The Darkness Within
"Doctor!" the cry came from three throats in the Tardis console room. The time ship tilted alarmingly, throwing all the inhabitants but the sandy-haired man at the controls, into the walls of the circular room. The Doctor held onto the console by the tip of his fingernails, gritting his teeth as temporal inertia threw everything out of balance.
"Hold on! It'll pass in a moment!" the Doctor yelled, flicking a switch on the console. When nothing happened, he thumped the console in frustration. The rotor stuttered and picked up speed again, and the console room righted itself once more. "That's my girl!"
A slender, youthful girl with long brunette, wildly curling hair picked herself up off the floor tentatively.
"Doctor, was that really necessary?" Nyssa asked, rubbing her head where she had hit it during the inertia.
"Yes; as if abducting me wasn't enough, you have to throw me around too?" a shrill, Australian accent inquired belligerently. The speaker slowly appeared from the other side of the console, just in front of the door, dressed in a lavender air stewardess's uniform, tight auburn curls brushing the collar. The Doctor turned toward her, one eyebrow raised.
"I did not abduct you, Tegan! And as for the 'throwing you around'," the Doctor turned back to his controls dismissively, "It must be the lateral balance cones. Accelerating the polarity of the neutron flows must have thrown them off-balance, and us with it,"
"You and your incomprehensible explanations! I barely understand one word in five," Tegan grumbled as she clambered up from the floor, her high-heels clinking against the floor.
"Where's Adric?" Nyssa looked around for her friend. "Adric?"
Something that sounded suspiciously like 'Nerrrhgggg' sounded from the opposite side of the console. The Doctor glanced down concernedly.
"Come on, Adric. No time to lie about," he said briskly, returning his gaze to the scanner.
Adric emerged from beneath the console, pale-faced and dishevelled.
"Easy for you to say," he grumbled, as he dragged himself upright, and readjusted the blue star badge on his chest.
"Where are we?" Tegan asked, joining the Doctor at the scanner. The Doctor glanced at her sheepishly.
"Errr….the temporal inertia threw the Tardis off-balance, I'm afraid. I need to do some repairs and it would be inadvisable to attempt a dematerialisation now. I am sorry, Tegan," he explained, conscious of yet another failure. Tegan turned away.
"Sure, sure Doctor. Where are we?" she asked again, resignation filtering into her tone. Attempt after attempt to return her to her own time had gone awry; and although a part of her was secretly glad to postpone the departure from the Tardis, the rest of her told the other part to shut up.
"Ummm, somewhere in the Kulric galaxy, some five hundred billion light-years from the Milky Way. The year is….8066, in the new Byzantine calendar. Humanity hasn't penetrated this far yet,"
"Is it very likely they ever will?" Tegan muttered under her breath.
"No. It would take them billions of years to reach this far, and their space ships are far too primitive. Space travel this deep is limited by humanity's own weakness; their mortality," the Doctor said, flicking a few more switches on the console. At that moment, a light began flashing on the console, bleeping a soft lavender.
"What does that mean?" Nyssa asked, Adric following on her tail, as they circled the console to look at the alarm.
"It's a distress call. Lavender means danger," the Doctor said, brushing them aside, and punching in co-ordinates. The time rotor wheezed in protest. "Come on, old girl,"
"But if it's dangerous; surely it would be red?" Tegan asked, her brow furrowed. The Doctor sent her an incredulous look.
"Tegan, sometimes it amazes me how narrow-minded humans can be. Just because red signifies danger on your world doesn't mean it does for the rest of the galaxy. Lavender is the galactic indicator for danger," the Doctor told her brusquely, as he traced the source of the distress call.
"Sorry," Tegan turned away disinterestedly. The Doctor chose to ignore her little huff.
"Doctor, the signal is originating from the Hades system, according to the database. On one of the outer planets, there could be a problem," Adric interrupted, glancing up from the scanner, a worried frown on his youthful face.
"Oh?" the Doctor peered over Adric's shoulder, forgetting his tiff with Tegan. "Ahh, I see."
"What is it?" Nyssa and Tegan asked at the same time.
"The planet the distress call is originating from is close to orbiting a black hole. It only has a few hours before it enters terminal orbit," the Doctor explained, a worried frown, equal to Adric's wrinkling his smooth brow.
"What we gonna do?" Tegan asked, searching his face intently. She knew the answer even before he spoke.
"We going to help, of course. It'll be close, but as long as we're not out there too long, we shouldn't get caught," he replied.
"But won't the gravitational effect of the black hole affect the Tardis?" Adric asked. The Doctor placed a fatherly arm around his shoulders.
"Adric, my people virtually invented black holes, we'll be fine. Now as long we use the environmental suits…." The Doctor's tone dropped its condescending edge as he began telling them what to do. Rolling their eyes, Tegan and Nyssa ignored him, turned on their heel and went off in search of the environmental suits. The Doctor stared after them exasperatedly.
"Why do they always do that?" he muttered, before turning back to the console. Adric heard him and sent him a small smile.
"Because they're girls," he replied.
"OI! We heard that!" Tegan's voice filtered into the console room, as a pair of environmental suits came flying through the door towards the two males. The Doctor caught his deftly, but Adric's collided with his head. The sounds of feminine laughter filtered through from the corridor.
