Fourth Reich
He felt time crack like a whip and settle in a new timeline, with an undertone of ripping, like a file across his teeth, as the continuum was damaged.
His new location in time-space was gloomy, 10x10 feet, sparse, square, he shifted his body- his wrists were manacled- not an improvement, the air was faintly tainted, unnatural, artificial atmosphere, gravity a touch under what passed for earth normal, .166 recurring, Earth's Lunar satellite fell in that range, and the trouble- that drew him like a gravity well- was Terran in origin as well. The cell was constructed of mid 21st century materials, with some anomalies, the electromagnetic currents he could perceive around him indicated a site of about 2.3 miles square, stellar radiation was blocked at some of the more dangerous wavelengths, neutrino flow was unimpeded. He detected the 153.453 km change in galactic location as a result of orbital motion and stellar drift, yes, the orbital ephemeris matched that of Luna. So the errant Elizabeth Klein's Galactic Reich had made it as far as a lunar base, with help from (no doubt) plundered Dalek? Sontaran? technology. His self from this time-line must have lined up something fairly substantial to stymie this lot, he could feel two Tardises, one his old type 40, another more modern model- he didn't immediately perceive another Time Lord- although that was no guarantee- but he was fairly certain he was on his own here, left to clean up his own mess.
Speaking of on his own, was he? Had a companion followed him through the vortex? Some of his aborted timelines had included companions, he'd never meet most of them now, that alone was worth mourning. He sat, idly following the power grid layout with one part of his mind while he solemnly recalled the companionship and deeds of his fellow travellers: Isaac, K'thel, the Countess de la Thevre, he sighed, he noted the power grid converged on a small buried area beneath the base- bingo! Nuclear pile- that might be useful.
A distant clang and rattle preceded bipedal footsteps up the corridor, keys rang against the door, then opened it, two earth-humans, uniformed in a style that still bore resemblance to the original Hugo Boss design, adorned with winged swastikas and bearing hard, cold demeanours came in, one of them set two chairs from the hall in front of him, then they sat.
I hesitate to say how sick I am of waking up face down on stone floors, but it wasn't pitch black and I was alone, so ahead of the game in that at least. The floor was some form of concrete, and dusty, it was damn cold, I couldn't be sure how long I'd been out, I'd grown able to tell on the TARDIS, but my sense of time elapsed felt disjointed, confused, I could feel the chill on my hands- but they hadn't gone white yet- in fact I couldn't remember the last time they had- I pondered that, my genetic whitefinger condition was cured? There was enough light to see my breath frosting slightly in the air, I was in a narrow roofed alley, one wall concrete blocks, one boxy corrugated sheets, set deep into the concrete, sealed at the top, the air was still, tasting oddly flat, clay? pumice? The dust was very fine on the tongue, a fine sifting in the air and on the floor, not clumping like organic or material debris. I heard a faint drawn out noise from the other side of the cinder block wall, I was sure I felt a faint vibration though the floor as well- it ended with a clunk. A pause, then I heard the sound of a number of metallic or ceramic things being put down on a hard surface- not scattering, slightly muffled, a bag of things? Then soft, scuffing steps became audible, approaching, a single, heavy item put down with a sigh- onto the floor, by the vibration, the soft steps moved away to the left, to the edge of my hearing, then I thought I heard a fixed keypad being used- not a loose one on a table, then I heard a door around the corner- into the alley- open. Light filtering from it showed a scuffed track of footprints down the middle of the alley, and clear signs of where I'd lain and handprints where I'd pushed myself up. The footsteps came my way, I stood still, a person in oil stained coveralls with uniform markings, a nametag, a number and a letter code stencilled on it came round the corner and let out a surprised yelp,
"Wer zum Teufal sind Sie?"
This was very bad news.
The door of the cell opened and Elizabeth Klein walked in, he noted the most recent version of the endless variations on uniform she seemed to delight in wearing,
"You're back, then." He baited her,
"Yes, Doctor, I'm back."
