The Trap

Bitter water slapped me round the face, surged into my ears, poured down my collar, the force of it sweeping me along the stones as my fingers scrabbled for purchase, it was cold, greasy feeling, salty, it let up and I dug my hands into uneven mortar between the slabs, the second wave came but barely lifted me.

I found purchase for my feet and crabbed up the wall fast as I could, the third wave was higher, but didn't do more than make me wet, I was on a set of steps leading down into the sea from a high, mostly blank wall, I hand-over-handed to the door at the top- lucky me- it opened.

Empty- all empty; a series of cold stone rooms, numbered out of order, some with scraps of furniture, implements, random monitor screens: no people.

It was a round building, like a Martello Tower, bigger tho: multiple floors, covered walkways across the water filled centre, strange corridors that ended in blank walls, a minute garden with a grave, and over it all a strange blank feeling. I couldn't detect any variation in g, any velocity of the body it was on- any information that would come from an outside universe.

It was like it was in a bubble; just the tower and the sea, and nothing else.

It was real, but I wasn't sure it was in the universe.

This meant it was created- that led to a short and unhappy list of species that could manipulate space and time this way. It didn't seem to have an exit. Was it a cage? Or a maze for a lab rat? It seemed likely both. Someone wanted something from the occupant of this.

Above the kitchen there was a hall, with a fire and clothes set to dry, I heard them drip, nearly ran the length of the room: Wet- they were still wet! Full set of clothes, shitty velvet jacket in plum, skinny black jeans and DMs, damp- damp from the sea, and yet...and yet there was a smell- among the guff of ocean- faint, green, spicy like exotic leaves.

Here?! He was here?! I felt no-one.

The Doctor- a Doctor- had been here. A Time Lord. In this place. A Time Lord trap. I felt so scared I felt sick. How could I get out a trap meant for a Time Lord?

Everything- everything was important. I examined every item, cup, table, cupboard, chair- every wall, every floor, a pile of dust in the centre of a room, a painting of an unknown girl, an undying flower in a vase, the undying fire and the drying clothes. Screens all over the building showing static, cabinets of cogs set against the walls at regular intervals. A horrible room at the top of the building contained a glass cabinet, an initiator unit, leads...and a skull. The skull looked burnt. The cabinet looked like a transmat booth. It had no power. There was no power at all in the room. No screens, no light- altho the bubble the Tower was in trended towards sunset, no power leads in the room except between the unit and the cabinet. And the skull.

I didn't know what that meant, but it made me very, very unhappy. Power had been expended on the skull- it was burnt. There was dust- had the rest of the body been entirely consumed? By what?

Anything combusts -if treated right.

Combustion is the release of power.

I realised I was crying as I looked at the setup.

Not transmat. Reconstitution. Make yourself anew by sacrificing yourself.

Over and over and over and over.

I felt sick.

How much time had passed here?

The fire still burned but the clothes were dry. The flower still bloomed in the dying light from the window.

I went up to the roof, the stars were visible, a confusing jumble that looked a little like- but wasn't- any constellation I knew.

I stared out over the water in the darkness, no illumination anywhere, no sound but the white noise of the waves outside, the white noise of the staticky screens inside, the breeze varied but the wind direction did not.

There was food in the kitchen by the pint-sized plot with the grave, cold soup, I tried it, bland but potable.

First light picked out no landmasses in that direction, as sunset had revealed none in the other. But I was pretty sure it wasn't a real sun, or a real planet, I was pretty sure it was just the Tower and the sea, and me.

The food in the kitchen didn't spoil- the plants didn't grow, or wither- my soup bowl didn't wash itself up either. What could be changed and what couldn't? I opened all the windows on the lee side of the tower, the wind direction hadn't changed. I checked the windows on the windward side and found a slight build up of salt, no more than a couple of weeks worth in these conditions.

I dug up the grave in the pocket handkerchief garden, six feet down in decent earth- if anything could grow here in this pocket of time, I found a wooden coffin, empty- never full, by the smell, the number '8' scratched on the lid. The oddly numbered rooms didn't include a room number '8'.

