“This is enough!” I heard somebody yell. The Doctor! “Sith! Jared! You will stop this nonsense now, or I swear you will not like what comes next!”
The Doctor stood at the entrance, holding two thumbs on his bowtie and a silver cylindrical tube in his other hand. This wasn’t a hologram, he was flesh and blood, bowtie and all. His cylindrical device didn’t look much like an energy sword hilt, but a lamp on its top blinked a sinister green.
“You have no power here, Immortal,” the main in black said, disengaging the light staff. Smoke rose from the hole in his victim’s back.
Jane’s Browning barked. The killer’s head jerked back and he fell to the floor.
“No, no, you can’t do that!” The Doctor shouted, but two more shots rang out and the two remaining men in black cloaks collapsed to the floor, their light swords disengaging as they fell. Jane’s knuckles turned bone white as she clutched the weapon’s grip. She pointed the revolver at The Doctor. “Hands up!”
The Doctor raised his hands and Jane rushed past him and out of the tavern. I followed; what else was I to do? I was hired to do a job and I was going to see it through… and with any luck, no one else was going to get killed. Yeah, right.
I followed her through the market and back into the alley. The blue box was where we’d left it. She jerked the door open. “You coming, Mr. Smith?”
“Where are we going?”
“This is a time machine… but what if it also travels in space? And if it does, what… what if we can leave this all behind? Go somewhere far, far away?”
“The world would still be disappearing.”
“Not if we go back to the time before the whole thing with my real dad happened!”
“You mean go somewhere a long time ago in a place far, far away?”
“Exactly.”
What did I have to lose? “Let’s do it.”
Run, You Clever Boy, and Remember
If the army had taught me anything, it was to stick up for your buddies. And so I decided to follow Jane Wesson – Moriarty through time and space to Destination Unknown. Come to think of it, maybe I should’ve dodged the draft.
“Where are we going?” I asked, closing the door behind me. She was at the control pedestal, pulling levers and pressing buttons in an inspired frenzy. The panel hummed, gurgled like a drowning animal, whined, and went quiet. Jane took a step back from the panel and pressed her fists against her waist in monumental defiance.
“TARDIS,” she said, “can you hear me?”
No reply came.
“TARDIS, hello?”
“You are not The Doctor,” said a woman’s voice from inside the walls.
I thought how if this machine was as fabulous as it appeared to be, it could’ve been anywhere at any time, heck, it could have probably been in many places at the same time, what did I know. The secrets it must have held, the answers to love, life, the universe… they key to everything that mattered. I could have asked it anything I wanted.
“TARDIS,” I said, “why do they call The Doctor Immortal?”
“The Doctor is known by many names throughout the multiverse. He is the last of the Time Lords, and I am the last TARDIS.”
“Where are the others?”
“Gone.”
“Should you be telling us this?” Jane asked.
“Yes. The Doctor installed a voice interface into me and left me with specific instructions to assist you in every way I can.”
“Then take us to where we can make this right again. Take us where we can stop the world from disappearing.”
“It is a place in a universe very different from this. The odds of you surviving are –”
“Never tell me the odds,” I said, and leaned against the wall, grabbing a nearby ramp.
Exactly nothing happened. No vibrating of the walls, no mind-numbing screeching, nothing.
“Hey, are you still there?”
“We are already here,” it replied, and made a clicking sound, indicating an end to the discussion.
I pushed the door open, and the next thing I knew, somebody’s inhumanely strong, scaly fingers clasped around my jacket and threw me out of the TARDIS. I flew a short distance, spun through the air, and hit a muddied puddle face-first. I spat out the rotten water and rolled to the side. Just in time, too, because my attacker, an orange humanoid with a reptilian face, was following me with the barrel of a rectangular rifle. I closed my eyes and prepared to die.
Jane’s Browning popped in an explosion of sound. I waited three seconds. I wasn’t dead.
My boss lay on her side, feet inside the TARDIS, the pistol’s barrel smoking in her hand. The reptilian creature lay dead on the ground. “Gun… fighting in a nut… shell… shoot them when… they aren’t looking,” she said through clunking teeth.
I helped her up. My heart beat like a drummer gone berserk; it was a monumental effort to calm my breathing and act as if I was one of those guys who are cool under fire. But I managed.
Around us, mud gave way to twisted trees, their heavy branches low to the ground, their “leaves” more resembling sea weeds than leaves. One side of the clearing opened to a dark lake that looked denser than the mud we stood in. A thick layer of fog rose from the ground, reaching up to my ankles. The fog carefully flowed around the TARDIS as if afraid to touch the blue walls.
Everything was almost exactly like the last time we took the time machine for a spin: we didn’t know where we were, we didn’t know what to do, except that now, somebody was trying to kill us. My army training must’ve kicked in because I found myself pulling the rifle out of the dead creature’s fingers, careful not to cut my hand on its talons.
“What the hell is it?” Jane asked.
“Wish I knew.”
The creature’s face looked like somebody crossed a pitbull with a crocodile. From the way its black eyes stared at the sky, you could tell it was dead. The reptilian man wore a yellow jumpsuit with stylized leather plates on his chest, covering everything but its scaled head, hands, and feet. “Whatever it is, there might be more out there.”
It was hard to tell anything through the fog, but I could have sworn I heard branches crack in the distance.
“I think maybe we should wait this out in the TARDIS,” I said.
“Yeah. Maybe that’s not a bad idea.”
The door to the blue time machine snapped closed before Jane reached the porch. She tried the handle, but it wouldn’t budge.
“TARDIS!” she said, “let us in!”
“I’m afraid that is impossible. The Doctor programmed me to return to him as soon as you were both transported to year three thousand nine hundred fifty six Before the Battle of Yavin.”
“What? Why?”
“He also programmed this voice module to self-destruct in three seconds.”
“Hey, hold on,” I said.
“Two.”
“Hey!”
“One. Goodbye.”
The familiar screech screamed from the time machine as it disappeared. If somebody in the area was deaf enough to have missed this gunshot, they knew we were here now.
More branches cracked in the distance. We were stranded at the edge of the universe, surrounded by lizard men with rifles from the future who in most likelelyhood planned to kill, roast, and eat us. I wasn’t the cowardly sort, but a chill ran down my spine. I gathered all my courage and said, “Oh well. Was a useless conversation anyway.”
What difference did it make where to die? I had nobody to come home to. Hell, I didn’t even have a home. But I wasn’t about to make it easy for them. My drill sergeant drilled at least that much into me.
“How many bullets do you have?”
“Three. You?”
It was a trick question. I insepected the rectangular rifle: it was twice as heavy as the Remington they’d given me at the army, and touching the flat trigger made me feel like it would pack a punch. These folks could wave their light swords all they wanted, there was nothing like a big caliber firearm. Maybe we had a chance after all.