Hello again lovely readers. A quiet week at work = so much more time to write. So enjoy!
Disclaimer: I own none of the Doctor Who franchise, nor am I making any money here, unless you count the minimum wage my boss is paying me to leave my laptop from time to time and serve customers.
THE HUNTING
"I'd ask you to identify yourself," The Doctor told the immobilized android shrugging, but I already know you're a repair droid. So let's skip ahead to the bonus round shall we? What ship are you from?"
Gears whirred and the ticking changed cadence, but the robotic creature didn't answer.
"Okay, then what are you doing here?" Martha asked risking a step closer to it.
The clockwork droid looked (as much as things without faces can look) from The Doctor to Martha.
"Incompatible," it stated flatly.
"What? ...What do you mean ... 'incompatible'?"
The Doctor put a hand on her shoulder, but the way he listed a little unsteadily told her it was more for his support than hers, "It means with its ship. Isn't that right?"
The droid didn't answer.
"Its ship?" Casanova asked incredulously, "Are these some kind of... nautical machines... something for manning a sailing vessel? ..."
"Welllll..."The Doctor paused. "Actually that's pretty close. They're meant to be crew members at any rate; specializing in repairs... scavenging parts... that sort of thing."
"Parts?..." a pretty grim and awful picture was just on the verge of forming in Martha's mind.
The droid turned its head jerkily in Casanova's direction.
"Compatible," it intoned.
"Compatible?" Francesca repeated fearfully.
More clicking and whirring accompanied a slight inclination of the head toward Francesca.
"Compatible."
Cassanova put an arm around Francesca who was trembling. "Tell us what you mean by this," he demanded.
The clockwork droid straightened up suddenly in full control of its formerly seemingly rusted over joints. But instead of unleashing its circular saw or advancing on them, it simply faced Casanova like an obedient soldier.
"Ship model T3X-7B349 is missing a trefoil adapter coil, ocular sonic graduator, ventricle fluctuation unit, and centralized processing unit centre. You are compatible." The droid paused, "But incomplete."
"It listened to you..." The Doctor marvelled. "Just like her...they listened to her too..." he murmured.
Frowning, Martha put an unobtrusive arm around his waist to take a little more of his increasingly unsteady weight.
"What do you mean by incomplete?" Casanova persisted.
"You are incomplete," The droid repeated.
"Oh, right..." The Doctor let out a quiet giddy laugh that seemed out of place enough for even Francesca and Casanova to look at him with a little concern. If there were eyes built into that smooth glass head of the droid's Martha was pretty sure it would have been staring at The Time Lord too.
"Happy Birthday! Welllll not yet technically, but you have a birthday coming up don't you Signor Casanova?- No wait! Don't tell me! What year is this... 17... 17..." The Doctor frowned.
"1776," Francesca supplied.
"Right! January 1776 So... in... 2 days, that's January 3rd," he explained as if it was some impressive mathematical feat, "That's your 50th birthday!"
"Um... well, yes," Casanova muttered, possibly irritated because as a world-famous womanizer he didn't appreciate his oncoming old-age heralded, or possibly because The Doctor was drawing conclusions that no one else in the room seemed to be following the importance of at all.
"Brilliant!" The Doctor grinned glassily, "a 50 year old ship and a 50 year old brain!"
And with that, The Time Lord promptly fainted. Martha only just managed to catch him before he collided with the floor, lowering him more gently.
"Bloody brilliant," she muttered, taking off her cloak to pillow his head against the cold floor.
"Is he alright?" Francesca asked kneeling next to her.
"Yeah," Martha sighed, "He's just... he'll be fine," she muttered, tired of trying to convince herself.
Casanova cleared his throat, "Um... ladies..."
The droids lying nearby chose this very convenient moment to start to tick again and try to get to their feet. The one still standing activated its saw again and started to advance on them. They seemed intent on Francesca.
Martha fumbled for the sonic screwdriver and Casanova rushed to put himself between the women, the unconscious Doctor, and the droids.
