Notes: Torchwood assembles a team to try and correct Rose's timeline. But the clock is ticking and she's getting desperate.
Chapter 6
Pete drove his BMW past the front of the house and around to the garage, where he reversed it in between Jackie's Audi and his old Land Rover. Rose's Peugeot 308 convertible, which she didn't even know that she owned, was parked on the other side of Jackie's Audi.
They got out of the car, Pete took her hand and they walked towards the front of the house. When they started up the steps, the door opened, and Alistair was there waiting for them. Each time the gates opened, it alerted him to an arrival and he was able to greet them as they got to the door.
"Mr Tyler, you managed to finish on time today. Ah, and Miss Tyler, I'm so glad to see you up and about at last."
Rose reached up and kissed him on the cheek. "Hello Alistair, it's good to see you. I mean it really is good to see that you are here."
Alistair looked a bit puzzled by that comment. "May I say your fancy dress is very good. 'Lara Croft' isn't it? Are you going to a party somewhere?"
"Alistair," Pete said, warning him that it wasn't the time or the place for his acerbic wit.
Rose gave him a weak smile. "It's alright Dad. Sorry Alistair, it's been a bitch of a week so far."
"Oh I am sorry ma'am. I didn't mean to offend."
Rose kissed his cheek again. "No offence taken. You would never offend me Alistair, and don't you dare stop givin' us that attitude, it's often the only highlight of a very bad day."
"Very well ma'am. It's nice of you to say."
They went down the hall and into the Sitting Room, where Jackie was watching the news and Tony was playing with his action figures, waiting for the news to finish so that he could have the children's TV on again. His face lit up when he saw his big sister.
"Rosieee!" He leapt to his feet and ran over to be picked up in a huge hug.
Rose held him under his bottom so that he was at head height.
"Mummy said that you were asleep for three days. Does that mean you were awake for three nights? I bet you were tired if you were awake for three nights. Mummy won't let me stay up late, even when I don't have to go to school. Was it top secret? I bet you were being a secret agent, I bet that's what it was and you can't tell me about it."
"She'd tell yer if you'd let her get a word in edgeways yer little chatterbox," Jackie said.
Rose was laughing, and she gave him a cuddle. Oh, how she hoped that she would be able to hold EJ again like this. She imagined that if he inherited John's gob that his chatter would be ten times worse.
Jackie stood patiently waiting for them to finish their greeting. "Well?" she asked.
"Malcolm, Roger and Chrissie are working into the night to put the old Dimension Cannon back together. Malcolm thinks that they may be able to use the time slip to travel back and correct the timeline," Pete told her.
"Oh that's great. There ya go Sweetheart; they'll soon have you back with your family." She squeezed Rose's arm with gentle encouragement.
"I think I'll go up an' have a shower before dinner. Is my room still my room?" she asked
"Of course it is Sweetheart. It'll always be your room whether you have your own flat, or your own house," Jackie said.
"Thanks Mum, that means a lot at the moment." She left the room and headed up the stairs.
When she came down to dinner, she was wearing jeans and a baggy sweatshirt, with her hair loose around her shoulders. Jack and Mickey had finished their shift, and were in the dining room ready to eat.
After the meal, they sat and watched some TV. They couldn't really concentrate on anything because they were all wondering how the Dimension Cannon was coming along. All except for Tony, who was playing with his toys.
When it came to Tony's bedtime, Rose asked if she could take him up. Tony was certainly enthusiastic about this; his sister usually told him a story of her adventures with the man with sticky up hair.
Rose recalled an adventure John had told her, about meeting William Shakespeare with Martha, and how he fought three witches who weren't really witches. They were Carrionites, and in 1599, they planned to use Shakespeare's new play, Love's Labour's Won, to free the rest of their race from the Darkness and take over Earth. They considered humanity as a pestilence, and wanted to replace them to establish the 'Millennium of Blood'.
Tony was hanging on every word, wanting to know how the Doctor beat the witches. He also wanted to know who Martha was, she hadn't mentioned her before. Rose then remembered that from Tony's point of view, she had never left this world, never met the Doctor again and knew nothing of his continuing adventures in the other universe.
After she had finished telling the story, with Tony cheering at the end, she was surprised that after sleeping for three days, she had tired quickly and was ready for bed herself.
