The beginning of this short story is similar to the Eighth Doctor novel, Eater of Wasps, but it crosses over with the Fourth Doctor adventure 'The Tribulations of Thadeus Nook,' a time travelling 'businessman' who acquired a dangerous time machine and tried to use it to make money selling time tours to different periods. Unfortunately, other parties became interested. It's worth a listen to from Big Finish.
Enjoy.
Thaddeus Nook and the Time Tours.
"Y'know, some alien weapons make it pathetically easy to save the day!" The Doctor remarked dryly as she lifted the sonic screwdriver in her hand and triggered the device, holding back her wince as the UNIT platoon aimed the flame-throwers towards the wasps as they swarmed around.
The flamethrowers fired long, expanding jets of plasma fire which expanded in every direction. The local people in the village who had survived the initial wasp attack and were helping the UNIT soldiers as much as they could be backing away in awe at the spectacle.
The Doctor just wished they would go away, leave this to them; she had no idea how long the flamethrowers were going to be effective. She hadn't had time to study the nano genes which had possessed the wasps and the people here and had rewritten the DNA of wasp and humans on a molecular level, but she suspected the weapon which was no larger than a cricket ball used nanotechnology similar to that employed by the Chula.
She hoped not.
She would never forget how a time meddler who came from the same period as that idiotic murderer Krasko had thrown a Chula Ambulance towards Earth and tried to change the whole of human evolution, just for the sake of their ambition. The Doctor had believed when she had stumbled across the insane plan it was the Rani, although she was surprised her old friend had chosen a primitive method of changing history and evolution. But the Doctor put that thought out of her mind as she focused on the work while she turned her head to see what was going on.
The wasps were engulfed by the fire while grass and wildflowers in this part of Kent were set alight, but the Doctor didn't know how long the UNIT soldiers had left before the swarm adapted; as she pointed the sonic screwdriver at the alien device being held by the controller/master/commander, or whatever the weapon behind this whole mess, the Doctor wished she could get close enough to really deliver a Venusian aikido move to take the device off them, but she didn't fancy getting strung.
The size of the swarm buzzing furiously around the possessed humans like yellow and black nano drones was enough to persuade the Doctor that was a stupid and really, really bad idea; she doubted she would make it even a foot before the swarm attacked, and after seeing how the swarm were splicing themselves with their human victims to create a new hybrid as the perfect warrior, the Doctor didn't want to imagine them creating a Time Lord/wasp hybrid once they studied her biology and DNA.
As the Doctor worked, she took the time to think about how all of this happened. A few days ago UNIT had received a report of a small UFO which has crashed into this small part of Kent, and there were fears the Nestene Consciousness was coming back - the Doctor had argued about that since there was nothing here that would attract the Nestenes here, but she had taken a small group of UNIT soldiers and scientists here to find out what was going on… and they discovered an alien weapon/artefact which was spreading nano genes across this part of the country and rewriting the DNA of wasps, which made sense since the device had crashed close to a wasp nest isolated from the human population. The Doctor had no idea who had created the device and why, she hadn't been able to get close to the device to study it to get some answers, but while she had a few ideas of how it worked and what it was ultimately for, she just wanted to get this mess over and done with before anybody else was killed and possessed.
She had learnt during that mess with the Chula nano genes which had threatened human history in the time of the Roman Empire the sooner she cleaned it all up, the better everything would be.
Her time in Iping (she wondered if the people who founded this place had been fans of HG Well's novel The Invisible Man) had shown the nano genes here after she had discovered the nature of the infection after she'd examined several of the humans who'd been killed had begun combining human and wasp DNA, and they were being spawned within the human's bodies. It was a gruesome piece of nanotechnological warfare, and the Doctor didn't know what the nano genes were doing to the wasps, but she had a few ideas.
