Chapter 5
"Come on, Kristof, come on. Kristof. Where..." The regenerated clone of Morbius was calling Zarodnix, his genetic scientist.
"I'm here, my lord. The infuser is prepared."
"Where's Straxus?"
"He's on his way."
Morbius was referring to a poor, unfortunate Time Lord called Straxus, who was supplying him with DNA to keep his forced regeneration viable. Kristof Zarodnix had designed a molecularly-sealed specimen capsule which had been constructed by the Trell, who were under his control.
"What's taking him so long? What if he's dead? If he's dead..." Morbius said in concern. Had they taken so many of his cells that he had perished?
"He's not dead. Our readings show that he will survive for ... a number of years."
"A number of year... a number of years? And what then? I need another Time Lord, if I am to sur... survive." He was failing, becoming weak after subjugating another world to his will. "And yet, in all my campaigns, not a sign of them. Where are they, Kristof? Where have all the Time Lords gone? And when Straxus is dead, perhap..."
"Please, my lord, don't upset yourself..." Zarodnix fawned.
"Listen to me. Kristof, listen," he said, as he looked over the balcony into the deep canyon below. "Down there, in the canyon. Maybe that's where my ultimate destiny lies."
"You're overwrought, my Lord Morbius. It is always this way before the feed..." Zarodnix turned as he heard the door open. "Ah, it's Straxus. Where's your guard?" The bionically controlled Trell called Rosto should have been escorting him from the dungeon.
"Never mind that. Quickly, bring him to the infuser," Morbius commanded.
"Come forward, forward. Come closer!" Zarodnix called to the figure in the hooded monks robe.
The figure shuffled across the room and stopped in front of Morbius. "Remove your cowl, Time Lord. I want to see your rotting, stinking face as you feed me."
The figure flipped back the cowl to reveal not a part eaten Time Lord, but a fresh faced one with short, brown, curly hair and a mischievous smile. "Well, there's gratitude for you."
Morbius' eyes were wide in disbelief. "You. Doctor! But..."
"And I'll take that." He grabbed the Stellar Manipulator Activator hanging around Morbius' neck and yanked it off, snapping the chain.
"Kristof, he's got the activator. Shoot him! Kill him!"
Zarodnix drew his side arm and approached the struggling foes, wanting to get a clean shot at the Doctor.
"Go get him, Rosto!" Lucie said to the Trell interplanetary marshal. He had been injected with augmentation nanocytes, which brought him under Zarodnix's control. What Zarodnix didn't know though, was that Lucie had made a big impression on Rosto Caradia Trell, Interplanetary Marshal, when he arrested her as a stowaway on a Zarodnix Corporation star ship. That first impression was now helping Rosto to override the commands from the augmentation nanocyte implants.
"Get away from me. Obey me!" Zarodnix shouted, aiming the gun at the ten feet tall, millipede Trell. A shot rang out, and Rosto staggered backwards.
"Lucie!" He called out as he slumped to the floor.
"Rosto, no! Straxus, we've got to help him," Lucie pleaded.
"Lucie, you must help the Doctor," Straxus reminded her. Damn! Why did these things always come down to having to choose? Just for once it would be nice if there was just one person to help, one person to save.
"Let go of the activator, Doctor. The power of the Stellar Manipulator is mine," Morbius growled.
The Doctor smiled at him. "Your grip is weakening, Morbius." He looked up to the sky over the canyon. "Orthena, Orthena, help me now... now!" He called out to the Mother Superior of the Sisterhood of Karn.
Morbius gave a derisive laugh. "You're seriously appealing to those witches? Not man enough to do the job yourself, Doctor? Always relying on puny females."
The Doctor struggled with Morbius on the balcony, twisting this way and that to try and wrest the activator from his grasp.
Lucie's eyes were wide with fright. "Doctor, look out. He's going to push you off the balcony!"
"Stay back, Lucie, stay back," he told her. "Orthena, now is your time, now!"
"Shoot him, Kristof!" Morbius shouted.
Zarodnix raised his gun and pulled back the hammer.
"No!" Lucie screamed.
"Lucie!" Rosto intoned, using her name as a block to the nanocyte programming. He staggered forward and caught Zarodnix with a blow to the neck with one of his many arms.
"My throat ... is..." Zarodnix gasped as he dropped the gun, grabbing at his throat to try and breath. He staggered around the balcony before stumbling against the railing and tipping over the edge into the abyss.
"You're weakening, Morbius," the Doctor noted.
"No..."
"And if I can just..." The Doctor fumbled with the activator as they struggled, and managed to switch it off.
