"Now what?"
"Excellent question, Tegan."
They had reached the chamber containing the unstable temporal initiation field, a vast cavern in the heart of the small moon that barely let them see the other side. In the center of it was a twisting ball of blue and white light. Ragged surges of light sometimes extruded from the surface only to be drawn back in as they met some invisible barrier. The rest of the chamber was filled with the rotating streaks of light, strobing flashes of it that bounced off the smooth gray walls with blinding intensity. They took it all in from the glass-walled control room overlooking the chamber, filled with seven rows of consoles and displays, all humming patiently. It had been sealed against the intrusion of the sad souls who had once staffed it and was now coated with a layer of lubricant-laden dust.
Benefiting from the second injection of the counteragent, the Doctor sat down in front of the first bank of controls and poked until the screen lit. It took a moment but the screen suddenly rippled and changed into something different for each of them. Tegan knew instantly that the projected translation circuitry of the TARDIS had changed the readouts into English for her but saw little point in it as it still made as much sense to her as if it had been in Ecosian. She couldn't even imagine what a Temporal Flux Limitation Field was but that was what the Doctor finally settled on when he finished scrolling through the control options. Nyssa leaned over and looked at the data written in electric blue on the screen below a diagram of the rotating energy field and a banner that read "Critical Failure".
"Good heavens, how could they have been so foolish?"
"Arrogance", the Doctor answered. "What they've done is not allowed for a bleed-over circuit once they'd attained the critical mass needed to create the stabilized energy shell. Instead the excess power entered the Temporal Initiation Field without any sort of containment. They assumed plasma would have no impact on the nullified area the field occupied, that it had to be a physical object to have an effect or be affected."
"Not remembering that they were creating an access to an existence where energy and matter are interchangeable on some levels." Nyssa completed, her head shaking in frustration. "And the excess energy is causing the contraction and expansion of the field. When it contracts time accelerates, when it expands time slows."
The Doctor looked up from the readouts, which for him were, of course, in Gallifreyan, long enough to smile. "You've been an excellent student of my rambling, Nyssa."
She returned his smile and rested a hand briefly on his arm, "As I will continue to be."
They went back to work trying to understand the extent of the instability. Tegan listened as she always did, catching bits and pieces that made sense in terms she understood. What she could put together was that Miros had blown the fuse of his time travel toaster by running too much current through it. "So how do you pull the plug on him?"
Absorbed in tenth-level maths and technology, albeit idiotically primitive by his standards, the Doctor kept working for a moment before he answered her. "Sadly, it's not as simple as depriving the field of power. It has to be dispersed on just the right parameter so that the chronomitic particles are rendered harmless by venting them into space and Miros's family has to be removed at a time interval as close as possible on a physical level as when they entered it. I doubt he would want to have his wife be old enough to be his mother and his children his own age. And they've done nothing to deserve having their lives curtailed or radically altered. Time out here has passed as it normally might, for them they have aged and regressed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of times."
Tegan came away from staring out of the locked door and looked down at the pulsing sphere of light. "But you can go in there and get them out."
"Well, I have to find them first. Ah, third balcony down and in toward the center." He looked up from the readouts and walked to the window, his arms folding against the chill. The energy that was emanating from the fluctuating time field apparently contained very little heat. He pointed at the distant balcony and, counting up from the floor, the two women spotted the square-railed landing. There were three figures piled up near the door, all three were dressed in white attire that was probably ceremonial. It was impossible to tell more than that at this distance.
"All right," Tegan pressed, "So how do you go into that thing and come out?"
The Doctor sat down again, back at the station he'd activated, and stared at the display with his mouth twisting. "As always, it's very difficult to explain. I can generate a limited temporal field as chronomitic particles are part of my genetics. They've built up in the two of you as you've traveled with me, a sort of positive radioactive by-product of traveling in the TARDIS, much the same as gradual exposure to sunlight protects the skin from its effects. Slow exposure stabilizes organic matter." He worked a moment more, ignoring the slow tightening in his chest. "The amount of protection I'll have, of course, is dependent upon the frequency of the fluctuations. I'll need time to adjust the field protecting me as time surges forward and back."
Nyssa sat down and began work to activate a second console, seeing the controls through the TARDIS interface in her own language. "Then the first thing we should do is observe the field for long enough to learn if there is a pattern to those fluctuations that we can predict."
"And there's also the matter of field density and if I can generate a field that is strong enough to withstand the accelerations and decelerations, even if we know how often they occur. As long as the TARDIS is helping to contain the fluctuations, it should be safe enough for you to accompany me down to the doorway outside the balcony, but we'll need to get those readings first."
