by Doctor Who
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‘All part of the first-class service,’ said the Doctor. ‘But each time it does that, it needs a bit of power to push it round again. Only it’s not a bit of power. It’s quite a lot.’
‘But we don’t have power reserves like this,’ said Captain Georgina, her eyes never leaving the screens. ‘That’s more than a ship this size could ever hope to contain.’
‘Ah well,’ said the Doctor. ‘Depends how you look at it. You know how much energy is freed up just by being stood still in time? You’re stuck in the space between moments, so it’s like you’re idling. Plenty of reserves just because none of you are really moving.’
‘So we’re OK?’ said Martha, relieved. For a moment, she’d thought they were in danger.
‘Oh yeah,’ said the Doctor breezily. ‘Well, kind of.’
‘Good,’ said Archibald.
‘When you say kind of,’ said Martha. ‘You mean we are in danger.’
‘Yeah,’ he admitted.
‘The energy needed keeps increasing,’ said Captain Georgina, studying the screens.
‘Does it?’ asked Archibald.
‘It does,’ said the Doctor. ‘You see, you’re all using up energy while you’re stuck here. Breathing, eating, talking, shooting. And coming back from the dead. It all has to come from somewhere.’
‘What will happen?’ asked Martha. She didn’t like how calmly he was taking it. Usually, just a sniff or trouble was enough to get him all fidgety and excited. It also didn’t help that behind them the other badgers and humans were enjoying nibbles and polite conversation.
She struggled to take it seriously.
‘Well,’ said the Doctor, sticking his hands in his trouser pockets.
‘There’ll come a point where the energy isn’t there. It’ll hit the gap and there won’t be enough momentum to get back round again.’
‘So we’ll be free?’ said Martha.
The Doctor jutted out his jaw. ‘In a manner of speaking.’
‘We won’t be free of the time loop?’ she asked him.
‘We’ll be dead,’ said Captain Georgina. The whole starship will implode.’
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‘Yeah,’ said the Doctor. ‘Something of that sort.’
‘But there must be something we can do!’ said Martha.
‘Well yeah,’ said the Doctor. ‘There’s always something. I think I could correct the problem, get us off the sand-bank.’
‘So do it!’ said Martha.
‘Ah,’ said the Doctor. ‘Still a problem after that.’
‘Captain Florence dun’t take pris’ners,’ said Archibald.
‘I’d sort of suspected that,’ said the Doctor. ‘So that’s why it’s tricky.
If I don’t get us out of this, we’re all going to die. But if I do, the pirate ship is waiting.’
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The human crew continued to eat canapés, chat and ignore their inevitable doom. Martha couldn’t bear even to watch them. She could feel her own heart beating, a sudden sense of herself being alive, of wanting to be alive.
She looked round at the Doctor, busy at the controls of the transmat booth, trying to make it do anything that might help them. He’d used the sonic screwdriver, he’d also used his fists. Nothing seemed to be working. But he kept at it, and she started to think he was just trying to keep himself busy. So he wouldn’t have time to think about being trapped. So he wouldn’t have to meet her eye.
Martha couldn’t help but think back to what the Doctor had said in the TARDIS, when she’d been begging him to bring them here. He’d said there were rules, that they couldn’t get involved and they couldn’t change anything. And now the two of them were caught up in the same fate as everyone else.
It could be brilliant, flitting through all time and space meeting all kinds of people. But Martha had seen enough people killed, enough terrible, awful things, to know their travels came with a price. And she’d known there was going to be trouble on the Brilliant – that it was going to disappear. The humans and badgers and Mrs Wingsworth 117
had been doomed even before the Doctor set the controls of the TARDIS. . . And now she and the Doctor were doomed with them.
She made her way over to him. ‘You can’t get us out of this,’ she said. ‘Even if you get that thing working.’
He looked up at her. ‘Can’t I?’
‘It would change history,’ said Martha. ‘And you can’t do that. You said there were rules.’
‘Rules?’ asked Captain Georgina, coming to join them.
