Of One Blood
Chapter One
(Author's note: This story takes place after the season 4 episode 'Journey's End.')
The buzz from the television was harmless background noise, its constant droning lulling her into a light doze as she snuggled into a pillow on the couch.
The documentary on the Discovery Channel had been interesting, but somehow, the American Civil War was no match for the pleas of her drained body's cells.
Martha hadn't slept for a few days, maybe wouldn't for a few weeks to come – but then that tended to happen when your whole world, or rather your whole planet was torn away.
It sounded almost comical now that the Earth was back spinning on its axis, but for one brief moment, the lights had almost gone out all across the universe.
Martha had helped change that, but, as always, success had come with a price.
Working with the Doctor again had awakened feelings she'd wanted to stay buried forever. Feelings for him that she had yet to feel for the man she was engaged to.
Tom was a good man, an honest man, and she did love him.
But not the way she would always love the Doctor.
Martha sighed in her sleep as she thought of his parting words to her.
"Save the world one more time…"
Except, she didn't know how, not without the hyperactive Time Lord from Gallifrey at her side.
She didn't want to be a slave to U.N.I.T. anymore, and Martha really wasn't sure that she wanted to take Jack Harkness up on his offer, either.
Torchwood had recently lost their medical officer, Owen Harper, and Jack had offered her the position; but was that really the kind of "saving the world" the Doctor had intended?
Martha squirmed, wriggling her body around on the sofa in search of a more comfortable spot, but just like her career choices, the right position was eluding her.
The engagement ring on her hand caught on a button in the upholstery as she tossed around, and as it snagged, she couldn't help but think that the tug was at her heartstrings, not her finger.
Tom…
But Tom was still in Africa, and the only company she had was the TV and an already cold cup of cocoa. Subconsciously, she considered slithering from the couch and making a fresh pot of coffee, but she was still so tired.
So uncertain about where life should lead her next.
And it was then she heard it – as if she had willed the sound, the machine into her home with her uncertainty. Maybe she had, telepathy wasn't beyond some Gallifreyans…
The familiar mechanical resonance always reminded her of some giant robot having an asthma attack.
Of course, it couldn't be.
Not here.
Not now.
Martha stirred anyway, rubbing at her grainy eyes in the vain hope that something big and blue was about to materialize in the corner of the room.
The whirring noise grew louder, and with it came a flicker of light.
The light that signalled the TARDIS was about to make an unscheduled, but very welcome appearance.
Martha felt the whoosh of air against her face as the translucent outline of a police box began to solidify. Within seconds, the 'wooden' ship had taken full form and was sitting right next to the flashing screen of her TV.
She took a breath, wanting to see the Time Lord's grinning features, but knowing he would probably only bring her more heartache – more indecision.
The TARDIS door swung open silently and the Doctor bounded out as if he'd just landed on some uncharted, never-before-seen planet. His favourite blue suit was creased and his tie hung loose as always.
Some things never changed.
"Martha Jones, fancy meeting you here…"
Martha sat up on the sofa and raised just one brow. "Well, I do live here…you could have knocked." She crossed her arms, feigning anger, but she already knew he wouldn't fall for it.
"Knock? Knock? KNOCK? Shouldn't you have a doorbell or something..?" He skittered around the room to the back of the door before she could answer just to check, poking the mechanism with his sonic screwdriver for good measure. "A-ha! Thought so! Circuits are fused….maybe I could fix that for you…oh…well…corroded! Humans never look after their electronics…how do you people ever make it another five billion years...?"
Martha exhaled slowly. Ranting was one of the Doctor's strong points and he was definitely going to launch into a lengthy diatribe about door chimes, electronics and the price of bread if she didn't hush him.
"So what brings you halfway across the solar system at this time of night?" She fixed him with her best steely glare. Not that it was going to work on this Time Lord.
"The TARDIS?" He offered innocently, pulling a bunch of wires from the now defunct doorbell mechanism.
Martha couldn't help but smile. He had a way with words, boy did he have a way with words. He wasn't ever going to be a Casanova or Romeo but he was cheeky, rude, and often far too sarcastic for his own good.
And she loved him for it.
"I meant what are you doing here? In my front room?"
"Oh! Riiightttttt!" He slid a hand into his pocket and pulled out a pair of glasses - glasses that he definitely didn't need – and slipped them on to inspect the wires he'd dissected. "Well I was bored…yes bored…" He stopped to think. "Re-aligned the time vortex sensors. Thought you might like to go for a spin while I check them out!"
