Chapter 21 - Expanding Problems
When she returned from her appointment, she looked for the Doctor, but he must have been busy, because when Adie checked for him at the Line House, he wasn't there. She was feeling a thousand times better than she had, which gave her a spring in her step as she searched. Not finding him, another thought occurred to her.
Gaige had said that he knew Dar. She hurried off to find Dar, entering the clinic and walking around the hallways until she got to the one that Tomoko had described to her. She knocked on it gently.
"Dar… are you in there? Or… is this the right wall?" She bit her lip uncertainly.
The door swung opened and Dar's voice drifted out.
"Hello Adie," he called out. "Yes, it's the right bit of wall."
She walked into a room that was really not much more that a computer monitoring space with far too many machines and not enough comfortable chairs.
"My lady, how can my lowly, undeserving cur of a self possibly assist you, most fair and lovely of damsels," Dar teased. "Please tell me that the reason you came has something to do with the much stronger and more secure looking bond?" he asked, pointing to the golden cord leading away from her hearts.
Adie blushed madly. She always found herself tongue-tied when put on the spot, and today was no exception.
"I… I… I… I…"
Tea?" he suggested gently and, taking her hand, escorted her into a chair, before turning to his own food replicator and getting tea for them both. "Have a sip and breathe, Adyra, it's okay. I haven't eaten a baby in just centuries," he told her with a sweet smile. It always mystifying to her how he could switch moods and tones so quickly. She wondered who he really was underneath the playacting. Was he the kind friend or the rogue? Or had she never met the real Dar at all?
She nodded, sat down, and took several sips of her tea. It did make her feel better.
"I had a dream," she finally managed, "And I wanted to ask you a question."
"A dream like the ones that Susan and the Master used to have?" he asked with a raised eyebrow, his face intent on hers.
"Like what ones that the Master and Susan used to have?" Adie was clearly surprised.
"Adie... You know that they were bondmated and then separated, right?" he asked, backtracking quickly, as he realized that she had no idea what he was talking about.
"Yes, I did... though I had forgotten. In my timeline she died, but Susan did tell me that, I'm sorry."
"Well, I was the Master's...um, guard, for the majority of the War. I was assigned to keep an eye on him. Over the course of that, we became friends and I was front row centre for the suffering he went through without her. He also had dreams about her. Later on, Susan told me that she'd shared some of those dreams. They had spoken to each other, made love to each other, both of them feeling as though the other had really been there, even though that was impossible," he explained and Adie listened carefully to his words, before nodding slowly.
"I dreamed that I spoke to him and it did feel incredibly real, like he was in the room, but it's only been three days and… I must be rushing things," she told him doubtfully.
"Adie, there is no right way to create a marriage bond and no wrong way either. You are individual people and neither of you is insane, one hopes, so using Susan and Koschei as a metric, is probably not going to be very useful to you all the time," he told her and patted her hand gently.
"Well, I… I dreamed that…" She looked down at her teacup. "He said that he knew you. So I thought I would ask."
"He knows me?" Dar looked at her in surprise. "What was his name?"
"He said to tell you… Ghost needs a rescue?" She looked up from the teacup nervously to see the blood drain from Dar's face and his eyes close in sudden emotion so intense, it was shocking to see on the usually controlled spy's face.
"Gaigerandettian, the Ghost," he murmured and stood up abruptly and walked away from her, trying to wipe his eyes as casually as he could.
Adie hastily looked down at her teacup and added a little bit of cream when she saw his expression. She didn't look up again for some moments, before taking a cautious peek in his direction. He was typing furiously on a keyboard and then an image appeared on the screen. The face was the one from her dream, but the skin was far paler and the hair more a honey gold than the bleached out white-blond it had been when they had spoken.
She felt a sudden surge of joy and hope, setting aside her teacup, as she jumped up and ran to the screen.
"Oh, you have his picture! Oh, Dar! He is real!" she beamed, and leaned forwards to get a better look.
"This is him? The one you saw in your dream?" he asked, looking at her with an unreadable expression, his face back to the normal genial blankness.
"Yes. He was more tanned and his hair was lighter, but that is him." She dug in her pocket for her tablet, and took a picture of his screen.
"Here," he murmured. "I'll download his file for you... minus the really... um... classified bits," he told her and the data streamed to her.
"The embarrassing ones, you mean… he was afraid you might share those stories, but… I'm not sure I want to hear those stories from you. I mean, no offense."
"Adie, he's your bonded husband, I'd never say anything to you about him that he wouldn't be happy to hear," Dar was looking at her with a soft, gentle expression that she'd never seen before.
"Thank you." She almost hadn't pulled her eyes away from the photo. "He's so gorgeous." She was staring at the image, her hearts pounding in her chest, feeling as though some part of her was unfolding slowly, like the universe was brighter and kinder than ever she had imagined it was.
