Inside the fantastic multicoloured corridor of the Time Vortex, the TARDIS - a dull blue brick - twisted and spun as if thrown. Not that it was without direction. No. It knew exactly where it was going. The exact planet. The exact country. The exact year, the exact month, the exact day. The landing position programmed down to the millimetre.
But it had been told to wait. And so it waited, its holding pattern a complex moebius-strip path through now and then, between here and there, across possibility and actuality.
It was impossible to tell how long it had waited - how do you measure time outside time? It flickered in and out of reality, realigning itself with the space/time curve, taking readings, picking fragments of history from the ether and shunting them through to the telepathic circuits for retrieval at a later date.
Inside the ship, in the impossibly huge control room, the time rotor rose and fell, keeping time like a metronome. Complex systems constantly monitored the internal configuration, keeping the structure contiguous where its passengers were residing, reconfiguring the rest of the ship as necessary.
Lights flickered on the hexagonal control column in response to a comment by one of its occupants that it was ' bloody cold in here'. and the TARDIS raised the mean temperature in the pool area by eight degrees, whilst still maintaining the specific temperature requirements in the rest of the ship as instructed by its other occupant.
He was concerned. The symbiotic relationship between ship and owner was a delicately balanced thing, and the TARDIS could sense it.
Events waited to be set in motion, waited until the Doctor was ready.
Setting another nonsensical path through the vortex, the TARDIS marked time.
***
Ace floated in the warm waters of the TARDIS swimming pool, or the bathroom as the Doctor insisted on calling it.
It was crazy. An Olympic sized pool, but with all the trappings of a council house bathroom. A small Formica cabinet with mirrored doors was bolted to one wall (Ace was meaning to check out the small delicate glass bottles that lurked inside), a wire rack filled with bath oils and a loofah hung in the shallow end and an entire flock of bright yellow plastic ducks bobbed and swirled around her. By contrast the poolside was littered with white plastic loungers, wicker furniture piled high with huge soft towels and plants from a dozen different planets. Ace had never been sure how they got watered. The Doctor had never struck her as the green fingered type.
She struck out for the deep end with long powerful strokes, muscles starting to ache pleasantly from her swim. The last couple of weeks had been remarkably quiet and she was starting to get out of condition. Not that she was going to complain. The Doctor had gone out of his way to make life as stress free as possible. No alien worlds to save, no monsters to fight. In fact the last few weeks had been everything that she had hoped travelling with the Doctor would be.
After Blini-Gaar, after everything that they had both been through with Vogol Lukos and Channel 400, he had been quiet and withdrawn, and Ace had begun to get seriously worried about him, even the mood of the ship had started to get sombre. Dull day followed dull day as the Doctor dragged her off to one faceless nameless planet after another.
And then they had landed at Heritage.
Ace hauled herself out of the pool and pulled a towel from one of the wicker tables. She slumped down on a lounger and started towelling her hair.
When it had all started Ace had been quite looking forward to it. A mystery to solve, an adventure to have. She should have known that something was wrong, but her guard was down. She had been bored and the little signs that she might otherwise have noticed had slipped past her. The Doctor had landed there with too much knowledge, as usual, but even he had been shocked by what they found.
Mel dead.
Poor trusting Mel. A do-gooder always seeing the best in people. So trusting that she had left the Doctor and headed out into the void with Sabalom Glitz without a moment's hesitation. Ready to take on the Universe.
Ace's room in the TARDIS still had signs of Mel's occupancy. Childish trinkets that Ace had tucked away in the back of a cupboard. All except one. All except a battered menu from the Shangri La Holiday Camp that Ace kept pinned to her notice board as a reminder. A reminder that she was not the first. That she was the latest in a long line of the Doctor's travelling companions. A reminder that nothing lasts forever.
After Heritage the Doctor had been lower than Ace had ever known him. She had barely seen him, a sometimes glimpsed figure flitting through the darkened corridors, an occasional half smile thrown at her from across the control room as his hands danced in complex rhythms across the controls.
