Mother

3

"This ship didn't look this size from outside," said Shomny, slamming the TARDIS door shut to keep out the worst of the cold while Jenny and Romana tried to warm up. Once again, trekking across the planet's surface had nearly incapacitated them in a matter of minutes, but the TARDIS had boosted the interior temperature to compensate.

"It's bigger on the inside," said Jenny, shivering.

She didn't allow Shomny any deeper into the ship, instead ordering her to stay put while she and Romana went about piloting. Using the Doctor's sonic screwdriver as a beacon they moved the ship right into the loading bay they'd entered through earlier, and Jenny was enormously relieved that she wouldn't have to brave the exterior again. She was putting on a brave face, but the weather there was nothing like the frozen tundra of Tungtrun she'd lived on at the beginning of her life. Tungtrun was the Sahara by comparison.

"You see?" said Jenny, "We're not planning to run away at all."

"I don't trust technology like this," Shomny argued, "Bigger on the inside – how does that work?"

"Well, it's, um…" Jenny paused, "It's like…"

"It contains an additional dimension," Romana stepped in, "'Time And Relative Dimension In Space' – TARDIS. Has the Doctor never explained it?"

"She has, I just… well, I don't always listen to her, honestly," said Jenny. The Doctor would make things transdimensional for her if she asked, she'd not learnt to do it herself.

When they disembarked, Jenny was again struck by the emptiness of the loading bay.

"If you're struggling for space with all the animals and people, why is this room empty? It's huge." Shomny looked at her like she was an idiot. "What?"

"It's our only way in and out," she said, "If we had animals and people here, the temperature change from opening the door would destroy them. Nikomar has a plan to move people in once we leave the planet."

"You don't have an airlock?"

"On the roof. We can't go climbing up and down the ship, it would take too long. We'd be dead." Jenny nodded.

"…Generator room, then?" she said, "Lead the way." Shomny scoffed and walked off, Jenny and Romana right behind her.

"Does the Doctor tell you a lot about Gallifrey?" asked Romana eventually, Shomny leading them into the bowels of the ship.

"No, but I don't ask," said Jenny, "I grew up on Earth."

"Predictable. What was Earth like?"

"It's not something I enjoy talking about," said Jenny.

"But the Doctor, she was-"

"She wasn't there."

"…Also predictable, it's unfortunate to say."

"Here," Shomny pointed out a door, letting them go through first, even though they were the alien interlopers. There were two people down there, presumably engineers, but they weren't working. "What are you playing at, Fingers? Don't you have work?"

"Work on what?" said 'Fingers', indignant, "I can't fix this. I'm just building up the courage to tell Nikomar."

"You're fucking useless, get out of here." He didn't move.

"Who are they?" he nodded at Jenny and Romana. The second engineer didn't say a word, just sat there staring morosely at the wall.

"Aliens. They want to help us."

"Aliens? They don't look like aliens. They look like us."

"Obviously they're not us, though," Shomny shook her head, "And I've just seen their ship. It's… even the Temporites don't have technology like that." She may have insulted the TARDIS while she was on board, but few people were immune to its charms. "Did you hear me? I told you to clear out, both of you.

"I don't care how advanced they are," 'Fingers' stood up, his second engineer following suit, "Nobody can fix that. It's fried. Good luck." And he took his leave.

He was right, though. The state the generator was in – it must have overheated in the storm and melted most of its internals. Wires were melded together in a big mush, things were fused to the circuit board where they shouldn't be, and there was a horrible smell of corrosive acid stuck to the air. There were multiple generators, but as far as Jenny could deduce, none of them was auxiliary – a poor design choice she didn't understand, unless they needed the extra space that desperately (there were bedrolls and old pillows in there, too). They needed every ounce of power and she didn't see a way for it to be diverted.

"What do you think?" she asked Romana, completely stumped.

"I think he was right, unfortunately. I'm not sure how you would fix this, the entire thing really needs replacing. We certainly don't have time for that, with the star," she said.

