A bit of an in-between chapter, this one. Hopefully it's to everyone's standards. Reviews appreciated etc. etc. Hopefully the amount of bold at the top isn't too much.
CHAPTER 9. A Very Unexpected Phone Call - 12 October 2010
"I can explain," Amy protested immediately, her voice trembling as she spoke. Uh oh uh oh.
"Gallifreyean, Amy," the Doctor answered. "Can't be sure no one's listening in on this."
"Got it," she replied, effortlessly switching to the innate Time Lord tongue. "As I was saying, I can explain."
"I look forward to the explanation. Right now though, there are more important things at hand."
Amy breathed a sigh of relief at being let off the hook – for now.
"Yeah, like the fact that I thought I had twenty-something hours to save ten billion people and it turns out that instead I have about thirteen."
"Like that. If your plan is to split up into several groups and try to disable the ship at different points, I don't think you have time for that now."
"How did you know that? You looking into my head?" Amy queried suspiciously. She got a chuckle in response.
"You're billions of miles away, Amy. Besides which, I'm the Doctor. It wasn't hard to work out what you'd try to do, given the number of people you brought along."
"Oooh, and aren't we all Mr Smarty-Pants today."
"Today and every day."
"So what's the plan, then? I'd rather not see ten billion people die. I like these people, you know."
"Agreed. Your best bet will be to come back and pick Rory and I up. He's not particularly pleased at you either, by the way." Amy swallowed. That was one conversation she would really rather avoid.
"I'm not sure this lot will take too kindly to me running away."
"We'll come back. We always come back." Amy was mildly surprised – but quite pleased – at the use of 'we'. Maybe I'm cut out for this after all.
She paused for a moment, thinking. "It'll take me a while to get back to the TARDIS."
"How long?"
She paused again, considering the distances, hiding spots and guard patterns that she'd seen along the way. "Two hours, maybe three. So that'll leave about ten or eleven hours before big blue star up yonder goes pop."
"That'll be enough."
"If you say so."
"You trust me, right?"
"Absolutely." There was no denying the conviction of her reply. "Wait," she said slowly, having just been struck by a rather obvious issue. "I don't know where you are. How am I meant to find you?"
"Purple striped switch on the third console panel, above the Orthogonality Distributor. Hard to miss. What was the label?"
He screwed up her face, concentrating. "Uhh... a bunch of letters, I think. LTD?"
"And what do you think LTD stands for?"
It took a second, and then it hit her. Her voice was barely audible when she answered. "Locate the Doctor?"
"Correct." The amusement and smugness coming through the speaker was almost unbearable. "One to keep it mind for the future, I suggest."
"Yes, sir."
"Oh goodness, please don't call me that. Last time people started referring to me as 'Sir' they tried to kill me not long afterwards. I didn't even know what I'd done wrong at that point."
Amy giggled.
"Alright. So, back to the TARDIS for a lift, then?"
"Yep. See you soon."
"And the same to you."
"Sir, you might want to hear this."
The leader of Them turned around to the radio operator, his pitiless eyes contemplating the young man. He better have a good reason to be disturbing me. Especially now that we are so close.
"Yes?"
"We picked up a stray communication to somewhere on this ship. Not on authorized frequencies."
The leader breathed deep. "So the stroyeteli are aboard?". The operator shook his head.
"No, sir. It was an FTL signal."
"Someone might have given them an FTL communicator," the leader pointed out.
"More than that sir. It was completely insecure, which is strange in itself, but then we tried listening to it. We only caught the last part." He held an earpiece for the leader to accept, which he took stiffly. He placed one in his ear and listened. The radio operator activated the recording.
Two voices, clear as day, came through the earpiece. One spoke with a deeper, throatier tone that was clearly masculine, whilst the other spoke in the high, flighty voice of a female. The leader wasn't thinking about that, however, because he was totally transfixed by the language that they were speaking in – which was most definitely not that of the stroyeteli. Even to a highly learned member of Them like himself, it was utterly, utterly alien. Flowing, graceful and ornate but so completely unlike any tongue he had ever heard that he didn't even know where to begin when trying to place it.
"What is that?"
The operator simply shook his head. "We've tried running every single translation algorithm we have, even some of the experimental ones, including the failures. None of them even came up with a potential suggestion, they just turned up blank. It's a strange coincidence, given all the odd things that have been happening around the ship in the last few hours." There had been multiple reports of computers going on the blink, lights failing for no apparent reason and even some minor explosions from electrical devices. The leader considered the news carefully, remaining silent for over a minute.
