by Clive May (clive@cj4386.demon.co.uk)

A story of the Fifth Doctor, Nyssa, Tegan and Adric.

The copy right of all things pertaining to the concept and characters of Dr
Who is the property of the BBC.  This Story is a work of fan fiction; it has
been written simply for the pleasure it gave me in writing it; and no money
has or will change hands with respect to the story.

The story and original characters are copyright Clive May 2001.


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Chaos Hunt.

Eleven.


"...But that's, that's hideous!" cried Harmony, staring round the chamber,
appalled at the revenge the Hunt Master intended to work with the Construct.

Kendron paused in his animated explanation of his planned revenge.  He
observed Harmony's reaction, quite untouched by her outrage. Her horrified
gaze came back to his impassive expression, then passed on to the Doctor,
seeking some sort of denial of the Hunt Master's words, yet knowing that
there could be none.

"It will work," the doctor confirmed in answer to the unspoken question.

"Of course it will work, Doctor," Kendron affirmed.  "After all, it is only
water.  And the Transduction Barrier has not been primed for evaluation of
possible dangers with regard to mass or volume..."

"But, Why?" demanded Harmony. She could hardly take in the awesome scope of
Kendron's monstrous plan.

The rogue Hunt Master seemed genuinely surprised by her question.  "Why?  You
have the gall to ask why?  An Incarnator?  After the things your kind have
done to us!" It was Kendron's turn now for angry disbelief.

"But that was not us!" cried Harmony.  "That was our long dead ancestors!
How can you blame us for what was done by others,  so long ago?"

Kendron fixed her with an accusing glare.  "And what, might I ask, have you
done since then to  atone for your ancestors' crimes?  I'll tell you what- -
nothing!  Nothing at all! You just stood by and let be - watched us suffer
down the endless eons and done nothing.  Well!  It's your turn to taste the
bitterness of suffering without hope..."

The enraged man broke off, falling into a sudden and fraught silence.  He
 was trembling with the intensity of his passion, struggling to get himself
back under some semblance of control.

"We did give you life!" Harmony pointed out. "Was our crime so bad?  Can you
not forgive?"

Harmony's ill-judged words served only to fan Kendron's anger. He cried:
"Forgive!  There are things that can never be forgiven!  I cannot
forgive! I will not forgive the Time Lords for what they did to us.  They
must be made to suffer as we have done. And they will!" He caressed Rain's
shoulder, growing quiet again.  "Won't they my dear?  You'll not see us
wronged so?"

In the Selkie's eyes, a miserable confusion warred with her broken
self-esteem.  She longed for the simplicity of the sea, to be rocked in the
rolling waters, cradled to the bosom of the deep, to be one again with Mother
Ocean;  but that was no longer possible, since she had given herself, body
and soul, to the Hunt Master.

"You will have your revenge, my love.  I will, will -" Rain faltered into
silence, for even to herself the affirmation rang hollow.  And if she had not
the conviction of her love for Kendron, then she had nothing.

Kendron passed a possessive arm about her shoulders, feigning concern.
He was acutely aware of how thin was the ice over the bottomless pit of
despair on which Rain skated.  "Come, my dear," he urged gently, steering her
to the sphere.  Before the contraption, they paused a moment.  Kendron kissed
her lightly upon her unresponsive mouth, and stepped back.

Dream like, moving in a trance of grief for her lost self, Rain unfastened
the silken robe, allowing it to slide from her shoulders.  The soft blue
material pooled about her graceful ankles, transforming her into a goddess
rising from her own personal sea.

A Goddess of vengeance?

She stepped inside.  Two of the guards swung the heavy door shut and fastened
the locking mechanism.  Beyond the curving transparency, Rain stood facing
away from them.  She could not meet their accusing eyes. Tears were streaming
down her cheeks.

The Blond haired Hunt Master turned from the sphere and swept the gathered
group with a feral gaze.  The smile on his mouth was all satisfied
triumph. Without a word, he motioned his guards to withdraw.  Behind them,
the mighty valves of the doors swung ponderously to with a deep earth
shuddering concussion.  Only the thinnest line remained to mark the division
of the armoured panels.

"Now what?" asked Tegan, hands on hips.  "I suppose you do have a plan to
stop that madman?"

The Doctor glanced significantly across at Nyssa standing amid the group of
Brood Sisters before nodding grimly.  "I do.  But it rather depends on us
getting out of here before Rain calls the water."

Without taking her eyes from the naked form of Rain, Harmony whispered to the
Doctor.  "Whatever you're planning, Doctor, I think you'd better try it
soon!"

