Doing Time (short story)

Doing Time was the eleventh short story in the Short Trips anthology Short Trips: Steel Skies. It was written by Lance Parkin. It featured the Fourth Doctor.

Summary
After luring a group of Time Lords to a remote moon to investigate claims of temporal disturbances, Shepard and his associates, Adams and Morgan, steal the impellor to their TARDIS's time rotor and then make their escape.

But when the three crooks arrive at the space station where they are to meet with their buyer, Shepard encounters the Fourth Doctor, who urges him to hand over the stolen device or suffer the consequences. Shepard ignores the Time Lord's advice, and together with his associates, he makes their rendezvous with a Sontaran, exchanging the impellor for a device that can to transmute everyday objects into gold.

Later, Shepard meets with his woman, Celeste, and spends the night with her, but when he next wakes up he is startled to find himself back on the moon, once more stealing the impellor with Adams and Morgan. Dismissing Shepard's concerns, they escape with the device, but on reaching the space station, they again find themselves back on the moon.

As the time between each cycle halves again and again, Shepard realises that the Time Lords have imprisoned them in an eternal time loop, and the only way to break it is not to steal the device; however, this realisation comes too late, as the cycle breaks down to a fraction of a second, dooming them to an eternity of repetition...

Characters

 * Fourth Doctor
 * Shepard
 * Adams
 * Morgan
 * Celeste

Continuity
to be added