"He ... he's shutting down the Manipulator. Keep at it, Doctor," Straxus encouraged.
Lucie too could see the tide turning, her impish smile framed by her golden locks of hair. "That's it, Doctor. You've got him now." If it carried on any longer, they'd be chanting like cheerleaders.
"Give it up, Morbius. The Manipulator is shutting down. The power of the Time Lords is returning. They'll cross the time-lines and write you out of history. Now, let go!"
Realising that his strength was failing, Morbius grabbed the Doctor in one last hug. "If there is no destiny for me, then you will join me in my oblivion."
"Morbius!" The Doctor shouted as they fell over the edge of the precipice.
"DOCTOR, NO!" Lucie cried out into the abyss.
The darkness seemed to brighten around the Doctor as he heard a familiar chant of, 'sacred fire, sacred flame.' It was Orthena and the Sisterhood of Karn, they were teleporting him out of the canyon. He heard Lucie call his name in despair from above, as the very air around him started to swirl in a vortex.
He looked down, past his feet and saw a polished wooden floor at the end of the vortex tunnel. He put his arms out to balance himself, as his long black frock coat billowed around him. He landed lightly on his toes, flexed his knees to absorb the impact, and sprung up with his arms out as though he had completed a perfect gymnastic floor exercise.
"Oh well done dear boy," a cultured, elderly voice said from behind him. He turned around to see who was there, and his eyebrows raised in surprise. "Got caught up in the portal as well did you?"
"Er, yes… Yes I did. But how can you be here?"
"Well, I was using this travel dial bracelet to…"
"No, I mean how can the two of us be present in the same time line? Okay, I know we've done it before… on more than one occasion…"
"Are you telling me that you are my future self. Mmm?"
"Number Eight, pleased to meet you… again." They both stood with their hands holding the lapels of their quarter length coats.
The first Doctor wore a waistcoat and chequered trousers under his coat, with a black neck kerchief tied around a high collared shirt. The Eighth Doctor wore a waistcoat and brown trouser, but his shirt was unbuttoned at the top and he had a loosely tied scarf around his neck.
"Well, it's nice to meet me, number Eight. Glad to see you're looking after my old body so well," he chuckled.
"Aaaargh!" They both looked over at the portal, as the sound of someone falling echoed around the gallery. A young, fair haired, Edwardian cricketer fell out of the swirling tunnel and rolled across the floor. Two explosive packs skidded across the polished wood of the floor.
"Urgh. This isn't the warehouse," the young cricketer said as he climbed to his feet.
"I say, are those explosives?" One asked, causing the young man to turn around.
"Someone's come tooled up for a job," Eight said. "Hang on. Two packs of Dalek explosives. That was when Davros escaped from his cryogenic prison. How's that going?"
"Oh, hello," the young man said with a pleasant smile, which turned to a frown when he recognised his first body. "Wait a minute, what are you doing here?"
"Ah, we've already covered that one," Eight said. He turned to the first Doctor. "Doctor, this is your fifth body." He turned back to Five. "And I'm your Eighth."
"Mmm. And does he need salad cream for that buttonhole?" One asked, spotting the celery stalk on Five's lapel.
"Now, now. There are few men who could pull off a vegetable as a fashion accessory, and I think he's accomplished it rather well."
"Look, can you leave my choice of buttonhole decoration to one side for the moment and tell me where I am, and why I'm here please."
"Mmm. A very good question dear boy," One said.
"We were just getting to that part when you dropped in. You said you were using a teleport bracelet, Right?" Eight said, turning to One.
"Yes, yes, that's correct," One confirmed.
"And I was falling into the canyon with Morbius, when the Sisterhood of Karn teleported me out," Eight told them.
"Whoa! Just back up there a minute," Five said. "Morbius is dead. The Sisters cast him into the canyon after I stunned him in a mind-bending contest in my last body."
"Er, yes, they did. But a Morbius groupie cloned his brain tissue and regenerated him."
"Morbius, that reprobate war mongerer? He was exiled wasn't he?" One said.
"Yes, that's him, but we're getting off track gentlemen. What were you doing before you got here?" Eight asked Five.
"I was in the Dalek Time Corridor." He looked over at the explosives, a sad, resigned expression on his face. "I was going to…"
Eight reached out and rubbed his upper arm in comfort. "I know. We've all done things we're not proud of when we've had no other choice."
One rubbed his chin. "So it would seem that each of us was a stream of dissociated atoms when something hijacked us and brought us here."
They all looked up at the portal. "But that would mean being able to override the Time Lock," Five said.
