Mother
"Winnie!"
Smoothing her dress, Winifred Lloyd-Bambera surveyed the living room one last time. Everything was in its place, not a toy in sight and every hint of dirt or dust had been chased away with liberal use of Pledge and a duster. Not that there had been much disorder to being with; the Lloyd-Bambera household was famed on the base for its neatness and sterile cleanliness.
The wide smile on her husband's face when he burst into the living room told Winifred everything.
"You got it?" she asked.
James picked her up in a massive hug, swung her around and kissed her heartily.
"I got it," he confirmed.
"That's wonderful!" Winifred said, smiling.
James stepped back and mock-saluted her. "Major Lloyd at your service, ma'am."
Winifred punched his shoulder for the "ma'am" but she couldn't be angry. Not when he finally had the promotion.
"Where are you being posted?" she asked.
"United Nations Intelligence Taskforce," James said.
Winifred frowned. "I've never heard of it."
"No reason you should have. It's all rather hush-hush, but if it's even half of what I've heard then it's going to be an amazing posting."
"New base?"
James hesitated. "Apparently we'll need off-base housing this time. Security and all that."
Winifred raised her eyebrows. "It must be a hush-hush thing. Will we be alright?"
James smiled and kissed her again, a sweet kiss to reassure her. Sometimes she missed the wild fire of their early marriage, but this mature, trusting partnership was worth the sacrifice.
"We'll be fine," James said. "Don't I always make sure of it?"
Winifred had always had a weakness for pretty blond men so she smiled and trusted him.
Sometimes she dreamed of other things, lives as different from her domestic simplicity as could be imagined. Lives filled with danger, excitement, fighting and strange, wondrous things. The dreams always fled when dawn came leaving nothing to remember.
Or long for.
Sergeant
The chopper pilot was trying, but it was no use. Green leaves flew under the helicopter with dizzying speed and branches clanged against the metal sides. Bambera could smell smoke, noxious and thick in her lungs.
"Brace yourselves," the pilot yelled, "we're going down!"
Bambera braced herself as well as possible and then the helicopter hit something. The world danced a jig around her, the sides of the chopper were suddenly under her and the sound was deafening.
The helicopter came to rest on its side, rocking unsteadily for a while. Sparks spurted from the instrument panel and the smoke became thicker.
Bambera was relieved, and a little surprised, to find that she could move. She sat up and the pain her chest was incredible. The smoke caught in her throat, which only made the pain worse. Broken ribs, definitely.
"Right, everyone off!" she shouted - croaked, really - as soon as she caught her breath. "This thing could blow at any minute."
She checked the pilot but she was dead, her neck twisted at a sharp angle. There was movement in the chopper around her as the survivors evacuated. Bambera grabbed her pack and gun and squeezed out after them.
She was just in time. A moment later the helicopter exploded, the heat scorching the back of her neck as she fell.
Bambera spat grass out of her mouth and muttered, "Oh sh-shame."
This definitely was not a good month to give up swearing.
"Are you OK, Sarg?"
Bambera looked up into the face of Lance Corporal Patterson. "Of course I'm OK. Did anyone else make it?"
Patterson nodded. "Salmon and Zbrigniev."
"No officers?" Bambera's head was starting pound. "Great."
"What hit us?" Patterson asked shakily.
"Just a guess, but I'd say it was one of those pepper-pots with guns that the Brigadier was warning us about over the radio," Bambera said. "I could be wrong, though."
"What do we do now?" Patterson asked.
Trying not to wince, Bambera levered herself into a sitting position and looked around. They were in a nice, leafy clearing in a wood somewhere in darkest Devon. There were metal pots with powerful weaponry menacing a small village a few miles away. She had a few broken ribs, Zbrigniev's leg didn't look good and Salmon was vomiting in the bushes. The officers were all dead; she was the only one with more than a sidearm and their odds looked slightly worse than a snowball's in hell.
"We go and find our people," Bambera said. "Before they have all the fun and leave none for us!"
Freighter Captain
Space is a vacuum, harsh and unforgiving, held at bay for some by the metal walls of a ship and a few technological gadgets. People had been known to go mad just from looking out at the void and realising how fragile their lives were. The first time Bambera looked out, frightened and alone, she had fallen in love with the majesty of infinity. It was a love affair that never ended no matter where she was or how many human lovers she took. The slowly moving starfield in the viewscreens haunted her dreams and drove her onwards.
