Fic: The Oblivion Effect (Part Two)
Title: The Oblivion Effect, Part Two
Author: the_tenzo
Beta: ladychi
Pairing: River/Rose
Rating: Teen (mild violence and sexual situations)
Genre: AU, action/adventure, sci-fi
Summary: She's a 21st century London girl. She's a 51st century Time Agent. Together, they save their (alternate) universe! Sexily.
Previous Chapters: [ One ]
Download for mobile devices at AO3
The order to return to base came entirely too quickly, if not unexpectedly.
The sort of death that had happened in their medical bay--mysterious, seemingly pointless, almost random--was altogether different from the kind Rose had so carefully trained herself (and been trained) to be on familiar terms with. Assassinations of cruel despots were one thing, but the suicide of a scared, half-mad civilian... She felt like she needed to mourn, even though she'd barely known him. Only marginally comforting was the fact that at least it wasn't just her: River could be heard pacing through the ship during their nighttime hours.
Without having to talk about it, Rose knew that they would come back to Farn and finish what they had started, permission or not. They just needed to pay some lip service to their superiors first.
"Buggering hell," Rose said when she saw their new instructions.
"Language," River reminded her, but then took the paper and swore an oath herself. "A fucking analyst?"
"Why us?" Rose pleaded.
River sank into her chair in front of the deep-space controls with a sigh. "We're just that good, I suppose."
"No," Rose said, defiant. "that's not it."
River arched an eyebrow.
"I mean, we are that good, but that's not why they always pick us. What's this one's name?"
"Agent Lamm K. Tiro," she read.
"More like Agent Gooseberry, yeah? You know I'm right." She came behind River's chair and pulled one of her curls before leaning down and nuzzling her neck. "Say I'm right," she purred, happy that the clouds had lifted a little.
"When you're right, you're right," River said with the wry half-smile that drove Rose wild.
"And when I'm wrong?"
"You're better." River twisted around in her chair and before Rose could balance, she'd grabbed her around the waist and pulled her forward. "How long have we got before the drive is fully booted?"
Rose was already unbuttoning River's canvas jacket, sinking down to straddle her where she sat. "Long enough."
***
The Time Agency--quite improbably--had rules against fraternisation, even between agents of same rank, as Rose and River now were. It seemed ridiculous given the fact that sex was so important a part of their arsenal that a few agents even had an implant that gave them some sort of jumped-up pheromones. (Mostly the human males, Rose noted. Typical.) In her own induction classes, she'd been blatantly encouraged to use sex as persuasion, as a trap and, when necessary, as a weapon.
And she'd been an apt pupil, even if 51st century sexual mores were difficult to wrap her head around at first. Human men, okay; human women, she wouldn't pretend she hadn't always been interested, even in the 21st century; but non-humans? That took some getting used to, with the help of a very patient, very understanding nine-tentacled, three-eyed classmate who generously offered her extracurricular tuition. In the end, she received top marks.
Still, throughout all of it, she always returned to thoughts of the woman who had recruited her. All the other dalliances were fun, and sometimes necessary, but when she was alone in her bunk none of the others visited her fantasies. By contrast, Agent River Song was nowhere to be found as Rose went through her classes, and it slowly dawned on her that she might never see the woman again. After all, the Time Agency was a massive, sprawling organisation covering thousands of galaxies and millions of years of history. Once she graduated, there was no telling where she'd be assigned and with whom. Her chest ached at the thought.
The day after she graduated, there was a knock at the door of her bunkpod.
"On your feet, Tyler," was all River had to say while opening the door. "We're shipping out at 0800. And bring that little black number I saw you wearing at the last Alternative Tactics training. It shows off your calves."
"I--" Rose stammered, scrambling off her bunk and knocking a number of items off a shelf in the process.
"You've been working out," River said with a wink before shutting the door again and leaving Rose alone, tingling from top to toe.
***
The Time Agency sector base seemed uncharacteristically laid-back when Rose and River arrived to collect their new charge. Field agents and office drones alike strolled the halls casually, no one seeming to be in much of a hurry to get anywhere. Half the bunkpods were vacant and the canteen was nearly empty.