Martha was unimpressed. "You mean you hit it with the hammer again?"
The question was rewarded with another manic grin as he pushed the sonic between his teeth and began twisting wires together.
But there was something wrong.
Something he wasn't telling Martha, but she was astute enough to pick up on anyway. He hadn't just popped in to offer her a mystery tour. The Doctor knew she'd left all that behind – or at least, had tried to.
No, for him to be here now, he was hurting, and whether he admitted it or not, it was obvious in his slightly down-trodden features. He could mask the pain, the loneliness, with all the skill of a nine-hundred-year-old Time Lord – but he couldn't hide it from Martha.
She'd seen the depths of his agony back in New New York when he'd eventually snapped and admitted the fate of his home world. The torment in his eyes, the weight of his own actions he'd had to bear for so long.
The joviality, the sarcasm, they were all just fronts that she could see through like a plate glass window. The Doctor used the humour, hid behind it. He had to, how else could he cope with the things he'd seen over the years and not go mad?
Martha frowned, finally realizing what was wrong with the picture before her. "Where's Donna?"
The Doctor stopped fiddling with the door chime and exhaled, his lips puckering outwards with an exaggerated gesture of defeat. After a moment, he switched off the sonic screwdriver and stuffed it back into his pocket.
"She's gone," he muttered, a doleful expression abruptly marring his usual playful façade. "Well…not exactly gone…"
Moving away from the door, he stuffed his hands in his trouser pockets and slowly ambled over to the TARDIS. Leaning his back against the left edge of the police box, he simply stared into space.
It was as if Martha suddenly wasn't there, his cheerless gaze as distant as the burning sun.
"Donna Noble has left the building," he murmured as if reliving a past memory. "Donna Noble has been saved…"
"Saved?" Martha didn't understand, but sometimes that was how it was with the Doctor. "'Nother dimension, like Rose?"
"Home." He shook his head and then tilted it back to rest on the surface of the TARDIS. Perhaps contact with the machine was somehow comforting. He was part of it, it was part of him – the perfect symbiosis. "I took her home and I can't risk her seeing me ever again…if she remembers any of what happened, just for one second, she'll burn up…"
Martha didn't know the details and she suspected asking would only cause him more heartache – or rather twin heartache, in his case.
She wanted to rush over and hug him, tell him it would all be okay, but she resisted the urge.
The Doctor had emotions, but he rarely showed them – even this little outburst was more than he usually allowed people to see. He normally wore one of three faces: The manic scientist, the angry Time Lord or the thoughtful philosopher.
Today was an aberration she didn't know how to categorize.
Martha didn't understand how to help, but she thought she understood the cause.
How many times had he lost someone, either to another dimension, or to their old lives…or worse still, to death? Over nine hundred years, the body count must have been pretty high.
Maybe he'd hidden that for so long, hidden all the hurt and pain and regret, that he'd believed he could outrun the past forever.
But in one fell swoop Davros, the Dalek leader, had changed all that.
Martha, and all the Doctor's acquaintances, had recently borne witness to his soul being bared, and it had not been pretty.
"How many have died in your name?"
"The Doctor, the man who keeps running, never looking back because he dare not out of shame..."
Martha could still hear the metallic voice crucifying her friend with its words. If Davros' speech had bitten into the Doctor's psyche then, how must he feel now that Donna had become another victim of his escapades?
She opened her mouth to try and offer some small words of comfort, but as she glanced up, her eyes locking with his, they shared something.
Don't, a little voice screamed in Martha's head. Was he reading her mind, or had she become that good at reading him?
In any case, the Doctor seemed to have recovered from his version of the blues the instant their gazes had touched. He pushed away from the TARDIS, his downcast expression transforming into an ear-to-ear grin.
"Anyway, Martha Jones! Wait, no…Doctor Jones…ooh, sounds like a Spielberg film…" He rapped on the TARDIS's blue woodwork with his knuckles. "Fancy coming for that spin? We could do the multiple moons of Bionite, or how about tickets to the burning sunset on Lexicon Five? There used to be a Krilitane selling them on eBay for a snip!" He cocked his head and his brows furrowed in thought. "Hmmn, I think he got nabbed by the Judoon as a ticket tout, though…wasn't pretty…"
Martha looked taken aback, not at the mention of the Judoon, but that eBay seemed to have taken over the universe, not just little old planet Earth. "eBay? Seriously? Out there, among the stars, and you people have eBay?"
