Ficathon Fic: Ὕστερον πρότερον (1/2)
Oct. 14th, 2008 06:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
purple_bugTitle: Ὕστερον πρότερον (1/2)
Pairing: Mel/Ace
Rating: PG
Words: ~4400
Summary: The locals of Epsilon Xi have a troubled future ahead of them. Or possibly behind them. Mel's getting a bit muddled with all this, actually.
Author's Notes: Written for the![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
dw_femslash ficathon, for ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
glinda_penguin, who wanted crossing of timestreams and mythology, and gave me this quote: "They have not wanted Peace at all; they have wanted to be spared war - as though the absence of war was the same as peace." - Dorothy Thompson. The title is Greek, and translates as "The latter one first". Sorry for the delay, and I promise to have the next part up within the week. Many thanks to agapi42 for her fast and helpful beta work! :o)
oOoOo
Location: approximately 140km above Human colony Epsilon Xi
Six months and four days before the end of Peacetime
Local time: 20H 07M
Just after mid-day siesta
There was a series of noises coming from the starboard engine that didn’t make their descent to Epsilon Xi any less unsettling than the fact that the nose of the ship appeared to be smoking as they crossed from the thermosphere into the mesosphere. The turbulence of re-entry (which was maybe just ‘entry’ and not ‘re-entry’ at all, since they’d never been to this planet before) brought Glitz stumbling through from the cargo deck, swearing loudly about a stubbed toe and grumbling about the “blasted cooling systems” as he dropped into the co-pilot’s seat.
“We nearly there?” he asked, rather unnecessarily. He fished a bag of some sort of distinctly meaty-smelling snack food out of his pocket and offered it to the pilot.
Mel took her eyes off the screen for a moment to give him a Look, then returned to scanning the visible landmasses through the cloud layers below.
“How’s the cargo?” she asked, once she’d identified their target continent and made sure their course was correct. “None of it on fire, or anything?”
“Not at the moment,” Glitz replied, putting his feet up on the glove compartment once the turbulence had subsided. “Although we might need to install an extinguisher in the engine room if the cooling vents keep blocking themselves up.”
“We’re into the lower atmosphere now, so it should start cooling down,” Mel assured him with a grin. They dropped through the last thin layer of clouds, and she couldn’t help a small sigh at the sight of the clear blue oceans, deep green forests, and wide grassy plains containing cities that glistened in the sunlight like clusters of iridescent beetles.
The eleventh planet orbiting the fifth brightest star in the constellation of Piraeus, Epsilon Xi had the most idyllic outward appearance of all of Earth’s colony planets. Large marine animals broke the surface of the waves and fanned their fronds in the air before returning below. Beaches stretched around the major continents, white and gleaming in the midday sun. Lush vegetation fringed the shores and stretched back to dense rainforest, thick with all manner of wild animals. It was easy to see why the Earth colonists had chosen this planet as a settling place several centuries ago.
A loud beeping from the console brought Mel’s attention back to the cockpit, and she decided to ignore the incredible view in favour of not nose-diving into that beautiful blue ocean. Glitz was similarly pushing buttons, controlling the various items of landing gear to slow their descent to the city of Camarina. The flight computer on board the Centennial Skylark (Mel had flatly disallowed Glitz’s plan to name it the Nosferatu III, after what had happened to the first two) had started chatting with the land-based computer in the docking port’s control station the moment they came into orbit, exchanging data about trajectories and flight paths, so the landing procedure was fairly straightforward. Mel still breathed a sigh of relief after every touchdown, nevertheless.
Once they were out of the ship and standing in the open air of the docking port, the sun warmed their skin quite pleasantly but caused them both to shield their eyes from the glare. Their contact, a burly middle-aged man by the name of Kris, hurried across from the sheltered waiting area to greet them, tailed by a string of wheeled pallets to transport their cargo.
As they perched on the back seats of the small open-topped vehicle towing the pallets, Glitz and Kris chattered away in trader-speak about the cargo and its various merits, while Mel watched the scenery pass. The architecture was rather sleek and shiny, revealing the wealth behind the colony, but more rustic elements remained from the earlier days of colony building, such as market squares full of produce and clothing.
There was a general sense in the area of a city only just awakening; the market traders were rolling tarpaulins back from their stall fronts, and there were more than a few children making their way to school who seemed as though they had just been rushed through the morning routine when they would have preferred to stay in bed.
Yet, it was the middle of the day. According to the sun, at least; shining high in the sky, maybe a couple of hours past noon.
“What time is it?” Mel asked, interrupting Glitz’s much-told yarn about the time he had ‘almost been killed on a philanthropic mission, delivering very important classified documents’.
Kris consulted a timepiece in his pocket. “Just after half past the twentieth hour.”
Mel thought about that for a moment. “So, how long is the day, here?”
“Thirty-three hours. We’re just past siesta, right now. Everyone’s going back to work, or school.”
“I see...”
“I could do with a little siesta myself,” Glitz remarked, yawning widely.
“No napping on the job for you,” Mel told him, sharply but fondly. “You remember what happened last time.”
“Oh, yeah.” Glitz had the decency to look slightly abashed.
When they reached the site, Kris barked short words of instruction to several workers, who rushed around lifting boxes from the pallets and carting them towards the half-finished building nearby.
“You’ll get your fee now that the supplies are delivered safely,” Kris said, turning to Glitz and pulling a money pouch from his pocket. Mel cleared her throat conspicuously.
“Ah, yes, you see,” Glitz began awkwardly, “Miss Bush here takes responsibility for handling the finances...”
“If it didn’t burn a hole in your pocket faster than hot coals, I wouldn’t have to,” she replied, grinning slightly. Kris counted out their payment into Mel’s hand, and she then tucked it away in her own money pouch.
