FIC: Jake 2.0/DW - The Wreck of the Trimethian Star (2/?)
TITLE: The Wreck of the Trimethian Star
AUTHOR: roseveare
RATING: PG-13
SUMMARY: With new companion Jake Foley on board, the TARDIS responds to a centuries-old distress call. But how much of an advantage are nanites where alien technology is involved?
NOTES: Written for the Doctor Who Choose-Your-Own-Companion crossover ficathon - the 5th Doctor with Tegan, Nyssa & Adric, and Jake 2.0's Jake Foley.
WARNINGS: Crackfic. I make no promises to avoid the obvious in dialogue, plotting, fights, bad jokes, gratuitous mentions of Australian beer, and quite possibly teh sex. You have been warned.
DISCLAIMER: Not mine, no profit, yadda, yadda, yadda.
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
"This is some ship." Jake winced as his awed whisper bounced metallically back at him, echoed around the cavernous empty space. The TARDIS was impressive, and weird, and mathematics-defying, but this was what he'd always imagined when he thought of a spaceship!
As though plucking the thought from his brain (Jake didn't think he could actually mind-read), the Doctor looked perturbed. But the alien only said mildly, "I think the TARDIS is in rather better state of repair than this." He tracked his flashlight around the walls, and Jake had to hurriedly turn away, raising a hand to shield his eyes and his night-vision. It was a relief that some things still worked, with half his powers crippled by these alien environs.
The Doctor was right, though. When it was shiny and new, this might have been the starship of his imaginings, with its sleek lines and glimmering, expansive spaces, and massive arrays of controls like Sat Ops could only dream of. But that had been a long time ago.
In the meantime, the outside world had gotten in. The hull had obviously been breached in the crash, probably in more than one place, although that fact aside the body of the ship seemed to have survived remarkably well, evidently constructed from materials that didn't corrode easily in atmosphere and damp conditions. But there were cotton-wool-like growths nestled in corners, clearly the planet's equivalent of spider-webs, and a layer of dust on the skewed off-level floor. Where the floor sloped down to its maximum depth in one corner, and the dust layer had thickened into a muddy paste, there were even straggly alien plants that could subsist in the minimal light the mud-obscured viewscreens up front afforded. Elsewhere, moulds clung to floor and walls.
"It looks like its been here for years," Jake said.
"Maybe hundreds of years," the Doctor agreed, striding to the main control panels.
"Hundreds? Then it's a wonder that signal's still broadcasting, surely? Can we be completely sure it came from here?" He voiced his doubts tentatively, aware that he was very much out of his depth.
"Oh, for certain," the Doctor said dismissively, and Jake suspected he'd not even noticed the question's caution. He waved his hands expressively, making Jake blink again to avoid the beam from the flashlight. "Most of the damage is purely cosmetic. I should think several systems are still capable of running. And while I don't recognise the specific technology, the power supply looks to be self-renewing. Its working life would be considerable."
Jake stared around the control room again, examining everything closely. The ship looked dead to him. "You really think there is anything still live here?"
The Doctor straightened sharply from where he'd leaned over to examine the controls. "You don't feel anything?"
"I'd rather not try," Jake admitted.
"Oh... yes, I can see how that might be the case. But you needn't worry about encountering the sort of backlash experienced with the TARDIS. I can assure you there's nothing remotely like those kinds of energies behind the operation of this vessel."
Behind which he read that the Doctor was interested, and had at his disposal a tool that could provide answers. Jake wasn't unfamiliar with the situation. Six months working for the NSA had made him over-familiar with it, and he could recognise it pretty well. Although, single-minded as it was, the Doctor's interest was motivated by a pure kind of curiosity compared with the NSA's motives. Jake didn't mind. It wasn't as though he didn't look for ways to make himself useful - it had only seemed sensible, for example, that the one combat-ready member of their crew accompany the Doctor in his initial exploration of the crashed ship. (And despite her comments before about the Doctor's leading them all into danger, Jake had the definite impression that the caustic Australian wasn't impressed by the suggestion.)