Nyssa continued to monitor the fields and record the flux intervals and any unexpected variables and spikes. She had searched until she found an adequate collection of the event programs, which had a blank back page, so that she could fill it with notes they could both read. There were dozen of portable data readers around and she could recharge them from the main consoles they had reaccessed but finding away for her to enter the text into it Trakenite, onto Ecosian controls, for the Doctor to read in Gallifreyan was a bit much for even the TARDIS. And beyond that, her knowledge and the Doctor's of time travel equations would far exceed what the Ecosian mathematics could allow for on the input system. Nyssa came back to the Doctor a few hours later, offering him the sheets of paper.
He smiled at her brightly, looking up from his own research as Tegan dozed nearby, "And where did you find a pen?"
"Pens, actually. I believe the team of scientists was supposed to end up signing autographs. There were several of them engraved at the stations." She sat down on the floor across from the Doctor and looked at the assemblage of data. "You've used their technology more aptly than they did."
"Well, it's all in the knowing. I should be ready shortly." He looked up from Nyssa to Tegan as stretched, awoken by their voices. She came to her knees and looked over at the T.I.F. through the glass walls. "Tegan?"
She turned, fully awake already to smile at him. "We're done here. I just need a moment to go over Nyssa's notes on the temporal field. Then we'll make our way down to that balcony and see if Miros is a man of his word in at least some respect."
The older woman grimaced but let the opportunity to make a biting comment pass. "All right, do we know how to get down there?" Tegan was picking up the bag Nyssa had been carrying, apparently having decided that the threat of the Ecosians had been so diminished that she could now spare her firing arm for other pursuits. The Doctor watched her for a moment and, despite the fact they were about to venture back out into another set of corridors, now with a few sets of stairwells, found her judgment likely true. He relaxed himself on that count and let his mind wander as Nyssa used the master codekey to open the wide heavy doors that lead to the balcony levels. There must have been some ceremony going on when they engaged their first Temporal Initiation Field, unable to look into the future to see its failure… There was debris everywhere, the remains of the panicked rush to escape the uncontrolled collapses and rebirths of the T.I.F. A dozen bodies were strewn throughout the corridors, and two at the bottom of the first flight of stairs they encountered. Time and exposure had left them as little more than dried husks in clothes that had once been grand. The smell was no longer the reek of decay but the musty choke of untended graves. They moved through it quickly and looking straight ahead, kicking aside the scattering of event programs, glasses, bottles, and serving trays. The Ecosians had died preparing to celebrate.
Three spiraling staircases and three rounded hallways flanking the circular chamber unwound before the travelers as they moved. For the Doctor's sake, Nyssa was glad that the stairs lead downward, and glad that Tegan was again wearing sensible shoes. The stairways were metal and open, leaving none of them entirely steady. The only relief was the hallways, which here had received a coat of deep blue paint. It wasn't much brighter, but it would have been enough to lessen their dread had it not been for the bodies of those who had died trying to escape. Halfway down the fourth hallway, the Doctor raised his hand and brought them to a stop. He was opposite a door that looked no different from all the others, a door with a rounded top, split down the middle and recessed half a meter into the wall of the corridor. The Doctor approached it slowly, as if it were a bomb he was about to diffuse, touching it as if it were a thousand degrees.
His hand bounced back a moment later, flung off like a fly on the neck of a horse. He stood silently for a moment, his thoughts almost audible, and then tried again. This time, as his hand approached the door, a dancing green light began to stir around it, obviously growing stronger and denser as he got nearer to it. This time he was able to touch the door with one hand and then both, triggering the lock. He looked back over his shoulder as far as he could. "Move away, both of you. As soon as I can stabilize the chronomitic particles in my body, I'm going to enter the field and open the door. The resistance that you have will not be enough to withstand the effects of the T.I. F."
"Wait a moment," Nyssa ordered, coming forward with the injector in her hand, "One last time and then I hope we'll have the real antidote." The Doctor bared his neck as she reached to inject him again and thanked her quickly as she moved off, joining Tegan at the far side of the wide hallway. The blur of green light around the Doctor eventually enveloped him completely and the two women watched as above his head a slender crack of light appeared and expanded. They got a quick glimpse of him as he bent over the first of the Miros family, shaking his head in quiet astonishment as she slowly aged before his eyes and then he sealed the door shut and sat down, concentrating on further strengthening the temporal stability he had called into existence around him.