“We’re very grateful for your services,” said Kris. “If you have time, would you like to see more of the city?”
Glitz was eyeing a nearby drinking establishment as though it contained the Holy Grail, so Mel just rolled her eyes and informed Kris that they’d take him up on that offer. He turned and yelled a name across the construction site, and to Mel’s surprise, the “hang on a second!” that echoed back was in a British accent. The colonists seemed to have a strong Greco-Roman influence to their society, so the background hubbub was vaguely Mediterranean, but this voice was recognisably English. Near London, even. And rather familiar.
Glitz had turned at the sound of the voice too. “Was that...?”
The half-spoken question was answered mere moments later, as their appointed tour guide extricated herself from the busier end of the site.
“What did you say, boss?” The young woman straightened her hardhat as she approached them, and when the brim finally shielded her eyes from the glare of the sun, she stopped dead. “Doughnut, is that you?!”
Mel laughed in surprise. “Ace! What are you doing here?”
Ace covered the final few yards to the safe zone in an instant, pulling off her hard hat and swinging Mel round in an enthusiastic hug.
“Didn’t think I’d see you again,” she said with a grin. “Did you have to bring old bilgebag, though?”
“Oi!”
The girls laughed as Glitz took offence, and Ace let Mel go rather reluctantly.
“Oh, it’s been ages! I’ve --”
A sudden high pitched sound stung Mel’s ears, hurting her head and making her dizzy. The sunlight became too bright to see anything at all, and she screwed her eyes tightly shut.
“Oh, what on earth was that?” she groaned, when the light and noise finally faded away. “Felt like microphone feedback in my head...”
Her ears still ringing, Mel blinked at the dark blotches in her vision and cast around in the gloom to find her bearings.
“Ace?” she called, hesitantly. “Glitz?”
Looking up, she saw a tall grey building looming over her. Further up still, she could see that it was suddenly night-time. Only the sound of dead leaves whispered around her, and a thick fog was creeping in through the city. It felt deserted, almost dead.
Mel shivered as the chill of the night settled around her bones. She tried her luck once more.
“Hello?” she shouted, her voice echoing around the streets.
A hand on her shoulder made her yelp and spin round, her heart thudding as she let out a shaky laugh of relief when she saw that it was Ace, her face alert and serious.
“What happened?” she asked, recovering a smidgen of composure.
Ace put her fingers to Mel’s lips, hushing her, and whispered, “Not here.”
Location: Human colony Epsilon Xi, somewhere beneath Camarina.
Thirty-two days after the End of Hostilities.
Local time: 29H 48M
“Ace, what on earth is going on?” Mel demanded to know, cold and confused as she watched Ace shove the heavy door shut behind them.
“It’s very complicated,” Ace replied, regarding Mel rather oddly. “Especially with what’s happened to you.”
“What do you mean? What’s happened to me?”
Ace opened her mouth to explain, hesitated, then shook her head and led Mel further along the tunnel by the hand.
“Let’s get you some warm clothes first.”
A short time later, clad in thick jumpers, Ace and Mel sat cross-legged on a rug, warming their hands next to a small heating device. Several such devices were dotted around the room, with small groups of people huddled round them for warmth. Mel noted several children, but fewer adults. Conversation murmured just above the hum of the heaters, only just masking a few quiet sobs. The small glowing lights embedded in the walls made no sound, and brought only dim light to the space.
“So, it’s like this,” Ace began, her eyes focused elsewhere. “There’s this computer, DELPHI. Artificial intelligence, tells the future. It was here when the planet was colonised.”
Mel frowned. “So the colonists weren’t the first sentient population?”
“Nah. Some time-sensitive race got wiped out centuries ago, left behind a bunch of technology. The human scientists pounced on it the second they found it, yeah? Started taking it apart, seeing how it worked. They couldn’t take DELPHI apart, though. She wouldn’t let them.”
“She?” Mel repeated with surprise.
“A.I., remember? The computer’s got a personality. Bit of a mean streak, too. Turned out she didn’t want to spend all day predicting the future of the colonists, so she started telling them misleading truths. Ended up starting a war with a passing fleet of alien ships.”
“Oh god...”
“She didn’t want any colonists at all. Tried to wipe them out.”
Mel shivered, even though she was warming up quite nicely.
“This is why I really dislike intelligent computers,” she remarked, after a few moments of silence. “Far more trouble than they’re worth.”
She stared at her feet for a second, then looked back up at Ace, with the intention of asking another question. The look in her eyes, however, was unfamiliar; a deep sort of sadness mixed with something else. Mel found her train of thought derailed, before the expression on Ace’s face disappeared behind invisible shutters. She recalled her question with some difficulty, although it was obvious once she’d grasped it again.
“How did I end up here?” she asked. “We were on the construction site, it was sunny... What happened?”
“DELPHI,” Ace said simply. “She began experimenting with Time before the war even started. Tried to change the future.” Ace smiled wryly. “She should’ve known that it was her own interference that would allow some of us to survive. Luckily, she's not infallible.”
“What did she do?”
“She knew that the person who had the most influence on the survival of the colonists had a strong artron energy signature. So she moved that person through time, to a point after the war, so she couldn’t interfere.”
“You mean, me?” Mel gaped. “Artron energy is to do with the TARDIS, isn’t it? Or the time vortex?”
“Exactly.”
“But we’d both have an energy signature.”
“Yeah. I don’t know which of us was originally supposed to be the most influential, but it ended up being you.”
“Me? But I’m here, after the war. How can I have any influence on what happened?”
