- Lord President Romanadvoratrelundar
this is relative time
"Tactics are all very well, gentlemen, but I want to talk strategy. We cannot negotiate, we cannot reason and we may not have the resources or technology to destroy every Cyberman on this planet. So how do we convince them to leave?" Harriet Jones looked down the conference table, into the faces of the men who were responsible, who would be responsible, for this chance to strike back.
Brimmicombe-Wood spoke first. "Enough of this pissing about; we should go straight for control. Hit them fast and hard and get them out of our bloody country."
"Language, Colonel," muttered Lethbridge-Stewart.
"Captain Harkness, Dr. Sullivan, you've fought the Cybermen in other circumstances. Other places, other…times." The Prime Minister looked expectantly from one to the other.
Jack met Harry's eyes for an instant, though both had military experience, they were still the only civilians here and Jack, at least, didn't feel qualified to give strategic advice on a situation when there were professionals, much more familiar with the situation than him, in the room.
"We can't think just of our country," said Harry, leaning forward. "We don't know the extent of their forces world-wide. I think we should be more cautious."
Wood rolled his eyes. "Caution was what got us into this situation in the first place. Investigation, negotiation and then having our bloody planet nicked." He slammed his fist into the table top. "We convince them we're strong enough to fight them, maybe they'll bow to their bloody logic and leave."
"And if they don't?" said Lethbridge-Stewart.
"Then us buzzing around like flies at their wee patrols isn't going to make a damned bit of difference anyway."
Harriet nodded. "For once, I'm inclined to agree with Colonel Wood." The door opened, the nervous face of a private. "Ah, yes," said Harriet, standing up and nodding to Jack. "The car's ready. And, I believe, Dr. Sullivan has volunteered to drive you."
"Uh, I know how to drive, Prime Minster," Jack told her.
She smiled. "Of course you do. But nobody goes out alone. Not even time-travelling adventurers from the future. Besides, now that we've re-established contact with the resistance outside London, they too have an opportunity to benefit from your expertise." She nodded. "Good luck, Captain. I hope you find him."
Jack stood, ready to leave. "So do I."
Ancelyn was driving.
Not as quickly as the Doctor could have, not as skilfully, but with a surprising ease considering he came from a dimension where technology was as primitive and misunderstood as magic was in this one.
In the back seat, the Doctor sat, Rose's head cradled in his lap. He kept one hand holding hers, the other rhythmically stroked her forehead. He knew that her ghostly pale eyes couldn't see him, but hoped a part of her knew that he was there.
There was nothing he could do.
She was dying, she has been dying as soon as he pulled her from the cyber-conversion unit, or from the moment they had plugged her into it. All a matter of perspective, and the Cybermen had never considered how to reverse their transformation process. His hope, his only hope, lay in the technology, the medical science, of a species whose limited knowledge he had made such sport of. He hated his haste, his recklessness. He hated the fact he had not thought of even asking Livia for the most basic medical supplies.
And he hated himself for thinking of only how he should feel if he lost her.
"We are close to our destination, my lord," said Ancelyn, not taking his eyes from the road. "The professor will know how to help your friend; she has great skill with your sciences."
The Doctor didn't move, didn't even seem to hear that Ancelyn had spoken.
He seemed not to notice anything at all in the world until the car stopped and the door was pulled open. "Let her go," Ancelyn said quietly in his ear. "They are doctors. They'll take care of her. You must let her go, Merlin.
The Doctor only left the car himself when he believed the dangerously low-ceilinged cave, acting as a garage, was empty. He walked stiffly, as though rigor mortis was beginning to set in. He did not notice a pair of eyes watching him.
The hand on his shoulder brought him out of his isolation, and slowly his eyes focussed on a familiar face. He mouthed his friend's name, though no sound came out.
Jack hugged him, held him. "Do you want to see her?" he asked, his voice low.
"Can they…?"
"The professor doesn't know. She's got her stabilised. It'll give them time, Doctor."
The Doctor stood up, nodded. "I don't know if I can help her."
"They've got good people here. You're not alone."
Slowly, Jack walking closer to him than he would normally have dared, the pair made their way through the underground base, to what passed for the medical wing.
Saw Rose, lying there, hooked up to the primitive, oh so primitive, life support. Keeping her breathing regularly, the drip feeding her, her blood - her own blood that was killing her - being replaced. Skin ash grey, eyes open and unseeing.
Jack stood with him as he watched. Minutes ticked by.
A sharp cough from behind them. Jack turned, shook his head. "I'm sorry, but he needs-"
"Is he a patient?"
"No, but-"
"But nothing, Captain Harkness. If we can help that girl there's no telling how many others we might be able to save."
"Look-"
"Move. Now, Captain. And you, Doctor."
