Chapter 20 - Reset
"Still breathing?" the Doctor asked him and Guinn nodded.
"Mostly," he replied.
"This is going much better than I ever hoped," his best mate told him with a broad grin. "I was sure they were going to tear you apart."
"Your bedside manner needs improvement," Guinn snarked and the Doctor laughed.
"Come on, let's get this old girl flying!" came the reply and Guinn just sighed. The Doctor never changed, even when everything else did.
When the reset hit, none of the Time Lords were ready for it. For Jake and the Mashas it was just a thing to be gotten through, but for people whose time sense was inherently part of themselves, it was devastating.
Rose tumbled over, feeling as though the ground had gone unsteady beneath her feet. Susan grabbed a counter, clinging tightly to it as a wave of dizziness rolled over her. The Doctor cried out, arms windmilling as he fought to stay upright.
Only Koschei, Guinn, and Adie didn't fall down and only because they were already prone, underneath stations in engineering, working on repairs.
"Bloody hell!" Koschei roared.
Tomoko's voice came over the intercom. "Reset! Reset! We're resetting!"
"That is rather unpleasant!" the Doctor agreed, holding onto the console like a drunk clinging to a light pole.
"Reset?" Rose asked, looking up at him from the floor, feeling as though she were in a boat in choppy seas.
"Beginning of the Time Loop, Rose," the Doctor replied.
"Wait, beginning of the bloody war?" she cried, face going pale.
"Bugger," Guinn muttered over the intercom.
"Look at the monitor! Look at the monitor!" Tomoko called over the intercom. She was not a Time Lord, but still sounded like she was in some pain.
On the monitor, things were suddenly completely different, the cities were now intact, ships were flying by, everything looked peaceful and calm. The Doctor and Rose looked at each other and shivered.
"Which Masha was assigned to this Loop?" he asked over the intercom.
"No one. This isn't a Masha loop," it was Adie who answered. "This is weapons testing."
"Bloody hell, that's no good," the Doctor muttered. "How long do you think this Loop went?" he mused aloud.
"Pretty long, because those bodies looked really old," Rose reminded him and he nodded.
"We know the length of reset to be one hundred years at least," Tomoko's voice came over the intercom.
"Yeah, that's bollocks," Koschei muttered. "Because its way too long for weapons testing. Something else must have been going on. Besides, a century would have been missed. You can steal a few weeks, but a full century? Someone would have noticed."
"So, what do you think it was?" Susan asked from the medi-bay, sounding shaken.
"It's been warped, this is an artificial Loop, not real time at all," Guinn agreed. "We built it from scratch to contain the Manifold."
"Right, so how long," the Doctor asked.
"A thousand years and the differential was eight months to an hour," he replied. "This was to monitor long term effects."
"And your conclusion?" the Doctor asked with a touch of irritation.
"That it was too damned dangerous to release," Guinn snapped back. "We were desperate, not suicidal!"
"Now what?" Rose asked.
"Now, we wait for them to attack." The Doctor's voice sounded bitter and sad.
"And what do we do during that time? We'll be targets too!" Adie sounded frightened.
"We get the TARDIS repaired and get out as fast as we can," the Doctor told Adie soothingly.
"Doctor, does the reset mean that the breach in the trans-Möbius barrier has been repaired?" Tomoko called again.
"Only partially. By giving them a thousand bloody years to nibble away, they'll have it down again in no time, no doubt faster this time, because they will have learned," the Doctor sighed out.
"Yes, wasn't my idea to give them this much time, by the way," Guinn grumbled over the intercom. "I wanted them utterly destroyed and not left around the place to get up to mischief."
"Incoming," Tomoko's voice was grim.
"Really learning to hate those things," Rose told her, unconsciously rubbing at her stomach, where she'd been injured.
"Doctor," Tomoko's voice was uncertain, "Is there any way to help the people in this loop?"
"If I had thought of one, Tomoko, I'd already be doing it," he replied, his face grim.
She was silent for a while.
"The bait we set out is not going to last through a war like this."
"No." He stood silently, watching the insects come screaming down onto the distant cities. "Koschei, Guinn, tell me the TARDIS is ready to get into the Vortex."
"This one, yes, but not Susan's," he informed him.
"Can Susan's be towed?" asked Adie timidly.
"Yes, let's get over there and you lot get moving," Koschei responded.
Koschei, Guinn, and Susan appeared a moment later, dressed in cold weather gear.
"Ready," Koschei told the Doctor, who looked at him with a worried expression.
"Be careful crossing over there. The skies are full of them," he cautioned.
"A lovely stroll through Dante's seventh level?" Susan suggested with an impish smile. "Not a problem."
She hugged the Doctor tightly and then the three of them stepped out into the freezing night, while above them, the sky sparked and flashed.
