Colonel Sergei Valentin Malevich checked the forward hatch of his Soyuz capsule as it swung around the earth at 27,600 kilometers an hour.
Satisfied everything was in order for docking with Salyut I, he spun about and propelled himself into the descent module.
As he passed through the ring, there was a tremendous impact against the hull that slammed Sergei’s stocky frame against the inner hatch rim, knocking the wind out of him.
A clatter of sharp metallic pings against the hull, then silence.
A micrometeoroid's impact could be catastrophic... and this was significantly larger than that!
Out the porthole, bright blue oceans flicked to the black void of space and back, again and again, like a strobe light.
There was no time to waste. The pilot-cosmonaut slotted down into his moulded Kazbek command seat and buckled himself in. He took a brief moment to smile at the crumpled, faded photo of his wife Sofia, and little Anya, affixed to the dash. “I will get back to you,” he said, and fired controlled bursts of the attitude control thrusters.
Slowly, gradually, the craft’s spin slowed, then stopped.
The blur of iridescent blue and jet black out the window resolved into a hazy line separating both. He squinted: dozens of bright metal shards, gently curved arcs of gleaming silver and iridescent nodules, spun through space outside the porthole, along with sections of… the Soyuz capsules’ heat shield.
He exhaled expletives.
He flicked the radio switch on, opening a channel to Roscosmos Control.
Silence.
He toggled the switch several times.
Nothing.
The Rassvet communications system was down.
A faint hiss alerted him to another issue: hull integrity had been compromised!
Sergei sighed and slumped back. Misfortune was the price of aiming high.
When it rains, it pours, as the farmers of his home town in Siberia were so fond of saying.
He cycled through options. Donning his spacesuit and depressurizing the hull seemed the best option. He just needed to reach the space station, contact ground control, and wait for a relief mission.
It would be fine.
No cause for panic.
He fumbled for his bulky helmet as a dark shadow passed over the window. Curious, he leaned over, pressing up against it, his breath fogging the glass, and peered out.
A large, conical object floated into view. It moved with deliberation, as if under power, yet he saw no evidence of thrusters, or propulsion of any kind. Magnetic perhaps?
It was a meter and a half tall; the lower-half was faceted, with rows of embedded nodules running the length, topped by a gleaming dome, out of which jutted what was unmistakably an eyestalk. Two short cylinders flanked the stalk, atop of the gleaming dome.
As he gaped at it, the cylinders flashed with a fierce blinding light, and a hysterical machine voice rang inside his head: “Infection detected. Exterminate!”
Alarmed, Sergei snatched the attitude controls and fired thrusters. “Do svidaniya!” The Soyuz spacecraft lurched forward, and the unwelcome guest vanished from view.
The periscope camera showed a debris field of fragments ahead. They pinged harmlessly against the hull.
Sergei’s eyes went wide as the unwanted visitor slid back into view out the porthole. He initiated erratic firing, jerking the capsule this way and that, to no avail. The guest easily maintained its relative position.
What was this thing? A capitalist ship killer? American sabotage? Did the corrupt West even have such technology? Or could it be even more fantastical? Aliens, lying in wait for humanity to slip the surly bonds of earth, only swat us back down like an upstart fly?
“Go away, you stupid machine!” he raged as his fear and frustration rose.
“EXTERMINATE!” roared the shrill voice again.
Sergei’s heart sank. Perhaps little Anya had been right. Perhaps he shouldn’t have volunteered for this mission after all.
With his free hand, he rummaged in his Sokol flight suit pocket, plucked out a flask of vodka, and took a long, final swig.
------
The Doctor stood, legs planted on softly humming deck plating, before the gleaming hexagonal console of the TARDIS, head downcast, while he contemplated eternity as only a Time Lord could. With drama aforethought, he tilted his head upward, one eye on the console mirror. He grimaced, dissatisfied. “Nah, doesn’t work. No audience, and even if there was, I’m just not as portentous!”
