Trial's End

by Ewen Campion-Clarke

based on a script by Eric Saward

Chapter 7: The End

'Glitz!'

The familiar voice was the first thing in aeons Glitz had heard that wasn't the unholy moan of what lay inside the Time Vent. Already more possibilities were splintering away inside his mind, and he saw many of them showed him dumped in the corner of a distorted TARDIS control room as a bearded face filled the malfunctioning scanner screen.

'There's very little time!' the face was shouting. 'There's only ten seconds left!'

The possible presents were being shunted aside for possible futures. The face, which Glitz distantly realized could be the Master, was speaking again. He narrowed his concentration and with a painful jolt he was suddenly stuck in the Valeyard's dying TARDIS as the Time Vent vomited chaos into history. It was a wonder he was still alive. Where were the Doctor and the Valeyard, anyway?

'You must close the Time Vent!' the Master was shouting over the scanner.

Glitz looked around in a daze. He felt as though he was about to pass out for good, as if his existence depend on a tiny, almost invisible thread worn down to breaking point. 'What?' he croaked.

'Close the Vent hatch!' the Master screamed, thought Glitz wasn't sure his ally had heard him.

How? wondered Glitz, but somehow found the strength to get to his feet on the shaking floor. Distantly, a deep bell had begun to chime. Everything was about to die. What to do, what to do... Glitz's eyes fell onto the control panel. If pressing the button and pulling the lever had unsealed and opened the hatch, would pushing the lever and depressing the button close and seal it?

It was the only option he had. If he failed the universe ended, but if he didn't try it certainly would.

Glitz slammed the lever back into place.

The segments of the hatch slid proud of the entrance, extending outwards to close the iris. The light grew more intense, the buffeting more violent as if Eccentric Time was raging at having its freedom so abruptly ended. With visible effort, the hatch slid shut, the Seal of Rassilon broken into six by the crackling energy seeping through the seams. Glitz pressed the button and with a harsh, electric rasp, the hatch was sealed once more. The Time Vent was closed.

Sabalom Glitz had just saved the entire universe.

Suddenly, the general feeling of exhaustion he'd suffered since the Vent was opened rapidly grew worse. Glitz felt very cold and was distantly aware of crashing, face down onto the console. He couldn't die after that... he'd saved the universe... hadn't even... got... a drink...

Something hot and bright exploded next to his ear.

Glitz flinched away, finding some vestige of strength to haul himself away from the console. Controls were exploding, sparks vomiting across the panel as dials and gagues popped and the panelling burnt. The white glare was draining from the walls, returning the control room to its gloom. But there was now a building noise, like a wind storm, or divine creatures wailing angrilly.

'What's happening now?' Glitz croaked as the TARDIS trembled around him.

The image of the Master was jumping and splitting. The myriad patterns behind him spluttered and died away. 'The Valeyard's illusion is breaking up now he can no longer maintain it!' the renegade observed, voice beginning to distort. 'If you want to live, my dear Glitz, I suggest you leave the Matrix now!'

'But I don't know the way!' Glitz wailed, feeling ever so tired.

'Then stay here and die!' the Master snarled, before a chunk of the control console exploded and the scanner hologram turned to static before blinking out of existence. The glass partitions behind where the scanner had been splintered as the circuits behind overloaded.

Glitz looked around in horror as another series of explosions tore across the control console. If more damage was gone he'd be sealed in this TARDIS forever! Glitz peered at the undamaged patch of the control panels and spotted the red-handled square the Valeyard had used to let the Doctor in.

Andromedan adrenaline leant Glitz the strength and speed to haul the square out of the console on its extendable aerial. The whirr of the door servo mechanism began immediately, but spluttered and began to run down. Glitz turned to see the double doors swinging open. One remained open while the other began to jerk closed and open spasmodically.

Glitz sprinted through the narrow gap.

Behind him, the control console was consumed in one coiling explosion of fire and smoke which billowed out to fill the distorted chamber.

Mel stared up at the screen. It showed a square of almost perfect white, with a small grey shape tumbling end over end, never quite disappearing off the screen. She'd ignored the strange illusions and exhaustion she had felt, staring at the whiteness until her eyes hurt. That'd explain why she was weeping over a man she barely knew. A man who had sacrificed himself for everything.

