Jenny Who?

by CaitlinJ1021

The life of the Doctor's Daughter as she travels the universe for 200 years. Jenny drifts through multiple names and places and planets and eras trying to find the Doctor, but also trying to discover who she is without him and making her own way. However, harsh moral choices and questions of survival challenge whether she is capable of being the hero she desires.

1. Nobody

Author's Note/Introduction: This fic is a prequel fic to my epic 2 million word saga of 3 Doctors, 9 Companions, What Could Possibly Go Wrong? and 4 Doctors, 12 Companions, What Could Possibly Go Wrong? however, being as it is a prequel, it has no bearing on either of those fics or their continuity and you do not have to read them at all to read this fic. But if you really like it, then feel free to go read it, though since I started it in 2013 the writing quality is pretty poor to being with. Much poorer than this. This is entirely a story about what happened to Jenny after she stole the ship from Messaline, but does not feature the Doctor or any companions, it's solo, just for her, and she deserves her own story after her sacrifice and paternal abandonment.

Nobody

Tungtrun, 25th of July, 6012

A vibrant, blue sunset spread across the skyline and blurred brightly like electricity along the horizon, the white sun setting halfway below the edge of the frozen planet. It was a ball of ice, an uninhabitable surface, in the middle of its winter cycle when a black shape drifted into view far above, as tiny as a star, floating hundreds of miles above the atmosphere in space. It hovered peacefully along for some time, gliding between the nebulas in the sky and the distant galaxies, the sky crisp and vibrant, shades of blue into deep, dark purples.

Then the black blot started to grow. It didn't grow very large, because it wasn't a very large object to begin with, but there was no mistaking that it was drawing closer and closer and closer, faster and faster and faster. A blue glow started up around it, shimmering hazily just like the horizon did, as it came hurtling dangerously towards the planet. It had dropped out of orbit, succumbed to the gravity, and now it was burning around the edges in oranges and indigos like a gas flame, and a whooshing noise accompanied it as it drew closer, a metal fireball. It was a spaceship, and it was unmistakably crashing.

It came speeding towards the icy surface, the thick snowscape, a flaming mass, the engines cut off, control completely lost, the pilot unable to regain command, if the pilot was even still alive. Like lightning it collided with the planet's surface and shot like a sleigh through the snow, the heavy white powder pummelling it and rising across the hull as it slowed, leaving a sooty, smoking slipstream behind it. The wreckage slowed to a halt in the middle of the sloping tundra, smoking curling in ash-filled wisps from the corners and the cracks in the hull where the engines sat underneath, stuttering out to silence. For some seconds, the only sound to be heard was that of the dying, crackling flames, and the chilly wind singing around it in a harsh descant.

A door on the side was pushed open violently, creaking upwards and then snapping off of its hinges. It fell with a soft, heavy noise into the deep snow and kicked up a fine mist for a second, before everything settled and somebody fell out of the wreckage.

Jenny staggered out of it, coughing, clutching her side intensely and dropping to her knees on the broken, hot door. She didn't know what planet she was on, but she had entered into its orbit accidentally, having no clue about how strong the gravity was or the precise specifications of her stolen spaceship, and now she had suffered the severe consequences.

She had been born yesterday. Yesterday. And already she'd died once and lost control of a spaceship in frivolous pursuit of a vanishing time machine. There was no way to track it, no way to track her father, other than fly aimlessly to try and get as far away from Messaline as possible. But she didn't know what this planet was, the escape vessel didn't have fully detailed star charts, didn't have maps, it was just set on a direct course for whatever the closest human colony was, but she had switched off that particular function straight away. She wasn't a human, she didn't want to go to any human colonies, she had wanted to take control for herself. And at any rate, there hadn't actually been enough fuel to get her to the nearest colony. The fuel had been syphoned out of all the ships on Messaline very gradually to make IEDs in the week-long war.

It looked like she was stranded, unless she found a way to repair her ship, and not in the least to fix whatever was wrong with herself after having a crash landing. Glancing down, she saw the skin of her left leg, the outside of her thigh, was a bleeding wound through the tears of her trousers, burnt to oblivion, wounds stretching up over her hip and singing her clothes. Feeling the pain only when she saw it, she limped over to the snow and picked up a handful to pack it over the burns. The relief she felt was momentary until her side became numb from the cold and she figured that she was going to be at risk of frostbite if she stayed out there for longer. The wreckage was hot, the heating system's filament had exploded against her causing her injuries, but it wouldn't be hot forever, and there weren't any spare, thicker clothes inside it.

It looked like Jenny was trapped on a desolate ice planet with no way to escape and no way to survive, because she had no food supplies or weapons at all, and even if she did have weapons, she couldn't see any animals to kill for meat, nor did she have a way to sterilise or skin or cook anything she found. On top of that, she didn't even know how to cook anything, cooking was not one of the important skills implanted into her brain when she had been created less than twenty-four hours ago. The ability to create gourmet cuisine was not there on the list of qualities belonging to the perfect soldier. She was left with no choice but to try and think her way out of things.

Her only option was to merely survive until she could think of something better to do, and survival meant heat primarily. She could do lots of things with heat, she could melt snow and make drinkable water, keep herself warm, keep herself alive. But the heating system was gone, exploded, and the fires of the wreck were going out. Her only hope was the engine, the engine produced enormous amounts of heat, heat that needed to be ejected out into space. It was a short-term escape pod, not any actual space vessel of any importance, the mechanisms were all simple. If she could ration the fuel, maybe mix it with snow to try and get more out of it, she could probably disconnect the engines from everything else in the ship and funnel the heat ejectors back into the cockpit. If she did that, she would only have to fix the door back up and she would have a relatively warm place to sit and think.

She staggered, wincing against the pain of her wounds, into the ship and spied a first aid kit, but that could wait for later. What she needed was a toolbox, anything left for general maintenance, hoping that they, too, hadn't been procured by the human or the Hath armies for the war effort. Who could fight with a bunch of screwdrivers, anyway? Apart from her father. Though, she barely knew him, and he had just left her. He hadn't even waited to see if she would wake up. Surely he suspected that she might? It must be something to do with him, she knew it, something to do with these Time Lords, but if he was the last one, like he said, who was there to tell her the specifics of their anatomy?

She found a toolkit finally, and opened it to a glorious assortment of spanners, screws, nuts, bolts and screwdriver; a plain, cold, metal screwdriver, not a weird, glowing one. Sonic one. Was that what he had called it? A sonic screwdriver? She was too cold to remember properly. She stumbled to the outside and found that her route to the engine was covered in snow, that the pod was completely caked in the stuff, the nose buried deep down.

At a loss, she dropped the tools and desperately started trying to shovel the snow with her bare hands. It proved fruitless though - there was so much snow, and her hands were numb after just a few seconds. She was stuck shivering, unable to move her fingers at all and barely scratching the surface of the ship's hull. Even worse, the sun was setting above her. The sky was getting a darker and darker shade of purple, the ice reflecting plum-colour back at her, the snow like grapes, and the moon was minuscule and too far away to give any light. There was no source of light in the toolkit, there was none anywhere.

She collapsed onto her knees and felt like crying. Who knew if she would come back to life again? If she would wake back up, if she died on this planet, in this cold? She was getting colder and colder and colder by the second and dragged herself inside the ship, the door-less ship, as a wind started up outside. She had never been caught in a snowstorm before. It was no warmer within but she kept herself going on the illusion that it was, on the illusion that she was doing the best that she could.

How could she have failed so quickly? She wasn't even a day old. Not a single day. To die twice in the space of a day? To die alone and freezing on an empty planet? She was going to freeze, she was going to develop hypothermia. She was going to be frozen and buried in the snow and even if she did wake up again inexplicably, she wouldn't have a way out.

It was pitch black outside now and she could definitely hear the storm picking up. Jenny wanted to cry at her uselessness; she should have just keep the ship on course for the nearest human colony. There was no reason she wouldn't be allowed onto a human colony. She was born in a human colony. There was no reason why she hadn't stayed on Messaline, either. Running after a man who had let her die for him and then left.

Where had the Doctor been when she had woken up? Where was the Doctor now? Maybe they had a connection, she thought. She was his daughter, maybe he would know that she was going to die, that she needed to be saved by somebody, anybody. She felt like praying, but she didn't know who to pray to, she didn't know anything of religion, or gods. The only creation myth she had ever known, her father had proven false. That one shred of hope.

As the light dwindled, Jenny remained alone on the planet, alone with a frost gathering on her lips, eyelashes, eyebrows, her fingertips. She couldn't see if they were going black from frostbite yet in the darkness, she couldn't tell if the darkness was outside of her or inside of her. Maybe she was fading away and her brain was shutting off from the cold.

Regardless of where the darkness came from, she succumbed to it eventually, and fell away from herself.

