Disclaimer: The Doctor, his TARDIS and his companions belong to the BBC. I have borrowed them for this story and am making no profit from this.
Prologue
"Get the door, would you, Harry," the Doctor called, buffing at a spot on the TARDIS console with his sleeve and then patting it.
The door control was one of the few switches on that console Harry Sullivan dared touch, after the alarming outcome of his first encounter with the Doctor's remarkable time machine. He'd come a long way since then – halfway around the universe and back, in fact – but it was with hard-earned caution nonetheless that he flipped the switch, and was relieved to see the door opening as intended, which meant he'd chosen the right one.
This was the second attempt they'd made to return to UNIT in response to an urgent summons, and if Harry's time aboard the TARDIS had taught him anything it was that the Doctor's ability to control his remarkable time machine was a little on the erratic side, so he headed for the door hoping rather than expecting to see the reassuringly familiar sight of the lab back at HQ.
The door opened into space – or height, rather – and he caught hold of the frame to avoid stepping out onto nothing, looked down at a tremendous drop of many thousands of feet, dizzyingly far and crowded with traffic…airborne traffic, zipping around at breath-taking speed. Looking up again, he blinked and jerked back as another of those flying cars zipped past, almost close enough to touch – and then another, and another. The sky was full of them, zooming around in all directions and at all levels.
It was a city of some kind – a city of skyscrapers, impossibly high, all glass and chrome, graceful and curved, busy and bustling with air traffic of all shapes and sizes, as far as the eye could see.
Not UNIT headquarters, then.
"Er, Doctor…"
Part One
Sarah Jane Smith arrived in the console room just in time to hear the Doctor say, "Ah," in a pensive, chagrined tone.
"Well, that doesn't sound good," she remarked, amused. "Aren't we there yet?"
Standing over at the door, Harry turned and caught her eye. He had an expressive face, as a rule, and the expression it wore just now was a mixture of resignation and amusement. "Looks like we've missed the target again, I'm afraid, old thing."
"Again?" She shouldn't be surprised, turned quizzical eyes upon the Doctor, teasing, "Hey, I thought you said you were fixing the thingamajig."
"The navigational stabilisers – I was. I have," he loftily defended.
"He's almost sure of it," Harry mischievously added, and Sarah had to grin at the Doctor's baleful glower. He didn't like to have his TARDIS steering prowess questioned or mocked, even when that questioning and mocking was completely justified.
"The balance is a little out, that's all," he said with a sniff, and managed to make it sound as if he'd always intended this as no more than a test run. "Just a matter of refinement, you know, easily resolved. Still, we may as well get our bearings, since we're here. Let's take a look, shall we?"
"Careful," Harry warned as they joined him at the door and a moment later Sarah saw why and caught hold of the door frame with a gasp because they were perched right at the edge of some kind of ledge, teetering over the most tremendous drop she'd ever seen.
"Oh, that's high." She wasn't fond of heights at the best of times, and this was so high the ground wasn't visible – there were clouds down there, far below them! Harry solicitously took her elbow to steady her and she couldn't even feign a protest on principle, too busy maintaining her death grip on the doorframe so as not to wobble right off the ledge. She stared in wonder at glistening skyscrapers and the dizzying array of fast-moving air traffic that filled the space between them. "Where are we, Doctor?"
"I'm not entirely sure," the Doctor admitted with an expansive shrug and a thoughtful moue. "These intergalactic trading outposts all look very much the same, you know – if you've seen one, you've seen them all."
Sarah looked at Harry and said, "It's an intergalactic trading outpost of some kind, then," with a roll of her eyes that made him grin – it might go without saying for the Doctor and may not be as definitive an answer as he'd like to give, but it was useful information for them. "How high do you suppose we are?" she added, glancing downward with a shudder.
Another of those expansive shrugs the Doctor was so fond of, accompanied by a tug of the ear lobe and rub of the chin, which meant he was guessing and didn't want to say so. "Oh, a good two miles or so, I should imagine."
"Two miles?" Her head span again at the thought of it.
"At the very least." The Doctor peered appraisingly out at the breath-taking view. "No obvious landmarks – check the rear view on the scanner, would you?"
As awe-inspiring as the cityscape was, Sarah was only too happy to step away from it and activate the viewscreen instead, for a rather safer view of whatever lay behind them. It flickered into life…offering a wonderful view of a dull, metallic wall of some kind, slightly curved, with no identifying features whatsoever.
"Well, a fat lot of help that is," she snorted.
"Ah," said the Doctor, and he waggled his eyebrows at her with a cheery grin. "Back to the drawing board, then."
"I think I can see some kind of inscription around the way here – a logo of some kind," Harry offered. The Doctor brightened.
"What does it say?"
"I can't quite make it out." Harry was leaning out through the open door at an alarming angle to peer around the side of the TARDIS and Sarah's head swam with vertigo just looking at him, hanging out over that drop.
"Hey, be careful," she called, because this was Harry, who could trip over his own feet for no good reason on a perfectly flat bit of ground, never mind over a two mile drop, and they were right on the edge.
"It's all right, there's just enough room here for a foot. It's only a step." He swung himself around as he spoke, using the tiniest of gaps between the TARDIS and the edge of the ledge as a foothold, and vanished from sight.
"Well?" The Doctor strode to the door and tried peering out and around himself, and Sarah hurried after him, deathly drop or no deathly drop.
"Well don't you go disappearing out there as well."
"Harry? What do you see?" the Doctor called.
"I say. What a remarkable place." Harry sounded impressed. "You can see for miles from up here. No way out, though."
"How do you mean?"
"Funny sort of wall back here," he replied, with typical Harry vagueness. "No doors. Jolly odd sort of place, I must say. We seem to have landed on some kind of platform, I suppose, just sort of sticking out and going nowhere. It's not very big."
"What about the logo, Harry – anything to indicate where we are?"
"Er…it says 'Vox-Leon orbital'," Harry began to read, but he got no further because that was when the platform beneath them tilted on its side.
It was over in a blink, no time to grab onto anything, barely even time to scream. One moment Sarah was standing alongside the Doctor in the wide open TARDIS doorway, the next they were falling out through it and all she knew was terror. It was thousands of feet down to the ground below, so high she couldn't even feel how fast she was falling, bitterly cold air whipping through her hair and clothes and lungs, and then a sharp jerk almost pulled her shoulder out of its socket and she was hanging.