Around her, there was some cheer and jubilation. The Time Lords were muttering with relief, and the Keeper was worst of all, suddenly obsessed with how dangerous the situation had been now that they were safe. 'He only just closed the Vent in time,' he said yet again. 'A few more seconds and, well I dread to think about it, I really do.'

'What will happen to Sabalom Glitz now?' asked the Iquisitor - now the crisis had passed, she was recovering her composure, and quietly planning how to switch her allegiance to the new regime without the old one conspiring to execute her. She knew about the Ravalox operation as much as the Valeyard did and despite her apparently random appointment, she had been chosen specifically to ensure the Doctor achieved a fair trial, albeit one with a foregone conclusion.

'Without the Valeyard's mind to support it,' the Keeper mused, 'the mindscape he created will fold in on itself in a data purge. Anyone in the scape when that happens will die.'

The Inquisitor nodded, satisfied. 'Once the Matrix is purged, it must be secured completely - to both outsiders and Time Lords. We cannot risk such another occurence.'

The Keeper nodded quickly. With luck, his negligence in Matrix security would have to be ignored if the reputation of the computer net was to be maintained. Otherwise he would be replaced. Or worse.

Mel listened to the Time Lords, not taking her eyes from the screen. The Doctor's fury had not been misplaced - his people were totally corrupt. She no longer particularly cared.

On the screen, she had lost track of the grey speck.

Glitz was caught in madness. As he had hurled himself out of the TARDIS he had found himself on the balcony overlooking the courtyard of the Fantasy Factory. But the fog was swirling faster than a sand storm, and the disembodied singing voices were an incomprehensible jangle of noise. When a barrell of rainwater had exploded, flooding the yard and washing around a statue of Queen Victoria he was sure had not been there before, Glitz considered retreating inside the Factory.

When something in the water had started screaming, he stopped considering and did just that.

But instead of a disintegrating TARDIS control room, he found himself facing an endless corridor composed of identical offices, each containing a Mr. Popplewick. The Junior, the Senior, one in a monk's robe, one dressed like the Valeyard in court, another in Victorian bathing attire... each one was chanting 'You are contravening all established procedure!' over and over again.

Glitz had spotted the door to the Waiting Room and dived inside. Like the Doctor before him, Glitz was suddenly on a windswept, muddy beach. But the ground was bubbling quicksand pierced by mindlessly flailing hands which Glitz avoided and ran up the dunes. The sea was crashing and in the distance a lighthouse on the shore crackled with energy as its lamp spun faster and faster.

Glitz sprinted as fast as he could over the hillocks, scattering pebbles, but the exposure to Eccentric Time had exhausted him - and he wasn't that fit to start with. When he realized the sea had turned into coiling, choking steam, he'd thought it really was the end.

Then he'd seen, just in front of him, a dilapidated shack dwelling stained with tar. Friendly light bled through the windows and open doorway, mingling with the stining sea fog. Glitz managed to hurl himself through the doorway of the hut, and collapsed onto the floor.

The floor was polished ebony, and behind him was a familiar whirr that silenced the crashing of the waves and the hissing of steam. A mechanical hum gently throbbed the air around him. Glitz couldn't find the strength to move and just lay there as the hum deepened.

'Welcome Sabalom Glitz,' said a warm voice.

Glitz knew it was the Master. 'You...' He let out a hacking cough. 'You rescued me...'

'How could I not reward the one responsible for the Doctor's death?' the Master asked idly.

Glitz had recovered just enough to lift his head. He was in the Master's TARDIS, a less sophisticated version than the Valeyard's, with the walls, ceiling and floor all matt black. Even the grey control console was outlined in black, but the bright light from the roundels made the control chamber far more welcoming than the bridge of the Valeyard's ship had been.

'I would have thought you'd... kill me...' Glitz croaked. 'If I'd croaked that fair-haired personage.'

The Master was staring into space. 'He did it himself. No one else could have succeeded,' he mused softly, before adjusting some settings on the console. 'We're out of the Matrix now. The Valeyard's illusion has cancelled itself out. We are free.'

