Fic: Ashes of Gallifrey ; Dust of Eden 4/5

[metztlimoon]

Author: Metztlimoon
Characters: Tenth Doctor, OCs, Special guest star
Rating: Contains adult concepts.
Wordcount: 17,000 in 13 chapters (and a bit)
Summary: The Doctor is injured and stranded on a planet that's been ravaged by a race with an unknown purpose. Working with the woman who found him to solve the mystery and save the planet, the Doctor comes to believe they're also fighting an old friend. (Set after Voyage of the Damned.)
Beta: kahtyasofiaYou have been awesome from the first moment. Thank you.
With Thanks to: blaiyzed, Zebedee, kwizbit, ficfinishing
A/N : This is a first person fic from the viewpoint of the main OC. It had been sitting a third done on the hard drive for over a year, until ficfinishing came along and gave me confidence and inspiration. Kat also deserves thanks for the awesome title as well as everything else :)

Part ONE is HERE
Part TWO is HERE
Part THREE is HERE  

Ten

It took me a few moments to gather my thoughts and follow him, by which time the Doctor was out of sight. I didn’t have a clue what to do but I couldn’t leave him to wander around. We were already in enough trouble and he was the only other person who had any idea what was going on.

It’s not like he could get far.

When I found him, he was sitting at the table as I walked into my room. He looked up as I closed the door with my foot and I waited for some kind of telling off.

“There're some very strange things about this planet,” he said. “Not least of all, you.”

“Yeah, thanks,” I said, walking past him and slumping on the edge of the bed.

“Oh,” he said, “I didn't mean...”

“Yes,” I replied, “you did.”

“How old are you?”

“Thirty... ish.”

“Were you born here?”

“I could operate a planter before I could read.”

He smiled, “Thracian pride still in place, then?”

“Not really, I preferred reading.”

“Were you born entirely... naturally?”

“My mother was my mother, my father was my father, and I was never anywhere near a test tube, if that's what you're asking. Believe me; I've hoped I was adopted since I was six. It would have made a lot of things make more sense.”

“Any spatial-temporal rifts on the family farm?”

“Where is this going?”

“I don't know yet,” he said. “I need to see what they are up to. Where's their nearest base?”

I laughed, “It's twenty-five kilometres beyond the city boundary. There's no transport, and we'd be dead trying it on foot; from the sun or the patrols.”

“Do you think you could get me to my ship?” he asked.

I looked at him, “Cobalt's already gone after it. He’s probably halfway back here, by now.”

“He won't be able to do anything with her, and particularly not if he's gone on foot.”

“Yes. I could get you there.”

He stood up, wincing, and putting his hand to his side. I was halfway to my feet to check the injury (it's been what? Three days? He's probably ripped the stitches out) but he waved me away.

“Time,” he said suddenly, “time, time, time. It's all about time. Time Missiles, Time Agents, temporal instability, time sensitivity.”

“Time,” I said, “as in we don't have a lot of it. Cobalt's going to be back soon; you really don’t want to be here when he finds out whatever you did to his missile.”

I laced my boots tight and dragged my pack from under the bed, “We'll need water. Fill these.”

I handed him the bottles and busied myself finding a spare shemagh for him. When I turned round he was still standing there with the empty bottles in his hands. I tipped my head on one side, “you really don't respond well to instructions, do you?”

“Can you hear that?”

“Hear what?”

“Shh, listen.”

I listened until just on the edge of my hearing there was a low hum... more a sensation than a sound.

“What is it?”

“I have no idea,” he said then grinned. “Shall we go and see?”

He dropped the bottles, took my hand and pulled me out of the door. I felt redeemed.

It seemed odd that he’d come to be leading me through the place I had lived for the past two years, up in the direction of the surface. He needed me to get him through the gate, and then he ran ahead of me again in the direction of the noise. We were close to the desert side of the city here, and he scrambled up the rubble of the wall to look over the top. I hauled myself up behind him, squinting into the expanse of white even through my glasses. He pointed to the horizon, “Given size of the planet and the curvature of the horizon... that's what? Twenty kilometres away?”

For just a moment I remembered the light dancing on the city's massive lake, replaced now with the stark reflection from bleached earth. There was a grey shape moving over the plain. It would have to be huge, city sized, for him to have estimated that distance and I found it difficult to believe. I dug into my pack and pulled out the binoculars, passing them to him before I even thought to look myself.

