Two
There's Nothing Funny About Sontar
"Behold the unrivalled beauty of the homeworld of the mighty Sontaran Empire!" Strax trilled.
The TARDIS doors opened onto a ruined wasteland. Crumbling ruins of huge buildings stretched as far as the eye could see. Underneath a crimson sky, pink lightning struck the ground, setting off further explosions wherever it touched. Fires raged. From horizon to horizon, as far as Clara could see, the landscape around her was a charred cinder, lifeless and barren.
"Oh…" Clara said, as Strax padded out slowly between where she stood and the Doctor, staring silently at the devastation before him. "Oh Strax, I'm so sorry…"
"YOU!" Strax whirled, pointing his pulse rifle at the Doctor. Clara had to admit, as a pointing device, it beat the hell out of a toothbrush any day of the week.
"Me?" the Doctor said defensively, as Strax continued his advance.
"Strax, it's not his fault!" Clara said, trying – and failing, thanks to a gentle but nonetheless very firm arm extruded by the Doctor – to get between Strax and his gun and the target of his anger. "Whatever happened to Sontar, we can-"
"I'm LATE and it's YOUR fault! I have MISSED it all, and look – look – how glorious!"
About thirty miles behind him, the top of a massive rotunda-shaped building (not unlike a Sontaran head, she noted) finally gave up the ghost and slid with a noise like every blackboard in existence being fingernail-violated off the building it capped, falling with terrible slowness to the surface below, throwing up a huge cloud of dust and debris.
"What's going on?" Clara asked faintly.
"Ah, well…yes," the Doctor coughed delicately, checking his screwdriver's reading of the air around them and wincing at what he saw there. "I do appear to be about a week later than I anticipated."
"Gahhhhh!" Strax said, shaking in fury. Just as Clara thought the little alien was about to lose what remained of his temper, he turned on his heel and blasted a few stray volleys of plasma into the air.
"But…" Clara began.
"Sssh, boy!" Strax motioned for silence with a hand in the air. He seemed to be listening-
Thump. Thump, thump. Thump…thump.
Five little objects had fallen from the skies, the closest not ten feet from where they stood. Clara saw tiny, chitinous legs convulsively jerking for a moment before stopping. Plasma smoke curled from the body. It looked like a spider crossed with a wasp crossed with something you'd imagine crawling up your bed to get you if you were both a howling arachnophobe and a stonking great masochist.
Those volleys hadn't been so stray after all, she realised.
"Strax," the Doctor reprimanded harshly, "if you don't stop killing things I am going to have to rethink your TARDIS privileges, do you hear me?"
"I'm sorry Doctor," Strax replied, still visibly annoyed, "would you have preferred I let the Strikkomites alight on your boy's head and use their feeding tubes to ingest his brain matter?"
"Well…" the Doctor paused, "…just try to use more non-lethal methods of obliteration if possible."
"Tcchhhh," Strax muttered in disgust, marching off to a nearby rise, presumably to get a better view of the ruins of his homeworld.
Clara tugged urgently on the Doctor's coat.
"Yes, I thought you'd have questions," he said mildly, and indicated the expanse around them with an airy sweep of the arm. "Fascinating race, the Sontarans. Entirely dedicated to war and to relentless self-improvement. Every fourth generation of clones they gather everyone to Sontar for the War Olympics…not their real name, of course, just the best the TARDIS translation circuit can come up with. Sort of a…smorgaswar," and he seemed pleased with himself at this, then a little ashamed at being pleased at naming so horrible a concept. "All-out war with one another, Sontaran against Sontaran, until only a few survivors are left, and since they're obviously the strongest, the next generations of clones are taken from them in the belief that this makes the Sontarans even stronger."
Incongruously pink lightning flashed. A wave of heat rolled over Clara from an explosion a few miles distant. At her feet, the debris had moved a little and as she glanced down, she saw two stumpy fingers attached to a hand attached to an arm attached to nothing at all.
"Right," she said.
The Doctor blew a contemplative gust of breath out of his cheeks. "Funny old universe innit?"