For a moment the possessed human didn't even realise the device had been blasted out of their hand. Neither did the wasps. But they quickly caught on; when they did, the possessed humans let out a long drawn-out scream which rattled through the air while the buzzing of the wasps became more angry and very aggressive.
But the Doctor had already reached the device. The moment it had been blasted out of the hand of its holder, she had no problems rushing towards it and she picked it up…
"OW!" The Doctor yelped in shock and pain when she felt the sudden sting. Out of reflex she nearly dropped the device which had been protected by a few of the wasps, but the Doctor quickly pushed the pain away and regained her hold over it before she jabbed the tip of her sonic screwdriver against the device.
Ignoring the pain, the Doctor scanned the sphere and studied it. The device constantly created nano genes and programmed them before they were released near populations. The nano genes would then infect the victims, infusing them with technology and programming, all to create the perfect warriors. It was so similar to what the Chula themselves had come up with, and for a moment the Doctor wondered if this was Chula technology, but she couldn't be sure.
It didn't help that some of the wasps were swarming around her and stinging her. Letting out another yell, the Doctor rushed as fast as she could back to the UNIT soldiers, who covered her with the flamethrowers. Once they had discovered the root cause of the mutated outbreak, the Doctor had sent for flame-throwers which were plasma fuel-based, derived from alien weapons. The flamethrowers concentrated and expanded the flames within a special field over a special radius that could be controlled.
"Doctor! Quickly, get away from them! Stop firing!" Martha yelled at the soldiers while Captain Price hesitated while she tried to work out the best way of handling this without harming the Time Lady.
The Doctor continued her examination of the alien device as she ran, ignoring the searing heat from the expanding flamethrowers and the shouts and calls from the UNIT soldiers and Martha. The Doctor spent the next minute trying to reprogram the sphere so then it would safely deactivate and the possessed and reconditioned humans would be freed from its influence, but nothing she tried would work, and she slowly realised the device was programmed to produce soldiers and they were not expected to return to a normal life or more likely for practicality's sake the soldiers would be preserved for another battle.
There was nothing she could do.
The Doctor sighed and stopped while she weighed out what she would need to do.
"Doctor?" The Time Lady looked up into Martha's face. "Doctor, we saw you being stung."
"I can't do anything, Martha," the Doctor interrupted her friend.
Martha looked at him in confusion. "What?"
"This thing. I can't reprogram it. I can't free the people who've been infected. The only thing I can do is just destroy the connection, but when I do that they will die as the cybernetic circuits lose their connection to this thing," the Doctor rubbed her face in frustration, ignoring the pain from the stings. She'd had worse.
Martha licked her lips. She knew only too well just how seriously the Doctor took life, and the thought of taking them affected her greatly. She knew how she felt, as a doctor Martha hated the thought of taking life. But sometimes she knew there wasn't an option. "Are you sure?"
"Yeah, I've tried everything I can think of under the circumstances; if we had a laboratory either in UNIT HQ or in the TARDIS, I might be able to rig something up, but I doubt it somehow."
Martha took a deep breath, only to yelp in horror when a wasp buzzed close.
Shocked by the yelp, the Doctor turned to her friend. "Martha?" She cried desperately even though her friend was close by, and her eyes widened in horror when she saw a number of the swarm was now flying really close by herself and Martha. She hadn't noticed because she'd been trying to understand how the alien device worked, but the sight of the alien-nanogene possessed wasps and the possessed humans galvanised the Doctor into making her choice.
She triggered the screwdriver and there was a high pitched whine before the sphere flashed green and sparked, and then the colour of the metallic surface slowly turned silver, with blotches of silver appearing and spreading over and meeting together and expanding over the surface. The reaction of the seemingly endless swarm and the possessed humans was immediate - the humans started clutching their heads and screamed in pain as the cybernetic circuits in their head which had been planted there by the nanogenes shorted out, and the wasps seemed to be buzzing with pain as well, but after they had gone on a rampage, killing and infecting their victims with the nano gene plague, the Doctor felt no pity for them.