"Not yet."

"But, Doctor? If you wait until she kicks the amplifier - it'll be too late
to do anything!"

"And if we act before she is totally in thrall to the engine," the Doctor
countered; "she might notice something.  We'll have only one chance at this,
Dana - and only a very narrow window of opportunity to swing it in." All the
while, he, too, did not take his gaze from the sphere; but his eyes were
watching an eerie  green luminescence flaring in the crystal spike. Tiny
discharges of energy were forking from the top of Rain's head to the tip.

The Selkie stood motionless under the crystal, while she summoned up every
last erg of power.  The more she could build up, the bigger the boost she
would be able to elicit from the PK amplifier.  The more powerful the boost,
the easier it would be for her to control the "snatch" of the water, and pull
it in from space where it had been parked in readiness for her lover's great
coup.

"The instant she kicks that infernal engine, the water will come to her
call," Harmony warned. "Once she starts it into motion, it will take only
micro seconds to arrive.  Then nothing, nothing at all will stop it!  The
pressure at the centre of that sphere must be hundreds of tons to the square
inch.  When she translocates it in here, we'll be crushed in an instant."

The glimmering in the spike flared stronger. The Doctor was instantly alert.
He would have to make his play very soon.  He transferred his attention to
the woman's lithe form, wishing she had tied her hair up out of the way.  The
indication of Rain's degree of enthrallment would betray itself in the
tensing of her back muscles.  Their lives, and the lives of millions of
others elsewhere, hung upon his correct interpretation of the slight rippling
of her flesh.  He had somehow to judge that moment correctly; but Rain's long
mane of hair was all but obscuring her back, right down to the waist.

When that exact moment arrived, it would be up to Nyssa to play the trump
card.  It worried him that he must depend on the girl's empathic sense,
boosted by the unitary mind of the Brood; but that was how it hung; nothing
could be done to change, or influence, that aspect of the plan.  It would
work, or not, as the fates decreed.

Harmony, a hand on his arm, felt his tension, knew it would happen in only
seconds.  There was a curious, bitter-sweet flavour to the thought that she
might have only seconds of life, after so many, many centuries.  She squeezed
hard, felt the reassuring return of pressure.  She smiled.

The Doctor began to move.  It was time.

At that dire moment of consequence, Rain shifted.  The Doctor relaxed, hoping
against hope that the Selkie had not seen anything suspicious in his
movement.  She had turned her head to peer over her right shoulder, staring
directly at Harmony.  The glow made a black and green mask of her face.  Her
features were contorted with sorrow as she fixed Harmony with a look of
profound regret.  She was remembering the stolen tears in the desert - and
the bitter curse of revelation those tears had gifted.Her present despair had
blossomed in that moment, her entire world falling into ruins.

Harmony's heart went out to the woman.  From the rumours she had heard,
the Selkie was both betrayer, and the betrayed?  Harmony made to speak; but
no words could pass between them across the thickness of the sphere.
Instead, she conjoured a smile to offer as a token of forgiveness, and
mouthed: "I forgive you,"

Rain's resolve wavered; but she had already gone too far along the road that
would have been best un-travelled.  The pounding of the surf roared in those
silent words.  She could smell again the salt tang of the sea, and feel the
cool water sliding over her arrowing body as she turned and twisted in the
blue depths, revelling in the freedom of the sea, and the joy of being strong
in life.  Her heart clenched painfully with the loss; but there was no way
back to the sundering surf from where she now stood.  No way! Harmony might
grant forgiveness; but even the Incarnators could not grant a Selkie the sea
so willfully lost.  Her eyes sparkling with tears, Rain resumed her
summoning of the PK energy.

"Are they ready?' the Doctor asked, still studying the naked form in the
sphere.  The crystal spike was glowing a livid emerald green, casting the
countenances of them all within the Construct into ghoulish masks.

Harmony glanced across at the Brood.  They were in a tight huddle with the
Traken girl at their centre.  They had never looked so much a single creature
as they did now in the ghastly light.  Nyssa nodded to Harmony's silent
inquiry.

"I think so."

"Good," said the Doctor.  "Because It's time we did something."

He turned to face the panels of the blast doors.  The Dwarf Star Alloy was
shining with a putrescent bluish hue in the light streaming from the crystal.
The two Gallifreyans were joined by Tegan and Adric.  The boy glanced at the
naked woman enclosed in the sphere, concern writ plain on his worried
countenance.  The graceful form was wreathed in a greenish radiance which
rippled and pulsed over her skin.  Tiny green sparks were flickering in her
hair.

