by Paul Cornell
"And did she do this in the usual manner?"
"I'm afraid, Madame that she did." Pogarel pointed to the staser stuck in his ribs.
Flavia sighed. "To admit one psychopathic female to the office of one's President may be regarded as an oversight, Pogarel. To admit two smacks of - "
Ruath snapped the staser up to body height and blasted aside the weapon that Flavia had quietly drawn from her desk. Then she fired again, the silver bolt throwing the Lady President back against the wall. She ran to the door and slammed one of the devices from her belt against the lock. Seconds later, guards began to pound on it.
"Madame President!" Pogarel screamed. "You've - "
"No I haven't. I used stun setting. Speaking of which." Another bolt hurled Pogarel across the room. Ruath turned to Romana. "I only need you now."
Romana stared at her. "What sort of diabolical plotter doesn't want to kill the President?"
"One who knows that there are plenty more Presidents where she came from. One who knows the future, perhaps. We'll see. Now show me to the Time Scoop."
The Inner Council Room was the sort of alcove that the alcove-friendly Gallifreyan architects who built the Capitol adored. It was supposed to be a chamber where the President would gather the High Council to talk on secret matters. It was only used once in a millennium, and generally stood empty. Therefore it had become host to a number of Time Lord heirlooms carrying the tag "Of Rassilon". That alone, Romana sometimes suspected, was what kept them from being thrown out for the Shobogans to collect.
Amongst these objects was the Harp of Rassilon: an ancient Gallifreyan harp which stood in front of a painting that depicted a man, probably Rassilon in one of his many guises, playing it. Romana had recently learnt that if you played the notes depicted on the painting, a ballad called "Rassilon's Lament", a hidden door beneath the picture would slide open. This, she decided, was something that she wasn't going to reveal to Ruath. It was only a matter of time before the Guards burst in and stasered this mad woman. She led her into the Council Room and looked around, trying to locate a delaying tactic. She settled on the portrait.
"Here we are," she told Ruath. "This is an ancient painting of Rassilon. If you press his eyes, then a door opens to the Time Scoop. Of course, Flavia knows all about this now. Perhaps she's had it deactivated ..." She reached up to the portrait.
"I have an ancient relic of my own." Ruath opened one of her belt pouches and produced a silver ring, which she slipped over her finger. "This is the sigil ring of the Great Vampire, recognized by the Undead all over the cosmos. I found it in a book made out of human flesh. It was bound into the spine. And when I say spine, I mean spine." Ruath walked over to where Romana stood, idly pressing Rassilon's eyes. "The text of the book said that the ring was made of the command circuitry of Rassilon's lead bow-ship, ripped out of the deck by the Great Vampire himself. It is said that the ring can reactivate any of Rassilon's personal technology. Shall we see if that's true?"
Romana drew herself up to her full height. "Think about what you're doing. All these things that you've discovered are of great scholarly interest. But vampires aren't the way forward. They're parasites, they reduce civilizations to the level of animals. I've seen that at first hand. Whatever your personal grudges, you can't let evil like that loose again."
"I can, and I will." Ruath met her gaze evenly.
"I'll intercede with Flavia on your behalf. It's not too late to turn back."
Ruath paused, then shook her head. "It was too late a long time ago."
"I'm sorry." Romana lunged for the gun. Ruath caught her under the chin with her fist, and Romana lashed back, her hand smacking across Ruath's cheek. Stung, Ruath fired the staser and sent her flying backwards, collapsing against the painting.
There was the sound of a crash from the President's Office. Ruath held the ring high. "By Rassilon's command, open the door!" A tune hummed from the harp at a supernatural speed, and the door beneath the painting swung open, sending Romana's limp form rolling down the steps. Ruath ran after her. "By Rassilon's command, seal this chamber!" she yelled from the interior.
The door swung closed again just as the guards, led by Castellan Spandrell, raced into the room.
Spandrell slapped his thigh brutally. "Drat!" he rumbled. "If it isn't one thing, it's another!"
Ruath looked around herself in wonder. Things were moving so fast today. It was like she had grabbed the tail of some fast-moving bird, an owl perhaps! She was suddenly a leaf in the wind of destiny, a destiny that had been delayed from so long ago.
