by Mike Tucker
It reminded Bill of the shed belonging to Graham, Moira’s next-door neighbour. She’d had to pop round there one day to borrow a wrench when the shower had bust. Moira didn’t have a single tool in the house, of course, but Bill had remembered seeing Graham unloading a toolkit from the back of his car, so figured he’d be worth asking. He’d led her down the garden to his shed, unlocking the rusty old padlock and ushering her inside with a strange sort of pride. The interior had been the same jumble of hand tools and broken or unfinished machinery. Bill remembered that there had been hundreds of copies of Rail Enthusiast magazine in piles on the floor, and a half-built model of a steam locomotive on his workbench.
It suddenly struck her that there was the answer to her earlier question about what would leave the Doctor awestruck. He would be awestruck by Graham’s shed.
‘Here, take this.’
The Doctor re-emerged from the TARDIS and thrust a small black box into her hands. It was about the size of a television remote control, with a small display screen and two large buttons on the front – one red, one green.
‘What’s this?’
‘More sophisticated equipment.’
‘You’re kidding, right?’ To Bill’s eyes it looked like someone had gone and bought a kid’s toy from a pound store and stuck a couple of Smarties on it.
‘It’s an extremely sensitive subspace tracking device,’ said the Doctor, ignoring the disparaging look she was giving him. ‘You’re going to have to work fast because the subspace disturbance from the last transmission is already fading. This should have the range to track it to its source, but the longer you leave it, the less accurate it’s going to be.’
Bill regarded him suspiciously. ‘I’m going to have to work fast? What are you going to be doing?’
‘I’m going to go and find that ship.’
‘Oh, no, that’s not fair …’ Bill frowned. ‘Hang on … I thought that you couldn’t use the TARDIS. Didn’t you say that the gravity whatnots would upset the space-time thingummy and affect the steering?’
The Doctor looked pained. ‘Oh, I can see that all the lectures of mine that you’ve come to have really sunk in. Gravity whatnots? Space-time thingummy?’
‘Don’t avoid the question!’
‘Yes, I did say that I couldn’t use the TARDIS. I lied! It’s what I do.’
‘Why?’
‘To make an impression.’
‘What?’
The Doctor took a deep breath. ‘Look, believe it or not, getting caught in the vault stealing diamonds wasn’t exactly what I had in mind when we arrived, OK? It got us off on the wrong foot so I needed to do something that would make everybody trust us.’
‘Um, hello. You tried to rescue their friend from certain death.’
‘Yes, I did. And imagine if I had done that in the TARDIS. I pop into a box, the box vanishes, I reappear a few moments later with their missing miner. Ta dah! Everyone is happy, but …’ The Doctor grinned. ‘This way there was danger, and excitement and heroism …’
‘You were showing off.’
‘I was making a statement.’
‘You are impossible!’
‘Worked, didn’t it?’ The Doctor looked smug. Bill could have slapped him
‘Um, are you two planning on going somewhere?’
The Doctor and Bill turned to see Captain Palmer watching them suspiciously.
‘Captain Palmer, the very person.’
‘Doctor. You have been a huge help, but as I told you earlier, I’m afraid that I can’t allow …’
‘Captain, I don’t think that you believe the Ba-El Cratt when they say that they have Baines in a spacecraft too deep in the atmosphere for us to detect.’
Palmer was silent for a moment, and then shook her head. ‘No. No, I don’t.’
‘Of course you don’t, it’s a story that requires no proof from them and total trust from us, because we want to believe that they still have Baines safe and well.’ The Doctor’s eyes were alive with energy. ‘But what would you say if I told you that I had detected a spacecraft drifting in the rings. That would be worth investigation, yes?’
Palmer stared at him. ‘In the rings?’
‘Yes.’ Without taking his eyes from hers, the Doctor reached behind his back and pushed the TARDIS doors wide open.
Palmer’s eyes widened in shocked astonishment as she caught sight of the console room beyond.