But he found himself without any answers for the Doctor beyond a shake of his head. "I don't sense anything." The other man's disappointment was so keen he felt compelled to add, "The nanites' range is pretty limited. Something could be online elsewhere on board. Or maybe the systems are hibernating. Or they aren't anything I could sense at all anyway."
"Perhaps." The Doctor seemed to have moved on to other thoughts. "What I haven't seen yet is any bodies. Have you?"
"Maybe they all got out, or the survivors retrieved them. You said this planet was life-sustaining." Duh. The ship was about as airtight as a colander. Neither he nor the Doctor would be breathing right now if it wasn't. Not unless the nanites and whatever the Doctor was could handle prolonged oxygen deprivation. Jake fell silent.
"Or maybe they're dust." The Doctor directed his flashlight down, to the dull dusty layer on the floor. Jake felt compelled to move his feet, but there was nowhere to move them to that was completely free of the residue. "But no." The flashlight whipped back up again. "The accelerated decomposition is possible, depending on the skeletal structure of whichever species this craft carried and the corrosives present in the atmosphere, but it's far more likely you're right." He returned to poking at the controls, with a focus that suggested he searched this time for something specific.
"One thing that we do know for sure is that they're a century or several beyond our help or anyone else's - aha!" He stabbed at a button, which had no visible effect so far as Jake could see. "It's only the responsible thing to do - no sense anybody else diverting their course to follow that distress beacon," he explained as he turned back. "We should get back to the TARDIS before Tegan, Nyssa and Adric start wondering what's--"
The Doctor froze. The change in his expression was alarming to see on the confident and cheerfully self-controlled alien. He voiced one strained word that spoke volumes. "No..."
And Jake knew this scene. He'd seen it in a hundred horror movies. There's something behind me...
Something the Doctor had recognised. Something the Doctor was deathly afraid of. From what he'd seen of the Doctor so far (fearlessly facing down genocidal alien cat-things without a weapon in his hand, nor any sign he wanted a weapon in his hand) he really didn't want to meet whatever that was.
There weren't too many options, facing the wrong way and blind to the danger. Jake chose up.
There was a ventilation grill in the roof, fifteen feet above their heads. He caught it with his fingers, almost losing his grip as his right hand punched through one of the cotton-ball nests and it ejected something the size of a golf ball with far more legs than a spider, that promptly bit him and and scuttled off. He cursed, salvaged his grip, and looked down.
The thing that had been behind him was a four- or five-foot-high robot... thing, shaped vaguely like a cylinder that tapered slightly toward the top, punctuating in a dome-like 'head'. For features it had an eyestalk and two antennae. It seemed to move with an almost gliding motion across the floor towards the Doctor, its eyestalk swivelling up to note Jake's position.
So did one of the other, arm-like protruberances previously unnoticed below the eye. It was the Doctor's urgent warning cry that made Jake move, before he'd processed his own realisation that it was a weapon.
The grill exploded behind him, his body barely clearing the path of the weapon's fire in time. Unfortunately he hadn't gauged where he was going particularly well, missed the sparse handholds and crashed down onto the middle of the big control bank behind the Doctor.
"EXTERMINATE!" blared the robot in a metallic voice. "EXTERMINATE THE INTRUDERS! YOU ARE AN ENEMY OF THE DALEKS! EXTERMINATE!"
"Now, let's talk about this," the Doctor began. Jake raised his head, quashing a groan. The Doctor was backing off slowly as he spoke, trying to distract the robot and lead it away. But the robot had him cut off in a moment, and the Doctor's reasonable tone disintegrated into an angry, anguised, "You can't be here. This isn't right--"
The robot fired again as Jake moved, but it fired over the control panel and missed him as he crouched low. At the same time, the Doctor dived behind a smaller control bank. "It's protecting the ship!" he called. "Stay behind key systems and it won't dare risk damaging them!" Jake could hear him scrabble away from the thing - the dalek? - as it tried to round the console. Impossible to clearly make out the words he was muttering to himself amid the dalek's shrill metallic voice and the grind of its ambulatory mechanism, but Jake thought he caught 'something not right about this...'
