Chapter 2:

Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.

-Erich Fromm

The pinhole had already proven itself at least temporally aware by moving away from any detections coming off the TARDIS' automatic scans. Indeed, the entire reason for sending the Doctor in his battered-up old thing was because within the numerous failed attempts someone had noticed the older the TARDIS, the closer they could get to the dangerous little beast.

There was only one Type-40 TT model left in the Universe (parallel universes not being a topic for safe conversation, much less digestion), and luckily for the CIA, it was under their command. Even more luckily, the thing had a pilot that was actually willing to steer it.

And luckiest of all: it being under their authority, they had wiped it out of the Gallifreyan Register long ago. Technically it didn't exist at all, so if the unfortunate pilot died en mission, it was one death they didn't have to deal with.

"We're sending a dangerous little rouge after a dangerous little rouge," Sardon had mused with full conscious irony of the situation. He wasn't making a joke at all. He just had a finely evolved sense of reality.

"That thing has destroyed thirty of our TTs with the corresponding loss of life!" The current Chair protested for what was the shakiest argumentative grounds in the CIA: Morality. "Three were fully staffed and manned scoutships! Are you saying we can just order a person to take a solo mission that is sheer suicide?"

Sardon answered by toggling a button at his chair. The large screen on the wall instantly responded: the unmistakable luxury of a Gallifreyan Oubliette.

Oubliettes were often where the condemned lived out their natural lives, waiting for the closure of sentence…or, being Time Lords, they were often forgotten. To salve any inconvenient guilt, the government had created impervious cells equipped with every imaginable indulgence of food, drink, libraries, music and even spas.

This oubliette had stopped looking like a typical oubliette some months ago. Its current prisoner was easily bored and despite housing the body of a man in his middle years, was regretfully hyperactive.

Jokul nearly swallowed his drink the wrong way. "What is that?" He sputtered at the thing that now dominated much of the expansive sitting room.

Sardon lifted an eyebrow, taking the question literally. "I think it's some sort of fort." He mused. "Now how did he get all of the tables stacked up like that?"

"Sardon…"

"Those look like Prydonion curtains…"

"Sardon, we aren't supposed to use madmen."

"He's not mad, my learned colleagues. He simply…doesn't fit in the mold."

In the sudden drop in silence, Sardon cleared his throat and activated the speaker. "Doctor?"

There was a pause and (to Sardon's secret disappointment, the familiar scruffy little renegade did not emerge from inside the giant architecture of stacked table, chair, and draped curtains, but from behind the back of the enormous monolith). He was holding a tiny lacquered end-table in his hands and a large spool of what looked like red mantis-silk cord draped over his shoulders.

"Can't it wait, Sardon?" The Doctor's voice was overflowing with innocence. "I'm almost finished with the top-piece."

"And what do you call it, Doctor?" Sardon leaned his chin in his hand as he struggled to find some clues. "A fortress of solitude? Den of Iniquity?"

"It started out as a model of Mt. Lung." The Doctor admitted with that unnerving meek and shy demeanor he liked to use when someone was about to muscle him. Sardon once saw a Dalek flee from the Doctor when he used that voice, fast as his little static roundels could carry him. "But I couldn't get the proportions correct without knocking a hole in the ceiling."

"I'm so glad you didn't try knocking holes into anything—"Sardon noted too late a flicker of an "Oh, Rassilon" expression and decided to take a look at those rooms later. "In the meantime if you're suitably attired—"Sardon ignored the incredulous expressions across the table. "—your presence is required."

"Suitable?" The Doctor glanced down at himself, frowning in puzzlement. "And right now? I've still got to put up the Crow's Nest!"

Sardon managed not to ask what a Crow's Nest was, and forget ask why he was putting it on a model of Mount Lung—no, wait, he'd said it had begun as a model—that left a third example of restraint as he managed not to ask what the lump of furniture-sculpture was supposed to be now if it wasn't thirty feet of interpretive Art…

He struggled to pull his mind back to Gallifrey. "Come and join us, if you would please."

