Unnatural Selection
Author's Note
I have no idea where this little story came from, but it asked to be put to page, so here it is. I haven't had chance to get it beta'd, so apologies for any glaring errors or typos, just in case!
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The TARDIS was wheezing its usual spontaneous rhythm of rasp, cough, rasp cough as I lazed on the console chair.
I sometimes wonder how we all put up with its manic sounds. The noise is like an elderly patient with asthma and angina all rolled into one. And trust me, as a nurse, or ex-nurse, I should know.
Then again, to hear the Doctor talk, the TARDIS was an old lady of very questionable lineage, so who am I to talk? (Although after the events on the asteroid in the bubble universe, she didn't look that old to me.)
Anyway, right now, said Doctor was dancing around the center console pulling at switches and squeezing oddly shaped buttons to the tune of Michael Jackson's Black or White.
Thankfully, he didn't sing along, but his movements seemed oddly timed to the tempo of the music.
Amy hadn't appeared to notice his gyrations and was reading a small brochure that wouldn't have been out of place at Butlin's, or some other holiday escape.
Where my wife had acquired the booklet was anyone's guess, but given the deceptive size of the time machine we travelled in, it was a fair bet it had been on the craft somewhere just waiting to be perused.
In fact, knowing how the ship had a mind of its own, it may have even been placed for us to find. I've long since given up trying to fathom out how all the time stuff works and just go with the flow, so to speak. Even if said flow sometimes goes backwards, sideways and into another dimension!
Having been saved from death too many times to count by all the quirks of alternate realities and relative time and space, I'm not about to argue, though.
So, I moved up beside Amy, peering over her shoulder. "What are you finding so interesting?"
She flicked over the pamphlet to show me the pictures of strange alien vistas and worlds I would have once thought were purely out of a Sci Fi novel.
Shoving a bright pink bonbon in her mouth she gestured towards an image of a planet with azure skies, and even deeper cobalt clouds. "How come you never took me anywhere but Blackpool," she teased, her brogue accent strengthening the question.
I shrugged. It was always going to be impossible to compete with the Doctor with some things. I'd learned that lesson a long time ago on our wedding day.
It says here," Amy continued. "That Digamma 66 is considered by some as the Marie Celeste of the Horsehead Nebula. Apparently, every lifeform vanished from the surface just over a hundred years ago, and it's been quarantined ever since. Although no one has ever figured out what happened there."
"See," I countered, "that's why I prefer Blackpool. Or maybe even Bournemouth."
Amy punched me playfully and I couldn't resist a small smile, but it was all I had time for before the Doctor suddenly appeared between us, his face screwed up in confusion, and was that worry?
"I'm sorry," he said matter-of-factly, "but did you just say Digamma 66 has no population? I mean, it must have. There were billions there last time I stopped by for a cup of tea and a fish finger."
Amy toyed with the pamphlet, trying to get it to fold back on the right page. After a little fiddling, she found the article and offered it up to the Time Lord. "It says right there they all went missing a hundred years or so ago. Looks like they're going to lift the quarantine now and allow sightseers in."
She ruffled the crumpled bag of bonbons on her lap and offered them up to the Doctor. He sniffed them unappreciatively and shook his head. "Always preferred jelly babies myself."
"Eww, you're not one of those weirdo's who bites the heads off, are you?"
The Doctor bristled, straightened his bowtie and huffed. "Might be. What's wrong with biting their heads off anyway…" He took a moment to realize he was being ribbed and then snatched the leaflet from Amy's hand, whirling around on the spot with it as he apparently read the tiny text.
"Can't be an empty planet. Not empty for the last hundred years," he told himself. "I should know about it. I would know about it."
"Which means what?" I asked with a frown.
"Which means, I've been terribly remiss." The Doctor sighed, still whirling around the pulsing console as he deliberated. "And now I have to pay Digamma 66 a little visit before it becomes fair game to all you tourist lot."
Before either me or Amy could ask more, he'd bounded back over to the central controls and was examining unfathomable readouts on the TARDIS's monitor.
The thing had always reminded me of a telly my granddad had in his shed, but it seemed to work wonders and more on the little time ship with big aspirations.
As I watched him tap clumsily away at keys, I felt Amy brush up beside me, also watching him.
"I think we're about to get a holiday somewhere they don't serve fish and chips," she observed.
