In a ship that existed outside the realms of time and space, a human woman sat amongst a strange gathering of aliens. And while there were other humans on the ship, most on her bridge crew consisted mostly of aliens. Some looked like humans, while others resembled human if only because they were bipedal in form.

The ship was called Discontinuity and her mission is ambiguous, to say the least. Built by a coalition of planets in the 61st Century (the human's time scale), its original intent has been swept along the winds of time. Well, that's a lie. There is a reason why the ship exists; its just no one really wants to hear the reason. And after nearly 30 years (the damn human time scale) and countless millions of years that have passed in the wink of an eye, why bother? You just do your job, and don't ask questions. Still though, every now and then, she would ask herself just what the hell she was doing commanding a Coalition time ship from the 61st Century, when she could even barely finish her taxes before they were due. And don't even mention the fact that she comes from the early 21st Century. On Earth, as it is in Heaven (she still could remember her early days as Catholic schoolgirl, running around in those hideous outfits).

How she came to be on the bridge of this ship is an interesting story, if an interesting story is what you want to hear. And, of course, you do. But before we get to her story, let us explain why we are all here at this point in time.

Time, as they say is relative. And time can be fleeting and it does fly when you're having

fun. But what if you could use time for your benefit, instead of it being against you? What if you could travel the time winds and change your past, your future, or your present? How about some else's future?

At the start of the millenium, it became apparent that many new species where acquiring time travel capabilities. It was like it was on sale, and you could walk down to the corner market and buy it from a little old foreigner (alien, if you like). And like children with a new toy, a lot of these races did not play well with others. Most tried to alter their own history, if only to prevent wars, plagues and enemies from stabbing you in your own congress. The only problem (okay, the many millions of problems) with doing that, is it reeks havoc across the cosmos. To use a tried and true analogy, it literally was like throwing a rock in a stream. The countercurrents, the eddies, the course that is caused by such a toss has clear and true ability to really screw up not just the place they wanted altered, but other places, such as planets and the star systems they existed in.

So, tired of all the time foolery, many planets and many people, to put an end, or try to control the timelines formed a Coalition. It was commonly called the CIA, or the Celestial Intervention Agency. The Time Lords of Gallifrey were the creators and charter members of this Coalition. And in the 61st Century, the captain of the legendary, but super secret time ship, was an Earth woman from its 20th Century. Which no one knew. Though, some did know. But, who would put such a sophisticated ship in the hands of a human?

Well, no one really. But the did, anyway. Here's how it happened, folks

Abducted at the age of 20 in 1996 by the Conbronbi of Xos tenn, she spent two years as an experiment in terror. She was probed in every part of her body, and spent days on end in pain as those probes tore through her flesh. The Conbronbi, for their part, never spoke to her, never looked at her as sentient being. To them, it appeared, she was a lab rat, an idea that needed to be looked at in every direction with every sort of horrible tool ones own nightmares could never come up with.

Then it all ended when the Daleks wiped out the Conbronbi. Which surprised many, considering the Daleks were known for their experiments on lesser species. Maybe the Conbronbi were stepping on the Daleks own territory. Despite their claim of how emotions are a disease, the Daleks had always proven, with some of their actions, that they could be more emotional than humans. None the less, the Conbronbi were gone, and most of their lab rats had escaped in all the confusion. Kathleen Scully of Austin, Texas was able, with three other humans from Earth, to obtain a Conbronbi shuttle. And despite apprehension at first on how to fly the damn thing, they discovered how deceptively easy it really was. They left Xos tenn and headed into deep space.

