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The History of Paradox
"Ah, Dana," the Doctor said, smiling at the older woman reassuringly as he walked out of the lift to find her standing in the assembly hall. "Good news; I've got the generator back up and running- for the moment, anyway; what's been broken once can break again, after all-, and I've got a few ideas about how to cure that sickness you mentioned."
"You do?" Dana asked, looking at him in surprise. "But I haven't even identified the cause-"
"The Doctor's a genius," Amy said, smiling reassuringly at Dana. "Trust me on this; if he thinks he can cure that sickness, he'll at least make anyone suffering from it a lot better."
In a strange way, Amy's indirect acknowledgement of his failures made the Doctor grin all the more broadly at her; she respected that he wasn't perfect, and she still wanted to travel with him when she was old enough...
"I'd better explain the full details to Oswald; best to keep the commander abreast of things, after all," the Doctor said, clapping his hands together before he looked curiously at Dana. "Where is he, by the way?"
"Checking the life-pods in case we have to evacuate," Dana replied, indicating a door at the other end of the hall. "It's back that way."
"Right; lead on," the Doctor said, even as the apprehensive glance he shot at Amy was enough to convey his concerns at this latest news; why, after witnessing what the Vashta Nerada were capable of in darkness, would anyone bother to prepare darkened life-pods for launch?
He shook those thoughts aside as Dana took them through the large doors at the back of the room, past a series of lockers, and into a side room with at least four life-pods present
"Oswald!" Dana said, looking at the base commander as Oswald climbed down from examining one of the life-pods. "The Doctor thinks he can synthesise a cure for the sickness!"
"Poseidon is guaranteed to have what I need," the Doctor said, looking at Oswald with a positive smile on his face. "Sea sprouts, brine oil, sticky mushrooms, those things are always growing in some damp corner of an undersea base like this."
"This is a joke, right?" Oswald said, looking sceptically at the Doctor.
"Well, you might use brine oil to keep your machines going, but it's also full of iodine," the Doctor clarified.
"They need the access codes to get on to the agricultural sectors," Dana explained, evidently anticipating the Doctor's next necessity before he could ask for it himself.
"And by the way," the Doctor added, looking more sternly at Oswald, "I thought I told you; trying to get your people off Poseidon in life-pods will just get them killed."
"So I just twiddle my thumbs while you mess around with some crack medicine?" Oswald countered, glaring back at the Time Lord.
"If you really want to save your people, you'll listen to the Doctor," Amy said, staring firmly at the older man.
"And let you go mushroom-picking to get eaten by those things in the shadows?" Oswald said, shaking his head firmly. "No way! Enough people have died! No-one else, Doctor! It's too dangerous! We've got one chance, and it's these pods! And this is a restricted area; get out!"
Glancing over at Amy, the Doctor placed a calming hand on her shoulder- he appreciated her indignant glare at Oswald on his behalf, but it wasn't going to get them anywhere- and led her out of the room.
"I'm... sorry about him," Dana said, looking apologetically at them as they walked away from the pods and into a room that looked like the facility's laboratory, filled with all kinds of devices that looked like enlarged microscopes at a casual glance, with a white room that looked like a medical bay off to the side with various beds around the walls. "Oswald is a good man, but so many people have died... he's only trying to do what he thinks is right."
"Too bad that it's the wrong thing," Amy said, glaring at the older woman. "The Doctor needs those access codes!"
"But Oswald's not the only one who has them, is he?" the Doctor said, looking at Dana with a thoughtful smile. "You're the chief medical officer on this base; you have to know the codes yourself..."
"I'm sorry," Dana said, looking sympathetically but firmly at the two new arrivals. "I can't give them to you."
"We fixed the generator; it must be safer out there now," the Doctor said, looking at Dana with a reassuring smile as he resisted the temptation to express his current frustration more vocally.
"We'd be taking all the risks; not you-" Amy began.