Glitz was surprised to realize he was feeling better. The complete exhaustion he'd felt was reducing to a bearable ache. 'It's time for me to retire,' he decided. Seeing all those possible Glitzes had unnerved him, especially that lonely old crook dying in hiding. He hated the concept of dying at all, but to be honest, he preferred following the Doctor into oblivion that wasting away in misery. Yes, he'd decided. The idea of helping the Master with the money side of conquering known space had definitely lost its appeal.

Not to the Master, though, who was smiling a shark-like smile. 'You've hardly begun,' he chuckled. 'With the

Doctor out of the way - the universe is ours!' he crowed. For some reason, the thought did not send adrenaline pumping through his veins as it once had.

Glitz got to his feet unsteadily. 'I'll tell you what?' he offered breathlessly. 'You can have my half as well.'

The Master blinked. He'd intended to anyway, but was touched to be offered it. 'Thank you,' he said, slightly taken aback. 'I accept,' he said with his old steel.

'Good,' Glitz nodded. 'Cause all I wanna do is go home.'

The Master laughed mockingly and punched a sequence into the controls. The time rotor ceased its rise and fall and the console let out a chime. The black screen covering the scanner rolled back to reveal a short corridor made of marble. A blue police box and two empty transport caskets sat near a flight of steps to the court room. 'Return your casket, the Time Lords will return you home.'

Glitz nodded as the Master opened the exterior doors for him to leave. 'I suggest you leave Gallifreyan territory as soon as possible,' he advised, returning to the controls. 'It shall rapidly become a dangerous place to be. Farewell, Glitz. Forever!'

The Andromedan stepped through the doorway which he idly noticed was in a fluted Corinthian column which the Master enjoyed setting his TARDIS to be. The missing segment of fluted stone slid back into place and moments later, with a wheezing groaning sound, the pillar had faded from sight. Behind it, the entrance to the Matrix quietly sealed itself shut.

Glitz walked over to the capsule he'd arrived in, tempted to lift the lid and clamber inside - at least there he'd find somewhere to rest and get his strength back. He looked up at the lonely blue box. The Doctor would never come back for his disguise time machine. It'd probably just gather dust until some Time Lord noticed it and put it in a museum of primitive transport. The TARDIS wouldn't move again.

Besides, what was the point? Without the Doctor to be taken throughout the cosmos to sort things out, the TARDIS wasn't needed. The universe was going to have to look after itself from now on, and it was in a bad enough state without the Master planning to take over. Hell, there wouldn't even be a universe if he, Sabalom Glitz, hadn't saved the day, doing the sort of thing the Doctor did. The Doctor would probably have done it himself if he wasn't too busy dying at the time.

Glitz stroked the tattered paintwork of the blue box. He liked the colour. Maybe the Time Lords would let him have it as a souvenier? No, they wouldn't. And what could he do with a time machine that the Time Lords wouldn't immediately erase him from history for? Still, if the Master did take over Gallifrey, he might be understanding... But that left the question of what Glitz wanted the TARDIS for. The casket at his feet was more than enough to take him home to the Nosferatu and Dibber.

It struck him he didn't feel particularly inclined to go back.

He'd saved the universe. And he'd done it for the universe, he realized. At the time, not a single thought for himself had entered his head - though, admittedly, the Eccentric Time had given him enough thoughts about himself to last a life time. He'd saved the universe because it was the right thing to do, not because he happened to be in it. It felt odd. Maybe sort of good.

Sabalom Glitz had saved the universe! The ultimate philanthropist - he hadn't made a grotzi, no one else knew or cared, he'd even gone so far as to turn down a partnership with the Master... And he felt good about that? Was that feeling what drove the Doctor to wander the cosmos keeping other people safe?

Glitz looked back at the TARDIS.

Thinking.

Mel was sick of the Time Lords, their hypocracy, and staring at the screen in the hope for seeing her friend. She didn't want to know that opening a hatch could wipe out the universe, or that a bunch of squabbling pensioners were happy to wipe out humanity to stop people hacking into their computer. She just wanted to go home and forget all about this.

