Chapter Text
Senator Aulkona stood on the balcony overlooking the burning capitol. In the distance screams punctuated the unrelenting sound of weapons’ fire, and buildings crumbled to the ground. The air was choked with thick smoke and five floors up from the ground, it swirled around Aulkona in a dark fury.
Across the bridge, a crowd approached; angry and filled with violence, the last exhalation of a dying civilisation. Soon they would reach the government buildings, and Aulkona had no illusions about what they would do when they found her.
There was a movement behind her. She didn’t bother to turn around.
“I would have thought you’d be long gone, Professor,” she said.
“And miss this?” The voice was rich and warm, and perhaps a little amused. Aulkona turned to see Keller standing in the middle of the room, cool and unruffled, a faint smile on his face.
“You like it,” said Aulkona, studying him. “You are actually enjoying watching my world burn.” She sounded disbelieving, but inside she felt as though she had finally unearthed a truth about this alien who had been so eager to help when her civilisation stood on the brink.
She took a step forward, and noted the wariness on the Professor’s face. She had nothing to lose, she realised, and so, evidently, did he. There was no reason for her not to try and kill him.
Instead, she sat back in her customary chair, and surveyed her office with a strange, detached calm. Now that the inevitable was here, all her fears seemed to have evaporated. “Is this what you wanted?” she asked the Professor, suddenly curious.
He smiled and took the seat opposite her.
“Not at all,” he said. “Any advancements I gave you were intended for your benefit. I could have made use of a grateful population. Instead, your greed destroyed you. Petty factions battling for petty scraps of land and the little knowledge that I offered.”
She leaned forward. “Are you a god?”
He blinked, startled for a moment, before he burst into easy laughter. “Oh, my dear Senator, you must control these superstitious beliefs of yours.”
“Then what are you?”
“Does it matter?”
Aulkona looked away, her gaze drawn back to the balcony, and she heard the rioters, closer now, screaming obscenities. “I suppose not.”
She stood and reached for the knife carefully tucked away inside her senatorial robes. It was an ornate thing, meant for ceremony only. It had never occurred to her that she might actually use it in violence. Her fingers slipped along the blade.
“I’ve been told it was traditional for a disgraced aristocrat to stab herself.” She glanced at him. “But I’m too much of a coward, I’m afraid. I think it might be easier to throw myself from the balcony.”
The Professor tutted quietly. “Wasteful, Senator.”
“When that crowd find me, they’ll tear me limb from limb. Frankly I’d rather do the job myself.”
“You could survive this. Nothing is forcing you to remain in this building.”
“No? And where would I go? What would I do? I’ll not live as a hunted animal.” She stood up and brushed down her robes. “I intend to honour my oath to the Senate.”
“By nobly flinging yourself from its walls? How melodramatic. I hardly think you’ll be protecting your world by staining the courtyard with your remains.”
“You’re welcome to leave.” She paused, considering. “Why are you still here? If they find you, they won’t hesitate to kill you too.”
“I have my own means of leaving this world.”
“So what are you waiting for? Or do you wish to watch me die?”
The Professor leaned back in his chair, regarding her with a cool gaze. “I had intended to take you with me.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Did you indeed?”
“I have expended a great deal of time and effort on this world, and although the aesthetic outside is amusing enough, it’s still a poor return on my investment.”
“So I’m a commodity,” she muttered. Her eyes narrowed. “And you think you can buy me.”
“Do you think that the handful of planets your people have visited is all there is out there? I can travel anywhere in space, anywhere in time. I have the complete freedom of the universe. And I can take you with me.”
Aulkona met his gaze, aware of how persuasive his voice and his words were, and aware of her own weakness to the offer not merely of survival, but of a life worth living.
Another temptation, another test, but all she could lose this time was her life, and if she stayed then that was certainly forfeit.
“What do you want in return?”
“Your loyalty, your obedience.” The Professor stood up and stepped forward.
As he approached her, Aulkona was suddenly afraid, and wondered how she could never have noticed his eyes before and the way that they burned. And there was more: his voice, his posture had changed, so subtly, but it was as though a mask had been discarded, revealing something immensely alien and immensely powerful.
“I want your oath, Senator. Pledge yourself to me as you pledged yourself to your fallen Senate, and I will save you.”
She looked away; he waited.
“You have my oath,” she told him. Life or death. It was such a simple choice to make.
#
Aulkona knew that the Professor was from a civilisation far in advance of her own, that much had been obvious from the start, but stepping into his spaceship still took her breath away. All those months that the Professor had been working in the government labs and nobody had noticed that one of the storage units was an alien spacecraft, one capable of travelling through time and space. A TARDIS, the Professor called it.
While she stared around, trying to fathom what allowed the ship to be bigger on the inside than the outside, the Professor worked at the central console. After a moment the central rotor began to rise and fall. Just as quickly, it stopped.
“Just a short trip for now,” he said, and opened the doors.
She looked around as they stepped outside, eager to see how far they had travelled.
“But this is the capital’s museum,” she exclaimed, her attention caught by the smashed glass and broken exhibits.
“Correct. There is an artefact I wish to retrieve before we depart.”
Aulkona shook her head. “What could we possibly have that would be of use to you?”
“You wouldn’t recognise its value.”
They walked through several chambers, some with their displays almost wholly intact, before the Professor found what he was looking for. He stopped outside a sealed glass cabinet and, taking an instrument from inside his tunic, neatly cut a hole in the glass.
The small stone tablet that he retrieved from within was unimpressive.
“If that’s what you wanted, why didn’t you just take it?” asked Aulkona. There had been security at the museum, of course, but with the use of a machine that could materialise anywhere they would hardly have been effective. Besides that, she knew full well the Professor had no compunction about killing to get what he wanted.
“Because, Senator, that would have been exceedingly dull. Your people proved a most entertaining diversion.”
She looked away, looked outside. She wasn’t comfortable with her feelings; she knew that she should hate this man, for what he had done to her and her world, but instead she was ashamed, of herself, of her people. They had chosen to accept his help, and they had fought over its fruits.
“Are all species as…short-sighted as we were?” she asked quietly.
The Professor gave her a look somewhere between sympathy and contempt. “There are a great many eager for knowledge that they’re not ready for. In fact, our next stop is a world that is a step away from destroying itself with its petty little disputes. The natives call it Earth.”