No kidding.
"How do we stop it!" Jake yelled, trying to negotiate his way into a better position. Unfortunately his new choice of shield obviously wasn't a key system. He recoiled as the controls exploded in sparks and the back of it turned red-hot to the touch.
"Jake, wait-- No!" The Doctor's head rose from cover, alarm in his voice.
Unfortunately Jake couldn't heed the warning. With no cover left in easy reach, attack was his only chance. He sprang onto the robot, finding footholds and finger holds in the grill beneath its upper section, trying to stay above the level of the weapons at its front.
"Careful not to touch its gun - go for the eyestalk--" the Doctor instructed, helplessly ducking from another blast.
Jake was already moving, craning forward to curl his palm over the end of its electronic eye. The robot spun crazily, and he clung desperately in place. Then--
He was on the floor with his head full of blue sparks. Everything hurt, and his limbs fizzed with a sensation that felt less like the organic aftermath of a shock than electric signal interference. The smell of burnt flesh was strong. Somewhere close by, there was an awful lot of noise. He raised his head painfully and stared at the object still clutched in his burned right hand.
"MY VISION IS IMPAIRED! I CANNOT SEE!" The droning robot was spinning in circles, not three feet from where he sprawled. He tried to raise himself onto all fours to crawl clear of it, and hands grabbed him under the arms, lending much-needed assistance.
"What the--?"
"Shh."
There was smoke rising from the back of the frustrated robot now. As Jake watched, whatever circuit overload its blindness had induced reached critical stage and it - quite literally - blew its top.
Instinct raised his arms in front of his face as a shield from the debris. The explosion seemed to echo a long time in the subsequent silence.
Jake looked up at the Doctor, whose stare was fixed not on him, but through the smoke. "What the hell was that?" His own voice sounded hoarse. Hardly surprising.
"I don't know... but it wasn’t a dalek.”
Jake turned back sharply, following his gaze to where the thing had been. It wasn’t there. Nothing was there. Even the smoke was gone, and if it hadn’t been for the still-sizzling control panel and destroyed grill, there might never have been any fight at all.
“What - what the hell just happened?” Jake scrubbed the back of his hand over his eyes, then glanced quickly around. “Will there be any more of those things?” The palms of his hands were burned; his left knee, his right ankle, the toes and sides of his feet where they’d caught through his shoes - wherever he’d been in contact with the robot when it shocked him.
“I don’t know...” The Doctor was also keeping a keen eye on their surroundings, but there was contemplation in his face as well. He stood and briskly brushed himself off, then reached down with both hands to grasp Jake’s unharmed wrists and help him up. “It was a defence mechanism!” he announced, with the rather out-of-place blissful satisfaction of a puzzle solved. He waved an illustrative finger in Jake’s face. “Some form of telepathic sensory technology, taking from our minds the enemy we should least like to face and projecting it as a tactile hologram. How very clever!”
“It wasn’t real?” Jake felt a bit disappointed. After all, he’d thought he handled the fight pretty well.
“Oh, it would still have killed us if you hadn’t... taken care of matters.” He frowned at the empty space where the destroyed dalek wasn’t. “The daleks are an old enemy. Totally ruthless, totally dedicated to destruction. Let’s hope the technology here doesn’t pluck any more out of our thoughts, eh?” He clapped Jake on the arm, and did an abrupt double-take. His frown intensified. “You’ll be all right?”
“Uh... It’ll heal.” Jake stumbled a bit over the reassurance, still not used to talking openly about this with people who didn’t have security clearance. Lou would blow her top if she knew. “A day or two, at most.”