"Oh, wonderful!" Beaming, the Doctor put down the table and clasped his hands together. "Quite a party, I see. Are there appetisers? Should I bring the coffee-pot?"

"Sardon, this is absurd!" High Legal Advocate Norlan blurted. "We are not sending this scape-wit into the Minyan Belt!"

Sardon was already opening his mouth to deflect the situation, but it was too late.

"Minyan Belt? I take it you're finally doing something about that rouge pinhole gadding about Mutter's Spiral!"

Norlan croaked. "Who told you we were sending you there?"

"You just did." The Doctor said blandly, but Sardon could just make out the twinkle of a little Mountain-devil in the green eyes hiding under his thick fringe of black hair.

Sardon sighed. His head was starting to hurt. "Meeting first, Doctor. The guards are cleared for your escort."

If meddling wouldn't be his undoing, curiosity would do the job. The Doctor arrived promptly and took the first available chair, throwing his small body back and steepling his fingers together with all the poise of a bored maestro.

"So. What have I missed?" He smiled impishly.

"You're spying on us!" Norlan had been simmering in rage from the brief space between the Doctor's checkout and his T-matting to the Station. As soon as the originator of his indignity arrived, the simmer boiled over and promptly made a mess. "You can't sit here and tell me you haven't! We only just agreed to this mission and you've been in the Oubliette all this time!"

"Oh, dear. You've found me out. How rude of me." The Doctor drawled. His little fingers danced against each other in time to his words.

Sardon often studied the Doctor's hands. They reminded him more than anything else of how deadly the man was: despite the decrepitude of his appearance, his hands were the truest expression of his inner being: small, perfectly proportioned, and frighteningly gifted, they were scrupulously neat and clean and capable of terrifying precision.

The Doctor was capable of amazing acts of misdirection with his seemingly shabby and foolish appearance, but his hands were the one thing he could not disguise. If more opponents only noticed this little incongruity…they would doubtless live longer.

"I assure you he isn't spying on anyone, Comrade." Sardon said wearily. "The Doctor is simply plagued with curiosity and boredom in his confinement and has been studying the news. The missing Scouts have been on the newsfeeds for the past three months."

"Actually, for the past terasecond." The Doctor corrected in his unassumingly gentle voice. "If you factor in the totality of all the people missing under the same suspicious circumstances in Mutter's Spiral, it all follows a pattern sometime around the first approved emergence of Homo Sapiens." He tipped his head back, letting his too-long hair flop untidily down the back of his neck. "And we're not talking about the 'thirty-so' Gallifreyans missing; I numbered it up in the thousands with an average of one life missing per every twelve kiloseconds."

Sardon was able to keep up with the Doctor (he'd learned the risks of not going along with the little man long ago). "I'm surprised you didn't request a chance to investigate this anomaly."

"I did."

Goth breathed out, his fingers also in that very Prydonian gesture. "And have you any conclusions from your research?" He asked neutrally.

The Doctor's eyes flickered from a light, dancing blue to dark green. Lungbarrow Eyes. Goth and the Doctor were forever civil, but their dislike was as coolly formal as a genteel dissection. "This can't be an ordinary pinhole." He said at last, after the silence drew out. "It's behaving more like a compressed wormhole, and like a wormhole, its presence is affecting Relativity."

Sardon had the chilly certainty that the Doctor knew more than he was telling, but he never speculated unless in pretense; he was horribly aware of his facts when he gave them.

"Nevertheless, we need to get closer to this threat if we are to understand how we are to negate it as a threat." Sardon stared at the other, nodding faces around the room.

"If word gets out about this…if people start noticing…" The Arcalian was fidgeting at the thought and started pacing back and forth. The Doctor watched him almost idly, through half-closed eyes in an expression of patient laziness. Sardon certainly knew better than to trust that look. "We should go back over the news reports, make certain our citizens cannot come to their own conclusions. There would be a cloud of hysteria if they learned we had a rouge force of nature dashing at random throughout the Universe, causing death and destruction without prediction or limit!"

