The ship was failing fast.
Prentice stood in the musty air of the hold, his head bowed and fists tightly clenched until his nails almost pierced his palms. He could feel the thrum of the ship's engines through the deck beneath his feet, but barely. The tempo of the proton turbines surged and ebbed in time with the flicker of the strip lights, and it sounded as if the craft were struggling for its very life.
"Captain!"
He ignored the hammering on the bulkhead door behind him. It wasn't important any more. He turned his attention to the crate instead, and now peered through the barred aperture at the creature chained up inside it. There was precious little light left in the hold now, and the thing was not much more than a series of curves and gleams in the eldritch green glow of the emergency lighting.
It was quite still, and Prentice might have taken it for dead had he not known better. He leaned closer to the bars, pressed his forehead against the cold metal and addressed his captive.
"I know you're doing this," he said, softly. "But how?"
There was no response whatsoever. The only sound that now assailed Prentice was the harsh whistle of his own breath in the dry air.
"No matter what you do," he whispered, "you're not getting away from me. If we die then we die together." He angled his head with a mirthless smile. "Do you understand what I'm saying?"
"I understand," it said, flatly. Its voice, which had been weak and halting just a few hours ago, seemed much stronger now. In counterpoint to this, the bulbs in the hold dimmed even further, and several winked out entirely.
"Then why are you doing this?"
"We must survive."
"There is no 'we'!" hissed Prentice. "Your race is gone, don't you get it? Extinct. There's just you...and me."
The chains clinked faintly as it shifted in its restraints. "We must survive," it repeated. Prentice smacked his palm against the bars in frustration and fury, but he knew that the creature would not be intimidated so easily, if at all, and just as quickly calmed himself.
"You're already dead," he said, quietly and coldly. "You just don't know it yet."
"Captain! You have to stop this!"
Outside the hold, Argus pounded her fist against the door once more, pleading through the impenetrable steel. Her voice was raw from shouting and her eyes stung with helpless tears, as yet unshed. Anger, bewilderment and fear were fighting for control of her emotions, and her overriding concern for the rest of the ship's crew was only just keeping one or all of these from overwhelming her entirely.
There was no response from behind the locked door. There hadn't been in over two hours now. Ever since that abomination had been brought aboard several days ago, her captain – Jim Prentice, a man Argus had known and respected since her first posting aboard his ship more than seven years ago – had deteriorated into a paranoid, obsessive stranger. Their prisoner occupied his every thought and word. And now that it had finally made its move against them, they were quite helpless to respond in their own defence.
She returned to the bridge to find the pilot, Reese, hunched over in his seat, jabbing at the controls with his breath coming in sharp bursts. Argus could read his body language easily enough by now; the young man was practically sweating terror from every pore. She crossed the floor in the gathering darkness and took him by the shoulder.
"Do we have enough power left?"
"Enough for what?" he asked, his voice high and bordering on hysteria. "To steer the ship or maintain the shields? No. And believe me," he continued, with a guttural laugh, "in a few hours' time we're really going to miss those shields. Because guess what?"
Saying nothing more, he slapped at the switch that raised the visor on the forward view-screen. Argus turned her head and stared out at the vast wastes of space, and her heart stuttered in horror at the nightmare that lay ahead of the drifting vessel.
The screen was all but filled with a blinding orange glow, a wall of incandescent and highly radioactive gas that stretched away in both directions as far as she could see. This veil was translucent, however, and as Reese adjusted the filters on the screen to compensate for the glare that threatened to blind them both, she saw the real danger come into sharp focus.
Beyond the livid maelstrom, at the centre of a deadly whirlpool of plasma half a million miles across and screaming out its stroboscopic flashes hundreds of times per second, lay a pulsar. A hugely compacted star that could surely tear the ship and its crew into their component atoms, and then tear those atoms apart in turn.
And they were being dragged, slowly but surely, into its lethal gravitational embrace.
Not for the first time since she'd first set foot inside the TARDIS's capacious wardrobe, Victoria indulged in some speculation as to its contents as she wandered along an aisle of dresses, seeking something new to wear.
It seemed to her that it contained ladies' clothing suitable for just about any era, occasion or climate, and even though she'd quickly become accustomed to the revealing dresses and skirts of future fashions, she couldn't help but wonder where the Doctor came by it all. Or why, for that matter. He'd mentioned his family on occasion during their travels, and once he'd spoken of a granddaughter, but always in a carefully offhand manner, and with a look in his eye that wavered between evasion and sorrow and cautioned her against further inquiry.
These must be his granddaughter's clothes then, she decided, and on the heels of that thought she wondered which – if any – of these outfits were from the Doctor's home world. It still surprised Victoria that she had reacted so calmly to the Doctor informing her that he was from another planet, but since it had come in the wake of her traumatic experiences at the mercy of the Daleks, it was little wonder she'd failed to absorb the fact in its entirety. Lately, though, she'd started to examine it more closely every time her mind wandered, and had yet to find a way to reconcile the strange, shabby little man in the baggy coat with the notion of a four hundred and fifty year old alien from a race of time travellers.
Her attention was distracted at that point by a beautiful creation in soft blue velvet with a cream lace collar and cuffs, and she had almost finished changing when a series of sonorous peals began to ring through the open doorway. Though they had a melodious edge, the chimes were nonetheless somehow invasive and set her teeth on edge. Wincing, she hurried out into the corridor, still buttoning her dress, and almost bumped into Jamie, who gave her a quizzical look from beneath lowered brows.
