Four Doctors, chapter 2

“Oi, Spaceman!  A little warning next time you’re going to do the barrel rolls!”

Donna picked herself up off the floor, clinging tightly to the nearest girder.  The TARDIS did seem to have stopped spinning for the moment, but she wasn’t taking any chances.

“Sorry, sorry!”  The Doctor circled the console like a hyperactive ferret in pinstripes, frantically twirling knobs and flipping switches.  “We got caught in a time corridor.  Little hairy there for a while.  We’re out now.  Nothing to worry about.  All under control.”

“Are there any seatbelts in this tub,” Donna asked, “you know, just in case?”

“Yeah, no.  Not really.  Sorry about that.  The Old Girl here is usually more steady than that.”  He gave the TARDIS console an affectionate pat.  “Time corridor just caught her off-guard.  Nasty things, time corridors.  Crude, primitive technology, real navigational hazards … almost never used any more. Don’t think I’ve encountered a time-corridor since … well … not since I was a fair-haired youth in cricketing garb with a bit of celery on the lapel, which is neither here nor there. But this …”

He put on his glasses and frowned over a monitor. “…this one is quite recent … and very much in use, it looks like.  Well that can’t be good.”

“Why can’t it?”

“Well in my experience, and understand I’m only speaking from -- ooh -- about nine-hundred and four years of experience here, but in my experience when someone is using a shielded, stabilized time corridor they’re probably up to no good.  Or they’re in over their heads and likely to go creating nasty paradoxes and … well, a big old glopping mess seeping into the fabric of space-time and it’s just not good.”

“Oh, come off it,” Donna chided.  “You seem to do okay traveling through time without adult supervision.”

“I am the adult supervision,” the Doctor replied soberly.    

“That’s really how your lot see yourselves…” A brief, sharp look from the Doctor cut her off.  “Saw yourselves,” she continued in a chastened tone.

“That’s what we were,” the Doctor replied.  “Oldest sentient race in this part of the Universe, we’d made all the mistakes and learned from them, mostly, by the time the rest of you lot were crawling out of the primordial ooze.”

“And you couldn’t just sit back and let the rest of us learn from our own mistakes like you did.”

“Well, the Universe is more crowded now.  Too many races mucking about with space-time.  Little mistakes have more consequence now than they did back in our day.

“Mind you,” he continued, “I did always prefer the mentoring approach.  Let them all make their own mistakes and we’d be on hand to help out, clean up, minimize the damage…”

“Like you do now,” Donna said.

“Like I do now,” the Doctor echoed.   “Like I’ve always done.  I was their conscience, you might say.  A little niggling sense of perspective in the Great Time Lord Institution.  That was always my role.  Self-appointed, of course.”

He looked again at the screen in front of him.  “A unidirectional vortex,” he said, as much to himself as to Donna.  “It’s taking someone from fixed point to fixed point, and it’s a one-way trip.  Oohh, somebody’s definitely up to no good here.”

He adjusted some controls to change the TARDIS’s course.  “So what say we nip on over and see what it’s all about.”

The Doctor stepped out of the TARDIS and took in the dusty, dry, utterly barren landscape around them. "Well," he announced, "here we are."

“And 'here' is where, exactly?” Donna asked.

The Doctor was already fiddling with a small gadgety device he had pulled from the pocket of his overcoat. Donna wondered if those pockets, like the TARDIS, were somehow bigger on the inside.

“We are at … or rather very near … the opening of the time corridor," the Doctor explained as he poked at buttons, turned knobs, and studied the blinking lights on his gadget.  "Actually it starts over there a bit …” he gestured past a small rise of hills behind them, “and, well, sometime within the next few hours or so.”

“Yes, but where are we?”  Donna persisted.

“You know I can’t really say,” the Doctor replied.  “Somewhere just before we landed, our navigational readings went off the scale.  Says we’re outside of space and time now.”

Donna took in their bleak surroundings. “So outside of space and time looks like … this?”

 

“It looked a lot whiter last time,” the Doctor mused to himself.  

“No,” he said decisively.  “But I daresay I have been here before…” He crouched to the ground, pinched some dust between his fingers, put it on his tongue.  The taste was intense – acrid and evil.  He spit it out again.

“War,” he said.  “Long, brutal … generations of unrelenting destruction, raging on a long-dead planet…”

The words “dead planet” triggered something, causing memories to snap into place.  “Oh, no,” he said.  He turned and sprinted to the top of the hill.

“No,” he shouted.  “No, no, no, no, no!”

Donna joined him at the top of the hill.  Below them was what remained of a large city.  Once gleaming, now tarnished metallic buildings stood in ruins.  The cracked and broken remnant of a giant transparent dome encircled the city limits.

“Skaro,” the Doctor said.  “We’re on Skaro.”

“And that’s bad?”  Donna asked.  It certainly didn’t look good, and the Doctor’s whole demeanor told her it was probably worse than it looked.  But she hoped to prompt some explanation from him.

“Ooh, it’s worse than bad,” he said.  “It’s so many different levels of bad I don’t even know where to start.”

He looked to his left.  Far across the plain, an army was advancing – an army of Daleks.  Spread out to the horizon, as far as he could see, wave after wave of Daleks glided ominously, unrelentingly toward the battered city.

“We have to get out of here,” the Doctor said, pulling Donna back down the hill, back toward the TARDIS.   

“We have to leave now.”

To be continued.

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