A whimper escaped.
"It's all right, it's all right, I've got you," a voice called from somewhere just above, deep and low and soothing. The Doctor.
He had hold of her wrist and she clutched desperately at his sleeve with fingers fast becoming painfully numb with cold, flailed frantically with her other arm for something, anything to hold onto.
"Stop struggling," he said, and that was easier said than done when blind panic was in control of all motor functions. "I'm going to swing you around, try to catch hold of the structure."
He began to swing before she'd processed the words, before she even knew what structure he meant. The whole universe had shrunk to a pinpoint and that pinpoint was the Doctor's grip on her wrist and the two mile drop beneath her feet; she couldn't even see what he'd found to hold onto, because that would mean looking and she couldn't. He swung her and her stomach lurched, her vision blurred, but then there was a structure and she grabbed onto it with frozen fingers. Another heart-stopping moment as he released her wrist, but she had something to hold on to now and a second hand meant a tighter grip. Flailing feet found footholds and the Doctor was still at her side, the warmth of his body pressed tight against hers, pushing her onward up the outer wall of whatever kind of structure this was. At last she found an opening and crawled through it and away from the edge, collapsed in a quivering heap of pounding heart and heaving lungs.
The shaking subsided. She lifted her head to see the Doctor perched on all fours in that high, wide opening that had allowed them access to this level, right at the edge of the ledge with a white-knuckle grip on it as he stared down at the deathly drop below.
An icy fist seemed to clutch at her heart, filling her with dread. "Doctor?"
"I can't see the TARDIS," he said, and it was very nearly the same light, nonchalant tone he'd used before, when they were standing in the TARDIS doorway discussing the view, only not, there was an edge to his voice now that she'd only rarely heard before, and his face was turned away from her.
The TARDIS wasn't the only thing missing.
Harry.
"What about Harry?" He'd been right alongside them and the whole platform had tilted, so if the TARDIS had fallen then Harry had also fallen and the frantic panic of free-fall had been one thing, but this was a whole new kind of terror because he wasn't here on this new level with them which meant he hadn't managed to save himself.
Suddenly Sarah was moving again, faster than she'd felt capable of only a moment ago. Scrambling back to the edge of the ledge, fear of heights or no fear of heights, she stared, aghast, at the whirl of air-cars zipping through the sky, above, around and below them, and the dizzying drop to the ground thousands of feet below, so very far it couldn't even be seen.
"Oh no. No."
"Sarah." The Doctor's voice was low, his hand resting gently at the small of her back, but comfort only made it worse – made it real.
"God no." What became of a human body that fell two miles to the ground? She didn't know, but her mind, unbidden, conjured up images aplenty, each one more horrific than the last. Just a few minutes ago she and Harry had shared knowing grins over the Doctor's piloting eccentricities and now…
She retched, coughing up bitter bile, and felt gentle hands smoothing her hair away from her face and patting her back until the nausea subsided.
"Come away from the edge, Sarah." The Doctor's voice was still very soft, still very gentle.
She allowed him to pull her back and slumped in a heap staring dully out at the air cars and skyscrapers that surrounded them, blurred now by unshed tears. She was shaking again, and it took a moment to realise that the Doctor had started to talk – of course he had, it was his default reaction to stress of any kind.
"…should have realised," he was saying, uncharacteristically subdued, "the topmost platforms are for exo-atmospheric orbital cruisers – the landing rudders retract when they take off after re-fuelling, that's why we fell: landed on the rudder."
"We landed on a rudder?" Dashing at her eyes with the back of a hand, Sarah attempted to take an interest in what he was saying, in case it was important.
"Of an orbital cruiser, weren't you listening?" He sounded as flippant as if nothing had happened; you'd have to know him extremely well to catch the hollow undertone to his voice.
"No," she said, and stirred herself to look around at this refuge they'd found – this wide, open platform that formed part of a much vaster structure, bounded by pillars that arched to a peak high above their heads, supporting another platform further up, like some kind of bizarre cross between an oil rig and a multi-storey car park, giant-sized. There was a functional, industrial look about the place: glossy metal floor and support struts, ductwork and pipes and machinery, glisteningly bright and shiny. What any of it was for she couldn't imagine. "So where are we?" she dully asked.
"Re-fuelling station," the Doctor replied, still in that too-light tone that rang hollowly in her ears. "We landed on a cruiser using the facilities at the upper deck; this is one of the intermediate levels."
"We're going to have to tell them, you know." She didn't even realise she was going to say it until the words were already out. "When we get back to Earth, we'll have to tell everyone – the Brigadier. We'll have to tell him how we ran off with his medical officer and haven't brought him back."
Pushing back to his feet, the Doctor stuffed his hands in his pockets and turned away, his face hidden from her still. "That's a very defeatist attitude, Sarah," was all he said.
"Well, two miles is a very long way to fall, Doctor!" She scrambled upright, tears pricking at her eyes again. "And there's his family, as well – oh, but I don't even know if he has any." And that realisation hit hard. "His mother's dead, he told me that once," she added. It was the only thing she knew for sure about Harry's family and home life; although he would happily chatter away on all manner of topics, he never really talked about anything personal, and it was too late now to ask.
Shock became anger, bubbling over in a sudden burst of fury.
"It's as if you don't even care." And she knew that wasn't true, however strangely detached the Doctor's alien reactions sometimes seemed, but still the words came tumbling out. "He was your friend too, and he wasn't even supposed to be here. You thought it was funny, didn't you, tricking him into the TARDIS, never mind asking him what he wanted, but the joke was over the moment we landed on Nerva Beacon instead of going straight back to UNIT!"
"Well, you know, he did give that helmic regulator quite a twist…" the Doctor mildly defended.
"But it wasn't Harry's fault we fell from two miles in the sky all because we landed in the wrong place," she raged, and she couldn't stay still, couldn't settle, stormed away to nowhere, because there was nowhere to go on this flat, open space, high in the sky with the chill wind whistling through it.
She felt, rather than heard the Doctor following her, turned to see him shuffling awkwardly, hands stuffed into his pockets, his expression sombre.
He looked old, in fact, older than this vibrant new body of his had ever looked – old and tired and drawn.
"Two miles is a long way, Sarah. A lot can happen in two miles. We won't give up hope just yet."
