Welcome back! Here is the first chapter of the second Excalibur story. This carries on straight after James' encounter with the 10th Doctor, and at the moment, looks to be longer than the first story. If updates are irregular, I'm sorry, but I've got exams for the next two months, and I'm also working with incandescent daisy on a story at the moment. Anyway, Read and Review please.
It was early morning in the Excalibur Hub. No one was in apart from Laura, who had been up all night working; and James who lived there anyway, and he was asleep.
Suddenly, a siren blared out from all the computer terminals, as the walls began to shake. The Hub began to go into lockdown and Laura was suddenly aware of movement in James' office.
"I don't like having my sleep disturbed, What the hell is going on?" James yelled over the siren's as the doors slammed and bolted, from his office door. Laura turned to look at him, wearing breeches, a white shirt and trousers. Moving closer to him, she replied.
"The Hub's gone into lockdown, I have no idea what triggered it. Trying to get it out now," She said, with a reassuring smile, moving back over to her workstation. "From what I'm getting from the internet and the readouts here at the Hub, this would appear to be a small, localised earthquake. It could of course, be something completely different, and know our luck it's probably not that usual."
James launched himself across the raised platform and up the stairs to the upper metal gantry above Laura's head, and gestured for her to follow. They walked over the balcony to the interrogation room, and further along, turning when they reached the Lab into the emergency control room, which was covered in wall to wall computer terminals.
James stood in the middle of the room and barked, "Abort lockdown procedure, command protocol zero nine, ident, Harknell, James. Excalibur officer zero zero one."
"Access granted," the computer replied. "Lockdown procedure programme operational."
Laura and James marched over to the computer terminals and began typing furiously. After about ten minutes, James stood back, a look of worry crossing his handsome face. He ran out of the panic room, and Laura could hear his booted feet sprit across the gantry and down the concrete steps towards his office. Laura continued the process of taking the Hub out of lockdown until she could feel James standing behind her.
"Every seismologist in the country is asleep! But you've got an A Level in Geography. You must know about earthquakes," he stated.
"Of course. Earthquakes naturally occur along plate boundaries, however, interpolate boundaries can form when plates fracture. However, there is only a shallow fault in the Eurasian Plate in the UK in Hampshire, and I swear the reading said the focus was practically on top of us, when the boundary is miles from here," Laura practically recited until she reached the last bit.
"So, it's not an earthquake due to the lack of a fault line?" James asked, his mouth upturned into a mocking smile.
"I don't think so. It's also not affected anything above ground-just caused displacement down here." Laura replied. Her eye twinkled as she playfully mocked James in return "I only got a C at A level though- you need an expert."
"It's four o clock! All the experts are asleep...," James stated, only to be interrupted by a splash as an object fell into the pond of water supply that came down from the font to form a pool of water in the Hub below.
James walked through into the lab and stood at the opened window through which he called "Rob? Alex? Juliet? Jane?" His voice echoed through the concrete expanse of the Hub. Then he spotted it.
There was a brown leather object, not totally unlike a wallet, floating in the water. James ran through the Lab and out to the gantry above, ran down the concrete and onto the bridge that crossed the stream to the lift, which James had revamped recently, with a new piece of alien kit they had found on a scavenge, to place the lift on a spherical slab up in the chapel, which allowed the invisible lift to be surrounded by the water from the font. The alien device shielded the lift from raining water, and was invisible. It also parted the water in the shape of a door when the lift reached the top and the bottom of the Hub.
James fished the wallet out of the water, and opened it carefully. He could see that it was empty. However, a scrap of paper fell out of it, wiping the look of relief off James' face as he read it. Concern replaced it instead, a frown invading his brow, and the upturned corners of his small mouth.
'Harknell,
Here's looking at you, kid.
Z.' it read.
James turned over the piece of paper and a picture faded into view of two men beaming broadly in some form of bar. One of the men was James, his face distorted as he was clearly heartily laughing, but the other man was nothing to him. A blank face, with a smile breaking through.