Thanks to Isis and Spring for beta reading.
The Planet on its Side, Chapter 4
Alex woke up, still on the floor, with her head resting on the Doctor's leg. He had tucked a corner of his coat around her and was sitting with his back against the wall, legs crossed and sticking straight out in front of him. Little rectangular palmtops lay next to him in a neat pile. She sat up, frankly embarrassed to be dozing in the middle of an emergency. Around her, people were upholstering themselves with layers of pants, shirts, and coats. Carity and a little boy she hadn't noticed before, a child of about six, were ripping paper out of a three ring binder and wadding it up, then tossing the wads onto a pile.
Hannes walked over to the Doctor and Alex. "Having a nice rest, are we?" His voice was casual, but there was an undercurrent of resentment underneath it, as though it was unseemly for the Doctor to be going calmly about his business when there was a crisis evolving.
The Doctor smiled and finished tapping buttons on a palmtop, then set it gently atop the pile. "All finished," he said, standing and brushing his coat into place. He helped Alex to her feet. "These are for you," he added to Hannes, passing him a gunmetal gray disk and a small silver key. "I've programmed the current coordinates of the Tardis into each palmtop, but this device will give you a bit more precision and will correct itself if she moves again. You'll need a key to get in, in case we get separated. You and I, and Lila and Alex will be able to open the doors."
"Perhaps the child's key could be given to one of the adults?" Hannes suggested.
"Not a key. Telepathic recognition circuit. Nontransferrable, I'm afraid. Shall I give you a hand with the sleds?"
Hannes nodded to the Doctor, then turned from him to Alex. "Lila and Carity will help you get dressed. Take that paper and stuff it in between your two layers of pants. There's an extra pair of boots for you. They're a bit big for you, so try to get them on over your shoes if you can." He paused again, surveying the bustling activity in the shelter. "The ice is turning to snow. Wind speed is stable at fifty klicks. We need to be off within the half hour, if we hope find our way out there."
Alex sat down next to Carity and the little boy, and found the pair of snow boots sitting next to the pile of paper. They were only a couple of sizes too big, but her shoes wouldn't quite fit inside. She kicked them off, then pulled on an enormous pair of socks that had been stuffed into the top of one of the boots. With three pairs of socks on, the boots might just fit. She smoothed out her socks to make sure she wouldn't be walking on wrinkles, then pulled on the boots, taking the time to fasten them securely and make sure her pants bottoms were tucked inside. "Snows a lot where I come from, too," she remarked to Carity. "Not this much, of course." She stood up to stomp in the boots, then reached for a handful of wadded paper."
"Where's that?" Carity asked. Her bottom half was puffed out with paper already. She was busy putting layer after layer of socks on the little boy's feet.
"Kenosha, Wisconsin," At Carity's blank look, she clarified, "Earth."
"You're from Old Earth?"
"I told you I'm from way uptime. I'm from before humans had colonies on other worlds." Stuff, stuff, stomp, stomp. She gathered her shoes and tucked them into her backpack.
"You are ancient!" Carity said, sounding suitably impressed for a change. "What's it like?" She stood the little boy up and pulled a large sweatshirt over his head. He stood patiently while she rolled the sleeves up until his fingers poked out.
With wads of paper down her pants, Alex walked even more awkwardly than usual. At least everyone else would be walking like snowmen, too. "We've only been to the moon. Aliens come by sometimes, but people aren't sure whether they're real or not."
Lila bustled over with a bundle. "I found coats for each of you in the emergency supply kit." She stuffed the little boy into his coat first, using a belt to tie it up so he wouldn't trip on it, then helped Carity on with hers and handed her gloves and a hat. "Alex, can you get into this yourself?"
"Yeah." She caught the coat as it was tossed to her and put it on, then took it back off, rolled up the sleeves, zipped it up halfway, and stepped back into it. It was huge, but the modifications made it wearable. She pulled on her hat. She had a little trouble when it came to getting the backpack on over the bulky coat.
"I'll take it for you," Carity said, putting it on and cinching up the straps. "Oh, it's not heavy at all!"
"It's got one of those manifold thingies in it," Alex explained.
"Cool."
They made their way to the stairs, where everyone was gathering as soon as they had dressed. Hannes stood on the second step so everyone could see him. "It's too dangerous to tie ourselves together. If one person falls, he could bring down the whole group, but we are all going to stay together," he said. "Each of you has the coordinates to the Doctor's ship on your palmtops, but we can't trust the ground based tracking beacons to survive much longer, so don't count on them and get careless. The Doctor will be in front. Lila, you will be with the little girl, Alex, at the rear. We've got the babies strapped to their mothers. Denny will have to ride on the sled, he's too big to carry and too small to walk. That makes six groups of three. Carity, Alex, and Remy should have an adult on each side. Keep track of your neighbors on each side, in front and in back."