How long would it take to fall all the way to the ground from this height? Would it be over and too late already or could there somehow be even the slightest of chances still, if they could only manage to raise the alarm?
"They say that people who fall from great heights are dead before they hit the ground," she murmured under her breath, a sickening lurch in the pit of her stomach as she remembered that Thal guard on Skaro taunting her with those words, sneering that he didn't believe it himself. How many minutes had it been now? Too many, surely, and she turned on the Doctor again. "Do you really believe someone could survive a fall like that?"
"Well, we did," he observed with a shrug, and just like that her anger was gone, leaving behind a terrible ache, and she didn't want to have hope, not if it was only going to feel like this again at the end of it.
"I'm sorry," she quietly said. "I shouldn't have…it's not your fault. And I know Harry didn't regret coming with us, he told me."
"I'm glad to hear it." The Doctor's voice was soft and sincere, and she'd never seen quite that look in his eye before – she'd seen him frightened and hopeless and desperate, but this particular look was new; he'd never, she supposed, dropped a friend off a two mile height before.
"What are we going to do?" Stranded on a tower two miles in the air without the TARDIS was a bit of a pickle to be in, it only now occurred to her.
The Doctor looked around rather pensively, wrinkling his nose. "Well, we're not dead, so that's promising for a start – I'm sure we'll think of something."
Sarah glanced back toward the edge of the platform and the terrible drop that lay beyond. "We have to get down from here – find the TARDIS. But then…"
But then what? If they found the TARDIS and left, it would mean admitting that they really had lost Harry, and as much as she hadn't wanted to hope, she suddenly knew that she wasn't ready for that.
The Doctor pulled his floppy felt hat out of a pocket and crammed it down over his unruly curls. "We won't leave this world until we've found Harry," he said, as serious as she'd ever known him, "One way or another."
dwdwdwdwdw
There was a voice.
There was a voice and there was pain.
Rather a lot of pain, actually: red-hot agony that spiked and stabbed through nerve endings and radiated through joints and limbs, disorienting and all-encompassing.
Awareness of anything beyond the pain came only gradually, fading in and out like a television signal in a storm, now a moment of clarity, now gone. Muscle spasms. Ragged breath hissing through clenched teeth. Contorted limbs sprawled across an uneven surface, sharp edges digging in as pinpricks of pain that were no more than a tiny part of the searing whole. The whine of an engine somewhere at hand, its groans competing with the howl of rushing wind. The bitter chill of the air and the acrid odour of oil mingled with the metallic scent of pooling blood that was sticky and damp and in too many places. What had happened?
What had happened?
Harry tried to lift his head, but a new pain shot down his spine at the attempt, white-hot and blinding. He lay still, gasping for breath, while the voice he'd been only dimly aware of slowly coalesced into words.
"…thrusters non-functional, navigation out. Steering – whoa! Close. Steering: just barely. Stop moving, Earth man. You're bleeding all over the deck."
The command was curt and the speaker sounded annoyed. Harry tried to reply and heard an inarticulate moan. Was that him?
"You'll have to wait while I try not to crash us." Competing with the whistle of the wind and whine of the engine, the voice sounded strained. "I don't have time for this – you really couldn't have picked someone else's windshield to fall through?"
Windshield. Fall through.
A memory drifted into focus, the memory of a tremendous height and of falling and then hitting hard.
Harry tried to move, to get up, to see, and the pain that hit was a tidal wave, overwhelming every sense. He heard a terrible sound, a strangled, garbled howl, and was shocked to realise it had come from him, subsided once more, gasping and choking.
"I said stop moving. I'm busy and you've got broken bones." The whine of the engine grew louder, more ragged, and grunts of effort began to register. Then, "No good, we'll have to set down. Have to glide her down, hold tight…"
Harry coughed, pain shuddering through his frame, and spat out a mouthful of blood.
He was a doctor. Even concussed and semi-conscious he could tell how serious this was.
"Stop moving, what are you doing?"
Dying, he wanted to say, but couldn't. The storm was back, a fuzz of white noise that drowned out every sense. He felt hands on him, heard the drone of a voice that no longer shaped words, the sound distant and dwindling.
Then nothing but the velvety blackness of oblivion, swallowing him whole.
dwdwdwdwdw
Attempting to flag down a passing air car as it made a brief stop to use the facilities was spectacularly unsuccessful.
"How unfriendly," said the Doctor, pouting, as it sped away without even acknowledging their presence, forcing them to dive aside to avoid being run over – or flown over, as it were.
Watching the strangely-shaped vehicle zoom out and away, Sarah felt more despondent than ever, but the Doctor seemed undeterred.
"Oh well. This is a service station; there must be an attendant around somewhere. We'll start there. Onward and downward, eh, Sarah." He began to scout around, determinedly bold and confident – trying just that bit too hard to act as if nothing terrible had happened at all.
Sarah trailed after him with a heavy heart, wishing she could muster even a fraction of his optimism and assurance. "It's onward and upward usually, isn't it?"
"Up? Why would we want to go up? Down, Sarah, down, we want to go down – downward and onward, onward and downward. Ah, now this looks promising."
He'd found what looked to be the entrance to some kind of maintenance shaft. Of course. No matter where in the universe they travelled, from one planet and time to another, somehow they always ended up crawling through tunnels of some kind. It was the one constant of their travels – well, that and danger, of course.
It opened at the touch of a button to reveal a wide vertical shaft, tubular in shape. Sarah peered inside and shuddered. It was a long way down and the sides were completely smooth. "Nothing to hold on to – how are we supposed to climb down that?"
"Ah," said the Doctor, holding up a finger like a magician about to perform a particularly clever trick. He pressed some more buttons on the control panel set into the wall alongside the door, and then looked her in the eye and said, "You trust me, don't you, Sarah?"
"Of course." She sometimes wondered if she should, the amount of scrapes he led her into, but then he also always got her out of those scrapes again, and at the end of the day the universe was always a better place for it. She'd entered into this with her eyes wide open, knowing full well what it meant to set foot through the TARDIS door. No, there was no one in the universe she trusted more.
Harry had also trusted him, of course, and that was a painful thought, but the Doctor didn't give her time to dwell on it. He smiled and took her hand and said, "Jump," pulling her forward before she'd fully registered the word, and a second later her heart was in her mouth because she was off her feet and falling again.