"Looks like everyone's on their hols," Rose said, taking a second cake from the food conveyor since they didn't seem to be in much danger of running out.
River shrugged. "These things go in cycles. If we stick around for a few days, we''ll wake up one morning and the place'll be heaving."
"Then let's just pick up this boffin and get out of here," Rose said, eating her pudding first like an 8-year-old suddenly left to her own devices.
"Boffin? Guilty as charged, I suppose," came a sonorous male voice from rather disconcertingly close behind them.
Rose jumped a little but River coolly elevated her gaze and turned her head. "Agent Tiro, I presume."
"You presume correctly," Agent Tiro said.
Rose put her fork down and gave him an unabashed once-over. He was a tall man with olive skin, bulging, watery eyes and facial hair that made a rather bold statement. (That statement seemed to be, "I'm a pirate!" but she supposed that forked and braided goatees were probably the style on his planet.) He was dressed fastidiously, the shine on his shoes nearly indistinguishable from the shine of the polished floor of the canteen. Well, thought Rose, we'll dirty him up soon enough.
River liked to use the Uncomfortable Silence as a way of getting people she was suspicious of to make a tactical error. Agent Tiro, however, seemed immune. He rounded the canteen table, sat down primly, folding his hands on the plasticine surface, and simply waited her out. His eyes remained focused and unreadable, his body language completely neutral.
Finally, River had enough and stood, her chair clattering. "Be ready in 3 hours," she said stiffly. "You'll find our cruiser in Bay 18 on the fourth level. Don't be late."
Not wanting to be left alone with this man, Rose stood as well, popping a final bit of cake into her mouth.
"I'm very punctual," Agent Tiro said without affect. "It will be a pleasure to brief you on our mission at that time."
"I'm sure," said Rose, clearing her dinner tray. River was already nearly out the door.
***
Rose is certain that her interrogator is an AI and that this is not simply an overdue disciplinary review. The big guns have been deployed: a system that can dispassionately make connections between the minutest of details and is most likely also monitoring her eye movements and skin conductivity.
Rose tries to remember what she's learned about evading biometric interrogations. Her primary strategy has always been to not get caught in the first place, but she never counted on her own side being the ones doing the catching.
"Agent Tyler, do you recall Agent Tiro's mission briefing?"
She swallows with a dry mouth, and tries to think of a sour food to promote saliva production. The AI will certainly be noting this as a sign of increased stress. "Yeah, of course. We were to escort him to the Commercial Court of Tamna and serve as his personal protection while he negotiated with the High Amalgamate."
"And how would you rate the success of this mission?"
"Satisfactory."
There's a long pause. "But you do realise that Agent Tiro was made late for his scheduled liaison afterwards..."
"We agreed together to go to the Maestra system. I saw the message he sent to his liaison with my own eyes." This is not entirely untrue. They hadn't gone to Maestra, but they had agreed together to delay returning to base, and she had witnessed Tiro notifying his liaison. Was it really so recently that she'd believed that man to be a friend?
The intercomm clicks on again and Rose waits for further evidence of this double-cross, but it does not come. "Location: Maestra does not complete search string." Her heart plummets to the pit of her stomach. "Please repeat, Agent Tyler."
Maestra is only twenty parsecs from the Hidden Archive--that's why they'd picked it as a dummy location in the first place. She has to hurry. She has to tell them what they want to hear, if only she can figure out what, exactly, that is.
"Do you know the location of Agent Lamm Tiro?" the AI asks, moving on to the next node in its interrogation network.
Yes. "No."
"Are you aware of the contents of his last communication?"
Lies. "No."
***
"Agent Song will show you to your quarters." Rose hefted her rucksack onto her back in preparation to board their cruiser once again. As a home-away-from-- well, she didn't really have a home as such any more, but the ship served its purpose. Technically, it belonged to the Agency and could be replaced or decommissioned entirely at a moment's notice, but in practise, their superiors seemed to feel that letting them keep it was just easier for everyone.
"Please, call me Lamm," the tall man said, pulling absently at one of the forks of his goatee.
