"This is the stupidest idea ever," Neytiri hissed to Jake as they followed the Doctor to the teleportation plant outside Fe'nantang. "He's going to get himself killed, and leave us stuck back where we started. Why don't we just attack them like we did before?"
They were sneaking around, trying to make it so that the Doctor didn't know they were following him. Neytiri was certain she could have succeeded if she'd gone alone, but Jake, while being both brave and heroic, was certainly not subtle. With the amount of noise they were making, she was surprised the Doctor didn't already know they were there.
"He said we should get as much knowledge as we can before we attack. He did something back at the Tree of Souls—something to do with Grace, I think—and he said that because of that we'd only get one good strike at this new group of soldiers and we need to make it count."
"That makes no sense," said Neytiri.
"Actually, it does," said the Doctor, loudly, from several feet in front of them. "He's just not doing a very good job of explaining it." He turned around, and gestured towards them. "Well, are you two just going to stand there all day, or are you going to do this properly and follow me?"
Neytiri scowled. "I knew you wouldn't be any good at sneaking up," she said to Jake.
"Not his fault," said the Doctor, digging out his sonic screwdriver. "I blame his inferior biology. Not used to dense atmospheric pressures."
He buzzed the sonic screwdriver, and in a flash of light, they were somewhere else. Jake had expected them to appear at Hell's Gate or maybe even inside the compound, but instead, they seemed to be in the middle of a completely unfamiliar piece of forest. He looked around. "Where are we?"
"Other side of the planet," said the Doctor. "Sorry. Had to make a stopover first."
He darted over to something that was clustered by a large tree. It was covered with vines and woodsprites, and the various different bits of fauna surrounding it all seemed to lean in, as if wanting to touch it themselves. But underneath all that was something that Jake confessed he hadn't expected to see in the middle of the Pandoran wilderness.
"It's… one of those things," he sputtered. "That they used in England two hundred years ago or something. With the phones." He blinked. "It's got English writing on it!"
The Doctor seemed to take no notice, instead focusing all his attention on the blue box. He gave it an affectionate pat. "How are you doing, old girl?" he asked. "Had a nice chat with our young lady while I've been gone?" He fished a small, metal key out of his pocket, stuck it in the lock, and opened the door.
Jake was still sputtering, but Neytiri was trying to work things out. She crept towards it. It was blue—the same blue color as her skin, and was about the same height as she was. She touched the outside, and felt something warm tingle around the tips of her fingers—like the Tree of Souls. She wondered if this blue box was just like the tree—not really made of wood at all, and bigger on the inside.
Was this the legendary Tardis from the Songs of Never?
The Doctor darted out again, carrying the device that humans wore across their face when they were walking along the surface of the planet. He waved it over at Jake. "Look familiar?"
"That's an exopack!" said Jake, who hadn't yet lost his completely baffled sputtering tone of voice. "But it's purple!"
"Good," said the Doctor. "Right century, then. Well, I say right century. Actually picked this up in the 34th century at a museum gift shop. But they said it was a perfect replica."
"You haven't had any trouble breathing so far," Neytiri pointed out.
"Yeah," said the Doctor, locking the door to his blue box. "But they don't need to know that. Best to let them think I'm human until I work out what's really going on." He strapped the exopack on, and did up the breathing mask. "Ugh!" he said. "Smells like Uligen Minor. I hate Uligen Minor."
He turned to Neytiri. "Right, end of the line for you two. Want to make sure they don't know I have backup on the way. Here." He handed Neytiri the remains of the radio he'd been fiddling with earlier that morning. "When that beeps, call in the cavalry. The teleports won't work without me, so you'll have to fly in. Just remember: the state of grace circuits are now active, so any weaponry more sophisticated than bows and arrows won't work."
"That doesn't make any sense," said Jake. "And I still don't get what Grace has to do with anything."
The Doctor gave him that familiar look. "You wouldn't, by any chance, happen to be related to a Ricky Smith?"
Jake stared blankly at him. The Doctor sighed. "Never mind. Just… don't do anything without clearing it with her first," he said, pointing at Neytiri.
"But…" said Jake, and then the world went white, and they were back outside of Fe'nantang, and the Doctor was gone.
It wasn't actually that hard to get arrested. The Doctor was really very good at causing a nuisance. Of course, since the entire rest of the base was under lockdown, they didn't even bother to lock him up in a real prison cell. Instead, they just shut him up in what looked like it had once been some sort of scientific laboratory.
There, he discovered a small group of humans who were talking quietly amongst themselves. One of them had a voice he recognized.
"You must be Norm," said the Doctor, bounding over to him. He offered his hand forward, grinning happily. "I'm the Doctor. Lovely to finally meet you in person."
Norm seemed a little freaked out by this. He looked the Doctor over a few times. "But you're… I mean, you look…"
"Perfectly human and certainly not here to cause trouble," said the Doctor, giving him a little wink. Then he dove forward and swept him into a seemingly impulsive embrace, which Norm was feeling completely uncomfortable with until he heard the Doctor whispering in his ear, "Have they noticed that the guns don't work, yet?"
"No," said Norm, suddenly understanding the man's bizarre and inexplicable behavior.