Except that she wasn't falling.
It was the most peculiar sensation – they seemed to be caught in a jet of warm air that supported their weight, floating them downward as gently as if they were feathers, until they found themselves hovering at the opening that would lead out onto the next level down and had only to take a step forward onto the platform there.
"Whew!" Sarah grabbed at the Doctor's arm as she wobbled across onto solid ground once more – stepping off thin air like that felt very strange. Then she pulled away and smacked his arm. "Hey, a decent warning would be nice next time."
The Doctor grinned. "Anti-grav lift. Rather nifty, don't you think?"
"Well, that's one word for it!" Re-gathering her composure, she looked around at a platform almost identical to the one they'd just left. "All right, so what now – find a telephone and dial 999?"
This platform was almost identical to the one they'd just left, but not quite. The Doctor pointed toward a structure across the way. "The attendant's hut, I presume. That might be a good place to begin, wouldn't you say?"
dwdwdwdwdw
Relief came slowly, awareness of it slower still.
The pain had gone, Harry only gradually realised, after an eternity floating in some inky distant haze. He'd also been moved, made comfortable on some kind of couch affair, away from the pools of blood and broken glass. The voice was still there though, a grumbling, disgruntled constant.
"Sarah?" Had he spoken the name aloud or merely thought it? It wasn't Sarah's voice he could hear, though – or the Doctor, for that matter.
So who was it?
He opened his eyes to see some kind of instrument being brandished before them.
"...completely exhausted and these things are expensive, you know. What were you thinking, freefalling at such a height?"
Harry blinked, his sluggish brain struggling to process the question through scattered memories.
"Wasn't actually a plan," he mumbled, and was relieved to hear that the words definitely came out this time, his voice hoarse but audible. He tried an experimental flex of a hand, then a foot. Nothing, as if the injuries he distinctly remembered had never happened. "I say, that's remarkable. What did you do?"
The instrument was waved in his face again and behind it the owner of the voice came into focus for the first time: an alien being of some kind, female, tall and statuesque with indigo skin that was mottled like marble. Her head was bald but for a fringe of tentacles that ran from ear to ear along the base of her skull, her eyes were multi-faceted and iridescent, her nose strangely ridged and her teeth sharp and pointed, like a cat. The faint lines around her eyes and mouth would be an indication of maturity on a human, and she wore a kind of flight suit, a gun holstered at her hip. "I healed you, of course, and now the unit is exhausted," she grumbled. "And who will pay to replenish it?"
There wasn't a great deal Harry could say to that.
"Er, I'm very grateful," he stammered, sincere and rather dazed, unable to even begin to imagine how such miraculous medical technology might work.
She glowered. "Then you may express your gratitude by assisting me with repairs – I'm late, I can't afford to waste any more time and the job will be swifter with two."
She strode away, leaving Harry to slowly push himself upright on legs that were still just a touch on the wobbly side, the lingering effect of miraculously healed trauma.
He looked around, trying to orient himself. This was the inside of one of the air cars he'd seen earlier, now stationary. It had a cockpit up front with a small and rather sparse but functional living space to the rear; it was to the cockpit that the alien woman had moved. He followed her, carefully lest his wobbly legs pack in on him, and saw for the first time the extensive damage caused by his crash through the windshield.
"Oh, I say…"
That would explain her bad mood, then.
And the Doctor and Sarah definitely weren't here.
"Er, I don't suppose you noticed anything else falling, did you?" he ventured, looking askance at the blood splattered across the smashed central control panel and pooled here and there on the floor. As a doctor, he generally wasn't troubled by blood in the slightest, but when it was his own and there was this much of it, well… the reminder of that excruciating pain was rather unsettling.
The alien woman was on her back beneath the battered control panel, peering up into the wiring with a small handheld light. "Such as?"
"A box," he anxiously elaborated. "A big blue box."
"This box belongs to you, does it?"
"My friends were in it." He sincerely hoped they still were, tried to pin down the memory of what exactly had happened. The floor had tilted, suddenly, to an acute angle, tipping him off; that much he did remember. He was almost sure he'd seen the TARDIS slide off as well, thought he might have heard Sarah scream…but the memories were jumbled and indistinct, the after-effect of cranial trauma.
"No," said the alien woman. "No blue box. Come here and help me."
Harry looked at the mess of wires and controls.
"I'm not sure how much help I can be." He bent anyway to peer beneath the console, in an effort to show willing. She had, after all, saved his life – and that after being severely inconvenienced.
"Dilly, Dilly, never here when you're needed," she sighed to herself. "Put your hand here, Earth man – hold this in place while I solder."
"It's Harry." He placed his hand where she'd told him and watched with interest as she set to work on the repair. "Surgeon-Lieutenant Harry Sullivan, in fact. Er…about the blue box."
"This box of yours again," she said with a snort. "What of it?"
"My friends are in it," he repeated, anxious at not knowing what had become of them, rattling around in the TARDIS as it fell. "They may be injured."
"The box may have collided with another vehicle and destroyed both, had you thought of that?"
He hadn't, and paled at the suggestion. The TARDIS was more or less indestructible, wasn't it? The Doctor had claimed as much, at any rate.
"Is there any way we could find out?" he worriedly asked.
"A serious collision would be reported on the citadel information channels," the brusque response came from beneath the console. "If we could access them, we might learn of any such news." The accusation was implicit in the woman's tone as she waved a hand at the damaged console above them. "But my priority is to get this heap moving again, and fast."
The soldering tool flicked off and she pushed out from under the console, pulled a toolbox toward her and selected a handful, held them out to him.
"Hold these for me."
She disappeared under the panel again. Clutching at the tools, Harry felt helpless.
"Look, I don't want to be any trouble, er…" He didn't even know her name.
"Ren. You may call me Ren."
"Ren." Short and to the point, much like the woman herself. "I don't want to be any trouble, Ren, but, er…" He followed as she shimmied around to another section of console and began work on that. "But I really must find my friends." Anything might have happened to them, dropping off the top of a building like that; made the blood run cold just to think about it. "Perhaps if you could give me an idea of where I might begin…?"
"No." Her reply was brusque and to the point. "I need your help with this and you owe me the debt."
