'The Cerberus Protocol'
7. Secondary Control Room
The Zero Room was a null space. Same in its pearlescent white confines, the Doctor was safe from the intrusions of the universe. Space, time, matter and energy were meaningless inside those four walls, and he could exist separate and apart from all of it.
The Doctor didn't know how much time had passed since he'd entered the Zero Room. It could have been a couple of seconds, it could have been a hundred years; no time passed him by, and nothing seemed to change, but there was something at the back of his mind.
Something that wouldn't let him slip into the peaceful serenity of his immediate surroundings.
Strange, though. In this place, outside of time and space, his immediate surroundings were all that existed and even that existence was hazy. He could have spent the next million years trying to find his way to the other side of the chamber, and there'd be no guarantee that he'd ever get there.
Memory and sensation fled from him.
He floated, unaided and uncaring, from one extreme of nothing to the other. He was supremely comfortable and utterly disconcerted all at once.
There was something there, at the edge of his perception. A half-remembered idea. Maybe a name. Emotions flared as his lips worked to frame the thought that flickered through his mind.
Something was tugging at him, but he couldn't bring himself to identify it.
He was so old, now. He'd lived so many lives, died and been reborn so many times, that an umbrella in his stomach should have been nothing. The weight of his failure, the sadness that suffused him at the thought of having let her down again, was enough to crush him.
He was a foolish old man, stupidly sentimental. Why did he keep those outfits out for all to see? Why did he celebrate the distant past when there was still so much more to do? Bullets, radiation, poison, a fall, a blow to the head. Endings noble and ignoble in equal measure, but endings all the same. He should have put the past behind him; he should have kept to the present.
Funny, he thought to himself, how being separate from reality gave him such a clear view of it.
This whole thing, all of it, had been his fault. He'd fallen into despair the second the TARDIS had struck the null point. He'd run off, willy-nilly, to find the power source that would bring the TARDIS back online. He'd let the Protocol distract him, first with the voices of his old friends and then with her cries for help. He could have ended it all then and there, but he'd gone off to find her.
Gone off to save her, and in so doing doomed them both. Silly old Doctor.
"Sophie," he said to himself, and the word bounced off the almost-walls and the never-floors, and echoed endlessly in the endlessness only to reach him once more. Old and alone and floating in nothingness.
Time had passed, he knew. It could have been a minute. It could have been months.
It didn't matter. Something was going to happen, something terrible; it may have already happened, it may have been happening even as he existed there, in that place of non-existence, halfway between two ends of nothingness. Every fibre of his being, each of his time-attuned senses, whispered warnings to him over and over again.
Worse still, he knew that this situation was only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Something truly disastrous was lurking there, in the not-too-distant future, and the Doctor was going to key part of the coming catastrophe. Either was going to prevent it, or he was going to cause it.
For a while, or for the briefest moment, he considered what was happening and what all of it meant.
He remembered now, with the startling clarity only absolute separation could provide, what was happening and what he had to do. He had to find Sophie. He had to stop the Protocol. He had to save the universe.
"Sophie," he repeated, and in a century, in a minute, he found the door to the Zero Room. "I'm coming."
"Doctor," Sophie said to herself. She could have sworn that she'd heard his voice echoing in her mind, but she was sure that it wasn't the Protocol playing its usual games.
She looked around, trying to determine where the voice had come from. She was alone, however, and the only sounds she could hear were the humming of the TARDIS engines and the distant rumble of the ship striking something. Their voyage through the Vortex towards the Time Lock surrounding Gallifrey's place in history had smoothed out considerably.
That wasn't good at all.
Despite her injured ankle, she'd managed to pull herself out of the ring corridor that housed the passenger's living quarters. Finally, she reached the intersection where she had avoided the Protocol's beast-like avatars.
She shut her eyes, trying to think which direction she should turn. The TARDIS normally seemed to guide her to wherever it was she wanted to go. Instinctively, she'd know which way to turn, which corridor to take. True, that had helped her traverse the familiar route to her bedroom, but now she was expected to descend into the bowels of the dimensionally transcendental time machine and find a room she'd never seen before.
