Chapter 1
The Doctor closed his eyes, but it made no difference. Either way, he was in complete darkness. Even the glow of the TARDIS' windows didn't seem to reach the ground beneath him. There wasn't a sun or a star to be seen, and yet the air felt warm, almost humid on his face. Keeping one hand on his craft's wooden frame, he sniffed the air, twice. It was stale, and left an odd, metallic taste in his mouth. As he began to move away, he felt the ground begin to shift. His soft shoes suddenly began to sink into the silty mess beneath him. He flailed his arms and grabbed back onto the TARDIS' shell, barely managing to regain his posture. What kind of a planet was this?
"HADES stands for Hyperspace And Deep Extra-Solar travel. All HADES-class spacecraft are equipped with high-power solar cells capable of sustaining extremely long voyages in Dark Space -"
"Dark Space means there's no star systems close enough for us to get power from."
"Yes, Edward, I know what Dark Space means."
"It's Adward."
"What?"
Adward struck a key on the control panel and the hologram paused. He pushed his glasses back up his nose, and span around in his chair, irritated.
"My name, Cilana; it's Adward."
"Yeah, whatever," exhaled Cilana, flicking her hair as she turned her face away. "Just put the video on again."
"So, as you may have guessed, light is extremely important aboard a HADES vessel. Even our cutting-edge life support systems rely on artificial photosynthesis. The type of battery required to store such quantities of photoelectric energy was first imagined in the year..."
"Cilana, you're not even listening to it!" Adward thumped aggressively on the control panel. The hologram immediately fizzled out with a 'pop', leaving behind an annoying, high-pitched humming sound that filled the control room for a few seconds, before it, too, faded away. "How many gigajoules of energy can you put in one solar cell before it overloads?" Cilana quickly looked at everything in the room apart from Adward.
"Uhh, forty-two?" she said with a shrug.
"You're done for. You know that, right?" said Adward, keeping his eyes fixed firmly on the radar screen in front of him, in order to hide his smug face.
"Oh come on, I am not 'done for'. Lilith's not going to kill me if I don't know every little -"
"You call her Captain Teneber!" Adward exploded, standing up abruptly. "And she will kill you. Or worse, expel you from the mission!" This was Adward's chance. He had been annoyed by Cilana's laziness from the start of the voyage, and three months in, he was finally going to do something about it. He began to strut over to her, swinging his arms, knocking over a lever in his frustration.
"These holograms are meant to help you know your way around the ship! Captain Teneber told me to show them to you! To keep you safe! Heaven forbid anything really did ha-"
Suddenly, a violent explosion jerked them both off their feet. Adward's head collided with something heavy, and everything went black.
The darkness was playing with the Doctor's mind. It didn't add up. How could it be so warm when there wasn't a star in the sky? Was there even a sky? The dark made it impossible to tell. He began to think about the problem. He wasn't sure if he was speaking out loud or not. Either way, he could here his voice saying:
"No stars; no moons; no anythings as far as I can tell." He breathed in and out, pausing to feel the hot air on his face. He began to stroll, as carefully as he could, away from the TARDIS, squelching and crunching on whatever the ground happened to be made of. He stopped, and put his hands in his pockets triumphantly.
"Exothermic reaction! Yes, that's it! A nice exothermic reaction, bubbling away in the planet's core. Probably what's spewing out all of this stuff." He flicked some of the 'stuff' off one of his shoes, and nearly fell over again on the slippery surface. He started to think again, scrunching up his face and staring into the inky blackness.
"Not possible. Can't be a reaction. If this place is about the size of Earth, we'd need hundreds, thousands of volcanoes to keep it this warm."
"So," he said, definitely out loud this time, "Where are all the volcanoes?" The words echoed and bounced right back at him from all directions. "Oh, hullo! Well, that explains the darkness then." He began to advance his way forward again, taking his hands out of his pockets and thrusting them out in front of him.
"So what, am I in a cave then?" he asked. "If I'm in a cave, where's the… wall." His hands met with something cold, but not stoney. Something smooth, and metal. Like a smooth, metal…
"Door!" The Doctor exclaimed! Before the cold on his hands had worn off, he whipped the sonic screwdriver out of his jacket pocket, and aimed it square at the door. There was a click, then a clank, then a bleep, then the door swung open into an equally smooth, equally metal-looking corridor, stretching along for seemingly miles in both directions. It was dimly lit, and had the letters 'H.A.D.E.S.' spread opposingly across the wall opposite the door. The Doctor glanced back through the open doorway at the TARDIS, perched slightly precariously on a mound of what he now saw to be litter. The room they landed in must have been some kind of waste storage compartment, meaning they must be on a ship or a space station of some kind. He walked out into the corridor, and tried to work out where he might be. Suddenly, a violent explosion jerked him off his feet. He managed to glimpse the TARDIS get swallowed by the collapsing pile of garbage, before the door to the compartment slammed hard shut, and he was thrown to the floor. Gathering his senses, he quickly stumbled over to the door and tried to use the sonic again.
"Come on," he gasped, but the door refused to budge. He noticed a keypad with a display on the wall next to the door, and started to slap desperately on the keys. The display flashed with a message he did not have time to read, and the corridor was flooded with red light and blaring sirens.
"Oh, come on!" The Doctor shouted, as he turned to start sprinting down the hallway. It was business as usual.