He looked, and then turned to lie on his back and stare at the sky.

“What?” I asked.

“Look.” He handed me back the binoculars.

I poked my head above the rubble and resolved the focus. The image was fuzzy, and the battery-low light was flashing in the corner of the image because the sun filter drained it so fast. The range finder function struggled but eventually the image cleared. The ship, whatever it was, was flying low to the ground like an industrial combine, only with three times the wingspan. A flickering white beam pushed ahead of it into the ground. Behind it, a flurry of hooks and scoops dipped to ground level and up again. It looked and it behaved just like the combines I flew to raise money for college.

“But there's nothing out there but scrub and dust.” I said, “What's it harvesting?”

“Soil,” he replied, “they're taking the soil.”

“They don't have their own, so they're stealing ours? What? I don't understand.”

“I met a man once who broke apart whole planets. Nasty piece of work; he had a psychotic parrot.”

“I don't understand,” I said again, as if saying it would exempt me from the need to exist in a world where soil was stolen and the Doctor was rambling about psychotic parrots.

He turned onto his side and looked at me, “I have to know if there's anything you haven't told me.”

“About what?”

“About you. About anything. Anything strange.”

I wanted to tell him what a stupid question that was but I couldn’t. What could I tell him? That my family thought I was mad? It hardly counted as strange, given I’d told them I could hear the voices in their heads. That I told my best friend at college I could feel things, and the next day I was forced to leave, because she had told everyone and they had laughed at me? That wasn’t strange, it was people being people. Should I tell him about those stupid fantasies, leaping into my head making me want to touch him? That I kept dreaming about the end of another world? A world I had never even set foot on.

The dreams were the one thing I had never understood.

“You mean about the dreams?”

“Dreams! Yes, tell me about the dreams.”

“I've had them since I can remember. They're just dreams.”

“You know that isn't true.”

Those five words vindicated me. It was almost with relief that I told him, “I'm standing on another world. The grass is red. The sky is burnt orange. Twin suns burn overhead, cooler than this. The trees are silver...”

I looked at him and he was breaking. His hand twitched slightly. “You can't know that. You can't.”

“The sky fills with death...there's nowhere to run. And I feel it...burning. I feel every moment; hear the screaming- I’m screaming- into the darkness.”

He got to his feet, “Stop it.”

His pain assaulted my senses and I stopped. He looked away, and I put words to my realization. “That's where you're from. The planet that burned. It was your home.”

“Oh Eve,” he said, “there's so much more to it than that. You don't understand.”

“Then tell me.”

He turned his back to me, “I can't.”

“Don't you think I have a right to know what's going on in my own head?”

He turned to face me again, “The human race is still generations away from stable telepathy. It's not even stable in you, not integrated properly into the genome. You’re beyond simply sensing things though, beyond random bits of information simply sneaking into your head. You shouldn't exist and yet you do; without tampering, without selective breeding, without anything....”

He banged his head against his hand and groaned, “Of course! How could I have been so stupid? They shouldn't have- nothing should have escaped - but apparently they did. Tiny particles of my home, spinning out into the universe. Finding their way here, to you. Which means if you absorbed enough radiation to change your genetic code, the planet must have been bombarded with ooooh - lots. Harmless, of course. Mostly harmless. So what do they want with a truck load of… oh, they can’t be. Tell me that’s not the case.”

“That's... not the case?”

“But it has to be. Eve, they’re harvesting your planet to find the remains of mine.”

I looked at him blankly.

“They want control of time.”

Eleven

 

 

“Didn't I say it was all about time?” he asked, reaching down to help me stand. “I can only imagine Cobalt was under Time Agency orders to remove the anomaly and ended up trapped here himself. When this is over I'm going to have to have words with someone about their methods.”

My head was spinning, “I have to tell someone about that... harvester. I shouldn't think a city's going to slow it down much.”

“Yes, you should.”

“I'm at a bit of a loss who to tell. Can you stop it?”

“Their power is solar,” the Doctor said, “which means if we turn the lights off, they’ll be at a bit of a disadvantage.”

“Turn…the lights…off?”

He pointed up at the blazing disc of the solar collector.

“How?” I asked.

“Agent Cobalt's Armageddon missile.”

“Didn't you break it?”

“A bit. I can fix it again.”

“He's not going to like it.”

“It's going to be too late by the time it's done.”