"Of course," he hastily assured her, wondering just how great this debt might prove and how on Earth he was supposed to pay it when he hadn't a bean to his name – and still less mechanical ability. "But, er…perhaps when the ship is repaired, then – if you'll just set me down and point me on my way –"
"I don't have time! I'm already far behind schedule and my engagement cannot wait. So I am stuck with you and you are stuck with me."
Harry subsided, wondering what in the world he was going to do.
A sigh drifted out from beneath the console and Ren pushed back out, sat up and shook her head at him, wearing an expression of mingled frustration and resignation. "Perhaps afterward, when my business is complete – there may be time enough then to search for this blue box and your friends. Will that do?"
It would to have to. "Thank you," said Harry, relieved.
dwdwdwdwdw
This level was busier than the one above, a whirl of air cars coming and going, ranging from about the same size as the car Sarah had left parked outside UNIT headquarters, back on Earth however long ago it had been, to around the size of a large van or small lorry – a real mish-mash of shapes and styles.
Navigating the traffic to get across to the dome-like structure the Doctor insisted on referring to as the attendant's hut was a lot easier said than done. It was difficult to make out the occupants of any of the vehicles, but Sarah got the distinct impression that dodging in front of them wasn't going down terribly well. Foot traffic was clearly a rarity in these parts, something that no one either expected or had any patience for.
That being the case, it wasn't surprising that they should have trouble trying to get the attention of whoever was inside the attendant's hut – if indeed there was anyone in there. Given how self-sufficient the air cars using the facilities appeared to be, Sarah wasn't convinced that there was, right up to the moment a hatch suddenly slid open in belated response to the Doctor's determined efforts to either attract attention or, failing that, break in.
"Yes? Yes? What are you doing, what do you want?"
Sarah blinked and took an involuntary half-step back, caught herself before she could step into the path of a passing air-car as it zoomed away after re-fuelling, and then realised she was staring. She'd seen a lot of weird and wonderful creatures since meeting the Doctor, but this had to be the strangest yet. It was a kind of reptilian giraffe, but with arms as well as four legs, a scaly yet distinctly weasel-ish face, and an extra set of eyes on little antennae sticking out of the top of its head.
"Ah, good day," said the Doctor, doffing his hat at the creature. "I'm dreadfully sorry to disturb you –"
"I should say so," snapped the creature. "Why have you disembarked, don't you know it isn't safe? Use your sat-com if you require assistance, don't come banging on my door."
The Doctor seemed taken aback, which wasn't like him at all. "Ah. Yes. Yes, I'm terribly sorry about that," he began, but the creature interrupted again before he could go on, squinting at them appraisingly.
"Earth people, are you? We don't get many of your kind in the Sigma Citadel," it said in tones of deep suspicion, tilting its antennae eyes forward for a better look. "What are you doing here?"
The Doctor rallied. "I wonder if you could help us," he said in his most determinedly charming tone, evidently not in the mood to waste time explaining that he wasn't, in fact, an Earth person. "You see, we've had a most unfortunate accident, and –"
"Accident?" snapped the attendant, beady eyes narrowing. "What accident? Any fuels consumed must be paid for, regardless of any accidents."
"Oh, but we haven't used any of your fuel," Sarah explained, hoping to mollify the creature, but instead it only sniffed at her in annoyance.
"Then your problems are not my concern. Good day." It went to slam the hatch closed again, only for the Doctor to catch at it, holding it open.
"Just a minute, what's the hurry?"
The creature glared. "Time is money and you are wasting mine."
"Then we'll be quick." The Doctor's tone and expression became severe; this was a mood he usually reserved for beings considerably more evil than unhelpful garage attendants. "We need assistance and you're the only person who can give it to us, I'm afraid."
"No, no, no," the attendant insisted. "That is not my function – go to an information point and register your complaint there, good day."
"Wait." The Doctor stopped it from closing the hatch once more. "Information point, you say. Is it far? You see, we don't have any transport, and our situation is rather urgent."
"No transport?" The creature's four eyes swivelled as it peered at them in surprise. "Then what are you doing here?"
"That's what we've been trying to tell you," said Sarah, exasperated. "We had an accident. We've lost our ship…"
She couldn't quite finish the sentence, because they'd lost more than just the TARDIS and the thought of it choked her.
"What do you mean, lost?" the creature demanded.
"It fell," said the Doctor, looking grim. "From the upper deck, I'm afraid."
"Littering!" The creature was horrified. "Littering is strictly forbidden!"
"It was an accident," Sarah hurriedly explained, beginning to despair of ever persuading this creature or anyone else to help them in any way. It was frustrating beyond belief – after everything they'd seen and done, so many adventures through time and space, battling all manner of evil and saving entire worlds…only to find themselves stranded and stymied in a place like this, not by any malevolent enemy but by the sheer disinterest of some random bystander. "And it wasn't just our ship that fell, we had a friend with us, and…"
Again she couldn't finish the sentence, couldn't bring herself to say the words out loud, had to press a hand to her mouth to stifle a sob that caught her off-guard, just when she'd thought she was in control of herself and ready to press on with whatever it might take to find out what had happened to Harry – and the TARDIS – after the fall.
The attendant was not sympathetic. "All littering is strictly forbidden," it repeated, "Whether vehicular or organic detritus."
"Organic detritus?" It was the coldest, most horrible description of a dead body Sarah had ever heard, breathtakingly callous, bringing tears of fury to her eyes, because if Harry was dead – and she didn't know what to believe, couldn't quite bring herself to hope but also couldn't bear not to – then how dare this creature speak about him in that way.
The Doctor gently patted her shoulder and left his hand resting there as he quietly asked, "Is there any way we might find out what happened to them, either of them?"
"There has been no report of any collision," the attendant informed them with a sniff, and it was the first even vaguely helpful thing it had said.
"And you would know, if there had been?" the Doctor pressed.
"All honest citizens have a duty to report any incident, large or small. There have been no such reports; I'd have heard. Any debris that hits ground is removed – go to an information point and make enquiries there."
"How? We don't even know where the information point is," Sarah began to protest, but the Doctor was already shrugging this little problem off, taking her arm to steer her away from the booth.
"Yes, well, you've been most helpful, thank you. Come on, Sarah."
"Come where?" she fumed, beside herself with frustration and fury at the alien creature's refusal to help them.
"The nearest information point, of course," the Doctor calmly replied. He glanced around, wrinkling his nose, before adding, "We may have to hitch a ride."
