Author's Note: This is the third entry in my series Wolfe Pack, following ReichWorld and Tails from the Wolfe Pack. New readers are strongly urged to begin at the beginning. I should note that this is an ambitious undertaking, and will likely end up the longest of my stories by far – and will therefore take several months to write at my usual pace. I hope to get a good jump on it before classes start in a couple of weeks and I must perforce slow down.

Please note, I make ZERO claim to historical accuracy herein, any more than any DW writer. After all, this is Sci-Fi, not a documentary.

As always, Doctor Who and its major characters are the property of the BBC, not me.

Bad Wolf Ballet

Act One

The Man with Sea-Green Eyes

Original (Alpha) Universe, 2064 AD

Paul Corvantes was obsessed with two things: power and himself.

In the first, he wasn't at all unusual. Any given population of Homo Sapiens will have a percentage of those who are similarly obsessed, and who go about obtaining and keeping that power in a fairly prescribed number of ways. Corvantes' way was via the usual underworld methods: he was the typical ruthless underworld crime boss, with tentacles reaching far across the face of the planet from his home base in London, and in all areas of illegal operations, from drugs to prostitution to black marketeering to collecting politicians and police officials.

Early on in his nefarious career, as he first began stretching out from London in all directions, he chanced to come upon an abandoned facility hidden in the sewer system underneath Cardiff, full of an unworldly collection of equipment and gizmos – and a handful of moldering skeletons, two of which did not correspond to any known Earth animal, including humans. Whatever had happened here a decade or two earlier wasn't pretty. (It also showed signs of having been rebuilt after some catastrophe before then.)

Corvantes "the Sicilian" (so nicknamed for the birthmark on the back of his left hand in the shape of the island of Sicily) had also "acquired" a computer genius or three, and he let them lose upon the facility to discover its secrets. One of those secrets, a large contraption with complex computer systems and massive data storage, led in turn to his second obsession.

In this, he was completely original. For you see, it wasn't the body he inhabited that he was obsessed with, or the mind that inhabited it. It was seven other Paul Corvantes, in seven other bodies, in seven other parallel worlds.

Corvantes had discovered Alpha's Torchwood's Dimension Cannon.

^..^

Soon after disentangling the timelines and discovering – after an idly-curious search – the ones labeled "Paul Corvantes" in each, the Sicilian's techs made another earth-shaking discovery: the Timeline Reader (as they called it) could also send things – and people – to and from those alternate realities. They made sure to run a few experiments to prove it before bringing this incredible fact to the Sicilian's attention.

And get his attention it did. Immediately cognizant of the implications of this technology, the Sicilian moved to contact his counterparts in each world, planning to join forces with each of them and spread his underworld network throughout the eight linked worlds.

It was there that his plan came to an immediate, crashing halt. NONE of the other seven Corvantes was an underworld boss. In fact, each one was disgustingly, law-abidingly, pansy-assedly moral. And none of them – not the tech company CEO, nor the pediatrician, nor the actor, not even the lawyer (Constitutional law, not criminal) – NONE of them were interested in his plan, even after he managed (by way of briefly "kidnapping" them all together to his own universe) to convince them that the parallel worlds were real. To a one, each of them turned their matching sea-green eyes upon him and coldly announced he was on his own. Not even their shared Sicily-shaped birthmarks stirred any warmth for him in their hearts.

Reluctantly, Corvantes returned each one to their own world and life (resisting the temptation to stir the pot by mixing a couple of them up), and began to brood. How could it be that each of them had turned out so differently from himself?

He began to search back in their lives, and after a while made another startling discovery. According to the Timeline Reader, each Paul Corvantes except himself had had an encounter early in life with a certain other individual, who had influenced them so greatly that – especially in a couple of their lives – they had turned from a similar path to his own to the one they were on, on the right side of the law. Hard on the trail, he dug down deeper, and discovered the identity of this person. The same person in each universe. (He looked briefly, but couldn't find her in his own world anywhere.)

If only he could reach back in time to disrupt those meetings...

And of course, that was when his two tame techies, rummaging around in the piles of junk in the Cardiff lair, found a collection of what looked like large, odd wristwatches. Upon experiment, they turned out to be miniature Time Travel devices – mentioned in the logs of the previous tenants as "Time Jumpers" from somewhere up in the distant future.

Screw the future. He was going back to the past.

Scarcely able to contain himself for the time it took for his techs to work out how to control the Time Jumpers, he attached one to the wrist of each of seven henchmen, and sent them through the Timeline Reader to the alternate worlds again – to travel backwards in time, kidnap this meddlesome woman, and bring her here to their boss. Then, he'd just see how those other Paul Corvantes turned out.

And so off they went, seven men in seven worlds, to kidnap seven women...

...named Rose Tyler.