Ace grinned unexpectedly. “’Cause there’s a way to send you back.”
oOoOo
The plan wasn’t feasible until the next day; something to do with low radiation levels at night not providing them enough cover to mask their life signs from DELPHI’s sensors. There had apparently been some sabotage to said sensors during the war, which allowed them this opportunity to hide in plain sight during daylight hours.
Being unexpectedly ripped through time does tend to leave a traveller quite tired, so after a quick discussion with Ace and a couple of the rather bright and imaginative children who had edged their way into the conversation, Mel told Ace that she needed some sleep.
Ace said goodnight to the kids, advising them to get to their own beds as well, and took the heater with her when she led Mel to the sleeping area. The small space, just a large-ish cupboard with a single-berth bed, really, was one of several along a stone corridor.
“What was this place, before the war?” Mel asked, peering curiously into the gloomy shadows past Ace’s door.
“Some kind of bunker. It’s been here longer than the colonists have,” Ace replied, ushering her from the chilly corridor into the equally chilly bedroom. The portable heater quickly brought the temperature up to something resembling warm, for which Mel was very glad.
Ace sat on her bed, stared at her feet, and sighed.
“What’s wrong?” Mel sat next to her, covering Ace’s cold hand with one of her own.
“Oh, nothing,” she replied, almost breezily. “It’ll be a bit of a squeeze, since we’ve only got the little bed, but we’ll keep each other warm, at least.” She smiled, but it was slightly hollow. Sad, like before.
“Ace?”
The young woman looked up, the edges of her face picked out in soft yellow by the glow of the heater. She seemed about to say something, but then decided against it. Whatever it had been vanished behind the shutters again, and she got up to pull the covers back from the bed.
Mel stood, so Ace could move the layers of blankets past where she had been sitting. She watched in silence as Ace unlaced her boots and pulled the hair-tie from her ponytail, then got into the bed and shuffled over to the wall, leaving space for Mel to lie down. Which she did, after removing her own shoes and hair slide.
Ace pulled at the covers, and Mel tugged them the rest of the way over the two of them, and they lay together in the semi-dark, listening to the hum of the heater.
Eventually, Mel turned over onto her side, to a more comfortable position, and she felt Ace do the same. They lay close, but there was a palpable tension in her body which made Mel slightly uncomfortable. Ace was almost too still against her back, and it felt strange.
She sighed, and awkwardly rolled over to face her.
“What’s wrong?”
Ace reached up a hand to clasp around Mel’s, and held it in the cramped space between them.
“It’s nothing,” she assured her. “Just ... memories, that’s all.”
“Memories of?”
“Something amazing.” Mel couldn’t tell very well in the low light, but she had the feeling that Ace’s eyes weren’t shuttered at all anymore. “Something I don’t know if I want a second time, if I can’t ever have it again.”
Mel gazed at her for a time. She was so uncertain whether or not she was interpreting Ace’s words correctly, that she was caught completely by surprise when the small distance between them closed, and their cold noses bumped and brushed together in the dark.
After a long moment of not breathing, Mel let out a soft noise, a nervous giggle, as she remembered the balance between breathing through the nose and kissing with the mouth.
Ace chuckled back at her, kissing her a little more deeply and tangling fingers in her hair. She broke the kiss for a few moments, and lay nose-to-nose with Mel, just breathing.
“Second time?” she asked, tilting her head and grinning excitedly.
“There was a first?” Mel was occupying a heady space somewhere between bemusement and desire.
Ace laughed. “Oh, just you wait!” she breathed, anticipation in every syllable. Mel grinned back at her, allowing herself to be pulled close again, and Ace’s hands found some very interesting ways to warm themselves up.
oOoOo
It was strange to wake up in the same clothes you’d been wearing the day before. The frequently malfunctioning cooling vents on the Centennial Skylark meant that it was usually quite warm on board, so Mel often argued with Glitz on the merits of wearing a bathrobe on his way to the shower in the morning if he was going to sleep starkers.
Waking up fully dressed was even stranger when you were sharing a very small bed with someone. Ace’s hair was in her face, the arm under Ace’s middle was asleep, and the foot that wasn’t quite covered by the blanket was freezing. She shifted a bit, trying to alleviate the discomfort without waking Ace, but the two turned out to be incompatible. Ace tried to roll over, found she couldn’t, and made a sleepy noise of protest.
“Just me,” said Mel. “Can I have my arm back?” she added with a smile.
Ace sat up a bit, enough that Mel could pull her arm out from underneath her, and then she flopped back to the mattress with a groan. Mel rubbed at her forearm until it stopped feeling quite so boneless and started tingling back to life, and then she lay back down, her cold foot now warming up under the blanket. She curled up to Ace’s back again, her good arm over her waist, and Ace snuggled backwards into her. One of her hands found Mel’s and sleepily played with her fingers.
“We should get up,” she said quietly, after a while. “But it’s nice and warm here.”
Mel shifted around until she could roll over, and they lay nose-to-nose. “Shouldn’t we get some breakfast?”
“I suppose.” Ace pressed a kiss to her lips, then gave her a nudge to get her moving. Mel grudgingly slid out of the bed, shivering a little within moments. Ace followed her, giving the heater a tweak to warm the room up a little. They donned boots and tied back hair, and shared a few minutes of energetic snogging on the bed to try to warm themselves up a little more (though both giggled over the fact that it was a fairly poor excuse).
Breakfast was almost-tasteless ration bars, consumed in the dim light of the main room, huddled around the heating devices again. Ace and Mel discussed the plan in more detail as they ate, including the technicalities of actually travelling in time. Apparently this involved disabling DELPHI’s control just long enough to give them access to the necessary hardware to send Mel back.
“But how do we disable her?” Mel asked, sharing her ration bar with a particularly wide-eyed, sad-looking child.