"Hitchhiking is strictly forbidden," the attendant called after them.
"Well if you have any better ideas," said the Doctor, turning back to it, "Then I'm all ears."
"Your transportation issues are not my concern," said the attendant with a sniff.
"That's very kind of you," said the Doctor in his darkest tone. "Come along, Sarah. High time we were on our way."
dwdwdwdwdw
"Er…I don't mean to question your, er, mechanical ability," Harry ventured, watching as Ren delved into the wiring beneath another portion of the damaged console.
"But you will anyway," her sardonic voice drifted back to him.
"Well, shouldn't an accident of this nature be reported?" That was how it would work on Earth, at any rate – the police would be called, the vehicle would be removed to a garage for a professional repair, none of this do-it-yourself business, and he'd stand a chance of finding out what had happened to Sarah and the Doctor sooner rather than later. As it was, the thought that they were in the TARDIS and therefore at least partially protected was the only thing keeping him from outright panic.
They were in the TARDIS. They'd be all right. He just had to ride this out until he could find them – or until they could find him.
"Reported where?"
Surprised by the question, he floundered. "Well…to the authorities, I suppose."
Ren pushed out from beneath the console and looked at him as if he'd gone mad. "You wish to report that you jumped from a high rise into heavy traffic?"
Harry was indignant. "I did no such thing!"
"No? Then how did you come to fall from such a height – endangering more lives than your own, I might add?" she demanded, setting aside the tool she'd been using and taking another from his hand.
Harry scrubbed a hand through his hair and found it full of dirt and bits of glass, all tangled up in the curls. "It was an accident," he said, still piqued at the very suggestion that it may have been deliberate. "We'd just landed, and I stepped outside for a moment to see where we were – jolly fine view, I must say – and then…well, the ground seemed to just…fall away."
Ren gave him a look he'd seen often on Sarah's face, a look he generally interpreted as 'you idiot'. Shaking her head, she disappeared beneath the console once more. "What are you doing here, anyway, Earth man? Don't your kind usually stick to the Gamma Citadel?"
"My kind?"
"Earth people."
Harry sighed. "I don't know," he admitted. "Do we?"
"You don't know much, do you?" Ren reappeared, frowning at him perplexedly. She went to work at something on the console and wrinkled her nose in distaste at the blood splattered across it. "Make yourself useful," she said. "Fetch the cleaner from that compartment to your left."
The compartment was easy enough to find. Identifying the desired item from within it was not. "Er…"
"You don't recognise a cleaner when you see one? Your hand is on it," said Ren in tones of deep exasperation. "Don't you know anything?"
Harry pondered how best to explain that he was a time traveller from, probably, the distant past, who'd landed on this world by sheer chance only moments before the accident that brought them together like this.
"It might be for the best," he ruefully admitted, giving up any hope of salvaging anything in the way of pride from this situation, "If you assume that I don't.
If the look on Ren's face was anything to judge by, nothing would give her greater pleasure.
"Are all Earth people as strange as you?" she asked as she took the sleek metal box from his hand, pressed a button and set it down on the console. The device took on a life of its own, running all over the control panel and then down onto the floor, sucking up the blood, broken glass and any other dirt and debris as it went along, tremendously efficient.
Whatever humans might live on this planet, Harry suspected, no doubt did so by choice and therefore presumably knew a great deal more about the place than he did – since meeting the Doctor, he sometimes felt that everyone he met knew more than he did, and he'd once considered himself an educated and reasonably knowledgeable man.
"I imagine not," he said with a sigh.
Ren switched the device off again and handed it back to him to put away, then settled at the control panel and began some kind of start-up sequence. "The answer to your question is yes," she said, flipping switches and studying readouts. "We should report this incident. But we shan't, even if the com were functional. An investigation is the last thing I need and too much time has already been wasted. Here, put these on. With the windshield broken our eyes will need protection."
She handed him a pair of goggles, pulling another set over her own eyes as the engine kicked in, sounding much healthier now. As they took off, lifting up from the rooftop Ren had set down on to conduct her repairs, a chill wind whipped up through the broken windshield, fierce enough that Harry was glad of the protection afforded by the goggles, uncomfortable though they were.
"Er…so where are we going, exactly?" he ventured as the vehicle headed out into the dizzying air traffic once more, rather anxious because she could be taking him just about anywhere and there wasn't a blessed thing he could do about it.
Ren looked almost amused. "Would the answer mean anything to you, Earth man who has confessed to knowing nothing?"
"Probably not," he admitted. "But I'd like to know anyway."
"I'm sure," said Ren, and her tone was sarcastic. "Well, when we get there, then you'll know."
dwdwdwdwdw
"There, that's it!" cried the Doctor, and Sarah tried peering over his shoulder again at the readout he'd been poring over, a complicated readout displayed on a small screen beneath a panel of the ductwork that linked the attendant's hut to the re-fuelling stations and pipework around the place; a maintenance point, apparently. The Doctor had made a beeline for it as soon as the attendant slammed his hatch shut after their conversation, and was now engrossed.
"What's what?" she tried asking, because this was the Doctor at his most inscrutably uncommunicative, either assuming she'd be able to make the same mental leaps as him or not caring that she couldn't. How he'd even known to look for this maintenance console here she didn't bother to ask. How did the Doctor know anything that he knew? He just did, he always did, and it was almost funny because it was so easy to take him for granted most of the time, to think of him just as her friend, the Doctor and forget who he really was…but then at other times the gulf between her meagre two-and-a-half decades, human, and his however-many centuries, Time Lord, was laid bare, stark and glaring.
"The way out, of course," he said, as if it should be obvious.
"I thought we were hitching a lift?" It didn't usually bother her, this habit he had of speaking in riddles and talking over the heads of those not blessed with his mercurial alien intellect, but today was not like other days.
She should be used to this, she rather bitterly thought, the number of times she'd thought the Doctor was dead – but on every one of those occasions she'd been put out of her misery quickly, a few agonising moments of horrified grief followed by overwhelming relief. It had never dragged on like this, with no good reason not to fear the worst but no way of finding out for sure. Besides, how could anyone ever get used to the loss of their dearest friends?
The Doctor shook his head as he replaced the panel. "No need for that, we can take the chute again. Come on."