Finally I went down and stared at the sea from the steps, where I had arrived. Had the Doctor arrived at this spot too? Was that why the clothes had been wet? But the reconstitution cabinet had been used- by someone, so they had been here for long enough to do so- to need to do so. So why were the clothes wet when I arrived? If they were anything but a prop.

So why had the Doctor been in the sea?

I took two steps forward and jumped to get some depth underwater, it was murky and grey but there was enough light to see. They looked like empty pots, rounded, scattered all over the sea bed, just a few by the steps and then more, thicker spread, tumbled downslope, gathered like pebbles in heaps. I swam down, outward, the bumpy slope resolved into vistas.

Thousands. Hundreds of thousands.

Skulls.

The skull in my hand looked just like the one from the Reconstitution room. I set them on table in the hall, same size; same profile; same dimensions; same orbital structure; same brow ridge; jawline; same molar configuration; burnt.

I had a hard time accepting it.

A one-man prison. For life after life after life?

What could you want from someone so badly to do this?

There was an element missing from the Tower, I was sure of it- some element of coercion. You could just leave a Time Lord in here forever in this pocket of time and space, with the option to renew themselves when their body finally aged too much, with nothing but their own image staring back at them from the screens as they roved the unchanging tower. Chances are the Doctor would find his way out tho.

Such a fate might gratify some of the Doctor's enemies- but the addition of some persuasion- some threatening force you might think you could eventually get the Doctor to do or say something you wanted. To spill the beans.

Screens everywhere- to show the Doctor himself- or something else?

After more soup that tasted of not much I lay on my back on the turreted roof of the round tower and examined all the stars- I wondered if they mimicked orbital variation. There was one constellation, a boxy thing, low in the direction I arbitrarily labelled south, that I thought I recognised- it was very distorted. Like several million years of stellar proper motion distorted from what I knew. Enough years to build up the skulls in the sea.

Without the interrogation, without the persuasion, this was just a prison. A very sophisticated pocket of time to keep a Time Lord locked away in.

Forever?

If the clothes in front of the hall fire had been wet when I arrived- either the Doctor had just been here, or time (sequentiality, really) had been triggered to restart when I arrived.

What was the next stage?

Because there was one, I was sure of it.

Nothing that I had changed had changed back yet. I could see the bottom of the soup pot. Nothing that was unchanging has changed. Having crawled over every part of the building I could reach, I started interfering with things that exhibited no change. I threw the flower and vase out of the window, dumped the portrait on the floor, ripped a screen off the wall and tore the wiring out and took it up to the reconstitution room, began to lay a power cable to the cabinet and the initiator, by virtue of snapping the cutlery levered my way into the control unit to examine it. I had no idea what to do so I just started taking things apart to look.

More- to prod the Tower. To get a response.

It came when I was up on the roof, comparing stars, every hair on my body stood up, it felt like my scalp was trying to crawl across my head- I got double vision for a second and I staggered as it felt like everything moved. I could feel the vibration thru my feet, hear whirring, grinding, over the crenelations starlight was bright enough to see the Tower turning, the covered bridges whirling like clock hands as the floors rotated independently like stacked cogs. Three floors rotated clockwise 270º, one stopped at 180. Corridors leading to new places. I ran down the stairs.

The pillaged wiring was gone from the Reconstitution room, the initiator unit whole, further down the leeward windows were shut, the flower vase back, the portrait on the wall, the grave and the soup pot refilled. I couldn't hear or feel anything else new. I took the other stairwell back up to map the Tower's corridors anew.

Two rooms were shut off now, blank walls where the doors had been, rotated into place. Nothing else moved, nothing showed on the snowy screens. Where were the teeth of this trap? The last dead-end corridor didn't end in a stone wall any more. The door said '8'.

A long room, high ceilinged, obstructed by a floor to ceiling block of dim, white, rough surfaced crystal. Twenty feet thick- with a human sized tunnel thru it. The light from the corridor beyond the open door didn't reflect on it, but made a hazy patch of brighter white beneath the surface. My steps reflected sharp echoes back as I made my way through it. The open space at the end was empty. I had found the end of the trap. What had been here? Logically- it was the Doctor, so it would have been the Tardis- the ultimate lure. The barrier?

