A/N: I want to thank my first two reviewers for this story, Arcander and Nighthowler, for proving me wrong in thinking that no one else would be interested in this wacky tale. Oddly, I've always felt that the Firefly 'Verse and the Riddick 'Verse had much in common. And both of them suit the darkness of the 9th Doctor… But I blame the Christmas Chocolate and too little sleep for this rather persistent mutant plot-bunny…
Summary: The Doctor can go anywhere in space and time, right? Reeling from the effects of the TimeWar, the last surviving Timelord stumbles into a situation he cannot ignore when the TARDIS lands him inside a ship that is clearly in trouble.
500 years in the future, Humanity is in space and expanding outward in fits and starts. Not everyone fleeing Earth-that-was went to the same system.
Lets just imagine then that Blue Sun exists on the opposite side of the galactic arm from the rest of civilized space, and that this ship is taking a ghost run through the long route. Port of Departure: Eavesdown Docks, Persephone. Mixed Sino-Anglo culture. Port of Call: Tangiers-5. Darkside. Mixed Islamic-Anglo culture. Crew complement: Four. Passengers: Forty.
So what happens when a passenger by the name of Dr. Simon Tam and his cargo get on the wrong ship? There's a Bounty Hunter aboard, but not one after him…
Doctor Who / Firefly / Riddick X-over.
Features Doctor 9, Pre-"Rose"; Simon and River Tam, Pre-"Serenity" Firefly episode 1 and the cast of Pitch Black…
Doctor Who and the Great Eclipse
Part two
Chaos.
He drifted through layers of murky warmth. So peaceful. Sometimes when he was home and surrounded by the stresses of his family, many he didn't even know anymore, he craved this. Like a drug, it was. This deep sleep and euphoria of being on death's door, hovering. Not that his job let him go home often. The thoughts were only able to flow because something was forcing him out of the deep sleep. He struggled to recapture that peace, to clutch that warmth, even as his heart kicked into full pulse and his eyes flew open.
His brain seemed to lag behind, noting only the pretty colors on the plexi-screen before him and the red handle clutched in his left hand. Then he became aware of the flashes of light beyond, white, red, black, white, red, black – it made his eyes sting. He blinked. A shape arced through his line-of-sight from left to right, a flesh and navy toned blur. There was something he should be doing.
Oh.
Red handle.
Hadn't it been drilled into him at some point that if he had his hand on a red handle that he should pull it? He thought so, now. Yes. He should be pulling the red handle in his left hand. Okay. He looked again to make sure. Yes. There it was. His hand was on a red handle.
He pulled.
Suddenly he was thrust into chaos as the pressure change and sudden gravity jointly worked against his remaining upright. Something soft and warm cushioned his fall. His ears heard an "Ouff" noise but he was unsure if he made it or if there was someone else in the room with him. The flash off his wrist caught his eyes and he was riveted to the information there. This was his wrist chronograph. It showed Universal Standard time, the Universal Date, and had quick sensor enabled local time and date. But what froze him was that the numbers did not match up. "Why did I fall on you?" Not 'where are we' or 'who have I fallen on' but 'why did I fall' because he knew he was in deep space, and quite frankly the date he knew gravity was to kick in didn't match up with the chrono on his wrist.
"He's dead. Cap'n's dead," came from below him with a feeble push. "Christ, I was looking right at him when --"
But he cut the voice off, to alarmed to listen to it, "I mean, chrono shows we're 22 weeks out, so gravity wasn't supposed to kick in for another 19. So, why did I fall at all?"
The woman below him shoved at him a little harder, more to get his attention than to move him off of her shivering form, "You hear me? Captain Mitchell 's dead. Owens too."
Something was terribly wrong with that last statement. He froze. "Oh, no. Not Owens, not... Wai -- wait. I'm Owens." He looked at the woman that his brain finally identified as 'Carolyn Fry'. "Right?"
