by Mike Tucker
Out of the corner of her eye, she could see the Doctor shaking his head in despair. Delitsky was just staring at her as if she was mad.
She felt her face flushing with embarrassment. ‘Well, it’s not that easy to explain …’
‘This is ridiculous,’ snarled Delitsky. ‘Why I ever agreed to let you—’
‘Wait!’ The Doctor suddenly clapped his hands together, spinning on his heel. ‘I’ve got it!’
He hurried across the control room to where Jenloz and his team of engineers were watching him in astonishment. Bill groaned. As always, when the Doctor ran anywhere he looked ridiculous. ‘A penguin with its arse on fire,’ she muttered under her breath.
The Doctor crouched down, bringing his head level with that of the diminutive Chief Engineer. ‘I’m guessing that you’re the one with the real brains around here, yes? I mean it only stands to reason, it’s you and your guys who do all the hard work on this rig, all the gravity calculations, the maintenance. Everyone else in this control room just seems to do a lot of shouting. And in order to properly calibrate the gravity inverters you must have sensors everywhere, inside and out. Am I right?’
Jenloz just nodded.
‘Even in the vault?’
‘Captain Palmer!’ Delitsky’s patience was finally at an end. ‘ Get this lunatic out of here!’
As security officers advanced on the Doctor once more, he backed away from the little engineer, his eyes pleading. ‘Just turn on your gravity sensors in the vault and tell them what you see. Please.’
The security men loomed over him. Bill could see Officer Sillitoe’s lip curling into an unpleasant sneer. He grasped the Doctor roughly by the arms. ‘Right, sunshine, I think we’ve just about had enough of you.’
‘Stop!’ Jenloz was staring at the readouts scrolling across his screen in disbelief. Hopping from his chair, he scurried over to Delitsky.
‘Chief, whatever it is that’s sitting up there in the vault we need to get it down here. Right now.’
The Doctor caught Bill’s eye, and just smiled.
Laura watched as the activity in the control room reached fever pitch. Her admiration for the engineering crew had just gone up a notch. It had seemingly been the work of moments for Jenloz and his team to get the Doctor’s box moved down from the vault, manoeuvring it through service hatches and lift shafts by means of a series of sophisticated robotic cargo movers.
Now it was in the hangar, incongruously sitting in the spot previously occupied by the mining pod, a swarm of technicians bustling around it as they struggled to attach it to the mining winches. Laura couldn’t possibly imagine how this ridiculous-looking contraption was going to help rescue Baines, but Jenloz was adamant that this ‘TARDIS’ was exactly what they needed.
The little Cancri engineer was chattering excitedly to Delitsky. She had rarely seen him so animated. Whatever readings he had got from that box, it had convinced him that the Doctor was the solution to this crisis.
The Doctor himself was standing to one side, arguing with Johanna Teske as she attempted to persuade him to wear the various medical sensors that she had produced. His young girl companion, Bill was hovering at his shoulder.
‘Is this really a good idea, Captain?’
Lynne Harrison sounded nervous. Laura gave a deep sigh. Her sergeant was only saying out loud what she was thinking herself. They didn’t know who this man was, where he had come from or how he had got here, they’d caught him in the act of taking a diamond from the vault, and yet …
Laura stared at the lanky figure in the hangar below as he finally gave up in his attempts to dissuade Teske from wiring him up, and reluctantly allowed her to start attaching sensors to his forehead and torso. If this strange blue box of his really was a spacecraft of some kind then he had had ample opportunity to escape with his friend, either when they were still in the vault, or as they had made their way down to the control room.
No, his entire manner had changed as soon as he had realised that there was some kind of problem on board the mine, and especially once he had become aware that there was a life in danger. Laura might not know anything about this strange man, but her gut instinct told her that they could trust him.
‘Let’s just wait and see how things go, shall we, Sergeant?’
Harrison shrugged. ‘Your call, Captain, but you’ve got some pretty high-powered bigwigs looking over your shoulder if things go belly up.’ She nodded towards the far side of the control room.