‘Do you fancy accompanying me on a little trip?’ asked the Doctor coyly.
‘I … I don’t believe it.’
The Doctor stepped to one side as Palmer peered through the doorway.
‘I just don’t believe it.’ Gingerly she stepped inside the police box.
Bill gave the Doctor a disapproving glare. ‘You love it, don’t you? Doing that big reveal.’
‘It’s a very useful distraction.’ He held up a small bunch of different coloured plastic tags.
Bill peered at them. ‘What are those?’
‘Electronic keys.’
‘Did you just lift those off her belt?’ she asked accusingly
‘Yes.’
‘She’ll notice!’
The Doctor gave a snort. ‘No, she won’t. I’ve just given her brain far more pressing things to process.’
Bill looked at him suspiciously. ‘OK. What do you need them for?’
‘I don’t need them. You do.’ The Doctor pressed the keys into her hand.
‘Bill, listen to me.’ All the playfulness had suddenly vanished from the Doctor’s voice. ‘I have a sneaking suspicion that our friendly alien refugees are anything but friendly. I also think that someone else here knows that already. These are security master keys; they should get you through any door. Use the tracker. Once you find that transmitter, it should give you some idea as to who is operating it. Once you know, tell Delitsky to act. Otherwise I have a feeling there is going to be another accident, and this one could be fatal.’
Bill nodded, conscious of the trust that the Doctor was placing in her.
The Doctor stepped into the TARDIS, hesitating for a moment on the threshold. ‘Bill … please don’t take any unnecessary chances.’
With that he vanished inside.
Bill stood back as the doors closed and the familiar wheezing, groaning sound started to echo around the room as the time ship faded from view.
Bill hefted the keys in her hand. The Doctor had trusted her with an important task. She wasn’t about to let him down.
Chapter
14
Nettleman sat in the empty conference room, his mind awash with intriguing possibilities. He was all too aware that, in a career that had been spent almost exclusively in meetings, the few minutes that he had just spent with the Ba-El Cratt could possibly turn out to be the most important meeting that he had ever had.
He had listened to their tiresome sob story about war and oppression and having to flee from their home planet, nodding in all the right places, his face a carefully constructed mask of concern and sympathy. He had carefully considered their plea for asylum, making sure that they knew he was on their side, but being very clear about the fact that the decision to grant that asylum wasn’t something he could take alone. Nettleman knew from past experiences that gambles this big needed the involvement of other people to take the blame if things didn’t go to plan.
Perhaps, he had suggested to the Ba-El Cratt, they could offer him something that he could take to his superiors that would help make the request go through more smoothly …
That was when the conversation had become interesting.
Nettleman had come to Kollo-Zarnista Mining Facility 27 with a plan to make himself rich. Because of all the problems on board, those plans had started to unravel, but now … Nettleman was starting to realise just how profitable this trip could actually turn out to be.
The Ba-El Cratt could survive in the crushing pressures of the gas giants. No, it was better than that, they thrived in that environment. He thought about all
the technology that the human race needed just to be able to work here: tonnes of equipment, hundreds of people, millions of dollars’ worth of investment. Not to mention the payment in diamonds that the Cancri demanded. Yes, it was true that they provided some necessary machinery, some basic support contracts, but if he could remove the need for all that …
In his mind’s eye, Nettleman could see a new way forward for Kollo-Zarnista. The Ba-El Cratt needed asylum. Well, fine, but why shouldn’t they work for it? The human race would provide them with a safe haven, sanctuary within the atmosphere of the gas giants, a security team to guard them from their enemies, and in return, they extracted the diamonds.
His heart started to pound. If he could make this work then they might not have to pay anything to mine the diamonds. They could terminate their contract with the Cancri, shut down the mines, shed hundreds of staff from the payroll. It would save the company millions. Hundreds of millions. And it would all be his doing.
Nettleman sat back in his chair, closed his eyes and started to dream about how much Kollo-Zarnista might reward him for negotiating a deal like that.