She let off a shaky laugh, "Meant Merritt, hard to keep you two separate." This time he joined her tottering titter as she continued, "Cryo-sleep. Swear to God, it sloughs brain cells."
The harsh noise of the alarms beat into his brain as Douglas Owens shifted his weight onto his knees and off of the docking pilot. With the captain and the tech dead that left just them to figure out what the hell was going on. "You're shivering. Warm-up suits?" he managed. She nodded as he gained his feet. He paused to help her stand and then half supported her as they stumbled together into the Nav Bay. Fry fumbled with the locker and pulled out the warm-up suits and after tossing one his direction put the other on.
Her voice seems stronger as he crosses the room. "1550 millibars, dropping 20 MB per minute, shit, we're hemorrhaging air. Somethin' took a swipe at us," she states as she leans over her backup display.
Meanwhile, he's put on the suit and has managed to not take a tumble. Even with the hull not being totally air tight they could survive this, if they are still in space. "Just tell me we're still in the shipping lane. Just show me all those stars, all those bright, beautiful, deep-space..." But his turning on the monitor to the external view chokes his voice off.
There's a large yellowish ball of dirt hurling at them with break-neck speed. They're all gonna die.
"Jesus God..."
0o0o0o0o0o0o0
The Doctor, inside the TARDIS, braced himself for the crash that he knew was coming. How he knew, he didn't know. The thought of forcing a dematerialization didn't even cross his mind, although it might have been a good idea. Something pinged against the outer surface of the living ship. 'Micro-asteroid,' his mind helpfully supplied. So she placed herself here to protect someone, he gathered. The ship hummed sweetly across his mind again, like a kiss from a lover rewarding a birthday card. Right. In one hundred and twenty seconds or so this ship was going to be metallic bits spread across an alien world and the TARDIS wanted to protect someone that was just to the right of it. More pings echoed through the control room, telling him that whoever it was that the TARDIS was shielding would have been turned into ground meat by the barrage long before the crash had a chance to kill them.
There was a pause then the shaking started. 'Entering Atmosphere, I gather.' He figured he had about ninety-five seconds to wait. A dull thud hit the side of the TARDIS, sounding like a heavy body, impacting with it. The sound came from the wrong angle for it to be the protected though. There was a wave of pops, echoes and ripples from the ship shedding the deep space drives and other bays in someone's effort to ride the crash down. Then he was aware of a rolling motion, although his ship didn't actually roll or tumble. Then it leveled out. He glanced up at his outside viewscreen. The planet filled the port, rushing up much too fast still with no horizon. About seventy seconds left before he'd know if his ship had suddenly become suicidal.
The next few moments were jarring and bruising, and thankfully he'd just regenerated less than twenty-four hours ago so the damage healed with little effort. He picked himself up off the floor where he found himself sprawled and thanked fate that there were no companions to laugh at him for his lack of grace. He'd have to work on that 'lack of grace' issue. Taking a tumble like that had triggered a regeneration once, and ever since he'd been careful of his head around the console. He shook out his wrist and forced a pop to realign his hand and arm. The pain reminded him that he was alive but he still winced as the damage repaired itself.
The TARDIS opened the main door, revealing an expanse of smoldering blackened yellowish soil, grooved into a deep rut that he was in the middle of. Part of the ship, crumpled and heat-scarred blocked his view. The oxygen poor but dense air was oven hot against his new lungs even from this distance. "You expect me to go out there?" A drawer opened near the door that held a glint of silver. His sonic screwdriver. "Oh. Bribing me now, are we?" The air of expectation built as he stood staring at the device. He'd thought it lost, really. "All right. I'll go look around and see if that individual you were shielding is still alive." He marched up to the drawer and snatched his sonic screwdriver just a bit miffed that the bribe worked. He then slipped the TARDIS key around his neck like a talisman against whatever bogeymen might await him on this alien world before stepping out into blisteringly hot, bright alien light.
Behind him the door closed and the TARDIS dematerialized only to reappear about 30 feet in front of him. "Stop jumping about on your own," he scolded, "Or I'll take out that new circuit of yours."