"Left."
Her eyes snapped open. That was the Doctor's voice. She glanced down the left branching corridor, which seemed to go on forever. It wasn't unusual for TARDIS corridors; walls of burnished bronze and gold and orange, punctured at random intervals by roundels of various sizes.
"How do I know it's you speaking to me, Doctor?" she asked the empty air.
"Trust me, Sophie."
"But you could be the Protocol trying to mess with me," she responded, before adding "you know, again."
"We're running out of time," the Doctor's voice pressed.
Sighing, Sophie nodded. "Fine."
Slowly, she began making her way down the left-branching corridor, making sure to keep most of her weight off her injured ankle however possible. The air was still freezing cold, but at least the temperature wasn't dropping any further, and the TARDIS' smooth course meant that she wasn't being thrown about like a rag doll anymore.
She continued down the corridor, before reaching what seemed to be an elevator lobby. Instead of elevators, though, each doorway led to a spiral staircase that stretched away in gravity-defying and utterly confusing directions. There was one that seemed to twist about like a pretzel, another that zigzagged and a third that went straight up.
"Oh, God," Sophie muttered to herself. "Doctor, you need to sort this place out. Which one am I meant to take?"
Only silence answered.
"And now you leave me," she sighed through clenched teeth. Interestingly enough, the walls of the staircases seemed different to the rest of the TARDIS she'd seen thus far. One seemed to made of some sort of coral-like substance, which glowed with a kind of inner light much like the walls of the console room. A few were a sterile, slightly off-putting white, with much larger, more evenly-spaced roundels than she was used to seeing. Another was stone, and yet another seemed to be some kind of ghastly leopard-print wallpaper.
The last, however, with a staircase that went downwards at an impossibly steep angle, was panelled with wood. The scents of undisturbed dust rose from it, and something in Sophie's mind told her that that was the direction to take.
She had a feeling that each of these staircases would lead to very different parts of the TARDIS, and though all of them had the quality of history about them, a sense that they had not been disturbed or even considered in quite a while, only this last beckoned to her the way the path to her bedroom had before.
The TARDIS, wherever she was inside her own systems, was calling to Sophie. For some reason, despite the chill of the air, that warmed her. To know that the TARDIS was still there, was still fighting, that it had refused to give in to the Protocol…
Sophie smiled. It was a quiet smile, but one full of resolve.
Tucking her phone and the sonic screwdriver into the pockets of her enormous coat, she started down the staircase, and gravity immediately corrected to keep her in position. She would have been walking perpendicular to where she'd been standing on the deck above, but it felt for all the world like she'd just stepped from one stair to the next.
With one hand on the railing, she descended the staircase as quickly as she could given her ankle. At the foot of the stairs, she could make out a faintly glowing light.
She was about halfway down when the deck bucked beneath her like a wild horse.
Sophie lost her footing, and slammed down to the stairs hard. Thankfully, she managed to maintain her grip on the railing; if she hadn't, she would have tumbled down to the bottom. The ship was shaking, hard, and alarms started wailing as warning lights plunged the staircase into a crimson-infused twilight.
The TARDIS was been shaken apart again. She was running out of time.
Deciding that standing was too risky, Sophie kept a hold of the rail and began to scoot down the stairs while in a sitting position, one at a time. Not only was it more stable that attempting to stand but it kept pressure off her ankle.
She was three quarters of the way down the stairs when the gravity suddenly inverted. In the split second she had before she was thrown the roof of the stairwell, which was now the floor, she managed to grab on with both hands to the railing. For half a minute she dangled, before the gravity righted itself and she was thrown back to the stairs with a bone-shaking bang.
Pulling herself gingerly to her feet, bruised and sore all over, she pushed her ankle to its limits. By the time she reached the bottom stair, she was about to pass out. Sucking in a deep, steadying breath, she made for the nearest doorway.
It was hexagonally shaped, like many on the TARDIS, and it was coated in a thick layer of dust.
Remembering how the Doctor had opened the door of the storage room earlier, she reached for the sonic screwdriver and went to the nearest roundel. She removed the covering the same way the Doctor had, and pointed the screwdriver at the interior circuitry.
