It has been an age and a half since I wrote anything. Life in the time of Covid will do that to you. Given that, the only solution was to finally start working on a fic I've had bouncing around in my brain for years. So at long last, here we are!
The Doctor, closely followed by Bill, stepped from the TARDIS. A merciless desert sun and sand-laden breeze welcomed them. Bill squinted against the harsh brightness and whistled in appreciation of what she saw.
The TARDIS had landed a few feet from the edge of a cliff. From their vantagepoint, the two travelers were treated to the sight of a valley carved from the surrounding limestone. A road had been laid through the valley, and the road led to a series of small, obviously man-made portals in the cliffside. A few tents had been set up throughout the valley and humans, mostly dressed in desert camouflage, milled around the structures.
"Welcome to the Valley of the Kings," the Doctor said. "It doesn't look like much now, but 50 million years ago, this was a magnificent fishing spot."
Bill shook her head. "There are pharaohs buried here! Mummies! How is that not cooler than a fish?"
"You haven't seen the fish 50 million years ago. I'll have to show you. The fact that two pharaohs tried to have me entombed alive may also be influencing my opinion. Fish will try to eat you, but they will never bury you alive."
"I'll remember that. Oh, is that person waving to us?" Bill pointed to a doll-sized figure down in the valley.
The Doctor returned the wave. He then sat down and patted the ground beside him.
"Aren't we going down there?" Bill asked.
"What, walk? That'll take at least thirty minutes. They have jeeps."
Bill shrugged and joined him. The earth was hot even through her jeans. "While we're waiting, why don't you tell me some good fishing stories?"
By the time a jeep arrived to collect them, the Doctor was halfway through a tale of how he'd spent three days beside the ocean waiting for a nibble only to realize he'd mistimed his fishing trip and had landed in the early Ordovician Period and fish hadn't yet evolved jaws. A young solider exited the vehicle just in time to hear, "And that is why you should never antagonize a lamprey."
The soldier threw a salute at the Doctor, who grimaced. The soldier grinned sheepishly. "Sorry, force of habit."
Once Bill and the Doctor were aboard, the Time Lord asked, "Why is UNIT camping at the Valley of the Kings? And why do they need us? Bill, you didn't borrow the TARDIS to scribble naughty hieroglyphics in anyone's tomb, did you?"
"No, that was Missy's idea. And then when you wouldn't lend her the TARDIS, she said she'd already made plenty of graffiti in ancient Rome."
"Sir, Director Stewart asked that you be contacted. UNIT received a call yesterday regarding an archeological expedition. They've got a story to tell and it's…weird."
The Doctor leaned forward from the back seat. "How weird?"
"Well, I don't know. Weird enough to bring you in, I suppose. You can talk to the expedition leader momentarily. Her name's Nour and she's waiting in the main tent."
A few minutes later the jeep stopped beside a large canopy. Soldiers rested in its shade and a number of UNIT scientists were setting up electronics, computers, and other equipment on tables within the tent. The Doctor wasted no time and vaulted over the side of the jeep. Bill took the time to open the door.
Nour turned out to be a painfully sun-burned woman seated in front of a laptop. She looked over at the new arrivals. "Where's the talking penguin?"
The soldiers and scientists surrounding her gave her a look that suggested she'd asked when the human sacrifice would start. A medic readied his bag, just in case Nour decided to either lose her mind or have a stroke.
"Penguin?" Bill asked.
"Frobisher! My mum told me the Doctor traveled with an alien penguin named Frobisher. She used to make up stories about them when I was little."
"I travelled with him regenerations ago! I haven't seen in Frobisher in a very long time. Or maybe I have. He is a shapeshifter. Suppose it's entirely possible I've passed him on the street," the Doctor replied.
Nour sighed, deep and sad. "My mum's going to be disappointed.
"Apologies to your mum. Now, I was promised weirdness," the Doctor said.
"Right." Nour typed something into the computer. "Bit of background. My team and I—I'm sure they're around somewhere—were looking to map the geography around the valley. We've got a drone rigged with ground-penetrating radar. Brilliant machine, I had to beg, borrow, and steal to get it funded. Anyway, second day of the survey we find this."
Nour turned the screen towards Bill and the Doctor. They both peered at it. The image on the screen was a gray box interspersed with wavy lines in various patterns.
"What is it?" Bill asked.
"An image taken by the ground-penetrating radar." The Time Lord pointed to one of the wavy lines. "Is this an anomaly in the soil?"
Nour nodded feverishly. She turned the laptop back toward her and typed something else in. Once she was finished, she showed the Doctor and Bill a new picture. The gray box had been replaced with a color photograph of a landslide. It looked like a section of cliff wall had crumbled and boulders of various sizes littered the valley floor.
"At first we were disappointed. Because of course a rockslide is going to have air pockets and voids and all sorts of rubbish. But we made a few more passes by air and discovered something fantastic. The anomalies extend beyond the rocks. They're deeper. Deeper, actually, than the radar can reliably penetrate."
"Any idea what they are?" the Doctor asked.
"Just looking at the radar, no. But every Egyptologist has a secret dream: they're going to discover an unknown, untouched tomb. None of us dared to say it, but I'm sure we all went to bed that night thinking it."