“Good... good.” The Doctor’s concentration was elsewhere again - it didn’t seem that it ever stayed in one place for very long, much like the man himself. “Well, one thing that we know for certain - there are definitely still active systems in here. That kind of technology doesn’t have much range, and it needs a sophisticated computer’s control. Before we get you back to the TARDIS, how about giving it another try?”
Jake was honestly more concerned about the security system trying to kill them again with things that didn’t exist. “The dalek--”
His protest was waved off. “I doubt we’ll be seeing any more of those for the time being. Likely the feedback from the hologram’s destruction shorted the circuits, but even if it didn’t the power drain must have been immense - base levels will need to be restored. I should probably find those systems and cut the power before we leave. It wouldn’t do to have anyone else wandering in unknowning and getting hurt.”
Jake supposed it wouldn’t, but the ship's systems still remained elusive, making it academic. Or... no, maybe his interface had touched something, very briefly, only to slide off it again. Like it was a smooth surface, and the nanites unable to find any purchase. He shook his head. “There’s something... I can’t touch it. It’s too alien. Or too well defended.” Or both.
“Never mind,” the Doctor said, patting his shoulder. “I shall bring Nyssa and Adric back here to investigate the ship’s systems the old fashioned way.”
Nyssa? Jake could imagine all too well how the girl would fare against another creature like that. And Adric was just a kid. But it seemed that for the Doctor it was no concern to expose his troop of non-combatants to such dangers. Jake grimaced. He knew this was how these people worked - how they had been working for a long time before he stumbled into them - but on this occasion, it felt like it was his failing that made it necessary for them to take the risk.
The Doctor saw his dismay, even in the half light - and Jake did suspect that the Doctor’s alien physiology included a degree of night vision too. He had lost his flashlight, but he did not seem to struggle to see.
“Not your fault. Come along, Jake. Tegan and the others really will be wondering where we are.”
Despite the Doctor’s reassuring words and mild tone, it definitely seemed to Jake that he was not having the best of success so far in his stint on this crew. But he let the 800-plus year old alien take his arm and help him to negotiate the awkwardly skewed floor, and they limped slowly back to the TARDIS.
Chapter 3
Hopefully another chapter or two tomorrow/Friday!
AUTHOR: roseveare
RATING: PG-13
SUMMARY: With new companion Jake Foley on board, the TARDIS responds to a centuries-old distress call. But how much of an advantage are nanites where alien technology is involved?
NOTES: Written for the Doctor Who Choose-Your-Own-Companion crossover ficathon - the 5th Doctor with Tegan, Nyssa & Adric, and Jake 2.0's Jake Foley.
WARNINGS: Crackfic. I make no promises to avoid the obvious in dialogue, plotting, fights, bad jokes, gratuitous mentions of Australian beer, and quite possibly teh sex. You have been warned.
DISCLAIMER: Not mine, no profit, yadda, yadda, yadda.
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
"This is some ship." Jake winced as his awed whisper bounced metallically back at him, echoed around the cavernous empty space. The TARDIS was impressive, and weird, and mathematics-defying, but this was what he'd always imagined when he thought of a spaceship!
As though plucking the thought from his brain (Jake didn't think he could actually mind-read), the Doctor looked perturbed. But the alien only said mildly, "I think the TARDIS is in rather better state of repair than this." He tracked his flashlight around the walls, and Jake had to hurriedly turn away, raising a hand to shield his eyes and his night-vision. It was a relief that some things still worked, with half his powers crippled by these alien environs.
The Doctor was right, though. When it was shiny and new, this might have been the starship of his imaginings, with its sleek lines and glimmering, expansive spaces, and massive arrays of controls like Sat Ops could only dream of. But that had been a long time ago.
In the meantime, the outside world had gotten in. The hull had obviously been breached in the crash, probably in more than one place, although that fact aside the body of the ship seemed to have survived remarkably well, evidently constructed from materials that didn't corrode easily in atmosphere and damp conditions. But there were cotton-wool-like growths nestled in corners, clearly the planet's equivalent of spider-webs, and a layer of dust on the skewed off-level floor. Where the floor sloped down to its maximum depth in one corner, and the dust layer had thickened into a muddy paste, there were even straggly alien plants that could subsist in the minimal light the mud-obscured viewscreens up front afforded. Elsewhere, moulds clung to floor and walls.
