Xena was cradling Gabrielle in her arms and her thoughts drifted back to when her son Solan was a newborn and how when she had looked down into his soft blue eyes, all her anger with the world seemed to dissipate. Here he was, a helpless newborn and all that mattered was him, the son of she and Borias. Her heart ached at the sacrifice she had made as she thought back to the night she had given Solan into the care of the centaur, Kaleipus. Xena's thoughts returned to the present and she looked at Gabrielle's face which seemed to be shining with an angelic inner light of its own. Here you are, she thought. You , who are the one bright light in my dark and lonely world. How could I have let this happen to you? I want so much to save you from and protect you from this darkness within me and from the world around us. But how can I fight an enemy I can't see? You are my guiding light, my way, my peace. I'm lost without you in my life. Gabrielle, please, come back to me. Almost as if she had wished her to revive, Gabrielle started to squirm and fidget and then sat bolt upright, a single word escaping from her lips in a cry of desperation, "Doctor!" The bard looked wide-eyed in terror as Xena looked at her and for a moment, the warrior didn't see Gabrielle. The person who was sitting before her was a complete and total stranger. The moment passed quickly and the girl from Poteidaia looked over at her friend and asked, "Xena, what happened?" "You fainted," the warrior replied, fighting to keep the worry out of her voice. Gabrielle tried to remember what had happened but there was only distorted images in her memory now; bits and pieces that eluded her whenever she tried to mentally grab onto them. The bard stood and brushed herself down and she leaned on her staff for support. She felt that it had almost become a part of her in a way; like it was an extension of her own being. It felt reassuring against her flushed cheek and she turned to face the warrior. "Xena, we need to leave this place, it isn't safe. We're in grave danger here. I can't begin to imagine what we'll find in Amphipolis." Rising to a stance from near where she was crouching by a fire that she had built, Xena started to finger the catch where her chakram rested. "So, we can expect some kind of attack, possibly while on our way home." Gabrielle cut her off, "It's not that. That feeling that I had earlier, of something happening in Amphipolis, it's grown stronger. Something unpleasant is definitely going to happen or will happen soon. And Xena, someone may die."
PRESIDENT ROMANA'S CHAMBERS-GALLIFREY:
The President looked up from the discourse she was preparing and over at Ace. It had been some time since she had seen the Doctor and she was pleased at the opportunity to see him again, providing of course, they could find a way to reach him. Romana spoke, "With all the interference surrounding the Earth, we can't establish any kind of contact with the Doctor, and his is the only Type Forty TARDIS still in existence."
"Well, we have all sorts of various means at our disposal. According to what you had said earlier, the latest temporal scans placed him on Earth at the end of the twentieth century. Is it possible we could use the Time Scoop to snatch him from Earth?" Romana gave thought to Ace's observation and finally said, "We may have to. The Time Scoop has the necessary ability to punch through the interference and rescue, if you will, the Doctor. Our trouble is going to be in pinpointing the exact temporal coordinates that his TARDIS is located in. Without those, the Time Scoop could accidentally pull anyone or anything out of time that shouldn't be. Also, Lord Ambul has strong support here in the Capitol. Both he and his followers strongly favor a return to the old ways and wouldn't hesitate to see Earth destroyed to preserve the integrity of the space-time continuum to their own greedy ends. This situation provides them plenty of fuel to fire their arguments with."
"Is their support really that strong?" Ace wondered.
"Yes," replied Romana, "And I'm afraid that in the right situation, it could lead to civil war here on Gallifrey. If there was only some way we could keep track of him, or somehow get a handle on what he's up to."
"There's no need," said Ace, "I already have a man on it now. In fact, he should be in a secret meeting with Ambul and his gang even as we speak." Romana looked up at her most trusted adviser and gave a thoughtful grin as she said, "Wicked!"
* * * * *
Lord Ambul was meeting with some of his soon to be confederates. It was plain that civil unrest was indeed in the offing.
