Living In Time And Space (Book Six of The Bad Wolf Chronicles)

The Sister of River Song

This is a bumpy one, guys. Hold onto your seats, and I hope you won't need the bazookas some of you might be tempted to use.

Jessie goes to her death, River stops it from happening, yada yada yada. But who joins them in the attempt to set time right, and just complicated is Jessie's plan?

Here's "The Sister of River Song!"

***

Winston Churchill, Holy Roman Emperor, dismissed his guards as his prisoner was brought in: a dark-haired woman in Asgardian robes. "Tick tock goes the clock, as the old song says," he told her. "But they don't, do they? The clocks never tick. Something has happened to time. That's what you say. What you never stop saying. All of history is happening at once. But what does that mean? What happened? Explain to me in terms that I can understand what happened to time."

Jessie looked up at Churchill and deadpanned, "My sister."

+++

"Imagine you were dying," Jessie said as she walked into a crashed and disabled spaceship. "Imagine you were afraid and a long way from home and in terrible pain. Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse, you looked up and saw the face of the devil herself." Jessie smiled sweetly into the Dalek eyestalk in front of her. "Hello, Dalek."

"Emergency! Emergency!" the disabled Dalek cried, trying to move. "Weapon system disabled. Emergency!"

"Quiet, you," Jessie ordered, opening the top of the Dalek. "There's something I need from your data core. You Daleks must know something about the Silence. I need it all."

+++

Jessie later walked into the Calisto B space bar and headed right up to the bartender. "Gideon Vandaleur," she offered the name. "Get him. Now."

"Who says he's here?" the bartender asked.

Jessie held up her hand and let the Dalek's eyestalk drop onto the counter. She smiled sweetly at the scared man. "I did."

A short while later, while she absently played with a table tennis racket and ball, a cloaked figure sat across from her. "Father Gideon Vandaleur, former envoy of the Silence," she acknowledged. "My condolences."

"Your what?" the man asked.

"Guess you didn't hear," Jessie smirked, catching the ball. "Gideon Vandaleur has been dead for six months." She slid her sonic down her sleeve and sonicked the figure, and it stiffened. She leaned forward and looked right into one of the figure's eyes. "May I speak to the Captain, please?"

She saw a faint figure run off, then she leaned back. "Hello again, Tesselecta time-traveling shape-changing robot powered by miniaturized people. Did not expect to say that in my lifetimes. Long time since Berlin."

"Bad Wolf, what have you done to our systems?" the Tesselecta asked.

"They'll be fine if you behave," Jessie promised. "This unit can disguise itself as anyone in the universe, so if you're posing as Vandaleur, you're investigating the Silence. Tell me about them."

"Tell you what?"

"Just one thing. What's their weakest link?"

+++

It turned out to be a who. Jessie smirked smugly as she played Live Chess against an alien in an eyepatch, and she was winning. The crowd around them was roaring, and she tapped her fingers on the board. "The crowd is getting restless," she goaded. "They know the Queen is your only legal move, except you've already moved it twelve times, which means there are now over four million volts running through it. That's why they call it Live Chess." She gestured to the alien's hand. "Even with the gauntlet, you'll never make it to Bishop Four alive."