Chapter 25 - Silence in the Stacks

Tomoko staggered. She was barely used to the Song in her head and the sudden removal of Adie and Gaige from it obviously had left her reeling.

"They're gone," she mumbled somewhat thickly. "Adie and Gaige. There's a hole in my head….?" She looked at Dar, her eyes searching his face.

The Doctor felt the same sense of horrified disbelief and he could see that the others were all staggered by the loss as well.

"Their song in my hearts is stilled. Their laughter in my mind is lost," Dar replied in a quiet voice, chanting in Gallifreyan, his face expressionless, but his eyes haunted. He clutched Tomoko to him rather fiercely and the Doctor couldn't blame him in the least.

He stood in the blazing sun and wondered what to do next. He wasn't sure that they could make it back to the TARDIS right now, with the Vashta Narada between them and it. He had no terrifying reputation in this universe to fall back on, nor was he even certain that little Charlotte had been able to save the people here, as she had before.

It occurred to him that he had come here without a clear plan.

He'd gotten Moira, Adie and Gaige killed and, quite possibly, it was all for nothing.

Poc'utal might find the Time Lords a little dismaying at times, but he certainly was glad of their help when things went badly. Right now, he was missing that help. She'd left soon after their conversation, explaining that she'd be too tempted to 'meddle' if she stayed.

However, just at the moment, the Architect was deeply desirous of a little judicious meddling.

"Sir, we still have no contact from the planet," Keek informed him, fluttering into the room with a hesitant air. She was losing feathers as the crisis went on and her stress levels rose. Poc'utal was resisting the urge to have a bot follow her around and clean up after her. He deplored the mess, but didn't want to insult her by pointing it out.

"What about the orbital stations?" he asked.

"They are still working and whatever has happened on the planet doesn't seem to be affecting them," she reported.

"What does Dr. Moon say about it?" he asked next and Keek shook her head, like she was trying to shake off something unpleasant.

"He's not making any sense! He keeps saying that the darkness is consuming the planet, that the light is being driven out, but there is no evidence of power outages visible from space!" she exclaimed.

"Maybe it's metaphorical?" he suggested and Keek looked disgusted by that.

"I'm a police officer, not a philosopher!" she snapped back and he frowned. She was instantly contrite. "Apologies, Architect, I am far out of my nest with this."

"We all are," he replied. "It's baffling and I am extremely worried about the Doctor."

"He has always been very good at surviving, even when others do not," Keek pointed out with a touch of asperity. Poc'utal nodded. He had long ago ceased to suggest that any of his people go with the Doctor on any investigation. It was very nearly a death sentence. His predecessors had left him detailed information on all their dealings with the Doctor, so he knew that the Time Lord was capable of solving even the most impossible seeming problems, but the death count could occasionally be rather disturbing.

"Yes, but, she was right. This is the earliest form of the Doctor on record. I checked. He was active in founding the Temporal Defense Agency at this point. If he dies now, if that is the pivot point she was talking about... " he trailed off, suddenly horrified by that thought.

"Shells and Shards!" Keek gasped. "The Drone! The Phantom Agents! The Dark Walkers! All the enemies that the Agency has protected us from!"

"Indeed. We could be looking at the end of the universe. You and I really could cease to exist at any moment," Poc'utal replied softly and Keek just stared at him, beak hanging open in shock.

"Excuse me!" Keek muttered and headed for the door.

"Where are you going?" he asked in surprise.

"To get some fermented seed! I don't even care if I'm on duty!" she shot back and stomped out of the Architect's office.

"Sement?" he called to his secretary.

"Yes, Sir?"

"See to it that Keek gets some administrative leave when this is over," he told her and she nodded.

"Yes, Sir," she agreed, efficient as always.

It occurred to Pok'utal that they could all really use a vacation soon.

"Book me a room on Apalapucia too, for next week. I will need a vacation as well, assuming that I still exist," he added and she nodded. This was going to be one long nerve-wracking mission.