"So, you can't do anything? Great," said Shomny.

"Nobody said that," said Romana, "I'm an excellent problem solver, and I'm sure Jenny is, too."

"Where are the wires that feed out from this? Those up there?" Jenny nodded at the wires between the generator and the ceiling. "Because they look alright, except for the connections. The problem – a fire, I suppose – must have started inside the generator when the shields were overpowered. Even if we fixed this, another bout of radiation would probably cause the same fault."

"Then what are you going to do? We need to leave," Shomny insisted.

"I might have an idea… come on, there are some things I need to look at on the TARDIS."

"You have a spare generator, then?" said Shomny, following them as they left once again, having now assessed the damage.

"I don't know what we have, I'll need to look around," said Jenny. "Don't want to get anybody's hopes up until I've done a thorough search."

"But you do think you can help us?" Shomny implored.

"The worst case is that we load all of you onto the TARDIS. I'm not sure how many animals we'd have time to bring, though."

"We can't leave them."

"We'll do what we can, I promise. You're not going to die because of that star."

"Where are we going, precisely?" asked Romana once they were back on the TARDIS, "The Doctor's archives aren't the easiest or fastest to navigate."

"We're not looking at the Doctor's archives, we're looking at Oswin's, down here," said Jenny, heading down a gentle ramp from the central column towards another door. "She used to have this place up a big staircase, but it's beyond me why, since she's nearly always in a wheelchair. I think it was some sort of joke. Luckily, she isn't here."

"Wouldn't it be more helpful if she was?" said Romana.

"Believe me, you don't want to meet her," said Jenny.

Oswin's lab was just as small and cramped as it had been since she'd first built it. She kept it somewhat organised, in her own baffling way, and archived old projects to keep everything current. But it was still ruled by a convoluted system Jenny had never even tried to decipher, making her dread the task of trying to find anything. There were many benches and tables, lining the walls and sticking out as islands every so often, all drowning in prototypes, gadgets, sketchbook paper, computer parts – everything Oswin had been working on when she'd left that morning.

The lights flickered on. Jenny put her hands together.

"Alright," she said, "We're looking for tokamaks."

"In here? It's too small," said Romana.

"Micro-tokamaks. It's her hobby at the moment."

"What's a tokamak?" asked Shomny.

"Nuclear fusion generator," said Jenny, "If we're lucky, she has a working one. But I have a backup; we found an isotope a few months ago, neon-99, that you could build a fission reactor with."

"Do we have time to build a fission reactor?" asked Romana.

"Probably not," said Jenny, lifting up stacks of paper, "But I'm sure she has a working prototype around here."

"And she's a Time Lord as well?"

"No, a human."

"That's not possible. A human who lives on the TARDIS and builds 'micro-tokamaks'? For fun?"

"She's very clever," said Jenny, picking up a device she could not discern the use for, "Allegedly." Whatever she was holding, a cylindrical object covered in gizmos, began to move, pumping and hissing in a way that immediately made her put it down. But then she realised it wasn't anything filthy, it was something Oswin had shown her a while ago for easy water treatment. "Here, you could've done with this on that salt planet," she said, "It would've cleaned the water right up."

"How intriguing," said Romana, looking at the device on the desk. Eventually it stopped moving. Jenny had no idea how it was getting power – unless it was purely mechanical? Intrigued, she picked up the nearest of Oswin's many physical notebooks. She managed to find sketches in there, but the writing was completely illegible.

Romana, over her shoulder, asked, "What language is this? Those aren't any letters or words I recognise."

"I'm sure it's beyond anybody's ability to translate," said Jenny. She could barely read Oswin's handwriting when it was in a real language, let alone one of her esoteric shorthand techniques.

"Fairly recently – well, recently to me – the Doctor and I were in Paris, investigating Mona Lisa copies. It's remarkable, but da Vinci would encode his notes much like this."

