Allow me to pass on a birthday Omake of my own for a regular contributor :)
"What was that?!" Martha yelped as the entire TARDIS shuddered, making an almost indescribable sound at the same moment. She turned to the Doctor to see him staring at the various central console displays in horror, which only lasted a few seconds before he frantically began flipping switches and turning controls, some of which were almost certainly not original equipment. She still didn't know why there was the top half of a perfectly ordinary eggbeater sticking out of the console on one side, but he was twirling the handle of it while muttering to himself in tones of great worry.
The time-space machine quivered again, a massive groan coming from the structure in the process, and she could swear she heard some enormous bell sound from somewhere far away. Her companion visibly paled and began moving twice as fast. "Quick, pump that," he said, pointing with his left foot, the other one and both hands all operating various controls as he nearly lay across the console. Not for the first time she thought the way this hyper-advanced machine was controlled was just silly. It had clearly been designed for more than one person and it baffled her why someone as brilliant as the Doctor had never taken the opportunity to modify it for only a single occupant.
Brilliant he might be, but at times, practical he wasn't.
She grabbed the indicated control which appeared to have been improvised from the handle of a grease gun or something like that, and pumped it. "Faster!" he yelled as he kept throwing switches, turning dials, pushing buttons, squeezing the thing that went 'skronk!' and doing all the other bizarre and apparently random operations that seemed to determine where and when the TARDIS ended up. Sometimes. When it felt like it…
Panting a little at the exertion, she kept pumping, then turned the control he indicated with his eyebrows counter-clockwise as fast as she could. He couldn't tell her to do that since he was currently typing something into one of the keyboards with his tongue, a sight she'd have been as happy not to have seen.
He was remarkably good at it, she thought rather distractedly, sweating from both the effort and the way the control room seemed to be getting distinctly warm.
The stressed sounds from the fabric of the TARDIS kept getting louder, while odd visual effects occurred once or twice, the entire room flickering different colors out of the corner of her eyes. This seemed to make an apparently panicking Time Lord look positively terrified and redouble his efforts yet again, leaving her straining to keep up.
Somewhere deep below them, or possibly off to one side (it was hard to tell with the somewhat arbitrary internal topography of the TARDIS) an irregular bass hum was beginning to be audible. She could smell a sort of greenish purple yellow color, which was something she'd never experienced before and wished she hadn't now.
The lights, all of them, flickered again, then there was a peculiar crunching sound as everything lurched in a direction she wasn't sure actually existed, throwing both of them to the floor. The central column, which had been moving up and down as it normally did during travel, abruptly stopped dead amid a series of tinkling noises.
Then everything went still and silent, the lights dimming significantly.
"Oh, dear," the Doctor finally said after several seconds during which Martha tried to catch her breath, lying on the floor staring at the ceiling with his eyes wide. "That's not good."
"So what was all that about?" Martha asked, leaning on the rail around the raised control console deck and peering down through the holes in the floor at the Doctor, who was climbing through a mass of cables under the main console waving his sonic screwdriver around and inspecting it with an uneasy frown. "Where are we?"
He didn't reply for a few seconds, leaning into one of the small alcoves which the cables terminated in and poking around. There was a sharp snap! and a flash of blue-white light, causing him to recoil, then suck his thumb with a reproachful look at the machinery. "Ow," he said when he pulled it out and examined the damage.
"Doctor?" she prodded.
"I don't know," he finally admitted, sounding embarrassed, or as much that as she'd ever heard from him. Normally even when he was utterly lost, which happened a lot more than he'd admit to, he still exuded good natured confidence, but at the moment he definitely seemed worried. "I don't know exactly what happened, or where we ended up."
Reaching out he lightly thumped one of the junction boxes, scanned it again, and sighed.
"There's hardly enough energy left to keep the lights on," he said after a moment of silence, shaking his head. "Poor girl drained her reserves almost completely keeping everything intact during… whatever that was." Turning, he headed to the stairs up to the level where Martha was, climbing over bundles of slightly organic-appearing cabling, some of which twitched a little when he touched it. "Some of it will rebuild given time, the TARDIS heart is still intact although it's also somehow hugely depleted, but we really need a jump-start. Something like the Cardiff Rift would be ideal."