"It looks like its been here for years," Jake said.
"Maybe hundreds of years," the Doctor agreed, striding to the main control panels.
"Hundreds? Then it's a wonder that signal's still broadcasting, surely? Can we be completely sure it came from here?" He voiced his doubts tentatively, aware that he was very much out of his depth.
"Oh, for certain," the Doctor said dismissively, and Jake suspected he'd not even noticed the question's caution. He waved his hands expressively, making Jake blink again to avoid the beam from the flashlight. "Most of the damage is purely cosmetic. I should think several systems are still capable of running. And while I don't recognise the specific technology, the power supply looks to be self-renewing. Its working life would be considerable."
Jake stared around the control room again, examining everything closely. The ship looked dead to him. "You really think there is anything still live here?"
The Doctor straightened sharply from where he'd leaned over to examine the controls. "You don't feel anything?"
"I'd rather not try," Jake admitted.
"Oh... yes, I can see how that might be the case. But you needn't worry about encountering the sort of backlash experienced with the TARDIS. I can assure you there's nothing remotely like those kinds of energies behind the operation of this vessel."
Behind which he read that the Doctor was interested, and had at his disposal a tool that could provide answers. Jake wasn't unfamiliar with the situation. Six months working for the NSA had made him over-familiar with it, and he could recognise it pretty well. Although, single-minded as it was, the Doctor's interest was motivated by a pure kind of curiosity compared with the NSA's motives. Jake didn't mind. It wasn't as though he didn't look for ways to make himself useful - it had only seemed sensible, for example, that the one combat-ready member of their crew accompany the Doctor in his initial exploration of the crashed ship. (And despite her comments before about the Doctor's leading them all into danger, Jake had the definite impression that the caustic Australian wasn't impressed by the suggestion.)
But he found himself without any answers for the Doctor beyond a shake of his head. "I don't sense anything." The other man's disappointment was so keen he felt compelled to add, "The nanites' range is pretty limited. Something could be online elsewhere on board. Or maybe the systems are hibernating. Or they aren't anything I could sense at all anyway."
"Perhaps." The Doctor seemed to have moved on to other thoughts. "What I haven't seen yet is any bodies. Have you?"
"Maybe they all got out, or the survivors retrieved them. You said this planet was life-sustaining." Duh. The ship was about as airtight as a colander. Neither he nor the Doctor would be breathing right now if it wasn't. Not unless the nanites and whatever the Doctor was could handle prolonged oxygen deprivation. Jake fell silent.
"Or maybe they're dust." The Doctor directed his flashlight down, to the dull dusty layer on the floor. Jake felt compelled to move his feet, but there was nowhere to move them to that was completely free of the residue. "But no." The flashlight whipped back up again. "The accelerated decomposition is possible, depending on the skeletal structure of whichever species this craft carried and the corrosives present in the atmosphere, but it's far more likely you're right." He returned to poking at the controls, with a focus that suggested he searched this time for something specific.
"One thing that we do know for sure is that they're a century or several beyond our help or anyone else's - aha!" He stabbed at a button, which had no visible effect so far as Jake could see. "It's only the responsible thing to do - no sense anybody else diverting their course to follow that distress beacon," he explained as he turned back. "We should get back to the TARDIS before Tegan, Nyssa and Adric start wondering what's--"
The Doctor froze. The change in his expression was alarming to see on the confident and cheerfully self-controlled alien. He voiced one strained word that spoke volumes. "No..."
And Jake knew this scene. He'd seen it in a hundred horror movies. There's something behind me...
Something the Doctor had recognised. Something the Doctor was deathly afraid of. From what he'd seen of the Doctor so far (fearlessly facing down genocidal alien cat-things without a weapon in his hand, nor any sign he wanted a weapon in his hand) he really didn't want to meet whatever that was.
