THE QUANTUM ARCHANGEL CRAIG HINTON For Julian and Christian Richards, Adam and Samuel Anghelides, and Robert Stirling- Lane. The next generation. May you find the friendship and love that we have. Published by BBC Worldwide Ltd, Woodlands, 80 Wood Lane London W12 0TT First published 2001 Copyright © Craig Hinton 2001 The moral right of the author has been asserted Original series broadcast on the BBC Format © BBC 1963 Doctor Who and TARDIS are trademarks of the BBC ISBN 0 563 53824 4 Imaging by Black Sheep, copyright © BBC 2001 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Mackays of Chatham Cover printed by Belmont Press Ltd, Northampton CONTENTS The Quantum Mechanics Gods... ...and Monsters The Piecemeal Construction of Small Gods Chapter One - Total Eclipse of the Heart Chapter Two - Holding out for a Hero Chapter Three - It’s All Coming Back to Me Now Chapter Four - Faster than the Speed of Night Chapter Five - Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad Chapter Six - Bat Out of Hell Magnificat Chapter Seven - What Have I Done to Deserve This? Chapter Eight - It’s a Sin Chapter Nine - Opportunities Chapter Ten - Always on My Mind Chapter Eleven - Domino Dancing Acknowledgements About the Author I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you. Malvolio – Twelfth Night His sins will find their punishment in due time. Rassilon – The Five Doctors And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges. Feste – Twelfth Night The Quantum Mechanics Gods... She had been there for an eternity. Then again, what was eternity to an Eternal? Stars could burn and die, galaxies could collide, timelines could converge and collapse... but Elektra would wait, wait out her long silent vigil in the depths of the darker strata. Elektra knew that she would be undisturbed there. The darker strata, the deepest levels of the time vortex, were ignored by all – the Eternals, their cousins the Chronovores, the mysterious Time Wraiths with their insane appetites, the Swimmers mindlessly pressing against the multiversal boundaries... All the Transcendental Beings shunned the darkness, preferring the upper levels or the Six- Fold Realm itself. But the dim, turbid streams of the darker strata were the perfect place for an Eternal who didn’t want to be found. And Elektra most certainly did not want to be found. Like all the Transcendental Beings, the Eternals had existed since before the universe had formed – an eternity in the most literal sense. Abandoned by their parents, they had been left to forge their own path – but it was a path that Elektra rejected. Not for her the endless hunt for lesser beings to fulfil her life; not for her the need for ephemeral thoughts and desires to give purpose to her existence. No – Elektra knew what she wanted. But what Elektra wanted was forbidden, forbidden by the Ancient Covenants that bound the Transcendental Beings. Because Elektra wanted fulfilment. Once, long ago, within the abyssal confines of the darker strata, she had found that fulfilment. And she would do again, so very, very soon. Because, for the first time since the remnants of the big bang had hung in the vortex like veils of preternatural fire, since the Transcendental Beings had found themselves in their new home, Elektra had found one simpatico to her needs and her wishes... As if in response to her reverie, the dark of the abyss began to stir. It began to curdle into patterns of time, space and reality, new regions of space-time bubbling down through the substrates to the closed reaches of the darker strata, permitting a heavily built figure of fire and ice to penetrate Elektra’s oubliette, his wings outstretched in greeting. Elektra responded, creating a spiral spectrum of turbulence in colours that could only be seen in the time vortex, and then only by gods. But Elektra was a god, and so was her consort. Prometheus. As he approached, his mind began to burn within hers as hers did within his, minds of unimaginable complexity and reach also minds of imagination, a concept that their fellow Eternals and Chronovores simply couldn’t comprehend. For theirs was a marriage that screamed in the face of the Ancient Covenants. She was of the Eternal caste: those who drifted mindlessly, seeking out other imaginations, other lives, to lead and to leech from. Occasionally, if the boredom grew too great, they would be drawn to the Games, where the Council of Guardians or the less aloof old gods would organise tournaments and entrapments for them, but most of their time was spent looking for others – for those who led real lives – who could fulfil that great longing that was the Eternals’ curse. But not Elektra. As far as she knew, she was unique – the only Eternal who lacked the great longing for external fulfilment. But there was another longing, another need... one that required succour from another who could meet her on her own plane. Not one from the brotherhood and sisterhood of the Eternals, but from another source... The dark caste of the Chronovores. Segregated at birth, they had been consigned to exile just because they failed to meet the standards of the council. Damn the Ancient Covenants! She looked at Prometheus, radiant, magnificent... She found it hard to reconcile that with the covenant description of the Chronovores. According to the council’s ruling, the Chronovores were nothing but vampires: subsisting on the primal energies of the Six-Fold Realm, only truly living by drawing the life essence from the moments of choice, where they could thrive on the what-ifs and the what-might-have-beens, keeping this cosmos alone in the multiverse. An empty existence, a life of loneliness. Just like the Eternals. But not Elektra and Prometheus. Not them. As he approached her through the murk of the darker strata tendrils of thought stroked the outer edges of her mind. Reinforcing her belief in him. Reinforcing her. Elektra and Prometheus. Eternal and Chronovore. They had broken the rules, because they were the future. And their forbidden needs and desires would forge that future. With his imagination and her primal strength they would lead their estranged families to a common ground, to a place where all the Transcendental Beings could live together with the races spawned by this universe. The humans, the Gallifreyans, the Daleks... they would all have their part to play. As would those Transcendental Beings that had stolen away into the hidden places, regions of the multiverse that were even more remote than the darker strata, beings that had seen the universe as a challenge to be conquered, a people to be raped, an artefact of so