"Gaige? Gorgeous?" Dar peered at the screen and chuckled. "You really are in love. I mean he's not ugly or anything, but his best trait is that he blends in." Dar shook his head thoughtfully. "He never had a steady girlfriend and I always wondered... it was always the two of us, off doing the most dangerous jobs, because we had no attachments," Dar mused. "He must have been waiting for you all that time."
She looked at him.
"I wonder who is waiting for you," she mused.
"Whoever she might have been, Adie, she probably died in the Time War," he said gently. "None of the survivors have set my pulse all aflutter, except for you of course, lovely one," he teased her, ending it with a grin to lighten the mood.
"What about the new arrivals?" she asked and he patted her head.
"No, I think I'm just not going to be that lucky," he replied.
"You may be right… on the other hand, that is exactly what I said about Gaige."
"Touche, princess!" he laughed. "You could be right, some perfect woman is probably hanging about somewhere, wondering when I'm going to get a move on!" He frowned. "So, where do we go to rescue our Ghost?" he asked next.
Adie's eyes flooded suddenly.
"Oh Dar… he's inside one of the bubbles." Dar stared at her for a long moment and then jumped up, grabbed her hand, and dragged her after him out of the room, running hell for leather to the workshop.
"I couldn't find the Doctor!" She told him as they ran. "That's why I came to find you!"
"To hell with the Doctor! We need Rose and she's in the workshop!" he shouted and when he saw her faltering, he picked her up, carrying her like she was a child and hardly breaking stride.
They burst into the workshop, where Rose, Guinn, and Koschei were all standing over a holographic table display, staring at them.
"Rose! What's in the damnable Bubbles?" Dar asked and set Adie on her feet next to Guinn, who steadied her with a hand, looking at her in concern.
"That's what we're working on right now," Rose told him in surprise.
"Could there be people in them?" he demanded and they all turned to look at him.
"How did you know?" Rose asked.
"Look, we'll show you," Koschei told him and gestured at one of the screens which proceeded to display a topographical map of the region where the Bubbles were seeded.
"Artron energy levels are too high for normal background radiation," Guinn reported, pointing to a series of coloured areas. "We highlighted all the ones that might be inhabited in green."
"The levels of entropy are too high in these ones though, for there to be anyone left alive, even if there was before," Koschei informed them, highlighting a group of bubbles with a reddish tone and Adie put her hands over her mouth.
"These ones are far more dense than the others, they are the ones that contain the greatest mass," Rose chimed in and highlighted seven of the Bubbles in blue.
"We're still working out some of the maths, you see," Guinn explained.
"Really not done yet, but I do think we can cross this one off," Koschei said, changing a green one to black. "Not nearly enough mass or oxygen."
"Well, what about this one?" Guinn pointed out and the three of them were suddenly throwing about numbers and readings. They were talking to and over each other and yet somehow they were making progress, the stellar map became a rainbow of colours as they worked.
"Dar, there are at least six Bubbles that could have inhabited worlds in them still," Rose told him finally and pointed to the ones highlighted in Mauve. "We'll need to find a way to transfer the contents into this universe somehow," she told him.
"Can that be done?" Dar asked.
"Theoretically, yes," Rose replied, looking uncertain.
"Just because no one has ever done it before, doesn't mean we can't do it," Koschei added with a small frown. "The Doctor is working on it with Farian and some of the original Physicists that Rassilon recruited to create the Bubbles in the first place."
"We need to move fast, though. These three here only have another few weeks before the entropy inside them builds up to lethal levels," Guinn explained.
"I suppose we could try to take a TARDIS inside one of them?" Adie suggested tentatively.
"Without coordinates?" Koschei pointed out.
Susan came striding in, her face abstracted, and pushed a lock of hair out of her face, the short curled strands refusing to cooperate with her. She turned to greet Adie and Dar and then stood there, mouth hanging open.
"Adie!" Susan exclaimed suddenly. "Your cord!"
Rose, Guinn, and Koschei, all turned and stared at her chest.
Adie blushed to her hairline and looked down, not necessarily because she wanted to see the cord, but because everyone was looking at her. She swallowed hard, feeling as if she had suddenly been placed under a spotlight. She had to fight the urge to edge back behind Dar.
"I'm sorry, Adie," Susan apologized, her face filled with chagrin. "I do know how hard it is to have no privacy at all for your deepest and most intimate feelings." She walked over and hugged Adie, holding her gently. "It's awful having your emotions on display like this and I am really sorry for blurting it out that way."
"It's not your fault," Adie blushed. "I'm okay." Still, she was very, very glad of the hug.
"I understand too," Koschei told her with a sympathetic gaze and Guinn nodded as well. "It's like walking around with no clothes on all the time."
"Now, what can you tell us, without making yourself uncomfortable?" Guinn asked and rubbed her back with gentle fingers.