"Sprechen Sie Englisch?" I said, not moving a muscle, my hands by my side,
"What? Yes, of course! What are you doing here?" Her eyes were wide, her voice rising in volume, she was really quite scared,
" I mean no harm, I'm lost, looking for a friend."
"Here?!"
"Where is...here?" Clearly she thought I was mental, I sat down crosslegged in the dust, my hands on my knees, "I'm lost."
"This is the moonbase. Where's your uniform?"
I shook my head, "I have no uniform. Whose moonbase?" She wasn't looking quite as scared as I expected,
"The Galactic Reich." Nazis.
The name made me snarl, I'm sure of it.
"Who are you?" Now she didn't look scared at all,
"My name is Kate. Yourself?"
"Rachel. How did you get here?"
I frowned, "I don't know." She made an impatient noise, I indicated the marks in the dust, "I woke up here."
"Where are you from?"
"Complicated."
"Are you human?" An unexpected question,
"Yes. You know someone who isn't?" I watched her catch her breath, and not answer that question, hiding something, hiding someone?
"Who are you looking for?"
"A friend." We eyed each other,
"Information." Pronounced 'infomatzion' by a languid computer generated voice from the area beyond the cinder block wall, "Schichtwechsel. End of information." It changed to english in my ears, I looked at her, realisation sparkling in my mind,
"It's here."
"The Tardis." She said, "You're associated with the Reich's Temporal Affairs department?"
I felt the blood draining from my face, Nazi's with a time machine- that's how they ended up in charge, back and forth- changing history every time there was a problem...until their timeline superseded mine.
I shut my eyes, took an unsteady breath, I have no place in this timeline! "They altered the timeline and replaced the original." My heart hammered panic in my chest at the enormity of it,
"Yes, they use the Tardis to change past events, you are from a different timeline, then?"
"Yes, one in which the Reich ended at the Second World War. Where is the Doctor?"
"I don't know. I haven't seen him for six months, I've been following his plan, but..six months!" She looked panicky, then forced the fear down, "It's all I can do."
"Your Doctor, he a little bloke with a hat and an umbrella, bad paisley ties and a habit of reticence?" She nodded, Could there be two here? "Which one is here, in this timeline, mine or yours?"
She looked horrified,
"You were travelling with him?"
"Yes, in the Tardis- I got dumped out here, sans Tardis, did he?"
"There are two Doctors?"
"I don't know."
"Does your Doctor exist any more? Does mine?"
"I can probably find out- if he's here. Maybe count Tardis's," I muttered,
"What?"
"He taught me how."
"You can communicate with him?"
"No, it's just a sort of locator beacon- maybe he can read me- if it's him- my Doctor." And if it's not my Doctor? There'll be no link between us, no reading. He won't know I'm here.
I lay flat on my back in the hanger wall walkway, and put everything out of my mind. Simply counted breaths, waiting for my body to slow down- then I stopped counting breaths and simply observed the inflow and outflow of air. I imagined myself back on the TARDIS, safe, warm, and then I swept my attention around the compass, looking for that little cloud of awareness I recognised as the Doctor.
And found him abruptly. Quite clearly. I pointed, "What's in that direction?"
"Detention." She said glumly.
"Where better to wait?" I sighed.
I swept around the area again, only one Doctor, there was a surprisingly large, diffuse mass in another direction, sort of familiar- Tardis, and another, fainter, further away, ghosty, like it was trying to hide- is that what a working chameleon circuit looks like?
"One Doctor, two Tardis's, one unfamiliar." She nodded.
The short and informative interview with Klein had made clear what he suspected, but he still couldn't fathom the plan his other self had had in place, he had a feeling he wouldn't have to wait long.
"He had a plan, what is it?"
"Disable Klein's Tardis, he made a deal with the Selacians to attack the base ecobubble and he would meet me at Hanger 14 with Klein, and he'd rewrite the timeline."
