(no subject)

[dreamer_easy]

outsdr set me quite a task with his fic request... here's the first part of three. Set after the end of S4, so beware SPOILERS.

I prefer to speak in the full formal register of Modern Standard Gallifreyan when dealing with aliens. My TARDIS sometimes repines a little at having to render it for their ears. I have always preferred the serious over the flippant and trivial. I do not wander aimlessly; I do not concoct baroque schemes and then wonder at their failure. I have simple and straightforward goals. I take careful notes.

Aliens speak of The War in hushed tones, as if it was something from an Age of Miracles, when gods strode the cosmos. It was not. It was a final battle for power between the brutal and the decadent, whose idea of reordering creation was to turn as much of it as possible to ashes. No, I was not sorry to learn that either polity has gone for good, freeing me of their interference.

How annoying, then, to discover that - with the inevitability of a tenacious weed that will not stop growing back - four of us have survived.

In my case it was through the simple expedient of minding my own business. I kept out of the way, I got on with my own work, and I let them destroy each other.

Four of us, and now... this creature.

She sits squeezed into a narrow seat a little distance from me, shoulders slumped, clothes crumpled, a single bag at her feet. She has not slept properly for days, but the confusion in her face, the tears in her eyes, tell me there's more going on within than mere exhaustion. In this crowd she is perfectly alone.

I don't require a scanner to perceive the chronons that hover round her like a cloud of bees Time stains its travellers, like a suntan or a scar, or airport luggage, multiply tagged with placenames like codons.

My scanner on the asteroid Apophis automatically alerts me to anything unusual in Earth's biosphere - one which rewards patient watching. Her unique trace has been on the move for a week, mapping out the planet's airlanes and airports. At first I followed; then I decided it would be simpler to let her come to me.

I carry a miniature version in the guise of a mobile phone. She does not know where this compulsion to run has come from. She does not know what she is. Now that I've been able to do a more detailed scan, I know. Euthanising this grotesque chimera will be an act of kindness as well as self-defence.

I feel the other before I see her, even before my hand-held scanner lights up with fresh readings.

Passengers have been shuffling off the flight all this time. Finally, the crew appear, and with them, a woman not in uniform, short and slight. She, too, is surrounded by the unmistakeable crackle of time particles.

She's no doubt the organ of one of the interminable list of 'secret' agencies which monitor extraterrestrial activity. The imbeciles are apparently unable to grasp that the same high technology that brings us to their doorstep can read their computer systems as easily as flipping the pages of a magazine!

The irony of it is this: she will do my work for me. She picks my prey out of the crowd and steps towards her, with no idea that a single surfaced memory will poach this woman's brains on the spot. A single word could be enough to do it.

All I need do is observe.