"And I'm responsible for your safety," Dana said firmly. "I can't let you go."
"I'm sure I'll find the ingredients in the storerooms out there-" the Doctor began.
"But you're not certain," Dana said, looking apologetically at the Time Lord; she evidently wanted to believe him, but was focusing on what she knew of the situation regardless. "It's too risky."
"You're not putting Oswald in danger or breaking his trust," the Doctor said, stepping forward to look more directly at Dana, an earnest expression in his eyes as he stared at her. "I know what I'm doing, and I'll take every precaution possible; this will help all of us, but you have to give me the chance to try."
"Look," Amy said, looking at Dana with the same earnest stare that she'd used to get her way so often in the past when faced with difficult teachers in the past, "I know this is all scary and confusing to you, and you think it's easier to stick with what you know, but trust me; the Doctor can do this. I've seen him do this kind of thing before, and it's worked because we gave him a chance; you just have to trust him now."
After looking solemnly at the little red-haired girl with eyes that were far too old for her face, Dana nodded.
"Fine..." she said, looking grimly at the two of them. "But be careful, and try to get back before Oswald notices."
"Thank you, Dana," the Doctor said, grinning warmly at her. "And I am always careful, and when we come back with the cure, you'll be glad we went."
"I'll enter the codes now," Dana said, turning around and walking over to a table with a speaker/microphone on it similar to the one attached to Jones, tapping a few buttons on a panel underneath the speaker.
"Access codes accepted," Jones's voice said. "Security override released."
"We're trying to do this on the quiet, you numpty!" Amy said, glaring at the speaker before she smiled at herself as though realising how foolish what she'd just said was.
"Come along, Pond," the Doctor said, turning around and hurrying towards the assembly room, which they quickly ran through on their way to the lift.
"So, how long have we got?" Amy asked, as they entered the lift and began their ascent.
"Oh, several minutes, I'd assume; the pods might be straightforward bits of equipment, but even if Oswald doesn't believe me about the Vashta or the Zaralok he'll want to make sure that nothing's been damaged before he launches them," the Doctor replied, before the doors opened and the two of them were in Jones's room once more. "All right, with the corridors illuminated, so long as we move quickly the Zaralok shouldn't be an issue; I'll look for the sticky mushrooms, and you check the storeroom on our right- the one on the left once you start going back towards the TARDIS, I believe- for the sea sprouts and the brine oil container; I'm fairly sure I saw some there earlier..."
"Meet back here in a few minutes?" Amy asked, smiling at her friend.
"Well, you should be here then, anyway; might take a bit longer to find the mushrooms," the Doctor said, shrugging briefly before he waved her along. "Just remember; keep moving!"
Looking up at where the Zaralok was still swimming in the distance, Amy nodded in understanding and ran down the corridor, years of attempts to escape the taunting of other children for her 'imaginary friend' now helping her aid him in his latest task.
A part of her almost couldn't believe it; she was actually helping the Doctor to save lives...
She knew that what she was doing was relatively minor in the grand scheme of things- finding a few things lying around the base wasn't exactly disarming the bombs or rewiring the ship's engines-, but she knew that she couldn't expect to be trusted with something that complicated this relatively early in her time with the Doctor; this was only the first time she'd actually been in this kind of position...
After a few moments of hurried searching, she found a small can containing what appeared to the oil that the Doctor had mentioned he was looking for earlier. Slipping the phial into the pocket of her blue coat, Amy hurried into another storage room where she found some large green sprouts that were almost certainly the sea sprouts the Doctor had asked her to look for. Carrying the sprouts in her arms, she hurried back towards the entrance to the Poseidon Eight base, where she found the Doctor standing with a few large sticky mushrooms clutched in his hands.
"Are those really needed?" Amy asked, looking at the mushrooms with a slight wince.
"It's all necessary, I assure you," the Doctor said, smiling reassuringly at her. "It won't exactly be pleasant, but then, medicine never does, does it? Let's just get back to the lab and work on that cure."