"Klein?"
"Someone he used to travel with, she stole the Tardis." My eyebrows shot up,
"Is she human?"
"Yes."
"Selacians?"
"Warlike shark-hominids."
"Attack the base life support?"
"He said it was the only way."
"And when time is rewritten none of this matters?" An ecobubble- against the vacuum of space, the casualties.. "What's the population of this moonbase?"
"Four hundred." She looked miserable, I hope I never ascend to such Timelordly levels of indifference.
"This sucks," I said angrily, we were going to have blood on our hands, "but I don't see any options. When will you disable the Tardis?"
"Soon, I have it in hand. The Selacians will transmat in soon after."
"Any way we can engineer an incident of some kind to get people away from danger?"
She thought for a moment, "Solar radiation would get people into the sealed buildings, but environmental monitoring is a security area, the whole base is a security area! If you're seen you'll be arrested."
"If I can get into the computer system I can probably do something." She nodded, "I might be able to communicate the situation to him. If he can read me."
"I will try and send our presence, the plan, just in case he can pick it up. I don't know if he can." I ran through it forcefully, in my head, twice, me, Rachel, sabotaging the Tardis, the coming attack on the dome. I sighed, an answer would be nice.
The Doctor's eyes gleamed in the gloom. Selacians. So. A marine race brutalised by years of attacks and oppression- they should be years away from space travel- which meant he had brought them here, and he could call in his end of the deal to mitigate the slaughter that was about to take place. Kate was here, and there was action underway to neutralise his- Klein's Tardis. He hated the plan, and he hoped it worked.
I worked my way through the layers of programming- 22nd century it was not, but there were some oddities. They had corrected mistakes before they occurred to win battles, counter threats, control people, the spoils of war littered their technology, from Sontaran hand blasters to software code but their security was surprisingly primitive- all passcodes and cameras, not even monitoring on the scale of my time, no analysis; the computer code looked like it had been assembled in blocks- like lego- with all the elegance of their blocky architecture, the security flags were even placed at precise intervals- how had someone not hacked this system to death? I could only assume it was bad luck and timeline rewriting. I tapped into the solar radiation detection protocols- the data gathering was automatic, hardly monitored- not so much a survey, more a reaction system- no science done here, programming in a flux and an overload in the electromagnetic field generators to Rachel's timetable was easy.
The Doctor felt with a wince the crunch of his old type 40 Tardis being destroyed- as the dimensional anchor ripped the stricken quasi-sentience apart, so it begins.
There was a shudder, atmospheric pressure dropped abruptly- kept dropping, the whooping decompression klaxon joined the hazard and intruder alarms blaring pointlessly into the rapidly depleting air, the deckplate shuddered again. Detonations began to sound at the other end of the building complex, I struggled into a space suit, by the sound of it the Selacians were taking out the spacecraft hangers now- murderously efficient.
After a panicked Klein fetched the Doctor from his cell, he looked sadly over the remains of his ship, his home, it was like attending the funeral of a friend. Then he went to try and deal with the Selacian invasion.
They'd breached the ecobubble, condemning goodness knows how many humans to death by decompression, the base alarms were racketing and there seemed to be a lot of people in the building, conscripted civilians gathered in the service areas as well as the tense troops hurrying by.
The Doctor set about using the output frequency of the reactor core to deflect the Selacian transmat beams amid the hubbub in the command centre, then he had to stymie Klein's attempt to use the radiation of a reactor backlash to kill everyone on the base- including the Selacians- outside the protection of the command centre. Fortunately there wasn't time for Klein to initiate it herself or for the threats to make him do it to escalate into violence- the Dalekanium laced bulkhead burned through and the black battle-armoured Selacian Leader stamped in, and the Doctor played his ace.
"Stand down your troops, Leader. That is an order. There will be no more deaths today."
"Who are you, human plankton, to give me orders?" The battle Leader growled, "I am in command here, this moon-base belongs to the Selacians."