Getting back to the chute was every bit as hair-raising as the reverse journey had been, dodging traffic all the way, but at least this time she was prepared for the stomach-churning fall-that-wasn't. On a different day, it might even have been fun.
Instead of opening onto another level of the re-fuelling station, the chute this time took them down to a cross-section of wide, arching tunnels full of pipes and cables, the infrastructure that supported the station – maybe even linked it to other towers. The Doctor didn't explain, he simply picked a direction and set off, with long, confident strides, and all Sarah could do was scurry to keep up, hoping he knew where he was going and wishing he'd explain what he was thinking.
The tunnel was long, the way ahead too dark to see just how long, but the strip-lighting above their heads lit up as they approached so that they could see where they were putting their feet and then de-activated again once they had passed. As service tunnels went, it was probably the most hospitable of Sarah's now considerable experience.
"So we're heading for the information point, are we?" It seemed such a nebulous destination. They'd visited so many alien worlds, fought life-and-death battles for the most enormous of stakes, and now here they were struggling simply to raise the alarm for their lost friend and lost TARDIS. It might have been laughable if it weren't so sickening.
"An information point, certainly. Information is what we need – wouldn't you agree?" said the Doctor, leading the way swiftly and confidently.
"Well, I still think a telephone and the local equivalent of 999 is what we need!" she retorted. "I mean, this seems a civilised enough sort of place," unhelpful garage attendant notwithstanding. "They must have emergency services, surely. Someone will be able to help us."
"Possibly, possibly – I was thinking more that we might help ourselves. Ah, here we are." They'd reached a kind of T-junction and the Doctor stopped and lightly rapped his knuckles against the wall before using the sonic screwdriver to open a well-concealed panel and then sticking his head out.
Sarah waited, fidgeting.
"All clear. We'd better be quick, no point causing alarm – unless of course we want to cause alarm, but would that help or hinder us? That's the question."
He began to squeeze out through the narrow opening as he spoke and Sarah followed, wondering if there was a point to the nonsense he was blathering or if he was just talking to fill the space, as he so often did when there were larger subjects to be ignored. He was very subdued, by his standards, and that troubled her in ways that were hard to define.
"This is the information point, is it?" she pressed, fed up of being expected to just trail along after him without knowing where they were going or what he was planning. She wanted, quite desperately, to be able to do something – but what?
"Well, in a manner of speaking, certainly." As the Doctor stood aside, she got her first look at where they were now.
"It's a shop." She stared in disbelief at the vast warehouse, crammed with aisles and shelving that seemed to stretch on forever, a riot of colour and sound and scent: discordant muzak blaring from unseen speakers, fast food vendors hawking enticingly scented alien wares, alien customers of every shape and size zooming around in flying trolleys, and holographic advertisements flashing neon and singing slogans. "You've brought me to a shop."
"A superstore, in fact," he mildly corrected, as if the distinction somehow mattered, and waved his arms in an expansive gesture, taking in the enormity of the place. "Bulk purchase for outgoing space vessels – that's big business on an outpost like this."
Anger bubbled up again, fierce and inescapable. "But why are we here? We can't exactly buy a new TARDIS, can we – or a new Harry!"
"Don't be silly, Sarah." Maddeningly, the Doctor refused to bite back, remaining utterly imperturbable; she envied that detachment, his most alien quality. "Information, remember – we're going to borrow a computer, this was the nearest we might find…ah, over there, I believe."
Instead of plunging into the kaleidoscope of sensory stimulation that was the store, he turned to quickly stride along the length of the outer wall until he reached a low archway, disappearing through it without as much as a backward glance.
Sarah bit back her frustration, because it wasn't helping and it wasn't his fault, and hurried after him, through the archway and into the quiet alcove that lay beyond, lined with a bank of sophisticated-looking computer terminals, with another door, firmly closed and labelled staff only, set into the wall at the far end.
The Doctor was already busily interrogating one of the computers, his fingers flying over the keypad at dizzying speed. "Not exactly the standard customer request, of course," he muttered rather more to himself than to her as he worked. "And then there's the question of how much information is made public at this level, but there should be a link to the central mainframe, if I can just –"
The console bleeped an angry warning that it wasn't going to be as simple as all that, and moments later a sharp voice rang out behind them. "What are you doing there?"
Sarah groaned. "Not again."
The Doctor sighed and shook his head, muttered an imploring, "I'm busy, Sarah," motioning for her to deal with it while he worked, and she reluctantly turned to see another alien glaring at them from that doorway at the far end of the alcove.
It was a different kind of alien than the unhelpful garage attendant they'd spoken to earlier – this one more-or-less humanoid, sallow-skinned with a long, double-pointed chin that curled upward to almost meet an equally long, double-pointed and downward-curved nose, the forehead heavily ridged; definitely female this time and smartly dressed, professional looking, her dark hair elaborately coiled – but the air of disapproval was exactly the same.
"You triggered an alert," the alien grumbled, and the sideways movement of her jaw when she spoke was fascinating. "What's wrong with you? The terminals are simple enough to use."
Sarah hesitated, wondering how to play this. The truth hadn't exactly gone over well so far. Still, there was nothing else for it, so she offered the woman a smile that was a good sight brighter than she felt. "Oh, hello, I wonder if you can help us. You see –"
She got no further, as the muffled sound of voices and musical slogans and the hum of trolley-engines from back in the store proper was suddenly drowned out by an outbreak of shouts and yells…and a sharp burst of weapons fire.
The alien executive's eyes widened comically.
"What's going on out there?" she gasped as Sarah whirled around to see dismay and exasperation warring on the Doctor's face as he straightened, listening intently.
"Doctor? What's happening?" Sarah scarcely dared imagine what might have gone wrong now.
"Is it a robbery?" The alien woman's voice was sharp, alarmed. "We're being robbed!"
dwdwdwdwdw
The view from the air car was quite remarkable, and Harry rather wished he could enjoy it more.
"You're very impatient, Earth man," Ren told him. "Stop fidgeting and enjoy the ride."
"Easy for you to say," he muttered under his breath. After all, he was trapped aboard this ship with no idea where he was, no way of finding out what had happened to Sarah and the Doctor, and even the benevolence of his rescuer appeared tenuous at best.
He fidgeted again, drumming his fingers nervously as he wondered just how far they were going to travel and how he might find his way back to wherever they'd started from to look for his friends. Then the engine stuttered and he clutched reflexively at the edge of his seat in alarm.