Laura followed her gaze. Nettleman and Rince were also watching the preparations in the hangar. Harrison was right. The two Kollo-Zarnista executives were looking far from happy at the gamble that she and Delitsky were taking. If this didn’t end with the safe return of Baines, then this might be the last trip to Saturn that she ever made.
‘I don’t understand why you’re allowing this, Nettleman.’ Clive Rince chewed on the arm of his glasses nervously. ‘We don’t know anything about those two …’
Donald Nettleman didn’t take his eyes off the Doctor. ‘This “Doctor” and his friend could be exactly what we’ve been waiting for.’
‘But he managed to get into the vault!’ hissed Rince.
‘Yes, and I’d really like to learn how he did that, but for the moment, I want to let Delitsky play his hand.’
‘But …’
‘The situation is already a mess, Rince …’ From the tone of his voice, Nettleman was in no mood to waste time discussing this. ‘Head office is bound to send more people now, regardless of whether they manage to rescue that miner or not. But at the moment Delitsky and the others have their hands full. Which reminds me …’
He reached into his jacket pocket, pulling out the diamond that had been recovered from the Doctor.
‘You had better give this back to Captain Palmer and get one of her team to return it the vault.’
He pushed it into Rince’s hand.
‘We don’t want to be accused of stealing, now, do we?’
‘Right, That’s the last one.’ Johanna Teske pressed the final sensor pad onto the Doctor’s temple and nodded with satisfaction.
‘Is all this really necessary?’ sighed the Doctor, scratching at the self-adhesive pads dotted across his forehead.
‘Yes. I want to be able to monitor your vital signs at every stage. I’ve lost one man today – I’m not going to lose another.’
The Doctor opened his mouth to make some pithy remark, then thought better of it.
Jo picked up her medical bag. ‘I’d better get back to my console, make sure the readings are coming through OK.’ She paused. ‘Doctor, if you … see anything when you’re down there …’ She tailed off.
‘See anything?’ The Doctor raised an eyebrow.
The medic shook her head, suddenly looking embarrassed. ‘Nothing. Forget it. Just be careful.’
The Doctor watched as she made her way across the hangar. ‘I wonder what was that about?’
‘I dunno.’ Bill shrugged. ‘But at least they’re trying to look after you.’ She was looking worried. ‘Can I please come with you?’
The Doctor shook his head. ‘No. I’m going to be taking enough risks, as it is. Don’t want any distractions.’
‘Thanks a lot!’
‘Listen,’ barked the Doctor. ‘This is going to be tricky, even for me.’
‘Well then, I can help.’
‘No!’ His tone softened, ever so slightly. ‘Look, I can’t do this and be worrying about you as well …’
‘OK.’ That was as close an admission as Bill was going to get that he was actually taking her into consideration at all. It still didn’t quite make up for the fact that he had pointed a gun at her head, but it would do. For the moment.
She glanced at the huge clamps that the technicians had attached to the TARDIS roof, and the massive winches that loomed in each corner of the hangar.
‘So, is all this palaver really necessary? Couldn’t you just, you know, fly the TARDIS down there?’
; The Doctor gave her the same despairing look that he always did when she asked a stupid question in one of his classes. ‘Miss Potts, do you really think that I’d be going to all this trouble if I could?’
‘Why not? You’re the one who keeps telling me how amazing the TARDIS is.’
‘And if you’ve got a spare hour or two for me to lecture you on the specifics of extreme gravitational stresses created by gas giants, and the effects that those stresses can cause in relation to short-duration navigation through interstitial time when materialising within a gravity compensation field then I’ll be happy to go through the figures, but given that we’ve got less than –’ he glanced at his watch – ‘seven minutes before Mr Baines becomes a permanent part of the atmosphere of Saturn, I think that we’d better stick to the current plan, yes?’
Bill nodded sheepishly. ‘Right.’
‘Actually, I think I might want to come to that lecture as well …’ The engineer, Jenloz, was waiting expectantly. ‘We’re ready to depressurise the hangar, Doctor.’
The Doctor nodded. ‘Can you do me a favour and make sure Bill is looked after whilst I’m gone? Preferably somewhere well out of reach of that security thug, Sillitoe.’