The Doctor sighed. "I suppose now would be a good time to tell you my degree in Egyptology is honorary. And from a university only recognized in one solar system in the Andromeda galaxy. If you need an expert-"
"If we needed an expert on tombs, Nour's got twenty professors on speed-dial who would murder each other for the chance."
The Doctor turned around to find a woman with shoulder-length blonde hair standing at the mouth of the tent.
"Go on, finish the story," Kate Stewart said. "See if you can't get him interested."
"Right, so we decided to excavate. Carefully and with all our permits filled out in triplicate, of course. We also borrowed a few university students from Cairo and assembled every shovel we could find. It took a week of manual labor and documenting every rock we moved, but we eventually cleared enough of the landslide to reach ground level."
"What did you find?" Bill asked.
"Bugger all nothing. Or so we thought. One of the university students was tapping the ground with his shovel when the soil gave way. He opened a hole about the size of a fist. Just big enough to shove a torch into. Or a mobile with a torch app."
Nour forwent the laptop this time and pulled out her mobile. "I've got it saved on the computer, too, but I think this is more authentic."
Shaky, dim footage that had been all the rage in horror movies for a few years filled the mobile's screen. As the camera stabilized, the picture became a little clearer. Walls and a floor materialized.
The Doctor leaned closer. The footage wasn't fantastic by any means, but by what the Doctor could see, something was very odd about the chamber displayed on the mobile. Everything was smooth. There was no sign of chisel-marks or imperfections. The angles where floor, wall, and ceiling met were laser precise.
There was also not a single adornment anywhere in the chamber. Egyptian tombs and temples were usually covered in hieroglyphics and carvings, often brightly painted. This felt more like a room in a home where nobody had ever lived.
"It's creepy," Bill said. "I can't say why, exactly, but something doesn't feel right."
"Wait 'til the end," Nour replied.
The hand holding the mobile changed positions, allowing the camera to scan a new area of the chamber. There was again a need to wait for the footage to stabilize before the eager eyes could make out anything useful.
A minute into the slow tour around the chamber, a shape began to materialize. As the light from the mobile more fully exposed it, the shape took on more detail. It was large, bulky, vaguely humanoid, and covered in cloth.
The hand holding the mobile, of course, had no idea what it was filming. The bizarre figure slowly disappeared back into the murk as the camera kept turning. After another thirty seconds, the mobile was pulled from the hole and midday sunlight filled the screen. Nour stopped the video to spare everyone from the glare.
"Did that look like a mummy to anyone else?" Bill asked. "Doctor, what do you think? Doctor?"
The Time Lord was staring at the small screen. It was difficult to be sure given his typical complexion, but it seemed to Bill that the Doctor had paled. Even without the color change, there was no denying the look on his face: fear. The strange traveler who had faced down alien armies was afraid of mummies.
"What's wrong?" Bill asked.
"Has anyone been down there?" the Doctor asked. "Has anyone touched it?"
"The mummy? No. After we reviewed the video and saw it, we took more videos. Higher quality, better lighting, with actual cameras. But we haven't made any attempt to excavate it," Nour said. "Going by your reaction, suppose we made the right call."
"Wait," Bill protested. "I still don't understand. How did we go from a video of a mummy to UNIT calling us for backup?"
"There were enough strange things to make us uncomfortable," Nour explained. "So I called my mum, half-joking, to ask if she'd ever dealt with anything like it in her UNIT days. She told me it sounded like a file she'd read once. She rang some old UNIT mates, next thing I know, there's helicopters and soldiers and they've closed the whole site."
The Doctor took a deep breath. "That may not be enough. In the worst-case scenario, closing the entire planet won't matter."
"Doctor, can you please just explain why this mummy is so dangerous?" Bill begged.
"It isn't a mummy. It's an Osiran service robot."
"That answers all my questions, thanks."
"The Osirans were one of the most powerful species ever to inhabit the universe. Of all the aliens that humans have called gods, the Osirans were the only ones to live up to the title."
"I have so many questions about that last sentence, but I'm going to wait," Nour said. "What is alien tech doing in my dig site?"
"I don't know. Yet. That mummy is a simple tool. Constructing an elaborate tunnel for it would be like designing catacombs for a Roomba." The Doctor shook his head. "No, I think there's something infinitely more dangerous below the Valley of the Kings."
Bill pressed him. "Such as…?"
"Such as a final remnant of a race I believed extinct since 1911."
"What happened in 1911?" Bill asked.
"I murdered Sutekh the Destroyer to prevent him from laying waste first to the Earth, and then to all life in the universe."
"Oh, we have got to hear this story."
If anyone is totally unfamiliar with Classic Who, this fic is heavily influenced by a Fourth Doctor era episode titled The Pyramids of Mars. Do you need to watch it to understand everything? Not really, but it may help.
And to people who have consumed Doctor Who in all media, I am blatantly ignoring certain comics and novels pertaining to the Osirans. Sorry!
Lastly, if anyone is curious, fish developed proper jaws during the late Ordovician or early Silurian period, about 440 million years ago.
For real lastly, this work will be published simultaneously on FF and AO3.