He stalked around the control pylon, hands thrust deep in coat pockets, muttering to himself. He stopped abruptly and snapped fully upright.
“I’m bored!” he exclaimed, grinning broadly. “That’s what it is! Must be why I keep all those humans around… Oh dear.” He slumped against the console and ran a hand through his spiky hair. Personal revelations flowed: “Without them, I… don’t know what to do with myself. What does that even mean?”
An alarm squawked and shook him out of reverie. Console lights flashed and data feeds chittered excitedly.
“Now, now, steady on, old girl” he soothed the TARDIS, patting the console. “I’ve plenty of—wot’s that?” Hazel eyes darted over readouts: the exquisitely sensitive TARDIS detectors had picked up an emergency time shift!
Who was left to mess with time, but him?
“Not too far off,” mused the Doctor, tightening the scanner scope. “Jackson was, what, 1851? We’re… ah! May 5th, 1971. Earth orbit… that’s odd.” He gave a blinking readout a sharp tap. Alien text flowed across the tiny scope. “Dalek. Unmistakable. Up to new tricks, eh? Well, I’ve come up with a few of my own!” He scampered around the console, flipping switches, spinning dials and pressing buttons. “Once more into the breach!” He flipped the materialization switch.
With a great wheeze, the central column flared white. It rose and fell like some kind of temporal butter churner. A groaning, shuddering sound filled the ship.
------
Outside Soyuz, the whisk-like appendage protruding from the alien’s casement dazzled Sergei’s eyes with a brilliant green light. Then, somehow, the light turned in upon itself, and the machine… rippled. Chunks of it collapsed at angles Sergei’s eyes couldn’t make sense of, as if it were happening in dimensions beyond his perception.
“SPATIAL ANOMALY!” grated the disembodied voice. “ALERT! VORTEX–AAIIEEEE!”
There was a blinding flash, a resigned wheeze, and all at once the alien was replaced with a British police call box.
Sergei gaped again.
He looked down accusingly at his flask, then back out the portal.
He blinked.
It was still there.
He’d seen these police boxes on his tour of London back in ‘61, with Yuri.
“Chto za huynya?” he blurted. There was no rational, sane reason for one to suddenly appear 450 kilometers above the surface of the earth!
Then the rough wooden doors of the blue box flung inward. Golden light flooded out.
He squinted and held up a hand to shield his eyes.
The silhouette of a man appeared, framed by a shimmering halo. Behind him was a vast control room, far too big to fit inside the box.
As Sergei’s eyes adjusted, he could make out more detail: the man wore a sharply fitted pinstripe blue suit and a taupe overcoat. His hair was spiky at the front, and he had a big, stupid grin on his face.
Alarmingly, the man wore no protection against the harsh, cold vacuum of space.
Impossible!
As if reading his thoughts, the stranger grinned even more broadly, reached out, and tapped the porthole. He stabbed a forefinger at the docking hatch, and spoke. Despite the vacuum, Sergei could hear him cheerily say, in fluent Russian no less, “Privyet, comrade! You’ve got some good sized gashes in your ablator plating. Fancy a lift back down?”
Sergei stared, dumbfounded. Then he drained the last of his flask, pocketed the picture of his family, and propelled himself towards the bow of his wounded ship.
One had to deal with reality, however unreal, after all.
------
After setting the TARDIS cortex onto the trail of the Dalek, the Doctor sat down for a quick, convivial tea with the bewildered cosmonaut. The poor fellow was clearly having difficulty processing, which was understandable.
Nothing like tea and crumpets to settle the mind!
Temporal disruption eddies faded quickly, The Doctor explained: it was vitally important they find out what the Daleks were up to, and why.
The prospect filled The Doctor with giddy excitement. A tantalizing new challenge! Something for his vast looping intellect to sink its proverbial teeth into. Puzzles and problems and more!
He did love them so.
It would be great to have a mission again. A purpose. Meaning.
