Chapter 1: Ground Zero

Candlelight shadows danced against the brown rock wall as practiced hands, expert fingers, wove strands of brown wicker. In soft, fluid motions, Elsia manoeuvred each thread against and through a neighbouring arrangement, crafting a shape that looked sturdy and durable. She placed it on the simple wooden workbench, and pushed down on it with both hands. The wicker fibres held firmly together, and Elsia nodded in satisfaction as she took up another long strand and resumed her weaving. Her actions were constant, like a flowing stream, and her hands paused only long enough to tend to an itch on the back of a silver scaled arm.

The air was musty, and seemed to visibly hang within the low ceilings of the dank underground space. Elsia didn't notice. To her it was normal; it had been this way for as long as anyone could remember. The dim light from a handful of candles did little to impede her progress, as her eyes had long adjusted to the conditions. To an outsider it may have appeared a dungeon, a grotto, but to Elsia, she was in her element.

A hooded figure entered the room, moving with long strides. "Is it ready yet?" It was an old voice, a male voice, and spoke in a demanding tone.

Elsia reached up to her face and brushed a strand of white hair away from her silver scaled face. "You can't rush the process, Alquel," she said simply. "You know that."

Alquel grumbled, then said nothing. He paced the room, mulling over his thoughts, then eventually decided he could remain quiet no longer and said, curtly, "It needs to be perfect."

"It will be. It always is." Elsia put down her wicker handiwork and turned to look at Alquel. He was on edge, nervous. His hands fidgeted, and she smiled sympathetically. "Alquel, trust in me. Trust in your life partner. You know it will be ready."

Alquel's mouth curled. Elsia had aged terribly. Harsh wrinkles had cut into her scaled face, ravaging it with time. Crows feet clawed at the corners of her black eyes. And her smile... years upon years had made that less of a sight than he was accustomed too.

A shame, he thought. What was once so beautiful is now eroding.

His lack of a response was noticed by Elsia, and her earnest demeanour changed. Her eyes fell as she turned back to her bench. "I need more reeds," she said. Her voice was cold.

Alquel waved a dismissive hand. "So send for the child."

Elsia pursed her lips, thin with frustration. "It wouldn't take long."

"I need to speak to the elders. The child can do it."

Elsia sighed, exasperated. She knew of Alquel's meeting, but asked anyway, hoping he would at least consider it. Hoping that calling for that child wasn't necessary. She turned around, ready to argue, but Alquel simpy stared at her, and he wasn't budging. Elsia sighed again, and put two fingers to her mouth and blew a shrill whistle. "Celphine! You are summoned!"

Alquel rubbed the side of his head, moving his fingers in circles. "My dear, there are less enthusiastic and painful ways to approach one's duties."

"Love of mine, the caves are many and the tunnels lengthy. How does sound travel if there is not the energy to propel it?"

Another grumble. A trademark non-answer from Alquel.

A moment passed, but no one appeared at the rock entrance. Elsia inhaled deeply and whistled again, louder, longer. "Celphine! Child! You are summoned!"

Timid footsteps approached the entrance, and a small child entered with her head bowed. She, like the others, had skin of silver scales. She wore a brown robe that frayed at the edges, and was far too long at the sleeves; even bunched up around her elbows, they draped low over her hands, signs of a hand-me-down that had not been adjusted to fit. Alquel turned and looked down at Celphine with disdain. The child was always late, he thought. No concept of time whatsoever.

Celphine cleared her throat. "Your bidding?"

"Get more," said Alquel.

Celphine did not move. Her head remained bowed. Almost inaudibly she said, "Was what I got not enough?"

"Obviously not," snorted Alquel. "Why would we call for you without a necessary reason? You will go and get my wife the reeds she requires. And you will tell no one. Am I clear?"

Celphine nodded, then skulked away. As she disappeared away from the candlelight and into the shadows, only one thought crossed her mind. The same thought she always had when Alquel, and Elsia, and the others, said that same statement:

Who would I tell?

The inside of the TARDIS jostled with wayward rocking motions. Rory Williams clutched the edge of the control console with both hands, desperate to stay anchored to the structure amid its wild behaviour. His brow was furrowed - he looked worried. Next to him, the Doctor was hunched over in a similar pose; he, too, had both hands gripping the console for dear life. The two exchanged worried glances.

At the other side of the array, Amy Pond was pumping down on a piston with feverish energy as she looked up at the time rotor, gauging its movement with hers. She peered around the column to address the Doctor. "How's my driving?"

He feigned a smile. "Well, good for a first-timer. Not bad. Pretty good."

She smiled back, and the Doctor leaned into Rory for a conspiratorial whisper. "Terribly, horrible. Totally out of synch. Can't she hear how misaligned those centrifuge tracks are?"

Rory looked at the Doctor. "Two squashed traffic cones and a bent Stop sign."

"Huh?"

"They're the reasons why Amy doesn't have her licence."

The Doctor's eyes went wide and his body lurched into action, heading towards Amy. "Okay, I think we're done with TARDIS flying for today." He put his hands over Amy's and relieved her from the console. "That was fun, that was interesting, that was my lunch threatening to make itself my afternoon snack. Note to self: install a basic mode."

Amy turned to the Doctor, but Rory distracted her with an arm around her shoulder. "Nice work," he said.