"Oh yesss!" He grinned and then clicked his fingers in front of the TARDIS, mentally commanding its door to creak open.
Martha looked suitably impressed at the new trick. In her day, the almost mystical machine had required a key. Still, impressed or not, she wasn't quite ready to go back into time and space without laying down a few ground rules.
Yes, he seemed to need someone right now, and no way would she deny him that, but after racing around the planet with the Osterhagen key, she felt like a little less mayhem and a little more relaxation – perhaps something closer to home than all the galaxies far far away he seemed to want to explore.
"Oi!" She raised her voice to get his attention – not always an easy thing to do once he'd started bounding around like a rabid gazelle.
The Doctor paused mid-bound across the threshold to the inner, bigger TARDIS, looking like a deer caught in a van's headlights.
"Can't we just do something a little more Earth-related for once?"
Martha crossed her arms again defiantly. She'd learned the hard way that sometimes it was the only method of getting through to him. Turning towards the TV, she nodded at the programme she'd been watching earlier. The credits were rolling up, but it was still easily recognizable as a history documentary.
"How about the Gettysburg Address? Pretty pivotal point in history, yeah? I mean, I dunno, can we just not do anything dangerous for once?"
The Doctor cringed as if she'd just stabbed him with a Sycoraxian sword. "Pivotal, yes, boring, totally…c'mon, Indiana, where's your sense of adventure?" Finishing the madcap leap he'd stalled previously, he landed in the TARDIS and whirled to waggle the sonic screwdriver in Martha's direction conspiratorially.
The little blue light flickered like a beacon, calling her inside, but she refused to be so easily led. She smiled, but still didn't move. This was so like working with kids.
"Oh, alright," he caved. "Gettysburg it is then!" When Martha still didn't budge he narrowed his eyes, an impish twinkle flashing across the deep brown of his irises. "Just one trip?"
Martha let her smile spread into a grin as she strode inside the time machine like it was a second home. "That's just what you said the first time…"
The wheezing noise from the center console's rotor was almost hypnotic as it moved through its cycle. A pulsing green shaft that throbbed like the TARDIS's very own heart, bathing the control room in its alien glow.
Martha watched it with renewed admiration every time she took a trip with the Doctor.
The machine was so ancient, so battered, and yet it traversed the universe and beyond like a figure skater whirling lithely across ice.
Of course, it had its moments. There was rarely a journey when the Doctor didn't have to slap, bash or hammer the controls at least once, but still, the ship was like the eighth wonder of the world.
As she watched, the rotor began to slow and the Doctor started to furiously press buttons, switches, and weird items that definitely didn't look like they belonged in a time ship – one, she was sure, looked suspiciously like a bicycle tyre pump as he began to push it energetically up and down.
If the Doctor saw her watching him, he didn't show it, continuing to bounce around the console until the rotor became static.
Martha waited, wondering what kind of landing they were about to make. Sometimes, you couldn't even tell the TARDIS had moved in time or space, but others, it was like being in a tiny sailboat that was being hit by a tsunami.
Today, fortunately, the Doctor had managed a textbook arrival – well, if Time Lords actually used textbooks. Martha suspected they'd gone beyond that millennia before the human race had started walking upright.
"Ready to meet the President?" The Doctor leapt down from the controls and grabbed Martha's hand, tugging her towards the door like he was all of six years old and had just arrived in a toy shop.
When the door swung open, he hurtled through it, only to stop dead a few feet from the TARDIS.
As Martha watched, his six foot gangly frame seemed to sag at the shoulders and he deflated like a balloon.
Running a hand through the front of his hair, he spun around until he'd done a complete one-eighty, surveying the very wrong scenery that encircled his ship. "Aww, I knew I should have turned second left at the Medusa Cascade…"
Martha smiled and stepped out into a cold blast of air. It wasn't unusual for the Doctor to be a little, um…off target. "We so need to get you an intergalactic Sat Nav."
He turned and looked at her with one raised brow, a look of vagueness seeping across his features. "Really?" Then he broke into a grin. "Nah, had enough of those with the smoky ol' Atmos! And besides!" He whirled around, arms outstretched. "Look at this place! It's brilliant! Reminds me of the Ood Sphere! Except I don't reckon we're in the Horsehead Nebula…"
Martha waited for the lecture to be over, letting her ears shut off until his voice was nothing more than a dull thrum in her head.