Ignoring the pain in her hand after she had been stung by the wasps, the Doctor walked over to the bodies and studied the corpses of the humans whose faces were swollen red after the victims had been stung by the wasps. Their mouths were open and their eyes were staring with wisps of steam wafting upwards along with the scent of burnt flesh.
The Doctor wasn't really surprised by the aftermath - the sphere was a control device and by shutting it down after discovering its programming centre, she had programmed the destruct sequence.
"Doctor," Martha called and the Doctor turned and quickly scanned her with her sonic screwdriver. Like herself, Martha had suffered from a few wasp stings, but not enough to incapacitate them into becoming possessed like the humans smoking on the ground.
"Martha," the Doctor embraced her friend, wincing at the sight of Martha's formerly neat and professional bun now loose and disbelieved and the swollen wasp stings.
Cursing herself for waiting too long to wrestle with her conscience, the Doctor pulled back and looked at the young human. "I am so sorry, I shouldn't have hesitated…," she apologised.
"Doctor, I would have done the same thing. When I decided to become a doctor, I soon realised what I might have to do during my career. I didn't like it, and I often questioned if becoming a doctor was worth it if I could not save a life. But I accepted it and went through with my training," Martha stared at the Time Lady passionately and sadly. "I know you. You wanted to save them all but you couldn't, but you saved everyone else."
The Doctor looked back at her solemnly but she didn't say a word.
X
A couple of hours later the village was struggling to recover from the unexpected attack. So many people had died only for the nano genes to rebuild and recondition them into becoming warriors, to say nothing of those who'd simply been killed by the wasps and left on the ground, their faces and bodies swelled with hundreds of stings. Life in the village would likely return to normal, although how much of it would return, nobody could say.
As she watched the villagers accept the aid of the paramedic technicians, the police officers who'd been brought in for UNIT's support, and the firemen who were called in when a family reported being trapped and unable to escape from a house that they'd set alight deliberately to kill off as many of the wasps as they could handle, the Doctor did what she could to offer some help and comfort. Many of the villagers were unsure of what to make of her, but the Doctor ignored it and carried on, doing what she could while she gave special instructions to the UNIT platoon.
She had ordered for the bodies of the possessed humans to be incinerated, the bodies of the possessed and reconditioned wasps were to be hoovered up and destroyed so they would say they'd destroyed the cybernetic and nanotechnology that had appeared from nowhere. The Doctor supervised the collection of the bodies while the platoon scoured the lands for miles around to make sure the incident did not exceed too far. But she needn't have worried; it seemed the nano genes had been deprived of resources and they'd needed time to gather their energy, and infect others.
But at the same time, she wanted to get the alien device back to UNIT so she could quarantine it and learn where and when it came from. She wasn't sure if she was dealing with time-travel technology or just a weapon from this era, but she wanted to check.
"They seem to be pulling through, don't they?" Martha's voice pulled her out of her thoughts and the Doctor turned to her.
It took a moment for the Doctor to realise what her friend was saying, and she nodded. "Yeah. It will take time for them to adjust; so many people were killed by the wasps and so many were possessed by them."
Martha nodded and she spotted the sphere in the Doctor's hand, from where the Time Lady had been examining it and she hadn't let go of it. "Is that thing safe?"
"It is now."
"Any idea where that thing came from?"
"No. I want to get it back to UNIT, from there I can examine it better and maybe get an idea of its origin using the TARDIS…Wait, listen!" The Doctor suddenly stiffened and she straightened up.
Martha, surprised by the sudden tension, stiffened herself, idly remembering seeing the way a rabbit or hare had stood to attention in a field to better be aware of any dangers. But she pushed that aside, this was clearly not the time for that. "What's wrong?"
"Listen!"
Martha went still and she listened. There was a faint vibration in the air, followed by a low wheezing and groaning sound like an ancient engine was trying valiantly to work while it didn't explode.
