Out of Order
by Richard McGinlay

Featuring the Seventh Doctor, this adventure takes place between the Big Finish audio drama The Sirens of Time and his cameo appearance in the BBC novel The Eight Doctors

The TARDIS was confused, and who could blame her? After all, her owner had just returned to her in triplicate.

The latest among these three incarnations of the Doctor, who was commonly regarded as the seventh, patted the mahogany-panelled control console by way of reassurance. 'There, there, old girl,' he said, 'we've negotiated more complex chronological conundrums than this one.' He briefly looked over his shoulder towards his earlier selves as they entered the TARDIS and looked around, taking in the decor. 'Do come in,' he called cheerily to them. 'Make myselves at home!'

Turning back to the controls, the little man removed his straw hat and deposited it atop the small console, which lacked the transparent central column that he was more used to. He lifted one of the console's wooden panels to reveal the instrumentation of the conceptual geometer.

'Ah,' remarked the Doctor from two regenerations ago, a fresh-faced blond man wearing the garb of an Edwardian cricketer, 'the secondary control room.'

'Primary would be a more accurate designation, don't you think?' came the pedantic tones of the garishly costumed, curly-haired Sixth Doctor, as he barged past his younger self to get a better look at the console. 'It is, after all, the original one.'

'Well,' replied the Fifth Doctor, somewhat defensively, 'it's secondary in the sense that I - that is, we - rarely use it. Until now, it seems...'

'Yes,' murmured the latest Doctor (who barely registered the fact that he had begun to mentally capitalise the numbers of his incarnations). While his former selves had been bickering, he had been setting temporal co-ordinates and tying them into the TARDIS' architectural configuration. This done, he turned back to face his predecessors.

'I was recently forced to shut the old girl down in order to - how shall I put it? - prevent her from falling into enemy hands,' he explained, attempting to bring a little order to the proceedings. 'In rebooting her, I seem to have returned her to her original configuration, with this room reinstated as her primary control.' Which had certainly come as a shock to his companion Chris, he recalled.

The little man spun around on one heel to take in a full 360-degree view of the chamber. 'I rather like this room, actually. Quite Gothic. I might add a couple of bookshelves, though, here and there. But the colour scheme does go well with this jacket, don't you think? Ah!'

With that exclamation, he abruptly stuck his hands in his jacket pockets and started to rummage about. 'That reminds me...' Momentarily he produced a crumpled paper bag, which he unfurled and offered to his former selves. 'Would you like a jelly baby? I found them in a stasis cupboard over in the corner.'

The Fifth Doctor politely declined, looking rather dubious about the decades-old sweets.

'Oh, they're perfectly preserved,' the Seventh Doctor explained, 'and entirely edible. In fact, I'd quite forgotten how good they taste!'

The Sixth Doctor reached eagerly into the bag. 'Thank you - don't mind if I do!' He threw several jelly babies into his mouth. 'Now,' he mumbled through a mouthful of jellies, 'I personally don't mind which room you use to do it, so long as you get us both back to our own TARDISes.'

The three Doctors had been brought together by the machinations of the Sirens of Time, beings that thrived on the energies released by distortions in the flow of time. Different manifestations of the Sirens had intercepted the Doctor at three separate points in his lifetime and had manipulated him into perverting the course of established history. The effects had even been felt on the Doctor's home planet, Gallifrey, where the Time Lords had been overcome by an invading force, the Knights of Velyshaa. Thousands of Gallifreyans, including the High Council, had been slaughtered in this altered timeline. Fortunately, with the help of a creature called the Temperon, the Doctors had been able to restore history's proper pattern - or, at least, they sincerely hoped that they had.

The Temperon had deposited them in a forest on a planet, the name of which they had never discovered, close to where the Seventh Doctor's TARDIS had landed. As they trudged through the forest, the Doctors had tried to decide which era of Gallifreyan history had been affected by the Time Sirens. Had the world they had visited been contemporary to the Fifth, Sixth or Seventh Doctor, or had it been the Gallifrey of a different era altogether? It had been difficult to tell from the state of disrepair caused by the invading Knights. The Laws of Time ordinarily forbade Gallifreyans from visiting their planet's relative past or future, but then the situation had been anything but ordinary.

The Seventh Doctor hoped that, if it was President Romana's tenure that had been affected, his old travelling companion had come out of it unscathed.