Rose ignored him. "Our journey to Tamna will take about 65 standard hours. In that time--"
River came back down the gangway, all holsters and combat boots. "In that time we'll expect you to stay out of the way," she said. "We didn't ask for this assignment, but we're good little toy soldiers and we do as we're told."
Rose smiled sheepishly. "All aboard, Agent Tiro." River might be a good soldier, but one thing she did not mince were words.
Her intimidation tactics must have worked, because they barely saw the man for the entire journey. If he was assigned to them in order to put a crimp in their not-very-secret fraternising, he wasn't doing a very good job of it. After informing them of their mission (to provide discreet protection while he acquired an important item from the Mercantile Empire of Tamna), he seemed to melt right into the walls. Every now and then he'd appear in some public area of the ship--the galley, usually, or the fitness area--arriving just as silently as he would later leave again after exchanging a few brief, bland pleasantries.
He wasn't doing anything wrong (and in fact was doing precisely what River had ordered him to do), which is why Rose couldn't put a finger on what seemed so off about him. She'd looked him up just as soon as they'd gotten under way and found nothing but well-ordered official documentation. Everything checked out, except for his home system, which started with a C or a K or something, and was otherwise nonexistent in the Agency's databanks. That wasn't so unusual, though. There were plenty of little-known systems nestled on the fringes of remote galaxies that remained poorly documented. The Time Agency wasn't omniscient, after all.
Rose tried to put it aside, and didn't bring it up with River for fear of seeming a bit paranoid. Meanwhile, they spent their days alternately at their computers researching Farn and in bed, researching a good many more enjoyable things. These long journeys could be tedious, but with a mystery to work on and River's soft curls spread out on her pillow when she woke, it could be worse.
Still, Rose had been putting off the one thing that she felt could hold the key to fitting the pieces together. In the middle of one of the indistinguishable deep space "nights," she slipped out of the habitation quarters and padded up to the bridge, alone.
She couldn't forget the lucid, knowing look in the eyes of Twelfth in Cohort Etnn before he died. That was not a madman, that was someone who knew more than he could bear to live with. While he seemed to think that giving a direct warning was futile, there might still be a way that his death would not be in vain. She had to watch the footage again.
The ship was quiet except for the low hum of the deep-space drives, the lighting automatically turned to a low sleep mode. Rose sat in front of a bank of monitors and called up the stored video, bracing herself.
She looped through it several times, and rather than getting inured to it, it just seemed to get worse. Moreover, she wasn't getting any new information at all. The Farnallax seemed to think that what had happened on his planet was their own fault (What have we done?) and thus somewhat outside the purview of the Time Agency. His warning that all things would soon end did not gain any further meaning. Perhaps it was simply a reflection on the inevitability of death. The mystery of what had so suddenly awoke him from deep sedation remained, and the life-support data was not helpful there, either.
As a last ditch, she tried muting the sound to see if just watching allowed her to gain a new perspective, but that didn't seem to be working either. She was getting nowhere and the mundane details surrounding the stark reality of death just began to look like a farce: The glass of water on the table that was upended as he reached for his weapon; the door to the toilet coming slightly ajar; the timecode in the corner ticking onward as if nothing important was happening.
The timecode.
They had noted the time of death but never thought to note the time that he had awoken. Had something happened somewhere else on the ship? Perhaps there'd been a psionic event or some other disturbance. It was worth a cross-check through the logs, at least. She inputted the data and downloaded the results to a tablet, meaning to take it back to bed to comb through, but the answer was right there on the very first line. She felt like an idiot for not thinking of it sooner.
Back in their quarters she gently shook River awake and thrust the tablet under her nose as soon as she sat up.
"I think you should see this."
"What time is it?" River rubbed her eyes and stretched with a groan.
"I don't know, 0300 or something. We're in space; does it matter?"
"What am I looking at?"
Rose sat down on the bed and snuggled into the duvet a bit. "I was just looking at the video of... you know, of what happened. Just trying to see if we missed anything and all. And I thought I'd cross-check the time that he woke up with the ship's logs, cos, you know, what if something from outside..."
River blinked sleepily. "And?"
"And look: This is the exact moment that his vitals went mental. Down to the millisecond."
