We'd all heard tales of the Doctor. Now, I know what you're thinking: "I had long heard legends of this wonderful man, until one day he saved my life!" Well, this isn't one of those. In fact, that sentiment is wrong on pretty much all counts. See, space pirates don't tend to be fans of people who run around fighting injustice and stuff. Tends to get in the way. So yeah, we're not his biggest fans. In fact, he terrifies us. And he isn't some story or legend. The Doctor has long been an enemy of the Thylakoid space pirates. The irritating thing is, I don't think we're an enemy of his. We seem to just be something he uses to keep himself amused.
We were in trouble that day. Our ship was falling apart, and we were attempting to outrun a supernova. The experience of trying to outrun a supernova is best equated to trying to engage a UKIP voter in a sensible political discussion while simultaneously trying to fight off a honey badger. Futile, and you are likely to end up looking very silly, or dead, or both, trying. Incidentally, I am as surprised as you are that UKIP has lasted for 3000 years after there was ever a United Kingdom, or indeed a planet Earth.
I was on the bridge, sitting in the Captain's chair while, all around me, my robotic crew tried desperately to stoke our ship's knackered engines. The air was thick with alarms, smoke was rising from almost every control panel and completely obscuring the view through the glass ceiling of the bridge, and the coffee machine had been jettisoned long before, only to be rejected by the supernova and come crashing back into my office.
"Increase power to the turbo thrusters!" I barked.
"On it, Captain!" yipped an engineer robot (at least, I assumed it was an engineer robot. They all looked the same, a fascinatingly uninteresting design, painted in all the colours of the vomit-inducing neon rainbow).
"Boost energy feedback to the warp drives!"
"Aye-aye captain!" yipped another robot.
There was a roaring, a squeak, a whistle, a banjo strum, and then...silence.
"Report!' I yelled.
"We seem to have cleared the blast radius, captain!"
I slumped back into the expensive leather of the captain's chair. "Thank God for that. Is the cargo still secure?"
A robot checked a reading. "All gold bars still secure."
"Good. Pull up the ship's schematics."
A robot pressed a button, and I was treated to the exterior view of My Little Pirate Ship.
My Little Pirate Ship is one of the most dangerous and controversial toy lines in the history of the universe. Created in the year 5868 by the Hasbro Toy-Merchant Empire (one of the most powerful imperial forces in all reality, and home to such intergalactic marvels as the "My Little Space-Serpent" pens and the slave pits of Cybertron), My Little Pirate Ship was designed to appeal to young carbon-based women (or variations thereupon) in the middle-class regions of the universe. Designed as little toy vehicles for rich kids with more money than sensory neurons, they were marketed with the tagline "Play has never been more Real". To add to this realism, the ships were not only made completely space-worthy, but were also kitted out with the very latest high-tech weaponry and power sources, and robotic crewmen, as well as the mandatory spaceship fins (useless, but cool-looking). Curiously, this meant they were popular not only among young girls, but had a significant periphery demographic among young men and teenage boys, as well as with actual pirates. This led to the greatest explosion in space-piracy in history, and not a few unsettling ad campaigns.
I examined the schematics. We had lost the secondary warp drive and suffered some minor hull damage, but were otherwise OK. It was while performing some periphery scans that I noticed something. A very small, cuboidal craft flying about 1000 meters above us. As I watched on the display I noticed three foreign objects, which the computer momentarily identified as bodies, fall from it, and I realised with a yell that they were heading straight for the bridge.
"Everybody get down!" I yelled, just as three bodies crashed through the ceiling in a shower of broken glass and shattered no-claims bonuses.
As I emerged from behind my chair, I saw two vaguely familiar faces-those of a grinning young lady in medieval dress with long brown hair, and a vaguely amused yet austere-looking man in a long black coat, wearing a powdered white wig. I also saw another face, clutching a silver metallic torch with a green tip between its teeth. She was wearing a long white frock coat, a black waistcoat, red tie, grey trousers and a battered brown stetson atop her shoulder-length red hair. She let go of the rope which she had used to swing onto the ship, fixed me with her intense brown eyes, pulled the sonic screwdriver from between her teeth, pointed at me, and said:
"I'm the Doctor. These are my friends Lady Godiva and Adam Smith. You've just been boarded."
I stood there, as dumbfounded as a bird halfway through its southern migration which has suddenly realised that it is missing both wings.
"Blimey, I love saying that. We must do this more often."
"D-Doctor?" I spluttered.
"That's me!" she grinned.
"B-but you're..."
"Finally ginger?" she asked. "I know. Fantastic, isn't it? I am flattered that you care so deeply about my appearance."
She gave an idle flick of the sonic screwdriver, and all of My Little Security Systems and My Little Killdroids were disabled.
"Now," she clapped her hands together. "This ship is ours, and we have a particular interest in your cargo."
"Now wait just one moment!" I roared, pulling out My Little Laser Gun. "You'll not take my ship that easily!"
The Doctor's face fell. "Oh dear," she sighed. "I did hope that you wouldn't make this difficult."
"What's that supposed to-"
I stopped. Someone had tapped me over the shoulder. Looking over it, I was punched squarely in the face, and fell to the floor, mind reeling.