The Doctor recognised the voice, somewhere from the past, the mists of memory obscuring his recollections as he searched for a name. She stopped by the Doctor, looked up at him, her face aged, her eyes still bright, sharp with her formidable intellect.
"Liz?"
Professor Elizabeth Shaw smiled, her face suddenly softer. "I couldn't quite believe it when Bambera told me. I'm still not sure I do. Complete bodily regeneration…" She shook her head. "It's good to see you again, Doctor. We could use assistance help, and so could your friend."
"Will you be able to change her back?" asked Jack.
"Dr. Sullivan is currently making himself useful in the laboratory, and I've a few ideas we can try." She glanced at the Doctor. "But you know as well as I do how far this is beyond our science."
"I don't think…" He shook his head, his eyes straying to Rose's bed.
"Doctor." Liz's voice took on a sharp edge. "Doctor, you won't do her or yourself any good just standing here. Come to the laboratory, if nothing else it'll help keep your mind occupied."
The hour was late, and the situation grim. Nothing that Harry, Liz or the Doctor could come up with seemed to have an effect on what was happening to Rose.
"The blood transfusions are only slowing down the mutations, not stopping them," Harry told them, after checking on their patient. In fact, Rose's entire physiology was changing, adapting itself for the mechanical components that would never come.
"And our blood stocks are running low," muttered Liz. "Better start asking for volunteers."
"I'll get right on it," said Harry with a nod leaving them again.
Liz shot a look at the Doctor, almost as pale as Rose, but at least he was talking now. "Any progress over there?"
"No." The Doctor clenched his fists, and Liz thought that he was restraining himself from a much more violent reaction. It was strange, as different as this man was from the Doctor she had known, there was still that same intensity, that same knowledge and drive. Even if it now seemed to be a drive that was paralysing him from being able to act. The Doctor stood up, shoved his hands into pockets, frowned. "It's not the theory, it's the technology. Even if we were in a state of the art hospital, I don't think it would be enough. Twenty-first century medicine is just to primitive. And we're working with very limited resources."
Liz raised an eyebrow. "I thought you were a genius."
"I am. But even I can't make a rocket ship out of sharpened sticks."
"That's hardly the sort of technological difference that we're facing."
"Not quite, no," said the Doctor. "If only I could get to the TARDIS…"
"That old police box of yours?"
"Yes."
"Where is it?"
"She is currently at the bottom of the Thames."
Liz laughed, got a look from the Doctor and quickly tried to stifle it. "Oh, I'm sorry, but really…how on Earth did it get there?"
"The Cybermen must have located us after landing. Shot her straight off the bridge with us inside. Couldn't dematerialise so we had to swim for it."
"That's quite a tale." She paused, considering. "They must have spotted you pretty quickly."
"Yeah, must have."
"Not that I'm inclined to believe that you could make that thing appear and disappear wherever you liked, but why couldn't you dematerialise?"
"There was a suppression field over the whole area. It shut down most electronics. Meant that I couldn't open a gap into the Time Vortex."
Liz frowned. "If that ship could do everything you say it could, it must have been even more advanced technology than what the Cybermen have…"
"It is," agreed the Doctor.
"And yet the Cybermen could shut it down? Shut it down when they were expecting to fight against nothing more than twenty-first century human technology?"
The Doctor blinked. "Bit odd, isn't it?"
"Just a bit."
"Liz, I've just remembered something."
"Where you left a spare TARDIS?"
"Almost!" he called, striding out the door. "I've just remembered where I've seen that face before!"
"I've been waiting for you."
The Doctor had calmed down by the time he'd reached Bambera's office and managed to ask her what he wanted to know quite civilly. When she wanted an explanation, he hadn't bothered, but gone straight to the garage to wait for the patrol's return.
She was last out of the van, and would have been last out of the garage if the Doctor hadn't moved from the shadows to block her way. The leather coat merely heightened the paleness of his face in the half-light.
Livia stared up at him, unimpressed with the cold look he gave her. "Can I help you?"
"Yes," he said, stepping forward. "Yes, I think you can. There's a patient in your medical wing who's a very good friend of mine and I think you might just be the person to help her."
"I heard you'd brought the girl back, and I'm glad you found her alive, but I'm…I was a cardio-thoracic surgeon, so unless you want to give her a heart transplant, please get out of my way. I have a lot of work to be getting on with."
"No."
Her lips quirked. "What?"
"No, I'm not leaving till you've agreed to help her."
Livia rolled her eyes. "Really, this is ridiculous. I'd help the girl if I could, but I simply don't have the expertise. Liz is a brilliant scientist, and I'm sure she'll do whatever she can, now, please, I have work to do."
"I know who you are."
