'Oh no!' cried Susan.
'I don’t believe it. This can’t be happening.' shouted Dean.
The pair sat shocked and they watched the odd piece of wreckage drift out from the fissure.
'Dean.' Susan whispered.
'What is it?'
'I don’t think we’re where we were.'
'What do you mean?'
'The asteroids have gone.'
'What?'
'I could see the asteroids before.'
Dean checked his malfunctioning equipment.
'Oh no.' moaned Dean.
'What?'
'That’s impossible.'
'What’s impossible?'
'These readings. We must have hit some kind of time barrier.'
'What?' said Susan anxiously.
'According to this we’re one hundred years in the past.'
'What?'
'And drifting in a ship with no power.'
Kobeck’s cruiser pierced through space.
'Have you found them?' asked the Doctor expectantly.
'Erm hang, Doc-tor.' Kobeck replied.
'Come on young man, come along.'
'Yes, I have some-thing. Thr-ee figh-ters.'
'Excellent!'
'I’ll put it up on the scan-ner.'
In front of them appeared the images of the three ships.
'Wonderful we’ve caught up with them.' said the Doctor.
'What are they doing?' asked Kobeck, as they watched the ships line up to go through a whirling hole in space.
'Ah!' yelled the Doctor.
'They shouldn’t be out here.' Said Kobeck.
'You know these irregularities?'
'Yes. They were made by the Time A-gen-cy, this place is out of bounds.'
'Mmm. That would explain the reading my ship picked up earlier. And it looks like they’re going to fly into one.' said the Doctor.
'But that’s cra-zy.' wailed Kobeck.
'Harmless eh?'
'Well, well.' stuttered Kobeck.
'Come on. We must get to them.'
Kobeck’s cruiser picked up speed. The Doctor could hardly contain his anger through out their journey.
'They ha-ven’t e-merged Doc.' said Kobeck, glancing at the scanner. 'It this what happened to Susan?'
'I’m not sure, we could already be too late.' admitted the Doctor.
But as if on cue the three ships flew out from another hole further away from the one before.
'They’re they are!' exclaimed the Doctor. 'We mustn’t let this madness continue any longer.'
But as Kobeck’s cruiser approached the three ships they once again dived into a break in space.
Chapter Four
A solar wind blew around the large vessel as it powered its way through space. A figure sat looking out of a window. It was Susan; her face was sad and drawn. She thought back to what had happened all those years ago.
After Dean’s fighter had lost power they had drifted for hours until a Difreezean junket had picked them up. On board they were expected to contribute to the running of the ship, Dean watched on helpless, his protests ignored as the Difreezean engineers ripped his fighter to pieces for spare parts. Susan was engaged in the ship’s kitchen making food, with three others, for the two hundred or so crewmembers.
Days, weeks, months past, then the ship was attacked. Susan never saw Dean again; she thought he died in the battle. She was taken prisoner and was enslaved.
Decades of servitude to her frog-like masters went by, until finally she was an old woman and no use to them anymore so they let her go. Dressed in rags she made her to Planet 10 by hitching lifts on star freighters offering to repair the crew’s linen and clothes as payment for the journey.
She could hardly believe that she had now finally returned to Planet 10. As the freighter docked she felt sick to the bottom of her stomach to see the three Space Rats fighters flying out from the complex.
Wandering the port she couldn’t remember what level her and the Doctor had originally arrived on, so she made her way to reception. It took every once of her remaining strength to make it and when she arrived she asked for the Doctor, her Grandfather.
She felt herself slipping away and time was now irrelevant and she fell, she was caught. It was her Grandfather! Her eyes, now older than his, meet and she uttered only a few words the last of which being 'I love you.'
~~~
They waited sometime but the ships never re-emerged.
'It’s too late.' sighed the Doctor, holding his head in hands.
'I’m sor-ry Doc-tor.'
The Doctor just stared at the metal floor.
'What happened Doctor?'
'I’m not sure.' he admitted. 'May I?' The Doctor indicated to sit in Kobeck’s seat. Kobeck shuffled out and the Doctor moved across.
'So these breaks in space were made by some time experiments.'
'That’s right, I told you.' said Kobeck, trying to get his head around the idea.
'Yes, yes, yes, of course, but they appear to be growing since they were first created.'
'Grow-ing?'
'Yes. Changing.'
'What does that mean?'
'It means that they could now be anywhere in the universe!'
'And Susan?'
'If she left us just now it could have taken her years to get back to us.'
'But we saw her before she went into the hole?' replied Kobeck, somewhat confused.
'Time travel.'
'Time travel, that’s impossible.'
'Is it really? Let me tell you, Mr Kobeck, time is my business!'
'Right.'
'They must have gone back in time.'
'I see, I think. Well what can we do?'
'Well it’s a risk.'
'I don’t like the sound of that.'
'Remember we saw them go in and then half an hour later they emerged again?'
'Yes.'
'What if we went through the way they came out and emerged half an hour earlier? We’d be here to stop them?'
'But, but.'
'No buts dear fellow.'
'You said they were chang-ing, grow-ing you said.'