It was then that something rather unexpected happened. Inside Clara's mind, the jumble of emotions she was going through at bearing witness to the spectacle of the aftermath of Sontar's self-harming parted, and like a ray of light shining through clouds, knowledge descended upon her, insight taken directly from her immersion in the Doctor's timeline.
"You did this deliberately, didn't you."
He looked at her with that wounded animal look he always used when he'd been caught with his hand in the cookie jar of the cosmos. "Dunno what you m-"
"You knew if you arrived here on time Strax would participate and probably wouldn't survive. Odds of twenty-two billion to one or thereabouts, right? So you arrived late, knowing he'd be furious with you, but also knowing he'd be alive to be furious with you."
Strax was stalking back toward them. The Doctor moved close and spoke quickly and urgently. "Strax is a friend of mine but he's also a Sontaran and to a Sontaran, honour is life. If he suspects we kept him from this," and the Doctor looked around with an expression of genuine anger, "this madness deliberately, he will kill himself rather than submit to the dishonour, do you understand?"
Clara nodded. "Yes."
"Come, Doctor!" Strax called. "I've selected my preferred landing zone – scorch marks indicate an optimal chance of survival for perhaps as long as several hours! To the past we go!"
"Strax," the Doctor said gently, "I can't take us back to the beginning of the War Olympics. Crossing your own timestream. Very bad."
He's lying through his teeth, Clara realised with a chill creeping up her spine. The Doctor was telling whoppers the size of blue whales and he wasn't blinking an eyelid of effort at doing so. She knew why he was lying in this instance, of course, and found it impossible to argue with his motivations or justification for doing so, but even so…it was somehow horrifying to see how easily this man made a lie seem like the truth, and more than that, like a truth created especially for you.
"Four generations onward, then!" Strax demanded, not missing a beat. "By then Sontar will have been rebuilt by the victors of these magnificent Games and I can participate with my new brothers."
The Doctor looked stumped by this. Clearly he hadn't anticipated Strax to be so creative. Clara could see him scrabbling for another gift-wrapped truth, but before he got a chance to deliver it, they heard the moaning.
Strax was on guard in an instant, sweeping the pulse rifle around. Clara was slightly touched to see how he instinctively moved to protect both her and the Doctor. She could see why the Time Lord so wanted to protect this remarkable little Sontaran.
"Ten metres to the north," Strax said, his voice clipped and efficient.
"It sounds like someone's hurt…" Clara said, taking a step forward. A gentle hand on her shoulder stopped her in her tracks.
The Doctor pointed up at the crimson skies above. "Not exactly a welcoming atmosphere," he said dryly. "The TARDIS is extending a bubble of Earth-normal air, but she has her limits…" and he coughed and added in a very bad rapid stage whisper, "especiallywhereitcomestoyou. Ahem. Let's allow Strax to deal with this, shall we?"
Clara glanced back at the squat blue box, narrowing her eyes. From the day and hour she had first entered the magical interior of that impossible little craft, she had had the overwhelming sensation the TARDIS wanted to spit her out, as though the ship were a jealous cat rubbing against the legs of its master and hissing at her whenever she got too close.
I threw myself through time and space for your Master, she thought at the machine, not even feeling slightly ridiculous for doing so. The TARDIS was much more than just a machine; she was a living being, and for something so powerful and so ancient and so important to the Doctor to have taken a dislike to her…well, it hurt, not to put too fine a point on it.
Strax was returning to them, carrying the body of another Sontaran. It was slightly breathtaking to see how effortlessly Strax supported the weight of one of his kin with no more apparent effort than Clara would have used to lift a tin of beans. As he entered the bubble of Earth-normal air, he laid his fellow Sontaran out with surprising tenderness. Clara could see immediately that the other alien was in a bad way; battle armour cracked and open, oozing discharge from various body parts. The Doctor ran the screwdriver over the body, and caught Strax's eyes with a quick shake of his head.
"Identify yourself, soldier!" Strax barked.
The Sontaran's eyes opened. "I am-" he began, and then his strength faltered. The Doctor aimed the screwdriver at one of his particularly bad wounds, and it seemed to dial down the pain enough for the Sontaran to speak. "I am Stront, of the Five Thousandth Legion."
"Five Thousandth!" Strax said, in awe. For a moment Clara honestly thought he was going to bow.
