Chapter 4
The TARDIS had been forced to land on a dark and stormy night on a rocky and remote planet. The Doctor emerged in a rage; certain some external influence - most likely the Time Lords - had made them land there.
After Sarah Jane had left him sulking, and explored the local area, she saw a vast plain strewn with the wreckage of dozens of spaceships. They found the decapitated corpse of a crash victim, which the Doctor identified as a Mutt, a mutant insect species widely established in the Nebula of Cyclops. He eventually realised from the stars that they were within 'a couple billion miles' of Gallifrey.
Sarah Jane jumped at the flash of lightning and clap of thunder, which revealed a nearby castle, looking like a basilica with lots of flying buttresses.
"Come on. At least its civilisation," she said as it started to rain. She tried to cover her head with her quilted jacket, while the Doctor put up a broken umbrella.
She rolled her eyes. "Oh God. Come on."
After being given shelter by the castle's owner, Solon, they were given a glass of wine.
"You know, I always knew that one day I'd have a guest with a head for such a fine vintage, Solon said.
Sarah Jane wasn't convinced, and tipped her drink into a bowl when no one was looking. Suddenly, the doors blew open and the wheel chandelier crashed to the floor. The cloth was ripped away from a bust and the fire was blown out. The doors slammed shut again, and Sarah Jane came out from underneath the table.
"What was that?" she asked as she stood up.
"Oh, just a freak squall," Solon informed her.
"Or a telekinetic visit," the Doctor suggested as an alternative explanation.
"What?" Solon said, surprised by his insight.
"From the Sisterhood of Karn." The Doctor had realised that they were on the planet Karn, where the remnant of Pythia's power ended up.
"What do you know of the Sisterhood?" Solon asked suspiciously.
The Doctor drunkenly tapped the side of his nose and turned to look at the bust. He stood and walked over to it. "I know who that reminds me of now. One of the Time Lords... Morbius."
Sarah Jane saw him stagger slightly. "Doctor, are you all right?"
He didn't respond to her question. "One of the most despicable criminally minded wretches that ever lived." He sat down again and passed out.
"Doctor!" She shouted.
"There are some of us who would not agree with that, Doctor," Solon said to the slumped Time Lord.
Sarah Jane realised that he'd been drugged and slumped back in her chair, feigning unconsciousness.
Solon's servant Condon, picked up the Doctor and carried him to the laboratory. When they had left the room, Sarah Jane carefully opened her eyes, and started to follow them through the hallways.
In his lab, Solon listened to the Doctor's hearts with a wooden stethoscope. "A secondary cardiovascular system. So he's a Time Lord. I thought as much. That's excellent, because we have no problem of tissue rejection."
"Time Lord dangerous," Condo said.
"What?"
"Much power, master."
"Rubbish! The Time Lords are spineless parasites. Morbius offered them greatness once but he was betrayed and rejected. They'll pay for that mistake, Condo. These pacifist degenerates will be the first to feel the power of his revenge."
Solon put a scalpel against the Doctor's throat, as Condo brought a trolley of surgical implements.
"What's that for? Do you think I'm going to operate in this light? We need proper lighting and power for the instruments, so we have to repair the generators. Come." Solon picked up the lamp and led his servant out of the laboratory to try and restore power to the castle.
Meanwhile, unbeknown to Solon, The Sisters of Karn were on their knees around Maren, the High Priestess, who was on a raised circular dais. She was gazing into the large stone on her ring.
"Sacred fire. Sacred Flame. Sacred fire. Sacred Flame. Sacred fire. Sacred Flame. Sacred fire," they chanted, invoking the teleportation power of the Sacred Flame.
Maren's ring showed her the Doctor draining a goblet of wine and smiling. "So, our enemy thinks himself safe in Solon's castle," she said with scorn, thinking that the Doctor had come to steal the last drops of the Elixir of Life. Without the Elixir the Sisterhood would be doomed.
"Sacred fire. Sacred Flame…"
Back in the laboratory, a glowing mist drifted over the Doctor and he slowly faded away.
The effects of the drugged wine started to wear off, and he found himself floating head down in a swirling tunnel. He looked down, and could see his floppy hat that had freed itself from his pocket. It was falling ahead of him towards the green ground below. His long scarf had been affected by the rotation of the vortex, and had formed a helix in the direction that he was travelling. Which was down.
The wrinkled little alien sat in his mobile life support system, and watched his prisoner being escorted into his laboratory. He looked up with sightless eyes, his vision being supplied by the single optical unit on his forehead. "Welcome, Doctor. I have waited many years for this meeting," he croaked.
"I'm sorry to have detained you," the Doctor quipped in reply.
"It was but a pleasure deferred. Now you are here, you will repay tenfold for the mental agony I suffered." He was referring to his ninety years of cryogenic imprisonment, whilst being fully conscious.