Rubbing her red eyes, she got to her feet. The Time Lords were already heading for the other exit, the red-clad guards following. The Inquisitor and the Keeper had been talking in whispers for several minutes. Sick of it, Mel butted in. 'If it's not too much trouble, I would like to be returned to my own planet and time,' she said loudly and firmly.

The Inquisitor glanced at her. 'Of course,' she said, mentally deciding to have the human's memory of events on the station wiped from her memory. Letting a human return to 1980s Earth knowing the darkest secrets of the Time Lord was entirely out of the question.

'Before I go, can I have one last look in the Doctor's TARDIS?' Mel asked.

The Keeper blinked. 'Why do you ask?'

'I've always wanted to see inside it,' Mel said. When she had first met the Doctor and Peri, she had not had the chance to see inside the Doctor's fabulous, bigger-on-the-inside time machine and spaceship. 'I'll never get a chance to know, will I?'

The Keeper sighed. He rather admiring the little redhaired human. 'I'm sure that can be made possible, just a brief visit.' He glanced meaningfully at the Inquisitor. 'It's the least we can do for the Doctor's companion, is it not?' he remarked.

The Inquisitor didn't particularly care. It would keep Mel out of the way while reparations were made. She glanced up at a Chancellery Guard. 'Allow this woman access to the Doctor's TARDIS and prepare to return her to her point of origin.'

The guard nodded and crossed the courtroom.

'I shall miss the Doctor very much,' said Mel, deciding to play extra-vulnerable. She didn't trust the white-clad Time Lady an inch.

'I'm sure we all will,' the Keeper said warmly. 'Won't we?'

'What?' the Inquisitor muttered. 'Oh, yes of course.'

'Will you ever be able to retrieve his body?' she asked.

The Keeper shook his head firmly. 'I shouldn't think so, we can't risk re-opening the Time Vent. If they wish to escape the syphon, it will have to be through their own ingenuity, I'm afraid.'

Mel's jaw dropped and she looked up at the screen of the tiny grey shape. 'The Doctor is still alive?' she gasped. She'd assumed they'd been killed the moment they'd fallen into the Time Vent.

The Inquisitor almost smiled. 'Of course, young woman! They both are - for the moment. Only Time Lords could survive freefall in the time nexus for any period of time.'

Mel found her eyes drawn back to the screen. 'I... I didn't know,' she said, helplessly. Her expression darkened. 'And you're going to leave him there?'

'It would take far more than seventy two seconds to mount a rescue,' the Keeper said reprovingly. 'The Doctor would not thank us for devastating time and space on such a vain hope. Besides, the Doctor has a limited amount of time he can survive in the Vent.'

'By the time the Matrix is cleared, it will be too late,' the Inquisitor concluding, privately cheerful that this removed the awkwardness of sentencing the Doctor to death. 'I'm sorry,' she lied.

Mel grimaced. 'But, but, he might manage to escape before his time runs out!'

The Keeper nodded. 'It is a possibility, but it will be far from easy.'

Mel shook her head. 'He'll succeed in getting out. I'm sure he will.'

The old Time Lord sighed. 'If he doesn't, the Time Vent will remain his prison for eternity,' he said bleakly.

The hatch to the Time Vent was closed. The Eccentric Time particles smashing against the inside of the hatch bounced off and the energy backwash began, surging down the syphon towards the two figures tumbling and falling through infinity.

The Doctor was now struggling to break free from his future self's iron grip. Not that there was any reason to, but it was the closest he could have to entertainment before the end. When the backwash engulfed them, their personal history would be torn to shreds again and again until they literally faded out of existence altogether. There was nothing he could do.

But it was worth it. The hatch had closed, maybe in time. The universe was probably safe.

And caught in this impossible situation, he would at least be spared the destiny of becoming a bitter old man so terrified of death he'd sacrifice everything he'd believe in. The Doctor felt the first drops of the energy wave reaching them, and wished he'd saved Peri. Over nine hundred years and that was the only regret he could think of. Something to be proud of, he supposed.

The wave reached them and the Doctor and the Valeyard began to die.