There is no escape, Doctor. Return the TARDIS immediately to our home planet.
Jamie clutched reflexively at the edge of the console as the disembodied voice echoed through the control room. He cast a quick, sidelong glance at the Doctor, whose panic was now tainted with a broad streak of righteous fury. The man's mouth twisted in anger, and he raised his head, addressing the unseen speaker.
"Why can't you leave me alone? I haven't done any harm!"
You have broken our laws. You must face your trial.
"Trial?" echoed Jamie. He felt Zoe's hand settle on his arm, her grasp tightening there, fingers tugging at the sleeve of his coat as if to demand his attention; but for the moment, the Scot kept his quizzical gaze fixed on the Doctor.
You will do better to return of your own accord, said the voice, still radiating endless patience.
"Oh...very well. If I must," sighed the Doctor.
His companions watched in alarm as he dashed around the console, his hands darting over the levers, smacking at the switches with a sudden bolt of fevered energy. His hair hung in his eyes and a coat of sweat had sprung out on his forehead; he paused only to wipe this away on the cuff of his coat and then glanced up at Zoe as she started toward him, her face set in sharp lines of concern and bewilderment.
"Doctor, what on earth are you doing?" she asked, her voice trembling.
"Trying to make a quick transference jump," he snapped, returning his attention to the console. "We've got to get away from here to somewhere safe."
Jamie felt the ancient TARDIS surge and stutter beneath his feet, and the old machine took another nauseating lurch, the central column grinding as if the mechanism were full of rocks. He tottered first one way, then the other, then reeled into Zoe; the pair clutched at one another as the TARDIS wailed like an animal in pain. Zoe squealed loudly into Jamie's ear, and he winced, but now the Doctor seemed to be bringing the ship under some semblance of control once more.
"Ah, we're landing," he said, the words escaping on the back of a deep sigh of relief.
There was a juddering thump, the TARDIS groaned in protest once more, and then fell silent.
For long moments, nobody moved. Jamie kept one arm curled protectively around Zoe and the other braced against the console, and now he glanced over the top of the girl's head at the Doctor, who was leaning over the instrument panel, his knuckles pale and his head raised as if scenting the air.
"Doctor? What's – "
"Quiet, Jamie," the Doctor hissed in response, waving one hand in the air in a guarded gesture. Then he inhaled slowly and steadily, stepped away from the console and cocked his gaze at the ceiling. At last, her concern getting the better of her, Zoe broke away from Jamie's side and took the Doctor's arm, very gently.
"Have we managed to get away?" she asked, keeping her voice soft and level.
"I..." the Doctor began, and then hesitated as a tiny frown nicked his brow. At length, he lowered his head and looked around at her. "Yes. Yes, I do think we have," he added, with a halting smile. He tugged his handkerchief from the depths of his pocket, mopped his face and tucked the handkerchief away again. Then he rubbed his palms together, suddenly all business, and turned to the scanner screen.
"Oh, I say," he said, after a pause. "Well, that's not very helpful."
His companions studied the screen, which was showing nothing but the tops of a few trees, little more than black scribbles against a wall of murky indigo clouds. As they watched, however, a bright spear of lightning split the sky, leaving blue-white tendrils of fire in its wake and bringing a rising wind that set the leaves to thrashing.
"Well, at least we know there's an atmosphere out there," said Zoe, matter-of-factly, and then – before the Doctor could muster any objection – she flipped the lever that opened the TARDIS doors.
The wind danced in at once, wearing a rustling skirt of dead leaves, which it promptly strewed across the floor with careless abandon before whirling out of the door once more. The Doctor glared at the leaves as if seeking an apology for the mess they'd made of his TARDIS, but then sighed wearily, put a hand on Zoe's shoulder and nodded to Jamie.
"Come along, you two," he said, nodding at the whispering, creaking darkness outside. "We'd better go and find out where we've landed."
"Ye mean ye don't know?" said Jamie, hanging back from the tempest outside the doors.
"Sorry, no," the Doctor told him, with a brief, slightly apologetic smile. "I didn't really have time to look where I was going."
"Aye, as usual," Jamie muttered, but the Doctor ignored this with the ease of long practise and simply led the way out into the storm.
Once Jamie was outside, however, the evening wind seemed both lighter and fresher than he'd expected. It was curiously warm, almost tropical, and carried the softest suggestion of nearby plants in full bloom. Another flash of lightning threw the jungle into monochrome for a moment, the shadows of the nearest tree printing themselves across his unprepared eyes, and through a break in the hurrying clouds, for perhaps two seconds, he saw the shimmering ghost of a gibbous moon.