"And the Backtime Field Buffers," Eight added.
Five and Eight took out their sonic screwdrivers and started to adjust the settings for scanning.
"What have you boys got there?" One asked.
"Sonic screwdriver," Five said distractedly.
Eight looked up in realisation. "Oh, of course. You haven't used one yet have you?"
"No, that's right," Five said. "You start using it in your next body. It's like a scientific Swiss Army Knife. You're going to love it."
"Hmm. I look forward to it."
They held up their sonics and started scanning the portal.
"It's a Time Fissure alright," Five said.
"Immensely powerful. Only something like a Stellar Manipulator could generate this," Eight said.
"It seems to have two other openings, branching in time like a 'Y'," Five noted. "I wonder where they go?"
"Or come from?" One said philosophically. "I mean, they brought us here… wherever here is," he said, looking around.
"Some kind of art gallery," Five ventured.
"Kind of obvious when there are paintings on the walls," Eight said sarcastically.
"Holographic paintings though," One observed. "And someone or something has broken the glass from the painting side."
"Dorian Grey?" Eight quipped.
Five was continuing to scan the room with his sonic. "Hold on. The electrical cabling is carrying an alternating current at 50 Hertz, with a potential difference of 240 Volts."
"Hmmm. Great Britain on Earth in the late twentieth, early twenty first century used that configuration," One remembered.
"But they shouldn't have holographic paintings in that era," Five said.
Eight went over to an open toolbox on the floor, and rummaged through it. "Mmm. Stanley screwdriver, Draper spanner set. Ooh, Bosch cordless drill, the forerunner of a sonic screwdriver."
"Well, we seem to be right about the time and place then," Five said.
"I think that maybe we should see if we can find someone, and ask them if they know what's going on. Mmm?" One said.
They climbed the couple of steps through the doorway, and went through to the next room, which had display cases containing a variety of curiosities. A Pufferfish, a bust of Albert Einstein, and various porcelain vases.
"Oh look," Eight said. "Some old friends of ours." He was standing in front of a painting of an ancient sailing vessel with failing Cybermen on it.
They carried on through another doorway into a room of arched columns, with empty pedestals, and stone dust on the floor. Five stooped down and scooped up a handful of the dust.
"It looks like whatever statues were on these pedestals have been pulverised to dust," he stated.
"But who would perpetrate such an act of vandalism?" One asked, looking around at the empty pedestals.
"I don't know… A seriously depressed artist. A seriously disturbed art critic," Eight said with a smile.
One had walked on further, and climbed the steps into the next room. "Whoever did this then, may have been a spurned suitor, or a jilted lover."
The other two went through to join him and turned to look at the other side of the door. There was a painting on the door of a man in Elizabethan costume, with wild, sticky up hair. The woman he was standing next to, had a hole where her face used to be.
"Mmm, I see waht you mean," Five said. He picked up the bit of the canvas of the floor, and held it up by the hole. "Is that Elizabeth Tudor, Good Queen Bess?"
"I do believe you're right my boy," One said.
"But she was the virgin queen, she never married… So who's the guy in need of a comb?" Eight asked.
Five and Eight stood for a while pondering the mystery, whilst One wandered over to the elevator door, and pushed the button on the polished metal panel. Nothing happened.
"Boys, do your Swiss Army Knife devices work on door mechanisms?" One asked.
"Some of them," Five said.
"Not so good on wood though," Eight told him.
They adjusted their 'Swiss Army Knife devices' and aimed them at the panel. They made whistling, warbling noises, but the door remained still. They adjusted the settings, and scanned the controls.
"Ah, remote security lock down," Five said.
"Oh, right," Eight said. "So if this is the only way out, then we're staying in."
"Mmmm. We could always see where the time fissure leads to," One suggested with a raised chin as he held his lapels.
Five and Eight looked at each other and raised their eyebrows. "He's got a point," Five said.
"Nothing ventured, nothing gained, as I always say," Eight said with a smile.
"I don't think you've always said that," One corrected him. "I don't remember using that phrase before."
"Actually, now you come to mention it," Five said.
Eight rolled his eyes. "Look, if we compare notes on eight hundred plus years of things we've said and not said… Well, it's going to be a very long discussion." He walked past One, and headed back to the room with the time fissure.
They stood under the swirling portal, and linked arms in a triangle.
"If we keep together, we should travel down the same portal and end up in the same place," Eight said.
"Yes, we know all that," One said irritably. "Let's get on with it. Ready? One… Two… Three."
They bent their knees, and jumped up together. The time fissure gently continued their jump, and they rose into the vortex.