"Probably a stray signal floating through space for millions of years, or interference of some kind. But tell the Guard Chief to be extra careful around the critical areas of the ship." The operator bowed deeply and left to do his duty. The leader returned to his inspection of the majesty of deep space before him, his mind troubled.
A language so dead, so lost that no tongue currently living even remotely resembles it, being heard again...
As she'd predicted, none of Amy's comrades nor those on the communicator were best pleased with her proposed change in plan, nor the drastic change in circumstances.
"So having piloted us to a point where it will probably be too late to reach our destinations, you're going to leave us?" The General's voice seethed with quiet rage through the black earpiece.
"I will come back. I promise. But if you want to have any hope at all of saving your people, you have to let me do this."
"I don't see how two people will make that much difference."
"One of them is my fiancée-"
"I don't see how that will help," General Gordost interjected roughly, forgetting his natural politeness.
Amy paused before continuing. "The other is the Doctor."
A silence met her words, several seconds in length. "So you found him?" Gordost asked eventually in a quiet, far more level tone.
"He told me where he was. Well, not really, but he told me how to find him."
A sigh. "This is a lot of effort for two men."
"The Doctor is good as an army. Better, even. Trust me on this – he's a thousand times the Time Lord I am."
Silence. Please, please let me do this, she implored silently. After an age, the earpiece crackled into life again.
"Alright. But you're on your own."
"Fine by me."
"So she's safe?"
"Yes, yes, in a manner of speaking."
"In a manner of speaking?"
"On a ship filled with a quite a lot of very not nice people, Rory."
Rory sighed. "Why does this always seem to happen around you?"
The Doctor shrugged. "Dunno. Must be some kind of universal bad luck charm. Or maybe I'm just attracted to trouble."
Rory shook his head. I swear, Amy, I'm gonna kill you for this. After he made sure she was alright, of course.
They had returned to Nadezhda's shop yesterday along with Heviniye. The Doctor had immediately set to work creating a faster-than-light communicator. It took over one and a half Stroyet days, several aborted attempts, a spare dishwasher and all of Nadezhda's forks, but he had eventually managed to construct the communicator (which was almost his height) and give Amy a very unexpected phone call.
"So what now?" Heviniye asked.
"She's going to fly the TARDIS back here and pick us up."
"And then?"
"And then go back to the ship and sort this mess out."
"How long will that be?"
"Amy said two to three hours. Not much to do other than to wait." So they did, sitting tensely in the back garden, all too aware that every second that passed was a second closer to the end of the world.
Rory, however, wasn't thinking about this – there was something else very much on his mind. "Doctor," he spoke suddenly just after two hours had passed. "Can we talk?"
Surprisingly, Amy moved quite swiftly through the corridors. Unencumbered by the other soldiers, she darted efficiently between the shadows, relying on her telepathy and her sonic phone to evade and distract.
This is actually pretty easy, she thought, as she disabled another guard by remotely unscrewing a hanging lamp from the ceiling, causing it to fall on top of him. She darted swiftly around the corner and found herself back in the hallway which she recognised as being the same one that she had left at. Haha! Success!
Unfortunately, however, she had been forced to take a slightly different route from the one she had left it by, and the complete uniformity of the grey, steel doors on either side of the corridor made it near-impossible to tell which one was the correct one.
Ugh. Nothing for it but to try the doors, I guess. She moved to the first door, pressed her head against the door, trying to sense the presence of any people inside. When she found none, she pressed her sonic to the latch and activated it, gently opening the door. She peeked inside to find an empty store room, not too dissimilar to the one where the TARDIS was parked. Not the same, though. So let's try the next one, she thought, relocking the door.
She performed the procedure on the next steel door, finding a completely empty room – not even a chair was present, just walls and a floor. It was darkened, so Amy could quite tell the colour of the walls, but it wasn't important – this clearly wasn't it. The next door was another storeroom, similar but not identical to the first. Fourth was another empty darkened room.
Hmm... starting to notice a pattern now. Maybe I'll try one more, but otherwise I'll just skip every second door, she thought after checking another storeroom. She pressed her head to the next door, searching and failing to find the presence of anyone inside. She buzzed her sonic phone and the door slowly opened. She poked her head inside, and saw that it was another empty room – but this one was lit. The floor, walls and ceiling had all been painted the same colour – white. The purest, cleanest white.
Without warning, a wave of indescribable terror washed over her. Sheer unadulterated fear swelled within, filled every ounce of her being. Her face almost as white as the room within, her eyes as wide as they could possibly be, her twin heartbeats racing. She slammed the door shut and pressed her back against it, breathing in short, sharp gasps.