The Doctor pulled out of the embrace. "Good man," he said. Then he bound over to the abandoned work station. "Right," he said, loud enough to make sure that all the armed guards around could hear him. "Now, far as I can work out, this whole mess is over the mining rights to something called unobtainium. But that's just your basic run-of-the-mill quazi-crystalline structure containing a fivefold molecular symmetry with built in magnetic voids. So, as they say, why mine the gold when you've got an alchemist."
He looked over at the armed guards, who were trying to look disinterested. "Blimey, talk about the military mind." He bounded over, and then started mixing things together, hooking up bits and bobs to build the machinery that would produce this useless material that had the humans so fascinated. Of course, if he understood the structure of Earth-based corporations, the people making the decisions probably wouldn't be able to tell that his 'unobtainium' was completely worthless, but that would just play right into his hands, then, wouldn't it?
Norm was gawping at him. "You mean while the RDA has been raising a small army to mine this stuff, we could have just stayed at home and mass produced it in a lab?"
"Oh, yeah," lied the Doctor. "Course, you need a genius like me to do it, but once you work it out, easy as pie. Good thing, pie. Apple pie, especially. I like apples. Particularly the ones you get in the fall just as the leaves are turning all those different colors." The Doctor kept up the ramble, but he was no longer paying attention to the words that were coming out of his mouth. He was mainly hoping to distract the guards from the fact that he was cobbling together a piece of technology that was several centuries before its time.
And then, ta da! There it was. One piece of totally worthless (and completely obtainable) unobtainium. Stripped of everything that could actually be remotely useful without time travel technology, but still resembling that shiny metallic rock he'd used to hide Eywa away during the war. By now the guards had dropped all pretence of ignoring him and were openly gawping. He tossed the rock to one of the guards. "There you go, big guy. Pay your way home."
And sure enough, after that, it was only a matter of time before he got to see the big cheese—a Mr. Clarence, not that the name meant anything to him. So far the entire plan seemed to be going swimmingly. Now he just had to play dumb and let the villain talk so that he could work out how much they actually knew.
He knew the big cheese was human the moment he walked through the door. He'd always been quite good at identifying species, even without waving the sonic screwdriver around. Which meant this lot had to be the bumbling humans variety. Good. All he had to do now was to convince them that they were messing with things they didn't understand, then let them all pack up and go home. Or maybe, with his demonstration in the lab, they'd think they had the formula for financial success in their pockets, and they'd go home anyways.
"Uligen Minor," said Clarence.
The Doctor froze. "Beg pardon?" he said, in what he hoped was a clueless voice.
"On your exopack," said Clarence. "It looks like a normal pack, but if you look carefully at the bottom, it says, 'made in Uligen Minor'."
"Ah," said the Doctor.
"And there is no Uligen Minor," said Clarence. "I've checked."
"Um," said the Doctor, scratching the back of his head. "It's new?"
"Or maybe," Clarence continued, "the reason I haven't heard of Uligen Minor is because it hasn't been discovered yet. Because it's from the future." He looked up at the Doctor, and smiled. "And that would make you the Doctor."
"Ah," said the Doctor. He thrust his hands into his pockets, thumbing the settings on his sonic screwdriver that would send the signal to Jake and Neytiri. "There are many things about this that are not good."
"My boss told me about you, Doctor," said Clarence. "Some kind of time and space traveler. Defender of the innocent. A genius in his own right. But if you really are the Doctor, then you know what this thing is that we're looking for. You can tell us where it's buried, and you can show us how to use it."
The armed guards came over and pointed their weapons at the Doctor's head. The Doctor's mind was racing, trying to work everything out, trying to determine how best to play the situation to get the information he needed.
"Bit heavy handed for a treasure hunt," said the Doctor, taking his hands out of his pockets, and putting them up in the traditional sign of surrender. "Ship full of soldiers. Not your conventional mining group, is it?"
"Up until a year ago, this venture was just about the unobtainium," Clarence said. "But then we got this report from Jake Sully, about the Songs of Never that are sung on this world. And it took us a while, but with some help from Torchwood, we worked out what these Songs of Never were really about. A Time Walker who buried a secret treasure beneath the surface of Pandora. Something powerful, something he wanted to keep out of a 'war that never happened'. Something that could give its wielder ultimate power over creation."
"Something you really, really don't want to touch," said the Doctor. "You called this planet Pandora, so take your own advice. Once you open this box, you're never going to be able to close it again. Go away now, and be grateful you've escaped with your lives."
"We know it's dangerous," said Clarence. "My boss may be many things, but he is certainly not an idiot. The RDA trusts its scientists with a lot, but with something like this? Hardly prudent. We were just here to take pot shots at the Na'vi, but now that you've shown up, we can finally get what we really want."
"I'm not going to help you," said the Doctor. "Worse beings than you have tried to make me."
"Thing is, you don't really have any choice in the matter," said Clarence. He nodded at the two guards, who advanced on the Doctor. The Doctor was about to run for it, when something slammed into the back of his head.
"I think it's time you met my boss, Doctor," said Clarence, as the world around him went dark.