0o0o0o0o0o0o0
The docking pilot had stumbled away in panic, leaving him to wonder what he should be doing. He had no idea… wait; there was the matter of a distress call out. He toggled on the communications array; "This is the Hunter-Gratzner. We are off course and out of our assigned shipping lane. Currently angling for an emergency landing at an unregistered planetary body with the following stellar co-ordinates: X-38-stroke-5, Y-95-stroke-8, Z-21-" he was cut off when his signal went dead. "They trained you for this, right? -- Fry?" Panic flooded his senses, "FRY?" He decided to do something about the blaring alarm and riped the guts out of the console to stop the annoying noise.
One silence relieved him and the other upset him. He forced his voice steady and himself into business mode in order to just survive this. "Looks like the crisis program selected Number Two of this system because it shows at least some oxygen and more than 1,500-millibars of pressure at surface-level. Okay, so maybe the ship did something right for a change..." The hull pass doors closing taps at his attention. Then there is a series of shuttering jolts. "Fry? Was that a Purge?"
Over his headset he hears her finally reply, "Had to drop the deep-space drives and streamline our hull. But I still need to get the nose down. I got no horizon."
He took a deep breath, "Cargo?"
"Might go too. If I can't get a level in the next couple of seconds. Just do your job Owens, and I'll do mine."
"Planet has no major water bodies. Maximum terrain, 220 meters over mean surface. Reading largely cinder and gypsum with some evaporite deposits..." He rattled off over the comms. Another series of jolts announced the fall off of the cargo compartments. "Tell me you got Horizon now, Fry."
His answer is the door behind him sliding closed.
"Fry? What're you doing?" He unbuckles and dashes to the door, aiming to manually force it open if necessary. The headset is still feeding him static. "Fry?"
"Can't get my nose down...too much load back there..." The docking pilot sounds frantic.
Owens starts struggling with the door controls, punching in his override command, "You mean that 'load' of passengers?" He had to keep her talking so he would have time to muscle the door open and jam it.
"So what, we should both go down too? Out of sheer fucking nobility?" she asks him.
He almost has the door open now, "Look, Company says we're responsible for every one of those people, Fry --"
"You know somethin' I don't? Wanna come up here and take the chair, Owens?" Fry is screaming at him now, her lower-class accent forcing its way through all her cultured training.
He winced at the reminder of her background and how much she has struggled to reach this point of her career. He knows though that she's a damn good pilot and deserves to have her own ship. She could have taken a smaller freighter as captain almost a year back and didn't. He took a deep breath, "When Mitchell went down, you stepped up -- whether you like it or not. Now they train you for this, so -- "
"An' there wasn't a simulated 'roach alive within 50 clicks of the simulated crash site!" she thundered. "That's how they train you! A fuckin' simulator!"
He's suddenly aware that he's not braced the door yet and was so caught up in the debate with the docking pilot that he's not got anything in hand to use. "Don't touch that switch!" he ordered with all the authority he can muster as he franticly casted about for something that will jam the door open. He spied a thick wrench and wedged it into the door. A jarring jolt sent him sprawling back into his seat.
"I'm not dying for them," comes over the headset followed by an angered "Owens!"
He buckled himself back into place, "70 seconds! You still got 70 seconds to level this beast out!" He can feel the ship level, shuddering and pitching in protest. A wave shivers past him, "What the shit was that?" He knows they are falling fast, too fast still. His display reads 120 meters and descending. Seemingly less than a second later an new alarm kicks in, screaming a warning that they have less than 60 meters to contact. He riped that apart too. Glancing back up at the screen showed that there were 50 meters left. He's numb in shock.
40 meters...30...20...10...
Owens grips his chair and tries to prepare for the impact. It hits with a suddenness that he couldn't have prepared for. There's a metallic tearing sound and he found himself flying through the air. He realized that his seat had come loose.
Then he slammed into the ceiling.