"It was right when we passed over the Farn system's solar gravity barrier."
"Bingo."
"It's like... escaping the solar gravity field broke a spell that was on him." River's fingers slid lightly over the tablet's screen, calling up further information. "Farn's sun is called Nnae-I-Farn, a Class 8 star," she read.
Rose looked over River's shoulder and skimmed the data herself. "Have the Farnallax manipulated their sun in any way?"
"Manipulated?"
"Yeah, because of what that poor man said: What have we done? Like it was their fault."
River tapped the side of the tablet with her nail and went quiet. Rose started to worry that she'd said something daft, though she'd been pretty proud of her discovery and was prepared to stick by it.
"What?" she finally asked.
"Maybe it was their own fault but... you know, the Farnallax have no word for 'I.'"
"So he could have been referring to things that he himself had done."
River nodded. "Things like killing members of his own Cohort, his own people. For a species like his, that's inconceivable."
"So, if this is an effect from their sun--what's it called, Nnae-I-Farn--and it was not caused by the Farnallax themselves but by something or someone else..."
They both bowed their heads to the glow of the tablet screen again, scrolling through pages of information on this sun that seemed to be causing a terrible form of madness.
"Wait, here it is," River said. Her tone was one of both satisfaction and sadness. Rose followed her finger to the paragraph in question.
It was a result from a Latter Timestream search, referencing all of the Time Agency's databanks from points forward in the future.
Timestream 367.0055, linear K
Class 8 solar body, commonly known as Nnae-I-Farn, becomes singularity Mu-672.
"It becomes a black hole?" Rose asked, though it wasn't really a question. It was right there in black and white: In the future (and not that distant in the future, either), Nnae-I-Farn goes supernova, and the entire Farn System is destroyed in an instant.
"For a sensitive species like the Farnallax, that might be enough to send them over the edge," River mused, setting the tablet aside as she settled back into the pillows. "They could be prescient as well as empathic. They keep themselves to themselves, so it's possible our data on them is incomplete."
"That's a shame," Rose agreed as she snuggled into River's shoulder. "Still, I guess that's that. And we arrive at Tamna tomorrow."
River made a sleepy sound of being less than excited about that prospect. Rose still felt a little wired, though and picked the tablet up again to check her messages. Every now and then, when Mickey was around to help, her mum was able to navigate the interface and send her reminders to eat right and be careful.
But when she tapped the screen to wake it, instead of seeing the page on Nnae-I-Farn that they'd just been consulting, it was blank. The standard Time Agency watermarking was present, as was the search bar, but the page itself was completely empty.
"Did you erase this or something?" she asked, poking River in the arm.
River jolted awake and gave her a very sour, squinty look indeed. "What?"
"I said, did you erase the page? Look... it's all gone."
"You can't erase an entry from the databank," she mumbled irritably. "Referesh the page."
Rose was already refreshing, but there was nothing. She typed the search back in, to run it again, but this time it came up as unable to be filled. Wondering if there was a fault with the transmission pathways, she ran searches for Tamna and Rose Tyler and Melody Pond (codename: River Song). All yielded the expected information, but any search involving the Farn system, the Farnallax or Nnae-I-Farn came back empty.
"No, there's really something wrong," she said after several different attempts. "I'm even trying non-Agency sources and... oh god, look at this."
She'd called up a commercial map of Farn's sector. Just a simple map for holiday-makers and delivery freighters, from their current time--just three days ago they'd been on the planet itself, in the middle of a very real civil war. But on this map, where the entire Farn system should have been was simply a blank. Nothing had replaced it, there was no notation indicating that anything had ever been there at all, not even singularity Mu-672. It was just gone.
***
In his habitation quarters, Lamm Tiro prepared for his mission. His people utilised several complex meditation techniques to train and focus the mind in time such as this, but he eschewed them all. They had always been fools with delusions of transcendence. Well, the more fool they, for believing he would ever be anything other than what he was. If the legwork hadn't been such a bloody pain, he'd say that this entire gambit had been almost too easy. He'd shed his fears of pain, death and uncertainty while passing through that eternal maelstrom that some would call Hell. Now he was cleansed. Now he was more himself than he'd ever been before. Now there were no limits.
