Who Universe
"We travel."
The rusty surface of Gallifrey, blotched with brown lakes and dust-grey clouds, spun beneath them and was eclipsed by darkness, devoured by the vortex void into which the Chronauts were hurled. This brief and unexpected mental image, so startling to the first-ever time travellers, still came as a shock to all those who followed on later missions. The total break from the world and reality to which they were native was like the severing of the umbilical cord that ties all that is born with existence.
They were alone in the dark with only each other's thoughts to cling to. For a moment, in a cluster of moments, surrounded by no moments at all, hope and time trickled away into nothing.
There was a click. The toy ounce-ape whirred into life, spinning and tumbling across the floor on its whirling arms.
The Chronauts heard the Pilot's giggle. "This way," he said aloud. "Soon be there."
"One minute since immersion."
The spheric pool, hovering above the Time Scaphe's heart, shimmered up an image of the astral vortex outside the ship. Cascades of rainbow light streamed from a far point forming a tunnel along which the Scaphe passed.
The Chronauts reclined on couches that lay like spokes around the wheel of the chamber. Their heads that drove the ship rested against the wheel hub in whose hollowed centre sat the Pilot, playing with his toys. Only occasionally, the child tapped his fingers on a hovering grid of coloured light that guided the Scaphe through time's convoluted vectors.
The crew watched the streaming light play in the pool above their heads as they travelled up-time or down-time. It was an illusion. No one alive had seen or could imagine the vortex real. It was an unproven dimension which existed only in theory — and so they were travellers within its boundaries, bootstrapping their way across its coursing tumult, bringing now to the future or the past, in concert with laws more akin to the superstitions of the suet workers in the city. Complexities in the Scaphe's sustainers created the illusion of flight as a courtesy for the crew.
The synthetic air in the chamber was already sluggish and warm. It was no different to a hundred simulations they had been through, but if they returned home from the flight, they would be pioneers. If they did not, they were martyrs.
Captain Pekkary had no need to watch his companions. The fusion of their minds as a crew told him everything. The Scaphe's course had been chosen and preset. Ninety minutes immersion in vortex, to emerge into real time ninety days after departure.
Pekkary closed his eyes and could still see their passage through the vortex. They had simply to think "We travel" and they went. Only the Pilot thought separately.
"We travel."
The thought core of the crew, bound and woven by three years of training, virtually eliminated the necessity for a reality. Six minds in one mind. A microcosmic pool of awareness. Shared thoughts in a harmonic ratio. Except . . .
The loss of Chronaut Taspar from the crew had disturbed them all in its suddenness. A freak skimmer boat accident among the marshlanes near the city, only sixty-one days before their mission commenced. Taspar, a proven quantum theorist and the crew's confirmed joker, who also acted as their Pilot's guardian, responsible for the young navigator's welfare. They had all loved him.
A hurried investigation blamed the crash on a corroded fuel plug and a pocket of volatile marsh gas. The mishap was unpredictable and unfortunate. Such are the ways of the Gods.
Since the time programme could not be delayed, Taspar was interred with full posthumous honour and the mission dedicated to his memory. The affair was tidied away with efficiency and reverence. But all the crew had felt his scream and tasted mud as imagined water choked their lungs.
The Pilot had inevitably taken the loss of his "nanny" hardest. His had been the strongest bond, but it had not been easy for any of the crew to accept Taspar's replacement into their tightly woven telepathic family.
Pekkary detected hints of unease in his second officer. Chronaut Amnoni Distuyssor Lorizhon, daughter of the ancient House of Blyledge, had been chosen for her qualities as natural questioner and antagonist. Now Amnoni lay on her couch, unnaturally silent, directing her mind solely to the business of their flight. But Pekkary knew her better. The problem had disturbed them all.
Taspar's replacement had been selected, Amnoni called it imposed, by the Court of Principals with no consultation with the crew. He came from a newly prosperous family in the pasture belt valleys and his hair was almost as red and flame gold as that of the crew's Pilot. He immediately proved himself an excellent time theorist. His mind was sharp and strong-willed, responsive to decision-making, but it was also cold. It sat uneasily in the telepathic pool. His shared thoughts could be abrupt and angry. Too much the Individual.
In short, Chronaut Vael Voryunsti Sheverell was an intruder, and worse, the Pilot did not like him. The mission and all their lives lay in the hands of a four-year-old innocent who must not be provoked. And provocation seemed to be Vael's forte.
Faced with the prospect of hurled toys, temper tantrums and the possible disintegration of his crew, Pekkary directed the thought core towards the function of the Scaphe. An adequate solution. It held together, but it was no longer the team he had built.
"Two minutes since immersion."
Monitor units, set around the tight walls of the Scaphe, registered and recorded the crew's every movement and reaction, both physical and mental. Scientific Specimens in a sealed environment, a cradle of the future.
Plant seeds in temporal isolation tanks germinated, grew, flowered and ripened their fruits, even as the Chronauts watched. A specimen tafelshrew fell accidentally from its exercise wheel and died, its body withering away in mouldering storm of high-speed decay. Its mate gave birth and weaned its young. Thirty days in thirty minutes.
These were the easy trials. Worse by far were the missions when the Scaphe was immersed in vortex for ninety days' isolation, to return only ninety minutes after its departure.
The Captain put out of his mind that the Scaphe should make timefall somewhen or where. Such plans were as yet an impossibility. This phase of the Time Programme was barely the equivalent of the first space flights, carrying lone Heroes strapped into tin canisters on single orbits of Gallifrey.
One day, this work would also seem primitive. Nevertheless, the prospect of a detour into the future to see where their labours would lead amused him greatly.