---

Arooh, Tungtrun, 27th of July, 6012

There were grunting noises around her when she awoke in warmth, buried underneath something. For a few seconds, she thought she was dead, permanently dead, but the smells around her were too poignant and mildly unpleasant to be part of the afterlife if it existed. And going by how she hadn't gasped her away back into consciousness in a violent fit of resuming respiratory functions, she hadn't died again, either.

She opened her cold eyes groggily and looked around to see she was in quite a dark place with a lantern hanging from an icy ceiling, tightly packed ice walls around her, and there were people bustling around. Well, maybe not people - she didn't know what they were, but she was quite sure that there were two of them with four arms each, and they were somewhat larger than a human. They were cooking something on a fire, the light a vibrant orange, and she was underneath a heavy blanket that smelt of decay so strongly she was sure it was first of all old, and second of all made of fur. It definitely seemed soft enough to be fur.

One of the things in the room spoke to other upon noticing her staring at them, and she saw that there was a pot like a cauldron over the fire, and she could smell something cooking in it.

"They're awake," one of them said to the other, coming over to her. She didn't know what species this creature was. It had four yellow eyes deeply set into grey, wrinkled skin that shone like scales in the light, and four, long arms with three spindly fingers and two thumbs on each hand. It was also speaking another language to the one she was used to.. She didn't know what language it was, just that she could understand it, and she got the feeling that if she tried to talk, she would succeed in speaking it as well.

"Where am I?" she asked, and it stared at her in surprise that she really was speaking its language. Her mouth moved differently to the words she knew she was saying, and it was strange, but not so strange that she couldn't see it was a benefit.

"No humans know how to speak the native tongue," it said.

"…I'm not a human," she said after a pause. She didn't know what this ability was. Possibly something to do with the things forced into her head by the progenation machine that had created her, because she could always understand the Hath as they addressed one another with their green-bubbled face-tanks, "Who are you? What are you? What planet am I on?"

"Tungtrun," it told her, "We are Trodahz. I am Cardak, this is Ruax."

"I'm Jenny," she said politely, not having any other name to introduce herself with other than the one Donna had given her, "Did you rescue me?"

"We came to examine the wreckage, you've been unconscious for two days," Cardak explained. She didn't know what a Trodahz was, but they were clearly the species who inhabited the planet, living under the surface, by the looks of things, "It caused a cave-in in the reservoir."

"Your water supply!? I am so sorry," she apologised, "Is there anything I can do?" Who knew if the water was contaminated with drops of fuel or burning spaceship now.

"You can tell us what you are," Ruax said from by the fire, stirring whatever was in the pot. When she looked around, it didn't seem as primitive as it first had. Sure, they were cooking over an open fire and lived wrapped in furs, but she could see some sort of technological device on the ceiling that looked to be doing the same job as a simple, household extractor fan, sucking the smoke out. And there were power cables powering the lantern that fed through another hole in the wall, and the door in was made of metal. It was a very odd sort of place.

"I'm… I'm a Time Lord," she said eventually, and they both laughed.

"A Time Lord? The Time Lords are all dead. Your ship log said you came from Messaline," Cardak said.

"You accessed the ship's log? How badly is it damaged? Is it repairable?" she asked urgently. She thought that if she had the parts, she could probably fix it. The parts and some way to live until she got them, then she could figure out exactly what had gone wrong and caused the malfunction that made the heating system blow out, destroying the gravity estimators.

"With the right parts and the right knowledge it is," Cardak answered her.

"Good. Where is it? I need to fix it," Jenny said, trying to get out of the bed she was in and finding her leg bound tightly with bandages, the open first aid kit from the ship lying on the floor next to her. The floor was covered in fur, like a carpet, only not nailed or stapled down, a range of different furs in different colours taken from animals she could scarcely imagine all making a patchwork rug on the floor.

"The parts will be hard to find," Ruax said, "You should rest. You shouldn't have woken up so soon, or healed so quickly."

"Well I just told you, I'm not a human, am I?" she argued, trying to stand up still, "Look, I admire your hospitality, really I do, and if there's anything I can do to help you, I'll try, but I have to find my father, it's important."

"Your father? Another Time Lord?"

"Yes, another Time Lord, the last Time Lord. Apart from me, I mean. The Doctor. Do you know him? Have you heard of him?" Jenny said, and they exchanged a look that might be a look of worry, Cardak standing up from where they had been sat at the edge of the bed to tower two feet above Jenny.

"The Doctor is a myth."

"The Doctor is not a myth, he's my father, he stuck his hand in a progenation machine on Messaline and I'm what came out, then he ran off and left me there because he thought I was dead, can you help me fix my ship or not?"

"…The only place to get those sorts of parts quickly and at a good price is the black market," Ruax answered her finally. She was shivering already, freezing cold. She guessed it was a lot easier for them to live on the planet than it was for her, as she wrapped her arms around her, the burns on her body vanished already.

"Price? What's the currency here? How do I get money?" Jenny asked.

"Working," Cardak answered, "Won't you have something to eat? Some stew?" Food sounded good right then, and she was instantly side tracked from her paternal endeavours, because she could smell the food on the air.

"Why are you being so kind to me?" Jenny asked ten minutes later, sat on a chair by the fire with a blanket around her shoulders, an enormous blanket, meant for other enormous Trodahz like Cardak and Ruax, she supposed, "After I caved in the ceiling of the reservoir?"

"Caving in the reservoir is almost beneficial," Cardak answered, "Usually, people have to go out to the ice fields and bring snow back to put in the geyser that melts it."

"Oh," she said. At least she had done something right in her crash landing.

"Ruax was hoping you might sell the ship for scraps and give us some of the money," Cardak said. Ruax didn't seem pleased at this news being delivered.

"Cardak hoped you might die so that we could sell it and keep all the money," Ruax said to get back at Cardak. Jenny thought they might be married, but she hadn't a clue if either of them had genders. She didn't know much about how genders worked in other species.

"I'll pay you back for whatever trouble you went to, make it up to you," she promised, "I'll get a job here, to get money to fix the ship, I swear."

"If you were born from a progenation machine, how old are you?" Ruax asked. They both stared at her expectantly, and she didn't think they would like the answer she gave them.

"…I suppose I'm about three days old," she answered, to which they were shocked, and she heard them argue between each other for a few moments about how a three-day-old clone was ever going to get a job and make any money on Tungtrun, "I'll make the money I need to. And if I don't, and I do end up dying, you can have the ship and sell it." When she said that, they settled again, because it looked like rescuing her would pay off regardless, since she was making all these agreements. "What's in this stew?"

"Ebreth, Wolt, Kaat, all sorts of the surface creatures," Ruax, who had cooked it, answered. She didn't know what any of those things were, but she thought she had better learn. It didn't look like she would be leaving Tungtrun anytime soon, after all. Who knew how many ship parts she needed? How long it would take to fix? She might even be overestimating herself and she wouldn't be able to fix it. Then she would have to find somebody who could.

"So," she began, "Where's the black market?"

---

Arooh, Tungtrun, 7th of May, 6014

Tungtrun only had one city. There were supposed to be villages dotted about here and there, but Jenny had never found any of them in her explorations. The singular city it had was enormous though. In the summer, which was hardly a summer at all by what she thought a summer should be, the trade routes boomed and people came from all around, this being the closest inhabited planet to the edge of the Canis Perilos system. The city was underground and called Arooh, and was made entirely of tunnels and caverns dug into ice and rock. The further down one went, the warmer it was, and the less ice and the more rock one would find. Jenny had been born in tunnels and internal terrariums on Messaline, and now she spent most of her days prowling more tunnels dressed in furs and thick clothes to protect from the cold, because it still wasn't particularly warm even in the warm sections.

It had almost been two years of her life living in Arooh's caves, skulking around in the dark trying to build up enough money to get the parts to fix her spaceship, but it wasn't as easy as that when she was also having to provide for herself, pay rent on the squalid little ice cave that she lived in, and install a rudimentary heating system that was a work of genius. That was why she was still there, stuck, and that was why she was presently in a down-market tavern brandishing a carcass at the bartender trying to get money out of him.

"It's good quality meat, Brund!" she shouted at him over the bar, stood on tiptoes, holding the six-legged Ebreth by its long tail. Orange blood stained its grey fur. It wasn't a peak time, it was only the middle of the afternoon, so he wasn't exactly losing customers by the sight of a tiny blonde human-looking girl waving a dead bit of vermin in a place where they were expected to eat.

"Get that thing outta here," Brund, a Trodahz like her benefactors of two years ago, ordered her gruffly, polishing a dirty glass. Jenny had never seen clean glasses down there, down in The Howling Something. It was The Howling Something, because whatever the howling noun was that came next had been scratched off the sign after a disagreement between Brund and the previous owner long before Jenny had arrived.

"You bought it last week! It's the staple food around here, you can't afford to let it go to waste," Jenny argued, waving the game at him.