"So what do you propose? How do we seize control?" A junior grade Time Lord asked. Ambul replied, "We have a great deal of support here in the Capitol. News of the crisis on Earth is being spread like wildfire even as we speak to assure us of victory. Should it come to it , however, a full scale civil war will be fought. Be assured, my lords, that President Romana's support is strong but not without its weak points. It would only be a matter of time before the old regime could be reestablished." Some of the other lords looked decidedly pale at the thought. Ambul further reassured them, "Only as a last resort, of course, will it be used. By that time however, we will have the power to stop what is happening on the Earth. Gallifrey must be protected at all costs! The President has let outsiders into our world and I feel certain that Rassilon never intended it that way. We must ensure the safety of our home even if it means ultimately sacrificing the Earth! Are you with me?" There were a few muttered words of consent. "Think of it this way," Ambul continued, "We are not only saving ourselves, but the whole of time itself. Time is what we are pledged to protect! Again I ask you, are you with me?" "YES!!" chorused the assembled lords. "Good," Ambul started, "You're all dismissed except for Valyeux and Mnemost." All of the lords then departed except Valyeux and Mnemost and unbeknownst to them, a spy who had been planted to infiltrate the group as seen to by Ace. What he overheard shocked him to the very core of his being, "All is set Lord Ambul." The spy couldn't see who was talking from his vantage point where he was hidden, "We have been able to discover the plans for the Demat Gun in the Matrix and have discovered how to integrate the basics of the technology into the Magnotron beam. One blast and the Earth will be no more!" The spy turned to flee and warn Romana and as he did so, his robes caught on the stand on which a small vase was resting. Too late, he saw the vase crashing down and reached out to catch before it could shatter on the floor. With amazing Time Lord dexterity and agility, he caught the vase and settled it on the floor. He turned away again to find the President and warn her of the soon-to-be chaos. As he turned away, the antique stand the vase had rested on came toppling down, smashing into the vase and clattering across the floor. Knowing that his cover was blown, he made a hasty exit but not before realizing that he had also been seen. "Quick!" Ambul bellowed as he saw the spy escaping, "He'll warn the President!" Valyeux took off after him as Ambul and Mnemost stayed behind, the former swearing under his breath. At last he said, "This forces our hand, Mnemost. Now we must go through with the coup. Rally the others! We strike tonight!"
The spy had a start on Valyeux, but not a large one and Valyeux had been armed as the spy had been made painfully aware. Valyeux had fired at him and even though it was just a grazing shot, with a staser set to kill, it was enough to trigger a regeneration. The shot had caught him in his left shoulder. The spy had to reach the President's suites first and Valyeux was beginning to gain on him. Managing a burst of speed, the spy found a place where he could stop a moment and rest and perhaps make Valyeux think he had doubled back. He winced as he felt his body shudder and nearly shut down as he yearned to allow the regeneration process to start and run its course. As he came out of hiding, he rounded a corner and noticed Valyeux stealthily searching for any signs of him in the corridor. To get to Romana's suites the spy's path would take him directly into Valyeux's line of sight and that was one thing he wanted to delay as long as possible. He noted it was just a very few yards to the President's suites down the corridor directly in front of him. Valyeux was down the corridor to his left and was slowly advancing towards the spy as he searched for him. The spy started out, knocking over a large, exotic-looking potted plant and causing Valyeux to catch sight of him. The spy ran. The last few yards seemed like miles to him and gasping painfully, he at last collapsed on the floor of the President's suites and managed to gasp at Romana and Ace, "Plan-planning a...coup...Civil war...de...stroy...Earthhh..." "Salvaar? Salvaar!" Ace cried at the prone figure as the last of his breath escaped and he became comatose. It was too late for him. The regeneration process began and Salvaar's body began to glow with the light of the noonday sun. Valyeux then entered the room and lowered his staser at Salvaar and fired point blank. The regeneration stopped and the golden light caused by the biochemical processes of regeneration and electricity from the staser blast collided in a maddening ballet of light and noise. The light grew in intensity until it was blinding all in the room. When it dissipated, Salvaar was no more. Ambul and Mnemost then joined Valyeux with a host of others, stasers trained on Romana and Ace. The President's features betrayed no emotion while Ace's eyes flashed dangerously as Ambul said in mock remorse, "I am so sorry that it had to come to this Madame President, but consider yourselves under arrest. The restoration of the old order begins now." He then looked at Ace who was being restrained by two guards and squeezing her jaw between his fingers, hissed, "I have something special planned for you my dear." She responded with a snarl and spat in his face. Turning to address the guards that had sided with him, Ambul said, "Convey them to a holding cell. They are to await termination. Also, arrange it so that it appears they died in a catastrophic accident for public record. Trash the room. A bomb planted by terrorists ought to do for a cover. Make it so." Romana and Ace were then led away. Romana was calm and reserved; Ace was cursing up a storm.
