Chapter Text
The ship groaned again. There was a low, bone-deep creaking that sounded less like crumbling metal and more like something old waking up from a bad dream. The Mark-II Utility Cruiser - an oblong wedge of battered plating, cracked chrono-dials, and Gallifreyan parts repurposed with civilian glue - had once been a training vessel. It wasn't meant for deep-space travel, nor shallow-space really, but it was Kevran's; it had been stolen and hidden for long enough that it could be considered his, at least.
Kevran glanced up from the control panel. "Well, that was a new sound," he muttered.
Socket, bolted to a worn diagnostic rail above the navigation panel, emitted a trill of concerned data. The pattern wasn't urgent, exactly, more like annoyance.
"Structural integrity holding, just about. Internal gravitational alignment is ninety-three per cent of standard industrial baseline. Recommend avoiding turbulence, sharp turns, or... standing too quickly."
Kevran grunted. "Noted. I'll just stop breathing while I'm at it, shall I?"
"Well now," Socket whistled. "I detect sarcastic tones in your speech pattern. I shall log this for later use against you."
Kevran rolled his eyes at the droid. From below the deck, there was a loud clanging that rang out, quickly followed by a muffled cursing. Before long, Khandi emerged from an open floor panel, her copper-stained fingers brushing hair from her reddened face. She glanced over to the pilot seat with a murderous look.
"You routed the propulsion system through the coolant relay."
Kevran winced. "It was either that or life support."
"You chose propulsion!?"
"I panicked!"
She threw a wrench across the room towards him. Socket released a warning ping as it clattered dangerously close to the fuel stabiliser coils. Kevran sighed, looking at the spiking readouts, and quickly braced himself against the wall as the ship jolted with another mechanical hiccup. The cruiser drifted off-course for the fifth time in that hour alone, but there was little he could do to fix it under the current circumstances.
In the long moment of quietness that followed, Kevran let his eyes trace the curved edge of the display screen. The electric glow was dimmer than it used to be, and the lights on the control panel were faded. Static danced in places where navigational network data should have been. Far beyond the glass, the stars flickered slower than usual, as if somehow caught between ticks of the universe's clock.
There was a chirp. Socket straightened, suddenly more alert. "Unidentified signal. Short-range. Pattern suggests Gallifreyan origin... however, timestamp encoding is corrupted. It is bouncing through fragmented null-time. I cannot locate the source."
Kevran leaned forward. "Play it."
A bassy, pulsing tone filled the cockpit. It was not quite a voice, but not quite unintelligible static either. It shivered through the hull as though the signal was coming from inside the walls of time itself.
Khandi rechecked her datapad as she furrowed her brow. "This is phantom code. Shouldn't even exist anymore. The pattern's recursive. It's folding in on itself."
Kevran didn't move.
"It could be a trap," she added.
"It could be Epoch," he replied.
Khandi narrowed her eyes. "You're still chasing that? That's the whole reason you had to flee from Gallifrey in the first place."
Kevran's voice dropped, shifting into a more defensive tone. "You weren't there, alright? I saw the look on Siri's face when she thought I wasn't watching. She was afraid. It wasn't just about the politics. She was properly afraid."
Khandi shook her head, but something in her eased. She gestured to the coordinates flicking in and out of clarity. "There's a derelict station on that vector, looks like. Power levels are... wrong. Not dead, just dormant. It's a Gallifreyan build, but it looks like it predates the last twelve aeons."
Kevran's eyes lit up with a quiet curiosity.
Socket, less enthused, whirred. "Current vessel condition is suboptimal. Estimated survival probability inside unknown structure is-"
"Don't tell me," Kevran interrupted, tightening the seat straps. "I'd rather not know the odds. It makes me feel more comfortable."
Khandi groaned and disappeared back beneath the open floor panel. "One of these days, Kevran, your curiosity is going to kill us!"
He gave her a soft smile, turning back to the pilot controls. "Not if it gets us the truth first!"
The derelict space station hung in the void like a forgotten God, colossal, silent, and wounded. Its outer shell bore the burn marks of ancient temporal exposure. Starfire hadn't touched it in centuries, maybe longer. Gravity drifted lazily around its mass, time eddying at the seams. The utility cruiser docked with a long groan of effort. The clamps locked in with a violent thunk, but only after Khandi had manually overridden the hydraulic sequence twice. The old docking tube extended slowly, its frame juddering as it made contact with the station's port. A hiss of depressurisation echoed down the spine of the ship. Kevran stood by the airlock in full void traversal gear. For once, he'd even bothered with the helmet. Socket hovered as a round sphere just over his shoulder, lightly magnetised to his chestplate. His ocular lenses shifted tones, pale blue, then a cautious yellow.
Behind them, Khandi adjusted her toolkit harness and grumbled. "I'm telling you now, if we die in there, I'll hurt you so bad regeneration energy won't save you."
Kevran offered a weak grin which faded as the airlock cycled open. A deep blackness that greeted them. The interior was vast, wider than the cruiser, with panelled walls that arced gently upward like a cathedral spine. Dust floated where gravity should've pinned it down. Soft pulses of old Gallifreyan script flickered across sections of the wall, fading in and out like a dying heartbeat.
Kevran gave Khandi a sideways glance before realising that she was waiting for him to make the first move. After all, it was his idea to come here, so he should lead the way forward. He carefully stepped through the doorway. The very moment his boot hit the floor across the threshold of the airlock, his vision blurred heavily, and he briefly felt the sensation that he had been falling sideways for hours. Then he was standing normally again.
Khandi followed with a muttering curse. "This whole place is bleeding chronostasis."
Kevran ran a gloved hand along the wall as they moved deeper. The energy inside the structure was wrong, like the station was aware of their presence.
Socket's light dimmed slightly. "Localised gravity detected. Variable. Structural stress is minimal... but consistent with long-term isolation. I am also detecting-"
There was a flicker. A brief shape appeared down the corridor - a figure, not quite there. It was gone as instantly as it appeared.
Kevran froze. "Did you see...?"
Khandi raised her scanner. "Telemetry scanner is coming up empty. Nothing there."
Kevran exhaled. "Probably just-"
His eyes locked onto something carved into the wall beneath a heavily damaged panel. It was faded and half-erased, but still legible.
Echo Drift Substation.
Temporal Survey Corps.
Primary Aim: Phanatosis Prototype Division.
Secondary Activity: Epoch Investigation and Experimentation.
Kevran's breath caught. "This is it."
Khandi stared at the seal on the cracked panelling. "These symbols and runes are strange. Really strange. I don't recognise their particular structuring."
"Yeah, Old High Gallifreyan. Still readable to us but uses a different shaping to its runes. No one's used that insignia since... the Sixth Revision. Just by being here, this structure predates even the Archive."
Socket processed silently. "If that were true, Kevran, this facility should not exist. Historical records from a hundred and forty-nine separate aisles of the Panopticon Archive indicate that such Gallifreyan satellites were not constructed until many years post-archival construction."
"I know," he said. His hand lingered on the symbol. "So, either the station isn't real and we're somewhere else, or the people here just liked the look of old-school linguistics more."
"Speaking of people," Khandi looked around. "Where are any of them?"
"Good question," Kevran tugged his hand away from the insignia.
He stepped forward, and a sound came from somewhere deeper within the station, down a corridor that hadn't existed a moment ago. It wasn't a voice, not quite. It sounded more like a shuddering breath, drawn through the spaces between seconds.
Socket's metallic voice spoke quietly into Kevran's ear. "Warning. Scanners indicate a change in surroundings. There is something... awake."