Short but sweet. Please review. :-)
Chapter 9
The Doctor and Yorlo stood, feet apart, arms crossed over their chests, listening intently. Martha sat on the jump seat.
"Well, to tell you the truth, my story actually begins a few hundred rotations before the Azu/Gufere Exodus," Safiro corrected.
"That's about... what, a decade, in human terms?" the Doctor asked.
"Maybe a bit more," said Safiro. "But yes, thereabouts. Mind you, on Azu and Gufere we live at least five times longer than humans."
"Of course," said the Doctor.
"I was fresh out of the Academy, and I had what one might call wanderlust. I wanted to see everything - stars, planets, different peoples and creatures, you name it. So, a few friends and I decided to take an extended holiday - sort of indefinitely. We figured we'd come back home if and when it suited us.
"Actually, I don't really know what happened to them; there were five of us, and we parted ways after about a hundred rotations because... well, on the surface it was a squabble over whether to go snow-shoeing in the Touchfall Mountains of Tocabatom or hydroplaning in the sulfur lake on Butrialios VI. Deep down, I now understand, it was the result of that insidious creature that seeps into your life when you spend too much time with the same folks. We'd grown apart; no longer wanted the same things.
"As far as I knew, they continued to travel. One of my friends actually got a job as a tour guide to one of the space hoppers that takes off from Butrialios! Right from the sulfur lake! After that gig ended, I have no clue. But I digress.
"The point is, I was travelling alone after all those years of being with my friends. I was earning my keep working in a watering hole in the Recesh Galaxy where I had decided to stay temporarily, and I received a call on my portable comm unit. The planet was in peril. It was an all-call, a distress signal that went out to anyone who was off-world at the time."
"Was the call asking you to come home and help?" the Doctor growled.
"Yes, it was."
"Why would citizens of a planet about to be swallowed in a sea of lava call out and ask anyone to come home? Wouldn't it be more like, FYI, we're all in trouble. Stay where you are, since there's not much you can do without getting killed?" asked Martha.
"Exactly," the Doctor responded, looking sideways at Martha.
"The call hadn't come from Azu," said Safiro. "At least not directly. It had come from a completely different planet, and had been bounced off of Azu, to make it seem as though it had come from home."
"Oliris," Martha sighed. "Okay, I'm getting it now." After a beat, she asked, "Wait, are you telling me that Oliris somehow orchestrated a volcano eruption en masse , all over the planet?"
"No," Safiro said. "They did not orchestrate it, but they did take advantage of it. And they did orchestrate the ruse that brought all the off-worlders back to try and meet the space buses at particular coordinates to ease the load. They told us they could get more citizens to safety if we flew in with our transporters, especially the 960 Model transporters, the big ones."
"So what, were the Olirans waiting on an asteroid with a butterfly net?" she wanted to know.
"Nope. They transmatted us in, amid the chaos. There was so much traffic, no-one even noticed they were there," Safiro said sadly, remembering.
"Us?" asked Martha. "You were captured?"
"I was," he answered. "Along with about a dozen other Azuros Beasts, including some of my friends with whom I had started out travelling all those years ago. We were all flying about the orbit of Azu in those final minutes before planetfall, all having fallen victim to the fake distress call. Martha, you were commenting on the fact that we are educated, but then some of us are sold off... well, it all turned out to be futile in this case because Oliris thought they could use the commotion to steal us away, no one would notice, and they would be able to stop paying for the labour. I mean, not that they pay anyone once they're inside the carnival, but they do buy their slaves from time to time."
Martha stood up and took two steps forward. "Am I hearing you correctly? You were a slave on Oliris?"
"Yes, technically."
"At the Pecclates Carnival?"
"Yes."
"We now have word from the horse's mouth that this thing is real," she said to the Doctor.
But he was somewhere else. He didn't even shift his eyes to look at her. She searched him for a moment, until Safiro began to speak again.
"I'll assume that's your way of saying that you now have proof positive from someone who was there," he chuckled. "And I was, indeed, there. But only for a few hours."
"A few hours?" she asked.
"Yes, hours. Just after we arrived, the psychic barrier went offline. I don't know whether it caught a virus or malfunctioned at the mechanical level, or what. It was only down for three minutes, but we took advantage of the situation, just as they had. We Azuros communicated very quickly to each other that we needed to escape in the distracted chaos. And we did. All carnival officials went instantly to deal with the problem of putting the psychic barrier back up, and a bunch of us were able to slip out. I won't say we were unnoticed, but... well, we got out."
"Doctor, did you hear that?" she asked, trying to get through once again, though noticed a second time that his mind was not on the task at-hand. "Doctor, he's talking about the psychic barrier going down - are you... hello?"
"We were not recaptured because we were never on the official registry. They had not had time to record our DNA or energy stamps. We got off clean," Safiro continued.
Martha said, "Safiro, you'll have to excuse me a moment, the Doctor has checked out."
"No, I haven't," the Doctor said, almost without moving his lips.
"Well then, will you please react?" Martha requested.
"Trust me, I am," he muttered.
She crossed her arms and studied him for a few moments. Then she said, "Safiro, I think that I'll need a minute or two to speak to the Doctor about what we've just heard. Is there any way we can get hold of you to talk again, if we need to? I mean, that is, if you are finished with your story for the time being."
"I am finished," Safiro said with some finality. "Do with this information as you will. As I've said, I've learned that Time Lords do great work, so I will assume... well, anyway, I'll leave you to it. I am leaving my call signature in the memory bank into which I am speaking. You can use it to trace me, should you have any further questions."
"Thank you," Martha said.
"You're very welcome."
At that point, the call seemed to go silent.
"The Time Lords did great work," the Doctor mused.
"What is your problem?" she wanted to know. "Did you hear anything he said about the planetfall? The barrier?"
"Yes, I heard all of it. I need to examine that painting," he responded.
"Excuse me?" said Yorlo, chiming in. Martha had all but forgotten he was there. He had not said a word, throughout the dialogue with the Azuros Beast. "That is what you got from this conversation?"
The Doctor, at last, turned his head to look at Yorlo. "Forgive me, old friend, but you wouldn't understand. This is something for Martha and me to deal with."
"It is?" she asked. "Mind telling me what that something is?"
"Set the TARDIS coordinates to random and I'll show you."