"Pleasing thought," agreed Regulator Chesperl. She turned her head to grin at Chronaut Reogus, who lay on the next couch.
Reogus Teleem Lacott, the Battery of the Scaphe, a big-framed hulk of a man, tall as a Pythia, on whom all the telepathic energetics of the crew were focused, channelled into the ship's drive impulse. "I lay odds they don't tell us when they do it. A depak to a dumpling the Pythia smothers the opposition before we get back."
His fingers were linked between the couches with Chesperl's, low down where the others could not see. "And you"11 miss Rassilon's public stoning," her thoughts teased at him. "I'm sure his head'll still be on a pole when we get back. Or we could always go now."
"And who's going to persuade the Pilot?" interrupted Amnoni. There was a note of disapproval in her thoughts.
"The Pilot is the only one concentrating," said a voice out loud.
It was a habit that Vael had picked up to annoy them when they excluded him from their thoughts. He watched them from his couch with the air of a dispassionate sneer.
They stared back awkwardly, hiding their feelings behind smiles of concern. Chesperl put out a thread of warmth and friendship. It was turned away.
In his playpen at the heart of the ship, the Pilot had become very quiet.
At that moment, Pekkary caught the first intimations of approaching danger. Since he sensed it, they all knew.
With a smirk, Vael turned on his couch. Pulling at the monitor leads on his arms, he knelt up and looked over the top of the hollowed hub at the Pilot.
"Hello, little one," he said coldly. "Still missing nanny?"
The child, knowing things that grown-ups forgot, had been gazing up at the lights in the spheric pool. He stared at his tormentor with widening eyes and pulled his toys in close for protection.
The ship's lights guttered and the hum of the power drive fluctuated for a moment.
"Vael." The warnings the crew sent out were ignored. The Pilot whimpered in anticipation of a blow.
Vael's hand darted out and snatched away one of the toys.
The child's eyes filled with a hatred that was frightening in one so innocent. The Time Scaphe lurched as the guiding concentration fell apart.
Pekkary struggled to assert an order. But "We travel" was lost.
Reogus launched out of his seat. "Leave him alone, you little sheetsnacker!" he shouted, pulling Vael away by the head.
The Pilot screamed with fright. The chamber lights dimmed and the spheric pool filled all the chamber with the streaming light of the vortex.
No past. No future.
The vortex streaming wildly. The silhouette shapes of the crew, arms outstretched, seeking each other and calling aloud because their minds are dark. Blundering as their vessel lurches unpiloted in the tumult of time's maelstrom.
There is only now.
"Chesperl!"
"Reogus. I'm here!"
"Where are your thoughts? I cannot find you."
Specimen tanks and equipment slide loose like dried beans on the Pilot's drum.
"Amnoni. I cannot hear you."
"Lost. We're lost."
Clinging to the hub of the Scaphe, Vael watches them. They cluster in a huddle, arms around each other, searching for their lost thoughts, pushing him out of their clique. Trained in the disciplines of logic and the irrefutable sciences, they are praying aloud to the Gods for salvation.
In their terror there is only now.
The lights of the vortex reeled in Vael's head like scattered moments of the siren past, willing him out of reality into the safety of his memories.
It was too easy and he knew it. A path had been cut through his studies to lead him inexorably to his current placement on the Scaphe. He scoffed as sacrifices of propitiation on secret altars were made on his behalf. But doors opened. Opportunity, never a lengthy visitor, called often. A hidden guiding hand slapped away all opposition.
Even now, as the primal energies of creation tore at the ship, he was not afraid. It was always with him. The eye that watched in his head. Sometimes the Sphinx, sometimes the wise woman, sometimes the copper moon Pazithi Gallifreya. And sometimes, when he best knew despair, the wild eye of an innocent girl wreathed in scorching smoke.
He had a power in him. A power to manipulate and inflict, to scorch and wither. They might call it a crime — those who thought themselves powerful. But she, the most venerable of all, sought this power, even came into his head after it. She imagined she used him for her own purpose — whatever that might be. Perhaps, but he used her also. He was the Individual among Individuals. The power was his. And even he — until he understood the nature of his crime and could control it — even he was afraid of it.
Where would it lead? When would he fulfil a legend and have his own victory parades through the City?
He watched the helpless crew of the Scaphe and began to laugh as they grovelled in their superstitious misery.
A sharp pain shot through his hand. He spun and saw the Pilot, eyes burning with hate, sinking his milk teeth into the flesh.
Vael gave a yell and pulled back his bleeding hand in agony. He stared up at the reeling spheric pool overhead. Out of the chaos tumbled a shape he knew. Hard blue planes and angles. A light flashing like a beacon on its crown.
"Look," said the Pilot, his voice full of a sudden wonder that washed away the fear.
He pointed a tiny finger upwards as the spinning object bore inexorably in upon them.
They had crashed into it.
The 7th’s Doctor’s TARDIS was stuck in flight in the vortex. A creature called the Process, (a datavore, a creature that feeds on raw knowledge), had invaded the TARDIS and was digesting the energy and knowledge of the TARDIS. The TARDIS turned its self inside out and the crew of the TARDIS and Chronauts were stuck inside. The Process had enslaved the Chronauts except Vael and the Doctor had disappeared leaving Ace to figure out what was happening and where to find him. Eventually Ace found the Doctor and persuaded the Chronauts to go up against the Process. In the end Vael’s anger destroyed the Process. The Pythia had annoyed Vael to the point he decided he was an individual and was so angry at the Pythia that his anger zoomed in on her in head and destroyed himself. The TARDIS began to repair herself and the Chronauts’s ship. After their ship was repaired they said goodbye to the Doctor and Ace and headed back to their own time on Gallifrey.
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