As on Logopolis, literally in another life, the figures of temporal physics entered the Time Lord's mind, becoming part of reality, emanating from his body as the synaptic energy that was the physical existence of knowledge became the basis of the telepathic matrix that exuded protection around him. It took several moments but the bubble of energy that surrounded the unnaturally aging body of Miros's wife pressed around her but did not envelope her, not yet. The time, as it had not been for some months, was not right. The Doctor watched as she suddenly stopped aging and with unsettling slowness her hair darkened and shrank back within her head. Some ten years of lines faded from her face and hands and her body once again began to fill out the white gown that swept the ground around her. She regressed to a beautiful young woman some twenty years from her oldest moment. Tiring steadily, the Doctor watched the procession twice more until she had reached the age that was the fulcrum of the process, the one she had been upon entering, somewhere in what would seem like her late forties to a Human woman. At that moment, the field surrounding her, extended from the mind of the Time Lord, snapped open and held them both. Rising from his cross-legged seat on the plush carpeting, he quickly rose and lifted the Ecosian woman in his arms then opened the door, hoping that Nyssa and Tegan had had enough sense to keep their distance.
"Stay back!" The Doctor shouted as he cleared the opening door and then moved half-way across the hallway before dropping to his knees and gently placing the Ecosian woman on the floor. Tegan ran over and dropped to the other side of her.
"Is she still alive?" Tegan looked down at the small Ecosian woman quickly, knowing that she was mostly concerned that the woman was alive because only her living DNA could save the Doctor, if Miros was good for his word. God, how she hated "if".
"She should be," the Doctor breathed his head down as he gasped at the recycled air of tunnel. Nyssa went to her knees beside him, taking his arm.
"It's almost over, Doctor. Miros's wife is alive but her mind is very blurred. You must get the others before he will act. I will do what I can from here."
Tegan glanced up at the other woman. "He can't go back in there this soon."
"I have to, Tegan. I timed our arrival at just the right interval in the power cycle of the T.I.F. In a few minutes the cycle will speed up beyond the point where I can adjust and remain that way for another 96 hours. We were able to extrapolate the cycle of the acceleration and deceleration fields based on," he looked at the Australian woman for a long moment, his eyes slowly losing focus, "based on something to do with…".
"Doctor!" Nyssa's voice was sharp as she shook him, grabbing his temples in her strong hands. She reached him after a moment and he stood slowly, looking toward the door as he took her hands in his and lowered them. She tightened her grip before he let go. "Wait. Can you extend the field around both of us if I help you? That would mean you would only have to make one more trip."
The Doctor stood for a long moment, indecision on his face. "I don't know. The eventual power output would be the same but to do it all once may be too much. The children are young, however, no more than twelve or thirteen by human appearance and you needn't move them far."
"Then it is possible?" The Trakenite persisted and shared a desperate glance with Tegan.
"If not and you become trapped, I'd have to also retrieve you."
Nyssa shook her head and tightened her grip. 'If so we have time for that if we move now. Our chances are better this way."
That made up the Doctor's mind and she let go of his hands to let him lay his hands upon her shoulders. Left out of the picture for the moment, Tegan returned to kneel beside the Ecosian woman, chafing her wrists to help her wake. She tried to keep her mind on what she could do for her and off the slow aura of green light that was building around the Doctor and her friend. If something happened to them both… Tegan couldn't help it; she looked up as the door opened onto the white-carpeted balcony. Two smallish boys lay upon it, toppled over one another as their mother had tried to shield them with her body.
Nyssa looked at the Doctor with unquestioning confidence and inestimable trust as they stood over the young Ecosians, their hands linked and the field again slowly covering the young boys but not opening to them. At their feet both children grew to adulthood and then as if someone had simply reversed a film of their entire lives, they slowly became no more than toddlers lying on the bright carpeting. The spectacle made it hard for Nyssa to concentrate and she closed her eyes until she heard the Doctor's voice, perhaps only in her mind, quietly utter "Now."
Their hands dropped and they bent to quickly retrieve the children he had enveloped in the stable temporal field they had created together. Nyssa reached for the dark-haired boy the Doctor handed up to her and wrapped her hands around his white-clad waist to drag him out. Having a much easier time of it, the Doctor retrieved the second boy, this one slightly bigger and they moved toward the opening door.
