Disclaimer: Second verse same as the first!
A/n: Nah, I'm not going to make you wait. I wrote the whole 18k-word thing in three days – now if only I could get myself to dream about Painting Roses, everybody would be a lot happier.
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Chapter 2
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Commander Goddard was the last of the crew to flock to the medlab. He strode through the door at pace, his expression thunderous, to find the rest standing around in bewildered silence as a strange man in suspenders, a tweed coat and a bowtie darted around, gaping at every instrument and screen in the room like a tourist fresh off the transport shuttle.
"A spaceship called Christa!" the man was saying to no one in particular, eyes alight with a childlike glee. "Bit odd, but, who am I to judge? I once named a galaxy Alison. Seriously though, a semi-biologic, quasi-sentient ship, with, what? – ooh, Lumanian design by the look of it, bioprint relays, crystalline-refractive control, primitive ARS, protomix hyperdrive, vortex manipulation matrix with dimensional shifting capabilities – I've never seen a configuration like this! What a beauty! And you say she can only be piloted by children? Ha ha! That's a treat! First rate! Splendiferous! …er, no, promised myself I'd never say that again… but really, just top notch!"
Meanwhile, from inside a big blue box that was crammed into the far corner of the medlab, there came a metallic clanking and crashing, followed by an echoing squeal of pure delight.
"A helmic regulator! RDS and DDS! Friction contrafibulator! Chameleon arch! Gravatic anomalizer! Oooh, a wibbly lever!" There was some more crashing and clanging. The sound was strangely hollow, as though it were coming from a much larger space than the narrow box could possibly hold. "Oh Grozit, no way, this fluid link is amazing! Mercury's a bit low though…"
Suzee burst out of door to the box and nearly ran smack into the stranger.
"I love your ship!" they shouted at each other in ecstatic unison, before breaking apart and running past one another to keep exploring.
"What is going on here?" Goddard demanded, flummoxed and trying not to show it. "Who is this guy?"
"He answered the distress call," Harlan explained.
"He's a doctor!" Rosie added hopefully from where she and Bova were fanning a still-swooning Miss Davenport beside the far console.
"Doctor?" Goddard repeated, suspicious. "Doctor who?"
"No, just the Doctor," the stranger called absently over his shoulder as he flicked a quietly humming probe out of his jacket and began waving it diligently around the room. "Let's see! Humans, Rigelians, girl with gills – love it! – Thelma unit… and one comatose Andromedan. Prisoner?" he inquired conversationally.
"No!" Rosie exclaimed, aghast. "Radu's a member of the crew!"
"Ah, good! Post war, then."
"What do you mean, postwar?" Harlan demanded skeptically. "Just how long have you been floating around out here in that box, anyway?"
"Sorry, must have slipped a time track, don't mind me."
"What kind of doctor travels around the galaxy in a box anyway?" Bova commented. "He's probably some kind of mad scientist."
"Oh, I'm definitely that!" the Doctor said cheerfully.
"See?" Bova said lightly, brightening at have his pessimism justified. "With our luck, he'll surgically harvest our organs and sell them on the intergalactic black market."
Miss Davenport, who was just beginning to revive, groaned at his words and rolled her eyes back in another dead faint.
"You're not helping, Mr. Bova," Goddard snapped. He gestured at the stranger. "How did he get aboard this ship?" He glared pointedly at Harlan.
"It's not my fault, Commander!" Harlan said, his tone all wounded innocence, despite the unspoken but palpable, 'this time'.
"Yeah, Dad, it's not his fault," the man calling himself 'just the Doctor' interrupted as he finally finished his self-guided tour through the medlab by coming to a stop beside Radu's prone form. He ran his humming scanner over him and flicked it up, raising an eye brow at whatever it told him.
"Excuse me?" Goddard asked, perturbed. "Dad?!"
"I said it's not his fault." The stranger lowered his scanner and turned to Goddard. "I just sort of turned up. I do that, it's sort of my thing. Well, one of my things. That and badminton, but you mustn't tell anyone…"
"Commander," Goddard corrected him in something very much like a growl.
"No, Doctor," the Doctor corrected him patiently.
Goddard scowled.
"Look, whoever you are, however you got here, you're a doctor, right?" He waved an arm at the exam bed, where Radu remained completely unmoved by the low-grade chaos erupting around him. "Can you help him?"
The Doctor lingered for a moment, smiling into the Commander's eyes. Neither flinched, and an inkling of respect was purchased by both. Without further ado, the Doctor spun in place and bent back over the exam bed, probe droning and flickering.
"Let's see, shall we?" he said. "Andromedan male, approximately eleven Earth-standard-years old, puts him close to full maturity. Five foot four, two hundred pounds, molecular density of 63 on the Valeran* scale, all perfectly average. Hmm, but that isn't…elevated cardial activity, elevated temperature, barometric pressure dropping… dropping? What?" The Doctor thwacked the scanning tool against his hand and pointed it at Radu again, squinting. "Oh, that's not good… minor internal condensation… cloudy with a chance of… elevated androgenic… low band psionic… oh… ohhh… oh, I see!"