There weren't too many options, facing the wrong way and blind to the danger. Jake chose up.
There was a ventilation grill in the roof, fifteen feet above their heads. He caught it with his fingers, almost losing his grip as his right hand punched through one of the cotton-ball nests and it ejected something the size of a golf ball with far more legs than a spider, that promptly bit him and and scuttled off. He cursed, salvaged his grip, and looked down.
The thing that had been behind him was a four- or five-foot-high robot... thing, shaped vaguely like a cylinder that tapered slightly toward the top, punctuating in a dome-like 'head'. For features it had an eyestalk and two antennae. It seemed to move with an almost gliding motion across the floor towards the Doctor, its eyestalk swivelling up to note Jake's position.
So did one of the other, arm-like protruberances previously unnoticed below the eye. It was the Doctor's urgent warning cry that made Jake move, before he'd processed his own realisation that it was a weapon.
The grill exploded behind him, his body barely clearing the path of the weapon's fire in time. Unfortunately he hadn't gauged where he was going particularly well, missed the sparse handholds and crashed down onto the middle of the big control bank behind the Doctor.
"EXTERMINATE!" blared the robot in a metallic voice. "EXTERMINATE THE INTRUDERS! YOU ARE AN ENEMY OF THE DALEKS! EXTERMINATE!"
"Now, let's talk about this," the Doctor began. Jake raised his head, quashing a groan. The Doctor was backing off slowly as he spoke, trying to distract the robot and lead it away. But the robot had him cut off in a moment, and the Doctor's reasonable tone disintegrated into an angry, anguised, "You can't be here. This isn't right--"
The robot fired again as Jake moved, but it fired over the control panel and missed him as he crouched low. At the same time, the Doctor dived behind a smaller control bank. "It's protecting the ship!" he called. "Stay behind key systems and it won't dare risk damaging them!" Jake could hear him scrabble away from the thing - the dalek? - as it tried to round the console. Impossible to clearly make out the words he was muttering to himself amid the dalek's shrill metallic voice and the grind of its ambulatory mechanism, but Jake thought he caught 'something not right about this...'
No kidding.
"How do we stop it!" Jake yelled, trying to negotiate his way into a better position. Unfortunately his new choice of shield obviously wasn't a key system. He recoiled as the controls exploded in sparks and the back of it turned red-hot to the touch.
"Jake, wait-- No!" The Doctor's head rose from cover, alarm in his voice.
Unfortunately Jake couldn't heed the warning. With no cover left in easy reach, attack was his only chance. He sprang onto the robot, finding footholds and finger holds in the grill beneath its upper section, trying to stay above the level of the weapons at its front.
"Careful not to touch its gun - go for the eyestalk--" the Doctor instructed, helplessly ducking from another blast.
Jake was already moving, craning forward to curl his palm over the end of its electronic eye. The robot spun crazily, and he clung desperately in place. Then--
He was on the floor with his head full of blue sparks. Everything hurt, and his limbs fizzed with a sensation that felt less like the organic aftermath of a shock than electric signal interference. The smell of burnt flesh was strong. Somewhere close by, there was an awful lot of noise. He raised his head painfully and stared at the object still clutched in his burned right hand.
"MY VISION IS IMPAIRED! I CANNOT SEE!" The droning robot was spinning in circles, not three feet from where he sprawled. He tried to raise himself onto all fours to crawl clear of it, and hands grabbed him under the arms, lending much-needed assistance.
"What the--?"
"Shh."
There was smoke rising from the back of the frustrated robot now. As Jake watched, whatever circuit overload its blindness had induced reached critical stage and it - quite literally - blew its top.
Instinct raised his arms in front of his face as a shield from the debris. The explosion seemed to echo a long time in the subsequent silence.
Jake looked up at the Doctor, whose stare was fixed not on him, but through the smoke. "What the hell was that?" His own voice sounded hoarse. Hardly surprising.
