"C'mon!" the Doctor exclaimed, grabbing her arm to pull her vertical. The floor swayed and shimmied sickeningly, accompanied by a chorus of protesting groans and rattles from within the TARDIS, tossing the Doctor back against the bulkhead and throwing Miranda against his legs. Something small clattered into her lap. Her glasses!
"Did we hit something?" she asked, shoving the slightly bent specs back onto her face.
"Shouldn't have." The Doctor grabbed her arm again and helped her to her feet before sprinting off down the corridor towards the console room.
"Coming!" Miranda hollered after him pointlessly, hurrying as fast as she could in his wake. Unfortunately, after a year on solid planet surface her TARDIS legs were decidedly out of shape and her urgent running was more a drunken stagger. By the time she lurched into the console room, the Doctor was controlled chaos at the hexagonal panels, turning knobs and landing the occasional fist to the controls, but it was working. The TARDIS was once more sailing smoothly. Or so it felt, at least. But Miranda knew better than to expect it was just passing turbulence.
The frame of the timeship shuddered, unsettling Miranda enough that she grabbed the railing just in case. "Sensible things like seatbelts would help too, you know," she felt fit to remark. The Doctor shot her a look from the other side of the console, so Miranda smirked at him. Briefly, the Doctor flashed his megawatt grin in return before an insistent beeping from another panel drew his attention.
"Can I help?" she queried as the TARDIS continued its queasy rocking.
"You are."
"How?"
"By standing clear and not touching anything."
"You're welcome."
The TARDIS gave a particularly rough shake, encouraging Miranda to grip the railing tightly. "What is this?" she groused.
The Doctor flipped a series of switches, paying close attention to their effect, which seemed negligible to Miranda. "Press the yellow button!" he ordered suddenly from his side of the console.
Miranda jumped down from the catwalk to the console and looked over the mishmash of gadgetry. "Where?"
"Beside the quantiscope!"
"The what-scope? Oh, here!" Glancing underneath the panel, she spotted a large, glowing yellow button. It was the only yellow button she saw, so she smacked it hard with her palm. She didn't know why the Doctor kept trying to explain things to her in terms of Timelord techno babble. Quantiscope? 'Yellow button under the panel' she understood. "Got it!"
"Keep pressing it!" the Doctor jumped to a different panel and gave an instrument a good twist. The shaking and shuddering and rattling of the TARDIS suddenly subsided, as Miranda and the Doctor both stood still and waited. Well, the Doctor stood. Miranda was stuck crouching so she could keep her hand on the button. It reminded Miranda of the three weeks she'd spent on Hurndas, where turbulence was so commonplace from the air foils suspending their landmasses above the molten surface that the entire village would simply stop what they were doing and sit down, calmly waiting out each aftershock.
Hurndas...she hadn't thought about that little trip in quite a while. It had been her first solo trip to an alien planet, what, nearly three years ago by now? So very long ago, it seemed.
Whatever the yellow button was for, it seemed to do the trick. The TARDIS settled down, and the only sound was its usual, ambient humming. And the equine-in-distress wheezing of the time rotor.
"Can I--?"
"Yes, you can let go," the Doctor cut her off confidently. Miranda stood up, seeing the Doctor once again grinning like a satisfied cat.
"That was some turbulence," Miranda remarked, loathe to feel any stupider by asking 'what is it' a third time. "What happened? Some kind of temporal distortion?" she suggested instead, recalling the circumstances around their first meeting.
"Of a kind. We've been pulled out of the vortex by something. The TARDIS is caught," the Doctor looked slightly bemused.
"Caught how? Wouldn't that take a lot of energy?" Miranda asked.
"Massive amounts! Like..." the Doctor gestured her over to the scanner. Miranda rounded the console and joined him at the screen, which was displaying nothing more impressive than a series of concentric rings, with a long column of meaningless numbers along one side, the values changing faster than Miranda could follow. "...like those produced in a time corridor," he intoned decisively.