Author: the_tenzo
Beta: ladychi
Pairing: River/Rose
Rating: Teen (mild violence and sexual situations)
Genre: AU, action/adventure, sci-fi
Summary: She's a 21st century London girl. She's a 51st century Time Agent. Together, they save their (alternate) universe! Sexily.
Previous Chapters: [ One ]
Download for mobile devices at AO3
The order to return to base came entirely too quickly, if not unexpectedly.
The sort of death that had happened in their medical bay--mysterious, seemingly pointless, almost random--was altogether different from the kind Rose had so carefully trained herself (and been trained) to be on familiar terms with. Assassinations of cruel despots were one thing, but the suicide of a scared, half-mad civilian... She felt like she needed to mourn, even though she'd barely known him. Only marginally comforting was the fact that at least it wasn't just her: River could be heard pacing through the ship during their nighttime hours.
Without having to talk about it, Rose knew that they would come back to Farn and finish what they had started, permission or not. They just needed to pay some lip service to their superiors first.
"Buggering hell," Rose said when she saw their new instructions.
"Language," River reminded her, but then took the paper and swore an oath herself. "A fucking analyst?"
"Why us?" Rose pleaded.
River sank into her chair in front of the deep-space controls with a sigh. "We're just that good, I suppose."
"No," Rose said, defiant. "that's not it."
River arched an eyebrow.
"I mean, we are that good, but that's not why they always pick us. What's this one's name?"
"Agent Lamm K. Tiro," she read.
"More like Agent Gooseberry, yeah? You know I'm right." She came behind River's chair and pulled one of her curls before leaning down and nuzzling her neck. "Say I'm right," she purred, happy that the clouds had lifted a little.
"When you're right, you're right," River said with the wry half-smile that drove Rose wild.
"And when I'm wrong?"
"You're better." River twisted around in her chair and before Rose could balance, she'd grabbed her around the waist and pulled her forward. "How long have we got before the drive is fully booted?"
Rose was already unbuttoning River's canvas jacket, sinking down to straddle her where she sat. "Long enough."
***
The Time Agency--quite improbably--had rules against fraternisation, even between agents of same rank, as Rose and River now were. It seemed ridiculous given the fact that sex was so important a part of their arsenal that a few agents even had an implant that gave them some sort of jumped-up pheromones. (Mostly the human males, Rose noted. Typical.) In her own induction classes, she'd been blatantly encouraged to use sex as persuasion, as a trap and, when necessary, as a weapon.
And she'd been an apt pupil, even if 51st century sexual mores were difficult to wrap her head around at first. Human men, okay; human women, she wouldn't pretend she hadn't always been interested, even in the 21st century; but non-humans? That took some getting used to, with the help of a very patient, very understanding nine-tentacled, three-eyed classmate who generously offered her extracurricular tuition. In the end, she received top marks.
Still, throughout all of it, she always returned to thoughts of the woman who had recruited her. All the other dalliances were fun, and sometimes necessary, but when she was alone in her bunk none of the others visited her fantasies. By contrast, Agent River Song was nowhere to be found as Rose went through her classes, and it slowly dawned on her that she might never see the woman again. After all, the Time Agency was a massive, sprawling organisation covering thousands of galaxies and millions of years of history. Once she graduated, there was no telling where she'd be assigned and with whom. Her chest ached at the thought.
The day after she graduated, there was a knock at the door of her bunkpod.
"On your feet, Tyler," was all River had to say while opening the door. "We're shipping out at 0800. And bring that little black number I saw you wearing at the last Alternative Tactics training. It shows off your calves."
"I--" Rose stammered, scrambling off her bunk and knocking a number of items off a shelf in the process.
"You've been working out," River said with a wink before shutting the door again and leaving Rose alone, tingling from top to toe.
***
The Time Agency sector base seemed uncharacteristically laid-back when Rose and River arrived to collect their new charge. Field agents and office drones alike strolled the halls casually, no one seeming to be in much of a hurry to get anywhere. Half the bunkpods were vacant and the canteen was nearly empty.
