CHAPTER FOUR

"But Doctor, how could all this be your fault?" Rose asked as she tried to shield her eyes from the painful black glare of the object in the center of the crater.

For long moments, the Doctor didn't reply. He just continued to stare down into the crater. Every sort of painful emotion seemed to run across his face, but it happened so quickly that Rose thought she could have just imagined it.

Finally he spoke up.

"Do you remember the war I told you about?" The Doctor asked Rose, never taking his eyes away from the object.

"You said that your people had been in a war and that they lost. What does that have to with that?" Rose replied, indicating the object.

"Well our enemy just in physical numbers vastly outnumbered us. And they were EVERYWHERE. Near the end, they started to just attack and exterminate any planet that had a sentient species on it. They were trying to draw out and thin our defenses which, while were technologically superior, were limited in the numbers we could deploy for defense."

An angry look crossed his face. "The council decided to let the Galaxy fend for itself, and keep our defenses focused on our homeworld."

"I was opposed to that, so I proposed a quick and dirty solution."

"A Time Bomb. All planets that hadn't been attacked yet, that we could reach, would be given a device that would surround their world with a temporal shell."

"Any enemy attack would be repelled by a Chaotic Temporal Shockwave. Time itself would warp and twist anything not inside the shield."

"But we soon discovered that a sufficiently heavy enough assault would cause the shield to collapse and everything would be destroyed. The planet and the assaulting force would both be wiped out."

"Our enemy didn't care, so they simply started hitting protected planets with overwhelming force. It was a brute force approach, but they had the numbers to spare, and didn't care about individual casualties."

"I suspect that's what happened here. That thing in the crater could be best referred to as a time splinter. It's acting like a Paradox Machine. It's keeping the fixed point from collapsing, allowing this alternate history to proceed." The Doctor concluded.

"But how could the Earth still be here then, if they hit Earths Shield that hard?" Rose asked.

"The Golden BB effect I suppose." The Doctor replied. "remember, time itself was warped and shattered by my device. Everything and anything could possibly occur or not occur. Just this one time a physical temporal splinter was formed and somehow kept the Earth from being destroyed."

"Just luck of the Irish I suppose." The Doctor finished.

"So, can you shut it down?" Rose asked.

"It's not that simple Rose. That splinter is the only thing that's keeping time from collapsing."

"No, what I'm going to have to do is go back in time and try to put history back on track. Every time history deviates from what should have happened I'm going to have to correct it."

"The hard part is going to be in doing the correction. Every time we try to fix history, The splinter is going to be trying keep that from happening. As far as it's concerned, this is the correct timeline, and will do everything to oppose us."

"And to top it all off, we're only going to get one chance to fix each problem. If we fail, that's it game over."

"But that's not the best part, no. The best part is that the splinter itself is starting to fail. And if it fails before we're done, BOOM! The end of time itself." The Doctor concluded darkly.

Rose swallowed a little at that. "So, no pressure then eh?"

"Exactly." Turning to Rose, he suddenly smiled. "Right! Let's get to it then!"