Joining her upstairs, he started adjusting the controls. "But what exactly it was I simply don't know. I've never experienced anything quite like it." Glancing at Martha, who was listening closely, he half-smiled. "Which is fairly unusual if I'm honest."
She nodded, knowing what he meant. Considering his age and his species, never mind the amount of jumping hither and yon across time and space he'd done, he had amassed a truly staggering amount of information and experience in almost every field she could think of. For something to be entirely outside that… It was definitely going to be strange.
"So what do we do now?" she asked, watching as he delicately tweaked a few controls while staring at the viewscreen, which was showing a series of graphs she couldn't make much of despite her time as his companion. She knew quite a lot about the basic operation of the TARDIS by now but this was vastly out of her own knowledge.
"I'm not entirely sure," he admitted, leaning forward and scrutinizing the latest graph. Something caught his attention and he trailed off, staring at it, then looked down at the console. "Oh, that's not good at all."
"What isn't?"
"Really not at all good. About as not good as you can get," he went on, mostly to himself, as he fiddled with the instruments at a great rate. She sighed a little and waited, knowing that sooner or later he'd find himself unable to help explaining at least part of it. He did rather like the sound of his own voice, she thought to herself, amused despite the current possible problems.
Five minutes passed as he moved around the hexagonal console, making adjustments to almost every control on it, some of them two or three times, before he stopped, then braced himself on it and lowered his head with a groan.
"I assume it's not good news?" she said as lightly as she could, trying to get a smile out of the normally fairly cheerful Time Lord. He could be terrifyingly intense when he had to be, but most of the time he seemed to have a bit of a smile on his face even when things were getting dicey. Right now, though, he just looked resigned.
"Not particularly, no," he muttered.
"Go on then, tell me. It can't be worse than Cybermen or Daleks," she urged, smiling and trying to cheer him up. Inside she was desperately hoping she was right. The look he gave her when he raised his head and met her eyes made her heart sink. "I hope?" she added weakly.
"Well..." He stopped, then looked down at the console again. "We're in a bit of a pickle, I'm afraid."
She waited more or less patiently. Reaching out he almost idly prodded a switch, which resulted in a warbling alarm tone. Hastily resetting it, he sighed once more. "I think I know the cause of the problem but I can't really say I know what it was," he continued, looking at her again. "The poor girl seems to have accidentally passed right through some sort of massive energy discharge, a… cosmic conduit, you might call it… just at the point we were entering the time vortex. I can't make heads or tails about what sort of energy it actually was though. My people have recorded perhaps half a dozen similar instances throughout our entire history but no one seems to know what causes them, where they come from, or what they're made of."
He shrugged a little helplessly. "My best guess is that it's something fundamental to how the universe works. Absolutely appalling amounts of energy, the sort of thing that can extinguish a star in a microsecond. Or ignite one. Nothing even we could hope to control even if you ignore the little problem of not knowing what it really is."
"So it was an accident?" she asked, trying to understand.
"Yes, purely chance, we were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Just for a nanosecond everything lined up exactly and..." He waved a hand around them somewhat irritably. "Poof. We got dragged along the discharge, the poor TARDIS exhausted her reserves trying to keep us intact and alive, but there wasn't a hope of breaking free. Even with all the power she could bring to bear we just ended up tumbling along like a twig going over Niagara falls. Which is an interesting metaphor, I must remember that." He looked thoughtful, then shook his head as she smiled. It was very him.
"Anyway, eventually the discharge died down and we more or less fell out of it."
"And landed?" she asked hopefully.
He checked the instruments again as if he was expecting them to have changed.
"Yes… sort of… um. No."
Martha looked hard at him as he managed to avoid her gaze.
"So we're still moving? Or whatever you call it when the TARDIS is doing whatever it does?" She glanced at the motionless center column, which was entirely dark.
"Ahhh… No. Not really." He seemed both embarrassed and puzzled. "Nor are we drifting in space either. To be frank, I have no idea what our current position is." The Doctor prodded another switch, toggling it back and forth a couple of times with a clicking sound and no other reaction. Eventually he stopped, simply staring blankly at the unmoving column.
By now feeling quite worried, since she'd never seen him so confused, Martha thought hard.
"We're not moving through time."
"Correct."
"We're not moving through space."
"Correct again."
"But we're not on a planet or spaceship or anything like that."
"You're on a roll, Martha."
