Disclaimer: Sadly, I don't own Doctor Who and make no profit from it.
The time travellers headed back to the glen where they had last seen captor and captive. As the undergrowth grew thicker, blackberry bushes and hazels crowding their path, the Doctor pulled something from beneath his coat and began swinging at the brush. "Wait, is that a machete?" Martha asked.
"No-no-no, wrong time and place for a machete. On the other hand, it is something of a medieval Germanic cousin, so go ahead, call it a machete if you'd like."
"Where did you get it?"
"Found it in Charlemagne's tent."
"You nicked a machete from Charlemagne?"
"Well, it's not like he's using it at the moment. I'll give it back once we find him. Assuming I remember." He threw her a grin and a wink.
She smiled back. "Well, someone is in a good mood."
"Why wouldn't I be, Martha? What an adventure! Here we are, roaming the Ardennes, searching for a missing king and an insane computer. We're going to free Charlemagne and fix the Broodkeeper and rescue the lost Brood. And we get to do it with a machete and a bow and arrows. How brilliant is that?" The Doctor was practically skipping, and his smile could not possibly grow any broader. He so often carried the weight of worlds on his shoulders; it did Martha's heart good to see his childish exuberance.
But his high spirits faded abruptly when they arrived at their destination to find it empty. "Are you sure this is the right spot?" Martha asked.
"Yes, of course I'm sure." He studied the screwdriver, flipped some settings, smacked the tool against his palm, shook it, glared at it. "It's not working."
"What do you mean? It led us to the Broodkeeper just fine a couple of hours ago. Just…" She pantomimed a scan around the glen with an imaginary screwdriver.
"It was picking up the emissions from the hologram generator. But then I turned off the hologram, remember? And apparently the Broodkeeper didn't turn it back on. So…no trail to follow." He wandered around the clearing, kicking at tufts of grass.
"Fine, so we do this the old-fashioned way, Mister Tracker." She squatted down in front of the oak where Charlemagne had been bound, studied the ground, rose to a half-crouch and began moving away.
"What are you doing?"
She looked up to see his incredulous stare. "What? I was a Girl Guide."
"Oh yes? Learned a lot of tracking in the middle of London, your unit did?"
"How hard can it be to follow? Not many animals in these parts leave perfectly round prints like this. Anyway, have you got a better idea?"
He didn't. And so he joined her, bent low over the trail, following the prints through ground still damp from the early morning's rain. Where the terrain was drier or rocky, they sometimes lost the track and were forced to search in ever-widening circles until they could pick it up again. And as the light slanted lower through the trees, they knew that their time was running short. So it was a relief when, just before the sun could slip behind a ridge, they heard a pair of voices, one familiarly mechanical.
The Doctor put a finger to his lips, slipped an arrow from his quiver, pulled off the arrowhead, took the circuitboard and a length of string from his pocket, and bound the chip to the shaft. Then they crept forward until they had a clear view of their quarry.
Robot and king were stopped on the muddy bank of a stream, their backs to the trackers. The Broodkeeper had sunk nearly to the tops of its legs in mire; spastic jerks marked its futile attempts to extricate itself. The mud covering Charlemagne's back and his legs up to the knees indicated that he had narrowly escaped the same fate. But now he was standing behind the creature, hands on hips, mocking its cries for help, out of reach of the swiveling eyepieces desperately firing laser beams at random.
"So now the tables have turned."
"Help me! Free me! I must find the children."
"You expect me to show mercy? May your children rot in the mire with you."
"Quicksand?" Martha murmured.
The Doctor turned away from the others and pitched his voice low so as not to carry. "Yep. Can happen anywhere the ground gets saturated enough. We have to act fast. If he sinks much further, the universal port will go under, and then my whole bow-and-arrow scheme is out the window. And I really, really want to use this bow and arrow. Hey, did I ever tell you I was once in an archery contest with Robin Hood?"
"Doctor–"
"Nice enough fellow. Most of the legends are exaggerated, of course, as legends usually are–"
"Doctor–"
"–But one thing they got right is that he certainly knew his way around a bow. Taught me how to– Wait, I don't hear Charlemagne anymore."
"Nope."
"He's looking at us, isn't he?"
"Yep."
The Doctor spun around and grinned. "Charlemagne! You're looking much better than the last time we saw you."
"I remember you," the king said. "Who are you? And what are you doing here?"
"I'm the Doctor, this is Martha. And we're here to rescue you."
Charlemagne drew himself up tall, folding his arms across his chest and staring down his prominent nose at the interlopers. "As you see, I have no need of rescue."
"Fine, then we're here to rescue him." He nodded to the floundering robot.
"That abomination? Why would you want to save that monstrosity, that–"
"Eh, I'm sure he's not so bad once you get to know him. He's having an off day, is all."
"I forbid it."
The Doctor groaned in frustration. "Honestly, between you and Roland, this is getting tiresome. Listen, Your Majesty, I am not one of your subjects, so…" He shook the arrow at him. "So don't try to order me around."
"Are you threatening me with a headless arrow?" the king scoffed.
"This?" The Doctor looked down at the object, seeming slightly surprised to see it in his hands. "Not at all. I'm threatening you with this." He reached into his jacket and came out with the screwdriver. "Back off, or I'll unleash the diabolical fireflies of doom on you!"