Ace gave the kid a playful cuff on the head. “Oi, you, stop begging. You’ve got your own breakfast.” The sadly hopeful expression dissolved into giggles, and Mel laughed as the ‘starving urchin’ act fell apart. “You’re a soft touch, Doughnut,” Ace teased, giving Mel a nudge with her foot as the kid ran off back to the other children. “What were you saying about DELPHI?”
“How are we disabling her?”
“With a modified version of the computer virus that we used during the war,” Ace replied. She turned and called across the room. “Hey, Galen!” A young, skinny, bearded man looked up from his breakfast, then jumped up, fumbling in his pockets. He hurried over, and held out a couple of small objects.
“I managed to modify it enough that it’ll work again,” he said with a smile. “She shouldn’t be able to counteract it for several minutes, at least.” Ace took the items with a grin of thanks. “You just find a port, plug it in, the virus’ll invade, and she’ll lose control of her tech. Blue one’s modified, red one’s original.”
Ace passed the objects to Mel so she could take a look; they were not unlike USB sticks she’d seen in the early 21st century. Each was wrapped around with coloured tape, one red and one blue.
“I had to modify the virus from the original because DELPHI was able to recover from it and was then immune. You have to take the original virus back to war-time so we can use it then.”
Mel looked up at Ace, a slight smile forming on her lips. “It’s one of those time loops, isn’t it? I thought I'd seen the last of them.”
Ace chuckled. “Kind of, yeah. Thanks, Galen, that’s a huge help.”
He smiled, and added, “Radiation levels are high today, so you should be hidden until you’re inside the building.”
“Brilliant.”
oOoOo
“You know what you’re doing?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I suppose if anything went wrong, we’d be in a different future right now, wouldn’t we?”
“Perhaps. The Doctor was always pretty vague when he explained paradoxes, so I don’t know.”
“Yeah, they used to make my head hurt, too.”
Neither girl was smiling. The building that housed DELPHI loomed over them, windows glinting in the cold winter sunlight.
“So she’s in there?”
“Yep.”
“Shall we go in, then?”
“Not yet.” The sad, distant look had returned, and Mel pulled Ace into a hug. Ace hugged back tightly, squeezing the breath out of her for a few moments. Then she kissed her, arms around her neck and eyes tightly shut.
“I’ll see you again,” Mel assured her. “I will.”
Ace nodded, and cracked a smile. “You’d better!” She drew in a deep breath, then let it out with a determined expression. “Right, time to take out the evil computer.”
Mel grinned, and followed her inside.
oOoOo
The A.I.’s harsh tones rang out the minute they stepped into the main computer room. To Mel’s ears, the sound was somewhat akin to the tang of metal on the tongue.
“You again!”
“Me again?” she echoed in surprise.
“She met you last year,” Ace pointed out. “Back when we turned her into an obsolete piece of junk.” She directed this to the computer, whose main screen now featured an irate digitised face.
“Impudent child!” DELPHI snapped. “You may have succeeded once -”
“But I won’t succeed again?” Ace countered. She grinned in amusement. “Sounds like someone’s got their facts wrong. That was always your problem, DELPHI – you can see future events, but you can’t always understand them.”
The digital face fizzed and flickered with rage. “Your time on this planet is almost at an end!” she declared.
“Is it? Oh good,” Ace replied. “I was getting tired of this place anyway. Far too oppressive, and the facilities are rubbish.”
DELPHI's face flickered again, but far more uncontrolled than before. Not rage, but confusion; malfunction.
“How have you done this?” she shouted, voice jittering and laced with static.
“D’you think she’s noticed it yet?” Mel poked her head round the corner of the bank of terminals, after making sure the blue data stick was firmly plugged in and interfacing with the system. The screen displaying DELPHI's face went dark.
Ace grinned. “Nice one!” Mel grinned back. “Right, now, watch how I do this,” said Ace, moving to one of the consoles and tapping keys.
Ace programmed the date and time into the computer as Mel stood at her shoulder, memorising the controls and sequences. She stabbed triumphantly at a final button, and the console’s hum started rising in pitch. As it escalated, a loading bar on the readout screen slowly ticked upwards.
“When it’s loaded, you just need to put your hand on this.” Ace pointed out a small brass dome in the centre of the console.
“Right. And I’ll turn up in the same place, back then?”
“Easier than arriving outside and then trying to get into the building. It’s under quite heavy guard at the time you’re going to, to protect DELPHI from our ‘enemies’ - we still trusted her then. Just tell me everything I’ve told you - I’ve got enough authority that if I believe you, they’ll listen to you.”
The loading bar reached full, and the whine of the computers levelled out at a very high pitch. Lights around DELPHI’s screen were flicking on and off, shuddering back to life.
“Better go quick, before she wakes up.”
Mel nodded. She eyed the brass dome with trepidation, wondering if it would be as disorienting as the last time.
“Mel!” She turned to Ace, who quickly cupped her face in her hands and kissed her hard. “Go!” She let go, stepped away, and Mel brought her hand down on the dome decisively.
It was exactly as disorienting as the last time. Her head rang with feedback-noise, and the bright light seemed to be inside her eyes, blinding her.
When it faded, she stumbled a little on her feet. A rattle of clicks echoed around her, and she slowly took her hand from the brass dome.
“Don't move!” a voice barked.
She opened her eyes and peered through her light-blinded vision to see that she was currently in the sights of several mean-looking weapons.
“Put your hands up where we can see them.” Mel raised her hands to shoulder level. The man addressing her turned to one of his subordinates. “DELPHI was right - they can make themselves look like us. Not very good, though - I’ve never seen hair that colour before, have you?”
He turned back to Mel, who was trying not to let her legs give out. The second time-jump in as many days had really taken it out of her.
“You will be taken into custody as a spy against our colony. Men!” A couple of soldiers hurried towards her.