He closed his eyes and thought longingly of hot sand, before he went back to work.

"I don't suppose that simply firebombing the planet would actually be helpful," Tomoko muttered, but the Doctor caught the comment and snorted.

"If I had the munitions, I'd be doing it," Dar replied. "Sadly, I seem to have forgotten to pack any planet busters."

"And we definitely decided we weren't taking the War Robots?"

"Definitely did not take the War Robots."

"War Robots really aren't applicable here anyway," mused Tomoko. "A self-replicating viral or nanite-based response would be more appropriate."

"If I had my lab," Susan mused and then frowned down at her doctor's bag. "I suppose I could jury-rig something." She pulled out some of her tools, turning them over in her hands and frowning.

"A plasma induction lamp could, in theory, provide a strong enough light to hold them back," Koschei suggested and they all looked around the plaza for anything they could use.

Guinn pulled out his screwdriver and together, he and Koschei began disassembling one of the street lamps.

The Doctor wandered over and very soon the three engineers were pulling things out of their pockets, muttering, and then disassembling chunks of the plaza, while Susan dumped the rather considerable contents of her gray bag on the floor and began assembling a field lab.

"Always pays to be prepared," she replied to Tomoko's wide-eyed stare.

"Should we ask what they're doing?" Tomoko asked and Rose shook her head vigorously.

"We won't understand it and we'll only annoy them," she retorted with a grimace. The fun of this adventure had obviously worn off for her the instant Moira, Adie, and Gaige had died.

Tomoko sat down on a park bench and tried not to hyperventilate.

"Tomoko," Dar murmured, settling down beside her and pulling her against him, arms protective and strong around her.

"There were there and then they were just ... gone," Tomoko choked out. "There was no time..."

"Things happened too fast, but yes, they vanished quite abruptly," Dar mused, his face pale and his mind twisting to avoid the agony of the loss, while he was still engaged in trying to help save the rest of them.

She could see it then, a little of what he had told her before.

He was colder than some, more so than the Doctor, for certain, but he was thawing still and the jagged edges of the ice in his soul were painfully sharp. She had to edge around them to snuggle into his energy and he kissed the top of her head, nestling closer to her.

She was terrified for him, but she buried it deep inside, not wanting him to feel the depths of her worry.

Susan turned her head to watch her husbands working and probed the absence in her mind like it was a rotted tooth. Guinn's quiet devastation was washing through the bond and she could feel the churning anguish of his loss. To have failed Adyra again and this time so completely, it was nearly too much for his fragile, barely-healed mind.

Dar was also feeling the loss of Gaige and having it coming so closely on top of them rediscovering him again, made it doubly painful.

She was surrounded by a sea of grief and yet she found herself standing there, numbly unable to feel her own sorrow. Her hands were working frantically on creating a nanite defense swarm, even though she doubted that she had enough time to make something really effective. Something was niggling at her mind though and she couldn't figure it out.

"What is it?" Rose asked her and she shook her head.

"This wasn't one of the possibilities I saw," Susan explained.

"Excuse me?"

"I've seen a cascade of different probabilities, recently, but none of them included Gaige and Adie dying," Susan replied, feeling a headache coming on. Just trying to peer into the future, while her grandfather was standing nearby, was enough to give her a headache, but she couldn't make herself stop prying a bit at the edges of it, trying to make sense of it all.

"Does this happen a lot?" Rose queried, with a frown.

"What?"

"Seeing the future?" Rose replied. "I mean, yeah, I know that you're a Seer in theory, but I thought that you didn't like to use it, or something."

"I didn't, actually, I don't, but... since I've been bonded to Koschei and then to Guinn as well, it's been getting a bit stronger," she admitted. "I've always just sort of known things, like 'don't turn right', things like that, but lately... well, the dreams are getting stronger and more vivid and the possible futures seem to be more clear."

"Is that good?" Rose asked as Malla's mind began feeding her possible reasons for the change, none of which made her feel very happy.