What setting had she used before?...
Hoping for the best, Martha chose a random one and aimed.
The saws began to whir faster.
Just then, there was a loud shout from the doors.
"Stop! In the name of The City watch!"
Everyone, including the droids, turned to look, and found Captain Batista, in plain clothes but with his rapier drawn, standing in the doorway.
One of the droids clanked forwards and sized him up.
"I am a Captain of the City Watch," Batista boomed, "And you men will throw down your weapons sirs or-"
Apparently the good captain had just noticed that one of the "men" had a head full of gears.
"What in God's name..."
"Incompatible," The Droid droned, then: "You will be processed."
It advanced and Batista lunged forward, ramming his rapier into the well dressed android. A few sparks flew, and it stopped, but only long enough for Batista to dart out of the way when the droid, still with a rapier embedded in the circuitry of its chest, lunged for him.
"Come on..." Martha pleaded with the uncooperative sonic screwdriver, as the droids backed them into a corner and herded Batista towards them as well.
Suddenly, there was a light fizzing sound in the air, and six or seven more clockwork attackers materialized out of thin air.
In sheer desperation at this point, Martha pressed buttons at random and tried again. No effect.
"Doctor!" she pleaded with the unconscious alien. "I need you! I need you to wake up!"
More fizzes, punctuated the appearance of five or six more droids and Martha found herself wondering how her family would ever find out what had happened to her if she met her untimely end stuck in 18th century Venice, when The Doctor suddenly sat up and grabbed the sonic screwdriver from her and aimed it at the materializing droids. The effect was immediate. Had she ever heard the sound of a can of coke being opened in reverse, Martha would have said that was the noise the droids disappeared with. All except for the lone clockwork droid they'd been questioning before, the same one Batista had skewered. It simply fell over.
The Doctor looked down at the sonic screwdriver in his hand, genuinely surprised, "It reversed the polarity of the teleport..."
"What... what the bloody hell does that mean?" Batista asked shakily, and what were those... things?"
The Doctor was still blinking at his sonic screwdriver as if he hadn't heard.
The captain looked at Francesca and Casanova, "Lady Valeri, are you hurt?"
"No, cousin; thank you," Francesca said dusting herself off and straightening her dress,
"Cousin?!" Casanova looked from Francesca to Batista.
"Yes," he said, taking a protective step towards Francesca, "Her parents, my aunt and uncle, asked that I seek her out when it was found she was missing this morning. They feared she'd been taken by the attackers from the ball last night, but as I suspected, it was more likely she'd been lured away-"
"That's unfair..." complained Francesca.
"-by a certain undesirable gentleman of ill-repute."
"Doubly unfair," Casanova muttered.
Francesca crossed her arms indignantly, "I agreed to meet Giacomo here!"
"I find it disturbing that on two occasions," Batista continued, "involving these masked menaces, that I find you, Signor Casanova, at the scene."
"What are you implying sir?" Casanova asked voice smooth, but dangerously low.
"Excuse me!" Martha broke in exasperated, "I'm really sympathetic to... whatever's going on here... family quarrels, forbidden love and whatever else, but don't you think we have bigger problems?"
The three Venetians stopped to look at her where she stood, supporting The Doctor, who'd made it back to his feet, but was standing at this point, only with the help of his arm slung across Martha's shoulders.
"We're standing in a place that seconds ago was full of killer robots," she pointed out, "Does no one else think maybe we should find a safer place to talk about all this?"
"Robots?" Batista repeated.
"Androids. Clockwork droids..." The Doctor muttered faintly.
"Okay," she placated the sick Time Lord."Things that want to- "Martha sighed. She was pretty sure she was starting to put two and two together here but wasn't so sure she wanted to tell Batista or the other two just yet, "hurt us. I'm saying we should leave before those things come back."
