The Sound of Hope
8888
"Now, Doctor, you will give me the permutation!" The Krillitane in charge growled, smirking slightly on the screen.
"Sazarin, if you think I'm going to hand you the answer to limitless power, so you and your mob of half-crazed genetic mish-mash you've got in stasis can raze half the galaxies, then you're madder than I first thought, which is saying a lot." The Doctor retorted, as he quickly typed re-authorization codes into the command computer of the space station, keeping the self-destruct from going off. He looked up at the screen. "After all when I first met you my impression was of slightly unhinged, rusty gate, but now I see there was never a hinge to begin with!"
"You will do precisely as I say, Doctor, or the girl dies!" The Krillitane pulled a young woman into view of the camera. She had blonde hair, green eyes, light skin. She was wearing a light pink blouse with slight frills on the hems and a knee length blue skirt.
"Tanya! I told you get to the escape ports to evacuate with the rest of the station crew!" The Doctor furrowed his eyebrows.
"Ah, I found the dear lass, and let's say I persuaded her to come with me." The Krillitane chuckled as his clawed hand grasped the girl's arm a little tighter and she whimpered. "Now, Doctor, you will transmit to my location the Elkindein permutation, in five minutes, or I kill the girl."
"You kill the girl, I stop punching in re-authorization codes, Sazarin, we both go up." The Doctor returned, as his fingers stabbed at the touch screens in front of him. "You'd never make it to your ship before the countdown finished."
"You'd never make it to your TARDIS either!" the Krillitane gurgled, a toothy smile playing across his face. "I, however, came prepared." He pulled a small chain necklace with a small actuator pendant from under his armored vest. "Transmat, I'll be on my ship and half a quadloo away before this hulk blows."
The Doctor frowned, and narrowed his eyes and said in a defeated tone. "Let the girl go, take me instead. I'm worth far more than she is, she's patently worthless. She can't even follow simple instructions. My biology alone would be worth trillions on the Krillitane gene markets."
"Doctor, you're wasting your time. Four minutes fifteen seconds." The Krillitane shifted his weight and pulled Tanya in closer. "I may keep the genetic sample for her though, as a consolation, I can think a fair few, young Krillitane lasses that wouldn't mind wearing her morphic field."
"Let her go, or I stop the re-authorization! You never have enough time to grab me and get the data out of me, and I'd die in the explosion. If you take me with you not only will you get the information but you'll get my biological data as well." The Doctor shouted.
"Doctor, please, don't worry about me, just get out of here…" Tanya said, her voice clearly holding back a sob. "If Sazarin gets the permutation, there will far more people at risk than just me."
That's when the Krillitane stabbed something in Tanya's back. A burst of electrical energy flowed over the girl as she screamed, and he dropped her to the ground with a muddled thud.
"TANYA!" The Doctor stopped typing. "You said I had five minutes!"
"You were wasting it yammering, she's unconscious, but you're running out of time." The Krillitane said leaning forward. "Don't be a fool, Doctor, I'm only interested in the permutation, you can keep your Time Lord secrets. Two minutes thirty seconds."
The Doctor pursed his lips. A small klaxon went off and he absent mindedly entered an authorization code. If he didn't the station's self destruct would go off in fifteen minutes. Which normally would be plenty of time, except that the TARDIS was on the far side of the station and no matter how you sliced it, that was a seventeen minute run, an additional six minutes if he carried Tanya. The controls were deadlocked, his only hope was to keep the codes reauthorized until the command staff returned, but they'd only do that once the Krillitane were off the station. That was only going to happen if he gave them what they wanted, the Elkindein permutation, a block transfer matrix code that gave the one using it near limitless power over quantum entanglement fields, it would give Sazarin and his mutated misfits the power to wage a war across the seven galaxies and destroy innumerable worlds.
"One minute, Doctor." The Krillitane said as he reached up with his thin clawed hand to a chest holster and pulled out a disintegrator pistol. The Krillitane stepped back and pointed the weapon. "It'd be an awful pity for such a young girl to die from your stubbornness."