Whatever planet they had landed on, it definitely wasn't earth, never mind late nineteenth century America. The ground was nothing more than a thick icy tundra that stretched as far as the eye could see.
And it was cold, so very cold.
She unconsciously rubbed at her arms as she scanned the horizon. There didn't seem to be any kind of life here, animal, human or alien.
It was like one huge snow bank that rolled out into eternity.
And there was no sun in the sky, no clouds, just a wash of clear blue like someone had daubed in the heavens with watercolours.
Whatever the Doctor thought of this place, Martha didn't like it – no, that wasn't the right word – she feared it.
She spun around, expecting to have to drag him away from the place kicking and screaming, but when she looked, his face had already turned grim without her saying a word.
The Doctor was kneeling, his hand patting the white sheen at his feet as if he could analyze its structure just by touch. After a moment, he scooped up a ball of white slush and rubbed his forefinger over it, eyes narrowing to pinpoints as he scrutinized the minute frozen particles. "'Ello…"
"I am so not having a snowball fight," Martha warned, just in case he was about to turn mischievous on her.
The Doctor dropped the white sludge and without saying a word bounded back into the TARDIS. Grabbing the centre console's monitor, he began punching buttons until the details of their last journey appeared onscreen.
The figures meant nothing to Martha, but they obviously did to the quirky Time Lord – and he wasn't happy with what he was seeing. Letting go of the monitor he began to manically pace, slapping a hand against his forehead every few seconds as if he'd gone mad. "Can't be…yes…no! YES!"
"So where or when exactly are we?" Martha queried.
The Doctor stopped pacing but his eyes were still wide. "This is the right time." He pursed his lips thoughtfully. "Well, right wrong time. The Gettysburg Address was Nov 19th 1873. We landed July 3rd…"
Martha pulled a face and pointed towards the open door. "That? Out there? That's supposed to be America?"
He nodded, the energy rapidly draining from his actions as he channelled it into thinking instead. "That's Cemetery Ridge out there…should be twelve thousand five hundred Confederate troops marching to assault Union lines…"
"But it can't be! I mean, you must have messed up something when you realigned whatever, yeah?"
The Doctor shook his head. "Just checked." He returned to the console, tapping urgently on the small inset keyboard with one hand as he pushed on his glasses with the other. "Oh, this is bad…this is very very bad…as in 'the Earth is going to freeze to death before England ever gets to win the World Cup' bad…"
Martha put a hand on her hip and huffed. "Well are you gonna tell me, then?"
"We're sitting at the epicentre of some kind of anomaly. Whatever caused the freezing effect is cascading, spreading outwards. It's created a glacial wasteland for over two hundred miles in any direction." He pulled the glasses back off and stared at the screen in thought. "If we don't stop it, the whole planet will be consumed in less than six months."
"But the world can't get frozen back in 1863! We'd know about it, wouldn't we?"
The Doctor grabbed his brown overcoat from one of the inner support beams of the TARDIS and slid it on. "Wibbly wobbly timey whimey stuff, remember!" He jogged to the open door. "Well, c'mon then! Always fancied doing a bit of snowboarding…"
Before she could protest, he'd vanished back out into the white barren world that had once been a terrifying battle ground.
Martha followed, noting that the sky above was growing dark. The pastel blue watercolours had been replaced by something gloomier, but there were no stars yet, nor was there any sign of the moon.
It was as if they'd been sucked from the heavens by whatever dark force was freezing the planet. And I asked to be brought here! Nothing dangerous I said! Something a little more relaxing, I said. Yeah right!
Hugging herself, Martha moved on, picking up the pace to catch up with the overexcited Time Lord before he disappeared over the peak of a drift. His overcoat billowed behind him in the frigid wind, and like the rapidly solidifying landscape, the airstream seemed to be growing stronger as they walked.
The Doctor paused, sliding his hands into his trouser pockets as he surveyed the washed out panorama. "What are we missing, Martha Jones?"
Martha twisted the engagement ring around and around on her finger, hoping it would give some inspiration as she followed the Doctor's gaze across what was left of Pennsylvania.
It didn't, but her sharp eye for detail did.
"What's that? Over there, by that outcropping?" She pointed to a large section of tundra that seemed to jut away from the rest – like there was something beneath it, perhaps.
"Bonkers!" The Doctor exclaimed as he sprinted off towards the ledge. "This is totally bonkers! Can't be happening, but it is…talk about paradox…oh, I love a good paradox…keep you on your toes for weeks!"