Laura was still struggling to come to terms with the space around her. For a control room of this size to be inside that … that box!
She was suddenly aware of the Doctor watching her. He was standing alongside a mushroom-like device that was obviously a control console of some kind. With a sudden jolt of panic, Laura realised that she was standing in a spacecraft of unknown origin with a man she knew practically nothing about. A man who, on the basis of the evidence around her, was probably non-terrestrial in origin.
The panic on her face must have been clear.
‘Are you all right?’
Laura nodded. ‘Yeah.’
‘It was the rings, wasn’t it?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
The Doctor started to busy himself at the controls. ‘The thing that made you step over the threshold, to take the leap. It wasn’t the mention of a mysterious alien spaceship, it wasn’t because of any suspicions you might have about the Ba-El Cratt, it wasn’t even because of any hope that Baines might still be alive; it was when I mentioned the rings …’
Laura laughed, suddenly at ease without really knowing why that should be. ‘Was it that obvious?’
‘I’ve come across a few ring gazers in my life.’ A warm smile played around the edges of the Doctor’s lips, momentarily taking all the harshness from his features and making him seem … Younger? Or older? Laura couldn’t tell.
‘Ring gazer, huh? Well please don’t call me that in front of any of my squad, I get enough grief from them as it is.’
‘My lips are sealed.’
Laura stared around the inside of the ship, taking in the construction, the strange alien symbols, the sheer impossibility of it all. ‘Well, from the look of all this, I’m guessing that you’ve seen a few ringed planets in your time.’
‘A few. But I’ll let you into a secret: Saturn is one of the best there is.’
The Doctor flicked a control, and a viewscreen flickered into life. Laura crossed to the console and stared at the image on the screen. Saturn in all its glory. She’d never get tired of it.
‘You really have got it bad.’ The Doctor was staring at her, clearly amused.
Suddenly embarrassed Laura forced herself to focus on the reason why they were here. ‘So, this spacecraft you think you’ve detected in the rings …’
‘Think I’ve detected?’ Indignation wiped the amusement from the Doctor’s face. His hands started to dance across the controls, and the image of the rings jumped in magnification. A dark smudge now nestled amongst the tumbling sea of rocks and ice. He pointed at the screen.
‘To produce a smudge like that, something must have been involved in a collision that kicked up a cloud of ice and dust.’
Laura shrugged. ‘It could be a natural phenomenon. A Peggy.’
The Doctor nodded approvingly. ‘You know your history.’
Peggy was a moonlet, detected by accident way back in the pre-space-age era by an astronomer on Earth. The rings were full of such tiny objects.
The image jumped even nearer, and Laura leaned closer to the screen. What was floating there was unlike any ship that Laura had ever encountered before.
‘As a wise man once said, “It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it.”’
‘So why would the Ba-El Cratt lie?’ she asked him. ‘Why tell us that their ship was lost in the atmosphere?’
‘Shall we go aboard and find out?’
‘Come on, you stupid thing.’ Bill shook the tracker angrily. For a highly sophisticated, super-sensitive tracking device it was being extremely temperamental. It was like trying to get a 3G signal in Cabot Circus shopping centre, but at least there she knew that if you stood outside PC World, with your phone held in the air for long enough, then you’d eventually get a signal.
On impulse she did exactly that, stretching as high as she could and waving the tracker back and forth. Fortunately everyone else in the corridor was far too busy with more important matters to pay her much heed and, apart from one or two curious glances from people as they hurried past, most of the crew simply ignored her. Even so, she was glad that she had had the initiative to grab a discarded boiler suit from the equipment bay and pull it on over her own clothes. At least now she didn’t stand out like a sore thumb quite so much.
When she had initially turned the tracker on, the signal had been clear and easy to follow, leading her out of the equipment bay and up into the crew quarters. That’s when things had started to go wrong. As the Doctor had warned, the signal had swiftly started to fade, and Bill had found it more and more difficult to make sense of the readings that it was giving her.
