by Gary Russell
She was about to apologise, she really was, when with an exaggerated sigh the Doctor tugged his cream hat from his cricketing coat pocket, unfurled it and jammed it on his head.
‘Well,’ he said darkly, ‘anyone who wants to join me outside is welcome to do so.’ He looked straight at Tegan. ‘We might as well find out just how far from Heathrow 1981 we actually are.’
‘Doctor..?’ Tegan started to say, but he just rolled his eyes towards the ceiling.
‘Not now, Tegan, please. You have made your point.’ And then, fixing her with a steely stare - the sort of stare that reminded her that he was nearly a thousand years old rather than about thirty; the eyes shrieked of an old and wise man, trapped inside a young man’s body, never getting the automatic respect and reverence he deserved - the Doctor casually flicked back the red-topped lever that opened the TARDIS doors.
At which point Adric squealed like a young puppy as the doors moved inwards, pushing him to one side and sending book and half-gnawed apple in different directions.
‘Owww!’ he whined.
‘That’ll teach you to sit in stupid places,’ Tegan heard herself say, automatically taking her angst and annoyance out on the boy.
Adric, naturally, took the comment as he did everything else - water off a duck’s back.
Nyssa came into the TARDIS console room. The brown corduroy trousers she’d dug out of the TARDIS wardrobe matched her Traken jacket (even her hair was always immaculate and styled) and both looked as if they’d come straight from the shop. How did she do that?
‘Oh. Have we landed somewhere?’
Immediately the Doctor’s mood changed - and he beamed at his young protégée. ‘Yes, Nyssa,’ he said. ‘And I think you might find this quite interesting.’
Ignoring Adric and Tegan, Nyssa strode towards the Doctor and together they left the ship.
With a last withering look at Adric, Tegan scurried out after them. ‘Hey! Wait for me…’ she yelled indignantly.
The Doctor was standing, one hand in his pocket, gesticulating with the other, and using his hat, now furled up again, as a pointer to show the particular marks and design points of the frankly dull, grey room they were in.
The Doctor and Nyssa had a rapport that Tegan never understood and was more than a little envious of. In many ways, Nyssa was like a young, female version of the Doctor.
They shared a love of science, of exploration and knowledge. They also shared an amazing ability to get lost, locked up, shot at and generally tumble into trouble wherever the TARDIS took them.
It amazed Tegan how quickly she had got used to the idea that it was the ship that actually guided them rather than the Doctor, who seemed content to ramble around the twelve (at least) galaxies at the mercy of the TARDIS’s apparent whims.
Tegan was aware that Adric was at her shoulder, equally bemused by the room, his little snub nose almost twitching as he feigned disinterest when really he was just as curious as the other two - albeit through an innate need to be nosy rather than because of any genuine intellectual advancement he might achieve.
‘It’s big,’ he said pointlessly.
‘Any suggestions as to where we are, hmmm?’ The Doctor looked down at Adric as a schoolmaster might look at a particularly dense pupil.
‘A space ship?’ offered Tegan, as encouragingly as she could. If they could get past the recent argument...
‘Possibly, possibly,’ the Doctor nodded, bringing her back into the field trip. He gave a couple of jumps into the air, to check the gravity. ‘But there’s no feeling of movement.’
‘There is,’ said Adric. ‘But it’s slower, more constant.’
‘A space station,’ Tegan offered up. ‘It’s going around very slowly, creating an artificial gravity. Or something.’ She realised the others were looking at her. She’d got it wrong again.
‘Spot on,’ beamed the Doctor, pointing at her with his hat.
‘Top of the class, Ms Jovanka.’
‘It’s from Earth,’ Nyssa said dryly. ‘As usual.’ She was standing by a doorway. A sign in red and green displayed OPEN
and CLOSE in English.
‘Oh good..’ murmured the Doctor, and Tegan wasn’t sure if he was being sarcastic or not. ‘I wonder where we are?’
Adric, impatient and pragmatic as ever, waddled towards the door and pressed the green OPEN panel. The door silently slid back.