“What about your ship?”

“Stopping that harvester is more important.”

“What do you need?”

“A technician.”

Grant. “I'll get you one.”

***
Grant was less than happy when I just walked into his room without knocking; ignoring the limbs of whoever it was he’d been sleeping with, and the fact he was stark naked and lying mostly on top of the sheet.

Mostly ignored, anyway.

“Put it away and get dressed,” I barked, “we've got a problem.”

“ Eve? What? When did you turn into Jay?”

“I mean it. There's a Jar ship on its way here and we have to stop it.”

“What?”

“Huh, what, alien ship?” said a sleepy voice and a bleary eyed young woman poked her head out of the blankets. “Oh, hi, Eve.”

“Hi, Emma. Please, Grant. The Doctor needs your help.”

“The who, what?” Grant casually swung his legs over the side of the bed and slowly reached for his dressing gown. When he finally looked up he noticed the Doctor standing in the doorway looking discreetly away, but still somehow waving in the right direction. Grant pulled the robe over his legs and looked at me pointedly, “You really aren't messing, are you, honey?”

“You think it's the sort of thing I feel the need to joke about?”

He gestured toward the Doctor, “He know what's going on?”

“Yes.”

“About time someone did,” Grant stood up and pulled the dressing gown closed. “Right then. What do we need to do?”

When Grant had dressed and we were outside, I hurriedly explained that Cobalt sold us out, that there was a giant soil-stealing ship a few kilometres out, running on solar power and the Doctor had a plan to take out the orbital mirrors. To his credit, he listened without interrupting.

I finished up with: “Emma? Seriously?”

“Not at all seriously,” Grant said. “So Doctor is it? Workshop’s this way.”

That, unfortunately, left me the job of finding out if Cobalt was back yet.

He had to still be gone. Walking out there, finding the ship, doing whatever he needed to with it, walking back...that had to be two hours, right there. And it's been what? Just over an hour since he left?

It's really only been that long?

When I reached his office though, the door was ajar. I told myself that it must be Jay, not Cobalt; but when I peered cautiously through the crack, I realised that it wasn’t Jay.

“It’ll be much easier if you come in,” Cobalt said.

I hesitated.

“Oh, it's all right. I won't shoot you.”

I entered, keeping my eyes on Cobalt. He was sliding the cover back onto the missile as he looked up.

“You're very resourceful,” he said, “or rather, your new friend is. Where is he?”

“He's looking for his ship,” I lied, “What did you do to it?”

“It was of no use to me.”

I tried not to speculate on what Cobalt would do to things he couldn’t use; or the consequences.

“I know about the soil,” I said, “I know what they want it for and I know why you've been screwing with us. I've seen the harvester, but now, you're stuck here with the rest of us.”

“Actually, I'm not,” he wandered to the desk, “I'm just about to leave.”

“How? You said you needed the time-source to get home.”

“I have a ship,” he shrugged. “You really think I'd build that,” he pointed at the missile, “if I didn't have a way to get away from here?”

I wanted to smack him for that cocky-bastard statement, but he was too far away and I was too scared.

“Okay, maybe I won't get far; it's not in the best of health. The next moon perhaps, but far enough away to not be here.” He carried on adjusting the missile. “I've been stuck in worse centuries.”

I've been stuck in worse centuries? Who had the Doctor said Cobalt worked for? Time Agency. And, if there was a time-source in the Doctor's ship then the Doctor himself wasn’t only alien...

“So, you're just going to leave us all to die?” I asked.

“That was always the plan,” he said, finishing what he was doing and standing just out of reach. “That was what I was sent here to do; find out what threat this place posed and stop it by any means I had to. This is bigger than the Jars; there are other creatures, worse things that would do more damage to existence than you could possibly imagine. Compared to that, Thrace is nothing. This place, your people, they're un-saveable. You know how to deal with the un-saveable, don't you, Eve?”

A knife in the right place is quick, finishing a job already started and beyond repair.

Is he right? Are we the same? I hit him, unaware of anything but anger and a sudden satisfaction as I landed a blow on that pretty face of his. He knocked me to the floor without hesitation and I spat blood into the dust. No, we are not the same.

Looking down, he smiled and operated something on his wrist. “Things I've seen; you'd be begging to die. Goodbye, Eve,” he said and faded into nothing.

Somewhere behind me the missile's arming process clicked to life.