"And we're not floating in space."
"Again, full marks."
"You're not helping," she snapped, making him briefly grin. Relieved that he was more or less acting normally, she sighed and shook her head, knowing it would lift his mood. "So what's left? Some bizarre interdimensional space, leaving us drifting between universes, helpless to find our way back to our own one?"
He chuckled, moving to read the scanner screen again. "You have a marvelous imagination, Martha," he said. "No, we haven't moved between time lines, that's almost impossible now in the first place and the last time it happened the TARDIS nearly died. She's undamaged, more or less, but the engines are severely over-stressed and we have almost no power."
"Is there something other than parallel worlds or whatever that is?" she asked curiously. "Different time lines are parallel worlds, right?"
"Essentially although it's a complex subject," he replied as he leaned closer to the display and adjusted his glasses, which she'd never been sure he really required, to study one of the graphs slowly moving across it. "But like I said it's not something we need to worry about anyway, parallel world travel while very dangerous isn't really possible these days. And I'd have recognized it if it had happened since..." His voice faded and a sad expression passed over his face. After a couple of seconds, he finished, "I'd have recognized it."
Martha didn't say anything about the momentary lapse. He got like this sometimes and she'd learned not to poke too much. With the amount of past he had, there were a lot of things in it he regretted, she knew, and every now and then she had a glimpse of that.
"All right. I think I have the idea. The big question is..." She took a breath. "Can we get back?"
There was a long pause.
"I… don't know," he finally said, looking at her. "We're not going anywhere without more energy, which will take time to build up if it ever does. Plus since I don't know where we are or how we really got here, working out how to get back to where we were is… tricky."
Martha felt, for the first time, very worried. She pulled out her specially modified phone and looked at it. He followed her eyes and shook his head. "That won't work. Not here."
Having no reason to doubt him she sighed and put it away again.
"On the positive side we have enough energy to keep us alive more or less indefinitely so there's no problem with food or water or anything of that nature," he went on after another few seconds. "We're not in immediate danger. I'm sure that once I've had time to think about it I'll work something out."
She gave him a look.
"...Probably."
He ducked his head as the look intensified, appearing a little shifty.
"...I think."
Two days later Martha wandered into the control room with two plates in her hands, heading over to where the Doctor was puzzling over an eclectic collection of computer tablets, old parchment scrolls, a large stack of books, and one or two things she couldn't work out at all. He was muttering to himself and prodding buttons on what looked like it had once, many years ago, been a calculator. The thing was making little weebling sounds which changed as he manipulated it.
"I brought you a sandwich," she said, putting the plate down next to him, then sitting on the steps up to the currently useless control console. "You haven't eaten for nearly twenty hours. And why are you sitting on the floor doing that? You've got any number of rooms you could use."
Reaching out for the sandwich without looking he retrieved it and took a bite, still tapping away on whatever the device was. "Too busy to eat," he said absently through a mouthful of food, ignoring the other half of her question.
She watched as he kept working, finishing off the sandwich in short order. She did the same. Eventually he looked at the final result, shook his head, dropped the device next to him and flopped back while throwing his hands out. "It doesn't make any sense!" he exclaimed. "I get a different result every time!"
He folded his arms across his chest and lay there glaring at the ceiling as if it was deliberately keeping the truth from him, a petulant expression on his face. Martha did her best to suppress the snicker that welled up, despite the seriousness of the situation. His mood swings could be pretty funny at times and she was never sure how many of them were real and how many just him manipulating people who were around him. She was well aware that he was beyond good at that, and not above using it. Still, he meant well, she was sure of it, or she wouldn't be where she was.
Eventually he sat up and unfolded his arms, picking up a notebook and flipping through it with a puzzled look in his eyes mixed with irritation. "This is really quite annoying," he commented, before looking over to where she was sitting with her elbows on her knees and her chin in her hands, just watching him. "I'm sorry, Martha. I didn't intend to get you trapped in here with me."
"It was an accident, you said as much yourself," she shrugged. While she was worried she didn't blame him, and it hadn't been long enough yet that she was feeling claustrophobic. The TARDIS was large enough that she could always find something new to look at, at least for a while. That said, she didn't want to spend the rest of her life in here. "And don't forget, you're trapped in here with me too."