She was positive that the transmitter had to be located on this deck somewhere, but there were literally hundreds of crew cabins, and even if by some miracle all of them were unoccupied, searching every single one was going to be a virtually impossible task.
To her amazement the tracker suddenly gave a beep, and the soft pinging noise that had led her this far resumed once more.
‘Finally!’ Bill lowered the tracker and studied the readout. If she was reading it correctly then the source of the signal was really, really close.
Praying that the machine wouldn’t pack up on her again, Bill made her way along the corridor, swinging the tracker to and fro in front of her, the pings it was making getting closer and closer together, and higher and higher in pitch.
The noise reached a crescendo and Bill found herself standing outside a door with a sign reading ‘Guest Quarters. Executive Personnel’. She looked at the nameplate that had been affixed below it. ‘Donald Nettleman’.
‘Gotcha.’ Bill nodded with satisfaction. The man was a weasel. She’d enjoy exposing him.
As she reached in the pocket of her boiler suit for the security keys that the Doctor had given her, the noise from the tracker became even more frantic. Surprised, Bill looked down at the readings. The signal was actually coming from the room next door.
Bill stared at the sign on that door. ‘Clive Rince’. The saboteur wasn’t Nettleman. It was Rince.
Quickly checking the corridor to see that there was nobody watching, Bill pulled the keys from her pocket, realising that she had never asked the Doctor how they worked. There was a small silver plate next to the door. Presumably you just placed the key on the plate? She did so, and to her relief the door slid open with a hiss. Bill hurried inside.
The room was sparse and functional, a cross between a ship’s cabin and a low-budget hotel room. There was a bed, a desk, a small en-suite shower room, but everything was cold, metal and plastic. Bill swung the tracker around the room; the signal was staring to fade again, far more rapidly than before. She was running out of time.
On impulse, she hurried over to the shower room, leaning inside and waving the tracker around the interior. Nothing. There was barely enough room for the toilet and the sink, let alone anything else.
As she stepped back into the bedroom the signal suddenly peaked, then abruptly went dead. It was enough of a confirmation, though. The transmitter was in here somewhere. Quickly, she started to search, pulling open drawers and cupboards, but there didn’t seem to be anything in them other than clothes and paperwork. There had to be a concealed compartment or something. Stepping inside, she started to check the walls and floor. After five minutes of searching she had still found nothing, and was on the verge of giving up when something in the ceiling caught her eye. A loop of cable had somehow become trapped between one of the ceiling panels and the stainless steel wall. She reached up to try to pull it free, but the cable was tightly wedged. Excitedly, Bill realised that the entire ceiling panel must come loose. That was where the transmitter had to be hidden.
She pulled the metal chair from under the desk into the middle of the room and clambered onto it. As she stood there on tiptoe trying to work out the release mechanism, she suddenly became aware of footsteps behind her.
Someone had entered the room.
Laura had watched in disbelief as the Doctor emerged from the bowels of his spacecraft with a couple of bright orange spacesuits bundled up in his arms.
‘You’ve got to be kidding. We can’t go out there in those!’
‘Why not?’ The Doctor had dumped the suits on the floor of the console room and, discarding his jacket, started to struggle into one of them.
‘It’s Saturn. We’ll need gravity inverters.’
‘We’ve got them.’ The Doctor pointed at a small silver device on the neck of his suit.
Laura stared at him as if he was mad.
‘That? A gravity inverter.’
The Doctor grinned. ‘Don’t tell the Cancri.’
Sincerely hoping that she had not opted to spend the last few moments of her life with a total madman, Laura had discarded her uniform jacket and belt, and started to pull on the spacesuit that the Doctor offered her.
Now she was standing in front of the strange old-fashioned doors as the Doctor made the final navigational adjustments to bring his ship alongside the alien wreck. The Doctor had deemed that attempting a landing inside the vessel came with too high a risk of shifting it from its precarious orbit or somehow alerting the Ba-El Cratt.