"What's all this noise, eh?" he asked her, glancing up and down the passage, his hands on his hips.
"Well, how am I supposed to know?" she protested. "I don't like it, though. My ears are hurting."
"Aye," said Jamie, rubbing at the back of his head with a sudden scowl; clearly he was similarly affected, though with his usual Highland stoicism, not deigning to admit as much. "Aye, well," he repeated. "Let's go an' find the Doctor, anyway."
They eventually located the Doctor tucked away beneath the console in the control room, and Jamie addressed what little of the man could be seen, which basically amounted to a pair of legs wreathed in an alarming quantity of acrid smoke.
"Doctor!" Jamie raised his voice above the hearty crack and sizzle of the console, trying to reassure himself that if the Doctor wasn't panicking then there was probably no need to panic. When there was no immediate response, he rapped his knuckles on the nearest panel of the console and then stepped back as the Doctor clambered out of the mysterious inner workings of the TARDIS, his hair even more awry than usual and a piece of wire hanging from his ear.
"It's the fluid links again," he said, his expression so mournful it was almost comical; Victoria covered a smile and then watched him brighten a little before reaching up to remove the stray wire and make a token attempt to smooth down his hair. Behind him, apparently unheeded, the console continued to smoke gently but persistently. Victoria tapped his arm gently and indicated this fact with a meaningful nod.
"Yes, yes," he said, distractedly and in peculiarly good humour, given the circumstances. Turning back to the problem at hand, he flipped a small lever that stopped both the distressing crackling sound from the console and the ominous booming of the alarm bell.
"Doctor, what was that awful noise?" she asked, waving away the last of the smoke as it drifted past her face.
"That was the Cloister Bell," said the Doctor, ambling around the console and making a few more minor adjustments to their course, his expression screwed up in thought. "I'm not entirely sure why it was ringing. It's supposed to be for emergencies only."
"Emergencies like the TARDIS bein' on fire?" said Jamie, with a dash of sarcasm.
"Or the end of the universe," said the Doctor, his tone so placid that it took his companions a second or two to register the gravity of his words. Jamie and Victoria exchanged wide-eyed glances, but the Doctor evidently hadn't finished pursuing his line of thought, and in any case the three of them didn't appear to be in any immediate danger, universe-ending or otherwise.
"I was in fact trying to trace a distress signal," he went on, without looking up from the readout he was now perusing. "It was so faint I had to divert power from the primary propulsion systems just to maintain a lock on it. Obviously a little too much power," he added ruefully, looking back up and treating them both to a bright but fleeting smile. "Still, I managed to secure the correct coordinates, so we're on our way now. Shouldn't be long."
Jamie looked sideways at Victoria for a second and then back at the Doctor. "There's no' gonna be too much danger, is there?" he asked, aware that it was probably a silly question but consumed, as was his ingrained habit, by a desire to protect the young woman.
"I shouldn't think they've sent out a distress signal because they've run out of milk, Jamie," the Doctor replied, condescendingly. "Yes, there probably is some danger. But we can't ignore a cry for help, now can we?"
"Suppose not," said Jamie, though grudgingly. Privately, in that moment, he re-examined a few old reservations about the Doctor's moral compass. Half the time, it seemed to him, the man would blithely stroll into the most readily obvious peril for reasons that had nothing to do with protecting other people's lives. Sometimes it was due to boredom, curiosity, or a desire to grandstand. Sometimes simply because it was there. And along with him he dragged his companions and other innocent bystanders, not all of whom had made it out alive in the past.
It wasn't that Jamie didn't like and respect the Doctor. But there was a fine line between courage and recklessness, and the Scotsman sometimes wondered if his friend knew exactly where that line lay.
He returned his attention to the present to see the Doctor staring coolly at him across the console, and there was a hint of something that looked very much like calculating analysis in those bright blue eyes. But it was there and gone again before he could react to it, and then the Doctor was pressing buttons on the console and evidently feeding the incoming signal through the loudspeakers. The sound filled the room at once; a ghostly electronic wail, rising and falling in pitch.
Victoria started at the sound at once. For some reason that she couldn't identify, it raised a rash of goosebumps on her arms. She rubbed at her elbows, trying to distract or reassure herself, she wasn't sure which. Jamie noticed her reaction and moved to her side, putting a comforting arm around her shoulders. As he did so, the central column groaned once and then ceased its movement, indicating that the TARDIS had reached its destination. The Doctor rubbed his palms together briskly and made a cursory check of the local atmospheric conditions, muttering to himself as he did so.
"Air pressure fine, oxygen levels a little low but tolerable...temperature...what? An electromagnetic field. How strong? My goodness me. That can't possibly be right. Oh, well, probably won't be here long enough to worry about that. Yes. Hmm..."
After a few more seconds of similarly cryptic commentary, Victoria spoke up. "Doctor? Is there anything wrong?"
"No, no, everything seems to be within acceptable limits," he said, though his features remained set and entirely indecipherable. "More or less, anyway. Shall we?"
Without waiting for an answer from his companions, he opened the doors, turned smartly on his heel and marched out into the darkness beyond.