He smiled for a moment, then returned his attention to his notes. Shaking his head he stood up, then climbed the stairs to the console, as she moved out of the way before following. "There is that, I agree," he joked, studying some displays and comparing them with his notebook. He scribbled down a few new numbers, peered at them, then sighed again. "Still doesn't make sense. Although the artron reserves are very slowly refilling from the main power core. At this rate, they'll be back to normal in..."
He quickly ran a calculation, then checked the results. "...only nine hundred and twenty-three years. And two weeks," he finished with a sour look.
"That… is quite a long time," Martha pointed out evenly. "Even for you."
"I'm forced to agree with you," he nodded, tapping a meter which twitched a couple of times then settled down once more. "As much as I enjoy your company it's probably going to make both of us a little irritable after the first century or so." Glancing at her he winked, making her smile.
"So what do we do?" she said, leaning on the railing with her hands on either side. "From what you said even if the petrol tanks were full we'd still be stuck."
"Unfortunately, that's true," he grumbled. "I'm still not sure, but I'll keep at it. We got here, logically we can get back. Somehow."
"Can we at least go outside and look around?" she asked, glancing at the door.
"Technically there isn't an outside right now," he explained, pointing at the viewscreen which was showing a completely blank image, although somehow with a sort of three dimensionality to it that didn't make any sense. "I don't want to risk opening the door, I'm not sure that the TARDIS life support field would help if we do that. Not that there's anything to see in the first place."
She nodded slowly, watching as he started moving around the console and writing down all the readings. It looked more like some sort of displacement activity than anything useful but for all she knew it was vital.
A few minutes later she got the strangest feeling they were being watched. Looking around uneasily, she couldn't see any reason for it. When she completed her scan of the room her eyes drifted across the viewscreen and she froze.
The glowing yellow eye that was the only thing now displayed on it completely filled the image. A cat-like pupil was locked on her.
Seconds passed as she stared back. A slight movement of her head made the pupil expand slightly, giving her the unshakable feeling whatever the hell that was could actually see her...
"Ah… Doctor?"
"Hmm?" He didn't look up. The pupil moved a little and widened more.
"You really need to look at this," she said through a fixed and terrified smile.
"What is it, Martha?"
"I have no idea, but it's looking at me."
There was a pregnant pause, while he stared at her from the other side of the console. "Excuse me?"
Risking taking her eyes off the screen, she turned them Doctor-wards. "There is an enormous eyeball on the screen staring at me," she hissed urgently. "It can see me somehow."
"That's impossible, Martha, there's literally nothing outside, and even if there was, the camera system is one way," he replied, although he walked around to join her.
"In that case, explain that!" she demanded, pointing.
"Explain what?" he finally asked. She took her eyes off his face and looked at the screen, which he was examining with interest.
There was, of course, no sign of any glowing eye. Just the same disturbing blankness.
Martha sighed. She should have learned by now that weird things happened around this man, and honestly this was one of the less weird ones considering some of the things she'd seen.
"There was a big glowing yellow eye looking at me," she insisted, as he looked at her with a raised eyebrow. "Properly glowing, not just reflective. It looked really strange. I could have sworn it could see me, when I moved it followed me."
He looked back to the screen as did she. "It's not there now."
"No, it isn't," she agreed. "But it was."
"Being under stress can cause people to see..." he started.
"I'm a doctor, Doctor. I know an awful lot about stress, believe me," she retorted before he finished his sentence. "I'm fairly sure I'm not at the point of hallucinations."
As he was about to say something, a sound echoed through the control room, one that both of them recognized and which made both of them stop dead and stare at each other.
Slowly, they turned their heads.
The sound was that of the TARDIS door opening.
Which was, according to what the Doctor had told her on more than one occasion, impossible. Yet as they both watched, eyes wide, the impossible happened...
"OK, guys, we're going to need to bootstrap the main power converter and spin up the singularity again. Metis, the input port should be under the user interface tower over there, unless those pirates modified it more than our records show." The person(?) who seemed to be in charge of the bizarre collection of beings who'd just casually come into a theoretically impregnable time-space craft made by possibly the most advanced civilization in the universe, pointed at the stairs under the control console. "There should be an override terminal on the lower deck, next to the universal translation field generator." She, for it appeared to be female, handed one of her companions the end of a heavy cable that trailed back through the door and outside.
"Plug this in then start the diagnostics, will you?"