If he could reconfigure the computer to extend the timing ratio of the countdown that could buy him time, but he couldn't both program the computer and re-authorize the codes, plus the Krillitane would definitely realize something was up and just kill Tanya. He mentally looked to his pocket where his TARDIS key was, and thought briefly about trying to summon it with the key, unfortunately it would just as much alarm Sazarin, and the Doctor could never materialize and rematerialize the TARDIS fast enough to keep Tanya from dying, and that was if he could get the TARDIS to land right anyways.
"Half a minute, Doctor, stop weighing your alternatives, because you have none." The Krillitane released the safety on the pistol, the energy whined softly as the battery pack charged the ion chamber.
"Fine! I'll tell you, everything…just don't hurt her." The Doctor said, sagging, drooping his head as his fingers played over the touch screens.
"That's what I was hoping to…."
That's when the sound came over the speakers. A sound the Doctor had heard millions of times. A sound that was impossible for him to hear now. It was the sound of ancient grinding gears, cosmic violin strings being raked with cold steel, heaving and scraping from the ether. The Doctor looked up in shock, although Sazarin looked even more in shock as a distinct form shifted into and out of existence around him, and that's when the real impossibility of it shocked the Doctor. The form that appeared on the screen was a blue police box.
"No, that's…it can't…" The Doctor stammered, shock and horror at the idea flooding his brain. Only his autonomic nervous system reacted to the klaxon kept him from getting himself killed by space station self-destruct.
The Doctor watched as the windows of the TARDIS flashed with a bluish green light, and then a few seconds later, the doors opened, and Sazarin collapsed out of the ship and slumped over the desk where he'd been broadcasting from. A couple seconds later a man walked out, and dropped a phase disruptor on the desk. He was a youngish looking man brown slightly curly hair framed an angry face with gray-blue eyes. He wore a leather jacket and dark pants with an ammunition belt slung across his torso. The hairs on the back of the Doctor's neck rose on end.
"I've set the TARDIS's systems to work shutting down the self-destruct." The man said, his voice was surprisingly gravelly for a face so young. "You'll be free to go with Tanya in a few minutes."
"You're…not meant to be here." The Doctor said, with more venom than he had dosed to Sazarin.
"You know who I am?" The man asked.
"I always know…" The Doctor said, growling slightly. "You killed him?"
"I saved you." The man said locking eyes with the Doctor over the view screen. He looked down at where Tanya was lying. "I saved her."
"I could've…"
"No, you couldn't…she'd have died," the man said with too much certainty.
"You can't just rewrite…"
"History is in flux, the universe is shattered. You may not know it, but there is something coming in your future. A darkness will envelope everything, and you have to make a choice." The man said sharply. "I'm making sure you make the right choice. I saved her, Doctor, I gave you a mercy, a victory. It won't change anything in the grand scheme of things, but it does do one thing for me."
Memories flooded into the Doctor's brain. This man, across his time line, was changing things.
"You're in my personal history! What are you up to!?" The Doctor roared, standing up in rage, forgetting the authorization codes. "How dare you violate…." That's when the Doctor realized what was going on. "You're fixing yourself into the time stream. You're creating fixed points throughout history…you're making yourself inevitable."
"I'm sorry, Doctor, it's the only way." The man said quietly. Tanya moaned softly and shifted, the effects of the stunner apparently lifting. "I have to be sure that you'll make the choice that needs to be made, and make me happen."
"So what, I become a killer for what reason? A monster?" The Doctor sneered, glaring at the man on the screen.
"No, Doctor, you die." The man said somberly. There was a beeping from the station consoles. The man looked up. "The TARDIS has finished her computer patch, you're free now."
The Doctor snorted. "Free? No, not anymore, you've trapped me now, trapped me into whatever Machiavellian machinations you're plotting. I thought the last one with the panama hat was bad, but he at least had scruples."
"From my point of view scruples get you killed." The man said as he turned and walked back to the TARDIS. "Doctor, just be glad, you got one more victory today, a stranger arrived and snatched victory out of the jaws of defeat, you get to put one in the win column that was always meant to be in the loss column. Even for a Time Lord, that doesn't happen very often."
"BE GLAD!?" The Doctor roared but the man disappeared into the TARDIS and it dematerialized. The Doctor watched it as the ship disappeared. His jaw clenched tightly as his eyes glared at the screen. "Never….I won't become that…NEVER!"