Martha recognised that noise. "Doctor, is that-?"
"Over there!" The Doctor pointed, her expression making Martha gulp. She had never seen the Doctor that annoyed before, never. Still, Martha turned and she gaped when the TARDIS materialised in between two houses in the village square. The familiar incongruous form of the Doctor's TARDIS in the police box shape was a welcome relief, but an unexpected one. " I didn't know the TARDIS would come to you like that? How did it do that?"
"I don't know. I didn't summon the TARDIS, and it wouldn't have worked regardless," the Doctor replied, her expression grave and unhappy. It was something Martha quickly noted and decided to question her friend on.
"What's wrong, Doctor? You don't seem happy. After all, it's the TARDIS."
"Don't get me wrong, Martha, I am happy the TARDIS is here. She's my oldest friend barring you and Alistair, but she can't move unless she's under the control of someone else. The fact she's here means someone else brought her here, and I know who that is…," the Doctor trailed off and pulled out her key, and shoved it gently into the lock and turned.
Martha followed her in, smiling gently as she took in the great dome-shaped control room with the arching and winding pillars and the grated floor which seemed to compliment the organic setting they were in before she smiled affectionately at the organic-looking controls which somehow went with the neatly laid out keyboards and pads and displays set into the control console. It was good to see the TARDIS even with the Doctor's concerns.
But her smile disappeared when it became apparent they were not the only ones in the console room.
A tall thin man wearing an immaculate suit complimented by a bowler hat and an umbrella, which gave him the appearance of a businessman from the 1920s. The smug, supercilious and condescending expression written all over his face stopped even the thought she would like him. And it was clear the Doctor was annoyed at the sight of him.
"Ah, there you are, Doctor. It's good to see you once again."
The Doctor glowered at him. "Why are you here? I take it you're the one who guided my TARDIS here to Iping?"
"Mm, Iping? Oh, you mean the primitive village, don't you?" The man seemed amused by the name as if he couldn't believe the village had a name.
"And no, we knew where you were; I used my Time Ring to arrive on Earth and I went along for the ride in your TARDIS," the man looked around the console room, sniffing in disgust at the surroundings, clearly in disapproval.
"Doctor, who is this man?" Martha asked, deciding she'd stood and listened long enough, but she was hoping to break the silence lest the Doctor kill the man. Yes, he was obnoxious and arrogant, but she did not want the Doctor to do anything she might regret later.
"Martha, this is a member of the High Council of the Time Lords back on Gallifrey," the Doctor explained without properly introducing him. "He's annoying, smug, condescending and has never properly grasped sarcasm-."
"Now, look here, Doctor, there's no need to be offensive-."
"And he recruits me on missions I neither ask for nor want. That's why you're here, right? You're here to give me another mission? You didn't answer my question," the Doctor pointed out, as she folded her arms.
The Time Lord sighed. "You really are no fun, Doctor. Oh, very well. I've come to ask you for your help and to give you a mission, yes. But this one is serious," the Time Lord's expression was grim and somehow Martha got the feeling the Doctor, judging from her expression, was getting a telepathic message sent into her brain to make her see this was no joke.
The Doctor's expression darkened, but that familiar curious look crept over her face before it was gone. "What kind of mission?"
The Time Lord came to the point. He held up his hand and a holographic sphere appeared above the palm. The sphere grew quite large so both the Doctor and Martha could see it properly. It showed a beach with X shaped crosses joined by winding barbed wire with small gun emplacements. Elsewhere in the picture were soldiers wearing distinctive grey uniforms.
"Normandy, 1944; not long before the Allies launched what is historically known as 'D-Day,' but look at the picture again," the Time Lord's smug and condescending expression became more serious.
The Doctor and Martha did as they were told and they watched in surprise as a man appeared, whistling cheerfully and with the kind of nonchalance which neither female in the console room liked. The man was wearing strange clothes of a fashion neither could identify, carrying some kind of suitcase.