Here she stood, in the darkened underground control room that had been host to so many futile grabs for power. They would surely destroy it now. But not just yet. It would take time to activate the giant beam weapons that were housed in the remote Matrix station orbiting the planet. It would take time to evacuate the Capitol. And would a weak leader like Flavia authorize the destruction of so much history? Of course not. She had a free hand.
The great game table stood in the centre of the room, its surface a replica of the Death Zone, the Dark Tower in the centre. "The winner shall lose, and the loser win," breathed Ruath. "I must take care not to win just yet."
Ruath bent to check Romana's pulses. She was still alive, comatose thanks to the stun setting on the staser. Then she turned her attention to the Time Scoop. The ancient machinery still stood on the other side of the room. As Ruath had counted on, Flavia hadn't numbered destroying it among her priorities. She'd seen the opportunity as soon as she'd run into Romana, and seized it. They'd never have let her into the Temporal Observation Bureau, and then there'd be the matter of escape. This solved both her problems.
She hit a control on the Time Scoop experimentally. Nothing happened. Ruath sighed, raising the ring once more. "By Rassilon's command, activate!"
The machine came alive. She adjusted controls, and a silver-haired old man in severe Edwardian dress appeared. "You got so old, Theta!" Ruath spat. "You hung on for so long before betraying me!" She spun a dial and the picture swirled through many times and adventures, the image of the Doctor changing several times. Ruath stared at the final image. "So that's what you become!" she gasped. "Well, that's no good to me." She reversed the dial, and spun back to the Doctor's most youthful-seeming incarnation, the impulsive cricketer. Ruath knew that it was forbidden, and thus generally impossible, for Time Lords to meet each other out of temporal sequence. That was Rassilon's First Law of Time. "But she who has the ... oh, what the Omega, the Ring of Rassilon, can do such things. And I certainly wouldn't want to take on the Ka Faraq Gatri ... Show me the path of the Fifth Doctor's TARDIS ."
The screen lit up with a series of cosmological maps, showing the TARDIS's flight out of the formation of the universe, to a deserted planet, through deep space, Deva Loka, Earth several times, Gallifrey and then Manussa. "Stop!" Ruath commanded. The TARDIS icon was blinking away on Earth once more. The Doctor was at his most vulnerable there, on his favourite planet, possibly without other foes to get in the way. She had an instinct about this moment in time. And if she had an instinct ... She made a brief search of events around the time. Yes, there she was, stepping out of a TARDIS! She had to see more, see if she succeeded in her plans Romana threw herself across the room and spun the dial. The picture fluttered backwards as the two Time Ladies grappled. "You shan't do it!" Romana called. "I won't let you!" Ruath gave Romana a savage shove across the room and stabbed a control on the Time Scoop. As the elegant Time Lady struggled to her feet, a shining black obelisk spun into existence and swallowed her. For a moment, she was frozen in the gleaming darkness. Then she and the obelisk spun away. Romana appeared on the screen of the Time Scoop a moment later.
Ruath regained her composure and glared at the image. "You have interfered enough!" she spat. "Go and play with ..." she flicked the dial through random images. "Oh yes. One of those!" She hit another control, and Romana spun away into the vortex.
From high above the ceiling, an explosion erup
ted. They were using heavy blasters on the floor of the President's Office. How bold of them. They might soon find a way down. The transmat booth in the corner was whining too, as if its one-way link to the Dark Tower was being forcibly reprogrammed. Spandrell must have taken a team out there by capsule. He was wasted as Castellan. Perhaps she'd persuade the Messiah, Yarven, if he was open to persuasion, to keep him on.
Time to go.
Ruath preset the controls of the Time Scoop and pulled a tiny object from her belt pouch, placing it on the control deck. The obelisk spun down and engulfed her, then spun away again. As the whine from the transmat increased in volume, the Time Scoop controls spun and clicked into place.
As the first of Spandrel's Chancellery Guard burst into the room through the transmat booth, Ruath's bomb went off. The Time Scoop erupted in flame, and the chamber filled with choking smoke. The guard swiftly reset the controls of the booth, throwing a gloved hand up in front of his face as the fire consumed the oxygen in the room. A moment later, he vanished.