"Looks like everyone's on their hols," Rose said, taking a second cake from the food conveyor since they didn't seem to be in much danger of running out.
River shrugged. "These things go in cycles. If we stick around for a few days, we''ll wake up one morning and the place'll be heaving."
"Then let's just pick up this boffin and get out of here," Rose said, eating her pudding first like an 8-year-old suddenly left to her own devices.
"Boffin? Guilty as charged, I suppose," came a sonorous male voice from rather disconcertingly close behind them.
Rose jumped a little but River coolly elevated her gaze and turned her head. "Agent Tiro, I presume."
"You presume correctly," Agent Tiro said.
Rose put her fork down and gave him an unabashed once-over. He was a tall man with olive skin, bulging, watery eyes and facial hair that made a rather bold statement. (That statement seemed to be, "I'm a pirate!" but she supposed that forked and braided goatees were probably the style on his planet.) He was dressed fastidiously, the shine on his shoes nearly indistinguishable from the shine of the polished floor of the canteen. Well, thought Rose, we'll dirty him up soon enough.
River liked to use the Uncomfortable Silence as a way of getting people she was suspicious of to make a tactical error. Agent Tiro, however, seemed immune. He rounded the canteen table, sat down primly, folding his hands on the plasticine surface, and simply waited her out. His eyes remained focused and unreadable, his body language completely neutral.
Finally, River had enough and stood, her chair clattering. "Be ready in 3 hours," she said stiffly. "You'll find our cruiser in Bay 18 on the fourth level. Don't be late."
Not wanting to be left alone with this man, Rose stood as well, popping a final bit of cake into her mouth.
"I'm very punctual," Agent Tiro said without affect. "It will be a pleasure to brief you on our mission at that time."
"I'm sure," said Rose, clearing her dinner tray. River was already nearly out the door.
***
Rose is certain that her interrogator is an AI and that this is not simply an overdue disciplinary review. The big guns have been deployed: a system that can dispassionately make connections between the minutest of details and is most likely also monitoring her eye movements and skin conductivity.
Rose tries to remember what she's learned about evading biometric interrogations. Her primary strategy has always been to not get caught in the first place, but she never counted on her own side being the ones doing the catching.
"Agent Tyler, do you recall Agent Tiro's mission briefing?"
She swallows with a dry mouth, and tries to think of a sour food to promote saliva production. The AI will certainly be noting this as a sign of increased stress. "Yeah, of course. We were to escort him to the Commercial Court of Tamna and serve as his personal protection while he negotiated with the High Amalgamate."
"And how would you rate the success of this mission?"
"Satisfactory."
There's a long pause. "But you do realise that Agent Tiro was made late for his scheduled liaison afterwards..."
"We agreed together to go to the Maestra system. I saw the message he sent to his liaison with my own eyes." This is not entirely untrue. They hadn't gone to Maestra, but they had agreed together to delay returning to base, and she had witnessed Tiro notifying his liaison. Was it really so recently that she'd believed that man to be a friend?
The intercomm clicks on again and Rose waits for further evidence of this double-cross, but it does not come. "Location: Maestra does not complete search string." Her heart plummets to the pit of her stomach. "Please repeat, Agent Tyler."
Maestra is only twenty parsecs from the Hidden Archive--that's why they'd picked it as a dummy location in the first place. She has to hurry. She has to tell them what they want to hear, if only she can figure out what, exactly, that is.
"Do you know the location of Agent Lamm Tiro?" the AI asks, moving on to the next node in its interrogation network.
Yes. "No."
"Are you aware of the contents of his last communication?"
Lies. "No."
***
"Agent Song will show you to your quarters." Rose hefted her rucksack onto her back in preparation to board their cruiser once again. As a home-away-from-- well, she didn't really have a home as such any more, but the ship served its purpose. Technically, it belonged to the Agency and could be replaced or decommissioned entirely at a moment's notice, but in practise, their superiors seemed to feel that letting them keep it was just easier for everyone.
"Please, call me Lamm," the tall man said, pulling absently at one of the forks of his goatee.