"Eat it yourself, then it won't go to waste," he said sharply, and she scoffed. She couldn't eat it herself, it would ruin her stew. She'd been cooking a stew for a week now, and anymore common vermin in it would just ruin the flavours. It was stew for breakfast, lunch and dinner for Jenny, her day-in-day-out meal, and the only thing she ever had to season it with was ice. And then the ice turned into water that tasted of dirt eventually. She dropped the dead Ebreth right on the countertop.

"Take it or leave it," she said coolly, crossing her arms, getting orange blood stains on her clothes as she did.

"Eurgh!" Brund exclaimed, and he swatted the thing so that it fell off the bar and back into Jenny's arms when she ducked to reflexively grab it again, "I'll take it, but I won't pay you for it."

"Then what was the point of me going and killing it to begin with?"

"I keep telling you, all anybody wants to eat these days is Roran," Brund told her sharply, "That's all anybody cares about, these tourists. They like the furs."

"What's wrong with Ebreth furs? Some of the furs I'm wearing right now are Ebreth furs," Jenny argued, pointing out the gauntlet on her left arm, made of dilapidated grey skin.

"Not blue enough."

"I'll dye it blue."

"Dye it blue and stick horns on it and I'll pass it off as a baby Roran and see if I can't get a fair amount of credits for it," Brund shrugged. Jenny glared, and made to cart the stupid carcass out of The Howling Something right then and there, turning on her heels and holding it at her side just high enough that its head didn't thwack above the floor, when somebody addressed her.

"Hey, I'll buy it off you," they said, and she turned around to see somebody sliding out of a barstool that had previously been stuck in the shadows. A man, tall, young, light brown hair, a face that made you want to trust him and warm eyes to match.

"How much?" she said instantly. By that point, she'd take anything to get rid of the Ebreth.

"A hundred."

"A hundred what? Credits? A hundred credits? For this thing?" she questioned, holding the Ebreth up again at this newcomer's face. He wasn't from Arooh anymore than she was, and he flinched away from it. She'd bet two-hundred credits that he didn't have a single idea what to do with a piece of meat like that, or where all the best parts were to eat, or even how to skin it. He didn't look the type. Then again, she didn't look the type, either.

"Sure thing," he said, flashing a credit stick at her with three digits, a one and two zeroes exactly as proclaimed, flashing up amber on it. Well, Ebreths were so common it was barely even a risk taking a hundred whole credits off of a stranger. She snatched the stick and held out the Ebreth right to him, and he took it and stared at it.

"What are you gonna do with it?" Brund asked him, "Eat it? You don't even know what it is, pretty boy."

"I presume it's edible or she wouldn't be trying to sell it here," he said, then he turned back to Jenny, "What's a human doing in a place like this?"

"You're the only human here," she told him.

"Oh yeah? What're you, then?"

"She's been here for two years and she claims she's a Time Lord," Brund said. Jenny told everybody she met that she was a lost Time Lord, the lost daughter of the Doctor, the only one left, and not once had she ever been believed. Nobody had the equipment to scan her, nobody had even the smallest stethoscope to check her two heartbeats, but they were there sure enough. She could hear them at night when everything else was quiet.

"I am one," Jenny snapped.

"You?" the mystery man asked incredulously, like she was some confused kid who'd just told him she lived on the moon.

"Yep."

"How old are you?" he asked, and Brund snorted.

"What's it to you? That's a personal question," she said defensively. She never knew what to say when people asked her that. She would always either lie and say she was in her twenties, or she would tell them the truth, that she wasn't even two, and she'd get laughed at. Well, she usually got laughed at. They expected her to say she was centuries old, or something. That was what she thought, anyway. She didn't know a lot about Time Lords. Her father had never had the chance to tell her much more than the name and the two-hearts-thing.

"I'm a Time Agent," he answered her. That explained the smoothness of his accent and how out of place he seemed, he really was out of place.

"The Time Agency died a thousand years ago," Jenny told him. She read every book in Arooh she could get her hands on, and some of them were ancient human relics that told of institutions like the Time Agency. Suffice it to say, Jenny had been interested in those tomes to a serious degree.

"He's a con artist, ignore him, he'll scam you," Brund told her.

"Would you shut up? He's the only person around here who's ever given me a decent sum of money for anything I've ever killed on the surface. I don't see you risking your neck going up there," Jenny said to him angrily, to which he responded he didn't even have a neck, and she said it was just a saying. Then the mysterious man asked her where she'd picked it up from, it was a very old human saying, and she lied and said she didn't know. She wasn't going to be sticking around The Howling Something talking about her origins for much longer, at this rate. "You'd go out of business if it wasn't for me, you know I'm the cleanest, sharpest shot in this whole city."

"Oh yeah?" the Time Agent asked her, "Can you do anything other than shoot good?"

"I don't shoot good, I shoot exceptionally," Jenny said, "I've never missed a target in my whole life." Not that he knew how long Jenny's whole life was, but he seemed interested now, more so than he had been before, even.

"Could I talk to you somewhere more private?" he asked, and she was taken aback. Maybe he was kind of a 'pretty boy'… He just smiled.

"Uh…"

"He's scamming you, Jenny," Brund advised her, and she clenched her jaw and looked around and glared at him.

"Whoever buys the Ebreth gets the girl," she told him, "And he bought the Ebreth, and after eating the slop you cook up in here I'm sure he's dying for a proper meal on this godforsaken snowball." God, she wanted to leave so badly. She was so sick of Tungtrun and its freezing atmosphere right then.

"And by 'proper meal' you mean a bowl of that stew you've been brewing for six months?"

"This is a new stew, actually, you know that after I gave you what was left of it, it's only been on for a week," she said. There was absolutely nothing wrong with slow-boiling meat to the point of juicy disintegration, Jenny thought, and she turned on her heels and dragged the Time Agent out of The Howling Something by his upper-arm, letting him go immediately upon their exiting of the building.

"You've been cooking stew for a week?" the Time Agent asked.

"It's great stew," she said defensively, "You'll see."

"Are you taking me to your house?" he frowned.

"It's not so much a house, more a cave, but it's the warmest place in all of Arooh, I have a rudimentary heating system," she explained to him, him following just behind her. They must have looked strange, a pair of 'humans' wandering about, him trailing along while being a great deal taller, "Who are you, then? A Time Agent? What's your name? Why are you here?"

"Here on business, of course," he said, "My name's Emmett, Emmett DeLacey."

"Ugh, surnames, I wish I had one," she said wistfully, "Especially one like 'DeLacey.'" Emmett DeLacey laughed.

"You're just Jenny, then?" he said, "Jenny Nobody?"

"Well, I guess I am," she said, "I've never found a name I liked enough to take yet. What's a Time Agent doing on Tungtrun? There's nothing here, it's an ice desert, trust me."

"Why're you still here, then, Time Lord?" he toyed. Maybe he really was quite cute, the more she looked at him.

"I'm stuck, no way off," she said, "I crashed here in July of 6012 and wrecked a shuttle I stole from Messaline, you know Messaline?"

"Neighbouring planet, renowned for its clone war," he said.

"Yeah, that. Clone war. I've been trying to fix it for nearly two years, stuck down here trying to buy any spare ship parts that float into the black market," she said.

"What a coincidence, I'm here for the black market, too," he told her. The streets of Arooh were just tunnels, and they always seemed to be empty. There wasn't a rush hour, there was barely night and day. There were no schools, every youngster was taught at home, and mainly taught survival. It was a grim place, a squalid hovel that she wished to escape from as soon as she was able. Maybe one day she'd live to be as old as the Doctor had been alluded to be by those girls he'd been with, but over ninety-nine percent of her life had been spent in ice tunnels. She might as well be a Tungtrun native.

"How come?"

"Can't speak about it out in the open, I'm meant to be working undercover," he said.

"Half the people won't even believe you're a Time Agent coming all the way out here," she told him, and he shushed her, but she got the feeling he was only kidding about the need to be quiet. Nevertheless, they didn't talk about anything at all as she took him through half-streets and over rocky passages to get to the dismal cave she had to call 'home', a cave half taken up by her spaceship, the large chair of which she had been using as Tungtrun's Most Uncomfortable Bed for the last twenty months.

"There aren't any chairs," Emmett DeLacey commented, staring around.

"Sit on the table or something," Jenny shrugged. Everything she did she did inside the cover of the spaceship. It had been an almighty task trying to get it down there in the first place, she remembered vividly, "I never thought it was necessary to buy chairs, not when I can't take them with me when I go." Every inch of Jenny's home was full of furs, furs to keep the warmth in, furs she wore for clothes, fur blankets, fur everything made from every animal she could grab on the surface and every critter she chopped up for stew. Stew which she ladled into her singular bowl (she was not hungry) and gave to Emmett, who looked at it regretfully. "It doesn't taste nearly as bad as it looks. Honestly, that's the best thing you'll find to eat on this entire planet."

"What a dismal place," he told her, "Are you really a Time Lord?"

"Of course I am."

"The Time Agency have it recorded that all the Time Lords are dead but one, are you that one?" he inquired, and she didn't answer, because she knew she was not, "The Doctor?"

