones caught inside the explosion crashed against the Judoon ship before falling out of the sky. Another drone was pushed away from it's vantage point, scratching one of it's own allies with it's beam weapon as it tried to re-orient itself.
If Taska Venkman herself were transported to the real world, witnessed the master shot that June had pulled off in her name, and offered to share herself as a reward, June would still look back more fondly on the beauty of the shot itself. Maybe not much more, but a little bit.
"Nice shooting, Captain."
Was that Ari speaking from behind her?
"Are you ready to come back?"
That was her, all right. June looked over her shoulder to see where Ari's voice was coming from.
A charred, mangled, box lay next to the door June had run out of. Clearly there was a microphone and speaker somewhere in that mess of metal plates and wires. Had it been hanging above the door before the firefight? "I'm ready when you are, beautiful."
"Just few more seconds."
June turned to face forwards again. The surviving drones had broken off from the Judoon ship and were flying towards her, each far enough away that June couldn't hit more than one at a time with a Venkman.
Then again, she could easily shoot them down despite the distance between them. June's blood tickled as she imagined the looks on the drone operators' faces as they tried to attack her, only to see her charge at them with a plasma rifle blazing in each arm, jumping off the roof to get closer to the drones, and possibly getting teleported out before getting hit herself and/or falling to her death.
She realized that a mid-air evac might not work this time. Ari had never had trouble with moving-target teleports before, but June didn't think Ari had ever tried one in the middle of a battle this massive before, not with everything else happening her to keep track of.
June looked back to the mangled radio behind her. "Ari, if I jump of the roof, are you able to catch me?"
"Yes I am."
So Ari already had a teleport lock on June's body. Just to verify, she signed with her hand, "Can you tell what I'm saying?"
"Yes, I can."
This was going to be fantastic.
June hoped that the drones weren't automated, or at the very least that there were functioning cameras for the soldiers downstairs to watch what was happening. Personal pleasure aside, she didn't see much point in trying a stunt like this if it didn't scare the shit out of somebody.
June turned and hopped to the opposite side of the roof, taking great care to copy the speed and posture of somebody like Nathan or Damien trying to running as fast as they could. Granted, any officers still alive to watch her had probably already seen her running at her real speed, but maybe she could convince them that she was exhausted, or that she'd been using hidden equipment but ran out of fuel.
Hell, she might even get lucky enough to find an audience who hadn't seen her run at top speed yet.
June reached the edge of the roof. She was about 120 meters from the opposite edge, maybe 150. Shouldn't take more than five or six seconds to run back across at full speed.
She turned around and crouched down, aiming her rifle with both hands so that any hypothetical viewers might think that she couldn't fire accurately with one hand.
The drones drew closer to their home base. None of them were firing; they must not be accurate for long distance.
June was. She fired 3 shots at the nearest drone, then 3 more at another. Two shots hit the closer drone and sent it crashing to the ground, one more hit the further drone and knocked it a few metres off course.
She fired 3 more shots at the damaged drone, then 3 at another one. Each drone was hit directly and each one exploded.
This seemed like a good place for the climax of her performance.
June set the rifle in her hands to full-auto. She let it drop, savouring the pressure on her neck as the shoulder strap dug into her. She took the rifle from under her other shoulder, double-checking that it was already set to full-auto.
Pale green light shined in front of the nearest drone. The beam weapon must be charging.
June slipped out of both shoulder straps. She put one hand through each one, wrapped each around her arm, and took the rifles in her hands.
Green lights started glowing in front of the other drones.
June raced towards the swarm.
Beams of green burned through the air above her head. June ducked lower to the ground.
Her foot landed against the corner between the roof and open sky. She jumped into the sky.
The air massaged her and kissed her on every centimeter of her skin as it rushed past her. Her insides shivered as the gravity of the planet reached up and tried to take her for itself.
June hoped that flying felt as wonderful to Ari as it felt to her. If a deity ever revealed itself and offered June eternal life and youth, she would trade it in a heartbeat for the ability to fly.
The first of the drones soared past. Its beam swept across the sky as it tried to turn around.
June twisted in the air. She fired one of her rifles at the drone she'd just passed, her other at a drone further back.
Both drones exploded against the force of the plasma storms. June aimed her rifles at two more. These exploded just as quickly as the first two.
One of the energy beams drew too close for comfort. June focused both of her rifles on the drone shooting at her. The machine went down before the beam could connect.
The wind against her skin told June that she'd reached the peak of her flight and was starting to fall. She rolled her body around so her back would be to the ground.