‘Of course.’ The little Cancri nodded enthusiastically. Ever since he had lain eyes on the gravity sensor readings that the TARDIS was giving off – he had become something of a fanboy. He wasn’t kidding about wanting to listen to the Doctor give a lecture. He’d probably want a guided tour of the TARDIS as well.
A klaxon started to blare, and Delitsky’s voice boomed around the hangar. ‘All crew, please take your stations. Hangar depressurisation countdown commencing in one minute. Doctor, you’d better get ready.’
All around, technicians hurried to clear the room. Catching hold of Bill’s arm, Jenloz steered her towards the stairwell, snatching one quick glance over his shoulder as he went, hoping to catch a glimpse of the inside of the TARDIS.
The Doctor rolled his eyes. Just what he needed. A gravity nerd.
He watched as Bill climbed the stairs towards the control room, catching her eye and giving her a reassuring nod. Then he turned and unlocked the TARDIS.
Delitsky watched as the Doctor vanished inside the ridiculous blue box and the rickety door closed behind him. He couldn’t actually believe that they were going through with this, but if what Jenloz had told him was to be believed (and Delitsky had learned over the years to trust everything that his engineer told him) then that blue box was a masterpiece of gravitic engineering.
Focusing on the task in hand, the Rig Chief started the countdown. ‘All crew. Stand by to initiate rescue drop.’
He suddenly heard a sharp intake of breath from the metical station. He looked across to see Johanna Teske staring open-mouthed at her screen as the Doctor’s bio-readings started to come through.
‘Problem?’
Teske tore her eyes from the monitor screen and stared at him for a second, then shook her head. ‘No. No, we’re good.’
‘Right then.’ Delitsky turned back to the task in hand. ‘Doctor. Stand by. We’re initiating drop in … Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Drop.’
In a swirl of boiling vapour the TARDIS vanished through the hatch in the floor.
Chapter
7
The small blue box fell through the clouds of Saturn, an insignificant speck against the swirling splendour of the gas giant. Gravitational forces capable of crushing the mightiest starships to dust tore at the seemingly flimsy shell, but the workers in the timeshipyards of Gallifrey had done too good a job. Almost as if frustrated by this perversion of the laws of nature, a huge storm began to rage in the planet’s atmosphere.
Inside, the Doctor clung to the central control column of the TARDIS as the time machine jerked and rolled. On the screen jutting from the panel in front of him, he watched as the huge, hulking shape of the mine raced away from him before vanishing from view, swallowed up by the roiling clouds.
For the first time in millennia, the Doctor took a moment to check on the status of the TARDIS’s gravitic anomaliser, suddenly conscious of just how important it was in stopping him being crushed to the size of a grain of salt.
‘Doctor, this is Delitsky.’ The Rig Chief’s voice crackled from a grill in the console, distorted by the gravity waves flowing around the TARDIS. ‘Baines is still showing as being directly below you, you’re coming up on him fast.’
The Doctor stabbed at a control, changing the view on the screen to a schematic that showed his approach to the stranded crewman. A numeric readout was scrolling down at frightening speed. Six hundred metres, five hundred metres, four hundred metres …
‘We’re going to bring you to a halt at ten metres. That’s a close as we dare. After that, it’s up to you.’
‘Oh, the difficult bit you mean,’ muttered the Doctor through gritted teeth as the storm buffeted the TARDIS like a toddler shaking a rattle.
On the screen, the rapidly descending countdown started to slow until, with a sudden jolt, the TARDIS came to a halt. Scurrying around the console, the Doctor started to make delicate adjustments to the controls. Extending the force field to create a stable corridor from the main doors was something that he had done on many occasions, but never in quite as hostile an environment as the one that he now found himself in. Satisfied that the settings were correct, the Doctor slipped on his sonic sunglasses, and operated the door control.
