Doctor Who: The Time Splicer: The Penitentiary (The Time Splicer Series Book 3)

by Cour M.

  “Truly,” Eight commented, picking up one of the guns and tossing it away from them, “so uncivilized.” Looking toward the prisoners, he ordered for them to bring the guards along, heavily secured. With the laser guns pointed at the guards, they made a very strange ensemble, walking along in a strange shape. Eventually they arrived at the spaceship and seeing that his fellow guards were detained, the pilot had no choice but to take the prisoners back on board and return to Jupiter 6.

  ⌨

  “So,” Captain Gilmore sneered, leaning back in his seat. “You couldn’t just do it, could you?”

  When the prisoners had returned, they were all taken back in their cells, to await there until further notice, while Eight was taken to the Captain’s office.

  “Do what?”

  “You couldn’t just die.”

  “No, forgive me, but I take great pleasure in being hard to kill.”

  “I was informed of that in your M.O.”

  “Is that why you did it?” Eight hissed, realizing another aspect to Gilmore’s intentions. “You better not have sent those prisoners out there as collateral, just because you wished to kill me.”

  “Of course, I didn’t do that. That’s too much work for one Timelord, now isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it is. Which leaves me to the only theory that I have.”

  “And you expect me to let you talk about it.”

  “Of course, you will. Because you are curious to see how right I am.”

  “You are that sure of yourself, eh?”

  “No, just that eager.”

  Captain Gilmore leaned back in his chair and kept his steely gaze on the Doctor. Taking that as encouragement enough, Eight began to list his thoughts.

  “We found out that you send prisoners to that moon rarely, and only at certain times of the year, and I wondered why at first. I figured it out too late, and I feel slow. So terribly slow. You send them there because you knew the Equinae was there, and this was a way to kill your prisoners in a way that no one either notices or cares. If your prisoners die on an oxygen atom run, then you can’t be blamed for it. Also, the way that you arrange us to eat breakfast—no prisoner ever sees all their fellow inmates at once. You place us in a way, section us off, so we cannot always see each other—so that we cannot see when some are missing. In fact, they can’t ever be missed, because you don’t miss something that you never knew was there. Yet if they did know each other, and a whole unit that was sent to retrieve oxygen was missing, then the other prisoners would notice the pattern. They might question. They might rebel. So, you section us off, send a certain party out every now and again, and they don’t come back. And it’s a write-off.”

  Captain Gilmore clapped slowly for him.

  “Well done, Doctor. Then again, it wasn’t very hard to figure that out, now was it?”

  “What I want to know is why you are doing this? Are these orders sent from Mecrellas?”

  “Do they order us to decrease the surplus population?” Captain Gilmore guessed the Doctor’s thoughts, “Because there is that possibility, isn’t it? The Eastern State Penitentiary is a large place, yes. But is it large enough to always meet the demands of the number of prisoners in it? After all, we don’t allow the prisoners to share a cell. Or maybe it’s because Mecrellas wishes to kill its criminal population down one by one, for the sake of decreasing the numbers of its nefarious population. Or maybe we do it just for the sheer pleasure of it. Or who knows? Maybe I’m not even doing it because of orders. Maybe I’m working outside of the jurisdiction.”

  Captain Gilmore stood up, walked over to Eight, and stared him in the face.

  “So, the Doctor wants to know, which answer is it? It’s eating away at you, isn’t it? What is the real and true reason behind why Captain Gilmore does what he does? And do you know what I say to that? That I shall never tell you.”

  “What is the reason?” Eight demanded.

  “I shall never tell you.”

  “What is the reason!”

  “I shall never tell!”

  “You will tell me!”

  “Never! Now stay here and rot, knowing that you don’t know the answer.”

  “These are innocent men.”

  “In all my life, I’ve never met an innocent man or woman. Everyone has wronged someone eventually.”

  “You mistake everyone for yourself.”

  “Correction, Doctor. I know everyone is me.”

  “Ah, and here it is.”

  “What?”

  “The moment that you make an excuse for everything that you are by seeing it in others. The impulse to hurt before you get hurt. The desire for your justification of evil, is in the evil of others. And once more, you know what I’m going to say to you. You always know what I am going to say to you.”

  In hearing this, Captain Gilmore’s face turned white with shock and he couldn’t stand it any longer.

  “Take him away,” he ordered the guards, “To the isolation chute, and let him remain there.”

  “The cellar chute?” One of the guards questioned, “But, sir, it will kill him.”

  Captain Gilmore gave him a menacing look and the guard buckled.

  “Forgive me, Captain.”

  Eight was dragged out of the office.

  “Remember better times, Doctor,” Captain Gilmore advised. “It shall be more entertaining to watch you forget them one by one in the end.”

  Eight was led along the hallway and he turned to the guard who had the instinct to defend him.

  “One question. Will the prisoners that returned with me be given food? They are starving. And will they be safe?”

  The guard did not respond.

  “Captain Gilmore is not watching you now.”

  “He is always watching.”

  “You are not telling me anything that can be held against you. You’re only telling me for my peace of mind. Will the other prisoners be given food and be allowed to live?”