"He's having a picnic close to the Nazis!" Martha gaped in surprise when the idiot placed the case on the ground and looked around - she thought he had said something but there was no sound from the hologram, so it was hard to be sure - and he opened the case, and pulled out a blanket of a style she had never seen before, before pulling out a strangely shaped teapot and some other refreshments.
"Who is he?" The Doctor asked, her tone making it clear she herself was just as surprised.
"I don't know his name. But look into the sphere, Doctor," the Time Lord instructed as the hologram changed to show a rather large metal object with a clear door appeared.
"A Utrician time machine?" The Doctor gaped, recognising it instantly before she looked into the Time Lord's face. "But I thought they'd been confiscated from Utritia Prime when we moved in to stop them from causing further damage to the timelines?"
"Utritrican?" Martha repeated the obvious question on the tip of her tongue.
But both Time Lords ignored her.
"This one obviously escaped before the purge, Doctor," the Time Lord commented gravely, his eyes hard; like the Doctor, he knew just how serious this was. "On Gallifrey, we're going through our records to see if a renegade Time Lord thoughtlessly removed one of the time machines we impounded, but so far our findings say nothing was tampered with-."
"You could also say it slipped out of your fingers," the Doctor interrupted, shaking her head as she gazed at the image of the time machine thoughtfully before she shook her head. "No, I can't see a Time Lord stealing one of these things. They wouldn't take such a primitive time machine, we've been using TARDISes and Time Rings for centuries, and we see them as the pinnacle of time travel technology; anything else is instantly discarded. No, this machine was free the entire time."
"Mm, you might be correct, Doctor. Still, we still need to check. But keep watching. The point of one of the reasons I'm here will be made clear in a second," the Time Lord said, nodding in agreement without commenting about the rude interruption he'd just been on the receiving end of.
The Doctor did. She didn't blink or make a comment when she saw the time traveller setting up the picnic so foolishly close to the Nazi emplacements on the beach. She didn't say a word when the Germans saw him and took him away, destroying his picnic while ignoring his protests. The time traveller was taken to an office, and he made several foolish comments which caught the attention of the German officer and the soldiers in the room in attendance.
There was a rather feeble rescue featuring a man with a beard and moustache, wearing a slightly scruffy but somehow still snappy suit which made him look like a circus showman, but the attempt failed and the second time traveller was taken with the first to the Gestapo. It didn't take long for the Gestapo to break them; neither men were soldiers, one of them seemed quite weak-willed while the other seemed villainous in the sense he was quite a rogue, but he couldn't pull it off.
The two time travellers confessed to everything but what really made it worse was how the Gestapo got hold of the time machine that brought them to the 1940s in the first place. Two of the time travellers tried to escape, but the Germans stopped them - it was obvious the Gestapo had given strict orders to shoot to wound, not to kill, and the time machine was impounded. The travellers who consisted of humans and aliens were then interrogated brutally while the time machine was seized. The Doctor watched in horror as the Nazis learnt of the planned invasion and they managed to divert so many of their resources to destroying the allied attack, but what made it worse was the Nazis went on and started releasing new weapons based on principles that humanity, on the whole, would not know for centuries, if history unfolded the right way.
"Alright, I think we've seen enough," the Doctor waved her hand and the sphere vanished.
"You understand the problem, Doctor, however, you don't realise that this is one possibility," the Time Lord interrupted, "there is a number of timelines that are being bent out of shape because of this time machine, and its new owner. This is one of several possibilities unfolding within the vortex. We want it stopped. Now."
"Who is the owner, anyway?" the Doctor asked. She knew the Time Lord was right but she wanted more information.
"His name is Thaddeus Nook. A human. He originates from Seranus, and he seems to have suffered from several failed businesses," the Time Lord said.
"And now he's gotten hold of a dangerous time machine without a clue of what it can do. It looked like he was running some kind of time travel tourism business."