"My father," she said, and he frowned.

"Then… you're not a real Time Lord?"

"I'm plenty real."

"How were you born?"

Jenny paused for the longest while and resolved that Emmett probably held some way to get her off Tungtrun, and she might as well tell him a truth she'd grown to be almost ashamed of.

"Progenation machine on Messaline," she said, "That clone war you were talking about. I'm one of the clones, just a Time Lord clone."

"Do you… you know… regenerate? I've heard that Time Lords can regenerate," Emmett said.

"Do I what?"

"They change their faces, that's what the Time Agency says. They die, then they come back and look different," he explained. More information than she'd gotten out of the Doctor in the handful of hours she'd actually known him. She stared off into the middle distance pondering this.

"That's what happened…" she breathed, mostly to herself.

"How old are you, again?"

"Not even two yet," she confessed, "Sorry if you were expecting somebody more seasoned. What's this black market business, then? Why are you here? Were you after my help?" He looked her over in an odd way for a few seconds, like he was sizing her up, but not in a perverse way; as though she were some weapon and he was deciding how lethal she might be. "I mean, I was genetically conditioned to be a soldier, and thanks to my Time Lord DNA from my father, I'm basically a super-soldier."

"There's a freighter docked on this planet and its cargo is in the black market awaiting transportation, its cargo being some rare Krixes," he began. There was a pause.

"…What's a Krix?" she asked.

"Dangerous. Huge killing machines, lots of teeth and tentacles. They're planning to use them as weapons. They're also endangered and stolen, and I've been assigned to recover them because of some information someone leaked to the Time Agency."

"How did somebody leak information to an organisation that went bust a thousand years ago?" she asked, wondering if that was too much of a spoiler for Emmett's future or not. She didn't know what his future was or what she was and wasn't supposed to say. She wished she wasn't so naïve sometimes, "I didn't think that was the sort of thing you lot dealt with. Do you know anything else about Time Lords?"

"The Agency knows lots about them, I'd be happy to tell you if you help me get these Krixes back. All we have to do is commandeer the ship they're on. But it's a one-way trip, no coming back to Tungtrun once aboard, just flying off until I can get us to the pickup point a thousand miles out of the system. And it's not what we deal with, but it turns out that there's a dissenter who's trying to use the Krixes to cause chaos."

"Mutiny in the ranks?" she asked wryly, but he didn't find it amusing. She supposed he was quite loyal to the Time Agency. Maybe she could become a Time Agent? A Time Lord working for the Time Agency – what better way to live? She could get her hands on a time machine, any kind of transportation, if she did that. She could go anywhere, and do what Donna said the Doctor did, and she could find him. "I can help you get them back."

"They might need to be killed," he said.

"But you said they were rare."

"Sentient lives come first." He ate some more of the stew then, and she continued to have her little fantasises about what she might do with the ability to travel through time like her father did, now that it seemed like less of a pipe dream. Two whole years nearly she had been without him, maybe she wouldn't have to do that for much longer? He couldn't be that hard to find…

"I could kill them if needs be," she offered finally, when it seemed that was what he had been waiting for. She clenched her fists. She didn't want to kill them if they were rare, she'd rather transport them. But if it came down to it, it was a kill or be-killed world out there in space. She'd do anything to find the Doctor.

"I can see that, you've already killed plenty down here," he waved a hand at the dozens of furs hanging around the room. True enough, "And you know your way around here, I assume?" She nodded.

"If you get me off this planet," she bargained, "I'll help you get these Krixes."

"Deal, Jenny Nobody. And this stew really is better than it looks…"

---

The way ships docked into Arooh was through an impossibly vast cenote which burrowed down through ice and rock for miles to reach the warmer layers, and accordingly the layer where the black market was situated. There was a major issue with snow coming in down it whenever a ship had to land during a blizzard and the basic forcefield was retracted for a few minutes, and a nasty breeze sometimes came through. She spent a lot of her days down this particular hole looking for spare spaceship parts for her Messaline shuttle, but rarely did she find anything. Sometimes there would be something she could nowhere near afford but also wasn't worth the risk of stealing, and then she would get herself in a sorry mood for a few days and would spend more time hunting on the surface than usual.

At the bottom of this cenote it bloated into a rocky belly which had become an aircraft hangar for all the ships coming and going over the years. Lately it had become overrun with tourists and supply ships on stops on their way to Messaline which, Jenny heard, was flourishing quite well as the new Eden of Canis Perilo. As wonderful as the luscious forests and jungles created by the Source two years ago sounded by comparison to the hovel of Arooh buried five miles below a harsh, arctic tundra, she was not inclined to return to her place of death. Not yet, anyway. No, there was no way she would go back there until after she found the Doctor.

"Who're we looking for, then?" Jenny asked Emmett, who walked about like he owned the place, like he were some sort of king. She suddenly felt very naïve and almost innocent by his side, a follower, as though it wasn't her who was guiding them through the squalor of Arooh, "Do they know you? Your face?"

"No, of course not," Emmett told her. He talked to her like she was a child now that he knew her age. When she had left Messaline, left its warzone and thus slipped away from the purpose which had been assigned to her by the progenation machine, she had lost most of the attitude that she was not a baby. She had said it to her father, all she knew was "how to fight, and how to die." Here she was on Tungtrun, never fighting anything more than whatever beast she was stalking to shoot with her souped-up crossbow (and that never amounted to fighting because they were usually dead before they even knew she was there), and doing everything in her power to stay alive. Dying, once upon a time, she had seen as honourable. But it had been anything but. It had cost her a family and a life so much more extraordinary than this.

"Who is it, though? Who has the Krixes?"

"I don't know them, I only know the ship, a freighter. You know what a freighter looks like, don't you?" he said.

"I don't really like being patronised, Emmett," she told him finally, "And yes, I do know what a freighter looks like." She did. She was not an imbecile. Freighters were medium-sized, long and deep with room for plenty of cargo. They always had the most trouble navigating into Arooh's cenote. Eight months ago, one of them had crashed and the entire tunnel had needed to be hastily reconstructed. There had nearly been a famine as a result. So, yes, she knew exactly what a freighter looked like.

They left huts and stalls and caves where shady shops were built, wending betwixt the illegal products – drugs, weapons, the usual – to creep into the aircraft bay itself. Well, it wasn't creeping, so much. She doubted that until they started trying to get on board this ship, they wouldn't be questioned at all by anybody.

"Sorry," Emmett apologised, "It's just… there's only so much you can learn from things being uploaded into your brain."

"What are you saying? I should just choose to be older?" she challenged him, and he stopped walking for a second and looked at her.

"…That isn't what I meant," he said.

"Look, I'm not a liability here, and I'm going to try my best to help you with this because I'd really like to get off this planet, and it doesn't look like my ship is going to be fixed any time ever. I'll do anything to find my father," she told him firmly. Still, she thought she sounded like a child. A child justifying to their parents why they ought to drive them to their first party, or a child justifying to their father the particulars of war and military service.

Emmett didn't really say anything more, and Jenny got in quite a huffy mood as they continued through the cavernous hangar together. There were various other humans or human-looking people down there, and she wondered how many of them were actually clones from the war on Messaline she had just never met in her first day of life. Some of these people might be less than two years old, as well, play-acting in a world full of 'grown-ups.' But she was not a human, and she didn't think it would be worth her time to hang around with washed-up, infantile soldiers, the remnants of an old war which hadn't found a use for them afterwards. Did they still use the progenation machines, she wondered?

There were not just humans, though. Humans were in a great minority by comparison to non-humans, and especially the native Trodahz. And then they walked past over a dozen other species littered about in droves, only half of which Jenny could name. A lot she had seen before, but didn't know anything about them. She found that people didn't really like getting interrupted and asked intrusive questions by a nosey 'human' girl when they were just trying to go about their often illegal business. Months ago, she had stopped asking. Sometimes she would ask Brund if there was anybody particularly noteworthy in The Howling Something on one of the rare nights she was there during happy hour.

Emmett shivered and crossed his arms around himself.

"Cold?" she asked wryly, "Should've borrowed those furs from me like I suggested. I'm plenty warm."

"I bet you are," he said in a tone of voice she could not place. She faltered in her steps, which Emmett didn't notice, and had to clench her jaw and catch him back up again. What did that mean? What did his tone mean? Strictly speaking, it wasn't true that she couldn't place how he sounded. Oh, she could. She just didn't want to. Or maybe she did… she didn't know. She didn't know him or herself, and she was getting much too worked up about a four-word comment from a boy whose time period was ancient history and was only semi-cute. Emmett stopped and Jenny nearly walked into him. "It's that one."

"What's what one?"

"The freighter," he explained, nodding his head. She frowned. "The one we came here looking for..?"