I nodded. But then, they rarely did serve fish and chips where the Doctor journeyed.
...
Digamma 66 Central Hub
Forty Seconds Later…
Tripping with the Doctor is never like a regular journey. Pick a star, any star, and if it would take a million light years to get there, you'll arrive a second after he's given the TARDIS its co-ordinates.
Landings are sometimes an acquired taste, and you don't always quite land where you're expecting, but it's never dull. I guess that was what first attracted Amy to the bonkers alien that we'd both become so close to over the last few months.
Anyway, as the time ship settled, it jolted twice and we found ourselves on the very empty world of Digamma 66.
The Doctor swiftly informed us that the planet had an atmosphere like earth's, so we'd be quite safe to walk around unaided, but as we exited the TARDIS door I could also see trepidation creeping into the lines on his face.
He could sometimes fool Amy with that youthful almost playful look of his, but I could often tell when he was worried – no, not just worried, this time he was genuinely frightened.
"No poking around on your own, you two. At least not until I've checked everything is hunky dory here." He slid open the police box door and lithely snapped his sonic screwdriver from his tweed jacket pocket.
Tweed actually made him look like an old school teacher, or should I say nutty professor from bygone days, but I never told him so. That's what friends are for, right?
As we took our first steps on the lonely world, he was already busy scanning the sky, the ground, the buildings. Basically, everything, and Amy and I followed.
"So why are we here, exactly?" Amy asked, mirroring my own thoughts. "I mean, there's hardly an emergency, and there were way cooler places to visit on that brochure."
The Doctor ignored her and kept scanning, the tip of his sonic ebbing and pulsing ever few seconds. "Because this place shouldn't be empty. It should be writhing with workers." He pointed directly in front of us to a structure that appeared to be a massive factory. "They used to build the Flavius Four there. Still were building it not three weeks ago last I heard. And now this?" He raised a brow.
I peered intently at the depot expecting it to give up some miraculous answers, but all I saw was a disused building that was falling into disrepair.
Some of the upper windows had cracked or fallen out completely, and whatever weird substance it had been formed from had started to degenerate and crumble – possibly from the heat of the intense multiple suns that burned above us.
"I'm sorry. Flavius what?" The Doctor was always confusing, but today I was already getting a headache from the lack of logic that seemed to be going around.
"Flavius Four!" He crooned as if I should have known what it was. "It's the in thing in space cruiser! Think of it as a Ford Cortina of its day or something. Or maybe not…"
Amy put a hand on her hip and tossed her red locks over her shoulder and I knew she was getting annoyed with him. It tended to happen a lot, because the Doctor does have a tendency to overstate the obvious, or sometimes not so obvious.
The Doctor noticed too, and cleared his throat. "Yes, well, what I'm saying is, I know this place was still tossing out space ships at four hundred a week last month. And now look at it. It was the New Detroit of its age and now it's a dead planet."
"Someone's changed history," I concluded, finally seeing his point.
"Possibly," he mused, tapping the sonic against his lips. "But there's more to it than that. Come on, into the belly of the beast!"
With that he was off, clumsily traversing a set on steep concrete steps in his little black, totally out of date boots, into the warehouse structure.
I took Amy's hand and we followed, but already I was worried about what we would find. Or rather, what might find us.
The Doctor hadn't changed course and come here lightly, and whatever was in that thick Time Lord skull under all that mad floppy hair, he wasn't ready to share.
That worried me even more.
...
Inside the factory or warehouse, or whatever it was, seemed fairly light and airy, and yet it took me awhile to actually digest why.
Long tubes illuminated the far reaches of the shop floor, and here and there machinery still whirred with signs of life.
Should a building that hadn't been inhabited for a hundred years still have power?
We strode past some kind of robotic arm, and it jolted spasmodically, a control panel to its right flashing and chirping like morning birdsong.
The whole effect sent a shiver down my back, and I sensed Amy quiver with the same sense of trepidation.
"Why are we even in here?" She whispered, eyes darting to and fro from machines to monitors, and back again.
I didn't really have an answer to give.
Only the Doctor did.
And he was already several feet away heading for a set of stairs.
The Time Lord bounded up them two, sometimes three sets at a time until he vanished inside a sliding hydraulic door. I expected the door to hiss closed, shutting us off from him, but it was just my imagination and we were able to walk through unhindered.