"She's a genius," said Jenny simply, flipping through the notebook and looking for drawings of tokamaks. She found none, however, just more illegible scrawling and other knickknacks.

"The sketches alone are fascinating," said Romana, "What else does she build?"

"Have a look around," said Jenny, shutting the notebook when it yielded nothing useful.

"It's a terrible shame she isn't here."

"Believe me, it's not. You don't want to meet Oswin."

"Is this her?" Romana had found a framed photograph propped up in front of a surprisingly neat row of tiny screwdrivers and a clear(ish) workspace. Jenny looked over. It was Oswin and Adam Mitchell standing next to each other with an ornate building in the background Jenny didn't recognise. They were both beaming. Jenny wondered who had taken the picture.

"Her and her boyfriend," said Jenny. "Don't pick that up, though," she warned, stopping Romana when she was about to do just that, "She'll be able to tell if it gets moved."

"You're moving all sorts of things."

"But I'm not a stranger."

"You two are talking a lot to say this is urgent," said Shomny, lingering near the door and staying clear of Oswin's many inventions.

"It's rare anybody tells me I'm talking a lot," said Jenny.

"Communication is vitally important in teamwork," said Romana curtly, "How are we supposed to coordinate otherwise? Besides, Jenny is the only one who's been here before and the only one who knows what these 'micro-tokamaks' looks like."

"Looks like a tokamak," said Jenny bluntly, "But smaller."

"And what does that look like?" asked Shomny.

"A metal doughnut. She could have enclosed the whole thing in a sphere, though. They're never the same."

"What's a doughnut?"

"A ring shape," said Jenny. Of course they didn't have doughnuts on that planet. "And it'll probably still be quite large." Shomny still didn't join them in their search, but Jenny didn't press her. It would be better not to have random aliens poking around Oswin's laboratory.

"What on Earth is this?" asked Romana, pulling something out from a pile of clutter. A few things clattered to the floor around it.

"That is a hoverboard," said Jenny, "But be careful with it."

"Careful with a hoverboard? They're rudimentary technology. It's a simple case of inverting a magnetic field to generate repulsion."

"Yes. Usually. But that one's got a quantum levitation mechanism using an antimatter particle," said Jenny, "Turn it on, you energise the particle, and then it shoots all over the place. Impossible to steer, even for me."

"Gosh. Why not use the magnetic field?"

"She was thinking of using quantum levitation for one of her wheelchairs, but she hasn't been able to iterate on it enough. The antigravity uses less power. I believe 'elegant' was how she described it." Romana carefully put it down, much to Jenny's relief. She'd been Oswin's test subject for the thing for months, and had eventually quit when she got a particularly bad sprain and didn't want to chance a broken neck.

"Could the Doctor not help?"

Jenny nearly laughed. "Oswin doesn't let the Doctor anywhere near this stuff."

"But you're allowed?"

"Oswin likes me. She often does not like the Doctor," said Jenny.

"And yet the Doctor lets her live on the TARDIS."

"She has to. Oswin's Clara's twin sister."

"Twins?" said Romana, looking back at the photograph on the desk again. Jenny, however, had found something else interesting, pulling out a cylinder, a foot tall and made of transparent densi, containing a frozen explosion.

"What's that?" asked Shomny.

"Experimental stasis pod," said Jenny, setting it down on the main desk, "She made this for me, but forgot about it."

"What did you need it for? Holding explosions?"

"No, this is only a cornflour reaction she has stuck – I need it for better food storage. It's much better to put meats into stasis than freezing them."

"Far more energy intensive."

"Yes. One of these tokamaks, it's in the base," she said, nodding at the cylinder.

"Then, can we take it?" asked Shomny.

"Maybe as a last resort. But let's keep looking." Jenny left the stasis pod out so that she could remind Oswin to keep working on it later.

"Seems rather complicated, again."

"She doesn't do things by halves."

"And she builds these things for you?"

"She builds things for anybody who asks," Jenny said.

"She doesn't mind?"