With a sparking start, the door jerked halfway open.
The Doctor wouldn't have been able to fit through the opening, but Sophie, willow-thin and fairly short, managed to squeeze through without much difficulty.
She found herself in a six-sided room that reminded her more of a chapel than the control room of a vessel capable of travelling anywhere in space and time. The walls were wood-panelled, much like those of the staircase she'd just descended, and where the roundels in the rest of the TARDIS were usually located there were instead stain-glass windows that depicted Gallifreyan symbols.
There was an old hat stand, a few antique leather armchairs and the whole place smelled of dust and old books. There was another door, which Sophie guessed would have led to the TARDIS exterior.
The centrepiece of the chamber, though, was a small, four-sided console. Unlike the console in the main control room, this one featured only a few knobs, dials and levers. Gone was the telephone, the gramophone, the typewriter keys and all the various cobbled-together switches and buttons.
Sophie heaved a sigh of relief that she'd finally found the secondary console room. This was all about to be over. The TARDIS was still shaking, but not as badly as it had been, and though the room was still bathed in threatening red light she felt as though a great weight had been lifted off her shoulders.
She dragged herself the last of the way towards the console and was pulling out her phone when a figure appeared near the doors facing the entrance she'd used.
A blue-tinged, holographic representation of herself was standing there, watching her.
"Oh, God," Sophie groaned, "would you please just go away?"
"The Doctor lied to us, Sophie," the hologram told her, the Protocol's latest avatar speaking with her voice. "He didn't tell us why he brought us on board."
"Us?" Sophie repeated, rolling her eyes, "are you seriously trying to win me over with that whole 'I look like you, so I am you' thing? I've seen Star Trek, all right. I know all the tricks."
The expression on the avatar's face, a moment ago serene and beatific, become a twisted sneer of condescension. "The Doctor lied to you."
"I'm sure he did," Sophie said, and set her phone on the console. She lifted the sonic screwdriver, and was about the hit the button when the ship rocked again, just as wildly as it had when the gravity had flipped. This time, Sophie tripped and struck her jaw hard on the edge of the console.
She screamed in pain, and the breath was driven from her as she slammed into the wood-panelled floor.
"The TARDIS is about to breach the Time Lock," the Protocol told her, looming over her and daring to speak with her voice. "Its engines are already at critical. When they lose temporal cohesion, they will unleash a shockwave that will set Gallifrey free."
Sophie blinked as she fought to regain her breath, and finally managed to pull herself up. Despite the pain that threatened to consume her, she stared down the holographic entity.
"The Doctor's already told me how bad that would be," Sophie said, "and no matter what you say about him, you can't get me to betray the trust he's shown in me. You won't get me to give up. Not now."
"How much does he trust you, Sophie?" the Protocol.
"With my life," a new voice boomed.
Sophie whipped around to see the Doctor framing the doorway. He stood there, large as life, wearing his trademark black coat and smiling his usual infuriating, maddening, brilliant smile.
"Impossible," the Protocol intoned.
"Doctor!" Sophie cried, unable to believe her eyes. "I thought you'd be stuck in the Zero Room."
"Funny thing about the Zero Room," he said as he strode towards her, seemingly unaffected by the quaking TARDIS, "is that exists outside of the usual flow of space and time. It's meant to protect whoever is inside from the inconsistencies and random variants of the universe, and it does that by shutting down any outside input entirely. I don't know how long I was in there, but it was long enough for my wound to heal."
"You are too late, Doctor," the Protocol warned him. "This capsule will be destroyed."
"No, it won't," the Doctor assured the ancient Time Lord security device. "Sophie, now!"
Sophie grinned, and raised the sonic screwdriver to the phone. She activated it, and suddenly its screen came to life; it was filled with scrolling and spinning Gallifreyan symbols, glowing bright green. The TARDIS' shaking and bucking slowed, then stopped. The crimson emergency lights flickered off and then the full lights of the ship came up brilliantly.
The cold in the air began to leach away, and the Protocol looked about as the swirling text beneath the surface of its holographic avatar picked up in speed and intensity.