She seemed to be taking everyone’s certain deaths quite easily. Perhaps, thought Martha, it would make her look less effortlessly beautiful if she allowed herself to panic. Or perhaps she just knew there was nothing she could do. Martha’s dad always said you should only worry about stuff you actually had any control over. The other stuff would just happen anyway. It was what he usually said when he was arguing with Martha’s mum.
‘Well, not rules as such,’ said the Doctor. ‘We have responsibilities.
You see, we’re sort of from the future and the Brilliant disappeared.’
‘I see,’ said Captain Georgina.
‘You do?’ said the Doctor. Martha knew he enjoyed it when people freaked out about time travel.
‘I’m fully briefed on the implications of the experimental drive,’ said the captain. ‘It stands to reason where this technology was leading. I assume you’ve come back to fix the problem for us.’
‘Um,’ said the Doctor. ‘Yeah, well I was gonna see what we could do.’
Captain Georgina nodded. ‘Then we sit and wait it out,’ she said.
‘Well, yes,’ said the Doctor. ‘But that’s not what Martha was asking.
Not can we get out of this, but if we could, then should we?’
‘You’re telling us it’s wrong?’ asked Captain Georgina.
‘Wrong is bad,’ said Archibald, coming over with a tray of blinis.
‘So is it wrong to tamper with reality like that?’ said the Doctor. ‘To come back from the dead?’
‘The experimental drive causes problems with causality anyway,’
said Captain Georgina. ‘Even just starting it up affects what we think of as reality.’
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‘That’s right,’ said the Doctor. ‘But that’s not just true of your clever engine. Look, you change history just by doing anything. Or not doing anything. What you do, what you strive for, every choice you ever make. That’s what builds the future.’
‘But you only get one go at it,’ said Martha. ‘Normally, I mean. If you get it wrong, that’s tough.’
‘You have to deal with the consequences of what you do,’ said the Doctor.
‘Aw,’ said Archibald. ‘Do we ’ave to?’
‘Yes,’ said the Doctor. ‘It’s called being a grown-up.’
‘Sounds really boring,’ said Archibald.
‘Sometimes it would be good to be able go back and do things again,’ admitted Martha.
‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you?’ said the Doctor gravely. ‘But it doesn’t work like that. It’s like telling lies. You can never just tell the one fib, can you? Sooner or later you’ve got to tell another, just to back up the first one. A week later, you’re juggling a whole intri-cate patchwork of lies on lies on lies. You can’t remember what you’ve told different people, and you’re probably not entirely sure what the real version is any more. So it’s only a matter of time before someone catches you out or you just plain forget something and it all collapses, boom!’
‘I’ve an ex-boyfriend you should explain that to,’ said Martha.
‘Before or after he’s an ex?’ he said.
For a moment Martha could see the Doctor turning up on a rainy night in 2005 and sorting out one particular row. ‘OK,’ she said, unsettled by what she’d just been offered. ‘It’s just a world of messy and complicated, yeah?’
‘That’s it,’ said the Doctor. ‘I hate all that tricky continuity stuff.’
�
��We just have to accept the hand we’re dealt,’ said Captain Georgina.
‘No cheating,’ said Archibald.
‘Well. . . ’ said the Doctor, and his eyes glittered. ‘Our real problem is how we get out of this mess without changing history. Which needs us to be very clever indeed. If only we had someone with an innate 119
understanding of the space-time continuum. Someone with several lifetimes’ experience doing this sort of thing.’
‘Oh,’ said Martha laughing. ‘You mean like the last of the Time Lords?’
‘Yeah, I think he’d do,’ grinned the Doctor. ‘If only we could find him.’
‘I see,’ said Captain Georgina. ‘You can help us, can you?’
‘Can you?’ added Martha.
The Doctor met her eye. ‘I’m working on it,’ he said.
He continued to work on the transmat booth for hours. Archibald and Captain Georgina eventually left him to it and went back to the canapé-scoffing party. Martha felt torn between joining them and staying with the Doctor.
