Onboard Sky Station Epsilon-065

Secret Research Base for Division 7

THE DOCTOR SAT BOLT UPRIGHT in his seat, pulled awake by the thundering of his heart and the hammering in his head. Momentarily off balance, he clutched the arms of his chair, gripping the supports tightly between his fingers as he waited for the initial alarm to fade.

He’d fallen asleep at his desk again. An occurrence that was starting to happen with frightening regularity these days. He’d always put in long days and short nights, but after the destruction of NE-2, he barely slept at all anymore. Exhaustion hung over him like a shroud, pressing him down and down toward an early grave, and even when he did sleep, it was only to be awoken again by nightmares. Or should he say the nightmare—it was always the same one.

Spectres. Thousands and thousands of Spectres surging around him in a pool of black.

The Doctor shuddered. Others may call them aliens, but they seemed to him nothing so much as demons, like those in the vision of Leo XIII, a Tellurian holy man of old. As the stories went, he’d fallen into a deep faint while in conference with his men, only to have the most terrible of visions: evil spirits charging up from the depths of hell, falling upon the Eternal City that they might damn every last living soul.

Evil spirits.

A vision of blackened rainbows writhed through the Doctor’s head, and he let out a noise somewhere between a laugh and a sob. Evil spirits, indeed. After all these centuries, the spirits of that holy man’s vision had finally come, descending upon the human race in an endless shiver that would not cease until they had taken every last man, woman, and child in the universe. Only in Leo’s vision, the mighty Archangel, Saint Michael himself, had swooped down to do battle with these spirits, never resting until he had cast Satan and all his demons back into hell.

Without thought, the Doctor’s lips silently moved in prayer to that mighty defender, the words taken straight from those written by His Holiness himself.

Saint Michael The Archangel,

Defend us in battle.

Be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the Devil.

May God rebuke him, we humbly pray,

And do you, O Prince of the Heavenly Host,

By the Divine Power of God,

Cast into Hell Satan and all the evil spirits

Who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls.

Amen.

Even the familiar words did little to soothe him. It had been over four years since the Spectres had come, seeping into the human race without anyone the wiser. Time was running out, and yet neither faith nor science had yielded an answer to this plague of spirits sent to destroy them all. Though the Doctor normally considered himself a patient man, a thread of desperation had slowly begun winding its way through his subconscious, creeping into his slumber and subverting his dreams, suffusing his consciousness with a restless urgency almost strangling in its insistency.

It had made him reckless, pushed him to do things he wouldn’t otherwise have done, like interrogating a heartbroken kid in a quest for answers that no longer existed, if they’d ever existed in the first place. It was a futile ploy, but with the WMGD technology still inoperable, he couldn’t leave any stone unturned. Not when they were so close to success. All it would take was one thing. One small detail that could well turn out to be the key to everything. Yet no matter how many times he went through the data, ran the numbers and scanned the test results, still the answers hovered just out of reach, hanging in some shadowy place between victory and madness.

The Doctor snorted. He wouldn’t be surprised if he did go mad one of these days. He certainly had enough cause.

A low buzzing in his chit temporarily stayed the thought, and with a flick of his hand, he threw the incoming link onto the wall beside him. Dr. Preston appeared on the screen, face flushed and normally staid eyes flashing. The Doctor frowned at the interruption, raising one eyebrow as he asked, “Yes?”

Preston’s lips fluttered, opening and closing slightly as though she couldn’t quite find the words . . . then faith and science combined in a single instant, bursting like a supernova across the blackening void, as she uttered the two words he’d been waiting over sixteen months to hear.

“It works.”