‘Adric!’ cried the Doctor.
‘What?’
With a sigh, the Doctor took Adric by the shoulders and eased him to one side. He looked through the door, left and right, before turning back to the boy. ‘How many times must I tell you not to just open doors, hmmm?’ He shook his head.
‘Anything could have been out here.’
‘But it wasn’t,’ was Adric’s answer, ‘there’s no one here.’
‘Hardly the point..?’ started the Doctor before wandering out into the brightly lit corridor with identical grey metallic walls. He stuck his head back around the door of the room where his companions stood. ‘Well? Coming or not?’
Tegan shook her head, taking up the rear as Nyssa and Adric duly followed him into the depths of the space station.
Hey, at least she’d known it was a space station. Things must be improving.
Commander Oakwood folded his arms, rested his feet on a chair opposite the one he was sitting on and let his head lean back against the rest.
Breakfast was barely over and they had a crisis. First one, admittedly, but a biggie. He still wondered about telling Earth but thought it better to wait until he had more facts. Or more possibilities, maybes and perhapses, so that he could at least anticipate Earth’s questions and have answers, even if they weren’t exactly the solutions that would be wanted.
There was a buzz on the door.
‘Yup?’ He didn’t move or open his eyes. Important to let everyone know he was as calm as ever.
Sarah Townsend seemed equally unflustered as she marched in, a data pad in her hand, reading from the scrolling notes. She liked her pad. And why not? She was one of only three people to have one. Had this been a big frontier-expanded exploration ship everyone would have one.
Probably two or three. But not here. Not on a space station guarding a silly planet.
‘Well?’
Sarah was frowning. ‘Nothing sir, except a momentary energy surge in the stacks. Which is odd...’
‘As there aren’t any energy pods or devices in the stacks,’
Oakwood finished.
‘Kris, this spike happened at exactly the same second we lost contact, give or take a point three shift.’
‘Exact second?’
‘As I say...’
‘Give or take a point three shift. Hmmm’ Oakwood stood up and straightened his uniform. ‘Nothing, no matter how insignificant, should be overlooked CPO Townsend. Care to accompany me to the stacks?’
Grinning, Sarah Townsend nodded, automatically tapping her wrist communicator. ‘Mr Braune, meet myself and the commander at Elevator 4, please.’ A bleep by way of reply made her smile. Braune, their solitary security officer, had been with them for less than three months and already had it reputation for an inability to waste words.
She followed Oakwood out of his quarters and towards the elevator. Lieutenant Paladopous caught up with them. ‘Hey, bossman, the readings from that energy spike are really weird.
Nothing I’ve ever encountered before, but at the same time there’s nothing to link it with Dymok and the situation down there. It could be a coincidence.’
‘Bloody convenient one,’ Oakwood snapped. ‘How weird is weird?’
‘A displacement field in some respects. But whereas our displacement fields are used to move heavy machinery and cargo, this is more like it displaced... well, nothing. And everything. For a moment, it’s like the air in the room was just eased around. Compacted.’
Townsend frowned now. ‘You mean, like something replaced the air?’
‘Molecularly yes.
Like something just appeared in there. So the air molecules had to move around to accommodate it.
Which is, of course, nonsense.’
‘Absolutely. Arrant nonsense,’ confirmed Oakwood. ‘Still, let’s go see if the laws of physics have been changed or not.’
He buzzed for the elevator and the doors slid open, revealing a bear of a man: Braune.
‘Morning, Drew,’ Oakwood said brightly. Braune nodded his acknowledgement but said nothing. A smile passed between Townsend and Paladopous - Braune was acting exactly as they knew he would.
The rest of the elevator trip was in silence until they arrived at the stacks.
The stacks was the station’s ‘engine room’ - a vast series of interlinked box-like rooms with control panels featuring a life-support system, power, computer relay and similar essentials. There were also, along the walls on the outside of the station, a series of small cargo bays where supplies could be brought aboard and where links to ships could be attached.