"Oh, that freight..? Yep, sure. Okay. That one. Gotcha," she smiled brightly and then turned to actually look at the ship. It wasn't very interesting. It had one of those gang symbols painted on the side, but the transient criminals who drifted in and out of Arooh's docks had never been something she paid attention to. It was probably dangerous, she admitted, and she didn't really want intergalactic space smugglers to be after her, but this was her best shot to get off Tungtrun and travel the stars, and if she was going through time, they'd never find her. The freighter was nothing more than an old grey lump of metal. Though, it was quite big. She wondered where it was supposed to be heading.

"Do you have any weapons apart from that crossbow?" Emmett asked her.

"Why would I need another weapon? If you wanted me to use a different weapon, you should have said before we left so I could've grabbed my longbow," she told him.

"I was thinking something a little less… acoustic?" he suggested.

"Acoustic?"

Emmett sighed and reached into his coat and, to Jenny's great shock, pulled out a handgun. Well, it was more of a blaster, judging from the shape of the ammo cartridges she saw when he pulled out two of those from his pockets as well.

"Do you know how to shoot that?"

"Of course I do," she muttered, taking it and loading it immediately. She preferred her crossbow. It was quieter, more deadly, and the bolts could be recycled. You could not recycle laser-charged energy blasts.

"Good, because you'll probably need to use it," Emmett said, taking her arm and pulling her into a secluded shady corner. Then he stooped a little so that he could speak to her better, and she couldn't make up her mind about whether that was patronising (again) or sweet. Not that that mattered, she thought hastily. Why would she care if he was being sweet? She didn't, obviously…

"What's the plan, then?" she asked him, "How are we going to commandeer the ship?"

"Some of my fellow Time Agents are known to be a little, uh, brash, see," he explained, "They kind of go in, guns blazing, all that-"

"I've heard stories," she told him.

"Well, I'm not really like that. I have handcuffs. We'll have to sneak. Sneak into the cockpit and lock it off from the rest of the ship," he told her, "Then the Agency can arrest the criminals."

"Wow, that is so much less gung-ho than I was expecting," she said, "And, what happens if the other people on the ship sabotage it? Cut off the engines? Cut off the power?"

"Then they'll have to be eliminated. And they wouldn't risk doing something like that with the Krixes on board, as long as they don't find out who we work for. Well, who I work for, and what my aim is," Emmett explained, "But, you know, try to kill as few people as possible, alright?"

"What do you think I am, a trigger-happy murderer? I kill animals for resources, not for fun. Of course I'll keep fatalities to a minimum," she said.

"Good. I just don't want you to end up being like your father," Emmett said. He said 'your father' with a note of incredulity still, but she was used to it, so she ignored it, because the words he had said were more perplexing than his inflection.

"Like my father..? What do you mean 'like my father'? My father's a pacifist," she told Emmett as he began to walk off, her trailing after him, "He taught… he taught me that killing's wrong."

"A pacifist?" Emmett stared at her, "Is that what he told you?"

"Yes," she answered firmly, through gritted teeth.

"He has the blood of millions on his hands," Emmett told her, and she felt like she had been slapped. Emmett was walking off again, and she couldn't do anything but follow. She couldn't stop thinking about what he said, though. The blood of millions? The Doctor? The Doctor who told her that there was always a choice? Always a way to avoid people dying? She knew that he hadn't even avenged her, hadn't killed Cobb when she jumped in front of the bullet. She did not know the particulars, she hadn't exactly been aware, but she knew that when she had left Messaline he had definitely been alive.

Jenny resolved that when she saw the Doctor, she would ask him. There was no point in getting her information second hand, and he was her father. Explanations like that, she thought, were owed to her. For him leaving. It was the least he could do.

They crept through the cavern now, the sounds of engines and chatter in the cold air, to sneak around the outskirts and discreetly get around to the other side of the freighter where the door was. However, getting in that way was a challenge in and of itself. No doubt there would be people crawling all around inside of it, guards and criminals. The entrance was no exception, just a ladder hanging down because the doors to the loading bay, presumably where their valuable cargo was stored, were locked up tight. But it would be impossible to get inside without attracting the attention of round about a dozen people. They crouched behind some boxes that smelled like they were full of low-quality cured meats. Or, she should say, meats in the process of being cured.

"How do we get in?" Jenny whispered, "There's at least ten people just outside, we'll never get on board."

"Well not by walking, sure," Emmett said, pulling up the sleeve of his coat and revealing some small device with silver buttons held together by a leather wrist strap.

"What's that?" she asked, in awe.

"This? It's a vortex manipulator, standard issue. I thought you knew about the Time Agency?" he asked her, "How do you think we travel around through time?"

"With a spaceship, or a big machine – but that? That's what lets you travel? Travel anywhere, in the whole universe? All of time and space?" Jenny gawped at it.

"Uh-huh," he assured her with a smile, though he was a little distant. He had cleaner teeth than anybody she had ever seen on Tungtrun, including herself. Truthfully, she didn't have the best hygiene regimen. She probably smelt. It wasn't too easy washing on an ice planet with no proper plumbing, waste disposal was a bad enough issue without adding daily personal washes into the mix.

"Well – what are you going to do with it?" she asked him.

"Get us on board," he told her.

"What? Just like that? That easily?" she frowned.

"Don't count your blessings yet, Jenny Nobody," he told her, pushing the buttons on his wrist gizmo. Then he grabbed hold of her hand and she was wrenched forcefully out of space. For a split second, it felt like every muscle in her body was on fire and every joint was dislocated, her eyes burning with a bright blue light. But the light vanished and left a stain in her peripheral vision and she gasped for air and collapsed against a wall in a much darker environment, still feeling the warmth of Emmett's hand in hers. "Was that your first teleport?" he asked with a grin, dropping her hand.

"That's a bumpy ride," she coughed. She could taste blood. And her hand was tingling, but she didn't know if that was to do with the teleport or to do with Emmett. She'd never been inside a spaceship any bigger than her Messaline shuttle before – she wondered if this was anything like her father's ship? She'd never seen it. She couldn't even remember what its name was now. "What do we do now?"

"Go to the cockpit, fly away," Emmett shrugged, "Get to the drop-point a thousand miles out of Canis Perilos. Then, you know, you're… free to go on your way." He started to walk off to the right, in the dark ship's hull. Nobody knew they were there. With her crossbow slung over her back, she reached for the loaded pistol Emmett had just given her she had stuck in her belt as a precaution, holding it loosely in her right hand. She would make every shot count; she always did.

Emmett, who knew his way around, led Jenny and her naïve self through low-ceilinged, narrow hallways, not designed for the transportation of large monsters, she was sure. Her eyes followed his arm, trailed along it repeatedly to the vortex manipulator on his wrist. Wouldn't it be easy to just take it? She could shoot Emmett. She could knock him out. She could probably even wrangle it off him in a fight. Then she would be free, free to go anywhere in the universe, do anything at all. Save planets and people and stars – she didn't know anything about Emmett DeLacey, didn't know that, as unwilling as he presently seemed, he might not just kill her and fly away. Who knew how many of these 'regenerations' she could pull off? Maybe it really would be in her best, most selfish interests to steal the time machine and travel the stars on her own?

Then again, joining the Time Agency? That was just as romantic as a solo career, and she knew that before they were disbanded they had great resources. Resources enough to find the Doctor, maybe? To help her? Really, though, it wasn't even a dilemma. She knew that she would help Emmett, regardless. Unless she was blatantly double-crossed, she wouldn't really even entertain the idea of stealing something so valuable from him, not when he had already promised her passage off Tungtrun. Not when he was already making good on that deal. While she might not have any reason to trust Emmett, she didn't have a reason to distrust him, either. He didn't exactly strike her as the lying, confrontation type, anyway. Had he not bought the Ebreth off her for a hundred credits because… well, she didn't know because. Why had he? She had yet to even do anything useful. All she did was ask him a bajillion questions.

"Do you know how to fly a ship?" Emmett asked.

"Uh… I don't really know, exactly… I mean, it can't be… not that hard, can it? I know basics. I think," she confessed, then her tone turned urgent, "Why? Do you not know how to fly it, or something?" Emmett laughed.

"I'll tell you what to do," he promised. Again, she thought, why had he brought her? She tightened her grip on her gun.

"This seems too easy…"

"What were you expecting?"

"I don't know, a gunfight? Drama? Running? The daring rescue of the Krixes? Not just… just teleporting. It feels like cheating," she said.

"Hey, it's not a game, this is your life," he told her, "Even if you can come back. Someone kills you and you wake up here, they're just gonna keep killing you. You can't put a price on safety."

"You're a Time Agent telling me about safety? Your entire life is unsafe."

"So is a soldier's, but you wouldn't expect a soldier to disobey orders or not hold their weapon correctly. Overload a pulse gun," he said, "You still have to be careful, don't you?"

"Careful. Right. And, being careful, that would probably include not offering places on spaceships to girls you don't know anything about, wouldn't it? Picking up liabilities? For all you know, I could be a seasoned liar," she told him, following at his heels like a dog as they walked slowly and listened out for voices. She heard none, though, so if she heard none, chances were Emmett heard none. She had better hearing than an average human.