The next morning though, Rose was awake early and felt refreshed. She was eager to get back to Torchwood to see what progress had been made. She had breakfast with her family and then got a lift in with Jack and Mickey
The Lever Room had been transformed overnight to its former glory. Malcolm, Roger and Chrissie had worked through the night, staggering their rest periods so that they could each get some sleep in turn.
Chrissie came into the room, rubbing a towel over her hair. She had just woken up and had been down to the locker room to have a shower and then grabbed some toast and orange juice from the Standby Room.
"Wow! You guys are miracle workers," Rose said, giving her a hug in greeting.
"It was the shift rotation of engineers and technicians that did most of the hard work, we just directed them to put things back in the right place and made sure it all connected together properly."
"When will it be ready to go?" Jack asked her.
"We're going to do calibration and tuning this morning and hopefully a test jump with a drone around lunch time."
"Right, what can we do to help?" Mickey asked.
Chrissie indicated the computer terminals at the entrance to the Lever Room. "Each of those consoles has a calibration program on it. If you wouldn't mind overseeing the software, that would be a big help. I'm afraid it's a bit boring."
"Hey, I can do boring if it means Rose gets her life back," Mickey said with a lopsided smile.
Rose kissed him on the cheek. "Awh, thanks Mickey. I don't deserve friends like you."
They spent the next few hours watching progress bars show the percentages of tasks completed as the systems ran self diagnosis, tuning, voltage and current tests, tests under load, magnetic field shimming.
It was boring but essential. If Rose was going to trust her life to this equipment, she wanted to know it was all working properly. She glanced up at the status display on the wall which said 'Retro-closure in 10 hours, 37 minutes and 17 seconds'.
Malcolm and Roger had calculated the rate of 'hardening' of the walls of reality, with a safety margin built in that gave them the last moment at which it would be possible to use the Dimension Cannon. When the count reached zero, the cannon would stop working.
It was a sobering thought. Rose started another test running which said it had approximately ten minutes to complete. She took this opportunity to go and fetch three coffees from the machine on this floor and bring them back for her friends.
Pete came through from his office to see how things were going.
"If I close my eyes, I can see a status bar that says '67%'," Mickey said.
They all laughed and agreed that they could see the same, but kept at it until all the tests were completed. Malcolm and Roger appeared from the guest quarters, where they had caught up on their sleep.
"Good work people," Malcolm said. "It looks like we're ready to start some trials. We'll send the test drone through a few times and see what happens. Why don't you go and grab some lunch and we'll call you when we're ready?"
They were in the restaurant eating the 'special' of the day, which was chicken tikka masala, when Chrissie came to find them.
"Eat up guys. When you've finished, suit up. You're good to go."
Retro-closure in 7 hours, 30 minutes and 47 seconds
WHOP!
Three black uniformed people appeared in a dim and dusty Lever Room on the 'other' Earth. It didn't look good, the whole place was deserted and abandoned.
"I was afraid of this," Jack said. "The place has been left untouched since the 'Battle of Canary Wharf' six years ago."
"Let's see if we can find the power switch," Mickey suggested.
Rose was silent, staring at the lever where she had last seen the Doctor before her life had changed forever. There was a clunk as Mickey threw the lever on the isolator, and the room lights flickered to life.
"Okay, make sure your helmet cameras are recording. Malcolm needs all the data we can get," Rose said, pulling her eyes away.
"I'm going to find the field coil controls and see what state they're in," Jack announced.
He found the helium compressor that super cooled the coils and made them superconducting. He flicked the switch and the pump started squeaking. He would have to keep an eye on the temperature gauge to see if the coils would become cold enough to function.
Back in the Lever Room, Rose and Mickey were booting up the computers and attaching external hard drives to download all the data. They spent the half hour examining all of the equipment in the room, using their scanners and helmet cameras.
After half an hour, the jump buttons were recharged and they jumped back to their own universe.
The clock was still ticking.
Pete had called a briefing in the Executive Meeting Room so that Malcolm and Roger could explain their findings.
"It appears that the Lever Room has been left abandoned for six years, which has caused the superconductive field coils to 'warm up' and become ineffective. It will take weeks to refill them with helium and cool them down enough to become superconducting again," Malcolm said.
"Why don't we just jump back to a month after the breach closure and use the Lever Room then?" Jack said. "Once UNIT had closed down Torchwood One and replaced the windows that had been smashed by the flying Daleks and Cybermen, the Tower was sealed."
"Jack! Why didn't you say before?" Rose asked him.
"Sorry Sweetheart. I didn't know the equipment would be in such a bad state."