"Sontar's elite. Winners of the last three Olympics. Favourites for this one," the Doctor murmured in Clara's direction.
"The Doctor," Stront said.
"Him?" Strax said with a hearty guffaw so hugely wooden animals could have sheltered in it two by two. "No. He's just a Doctor impersonator. I brought him along to the War Olympics so that we might have had sport with his corpse. I see the Games were glorious-!"
"Games?" Stront coughed.
Clara felt another chill pass through her. It was all going wrong, she realised.
"There were no games. The Doctor…he came. His TARDIS…different. Huge. He said he was going to give us our greatest wish…war. War with him. No more…hiding and running, he said."
Clara and Strax were staring at the Doctor. His expression was unreadable, but when he spoke, his lips hardly moved at all.
"He called himself The Doctor?"
Stront coughed blood once more. "He…was The Doctor!" Stront said. "Everything our stories said about him…everything our legends whispered of. The Storm. The Beast. He was all of those things…all of them and more. He cut the mighty Sontaran Empire to its knees and when we disgraced ourselves by begging for mercy, he looked on us with disgust and bade his TARDIS to rip our world aparrrrtttt…" and Stront twisted in agony, holding the wound at his side, his body seeming to shrink inside the combat armour. Clara touched the Doctor's arm – can't you do something? – but he met her eyes and she knew he had done all he could.
"It was glorious," Stront said, and died.
"Scan for life-forms. Use the TARDIS to boost your screwdriver's range," Strax commanded the Doctor. Clara watched as the Doctor obeyed, without comment, without question. He raised the screwdriver to his head, shook it, did so again. Then he sighed and sat back down.
"We're the only people left," he said, looking to the TARDIS, "old girl must have set us down near the survivor. She knew we'd need to see this."
Strax absorbed the Doctor's words, as Clara watched in horrified fascination. "But," she said, "there are other Sontarans out there, yes? You've got spaceships? Colony worlds?"
"The Games call us all home," Strax replied. "During War Olympiads all Sontaran offworld outposts are run by mechanised service units. It's a risk, and every time we lose many worlds, but it's one of the first trials of the new generations of clones – taking back our territories. There are few greater honours."
Though he spoke of his favourite topics of war and honour and death, his voice was flat and emotionless. Clara had seen Strax try to obliterate raindrops with an umbrella and relish every swing doing so. She worried what Stront's testimony that it had been the Doctor responsible for this act of genocide would lead to, but Strax did not seem angry, and when the Doctor laid a hand on his little friend's shoulder, the Sontaran did not shrink from it.
"I am the last of my people," Strax said heavily.
The Doctor slid into a half-crouch, the better to address an alien a little over half his considerable height. He took Strax by the shoulders and spoke to him with such sheer ferocity of conviction Clara was reminded the Doctor's truths were equally as powerful as his lies.
"Then it's lucky you're the best of your people, Strax," the Doctor said. "You can rebuild the Sontaran race. I will help you do this, I swear it."
"Rebuild? A race of war-obsessed soldiers bent on nothing less than universal conquest, and your personal destruction as a consequence?" Strax asked the Doctor.
"You're the last Sontaran. They will be in your image now," the Doctor said gently.
"A race of nurses!" Strax spluttered.
"A race who can change," the Doctor returned. "You were a mindless warrior once, Strax. Since then you've been a nurse, a butler, and for a brief and unfortunate period, a burlesque dancer. For someone belonging to a race ordered to shoot me on sight and blow up the planet, you've done a pretty poor job of both."
"I was getting around to it," Strax muttered, and for a moment it took all Clara had not to hug him.
"Come with me," the Doctor said.
"I…cannot, there is so much work…the cloning process…" Strax said helplessly. "My place is here."
"Your place is by my side. I'm going to find the person who did this," the Doctor said, "and I'm going to look them in the eye and ask them why. And then I'm going to let you do the same."
Clara looked from Strax to the Doctor. A moment of understanding was passing between the two men, one that she wasn't sure she particularly liked the look of.
"Where are we going?" she asked, as they left a ruined Sontar behind and re-entered the TARDIS.
The Doctor smiled humourlessly. "I have the sudden urge," he said, "to spoil myself..."