"Right, once they are inside the other TARDIS, it'll be time for us to get moving," the Doctor said in a strained voice. On the monitor, a city was going up in flames.
They made it, but only just. The city lasted barely the time it took for them to get from one TARDIS to the other.
"Strap yourselves in," Guinn told Koschei and Susan.
"There are no actual seat belts on a TARDIS, Guinn," Susan chuckled. "A dreadful oversight, to be sure."
Koschei and Susan took their places at the console and glanced at each other, before setting the TARDIS into neutral mode, to make it easier for the Doctor to tow them.
"Can you hear me?" Tomoko's voice came over the intercom. "We're about to take off, it may be a rough ride."
"Loud and clear," Koschei replied. "Wouldn't be the first time," he muttered.
"All ready on this side, Doctor," called Tomoko. "Communications established."
Adie allowed the other Time Lords to take their places first, then stood near a console.
The Doctor moved with economy and speed, Rose working with him, and they were soon shifting into the Vortex, dragging Susan's TARDIS behind them.
"Ugly, but functional," the Doctor sighed.
A wasp spotted them at the last second and swooped, but they were too quick for it. Once they were in the vortex, Adie breathed a sigh of relief.
Tomoko's voice came over the intercom.
"They're safe in the Vortex, so we can go after the other Mashas, now," she said.
"Not a problem for me," Rose assured them. "Anywhere away from those things is a good place to be."
"Doctor," came Tomoko's voice again, "Do we know where the other Mashas are exactly?"
"We have the Master's monitoring equipment, so yeah," he replied.
"Then lets get moving," she muttered, then clicked off.
Masha 57 spent several minutes re-tying the ends of the rope that bound the raft together. She spent most of her time here, drifting from island to island, making brief stops on land for supplies before setting out again.
Life really was much easier on the raft. Tall trees stretched up and laced together above her head, tendrils of lacey moss drifting down from them. Long limbed birds flapped and sang above her and playful monkeys hooted from the branches of the trees.
She was laying on her stomach, watching the lights far below her, when a wheezing noise made her look up. There, in the middle of the air, was a drifting balloon with a closed basket underneath. She wasn't sure where it came from, but the pilot must be insane. Already the fish below her were darting away to safety, as the movement in the depths alerted them.
A hatch in the side opened and a man was peering out, grinning madly at her. He was no one she had ever seen before and she was rather taken aback.
"There you are!" he called. "This is a rescue! Come aboard!"
"Are you mad?" she shouted back to him. "If the Tawdra see you…" she pointed at the water and he looked at her with bafflement, then his eyes went suddenly wide, as he started to shout a warning.
But, it was too late.
Inside the TARDIS, Adie gave a sudden shriek of surprise, jerking her hands away from the console as she saw the scanner. She was a competent enough pilot, but extremely inexperienced, and didn't yet have much confidence at the controls.
The Tawdra was enormous. It breached out of the water as if the TARDIS had been dangling on a hook. It had an enormous mouth, filled with sharp teeth, which fitted quite nicely around the bottom of the basket. The pitted hide of the thing, an unholy cross between a whale and a piranha, was like the surface of the moon. It had tiny silver and black eyes that seemed filled with cruel menace to Adie's frightened gaze.
"Bugger!" the Doctor shouted, scrambling back from the door.
"Close the door!" Rose shouted and jumped for the controls.
"Move!" the Doctor cried, but Adie, startled by the creature's violent lunge, froze. Huge teeth snapped around the TARDIS and the vast bulk of it was weighty enough to pull the TARDIS right under the water.
"Oi! No chewing on the TARDIS!" the Doctor shouted. "I just fixed it!"
Pleased with its prize, the Tawdra swam off at once, the TARDIS still in its mouth, only to be rammed by another Tawdra. This made the first one drop its new treat; and while they fought over it, a third one took the opportunity to snatch it and lumber off in a new direction.
"Oops! I'm sorry!" Adie had been knocked into the nearby wall by all of this, but hastily made her way back to the console. She was blushing furiously, but already starting the de-materialization sequence.
"Is everyone all right?" the Doctor asked.
"Nothing but a bruise," Rose assured him.
"We're all right," Evie said softly.
"Could it eat us?" one of the others asked and the Doctor shook his head.
"We're safe as houses," he assured her. "Takes something a lot worse than that to chew up a TARDIS." Like, the Manifold, Adie thought to herself.
The victorious Tawdra was furious when its prize suddenly vanished, and promptly got into a fight with the other two.
Masha-57 was busy keeping afloat in the water. The waves kicked up by the Tawdra had easily swamped the little raft. She couldn't drown, but she couldn't try climbing back on board until things had calmed a little.
The floating balloon appeared back in the air and the mad fellow opened the hatch again.
"Let's try it again, shall we? This is a rescue! Come on, quickly!"