The final drone's beam weapon pirouetted around her, sweeping closer one moment, over-shooting the next, then trying to re-orient but always missing.
Did that mean that the drone was being piloted remotely? The cannon was clearly not designed to hit such a small target from such a great distance, and any halfway decent auto-targeting program would've known better than to try its luck. The only explanation June could think of was that the drone was being controlled by a person on the ground, that June's feats of 51st century speed, strength, and hand-eye coordination had terrified this person beyond the capacity for rational thought, and that this person was instinctively trying to destroy the enemy at all costs instead of looking at the situation rationally. The ground operator couldn't possibly know that June would be able to survive a fall from this height, so the reasonable thing to do would've been to fly the drone away and let her fall to her death.
Could the pilot have realized that June would survive the fall and could continue firing from the ground? Now that she thought about it, that wouldn't actually have been unreasonable for the pilot to figure out after the jump that June had just made.
Still, the pilot hadn't seemed to realize that flying the drone for a closer shot would work better than trying to snipe like this. June was far closer to the drone right now than she had been for her Venkman barely a minute earlier, so the pilot should've realized that keeping the drone at an unusable distance would not protect it from June's own shooting.
She tried to decide which would be scarier: getting teleported out while the drone pilot was powerless to stop her from escaping, or destroying the drone first and leaving the pilot with no idea what would happen next.
She chose destroying the drone. If the pilot saw June teleport out, then the pilot would know that June had teleported out, and knowing less was always scarier than knowing more. June wanted the drone's final visual transmission to be that she was plummeting to the ground, yet confidant that this wouldn't be the end of her.
The drone dove through the sky. The energy beam missed more narrowly than it had a few moments ago.
June grinned and licked her lips, hoping the drone's cameras would be able to make her face out from this distance. She aimed both rifles at the drone, waited a second for the pilot to process what was about to happen, then fired a barrage of plasma rounds.
The last of the drones exploded. June whooped at the thrill of the lightshow. The beam dissipated centimetres from the side of her waist.
The pilot's pants must be soaked by now.
This seemed to be as good a time as any to check back in with Ari. June let go of a rifle and signed "Pick me up?" with her now free hand.
The beautiful tingling of pre-teleportation buzzed across her body. She closed her eyes to focus on the feeling. In an instant, she went from laying on her back to standing on her feet. The bed of wind rushing against her disappeared.
June opened her eyes. She was inside Ari again.
Damien was sitting against Ari's hull, and it sounded like people were moving around upstairs.
June's face flushed with warmth as a smile danced across. She leaned her back against the wall and looked to the ceiling. "I missed you, Ari. I don't think I got to say that when we bolted out of here, but I really did miss you." She stopped herself from rubbing her hands across Ari's paneling.
"I missed you too. Are you OK?"
June laughed. As far as she could tell, everything was fine. Wouldn't Ari already know that from scanning her for the teleport? "Five by five, Ari. Is there anything else left for us here?"
"I just need to hang up on Yorta. Do you want to say anything first?"
Yorta? Was Ari talking about the Shadow Proclamation Judoon Commander Yorta that June had once shared a wonderful time with, only for him to chase her off the planet when he found out that she was a wanted vigilante? What was she talking with him for? "That depends, what have you said so far?"
"Kyra called from his ship asking for the Time Lords, so I teleported her over to talk in person."
June chastised herself for assuming the worst about one of her closest friends. "Was this a private conversation?"
"Kathryn said that she wanted to stay with us, Kyra tried to convince her and The Agent to go with the authorities, but Kathryn and Damien convinced her and Shanjik to stay."
June almost passed out from euphoria. "Oh my gods, Ari, did I hear you correctly?"
"Kyra, Shanjik, Kathryn, and The Agent will be leaving with us."
She covered her mouth with her hand and laughed. Or cried, she couldn't tell exactly which.
New people would be joining the family. For all the thousands of single-serving friends she'd met in her travels across the universe, she'd had to spend the last year and a half with only two or three personal friends – first Nathan and Arachne, then Damien – that she could trust with her life, that she could count on to be there for her, and that she could be there for in return.
Learning now that her family of vagabonds would be doubling in size, June wondered how she'd made it this long.
She could already feel the possibilities flooding her brain for the life that the new family could make together.
Damien and The Agent would obviously have the chance to turn their whirlwind-fling into a genuine romance. As far as June knew, they could be the first loving couple ever to live inside Arachne as a couple.