"I'll say one thing for you, Davros. Your conversation is totally predictable. You're like a deranged child, all this talk of killing, revenge and destruction."
"It is the only path to ultimate power."
"But to what end? Just more suffering for those unlucky enough to survive?"
"Only for those who resist my will."
The Doctor turned to Mercer, one of the guards, and he handed over his high tech rifle.
"What are you doing?" Davros asked with concern.
"Until I walked through that door, I foolishly hoped you'd changed enough for me not to have to do this," the Doctor said, his voice tinged with sadness.
"Stien, kill him!" Davros screeched at the remaining armed guard.
"I'm not here as your prisoner, Davros, but your executioner." The Doctor realised that there was no other option for this poor, mad being. It would be an act of kindness to put him out of his misery.
"Listen to me. You, in your way, are not an unambitious man. Like me, you are a renegade."
"Save your breath," the Doctor said.
"I had planned to completely redesign the Daleks. Kiston will confirm I am telling the truth."
The engineer who had worked with Davros, nodded his head. "It is so."
"My mistake was making them totally ruthless. It restricted their ability to cope with creatures who rely not only on logic, but instinct and intuition. That is a factor I wish to correct.," Davros explained.
The Doctor didn't doubt the truth of Davros' words, only the motivation. "And compassion? Are they to be programmed for that?"
"They will learn to recognise the strength that can be drawn from such an emotion," he said.
"But only to make the Daleks more efficient killers," the Doctor reasoned.
"To make them a more positive force."
"For destruction!"
"The universe is at war, Doctor. Name one planet whose history is not littered with atrocities and ambition for empire. It is a universal way of life."
"Which I do not accept," the Doctor declared with a hint of pride.
"Then you deny what is real. Join me. You will have total power at the head of a new Dalek army," Davros offered.
"Doctor," Stein said, looking at the security monitor.
Two Troopers were in the corridor outside.
"Outside," the Doctor ordered. "Deal with them."
Stien and Mercer left the laboratory.
"To be honest, I wouldn't know what to do with an army." He raised the rifle and pointed it at Davros' head. Especially a Dalek army, he thought to himself.
"You hesitate, Doctor," Davros taunted. "If I were you, I would be dead."
What Davros didn't realise, was that it wasn't hesitation on the Doctor's part, it was deliberation. If he killed Davros in cold blood, it would be the first step on the bloody road to damnation. He would become that which he most despised. "I lack your practice, Davros."
"You are soft, like all Time Lords. You prefer to stand and watch. Action requires courage, something you lack," Davros goaded.
Before he could tell him that it took more courage to not interfere, there was the sound of a firefight outside. The Doctor stepped out of the laboratory to investigate the noise.
"Stay where you are," Stein shouted.
"No, no, you need medical attention."
"I can't control my mind. I'm not safe. I caused Mercer's death. I've got to get away from here," he told the Doctor. He had been brainwashed by the Daleks to do their bidding.
"No, wait! Look, I can help you," the Doctor told him.
"Don't try to follow me. I may cause your death." Sergeant Stien turned and left the Doctor in the corridor on his own.
The door to the laboratory slid shut and locked the Doctor out.
"I'm an imbecile," he said to himself as he rested his head against the metal door. At least he had been spared the agonising decision of whether to kill Davros or not. He carefully made his way back to the Time Corridor.
"We are ready to descend," one of three Daleks announced from the chamber.
"Proceed. Everything in the warehouse must be exterminated, including Lytton and his Troopers," a voice screeched back.
"We obey."
The Doctor watched the Time Corridor door close then took a couple of packs of explosives from the nearby armoury, before walking back to the Time Corridor door. He pressed the domed button, and the door slid upwards to reveal a now empty chamber.
He stepped inside and waited for the door to close. The Time Corridor activated, and he was surrounded by a swirling vortex tunnel.
The Doctor's recent regeneration had been affected by spectrox toxemia, caused by exposure to unrefined spectrox on Androzani Minor. Having developed even worse dress sense, and attacking Peri without remembering it, he decided that he needed some solitude while his regeneration stabilized.
"I am a living peril to the universe. If this poor hive is to be cleansed, there's only one recourse. Contemplation. Self-abnegation in some hellish wilderness. Ten days, ten years, a thousand years! Of what consequence is time to me? I shall become a hermit, and you, child, shall be my disciple. I know the very place. An asteroid so desolate. Titan Three is where I shall repent!"
Only Titan Three wasn't that desolate, in fact it was a veritable hive of activity. After a ship crash landed, they found a survivor, Hugo Lang, the Flight Leader of a search mission looking for two kidnapped genius children. They then looked on the TARDIS scanner and saw a building, something which had no place on an uninhabited asteroid.