"Doctor, is this Earth?" Zoe was asking, her head turning to and fro as she took in the encompassing forest around them.
"Possibly," said the Doctor. Almost absent-mindedly, he reached out and pulled at the leaves of a nearby tree, studying one intently as a complicated, eyebrow-intensive frown developed on his face. Then, his curiosity apparently sated, he let it go once more. The springy branch, in obedience to the laws of physics, promptly sprang back and slapped Jamie in the face, sending him stumbling back into a shallow ditch filled with a thin layer of rainwater.
He heard Zoe laughing, but was too preoccupied with the unpleasant sensation of the cold water slopping over the top of his boots and soaking through his socks. He grunted in annoyance, looked down at his feet...and then froze solid as an icy trickle ran down his spine as well.
It wasn't a ditch he'd stepped into. It was a footprint. A clawed, three-toed and deeply indented footprint almost a yard in length.
"Er...Doctor?"
"Not now, Jamie. Now, then, what's this?"
The Doctor pushed aside the last fronds of proliferating vegetation and stepped out onto a flat, rocky promontory that offered him a breathtaking view over a thickly forested valley, through which a broad river leapt, surged and danced amongst well-worn chicanes of white limestone, the tumbling rapids sparkling now as the moon found another breach in the clouds.
All of this natural splendour registered only for a moment, however. The Doctor was suddenly far more preoccupied with the jagged mouthful of teeth in the foreground.
"Jamie, don't move."
He obeyed, and simply stared into Zoe's eyes across the space that separated them. She was looking past him, however, at something else entirely, as the wind whipped her hair across her pale cheek. With the heightened acuity of apprehension, he heard the soft hiss of parting leaves and the brisk snap of a fallen branch. And then, in the lee of these little sounds, a dry, throaty rattle, like the snarl of a dying dog.
"Wha' is it?" he muttered, his lips barely moving. His muscles were tightly coiled, poised for action, his age old instinctive response to any threat. But the urgent tone of Zoe's voice overrode his reflexes for the moment.
"Just stay still," she whispered back, although her eyes slid to the side as the creature – whatever it was – emerged from the dense foliage behind Jamie and then moved around his side, its feet thudding on the damp mulch, still broadcasting that eerie clicking sound. He tried not to flinch as it snuffled almost lovingly at his hair and then exhaled, snorting hot breath right into his ear.
And then, at once, Zoe screamed at him to move.
He ducked and rolled, and dimly felt a backwash as something slashed through the air where his head had been a split second before. His shoulder smacked into the trunk of a nearby tree and the impact knocked half the breath from his lungs, but he recovered with due speed and bounced upright once more, pulling Zoe into a patch of shadow and, finally, gaining sight of the beast. What he saw, however, threatened to unseat his sanity.
Jamie had heard tales of dragons at his mother's knee, but never suspected they might look so strange, nor so unnerving. The creature reared up a head taller than a grown man, balancing on two sinewy, scaly hind legs, swaying slightly from side to side as if to mesmerise its intended prey like a snake. Its narrow snout weaved and ducked, and its eyes shone like gold coins. But as it shook off the last trailing creepers and stepped out into the clearing between them and the TARDIS, another bolt of lightning lit the scene in brilliant blue, and Jamie saw that it was flexing a pair of ragged wings that ended in hooked yellow claws.
"Jings, it's nae but a big chicken – " he began, but then the beast yawped at them, issuing a strange breathless cry, and in that maw he saw a profusion of needle sharp teeth that had him backing away with his heart in his throat.
The Doctor's eyes were watering slightly.
"Good boy," he said, soothingly, and then felt profoundly foolish for it. Instead, he cleared his throat, sharpened his gaze, stared into a pair of eyes that were almost two feet apart and tried to set aside curiously persistent mental images of being bitten in half.
The huge head tilted to one side a little, as if the tyrannosaur was trying to make sense of this unexpected hors d'oeuvre in ragged trousers. Taking advantage of its momentary confusion, the Doctor squinted with effort and then, finally, managed to break though that narrow crack into the animal's mind.
What he found in there wasn't encouraging. It was more or less a blank canvas on which a few simple directives were scrawled in large block letters; mostly ones concerning food and females. He tutted impatiently and pushed past these, leafing through what little mind the reptile possessed, trying to find something which which to frighten the beast into retreat.