"Look more closely, Leader, I'm not human, and you've achieved your objectives. The Reich's time machine is destroyed. It's former pilot is your prisoner, there she is, standing in front of you." Klein was appalled to be given up to Ausländer by one seemingly closer kin to her.
It almost worked- he couldn't extract a guarantee of no more killing, nor could he release all the humans from the troopers' attentions- the Commandant would be questioned, but he got things quieted down, and he got Klein- the instigator of this whole sorry affair.
She was smart enough to speculate aloud that his predecessor had staged this whole invasion to draw her into his grasp- as if that was the most important aspect of this operation- not the stopping of a murderous fascist state- not the correction of the timeline- the capture of one errant scientist. She cast herself as hero- even in defeat- even facing death. He despised melodrama.
The violence began spiralling out of control again- the Doctor heard gunfire from the Command Centre, he turned toward it,
"Where are you going?" Klein demanded,
"You heard that- there are people in danger, I'm going to help them."
"You're insane." She grabbed his arm, "A Selacian.."
"As it seems I brought them here it's up to me to deal with them."
"Not this time, Doctor. You know what you're supposed to do, you've already done it."
"I'm not that man, Klein, the man you want me to be. What happens here matters, these people matter. I won't let them suffer if I can help." He pulled free, hurried back the way he'd come.
But it was too late- the inevitable resistance had led to retaliations, despite the Doctor's protests- then the leader turned abruptly to him and said,
"So, Doctor, you intended to betray us all along." The Timelord's eyes narrowed,
"What on earth gave you that idea? I assure you.."
"My sources of information are not your concern. Do not compound your crime by attempting to deny it. You thought you could use Selacians to topple the human empire, then snatch our spoils from us."
How had they found out? Who from?
Beeping monitors began to report detection of hundreds of ships popping into existence around the moon, around Earth, the Doctor felt events slipping out of his hands with a sick sensation,
"You gave us the means to transport six warcraft backwards in time." The leader rumbled, "Your mistake was in thinking us too stupid to replicate these means."
The Doctor's protests fell on deaf ears as the Selacians rounded on earth, closing in to complete the destruction, he pulled down the brim of his hat and slipped away.
The door slammed back on the TARDIS and the Doctor ran into Hanger 14, she'd made it, but she wasn't in the protected engine core test bay- he could make her out in the flashing hazard lights, she was slumped on the floor in a spacesuit and there was a wrench jammed through the handle of the bay. He grabbed her under the arms and dragged her quickly into the TARDIS, then he ran back outside to see what was locked in the test bay...there was the second spacesuited figure, they fell out into his arms, he manhandled the small figure into the TARDIS, then flushed the radiation laden atmosphere out of the console room and collapsed the atmospheric bubble beyond the doors, slamming them shut and sending the ship into the vortex before secondary explosions from the moonbase's weapons stockpile caught them. He sneezed once and expelled the radiation from his fingertips in a sparkle of excited particles. He quickly pulled the helmet off his companion, she was very heavily irradiated, he wasn't sure she would live- the other suited figure had been somewhat protected by the test cabinet she'd hidden in- she would recover with treatment, he fumbled under the console for the kit and slapped a decontamination patch on her neck. Then he turned back to Kate.
She was slipping away, losing another companion filled him with such dread...he ordered the console open and stared into the inferno at the heart of his TARDIS, then he shoved his hand into it, and put the other on Kate's head. The artron energy streamed across him into her, he screamed as it burned across him, giving her cells the kick they needed to for the DNA to rewrite, he guided them as best he could- the Time Lord genes had such a tenuous foothold in her biology, his hands began to blacken. Slowly, so slowly, the golden glow crawled across her body, until it finally encompassed her like the caterpillar's cocoon, the Doctor sank, gasping to the deck.
