"Understory"

The city is empty. They read bright red on Leela's scanner, the only things large enough to register. Ollistra is tightly focused on something off-screen, face waxen and still. One soldier has a rifle he will not be confident in using; the other has a box of kit he doesn't understand. Three tiny birds are fighting over something unidentifiable.

Leela is marking out a perimeter, one foot a measured pace in front of the other, sensors falling from her hand like seeds. The quarry is dug in the middle of what had once been a park, abstract sculptures in faded blues and greens half-toppled where the orange dirt is cut away. Plants wither near the hole, cables stretching out from the main camp pod like tentacles and dropping down into the fathomless underneath. There are no guardrails. She lets her last seed fall into the void.

"I'll remind you not to damage War Room property," Ollistra says, not looking up. Leela steps back from the edge.

This is mining camp three of ten, kept unlinked to avoid a catastrophic temporal cascade. Something had happened - an attack? An accident? Ollistra had been tight-lipped on the details. Shipments of extracted resources had slowed, then stopped. Automatic communications had gone silent. Gallifrey's forces were stretched thin; Leela had been volunteered for the mission, along with the two stupid, stolid soldiers (Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, says a plummy voice somewhere deep down in her subconscious) and a relay device reflecting Ollistra's matrix projection.

Leela suspects she's being tested on something, or something is being tested on her. Ollistra is taking too many notes. Inside the pod is cramped and labyrinthine, the air stuffy. She immediately wants to leave; Tweedle Dum is behind her, the tip of his staser rifle soft but insistent in the small of her back. They join Tweedle Dee and Ollistra in the main control room, the matte white and shiny brass architecture somehow off, uncertain. The dimensional bindings coming loose.

She stares at her reflection in a decorative brass panel, High Gallifreyan curlicuing along the edges. Her armor gleams, the uniform underneath crisp; her hair is clean and neatly arranged. A knife, edge blunted, is tucked into its scabbard. Her eyes disappoint her, like there's a light slowly dimming, like something is hiding in complacency or fear.

"Do you know how to use a computer?" Ollistra flickers, then vanishes back into her box. Tweedle Dee twiddles knobs and shrugs as Ollistra fails to re-appear. Her face emerges on the monitor's screen instead, peering out wide-eyed and beaky.

Leela breathes in and exhales slowly, her body locking down. "Yes," she says. "What would you have me do." Her tongue feels too big for her mouth, crowding against her teeth.

Ollistra walks her through a series of mostly-comprehensible commands, though some are more esoteric than she's used to.

Tweedle Dee shifts under the weight of the box. Mental, primarily: the unit is equipped with anti-grav. Tweedle Dum is similarly anxious around the potential energy and heft of his staser rifle.

The sound of her fingertips against plastic are dull and muted in the still air. Somewhere a motor spins up. Somewhere underground a drill resumes turning.

"Nearly there," Ollistra murmurs, mistaking Leela's discomfort for impatience.

Far below them, the hole grows deeper.




"Those were the easy ones," Ollistra says. "Only the transceiver was damaged. I will require your help more here. You can start by clearing enough of this debris to allow us to enter."

Leela nods, and notes that vulnerability for later. She considers using it now:
She pauses, breathes in deep, spins around with her gaze and arms open to the sky. There's no one else here except for flying insects and something small rustling through the thorny underbrush. The Tweedles could be incapacitated easily, and even if they could get to their communicators in time, the message would be slowed by the atmosphere. (Rasmus had helpfully explained this principle earlier, in small words that had been rounded off by the translator. It is like a river in the air. It is like a magnet - do you know about magnets? It is like a dog pulling on a rope with its teeth.)

Her knife might be dull but it is still heavy in her hands, and death through blunt force trauma is as dead as death from a cut.

But then, of course, it would all be over. Even if she could make it back to the TARDIS alone, even if she could convince it to let her fly it, it'd be over.

They want to chain her to Gallifrey. Every week a new bribe, a new threat, a new microscopic device inserted somewhere in her body. Had they forgotten? Who kept track of that leverage, outside of Rassilon himself? Who looked after Romana? Who made sure she was both hopelessly lost and suffocatingly protected?

Ollistra clears her throat. No doubt she thinks she's interrupted a primitive ritual, one which has now gone on for too long. She's not nearly as indulgent as the General.

Leela stretches, feeling the weight of Ollistra's gaze, and, smiling in a way she knows registers as threatening, begins pulling the rubble and weeds from the entrance. She notes the distinctive pattern of staser burns, the soot webs stretching from dead vine to broken support beam. A ration bar half-eaten (from the wrong end and through the wrapper), half-buried in the dirt.

The inside is as dim and stale as the first. Tweedle Dee sets up his lamp and opens his case of devices, Ollistra's monitor, projector, and amplifiers propped up and plugged into a battery. Tweedle Dum paces, finger too close to the trigger.

