Mind the Gap

by Adrian Tullberg

The wooden door opened, and a misplaced leather boot nearly caused it's owner to fall.

A short spectacular balancing act accompanied by lots of arm movement later, and the Doctor decided it was stable enough to look around, not seeing anyone about.

Small asteroid, couldn't be more than a square mile in mass. Near no Artificial Environmental Shell; Earth local gravity, atmosphere, temperature, or near enough. Better stay close to the TARDIS in case whoever transmitted that very directed-at-him directional beacon decided it would be horribly entertaining to turn off this environment while he was still here...

"Doctor."

He stopped, turned on one heel to the stern expression underneath that frizzy blonde hair.

"River."

Her expression didn't change.

"Baby. Honey. Sugar. My Better Half. The Old Ball and Chain ..." The Doctor trailed off; the whole relating to those you happened to be married to still something of a mystery.

"The whole 'Sweetie' thing, never thought I'd miss it, but here we are and here I am, missing it-"

"I heard about Oswin Oswald. More importantly, I heard what Oswin Oswald did. Did for you. Did to the Daleks."

That raised a smile on his face. What she did, not what had been done to her.

"Yes, incredible wasn't it? I mean accessing the Master Delete function alone, that's a highly secure utility used to wipe out particularly malicious code, you need the authorisation of at least several Supremes..."

"Yes, unprecedented bit of hacking, well done. What I just spent a great deal of time and effort bringing you here to this exact time and place was to ask one question; when are you going to restore your files in the Dalek Pathweb?"

This stopped him.

"Okay, River? Don't know if I was getting the point across, but the Daleks don't remember me anymore. On-board files from soldier drones up to the next Emperor, right to deep secure back-up archives about me; gone."

"And that's the problem."

Sometimes, he wondered about River. Of course, what the Silence had done justified a lot of wondering, but encountering the reality ... "River, the whole faking my death thing? Didn't fool the Daleks for a second. They knew me too well."

"I know. Listened to some intriguing signal traffic once; A Supreme stated that all the Silence did was give you the element of surprise."

"This whole deleting business means that not only are the Daleks unexpecting and unaware, but it means that they won't be targeting others. You. Amy. Rory. Not to mention Sarah-Jane, Tegan, Martha, Donna, Mickey ... they won't hop on the bus and find the next version of a Roboman zapping them onto a Dalek Saucer so we can play a game of 'threaten the Doctor into doing whatever we want'."

"Well done. Very good points."

"Thank you."

"Can I make my points now?"

"If you must ..."

"When I was studying art history..."

"Art History?"

"I thought it was an easy grade. Big Mistake, some of those art academics should have been committed. The second thing I learned - the first was to duck when a certain vein starts pulsing - is that one of the major principles in the composition of art is that sometimes, the absence of something is more significant that it's presence."

"Yes. Very Interesting River. I'm not quite seeing how –"

"Right now, there is what can only be described as a significant absence in the Dalek's collective memories. Specifically, huge gaps concerning their most major defeats."

The Doctor raised his hand. "That can be attributed to other things, other events ..."

River was not to be deterred. "Right now, they cannot explain why they were driven off twenty-second century Earth. Spiridon. Why they inexplicably invested colossal resources in developing a prototype dimensionally transcendent time machine. Just why the Hand of Omega decided one day to scour Skaro's system. Gaps concerning the events of their creation. Events leading to the creation of the New Paradigm are a blank. They have no idea how they were defeated during the Time War."

"I see how that might be construed as an issue ..."

"Doctor, the most successfully genocidal warrior race that ever existed now has no idea who or what repeatedly defeated them and how. Just how do you think they're going to react?"

"I suspect a long sit down with a cup of tea and biscuits are not on the agenda."

River's hands flexed in that manner that reminded the Doctor about the whole 'her being trained and programmed to kill him' thing.

"Races that are less cybernetically dependent then the Daleks are spectacularly anally retentive about maintaining their memory files and backups. They know that they've been tampered with. And while the Daleks are many things, stupid is not one of those qualities. While the details of your involvement may have been spectacularly deleted, there's enough evidence for the Daleks to piece together that those events may have had one common element."

"But they still don't kn-"

"Doctor!"

"Shutting up. Dear."

"Before, you terrified them. Angered them, confused them. But you were a known element. Potentially predicable. Avoidable. Possibly defeatable. But now? There is something out there, something completely unknown that has consistently stopped them. They know nothing about it's strengths, weaknesses, patterns of behaviour, wether these were random encounters or targeted strikes."

River checked her 'liberated' Vortex Manipulator, then walked towards the edge of the asteroid. "Over here."

The Doctor, with some trepidation, walked over to the edge of the asteroid, then looked down over the curve. From the perspective of the current gravity orientation, he was looking down towards the starscape of a vast galaxy beneath him.

"Must say, you find some spectacular places when you want to twist my ear off."

River's face was unmoving. "Recognise that?"

"Ah ... typical spiral galaxy ... I know this one ... not terribly far from ..."

The vast cloud of stars like diamonds thrown onto velvet.

"...Skaro ..."

The diamonds were darkening.

The Doctor kneeled down, watching as what was one small dark blotch was slowly growing, spreading, starting to swallow the spiral arm.

"It's a horribly efficient weapon, you have to admit."

Countless stars dimming, fading, either compacting into black holes or simply collapsing. Whole systems, countless billions, trillions of lives snuffed out in an instant.

"The Daleks use dimensional rifts to link to a universe that's reached heat death. Then using the methods pioneered by Logopolis - they simply bleed enough entropic energies into the area."

The Doctor looked up at River. "Wha ... why ..."

River's cold expression slowly focussed on the Doctor.

"They want to maintain a five hundred gigaparsec defensive gap around their home galaxy." River got up. "There are three more scheduled for clearing."

"River, I ..."

"Mind the Gap, Doctor."

The whine of the Manipulator left the Doctor in the silent cold darkness.

The Doctor looked down the gap, the endless blackness.

Not too sure if he was trying to stop himself falling – or he'd fell long ago.