"I don't know," Susan sighed out. "I'm worried that the Arkytior is pushing me a bit, but I also wonder if having two conduits is... was...," she corrected, twitching as she realized again that Adie was gone. "If that was just making things more intense, or if the fact that I have two anchors is making me better able to handle it, but I just don't know."

"It's not like there's a manual for this after all," Rose grumbled. "The Care and Feeding of Arkytiors and Other Giant Energy People."

"No, sadly, there isn't one handy," Susan agreed with an amused look.

"Handy?" Rose asked, eyebrows shooting up at the way that Susan had said that.

"Well, no doubt the Graces have an idea about that sort of thing, but you can't exactly knock them up and ask, now can you?" Susan pointed out and Rose goggled a bit at the thought.

"No," she answered and then returned to the original discussion. "So, you saw some futures and none of them included Gaige and Adie dying?" Rose asked next.

"That's right," Susan replied, looking over at Guinn with a sad expression. Rose guessed that he was torn up about Adie, probably even more so than the rest of them. He'd known her for a very long time and they were only now starting to really repair that relationship.

"Maybe your internal Ouija board is on the blink?" she suggested and Susan shrugged.

"I haven't the faintest. I sort of skipped the classes for this," she sighed. "I admit that I am sort of regretting that just a bit right now."

"Yeah, well, I like you better sane," Rose told her and Susan nodded, looking wry.

"There is that." She frowned and Rose thought that she saw a faint glimmer of something in her eyes, like the afterimage of flames.

"What?"

"The other possibility is that someone is mucking about with probability, changing the outcomes," she murmured slowly, her face strained.

"Now I know that that's not good," Rose grumbled and then turned to stare at the hulking granite buildings around them, feeling the eerie silence like a weight on them.

"Yeah, the Vashta Narada alone was bad enough," Susan agreed. "Hm, maybe an induced replication error?" She frowned at the tiny lab setup as she worked.

"So, besides the Vashta Narada, what else might be hunting us?"

"That's a question that I would like an answer to as well," Susan sighed and then ducked her head back down to work.

Swan felt the shift and heard a rumbling in the deeps of the universe that alarmed her. The Primal Spark was stirring, her anger and unhappiness roiling through the fabric of everything. With a sudden sense of urgency, Swan abandoned her researches and fled back towards the world where the Time Lords had been relaxing.

The White Guardian's Champion and several others were not there and Swan realized that she had erred. She had expected them to stay put and that had obviously been a miscalculation. She cast about for their energies and when she sensed them, she flung herself in that direction, heedless of the danger. The First Spark had been aroused, the Time Lords were in jeopardy, and many potential futures were teetering in the balance. She was dismayed by her inattention and rushed off to try to mend her mistakes.

She only hoped that she would be in time.

In his innermost hearts, the Doctor had to admit that he was scared.

Even as he worked feverishly with the Koscheis on building the light sources, he was feeling an unaccustomed dread. Maybe it was just how quickly Adie and Gaige had been consumed, maybe it was his memories of how badly it went the last time, or perhaps it was the fact that so much of his family was in danger. He wasn't sure which aspect of it all was frightening him the most, but he was unsettled and jumpy.

"Hand me that flux capacitor," Koschei muttered and the Doctor reached for it, picked it up and then dropped it again, his fingers feeling clumsy and less responsive than normal.

"Are you all right?" Guinn asked him, pulling out of his own misery to look at the Doctor in concern.

"No, not really," he admitted.

"Theta?" Koschei asked, blue eyes sharp on his.

"I'm scared to death," the Doctor replied. "I can't lose you all again. I just can't." There must have been something in his tone that alarmed them both, because Koschei was right there suddenly, with an arm around his shoulder.

"You're not going to. We'll figure this out, just like we always do," he promised.

"Help us build this. It's going to work," Guinn added and the Doctor picked up the piece and handed it to Koschei, his other hand white-knuckled on his sonic.