“Terrific,” Mel sighed.
oOoOo
Part 2
Pairing: Mel/Ace
Rating: PG
Words: ~4400
Summary: The locals of Epsilon Xi have a troubled future ahead of them. Or possibly behind them. Mel's getting a bit muddled with all this, actually.
Author's Notes: Written for the
dw_femslash ficathon, for glinda_penguin, who wanted crossing of timestreams and mythology, and gave me this quote: "They have not wanted Peace at all; they have wanted to be spared war - as though the absence of war was the same as peace." - Dorothy Thompson. The title is Greek, and translates as "The latter one first". Sorry for the delay, and I promise to have the next part up within the week. Many thanks to agapi42 for her fast and helpful beta work! :o)oOoOo
Location: approximately 140km above Human colony Epsilon Xi
Six months and four days before the end of Peacetime
Local time: 20H 07M
Just after mid-day siesta
There was a series of noises coming from the starboard engine that didn’t make their descent to Epsilon Xi any less unsettling than the fact that the nose of the ship appeared to be smoking as they crossed from the thermosphere into the mesosphere. The turbulence of re-entry (which was maybe just ‘entry’ and not ‘re-entry’ at all, since they’d never been to this planet before) brought Glitz stumbling through from the cargo deck, swearing loudly about a stubbed toe and grumbling about the “blasted cooling systems” as he dropped into the co-pilot’s seat.
“We nearly there?” he asked, rather unnecessarily. He fished a bag of some sort of distinctly meaty-smelling snack food out of his pocket and offered it to the pilot.
Mel took her eyes off the screen for a moment to give him a Look, then returned to scanning the visible landmasses through the cloud layers below.
“How’s the cargo?” she asked, once she’d identified their target continent and made sure their course was correct. “None of it on fire, or anything?”
“Not at the moment,” Glitz replied, putting his feet up on the glove compartment once the turbulence had subsided. “Although we might need to install an extinguisher in the engine room if the cooling vents keep blocking themselves up.”
“We’re into the lower atmosphere now, so it should start cooling down,” Mel assured him with a grin. They dropped through the last thin layer of clouds, and she couldn’t help a small sigh at the sight of the clear blue oceans, deep green forests, and wide grassy plains containing cities that glistened in the sunlight like clusters of iridescent beetles.
The eleventh planet orbiting the fifth brightest star in the constellation of Piraeus, Epsilon Xi had the most idyllic outward appearance of all of Earth’s colony planets. Large marine animals broke the surface of the waves and fanned their fronds in the air before returning below. Beaches stretched around the major continents, white and gleaming in the midday sun. Lush vegetation fringed the shores and stretched back to dense rainforest, thick with all manner of wild animals. It was easy to see why the Earth colonists had chosen this planet as a settling place several centuries ago.
A loud beeping from the console brought Mel’s attention back to the cockpit, and she decided to ignore the incredible view in favour of not nose-diving into that beautiful blue ocean. Glitz was similarly pushing buttons, controlling the various items of landing gear to slow their descent to the city of Camarina. The flight computer on board the Centennial Skylark (Mel had flatly disallowed Glitz’s plan to name it the Nosferatu III, after what had happened to the first two) had started chatting with the land-based computer in the docking port’s control station the moment they came into orbit, exchanging data about trajectories and flight paths, so the landing procedure was fairly straightforward. Mel still breathed a sigh of relief after every touchdown, nevertheless.
Once they were out of the ship and standing in the open air of the docking port, the sun warmed their skin quite pleasantly but caused them both to shield their eyes from the glare. Their contact, a burly middle-aged man by the name of Kris, hurried across from the sheltered waiting area to greet them, tailed by a string of wheeled pallets to transport their cargo.
As they perched on the back seats of the small open-topped vehicle towing the pallets, Glitz and Kris chattered away in trader-speak about the cargo and its various merits, while Mel watched the scenery pass. The architecture was rather sleek and shiny, revealing the wealth behind the colony, but more rustic elements remained from the earlier days of colony building, such as market squares full of produce and clothing.
There was a general sense in the area of a city only just awakening; the market traders were rolling tarpaulins back from their stall fronts, and there were more than a few children making their way to school who seemed as though they had just been rushed through the morning routine when they would have preferred to stay in bed.
Yet, it was the middle of the day. According to the sun, at least; shining high in the sky, maybe a couple of hours past noon.
“What time is it?” Mel asked, interrupting Glitz’s much-told yarn about the time he had ‘almost been killed on a philanthropic mission, delivering very important classified documents’.
Kris consulted a timepiece in his pocket. “Just after half past the twentieth hour.”
Mel thought about that for a moment. “So, how long is the day, here?”
“Thirty-three hours. We’re just past siesta, right now. Everyone’s going back to work, or school.”
“I see...”
“I could do with a little siesta myself,” Glitz remarked, yawning widely.
“No napping on the job for you,” Mel told him, sharply but fondly. “You remember what happened last time.”
“Oh, yeah.” Glitz had the decency to look slightly abashed.
When they reached the site, Kris barked short words of instruction to several workers, who rushed around lifting boxes from the pallets and carting them towards the half-finished building nearby.
“You’ll get your fee now that the supplies are delivered safely,” Kris said, turning to Glitz and pulling a money pouch from his pocket. Mel cleared her throat conspicuously.
“Ah, yes, you see,” Glitz began awkwardly, “Miss Bush here takes responsibility for handling the finances...”
“If it didn’t burn a hole in your pocket faster than hot coals, I wouldn’t have to,” she replied, grinning slightly. Kris counted out their payment into Mel’s hand, and she then tucked it away in her own money pouch.
“We’re very grateful for your services,” said Kris. “If you have time, would you like to see more of the city?”