Stepping into the lift, the Doctor and Amy headed down to the meeting room, quickly hurrying from there into the labs.
"We've got everything," the Doctor said, indicating the ingredients in his and Amy's arms with a smile at Dana. "Everything else I need should be here already; just give me a few moments, and I should be able to put it all together."
"Right," Amy said, putting her collected items down as she indicated the door to the lab. "You get on with that; I'll just... take a look at the view."
It felt a bit awkward even as she said it, but Amy was just focusing on the facts; she couldn't help the Doctor do anything right now, and she'd been wanting to take a good look at the city anyway.
Heading over to the assembly hall, Amy climbed up the stairs to an upper level, walking up to the console room at the other end, where she could take in the sight of the city around her with a relaxed smile at the sight before her.
Even with the shark-like thing that the Doctor had called a Zaralok swimming around the city spread out before her, the sight of the glass tubes spread out between the various connecting terminals she and the Doctor had been walking through earlier, now illuminated and glowing a brilliant blue amid the fields of undersea crops, followed by the more distant sight of larger, more contained buildings that were probably living accommodations.
It might not be space travel, but for her race to have built something like this underwater- an environment that they were almost equally incapable of surviving in- was still a very impressive achievement...
After she'd spent a few moments taking in the sights around her, Amy turned around and headed back to the lab, grinning happily at the sight she'd just witnessed, only for her smile to falter as she returned to the lab and saw the Doctor studying the equipment in front of him; no matter how much she might want to pretend otherwise, they still had a serious problem in front of them...
"Finished," the Doctor said, holding up a glass phial with a smile as he indicated the yellow liquid within it. "One sip, and it's all sorted."
"Do I need to...?" Amy asked, indicating the phial uncertainly; she might trust the Doctor, but she wasn't that keen on drinking something like that...
"You should be fine, really; that universal vaccine I gave you earlier should take care of the most immediate consequences of the radiation, and we'll be leaving soon enough anyway," the Doctor said, reminding her of the injection he'd given her early on during their acquaintance; it had just been a quick injection, reminding Amy of the hyposprays she'd seen on Star Trek, but according to the Doctor it had provided her with immunity to most common diseases she'd find, both on Earth and during their travels. "Dana and everyone else here are going to need this cure more for the long-term consequences of prolonged exposure to the vortron radiation rather than anything else."
Picking up the phial, he smiled slightly at it before he walked over to the medical wing, where Dana was sitting patiently on a bed.
"Sorry," the Doctor said, holding up the glowing yellow phial, "all out of sugar lumps."
"Is that witch's brew really going to fix me?" Dana asked, now slightly bent over as she weakly clutched at her stomach; Amy thought she even looked slightly paler than she had earlier.
"You'll feel better, I promise," the Doctor said, placing the cure in Dana's hand. She stared at it for a moment, and then swallowed, it, only to gasp in disgust at the taste.
"Quite a kick, isn't it?" the Doctor said, smiling at her. "That's the sea-worm extract; unpleasant, but necessary to get the full effect."
Amy just shuddered slightly at the thought of drinking something that had come from a worm; she might be open-minded, but that was not a pleasant image..."
"The Doctor's Patented Vortron Radiation Elizir," the Doctor said, smiling at her. "One hundred percent effective; you may grow hair in the palm of your hands, but until that happens, I need your help, Dana."
"With what?" Dana asked.
"Vortron energy only comes from some sort of dimensional vortex-" the Doctor began.
"Are you serious?" Dana asked, looking at him in confusion.
"He's serious," Amy confirmed with a brief nod.
"Just what kind of a doctor are you, really?" Dana asked, looking at the Doctor with sudden suspicion.
"The kind you need," the Doctor replied, leaning forward to stare at her. "And I mean really need, and if I can find the source of the Vortron energy I can make everything better."