"That's what it looks like, Doctor."
"Let me stop you there; there's a reason you showed us that particular timeline divergence, isn't there? You want us to prevent it happening, negating its possibility for good," the Doctor said.
"Correct."
"Okay, give me the space-time coordinates and I'll do it," the Doctor walked over to the console, only for the Time Lord to send a smirk at her back.
"No need for that, Doctor," the Time Lord said before the Time Rotor began to rise and fall and the TARDIS engines boomed through the ship.
Martha was the only person who could see the Doctor's expression right now, and she could not help but shiver at the look of internalising rage she could see there. The Doctor's lips had been drawn into a thin, displeased and angry line while her eyes narrowed in anger. Suddenly the anger was gone, and the Doctor turned back to the Time Lord.
"That is a neat trick," the Doctor said offhandedly without showing what she feeling to the other Time Lord, but whether he could see it was a facade or not, Martha could not tell for sure. He was just as good at masking his emotions as the Doctor was, she reckoned.
"I'm glad you think so. Good luck, Doctor," the Time Lord doffed his hat, but then he brightened up in realisation and added, "Oh, before I forget, Doctor. We have taken remote control of your TARDIS, but when you arrive in 1946 you will be able to control it." The Time Lord paused as he looked around the console room, his expression pinched in distaste. He reached into his pocket and handed over a silver plastic wallet.
The Doctor took it but she didn't open it. "What's this?"
"A hypercube."
The Doctor instantly tried to hand it back. "Oh no, I don't want this-."
The Time Lord's voice was hard. "You have no choice, Doctor. There are dozens of ways this can go wrong, and while we on Gallifrey have faith in your experience there is the chance other parties can get involved. Have you heard of Grannus Drek?"
"The warlord?"
The Time Lord explained gravely. "The time travel tourist agency originates from a time after Drek, Doctor, but his teachings created a number of fanatical cults. We have foreseen a timeline where a cult forces Nook to take them to the point of his death during that festival, and save his life. However there are too many timelines that are clouding our projections of the final outcome, so we can't say for sure which will come to pass. From, what we can tell, Doctor, there are timelines where others will try to steal that time machine. In one timeline, there are the Daleks. In another, the Cybermen. In another there are the Rocket Men, who will try to plunder space and time on a level they should never even imagine, never mind achieve, but there are others. That cannot be allowed, and that time machine is a threat. We need your help to negate all of them and to keep history on track. Drek's death is a fixed point in history, we cannot allow that to be changed. That hypercube is being given to you because there is a chance other parties will get involved, and if that happens we need to stop them. Forget your insufferable pride and actually take heed; we are sending you on a dangerous mission and you might need help in case events slip out of your control."
Martha had never once seen the Doctor looking so angry before in all the time they'd known one another, but she knew the Time Lord had struck a nerve. Whether it was deliberate or not, she could not tell. She was willing to bet it was a mixture of both.
The Doctor was furious. Not only were the Time Lords sending her on another mission, effortlessly showing their control of her TARDIS while she couldn't even get the old Type 40 out of Earth's time sphere, but they were also going out of their way to remind her of her choice with the soldiers stranded on an alien world by the War Games.
She had grown to see the hypercube as a symbol (one of many) of her exile, and considering how long this incarnation had been exiled on Earth - either because of the Time Lords sending her back in time, or some other reason, the Doctor had grown resentful of the technology, just as she had with the Time Lords showing their ability to control her ship.
When she had confronted the War Chief a regeneration back, the Doctor had already worked out enough about the set-up to know the SIDRATs were in poor shape; the dimensional flexibility and the remote control features were good examples of a TARDIS even one of the most basic types being close to dying.