The power source of the Time Scoop exploded.
Flavia and Pogarel watched from a nearby tower as the Presidential Office blasted upwards into a ball of flaming debris.
"Oh dear," the Secretary breathed, his knuckles in his mouth. "Madame President, please forgive me!"
"Please don't worry, Secretary Pogarel." Flavia patted him comfortingly on the shoulder. "I was thinking of having the Presidential Chambers redecorated anyway. All that lead. I'll commission something less martial immediately."
Pogarel sagged. "Thank you, Madame!"
"But if another strange woman comes to visit," Flavia murmured, "particularly in the company of the Lady Romana - "
"Yes, Madame President?"
"I'm out."
The black obelisk carrying Ruath spun back into normal space inside the Capitol's TARDIS bay. Nobody was present to see it. The destruction of the Presidential block, on top of the events of the last few days, had caused a Gallifrey-wide panic. Most Time Lords were of the opinion that a full-scale revolution was in progress.
Ruath felt for the key on her belt. Her study group, long ago, had been given access to a Travel Capsule for research purposes. She'd never taken advantage of it until now, but it would be quicker than breaking into one of the capsules. A smile crossed her lips. Nostalgia.
She looked along the line of plain white capsules until she identified the one for which she held the key. She placed it in the lock.
"Stop right there!" with a guttural accent.
Ruath turned around. Castellan Spandrell, alone, pointing a staser rifle at her. "Very good, Castellan."
The voice was old and gravelled, "Oh, it was nothing," Spandrell shrugged, keeping his aim steady. "As soon as my guards reported from the Tower, I guessed this is where you'd come. You don't want to end up on some alien world without a TARDIS, do you?"
"Indeed not. So, Castellan, we're both holding stasers
"Ah, but mine is aimed and ready."
"True. So one of us is going to fire, and the other is going to die."
"That, dear lady, is also true."
"Except, Castellan, that I've seen the future. I know I'm going to go to a place called Earth. I haven't done that yet, so ..."
"I see. Well, forgive me for trying." Spandrell fired, flipping the setting to stun as he did so, in case she was telling the truth.
Ruath had already dived aside, snapping a shot as she went. The killing blast caught Spandrell dead centre, and the old lawman fell to the floor, the rifle clattering from his hands.
"I told you," sighed Ruath, unlocking the TARDIS and going inside. "You can't avoid the future, old man." The box faded away, rending time and space.
Spandrell opened his eyes and sat up, pulling the staser-proof vest from his bulky torso. "True as well," he sighed. "But sometimes you can see it coming."
Romana stared up at the Drashig.
The Drashig stared down at Romana.
It was at times like these that she rather regretted that it was beneath her dignity to emit a really good scream.
Drashigs were huge, snake-like creatures, with a cluster of tiny eyes atop their ridged bodies. Their main feature, however, was a vast number of incredibly sharp teeth.
The thing was, the Drashig kept on staring. It didn't lunge or roar or anything. So Romana didn't do anything either, regarding the situation as a reasonable default. She realized that the Drashig was sniffing the air. If she remembered correctly, the creatures hunted by smell.
She reached into the pocket of the jacket she wore and extracted a tiny scent spray. This would require the sacrifice of a silk handkerchief. She slowly took one from her top pocket, keeping her eyes on the Drashig all the time, and balled it up around the spray, kneading the rubber ball of the spray until the entire contents of the bottle were impregnated into the silk.
The Drashig rolled its head, trying to focus on the molecules of strong scent that were arriving at its many and various nostrils.
Romana replaced the empty scent bottle and took careful aim. "Go on boy," she called. "Fetch!" She threw the balled handkerchief right past the Drashig's head, and ran.
The monster turned with incredible speed, snapping at the tiny target. It missed, and twisted its whole body round to locate the powerful smell that was so engaging its senses.
Romana was dashing across the soggy ground, heading for the grey slope of a rock-face up ahead. There was a cave at its base, a cave far too small for that monster's snout.