He skidded to a halt a few feet from the ridge of ice and then kneeled, patting the ground as he had before. After a moment's contemplation, he backed up, sifting through his pockets until he found his sonic screwdriver.
Deftly twirling it between his fingers, he adjusted the setting and the bulbous tip began to glow an iridescent blue. Pointing the screwdriver downwards, he took another step backwards as if he was avoiding stepping in something nasty.
"What you doing?" Martha dared to ask.
"Resonation pattern…break up the ice," he said matter-of-factly. "Well…would break up the ice if it was ice…which it's not…"
The tundra in front of them began to move, like it was changing, but not exactly melting. The white mass seemed to separate at their feet as if the Doctor was parting a sea.
And beneath the solid ice, some vestiges of the human race remained.
"There! Almost as good as Moses!" Ignoring the slippery footing and sharp incline, the Doctor dived into the abyss he had just created, not caring what dangers might await in the shadows.
Darkness was falling around them, and the small pit in the ground could easily be a haven for anything supernatural or alien.
Martha shuddered, but for once not from the frigid air around her. Still, it was better to be doing something than standing around waiting for the chatty Time Lord to return, so she followed him down, her boots sliding wildly on the slick sides of the cavern.
At the bottom, the Doctor was already examining their sickening find as if he was on an archeological dig.
Bodies littered the entire area – and not just human corpses. Horses that had carried vital supplies lay stiff alongside a huge trail of wagons they had once been burdened with hauling.
A Confederate flag stood tall, the lace frozen hard as if it had been caught and solidified as it blew in the wind.
Grey uniform after grey uniform seemed to form a carpet of the dead, and Martha realized it was going to be hard to move around without treading on what had once been a living, breathing person.
Most of the dead appeared to have been caught with an expression of surprise on their faces, as if what had happened here had been so instant, so unexpected they hadn't had chance to react.
This mound of bodies had formed the outcropping the Doctor had just 'melted'. And no doubt, beneath the rest of the ice fields there would be hundreds more: Twelve thousand five hundred soldiers who should have fought at Cemetery Ridge, instead lying here like grotesque ice sculptures.
And how would that shape history?
How had it already influenced history?
Martha didn't want to think about the people who had already blinked out of existence in her world because their forefathers had been killed here by whatever was happening.
She crouched down, examining the nearest body, even though she had no clue what they were supposed to be looking for.
The soldier looked young, too young to be on a battlefield like this. Would he have lived if Gettysburg had happened? She reached out, touching his taut flesh, and was shocked by how hard and cold it was. Human block of ice…
"How can the bodies be so solid? I mean, if it's that cold why haven't we frozen to death too?" Martha looked across and met the Doctor's gaze, his angular features suddenly making him appear far more serious than usual.
Scraping at the ground, he removed a thin layer of the 'snow' and let the flakes fall into Martha's open palm. "Like I said, not ice. They're a form of crystal. When they first hit the earth's atmosphere there was a chemical reaction – for a time, everything got super-cold, not just really, really, really, really…"
Martha stopped him. "Yeah, I get the picture, but what I mean is, where are they from? It's not like the earth gets bombarded with alien crystals every day is it?"
The Doctor considered it. "Not unless that Denubian soap flake factory on Tarsus Four has exploded again, at any rate…"
"Can we stop it spreading?"
There was an awkward moment where Martha actually thought he was going to say no. Then his bleak expression changed like someone had flicked on a light bulb.
"'Course I can!" He beamed. "I'm a genius!" Pushing up from the ground, he pointed back up the side of the hollow. "I reckon if we leg it back to the TARDIS we might have this all sorted and be home in time for tea…nice cup of Darjeeling and a crumpet…"
With that, he began scrambling back up the icy slope with all the ease of someone who'd climbed Mount Everest – but then, knowing the Doctor, he probably had.
Martha carefully followed in his wake, using the hand and footholds he'd discovered to haul herself back to the top.
Once out of the weird hole in the ground, she looked around, noting that while they'd been exploring the world had truly gone dark around them.
And still there are no stars, no moon… She thought about asking the Doctor why, but some tiny niggle in the back of her mind was too scared to. What if she didn't like the answer?
Brushing loose crystals from her leather jacket, she glanced downwards and found herself looking at a set of paw prints in the slush at her feet.
"Doctor?"