"And how do we do that?" Amy asked. "I mean, if the source was close by, wouldn't we have seen it by now?"
"Does Poseidon have external scanning equipment?" the Doctor asked, turning his attention back to Dana. "By which I mean long-range scanners?"
"Of course," Dana said, leaving the lab and taking them back to the upper console that Amy had been studying earlier. As they reached the console, Dana began to search through a few controls, activating a series of remote observation posts set up around the outskirts of the Poseidon colony.
"Done," Dana said, stepping back as she finished her immediate task. "All the beacons are activated, but... what am I searching for?"
"Just give me a moment..." the Doctor said, taking up Dana's position as he entered a series of equations and information into the console at such a speed that Amy could barely follow his fingers as they danced across the console, until he stepped back with a smile.
"There we are," he said, indicating an image on the screen, which seemed to display an old military ship (Amy thought it looked like something from her time, but acknowledged that it could have been a few decades one way or the other; navy ships weren't something she paid much attention to).
"That's the source of the radiation?" Dana said, looking at the screen in surprise.
"But... you said Vortron energy came from some sort of vortex," Amy said, looking at the Doctor in confusion. "That's... just a shipwreck."
"Oh, no no no no no no no no, Amy Pond," the Doctor said, looking firmly at her. "That is the shipwreck of the USS Eldridge."
"Is that important?" Amy asked after a moment's pause; she'd been enjoying her history lessons more lately- they were giving her a few ideas about where she might ask the Doctor to take her when they started travelling together-, but she didn't recognise that name from anything she'd been studying.
"The Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, 28th October, 1943, Project Rainbow," the Doctor elaborated. "The US Navy experimented with Einstein's Unified Field Theory to make their warships invisible; instead, they break the laws of transdimensional physics, open a gateway, and the Eldridge travels around the world and back again in the blink of an eye, with every man on board either dying or going insane."
"So what's it doing on the seabed?" Dana asked; either her initial confusion had been put aside, or she was just so confused at this point that she had decided to just listen to the Doctor's story rather than try to argue with him.
"My people took... steps... to stop the experiment," the Doctor explained.
"Your 'people'?" Dana repeated, looking at him suspiciously.
"That's... not important right now," Amy said, looking warningly at Dana before she turned back to the Doctor. "What happened?"
"The gateway was unstable and the Eldridge disappeared before they could neutralise it completely," the Doctor explained.
"And now it's here and the gateway is still open?" Amy asked. "The Vashta Nerada and that... shark thing; they came through it?"
"Exactly," the Doctor said firmly, turning to look solemnly at the screen. "And we have to close it..."
The sound of machinery from another part of the building prompted the Doctor to look back, already knowing the source of the discovery and cursing this turn of events.
"He's going ahead with it," he said, unable to completely believe what he was hearing. "Those aren't going to be life-pods your crew's getting in, Dana; they're coffins. Come on, Amy; we have to stop this."
Just as he turned to walk down towards the lab, he found himself halted by the sight of Oswald standing on the stairs, a large harpoon in his hand as he aimed it at the Doctor.
"You can't interfere," he said, staring firmly at the Time Lord.
"Oswald, you can't-!" Dana began, stepping forward to try and protest, only for Oswald to turn and point the harpoon at her. Exploiting the momentary gap in Oswald's defences, the Doctor lunged desperately towards the older man, colliding with him with such force that the harpoon flew out of his grip as the two men rolled down the stairs before hitting the floor. As the Doctor leant up from his position on top of Oswald, Amy ran downstairs to join her friend, reaching the bottom just as the Doctor reached down and-
"Oh my God!" Dana screamed, staring in horror at the withered mass beneath what had been Oswald's face, Amy's hands pressed to her mouth in horror as she fully witnessed a face that had only ever glimpsed in her nightmares.