TARDISes were simply not designed to be remotely controlled or possess a flexible interior dimension. She blamed it on the lack of foresight by the designing teams who'd laid down the building blocks of the first operational TARDIS. They had decreed Time Lords just take their ships to a planet to study the history from within the micro-universe so they didn't venture outside and potentially damage history, and it had become part of Time Lord tradition ever since. They had simply thought about it later, and as a result Time Lords of the Doctor's generation had learnt the only way a TARDIS could be remotely handled was if the Time Control units lifespan was slashed to ribbons.
If the Time Lords had done that to her ship now, she didn't want to think of what she could do to them. The Doctor had spent centuries rebuilding and putting the old girl together again, she would not allow them to damage her ship now.
The Time Control Unit would need to wait. Right now she had a mission to deal with, and at the same time, there was the hypercube…
The Doctor sighed and took it from the Time Lord.
"Alright," the Doctor didn't bother hiding her annoyance from the Time Lord, "I'll take it. I just hope you haven't damaged my TARDIS by taking control like that. I've seen exhausted ships that idiot pilots tried to remote govern before. If you've done the same-."
"Oh, Doctor, come now," the Time Lord's arrogance was really starting to tempt the Doctor to punch him. "Our techniques for that kind of control have become more perfected over the decades. Really, your TARDIS will be in good hands."
"Why don't I believe you?"
The Time Lord ignored that. He just doffed his hat, and with a more muter variant of the wheezing, groaning sound he vanished with a half-remembered, "Good luck," and then he was gone.
The Doctor glowered at the spot he was in a moment before and shook her head with a sigh. "Pompous idiot. It doesn't matter to him if my TARDIS is exhausted so long as he gets what he wants. Oh well, we'd better get on with it," she walked up to the console and started checking the instruments. "Mm, we'll be materialising in a moment."
"All to find this time machine?" Martha hoped the Doctor's subconscious remembered her earlier question.
But no such luck, sadly.
"And to stop them from changing history, even by accident. Those idiots you saw were unprepared for the Gestapo's interrogation. As a result, history changed in ways no self-respecting Time Lord would even want," the Doctor replied grimly. "We have to put that Utrician time machine out of action, somehow."
"Stop! Who were these Utricians?" Martha waved the Doctor to stop so she could get an idea of how serious this part of the mission was. "You and the Time Lords are worried about this time machine…"
"It's not the time machine itself, Martha. It's what the people who built them did with them that makes them so dangerous," the Doctor went silent for a moment and Martha began to wonder if the Doctor was going to say anything more before she began speaking again. "The Utricians were a lot like humans and other races in the universe. They had moments in their history, like wars, inquisitions, famines. But unlike those races, who develop and expand when they achieve faster-than-light spaceflight, the Utricians - I don't know how, so don't ask - developed time travel early in their history. At first, they used it to explore and make Temporal Charts of different eras and parts of the universe thanks to their access to the Time Vortex, but they began misusing it. They began changing their history, travelling back in time and changing the outcomes of their wars or erasing those wars from history."
"Yeah, but hold on, if they did that wouldn't they cause a temporal paradox which would erase their time machines from history anyway?" Martha asked as she remembered the lectures the Doctor had given her.
She had gone on a science fiction binge with the Doctor, and they'd focused on time travel films. Martha had quickly regretted it. It was hard to enjoy a movie when the Doctor was telling her how science was flawed and stuff like that, but she had learnt a lot about time travel from her enough to get a good idea of what happened with paradoxes.
It seemed she had picked up enough to impress the Doctor. "Impressive, Martha; you really do have an impressive intellect, and you do pick up on things quickly," the Time Lady smiled before it dulled. "And you're right, the Utricians came close, dangerously close, to parading themselves out of existence, but it wasn't the first time and it led to their fate."
"Why, what do you mean?" Martha asked, wondering what she meant. But then she remembered the conversation between the Doctor and the Time Lord, they had mentioned a purge of the time machines used by the Utricians.
