Heaven
888
Lord Commodore Balvin sat at his desk filling out the morning's contingent of paperwork. He'd always been good at filing. In the Academy he'd been the head treasurer, minute taker, even the president of so many clubs and committees. He'd quietly bumped up the ranks of society, had worked on a number of field excursions all non-combat. This had been what had qualified him to the position he had now, executive officer on the observation outpost on the Planet Heaven.
He was efficient and orderly. Reports went out on time, every time. He was a bureaucrat's bureaucrat. He knew every rule, every line of command, nothing was ever out of place on Heaven. He ran an orderly crew. The sky trenches were clean, the medical bays well stocked, each bed had crisp corners, every piece of armor so clean it had looked like it had never been used. This is of course helped by the fact that it very likely had never been used.
Heaven's position in The War was inconsequential. It was far flung from either the inner temporum of Gallifrey and from the front lines somewhere out in the expanse. Heaven was the place the Time Lords simply watched the war unfold, from a perspective away from the causal core of the events. This was the place that they sent the enlisted librarians, archivists and bureaucrats. This is where the sons and daughters of Cardinals, Councillors and Castellans went when they needed to show the other Gallifreyans that the highest echelon were also pitching in. Lord Balvin and almost everyone on the base knew this. However, the commodore was going to do his best to make sure the outpost looked like it was actually doing something, was actually assisting the war effort, and was able, if the unlikely event were to ever occur, to defend itself against attack.
Balvin sighed quietly as he flicked through three pages of requests for assorted luxury items. He'd divined a system of allowing and disallowing these requests that at the same time was random but looked considered. The inner treasurer in him nodded in approval of such actions as it kept the lower functionaries in line, whilst saving resources. After signing off on the requests he turned to the morning reports, tsking ever so slightly as the reports from the front lines. Audibly murmuring a wish to be there helping trash those dustbins, whilst truthfully glad he was where he was.
He was halfway through a particularly gruesome report from Allydon where the Daleks had ambushed a fleet of Bowships when the klaxons started. Balvin furrowed his eyebrows slightly as it took a handful of seconds for him to identify the sound. The door of his office burst open. Balvin jumped to his feet as he watched a young lad in armor that looked a size too large for him scramble into his office.
"What's the meaning of this!?" shouted Balvin as the lad fumbled to a stop by more or less crashing into the back of one the high backed chairs that sat in front of his desk.
"Commodore…we're…" The lad started.
"Yes, what?" groused Balvin. "What is this racket about!?"
"Attack, sir, we're under attack!" the lad shouted.
Balvin's eyebrows bunched even tighter together. he pushed around the desk and passed the lad and continued towards the door of his office. "Don't be ridiculous boy! We can't be under attack!"
"But we are!?" the lad returned following after Balvin.
"Impossible." Balvin returned as he continued on down the hall of the building. "I just got the morning reports, no word of any ships in the area. Who would attack us way out here anyways? We're in the middle of nowhere, of no when."
"I'm telling you, right now, we're under attack!" the lad returned again, this time urgently.
Balvin harumphed slightly but he could feel it. There was an urgency now throughout the base. A distinct bilious taste of uncertainty was bubbling up from the pits of everyone's stomachs. People rushing about, whispering quick whispers. He turned a corner and pushed into a room. A command hub with a large multi-sectioned arching window. There were multiple young people manning stations.
"Commodore on deck!" shouted one and the group of them all leapt to attention haphazardly.
Balvin nodded to them all and they slunk back to the stations as quickly as they'd leapt up. Balvin turned to the one that had shouted. "You, sergeant, what is going on?"
"We'd just finished our last sweep of the area when…well…" The sergeant tapped a young woman's shoulder and she pressed a holographic button. The windows wobbled as the image projected over the scenery. "A Monan leviathan, sir, along with a fleet of Thal war cruisers, Nekkistanni battleships, a Sunari time carrier, sixteen Navarino combat yachts, two Phaidonian transport carriers and one TARDIS materialized within our cordon." The sergeant looked back to Balvin. "They're already encircling the planet, sir."
Balvin took a deep breath and his muscles relaxed against the noise and apprehension in the room. He'd had this experience before, most of the troops under his command were green, or were never really expected to fight in the war in the first place. This wasn't the first false alarm he'd had. "Why are we concerned? It is likely a friendly contingent. Shut off that damned klaxon."
"Sir, the TARDIS detected is flagged as…" The sergeant swallowed slightly and turned to the screen. "It's flagged as the Enemy."
"Enemy?" Balvin felt the blood flee his face. He staggered backward grasping at the back of the seat of one of his underlings to maintain balance. "The…Enemy…here?"
A thousand thoughts in a thousand different iterations converged breaking over the beach of his mind roaring through his ears. It had taken him a few seconds for his brain to register the sound of him shouting the orders to battle stations. The soldiers around him rushed around like a flock of disorganized chickens. Each scrambling to a station, sometimes clambering over one another to get to a chair like some horrific game of musical chairs. He could hear the youngsters shouting at one another, attempting to coordinate some kind of response waiting for some orders more refined than 'battle stations'. All Balvin could think about was the amount of singularity cannons he had requisitioned and whether he could remember if he'd filled out the right Veta-16 form to get them delivered. Hours of procedural audits and official investigations seemed to pass in the seconds it had taken for the sergeant to grab Balvin's attention.