"For goodness sake, Doctor, you're starting to scare me." She did, to her credit, look rather nervous, but the Doctor put that down to fear of discovery rather than any actual worry at his odd behaviour.
"When I shook your hand, I wasn't sure." He took another quick step forward, grabbed her arm. She gave a soft cry of alarm.
"Let me go!"
But the Doctor was relentless. "Your skin was rather cool, but it was night-time, and I only had a few seconds. But I did know that face." He shoved up the arm of her jacket, put two fingers against her wrist.
"Damn it, Doctor, this has gone far enough." She twisted away from him, not quite breaking his grip, but reaching her gun. "You let go of me right now or I'll shoot you." She pointed the gun at his chest.
He still held her wrist with one hand, two fingers against her wrist. He met her eyes.
"You have two hearts, Livia." His voice was ice. "You're a Time Lord."
He let her go.
"I haven't the faintest idea what you're talking about," she said, keeping her gun steady and backing away. "But whatever the reports say about you, you're quite mad. The Brigadier'll have you locked up."
The Doctor shook his head. "Oh, I don't think so." He took a step forward.
"Stay back!" The Doctor stopped, looked into her eyes, frowned.
"You really don't remember do you?"
"Remember what? I'm human! I was born in London, for goodness sake. I have one heart."
"You don't," said the Doctor.
"This is a pointless conversation. Get away from the door."
"You don't," repeated the Doctor. "Check your pulse."
Livia gave a short laugh. "I'm not pandering to your delusions, Doctor. And I'm not taking my hands off this gun."
"Alright," The Doctor nodded. "Alright, if there's some sort of memory block that's preventing you from knowing who you are, then let's try this another way."
"Let's not," she snapped. "This is your last warning, Doctor. I don't want to shoot you, but unless you get out of my way-"
"What was your mother's maiden name?"
"I…what?"
"Your first schoolteacher? The name of your first pet? What happened on your tenth birthday? Your eighteenth?"
"This is irrelevant!"
"Think, Livia, think. Can you remember anything about your childhood? Can you remember your first kiss? The house you grew up in?"
She shook her head. "Stop it, stop it now." Her hands shook, her grip on the gun less certain.
"You were born on Gallifrey. You graduated from the Academy in medical and biological sciences. You are a Time Lord. Remember."
She stared at him, suddenly very still, except for her eyes. He could see it. The moment when the block collapsed.
He caught her as she fell, dropped the gun with a sob. Her hands covered her face. Breathing uneven. "Let me go," she whispered. "Let me go."
"You remember then."
"Yes," she stood up, her eyes very still, and so much older than they had been a few minutes ago. "I remember. And I remember what you did. You monster."
Ah, a revelation! And allow me to intrude a moment, my dear reader, to perhaps better acquaint you with this woman - the pacing be damned! - who, as the Doctor says, is indeed a Time Lord.
The Time War, most mysterious, and I will not draw back the curtain far, but I will share with you one particular incident. The incident that was to stick in the Doctor's mind when it came to this woman, this Livia, whose full name - Rassilon forbid that a Time Lord should be blessed with a name of few syllables - was Liviatrilatnachorus. But, according to the fashion of the time - set by the Time Lords' most beloved President Romanadvoratrelundar - she, like so many of her brethren gifted with such a burdensome tag, shortened it to the first few syllables.
It was in the closing days - oh, relatively speaking, of course, no need to go into the temporal complexities here - of the war and the Time Lords and their allies had been driven back to their home system. Whilst engaged in this last desperate defence, a single volley from a Dalek ship almost brought about an end to the war there and then. The morale of the Time Lords was crumbling, and it was only by sheer force of personality, the personality of their most beloved President, that their war effort was being held together.
"What happened?" demanded the Doctor rushing into the surgery room of the fleet's primary medical TARDIS. Brown curls and a velvet frock coat, this is not the Doctor that you are perhaps best familiar with, but rest assured he is the Doctor. Merely one with a more suspect dress sense - check the label on that coat and you'll discover it's from a costume shop in San Francisco.
He was caught by a Chancellery Guard, stopped from approaching the knot of surgeons surrounding the patient.
"Oh, let him go," muttered Livia, her eyes on her patient. "But if you're staying here, Doctor, keep back and keep quiet. Scanner, please."
"I saw the impact," he said.
"We all did. Don't worry, the President was transmatted over here immediately. We'll do everything we can."
"Can I help?" He leaned over her shoulder, peering down at Romana. No blood, not that sort of impact, some sort of temporal torpedo. Parts of her body were out of phase with relative time, others seemed to be fading away altogether.
