-8-

Gallifrey's first time traveller.

The space dock facility was old and antiquated; it had long since been abandoned by the Gallifreyans, built in the first decades of Gallifrey's long-range space exploration era. As with most civilisations that developed spaceflight, Gallifrey had realised very early on the problems of building spaceships in a high-gravity environment, such as on the surface of a planet. Many spaceships and probes, and space stations were simply too large to be built on the planet, and transported into space, so they were sent up in parts and assembled in orbit.

It was the same with spaceships. But there were facilities for building smaller ships, landing large ones and researching new technologies and sciences. The dock facility was spread out like a giant tree, with branches spreading out for miles and miles across the surface of the planet. The dock had been abandoned a long time ago, replaced by more advanced space dock facilities, and since much of Gallifrey had moved its operations into orbit as their technology advanced further and further, planet-side facilities became increasingly obsolete.

Nobody knew that there was someone there.

Thasia took a deep breath as she entered one of the main laboratories. The obsolete space dock facility was hardly the best place for her to carry out her experiments, but after spending so many years being hemmed in and threatened and forced by Tecteun to help with their time travel program, she'd finally had enough.

She had come out here, working in this abandoned place to get some peace away from the Gallifreyans, after spending decades in prison for breaking up that slavery ring, she had managed to contact Tecteun when she had learnt of the failing time travel projects and she had pointed out where they were going wrong. This went on for a few years before Tecteun ordered for her release, and put her to work.

But after a while, Thasia had managed to escape. And she had come out here.

At first, Thasia had been tempted to just escape there and then, but she had been curious about Gallifrey's temporal experiments. She had always been fascinated by the very concept of time travel. She had known of course time travel existed, everyone on Gallifrey did; explorers going out into the universe came across areas where there were temporal rifts which allowed free movement to different points of time.

However, Thasia knew that the people of Gallifrey didn't want time rifts. Rifts were too random, and jumping through one of them would land them on a planet or time completely at random.

They didn't want to traverse space and pass through a temporal rift, without any directional control or idea of where they were going.

No, the Gallifreyans wanted to rule time, and for that to work, they wanted machines that could control the flow of time and allow free movement into different points of time and space. They didn't just want to travel through time. They wanted to rule it for their own ends. But Thasia had worked for a long time with the scientists and saw that despite their best efforts, they had not gotten very far.

As for Thasia herself, well there was something about time travel she found fascinating. Unlike many of the others, she wanted to explore time and space. While others felt the same way, there were too many like Tecteun, who were funding the experiments into time travel to take dominion over it.

Thasia didn't understand why the Gallifreyans wanted to dominate time so much, but she knew only too well that they had a strange relationship with time; she knew she was able to tell time right down to the millisecond and even lower than that, and they had the skill to slow down the flow of time.

But mastering time was easier said than done.

Thasia did not know exactly what they had envisioned, but she had the feeling that the scientists had not originally had the time machines they'd built in mind for the job. They were just consoles that used tachyon bombardment and created a wormhole, allowing time travel into the past, but only the time machine's past; the time travellers would have to live out those minutes, hours, days, or even weeks before having to reset the timeline, or else they would be lost in some other dimension.

Thasia, now in her tenth incarnation, was a tall, beautiful and statuesque blonde woman with highly intelligent green eyes, and wore her blonde hair in a long plait, and she wore a white robe. She walked into the laboratory, feeling the butterflies in her stomach as she took in the devices she had built.

Thasia had known for a long time that Gallifrey's time travel research was flawed. They had massive ideas, but they were constantly thinking up possibilities for time travel machines which twisted the laws of physics like plaited bread.

There were paradoxes and there was chronology protection - if time travel did exist that could allow travel from the far future into the distant past, then where were they? - which proved that time travel was impossible; providing that they used the same universe.

Thasia had been interested and inspired by the same drives which had been used in the older Gallifreyan exploration vessels. In the past, the people of Gallifrey had had a hell of a time sealing gates into a terrible alternate world, they called the Upside Down as it was a twisted abomination of a mirror of their own world. But they had found it was possible to teleport large distances using it, and so they had looked to other worlds as they were seen as more stable than the Upside Down, and they'd had to fight many terrifying beings and entities.

The strange thing was for many years, Gallifreyan authors and philosophers had postulated when you travelled through time into the past before the first explorers, a new reality was created. Thasia had taken the research and she had decided to build on it for actual time travel, uncaring if the time travel took place in their home universe or not, and in many ways it was simpler to time travel by slipping sideways into some other reality.

And that approach had worked.

Thasia had left Tecteun's scientific think tank and came here to carry out her experiments, knowing that this was the quietest place for her experiments.

-8-

The first time machine was a squat console, connected to a wide circular platform. She walked over to it booted up the computer, and made adjustments. There was a rising hum of power before a ghostly image appeared on the screen and a larger version of the animal appeared on the pad. The time scoop was working perfectly.

Thasia moved away from the console and walked to another time machine which was reminiscent of an oddly shaped computer screen mixed with a television screen, but her attention wandered over to the hexagonal pad linked to a computer station. Picking up a small silvery ball, she pressed the inbuilt timer, and then she put it on the platform and made adjustments to the station. Again there was a rising hum of power, and with a flash of blue light, the ball disappeared.

A few moments later it reappeared, only a few yards away. Thasia rushed over, her robes fluttering with the movement, and she picked it up and examined the timer; according to her own personal sense of time, only five minutes passed, but according to the timer a few seconds passed.

Thasia grinned, she'd done it.

She ran a hand over all of her machines, marvelling at what she had done, dimly aware she would have to be careful to make sure nobody found out about this. She would take all of this technology away from Gallifrey so they would not misuse it.

But she had done it, she had created time travel.