The Wanderers--Chapter Nine

Doctor Who--The Crossover Internet Adventures
XIA #2--"The Wanderers"
Chapter Nine--"The Last Supper"
by John Seavey

 Penny and Judy Robinson entered the small room, which was already crowded enough with Jamie MacCrimmon, John Robinson, Don West, Zachary Smith, and a man known only as 'the Doctor' inhabiting it. The two girls had been dressed in tuxedos, with their hair tied back in tight buns. Their eyes were unfocused, as though they were staring at something just on the tips of their noses.

 "Dinner," they said in unison, "is served."

 "Oh, my giddy aunt," whispered the Doctor.

 

Zoe Herriot and Will Robinson were ushered into a plush office, decorated in the style of a Victorian gentleman's study. Books on every topic lined three of the four walls, and part of the fourth as well. The desk was kept immaculately clean, and the chairs in front of the desk were straight-backed and looked exceedingly uncomfortable. The only other piece of furniture in the room was what had once been a standing mirror...however, someone had shattered it, removing every single piece of glass from the frame.

 The chair behind the desk was turned away from them, but someone was evidently sitting in it. That someone said, "Greetings--I do apologize about the chairs, but I decided to leave the office just as Ramling had it before he left. The man had absolutely no idea what made good furniture, I'm afraid. This chair was a gift to him; it's the only reason it's worth sitting in."

 Zoe and Will looked at each other as they sat. With a slight shrug, Zoe decided to take the lead. "Who are you, and why were we brought here?" she asked.

 The chair rotated slowly to reveal a creaure--partially human, but with features that looked as though they had been commingled with those of a hideous monster. Zoe blanched as the thing opened its mouth, revealing teeth that had been warped into jagged sculptures, caught at various stages between human and whatever the thing was he had mixed with. A lolling, grotesque tongue slid from his mouth, as he licked his lips, then retracted in once more. "I call myself Umbra," it said in a voice that sounded remarkably cultured given the creature's appearance. "I once had another name, but I gave it up--I am no longer a Borad of Karfelon, and have become...something of a shadow of what I was." The thing smiled again, revealing those hideous teeth, and Zoe shuddered.

 

Zzatt and Pradnn watched as the aliens' ship was engulfed in a shimmering wave of energy. Suddenly, there was a massive explosion, and when the smoke had cleared, the ship had vanished.

 They looked at each other underneath the overhang of rock that sheltered them from the acidic storm, their expressions of shock and worry identical. Both of them were thinking the same thoughts, but neither one wanted to give voice to their suspicions. Pradnn, though, finally broke the silence. "The Aanotifh'ew. They knew these people would take action, so they destroyed them."

 Zzatt replied, in a broken voice, "Then there is no hope. They will hunt us down, and our race will be no more."

 Pradnn shook his head. "There is one final option. It means the death of the Hdojjwh, but that is assured in any case. We still have a cache of cobalt bombs--do not look so shocked, Zzatt. The Aanotifh'ew never abided by any of the Doomsday Treaties--surely it would be ironic if the weapons that they used became the instruments of their device?"

 Zzatt sighed. "There was a time when I would have refused...but no more. Then we shall detonate the bombs at their landing site?"

 Pradnn shook his head. "No...I wish to be absolutely certain. The Aanotifh'ew ship...it is still conducting mining operations?"

 Zzatt nodded. "They are just now finishing."

 "But the drill is still in place?"

 "Yes."

 "Then we will enter the ship through the drill bore and plant the bombs in the heart of their reactor. They will have no chance to run, Zzatt...finally, they will pay for the slaughter they have visited upon the innocent."

 

Penny and Judy ushered the group into a vast, mirrored hall, in the center of which stood a large mahogany table with a vast meal laid out upon it. There were seats enough for all of them, and a placard at each seat telling everyone where they were to sit. Smith and the Doctor sat next to the head of the table, facing each other, with West next to Smith and Jamie next to the Doctor. John Robinson was on the Doctor's side of the table, but he faced an empty chair, and no card was set for either the head or the foot of the table. Once they had finished seating the group, Penny and Judy stood by the doors, immobile.

 "Hello," a tall man with a moustache said as he entered the room, "I'm sorry I'm late." He looked at his bare wrist. "Wait--I'm not late, you are! Oh, never mind, none of you have had any wine, have you? OK, then, neither you, nor I are late. Yet."

 John Robinson stood up. "Who are you? How did we get to this--this place? What is going on?"