* * * * *
"I want to delay Xena and make my final surprise for her and the blond especially grand. Didn't I say that I love screwing with people's heads, Strife? Well, the Gate here," The Gate interrupted him, Call me Hexa-Prime; "How about just Prime?" Ares continued, "Anyway the Gate will allow us to free Callisto and Velasca and with their powers at my command, Xena won't hesitate to surrender or be destroyed." "But," Strife asked, "How will Prime here do that? Free Callisto and Velasca I mean?" Prime answered Strife's question. I can manipulate time itself. I can fold back time into itself to the point where the two women were imprisoned by Xena and free them and place them under Ares' bidding. A simple "Oh" was all that Strife could manage. We just need to keep Xena busy until I can attain power enough to free them both. "That won't be a problem, Prime. We can hit Xena where she's most vulnerable, that irritating blond, Gabrielle," Ares said. "But," Strife started to protest, "They don't even know we're here! How do we get their attention?" "Simple Strife," Ares said with a grin, "We announce our presence."
* * * * *
Joxer had wasted no time in trying to find the warrior and the bard. Ares had fairly shaken him up and though he could hear Gabrielle griping, he felt certain that she was gonna be delighted at having him around. Oh sure, she may keep on about how much she couldn't stand him, but to him, there was no denying it, Gabrielle had it for him bad. Aw, who was he kidding? He knew Gabrielle cared for him as she might for a brother or a very dear friend, but it would never go beyond that. But still, he could dream couldn't he? Dismissing his romantic notions for the time being, he focused, in as much as he was able, on his immediate task. He hadn't run into Xena and Gabrielle in a long while, and so for all he knew, they could be anywhere in Greece. Still, Joxer thought he'd try the one place where he figured Xena just might be; her home village of Amphipolis. He had lost track of time since the affair with Ares at the gorge where Callisto and Velasca were imprisoned. He remembered when he had first met the fair-haired warrior goddess, Callisto. At the time she was still an ordinary mortal who was driven in her quest to rid the world of the warrior-turned-heroine. He had wanted to be in her army of mercenaries until his eyes had been opened and he had become a good guy. He could be as dense as fog at times, but still a good guy. Joxer was just coming into the approach to Amphipolis when the first of the time quakes hit.
* * * * *
The Gate, at Ares command, activated. The internal area of the hexagon rippled and clouded over as temporal energy swam over and suffused the silver exoskeleton of the Gate's structure. The energies coalesced at the center and began to spin in a dizzying haze. Random bursts shot forth from the silver claws and the haze wavered and became a clear picture of a future battlefield. The fact that the soldiers in the scene were dressed oddly and had strange weapons didn't bother him. To Ares, here was a golden opportunity trussed up and presenting itself to him like a ready made sacrificial lamb and he'd be damned if he'd let it slip by. He addressed the Gate, "Can you allow these soldiers into this time? Do you have enough power?" I can but try, Prime replied. The image around the battlefield rippled as blue fingers of temporal energy sparkled over the onyx surface of the Gallifreyan artifact. An unearthly glow then suffused the Gate and with a blinding flash, the soldiers in the battlefield scene before them vanished.