The Doctor snorted.

The room temperature dropped to a point that might have been balmy in the Death Zone. Sardon had been blessed with the perfect angle of the room and decided that the Doctor's rudeness was not politically apt, but it did save Goth the trouble of crushing an enemy Chapter.

"First of all," the little man said with a sharp glare, "I did not read the news reports to come across this information. So your hidebound dreams of strangling the already filtered, sanitized and homogenized news for Gallifrey won't wash, I'm afraid." His eyes fully open now, he leaned forward, fixing the Arcalian with the intensity of his gaze beneath the curtain of sloppy hair.

"Then how did you learn about this pinhole, Doctor?" Sardon placed himself into the interrogation all the better to distract Narol from making a fool of the proceedings.

"I looked at the start charts." The Doctor answered blandly. "That's something even the CIA can't change—our people have been painting images of the night sky since before we discovered taranium!" He sniffed, and sounded much like his older personality just then. "Anyone with a basic education in astronomy can see what I saw and draw the same conclusions: This pinhole is affecting all of the Space/Time Continuum throughout thousands of different points through the Universe. It's probably affected the Parallel Dimensions and Pocket Universes as well but they're always harder to examine."

"How many charts did you read?" Jokul wondered.

"I don't recall counting those. Went over one map a day for two months for a bit…" He shrugged. "It began in a cislunar orbit from a point about 127.93 kilometers below the surface of Minyos. It only looks erratic because it jumps across the Temporal Continuum more than it does the Spatial portion." The pause at his interrogator was just ever so slightly challenging. "You do recall that the entire Universe is moving, don't you? Well, we have a moving bomb on one side, and a moving Universe on the other. They're moving in and out of each other's space like so many needles through knitting. Two different fabrics, sewing themselves into each other!"

"Its temporal awareness explains why it eludes our crafts." Sardon cut in before someone could be cut to pieces. "It eludes our most advanced technology but the older craft seem to be able to get closer—if only by a few parsecs—before it either escapes them or said craft get inadvertently too close and suffer the price."

"Which is the real reason why I'm here." The Doctor sighed. "I have the oldest TARDIS still functioning."

"It's your TARDIS we need, not you so much." Sardon said reluctantly.

That earned him his first smile of the day. It was disturbingly layered with a glitter of depth in those changeable Lungbarrow eyes. "Do you have anyone willing to pilot her?" He asked with that overflowing-with innocence look. "Wasn't she just taken off the syllabus some years back? How many people remember how to fly a Type 40 TT?"

"Precious little." Jokul piped up. His ridiculously handsome features scored the seriousness of the conversation with his "pallbearer's" expression. "The '40's were modeled directly on Rassilon's plan to seek out the enemy during the Vampire Wars. They are organic; flexible and require a level of creative thinking that is alas not encouraged in our schools at this time." He rose and went to the dispenser for his own glass of water. "Training a pilot isn't the problem. Finding someone willing to navigate a craft that may or may not agree with them? That's a separate order of mammal."

"Isn't that how you stole that one in the first place?" Narol asked with a sudden spasm of suspicion.

The Doctor tutted. "Stole, really. She was on her way to the scrapyard and everything of value had already been stripped. Just in case, I left a pandak-voucher at the 'yard on my way out." He smiled cheerfully. His smile broadened. "But essentially, you're asking how it was I managed to walk out of the yards with her unencumbered…" He shrugged. "Who bothers to lock up an old '40 when so few people can or will fly her?"

"Obviously, thieves." Sardon said dryly. "As well as anarchists, malcontents, insomniacs and civilians who have far, far too much information about the Decommission Yards."

Yes, the Doctor was definitely laughing on the other side of his elastic face. "Type 40's are designed to seek out trouble." He said gently as a snowflake falling upon an ice lake on a perfect day. "I promise you, we'll get to that pinhole closer than anyone else will."

"I doubt that not, Doctor…but will you survive it?" Sardon asked heavily.

Another shrug was his answer. "My term of service ends with the CIA when I die." He reminded the room with a placid calm. "It would be more interesting than building model galleons out of furniture."