As warm fuzzies washed over him, without warning, the TARDIS was struck by a jitter. Queen Victoria’s fine china spilled onto the floor, erupting into a cascade of porcelain shards.
“Well, t-that’s n-n-not g-gooood!” The Doctor exclaimed as he shot to his feet in a staccato of fractured temporal shards. He stumbled forward, grabbing at the hexagonal console to steady himself. Had he left the TARDIS’s brakes on again?
Sergei dodged his own oxygen tank as it careened erratically across the deck plating. “W-w-what is this? What is happening?” he spluttered, holding up a dainty china cup in one hand.
As the vessel lurched violently forward and back, the Doctor hauled himself along the console. He looked as if he were climbing Everest; reaching out with a trembling hand, stretching with every fibre of his being, he flicked one ruby red switch.
The TARDIS snapped back into the flow of time with a thunderous crack.
A blur of out of sync selves rippled around Sergei, who was now bug eyed. The poor fellow looked like he was about to toss his biscuits.
The Doctor’s haze of multi-timeline selves, however, were nonplused. He wobbled over to Sergei, an accordion of visages contracting and splaying out, and patted the cosmonaut on the shoulder reassuringly. “I’m going to see where we are-re-re-re...” his voice echoed. “It’ll settle down in a minute.”
------
The Doctor poked his head out of the TARDIS. Took a sniff. Satisfied, he slipped outside and took a few unsteady steps; a fading blur of iterations flowed after and through him, each bemusedly half-aware of the others. Small wonder the poor cosmonaut was overwhelmed, this sort of timey-wimey nonsense was challenging even for a Time Lord. Loops of consciousness from multiple realities interwove, cross-pollinating, implanting memories of other realities into the recesses of his already crowded mind.
He steadied himself on the still warm faux-wood TARDIS frame and took a deep breath.
The echoes finally faded, and he suddenly felt very alone.
“Well! That doesn’t happen every day.” He patted his striped blue suit down, snapped taut the taupe overcoat, and fully took in his surroundings.
The TARDIS had landed in a clearing between several ruined buildings. Dark grey clouds loomed menacingly overhead. The ground was littered with concrete chunks, half-melted steel beams and copious debris. There were stacks of bricks and rotten wooden planks dusted with ash resting against the ragged remains of a wall that cupped the TARDIS. A tattered poster declared, in faded red lettering:
EMERGENCY REGULATIONS: IT IS FORBIDDEN TO DUMP BODIES INTO THE RIVER.
“Charming,” sniffed the Doctor. “Not taking a dip then.”
To his left, a broad river, about 60 feet down a gravelly slope, cut through the ruins of what had once been a great city.
It all felt disturbingly familiar.
“Have I been here before?” he chortled to himself. “Or am I yet to come?” A noise behind him and whirled about. It was Sergei, the cosmonaut, stumbling out of the TARDIS.
“Tovarish!” called the man. “What was that? I could see myself, hear my thoughts, mine yet… not mine.”
“Temporal jitter,” said the Doctor, scanning the horizon. Far to the north, columns of smoke crumpled into the crisp grey sky. “It’ll pass.” Smokestacks jutted above the ruins to the south.
He felt a chill of recognition. It couldn’t be!
He had to get a better look. See what they were attached to.
He scampered up a concrete outcrop; from this vantage point he could see the stacks led down to… the Battersea Power Plant! The remains of it, anyway: two of its great brick smokestacks were missing, the outer walls pockmarked and scorched. A large metal sphere loomed beside it, streaked with rust and ringed by a narrow walkway. Low pressure gas storage, the Doctor mused.
“Incredible,” said Sergei. “Where… where are we? It looks like Leningrad, during the war.”
“Not quite. London, circa 2164,” said the Doctor softly. “Give or take a decade.”
This is where he’d bidden farewell to his granddaughter, Susan, all those lives ago.
Or would.