"Right yes," he agreed, but he wasn't convinced. His fears weren't so easy to dispel. He'd lost everyone before, he hadn't been the one to figure it all out, his Mum had been and she was gone now. There wasn't anyone to help fix his mistakes this time.

Wrack leaned back and studied the screen. She felt a small touch of pleasure in the present success of her gambit, as well as a certain satisfaction, as she watched the carefully laid trap closing around her enemy.

She was going to have him on his knees, begging her for mercy.

Which was ironic, since her kind weren't capable of mercy.

Rose turned in a slow circle, taking in the brilliant sunshine-drenched city and tried to think through the molasses thick quicksand of grief and fear. Tomoko was tapping madly away on her laptop, while Dar was stringing together light sources and draping himself in them, like they were bandoleers. Susan was sitting with her tools in her hands, Indian style on the grass, doing something that Rose couldn't quite grasp. The Doctor and the Koscheis were huddled over their device and she was left alone to think.

Something was off. She could feel it in the flow of the world around her, but she couldn't pinpoint the source. She was too new to all this and her frustration with her lack of understanding was high just then.

"You could always just ask," Malla muttered in the back of her head.

"What's wrong with the world?" she asked silently of the much older Time Lady.

"Time is moving more slowly here," she replied. "People started complaining about missing people in the Library over twelve hours ago, yet the computer stated that it's been only six hours since the last book was checked out."

Rose was silent for a long time, as her mind raced with the implications of that.

"How much power would it take to slow time like that?" she asked finally.

"To slow time across an entire world?" Malla retorted with a snort. "More power than I can calculate, without a crystal matrix computer and several hours to run the variables."

"So, a heck of a lot," Rose answered, thinking hard. "How many races could do something like this?"

"Well, we could, if we had positioned temporal wave modifiers in equidistant points around the planet. Not that we have access to that sort of technology in this universe right now. Other than us, well, I don't know of anyone short of Eternal-level or above who could pull it off. The real question though, is why? What purpose does it serve to slow time here?"

"Maybe it's not about slowing time, exactly," Rose mused as a thought occurred to her. "Maybe it's about cutting us off from other people. If time is moving more slowly, then the communicators won't be able to work properly. We can't call out. We can't call for help. After all, the first thing that happened, Moira said, was that they lost contact with the Mashas, right?"

"Perhaps we should experiment?" Malla prompted and Rose pulled out her cell phone. She speed-dialled her father and heard a faint crackling, but no ringing, and certainly no connection. After a moment, her cell phone shut down and she frowned.

"What is it?" Susan asked and Rose looked over at her.

"I can't get Dad on the phone. The line is not getting through to him," she explained and the Doctor looked up suddenly from where he was working.

"Not possible, that phone has universal roaming, it should be able to reach him in any time or place!" he insisted.

"Unless we're not in time," Rose pointed out and he paused and frowned.

"It's slower here," he replied, after a moment's thought, and the others all got the distant look in their eyes that said that they were paying close attention to the energies of time and space that were flowing around them all.

"Only on the planet's surface," Koschei added, squinting up skywards. "The sun is not affected, nor the moon. We can't see the planet moving around the sun at it's usual pace, but it actually is."

"Hm, Doctor Moon might be able to tell that something is wrong with Charlotte," he replied thoughtfully.

"Doctor Moon?" Rose asked him and he nodded.

"The Moon is actually an outboard diagnostics computer that monitors the Library and environs," he explained.

"I wonder if I can hack into it? I could use the Library's own interface with the moon to send a message, or at least to find out more about what is going on here," Tomoko mused aloud and the Doctor nodded.

"Can't hurt to try!" he told her, his usual smile starting to reassert itself and the waves of fear ebbing from him. Rose smiled too, relieved that that they were finally starting to figure out a plan. Well, a plan other than just running for their lives.

Which, now that she thought about it, really was their usual plan.