Sardon kept himself from asking what a galleon was. His life didn't hinge on knowing, he reminded himself.

The Doctor was told to report to the Bay when he was ready.

Naturally, he was always ready.

That was the problem with working with Intergalactic Space Hoboes, Sardon knew. The wanderlust hit Gallifreyans rarely, but when it did…it was all but incurable. Sardon's own (questionable) family history had taught him the value of never underestimating that quality.

With the Doctor it was all about the frontier. If it wasn't space, it was time. When it was neither, it was a puzzle. And when it couldn't be a puzzle, it was something that had to be fixed. In controlling him, his controllers should never lose sight of these truths.

Sardon was always re-establishing the roles between Master and Servant, and this new problem required his adoption of a new role: He walked into the Doctor's Oubliette without warning, just as he had back in the days of their early "relationship" when he was a criminal condemned to outright death.

He found his most troublesome charge sitting in the middle of his (astonishingly clean) quarters, working on some sort of puzzle.

The Grey Man paused in the doorway, considering the sight before him. The little Hobo was still refusing to wear anything but the clothing of Earth, but it was anyone's guess why he did so. There was a reason for this, the CIA provocateur knew, but he had no idea what it was.

His small form was perched cross-legged in the centre of his living space, with a deck of strangely patterned rectangles of stiff paper spread before him in a semi-circle.

Sardon could tell with his Time Lord's glare that it was a mere 52-card deck—a toddler's grade of game, surely—but there was something about the layout and the way the Doctor was playing that suggested it was really a complex pattern.

The Doctor dealt a fresh hand before responding. "You're already prepared, Sardon. That's why you had me copied for the Matrix." The small hands spread the cards in a graceful arc. "What was the real story, hmn? An insurance for later?"

Sardon chose his words carefully. The Doctor could smell a lie. "Your medical reports."

"My what?" The Doctor blinked. Whatever he had expected, it was not this response.

Sardon moved deeper into the room and chose the comfortable guest chair. "The Temporal scanners were able to work backwards once you were in custody, Doctor. It was the point of the Trial to come to the fairest of all conclusions. Anyone who leaves Gallifrey without permission—especially under conditions like yours—must be evaluated for mental illness."

"Hah." The Doctor scoffed.

"Nothing overtly wrong with your faculties…" Sardon leaned back, adopting a conciliatory pose. "But there were some…questions about your original body."

Now the Doctor's gaze had turned gimlet with suspicion. Sardon half expected the old Doctor to step out of the skin of the new one, but of course that was impossible. The Doctor lacked the ability to change his face like he could his wardrobe.

"It's quite a list, actually. A frightening warning to those of us who would wander without the support of Gallifrey. We collected records of broken bones—I forget how many—contusions, illnesses that placed unnatural strain on your body…most renegades leave after they acquire the usefulness of two hearts and multiple lungs, you know. But you didn't. Primitive dental care…and your entire system was shutting down bit by bit. There were pressures of age in your circulatory system, your nervous system, and alas that brain of yours you prize so highly. If the physicians were correct you must have been living in a constant cloud of pain for the last hundred years of that body's life." Sardon controlled his voice carefully, for the Doctor would not like to hear pity. "You were well within the boundaries for memory issues…occasional lapses of forgetfulness and confusion."

"Is there a point to this, Sardon?" The Doctor's voice was quiet and soft. His most dangerous voice and one he almost never used on his own people.

"When it comes to regeneration, Doctor, Oldbloods like you have the worst time. You're more likely to die for certain than successfully change over if you do it by yourself." As he spoke, Sardon wondered why in the world he was having this 90% socially taboo conversation.

Polite, "nice" Time Lords demonstrated their superior breeding by not mentioning regenerations in public at all. The fact that the two of them were having this conversation just enforced the fact that Sardon was not from a nice family, and the Doctor was permanently in the realm of "disreputable."