He was having trouble manipulating the buttons on the tissue regenerator, sheer strength had got Kate and the unnamed refugee into the medical centre, but dexterity was a little beyond him at the moment. He could feel Kate's consciousness swimming close to the surface, he tried reaching for her, met confusion, dreamstate, she blinked and pushed herself into a swaying sitting position, he dropped the regenerator in her lap, "There," he pointed at the buttons as best he could, "and there." Sending her the images as he did so, she felt distant alarm at his obvious injuries and stared at the oddly shaped box in her hands, trying to remember how to use it. "Green key," he said patiently, "one above that." She activated the scan and the regenerator immediately lit up the field activation keys, she pressed them and the Doctor felt his breathing begin to return to normal, unbidden she widened the regenerative field til it enfolded his whole body, he looked- but she wasn't fully conscious. The field shut down, he took the device from her hands and helped her lie down again.
I had this strange uncomfortable dream- I didn't know who I was, then there was an odd box in my hands and needing something- someone else needing something. Then it came again: gold light- I didn't know who I was, then a white place, a box in my lap and black hands pointing at it- really badly burned black hands! I shot awake with my heart in my mouth- the Doctor with really badly burned black hands- I threw back the covers of the bed and ran down the corridor into the console room, he was there- pristine white jacket, silk scarf, horrible paisley tie, white hands stretched over the console controls, he looked fine, I leant against the doorframe with my heart hammering in my chest.
"How do you feel?" he said; standing there in my underwear the best I could come up with was:
"Confused."
"You were injured."
"You were injured." I eyed him suspiciously,
"So you rremember." He tapped casually through a control sequence, What did I remember? What was he not saying?
The Moonbase, the Selacians, Rachel.
"Where's Rachel?"
"Ah, is that her name? The medical centre, she got a dose of radiation." I headed back down the corridor, she was on a med bench, a bit pale, the vitals on the screen looked a bit low,
"She'll be fine." The Doctor had walked in behind me. "She helped you, hmm?" I nodded, "But her timeline no longer exists, she'll probably remember it- for a while- but there's no guarantee she has a place in the corrected timeline, what will she do?"
I blinked at him, "She was your- your counterpart's companion, for quite some time, from what I gather."
The Doctor took a deep breath, he looked annoyed, "Then she will rremember, she won't be able to normalise to this timeline- you've created an anomaly! A remnant of a reality that no longer exists! She has no place in the universe!" He rapped his knuckles sharply on the scanner, "You tampered with the integrity of the timeline."
"You- we- needed her! She knew your counterpart's plan, did you?"
"I worked some of it out, I kept trying to avert the bloodshed." he muttered,
"Should I have left her behind to be snuffed out with her timeline? Never to have existed?" I asked angrily, "Once she'd ceased to be of use?"
"No," he growled, "all suffering matters."
"Pity your counterpart didn't think the same way." I muttered, he glared at me,
"You can't go lifting beings out of their natural timestreams, it distorts reality, imperils causality, and it's is a gross misuse of power to take any being, especially a sentient being, out of it's place in the universe!"
"Even if it's about to die?! You're afraid of me becoming Klein."
"Are you?"
I was going to snap him in two.
He grabbed her by the shoulder and managed to hustle her out of the medbay before she exploded, Ace had had a temper but this one ignited like a fuel dump- all that anger, all that pain- with her possibilities? He could not allow it to continue.
"YOU THINK I'M A NAZI? THAT I'M GOING TO REARRANGE THE UNIVERSE FOR MY OWN ENDS AND DAMN THE CONSEQUENCES? THAT SUFFERING MEANS NOTHING IN SERVICE OF THE GREATER GOOD? ARE YOU MENTAL?"
"None of us can foresee all the consequences of our actions."
"SHOULD WE THEN NEVER ACT?"
"We act with the greatest knowledge and considerration that we can."
"Exactly!"
"Your knowledge is not sufficient to act in this way!"
"THEN TEACH ME." She glared at him, he stared back, and promised himself he would.