I didn't know what it was, it didn't scratch, it scattered light into misty patches, it didn't shine, it darkened, the spade bent on it without leaving a mark. I guessed it was very dense.

Hundred of thousands of skulls.

Millions of years.

How dense?

How long to break thru this stuff?

It was too much- all that time- it weighed me down to the flagstones and I wept.

That was when the heartbeat started. A loud, electronic, repeated buzz, a one-heart sound. A screen caught my eye as I ran past- a metallic dome with a single stalk waving like an insect's antenna, lights instead of eyes perched on it's top..
What the fuck?

It was a dome on a cylinder on a conic section, it whirred along waving what looked like a manipulator arm, a camera arm and an energy weapon, they waved seemingly randomly as it motored slowly along the circumfrel corridor of the tower. The upper half was ringed with a grill, the lower half dotted with spheres like spores on a sporulating leaf. It did one full circumference. Two.
"Hey!" I showed myself from a crosshall entrance, ducked away.
No reaction.
I bounced a tin mug off it from behind.
Nothing.
But from behind I could see a crude square hole ripped in the panelling, thick cables from a depression in the conic base to the hole.
What?

I went for the exposed cables from behind, 3 metres from it I fell out of the universe.

Blackness, no-thingness, no sensation, no body.

I couldn't breathe, the blood couldn't move in my veins, no thought in my head but darkness, darkness.

Pain.

Held immobile, without body, without breath.

Darkness. Pain.

I was sprawled on the floor in the cold corridor, with the thing whirring away from me on it's route. I had no sense of how long I'd been wherever it was.

Imagine if I'd blocked it's route and then walked into this effect? And been held til the Tower reset? What would that have done to me?

My heart rate was returning to normal, I wasn't short of oxygen or damaged from deprivation of anything. It hadn't been stasis- there had been experience, there had been pain.

I barricaded myself into a room on an upper level to consider. I couldn't but think the armoured shell- reused here for another purpose in the Tower, was significant. The fake heartbeat still rang out, locating its' perimeter crawl. It was meant to freak a timelord out, it fit with the cruelty of this place. So whatever it was for now was also cruel.

How bad would that field of nothingness be for a timelord?

Could it be a field of no-time?

How could you experience anything in no-time?

Why was there pain in it?

I sat up straight- the pain had been in discrete bursts, it hadn't been there initially- or at least not a lot- then there was a burst, then another.

What the hell was doing that?

Was there a creature in that shell?

Was it the original? It clearly wasn't in control- that gun wasn't doing shit.

I began to think there was something in there, having something nasty done to it.

Would that work on a timelord? Oh yes, it would on this one, cruelty in front of his face that he couldn't do anything about?

The very inception of this place was cruelty, but the Tower had been re-used- this piece of fuckery felt almost tacked-on, crude, personal.

How was I going to deal with it?

I wanted to get a look at the wiring inside that casing.

And I couldn't.

Yanking the cables out of the back was an obvious attack. It seemed a little obvious for a timelord trap, if it was what I thought it was.

The only alternative I could think of was more research.

I ran up behind the moving metal shell and curled up before the field caught me, fell into darkness.

I searched for the pain. There was a lot of it, but as it faded I could tell where it hadn't been, it gave me a direction in this blindness. It hit again, I tried to find a centre, to get closer to it, I could almost feel a cry with the pain.

The Dark faded.

I broke my time up trying to fashion a robust enough hook to yank out the cables on a long enough pole to reach and a long enough rope to pull in case the metal casing's motor wouldn't pull it out. The Dark was giving me a headache, I decided to sleep on it.

Tower reset woke me, as it always did, midnight after two uninterrupted days. The structural interference to make to hook and pole, perhaps. I'd been dreaming of a child crying in pain.

Third go in the Dark.

Fourth go- I could almost get my non-existent arms around the centre of the pain and the crying. I needed to find the thing causing it.