Glitz was eyeing a nearby drinking establishment as though it contained the Holy Grail, so Mel just rolled her eyes and informed Kris that they’d take him up on that offer. He turned and yelled a name across the construction site, and to Mel’s surprise, the “hang on a second!” that echoed back was in a British accent. The colonists seemed to have a strong Greco-Roman influence to their society, so the background hubbub was vaguely Mediterranean, but this voice was recognisably English. Near London, even. And rather familiar.
Glitz had turned at the sound of the voice too. “Was that...?”
The half-spoken question was answered mere moments later, as their appointed tour guide extricated herself from the busier end of the site.
“What did you say, boss?” The young woman straightened her hardhat as she approached them, and when the brim finally shielded her eyes from the glare of the sun, she stopped dead. “Doughnut, is that you?!”
Mel laughed in surprise. “Ace! What are you doing here?”
Ace covered the final few yards to the safe zone in an instant, pulling off her hard hat and swinging Mel round in an enthusiastic hug.
“Didn’t think I’d see you again,” she said with a grin. “Did you have to bring old bilgebag, though?”
“Oi!”
The girls laughed as Glitz took offence, and Ace let Mel go rather reluctantly.
“Oh, it’s been ages! I’ve --”
A sudden high pitched sound stung Mel’s ears, hurting her head and making her dizzy. The sunlight became too bright to see anything at all, and she screwed her eyes tightly shut.
“Oh, what on earth was that?” she groaned, when the light and noise finally faded away. “Felt like microphone feedback in my head...”
Her ears still ringing, Mel blinked at the dark blotches in her vision and cast around in the gloom to find her bearings.
“Ace?” she called, hesitantly. “Glitz?”
Looking up, she saw a tall grey building looming over her. Further up still, she could see that it was suddenly night-time. Only the sound of dead leaves whispered around her, and a thick fog was creeping in through the city. It felt deserted, almost dead.
Mel shivered as the chill of the night settled around her bones. She tried her luck once more.
“Hello?” she shouted, her voice echoing around the streets.
A hand on her shoulder made her yelp and spin round, her heart thudding as she let out a shaky laugh of relief when she saw that it was Ace, her face alert and serious.
“What happened?” she asked, recovering a smidgen of composure.
Ace put her fingers to Mel’s lips, hushing her, and whispered, “Not here.”
Location: Human colony Epsilon Xi, somewhere beneath Camarina.
Thirty-two days after the End of Hostilities.
Local time: 29H 48M
“Ace, what on earth is going on?” Mel demanded to know, cold and confused as she watched Ace shove the heavy door shut behind them.
“It’s very complicated,” Ace replied, regarding Mel rather oddly. “Especially with what’s happened to you.”
“What do you mean? What’s happened to me?”
Ace opened her mouth to explain, hesitated, then shook her head and led Mel further along the tunnel by the hand.
“Let’s get you some warm clothes first.”
A short time later, clad in thick jumpers, Ace and Mel sat cross-legged on a rug, warming their hands next to a small heating device. Several such devices were dotted around the room, with small groups of people huddled round them for warmth. Mel noted several children, but fewer adults. Conversation murmured just above the hum of the heaters, only just masking a few quiet sobs. The small glowing lights embedded in the walls made no sound, and brought only dim light to the space.
“So, it’s like this,” Ace began, her eyes focused elsewhere. “There’s this computer, DELPHI. Artificial intelligence, tells the future. It was here when the planet was colonised.”
Mel frowned. “So the colonists weren’t the first sentient population?”
“Nah. Some time-sensitive race got wiped out centuries ago, left behind a bunch of technology. The human scientists pounced on it the second they found it, yeah? Started taking it apart, seeing how it worked. They couldn’t take DELPHI apart, though. She wouldn’t let them.”
“She?” Mel repeated with surprise.
“A.I., remember? The computer’s got a personality. Bit of a mean streak, too. Turned out she didn’t want to spend all day predicting the future of the colonists, so she started telling them misleading truths. Ended up starting a war with a passing fleet of alien ships.”
“Oh god...”
“She didn’t want any colonists at all. Tried to wipe them out.”
Mel shivered, even though she was warming up quite nicely.
“This is why I really dislike intelligent computers,” she remarked, after a few moments of silence. “Far more trouble than they’re worth.”
She stared at her feet for a second, then looked back up at Ace, with the intention of asking another question. The look in her eyes, however, was unfamiliar; a deep sort of sadness mixed with something else. Mel found her train of thought derailed, before the expression on Ace’s face disappeared behind invisible shutters. She recalled her question with some difficulty, although it was obvious once she’d grasped it again.
“How did I end up here?” she asked. “We were on the construction site, it was sunny... What happened?”
“DELPHI,” Ace said simply. “She began experimenting with Time before the war even started. Tried to change the future.” Ace smiled wryly. “She should’ve known that it was her own interference that would allow some of us to survive. Luckily, she's not infallible.”
“What did she do?”
“She knew that the person who had the most influence on the survival of the colonists had a strong artron energy signature. So she moved that person through time, to a point after the war, so she couldn’t interfere.”
“You mean, me?” Mel gaped. “Artron energy is to do with the TARDIS, isn’t it? Or the time vortex?”
“Exactly.”
“But we’d both have an energy signature.”
“Yeah. I don’t know which of us was originally supposed to be the most influential, but it ended up being you.”
“Me? But I’m here, after the war. How can I have any influence on what happened?”
Ace grinned unexpectedly. “’Cause there’s a way to send you back.”
oOoOo
The plan wasn’t feasible until the next day; something to do with low radiation levels at night not providing them enough cover to mask their life signs from DELPHI’s sensors. There had apparently been some sabotage to said sensors during the war, which allowed them this opportunity to hide in plain sight during daylight hours.