high a price that they would destroy everything to possess it. The Great Intelligence, the Nestene Consciousness, the Animus... Especially the darkest and greatest of the Old Ones, Nyarlathotep: after what he had done, Elektra had a special place in Hell reserved for him. All of them, hiding and waiting like spiders in their vile webs. They would be the enemy. That was her driving purpose. Such evil needed to be fought, and, for that, Time would need a champion. A champion that Elektra and Prometheus would give their wonderfully united universe, a champion that grew within her. Their child. Avatar. Their child would be the being who would unite all of sentience under one banner, whose dual heritage would show that this new universe was to be shared for the betterment of all. A mission led by Elektra and Prometheus. Elektra, my love. He was with her now, his body conjoining with the radiant aura which surrounded her. Eternals and Chronovores were built from matrices of exotic particles, resonating superstrings that gave them power and majesty, and Elektra gasped as those matrices intertwined. But their feelings... were there particles for that? If there weren’t, then Elektra and Prometheus would create them. The moment approaches, my love. Our child will be magnificent. Prometheus’ wings enfolded her, allowing them both to feel the embryonic consciousness within her communicating with them on a level that was almost impossible to detect. But they could detect it. And Elektra could tell that their child’s epiphany was imminent. An epiphany for the universe. A new universe, overseen by Elektra and Prometheus. They would be the parents of a new dawn, a new era... Thoughts of the future and their unborn child were thrown aside as the Stygian gloom of the darker strata was suddenly illuminated by a brilliance that defied description. For the first time since the Big Bang had lit the vortex, the darker strata were dark no longer. They were filled by a light that was even darker. They had found them. Even in the darker strata, they had found them. Elektra and Prometheus may have been gods, but there were greater gods. Beings at the very pinnacle of existence, at the summit of the cosmic hierarchy. The Guardians. Elektra had never seen anything like it in her long, so very long, life. And she knew that few others in the universe had either. Thankfully. The entire Council of Guardians, six burning figures of wrath and vengeance, of power and unimaginable majesty. A Six-Fold-God. A Six-Fold-God for a Six-Fold Realm. YOU HAVE TRANSGRESSED THE ANCIENT COVENANT, they said, six voices as one. YOU HAVE BROKEN THE VERY LAWS OF THE CONTINUUM. YOU WILL ALL BE PUNISHED. Elektra and Prometheus remained silent: there was nothing to say, nothing to do. Together, the Guardians could bend reality, fashion space and time to their whims. To them, a Chronovore and an Eternal were insects – less than insects. And then Elektra realised what they meant – what they intended to do. She screamed her defiance, her cries tearing through the vortex, powerful enough to shred matter down to the quark level. But to the Council of Guardians it was nothing more than a summer breeze. They had decided. Now they would act. Without further discussion they handed down their sentence. Prometheus was the first to be punished for his sins. Acting in metaconcert, the Council of Guardians was the most powerful force in the universe. In many respects they were the universe. Effortlessly, they took Prometheus’ timeline and unravelled it, string by superstring, back and back. Elektra could do nothing; even if she had dared to defy the council, its massed energies were freezing her in stasis. She could only observe as her lover, her partner, her mate, was unpicked from the fabric of space-time. She could feel Prometheus’ mind convulsing in agony, reaching out for her in a single long moment of need, before he ceased to exist. Before he ceased to ever have existed. The time vortex turned inside out as it came to terms with its fundamental nature being disturbed, before finally calming down into the blackness of the darker strata. Painfully, Elektra’s attention turned from the nothingness that had been one half of her life, anger igniting within her. Even though Prometheus had never been, his memory – his seed – would live on within her. Avatar. Even the Guardians could not rob her of that. CALM YOURSELF. YOU WILL NOT BE HURT. YET. IT IS THE CHILD WE WANT. No! Not the Avatar. She was still screaming as the First Phalanx of the Eternals, her family, descended from their hiding places and took her away. They say she never stopped screaming. ...and Monsters Murder was too small a word for it. ‘You’ve killed them,’ Mel whispered, turning away in distress. She looked at the Doctor through tear-blurred eyes. ‘All of them.’ The shutters closed over the image on the scanner with a nonchalance that belied the utter carnage that lay outside. Billions of people were now dead or dying beneath the sickly, scintillating green of a poisoned sky, their once-verdant planet nothing more than a ball of radioactive slag hanging in space. The clear blue waters that had once girdled it were stinking brown liquid graves, brimming full with the bobbing corpses of all marine life; the fruitful garden belt was blindly glazed with the obsidian residue of countless nuclear ground-zeros; the stately avenues of trees that had lined the capital city were nothing but charred fingers, grasping for a hope that no longer remained. Maradnias wasn’t quite dead, but only the last rites remained. Even now, Mel wasn’t sure how it had happened. She and the Doctor had arrived on the planet full of hopeful optimism, confident of averting the possible civil war that had threatened to disrupt it. The Doctor had commented as they materialised that the civil war was never going to be more than a small-scale affair, a mere bagatelle in his cosmic crusade; he just felt that it was his responsibility to stop even those few deaths. But now? What had gone wrong on Maradnias? She turned from the blind scanner and stared at the Doctor through moist eyes. His tall figure, incongruously dressed in that tasteless red-and-yellow jacket, was bent over the hexagonal central console but the strain was clear, even from behind. His broad shoulders were slumped, his head of curly blond hair was bowed in defeat, despair... But those were purely human emotions. And the Doctor wasn’t human, Mel had to remind herself. However human he looked, however human he acted, the Doctor was anything but. Mel was, and although the last thing the Doctor wanted was an