Even as the part of her that remembered the Doctor's advice to always take in her surroundings realised that the Doctor had pulled off the mask of Oswald's face that had been concealing the Faction agent's true appearance, the rest of her was just focused on the sheer horror of what she was witnessing in front of her.
"As sick and twisted as ever, aren't you?" the Doctor said, glaring at the thing that had been Oswald mere moments ago, one hand on his opponent's chest as he held the man down. "Tell me, was there ever a real Oswald?"
"Until a few days ago, anyway," the creature replied, seemingly smirking through its decaying lips as it looked back at the Doctor. "Oswald Fox would have made an interesting convert, but we lacked the time; it was... easier to do it this way."
"Easier for who?" Dana asked, anger replacing her initial shock as she walked forward to stare at the man lying beneath the Doctor. "Who are you?"
"Cousin Marion," the figure replied, looking at Dana with a smirk. "Of Faction Paradox."
Amy's instinctive gasp of horror prompted Cousin Marion to turn to look at her, a grin on his face that was all the more twisted for the lack of skin around it.
"Ah, Amelia Pond," he said, smirking as he looked at her. "The first of the Lost Ones..."
"You don't even look at her," the Doctor said, grabbing the chin of the thing that had been Oswald Fox and forcing the Cousin's eyes back on him. "What was your goal here?"
"Just a simple case of exploiting that rift to let in a few things that shouldn't be here; childishly simple situation to test a raw recruit, you know," Cousin Marion replied, smirking as he looked at the Time Lord above him. "Of course, that's bound to change once I bring you in..."
"Why do you keep doing this?" the Doctor asked, rolling his eyes in frustration. "I keep telling you all, I'm never going to be him any more!"
"You will eventually-" Marion began, before the Doctor leant back and punched him in the face, the force of the blow actually cracking some of the skin around his cheek as his opponent fell into unconsciousness.
"Lucky he was just a Cousin, really; if he had been anything higher we'd have really been in trouble," the Doctor said, standing up and flexing his hand looking over at the still-shocked Dana. "Dana, we need to tie him up and get him somewhere secure before he wakes up; whatever he was trying to accomplish, he can't do anything if he's locked away."
"But-but-but-!" Dana protested, before Amy grabbed her arm and turned the older woman around to face her.
"Look," she said, glaring at Dana, somehow managing to appear intimidating despite being approximately a head shorter than her and inwardly shaking in terror at the thought of facing the Faction, "right now, we have a deranged time-travelling voodoo cult out to destroy this base for some reason; your job is to get that thing that was your boss out of the way while the Doctor and I stop this whole mess, so do it!"
As Dana nodded and hurried off to the lockers they'd passed by earlier, Amy looked over at the Doctor.
"What now?" she asked, trying not to look at the faceless man lying on the ground; the flesh remaining on his body made the Cousin posing as Oswald more disturbing, in a strange way that she couldn't define, than the skeleton of Martin Flannigan lying a short distance away.
"The TARDIS," the Doctor said, hurrying past Amy to head back to the control console before she could ask what he meant. "Jones, show me the service system layout!"
"Watertight service trenches run beneath Poseidon," Jones informed the Doctor after a moment's beeping as the relevant information was retrieved. "Although seabed tunnels connecting to your craft's sealed location have been destroyed, access is achievable."
"Right," the Doctor said, smiling as he tapped a couple of controls and a small hatch in the floor opened up just behind the console, between it at the window, revealing various rungs leading down. "Come along, Pond; just need to help Dana lock 'Cousin Marion' up, and then it's time to be on the move."
"To the Eldridge?" Amy asked, glad to have something else to think about after that particular encounter.
"Precisely," the Doctor said with a resolute nod.
Amy might have just had her first encounter with the Faction in person- hearing the stories was one thing, but seeing them in person was something else entirely-, but if the Doctor wasn't going to be cowed by their presence here, then she refused to be either.
They would stop the Faction from exploiting the Eldridge's rift...