Their flight from the horror, however, was short lived. They discovered that the Daleks had damaged the shuttle in the initial attack. They were able to proceed in hyperdrive for only a few hours before they returned to normal space. But fortune favored them, and they arrived in heavy populated quadrant. With some help from Kalatron Imperium, the doomed shuttle was brought to the Imperium's home world of Kalatron 7. The Imperium offered them a chance to either return home, or stay and travel the stars. Kathy, who was the most optimistic of the four, decided to stay. Her three other fellow humans were returned home. She spent over three years on Kalatron 7, living with the strangely humanoid creatures. To Kathy, they looked like humans' -bipedal, ten fingers, and ten toes. They were all multi-colored skinned, but they there was a predominate darkness in their skin. They resembled Africans, mixed with Hindi's. They had ridges on their foreheads, making Kathy think of some of the science fiction shows she used to watch on TV back home. But, all in all, they were the most peaceful race she had ever met (of course, that opinion was based on the two alien species that wanted to kill her, Conbronbi and the Daleks). They had survived wars, starvation, and alien invasions, and had come out of it with no cynicism or hatred. They accepted anyone and everyone who visited their world for commerce or whom decided they wanted to live there.

After about the third year, a marriage and a child, Kathy became restless. She could not place her finger on why this feeling had crept into her like a thief in the night. But, she felt she had to leave, had to escape this feeling she was being drowned like a bag of unwanted kittens. Her husband understood her desire, which made her angry. She wanted him to protest, to yell, to cry, but he stood by her desire. He even told her to take their son.

After another 6 months of wrestling with her feelings, she made the final resolve, and departed her adopted home with her son for travel amongst the stars. Which, of course, turned out not be as fun as she thought (or remembered from all those TV shows about space travel). The fun wore out like a great pair of jeans. Even her son, who seemed to growing like a weed, had noted that space travel was a boring as watching his father fix space cruisers. They did have a few adventures, outwitting a few Dalek Battlecruisers (Kathy had decided that those pepper top idiots would never really rule the comos as they spouted on about, mostly because they contained too much emotions -something they said was a weakness). But, in the final analysis, space travel was only fun when you landed on a new world; and there were large gaps of open space between systems. So, after about a year, she arrived on Marconton, a largely humanoid planet who belonged to the Galactic Federation, and a planet that was the crossroads to many civilized areas of space and gateway to the uncharted regions of the universe. Here she discovered her true calling as she ended up buying a bar/inn, of all things, and serving clientele from every parts of the known space. She enjoyed the conversations, and she absorbed all the stories that all these travelers told. This, oddly enough, seem to satisfy her wanderlust.

She stayed on Marconton for the next 25 years, enjoying a profitable business and a new reputation as the best place to stay when crossing the great expanse of outer space. Her son, Drebel, grew up to be a handsome man who helped his mother run the business. He married a local girl, and fathered three children in quick order. They all worked together to make the Kathy's the best place to come to. Even her husband made an appearance, and Kathy re-discovered her passion for him.

But things changed, as they always do. Tragedy struck when a freighter, carrying an illegal waste product, crashed into some structure near her tavern. Had she not been in another province checking up on a local supplier of wine, she would have been killed as instantly as her family. Survivors' guilt haunted her like a bad debt, and she just did not have the energy, or desire to start over. She was 55 years old, she told her friends and she had just lost everything that meant anything to her. Why should she start over?

But fate had intervened again, just as it had 35 years earlier. A chance encounter with an alien who traveled in an old blue police box, and who called himself the Doctor, ignited her wanderlust. She traveled with the curly hair man, with the impossibly long scarf for a year. He had just left his homeworld after a battle with someone he called the Master. He was headed for Earth, would she like to come? She told him that she had been away from her planet for so long, that she really had no desire to return -all of her family assumed that she was dead, she reasoned. This Doctor seemed doubtful at first, but capitulated in the end. They had many adventures and saw many new aliens and visited many new worlds in many time periods -including Earth in 16th century and 61st. Intrigued by all the changes in Earth, she decided to stay on Earth.

She became involved with the CIA by chance. For a human, they reasoned, she had shown some remarkable observations about the universe. She appeared to know a great deal, and had was showing a vibrant ability to put emotions aside and look at things logically. Which served the Time Lords well. Unlike the Doctor, his fellow Time Lords were as emotionless as a rock. Funny, she thought, the Daleks could learn something about these time travelers.