And now he was lumbered with the task of getting his previous selves back home. 'Don't worry,' he announced confidently. 'Establishing a link between TARDISes isn't difficult, even across great distances of time and space. The same principle applies if you're linking the same TARDIS along different points in its own existence. The tricky part is having to cross my own time-stream.'

'Well, we know from experience that you're capable of circumventing the restrictions against that sort of thing,' remarked the Fifth Doctor. All TARDISes were engineered to avoid travelling into Gallifrey's past or future, and to prevent Gallifreyans from meeting each other out of temporal sequence. 'Quite capable, in fact,' he added, rather pointedly. 'Or are you going to tell me that that nasty business with the Ferutu hasn't happened to you yet?'

The Time Laws also forbade Gallifreyans from meeting older and younger versions of themselves, but the Seventh Doctor seemed to have made a habit of doing just that. He sighed. He had been hoping that his former self wouldn't bring up this particular subject. 'That was a tactical necessity...'

'Oh, really? And what about when you had your companion knock me out cold?' The blond man's voice broke into a higher pitch as he struggled to control his temper. Evidently this grievance had been on his mind for a while, but the three Doctors' recent escapade had kept them too busy for him to raise the subject before now. 'I suppose that was a tactical necessity too?'

The little man opened his mouth to reply, but was interrupted by a beeping signal from the console. 'Ah,' he smiled. 'Good news. That means my TARDIS has locked on to yours.' He pointed towards his fifth self.

'Saved by the beep, eh?' the Sixth Doctor grinned, nudging his successor.

The Seventh Doctor spoke sincerely: 'Believe it or not, I do regret some of my previous actions, and I've turned my back on certain aspects of my lifestyle. I've decided to go back to basics, as it were.' He gazed into the middle distance. 'It was recently made clear to me just how over-complicated my life had become. I have Romana to thank for that...'

* * *

They had been standing on a mountainside close to where the Doctor's ancestral home, the House of Lungbarrow, had until recently stood. President Romana and Director of Allegiance Ferain, of the shadowy Celestial Intervention Agency, had asked the Seventh Doctor to carry out a mission - the mission for which he had been bound before the Sirens of Time had distracted him. Romana had been reluctant to make the request; the same could not be said of the elderly Ferain.

'Just tell me,' said the Doctor. 'What is this mission?'

'We'd like you to bring back the Master's remains,' Ferain sneered.

The Doctor looked surprised, even shocked. 'His remains?'

'Yes,' said Romana, pushing Ferain out of her way. 'Didn't you receive the message?'

The Doctor shook his head, frowning. 'Message? No, I didn't. What message?'

Romana gently placed a hand on the Doctor's shoulder, and took a deep breath. 'The Master was executed on Skaro. For the crime of...' - she paused, feeling awkward, irrationally embarrassed about the news she was about to report - '..."challenging the power of the Daleks."' She imbued the Daleks' sentence with an appropriate degree of sarcasm.

'Oh.' The Doctor pursed his lips. 'I see.'

'Just prior to his extermination,' Ferain butted in, 'the Master sent out a telepathic message. His last will and testament. He wanted you to collect his remains and bring them back to Gallifrey.'

'I don't understand why you didn't receive it,' Romana added.

'Well, my life has been a little, um, irregular of late. My time-stream twisting and turning like a...' - the Doctor searched for an appropriate word - '...twisty-turny thing.'

'But even so, no matter what your spatiotemporal location, you should still have been able to receive a fellow Time Lord's mental communication at the appropriate point in Gallifrey's relative temporal sequence.' Surely this was a given, she thought, since the in-built limitations of Gallifreyan time technology did not normally allow travellers to encounter each other out of sequence.

The Doctor looked down, having apparently taken a keen interest in his footwear. He shuffled his feet guiltily. 'Yes, that's the theory.'

Romana was appalled. She conducted the Doctor away from Ferain's earshot, and whispered harshly, 'Do you mean to tell me that you've been deliberately travelling in disregard of Gallifreyan temporal sequence? That's terribly dangerous - madly perilous!'

'Well, some of my projects have required a bit of... delicate temporal manipulation,' the Doctor admitted. 'Benny's wedding, for instance.'

'Oh yes,' smiled Romana, finding herself reminiscing about the occasion, 'what a delightful event.' Then she frowned again. 'But wait a millisecond. The Master turned up there as well! I hadn't thought of that.'

'Why, yes, so he did.' The Doctor appeared not to realise what she was implying. 'I assume he escaped from Chancellery custody?'