"Time corridor. Right," Miranda agreed, making little effort to cover her ignorance (How much did he expect an anthropologist to know about temporal physics?).
"It's like a tunnel in the fabric of the universe, connects two points in space-time."
"Oh, like an Einstein-Rosen bridge! A wormhole," Miranda realized (the one thing she happened to remember out of 'A Brief History of Time').
The Doctor actually looked somewhat impressed. "Sort of, except that this is not a natural phenomenon." He glanced at her suggestively.
"You don't mean…"
He gave her a knowing look.
"Don't even--"
"Aliens!" he announced with entirely too much certainty for Miranda's liking.
She made a show of rolling her eyes and sulking against the console. She was long used to these interruptions, but that didn't make them any less enjoyable. She hated sticking her nose into weird, possibly dangerous situations. Well, perhaps 'hate' was too strong a word. She certainly didn't look forward to them, in any case. "Which aliens?" she asked, knowing he was waiting for the question. When the answer didn't come right away, she looked at the Doctor.
To her surprise, he was eyeing the scanner with a deeply serious expression, the fingers of one hand drumming restlessly on the console.
"You can't get the TARDIS out of it, can you?" Miranda surmised.
"No, we'll have to ride the time stream to its exit vector." He still sounded troubled, but not about that.
"You've done that with the TARDIS before?"
He gave her a look that Miranda immediately recognized, and set about fiddling with the controls again, changing the scanner display several times.
"Do you know where the corridor leads?" she asked inoffensively. "Where are we going?"
"Dunno," he answered simply.
"What? If we're following a specific vector, why can't the TARDIS-?"
"That's just the problem. It doesn't seem to have an exit. Nor an entrance. Not one the TARDIS can detect, anyway. It looks as though it transects the entire universe! That shouldn't be possible. The amount of power it would take to project an energy barrier across all of space-time--can't be done. Well, I suppose in theory...but where's the point of origin?"
"So we're stuck in a time corridor with no origin and no endpoint? How'd we get in?" Miranda asked, attempting to draw the Doctor out of his private brainstorming session.
"Dunno. There wasn't any trace of it a moment ago, then Wham! Here it is, and here's us stuck in it."
The TARDIS shuddered mildly again, but this time in a way that was quite familiar. The rotor wheezed and went silent. "Did we just land?" Miranda asked anyway.
The Doctor checked the instruments. Then rechecked them. Then knit his brows together.
"What? Where did we land?" Miranda was getting annoyed with this idiotic round of 'Twenty Questions.' As if goading her, the Doctor seemed to ignore her completely and continued to fiddle with the controls in bemusement. Miranda tugged on his jacket sleeve. "Doctor! Where are we?"
The Doctor stopped playing with the levers and switches and drummed his fingertips on the panel. Then he grinned at Miranda, and whirled past her, legging it towards the doors. "Well, let's find out, shall we?" he called back to her.
"But shouldn't we have the TARDIS scan it first? Make sure we can, you know, breathe out there?" Miranda protested, catching him up at the TARDIS doors before he could open them.
"Aw, that would only spoil the satisfaction of finding it out first-hand!" He reached for the knob.
Miranda placed a restraining hand on his sleeve. "Versus the agonizing death throes you'll experience if you can't?"
The Doctor pinched the bridge of his beaked nose in exasperation. "Timid little Miranda! Of course I scanned it first! Just trying to engage your spontaneity. But that's right; you haven't got any. How stupid of me."
"So what did the scanner say? Where are we?" Miranda persisted.
The Doctor produced his sonic screwdriver from his jacket pocket and twirled it. "Dunno," he answered, grinning, popping the door open and stepping out of the TARDIS.
Miranda watched him stride out into what appeared to be a decidedly ordinary countryside. But after no more than a step out of the TARDIS, he suddenly grabbed his head and sank to the grass with a painful moan.