"At the Time Agency, they teach you to tell when people lie," Emmett said.

"Do they?" she was awestruck, "How do they do that? Could you teach me how to tell? People are always trying to lie to me." He laughed.

"Sure I could teach you."

"But, why?" she inquired, "Why are you doing this for me? I'm not really doing anything for you, and here you are rescuing me?" Emmett sighed.

"You seem lost. You want to find your father. I saw that ship, you won't be getting off Tungtrun anytime soon without somebody's assistance. Why shouldn't I help?" he challenged her, "Why can't I save you for the sake of saving you? And you never know when you might need the help of a sharpshooter. I'm doing a good deed."

"I believe you," she assured him. She believed most things she was told. She didn't quite see why people would have the desire to lie to her, or to lie to anybody – what was so wrong with the truth? If telling the truth got somebody into trouble, well then, maybe they shouldn't have done whatever they needed to lie about to begin with. If people were just good, there would be no reason for subterfuge or dishonesty, or any upset, ever. If people were good, she would not have been shot. Although, if she wasn't good, she might not have jumped in front of the bullet. She had healed, so would her father. And they would be together.

Jenny always had things like this rolling around in her head. These borderline philosophical questions, these issues of self-discovery, of the fact that without a war to fight she was nothing, she just drifted from one campaign, one plight, to another. Hunting for food, following Emmett, and the greater one – finding her father. She had intelligence, but she didn't have knowledge. She craved it, but had nowhere to get it, so she felt hollow. She was an empty husk and she didn't know who she was supposed to be to fill that void of personality up. Maybe all Jenny was was a girl trying to find her dad, a lost child. But if she never found him, what would happen to her? Would she have wasted her life?

"Shh," Emmett hissed at her, stopping in the corridor. She hadn't been speaking, she had been questioning herself. For almost two years all she had done was question herself. Emmett held out an arm and kept Jenny back, and she drew her gun and held it tightly. Was she going to have to shoot someone? She had never shot someone. She had shot at people, she had been willing to kill people, but now? Now she knew what dying was like? How it was just empty? How could she knowingly send somebody into that emptiness, forever? A cessation of life like that was… well, it couldn't be carried out on a whim. It had to be justified, the only option.

There were people, though. There were definitely people. They could hear them, around the corner to the left, talking.

"…ain't enough, when you think about how much those things eat," a male voice said.

"Who cares? It's not our problem," a second man said, slightly gruffer, older sounding. The first was much younger, "I'm just a merc, and you're just an engineer." They were coming Jenny and Emmett's way, and there was no other hallway for them to continue on down. They had to turn and meet them, it was inevitable. But she didn't know them, didn't know their crimes, maybe neither of them had ever hurt anyone? How could she let herself have the power over life and death – what gave her that right?

Emmett stepped out and held up his gun. Jenny, in the middle of a minor crisis, followed suit, holding her own gun up. She did not shake, she gave nothing away about the turmoil in her head. The one on the left was the older one, the one on the right was a fresh-faced boy.

"Drop any weapons you might be carrying," Emmett ordered, "Or I'll shoot."

"You'll shoot? Who the hell are you?" the older one questioned. The younger one, however, was not nearly as cocky about being confronted in a freighter by unknown gunslingers.

"I'm with the Time Agency, hand over your weapons, I'm commandeering this ship," Emmett said.

"The Time Agency? That ancient clique?" the older one gave a guffaw which turned into a hacking cough. The younger one was panicking. Then the older one, while he feigned falling into the wall on his right and clutching his side, drew out a gun of his own and aimed it right at Jenny. "Who's your pretty friend, Time Agent? She one of you as well?"

"No," was all Emmett said, pointing his own gun right at the older one's head. It was a standoff. Jenny held her gun forwards, but didn't point it. Emmett frowned at her for this behaviour when he looked her way. She could kill an animal, no problem, for meat and fur, but a person? Someone sentient? Aware?

"What's say I shoot you and take your friend and hide her away in my quarters, huh? She doesn't look like she could put up much of a fight," he said smugly. Well. Now, she thought, maybe she could kill him. Anyone who spoke like that about abusing a woman had probably done it before.

"Just drop your weapon," Emmett ordered him.

"Give me the girl and I'll think about it."

"Nobody is having the girl," Jenny said through gritted teeth, "Just do what he says."

"No," the older man smirked and then cocked his gun. He wasn't the talking type, he was a smarmy rapist and a mercenary for hire and they were unthreatening-looking trespassers. He had a job to do. He went to pull the trigger. Emmett, however, was quicker on the uptake. Emmett put a bullet in his brain and blasted his skull out behind him before he could shoot either of them. His eyes turned white and he fell to the ground, and the younger boy whimpered.

"Don't shoot, don't shoot!" he protested.

"Drop your weapons," Emmett ordered. He wasn't happy about killing the old man. Jenny wasn't happy about it either – though, it was a cruel relief that he wasn't threatening to violate her anymore.

"Sure, sure! I'll do it, I'll do it, don't shoot me," he whined, looking like he might cry. He drew a gun out of his pocket and held it by its barrel, stepping closer and lowering it to the ground right at Emmett's feet. Emmett seemed to have the same flaw that Jenny did, though. The same flaw that had led him to pick her up and make her promises to begin with. He was too trusting. He didn't like the brash methods the Time Agents were known for, and somehow, this sobbing boy who wasn't even older than Jenny's appearance made her look got the drop on him.

The boy dropped his own gun on the ground, leaning close to the pair of them, but then he made a lunge for Emmett's hand and grabbed the gun right out of it. Luckily, he wasn't trained to fire. Probably one of those boys who thought they were hot stuff and cockily went out into the criminal underworld without being born into it, and then ended up miles out of their depth in deep space because nobody willing to do these jobs was expendable enough to turn down. Even if they were idiots. He was a bad shot, was what she was getting at, but it wasn't Emmett he went for. Most likely because Jenny still had a gun, she was the one he shot it. But he flailed when he pulled the trigger and shot her through the flesh on the back of her right leg.

While she stumbled over in pain and was caught in Emmett DeLacey's willing arms, the boy picked up both of the fallen guns – his own, and that of his cohort – and ran off down the hallway. Emmett grabbed Jenny's gun out of her hand and shot at the boy onehandedly and got him in the ankle, but he was gone around the corner, even if she did hear him shriek in anguish.

"What do we do!? Do we go after – gah," she made an involuntary noise of pain and winced. Her leg was bleeding. It wouldn't bleed for long, Emmett's gun was a laser blaster. Laser wounds practically sutured themselves. It just needed some dressing shoved into it – it went all the way through her soft tissue. She knew it hadn't hit bone, just a flesh wound.

"C'mon," Emmett, helping her, said, "That door right there's the cockpit. Are you any good with computers? They've never been my strong point. Hit that button there." She was on the right, and she reached over and hit quite aggressively a button lit up yellow. Red meant locked, yellow meant unlocked, green meant open. The light turned green, the door slid open, and they were in what was most definitely not a cockpit.

"This is a bridge," she told him, "Not a cockpit, cockpits are on fighters and shuttles."

"See? You are being useful, teaching me semantics." Lucky for them it was empty. He helped her to the nearest chair, and then he went and shot open a box containing wiring sitting on the wall to the right of the door. Closing the door, he cut one of the wires. The yellow door light went off completely, "You see that? The mechanism's destroyed. Nobody can get in, even the captain with a skeleton key."

"So how do we get out?" she questioned, wincing at the pain in her leg. She stared around and spotted another, very similar box, on the wall across the room, but it had a red plus drawn on it, "That box over there is first aid," she pointed for Emmett's benefit, pulling off one of her boots and rolling up the heavy fabric of her trousers, already dark and damp with her blood. Emmett did as she instructed.

"We have to hoof it," he told her.

"We have to what?"

"Go faster, on the double," he explained himself, elbowing the lock of the first aid box so that it opened and carrying the entire contents of it over to her, "What if it gets infected from those furs?"

"I, uh… I don't know. I don't know, alright? Don't you know? Do they teach you first aid?" she questioned him, frustrated, "I'm doing the best I can, it'll be fine." Jenny hurt her jaw when she bit down on it to suppress the stinging pain when she had to stuff the wound in her leg full of cotton wool and gauze to soak up the blood, and she wrapped bandages around herself a second later so tight that she was probably going to cut off circulation in her foot.

"That kid, he'll have told the other smugglers we're in here," he said, going over to one of the computer consoles nearby. There were two of them, curved around. She sat at the one on the right, him on the left. In the centre of the room was the captain's chair, but further in front of that was a much larger chair she knew belonged to the pilot. But the two of them didn't have a pilot. Emmett was switching computers on. Jenny copied him. "That one is basic systems. You have to lock all the doors, alright? On the entire ship, put it into emergency lockdown."

"What's your one?"

"Functionality. Control of the engines, management of the power supply, stuff like that. I turn on the engines here, you lock the doors there, then… then one of us has to fly this ship away," he said.