The station was not designed to allow them to dock - indeed, the station only possessed one six-man scout craft attached by an umbilical arm directly below the stacks.
It was towards one of the cargo bays that Braune led the officers right now.
Suddenly he stopped and put his hand up, regulation style, to stop them.
They listened.
Voices. No one from the crew should be down here - it was all automated. Besides which, the voices weren’t talking about the current problems that were on everyone else’s lips.
‘Pirates?’ mouthed Townsend.
Paladopous shrugged but Braune shook his head and mouthed two words back, taking a side-arm from under his jacket as he did so.
‘Or saboteurs!’
‘Fascinating structure, this,’ the Doctor was saying. ‘One of a class of space station constructed, oh, around the mid-twenty-fourth century, when Earth’s empire was at its height.’
‘Why are humans so interested in empires?’ Nyssa asked.
The Doctor stopped suddenly and looked around him in every direction, as if trying to get his bearings. ‘Err... this way I think actually. Sorry, Nyssa? Oh yes, well you see whereas on Traken your union only stretched through five or six planets in your own solar system, Earthmen are a very inquisitive, adventurous breed. They hate confinement, always seeking to better themselves. And in any species, there’s always room for improvement. Wouldn’t you agree, Tegan?’
Tegan, however, had found something interesting. It was an identification plate embedded in a wall of the corridor.
The Doctor peered at the plate, then breathed hard on it and wiped the brass clean with his sleeve. ‘Well spotted, Tegan. Yes, look I was right. How nice.’ He tapped at the wordage. ‘Look Nyssa, commissioned in two thousand, three hundred and seventy-eight..’
‘Place looks a bit battered actually.’ That was Adric.
The Doctor briefly closed his eyes. ‘Yes, thank you, Adric, you may be right. The structure may have been out here a few years already. But essentially we’re looking at a classic of its type.’ He tapped the nameplate again. ‘Little Boy II,’ he read.
‘How typically human - irony, coincidence or ignorance, I wonder which?’
Nyssa frowned, clearly confused.
‘―Now I have become Death. The Destroyer of worlds.‖‘ The Doctor peered at the inscription. ‘I do rather hope it’s coincidence.’ He wandered on and Tegan shook her head at Nyssa’s inquiry. The quotation was probably Keats or Wordsworth. Or maybe Shelley - that ‘Ozymandias’ thing, perhaps.
Adric pushed past them to keep up with the Doctor and then stopped. ‘Look,’ he said, as if he’d discovered a treasure chest rather than a directional indicator. ‘Elevator 4 is this way.’
‘Why are we suddenly looking for an elevator?’ Tegan asked, but before the Doctor could think of an answer, Adric had speeded up his pace and vanished around the corner, in the direction of the elevator.
With a groan, the Doctor started after him and then, as he reached the corner, stopped.
‘Oh dear,’ he said quietly, more to himself than Tegan or Nyssa.
As they caught up with him, Tegan could see the cause of the Doctor’s worry.
Adric was being held by a large bearded man who was holding a gun to his head. Three other people, two men and a woman, faced the Doctor and the two girls.
‘Terribly sorry,’ the Doctor began, ‘boyish enthusiasm.
Always gets him into trouble..’
The people opposite him weren’t buying any of it.
‘Who the hell are you?’
The Doctor raised his hands in surrender and Tegan did the same. After a moment’s pause, Nyssa seemed to grasp the idea of the gesture and did likewise.
‘Hello. My name is the Doctor. If you could just release Adric, it would make discussions less stressful for all of us, you know.’
Instead, the man with the gun gripped Adric tighter, making the boy wince.
The man who had spoken walked forward. Although he wasn’t obviously armed, Tegan was impressed by his presence. He seemed to be in his early forties, slightly thinning on top, and with a small scar above his left eye. His rich, jet black skin suggested to Tegan that his origins were probably somewhere in Ethiopia, or whatever the equivalent was by the twenty-fourth century
‘Commander..?’ This was a soft warning from the tall, blonde woman behind him. Beside her was a thin man with a lean, but attractive face which, despite his current frown, somehow looked as if it normally never stopped smiling.