‘You want anything to eat?’ she said. He didn’t even seem to hear her.
She made her way over to the human crew and badgers. They all seemed to be having fun, chatting, telling jokes and stories, and generally not giving a stuff about the problems facing them. Thomas made an unsubtle effort to impress Martha with a story about how fast he liked to drive. Archibald, grinning with new confidence, told the old joke about why pirates are called pirates. And Captain Georgina responded to this with a light and tinkling laugh. Martha smiled to herself. Was Archibald flirting? Was Captain Georgina? Did they even know themselves?
Only she and the Doctor seemed bothered that the ship might explode at any moment. Or maybe they were all just making the most of whatever time they had left. She felt glad for the three badgers, so clearly loving every minute of it. But she was also envious of them, and their ability to fit in. It wasn’t just being from Earth that made her an outsider. Now she’d met the Doctor she couldn’t just stand idle.
And that was when it struck her. They had a chance. Or at least, they had a choice. A choice between just waiting for the Brilliant to explode and daring to brave the pirates.
‘Archie,’ she said.
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Archibald grinned at her. ‘What you get,’ he said, ‘if you cross a robot with a pirate?’
‘Never mind that now,’ she told him. ‘I need your help.’
‘OK,’ he said.
‘What do you think the rest of your lot would make of the canapés?’
she asked him.
‘Huh,’ he said. ‘They’d like the cheese ones best.’
‘What is it?’ asked Captain Georgina. ‘Have you thought of something we can do?’ Around her, other people’s conversations died down. The party had been a pretence; they were all desperate to escape.
‘Yeah, I think so,’ said Martha. ‘I think we have a chance. If we can get out of the loop, we just need Archie, Joss and Dash to tell their friends what they found here. The food, the drink, a whole different way of living.’
‘But they want the experimental drive!’ said Thomas.
‘No,’ said Martha. ‘Whoever’s hiring them does. And while they do what they’re told, the badgers are just slaves.’
‘No one,’ said Dashiel slowly, ‘owns anyone.’
‘Exactly!’ said Martha. That’s what you have to tell them!’
No one said anything. The badgers looked at one another, the humans watched with bated breath. And then Martha jumped at a voice that came from right behind her.
‘I think that’s brilliant,’ said the Doctor.
‘Yeah?’ said Martha, swelling with pride.
‘Oh yeah,’ said the Doctor. ‘Double A-star and probably a badge.’
‘But will it work?’ asked Captain Georgina.
‘Oh,’ said the Doctor, ‘who knows? But you’ve got a choice between certain death and a small hope of surviving. You’re a clever lady, you work out the maths.’
‘And you can get us out of the loop?’ she asked.
‘Oh yeah,’ said the Doctor. ‘Easy. I just need to get down to the engine rooms and swap some stuff around. I’ve got some equipment down there which can help.’
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‘But how will you get there when the trans mat isn’t working?’
asked Martha.
‘Well, it’s not working quite like it should be,’ admitted the Doctor.
‘But I’ve been talking to it. And I think we’ve reached an accommodation.’
‘Doctor,’ said Martha, carefully. ‘You’re not going to do anything dangerous, are you?’
‘Of course I am,’ he said.
‘If anything goes wrong. . . ’ said Martha.
‘Then we take the consequences,’ he finished for her. ‘That’s how it works.’
‘You can program the engines from here,’ Captain Georgina told him.
‘I already have done,’ said the Doctor quickly. He seemed pleased to move on from Martha’s concern for his safety. ‘But I need the systems up here and the stuff down there to be doing slightly different things.
That’s how we jump-start the ship. It’s quite clever, really.’
‘So we’re going down to the engine rooms?’ asked Martha, already making her way over to the transmit booth.
‘Er,’ said the Doctor. ‘I am,’ he said. ‘I kind of need you to stay here.’
‘Oh,’ said Martha. ‘OK, whatever you want.’
‘Really?’ he said, surprised.
‘Well it’s going to be important, isn’t it?’ she asked.