A terrible scream erupted behind her, and a shadow fell over her.
Another one of the monsters had blasted up from the ground. She must have scampered over its tail. Mud splattered around her from the bulk of the thing's body.
The shadow grew, and Romana felt a great gust of fetid breath. The Drashig's repulsive head swayed down towards her. She threw herself to one side, and one of the many rows of teeth snapped closed where her head would have been.
Struggling to her feet, Romana raced for the rock, making herself turn at random intervals. She could feel the weight of the monster behind her, trying to adjust itself to the speed and manoeuvrability of its prey.
The cave mouth was just ahead. She took a chance and sprinted straight for it, diving the last few feet as, screaming, the Drashig's head swept at her for the killing bite.
It butted its head against the cave mouth and Romana dived through, landing in a sprawl against a wet rock.
After a moment to get her breath back, she turned and watched curiously as the giant monster tried to stick its mouth through far too narrow an opening. She smoothed a hair back from her brow and smiled. "Thanks, Coco."
It took a while for Romana to realize that there was something strange about the rock she was sitting on. It wasn't hard or stone-like or, well, rocky at all really. It was smooth and warm and made a hollow sound when you hit it.
It was made of some sort of plastic.
Romana got to her feet and followed the cave back into the hillside. She was beginning to have her suspicions about this.
Sabalom Glitz rubbed his hands together joyfully, grinning at his latest prize. The hold of the Nosferatu (technically the Nosferatu 2, but Dibber couldn't get his tongue round the name, resulting in a number of embarrassing communication problems) was a dank and dripping place, but somehow it was right for the object that Glitz was staring at with such delight.
"A Miniscope," he purred. "And that old fool thought that the crate just had a load of tinned fruit in it. Grotzi city here we come." Glitz's head was spinning with the possibilities. Miniscopes were tiny environment-containment devices, miniature zoos that could pull a crowd in any part of the universe you cared to name. The smart thing about them was that no feeding was required. The individual environments were held in chronic hysterechronic hyst-time loops. So what if the devices were banned under intergalactic law? That was virtually a prerequisite to any of Glitz's fortune-making schemes. He'd been in a bit of a turmoil lately, what with
Mel going home. He'd come to rely on her skills in the subtle bank jobs that they'd come to specialize in, but perhaps it was for the best that she'd gone back to Earth. Time for Glitz to get back to good honest dishonesty. In light of that, the Scope was Grotzis from heaven.
He pulled an oily rag from his pocket and gave the console of the device a rub. Here, that was a laugh. He remembered a story Mel had told him about some young Zobzer who'd got his hands on a magic lamp, and instead of pocketing it, he'd He found himself jumping backwards, his arms flailing behind him.
The woman had appeared out of nowhere, right in front of him. She ought to be careful, doing that could get you in serious trouble. With catlike grace, he lowered his arms from the killing Venusian Aikido position they'd automatically adopted.
She didn't look like a magical spirit, bit too much mud for that, but you never knew. He raised a finger and remembered the three wishes he'd kept uppermost in mind since he was a child. "I'd like an everlasting bag of crossbank galactic credits, a Draconian fiefdom and the rights to Mav Hasker's back catalogue. Ta!
The woman stared at him. "I'd like a cup of tea with milk and no sugar, a shower and a quiet sit-down. Of our two sets of wishes, I think mine's going to be easier to achieve, don't you?"
By the middle of her third wish, sitting grumpily ignored on a rear seat of the Nosferatu's flight deck, Romana had sorted out what had happened and what she had to do.
Having found that the rock corridor became a metal corridor and then a series of circuit boards, she'd made her way out of the Miniscope, got beyond its containment field and shot up to her full height in front of this ruffian. Luckily he seemed to regard her silence about the existence of the machine as a fair price for her wishes.
She was somewhere in deep space on the other side of the galaxy, with no TARDIS. Meanwhile Ruath had presumably escaped, with every intention of attacking the Doctor in his fifth incarnation. She could not, of course, go to help him, even if she'd wanted to, having met his seventh persona recently. If you started to cross timestreams like that, reality ended up looking like a badly knitted jumper.