"Impossible," it roared, "impossible!"
Sparks exploded from the stained glass roundels, and the Protocol began to shimmer and fade in and out.
"The TARDIS is reasserting herself!" the Doctor said to Sophie as he stepped into place beside her. "Her Matrix is overwhelming the Protocol, shutting it out of her systems!"
Sophie grinned. The lights that glowed behind the stained glass windows grew brighter and brighter still, until Sophie had to shield her eyes from the insurmountable glare. It was a cleansing light, that seemed to leach away the last of the cold and whatever remained of the Protocol's presence.
The TARDIS gave a great, powerful shudder; the Doctor ran to the console, and saw on the readouts that it was powering away from the Time Lock around Gallifrey at all possible speed, that its engines were falling away from critical. The TARDIS Matrix had indeed reasserted its control of the old ship, and the Protocol was losing.
"No!" boomed Sophie's voice, twisted and electronically manipulated.
The Doctor looked up, just in time for a burst of kinetic energy to strike him hard in the chest and bowl him off his feet. The Protocol's avatar was now a twisted caricature of Sophie, and was fast losing coherence. The creature, another dark legacy of the Time Lords, was standing over the two of them, one hand raised and its mouth a twisted cry of horror.
"You will be taken back to Gallifrey!" the monster was screaming, "you will be taken back or you will be destroyed!"
"Not today!" Sophie said, and she helped the Doctor to his feet. "Not after all this."
The Doctor smiled at her, even as the Protocol geared itself up for another attack. "Do you trust me, Sophie?"
She nodded. "Of course I do, Doctor."
He took one of her hands and folded it tightly around the edge of the console. "Then hold on tight!"
He slapped a control on the console surface, and the exterior doors flew open. Sophie's eyes widened as the vacuum pull of air rushing from the secondary control room into the Time Vortex, a yawning chasm of swirling blue light that beckoned from beyond the doors, hit her like a slap.
She held onto the console as tightly as she could as the air and whatever wasn't bolted down rushed past her. The Protocol's avatar, though holographic, was still tangible enough to be affected by the physics of decompression.
With one final cry, it was sucked from the secondary control room.
As one, the stained glass roundels exploded. Shards of brilliant coloured crystal rained through the chamber as they poured into the vortex after the avatar, which quickly winked out into darkness.
The Doctor hit the door control again, and the room was sealed. He and Sophie fell to the deck as gravity took hold again.
She took a few airless breaths before the life support system had pumped enough oxygen back into the room. The chamber was dark, save for the sparking ruins of the roundels and a few lights on the console.
"Is that it, Doctor?" Sophie asked, as the last of the adrenalin coursing through her body died away and the pain in her ankle took hold once again. "Is it gone?"
The Doctor, slumped beside her against the console, nodded. "When the TARDIS took control of its systems, it forced the Protocol's entire presence into its avatar. It was flushed out of the system entirely when the avatar left the ship and was destroyed in the Vortex."
He pulled himself up to check the readouts on the console, which were mostly functioning. Sophie, with great pain, went up to join him. "So what's happening now?"
"The TARDIS is back on a normal course in the Vortex," the Doctor explained. "There's been a great deal of damage, but its back to full power and shouldn't take long to repair. The physical damage, at least."
"What do you mean?" Sophie asked, frowning.
"The Protocol took a lot of information with it," the Doctor explained, shaking his head. "The databanks have just about been wiped clean."
"So what do…" Sophie trailed off, as she noticed the small screen on the secondary console come to life. She leant in towards it, and what she saw made her feel like she'd just been punched in the gut. It was an image of a newspaper article, from a paper called the Country Leader.
The Doctor, peering over her shoulder, recognised it immediately.
"Sophie," he said, his voice quite, full of regret and sadness, "no…"
But Sophie wasn't listening. Her eyes were flying over the article, taking in every word. There was a picture of a man and a woman hugging a little girl, and she recognised all three of them instantly. It was her and her parents. And the article said that she had died with them.
If what she was reading was true, she was meant to have died on 2 March, 1996. She was supposed to die in the same car crash that took her parents from her.