"Doctor?" he said.  "Whatever you're thinking of doing?  - I think you'd
better get on with it."

With an impish smile, Tegan raised an arm; she pointed dramatically at the
doors.  "Open Sesame," she declaimed solemnly.

The Doctor shot her a wry grin.  Tegan's optimism was irrepressible; it never
failed to warm his hearts, and nourish his fond regard for the
difficult woman.

Behind them, the light from the spike glowed brighter.  A low humming was
filling the air, undershot with a silken crooning from the throat of the
Selkie.  An oppressive humidity began to build in the air.

The time had come.

The Doctor nodded to Nyssa.  She acknowledged his signal with a little
answering nod.  Her eyes closed in concentration.  A shimmering something
rippled around the clustering Brood Sisters.  Everyone held their breath.

Nothing happened.

In the sphere, Rain drew in a long breath and raised her arms,
preparing to *call* the water.

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Agalayne dropped from his perch.  In murderous silence, he fell upon the two
men guarding the doors.  The first died in a welter of blood and torn flesh
as cruel talons ripped out his throat.  The man's scream died in a ghastly
gurgling,  as he subsided to the floor, clutching at the ruin of his throat.
The other guard, yelling in surprise, drew his sword.  Hefting the weapon, he
hacked at the flying fury.  Agalayne swerved aside.  Though his freedom to
operate was constrained by the narrow way, he came in again to the attack. He
was being driven on by the desperation of the Nyssa-Friend beyond the arch.
He must get to the panel, at all cost.  But it was impossible.  The man wove
a deadly web of steel in his path.  To dare that flashing pattern of steel
was death.  There was no way past.  Agalayne pulled up and circled about the
limits of the swordsman's reach, screaming his rage and panic.  There was
simply no way past to the locking mechanism.

Given a moment's respite, the man drew a blast pistol from a holster.  He
sighted carefully at the flying fury, and squeezed the firing stud.

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Inside the Construct, Nyssa let out a nerve scouring scream.  She jerked and
jigged like a marionette worked by a demented puppeteer.  Her left arm hung
limp.  The Brood gathered Nyssa into their multi-armed being, crooning
soothing sounds, stroking her hair, absorbing Agalayne's burning agony
besetting Nyssa's  mind.

In the sphere, the green light emitted by the spike of crystal hit a peak of
intensity.  The humming rapidly ascended the scale.  Rain's crooning rose to
follow.  She was going to kick the amplifier.  It was too late!  They were
all going to die.

At least it will be quick, thought the Doctor, and shouted:  "NYSSA!  AGAIN!"
Still nothing happened.  The Doctor's hand balled into furious fists of
frustration.  He raised them to pound upon the recalcitrant doors.  Rain's
crooning broke into a stuttering chant.  She was aligning her voice for
the kick.  The water would come in moments.

The Doctor turned from the doors, to stare at Rain through the walls of the
sphere, readying himself.  If they could not get out, there was just the
slimmest of chances that he could at the least prevent the destruction of
Gallifrey, and the endangering of the universe.  The moment Rain kicked the
amplifier, he would have a crude weapon at his disposal.  The drawback was
that he would have only the microsecond between the kick and the coming of
the water in which to deploy it; and even if he was successful - which was by
no means probable - all inside the Construct were doomed.

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In the passage, Agalayne staggered in the air under the dual impacts  of the
blast ray, and the imperative from beyond the doors. It had to be now, or not
at all.

Favouring his seared left wing, Agalayne danced a jig in the air. He
loosed a scream of rage, and stooped upon the man. Ignoring the whistling
blade, he slashed at the gun hand.   His claws raked across the back of
the hand, sending the blaster spinning in a welter of blood. It clanged
noisily on the rock floor and skittered away down the passage. In the same
instant, the blade took Agalayne in the left wing, slicing through the
membrane almost without resistance.  The grievously wounded creature drove
himself further onto the blade, doing terrible damage too his wing. In his
rage, he hardly noticed the pain.  The manoeuvre neutralised the sword.
Agalayne pressed home his attack. Razor sharp talons, already stained red,
clawed at the man's face.  Flesh was torn into tattered strips. Blood
sprayed. Screaming in agony, the man dropped the sword to claw at the flying
fury, trying to hold the creature from him.

Agalayne lunged for the unprotected throat.  His powerful jaws snapped closed
in the flesh.  The doomed man lurched back against the wall, hands clutching
to his ruined throat, in a futile attempt at stemming the red tide; but he
was already beyond hope.  Slowly, he folded up beside his dead companion, his
eyes staring wide with horror, his last breath bubbling in the arterial gore.