Nyssa cleared it first, dragging the boy to the center of the corridor next to his mother before easing him down into Tegan's waiting arms. She lowered him the rest of the way to the floor and turned to help the Doctor with the second boy. She took a breath to call Nyssa's name but it was unnecessary. The younger woman turned around in time to break the Doctor's fall. She went to the ground with him but controlled their descent and Tegan caught the pale Ecosian boy as he slid from the Doctor's hands. She eased him down to the floor and laid him so that his head rested upon his mother's arm. Tegan glanced down at the Time Lord and Nyssa as the younger woman sat on the floor with him between her legs, her hands cradling his head to her shoulder as she debated whether to let him rest for a few moments or to attempt to revive him.
Eyes on the Doctor, Tegan came to her feet slowly, her gaze moving to sweep every crevice and shadow of the corridor, her fire building as she searched for the monitoring devices that had to be focused on them. "That's it! That's it! We've played your stupid game, run through madmen, tramped around in the dark for a week, and then saved your family on top of it all! Now, you get us out of here and you give us that antidote, or we will find you and you will be sorry. The TARDIS will tell the Time Lords where you are and that you've killed the Lord President of Gallifrey. What do you think is going to happen to your miserable self then!"
She had taken her breath for the next round when a wonderfully familiar sound filled the wide corridor, a groaning, wheezing sound that could only have come from one source. Tegan fell silent as a familiar blue shape came into existence before them. She'd been happy to see the TARDIS before but never as happy as now. She pulled out her key and proceeded to move toward it when she nearly tripped on what the transmat beam brought into existence before them, a long vial filled with fluid, topped with a complex lock. Tegan snatched it up and pressed the unconscious finger of the Ecosian woman to the top. A second passed before the lock simply fell away.
Nyssa twisted around, pulling the pressure injector from her back pocket and injecting the Doctor with the last of the temporary counteragent as a precaution before taking the priceless vial from Tegan's shaking hands. Nyssa purged the injector and then refilled it, struggling to stay upright with the Doctor still resting against her. Tegan grabbed his shoulders and took some of the weight off her friend as Nyssa maneuvered backward and Tegan lowered the Doctor's head into her lap. Nyssa turned his head to the side and with her own hands now shaking, injected what she hoped was the antidote into the Time Lord's throat.
He didn't react at first and then did so slowly, seeming to worsen to the eyes of anyone who had not known the symptoms inflicted by the toxin. His muscles relaxed completely for the first time in many days and his breathing became what would be normal… for a Human. Tegan wiped at the tears in her eyes and stood. "I'll get the kids in the TARDIS, and then we'll both get the wife and the Doctor."
Nyssa nodded and stayed where she was, her fingers on the Doctor's throat, lifting his eyelids, and seeing that his pupils were dilated beyond what the dim light would have called for. Tegan opened the door and turned to lift the first boy and pull him into the familiar and very much missed time ship. She smiled in spite of herself when she entered the console room with her burden and lowered the boy to the floor. She propped the door open in a spite of paranoia and returned with the second boy a moment later. Nyssa had worked her way out from under the Doctor and lowered his head to the floor when Tegan emerged the second time. "Let's get Mrs. Miros into the TARDIS."
The Australian shook her head quickly, "No, take the Doctor first. We don't want any surprises."
Nyssa's head lifted, "Of course." Between the two of them they got the Time Lord upright and into the TARDIS, retrieving Miros's wife a moment later. Nyssa stood at the console and looked at the data it was offering with concern. "I've tried tracing the signal that we were originally sent but there's nothing at the source so it must have come from a ship of some sort. I'll send out an auto-alert on the same frequency and as for getting out of here I can rematerialize us on the surface to wait."
"Can you rematerialize us in orbit over Ecosia? I want off this damn planet."
"Agreed." The column rotor activated and brought them away from the dark interior of Ecosia Beta, away from the madness, and into the cold arms of space, and the welcome brightness of the Ecosian sun.
There were plenty of rooms on the TARDIS. They put the boys in two of them and their mother in one nearby. All were alive but showed no sign of consciousness. The Doctor they wanted somewhat closer and managed with the wheelchair to get him into their own room. The toxin was slowly being dissolved according to the tests Nyssa had done but the strain of creating the chronomitic field had drained the last of his strength. Nyssa had guessed there was little more she could do than keep him hydrated while they waited out the self-induced coma he was using to restore himself. She guessed it wouldn't last overly long and just being back in the TARDIS was a good thing for them all. Every safeguard the time ship could activate, the Trakenite and Tegan brought online, and they watched and waited for a sign that their success would be acknowledged by more than the antidote.