'As a matter of fact, he did. You don't appear surprised.'

'Not really. He usually escapes. Until now, it would seem.'

'Well, here's a fact that may surprise you, Doctor,' Romana announced gravely. 'When I succeeded President Flavia, I inherited a great many loose ends from her administration. One of these, I recently discovered, was a message from the Daleks. That was how I learned about your old rival's last request. The Daleks had extended an invitation for a Time Lord delegation to visit Skaro and collect the Master's remains.'

'Obviously a trap,' the Doctor interrupted.

'Obviously. But the point that I am making is that their request was received before I attended Professor Summerfield's wedding. Before I even became president. Therefore one or more of us - me, you, or the Master - must have been out of temporal sequence on that occasion!'

The Doctor winced. 'Rules never meant much to him.'

'Or to you, Doctor.'

'Hmmmm,' he pondered. 'That might not have been the first time he's met me out of order, come to think of it. There was that time on Duchamp 331...'

'This is a serious matter' hissed Romana. 'Might I suggest that you make an effort not to flout the Laws of Time quite so flagrantly? They will bend only so far before they break - catastrophically.'

'Madam President,' declared the Doctor earnestly, 'I promise you that from now on I will be much more careful. Especially when I set off for Skaro!'

* * *

The Sixth Doctor raised his eyebrows. 'Romana, eh?'

'She's back from E-space?' the Fifth Doctor piped up.

'Oh, she's back all right,' the Seventh grinned, 'and that's not all! Now she's the...' He stopped himself mid-sentence. 'Well, best not to speak out of turn when one's past selves are around. A little foreknowledge can be a dangerous - and complicated - thing.'

'Quite right, quite right,' said the Sixth Doctor. 'The waves of time wash us all clean - as a certain wise, handsome and rather distinguished Time Lord once said.'

'So, you're a changed man, are you?' asked the Fifth, dubiously.

'Oh yes,' replied the Seventh, 'several times over.'

'Well, you've certainly made a good start of "going back to basics",' said the Sixth Doctor sarcastically, spreading his arms wide to indicate the three of them.

'Well, this meeting was hardly my fault, was it?' protested the little man. 'I'm sure Time will take that into consideration.' He turned back to his youthful predecessor. 'Are you going to stand there all day, or do you want to go home?'

The Seventh Doctor flicked a switch on the console, and a hole appeared in one of the wood-panelled walls. The hole was blurred around the edges and it rippled like the surface of a liquid. Through it could be glimpsed the TARDIS' more familiar white-walled console room. Within this room stood two humanoids, a brunette female and a red-haired male - Tegan and Turlough, the Fifth Doctor's travelling companions. It was evident that they could not see the interface from their side of it.

The Seventh Doctor extended a hand to his fifth incarnation. 'Have a safe trip,' he said.

The blond man looked down at the proffered hand for a moment, then held out his own. 'As you're probably aware,' he said, 'I find it hard to hold a grudge.' The two Doctors shook hands. 'Goodbye, Doctor.'

'Goodbye, Doctor.'

The youthful Doctor then shook hands with his portly successor. 'Well, Doctor, it's certainly been an experience,' he said. 'Cheerio.'

'Bon voyage,' smiled the Sixth Doctor.

The Fifth Doctor stepped through the interface into his own TARDIS. As the Seventh Doctor turned back to the console, a high-pitched Australian-accented voice was heard to exclaim: 'Doctor! Where the heck have you been?'

The two remaining Doctors just had time to overhear their counterpart replying, 'I'm pleased to see you, too, Tegan,' before the interface closed.

'I was so sweet and innocent back then, wasn't I?' remarked the Seventh Doctor ironically, as he reset the co-ordinates.

'Hmmmm,' replied his predecessor dubiously. 'Peri seemed to think so. No wonder nobody took me seriously, in a body that young. Thank goodness I've regained some maturity since then.'

The Seventh Doctor raised his bushy eyebrows. 'Oh, yes, that costume certainly inspires respect.'

'Whereas your oh-so-stylish pullover is the height of haute couture!' replied the Sixth.

The little man looked down at his beloved pullover, bedecked with colourful question marks, which he'd only recently decided to start wearing again. He elected to change the subject. 'Thank you, by the way.'

'For what? My fashion advice?'

'No, for not letting on to the youngster back then about our own, um, little encounters. It would have rather undermined my defence.'