"Most races who evolve come to realise time travel is theoretically possible; when that happens they realise the dangers of temporal paradoxes and the risks of changing history. That's why when a species studies temporal phenomena and learn to travel in time, they are prepared for the potential risks. That's why the Time Lords and even the Daleks are extremely cautious when it comes to time travel. But the Utricians never learnt those lessons, they developed time travel, never realising the dangers. They began time meddling more than more, introducing advanced technology to themselves before they were ready, adults meeting themselves as children, sometimes even killing their own ancestors until their timeline was so badly twisted the Time Lords got involved. Naturally, the powers that be on Gallifrey would have liked nothing better than to put the timelines right, but they couldn't; they were too badly damaged so they did the next best thing. They locked the planet and the Utricians away in a time loop, and they took every single piece of time travel technology, every machine, every last component, every last nut and bolt and plan for the time machines and stored them on Gallifrey," the Doctor explained.
"Your people just locked them away without even trying to put things right?" Martha had heard a lot about the Time Lords during her time with UNIT and with the Doctor, her impression of them was they were people who could reknit time back together if it got so much as a tear. They should have been able to repair the damage she was hearing about, but even as she thought that Martha couldn't help but be doubtful.
From the sounds of it the Utricians had torn and twisted time to pieces until it resembled a pretzel, so maybe there was precedent for the Time Lords' actions. If time was so badly damaged, maybe the Time Lords were worried of making things worse.
The Doctor confirmed her thoughts. "Think about it, Martha; the Utricians had badly damaged their own timeline to the point if the Time Lords tried rewriting history there was a chance we'd make things worse."
The console beeped.
"We're almost there. And the Time Lords have released their control of the TARDIS," the Doctor added as she took the controls.
"They have? How can you tell?"
The Doctor knew it would take too long to explain. "I just can, Martha. We're materialising…. Now!"
Martha held on as the TARDIS materialised back into real space and time. The Doctor had switched on the scanner and tuned the poly-directrix lenses in as the TARDIS arrived. Aside from the quaint countryside and the disturbing reminders of the Nazi occupation, there was no sign of the Utrician time machine and the time travellers they had seen before.
"Are we early or are they coming later?" Martha asked.
"That's why I'm using the poly-directrix lenses and the time distortion meter, Martha. Any time machine that materialises will send out ripples and shockwaves through real-time and space as it emerges from the vortex, but there's nothing." the Doctor replied before she checked the instruments and nodded. "I was right. The Time Lords landed us here deliberately, at this point in time so we'd arrive before they did.'
"That makes sense if they wanted to make sure history didn't get changed. They really want this machine stopped," Martha commented.
"And this Nook with it," the Doctor added before the TARDIS console let out an alarm. Quickly she checked the systems and she looked up. "The time machine has arrived."
"Where is it?"
"Not far from here, according to the readings. It will take us five minutes to get to the time machine on foot."
"Can we take the TARDIS instead?" Martha asked, knowing with history at the risk it was, a few minutes would be a problem.
"I'm going to do that anyway, but I'll need to shut down the temporal systems so we can make the short hop work," the Doctor raced around the console, flicking switches and adjusting the controls before the TARDIS took off again. This time the flight didn't last long, just a few seconds. The Doctor once more checked the console and the scanner. She nodded and looked up grimly. "We're next to the time machine," she said simply.
As they left the TARDIS, Martha got her first view of the other time machine. It was like a round greenhouse made out of reflective gilded metal and it was quite large.
Martha turned back to the Doctor, "Not quite like the TARDIS, is it?"
"No. The Utricians were advanced enough to build them, but they didn't know about dimensional engineering. But right now I'm more interested in Nook and that idiot with the picnic. Hopefully, we can stop that idiot from being captured; I don't know how we can do it, but we have to. If we can limit enough of the changes to the timeline, the better it will be and the easier it will be to destroy that time machine," the Doctor replied, a glint in her eye.
Martha saw it and wondered what her friend had in mind.
Next time will be a chase through time and space.
See you then.
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