So much for my acute centurion sense of danger.
Beyond the metal entry was a much larger room that overlooked the whole floor below through a massive glass screen.
It was like a bridge from a Star Trek ship, with desks, consoles and strange computers burbling in the background.
I felt Amy squeeze my hand and then relax as she watched the Doctor begin to tap on touch screen controls.
She trusted him explicitly.
We both did, but I still suddenly wished we were back in Leadworth together on a totally boring, normal earth day.
The Doctor must have sensed our thoughts because he looked up at Amy specifically and smiled that quirky grin of his. "Don't be nervous, Pond," he cooed. "Everything's under control."
And then the lights that we'd feared earlier abruptly extinguished.
They didn't sputter out, they didn't slowly dim, they just died.
I snatched my hands out to try and reaffirm my grip on Amy, but she must have moved further away from me in the darkness.
I don't know why, but I feared calling her or the Doctor's name and I stammered instead, throat dry and voicebox in knots.
As quickly as the darkness had come, it receded, this time replaced by an abrupt flash of blinding red light.
I heard myself cry out as its intensity seared into my retinas, and then it was gone, once again replaced by the simple glare of the light tubes.
"A…amy," I spluttered. "Doctor..?"
"I'm okay." Amy was in front of me, picking herself up from a spot on the floor I could only assume she'd dived upon at the sign of any trouble. (You learn to dive a lot with the Doctor, but especially run.)
She looked at me, and then at the console where the Doctor had been working.
The Time Lord was still there, stooping over the screen with a frown so deep it was almost cavernous.
"Not quite what I was expecting," his very British tones grumbled. "But close enough."
"Expecting what?"
Trust Amy to actually want to know what was about to chew us up and spit us out.
"We're about to have a little chat." the Doctor tipped his head towards the huge glass window that overlooked the floor below, and as they watched it fizzed with a kind of static, a blue discharge fading over its surface until the window became a massive viewscreen.
The screen oozed white and black pock-like emissions for a second, then snapped into what looked like a security office monitor.
Several segmented pictures of different parts of the facility came into view, and in each, a scene was unfolding.
One had a large, stocky man hammering at the walls around him. Another showed a young girl with a knife to the throat of another, younger girl.
None of the scenes were pretty.
One contained nothing but an airlock full of corpses, and I could only imagine how they had become trapped there.
The Doctor stared for a very long time at the screen, his face as angry as I'd ever seen him, and usually he controls his temper well.
"What do you want?" He snapped, edging around the desk to stand in front of the viewer like a ship's captain ready to go down with his vessel.
The screen danced, showing more horrific views and even with my nurse's training I felt sickened.
Eventually, the images faded to be replaced by static again.
"Rory, I don't get it," Amy was once more at my side, and I knew she too felt the Doctor's anxiety.
The last time he'd been like this had been when our daughter had been kidnapped at Demon's Run, and that situation hadn't ended well.
The viewer seemingly hissed at us for interrupting its communication with the Doctor, and then a deep voice, impossibly below human range blasted through the room loud enough to almost burst our eardrums.
We both cowered, cradling our ears as best we could from the vibrations with the palms of our hands. The Doctor didn't seem to be affected.
The voice had a strange, terrifying resonance, and Amy and I almost wanted to run, except we couldn't, because this concerned the Doctor.
"What do you call a Time Lord that cannot regenerate?" It chided.
The Doctor suddenly grinned as if he'd expected the question. "Oh really, I much prefer the knock knock jokes, but if you must…"
The voice, or whatever it was, appeared not to respect his answer and grew silent.
Amy stepped forwards, hand on hip again, accent flaring as the second man in her life was threatened. "We don't know. What do you call a Time Lord that can't regenerate?"
I expected the thing to laugh then, like some hysterical monster. Let's face it, that's the way it happens on the telly, but it didn't.
The room was quiet, as if the thing was weighing up whether to answer anyone but the Doctor himself.
The Doctor appeared to sense this too and after another fiddle with his bowtie stepped even closer to the screen. "Go on then," he taunted. "Give us your punchline. What do you call a Time Lord who can't regenerate?"
He knew the answer. We all did, but still the words sent ice through our hearts and veins.
Because somehow, some way, we knew the thing talking to us would make its words become reality.
"A dead one…"