  “They will be given food, yes. But I am uncertain of their fate in the future. However, I am certain that no sort of executions shall occur in the next week. As for the week after, I am not so certain.”

  “Thank you. And tell me, what’s down below in the cellar chute?”

  “Down below in the cellar is you being put in Isolation.”

  “But you said something could kill me? What is it?”

  The guard gave him a warning look.

  “It,” was his simple reply. “It.”

  ⌨

  The guards and Eight reached a trapdoor with a lock on it. One guard leaned down and unlocked it.

  “How many prisoners have you done this to?” Eight asked.

  “Only one before now,” the guard answered, “that’s why we don’t understand why it’s happening again. Usually we just feed it scraps, like a pet.”

  The trapdoor was raised and the Doctor looked down into the darkness of the hole.

  “It’s time for you to go down, sir,” the guard announced.

  “You expect me to just go down there of my own accord?”

  “Please, sir. Don’t make us have to be the ones to do it,” the guard responded simply.

  Eight took in the guard’s frightened expression and he felt sorry for him.

  “How old are you, guard?”

  “I’m twenty-two, sir.”

  “That’s way too young.”

  “This was all that I was good at. Because I wasn’t good at anything else, you see.”

  “I am so sorry for that.”

  Taking pity on the guards, Eight dropped into the hole and began to slide down a ramp, further into the depths of the prison.

  Once he reached the bottom, he felt something roll after him, and he discovered that it was a flashlight. The guard must’ve thrown it in behind him, out of pity.

  He flickered it on and in the distance, he heard the roaring of an animal.

  And that was when Ten saw Eight’s memories. That was when he knew that he was in danger.


  Chapter 10

  Captain Gilmore

  Eight immediately turned the light off. He knew that the illumination would only draw the monster toward him more, and in a much quicker pace of time. Therefore, he crawled around in the dark at first, feeling his way, until his eyes adjusted. Eventually he could see a little, as he felt a rat crawl over his hand. At the scurrying of its feet over him, he recoiled, but then eventually got over it.

  “Brilliant, Doctor. You’ve got a hungry monster down here with you and you get skirmish around a rat? Wow, you need to sort out your priorities.”

  There was another roar that was in the distance, and Eight realized that he had no choice but to gather his courage, and face the adversary rather than hide from it. Above all, he also needed to know what it was that he was facing. Therefore, he lit the flashlight-torch, to show himself around the room. He was in a corridor and he saw that he had three different passageways to go down. He chose the one to the left, and then he heard the roaring get louder. Walking along, he entered a vast cavern where he saw that he was in an underground labyrinth.

  As he remained lost in the deep levels of the tunnel, Ten was remembering everything that Eight was going through just after Eight was undergoing it. In his mind’s eye, once his younger self underwent the action, Ten saw it only a few seconds later.

  Frustrated that he couldn’t do anything, Ten began to pace around the room. Next, his actions became direct and decisive. When Eight moved left along the labyrinth, Ten moved left in his cell.

  Eight moved his head to the left.

  So did Ten.

  Something fell from above, so Eight had to duck out of the way.

  Ten ducked as well, though nothing was falling from the ceiling of his cell.

  And both Doctors, together, were afraid.

  ⌨

  Ten’s cell-door opened and Captain Gilmore entered.

  “Let him go!” Ten demanded, rushing toward him, “take me in his place if you will, but let him go.”

  Two guards came in between him and Captain Gilmore.

  “You look angry,” Captain Gilmore announced, pleasant.

  “What gave it away?”

  “An interesting turn of events, this is. Yet I do believe that your phrasing was incorrect. You told me to let him go. Isn’t it more correct for you to say, ‘let me go’?”

  “Same thing! Now let him go. Let him go back to his cell and be done with it.”

  One guard brought two chairs in, and placed them opposite each other. Captain Gilmore sat down in one seat with both of his guards standing sentinel, with their guns outstretched toward the Doctor.

  “You do not help your past self by dying right now, do you think? Sit down, Doctor.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “I insist.”

  Ten swallowed his rage, trying to be strategic and so he sat down. However, as the memories kept flooding in, Ten’s body could not keep entirely still in that moment. For some reason, the link between both him and Eight was fully opened and his body felt as if it was undergoing whatever his younger self was witnessing.

  Strange!

  He had met his previous incarnations before in the past, when all five doctors were once trapped, or when the three doctors were recruited together to solve a problem, or when Two and Six met up for an adventure against a sontaran. Each time, it had required much energy to be used by the Timelords at Gallifrey to allow their time streams to cross in that way without things collapsing, but it had never been like this. Eight and Ten did not have energy conjured up to stabilize their joining up together, but no chaos ensued. Also, there usually had to be an intentional linking of their minds together so that they could see each other’s thoughts and memories simultaneously. The more that Eight encountered, the quicker that Ten was now recalling it. Ever since they had entered the prison, the link was becoming stronger, and he was recalling things within a second after Eight did. It could mean only two things.

  Either there was something about Jupiter 6 that was emitting an energy that affected the Timelord connection. Or both Eight and Ten’s mind were fusing, because they were together for too long, and now things would soon begin to crumble.