* * * * *
The Gate had opened a hole in time just big enough to allow it to pull a small force of British soldiers back through time from the American Revolution. As a result, the Earth's time field began to degrade faster.
* * * * *
In the caretaker's shed the Eighth Doctor raised a hand to his brow as the last of the cobwebs cleared from his brain. As with previous occasions when all the Doctor's personas came together in an emergency, if this could be called an emergency, there were the usual questions, "So, you're the latest model, huh?"; "Which regeneration are you?"; "Goodness me! So there are eight of me now!?" And the questions went on. To Susan, it almost seemed like a highly unusual family reunion of long-lost brothers. She hated to interrupt the moment, but action needed to be taken.
"Doctors, I realize this must be a happy time for you, but we need to find out what is happening to the Earth." To reinforce her statement, the quake caused by the Gate opening a temporal rift and hijacking the soldiers hit 1997 London with devastating results. The shed rattled and the party of ten burst forth from inside and glanced around them with horror. London had changed. A glowing void that warped and rippled had opened in the fabric of space-time and had settled over a large section of the city. It was like someone had suddenly overlaid a part of London from centuries past over the modern day metropolis. It was mind boggling to see sixteenth-century dwellings amidst the skyscrapers. Citizens of the city from four centuries past wandered around, some seemingly oblivious to the changes around them while others seemed dazed or in a state of panic. There was a general sense of folks not quite knowing what to make of the situation that had just occurred to them. Susan noted how the two different time zones seemed to just meld together. The horror, however, wasn't over there. The air still fairly seethed with temporal disturbance and London, both London of today and centuries ago, seemed to wave and ripple as time underwent the stresses imposed upon it by the Gate. The Doctors looked on, horrified, as random bursts of temporal energy began erratically sweeping around the gruesome scene haphazardly hitting the first thing that managed to get in the way. It was at that moment that a blood-curdling scream pierced the chill morning air. A woman from sixteenth-century London dropped a basket of washing that she was carrying and started stumbling towards the cemetery. The poor, bedraggled wretch was pale and wan and she screeched, "Help me!" As she neared the point where the two time zones converged she started to slow down and her voice slowed and deepened as well. Little by little, as if time itself were indeed standing still, she glanced back behind her. One of the many, loose, random bursts of temporal energy was thundering down upon her like a child's ball bobbing down the street. The woman seemed to ripple as she reached the barrier and started to cross over into modern London. She burst forth from the disturbance, which had the quality of a wall of water, like a butterfly from a cocoon. As she did, she started to stumble and had trouble keeping her footing. The temporal burst had passed unaffected through the temporal barrier and was nearly on top of her as her new course took her straight towards the Doctors. Susan dashed forward to help her when the Eighth Doctor grabbed her back. Let me go! I have to save her!" Susan struggled against the Doctor's vise-like grip. He spun her around with extreme urgency flashing in his eyes, "Susan, there is nothing you can do! Watch!" Susan stopped struggling and watched as the woman now seemed to be in a state of temporal flux and oblivious as to what was happening to her. Another bad sign the Doctor noted, was how more and more people were becoming aware of the gravity of the situation and were beginning to panic. Looking back over at the woman, the Doctor noticed that her body was alight with an unearthly glow and the entire TARDIS crew could see the buildings beyond through her as she started to fade into transparency. Her progress slowed and she froze in place as great horrible gashes ran through her making the Doctor think that someone had simply erased parts of the woman with a giant pencil eraser. The woman's faced locked into a rictus of fear and pain as the temporal burst hit her with the frenzy of time out of control. The energy swirled in a maddening ballet of light and spent itself as it seemed to permeate every fiber of the woman's being. The energy spent itself and was no more as the scene ended in a silent implosion. Susan could do nothing but stare, too stunned to even speak. Tears welled up in her eyes. "It's the two time zones," the Eighth Doctor said, "They weren't meant to coexist together. The result is the disturbances that we've been seeing. It's like trying to fit two ill-fitting pieces of a puzzle together."