Rose ignored him. "Our journey to Tamna will take about 65 standard hours. In that time--"
River came back down the gangway, all holsters and combat boots. "In that time we'll expect you to stay out of the way," she said. "We didn't ask for this assignment, but we're good little toy soldiers and we do as we're told."
Rose smiled sheepishly. "All aboard, Agent Tiro." River might be a good soldier, but one thing she did not mince were words.
Her intimidation tactics must have worked, because they barely saw the man for the entire journey. If he was assigned to them in order to put a crimp in their not-very-secret fraternising, he wasn't doing a very good job of it. After informing them of their mission (to provide discreet protection while he acquired an important item from the Mercantile Empire of Tamna), he seemed to melt right into the walls. Every now and then he'd appear in some public area of the ship--the galley, usually, or the fitness area--arriving just as silently as he would later leave again after exchanging a few brief, bland pleasantries.
He wasn't doing anything wrong (and in fact was doing precisely what River had ordered him to do), which is why Rose couldn't put a finger on what seemed so off about him. She'd looked him up just as soon as they'd gotten under way and found nothing but well-ordered official documentation. Everything checked out, except for his home system, which started with a C or a K or something, and was otherwise nonexistent in the Agency's databanks. That wasn't so unusual, though. There were plenty of little-known systems nestled on the fringes of remote galaxies that remained poorly documented. The Time Agency wasn't omniscient, after all.
Rose tried to put it aside, and didn't bring it up with River for fear of seeming a bit paranoid. Meanwhile, they spent their days alternately at their computers researching Farn and in bed, researching a good many more enjoyable things. These long journeys could be tedious, but with a mystery to work on and River's soft curls spread out on her pillow when she woke, it could be worse.
Still, Rose had been putting off the one thing that she felt could hold the key to fitting the pieces together. In the middle of one of the indistinguishable deep space "nights," she slipped out of the habitation quarters and padded up to the bridge, alone.
She couldn't forget the lucid, knowing look in the eyes of Twelfth in Cohort Etnn before he died. That was not a madman, that was someone who knew more than he could bear to live with. While he seemed to think that giving a direct warning was futile, there might still be a way that his death would not be in vain. She had to watch the footage again.
The ship was quiet except for the low hum of the deep-space drives, the lighting automatically turned to a low sleep mode. Rose sat in front of a bank of monitors and called up the stored video, bracing herself.
She looped through it several times, and rather than getting inured to it, it just seemed to get worse. Moreover, she wasn't getting any new information at all. The Farnallax seemed to think that what had happened on his planet was their own fault (What have we done?) and thus somewhat outside the purview of the Time Agency. His warning that all things would soon end did not gain any further meaning. Perhaps it was simply a reflection on the inevitability of death. The mystery of what had so suddenly awoke him from deep sedation remained, and the life-support data was not helpful there, either.
As a last ditch, she tried muting the sound to see if just watching allowed her to gain a new perspective, but that didn't seem to be working either. She was getting nowhere and the mundane details surrounding the stark reality of death just began to look like a farce: The glass of water on the table that was upended as he reached for his weapon; the door to the toilet coming slightly ajar; the timecode in the corner ticking onward as if nothing important was happening.
The timecode.
They had noted the time of death but never thought to note the time that he had awoken. Had something happened somewhere else on the ship? Perhaps there'd been a psionic event or some other disturbance. It was worth a cross-check through the logs, at least. She inputted the data and downloaded the results to a tablet, meaning to take it back to bed to comb through, but the answer was right there on the very first line. She felt like an idiot for not thinking of it sooner.
Back in their quarters she gently shook River awake and thrust the tablet under her nose as soon as she sat up.
"I think you should see this."
"What time is it?" River rubbed her eyes and stretched with a groan.
"I don't know, 0300 or something. We're in space; does it matter?"
"What am I looking at?"
Rose sat down on the bed and snuggled into the duvet a bit. "I was just looking at the video of... you know, of what happened. Just trying to see if we missed anything and all. And I thought I'd cross-check the time that he woke up with the ship's logs, cos, you know, what if something from outside..."
River blinked sleepily. "And?"
"And look: This is the exact moment that his vitals went mental. Down to the millisecond."
"It was right when we passed over the Farn system's solar gravity barrier."