There was a slight jolt as the Tardis landed, the Tardis crew hanging onto the console. The collective sigh of relief elicited an exasperated roll of the eyes from the Doctor, as he flicked the switch on his helmet, and adjusted the oxygen settings.
"Now, we cannot remain any longer than an hour out there, before our oxygen runs out, and we only have that time before the gravity well of the black hole will begin to affect the planet. So no wandering off, got that?" the Doctor said sternly, not stopping to see if he would be obeyed. He pulled the lever to open the doors and stepped out.
And into devastation.
The planet was a barren rock, black asphalt filling the deserts. Above them, hanging in the sky, the black hole shone with an eerie light, malevolent as a grinning demon. Tegan shivered as she looked up at it, the Doctor giving her a comforting squeeze of the hand. Adric and Nyssa looked up at the sky curiously, but it did not affect them as much as it did the Earthling. Adric held a handheld tracer in his hand, emitting a soft bleep in the howling night.
The planet seemed like a reproduction of Hell. The sky was a blood red ocean of gas clouds and rock shards, tumbling into the black hole's greedy mouth. The planet was a black desert of asphalt sand, blowing over the surface, over the crumbling remains of buildings and natural escarpments of stone.
"The signal is coming from a mile north-east of our position. It should only take ten minutes to walk there," Adric said, following the bleep intently.
"Especially as Tegan isn't in her usual high-heels," the Doctor muttered acerbically, forgetting that Tegan would hear him over the built-in intercom. She swiped him with her gloved hand. "Owww!"
"Let's get moving before we run out of time," Nyssa suggested, staving off yet another argument. It was all the Doctor and Tegan seemed to do these days.
"Yes, let's," the Doctor said, as he as usual, led the way into Hell.
The tracer led them to a small cave, a mile away from the Tardis, set back into a mountain range that rimmed the red sky like spears of black stone. Tegan felt a shiver ripple down her spine. She had a bad feeling about this.
"Doctor….." she began, as he helped her over a ridge and onto the ledge outside the cave. "I have a bad feeling about this,"
"What? Oh there's nothing to worry about Tegan. All intelligent life died out on this planet centuries ago," he gestured, including the ruins in the distance.
"Then why is a distress call being sent out?" she asked, her fear betraying her through the tinny intercom.
"Perhaps someone crash-landed here, drawn by the black hole. Whatever, we must help them," the Doctor replied gently. Patting her shoulder, he stepped into the cave. Taking a deep breath, Tegan stepped in after him and the others.
Inside, the cave was dry and quiet after the howl of the wind outside. It possessed a sandy floor, similar to the sand of the deserts outside. The ceiling arched far over their heads, a black cavern of twisted, tortured stone like some perverted cathedral.
The floor dipped into a circular bowl, as the time travellers slid down into it. In the very centre of the bowl stood a pedestal, fashioned so it looked almost natural in the cavern, and atop it lay a nondescript black object, rectangular in shape and small in size, and yet it seemed to be pulsating gently, like some grotesque amoeba. The Doctor and Adric approached it wearily, scientific curiosity painting identical expressions on their faces. Tegan hung back uncertainly. She still didn't have a good feeling about this. Nyssa stood nearest the cave opening, keeping an eye on the time.
"What is it, Doctor?" Adric asked as they knelt beside the pedestal. The Doctor glanced at him.
"I don't know. Yet." he amended, as he leaned forward eagerly in the scant light. "Hold the light up a bit, Adric,"
Adric dutifully raised the torch, and the mysterious object spasmed. The Doctor yanked Adric's arm down, and the torch tumbled into the dirt.
"Doctor?"
"Don't let any white light anywhere near it. It could prove fatal," the Doctor replied, peering closer.
"What is it?" Adric asked.
"It's a black energy device. I can't be sure of its purpose, but if you shine that torch on it it'll explode, and that could cause a big problem," he explained.
"How big?" Tegan asked wryly from the cave opening. He turned to glance at her glaringly.
"Humongous. An explosion of black energy would swell that relatively small black hole to supermassive size, not a good thing. I need to disarm it, or at least render it inert, before the planet falls into the black hole," the Doctor replied tersely.
"Hmph, why am I not surprised?" Tegan muttered quietly. Ignoring her, the Doctor reached towards the object.
A wave of foreboding shook Tegan. "Doctor, no!"
The Doctor's hand brushed the casing, and a ray of black light seemed to emit from the object and hit the Doctor. He collapsed on the floor.
"Doctor!" Tegan, Nyssa and Adric rushed to his side. When they turned him over, his head lolled unconsciously. "Nyssa, how much time do we have?" Tegan asked, pulling one of the Doctor's arms over her shoulder.
"We need to get back to the Tardis now. The gravitational effect will already by affecting the flow of time," Nyssa replied gravely. She took the other arm, and nodded at the black object.
"Adric, take that with us. It may help us later,"
"But what if it's dangerous?" Tegan asked, as they began to drag the Doctor out of the cave. Nyssa shook her head.
"I don't think it is anymore. That looked like a defensive mechanism to me," Nyssa replied, already out of breath from the Doctor's weight. Adric picked it up slowly, but there was no ray of black light this time.
"Come on. Let's get back to the Tardis,"
Together, the three humanoids dragged the Doctor back to the Tardis, as the planet began its inexorable fall into the black hole.