"Why not station soldiers here? Scientists?" Leela brushes dust off a console that is reluctantly flickering to life.

"There have been a few, but remote operation is more efficient," Tweedle Dee says, stroking the edge of the monitor.

"And the people who lived here first?"

"Relocated," Ollistra says, face blue and wavering in the monitor. Connection issues, something in the air. "Part of the War Room's resettlement program. They were taken to Gryben, I believe."

"You could have let them stay," Leela says, heart sinking. "This was their home."

"They wouldn't have let us stay if we had." She steps out into the world. "Oh, don't sulk, Epsilon 3. We all make sacrifices in a time of war."

There is a doorway leading deeper into the pod and, briefly, Leela imagines someone or something filling it. The darkness drifts away before she can focus. She shivers, wills down the hairs on her neck. Her anger, too, coaxed into a form small enough to hold.

"The computer," Ollistra gestures. She stares at Leela and makes another flurry of notes.

Leela opens her mouth to speak, but the words are tangled up in her throat. The translator glitching, her thoughts not arranging into Gallifreyan fast enough. She finds herself missing the cosmic Esperanto of the Doctor's TARDIS, always more forgiving and flexible than Gallifrey's lockstep vocabulary.

The translator, the monitor, the Tweedles' nerves, her own urge to run. They don't belong here; she suspects their tools will be in even worse shape before long.

She steps up to the keyboard, plastic cleverly rising to meet her fingertips. The edges of the console are singed, the air acrid. Ollistra flickers in and out over her shoulder. The drill resumes spinning.




Camp J is off-limits to her. A kilometer west of the other camps and drifting up a hill, it lies tucked between two ruined buildings, skeletons leaning heavily towards each other. Both are marked with signs, once brightly-colored, that do not coalesce into meaning for her. Tweedle Dee carries Ollistra's relay case through the doorway. Tweedle Dum stands guard at the entrance. His eyes and ears and gun are pointed inside; she is an after-thought.

It's not J, she thinks wildly. The translation matrix is fraying. How could it be a J, when Gallifreyans don't speak English? How could it be English when that's not what she speaks? When what she speaks is - what was it, again?

She fights back a wave of nausea. Tweedle Dum is trembling. She lets words slip out of her head, since they so desperately want to go, and instead:

There is no birdsong. There is the clink-clank of armor and heavy breathing. There is a noise like stones rubbing together somewhere to the right of her. The smell of cold iron overlaying the street's sourness. The crumbling pale blue concrete of the buildings, the brass and matte white of Gallifreyan instant architecture, Tweedle Dum's broad back and curl of blonde hair sticking out from under his helmet. The broken pavement under her feet. Her skin against fabric, her skin against air, her hand on the hilt of her knife.

Tweedle Dum shifts to one-hand his rifle so he can wipe his palm off on his armor; it slides slick off the plastic.

The thing emanating from inside Camp J pulses but does not grow. "They should be back by now," Tweedle Dum says. "Ollistra said ten microspans. It's been fifteen."

"Even Ollistra is not a perfect master of time," Leela says. She frowns. That was more coherent than she'd expected.

"It'll come and go," says Tweedle-Dee, turning to look at her briefly. "Language. This sort of anomaly, it - " He starts, wheels around to face the doorway again. "Something's gone wrong."

She remembers, abruptly, that even stupid guards are Time Lords, and Time Lords have stolen many gifts to give to themselves.

Maybe something is about to come down the corridor. Maybe something will beckon them in.

The whine of the staser's battery pack breaks the silence.

"It's not supposed to do that," he whispers. "That's not normal power drain, it's- something else."

Get out of my head, she thinks firmly.

"Sorry, didn't mean to. It's all jumbled. This is out loud, yes? I'm going in. Follow me if you want, I don't care."

They find them in the control room. The lights are out, and there a smallish woman in a larger soldier's carapace huddled on the floor, pale and blinking in the torchlight's glare.

"Krestos?" Tweedle Dum asks shakily.

"Vanza," Krestos says, and stands up as if she might embrace him. She doesn't.

"What happened?" Twee - Vanza. Vanza holds out his arm but does not quite touch her.

"I don't know, I don't know, it just - something - "

"Remember the checklist," Vanza says. "One. Name, rank, number."

He walks her through her itemized rebirth. Ollistra has gone back inside her box. Leela feels drawn taut as a bowstring, arrow poised to let fly. The three of them make their way out.




The next camp is further afield, on the outskirts of the city. The pod is gone entirely, reduced to rubble and a oil slick black spreading out over the land. Mushroom-like growths, tall as old trees, are clear-cut in a 100 yard radius. The circle is covered in gravel, the bits of what had been Camp Δ mixed in. She squats down to pick up a piece, examines it closely: pale grey, evenly pointed like a blunted star, heavy and cool in her hands. She drops it back down, the piece skittering and rejoining the mass.