Arachne herself could team up with Shanjik and Kathryn for medical and mechanical work, freeing Nathan to regain his life's love of programming, to focus on tending to Arachne's psychological health while Kathryn tended to her physically, and freeing Arachne to travel wherever she liked without having to stop for mechanical check-ups. Nathan had always been the closest thing Arachne had to a mechanical engineer – June and Damien tried to pitch in, but they'd never been able to help in an actual crisis – but even with him trying to take care of her, Arachne had always needed to stop every few weeks to get professional work done.
Kyra was not a soldier, so she would never be expected to use her psychic powers for combat, but if she was as socially conscious as she seemed, then perhaps she might like to take point on the family's conflict mediation. She might not have the clinical training to be a real-life Deanna Troi, but that didn't mean she couldn't use her power to be the best concerned friend that she could be.
Kyra also hadn't shown any interest in June physically, but perhaps Shanjik or Kathryn might be more open to experimentation. Granted, June hadn't got that impression from either of them either, but neither she had met either of their species until today. Maybe she was missing a tell somewhere in their expressions and their body language?
June wanted to dance naked for joy. She hadn't known most of these people for even a day, but already she couldn't imagine going back to living without them. This was turning into the most wonderful day of her life.
She registered the fact that Ari hadn't used the name "Alpha." "So The Agent told you his new name when he got back?"
"We actually need to talk about that later."
Really? How could that be something important enough to merit its own talk?
Arachne continued, "Right now, do you want to tell Yorta anything before we leave?"
Oh, she most certainly did want to say something. "Would we be able to jump to the Vortex as soon as we're done, or would it take us longer?"
"We can jump whenever."
Perfect. "Count me down, then."
"5, 4, 3, 2, 1, Go."
This was going to be fun. "Well if it isn't Commander Yorta! Do you still think about the nights that we spent together?" June certainly loved thinking about those nights whenever she got bored.
The Judoon's voice flooded out of Ari's speakers. "Captain June Harper, under the laws of the Shadow Proclamation and under the charter of the Time Agency, I hereby order you to surrender." June had thought Yorta would be more shaken, but he seemed to be maintaining his composure well enough.
She laughed. "Not going to happen, gorgeous!" Ever since the day that she and Nathan had met June for the first time, Ari had scoured the universe for the Shadow Proclamation's deepest, darkest databanks, and she'd always told June that the authorities never caught up with them. Was June supposed to believe that there was an arrest record somewhere in the universe and that Ari had been lying to her? No, that was never going to happen.
Still, no reason not to joke about the possibility a bit. June hoped Yorta would remember the ancient movies she'd gotten him to watch. "You can check your calendar if you think you'll want to remember this as the day that you caught me," she started to raise her voice in preparation for the climax, "but I can assure you that you'll always remember this as the day that you almost caught," She took a deep breath, signing with her hand, "Get us out as soon as I say it."
Yorta interrupted the dramatic pause. "Darico Cava."
Impossible.
June's heart clenched in place.
Arachne interrupted next. "Is it OK that I hung up and we're leaving now?"
June nodded. She tried to say "Yes, that is absolutely OK," but her throat couldn't push the words out. She signed the words instead.
Yorta knew the name "Darico Cava." Where the hell did he get that name?
Arachne had gone to great lengths over the last year and a half to find any information relating to June's life as Darico Cava, and she had gone to even greater lengths to find ways of erasing that information from the rest of the universe's timeline without changing anything else.
Hell, Arachne had even outsmarted a Dalek patrol ship since June had come aboard. No civilisation known anywhere in the universe had time technology comparable to that of the Daleks, but Arachne had once maneuvered a Dalek scouting vessel into a supermassive black hole in a way that the Daleks on the ship could not travel back in time to stop from happening.
Arachne may have flown like hell out of the way of all other Dalek ships she'd encountered, but she and her friends had always appreciated how miraculous that one victory had been. There wasn't a non-Dalek time machine in history that had ever been confirmed as defeating more than one Dalek ship. Arachne joining the exclusive club of ships that scored that one kill had cemented in June's mind the fact that Arachne was the most powerful time machine that June was ever likely to meet in her life.
And now Captain June Harper's old name had returned from the oblivion of timelines that had once happened but then had never happened. From the oblivion that Arachne had erased it to.
How could it possibly have come back?
How could any time travelers possibly have found powerful enough technology to do something that Arachne could not overcome? Had they stolen from the Daleks? No, the Daleks would've been able to go back and stop the robbery from happening. Even having a Dalek time-changing time machine didn't help if the thief didn't already have the training to use the machine as well as a Dalek could, and how could a thief get the training unless somebody else had stolen a Dalek time machine first?