"Um," Adie swallowed hard. "We're looking for a desert world called Azari Bal, with three suns and a moon."
"Azari Bal?" Koschei frowned. "Why does that sound so familiar?"
"Because it's like the Flying Dutchman," Susan told him. "The Shimmering World of Azari Bal, that appears and then vanishes again."
"Of course! It was one of those planets in a trinary system that had such an erratic orbit that it was nearly impossible to plot its course," Guinn cried. "I remember, it was one of the orbital trajectory calculations we had to do for the finals in ... well, never mind. The point is, it's a real place!"
"Right, so which Bubble is it in?" Rose asked. "Oi! Another question is why is it in a Bubble anyway?"
"Rassilon put him there," Adie whispered almost inaudibly.
"Burning up in the Moment was really not a painful enough death," Koschei muttered. "I really wanted to rip out his hearts and shove them..." he saw Adie's face and subsided. "Sorry."
"Right, so that's where he hid your husband?" Susan asked and then glared at the map. "We've got to get him out of there."
"There's a world, I think… there are a lot of people," she ventured.
"Then we'll have to get them all out," she decided and Rose and the others gave her a look. "What?"
"You are so like your grandfather," Guinn sighed.
"Well, we… can't just… leave them all," Adie pointed out.
"Indeed we can't!" Susan agreed. "Spit spot! Let's all get moving now. Things to do!"
"Uh-oh," Koschei sighed. "She's on a mission. Entropy hasn't a chance."
"I told the White Guardian he was a fool to think I'd ever give up. I mean really, the cheek of the fellow!" Susan muttered and gave Adie one last squeeze before they all went into action. "Now you lot hold down the fort, because I have to go check on Aislynn."
She left the workshop with a brisk stride and the remaining Time Lords looked back and forth with smiles of rueful affection.
"Just like her grandfather," Guinn sighed. "Gives us our orders, then runs off and leaves us to do the work."
Gaige strode through the streets of Ferrulah, not having time today to study the mosaic tiles, the brilliantly white stucco, or the multi-coloured hangings in the windows of passing shops and houses.
The tech level of Azari Bal was nowhere near Gallifreyan levels, but they weren't entirely primitive either. Motorized cars and steam trains plowed across the deserts and oasis, homes had central air conditioning and heat in the winters, and they only had one, rather understaffed, observatory, high on hill at the north end of the city.
There were legends amongst the people here that once the sky had been filled with stars, but a hundred years ago, they had all mysteriously vanished. Gaige knew the truth behind the legends, but he had long kept his otherworldly knowledge to himself.
He trekked up the hill and then began climbing the sagging, creaking stairs. He paused for a breath on one of the landings and looked down at the bustling city, all the people shopping, chattering, laughing, crying, living out their lives, all unknowing that they'd been denied the stars in order to provide him with a prison.
He took a deep breath and began climbing again.
"Hello my son, are you lost?" a wizened old man, in robes more gray than white, peered myopically out of the window, when he knocked on the door of the observatory.
"No, I'm looking for the Head Astronomer," he replied and the elderly man blinked at him in surprise.
"That would be me, but I have no money, if you've come to rob me," he replied and Gaige shook his head.
"I'm not a thief, I just want to look through the telescope, if you please." His words seemed to utterly flummox the man, who stared at him in bafflement for a long while.
"Well, if you wish it, but aside from the suns and the moon, there really isn't anything to see," he answered and came down to open up the door.
Gaige bowed politely to the man.
"I'm Gaige Randarian, of the 112th regiment," he introduced himself and the elder looked at him in confusion.
"You were born with that hair? Those eyes?" the man asked and Gaige nodded. "Are you djinn?"
"If I am, my mother never let on," he teased and the man laughed.
"Pardon my manners, Gaige Randarian, I am Hamman Frey, Chief Astronomer to the Court of the Sultan," he replied with an expression that told Gaige the irony of that statement wasn't lost on him, as he stood in his worn robes and tattered sandals.
"Please Master, may I look through the telescope?" he asked again and the old man gestured him forward, leading the way up another flight of rickety stairs.
"You may, but, as I said, the stars vanished long ago, there really is very little to see," he apologized, but Gaige merely smiled thinly.
The Telescope itself was huge, many times larger than an equivalent Gallifreyan one would be, but the controls were easy enough to figure out. He had run a few equations through his head earlier and hoped his half remembered physics courses from the Academy were enough to help him here.
He pressed his eye to the glass topped tube and angled the telescope a tiny bit more and there...
It looked like a cloud of violently agitated purple gas, boiling in the vast depths of space. What it really was though was cold, death, stillness, spreading out as heat loss sucked at everything near to it.
A huge area of entropic decay.
His closed his eyes and prayed that his lovely wife had a plan, because just then, he was all out of options.