"But you know how to fly it, right!?" she asked in a panic. Be careful what you wish for, she thought to herself, annoyed that she had previously been wishing for more excitement. Now smugglers were going to try and break in, and she had been shot in the leg.

"I – sort of? I mean, I'm improvising. This was supposed to be an easy job. We should've gone for sabotage, killed the Krixes and then got the hell off the planet with the VM," Emmett said.

"Couldn't we still do that? You could switch off oxygen in the hold? Increase the heat? Decrease?" she suggested. Her leg smarted.

"That's probably what they wanted me to do, didn't think I could do this. This is part of why I wanted you to come, I thought you might be able to help – you flew that shuttle, right? This is easier."

"This freighter is massive! How is it easier!?"

"It's slower, there's autopilot, the trajectories are less complicated, VI takes care of most of the functions? You plot a course and it goes – are you locking down the doors? They can get blowtorches out of the hold and break through the steel."

"They can what!?" she shouted at him, glancing at the door like the torches were already working their way through the metal.

"They only asked me to do this one because I messed up on my last assignment…" he said, more to himself. Jenny was trying to multitask in putting the ship onto emergency lockdown.

"I don't know how to lock it down without it shutting off the engines and going to drift, you have to hurry up first so I can trick the system into thinking there's been, a, uh… a hull breach. Then it'll shut the doors, if it thinks the oxygen is being depleted, but I don't…. I don't know how… I can't… I don't know enough about programming to trick it into thinking there's an emergency!" she shouted at him fervently.

"Then make an emergency," he told her.

"What?"

"Reroute all the oxygen supply to the bridge," Emmett ordered her.

"But everybody else will suffocate," she told him.

"Just do it!"

"They'll die!"

"They might not, there's a lot of air circulating out there, and emergency reserve tanks," he said.

"If I lock all the doors nobody can get to the reserve tanks, you can't pick and choose with a lockdown, Emmett! It's all the doors, or none."

"We only have to get a thousand miles out of Canis Perilos, it won't take long. We can figure it out later – maybe I'll be able to hack it, just cut off the oxygen so that the ship thinks there's an emergency and goes into lockdown! Do it now! You don't want to be a liability, do you!?"

"I don't want blood on my hands!"

"Do it!"

Jenny finally listened. She did cut off the oxygen, to everywhere but the bridge, like Emmett said. In spite of what her father had always taught her, that there was always a choice, she felt the choice she had wasn't about the life or death of someone else, it was about the life or death of herself. The smugglers would break through the door if she didn't put them into lockdown, they would get in and kill her without hesitating, before the Krixes could be saved.

It wasn't like that was the end of their problems, though. Not at all. Because one of them now had to pilot the ship.

"Are we safe now?" she asked.

"Safe enough. They might find a way to breach or override, but that'd take hours without an AI or a genius," Emmett sighed. He was doing things to the computer.

"What should I do now?" she asked him.

"Go sit in the co-pilot's seat of the console bay down there and see if you can't get a star chart loaded up, a mapping program. Figure a way to enter raw coordinates," he asked her. She stood up slowly, "Careful of your leg, though. We should have more than enough time." He smiled. He didn't seem happy though. Were there now people choking to death in the rest of the ship? Maybe the oxygen depletion would dissuade them from using a blowtorch. Blowtorches needed oxygen to work. But then, breaking through into the bridge to switch ship-wide oxygen functions back on was probably worth the risk. Their only hope was really that they didn't have any way to get to the torches in the first place.

Jenny limped with some difficulty down the small set of silver stairs to get the pilot's bay, sitting in the seat on the right, the co-pilot's, as it was labelled.

"It shouldn't be too hard," Emmett told her, "This ship will be stolen, the systems warped until they go wherever the smugglers tell it. This is a commercial transportation ship, it would be programmed to disallow passage through dangerous sectors, unless overridden by the captain or an external superior. Smugglers need dangerous sectors, though. This thing'll go wherever you tell it."

"Sure, sure…" she sighed, rubbing her head. Her palm shone with sweat. "What're these coordinates?" He gave her a very long string of numbers then, about twenty-seven. Coordinates took three segments, segments broken down into three phrases of three numbers each. It was like longitude and latitude, but space wasn't a two-dimensional map, it was three dimensional. They required length, height and depth to navigate. "Enceladus Seven? That's an Earthling colony, isn't it?"

"The Time Agency is an Earthling organisation," Emmett answered, "It's military. They'll want the ship and the Krixes."

"The Krixes will be dead because I cut off the oxygen," she told him shortly.

"They might not be. What's the ETA on Enceladus Seven?"

"Infinite, because we haven't set off," she answered. The engines rumbled below, but they were not taking off, because Emmett was still fidgeting over there instead of coming and helping her where she was. Because it was awkward sitting, she took her crossbow off and let it sit on the floor, propped up by the edge of the desk.

"I'm gonna have to keep moving back and forth to monitor the engines," Emmett complained, but he finally left that station and came over to sit on her left, hitting switches, "I told you, it's basically autopilot."

"Autopilot isn't going to get us out of the cenote," she said, "Don't suppose you could rig up that vortex manipulator?" Emmett laughed.

"Rig it up? What do you mean?"

"Connect it. Couldn't you use that technology to make a whole ship that could time travel?"

"Yeah, they used to, until they compressed the hardware and stuck it in a wrist strap. What you're talking about is primitive."

"What's wrong with primitive? Primitive is reliable," she answered.

"You're talking about technology thousands of years old," he said.

"You're thousands of years old," she remarked, "You hook that up, we get there within seconds."

"I'm thirty. And it's too big. The circuitry won't work. It's a nice idea. I'd've done that first if it was possible, but it would take hours. We'll just fly. Everybody flies in and out of here, how hard can it be? I mean – well, that sounds like famous last words… listen, slow and steady, alright? That tunnel is huge. The anti-gravity will keep us safe, it's just like navigating an asteroid belt," he said.

"Navigating an asteroid belt isn't exactly the easiest thing in the world, even I know that," Jenny snapped at him, and thought she heard a biting comment about her not even being two years old in retaliation.

Nevertheless, the freighter was lifting, up and up and up towards the roof of the hanger. If they hit any of the icy stalactites with the hull, they would break off and be sent torpedoing down into the people below. It was like an elephant doing ballet, trying to get that thing out of the cenote. It went forwards slowly, carefully, sending down awful heat below. The thrusters she had to keep manually angling, moving them about so they could make the narrow curve they had to so that they could race up like a spearhead towards the bright daylight of Tungtrun and its close-by white star.

Rockets kicked in as soon as they got the upwards angle and it was a straight shot directly out of the atmosphere, and she felt exhilarated, felt like laughing in spite of her perhaps murderous actions cutting off the oxygen. This was the most alive she had felt in her whole life, more or less, ever since she stole that Messaline shuttle, all full of hope. Then they were up into the darkness, the shining tundra of Tungtrun, the icy wastes, speeding away behind them. She could not see the planet, but she was sure it was just a distant blot. Her entire life so far, almost, gone. They were in space. She was in a spaceship, travelling through space, with a suave, gorgeous Time Agent who promised to show her the stars and the universe.

The autopilot kicked in and the freighter swung itself around in space, the sun slid across the front windows and out of their view as they turned to head right out of the system towards Enceladus Seven. The year was 6014, and she was free.

---

"What did you mean when you said you messed up on your last assignment?" Jenny asked Emmett. She kept obsessively checking her bandaged leg to make sure there wasn't any leakage. There wasn't, she'd done a relatively good job, and the laser sutured the wound itself, but she still worried. Death was the last thing she wanted.

"Had to apprehend a dangerous rogue of the Agency. Ran off because they 'stole' his memories, or something. I don't know. Stole an old ambulance while there were people in need of it, I stayed behind to help them instead of chasing him. He got away," Emmett answered, "They said I'm too empathetic. Figured if they gave me this job it'd teach me to sometimes do what's hard to make things easier. Switching off the oxygen. Guess it taught you that as well. Sorry. I didn't mean for that. If those two hadn't caught us, we might have had long enough to find out a way to do an emergency lockdown without hurting anyone. As long as criminals don't have those Krixes, more lives have been saved than lost."

"The ends justify the means?"

"You could say that. Still feels pretty awful, though, doesn't it?" he said, sighing. He slouched in his seat, then made a start, "I'd better go and check on the engines again." She stared out of the window at the darkness and the planets and the stars. It was beautiful. There were so many colours in the galaxies around them, galaxies that looked the size of her palm but were impossibly huge.

"What did you mean about the Doctor? That he has the blood of millions on his hands?"

"There was a war," Emmett answered, "I don't know a lot about it. I know he killed his whole species, though. Lots of species. The Doctor has a reputation for causing chaos like that."

"He… what? The… he never told me that it was him, that…" she sighed. Even if the other Time Lords were still alive, would they have ever accepted her? Her, a clone? A clone of a murderer? "That's how people know him?"