That didn't mean that the Daleks themselves were behind this, did it? Grading on a curve, June worked a hell of a lot harder to fight against the forces of darkness than most people did, but she'd never imagined that she'd made enough of a mark that the Daleks would take an interest in her specifically.
Did that mean that June's name coming back had been just a stupid accident? One of a thousand links in a chain of timeline changes stemming from something absurd like a Sontaran using time travel to cheat at some lottery? How could something like the name "Darico Cava" have possibly been recovered by complete accident?
June realized that she was kneeling with her hands on the floor. When had she lost her footing?
She forced herself to breathe. This wasn't something for her to worry about, this wasn't something that her brain was biologically capable of figuring out. Even if she could understand what had just happened, she would never be able to come up with any way to do anything about it. Only Arachne was able to understand how changing timelines truly worked, able to see where she was capable of changing something, where she was not, and if she was able to change something then how best to make the change happen.
Arachne's brain was a great many orders of magnitude more powerful than June's, and Arachne had clearly heard that name too. Whatever she was already doing to figure out if this was a problem – and if so, then how to solve it – June would just have to trust her greater expertise.
It wasn't like the name itself was a problem for June: if she got arrested, then she'd had a good run saving people on the outside, and now she could try controlling prison populations from the inside. Ending riots, saving captured guards, disrupting criminal communications between the inside world and the out, warning the guards about any flaws in the security that could be exploited… What had the greatest fictional hero in all of human history once said? "I'm not locked in here with you, you're locked in with me"? June could easily get used to living like that.
And if any of her friends got caught too and charged with helping her, then she could always find a way to cast herself as the psychopathic serial killer that law enforcement had branded her as being. She could make herself appear to be a threat for her friends to testify against in exchange for protection, and they could move on with their lives after reduced sentences while she got used to her new life.
No, her name itself wasn't the issue. The only problem June could think of was the technology required to get the name back in the first place and how that technology might influence the rest of the timeline, and that was something for Arachne to figure out, not June.
In any case, June didn't have time to worry about this even if she would've been able to. She had so many new friends to welcome into their new family, she should be focusing on them right now.
She looked over to Damien. "Need a hand?"
Damien's half-closed eyes snapped open. "Captain!" He climbed to his feet and saluted. "Yes, please. Would you mind?"
June laughed. Damien never would run out of sarcasm, would he? "I'm glad you're OK. Could you get everybody together while I come up with a good 'welcome aboard' for everyone?"
Damien nodded. "How much time do you need?"
"Not much, I'm hoping our new friends will want to talk too. I just need a good opening."
Damien walked to the ladder and started climbing. "Do you think we should ask if there's anything they've always wanted to do, somewhere they've always wanted to go? Or should we start with personal introductions?"
Good ideas. "Personal, definitely personal." June decided that she would ask if any of the new family members wanted to introduce themselves first. If none of them did, she'd ask if any of her old friends wanted to go first. If nobody else wanted to go first, June would do it herself.
Now she just needed something to start with if she ended up going first. Would it work best to talk about the years she spent in law enforcement before she'd been nicked for going off-book? Would it work best to talk about how she'd met her current circle of friends? Would it work best to talk about her more recent life and what she liked doing with her friends for recreation?
She decided to talk first about how she'd met Nathan and Ari a year and a half ago, then about how the three of them met Damien about half a year after that.
Damien and The Agent may have gotten surprisingly close in what little time they'd known each other, but looking at everybody else it had to feel like June and her three established friends were one tightly-knit group and the four that they'd rescued were a second equally-tight group. The four guests who would be joining the family had to feel like outsiders right now.
June decided to emphasise that she and Damien had felt the same way when they were each new to the family. Whatever else the former captives were going through that June's life could not possibly compare to, she could at least reassure them that they were not alone in how it felt to start a new life with a new family.
Granted, she and Damien had each joined the family one at a time, but she hoped that this basic concept would translate well enough to the different situation.
June took a breath, then jumped to the ladder that Damien had used. She grabbed onto a rung a few centimetres down from Ari's ceiling, jumped again up to the middle storey, and grabbed another rung to catch herself. She turned and stepped down from the ladder.
Everybody else was waiting. Damien, Nathan, and The Agent were standing against the storage compartment in the middle of Ari's floor, The Agent wrapped around Damien's arm and both clearly wishing they could be snogging right now. Kyra was sitting on the ladder to June's right. Shanjik and Kathryn were standing about half-way between Kyra and the boys.
Shanjik tilted his head. "Shan, do you need to rest, jik?"
June wanted to laugh. Why would she need to rest in the middle of something as wonderful as this? "No, I'm good." She prepared to start her story about meeting Nathan and Ari.