In the end, they agreed to hire two gondolas: one to take Batista and Francesca back to her parent's manor, and the other to take Martha, Casanova, and The Doctor back to 'their accommodations' (The TARDIS). It occurred to Martha that showing Casanova the TARDIS, explaining any of this to him, might change history in some... non-specific but potentially-bad way, but all things considered, she wasn't sure she was up to saving the world with an out of commission Doctor and no help. Also, after the droids had taken such an interest in him, The TARDIS seemed like the safest place for Casanova... probably much safer than letting him go with Francesca back to her parents. So after piling the semi-alert Time Lord and the apparently de-activated clockwork droid into a gondola (at The Doctor's insistence), she'd told Casanova to come along.
When she first started travelling with The Doctor, she'd been afraid that to so much as step on the wrong bug could reverse history or put a big hole in time and space, until he'd explained it didn't quite work like that. The Time Lord had gone on to say something about space and time and physics that had for the most part gone over head, but it'd calmed her down enough to stop her worrying that she'd find the destruction of an entire alien evolutionary chain stuck to the bottom of her shoe every time they visited a new planet. Then again, there were some things you couldn't muck about with he'd told her; certain things in history were fixed points. She'd taken it for granted that The Doctor would warn her if she was about to cross any of those invisible lines, but at the moment, she had to rely on her ability to make it up as she went along, because The Time Lord's condition was definitely deteriorating.
As they skimmed along the now more populated canals of Venice, the aforementioned alien had apparently dozed off against her shoulder, her cloak wrapped around both of them. Trying not to disturb him too much, she discreetly checked his pulse and laid the back of her hand against his cheek to gauge his temperature. She noticed Casanova watching her with a look that was a little too knowing for her taste and she turned to look out at the passing scenery instead.
"Here," Martha told the gondolier as they drifted up beside the dock closest to the palace.
Casanova looked up, "I thought we were going back to the inn you are staying at Miss Jones..."
"It's kind of... um complicated," she told him, giving The Doctor a quick shake to rouse him. "Doctor."
The Time Lord blinked owlishly at her for a few seconds before giving her a small smile, "Hullo Martha Jones."
"We're back at the palace," she told him quietly, "and The TARDIS."
Casanova paid the gondolier and between him and Martha they managed to drag the clockwork droid ashore, wrapped in a canvas tarp, and help The Doctor on to dry land. With the assistance of a gardener's wheelbarrow, Casanova offered to transport the deactivated droid to the "doctors of the gendarmerie's mysterious accommodations'. Martha and The Doctor walked ahead a little, the alien now moving a bit more under his own steam but looking decidedly like death warmed over.
"We're almost there," she reassured him, and admittedly herself as they trekked across the expansive courtyard in search of the nook where they'd left The TARDIS. "We'll find something to help sort you out there , yeah?"
The Doctor gave her a wan nod but didn't say anything.
"So..." Martha glanced back at Casanova but the man looked lost in his own thoughts. "These droid things... when you say they're looking for parts for repairs... and they're taking people's... parts... it's for their ship isn't it? They're... they're using people for spare parts somehow..."
The Doctor looked up from the determined way he was watching his own feet and at Martha with genuine fondness, "You're a star Martha Jones," he said softly, "Very smart; always said so."
"And you've come across them before with," she hesitated, "with Rose?"
The Time Lord stopped suddenly and shut his eyes, putting his hand out to catch himself on a nearby garden wall.
"Doctor?"
He smiled faintly to himself, "I snogged Madame de Pompadour."
Martha frowned, "Um Doctor..."
"Yup," he grimaced, righting himself, " me n' the clockwork droids we go way back. But something's different this time. Can't put a finger on it but..."
They came to a familiar fountain and Martha breathed a sigh of relief. If she remembered right, The TARDIS was just around the corner next to-
The Doctor stopped so abruptly she just about walked right in to him.
At first she couldn't make sense of what she was seeing.
"No..." The Time Lord breathed, "Oh no."
Casanova rounded the bend and stopped behind them, "What's the matter my friends?"
"It's gone," Martha whispered, "How's that even possible?"
Where The TARDIS should have been, there was nothing but empty courtyard.
DWDWDWDWDW
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