He wasn’t sure which timeline he was even in, thanks to that temporal jitter. Time travel was inherently multi-universal, flitting about infinite possibilities interwoven into a great big ball of timey-whimey stuff.
“Pizdets,” swore Sergei, as realization sunk in. “We finally did it. Nuclear war.”
The Doctor shook his head. “No… Not this time.”
A breeze from the river reached them. It carried the unmistakable stench of death. “Come on!” The Doctor clambered over the loose rubble to the water’s edge, with Sergei close behind.
At waters’ edge, jumbled flotsam and waves gently lapped at cracked remains of a pier. The mud brown river beyond was filled with corpses. Hundreds of them, bloated, purple, bobbing and spinning, carried along by a swift current.
The Doctor frowned.
Earlier, then.
Maybe 2140, when the plagues seeded by the Daleks were still doing their work.
“So much for the emergency regulations,” mused the Doctor quietly. “How very unlike Londoners.”
Sergei pulled out a handkerchief and placed it up against his face.
The Doctor clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth and thought back to an earlier life. Lives. The journey of at least two selves had intersected here, both times with the Daleks. This place was temporal taffy, a knot in spacetime, pulling in the same players repeatedly, across realities. But the specifics… ah, the specifics! Jumbles of capricious whimsy, a million-billion dice rolls.
Every Dalek attack proceeded with the same pitiless logic: asteroid strikes against major population centres, military installations and the moon bases, closely followed by genetically engineered plagues to ravage the world’s human infrastructure. The beleaguered survivors were left isolated, confused, vulnerable.
Just the way Daleks liked humans.
Other than dead, that is.
He explained the invasion to Sergei. “The object that hit your ship? That was a Dalek. A Time Strategist, to be specific.”
“The alien salt shaker.” Sergei grunted, troubled by the memory. He had felt its cold, merciless hatred in his mind. “Machine creatures.”
“Actually, inside the shell is a living dumpling of hyper-intelligent hate. Terrible at cocktail parties. Even worse everywhere else. I hate cocktail parties.”
“What brought them here? What do they want?”
The Doctor shrugged. “Oh, some batty scheme involving gravity. Planets as ships. Depends on the timeline, but it’s always grandiose. I have to give them props, you know, for engineering evil.” He sniffed the air. “Smell that? The faint metallic tang? ”
Sergei shook his head.
“Residual ozone of cosmic ray bombardment. Degrades DNA. Nasty touch.” The Doctor sniffed again. “Ten years, tops.” He pondered. “This Dalek task force is pre-time travel. Yet I traced that Dalek Time Strategist’s emergency temporal shift here, to post-apocalypse London. Curious…”
Sergei’s brow wrinkled. “What is it doing here?”
“No good! But exactly what kind of no good? Why wasn’t it locked down in the Time War? Is it starting a new one? Is it a precursor?”
“Time war?”
“Aaaah,” groaned the Doctor. How could he explain the Time War in a single, comprehensible sentence, using cultural touch points Sergei would understand? “Imagine the universe… is a film, written by a thousand thousand writers who hate each other and spend eternity rewriting each other’s material.”
Sergei made a face.
“Exactly. More and more so, the longer it goes on. Infinite recursion. Ouroboros eating its tail. Well. I’m mixing metaphors. You get the idea. Doubt any English teachers are left to correct me. Let the double negatives fly…” He frowned and slumped as realization weighed down upon him: they couldn’t leave. Not until whatever kinks the Dalek added to the timeline were smoothed out. Sooner he got to it, the sooner they could get out of this mournful place.
He gave Sergei a quick tap on the back, and set off Westward. “Alons-y! Time to go.”
“Go?” blurted Sergei, perplexed. “Go where, tovarish? It’s ruins in every direction!”
“Wood Lane, tube station. Resistance has a bunker there. Or did. Reality’s a bit interwibbly.” He interwove his fingers and wiggled them. “Like so. Keep an eye out for Dalek patrols. Been a cosmonaut long? Chop chop.”