It's just a room, Amelia. Just... a room. It's not... not it. Don't think about it. Forget it.
She shook her head, taking in several deeper breaths to try and calm herself, resuming her task. She was now very careful to skip every second door.
The Doctor felt it too. It wasn't nearly as intense for him as it had been for the Time Lady, having a certain distant and muffled feel to it. It startled him, however, causing him to stiffen suddenly as he walked through the door back into the shop.
"Doctor?" Rory couldn't fail to notice his sudden change in demeanour. "What is it?"
The feeling having passed, the Doctor relaxed again, straightening his bow-tie as he entered. "Nothing. Just had a back spasm, that's all," he lied, still deeply unnerved. What in the name of all that is good... what was that? Was that... Amy? What on Gallifrey made her feel that?
Rory raised his eyebrows. "A back spasm. Right. I am a nurse, remember." The Doctor smiled and clapped the young man on the back.
"Gallifreyean back spasm. Special kind, very unpredictable and somewhat annoying. Now, you wanted to talk to me?" he asked, as the pair sat down.
"You said there was nothing going on between you and Amy. Had never been," Rory began bluntly.
"I did."
"Are you absolutely sure about that? You're not lying to me about it?"
He hesitated slightly. "Yes."
"Because last week when Amy and I were asleep, I had this dream of you and her."
The Doctor raised his eyebrows slightly. "And so?"
"Amy doesn't dream, Doctor. Not like you and me. Not any more, no hopes and fantasies there. All she has is memories and the odd nightmare."
"And you know this... how?" the Doctor asked. "Oh... hang on. Ah. Touch telepathy. She's inadvertently giving you her dreams."
"And every single one of them is of something I know happened in her past. Some of them perfect to the last detail. Never anything weird or surreal – at least, not anything that we haven't done since I came aboard the TARDIS or she hasn't told me about. Except this – she hasn't told me about this."
A flicker of a suspicion lit itself in the Doctor's mind. "Was it in her bedroom?"
Rory's eyes widened slightly. "Yes."
"Was the TARDIS there?"
Wider still. "Yes."
"And had she just told me that she was going to marry you?"
Rory's eyes ceased widening, and instead narrowed to near-slits. He crossed his arms. "You know."
The Doctor sighed and rested his forehead on his palms. "Rory, I am so, so sorry. But believe me, it was a mistake. I knew it was a mistake. She knew it was a mistake. But she was scared that day. So, so scared. And all because I made a terrible mistake, I put her in more danger than you could possibly imagine."
He remembered how he'd felt upon realising that not only had he abandoned her next to a crack in time that could possibly have erased her from existence, but to escape she would be forced to walk blind through an army of the most malevolent creatures in creation - the shame still cut deep.
"And so in her relief, she... well, you saw. She apologised to me straight away and we haven't spoken about it since."
"I figured that, Doctor. But that's not my problem. The problem is that you lied to me – she lied to me. Why? And why didn't you come to tell me straight away?"
His head remained in his hands, and his voice was a flat, bitter monotone. "Because I was vain and selfish, and I was enjoying travelling with her too much to risk losing that. I put my own happiness above her welfare. Above yours."
Rory considered him for a long moment. "Alright," he finally said, slowly. "But hear this, Doctor. You can't just keep lying to me – and especially not her, now that she's like you – all the time. Because people will get hurt – people have gotten hurt."
The Doctor nodded, taking the words on board. Whilst fully aware that Rory was right, that wasn't what was occupying right now. Rather, something else Rory had said was forcing his brain into gear.
Amy doesn't dream, Doctor.
Why couldn't she dream? What had made her so empty, so bereft? That wasn't the Amy he knew – funny, flirty, frustrating, relentlessly optimistic. What did I do to her when I left her for all those years?
Where were her plans for the future? Where were the dreams of the family life with Rory? Of travelling through time and space with a young red-headed child? What of the life she wanted to lead? Does she even know?
And then there was that feeling, that flash of unbridled terror he'd felt emanating from billions of miles away. How was that even possible? What had frightened her so much that it would produce that sort of feeling, so intense that it could be felt across the stars?
What's going on inside your head, Amelia Pond?
His contemplations were cut short, however, when a familiar whirring sound filled the air and a blue police box materialised in front of him. The TARDIS doors opened and a streak of flame poked itself out of the doorway. Amy's eyes were bright, her face lit with excitement, holding nothing of the abject terror she'd felt less than ten minutes beforehand.
"All aboard!"
