Doctor Who 836 - The Ancestor Cell by Peter Anghelides; Stephen Cole

Author:Peter Anghelides; Stephen Cole
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2011-07-13T03:48:12+00:00

Chapter Twenty six

Discontinuity

The Doctor stared at Mali, affronted. ‘You stupid young woman!’ he yelled. ‘You’re completely missing the point! I’m not a Faction agent.’

Mali stared down at him, unmoved. ‘Your biodata is riddled with their virus.’

‘No!’ The Doctor shook his head, and felt the knife scrape under his chin. ‘It only probably is.’

‘Doctor, you’re not making sense.’

‘Listen. Listen to me very carefully, because I’ve just worked this out and the logistics are giving me a headache. I don’t want to have to repeat myself: He pondered for a moment, looking rapidly between Mali and Nivet. ‘Perhaps I should write it down. Anyone who gets lost could flick back a page and catch up.’

Nivet sighed impatiently. ‘Well, Doctor?’

‘Just then, while you were laying your hands on that knife, I wasn’t having a seizure, I was connected to the TARDIS telepathic circuits. The circuits in my TARDIS, out there in the Edifice. I was able to push through the shadows and commune with her.’

‘Shadows?’

‘Shadows and cobwebs, yes!’ The Doctor sniffed. ‘Do you know,I don’t think she even recognised me.’

‘The telepathic circuits must be worn to dust by now.’

‘No,’ the Doctor snapped. ‘Not to Dust. To Metebelis III. Giant spiders. Eight legs, Great Ones, blue crystals! I died on Metebelis, not on Dust.’ Mali and Nivet were staring at him.

‘Don’t you see? The Faction altered my timeline, killed me before my time, thought they’d poisoned my body along with my history.’ His eyes were gleaming. ‘But when I finally did regenerate, inside the console room, the TARDIS knew it was wrong. She’d already reached out and communed with me, while I was locked up and at my lowest ebb. She helped me then, put me in touch with my former self – she must have known my future history. And she sensed that the Faction had changed things.’

Nivet was beginning to look excited. ‘I’ve never known of such a bond between TARDIS and owner. An empathic interface of this magnitude is unheard of.’

‘We’ve been through a lot together,’ the Doctor said, shiftily, as if worried some impropriety was being implied. ‘She’s always helped with my regenerations. This time, she took the infected shadow of my dying incarnation into her own workings, holding it in temporal orbit.

When my next incarnation appeared, his shadow was his own, untainted.’

‘And in doing so, the TARDIS negated the effects of the alternate timeline,’ Mali ventured dubiously.

‘Or deflected them, anyway. Undoing them. Abandoning the edited version of my life, and leaving it the way it was.’

Nivet said, ‘Causality doesn’t work that way.’

‘It’s not meant to, at least as far as we understand it. Maybe the old girl cribbed from a higher power. We have encountered one or two in our travels.’ The Doctor smiled briefly.

Mali cautiously withdrew her knife, allowing the Doctor to rise.

‘Thank you,’ the Doctor said. ‘I’m glad I’m explaining this to Time Lords. I think Fitz’s brain would burst:

Nivet rubbed his own head. ‘But the energy required for your TARDIS to contain the potentiality of your diseased timeline would be vast, surely.

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