So, she ended up as the commander of Discontinuity, whose mission was to catalogue the timelines. After centuries of trying to explain all the paradoxes of time travel, it was discovered that there was one main "highway" of time, designated as 0001. It was her job and the crew of Discontinuity to make sure that 0001 remained on course. But keeping track of the infinite number of timelines created, was not easy, so space and time of 0001 hasn't really existed for many centuries. So, ideally, it was to keep the time as close as possible. Timeline 109047 was the closest they had gotten, and even that was disastrous. The Daleks still existed, along with those lumbering metal mental morons, the Cybermen. Then there was the planet Earth, who for reasons unknown, was critical to everything that was unwinding in the universe. Even Kathy had begun to wonder how her planet fitted into the galactic tapestry. Even by the 61st Century, it was still in its infant stage, even though the planet was well over the teething level. Still, it was her job to stave off the destruction of the universe.

So here she sat, idly playing with the many buttons that made up her uniform. It was a sign to her crew that she was bored. They usually tried to correct that mood as quickly as possible. So, when Tevil found something unusual, he called to his Captain.

Tevil was a blue-skinned humanoid from Altairian 12, a mostly water planet on the far side of Quadrant 3. He was tall, and very handsome, for a blue-skinned man thought Kathy. His age was unknown, but his species aged very slowly, living as much as 2,000 years. Many had traveled to his home planet in search for the truth behind Altairian Fountain of Youth. If there was an explanation, his people had decided not to tell. As he danced his fingers over his console, Captain Kathy Scully looked over his shoulder. A peat smell rose into her nostrils. It was not unpleasant scent, as it reminded her of Earth, and how the air smelled after a spring thunderstorm.

When she spoke, it was with the authority that all the crew respected and loved. "What's up, Tevil?"

The blue-skinned man swallowed, and brought up an image on his screen. "I had been tracing an odd disruption her on Timeline 23536."

"That's a fairly low number," Kathy said almost to herself. "What of it?"

"At first I thought it was nothing, a minor blip. Or even an error, considering all the problems we have been having with the main computers."

Kathy stood up straight. The main computer, an Artificial Intelligent system that was an offshoot of the Time Lords Matrix, had seemed to be going through some changes of late. While it always had a personality of its own, based on pure logic and mathematical certainties, over the last few weeks it almost seemed to be depressed.

She would've laughed at the concept, had she not seen for herself what was happening to the ship. And her conversations with it, for it had not only could you communicate with a keyboard, but also verbally was getting nowhere. It was caught in some sort of funk, she told the crew. Most did not get the meaning of the word funk, but assumed that it was not good. She sighed and asked him what he was tracking and where and when it was taking place.

"Earth," he said hesitatingly. He had been aware for some time that Earth was not a place she liked to talk about. He was only a few souls on board Discontinuity that knew she was from Earth. And he only knew that because her second in command, a shape shifting Navarino, was his husband. So when the subject of Earth came up, it usually brought on a bad mood for their Captain. Still, though, he went on. "I began to notice a few days ago, when I was tracking activity of a certain rogue Dalek ship that was attacking Earth in the early 21st Century.

"I thought the Daleks first invasion was in the 22nd Century." The captain said.

"It was and still is. That was the curious thing about it, though. So I backtracked a few timelines earlier and discovered many small disruptions, but none that were leading up to this invasion in 2010 of your time."

She let that comment slip, for no one was in real hearing distance. Even Blotus, the helmsman with the magnificent hearing, was not present. "So, where's the great mystery then?"

Tevil moved his hands around the controls and spoke out to the computer, who for some reason was asking for a name now, instead of just Computer. But, none, the less, it responded when Tevil spoke.

"Working" came a metallic sounding voice.

"Please bring up timeline 923536 and import over time line 109047." The computer screen went blank for a moment, before being replaced by two versions of two different timelines. Tevil pointed to the image in the left, which showed the corrupted timeline of 923536. "If I had more time (it was a pun that had started about the date she came on board, and while she hated it, the crew seemed to get an enjoyment out of using the phrase) and if the computer was acting normally, I think I could accurately give the exact time and place. However, since most of our resources are working on Timeline 20970456, I can only give you an estimate."

