One Life (audio story)

One Life was the fourth and final story in the audio anthology The Eighth Doctor: Time War: Volume One, produced by Big Finish Productions. It was written by John Dorney and featured Paul McGann as the Eighth Doctor, Rakhee Thakrar as Bliss and Jacqueline Pearce as Cardinal Ollistra.

Publisher's summary
As the full force of the Time War crashes down around the Doctor and his friends, a desperate battle for survival ensues.

But not everyone is playing the same game. Ollistra is after a weapon that could end the war in a stroke and she'll sacrifice anyone or anything to take it back to Gallifrey. Even the Doctor.

Surrounded by Daleks, and on a tortured planet, only one man can save the day. But he doesn't want to fight.

Plot
Commander Aymor is summoned from the frontlines by the Chancellor and shown that the Matrix projections of the Time Lords' chronology looks broken and partially healed around the recent weapons development programs. It seems that a weapon has been used to erase any evidence of its own existence, so the Chancellor tasks Aymor with finding it and keeping it from the Daleks.

In a club, Rupa meets Quarren Maguire and buys him a drink. Years later, on the Moon of Tenacity, the Doctor is saved from being shot by Cardinal Ollistra when the Daleks break through the final defences and attack. The Doctor gets Bliss, Rupa and Quarren into the TARDIS and tries to get Ollistra to evacuate her people, but she tells the Doctor that what is in his TARDIS is more important and joins him. She dematerialises the TARDIS and tells him that the Daleks used a reversal wave to break through Tenacity's defences, regressing the entire star system in time.

On Rupa and Quarren's first date in a diner by a spaceport, they share that they both want to explore beyond the star system. When Quarren suggests that they do that for their second date, Rupa jokingly asks why he is sure that there will be a second date.

The Doctor flies the TARDIS away from the pursuing Daleks, unable to enter the Time Vortex due to the TARDIS still repairing itself. He sets the coordinates to a disintegrating planet.

to be completed

Cast

 * The Doctor - Paul McGann
 * Bliss - Rakhee Thakrar
 * Rupa Maguire - Nimmy March
 * Quarren Maguire - David Ganly
 * Cardinal Ollistra - Jacqueline Pearce
 * Aymor / Chancellor - Laurence Kennedy
 * The Daleks - Nicholas Briggs

Continuity

 * The Doctor recalls that "the renegade" was pursued to the Theseus by the Time Lords, (AUDIO: The Starship of Theseus) and that he was sent to Tenacity system camp when the War Ollistra captured him. (AUDIO: Echoes of War, The Conscript)
 * The Cloister Bell is a portent of a TARDIS's imminent destruction. (TV: Logopolis et al.)
 * Ollistra describes the device that Quarren used to turn himself into a human as being something Time Lord spies can use to hide their Time Lord selves within a locket or pendant: a Chameleon Arch.
 * There was an account suggesting that the Seventh Doctor, prior to his regeneration into his eighth incarnation, made use of a broken Arch to create the fiction that he was half-human to use against the Master. (COMIC: The Forgotten, TV: Doctor Who)
 * The Tenth Doctor used one to become John Smith in order to hide from the Family of Blood in 1912. (TV: Human Nature / The Family of Blood)
 * The Fugitive Doctor used the Chamelon Arch to take on a human identity as "Ruth Clayton". (TV: Fugitive of the Judoon)
 * The Monk used a Chameleon Arch to flee the Time War, living as a human in a 16th century English abbey with his TARDIS's components disassembled. (AUDIO: Divorced, Beheaded, Regenerated)
 * The War Master also used a Chameleon Arch to regress himself to a child. (TV: Utopia, AUDIO: The Heavenly Paradigm)
 * Ollistra uses a hypercube to send her location to Gallifrey. (TV: The War Games, The Doctor's Wife)
 * The Doctor previously watched the rise and fall of another civilisation in mere moments, from his perspective, in his first incarnation. In both cases, the Doctor and company seem completely stationary to the locals. (AUDIO: Rise and Fall)
 * The Doctor mentions the sound of the planet screaming, noting that it's usually too slow to note the pain of continental shift. (TV: Inferno)