And the Doctor snickered quietly.
"What's so funny?" Harlan demanded.
"Nothing, nothing," the Doctor waved the question away. "Alright, three questions! First, has he eaten anything strange lately?"
"Everything he eats is strange," Harlan shuddered, recalling Radu's breakfast of raw narf intestines. (In fairness, Radu had found Harlan's breakfast of "cooked chicken embryos and fried strips of pig flesh" equally disgusting).
"Uhhhh-huh… second! Has he come into contact with any unusual substances or alien objects?"
"Not recently," Rosie said. "He did pick up a space virus from an alien teddy bear last year, but I cured him."
"That sounds like a story I want to hear! But later, later! Third question: where's his girlfriend?"
The crew exchanged incredulous looks.
"Radu doesn't have a girlfriend…" Rosie exclaimed.
"He wouldn't know what to do with one," Harlan laughed.
"What about Elmira?" Suzee said, emerging from the stranger's strange ship, her engineering exuberance having finally banked itself down to a pensive expectancy. There was something shrewd and very careful in her tone, and in the way she was watching the newcomer.
"Hey, yeah!" Rosie agreed. "Wow, I guess he does sort of have a girlfriend."
"Great, now people in comas are managing to have more interesting love lives than me," Bova muttered glumly.
"They've gotten pretty close, but I wouldn't call her his girlfriend," Harlan interjected skeptically.
"Has anyone ever told you lot that you're incredibly confusing to talk to?" the Doctor interrupted. "And I have it on excellent authority that, coming from me, that is really saying something."
"Can we focus please?" Goddard interrupted.
"Good idea!" the Doctor exclaimed, giving the Commander a pat on the shoulder, then removing his hand with awkward grace under the force of Goddard's glare. "Er… very good. Elmira, you say? Not Andromedan, I take it?"
"No, she's a Spung. How did you know that?"
"Spung…" The Doctor grimaced. "I'm not judging you," he assured the unconscious Radu rather too pointedly, patting his shoulder in much the same way he had Goddard's. "Very 'Romeo and Juliet'… So, where is the, ah, lovely lizard in question?"
"Oh, well, she's not here," Rosie said. "We haven't heard from her in a while. I really hope she's okay…"
"Is that so?" the Doctor mused, cocking an eyebrow as he glanced down at Radu, then around at the assembled crew. "The plot thickens…" he murmured mysteriously, then stifled another little snicker at whatever inside joke he was sharing with himself.
Goddard had had enough.
"Look, Mister –"
"Doc-tor,"the Doctor enunciated, glancing around with wide eyes as though to say to the rest 'is he slow or what?'
"Doctor," Goddard snarled through gritted teeth. "This charade has gone on long enough. Can you do anything for him, or not?"
"You can, can't you?" Suzee said, watching the Doctor with penetrating eyes. She had seen what was inside the blue box. Where she came from, half of the technology in there was still nothing but the fevered dream of a mad theoretical scientist – and the other half was beyond even that. "Surely you can do something."
Across the room, Harlan frowned, perturbed. He was worried about Radu too, albeit a touch grudgingly, but he didn't like the thinly veiled note of pleading in Suzee's voice, or the way her eyes flicked constantly towards the exam bed, as though she were fighting not to look and couldn't help it.
The Doctor fixed his eyes fully on Suzee, and despite his clownish behavior up to now, Suzee suddenly felt breathless under the weight of his piercing stare. Later she would tell herself she imagined it, but in that moment, she swore she could see the vast, ageless star-flecked turn of the universe gleaming in his eyes. She'd once looked into a black hole on a school trip; she felt now the way she had felt then – as though she were staring into a force of nature too much vaster and deeper than herself to ever genuinely understand.
Then he smiled at her, and she blinked, and the spell was broken.
"What's your name?" he asked her.
"Suzee. From Yensid," she felt compelled to add, as though trying to justify and define her presence before him for reasons beyond her immediate understanding.
"Well, Suzee from Yensid, let's see…" he spread his arms, looking around in speculative delight. "A fantastic, one-of-a-kind ship, with a motley crew quite unlike any I've met before – and that is saying something. A young life hanging in the balance. An audience – all eyes on me, good, good, I'm rubbish without an audience. Now if only there were some sort of cataclysmic emergency to spice things up a bit…"
Suddenly the deck shuddered and bucked beneath their feet as something struck the Christa's outer hull.
"That's more like it!" the Doctor cried.
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TBC
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A/n: If you review, Rosie will make you some of her super special fudge squares – and she even promises not to mistake the glue bottle for marshmallow sauce this time!