"No. She likes to keep busy."

"And you still say I'm not allowed to meet her? She may be the most interesting person who ever lived."

"Don't let the Doctor hear you say that. She'll be terribly jealous."

"What kind of a man is this 'boyfriend'? Is he just as intriguing?"

"He's…" Jenny didn't know what to say. She had never really understood what Oswin saw in Adam Mitchell. "He's nice. But Shomny's right, we should really focus."

"A sensitive issue, I see."

"What is?"

"You were very keen to talk, and then this boyfriend enters the conversation…" She wanted Jenny to interrupt her, but Jenny didn't bother.

"It's my life, it's not a soap opera," she said after a moment, pushing a large box out of the way. She should've left Romana with Nikomar and brought the Doctor, or better yet, gone alone.

"I didn't mean to upset you."

"I'm not upset. I don't like personal questions, that's all."

"So, when the questions are only about her, that's alright, but when you're involved?"

"You could ask me what I had for breakfast this morning and I wouldn't tell you."

"What did you have for breakfast this morning?"

"Nice try."

"You are just like your father. He never tells me anything I want to know, either."

"Yes, he's always been very good at that."

"You're going to go all quiet now, aren't you?"

"That depends. Ah-ha," she said, pushing aside enough of Oswin's clutter that finally, after all that, she found what they'd been searching for. A spheroid, only a little larger than Jenny's head, covered in tubes and ports for more wires, adorned with bells and whistles. "Here it is. The one I was looking for." She lifted it with both arms, needing all her strength. On the top, it had a word engraved. "It's called 'Sunny'," Jenny told Shomny clearly, "Says so right on here."

"She named it? It's just a generator," said Shomny, "And I don't see how something that size could power our ship."

"Oswin names everything. And this thing is a star, it could power a whole city," said Jenny, "It will work wonders, you'll see. Come on, then. We'll go install it. And Romana can tell me a story, in the meantime."

"What story would that be?" asked Romana, the both of them following Jenny back out of the lab.

"You can tell me all about how you met the Doctor."

The Doctor, Nikomar, and Anzuro were cloistered together on the bridge. There were computer screens flashing up warnings, but they had long been silenced. It was a little like mood lighting. He had been waiting for confirmation that Jenny and Romana had at least taken a look at the generator from the engineers, and following that, was making tea.

"It's impossible to talk history without tea," was what he'd said a while ago, before he went about boiling a strange, cube-shaped kettle. The Doctor only watched, very curious. The bridge was full of plants. Geb, the alien parrot, was perched on a small tree, chirping every now and then.

"Do you not have a hydroponics lab? A greenhouse?" she asked, looking at the plants, "How do you make oxygen locally?"

"There's a lab, but it's full," said Nikomar, back to her, carefully focusing on his work.

"Fuller than this?"

"Overgrown, after so long," said Anzuro, "Trying to preserve as much as possible. But without the generator, it's almost useless."

"They'll still make oxygen for you," said the Doctor, "Without you needing to – what was it you said earlier? Pump in air from outside and heat it up?"

"It's a separate system," said Nikomar, "If we used the same ventilation, it would bring enough cold air to freeze all the plants down there."

"Isn't that a risk when you take off? An ad hoc ventilation system designed to reach the outside?"

"It feeds in through the airlock on the roof," said Nikomar, the kettle hissing softly, "We just pull the tubes back in and close it when it's time to leave. Hopefully later today."

"I admire your ingenuity," said the Doctor.

"Here," he said, turning with two mugs, made of worn metal and also shaped like cubes.

"You really like squares here, huh?" she said.

"You drink it from the corner, and the leaves flow through it properly. Every sip is at the height of its flavour." The Doctor took the mug, and he kept the other for himself.

"None for Anzuro?" she asked. Nikomar laughed.

"I hate that stuff," said Anzuro, "I don't know how he drinks it."

"Maybe it's an acquired taste," said Nikomar, "But the tea is part of Iavai's history. If you're telling the truth, this is our first contact with an alien race, and I intend to make a good impression."