"Shan, are you sure? You smell like you're about to crash, jik."
Did he mean "crash" in that the drain of June's exertion over the course of the battle would catch up with her? How the feeling of pure-adrenaline would wear off and be replaced by the dizzying combination of extreme-adrenaline and simultaneous extreme-exhaustion? Sure, that was something that always happened after the most intense battles, and sure it was something that was going to happen at some point after this one, but that didn't mean that it was going to happen right now. That just meant that June should try to ride the adrenaline for as long as possible before it mated with the eventual exhaustion.
June started to tell him that she felt perfectly fine. Her entire face yawned before she could say anything.
Damn it. Why the hell had Shanjik had to say anything?
June looked around at the people who would be joining her family: the insect doctor and the Time Lord brother and sister standing on the floor, the psychic girl sitting off to the side.
What the hell had June been thinking? Just because she'd been excited to jump into the new family meeting didn't mean everybody else was. Maybe they needed time to relax and get used to their new home before jumping right into the extra stimulation of a massive meeting. "You know what everybody? Change of plans, I think our first stop should be the sleeping quarters upstairs. All of us are exhausted, some of us more than others, and anybody who wants to should feel free to just take a break for a few hours. We can try big group introductions after everybody's had a chance to unwind. Who here has seen the sleeping quarters?"
Damien raised his hand. June had to stop herself from laughing.
The Agent didn't stop himself. He laughed with an amazing smile on his face as he raised his hand. Kathryn and Shanjik raised theirs next.
June started to offer to show Kyra to the quarters. Then she remembered the whole reason she'd wanted group introductions in the first place: Damien and The Agent were the only pair from both groups who were completely comfortable with each other. "Kathryn, Shanjik, would either of you mind showing Kyra where everybody sleeps?"
Kyra raised her hand. "You and Shanjik are showing me right now." She nodded. "Thanks for showing me."
"Shan, you're welcome, jik."
June yawned again. "All right then. Anybody going to sleep before we try anything else?" She raised her hand.
So did Shanjik and Damien. Then Kyra. Then Nathan.
Kathryn and The Agent looked at each other. Kathryn turned to June. "We're probably not going to sleep for a while."
She sounded confidant, but so had June a moment ago. "Are you sure?"
"We don't have any kind of circadian rhythm like most species do. We could stay up for days if we wanted."
That was not something that June expected to hear, but that was impressive and she that wished she could do it too. On a normal day, she tried to keep her schedule as regular as possible – up at 0600 every day and asleep at 2200 – but there were so many days in June's life that didn't end up being normal. How amazing would it be for June to be able to choose a standardised sleeping schedule anytime there wasn't any kind of emergency and to be able to put sleep off indefinitely any time there was?
Still, June hadn't just been talking about physical exhaustion. "Does this also mean that sleep doesn't refresh you mentally the way it does for most people?"
Kathryn's pretty face puckered up as though she were about to snog someone. "Oh, OK I got it."
Damien yawned.
June yawned yet again. She turned back to the ladder. "Well I'm heading up now." She glanced over her shoulder on the off-chance that she could create another connection – or two – between each half of the new family. "Anybody care to join me?"
Damien jerked his face towards the rest of the group and mouthed "No! No! No!" shaking his head like he was ripping the flesh off of a freshly-killed meal.
June pinched the bridge of her nose. Why did he always have to be like that?
Still, she couldn't help but smile. It was so good to be back home with everybody she loved still in one piece.
June jumped through the ladder shaft up to the top storey. She didn't mind as she walked to Ari's sleeping quarters that she'd be sleeping alone again. She'd have appreciated the company, but not if nobody in her new family was interested in return. If they never showed an interest, then she would keep taking care of herself, and if it took a while before anybody showed an interest, then June would gladly wait however long it took for them to grow comfortable with her.
She didn't need to make anybody in her new family rush anything. They had all the time in the universe to decide what they wanted to do next.
The End.
OK, not the end of my characters' life stories (except for Col. Leeson, Dr. Jacob, and all of the anonymous mooks that the Morningstar crew fought, may they rest in pieces), but the end of this specific installment. I have a few more stories planned in my head, but clearly I need to be prepared for it to take a longer time for me to write them than I'd thought.
Joss Whedon was always brilliant at closing every season of every series with a climax that could serve as the grand finale if the network ever decided not to renew the show, but which could easily follow into another season if he ever did manage to stay on the air. I tried to do the same thing with the ending to this story, I hope that I did so even half as well as Joss Whedon always did, and I hope that everybody enjoyed reading this story as much as I enjoyed writing it :) Please review!