Charlemagne took a look at the flashing blue light, and glowered but took a step back. The Doctor returned the screwdriver to his pocket, unslung the bow from his shoulder, and nocked the arrow onto it. "Right, glad that's settled. Now let's see what we can do here." He began a cautious circle around to the Broodkeeper's front. "All right, now, I'm here to help, so stop struggling and stop wittering and above all, stop shooting!"
But his directions fell on deaf metal ears. The Broodkeeper continued jerking, driving itself ever deeper into the quicksand, its cries echoing around the clearing, interspersed with the crackle of laser beams. But at least its aim was well above the Doctor's head, to the Time Lord's relief.
"Doctor, I think maybe it's trying to shoot down a tree branch, you know, for leverage or something," Martha said.
"Well, I wish it would stop!"
The wisdom of those words was borne out when a large aspen branch crashed to the ground, narrowly missing crushing the Broodkeeper. The sudden stillness that followed was broken by the Doctor's chuff of frustration. He slacked the bow and pulled out his glasses to study the fallen limb. It lay snug against the robot's side, a leafy profusion of twigs splaying out in front of him and obscuring the Doctor's target. "Now see what you've done. I can't even see your port now, let alone hit it."
The Broodkeeper seemed to rise a little taller on mud-encased legs at this, laser eyes swivelling to fix on the Doctor. "Unauthorized access to the neural network is prohibited. Threats must be eliminated."
The Doctor skipped out of the way just ahead of the laser blast, and returned to the safe zone behind the creature. "Well, that could have gone better."
"Now what?" Martha asked.
"First things first, I've got to get that branch out of the way. Hard to tell where the quicksand starts, but maybe I can get close enough." He took several tentative steps forward, but each one was visibly harder than the last, and he ended up retreating to Martha's side. He sniffed, rubbed the back of his neck. "All right, hold on, let me think about this."
"I'll do it," Martha said.
He blinked down at her. "Do what?"
"I'll get the branch."
"No. No way. It's too dangerous."
"Same goes for you. And it will bear my weight better than yours." When he hesitated, she gave him her most confident smile. "It's our best shot. I can do this."
His protective nature warred with his practical side, but in the end he knew she was right. He handed her the coil of extra string, holding onto one end himself. "Tie this around the branch, and I'll help you pull it out."
Martha took a deep breath and began slowly moving forward, sinking deeper with each step, until she could barely lift her foot. Then she lowered herself carefully to the ground, turning to face the Doctor, legs and lower back fully extended in the mud. With her body weight thus distributed, she could scoot backwards towards the goal. It was hard work, and it seemed to take ages until her shoulders finally bumped up against the back of the Broodkeeper. The Doctor's eyes never left her, his brow furrowed in worry and concentration, as if he could will her to safety. It was times like this that she realized that she did have a place in his hearts, even if it wasn't quite the one she wanted.
She rested her head for a moment on the smooth metal, breathing hard from the exertion. But the suction of the quicksand against her backside reminded her that time was still of the essence. She tied the string around the branch and worked it free from the mire while the Doctor pulled from his end.
At last the obstacle was removed. The Doctor reached out his hand. "Good job, Martha. Now come on back."
"Not just yet. You've still got the problem of shooting him before he shoots you, but I have an idea."
"Martha!"
Ignoring him, she twisted around, leaned across the Broodkeeper's back, scooped up a handful of thick silt and let it dribble from her fingers over the eyepieces. The creature howled its displeasure, but the laser beams disappeared. "…Nine pink elephants, ten pink elephants," Martha said under her breath just as the first thin beam of light sliced through the mud. Another few seconds, and the robot's weaponry was back to full power.
"Ten seconds!" Martha was triumphant. "I can give you ten seconds. Is that enough?"
"It'll rather have to be." He grinned at her, restrung the bow, nocked the arrow. "Ready…Go!"
As Martha dropped her handful of mud, the Doctor stepped in front of the Broodkeeper, taking a deep breath, drawing the bow, sighting along the arrow. He held the pose while Martha anxiously counted the seconds to herself. "Come on, Doctor, you don't have long."
Bowstring pressed to his cheek, he said, "A fraction of an inch off the mark, and the chip shatters on his casing. Further off, and it misses him entirely and hits you. I've got one chance to get this exactly right."
Martha gulped and dropped another glob of mud to buy some more time. The Doctor held his breath and finally let the arrow fly. From behind the robot, Martha couldn't see where it struck, but the Doctor's explosive chuff and accompanying fist pump told her all she needed to know.
For a few seconds, nothing changed. Martha could still hear the sizzling sound of the Broodkeeper burning its way through the mud blindfold. But at the Doctor's order of "Cease fire!" all went silent, and Martha let out a breath she hadn't realized she was holding.
Author's Note: For any eagle-eyed readers who are wondering why the Twelfth Doctor wouldn't even admit Robin Hood existed if Ten had already taken archery lessons from him, all I can say is that I think Twelve was still suffering from a bit of post-regeneration amnesia. That, and I wrote this chapter long before "Robots of Sherwood" aired. :-)