  ⌨

  Deep below the penitentiary, Eight moved to the left, around a large heap of rock.

  As he did so, Ten instinctively moved to the left in his chair.

  “Something wrong, Doctor?” Captain Gilmore asked.

  Ten had a flash of Eight as he stubbed his foot against a stone. Instinctively, Ten’s foot mimicked it.

  “Nothing at all,” Ten replied, “now free my younger self.”

  “No, I think you’re lying.”

  Captain Gilmore looked Ten over.

  “Your older self is down below, in torment. Do you remember the things that happen to him?”

  Ten did not respond, but only gave him a menacing look.

  “I think that you do. In fact, you’re remembering what he is undergoing right now. What is that like, I wonder? For your past to overlap with your present? Or to be remembering your past when you are in the present. How strange. How backwards. And how like a Timelord.”

  “You don’t know my species.”

  “But I do.”

  “Yes, and it makes me wonder why. Why do you know us Timelords so very well?”

  “I am talking.”

  “And I’m not listening.”

  “But you are!”

  “Am I!”

  “Yes, and you are seeing what he is undergoing right now.”

  “And that’s why you came, isn’t it?” Ten realized, “you just couldn’t remain where you were. You just had to come here, and see me, because if you can’t see the pain that you are putting him through, then at least you can watch his struggle, through me.”

  “You’re sharper than your younger self.”

  “I’ve lived longer. That gives a person more time to discern things for themselves.”

  “And more time to make mistakes.”

  “Who are you speaking of now? Me or yourself? Now if you won’t release him, then send me down there with him so that I can help.”

  Captain Gilmore did not respond.

  “Oh, that’s right,” Ten groaned, “you don’t want me to leave this room. You want to watch me remember my younger self being tortured, tormented and feel so alone. Yet he never feels alone. I recall that very well. He’s not like me, and constantly is feeling abandoned… no, he keeps his companions within him. I recall myself so well when I was with him. And I never felt alone.”

  “Then I chose the right Timelord to watch, and the correct one to break.”

  “There’s no sport in hurting me. It’s so easy to do.”

  “You admit that you are not that strong?”

  “What’s the point in hiding it? Let me call myself a coward, let me rail and shout against the injustice of losing, because I have all the time in the world to do it! And your nature is as it is—the kind that wants to see me break. Well, I shall not dance for you. And what is the sport of watching something that is already broken?”

  “Is this where you admit that I have won?”

  “If this is the moment where you admit that you do not forgive me because I’m a Timelord. Is this where you admit that long ago, we wronged you somewhere, and you didn’t like it?”

  Captain Gilmore’s face froze over, and his eyes hardened.

  “Or our thirteen lives made you jealous, or our ability to travel through time and space provoked your disdain for not having such freedom,” Ten guessed, “I’ve seen such envy tear men and women apart. But with you, it’s more than that, isn’t it? You have regrets, Captain Gilmore. You made mistakes in your past, and we must’ve witnessed it. Or we were there to correct it. Tell me, what is the reason why, Captain? What happened to you that broke you to the point where you could never be mended again? And what did we do to make it permanent?”

  Captain Gilmore stood up and began to pace back and forth.

&
nbsp; “The universe is large,” Captain Gilmore began, “it’s vast, complicated and also ugly. Very ugly. But what’s more, do you know, that it is an irony unto itself? It’s also small, and even if we run, there is no chance that we can run far enough. From our wrongs, or from those that wronged us. You are proof of that. I got a job in a prison, and then I meet a Timelord. He belongs to a species that is as old as time itself, practically. Perhaps it is that all things come to he who waits. Or perhaps it is that the universe is large, it is vast—but it is still small because you cannot escape your own history. The universe doesn’t have room for those of us who run, and keep running, because it always must eventually push you back to it all.”

  “Then tell me what it is that you are running from!”

  “I will not! And it’s clear, Doctor. You still have some fight in you after all, despite your protests.”

  Realizing that he had to try and stick to his objective, Ten began to plead.

  “Please, let me go down to him. Please I beg you!”

  “Ah, yes,” Captain Gilmore sighed, “now that’s the tone that I was looking for.”

  Captain Gilmore began to leave, but Ten threw himself at his feet and grabbed his legs.

  “Please,” Ten cried, “take pity on us! Let me go down to him!”

  “Get him off me!” Captain Gilmore cried. The guards rushed to Ten and began to pull him off. Ten remained clinging on, shouting out in anguish and despair. Then he began to wrap his arms around the smaller guard and began to cling to him desperately. “Please, have mercy! I’m a poor, cowardly wretch, and therefore take pity on me! Have hearts, and take pity on him as well. Please!”

  The other guard pulled Ten off him and threw him against the cell’s floor. Ten rolled over, roaring out in grief.

  “Don’t abandon us! He’ll die if I don’t go to him!”

  The cell door was closed, and Ten was all alone.

  ⌨

  Ten continued to roar out.

  And then he quieted down and waited.

  The guards’ footsteps got quieter and quieter and then Ten determined that they were out of earshot.