So, leaving Lang behind, they set off to investigate and found a tunnel which led into the building. And of course, they ran into trouble.
"I see. You abduct these children, deprive them of their memories, bring them to this screaming wilderness and won't disclose your motives? That hardly sounds in character," the Doctor said to Professor Edgeworth, who he previously knew as Azmael, a fellow Time Lord, Prydonian Academy tutor, and master of Jaconda.
"You're wasting time," Azmael said.
The Doctor spread his arms. "Oh, what's time to us? You're in trouble, Azmael, grave trouble."
"There is a point beyond trouble. You can't help me now."
"Don't be absurd. You and I together? What an infallible combination," the Doctor said.
A Jacondan called Noma, in the service of a slug like alien called Mestor, sneaked away to arm a panel that had No Cancel Function. Start time was 9.44, the end was set to 12.10.
"Let this at least be clear, Doctor. I am no longer Master of Jaconda, but I can still save my people. I will do so, whatever the cost, even the price of friendship. You were always full of good intentions, Doctor. I cannot risk you interfering now," Azmael told him.
"What does that mean?"
"You must stay here."
"As prisoners?"
"The lock on the main door has ten million million combinations. Now, will you please move over there?" He asked the Doctor. "You too," he said to Peri.
He turned to the twin abductees. "Into the transmat area. Don't try to follow us. Once we've gone, the transmat will become random. Try to use it and your remains will be spread across the surface of this miserable rock. If it's of any comfort, Doctor, I too remember that evening by the fountain. Farewell." He was referring to a time in the Doctor's fourth incarnation, when they had got drunk together, and the Doctor had thrown him in a fountain to sober him up.
Azmael joined the twins and Jacondans in the transmat alcove, where they all joined arms and disappeared. Peri sighed and sat down on a bench. The Doctor sat beside her on the back of the bench.
"Poor fellow. He's not a bit like that really," he said to Peri.
"Don't care what he's like. He's left us here forever," she complained.
"No, Peri, a few days at most."
"Did you hear what he said? Ten million million combinations."
"That's what I mean. It may take even me a few days. Well, no time like the present. Let's get started." He stood up, moved over to the door control console and started to input commands.
While the Doctor used the computer terminal, Peri explored the room and found the red flashing panel that Noma had set going.
"Doctor? Doctor! Doctor, quickly!" She called out.
"It's vital you don't interrupt the sequence," he said in irritation.
"Well, it's vital you see this. I don't like the look of it one bit." She was obviously distressed.
"All right, all right, I'm coming." He finished inputting a string of code before giving an exasperated sigh. He walked over to the alcove where Peri was waiting for him.
"Hmm? Oh, no... He can't, he wouldn't have. We haven't got a few days, or even a few hours. In fact, we haven't got that many minutes." Talk about having a bad day. He was still in the first fifteen hours of his regeneration, recovering from spectrox toxemia. He had tried to kill his companion for no apparent reason. His old friend and tutor had kidnapped two children, and then locked him in a room that was set to explode sometime soon.
No wonder he was bad tempered.
"It's a self-destruct mechanism, isn't it."
"That I can't switch off."
"Are we going to die?"
"Not yet. It means we've got to find another way out of here, and very quickly indeed."
The Doctor started searching the room, looking for inspiration, when he saw the twin's equations. "Eureka! I can do it, Peri. I can do it." He sat down and started working on the equipment in front of him. After a few minutes, he straightened up. "That should do the trick."
"What trick?"
"I'll be brief," he said.
That'll be a first, she thought to herself.
"I must be very brief."
That'll be impossible.
"That is known as a revitalising modulator. It breaks down your molecular structure and puts it back together again. A most refreshing process. Until now, that's the only purpose it's served. I have improvised. It will take you back in time."
"What?"
"Ten seconds, to be precise. You'll find yourself in the Tardis."
"Are you sure?"
"Absolutely. In you get." He shepherded her into the teleport chamber. "Oh, no, wait a minute. Awkward. I won't be able to see the computer clock when it's my turn and I need to be able to compensate for the time factor so I arrive back at the Tardis at the same time as you do. Your watch, Peri. Lend me your watch."
Peri unfastened her watch. "Come on, quickly. Now, when I stand clear, press the button. Do hurry, Peri. In precisely one minute I'm going to be blown to pieces."
Peri pressed the button and vanished in a flash of light.
The Doctor looked at the teleport chamber with raised eyebrows. "It worked! It actually worked!"
He looked at Peri's tiny wrist watch and shook it. "Oh no, it's stopped."
He made an adjustment to the console, before stepping into the teleport chamber and pressing the button. As he stroked his cat brooch for luck, he was surrounded by a swirling vortex of light, and felt a sensation of falling.