Ren muttered a curse beneath her breath and thumped the console hard with a fist, which appeared to resolve the problem. She smiled wolfishly at the look on his face. "Percussive maintenance – you did a lot of damage, Earth man, and all I've done is patch the worst of it."
"Er. I'm sorry." What more could he say?
Ren narrowed her eyes. "You might well be, if this goes badly."
That ominous statement did nothing to settle his nerves. He picked at a fingernail, peering out through the broken windshield once more at the spectacular aerial view, the air traffic thinning out as they moved into what appeared, to his foreign eyes, to be a rather more industrial area of the city, sparser than the previous district. There were fewer skyscrapers, for one thing, the buildings here much smaller and more compact, and despite the alien nature of the architecture and landscape it reminded Harry of nothing so much as the warehouse district of London. Yes, definitely an old industrial area, run-down and neglected.
Ren took the air car in low, her sharp eyes scanning the area below intently, but then pulled up again and carried on without stopping. She looked worried, which worried him in turn.
"Not there," she muttered under her breath, and shot a decidedly unfriendly look at him, accusingly adding, "I'm late."
"Late for what?" he asked, mindful to sound as polite and helpful as he could, given her mood.
"Not your concern," she snapped, and he frowned because that was patently untrue.
"But I am concerned," and he meant that in more ways than one. "I'm here, aren't I – I'm involved, like it or not."
"Here, yes – involved, no," Ren retorted. "My business is not yours, so be quiet and let me think."
She flipped at a few switches on the console, her frustration and anxiety growing visibly.
"Nothing works! We might as well be blind – if they've been snared because I was delayed…" The threat was implied, her fierce glare speaking volumes.
"Look, I'm sorry." Harry was tired of apologising now; it had been an accident, after all. "If I could go back and fall into someone else's vehicle instead I would!"
Ren snorted. "Be careful what you wish for, Earth man."
Her fingers drummed against the steering controls as she hissed out a long breath through her teeth, brow wrinkling in an expression of deep thought. Then she swung the vehicle around in a wide arc and swooped low for another recce.
"You claim involvement by virtue of being here?" she flung at him, sharp eyes scanning the area below intently. "Well then, so be it. My associates are not where they should be. I need to set down and check the area – you may assist. See just there, that was the rendezvous point. Good spot for an ambush, you agree? I warned Brunnal, but would he listen…" She broke off, half-standing to peer through the broken windshield in sudden alarm, hissing, "They are in trouble – I knew it, the idiots!"
Harry stood to take a look for himself, wondering what she'd seen. "Your associates? How can you tell?"
"I used my eyes," she snapped, and he could see it now: bodies, three of them, sprawled in unnatural, contorted positions with blood pooling around them, half-hidden in the shadows at the edge of a large forecourt around which stood a strange, three-sided building.
"Oh, I say. Those aren't your friends?" he spluttered in alarm as Ren set the vehicle down and removed her goggles. She rifled rapidly through a small compartment to the side of the control console, pulled out a gun and swung around to glower at him.
"Not my associates, no. Those are traders we were to deal with, dead, and my people are not here. You owe me a debt, Earth man."
Now more than ever, having seen those corpses, Harry felt rather concerned about just what this debt might entail. He had no real idea who this alien woman even was, or what she was involved in, still less what she might demand from him. "Yes," he cautiously said, removing his goggles. "I'm aware of that."
Ren's fierce glare drilled into him, unrelenting. "My associates are in trouble. They are in trouble because I was not where I should have been at the time agreed. I was not where I should have been for a number of reasons, the main one being you. So your debt is owed to them, also. Can you shoot?"
Harry was not expecting the question, and by the time it occurred to him that perhaps he should vacillate, his natural honesty had already said, "Yes," because he could, of course he could, he was a military officer…but he was also a doctor, his calling was to save life, not take it, and he stared in alarm as she held the gun out to him.
"Good, because my associates are in trouble and I have to do something about it. I will need backup for that, and all I have is you. So remember that you owe the debt."
How, he wondered, had his day turned out like this?
"Er…what exactly do you expect me to do with that?"
Ren rolled her eyes expressively. "Use it, of course – to defend yourself and to defend me." She thrust the gun into his hand and charged past him into the rear compartment.
Harry followed, wondering how to tell whether or not he was on the right side here. "Now hang on just a minute. Look, I might owe you my life, but no one else's. What kind of business is this?"
"None of yours," Ren snapped, slapping at a button to open an external door. "I'm going out to scout. Watch my back and guard the door."
He'd thought he was as worried as he could be before, when he was merely lost on an unknown world unable to find out what had become of his friends. Now he realised just how much more worried it was possible to become, because taking up arms under order from a commanding officer was one thing but this complete stranger was another matter entirely. Who was she, really? What kind of business was she mixed up in, that could turn out like this – and could she be trusted?
He stared at the gun in his hand, unlike any weapon he'd ever seen before – product of a technology that was as alien to him as Ren was.
She was taking quite a chance on the stranger who'd crashed into her vehicle, he pointed out to himself, and she was doing it because she was as concerned for her friends as he was for his. Whoever she was and whatever her business might be – legal, illegal or something else entirely – she had also saved his life, and for the time being at least he was almost completely reliant on her, he realised with chagrin. None of that could justify involvement in illegal or immoral proceedings, of course, but if she were in danger of some kind, he could hardly just stand by and do nothing.
Watching brief it is, Sullivan, he told himself. He would just to have to play this one by ear and just hope for the best.
So he watched cautiously through the open door as Ren stealthily crept up to the corpses to give them a cursory once over – checking that they were dead, satisfying herself of their identity – and then continued on in search of goodness only knew what.
She seemed to know what she was doing…but had it been wise to allow her out there alone, he wondered? Not his most shining moment, surely – what if whoever or whatever killed those traders was still out there somewhere, lying in wait?
No sooner had the thought occurred to him than he heard a sound from outside, and a moment later a strange alien creature appeared in the doorway. About the size of a Shetland pony, it resembled nothing so much as a giant, grey-brown lobster, with huge bulbous eyes on extendible stalks, vicious-looking mandibles and more legs, arms and claws than Harry could count. Catching sight of him, it let out a cry, rearing up as if to attack.