The eighteenth century Scottish economist Adam Smith is, of course, most famous for his theory of "The Invisible Hand", the idea that markets are guided towards equilibrium prices and economic efficiency without direct state intervention. What few people realise is that Adam Smith was in fact psychically linked to an actual invisible hand, left to him by Commander Strax of the twelfth Sontaran battle fleet, which he used to punch markets into equilibrium position. The threats of Adam Smith's invisible hand have been acknowledged by many historians as a root cause of Britain's eighteenth century economic boom. Of course, traveling up and down the country punching merchants who over-charged for butter was tiring work, so the Doctor had offered him a little holiday, one of whose activities was the theft of my admittedly already stolen ship. But the real clincher was that Lady Godiva would also be there.
The thirteenth-century Coventry noblewoman Lady Godiva was, of course, immortalised after politely asking the entire town to look the other way while she rode around naked in the name of tax evasion. This was a historically significant event as it defied the three absolute certainties of the universe: death, taxes and that men stare at naked members of the opposite sex. Even the one man who tried to look (referred to by historians as "Peeping tom", or "dirty bastard", or, in certain dialects of the most poorly-evolved societies in the universe, "LAD") was inexplicably struck blind (almost as if by an invisible hand). This defiance of the three absolute certainties has fascinated historians and physicists for millennia. This, coupled with the fact that shortly thereafter Lady Godiva vanishes from all historical accounts, lends credence to the theory that in breaking the three absolute certainties, Lady Godiva became universally transcendental. She is believed to stroll in eternity, flitting in and out of history as she pleases, and never paying any taxes. Theories that she learned to change her appearance, found her way to Gallifrey and became the being feared throughout the Thylakoid system as The Doctor remain unsubstantiated. Certainly it would explain why the Doctor chose to hang out with her so much.
When I came to, I had been tied to my captain's chair, and Lady Godiva was pointing a Space Cutlas at me. A Space Cutlas is exactly the same as a normal cutlas, but with a markup of approximately 258 times the original price for the word "space" in the name.
"Now look here!" I yelled. "What are you clowns playing at?"
The Doctor and Adam Smith were consulting a bank of screens and readouts. The Doctor looked serious. She turned and glared at me, brandishing a paper readout, thunder in her eyes.
"Do you have any idea of the implications of this?" she demanded.
"Erm...no?" I squeaked.
"Me neither." she replied, crumpling up the readout and tossing it over her shoulder.
"I do, however" said Adam Smith, turning around and addressing me sternly.
"I do, however" said Lady Godiva, in a frighteningly good impression of Smith's pompous manner.
The Doctor and Lady Godiva roared with laughter.
"Do you mind not interrupting while I'm saving the world?" demanded Smith.
"Sorry," spluttered the Doctor, "do continue."
"Am I right in thinking that the hold of this ship is dimensionally transcendental?" Smith asked.
I gave a terse nod.
"And that it is currently packed to the gunnels with stolen gold?"
I nodded again.
"Then I am sorry to say, sir, that we must confiscate this ship from you."
"That's one way of putting it."
"I appreciate your co-operation in this matter."
"Hang on!" I said. "Surely you don't need gold, Doctor?"
"I don't." she replied.
"Then why-"
"Ah," she replied. "The thing is, you can't be allowed to take this ship full of gold back the Thylakoid 7. If you did, you would sink the entire planet's economy-"
"Aye, completely devalue the currency, destroy the medium for the exchange of goods and services, drag the planet back to the age of bartering," said Smith, contemptuously.
"Yes, and then you would sink the planet itself. Very heavy, see," finished the Doctor.
"So you're going to steal my ship and dump me here to die" I said, bitterly.
"Not quite." said the Doctor.
"In fact," said Lady Godiva, a completely infuriating smile playing her lips, "we're going to abandon the ship here and let the supernova have it, along with all the gold."
"It's the only way," said Smith, grimly.
"But how are you going to get away?" I demanded. "There are no escape pods on this ship."
"Well," said the Doctor, a grin dawning on her face now. "I was going to just bring round the TARDIS, but the good Lady insisted on being ostentatious."
"It's my speciality," replied Lady Godiva.
"I can attest." said Smith.
I emitted a groan. I could cope with the boarding, capture and humiliation...actually, what was I talking about, of course I couldn't. But anyway, the flirting was bad too.
The whole ship shook as the outer edges of the supernova started to nibble at its tailfins.
"Right," barked the Doctor,"fascinating chat, but it's time to be off. Lady Godiva, if you please."
Lady Godiva took the Doctor and Adam Smith by the hand.
"Will you be coming?" she asked, politely.
"No!" I rolled my eyes. "I'd much rather sit here and wait to be pulverised by a massive supernova!"
"Suit yourself." she said, and the three of them took off.
As they flew inexplicably through the vacuum of space, I cursed the fact that sarcasm hadn't been invented until the sixteenth century. I decided to go out with a classic.
"You haven't heard the last of me, Doctor!" I bellowed. "I'll be-"
That was as far as I got. An unseen fist grabbed me by the hair and dragged me along behind them. As I twisted through the void, observing the majesty of the cosmos, all I could think was that at least I had been able to avoid such clichéd last words.
After that, the typical wrap-up stuff happened. Lady Godiva engaged Adam Smith in heavy petting, while the Doctor winced and told them to get a room. I was handed over to the authorities, and am currently writing this from a prison cell on Terseron 5. What the scumbags didn't count on was that I managed to smuggle my inter-spatial transmitter in with me. I am now sending out this distress call, and it should be picked up by the nearest hub of degradation and villainy. Rescue should be along soon.
This text was posted on at 19:35 on 2/3/2014. Would you like to leave a comment?