***

The Doctor was talking to Grant in the workshop when I rushed in, breathless. Both of them looked at me, concerned. “Cobalt's just run for it and he's reactivated the missile.”

I didn’t stay long enough to check if they were following, but the Doctor overtook me in the corridor and spun himself into the room ahead of me. He pulled up in front of the missile and looked at the scrolling blue lights on the side. He frowned, standing on the other side of the device, and examined the cover for a long moment before sliding it off.

“Oh. I see. He's bypassed the flight control and turned it into a bomb.”

“You can stop it, right?” I ask.

“Pass me that telemetry stabiliser.”

Grant handed him something, “Anything else?”

“Hold the secondaries out of the way,” the Doctor said, pointing into the casing, “right now, loosen the Hill array. Slow-ly.”

“Doctor?” I asked again, as he and Grant worked.

“I can't stop it,” the Doctor said and wiped his forehead with his hand.

Can't? What? My heart sank. And that's it? Can't?

“Genius,” he said, “remember? I can't stop it but I can deactivate the temporal payload making it just an ordinary missile. Like that! Ha!”

He reached in again, pulling out a handful of wires. I couldn’t help but notice his hand was shaking as he did so. He paused briefly to still the tremor.

“And,” he continued, “I can reset the rocket guidance system. Grant, hard wire the mirror's position into the guidance system while I reroute this, like so...” he looked up from the missile. “Eve...?”

“Yes?”

“Please stop pacing.”

I pressed my hands onto the desk behind me and forced myself to remain still until the Doctor slid the panel back into position.

“Right. Done. Granted, it's going to launch rather than detonate. And, it's going to explode on whatever it hits first.”

The Doctor and Grant exchanged glances.

Grant grabbed one end of the missile, the Doctor the other.

“Just so you know,” said Grant. “If I see the slightest sign of the engines firing I'm dropping this and making a run for it.”

The next thirty seconds were a slightly surreal haze of me running ahead of them and opening doors until we were outside, and of Grant hunting for something to stabilise the missile long enough to get it airborne. Then the Doctor pulled him out of the way by the collar, and all three of us were diving for cover behind a pile of rubble as it streaked skywards.

Six minutes later, it went dark.

Like turning off a light.

From the blinding and constant light of the previous five years to nothing at all, in an instant. My heart beat painfully fast, a sudden spike of fear. I was shaking.

Although I could explain to myself what had just happened, tell myself that at three in the morning in the middle of autumn it should be dark; the sky shouldn't just go black like that.

Every sentient being on the continent, apart from the three of us, asked a single question; what just happened?

It went dark. Just like...

The burnt orange sky turns black with smoke and the world smells of blood.

Far away, the low throb of the harvester faded to nothing. I stared into the emptiness.

I cannot breathe, but I am still aware.

Terrified. Kneeling in the dust in the blackness, knowing what comes next, knowing what always comes next. I'm trying to wake up, I'm trying, but every time I think the image is gone, its back. I'm calling uselessly for help, but I have no voice and I can't wake up.

I’m begging for it to end as fire burns the skin from my flesh and the flesh from my bones and I am still aware.

Someone grabbed my arm and held me. “Eve,” I heard the Doctor say, “Eve. Look at me. You're dreaming. You're not there.”

I'm not...

From far away, I heard the sound of panic, because all of our power is solar too. The ground trembled, and I realised that even if the aliens had had backup, it hadn’t switched in time and the harvester must have crashed.

I'm not there.

The Doctor looked at me. A shaft of diffuse light caught his eyes as long forgotten night batteries kicked in and the ground was suddenly covered with pools of silver and blue.

I'm not there, but you are.

“There,” he said, patting my shoulder and helping me to my feet, “back with us. Brilliant. Now that's sorted we need to move on to the next problem.”

Grant was leaning against a wall, looking up, “Stars,” he said, “I can see stars.”

“Can't have you going all Asimov on me,” said the Doctor. “Yes, stars, very nice. I know it's been a while since you saw the rest of the universe, but first things first. We have to...” his voice broke off, for a moment. “We have to... Eve, what is it we have to do, again?”

“Deal with the Jars?” I asked, “Doctor, are you okay?”

“I'm fine, I'm absolutely...” he banged on the side of his head, “no, no, no, not now. There, all better. Now...”

He took one step forward and collapsed on the ground.
 

***
PART FIVE