"That battered-up old TARDIS helped you through it. It may have even thrown in a few things it thought her pilot needed. Your telepathic abilities have been…evolved. You have a quantum prescience that picks up on the environmental energies and allows you to glimpse possibilities in Time just a jump ahead of your opponents. An old instinct, barely used in this modern day and age, but certainly useful for a fellow who spent most of his life one step ahead of the law. You're much healthier than you ever were in at least, oh, three hundred years or so.

"But I digress. The point I'm making is, you regenerated with barely any time to spare—fighting Cybermen, honestly!" He shook his head, exasperated.

"Earth stopped Mondas." The Doctor said in that voice of frozen calm. "That was enough."

"Because you had help."

"I don't think even the High Council's Secret Officers could have done it by themselves."

"Yes, that is true." Sardon examined his cuticles as he spoke. "It is also true that you could have contested one of the major points of indictment against you."

"Oh?"

"The abduction and kidnapping of various people—all of them non-Gallifreyans—into being your companions."

In the corners of his vision, he could see how the little man froze, in slow motion. His hands stilled over his work.

"And what of it?"

"Nothing…nothing…except you could have argued that you were a…less rational being back in that span, Doctor. One's first life is always so fraught with mistakes and heedless consequence. And yet you didn't defend yourself at all on this charge." Sardon let his voice drop. "One might think you were protecting the lesser beings in question…that you were willing to shoulder an extra charge and punishment for their sakes. But that would be ridiculous, wouldn't it? To think that you cared enough for them that you'd tack all these years of servitude upon yourself so that we Time Lords wouldn't step in and erase you from their memories…like we did your last two."

It did not please him to see his opponent had stilled at his words. The scruffy little figure had paused in the middle of his task and was not moving at all. Waiting, Sardon realized, to see what else would happen.

The unkempt, dark head lifted up, and the shaggy fringe hiding those small, clever eyes fell away.

Despite himself, Sardon shivered.

"What do you expect me to say, Sardon?" The voice was very quiet, calm.

Waiting.

"Nothing at all." Sardon held his gaze. "Except I will be leaving my post in a few years. There are several candidates for my replacement. Some I have no faith in; others precious little." His eyes sharpened. "You may be able to fool them, assuming you've lived to that point. But some of these fools…" He took a deep breath, seeking calm.

"I'm not telling you to be careful, Doctor. That would be pointless in so many ways. But I am telling you that your ethics, admirable as they are for their sincerity…are ripe for the use of less imaginative minds. Minds that are not paying attention to the actual goals of the TSS and the CIA.

"You won't let that stop you, I'm sure."

"Why are you telling me this, Sardon?" The Doctor asked suspiciously. "You don't have to warn me, and like you said, I won't play anyone's game but my own."

"What was it you said when I asked you why you returned after the Lady Serena's death?" Sardon's smile was paper thin with regret at the loss of that young life. "You mentioned integrity. We see very little of that here, Doctor."

"I also told you I was aware you had the TARDIS wired for destruction."

"Which you and I both know we would only use if desperate. Those things are atrociously expensive. No, Doctor, when you play a game you have three or four motives behind every move. That way you can always pick the one that suits you—which is always to show yourself in the worst possible light-and say the truth without telling the whole truth.

"Your new keepers will not know this about you. They will not appreciate your differences except how it makes you a more valuable weapon. I don't claim to have integrity, Doctor. But I entered this shadowy world for a reason, and I do NOT intend to leave it knowing my years of work have disintegrated into nothing…nor will I allow this Agency to be worse than when I first joined."

The hard resolve in his voice surprised them both; speaking as equals was something neither of them did. They were largely comfortable in their roles: Sardon as the Master and the Doctor as the recalcitrant and immature student. But times were changing and they both knew it.

The CIA was forever working against the shadows…and many of the worst shadows were those inside the office.

The Doctor's mouth was a straight line. "Is that why you had me copied into the Matrix?" He asked quietly.

Sardon was shocked into swallowing. "I didn't know you knew that."