Vanza is muttering something under his breath that she suspects is a prayer. Krestos, wet and shivering, clunks forward in too-big armor and sets up the monitor, the projector, the amplifiers, the battery pack and cables. Ollistra steps free.

Leela had come to Gallifrey with her skepticism still newly-formed and sharp, an icily loyal companion as the universe had opened up to her. And she'd been met with a skepticism more blunt-force and omnipresent, the unexamined bedrock of this society. As if she were formed in opposition, formed to be the opposition - whatever form that would take - she found herself returning to the faiths of her childhood. Especially after Andred had died - not died - died again. Perhaps she'd been lonely and frightened. Perhaps she knew how they mocked her, and decided to give them what they'd expect. Maybe the void in Gallifrey's heart could only be filled with love, and this was a love that had not left her, even if it had been short-sighted and selfish.

And then Rassilon had returned, and Gallifrey had traded its skepticism for faith - for a strange, brutal love - and she pushed away again. Perhaps only the head can withstand the heart.

Standing here, the sky quickly darkening and the wind picking up, she wonders.

"We can restart it," Ollistra shouts over the wind, "But you'll need to go down to the drill itself. Vanza, your belay and harness; set her up and anchor her."

"Ma'am, I'm not sure that's wise -"

"And I'm not certain you truly mean to question my authority, soldier."

Leela tries to speak but the words are all gone. Something happens. Her vision splits, then splits again, the clearing a queasy fractal throbbing against the web of the world. Time shifts. She sees: what had happened here, who had been killed here, who had done the killing; how the blood had been paved over. She leans forward, swallows hard, decides against fighting it, and throws up. Ollistra looks at her with thinly-veiled disdain.

The words come back. "You said they were re-located." She wipes her mouth, pacing towards, stopping close enough to where she could grab her neck, if she were really here. "This planet is a mass grave."

"Sometimes, especially during a time war, more than one thing can be true at a time, no matter how contradictory they seem."

"You knew. And if this is a graveyard, why didn't you think to check if anyone had stayed to tend to it? To reclaim it? Move it away from all this Gallifrey, or Gallifrey away from it?"

"Superstition - "

Leela barks out a laugh. The black is rising over her ankles, soaking her trousers under her greaves. Vanza drops his rifle, fishes it out of the muck, then drops it again, watching hopelessly as it's sucked under.

"You fix this, you think it won't be broken again immediately? I go down there, I'll die, and for what? Is this worth damaging War Room property? You'd sacrifice your best weapon for a lost cause? Explain to me the logic in that."

Ollistra squints. Her robes still and hair carefully arranged as the flood surges around her. She's thinking about the potential data. Before she can speak, the wind whips up - lighting, or something like lightning, sparking overhead. The black pours out of the quarry.

"We're leaving," Leela decides. Vanza is already by her side; he beckons Krestos towards them.

There's a sound from the sky like two massive stones scraping against each other, culminating in a crack loud enough to make her ears ring. The black swells and overcomes the projector, the amplifiers. Ollistra flickers, an indignant expression on her face. The rest of them run as she goes under.




Leela dodges the General and his concern, and Rasmus's curiousity (Veklin has thankfully made herself scarce), ducking into the barracks for a quick shower and change of uniform. She's clean and sharp for her meeting with Ollistra.

In contrast, Ollistra looks surprisingly bedraggled, as if more than just a reflection of her had been caught in the deluge.

"I'm sorry I left you behind," Leela says, in a tone she hopes conveys that she isn't, actually, especially sorry.

Ollistra purses her lips. "That wasn't actually me, that was just a copy."

"Yes it was, wasn't it?" She pauses, mouth quirked into a not-quite-smile, letting the implication linger (as if the inner Doctor wasn't enough, now she's summoning Narvin's ghost as well).

Ollistra harrumphs, and writes down yet another note on her data pad, and shoos her out.

She passes Vanza in the hallway, headed to his own meeting with Ollistra.

"Are you alright? You seemed - shaken up, in the TARDIS."

"Well enough. We're headed back tomorrow, Ollistra wants the failed drill relocated." He holds his helmet in front of him like a skull.

"She would do all that again, knowing how it will end. And you would volunteer for it? Krestos died."

"She regenerated. Rassilon likes it when we regenerate in the line of duty. Increases loyalty, makes us more pliable. A old CIA trick." He puts the helmet on, tucking his hair back.

She touches his arm gently, wishing she could shake him, punch him, hug him. But even this is an impropriety. She pulls her hand back. "You have a choice, you always have a choice."

"Maybe." he smiles wanly, then snaps the visor shut over his face with a quiet but definitive click.