The commander held up his hand to her and continued forward. ‘It’s OK, Chief. If this doctor makes any untoward moves, Mr Braune will shoot his young friend instantly.’
‘That really won’t be necessary. We’re not here to hurt anyone. We are just travellers who got a little lost.’
‘Yeah, too right,’ Tegan heard herself say. She wished she hadn’t - and a look from the Doctor suggested he echoed that.
‘Lost? Out here? I don’t think so, Doctor whoever you are.’
The commander didn’t seem to be fazed by their appearance, however, Tegan noted. He seemed more curious than worried. ‘You’re from Dymok, right?’
‘Traken actually,’ offered Nyssa.
‘And he’s from Gallifrey,’ Tegan said.
Again the Doctor screwed up his face in despair.
Hey, she’d only been trying to help.
‘This is irrelevant,’ he said. ‘Please, our... craft is docked in your cargo bay back there. We’ll just be on our way and you can forget all about us.’
The commander shook his head, the overhead lights glinting on his high cheekbones and strong jaw. ‘No. I think we need to see a ―craft‖ that has managed to dock with this station.’
‘Of course,’ the Doctor tutted. ‘No docking system – access by transfer tube from a larger ship. This is a Mark VI, isn’t it?’
The commander shrugged. He pointed back the way they had come.
‘I had a model kit of one of these once, you know,’ the Doctor continued. ‘Lost the umbilical to the scout ship, though. Broke off I suppose. Nothing lasts..?’
His banter stopped as the commander propelled him onwards with the muzzle of his gun. With a shrug and a sigh, Tegan walked ahead. ‘Guns. Always men with guns...’
‘Break into space stations a lot, do you?’ That was the woman, the chief. ‘Don’t look like traditional space pirates to me.’
The Doctor started to try and explain the rhetorical nature of Tegan’s comment but the fourth, as yet undemonstrative, member of the crew bustled past them, a small portable doohickey bleeping in his hand. Tegan just knew it was homing in on the TARDIS and by the time they all reached the cargo bay, the man was walking around the craft, frowning.
‘It’s here, Commander, and yet it’s not. It is registering but constantly fluctuating. It’s like this thing isn’t real..?’
‘Thank you, Lieutenant,’ the commander said. ‘That’s very helpful’
Tegan thought it was quite a good description of the TARDIS - she’d not been travelling in it for more than a few weeks now, and she certainly didn’t understand it. However, she expected the Doctor to agree with the lieutenant’s description, and was taken aback when he moved away from the commander’s gun and snatched the contraption the young man was using right out of his hand.
‘That’s not right..’ he muttered. ‘Not right at all.’ Then with a long sigh he lowered the device and, with a resigned look on his face, turned towards her.
‘Tegan, have you been messing with the TARDIS controls again?’
‘No,’ she said. As if he could think she’d do that!
‘No, Doctor, I am very much afraid to say that was me,’ said a new voice, apparently out of thin air.
‘Because if you have, we could be in trouble,’ the Doctor continued as if no one had spoken. ‘I really think it’s time we left before involving these poor people in anything...
problematic.’
But Tegan wasn’t really concentrating on him. Someone, someone not actually in the cargo bay with them, had spoken. She knew it wasn’t just her that had heard it - Nyssa and Adric were frowning, looking around. But the Doctor and the station personnel ignored them, concentrating on the lieutenant’s portable device. The Doctor pocketed it and reached out towards the TARDIS. He whipped his hand back suddenly.
‘A force field!’ he exclaimed.
‘Who spoke just now?’ was Tegan’s question.
‘Can someone let me go please,’ was Adric’s rather feeble whinge. At a nod from the commander the burly security man, Braune, indeed relaxed his grip on the boy, who walked jauntily over to Nyssa. He was all smiles, completely forgetting that it was his pathetic need to explore that had got them into this mess.