"It's how all the people I've met know him. Did he really not tell you anything?"

"No."

"I heard they had strange names, the Time Lords. Another race, I mean, they're bound to, you know?"

"So what?"

"So, 'Jenny' isn't exactly the most out there name in the world. Jenny and no surname. Did your father not have a surname?"

"Not that he told me. He didn't tell me a lot of things. He wasn't… he wasn't the most immediately accepting of fathers. I mean, eventually, he… offered to let me travel. Then I jumped in front of a bullet for him. He left before I woke up, didn't think I'd be able to regenerate because that machine made me."

"Really? He only appreciated you in death? Who shot you?"

"This general."

"Did the Doctor kill him?"

"No."

"Wow. But he named you, though. He must have liked you to name you, and such a sweet name," Emmett told her. She listened to his words and continued to stare out of the window, listening out for any blowtorches or warnings.

"Yeah, he named me Genetic Anomaly. That's what he called me. He had this friend, she was called Donna, she liked me, she suggested Jenny. I'd've taken her last name, maybe, only I'm not sure I ever knew what it was. If I did, I don't remember," she sighed, "I have to find him, though. Tell him I'm alive."

"Well, you know, just hang about Earth in the past. I always heard he likes-" Emmett's words were cut off by a gunshot. Not laser, powder, an old-style weapon. She turned in her seat to see that boy, the same boy Emmett had shot in the ankle, standing right there next to Emmett and holding a gun. She didn't know where Emmett had been hit, but the boy shot at her head right afterwards. How the hell did he get in? Was there an entrance they hadn't checked?

Jenny's reflexes were fast, though, faster than that boy realised. She dodged the bullet and heard a crunch, turning her head under the cover of the chair she was in to see the bullet embedded in the glass window. Not that the window would break, that glass could withstand huge amounts of pressure and was probably two feet thick.

All of her thoughts of the rights and wrongs of killing and murder flew out of her head in a frenzy, because wherever Emmett had been shot, it didn't sound good. He was doing nothing to rid them of their assailant, and concern for him went above the issue of sending this boy whimpering into eternal nothingness. He was dead before she knew what she was doing, and she held her crossbow in one hand having just shot a bolt straight through his eye and into his brain.

Jenny stood in unmoving shock for a long few seconds, in a trance. A boy was dead, a person was dead, dead because of her. She was a murderer. What would her father have done? He had not killed Cobb for her. She had killed this boy for Emmett, and Emmett might be okay yet – what did that make her? Cold-blooded? A monster? Would the blood of millions collect on her hands like the Doctor's? She had refrained from killing anybody on Messaline, in the middle of a war. This was no war. She could have knocked him out, could have found something to throw, snuck around. But maybe that was unrealistic, with her injured leg. If she had shot him earlier, when he was right there in front of her like a crying child, then Emmett would not have been wounded. If they had been okay, though, she would have regretted it forever, not knowing what she could have prevented.

Emmett choked her name and she dropped the crossbow. It crashed to the floor and the spell of murder over her was broken. She ignored the smarting pain in her leg and ran over to him immediately and found he had been shot right in the gut at close-range, point blank. Why not the head? The boy had been aiming for a painful death. His sadism made her feel a little better about killing him, stopped her from thinking about the fact she had just stepped right over his freshly killed corpse with the crossbow bolt sticking out of the eye socket. She pressed her hands hard to the bullet wound to try and stop the bleeding.

"What do I do, what do I do?" she begged Emmet, crouching in front of him because the wound was low. This injury warranted emergency hospitalisation. Sewing him up with the stuff in the first aid kit wold just lead to him dying a little slower from massive internal bleeding, and he was bleeding from both sides, she could see blood on the chair behind him and pouring through her fingertips. "I have to save you, you promised to help me, you can't die, you can't leave me now."

"I'm sorry…" he coughed, and she saw blood on his teeth.

"Don't close your eyes, Emmett, don't close your eyes," she pleaded, "How did he get in?"

"A maintenance duct," Emmett said. She spotted it behind him, an open ventilation panel. The boy was small enough to sneak in. Sneak back in, kill the pair of them, switch the oxygen back on. If he'd succeeded, it would be as though they had never been there at all. Apart from the bodies.

"I should've shot him earlier – why didn't I shoot him?" she asked, like Emmett had the answer.

"It's not your fault, Jenny Nobody."

"It is my fault. If I had shot him, like you shot that other one – and, and now he's dead anyway, what difference does it make? If I'd shot him, you'd be okay," she said with tears in her eyes, "We always have a choice – my father, he – and now – I didn't even think, I just shot him, I barely even knew…"

"Live your own life, Jenny, without him."

"With you."

"No," he smiled slightly, "Not with me."

"Yes, you're not dying. You can't die, not here," she hissed at him angrily, but her hands were soaked with his blood, "You're my way into a better life."

"Here, here," he tried to sit up but couldn't because she was holding him down. She knew it was no use, she knew he was dying, that he had minutes left, but she didn't move her hands.

There was a banging sound at the door into the bridge and she heard voices from the other side, cruel voices, shouting something at the boy about how if he didn't get the door open in the next minute they were just going to melt it. Blowtorches, of course. They'd managed to find them. And now she was stuck, what was she going to do? Emmett was going to die and she would be at the mercy of a bunch of smugglers. She couldn't kill all of them – could she? Emmett was still trying to move though.

"Just stay still, you'll be fine," she lied. He knew she was lying, but it seemed like he appreciated her dishonesty.

"I'm giving you this," he said, fumbling with his arm.

"What? Your vortex manipulator? I can't take that," she said.

"You have to get away from here," he told her, "They'll kill you. They'll keep killing you until you can't-" he gasped in pain and she pressed down on his abdomen harder, "…can't come back anymore." He pushed it into her hands.

"I don't know how to use this!" she exclaimed.

"It's all set, just push this one…" he touched a button on it with a bloody finger and stained it, "You have to go before they come in."

"I'm not leaving you," she said firmly.

"You have to."

She heard a hissing sound and glanced at the door on the left again, and saw the bright orange sparks from the blowtorch they were using to cut through.

"You only have a minute – they'll kill you, you have to leave-"

"Well, where? Where will it take me?" she asked, and he didn't say anything, "Emmett? Emmett, no, you can't – you have to stay – you can't die!" He made a noise that sounded like a half-formed goodbye. "No, no. No no no no no!" She moved one of her hands and lifted up his eyelid, covering his face with his own blood as she did, and got no response. Then she took his pulse, and found nothing, "If you can hear me – still – I'll – I'll… I'll let the Time Agency know what happened. Your family, if they… if you have any…" She knew he couldn't hear her anymore, but she still spoke to him.

The door was halfway towards being open, but what could she do now? Leave, obviously. But what about Emmett? What would they do to his body? The Doctor had left her behind. If he had just taken her body, taken it to bury her somewhere, they could be together. She couldn't leave Emmett in this hell. So she grabbed hold of his arm and hoped that vortex manipulators took dead bodies and pushed the button with the blood on it and felt yet again like she had been sucked out of reality and all of her blood vessels were going to explode.

Until she fell out of the sky from a small yet surprising height and splashed down into heavy water and was instantly submerged, still feeling Emmett's arm under her fingers. For a second she worried that she was drowning, but she hit the ground. The ground was unstable though and she flailed around until she found herself breathing proper air and clutching the hand of a dead man, sopping wet.

On her feet, wobbling, she coughed, still covered in blood and stood in knee-deep brown water. It was warm and humid, she immediately noted. And there was fauna everywhere. Trees and plants and greenery – she had never seen so much green before, just like when she was on Tungtrun she had never seen so much white. Wherever she was, it was not Tungtrun, it was somewhere else entirely. And it was a swamp, that much was clear. She'd never been to a swamp, or really seen one, but she knew what one was. Blood stained the water, and she reached down to haul Emmett up and out of it. How would he want to be buried? She hadn't a clue. Would he want to be buried? Or cremated? Or… stuffed? Taxidermy? She didn't know human customs, didn't know if they might all want to be made into taxidermy horrors.

She held his body up as best she could, but didn't know where to take it. How did she know this wasn't just a completely uninhabited swamp planet? No people at all? Would she have to find a way to build an axe, chop down trees, make shelter? It couldn't be, she realised. There must be people. Wherever she was, Emmett had put the coordinates in. Why would he want her to go to empty wetlands?

Jenny resolved that her best bet would be trying to find some kind of solid ground, not submerged in muddy water. So she dragged Emmett in a random direction, hoping for the best. And that was when she heard an angry hissing noise. She turned her head to see behind her and saw a creature, a dark green reptilian beast over ten feet long with its head and spines down its back and its tail sticking out of the water. It lifted its long head and opened its mouth slightly to hiss at her, showing crooked rows of deathly sharp fangs and tiny, evil eyes. As far as natives of the unknown planet went, this one was not friendly. It was going to kill her.