 "To answer your questions in order," the man said, "The end of the world; my name is Jeremiah Ramling; and--no, wait. That's the wrong order. Although I am the end of the world, you know. But to answer your questions in the right order, I am Jeremiah Ramling; your ship's hyperdrive set up a standing interference wave with my interstitial projectors, pulling you into my mirror-world...don't worry, the energy discharge was negligible, and shunted into the real world in any event...and for the third, it's the end of the world. Not this one, I might add. Another one. But it's one you're all familiar with. Earth, I think it's called. I was very fond of it, once. But that was before I met Umbra." He sighed, theatrically, as he sat down at the head of the table. "I really should have known better than to work for a man who had a name like that. It sounds like something out of a child's cartoon." He looked over, just in time to see Jamie pick up a drumstick from his table. "Don't eat that!" he said, pulling out a gun. "It's just a prop! I always feel that people are more at ease if they recieve bad news over a meal. For example, Professor Robinson will probably be much more relaxed when he learns that I sent his lovely wife to her death."

 John Robinson started to launch himself at Ramling, but the gun moved in his direction. He sat down, his eyes filled with cold fury.

 The Doctor finally spoke. "My goodness," he said, "you do seem to have a gift for this sort of planning." Surreptitiously, he fluttered his hand in John Robinson's direction, trying to get him to sit once more. "I'm awfully intrigued by your...er, your gifts. Would you care to share more?"

 Ramling smiled. "Oh, and this is the part where I stupidly reveal my whole plans, my entire history, and everything you need to destroy me?"

 Doctor Smith said, "Yes. Yes, it is."

 "Alright," Ramling said. "Just wanted to make sure I wasn't giving this away too soon. I'm getting confused about timing, here."

 

"We--that is to say, I--hired Ramling to develop a device similar to one on my home planet. We called it 'the Timelash', and it was used to create a stable corridor between two points in relative time. There, it was used as a device of punishment...criminals would be exiled, instead of killed. Unfortunately, there was an accident. The Doctor wound up sending me through the Timelash, expecting me to wind up on Earth. What he could not have known was that the corridor was unstable. It collapsed, with me inside it, and when I finally did arrive on Earth, I was temporally fragmented.

 "Currently, there are 13 of me. When I first arrived on this planet, there were only three. By my calculations, I will go critical within the next month...by the time temporal fragmentation is complete, for a brief instant, there will be an infinite number of me, before I'm spread so thin that I vanish into interstitial time."

 "Interstitial time?" Zoe interrupted. "But that's just a theory, and a discredited one at that. The Thascales theory was proven to be fraud!"

 "No," Umbra countered, "the Thascales theory was perfectly correct. It was further developed, privately, by a man named Winterdawn who was secretly under my employ--unfortunately, Winterdawn's researches were contaminated, and I had to look elsewhere. Ramling was the perfect choice. I employed him, funded him, and directed him to other researches I had come in contact with that complemented his theories--those of Maxtible and Waterfield."

 Will said, "I've never heard of either of those two people."

 "It's unsurprising," Umbra said. "Their studies were suppressed and classified--first by the Shadow Directory, and later, after that collapsed, by UNIT. But they were visionaries...and their ideas helped Ramling immensely. He was well on the way to figuring out how to correct my disorder..."

 

"Then I went mad," Ramling said casually.

 "Just like that?" Smith asked.

 "Well, not quite just like that. I started to notice that I was having odd, irrational impulses..." he picked up the wine glass and set it on his head, balancing it without apparent effort. "I'd have violent urges, and not understand why--" he reversed the gun and smashed the butt of it into Dr. Smith's face, sending him crashing to the floor in agony-- "and then I'd return to normal."

 Major West helped Doctor Smith, who was whispering, "oh, the pain, the pain..." back to his feet. He tensed himself to leap for Ramling, but he'd already flipped the gun back around.

 "It took me some time to realize it, but I figured out Umbra was driving me mad. He'd been spying on my researches for quite some time, I knew, but when I found out he was an alien, it all became quite clear. He'd learned all he needed to learn from me, and now he was driving me mad.

 "So I tried to find a way to cure it, but already parts of me didn't want to be cured. They sabotaged my efforts, sapped my mind, destroyed my notes when I wasn't paying attention. So I imprisoned myself here, in a pocket of interstitial time, and I felt certain that I couldn't get out, and nothing could get in.