"Okay, so let's try again," Rose said. "Malcolm, is there anything we need to take with us to make this mission work?"
"We've identified some equipment that needs replacing, and some that needs adding to that will create a Dimension Cannon on that side. We'll put it in the holdalls for you to take with you," Roger said.
"Well let's get a move on then, we're runnin' outta time." Rose said; the urgency in her voice obvious.
"This meeting is adjourned," Pete said. "Everyone up to the Lever Room. We go as soon as those holdalls are ready."
Retro-closure in 6 hours, 10 seconds
WHOP!
Rose, Jack and Mickey jumped into a Lever Room that was pretty much as Rose remembered it on the worst day of her life.
"Now this is more like it!" Mickey said. "Let's get to work."
Jack went to the Plant Room and started the helium compressor. The guages showed that the equipment was in good shape and would operate as expected.
"Oh bugger!" Rose exclaimed as Jack came back.
"What's up, what's wrong?" Jack asked, anticipating a problem.
"It's those calibration tests we ran this mornin', we've gotta run 'em all over again on this lot."
Jack and Mickey groaned, but sat at the computers and started to run the diagnostic software. This would take a couple of hours, and then they would have to send the test drone to February 2014.
When that was all done, Jack and Mickey could jump back to the Lever Room and Rose could use this Dimension Cannon to send a message to the original project team, warning them that the Earth was going to disappear and that her other self should go a few minutes earlier.
"If I ever see a progress bar again after today, I'll scream," Jack said with a laugh, an hour later.
"I know, but when this works, none of this will have happened, so I think we can stand it for another hour or so."
"I hadn't thought about that Babe. What happens to us when you correct your timeline?" Mickey said.
"Well, I don't think it will cause a paradox or anythin' if I tell ya. You come back to this world Mickey, and start seein' one of the Doctors old companions, Martha Jones."
"What's she like?" Mickey asked.
"She's a smart, attractive doctor who works for UNIT."
"Result!" Mickey said with his lopsided smile.
"Jack, you are honorary uncle to my son."
Retro-closure in 3 hours, 54 minutes and 32 seconds
They had completed all of the calibration and tuning tests and were ready to try a test jump. Rose would send a drone to an empty office in February 2014 (Pete's World Calendar), where it would gather data for half an hour while it recharged and then return to its point of origin.
"Okay, here goes," she said as she remotely activated the Dimension Button.
It disappeared into the distance without moving, in that weird, transdimensional sort of way. There was nothing to do now but wait, and that was agonizing, because the clock was still ticking and Rose's window of opportunity for making the jump was getting smaller and smaller.
30 minutes passed, and they were looking to the empty space where the briefcase sized test drone had disappeared from. They all checked their watches. 30 minutes and 17 seconds, it was late. Rose looked nervously between Jack and Mickey, who had the same look of concern.
"Where is it?" she asked as it got to 31 minutes. "The digital auto timer was set to 30 minutes, it should have been back by now!"
"Let's check all the data, maybe someone found it and moved it," Jack suggested.
"What if they did? The auto return brings it back to its original time and place. That was a built in safety feature," Rose reminded them.
"I know! But that hasn't happened this time. We need data to find out what went wrong."
Rose knew Jack was right, but desperation was setting in. "What if I make the jump anyway? I could send my message and find the drone at the same time."
"Rose, listen to yourself. That briefcase could have jumped into the breach! Do you really want to go the same way as the Cybermen and the Daleks?" Mickey asked her.
"No, of course not. But I don't want to live without my husband or my son." Her voice was full of emotion. "I've only got just over three hours to send a message to the old project team before the walls of reality harden and close."
"What about if we start those pyramids again?" Mickey suggested.
Jack shook his head. "Firstly, the death and destruction caused by the earthquakes and eruptions would be unacceptable, and secondly, we don't know what is trying to come through. It could be worse than the Daleks."
"Oh yeah. Good point. So this really is a last ditch attempt then."
"Yes. So let's get to it and find out what went wrong," Jack said.
They went back to the computers and started pouring over the data to see what they had missed. There had to be a calibration error or mistuning somewhere that would account for the drone not coming back.
Then they heard it!
Quiet at first, as though it was at the end of a very long tunnel, then getting louder, stronger. It was the sound of the very fabric of time and space being bent into a doorway. The sound of the universe breathing. It was the unmistakable sound of…. a TARDIS!