Then one day he had bounced into the control room with his infectious crooked smile on his face and announced that they were 'having a couple of weeks off.'
Since then they had been on a delightful, magical, impossible switchback tour of all the good places in time and space. They'd celebrated New Year at a dozen points in a dozen planets' histories, he'd taken her to a royal wedding on a planet entirely populated by giant butterflies, they'd hidden on the moon watching as Neil Armstrong took his first steps - the Doctor keeping her in stitches as he whistled like a Clanger. For a week they'd hiked through mountains on the planet Kriss, their sherpas the gentlest, kindest, funniest aliens that Ace had ever met, he'd bought her candyfloss at the Twelve Planet Fair whilst he entered the juggling contest and they'd been to Live Aid. The two of them had never got on better and Ace had loved it.
And then they had landed at Woodstock.
At first everything had been fine. Ace still had a Polaroid of the Doctor from that day - ludicrous in his long wig and ankle length kaftan, weighed down with beads, both hands raised in peace signs. But then she'd met Gavin and his friends - hippies from Canada. They'd hit it off and one night she had slipped away from the Doctor, lost herself in the crowd and spent the night in Gavin's tent.
The following morning the Doctor had found her and Ace had never seen him so angry. He had practically dragged her back to the TARDIS and since then they had hardly spoken.
On several nights she had woken, sure that she had heard the familiar grind of the TARDIS's materialisation, but if they ever had landed anywhere then the Doctor never acknowledged it.
He spent much of his time in a room deep in the bowels of the ship. Ace had followed him there once, hiding in the shadows watching as the Doctor unlocked a heavy door with an ornate key, checking over his shoulder before he did so, furtive and on edge.
That had made Ace uneasy. For the Doctor to be jumpy and nervous inside his own ship... She had planned to try and sneak back to that room when the Doctor wasn't looking, to see what secrets he was keeping, but something about his manner frightened her and she wasn't sure that she wanted to see inside that room anymore.
She shivered and pulled the towel tight about her.
'I thought I told you to put some heat on!' she bellowed.
In the absence of the Doctor she had been venting her frustration on the TARDIS. Pointless, she knew, but it made her feel better. Suddenly the shadows inside the ship had started to seem a little bit darker, the echoes a little more distant.
Whatever it was that was going on, she wished that it was over soon.
***
Deep in the bowels of the time ship the Doctor sat back, exhausted, and took a deep breath.
He stripped the latex surgical gloves from his hands and let them drop into a stainless-steel bin, trying not to look at the blood.
It was over.
He rubbed at his forehead. He was tired and starting to feel his age, and at over 800 years old that wasn't a good thing.
Across the other side of the room the body lay under a dark-green surgical sheet. Ace's body. Not the body of an old woman, not a shrivelled corpse, but young, as she was now, and if he had any thoughts that she had died of natural causes, the bullet hole in her forehead had put paid to them.
The bullet itself sat in a stainless-steel tray on the trolley in front of him. The Doctor leant forward and picked it out, holding it in front of his face. Such a simple thing. Such an easy way of killing someone. The powder burns on Ace's forehead meant that the gun had been close to her head when it had been fired. She had looked her killer in the eye as he ended her life. The bullet had torn through her brain and blasted out of back of her skull.
When he had first found the body, when he had first dug the coffin out of the graveyard in the East End, the Doctor had painfully accepted that another death lay at his feet. There was nothing that he could do. His people had laws. Time had boundaries. Ace was dead. She would die, and he was powerless to stop it.
He had nearly given it all up at that moment. Nearly taken her back to Iceworld and left her, a billion parsecs and a thousand years from her death. Safe in the future.
Finding Mel had changed all that. Then he had realised that just abandoning her would kill her as certainly as that gunshot.
When he had first heard the rumours of the death of one of his travelling companions he had accepted the inevitable, blind to the fact that Heritage was the wrong place in the wrong time. Mel dead. And Ace was next...
