Beyond (audio story)

Romana met her fate on Unity, but Braxiatel isn't ready to give up on her. In a forbidden realm, he offers one last hope to escape the chaos of a universe at war.

First, they must enter the Beyond and confront the ghosts and monsters within...

Plot

Irving Braxiatel flies his TARDIS into a black hole to take himself and Romana into the Beyond. After a bumpy journey, they arrive and Braxiatel explains that the Beyond is an anomalous place which has come into being as a result of the damage to the timelines caused by the Time War. They have landed on a memory of Excium, a planet which was destroyed in a timeline which has been wiped out, and go to find a TARDIS to take them into the next "moment" of the Beyond, hurrying to avoid being killed by an exploding star.

Romana and Braxiatel avoid being hit by a crashing Battle TARDIS and meet its pilot, Captain Zarafortuna, who draws her weapon and tells them that she has been reliving the crash again and again but has never seen them before. The star explodes and time resets. Romana and Braxiatel get into Zara's TARDIS, which Braxiatel is able to get working and program to take them to Zara's ship, Dreadnought Servia. Zara becomes cocooned with energy and screams before disappearing, having been neutralised due to the TARDIS taking her to her own timeline, one in which she already exists.

Zara returns to the crash of her Battle TARDIS and emerges, calling out for Romana and Braxiatel. She encounters one of the Ravenous, who orders her to follow Romana and Braxiatel with its help.

Romana and Braxiatel arrive on the Dreadnought and find that the Time Lords aboard are abandoning ship due to the explosion of the star. Romana detects the TARDIS docks and leads the way to the hydrovators. Braxiatel tells her that they are looking for the Parallax, a powerful device which could end the war and was discovered by an engineer who travelled to the core of the Beyond through a black hole which appeared at the beginning of the war. He does not tell her what it is, however, claiming that she would not believe him. When they reach the TARDIS bay, they find that the TARDIS is deadlocked.

Lieutenant Dax is eaten by the Ravenous and Zara boards the Dreadnought.

Romana and Braxiatel track the owner of the TARDIS to the bridge, which Romana can enter thanks to being President in this timeline. They find the owner, this timeline's Narvin, and learn that his Romana ordered that the Apex Protocol be used to destroy the Cannovar system as it was to become the staging post for the final attack on Gallifrey. Narvin shows them millions of hidden Dalek ships which will be obliterated, as will the Dreadnought and the six inhabited planets in the system, and tells them that his TARDIS will not work. He gives them the codes, however, and asks them not to tell his other self what he did here. Once they have gone, Zara arrives on the bridge with the Ravenous, who transforms her into one of them. They devour Narvin.

Romana and Braxiatel find that everybody on board has disappeared and detect the draining of artron energy across the ship. They flee from the Ravenous to the hydrovator and surmise that the Ravenous have devoured everybody on board and increased in power with each kill. They reach Narvin's TARDIS before the hundreds of Ravenous on the ship can get them. Braxiatel has difficulty navigating the TARDIS to the next layer as the barriers become denser as they approach the core; on the journey, he tells Romana that the Parallax can use a quantum biological network to remove a species from existence. Romana finds this monstrous but Braxiatel, who says that he left the war so that he did not have to watch people sink to such depths, says that it is the only way.

The TARDIS materialises on Gallifrey, which is frozen as a result of the density of spacetime. Romana accuses Braxiatel of leaving Gallifrey out of cowardice and keeping information from her; he says that he knows how flawed and venal he is and wants to keep Romana from becoming the same as a result of the war.

The Ravenous emerge on Gallifrey and go in search of Romana and Braxiatel.

Romana and Braxiatel arrive at the Panopticon and identify a frozen Leela as the anomaly here, surmising that the artron energy from her time travel is reacting to their presence. Braxiatel realises that they are seeing the moment before Leela dies and that the Romana of this timeline attacked the Cannovar system as revenge. Their presence begins to cause a temporal shockwave allowing Leela to tell them to get away before it is too late; Leela dies and Romana and Braxiatel run away.

The Ravenous take away the frozen Time Lords and it seems to Romana and Braxiatel that this is the end, for which he apologises. However, his TARDIS materialises and they escape inside, although he does not believe that it could have found them by itself and thus must have been sent by somebody. He explains that his plan to escape once they had the Parallax was to use the engineer's TARDIS and finds that they are flying blind into the unknown. Once this is all over, he is uncertain about whether or not he would return to Gallifrey, never having felt like he belonged there, and asks about the Doctor; Romana has heard that he has changed for the worse.

The TARDIS materialises on a dusty world and Romana and Braxiatel head to a light miles away, resting in a cave for a while to get away from the duststorm. Braxiatel confesses that the Parallax removes not only the target species but also any unprotected worlds which the Daleks have invaded as a way of finding balance, which Romana finds repugnant. The Parallax requires the authorisation of two Time Lords, however.

Once the storm has calmed, Romana and Braxiatel find the engineer's house and raise their hands at his order. The engineer opens the door and reveals that he is an aged Braxiatel, having been here for what feels to him like eternity. He brought Romana and his younger self here by sending his TARDIS to Gallifrey for them. Unbeknownst to them, the Ravenous have arrived as well.

The old Braxiatel offers Romana and his younger self a nameless kind of rat to eat, but they decline. He explains that they are on a combination of different worlds and that the Parallax is real, having built it himself but not for the reasons that they think. He shows them the Parallax, which is actually a gateway leading to a universe without Daleks, a possibility of the Beyond which he fixed in place with a permanent gateway. He reveals to Romana that his younger self had deliberately taken her to the places that they have been in order to persuade her to help him commit mass murder.

The paradox of two Braxiatels being on the same plane draws Zara towards them. The younger suggests that he and Romana leave in the TARDIS, but Romana is tempted by the possibility of a world without Daleks and tells him to go whilst she prepares to enter the light with his older self. The younger is devoured by Zara, who dies due to the oversaturation of temporal energy within him. Romana decides that her duty is to her friends and to Gallifrey and that she cannot retreat through the Parallax. He hands her his TARDIS key and passes through the gateway.

Romana enters the TARDIS and sets the coordinates for Gallifrey, saying that she is coming home for Leela and Narvin. It dematerialises and something goes wrong. The Cloister Bell rings.

Cast

References

Romana last heard that the Dreadnought Servia was in the Jagbar Belt, protecting Epsilon Base.
Romana and Braxiatel use a hydrovator.
Lieutenant Dax is killed by the Ravenous.
Romana says that astrology is a "baffling human concept".
The Apex Protocol is a grain of super dense anti-matter encased in a sactevian shell and fired at 0.9x the speed of light into the heart of a white dwarf, destroying the Cannovar system on Romana's orders.
Cannovar's eighth planet, Excium, was wiped out and a memory of it exists in the Beyond, although the timeline in which it was destroyed was itself wiped out.
Braxiatel believes the desire to leave Gallifrey "runs in the family".
Romana claims others have seen "you know who" and she has been told that he has changed for the worse. Braxiatel believes he will never see him again.
Romana learnt how to make fires with little at hand whilst stranded on the Desert Moon of Zarber.
Romana mentions Wraxus, Pultonius VII, Armageddos, Aridius and Earth as planets invaded by the Daleks.

Notes

The names of planets invaded by the Daleks are references to the DWBIT Dalek Wars, which established that Aridius was subject to a full-scale invasion following the smaller incursion seen in The Chase.

Continuity

Romana mentions the Anti-Genesis codes. (AUDIO: From the Flames)
The Ravenous mention the Watchmaker sparing Braxiatel. (AUDIO: Enemy Lines)

External links

Official Beyond page at bigfinish.com