'Yes, that was quick-witted of me, wasn't it? Better to avoid discussing topics such as Davros' trial, for instance, when former incarnations are within earshot, I always think. Best not to fly in the face of the Time Laws any more than is absolutely necessary.'

The console beeped again, signifying that a connection had been established with the Sixth Doctor's TARDIS.

As he watched the interface open up, the Seventh Doctor couldn't help thinking about the ignoble fate that awaited his predecessor. Shot down by the Rani's weapon - what kind of an exit was that for such a theatrical personality? He hoped that his own demise would be somewhat more dignified and meaningful.

'Well, aren't you going to wish me a safe journey, too?' The portly man's words broke into his train of thought. The Sixth Doctor was holding out his hand.

'Of course, of course,' replied the Seventh, after what he hoped had been a barely perceptible hesitation. 'It goes without saying. Have a very pleasant journey, Doctor.' He shook his predecessor's hand.

'Adieu!'

As the Sixth Doctor stepped through the interface, his successor experienced an uncomfortable pang of guilt. The Seventh Doctor knew that he couldn't give away any kind of warning or clue about the fate of his former self without risking dire consequences to established history, to say nothing of his own current existence. He closed the interface and activated the TARDIS' dematerialisation circuit.

As the ship departed the material universe for the extra-dimensional realm that is the space/time vortex, the Doctor pondered his temporal misdemeanours. He really must try and avoid contravening Gallifrey's temporal sequence from now on. Live his life on the straight and narrow - so far as a time-traveller could, at any rate.

And on that note, he had a mission that was long overdue.

A mission to collect... something. Or was it someone?

He'd been about to set the co-ordinates... but for where? He'd been asked to go to this place, wherever it was, by the president of the Time Lords. Whoever that was.

President... Flavia? Was that right? She'd been succeeded once before, then reinstated, he knew that for sure, but hadn't Flavia stepped down again? He couldn't remember.

Why couldn't he remember?

Could this be the work of the Sirens of Time? Perhaps he and his other selves hadn't completely restored Gallifreyan history. No, surely not - if that were the case, then he would have felt the effects before now. So why was the memory of his mission eluding him like this? Was it some kind of Blinovitch Limitation Effect?

The waves of Time wash us all clean.

Could Time herself be regulating him in some way? Or was she chastising him, even? Perhaps Time had decided that he'd strayed from the straight and narrow once too often. Maybe he had been getting ahead of himself, or ahead of Gallifreyan events at any rate, and wasn't supposed to have been assigned this elusive mission just yet.

The Doctor's hands hovered over the co-ordinate selector, which still awaited his input. He gently closed the mahogany panel, without setting any co-ordinates. He decided he would let the TARDIS drift randomly for a while, and put all thoughts of a mission to the back of his mind.

He was left feeling somewhat at a loose end, but he had a sneaking suspicion that, when the time was right, events would catch up with him...

* * *

Elsewhere in time and space, in a laboratory deep within his own TARDIS, the Master was nearing the completion of a mission of his own.

He had begun his experimentation on the deathworms quite some time ago, in relative terms. Shortly after his escape from the planet of the Cheetah people, and still dangerously unhinged by the savage influence of that world, he had devised an insane scheme to destroy his arch rival, the Doctor, even at the risk of his own life. He had used accelerated processes of genetic engineering to improve upon the natural deathworms he had obtained from the Morg race. But even at an accelerated rate, the experiments took time.

During that time, the Master had faced a number of distractions. Not least of which were several run-ins with the Doctor and his troublesome assistant, Ace. Then an opportunity had arisen for him to be completely cured of his Cheetah infection. Thanks to Tzun nanite technology, he had even achieved a bodily regeneration. After that, the deathworm experiment had seemed redundant, and he had all but forgotten about the project.

But recently the Master's body had been devastated by a powerful and dangerous entity called the Warp Core. The creature had stripped him of the healing powers of the Tzun nanites and the restorative energies of the Traken keepership, and had left him in the same emaciated condition that had blighted him before his brief reign as the Keeper of Traken. Once again, the Master was in desperate need of a new body.

Among certain other schemes, he had resumed his experimentation upon the deathworms, and was even now adding characteristics that would increase their efficacy. The genetic traits of a Skarosian morphant that he had managed to procure were blending in superbly.

'Skaro,' the Master pondered to himself, as an idea took shape in his twisted mind. 'Ah yes, that would make the perfect setting. Perhaps I should pay a visit to my old friends on Skaro!'

Background feature: Before the Bullets