‘Oh yeah,’ said the Doctor, a little too quickly, ‘I need you to be up here watching.’
‘Watching what?’ she said, looking back at the horseshoe of computers. ‘I don’t know how these controls work.’
‘Not the controls. I don’t wholly trust the badgers. And I really don’t trust the crew.’ He grinned. ‘I quite liked Mrs Wingsworth.’
But something in his eyes didn’t feel quite right. She folded her arms. ‘What?’ she said.
‘What?’ he said back at her, feigning innocence.
There’s something, isn’t there?’ she said. ‘You’re going to tell me.’
‘All right,’ he sighed. ‘The transmat might not be much run. It’s meant to be instantaneous but we know there’s some kind of delay.
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And if I’m lucky I won’t notice while I’m inside it. . . ’
‘But if you do?’ asked Martha, her eyes wide in horror. She didn’t know quite how a transmat worked but imagined him scrambled like the eggy material that still blocked the doorway.
‘Oh, I’ll pull together,’ he said lightly. Before she could stop him he’d opened the door of the transmat, was inside and at the controls. ‘Play nicely while I’m gone,’ he said.
‘But Doctor,’ she said, tugging on the door which refused to open. ‘I don’t even know what you’re going to do!’
‘You know what?’ said the Doctor. ‘Neither do I.’ He grinned. ‘Ah well. Sure I’ll think of something.’ And with a pop he vanished from the booth.
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It didn’t hurt quite as much as he’d expected. Yes, it hurt a lot. And yes, a human being would never have survived. A transmat machine takes you apart and puts you back together again, but the whole thing is over so quickly you shouldn’t even notice. This one had taken its time. The Doctor had felt himself being slowly reassembled, an agonising torture where there was not enough of him to scream. But as he emerged from the transmat booth into the dark, noisy engine rooms, he felt pretty much OK.
His legs buckled underneath him, and he fell face first onto the floor.
He struggled to get up again and found his limbs weren’t quite responding. His arms and legs tingled with pins and needles, like they did when he regenerated. Perhaps that’s what he’d done, his body responding automatically to being pulled apart. He struggled to reach a hand up to his face. His fingers prodded
familiar skin, tight over prominent bones. He had the same thick hair and long, furry side-burns and, though his mouth tasted all peculiar, his teeth seemed to be the same shape they’d been before. So, he was still the same man for the moment. But it said a lot about what he’d just been through that he’d not been sure.
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As feeling came back to him, he heard hesitant, shuffling footsteps.
It took effort to sit up, but going slowly he managed it. A group of mouthless men in leather aprons and Bermuda shorts huddled a short distance from him, in the narrow alleyway between the huge, dark machines. One mouthless man gestured and pointed to the far end of the engine rooms. The Doctor looked, squinting to make sense of what he saw. A tall, skinny man in a fetching pinstriped suit was stepping into a wall of scrambled egg.
‘Huh thuh,’ said the Doctor, watching him vanish. He had meant to say, ‘Is that really what my hair looks like from the back?’
He sat there, recovering and, after a while, the mouthless men brought him a mug of tea with a picture of a sheep on it. His hands shook as he held the mug, but with each sip he felt better and better.
The engines around him filled his head with noise and his skin felt itchy with grime. Yet the dark and solid machinery seemed immaculate, the air rich with the stink of detergent; he just imagined the dirt.
Thank you,’ he said as the mouthless men helped him up on his feet.
They let him walk unaided but kept close in case he fell. The Doctor made his way to the wall-mounted controls for the experimental drive.
A small porthole let him look into the machine itself, and he gazed in on the eerie light. The light was just the same as that inside the TARDIS’s central column. It swirled and murmured, restless and alive.
‘OK,’ said the Doctor, checking over the engine controls. He made a mental note of the readings and how they differed from those upstairs on the bridge. The trick was then to get the TARDIS to make up for the difference. That would, he hoped, break them from the loop. Adjusting dials and switching levers, he felt the old speed and dexterity returning to his fingers. His thoughts were starting to speed up, too.