"Yes," said Livia, elbowing him out of the way. "You can stand back. I need room to work." She rotated the scanner, correcting for the time variance. Each variance corrected seemed to set off another distortion, each becoming more and more discrete, the mathematics becoming ever more complex. "This keeps up," she muttered, "and I'm going to have to start using a computer."
"I'm rather good at maths," said the Doctor in his most helpful voice.
"I'm sure you are, but you're no surgeon. What is that noise?"
The loud beeping pierced the quiet of the surgery. A guard stepped forward. "Priority message for the Lord President."
Livia gave a sigh of annoyance, but the Doctor quickly stepped in. "I'll take it," he said, accepted the frequency and switched on the nearest terminal.
The face that appeared on the screen was familiar and hated, but helping. The Doctor smiled pleasantly. "Hello, can I help?"
The Master scowled. "I was hoping to speak with the President."
"She's incapacitated."
"Well, do feel free to let her know that that if no reinforcements are forthcoming within the hour, she should consider Karn to have fallen. You may insist on having me defend this miserable civilisation, but I have no intention of becoming a martyr to the cause. Good day." The screen went blank.
"It's too much," he heard Livia murmur. She stepped back from the bed. "That's enough. Activate the zero field, please."
"You can't give up yet," said the Doctor.
"I'm not. I'm simply allowing nature to take its course." Livia glanced at the nearest guard. "Please have the Presidential T-T capsule transmatted into the surgery."
The Doctor couldn't take his eyes from the President, from Romana, and the face she had worn across four of his own lifetimes. Stillness, and the calming effects of the zero field almost convinced him that this wasn't quite real. She didn't seem to be in any pain, but then he had only experienced regeneration at times of crisis and on his own with alien people on alien worlds. Romana was surrounded by the greatest medical minds Gallifrey had to offer, her planet's most advanced medical equipment and had a close link with her TARDIS. He wondered if she'd even feel the change.
She regenerated.
Livia stepped forward. "Scan, please."
The Doctor looked at the new face of the President, her sharp features, her brown hair. Taller, darker. She looked like a stranger, and he felt strangely repelled at one of the most ancient abilities of his people.
He noticed Livia talking quickly with one of her assistants, stepped forward. "What's the problem?"
She looked up at him, her face softening a little. Perhaps she finally remembered what Romana meant to him. "There's been a complication." She took another long look at the scan results and nodded. "It's rare, but possible under conditions where the previous body has undergone severe temporal stress."
"And what does that mean?" he asked ignoring the slight elation that he had been right. He had known that there was something wrong when he looked at her.
"The regeneration isn't stable. It could last a week, a year or a decade. There's just no way to tell. More than that, she's likely to develop…a need for a greater degree of emotional support, intense attachments to certain places, certain times. In effect, establishing a zone of stability for herself to attempt to counteract the effects of the faulty regeneration."
"Will it work?"
"That isn't the point. She's the commander of a temporal war effort. She doesn't have the luxury of taking time off." Livia turned away, back to Romana, nodded to an assistant.
The Doctor moved with her. "What are you doing?" he asked, voice mild.
"What I have to do." She took the hypo-needle, but the Doctor grabbed her arm. Angry.
"And this is what, exactly?" he demanded, examined the needle. "Murder! You're going to kill the President."
Livia snatched her arm back. "This is the only way, Doctor. She's the only one holding us together. Unless we want to contemplate an instant defeat then we need her. Need her as she was before. Please excuse me."
The Doctor blocked her path. "No. No, I won't let you do this. I won't let you kill her. She's just regenerated. You have no idea what the trauma of another one forced could do."
Livia gave him a long look. "What do you think I am? I know exactly what it will do. I know how to correct for the problems and I know it is the only way if we are to have any hope of going on as a species. Now get out of my way."
The Doctor shook his head. "I will not."
She sighed, annoyed, spun on her heel. "Guards! This man is no longer welcome in my surgery."
The two Chancellery Guards moved forward, grabbing the Doctor, dragging him as he struggled furiously. "The Castellan won't agree to this," he snapped.
"What about Romana, Doctor? What would she want?" she shot back, before turning away. "Get me the template of the previous body, please. We'll superimpose. There's no reason for anyone to know that the President's even regenerated."
"Don't do this!" shouted the Doctor. One last gasp, before he was taken from the surgery, the doors snapping shut behind him.
"Me!" exclaimed the Doctor. "You killed Romana!"
"I saved the President's life, you ungrateful wretch. You committed genocide! Twice!"
"I did what I had to do. To save…to save everything that we were meant to protect. There was only one choice." He swallowed. "I didn't know there was anyone left alive."
"What? You mean other Time Lords?"
"I thought I was the only one left."
Livia narrowed her eyes. "You are the only one left. I'm no Time Lord. Nor is anyone else who might have been desperate enough to survive what you did."