"What we need," said the Second Doctor, "Is to isolate what's causing this."
"Agreed," the First Doctor said, "But where do you suggest we start?"
"Why not try a temporal scan of Earth from the TARDIS console," supplied the cricketing outfit clad Fifth Doctor.
"No," muttered the darkly mysterious form of the Seventh Doctor as all eyes turned to look at him, "There's much more to it than that. Time itself is in peril. We have to repair the damage and set history back on its proper course. Someone or something is manipulating time for whatever reason and it must be stopped." As the Seventh Doctor finished speaking, it seemed the time quakes were indeed becoming worse and the last semblances of order were starting to slip away. The Earth itself heaved to and fro as if a living entity. The ground cracked and split apart and bucked wildly as building after building began to sink into the ground; those that weren't destroyed by the temporal bursts. Other buildings and landmarks simply just ceased to exist as their temporal cohesion disintegrated. People were running and screaming as mass hysteria became law. The Doctors, Susan and Ian were swept up in a throng of people as they struggled to reach the shelter of the TARDIS. They tripped as the Earth continued its heaving motion. The short jaunt across the cemetery to where the TARDIS was parked seemed to take forever. Susan gasped as she suddenly remembered Barbara's casket and looked over at it. Amazingly, it had managed to stay largely undisturbed and Susan was determined that they should take it with them to keep it from coming to harm.
"Doctors! The casket," she cried, "We have to take it with us! We can't leave it in this chaos. Miss Wright's remains will be destroyed!"
"We will take it Susan," shouted the Eighth Doctor over the din, "We won't leave it behind." Susan beheld him for a moment, his brown hair waving in the wind. Even amidst this current chaos sweeping the planet, Susan still found it hard to believe that this eighth incarnation of the Doctor was her beloved grandfather. He did, however, represent the one thing that seemed to be lacking in this hellish chaos; the stability of time immemorial.
The band of time travelers reached the obsolete Police Box form of the TARDIS and noticed that its beacon was pulsing an angry blood red and that its engines boomed out an angry rhythm that matched the beacon's flashing. The ship itself had not gone unaffected by the ravages to the time line of the planet. Like the Doctor, the TARDIS had a special relationship to time and had its actual existence outside of normal time and space. It almost seemed as if the TARDIS would give into the forces overcoming the planet as the temporal cohesion of all things seemed to dissipate at random. The ship struggled to keep an anchor in 1997 as the planet slowly unraveled around her, causing her to phase in and out of the continuum. Just when it seemed that the TARDIS herself would swept away on a wave of wild temporal energy and be lost forever, the ship fought back. Summoning all of the energies at her command, the ship threw an algebraic lifeline into real space. Engines groaning with the strain and screaming defiance at the chaos around her, the TARDIS started to undergo a change. The Doctors all watched amazed as one by one, all the separate TARDISes that transported each Doctor to 1997 dematerialized. The blood red light of the beacon gradually lightened to orange, then yellow, before becoming a blinding bluish-white. As if attracted by an unseen magnet, seven separate forms converged on the form of the Eighth Doctor's TARDIS. The strangled rasp emitted by the ship's engines slowly grew in pitch and volume as each separate phantom TARDIS converged on the solid form. Soon, the TARDIS stood, her engines screaming out in a victorious trumpeting roar as if the materialization sequence had begun. The beacon streamed a brilliant white light that pulsed in time to the ship's booming cry and faded with a final materialization rattle as all the separate TARDISes had now become one. The Eighth Doctor opened the doors and bustled everyone inside the time ship as he fought to keep his balance as the quakes hit harder. A mass of human bodies milled around everywhere, some even looking as if they might consider the TARDIS as shelter. After making sure that his other selves, Susan and Ian were safely inside, the Time Lord cast a glance back over to Barbara's casket. Somehow, he had to find a way to get it back to the TARDIS. Knowing he couldn't carry it alone, he opted for the first thing that popped into his head-materialize the TARDIS around it. Gripping the edge of the ship's hull for support, he pulled himself inside.
