"The Class of 2012"

25. Sitting Helpless

On the shuttle to Pelles Three

At any moment they had expected for some alarm to start blasting through the cabin, alerting them that someone was chasing them or getting ready to shoot at them in retaliation for having wandered off and stolen the shuttle itself. It left them so tense that when Savelyn announced that they were coming down for a landing already, they stared at her in absolute surprise.

"Already?" Kurt asked. "Is this thing really fast or was it just really close?"

"I couldn't tell you how good this thing is compared to everything that's available out there, but we weren't that far off," Savelyn confirmed. "That'll be good news, if we need to go back in a hurry." When the shuttle had officially landed, the tremors gone away and the blue sky brightening the inside of the cabin, they'd all gotten the same question in their eyes: Now what?

"Is it safe out there? You know, to breathe and all?" Mercedes asked.

"It is," Savelyn confirmed, looking back to the console. "I've put us down somewhere out of the way, hopefully we won't have attracted too much attention with our landing. But we're clear to go out there, see what it's like, what's happening… and what we can do."

Stepping off the shuttle, knowing as they did that someone meant to drop a plague on this world, it just didn't seem fathomable. Why this place? They'd seen the sky as blue from inside the shuttle, and for lack of a better way of explaining it, it felt blue, too. It felt calm, and peaceful, the perfect idyllic sort of place, where birds twittered about, children ran around barefoot, laughing… It looked as though the whole of Pelles Three was an endless, perfect summer's day, never knowing a single gray cloud.

"This is just like Aren!" Brin declared, a smile spreading over her features like a wave of crystal blue ocean.

"Is that where you're from?" Blaine asked, guessing, and she nodded. "How can you tell?"

"All the other places I've been, I've never been anywhere like it. The air's different, can't you feel it?" she asked him and the others, too. Her giddiness could almost have been contagious. She did have a point though; the air did feel different, not exactly heavier, just… nearer, like an embrace. Once they saw it that way, it was hard not to.

The smile on the girl's face changed, slowly, as a new thought hit her, with terror at its heel.

"Maybe this isn't the target," she spoke slowly.

"What do you mean?" Blaine asked.

"Maybe this is just the practice, and the real target is somewhere else. They do that sometimes… don't they?" she tacked on after a beat.

If the Doctor had been here, he might have looked into her face and understood something she hadn't told any of the others… Or maybe he already knew and he just hadn't said anything.

They had taken her memories away, before sending her home. It was the proper thing to do, because what eleven-year-old would want to remember how they had been brainwashed, trained as an assassin… She had killed people. Some were strangers, others… She had killed friends, not for wanting it, but because she'd been programmed for it, sent out into this place where only the very best were meant to come out alive. She had earned her victory with the blood of less fortunate children.

If not for the Doctor, and Donna, and Blaine, she might have been made to take one more life, but they had kept that from happening, and their last kindness had been to take all those memories away. But months later, closer to a year, they'd started to come back. It had been slow at first, but not so slow that she didn't come to realize they might have been real. She couldn't tell anyone, especially not her parents. Did they know what she'd done? They couldn't have. But she remembered, saw the faces of her victims, before they'd died, and after… She remembered when she'd nearly turned her weapon on herself, rather than to live with the terribleness of it all.

What had helped her put it behind her had been the memories of everything else that had happened, of her friends both old and new, of those of them who had sacrificed themselves, so she and the others might live. The Doctor had meant to give her back on to life, to not let her be snatched by death, and she wasn't about to let it go in vain. So she lived, as honorably as she should be expected, to atone for the lives that had been ended by her hands if not her will.

"Maybe it won't be like that," Blaine told her, and for a moment she could have been fooled to think he was saying this, knowing what she'd been through, but she knew this was a younger version of the man who had helped her at the academy, and he hadn't gone through it yet.

"If it is, then all these people here will be hurt, and then more after them," Savelyn had to point out.

"Either way, we have to warn them," Mercedes declared.

"What if there's not enough time?" Corius asked. "How many people live on this planet, how much shelter is there? They can't evacuate, and we don't know when the threat will come exactly." They only had what they'd heard, what they'd seen, and though they hadn't found any direct indication, what seemed clear was that it would be sooner rather than later.

"We still have to try, get it in motion… We could still find a way to stop it, all of us, and the others out there, the Doctor…" his sister Della stated.

"Then come on, what are we waiting for?" Brin started for the nearest settlement they saw. All she saw now, as they neared the people of Pelles Three, were those people she had killed as part of her tests, her training. None of them, not even her classmates, had done anything to deserve what they'd gotten, and neither would these people here.

TO BE CONTINUED (TODAY)