The Tawdra were fighting madly below, but she swam until he could reach her hand.
She climbed aboard, coughing up water, but very glad to see them.
"Is this your first rescue?" she teased him. "Because you may need some practice."
Adie blushed madly.
"You'll get better," the Doctor assured her, with a pat on the shoulder. "You just need more practice."
"Which is what you're about to get," Rose reminded her with a big grin. "So, that's all good then!"
Slowly the TARDIS filled up with Mashas, hopping from one Loop to another. It was underwater for one Loop, underground for a second, practically in a volcano for a third. The Doctor was navigating for Adie, with Rose doing the computations in her head as fast as she could.
The baffled, tired, hungry, and threadbare Mashas came in one by one and each had to be debriefed and sworn to not kill Guinn.
The Doctor looked up as the shouting in the next room grew rather heated.
"They're not all happy about this," Rose sighed.
"When all you've known for hundreds of years is this one time, this one place, it's harder to change than you might think," the Doctor murmured.
"Is that why you keep travelling, so you don't get stuck in a rut?" Rose teased and he shook his head.
"No, it's because there is just so much to see, more than anyone ever could in a trillion years and I hate to miss out on any of it," he replied, giving her a grin.
"Really?" London asked him. "There really is that much out there?"
"Oh yes, there really is." His eyes unfocused a bit as he smiled. "Millions of worlds, of races, planets made of diamond, seas made of ice, worlds where the trees talk and walk and worlds where nothing exists at all."
"Who made them all?" she wondered.
"An interesting question, but the answer is that they come from what came before them, which came from what came before that in a never ending infinite stream of existence."
Her face fell visibly.
"So, it's just a really big Loop?"
"London, you can go anywhere you like, to any part of the time-stream you want to, you can see it all, and most importantly, you can leave any time you want. The universe is infinite, it has no bounds on it and there are an infinite number of other universes nested inside of each other ad infinitum. It it's a Loop, it's so vast that you'll never come to the end of it," he explained.
She fished in her pocket.
"Even here?" She showed him an old and battered piece of paper. It was so woebegone it took several seconds to identify as an ancient postcard.
"Visit London," it said, with several attractive pictures of the city.
"Especially there," he told her.
"I grew up there," Rose told her with a smile. "That's my home."
"Really? Is there really a clock? And what's this picture of?" London started chattering at her immediately. Rose might have just committed herself for the next several hours, by the tone of her questions.
Rose laughed and answered her questions cheerfully as they continued through the Loops, gathering Mashas as they went.
The Doctor was giving piloting lessons to several of the clones, but paused when he saw Tomoko and gave her a look.
"Seen Adie lately?" he asked her. "She's been hiding somewhere."
"I can go and find her if you would like."
"I think she might need to talk to someone," he nodded.
Tomoko nodded and headed down the hall, leaving the Mashas to the Doctor.
She checked the TARDIS' registry and found Adie's signal in the HADS bay, working on the automatic defence systems. With that information in hand, Tomoko went to run her quarry to ground.
Adie was working quietly on the HADS systems. They were only running at partial capacity, and she didn't like it. They would need to be fully operational once they fought the Manifold. The Hostile Action Displacement System was damn useful when things got really bad and it looked like things could get really bad rather quickly.
Tomoko came in, picked up a spanner, and set herself across from Adie, pulling off the cover to the next panel and digging into the wiring. She had changed to a simple shirt, work pants, and boots.
"You ought to have told me," she said to Adie, who looked up at her, a smudge of dirt on her face and her hair coming loose from her ponytail. The overalls she'd thrown on over her clothes, to protect them, were filthy and singed in places.
She didn't have to ask for what.
"I didn't want anyone to know. And in all fairness, even the Doctor doesn't know how much risk there is. I was always meant to be a replacement for Susan, but Susan will be right there, and I gather that Rassilon's previous attempts failed too. The Arkytior may not appear at all. We might be worrying for nothing," she temporized, trying to hide her own fears under a pile of cheerful 'ifs'.
"And if we're not?" Tomoko asked flatly, her eyes boring into Adie's with implacable resolve. She was silent for a while as she tried to think of something to say.
"I can't not do it, Tomoko. I think of all those people who stand to die and I can't not go. I'm scared out of my mind, but I am going out there," she finally told her, letting go of her protective lies.
"Then we need a plan B. I am going to take care of the Mashas, and you'll help me, but…," she trailed off and Adie sighed. It wasn't as if the thought hadn't already occurred to her. She'd been doing little but worrying about the Mashas for a century now, after all.
"But, given the circumstances, we shouldn't leave it to chance. I agree," Adie replied, leaving all of that unspoken.
Tomoko nodded, obviously hearing it all anyway, and they sat down and began to talk in earnest.