"I don't know... but it wasn’t a dalek.”
Jake turned back sharply, following his gaze to where the thing had been. It wasn’t there. Nothing was there. Even the smoke was gone, and if it hadn’t been for the still-sizzling control panel and destroyed grill, there might never have been any fight at all.
“What - what the hell just happened?” Jake scrubbed the back of his hand over his eyes, then glanced quickly around. “Will there be any more of those things?” The palms of his hands were burned; his left knee, his right ankle, the toes and sides of his feet where they’d caught through his shoes - wherever he’d been in contact with the robot when it shocked him.
“I don’t know...” The Doctor was also keeping a keen eye on their surroundings, but there was contemplation in his face as well. He stood and briskly brushed himself off, then reached down with both hands to grasp Jake’s unharmed wrists and help him up. “It was a defence mechanism!” he announced, with the rather out-of-place blissful satisfaction of a puzzle solved. He waved an illustrative finger in Jake’s face. “Some form of telepathic sensory technology, taking from our minds the enemy we should least like to face and projecting it as a tactile hologram. How very clever!”
“It wasn’t real?” Jake felt a bit disappointed. After all, he’d thought he handled the fight pretty well.
“Oh, it would still have killed us if you hadn’t... taken care of matters.” He frowned at the empty space where the destroyed dalek wasn’t. “The daleks are an old enemy. Totally ruthless, totally dedicated to destruction. Let’s hope the technology here doesn’t pluck any more out of our thoughts, eh?” He clapped Jake on the arm, and did an abrupt double-take. His frown intensified. “You’ll be all right?”
“Uh... It’ll heal.” Jake stumbled a bit over the reassurance, still not used to talking openly about this with people who didn’t have security clearance. Lou would blow her top if she knew. “A day or two, at most.”
“Good... good.” The Doctor’s concentration was elsewhere again - it didn’t seem that it ever stayed in one place for very long, much like the man himself. “Well, one thing that we know for certain - there are definitely still active systems in here. That kind of technology doesn’t have much range, and it needs a sophisticated computer’s control. Before we get you back to the TARDIS, how about giving it another try?”
Jake was honestly more concerned about the security system trying to kill them again with things that didn’t exist. “The dalek--”
His protest was waved off. “I doubt we’ll be seeing any more of those for the time being. Likely the feedback from the hologram’s destruction shorted the circuits, but even if it didn’t the power drain must have been immense - base levels will need to be restored. I should probably find those systems and cut the power before we leave. It wouldn’t do to have anyone else wandering in unknowning and getting hurt.”
Jake supposed it wouldn’t, but the ship's systems still remained elusive, making it academic. Or... no, maybe his interface had touched something, very briefly, only to slide off it again. Like it was a smooth surface, and the nanites unable to find any purchase. He shook his head. “There’s something... I can’t touch it. It’s too alien. Or too well defended.” Or both.
“Never mind,” the Doctor said, patting his shoulder. “I shall bring Nyssa and Adric back here to investigate the ship’s systems the old fashioned way.”
Nyssa? Jake could imagine all too well how the girl would fare against another creature like that. And Adric was just a kid. But it seemed that for the Doctor it was no concern to expose his troop of non-combatants to such dangers. Jake grimaced. He knew this was how these people worked - how they had been working for a long time before he stumbled into them - but on this occasion, it felt like it was his failing that made it necessary for them to take the risk.
The Doctor saw his dismay, even in the half light - and Jake did suspect that the Doctor’s alien physiology included a degree of night vision too. He had lost his flashlight, but he did not seem to struggle to see.
“Not your fault. Come along, Jake. Tegan and the others really will be wondering where we are.”
Despite the Doctor’s reassuring words and mild tone, it definitely seemed to Jake that he was not having the best of success so far in his stint on this crew. But he let the 800-plus year old alien take his arm and help him to negotiate the awkwardly skewed floor, and they limped slowly back to the TARDIS.
Chapter 3
Hopefully another chapter or two tomorrow/Friday!