The bridge of the freighter was a little too small to be properly called a bridge, but Bambera was too damned proud of it to care. This was finally her ship, bought and paid for, and even if there was only space for the pilot and engineer she was going to call it a bridge.
After twenty years of hard work, she thought she was entitled to call any part of the ship whatever she damn well wanted.
The S.S. Pendragon was old, creaky and the stabilisers needed a complete overhaul. She was also one of the fastest C-class Mercurys around and Bambera had been lucky to find her. The D-class was well out of her league and only the Mercury-class ships had the carrying capacity that she would need to make the ship pay.
None of that mattered at the moment. Bambera was standing on the bridge, tucked behind the engineer's chair, enjoying her first night as captain of her own ship.
The peace didn't last. With a burst of static, the radio crackled into life and Bambera heard Nallchi's voice.
"Captain, we need you down here," Nallchi said.
"What is it?" Bambera asked, making a mental note to get the engineer to look at internal comms as soon as possible.
"Not really sure, boss," Nallchi said. "Thought you might be the best person to look at it."
Bambera sighed. "I'll be right down. Where are you?"
"Galley, level 2."
The ship's living quarters were cramped, to ensure the maximum cargo space, but they were dotted in sections throughout the ship. It was supposed to reduce the sense of claustrophobia. It took Bambera fifteen minutes to reach the rear galley and she had to climb up two levels and down one to get there. Convenience had never been a big consideration in the C-classes.
The rest of the off-duty crew had joined Nallchi when Bambera arrived and they were surrounding something on the floor of the galley. The quiet murmuring stopped as she stepped into the room and several concerned faces turned towards her.
"What do we have?" Bambera asked, hoping it was nothing more serious than missing food supplies.
Without a word, the crew stepped aside to let Bambera see it.
Bambera sighed. "Oh, shame."
Sitting on the floor, curled up and looking around with a terrified expression, sat a young Asian girl. It was possible that she was over twenty, but Bambera wouldn't have bet her new ship on it. The girl had waist-length black hair, which looked tangled and wild, and she wore big boots, with a short skirt, leggings and a white lab coat over a red jacket. It wasn't a style that Bambera was familiar with, but fashions could change over time.
Bambera crouched down next to the girl and her crew moved off to the furthest corner from them.
Trying to put on her best, friendliest smile, Bambera said, "Hello."
"Where am I?" the girl asked.
"On my ship," Bambera said. "I'm Captain Bambera. What's your name?"
"Shou Yuing," was the shaky reply.
Bambera held out her hand. "Welcome to the S.S. Pendragon."
Shou Yuing shook her hand tentatively. She wasn't trembling and she was already starting to regain some colour in her face. Good, the kid was no coward.
"Do you remember where you were?" Bambera asked.
"In the lab," Shou Yuing. "The experiment . . . I don't know what happened."
"What year was it?"
"Nineteen ninety-two." Shou Yuing looked at her suspiciously. "Why?"
Bambera sighed. "You've been caught up in a time storm. This is 2315. I'm sorry."
For a long, frightening moment Shou Yuing was silent as she absorbed it. "What do I do?"
"Learn to live with it," Bambera said, trying to soften her voice but not succeeding. "I've never found a way back."
Journalist
"How do I let myself get talked into these things?" Winifred Bambera asked.
On the ledge above her, fiddling with the window, Sarah Jane Smith said, "Because curiosity killed the cat."
"Or the journalist."
"Or the journalist," Sarah Jane agreed. "Besides, you love this."
Winifred glanced down at the ground, which looked rather far away even though they were only ten feet up. "I'd love it better if I wasn't trying to break into the first floor window of a school."
"Where's your sense of adventure?" Sarah Jane asked.
"Back at the office, where we'd be if we had any sense."
"Sometimes I can't remember why I put up with you."
At that moment, there was a faint 'snick' from the window and Sarah Jane "ah"-ed triumphantly. The level of expertise with which she squirmed through the window told Winifred that this was not the first time (or even the tenth time) that she had broken into buildings. Over the past few weeks of being assigned as Sarah Jane's partner, Winifred had learnt that legality often took a back seat to Sarah Jane's moral code. She had also been involved in more dangerous and just plain weird situations than she had ever expected to find in a lifetime of journalism.