Being unexpectedly ripped through time does tend to leave a traveller quite tired, so after a quick discussion with Ace and a couple of the rather bright and imaginative children who had edged their way into the conversation, Mel told Ace that she needed some sleep.
Ace said goodnight to the kids, advising them to get to their own beds as well, and took the heater with her when she led Mel to the sleeping area. The small space, just a large-ish cupboard with a single-berth bed, really, was one of several along a stone corridor.
“What was this place, before the war?” Mel asked, peering curiously into the gloomy shadows past Ace’s door.
“Some kind of bunker. It’s been here longer than the colonists have,” Ace replied, ushering her from the chilly corridor into the equally chilly bedroom. The portable heater quickly brought the temperature up to something resembling warm, for which Mel was very glad.
Ace sat on her bed, stared at her feet, and sighed.
“What’s wrong?” Mel sat next to her, covering Ace’s cold hand with one of her own.
“Oh, nothing,” she replied, almost breezily. “It’ll be a bit of a squeeze, since we’ve only got the little bed, but we’ll keep each other warm, at least.” She smiled, but it was slightly hollow. Sad, like before.
“Ace?”
The young woman looked up, the edges of her face picked out in soft yellow by the glow of the heater. She seemed about to say something, but then decided against it. Whatever it had been vanished behind the shutters again, and she got up to pull the covers back from the bed.
Mel stood, so Ace could move the layers of blankets past where she had been sitting. She watched in silence as Ace unlaced her boots and pulled the hair-tie from her ponytail, then got into the bed and shuffled over to the wall, leaving space for Mel to lie down. Which she did, after removing her own shoes and hair slide.
Ace pulled at the covers, and Mel tugged them the rest of the way over the two of them, and they lay together in the semi-dark, listening to the hum of the heater.
Eventually, Mel turned over onto her side, to a more comfortable position, and she felt Ace do the same. They lay close, but there was a palpable tension in her body which made Mel slightly uncomfortable. Ace was almost too still against her back, and it felt strange.
She sighed, and awkwardly rolled over to face her.
“What’s wrong?”
Ace reached up a hand to clasp around Mel’s, and held it in the cramped space between them.
“It’s nothing,” she assured her. “Just ... memories, that’s all.”
“Memories of?”
“Something amazing.” Mel couldn’t tell very well in the low light, but she had the feeling that Ace’s eyes weren’t shuttered at all anymore. “Something I don’t know if I want a second time, if I can’t ever have it again.”
Mel gazed at her for a time. She was so uncertain whether or not she was interpreting Ace’s words correctly, that she was caught completely by surprise when the small distance between them closed, and their cold noses bumped and brushed together in the dark.
After a long moment of not breathing, Mel let out a soft noise, a nervous giggle, as she remembered the balance between breathing through the nose and kissing with the mouth.
Ace chuckled back at her, kissing her a little more deeply and tangling fingers in her hair. She broke the kiss for a few moments, and lay nose-to-nose with Mel, just breathing.
“Second time?” she asked, tilting her head and grinning excitedly.
“There was a first?” Mel was occupying a heady space somewhere between bemusement and desire.
Ace laughed. “Oh, just you wait!” she breathed, anticipation in every syllable. Mel grinned back at her, allowing herself to be pulled close again, and Ace’s hands found some very interesting ways to warm themselves up.
oOoOo
It was strange to wake up in the same clothes you’d been wearing the day before. The frequently malfunctioning cooling vents on the Centennial Skylark meant that it was usually quite warm on board, so Mel often argued with Glitz on the merits of wearing a bathrobe on his way to the shower in the morning if he was going to sleep starkers.
Waking up fully dressed was even stranger when you were sharing a very small bed with someone. Ace’s hair was in her face, the arm under Ace’s middle was asleep, and the foot that wasn’t quite covered by the blanket was freezing. She shifted a bit, trying to alleviate the discomfort without waking Ace, but the two turned out to be incompatible. Ace tried to roll over, found she couldn’t, and made a sleepy noise of protest.
“Just me,” said Mel. “Can I have my arm back?” she added with a smile.
Ace sat up a bit, enough that Mel could pull her arm out from underneath her, and then she flopped back to the mattress with a groan. Mel rubbed at her forearm until it stopped feeling quite so boneless and started tingling back to life, and then she lay back down, her cold foot now warming up under the blanket. She curled up to Ace’s back again, her good arm over her waist, and Ace snuggled backwards into her. One of her hands found Mel’s and sleepily played with her fingers.
“We should get up,” she said quietly, after a while. “But it’s nice and warm here.”
Mel shifted around until she could roll over, and they lay nose-to-nose. “Shouldn’t we get some breakfast?”
“I suppose.” Ace pressed a kiss to her lips, then gave her a nudge to get her moving. Mel grudgingly slid out of the bed, shivering a little within moments. Ace followed her, giving the heater a tweak to warm the room up a little. They donned boots and tied back hair, and shared a few minutes of energetic snogging on the bed to try to warm themselves up a little more (though both giggled over the fact that it was a fairly poor excuse).
Breakfast was almost-tasteless ration bars, consumed in the dim light of the main room, huddled around the heating devices again. Ace and Mel discussed the plan in more detail as they ate, including the technicalities of actually travelling in time. Apparently this involved disabling DELPHI’s control just long enough to give them access to the necessary hardware to send Mel back.
“But how do we disable her?” Mel asked, sharing her ration bar with a particularly wide-eyed, sad-looking child.