"It's funny," said the Doctor, "If you came to my home, I'd offer you tea first, as well."

"They have tea on your home planet?" he asked.

"My home isn't on my home planet. I live elsewhere. An immigrant, really. It's them who like the tea, although, they did steal it originally."

"From another planet? More aliens?"

"No, they stole it from another country on the same planet – it's a long story, involves colonialism, centuries of warfare, industrial espionage, the drug trade… but I think you owe me some stories of your own, first."

"He won't tell you a thing until you drink that," said Anzuro, checking the computer to see if there was a change in the generator status.

The Doctor sipped the tea very slowly, not wanting to burn her mouth since it was just water and tea leaves without Clara there to drown it in milk and sugar. She could not draw an analogue to any tea she'd had on Earth, one of the only planets that had such a diversity of tea, but it was very naturally sweet, and a little nutty.

She nodded her head, "This is delicious. Do you have milk here? I think it would benefit from adding milk."

"Milk? In tea? That's disgusting," said Nikomar.

"It's disgusting regardless," said Anzuro. The Doctor only laughed.

"Each to their own," she said. "But now. Tell me. Why have they built a power station around that star?"

"That's not something we orphans down here have ever been privy to," said Nikomar.

"Orphans?"

"It's what they call us, some sick joke, because we don't reproduce the way they do."

"You're not the same species, then?"

"Once we were. Not until they left to go live on that thing in the sky and froze the planet. But they were changing long before that, 'Temporites'," he said the word like it was a bad taste in his mouth. The Doctor was surprised he didn't spit onto the floor in disgust.

"Why did they leave, and you all stayed?"

"My father always told me they thought it was their 'destiny'. The star was calling to them. They renamed it, and everything – we still call it the Odo, like always, and they call it 'Kasterborous'." The Doctor coughed on her tea. "What does that even mean? Sounds like nothing in our language. Nonsense."

"Kasterborous? It called to them?" she asked quietly. He nodded.

"It means something to you?"

"It means a lot of things to me. But you still didn't tell me why them, and not you."

"They're the elite, they ruled the whole planet, with their 'houses'. Not that they call them houses anymore – we hear their communications all the time."

"Noble houses…" she sighed, "How is it that so many different species come to the conclusion that an aristocracy is a good way to run a society, any society?" At least on Gallifrey, everybody had been part of a house and a bloodline. And they didn't have peasants, or kings and queens. "The aristos all ditched you and built that thing, then? Typical."

"Left us here to die," said Nikomar, bitter. "The number of distress calls we've sent… They have the means to help us, all we want to do is leave. It's not like it matters to them."

"You will leave, I promise," said the Doctor, "I've got my two best guys working on it right now. Worse comes to worst, I take you outta here on my ship."

"You'd do that for us? People you've never met?"

"I do things like that for people I've never met all the time. You should see what I do for my friends – god, or for my wife. The things I do for my wife. And she'd love this tea, if she were here." The Doctor drank some more.

"You have marriage and weddings where you come from?" asked Anzuro. She nearly laughed.

"Sort of. Where she comes from, it's important. She's an alien. Or maybe I'm the alien. And I'm here today because of her."

"Oh?" said Nikomar. The Doctor leant forward to talk to them both seriously.

"I believe that one of your Temporites up there has wandered into my universe and developed a bit of a grudge against me. Kidnapped and tried to kill my better half just a few hours ago. She's at home recuperating," she explained. "That's why I'm really here, investigating."

"Not just a kind stranger, then?" said Nikomar.

"Oh, I wouldn't say that. I can be very kind, and especially strange, when the mood takes me," she smiled. "How long ago did they leave to build the Frame?"

"Eighty years," said Nikomar.

"Eighty years around that star…" The Doctor paused, thinking. K-9 had told her the orbital period of the planet. She did some quick maths. Almost two Earth centuries.