 "But you know what?" He leaned in, very close, to the Doctor's face. "I WAS WRONG!" The Doctor recoiled slightly from the shout, but his face still held the expression of earnest curiousity. "I was very very wrong. I'm still just as smart now that I'm mad, but it's all being applied in different ways. I figured out how to contact the Aanotifh'ew, how to use the interstitial tunnels to send them to Earth--your wife gave them the device, Professor Robinson, I'm almost certain she's dead by now--and I even figured out how to get your lovely daughters back after I sent them away from me. I can't beat the insanity, you see. It's like fighting an enemy who knows everything you do, and has all your memories, who knows all your plans in advance...it's impossible for me to stop. And Umbra did it to me. And he'll die for it."

 

"I'm fairly certain he holds me responsible for it all. I'm not certain why, of course...but then again, he is not a rational man, so I can't explain any of it. We tried to duplicate his work, but it was all too horribly random...the test creatures we used wound up on alien worlds, light-years beyond our reach. Still, they were genetically engineered to withstand those kinds of worlds, so it was no great loss."

 Zoe said, "So when we came here, through what I'm guessing was one of Ramling's interstitial tunnels, you grabbed us to ask for our help?"

 Umbra waved a single flipper-like hand. "No, nothing like that. I already found someone who can help me--someone who is an expert in the studies that Ramling was a comparative novice in. All I want from you is information on the world you were on...my new allies can do the rest."

 Will looked concerned. "What sort of allies?"

 Umbra chuckled softly. "They're some of the best scientific minds in the universe, actually. Maxtible and Waterfield went to them for help, but things went a bit sour. Luckily, we have a better understanding than they did." The bookshelf opened up, to reveal a dome-shaped creature that hovered into the room and regarded them with an eye-stalk. "Ms. Herriot, Mr. Robinson, meet my allies...the Daleks."

 

As the drill bore retracted into the belly of the mothership, Zzatt tried to keep a grip with one hand while he wiped nervous sweat from his palms with another. He started to shift his position to relieve some of the weight on his toes, but the slight settling of the cobalt bomb on his back caused him to freeze up again. He was grateful when the hatch closed, and he could climb down from the bore.

 He looked over at Pradnn. "Where to now?" he asked.

 "I'm not...certain," Pradnn said. "This is the closest any of us have ever been to an Aanotifh'ew ship..."

 "It doesn't really matter, you know," Zzatt said. "The bombs we carry will devastate this continent, let alone this ship."

 "I want to be sure," Pradnn said. "I want to see the looks on their faces when we detonate these things. I want to know that the sacrifice of everything we held dear was not entirely in vain."

 Zzatt nodded, and they began moving. They snuck through the corridors of the ship for what seemed like hours, barely avoiding several Aanotifh'ew as they bustled through the corridors on some unknowable errand. Finally, they slipped through a pair of doors into a massive room filled with computer consoles.

 "Engine room?" whispered Zzatt.

 Pradnn shook his head. "Bridge, I think. No sign of any reactors...wait. Look..." He pointed to the life-form that seemed to be attracting the attention of many of the Aanotifh'ew. "She's not Aanotifh'ew."

 "No...she's one of those other things that they destroyed. Maybe they're examining one last specimen?"

 "I don't know...it looks like she's still alive, though." Pradnn shrugged. "Not for long, though...this is as good as any of a place to detonate."

 Just then, the other group of Aanotifh'ew, the group that was not occupied with the woman, looked up from their studies of a strange collection of junk. They pulled a lever that looked as though it had been jury-rigged from some sort of hygiene implement, and the viewscreen started to swirl and shift.

 "Something's happening," Zzatt said. "We're moving..."

 

"This, my dear friends, is the penultimate moment," Ramling said as he watched the Aanotifh'ew ship vanish from the viewscreens. "The Aanotifh'ew have been lied to...they've been told that the last enclave of the Hdojjwh are here, but that they've found a way of escaping this sector of the galaxy. The interstitial tunnels will take them to Earth, where they won't find Hdojjwh...but they won't care. Their instinctive and revulsive hatred of lifeforms with two genders will lead them to exterminate all life on Earth. And I'll have my revenge."

 The Doctor stood up, seemingly uncaring of the gun in his face. "You can't do this! I'll have to stop you, you know!"

 "I know you'll try..." Ramling plucked the wineglass off of his head and raised it in a mock toast. "That's why I'm savoring this moment. This is the moment of anticipation, better than the victory itself. The penultimate moment, here and now, is the moment where even the defeated villain seems victorious...even in the happiest stories, the penultimate moment is filled with tragedy and sorrow. Here and now, love lies bleeding--" he gestured to Professor Robinson-- "--the Earth is doomed, and a madman stands in twisted triumph. You may stop me, you may fail, Doctor. But here and now, this is my moment of glory."

 He took a sip from the glass. "To unhappy endings, Doctor."

 TO BE CONCLUDED...

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