The TARDIS control room was immediately bathed in a harsh yellow light. The Doctor strode across to the door and stared out at the apocalyptic view. Thick, choking clouds swept past the TARDIS at terrifying speed, spitting, sparking balls of energy bursting into existence as the powerful envelope of the force field deflected the streams of gas. Lightning bolts arced in huge zigzag lines across the sky, revealing a monstrous, boiling cloudscape that seemingly stretched off to infinity. And amongst it all, glinting with each blinding flash of electric blue light, diamonds fell like rain, streaming off the force field and falling in sparkling streams towards the planet’s core far, far below.
The Doctor had seen many wondrous sights during his travels, but this was enough for even him to stop for a moment and stare in admiration and respect at the power on display. It seemed inconceivable that something as fragile as a human being could survive alone amongst all this chaos.
Reminded of the reason why he was here, the Doctor activated his sonic sunglasses, using the interface with his optic nerve to initiate a scan for the missing miner. Immediately there was a contact. The Doctor blinked twice, enhancing and zooming the image.
Hanging in the maelstrom was a figure, tiny and insignificant against the majesty of Saturn. The Cancri-designed pressure armour looked ugly and uncomfortable, as if someone had blended a suit of medieval armour with a diving bell, but it had done its job keeping its occupant alive. With the enhanced view afforded by his glasses, the Doctor could see the twisting, spiralling energies of the gravity inverters as they fought against the immense pull of the planet below. Gravity nerd he might be, but the Doctor had to admit that Jenloz and his species were pretty impressive engineers.
Interfacing with the TARDIS console via his glasses, the Doctor concentrated, narrowing and stretching the force field until it encompassed the motionless figure. Lightning cracked explosively around him and he hurried along the invisible corridor until he reached the stricken miner.
‘Baines?’ The Doctor tried to peer into the suit, but there was no visor, no way of seeing inside the thick armour. ‘Can you hear me in there?’ The Doctor rapped his knuckles on the metal torso. ‘Baines!’
Desperately hoping that he hadn’t arrived too late, the Doctor started to unbuckle his belt. The gravity inverters meant that the suit was floating like some bizarre novelty helium balloon. He just needed to tow it back to the TARDIS.
As he fumbled with his buckle, he suddenly became aware of movement out of the corner of his eye, and turned in time to see a vast dark shadow slide across the crackling surfac
e of the force field, moving like oil over water.
Startled, he stumbled backwards, an involuntary cry of surprise bursting from his lips as the shape shot past him. He spun around, trying to catch a better glimpse of whatever the thing was, but there was nothing – nothing but swirling gas and jagged lightning.
He swiftly adjusted the settings on his sonic sunglasses, cycling through dozens of different scanning options. He leaned forward. There. Right at the extreme edge of his vision, a dark smudge. A smudge that was moving in the opposite direction to the rest of the clouds … As the Doctor struggled get a firm reading from the strange phenomena, an alarm started to sound on Baines’ suit.
The Doctor cursed in Gallifreyan under his breath. He was out of time.
Tearing himself away from the mysterious object in the clouds, the Doctor hurried across to the miner, fastening the buckle of his belt onto a hook on the front of the armoured suit. He hoped that he hadn’t left things too late. The suit was already beginning to float lower than it had done previously, and the strange green glow from the Cancri gravity inverters was beginning to fade rapidly. If they failed completely, the Doctor wasn’t sure that he would be able move Baines in his own.
Wrapping the belt around his fist, the Doctor started to haul the miner back along the force-field corridor towards the TARDIS. Through the open doors he could hear Delitsky’s frantic voice on the speaker.
‘Doctor! Are you there? Doctor!’
Ignoring the insistent voice, the Doctor hauled Baines into the TARDIS. The suit crashed against the doorframe, and for one horrible second he realised that he’d not worked out if he could actually get the bulky armour through the doors or not.
Grasping Baines by the shoulders, the Doctor heaved with all his might. There was a horrible splintering noise as the pressure armour scraped through the gap. At the same moment there was a ‘pop’ and the gravity inverters finally shut down.
The suit hit the ground with a deafening crash, the impact sending the Doctor skidding across the floor of the TARDIS. He scrambled to his feet and darted to the central console, reaching out for the door control. As his hand touched the lever, he was suddenly aware of a dark shape flashing past the open doorway, making the edges of the force field pop and spark like embers in a fire.