"As soon as it was done, they cut off all contact with us here. Renamed the planet 'Iavai Minor' – that thing is Iavai Supreme," another thing he said with more contempt than the Doctor thought possible.

"The storms started after that," said Anzuro, "My grandfather – he was an astronomer, too – he always said, Odo was fine before they got their hands on it."

"There's a temporal rift up there, that's why," said the Doctor, "A tear in space and time. But I've never seen rift storms like that, even back home. There's another species in this universe, the Tharils, I was with them earlier. They've never dared come into this galaxy, but they call this place 'the Bleed'. That's because of that star. It's screaming. It doesn't have long left."

"We know," said Nikomar, "We're leaving because of it."

"But why aren't they leaving?" she continued, "To build a thing like that, you can't be stupid. They must be syphoning all that solar energy for something. Don't you know what they're doing?"

"Messing around with space-time?" Nikomar suggested, based on what the Doctor had said. "We don't know."

"You said you hear their communications."

"We don't recognise most of the words they use," said Anzuro, "They speak their own language now. And what we do here, we can't make sense of it. 'Nurseries', 'mothers', 'Kasterborous' – they're trying to be something, become something."

"Something that couldn't be further from us," Nikomar finished. "It's hard to believe we were the same species. Once. And they were just rich. Now they've degenerated so much they can't see that that thing is going to kill them, kill all of us, if they don't stop. Hell, for all we know, they're trying to detonate it on purpose. They're sick." She drank. Geb made some more noises and Nikomar got up to feed him something else.

"You have a family, then?" Anzuro asked her.

"Of course. You met Jenny, she's my daughter, like I said."

"I have a little girl. Merena."

"You mentioned her earlier. How old is she?"

"Two." Roughly five on Earth.

"A great age to be."

"My wife Lelphia works in the greenhouse, with the plants," he said. "She splits her time between that and the other children."

"Always nurturing," the Doctor smiled, "Clara's no good with plants. But she's a teacher. I'm the one who likes the plants." She regularly took fresh cuttings from the TARDIS greenhouse to grow new, alien plants and adorn the house with them. "You'll be able to make a life with them somewhere else."

"We don't even know where we're headed," he sighed.

"I'll see if I can do something about that. Romana probably knows a place."

"I don't think we've been able to tell you as much as you'd like, I'm afraid," said Nikomar, returning, Geb the parrot now satisfied.

"I've heard plenty, don't you worry. But maybe I should go see how they're getting on with the-" By serendipity, the alarms stopped flashing and a message that the life support was back online appeared on one of the screens. "What'd I tell you! My best guys."

"You really did help us," said Anzuro.

"Of course. I made a promise, and I never break those," she said firmly.

She continued to talk to Anzuro about his family – Nikomar absorbed with checking the computers – asking what kind of a life he'd like his daughter to have when they were away from the apocalyptic star, until her own wayward daughter returned to the bridge with Romana and Shomny.

"How did you fix it? What was the problem?" she asked immediately.

"Whole thing was fried by the rift storm," said Jenny, "I stole one of Oswin's tokamaks and installed that. Should have more than enough power to maintain the shields at an even higher capacity."

"I saw that," said Nikomar, "We're operating at almost double shield strength than usual. What did you say you installed?"

"A tokamak," said Romana, "It's-"

"A fusion generator," Anzuro said. "Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt. I didn't think they were possible, the power consumption alone-"

"Don't worry about any of that," said Jenny, "It'll be fine. It only needs a tiny amount of hydrogen as fuel."

"That's remarkable, a working fusion generator? We could power the entire ship," Anzuro was amazed.

"Looks like you have some new responsibilities as the resident physicist," said the Doctor, getting up from her seat. "Romana – I was just telling Nikomar that you might know a destination for this ship when it takes off. A habitable world."

"I'd have to consult K-9," she said, "But we can transmit you some coordinates. And I can inform the Tharils, I'm sure they'll assist you."