The Doctor took Hannes' place. "My ship looks like a blue wooden rectangular prism approximately one point five meters square in footprint and a little more than two meters in height. Why is not important, it just does." He paused, rubbing his hands together. They had managed to convince him to button his coat and put on a hat, but he had made no other concessions to the cold. "Think of this as an adventure. Allons y!" He bolted up the stairs and threw the door open.
Alex had to wait at the bottom of the stairs until everyone had filed out of the building. The door they had gone in by was gone, replaced by a flat rectangle of twilight. She followed Lila up and out. Van pulled out a sturdy flashlight and flicked it on. A neat line of people walking three abreast trailed away in the direction of the TARDIS, their hats and shoulders already dusted with snow. Fat white flakes spun and dipped in the flashlight beams, so thick it was difficult to see more than a few feet in front of her. She stood, flanked by Lila and Van, on a small plateau amid the dips and swells of open prairie strewn with a few angular shapes poking out of the handsbreadth of snow already on the ground. The buildings were entirely gone. They took their place at the back of the line, Alex expecting to hear their footsteps crunching as they walked, but all sound was muffled, swallowed up in the snow. Even the wind whipping at the bare skin of her cheeks was all but soundless.
This wasn't going to be so bad, she thought. They had to keep their heads down, both because of the wind and because of the chance of stepping on debris, but the ground was fairly level. The line of people stretched out before her like bobbing lanterns in twilight. The going was slow, but at this rate it would only be an hour until they reached the TARDIS, maybe a little more. The head of the line, sensed more than seen, dropped out of sight one row at a time in front of her.
She skidded down the steep slope at the edge of the plateau, waving off help from Van with her coat covered arms. The sleeves had unrolled, leaving her hands buried six inches inside the coat sleeves, but it was warmer that way anyway, and it didn't really matter if she looked like a penguin. The wind picked up again, slicing through layers of pants and paper. She resisted the urge to crouch down in the snow and fought her way forward. The line stretched out more now, it's front end visible only as a shining patch in the distance. They stopped moving forward. She stood stiff in the wind, waiting for everyone to start moving again.
"You doing all right, squeak?" Van said. The snow on his eyebrows made him look like an old man.
"I'm fine," Alex said. "Can you see?"
"Not much," Van admitted. "I'm just following the backs right in front of me."
"I'm following the Doctor. Can you see him way up there?" She pointed in his direction.
Lila answered her. "Alex, I can barely see the people right in front of us."
"Close your eyes and try. He's shining brighter than I've ever seen him, like a light house. I think he wants to be seen."
"I'm sorry, honey, I wouldn't even know how to look." Lila patted her on the back of her heavy coat once, then snatched her hand back. "We'll just have to follow you. You should be keeping track of where the ship is, not just following the Doctor."
"Head count!" came a shout from ahead of them. They each shouted their names, then the line began, slowly, to move again.
Alex took a moment to close her eyes and feel, or look, for the line that connected her to the Tardis. There it was, a glowing strand, straight as a laser beam. She felt her way forward in the deepening blue gloom, putting one foot forward, testing the footing for holes and loose snow, planting the foot, stepping with the next. She'd become so used to not trusting her footing that alone among Lila and Van beside her, and Gray, Mallena, and Carity just ahead of them, she had not yet fallen. Flashlights bobbed at waist height, illuminating flickering hordes of snowflakes. Mindlight sparkled a little higher, like candlelight refracting through crystal. The warmth seeped out of her clothes.
The wind shifted. The snow became, impossibly, heavier. Alex was caught by a gust that threw her off balance and into Lila. They tumbled together down a steep incline, Alex having to shield hard enough she lost track of the TARDIS, and hung up in a clump of snow covered brush. Lila said something, but Alex couldn't hear her over the sudden howling. She clapped her hands to her ears and shook her head. Lila tried to stand, but crouched back down by where Alex lay in a small hollow, wrapping her arms over her head. "Stay down!" she yelled, this time just audibly over the roar of the wind. Tornadoes were impossible in air this cold, Alex thought, at least, she hoped they were. She curled into as tight a ball as she could to wait out the sudden squall, taking advantage of her inactivity to pick up the TARDIS's thread again and try to find the Doctor, still far ahead and also unmoving.
Alex lay balled up next to Lila in their tiny shelter for ages, not daring to check her watch because it would mean pulling her hand out of the protection of her long coat sleeve. The thread in her mind strained and twisted suddenly, settling after several long seconds in a different location than it had been in before. It hadn't moved much, maybe a few meters, as if it had fallen into a kettle hole, but it would be enough to cause anyone relying only on the coordinates programmed into a palmtop to miss it entirely. She cast around her, counting heads, and could find only six or eight, not counting the Doctor. She and Lila had two of only four reliable ways of finding the TARDIS. That was, if the squall died down before they were all buried.
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