The rope and hook just pulled the whole shell backwards. The child screamed. I could almost hear it waking now.

Into the Dark.

The intensity of the pain made it easier to locate the centre, I focused on it and tried to rip it out with whatever I had in the no-space- an explosion of energy that went through me and I was sitting on the floor by a dead, empty metal shell with cables in my hands and the baby was gone.

I knew that feeling, I knew what it was, I'd felt it before.

The baby was dead- it's life-energy had passed through me as it had died. I sat on the floor with my failed rescue and wailed.

TheTower split apart like torn paper, taking with it the sky and the sea, against the Dark Light coruscated across a whale-like being the size of a planet, with a noise like thunder it called out for something, sought something,

Where?

I couldn't save your baby. I tried, I didn't know how, I couldn't save your baby from the trap, I'm so sorry, I tried, oh god, that poor baby, I wanted to save it ...

the thoughts tumbled out of my head without stopping, the grief and anger and the not knowing,

Why?

It wailed, I couldn't answer

Who?

I don't know, I fell into this trap, but I do know who to ask.

And I showed the SpaceWhale the Doctor.

Without preamble, without noticeable transition, I was sitting in a pile of dusty boxes in the dimness of a room behind market stalls?

Largish planetary body, in real space, many species, many languages- mostly talking about prices. Which meant Babel Field, which meant Doctor. I walked out into the market, looking along the rows of stalls, wiped a hand over my wet face and tried to find a pah.

There.

He looked like a tweedy scarecrow, walked like a stork, long legs stalking slowly along the market aisles, head craned over the merchandise on a long thin neck, glittering eyes intent, a lock of hair flopping over his face and a blood red bowtie nestling at his throat. Then his gaze shot sideways and fixed on me.

"Kate." he said, and he looked more closely, "Are you alright?"

"Got a problem." I said.

I just showed him, touched his mind and emptied the whole bucket of unhappy into his head, to make sure he caught every detail, every nuance I'd missed.

"You met a Time Whale?"

Met, accidentally killed the baby of.

"You couldn't have saved it." he said harshly, "I can see the field generator was in a feedback loop with the chronal dipole. You couldn't have done it. I couldn't have done it."

He took a breath, "I couldn't even have survived the time suspension field the baby created."

Who did this?

The young/old face looked angular, angry and solemn, "I've an idea."

His Tardis was something else, stainless steel and neon, it looked like a Gallifreyan clock had crashed into a Kitchen's Direct showroom, it was awful, I squinted at the lights,

"Did you do this?"

"Hmm?" he was at the controls,

"On purpose?"

"Do you like it?" He twisted the variables dial all the way over and flipped the switch flinging us into the vortex,

"Well, you get to stay here and appreciate the décor while I make a call." he said, he shook his head when I made to protest,

"This is personal." he said firmly.

I was going to ask when he came back in, but the pain that walked back in with him dissolved the words in my throat.

Grief.

I put it with my own grief and we sat there in sadness.

Surely there is enough misery in the universe not to cause more.

Missy's scream had been cut off at first gasp when she fell into the Time Whale's suspension field, his other self had not demurred, regarded her more coldly than he'd thought possible; he'd recognised betrayal when he'd seen it- when he'd handed back the shattered Confession Dial and told the tale.

Some souls, he thought, cannot be saved. And some, as he sat there sharing misery with Kate, can.

She would be safe let loose on the universe.

"I've got a job for you." he said. "This," he waggled an incised silver fob watch at me, "is a transportation device. It will take you where I need you to go to deliver the message to my other regenerations."

Hell's bells. "Can't you leave notes?"

"Not quick enough, and you can do this without me crossing any more of my timelines. In fact, you're perfect for it! Here." He held out the watch, "tell my other selves 10-0-11-00:02; RE 5916.44, the date and time I need to meet me." Gallifreyan co-ords and a date on his personal timeline, the fob watch began to pulse, the Doctor leant back against the Tardis console, put his hands in his pockets and looked satisfied, then I was wrenched out of time/space.