"I don't know how to thank the three of you – we're going to get off this planet," said Nikomar, "We're going to escape."

"You certainly are," said the Doctor, "And we should leave, too. Sooner the better."

"Wait," he said. Goodbyes would be cut short so that they could make their escape from the system, but he still paused and picked up the tea plant he'd taken a cutting from earlier, with its light pink leaves and thorns. "Here. We have plenty more in the greenhouse."

"That's… thank you," said the Doctor, taking it carefully in its cube-shaped pot, "This is wonderful. I'll treasure it."

"And we'll treasure the generator that's going to save our species." He put his hands together, "Alright. Anzuro, Shomny, this is it. We're preparing for take-off, now. Go and find the pilots, we're in action."

The rush began. People scrambled to tie things down, make headcounts, gather their families, and take stock of their supplies. It was so hectic that people didn't pay the three Time Lords any notice as they made their way back to the docking bay and the TARDIS.

"You really stole one of Oswin's tokamaks? She won't be happy about that," said the Doctor.

"She'll forgive me," said Jenny, indifferent. "What's your plant?"

"Tea. Very nice tea. I'll make you some when we get home."

In the TARDIS, she put the plant down carefully on the chair and set about taking off.

"See what K-9 says about getting some safe coordinates," the Doctor told Romana while she did that, also pointing out various things on the console for Jenny to do. The TARDIS thrummed, ticker tape already giving her updates on the condition of the star. Its volatility had already increased by no small amount, even though they hadn't been on Iavai for very long at all.

Romana got a destination. The Doctor, in orbit around the planet, patched into the ship's comms, getting Nikomar on the bridge.

"Did you leave already?" he said, crackling with static.

"We don't want to hold you up. You're free to go. And I've got your coordinates. You do have a warp drive, don't you?"

"Yes. We'd have no hope to escape without one."

"Romana's sending them through now," she said, watching Romana type out the long number carefully, "I'll try to organise a Tharil envoy for you. Some kind of welcoming committee."

"Thank you, Doctor, for everything."

"It's my pleasure. But, seriously, you only have hours until that star-"

"We know. I've got the coordinates. The pilots are ready."

"Bon voyage! Allons-y!"

With bated breath, the three of them crowded around the monitor to watch the ship, a tiny speck drifting away from the brilliant white tundra of the planet, float into space, obscured from view. But they saw the photonic boom when the warp drive kicked in and sent them out of the system. They were gone. Beyond the bounds of the TARDIS's local communications.

But the wave from the energy burst reached the Frame rapidly, triggering another rift storm. Again, the TARDIS was hit, losing power for even longer this time, almost knocking the Doctor's new tea plant to the floor. The console spat sparks and hissed, a little smoky. Flames broke out.

"Fire!" said Romana. Jenny was the only one who knew where the fire extinguisher was, diving beneath the console to pick it up. She pulled out the pin and blasted foam until the flames were put out, and the TARDIS groaned in response.

"She can't take many more of these storms," said the Doctor, concerned. "Makes me wonder how their Frame is able to do it."

"You haven't told us what you learned yet," said Romana once she had checked that K-9 was alright after he almost slid off the console platform into the cavity of electronics below. "What did Nikomar tell you?"

"Not as much as I'd've liked. Almost two-hundred years ago, the Temporites upped sticks and went to build the sphere. From what I gather, they have some strange way of reproducing that's caused the species to split. The star was fine before they went up there and started doing something to the rift. Trying to open it, maybe – like that's ever a good idea," she sighed. "But that's not even the worst part."

"What's the worst part?" asked Romana.

"That star. The Temporites have renamed it. They call it Kasterborous."

"That's not possible. Where would they get that name from?"

"Exactly. It's the constellation where Gallifrey is," she added for Jenny's benefit.

"I know that," said Jenny stiffly.

"Doctor," said Romana, deathly serious, "You don't think…?"

"That Gallifrey is on the other side of that rift? I do. And I think they're trying to punch their way through."