The impact blew Turlough sideways. His head head bouncing off the trunk of a tree with a slight 'bong.' Then he was flat on his bum staring stupidly at the people dying around him.
He had heard the sound of the ?mortar? before it hit, but he was too busy panicking to care.
Thirty-four meals... that's how he was counting now. Days and night ceased to have any meaning since he never really slept. Counting meals was the only thing that kept him going. Thirty-four meals since he had last sat in the TARDIS and dined. It wasn't the Doctor he missed, really. It was the food machine. It was an absolutely wonderful creation that provided him with meals of his home planet. After nine years of school dinners, there was no more wonderful thing in the world.
But right now, there were no dinners in sight and Turlough was getting shot at and slathered in mud. Why the Doctor had left him stranded in the war zone was beyond him.
Turlough picked himself up again and started running away from the sound of gun fire, his body quivering with energy, his thoughts a blur as he ran as fast as he possibly could, kicking his brain into survival mode, multi-tasking to figure out how to get the hell out of here.
He hadn't multi-tasked since he was a kid. Not that there was any need over the past ten years. Maintaining three separate trains of thought at an English Public School was hardly required. It would have driven him insane. Whenever he had tried it during lectures to distract himself from the hideous hours of boredom, he ended up thinking were three separate mind-sets all filled with frustration and hate, each layer mentally stacked one over another, bile dripping between his synapses.
His Overseer/psychologist/jailer -they had to act as counselors to their charges/prisoners to make sure that they did not go insane- had suggested that this multi-tasking merely made the other students at his school think he was even more devious and duplicitous than he really was. The Overseer had suggested that Turlough might try and fit in at school: rugby, the debate team, or perhaps learn to play cricket?
Little Vislor Turlough had merely sat there and listened, while quietly multi-tasking three separate and, yes, devious, ways of having his Overseer executed when Turlough returned to power on Trion.
The slap of gunfire jarred Turlough's eardrum and a splinter of flying wood stabbed him in the eye, his lachrymal gland spurting saline as he flinched sideways, pushing off the tree, pressing his hand against his eye, the sound of bullets- he found himself slipping into what the Trions referred to as Swahalla, four seperate, simultaneous trains of thoughts.
Something dropped onto the ground next to him.
odd, it's pulsing
six centimeters long, two centimeters in diameter
radiating at approximately 0.32352 in the visible range of the EM spectrum fluctuating at a rate of two pulses per second
force bomb
This is your mission if you choose to accept it. This message
But force tanta bombs are Riftan V technology, while bullets and mortars? Surely indicative of a level IV society...
Turlough turned his head slightly as he ran, throwing his hands up in front of his face risking a blow from random branches, and saw by a flare of light-
-he could actually see the resulting force wave smash aside vegetation as it swam through the jungle to meet him. He tried to throw himself down onto the forest floor, but the shockwave hit him first, slamming him sideways, his body skittering through the vegetation like a rock across of a pond.
Force bomb, got it right
What the hell is a force bomb doing in Vietnam? vegetation cushion,
Impact in two, one
They're all dead
We're all dead
I'm all dead
Zero
Turlough jumped- and landed in a foxhole.
There was no dirt, no mud, no slime, no guns, no death, no explosion
Turlough noticed people standing around him, staring as he lay on the humming floor, the thick mud that encased his body made wet, slurping noises as he pulled himself up.
He heard the muttering behind him as the doors-
Outer hull/cold plasma/ real world interface
-slid shut. He gazed around at the
resonance indicative of a power source, frequency and wavelength comparable and to
-the room? It was vast, immense and huge - no walls, just ?walls? of nothing that he could see through, he could see the forest he just left and the Viet Cong? or was it the Americans? He could never tell humans apart, they all looked alike, shouting and shooting down the foxhole he had just fallen down and if he tilted his head he could see what looked like an embassy office and if he tilted again he could see a primitive space capsule- were they still using those absurd rockets- bobbing up and down in the ocean while a Navy helicopter were raising an astro?cosmo?naut, and if he turned his head again he could see a Broadway musical? and so and so and so...
Outer plasmic hull must be simultaneously linked to six separate geographic points while resting in... one... chronological point?
He stopped and looked at the troopers again clustered around a mushroom shaped control console. Turlough slumped into a nearby Louis XIV lounge chair. There were at least six similar consoles that sprouted from the floor around the room, although, oddly none possessed the familiar crystalline glowing mass that had pulsed and oscillated on the console of the Doctor's
A TARDIS: Observation Model?
Turlough crawled away from 'his' door as the familiar takeoff noises began. He imagined the scene of a disappearing pot plant, a mirror, a cobweb, a tree trunk, and a toilet.
Turlough grabbed at the control console as the floor lurched under him- no the walls were moving up and down- no, they were moving up and down and the walls were staying still.
Turlough had a mental flash of the Doctor's control console, the central crystal column gently gliding up and down, moving in concert and monitoring the vast power source beneath it...
Turlough closed his eyes, opened them and stared at the patch of white floor that lay beneath his feet.
He gulped.