He followed her startled gaze and hunkered over, pushing his overcoat behind his back. "Ooh…Canis lupus…big one too…"
"A wolf, right? But how can it have survived out here when everyone else has been turned into human Cornettos?"
The Doctor slowly inhaled, glancing warily around their position as if the creature might suddenly appear. This time when he spoke, it was in a slower more deliberate voice, and he had the far away look in his eye that said his mind had latched onto something.
Something he didn't seem to like.
"Did you know that the Egyptians believed Anubis, the wolf god, led the deceased to the afterlife? Or that in Norse mythology, there was a wolf god called Fenrir who would one day bring about the end of all things?"
"So, maybe we can't stop this whole thing, is that what you're saying, yeah?" Martha watched his reaction, but as usual, his mood had already changed again to something more chipper.
"Nah…they're just myths." His face quirked into a smile. "Stuff and nonsense! Whereas I'm very real! In fact, I'm a very very very real whizz at this 'saving the Earth' stuff! C'mon, back to the TARDIS. We have work to do!"
And with that, he darted off at breakneck speed, his waterlogged All Stars squishing slightly as he ran.
Martha turned before following, an uncanny feeling of being watched invading her mind. For a second, as she whirled, she thought she saw a flash of grey fur vanishing behind a drift.
But it was just her imagination, wasn't it?
And even if it wasn't, the wolf must have survived much the same way they had – it must have found its way onto the transformed landscape after the big freeze.
At least, that was what Martha was going to tell herself, because the only other explanation would take her back to the Doctor's stuff of myth and legend.
I am the Bad Wolf, I create myself…
And she so didn't want to go there.
The TARDIS seemed so inviting after the bleak exterior world that Martha almost forgot it was an alien thing.
It was welcoming, it was warm, and most of all, it had an aroma that was so indescribable, Martha imagined even the sweet scent of Ambrosia couldn't match it.
Perhaps it was all in her mind, perhaps the little ship's perception filter could work both ways. After all, if it could convince the masses that a blue police box actually belonged wherever it landed, then convincing a passenger it was cozy would be 'easy peasy' as the Doctor would say.
Not that he was saying much right now.
The moment they'd arrived back, he'd scurried over to the centre console and stuck on his glasses. Since then, he'd been muttering and pressing keys while Martha watched his less-than-scientific dance around the controls.
Without warning, he jerked bolt upright and slapped his forehead. "I don't believe it! I don't believe it! Wait…that sounded so Meldrew…anyway…" He finally looked at Martha as if she understood what he was saying perfectly. "It's the Rift…and we're parked right next to it…"
"What, that thing in Cardiff where you sometimes make the odd pit-stop for fuel?"
The Doctor tugged at his ear as if he was still missing something. "This is one end of it, yes," he eventually conceded. "Some kind of temporal energy is stimulating the new activity. Making it create a doorway from another dimension to this one." He didn't look happy. "Maybe even a parallel dimension…"
"But that's impossible, right?"
"Right…right," The Doctor agreed, or maybe he didn't. "Except, the Rift is so powerful now that it's tearing open space and time. All sorts of gaps and little niches where planets, maybe whole universes, could get sucked into the void."
"So, the crystals are from another world and it's basically seeping into this timeline and taking over? Why now? I mean, it didn't happen this way originally." Martha joined the Doctor as he rifled a hand through his hair.
"Microscopic singularity passing through this solar system. Somehow, the energy emitted by the singularity shifted the chroniton particles in the Rift into a high state of temporal polarization and…"
"And you just made that up!"
"So did not!" He looked up to the TARDIS roof in thought, eyes narrowing as he considered it. "Right…um…yes…well…Star Trek! I knew that line would come in useful one day…"
Martha wanted to punch him, but she resisted the urge. He'd gone from the most dejected soul on the planet – no in the universe – to the most annoying in the space of two hours.
"Never mind your very dodgy taste in television. What can we do to stop this?"
The Doctor sighed and rolled his eyes as if Martha just didn't appreciate good sci-fi, then began frenetically punching keys again. "If I can just trace the temporal energy signature augmenting the Rift's power then…" He banged a fist on the console. "There! Long Island, New York, 1972!"
"Earth? Not some weird, totally freaky green aliens trying to fry the galaxy or something? Just Earth?"
"Well…" The Doctor cocked his head to one side. "Could be some totally freaky green aliens trying to fry the galaxy from Earth. Not like it hasn't happened before…although wait, now that's interesting…" He stuck his face a couple of centimetres from the monitor and then blinked.