Agalayne lit awkwardly on the floor.  He looked up at the locking panel; it
could not be reached with the sword in his wing.  The terrible insistence
thrumming inside his brain drove his head to the hilt.  Gripping it in his
bloody jaws, he dragged the steel free.  A moment later, he was springing for
the locking panel, tail and wings working frantically to compensate for his
torn membrane.

 Talons scrabbled at the buttons.  The red locked sign stayed on.  In an
insane panic, he redoubled his efforts.

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A deep grinding rasped from the doors.   A sudden, un-looked for hope
electrified the desperate group clustered before them. The valves shuddered;
 and with nerve jangling sloth, the armoured panels inched inwards, opening a
gap like a path into the promised land.

In the passage beyond, Agalayne took wing. The sorely wounded creature canted
drunkenly across the passage, to clutch onto a torch bracket, chittering in
agitation.  He settled his abused wings carefully over his back,  and screwed
his neck around to look at the green glowing slash that was slowly widening
in the Devil Metal.

With painful slowness, the two valves were inching open.

Inside, they crowded round the widening gap, desperately willing it to open
faster.  A high, soul-tearing whine was torturing their ears.  The Brood, and
the two Gallifreyans, seemed particularly troubled by the noise.  Behind them
all, the spike of crystal was glowing an incandescent green.

Rain prepared to snatch hold of the mighty sphere of water, setting it in
relative motion.  When it came to her call, Kendron would close all the
gates - except the one to the Panopticon on Gallifrey.  In that moment, the
Panopticon and the centre of the gigantic sphere of water would occupy the
same space time coordinates, linked by the construct chamber, with disastrous
consequences for Gallifrey, and possibly for the universe.

 The Doctor measured the gap, his expression grim. He grabbed Nyssa and
shoved her through.  "Come on!" he yelled.  "Out!  Now!  All of you!"

Nyssa stuck a moment, then squirmed free.

The livid green radiance began pulsing, sending their shadows dancing in time
to the growing energy that Rain was summoning from within herself,
concentrating through her focus, and feeding it back to the PK Amplifier.  A
thin mist materialised in the chamber, bringing with it a dank smell.

Then Adric was through; and the gap was wider.  The brood went next; their
slender forms passing easily between the edges.  Last came the Doctor,
supporting Harmony, with Tegan anxiously propelling her from behind.

At that moment of triumph, disaster struck.

A ponderous gonging alarm began to sound as safety circuits snapped in.  The
valves shuddered to a halt, paused a moment, then began to close.  There was
one awful moment of horror while the Doctor watched panic chase itself across
Harmony's features, as the edges of the valves began to crush her.  Then he
spun away, and flew to the lock panel.  On the screen, the words Emergency
Close were flashing in red letters.

The Doctor jabbed a prominent red button marked "Manual Override".  A time
display appeared in the bottom right corner of the screen.  It began to count
down the seconds from thirty.  A string of eight yellow numbers appeared on
the left of the screen, followed by a dash and a flashing cursor.  The Doctor
began to enter a number code of another eight digits, in order to pause the
timer.  The new numbers appeared in blue.  He went to press the command
input.

"NO!" screamed Adric, leaping at the Doctor, and dashing his hand aside.

"What?  Adric?.."

"The answering code has to be wrong," the boy explained in breathless
urgency.

"It's a standard Gallifreyan installation," the Doctor explained quickly.
"You can continue to stall the auto shut down by entering the reciprocal
codes." I know what I'm doing."

"Then it must bee booby-trapped," Adric said. "There are twenty three
buttons where there should be only sixteen. The code you are entering must be
wrong."

"What do you mean?" cried the Doctor hesitating, his finger poised over the
command input button, while the time display counted down remorselessly.
Only fifteen seconds now remained to irrevocable lock down and the closure of
the doors, no matter what they did.

"Doctor!  I can see the context in numbers, like you see the context in
written language.  I can infer from the form of the pre-code set that the
panel should have only sixteen buttons.  The number you have entered
therefore must be wrong.  I know it is wrong."

