Doctor Who: The Internet Adventures
"Experiment IV"
Chapter 11-- "Rock and a Hard Place"
By Christine A. Renner (pncwho@aol.com)

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 The Master had changed Ace. The Master had done something to Ace.

 Ace had done something to the Doctor. The Doctor fell to the floor, a knife in his back...

 

Now that Ace was gone from the Matrix, Grace shrugged off the sagging ropes and tried to fight the birds. Using the ropes to flail at the birds worked quite well, until one of them snagged it out of her grasp. Unused as she was to actual physical combat, she held her ground, but, being so badly outnumbered, she knew it was only a matter of time. She had to find some weakness in the birds...

 *Wait a minute,* she thought, looking more carefully at her avian foes, *these aren't really birds. There's something familiar about them, almost as if they remind me of...* Grace studied the birds; she thought she saw something humanoid about them, something about the way they moved, their mannerisms, almost like...almost like the Doctor, Romana and the Abbot...

 With a start, she realized what they were. These were the departed Time Lords whose brain patterns were stored in the Matrix. The Matrix, and its occupants, was fighting her.

 

"Ace, how could you?!" cried Romana as Ace sauntered up to her Master. "The Doctor was your friend!"

 Ace turned and sneered at Romana. "He was a sap. Always fighting for the downtrodden, the underdogs, and where has it gotten him? He's a pariah, an outcast, disdained by his people, including your precious Time Lord Council who still use him as their catspaw. What's the point? You gotta look out for Number One."

 The Master draped one arm around Ace's shoulders and aimed the Tissue Compression Eliminator in his other hand at the gathered Time Lords and Ladies and waved them out of the room towards the elevators to the Detention Area.

 

"Why are you doing this to me?" cried Grace. "I'm trying to help! I'm here to mend the Matrix!"

 "You don't belong here," snarled one of the birds. "We are Lords of Time, and you are merely human. You are as a virus; your presence is anathema to the Matrix. You must be destroyed."

 "But you don't understand! The space-time vortex is disintegrating! I'm bonded with the Doctor's TARDIS, and with the Matrix in the state it's in, I'm the only one who can fix it!"

 The birds closed in, clawing and tearing at her, pulling her down for the finish.

 

The Doctor stirred. There was an electrical tingling in the middle of his spine, just below his shoulder blades. He flexed his fingers; they worked. He tried moving his feet, but to no avail. *Well, that explains that,* he thought. What he'd thought was a knife he now knew to be a Paralyzer, a non-fatal but extremely effective Gallifreyan weapon that, when stuck in the victim's spinal column, paralyzed him from that point on down. He wondered why Ace had used that particular weapon instead of killing him outright; whose side was she really on?

 He moved his arms around his back to dislodge the Paralyzer, but could not reach that specific spot on his back. *Splendid,* thought the Doctor ruefully, *what else can go wrong?*

 The lights flickered.

 

Twenty floors down and stepping out of the elevator, the Master looked up instinctively as the lights flickered. Andred seized his chance and shoulder-charged the Master, knocking him to the ground and sending the TCE back through the closing elevator doors. Dessia and Drax seized the Rani and Ace as well, and a scuffle ensued.

 Nobody noticed a blue-green swirling mist approaching the fray.

 

The Doctor, mildly annoyed by the flickering lights, wondered if the electricity was being affected by the Matrix trouble.

 With a start he realized Grace was still in the Matrix. He had to help her; it was his fault she was in there in the first place. He pulled himself forward across the floor through the door, and down the hall to the Amplified Panotropic Computer room. Shoulders and fingers aching, he drew himself up to the computer, attached the headpiece, and plugged himself into the Matrix.

 He found himself on a grassy hill, under a cloudy sky. He looked for Grace and saw her fighting a losing battle against the spirits of the Matrix. Unlike Grace, however, he had been in the Matrix before and knew a few tricks. With a thought, twin stun guns appeared in his hands, and he fired at Grace's attackers, striking most of them down.

 He didn't sense the presence behind him...

 To be continued in Chapter 12...

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