"Bingo."
"It's like... escaping the solar gravity field broke a spell that was on him." River's fingers slid lightly over the tablet's screen, calling up further information. "Farn's sun is called Nnae-I-Farn, a Class 8 star," she read.
Rose looked over River's shoulder and skimmed the data herself. "Have the Farnallax manipulated their sun in any way?"
"Manipulated?"
"Yeah, because of what that poor man said: What have we done? Like it was their fault."
River tapped the side of the tablet with her nail and went quiet. Rose started to worry that she'd said something daft, though she'd been pretty proud of her discovery and was prepared to stick by it.
"What?" she finally asked.
"Maybe it was their own fault but... you know, the Farnallax have no word for 'I.'"
"So he could have been referring to things that he himself had done."
River nodded. "Things like killing members of his own Cohort, his own people. For a species like his, that's inconceivable."
"So, if this is an effect from their sun--what's it called, Nnae-I-Farn--and it was not caused by the Farnallax themselves but by something or someone else..."
They both bowed their heads to the glow of the tablet screen again, scrolling through pages of information on this sun that seemed to be causing a terrible form of madness.
"Wait, here it is," River said. Her tone was one of both satisfaction and sadness. Rose followed her finger to the paragraph in question.
It was a result from a Latter Timestream search, referencing all of the Time Agency's databanks from points forward in the future.
Timestream 367.0055, linear K
Class 8 solar body, commonly known as Nnae-I-Farn, becomes singularity Mu-672.
"It becomes a black hole?" Rose asked, though it wasn't really a question. It was right there in black and white: In the future (and not that distant in the future, either), Nnae-I-Farn goes supernova, and the entire Farn System is destroyed in an instant.
"For a sensitive species like the Farnallax, that might be enough to send them over the edge," River mused, setting the tablet aside as she settled back into the pillows. "They could be prescient as well as empathic. They keep themselves to themselves, so it's possible our data on them is incomplete."
"That's a shame," Rose agreed as she snuggled into River's shoulder. "Still, I guess that's that. And we arrive at Tamna tomorrow."
River made a sleepy sound of being less than excited about that prospect. Rose still felt a little wired, though and picked the tablet up again to check her messages. Every now and then, when Mickey was around to help, her mum was able to navigate the interface and send her reminders to eat right and be careful.
But when she tapped the screen to wake it, instead of seeing the page on Nnae-I-Farn that they'd just been consulting, it was blank. The standard Time Agency watermarking was present, as was the search bar, but the page itself was completely empty.
"Did you erase this or something?" she asked, poking River in the arm.
River jolted awake and gave her a very sour, squinty look indeed. "What?"
"I said, did you erase the page? Look... it's all gone."
"You can't erase an entry from the databank," she mumbled irritably. "Referesh the page."
Rose was already refreshing, but there was nothing. She typed the search back in, to run it again, but this time it came up as unable to be filled. Wondering if there was a fault with the transmission pathways, she ran searches for Tamna and Rose Tyler and Melody Pond (codename: River Song). All yielded the expected information, but any search involving the Farn system, the Farnallax or Nnae-I-Farn came back empty.
"No, there's really something wrong," she said after several different attempts. "I'm even trying non-Agency sources and... oh god, look at this."
She'd called up a commercial map of Farn's sector. Just a simple map for holiday-makers and delivery freighters, from their current time--just three days ago they'd been on the planet itself, in the middle of a very real civil war. But on this map, where the entire Farn system should have been was simply a blank. Nothing had replaced it, there was no notation indicating that anything had ever been there at all, not even singularity Mu-672. It was just gone.
***
In his habitation quarters, Lamm Tiro prepared for his mission. His people utilised several complex meditation techniques to train and focus the mind in time such as this, but he eschewed them all. They had always been fools with delusions of transcendence. Well, the more fool they, for believing he would ever be anything other than what he was. If the legwork hadn't been such a bloody pain, he'd say that this entire gambit had been almost too easy. He'd shed his fears of pain, death and uncertainty while passing through that eternal maelstrom that some would call Hell. Now he was cleansed. Now he was more himself than he'd ever been before. Now there were no limits.