The Doctor hesitated no longer.  He had already learnt to trust the boy's
"feel" for mathematical patterns.  He might not be entirely trustworthy in
other areas, indeed he had proved himself not, but in the area of maths, the
Doctor trusted his genius implicitly.  He surrendered the panel to Adric.
The boy cleared the screen.  A new eight digit code appeared on the left in
yellow letters.  Adric studied the number a moment, then his fingers danced
over the keys.  A string of blue numbers chased the cursor across the screen.
Adric hit the command input button.  The figures turned green.  The timer
paused, awaiting the outcome of the next code input.  A new code appeared.
Adric entered the code, and hit the command input.  Two of the numbers went
red.  The timer started again - seven seconds left - there was no leeway for
another error.  He scowled, cleared and re-entered, hit command input - the
numbers went to green, and vanished.  Another code appeared.  Without
hesitation, Adric punched in the required response.

The Doctor turned away.  The boy had the matter under control.  He looked to
the doors.  Harmony had shrugged out of the baldric and let it fall at her
feet.  She had turned sideways and was trying again.  The gap was still too
narrow.  Over her shoulder, he could see Tegan's pale face, her eyes wide
with fear.  "help us!" she mouthed, her words drowned by the gonging of the
alarm.

"I can't get through," Harmony cried, wriggling herself tighter into the gap.
"It's too narrow.

The Doctor started for the doors to try and help the two women, knowing there
was little he could do.

"Leave this to us, Time Lord," said Ariana.  Again he was brushed aside as
she along with Sedra and Duo Danella ran to the door.  They each took a grip
on Harmony's hand.  The aggravating sound of TARDIS engines, striving for
take-off, echoed down the passage, hardly heard under the humming and the
bonging of the alarm.

Beyond Tegan, the Doctor could see the PK amplifier.  In the sphere, Rain was
become a being of liquid crystal, a figure molded from living green fire,
translucent and shining.  The humming modulated itself in to a deep throbbing
which stirred the bowels of the world, pulsing in time to the dancing shadows
thrown by the lurid green light as the emerald lambency radiating from her
form began to pulse in time to the pounding of her heart.

The water was coming; and there was nothing he could do about it here.  If he
could get to the control chamber in time - there might be something he could
do?

Spinning on his heel, he pelted away into the throbbing green gloom.  As the
Doctor ran, a brown form darted above his head, skating crazily in the air on
ragged wings.  Dipping and yawing erratically, Agalayne headed for an
archway, with the Doctor pounding in pursuit, urged on by the frantic
screaming of the creature.  Agalayne back-winged, stood on one wing tip, and
soared into the stairwell.  A second later, the Doctor plunged after him.

At the door to the construct, the TARDIS sound reached a desperate crescendo.
The form of Harmony flickered and appeared to rotate through the too narrow
opening in a manner that confused the eye.  One moment she was jammed in the
gap, the next she was sliding to the floor at the feet of the Brood Sisters .
Others of the Brood caught her up, and bore her from the door.  In the gap,
Tegan was already squeezing herself frantically as far between the panels as
she might until she stuck fast.  The three Sisters took her hand; once more
the TARDIS engine sound ran quickly up to a desperate crescendo.  With a
shriek of agony, Tegan twisted through the opening and fell into the waiting
arms of Nyssa and Gabriela.  As they bore her from the portal, she was
screaming: "Shut the bloody doors!  Adric!  Shut the bloody doors!"

Adric cancelled the manual override, releasing the mechanism to its emergency
closure sequence.  The great armored valves began to close.  The fat bar of
livid green light striping the opposite wall narrowed.

They'd done it!  If Rain held off just a few more seconds, they would be
safe?

Then the jubilant boy noticed the baldric.  It was laying between the valves.
He dove for it to pull it clear; but he was a second too late.  The edges of
the doors ground on the belt, crushing it between them. The pitch of the door
mechanism rose as it strove to seal the panels against the obstruction.  The
gap closed to a thin filament of brilliant green light.  Adric fell over
backwards, still clutching an end of the baldric chewed off by the
closing panels. Scrambling to his feet, he ran to get as far away as
possible.  In the construct, Rain kicked the amplifier.

With a truly earth-shaking concussion, the water came.

The ears of all those in the tunnel popped painfully.

A razor edge blade of water sliced across the passage, travelling at twice
the speed of sound.  The tremendous pressure imparted a diamond hardness to
its leading edge.  It sliced into the stone wall like a hot knife through
butter.  Another thunderous concussion staggered the world.  With explosive
force, steam and rock shards filled the air.  A tidal wave of scalding water
with embedded boulders, surged in the tunnel.  It roared up the passage,
sweeping all before it.  An instant later, the valves were forced
closed by the pressure from within, stemming the raging torrent.

As the tide subsided, it left a tangled pile of bodies and broken rock behind
in the steaming water.





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