"That's better than nothing, but why all this work?" The crew had been enterprising on Timeline 20970456 for a few weeks, so there was not much time, so to speak, to work on personal matters. Besides, the CIA did not encourage individuality. But she wondered if this had something to do with the job on hand?

"Not really, but I've always been taught that when dealing with time, nothing is unusual." He licked his blue lips.

She nodded and decided not to comment on his conclusions. "So, what do you want to do about this?"

Tevil frowned. "The problem is, that if we let this go, the Time Lords could be facing extinction."

It was time for Captain Scully to frown. "I beg your pardon?"

Like a worker who knows that he supposed to be working on what the team was, Tevil wanted to jump up and show what a little individuality can do. He had spoken out of turn, but he knew he had to say something. "If we let this current situation run its course, I predict the Time Lords will be greatly affected by this disruption."

Scully was intrigued, and leaned forward. Her eyes swept over the blue man, trying to read hi thoughts before he spoke. "How?"

Tevil brought up an image on his screen. "If this timeline is allowed to proceed with no manipulation on our part, the Time Lords planet of Gallifrey will be utterly destroyed by a race that will put even the Daleks to shame."

"Who?"

Tevil's frown deepened. "The computer and I are unsure who these creatures are. The best we can come up with, is that they are some sort biomatter creatures who use energy weapons based with temporal dark matter."

Captain Scully was not sure what to say. Over the years she has served on Discontinuity, she has seen many wondrous and frightening things. She trusted her staff, and assumed that Tevil knew what he was talking about. When she asked if there was something they could do without altering their current mission, her voice rang with the authority of her status as Captain, but also with a slight waver, indicating she was just going to have to let the blue Altairian try to solve this problem on his own.

Tevil sighed and requested the image of the Doctor. Kathy raised an eyebrow. "The Doctor?" she spoke with surprise. "You know he hates his fellow Time Lords. Besides, he also dislikes being manipulated by the CIA."

"All true, but what if we send him to earth at time after the disruption? Let him nose around a bit, until he catches on. He's always liked a good mystery."

"Your thinking like a human, Tevil, " She said, but it was not an insult to him. He liked humans in general. Even his husband kept the human shape. She had remembered the many adventures she had with the fourth Doctor. It was true, he loved a conundrum "Still, you might have a point. Which Doctor are you thinking of sending?"

Tevil rolled through the images. The current information they had on the Doctor, had him in his eighth incarnation, a strikingly handsome man who looked like a conglomerate of his past selves. Tevil rolled the images back to the fifth Doctor, whose broad smile and sensitivity was as charming as the fourth Doctors sporadic length of his scarf.

"I think this version of the Doctor will help us. At this juncture of his timeline, he has left Gallifrey after the incident with the Lord President and the Dark Tower, and before his encounter in Earth year 2084 with the Silurians."

"Why then?"

Tevil looked at his Captain. "It is a period of unrest for him. He knows his time in this incarnation is short, and he'll de distracted by the next handful adventures that will eventually cause him to regenerate. He'll be less likely to accuse us of manipulating his destiny, and just arrive at the thought that this was all part of the Web of Time. Besides, there is Adric."

Adric?

Scully racked her brains to remember. She was fully aware of the history of this Time Lord, (she never told them that she had traveled with him, and over the year they traveled together, he had taught her how to block her thoughts so the Time Lords could not read her mind) along with the other renegades of his planet. She liked him, despite what the High Counsel have said about him. She never favored using him, but there was time when his brilliance was needed. She tried to remember where she had heard her that name. After a few moments, it came to her. He was the boy who sacrificed himself to bring them closer to Timeline 0001. Like her, after the death of her family, guilt had been eating away at him. Maybe, this little sideline trip could resolve him of this culpability.

She moved by to her command chair and sat down. "Do it, and I want a report on my desk by the end of your shift."

Tevil smiled, "Yes, Captain." He began his task.

Somewhere in time and space, Discontinuity continued its task.