"What? What do you see?" Martha asked, her impatience growing with every second.
"The extra power's coming from Montauk! Fancy that! 'Course it's just an urban myth…at least that's what they like people to believe…no real aliens, noArea 51…"
"So what's this Montauk place and how can it be affecting the timeline?" Martha rubbed at her brow as something hit her. "And hey, how come U.N.I.T. don't know about it?"
"Governments," the Doctor chided. "Always have to have secrets. It'll be the death of them someday. Just not this century though." He tapped at the monitor. "So, anyway... The Montauk Project was/is the continuation of Project Rainbow, or as some people called it, The Philadelphia Experiment…"
"Wasn't that a film back in the eighties?"
"Best way to cover up the truth," The Doctor exclaimed as he started to reset the TARDIS's destination coordinates to 1972. "Stick the truth right under you humans' noses and you never think to believe it! 'Course, there was a lot more to it than making a ship vanish. Oh yes…Unified field theory, mind control, time travel, alien autopsies…they're a meddlesome lot at Montauk…"
"And now whatever they're doing has changed the Rift, made it even more unstable until it's tearing up time…"
"Crude description of such a beautiful event, but yeah, basically." He began vigorously attacking the 'bicycle pump' again, which probably meant it was time for take off. "Doctor Jones, we'll never make an Einstein out of you…"
"What, grey haired and wrinkly? No thanks!" Martha smiled, but deep down she wasn't feeling very cheerful. There was too much going on, too much at stake yet again.
Can we make one journey, just one journey and not run into trouble?
But she knew that was too much to ask for with the Doctor.
"So we just drop in unannounced, shut them down somehow and still make it home for tea?"
"Well… maybe supper's the one to aim for." He winked, then slammed his hand into something that Martha was sure was a brass reception bell.
"Wait a minute…if this Montauk place likes to dissect aliens, should you be handing yourself over on a plate?" It seemed like a stupid question. The Doctor wasn't just going to walk in and announce himself, and they had the trusty psychic paper to get them inside.
But still, the odds were already stacking against them before they even arrived in '72.
"Me? Alien? Nah…even have a doctor with me to prove it." He pinched himself and faked a hurt expression that she'd even suggest it. "See! Human as the next man!"
Martha looked around the TARDIS and feigned surprise. "Yeah, perfect seeing as there is no next man. Just make sure you don't end up as their chief lab rat!"
"Ooh, funny you should say that…1972 IS the year of the rat in the Chinese calendar!" He raised one brow, shortly followed by the other. "Nah…couldn't be…"
"Yeah? Just as long as it's not the year of the wolf…"
The instant the words had left her mouth, Martha wished she'd kept her jaw clamped shut.
The TARDIS control room's usual green radiance vanished, sinking the main area into a deep, bloody red that seemed to leach a terrifying warning into the very air she breathed.
To complete the ominous new theme, a cavernous cloister bell began to toll.
Martha had never been witness to this before, but she knew what it meant. She knew that the TARDIS only mutated this way when some terrible catastrophe was about to occur.
It was a cry for help.
The machine's way of calling its master, warning him that the universe was in danger.
The TARDIS had been a portent like this in the recent Dalek attacks, but to Martha this drumming knell was even more poignant because it wasn't Cybermen, or Krilitanes, or even the Daleks again that were about to destroy everything.
The Universe was going to implode - worlds, galaxies, people, dimensions, all smashed together until nothing was left but floating atoms – if even that.
And not because some ancient race from the stars had declared war.
But because mankind was never satisfied.
Martha slammed a fist into the TARDIS console, not even thinking about where her punch landed. Had they been through so much, fought so many, only to be destroyed by themselves?
In a way, it would be poetic.
Annihilated in the past trying to change the future.
And what of her family? Parents, brother, sister? Had they already been erased from existence?
Martha sensed movement behind her as the bell finally ceased its peal of death. She looked down and realized her hand was bleeding from where she'd punched the ship.
And then the Doctor was at her side, reading her mind with just one take of her expression. He placed his hand on her shoulder, his own emotions camouflaged by a wan smile. "Time to be the cavalry one last time, Doctor Jones…"
Martha nodded, finally knowing why she'd been needed so badly on this trip.
Not for the Doctor's sake, not for her own, but for life as everyone knew it.
"Save the world one more time…"
And with the Doctor, she would.
TBC...