The Doctor had actually reached the last page before it occurred to him that the whole thing had been a waste of time. A seven-ton apex predator had no instinctive fears. Why would it need any?
This realisation hit him at the same time as his tenuous hold on the tyrannosaur's mind snapped like a thread, and there was a mighty rush of air as it inhaled and then darted its huge head down with shocking speed, trying to snap at him. He promptly took to his heels, but slipped on the rain-slicked rock and fell to his knees, turning over his shoulder as the beast took a step up onto the outcrop and then bore down on him with a nerve-shredding roar busting from the back of its throat.
The Doctor rolled aside as it lunged for him once more, and this time he somehow found a moment for a smirk of satisfaction as its snout hit bare rock instead, the impact dazing it. It stepped back, tripped over its own tail, reeled crazily and then promptly staggered sideways over the edge of the outcrop in a crackle of breaking branches and one final, bone-shaking thud.
The fall wasn't a mortal one, however, and the Doctor wasn't inclined to wait for the animal to recover its wits and make a second attempt on his life. Struggling out of the puddle in which he'd landed, he climbed to his feet, shook his hair like a dog and ducked back into the jungle in search of his companions.
He reached the TARDIS doors, which stood ajar, and wandered inside, dripping water and muttering mild invective about the state of his clothes. He was still looking down at himself as he walked, trying to pick fragments of moss off his lapels, so it was only Jamie's distant cry of warning that saved his life as he glanced up, gasped and then ducked at once.
The raptor's jaws closed on empty air. The Doctor straightened up, spun around and hared back out of the TARDIS, finely honed survival instincts lending swift wings to his heels. He heard the shrill squeal of claws on the polished floor of the control room, and then a thump as the creature landed on the ground outside and came in pursuit.
The Doctor blundered through a thorny bush and into Jamie and Zoe, who tackled him and brought him to the ground in an ungainly heap of muffled complaint. Zoe jabbed him in the ribs and then clapped a hand over his mouth to silence his protests, but all to no avail as the remains of the bush succumbed to the flailing of the enraged raptor, still clearly undeterred from its prospective meal.
Jamie reached for his belt, drawing his knife for all the good it might do, preparing to defend his friends as best he could, when the raptor suddenly let out a strangled shriek and disappeared backwards at speed, claws ripping and snagging at the bark of the trees as it went by.
Then it was gone, and the silence it left behind was punctuated by another ear-splitting crack and flash as the storm peaked overhead. The ravaged jungle canopy groaned under the weight of a fresh downpour, the rain bursting from the fat purple clouds overhead and hammering at the forest as if it meant to flatten it. Jamie reacted first, clambering up out of the mud before reaching down to help the Doctor and Zoe to their feet.
Together they hurried out into the clearing to see the tyrannosaur furiously shaking its victim to death in a shower of fresh blood and torn feathers. The three travellers, quite unnoticed now, ducked beneath its lashing tail and dashed for the safety of the TARDIS, where the Doctor leant over the console and grabbed for the lever to close the doors. Finally, borne on a long and weary exhalation, he sagged to the floor, where his companions joined him.
Above their heads, the console hummed into life as the Time Lords finally seized control of the machine. Jamie started, trying to get up, but the Doctor placed a hand on his arm and restrained him gently, shaking his head.
"It's all right," he said, with a small, tired smile. "We did our best. No sense in trying to outrun the inevitable, is there?"
"But ye cannae just let them take ye back," said Jamie. He tried to catch the Doctor's eye, wanting to plead his case, but with little success; the man's gaze was now fixed on the middle distance as his brow furrowed.
"It was only a simple transference jump," the Doctor said to himself, his voice soft and lilting with confusion. "One hundred million years? How? How?"
The switches clicked and snapped, the central column rose and fell, and the TARDIS dematerialised, bearing them away to their fate.
Muldoon lowered his binoculars, his lips thinning.
"It's killed another raptor," he said, turning to his aide. The other man shrugged.
"Sorry, sir."
"Don't be," said Muldoon, brusquely. "I told Hammond he shouldn't have bred those blasted things in the first place." So saying, he swung a heavy black rifle down off his shoulder and handed it over. "Round up the team and get it back in its own paddock, will you?
"And make it quick," he added, climbing into his Jeep and starting the engine. "We've got visitors in the morning."