"Sir! We have enemy landing parties on sky trenches in the northwestern hemisphere, Algol-Tremba 52 through Farra-Borma 27. What are your orders?" the sergeant shouted.
"Orders?" Balvin asked as the world muffled around him. "Transduction barriers…raise the transduction barriers…"
"Barriers already disarmed, sir, the Enemy's forces seem to have command protocols that supercede our own." Someone in rusty red shouted from somewhere.
"Where are the bowships? Our warTARDISes? Our defense squadron!?" Balvin stuttered.
"It appears the Enemy has already commandeered them!" another voice shouted.
"All sky trenches are reporting in, all are compromised." the sergeant reported. "We have forces in the operational base, sir."
Balvin could feel the sweat gurgling up from under his skin, soaking the tunic inside of his, until now, largely ceremonial, armor. He clenched his fists as he tried to force himself into clarity. "Fire, fire, dammit, shoot something!"
In the back of the room. He heard it. The sound that every Time Lord knew. Balvin spun around to see the blue box force itself into the space in the back corner. Balvin gritted his teeth, he reached down feeling the staser pistol clipped at his hip.
The doors of the TARDIS opened. An old man stepped out. He wore a brown, tattered, leather jacket. A bolero was hung across his chest. His face was covered by a white beard and his hair was short and stiff and gray. His face was rugged, with scars and pitting. His eyebrows were bushy and gray.
"Commodore Balvin, I gratefully request you to join us." the man said very gently, very grandfatherly.
Balvin could feel his cheeks twitch the corner of his eyes spasm slightly. "What makes you think I would dare join you?"
"Because, this battle is over, you've lost." the old man said quietly. "We've taken Heaven without a shot fired. So right now you have a choice. You can join us, or, you can be humiliated. My forces are more than happy to take your men, strip them down, take their arms, their armor, their supplies, and then attach and activate their time rings, returning them to Gallifrey defeated, naked and embarrassed. However, if you simply join us, you could claim this as a masterful completion of a long game of your own, I'm more than willing to allow you that."
"You don't think we can fight back?" Balvin grunted, his jaw tightening. He glared at the old man. He wasn't a fool, and he wasn't about to let the Castellans and Cardinals whose children he'd been given to care for be insulted by such an indecent event. He looked around him, there were nine of them and only one of him. Even the fleet the size and scope of the one currently occupying the planet's orbit had to have limited man power and would be outnumbered ten to one. Balvin's teeth gritted as he spoke. "You have that hubris to think this ragtag gang of races you slink around with in those old boats can take a Gallifreyan war base, without a fight? The Time Lords will send…"
"No, they won't." the old man said, shaking his head. "They have better things to do than rescue the honor guard. Everyone knows that your lot were sent out here to be put out of the way. I see that as a waste of material, you can be trained to be effective and Heaven, despite being out in the boonies, has a charmed position to mount a counter-war."
"Honor guard? Counter-war?" Balvin gritted his teeth. His bruised ego was quickly inflating his sense of indignation. "How dare you!? You dare underestimate the First Heaven Regiment!? We will not stand down, we'll fight you to the end, I'll never let a rebel renegade like you simply walk in and take over."
The old man quirked an eyebrow. "Right, I suspect that means we'll be stripping your men." He turned scanning the group of youngsters in the room. "If you would all drop your weapons and take off your armor, and kindly sit down I'll try and make this as gentle as possible."
"Over my dead body!" Balvin growled. He pulled his staser from his holster, pointing it at the old man. "I remember the old days, I heard the soldiers talk about you, they said the first thing you knew about you was that you always came unarmed! Everyone knows the renegade boasts about how unarmed he is! Put your hands up." Balvin's staser whined to life. The old man raised his arms. "So, I suspect I have you now; call your forces off, or I cut the head off the snake." Balvin turned his head to the sergeant. "Sergeant, if you would restrain our prisoner. The Lord President will be most pleased with this turn of events."
Balvin smirked as he looked to the old man who was standing there, his face nonplussed. The sergeant unclipped the cuffs from his hip belt.
"Lord Balvin, I think I should say that the second thing most of the people I know, know about me is that I travel with companions." The old man said as a flash of light burned in the room.
The next thing the room knew was that there were two, blonde shock troops wearing Skarosian military fatigues were stepping out of the light of the transmat; they stood next to the old man, carrying rather impressive looking phase-rifles. An audible gasp swept through the room as the two troopers swept the room with the barrel of the rifles, not firing but making sure all in the room knew the scoring of the situation if it were to get ugly.
Balvin growled and pointed his staser menacingly, his finger pressing heavily against the trigger. There was a stinging sound. Balvin was shocked. He winced falling backwards from the force of it. He groaned slightly as he looked down and saw the scorch marks on his chest armor. The old man was walking towards him a staser pistol of his own pointed at Balvin.
"But all the stories?" Balvin grunted quietly, as his staser slipped from his hand and fell to the floor.
"Unfortunately, the last thing most people that come to know of me find out, and that which many don't get around to telling anyone else, is," the old man slipped the staser pistol back into the depths of his jacket, "rule one, I lie." The old man winced as he bent down onto his haunches. "Now, Lord Balvin, I'll ask again. Will you join us, or will you be sent home terribly humiliated?"