Ace gave the kid a playful cuff on the head. “Oi, you, stop begging. You’ve got your own breakfast.” The sadly hopeful expression dissolved into giggles, and Mel laughed as the ‘starving urchin’ act fell apart. “You’re a soft touch, Doughnut,” Ace teased, giving Mel a nudge with her foot as the kid ran off back to the other children. “What were you saying about DELPHI?”
“How are we disabling her?”
“With a modified version of the computer virus that we used during the war,” Ace replied. She turned and called across the room. “Hey, Galen!” A young, skinny, bearded man looked up from his breakfast, then jumped up, fumbling in his pockets. He hurried over, and held out a couple of small objects.
“I managed to modify it enough that it’ll work again,” he said with a smile. “She shouldn’t be able to counteract it for several minutes, at least.” Ace took the items with a grin of thanks. “You just find a port, plug it in, the virus’ll invade, and she’ll lose control of her tech. Blue one’s modified, red one’s original.”
Ace passed the objects to Mel so she could take a look; they were not unlike USB sticks she’d seen in the early 21st century. Each was wrapped around with coloured tape, one red and one blue.
“I had to modify the virus from the original because DELPHI was able to recover from it and was then immune. You have to take the original virus back to war-time so we can use it then.”
Mel looked up at Ace, a slight smile forming on her lips. “It’s one of those time loops, isn’t it? I thought I'd seen the last of them.”
Ace chuckled. “Kind of, yeah. Thanks, Galen, that’s a huge help.”
He smiled, and added, “Radiation levels are high today, so you should be hidden until you’re inside the building.”
“Brilliant.”
oOoOo
“You know what you’re doing?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I suppose if anything went wrong, we’d be in a different future right now, wouldn’t we?”
“Perhaps. The Doctor was always pretty vague when he explained paradoxes, so I don’t know.”
“Yeah, they used to make my head hurt, too.”
Neither girl was smiling. The building that housed DELPHI loomed over them, windows glinting in the cold winter sunlight.
“So she’s in there?”
“Yep.”
“Shall we go in, then?”
“Not yet.” The sad, distant look had returned, and Mel pulled Ace into a hug. Ace hugged back tightly, squeezing the breath out of her for a few moments. Then she kissed her, arms around her neck and eyes tightly shut.
“I’ll see you again,” Mel assured her. “I will.”
Ace nodded, and cracked a smile. “You’d better!” She drew in a deep breath, then let it out with a determined expression. “Right, time to take out the evil computer.”
Mel grinned, and followed her inside.
oOoOo
The A.I.’s harsh tones rang out the minute they stepped into the main computer room. To Mel’s ears, the sound was somewhat akin to the tang of metal on the tongue.
“You again!”
“Me again?” she echoed in surprise.
“She met you last year,” Ace pointed out. “Back when we turned her into an obsolete piece of junk.” She directed this to the computer, whose main screen now featured an irate digitised face.
“Impudent child!” DELPHI snapped. “You may have succeeded once -”
“But I won’t succeed again?” Ace countered. She grinned in amusement. “Sounds like someone’s got their facts wrong. That was always your problem, DELPHI – you can see future events, but you can’t always understand them.”
The digital face fizzed and flickered with rage. “Your time on this planet is almost at an end!” she declared.
“Is it? Oh good,” Ace replied. “I was getting tired of this place anyway. Far too oppressive, and the facilities are rubbish.”
DELPHI's face flickered again, but far more uncontrolled than before. Not rage, but confusion; malfunction.
“How have you done this?” she shouted, voice jittering and laced with static.
“D’you think she’s noticed it yet?” Mel poked her head round the corner of the bank of terminals, after making sure the blue data stick was firmly plugged in and interfacing with the system. The screen displaying DELPHI's face went dark.
Ace grinned. “Nice one!” Mel grinned back. “Right, now, watch how I do this,” said Ace, moving to one of the consoles and tapping keys.
Ace programmed the date and time into the computer as Mel stood at her shoulder, memorising the controls and sequences. She stabbed triumphantly at a final button, and the console’s hum started rising in pitch. As it escalated, a loading bar on the readout screen slowly ticked upwards.
“When it’s loaded, you just need to put your hand on this.” Ace pointed out a small brass dome in the centre of the console.
“Right. And I’ll turn up in the same place, back then?”
“Easier than arriving outside and then trying to get into the building. It’s under quite heavy guard at the time you’re going to, to protect DELPHI from our ‘enemies’ - we still trusted her then. Just tell me everything I’ve told you - I’ve got enough authority that if I believe you, they’ll listen to you.”
The loading bar reached full, and the whine of the computers levelled out at a very high pitch. Lights around DELPHI’s screen were flicking on and off, shuddering back to life.
“Better go quick, before she wakes up.”
Mel nodded. She eyed the brass dome with trepidation, wondering if it would be as disorienting as the last time.
“Mel!” She turned to Ace, who quickly cupped her face in her hands and kissed her hard. “Go!” She let go, stepped away, and Mel brought her hand down on the dome decisively.
It was exactly as disorienting as the last time. Her head rang with feedback-noise, and the bright light seemed to be inside her eyes, blinding her.
When it faded, she stumbled a little on her feet. A rattle of clicks echoed around her, and she slowly took her hand from the brass dome.
“Don't move!” a voice barked.
She opened her eyes and peered through her light-blinded vision to see that she was currently in the sights of several mean-looking weapons.
“Put your hands up where we can see them.” Mel raised her hands to shoulder level. The man addressing her turned to one of his subordinates. “DELPHI was right - they can make themselves look like us. Not very good, though - I’ve never seen hair that colour before, have you?”
He turned back to Mel, who was trying not to let her legs give out. The second time-jump in as many days had really taken it out of her.
“You will be taken into custody as a spy against our colony. Men!” A couple of soldiers hurried towards her.
“Terrific,” Mel sighed.
oOoOo
Part 2