"Child's play, Sardon. Quite illegal, but when has that bothered the Interventionists?" The eyes were dark as Arcalian dye. "Am I to be your weapon after all? A tool of vengeance against your enemies? A tool you can resurrect from death again and again as the need may be?"

"I don't believe it will come to that, but that isn't the point." Sardon told him in a voice lacking in feeling. "I don't trust the future, Doctor. But I know that you are a large part of Gallifrey's. And there are powerful interests who are watching all of us. I will not be unprepared."

"No...no of course you won't." The Doctor answered in the same voice. And his hand reached down to rest over one of the Exile tattoos resting on teh flesh beneath his sleeve.

SSSSSSSSCCCRRRRREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Tears filled the Doctor's eyes. His protective lenses shut down all the way, but he didn't need to see so much anyway. Even stone blind he knew every inch of her.

"There you are!" He crowed, and slapped his hand down on one of the less-used controls. "Got you now, you little—"

Reality happened.

It threw the TARDIS into a spin echoing that of the much-larger craft. Together the ships fell, the smaller one pulled by micro-fine webs of gravity gained by the Feathered Sun's mass. To the Doctor's horror his new CIA Fault Locator shrieked and blew in a burst of mercury and ion.

The TARDIS was now in a war of mass between the cargo ship and herself.

"Oh, no," he murmured around the banshee screams of pained circuits. "The pinhole's messed up my block-transfer equations! Normal space doesn't know if the TARDIS is the size of a call box or bigger than the freighter!"

His small hands quickly dipped over the console. "Not the first time this happened," he murmured. "Remember when we were all shrunk to the size of insects on Earth? Not a good time!" Barb and Ian and Susan…oh, heavens, Susan. She did NOT like those ants!

The little Time Lord felt slightly more confident about his abilities this time around. His body was capable of doing what it needed to do, and his mind was unencumbered by the numbing poisons.

"Time for a new trick, dearie." He said under his breath. If the klaxon lights showed his face was suddenly shining white from sweat, he had good cause.

The Doctor hated to perform mental gyrations in more than 14 dimensions without advance warning—or at least, a very strong cup of coffee.

Outside the TARDIS, the Feathered Serpent was continuing her spin, but it was tighter. She was fast approaching the outer limits of Minyos' dead coronas. Radiation shields erected into high gear, and the last of the emergency alarms called against the perimeter invasion.

The TARDIS, still spinning, did more of it. Under the Doctor's calculations her spatial path sent her like a yo-yo on an infinitely long string. Faster and faster she spun, until thermal waves caught and threw off her nimbus in a cloud of solar rays and red-spectrum particles.

Years later, his Successor would use a similar trick in Venusian Akido—because he would be much bigger that time, and there was no point in treating a large body as a small one.

But in the body he wore now, he was quite small indeed, and he used it to his advantage.

He entered the gravity spin, joined in on the spin, and made it worse. He slipped inside the waves and increased speed until the TARDIS vibrated.

And at the last second before the Feathered Sun entered the Radiation Belt, he landed on that side of the ship.

At the same time he reverted the BTC's to the original dimensions it wore when it shrank to insect size.

He'd never erased those configurations.

You never did know when something might come in handy.

The Feathered Sun shot backwards out of the choking grip of Minyos' gravity, skimmed like a skipping-stone over the soft, flat surface of space, and broke through the Kirkwood Gap's outer skin and almost through the Gap entirely but she had sloughed off enough orbital pull by then, and the startled computers compensated just in (pun not intended) time.

The ship righted itself.

The ship was back on course, if a few weeks behind her original schedule.

The Doctor stared at the image from the Secondary Console Room. Feeling a little shaky, he wiped his face and knelt to pull out a new message cube. This one was even older than the model he'd used in trapping the pinhole, but it would have to do.

A few repairs to the Old Girl and he would be able to return back to the CIA in mostly one piece.

But even as he saturated the paper squares with his thoughts, he kept a very important one away:

He would not repair the TARDIS until he checked on the safety of the Feathered Sun.

Thousands of lives were at stake, and that pinhole had almost wrecked them.