Amy looked at Rory for a moment, then her eyes narrowed. "You told him about the traffic cones, didn't you."

"Well, I may have mentioned—"

A sudden jolt lurched the TARDIS at a violent angle, sending the occupants crashing to the floor. This wasn't the usual travel tumble, this was something more. The console room seemed to tumble upside down, and desperate hands scrambled for a grip on something, anything. The lights dimmed, then returned, and for a moment it felt like the TARDIS was buoyant, bobbing on water. Very slowly the room righted itself, and the floor returned to an almost level position.

Amy looked over to Rory, then the Doctor. "That wasn't me," she said quickly.

The Doctor picked himself up off the floor. He stood very still, didn't say anything. He then rushed immediately to the console and navigated the controls in a flurry of movement. Levers pushed, buttons pressed, rotors spun, and as his gaze flicked down to each device, it flicked back up to the display monitor before him.

"The velocity, the power... a trajectory like that, it's got to be a piloted craft. Curvature of the tail thrust means it's travelling at—"

"Doctor," said Amy. "Want to share it with the class?"

He ran his fingers through his hair. "You know how you're about to cross the road and some idiot on a bike speeds right past you and you fall back into the gutter with shock? That was more or less that, except the bike is a spaceship the size of a small city." He looked back at the monitor. "We just had a near miss - any nearer and we'd be scraped off the windscreen at the next pit stop. But from the looks of this thing..." He tapped the keyboard. "...it doesn't look like it's stopping any time soon. In fact, it's speeding up."

Rory approached the console and looked at the monitor. It looked like a star chart, with a handful of lines joining one dot of light to the next. Overlaying it was a curved red line, and moving over it at a rapid pace was a red dot, heading towards a large ball of green. Rory pointed to it. "What's that? Is that us?"

"No, that's one of the nearby planets in this..." The Doctor trailed off, and he leaned in until his nose was mere inches from the monitor's display. "It's heading right for it. That ship, it's heading right for the planet. It's going to crash!"

"Can't you do something?" said Amy.

"Can't you see I'm trying?" The Doctor whirled around the console, steering the TARDIS with one hand while furiously typing away on the keyboard with another. "I can't get a lock, it's moving too fast. Can't override the flight computer. And we can't board it, not at that velocity."

"So... you can't do something?"

The Doctor looked beaten, weary. All he could do was slowly stand away from the console and stare at the monitor before him. Amy and Rory joined him at either side and looked at the display. The red dot moved closer and closer towards the green sphere until, inevitably, they touched, and the monitor flashed white. A moment passed, and when the map returned, the green sphere remained. The red dot was gone.

"It... crashed?" said Amy.

The Doctor swallowed. His voice crackled. "Yeah."

Rory didn't know where to look. "I, uh... I don't suppose there'd be any survivors?"

The Doctor could only shake his head. "You saw how that thing threw us around in its tailwind. Anyone on board that ship or in the vicinity of the impact site never stood a chance. They never stood a chance... and I couldn't do anything."

Amy put a gentle hand on the Doctor's shoulder. "Couldn't we at least go see?"

The TARDIS landed with a thud, and the time rotors powered down with an aged wheeze. The Doctor tapped the display with a finger. "Hanzelis S," he said. "Also known as The Many Planet, according to the brochure. And that's where my knowledge ends."

The Doctor went to the TARDIS doors. He placed a hand on the latch as Amy and Rory approached him from behind. He turned to them. "Are you sure you want to put your game faces on? The speed and the size means this thing's not going to be pretty."

Amy nodded. "We nearly had a hit and run with the biggest bike in the galaxy. We're witnesses, we're not going to ignore what happened." She shrugged. "Call it atoning for those traffic cones."

"And the Stop sign," said Rory.

She punched him on the arm, and the Doctor raised a hand. "Okay, fine, but please, keep yourselves respectable. There's going to be a fair bit of..."

The Doctor opened the TARDIS doors, and couldn't help but lose his train of thought as he took in the sight before him. A barren landscape, drenched in a hot desert sun, baked a parched, cracked ground of brown dust and dirt. In the distant horizon, a rust-red mountain range ran as far as the eye could see. But it was what lay immediately before them that was impossible to miss.

Towering up into the sky was an aged, rusted ruin, surrounded by the dunes of an eroded indentation. A skeleton framework of bent beams and panels, of parts that had decayed and fallen apart from the ravages of time. An ancient wreckage, kilometres tall, embedded in a decaying crater.

Rory put a hand up to shield his eyes from the sun. "Where's the ship?"

The Doctor cocked his head. He checked his wristwatch, looked back into the TARDIS at the central console, then back out into the desolate landscape. "It's... there."

"That thing? That's the spaceship we just saw crash?"

The Doctor could only nod, and Rory shook his head. "You landed at the wrong time. You're a few hundred or thousand years out."

"We're at the correct time relative to the crash," the Doctor said. "It crashed, we landed, and this is it."

Amy said, "But that thing's rusted and old. It's a tetanus playground. Doctor, this must be the wrong time."

"It's not."

"But it has to be."

"It's not."

"So that thing, that mess over there, is the centuries-old ruin of a spaceship that crashed two minutes ago?"

The Doctor nodded. "It is. And I have no idea how."

CHAPTER TWO COMING SOON!