The rumours about Sarah Jane had seriously underestimated her.
Sighing internally, Winifred scrambled up the fire-escape ladder and followed Sarah Jane through the narrow window, dropping to the floor with a thud. The sharp pain in her knee was sure to be a nasty bruise and Winifred wondered what new stories she could come up with to explain the scrapes along her forearms.
Sarah Jane stood a few feet away, peering down the corridor. The walls were lined with the usual school remnants; pictures painted by childish hands, craft displays and fire extinguishers. It all looked perfectly normal.
"What are we looking for?" Winifred asked, standing up and trying to brush the worst of the dirt off the front of her jeans.
"Anything odd," Sarah Jane replied.
"What sort of odd?"
It was hard to make out the other woman's expression in the moonlight, but Winifred thought she rolled her eyes.
"Just . . . odd," Sarah Jane said. "Out of place."
After ten minutes of wandering up and down corridors with nothing more exciting to see than class 5D's prize-winning pottery pigs, Winifred paused at a door marked 3C. It was one of those institutional classroom doors with a mesh-covered glass window in the centre and ugly green paint. Winifred had stood outside half a dozen of them during her school career, waiting for teachers to let her back into class or march her to the headmaster for another lecture on being a smart-arse to authority figures.
This door was different. It vibrated slightly beneath her fingertips.
She peered through the glass window for a long moment, trying to make her brain take it all in. She had seen a few odd things since Sarah Jane appeared in her life, but nothing like this. Something in the back of her mind screamed.
Sarah Jane trotted down the corridor towards her. "Found anything?"
Winifred nodded, not taking her eyes off 3C's window. "I think so."
Green light bathed Sarah Jane's face as she moved to peer in through the window. "Oh no."
The panic seemed to be rising up to choke her, but Winifred hung on grimly and asked, "What do we do?"
"Right now?" Sarah Jane asked. "Run!"
Burning red eyes turned towards the window as Winifred and Sarah Jane began running.
Time traveller
Brigadier Bambera watched the TARDIS fade away, accompanied by a loud wheezing sound that seemed out of place with the supposed sophistication of the machine, and wondered.
It was an odd feeling to suddenly realise that there was an entire world out there that she didn't know. Aliens, other dimensions, magic that looks like technology . . . none of that had been in her brief when she was assigned to UNIT and in six months of service this was the first time she had encountered any of it. To hear Lethbridge-Stewart talk, it used to happen all the time.
Times, it appeared, were changing.
A few days ago Bambera had been quite happy with the UNIT assignment - ecstatic, even - yet now she felt oddly discontented. Life with UNIT was all very normal these days.
Bambera wasn't sure that she liked normal.
Lethbridge-Stewart was walking back to his Doris, back to his life, and Bambera began to turn away and follow him.
That was when she heard it, that groaning, laboured sound that couldn't possibly come from a machine that actually travelled through time and space in the blink of an eye. It was a sound that Bambera had been sure she would never hear again.
Heart just starting to beat faster, she turned back in time to see the blue police box materialise in front of her. A moment later the door opened and the Doctor leaned out.
"Ace thought you might like a trip," the Doctor said cheerfully, raising his hat to her.
Ace joined him at the door with a wide grin. "Yeah, we thought you might want to see a few things."
"Well, I-" Bambera began.
"There must be some period in history you've always been interested in," the Doctor said.
Ace rolled her eyes. "If he can find it."
The Doctor looked mildly offended. "If I can find it?"
"Professor, this thing never quite lands on time, does it?"
"I'll have you know that this TARDIS is one of the finest achievements of the most advanced culture in the universe," the Doctor said. "The pinnacle of their technological prowess, the epitome of-"
"Yeah, yeah," Ace said. "But its timer is a still little out of whack sometimes. What do you say, Winnie?"
Bambera's eyebrows drew down. "Winnie?"
"Well, I can't just call you Brigadier all the time," Ace said.
Bambera fixed her with her most freezing glare. "Brigadier will do perfectly well."
The Doctor smiled at her, that disarming smile that seemed to come just before he did something utterly insane. "Winifred, I can have you back before supper. We'll take a quick trip, drop Ancelyn off and no one will have time to miss you."
As Bambera walked towards Ace and the Doctor, it occurred to her that she'd decided to go with them the moment the TARDIS reappeared, whatever it took.