"OK," the huge matte black reptilian creature said in a deep voice, grabbing the cable and pulling it after her as she headed for the stairs. Moments later she was below them, picking her way through the mass of wiring and equipment with unexpected delicacy considering her size. "It's a complete mess down here. Doesn't look like anyone's done proper maintenance for years."
"This is a type 40, they've been obsolete for millennia," the first person, who was also reptilian, although much more slender and more human scale, replied as she unrolled a large set of what looked like plans which had come, somehow, to her hands. Moments later she was half-hidden behind them. "And this one looks like it was patched up over and over."
A head with the exact same glowing eyes Martha had seen on the screen came back into view over the documentation. "Is there an access port for the main artron bus in sector 5-G?" she called.
"Hang on..."
Martha and the Doctor exchanged incredulous gazes, looked simultaneously down through the grid-work, where the black lizard was now poking around in a number of cabinets which she'd somehow removed the covers from, then met each other's eyes again.
"Yep, got it. It's the old style connector."
"You'll need the seven dimensional adapter for it."
"I forgot that one back at the workshop. I've got a nine, will that fit?"
"Ah… yes, it should do, but you'll have to adjust the second reciprocal node to 28.3 terahertz."
"Thanks." There was a bizarre sound. "That worked. And I've got the main sentience engine debug routine running." A sucking sound that was universally recognized as the precedent to something expensive happening occurred. "This thing seriously needs a pruning and a good refactor."
"I can do that," another voice said from the door, accompanied by metallic footsteps. Both the currently shocked rigid observers looked that way to see what appeared to be a seven foot tall human-form robot or something of that nature, visibly metallic in construction but in a way that looked almost organic it was so clean and sleek, enter and look around with glowing red eyes. Other illuminated parts in various places gave the impression of danger and extreme high tech. It spoke with a mellifluous and educated voice, sounding entirely human and male.
"Great." The first reptilian individual held up the plans and pointed. "Best to connect in here in the main personality sub-node. Try not to scare the poor thing." She grinned at the robotic being, which gave a good impression of rolling its eyes. "You know you tend to come over all 'Ragh, I'm the smartest toughest AI around, fear me.'"
The machine now looked a little embarrassed. Martha hadn't got the faintest idea how it did that. "I'm better now, you realize," it mumbled.
The lizard woman snickered, patting it on the shoulder. "I know you are. We're proud of you. Go on, get to work, we've got a lot to do."
"Ma'am, yes, Ma'am," it said, saluting snappily.
"And less of the snark. That's my job."
"I thought it was The Amy's?"
"I subcontract. Get on with it."
The thing walked off chuckling and disappeared down the exit from the control room.
"Right, looks like half the time circuits are damaged, there's something funny wrong with the realspace engine, and a number of power conduits are leaking like crazy," the black lizard reported from below them, making Martha and her companion look down again after having followed the robot with completely bemused stares. "We're going to need an entire new displacement generator and four… no, six new tesseract blocks. And a whole mess of seirpinski gaskets, the good ones."
"That seems to match what I'm seeing here," yet another reptilian visitor announced from where he'd managed to get half inside one of the walls. Only his lower body was visible, legs and tail sticking out of a hole that Martha was fairly sure wasn't large enough, although inside the TARDIS size tended to be a matter of opinion anyway. "There are signs of overload all over the place. We'll have to rewire about thirty percent of the circuits but the rest is salvageable. I think some of the parts from the model 42 will probably fit."
"They should do, this design is ancient, but it's solid," still another weird person said. This one was apparently a feline/human cross, and was pulling some of the floor panels up with a tool she'd produced from a box that she'd brought in. "They reused a lot of it in later models. I guess we're lucky that they had the good taste to rip off a decent design not one of the crap ones."
"Excuse me!"
Everyone, which included all the new arrivals, that by now numbered about a dozen, stopped and looked at the Doctor who was rubbing his forehead with a pained expression.
"Yes?" the leader of the apparent repair team said politely.
"I'm the Doctor..." he began.
"Yes, we know who you are," she replied, raising what would normally be an eyebrow in someone who was a little closer to human.
He stopped, then tried again. "And you are?" Martha could tell he was extremely befuddled and trying to cover it.
"Oh, sorry, got carried away there for a moment," the blue lizard female smiled, showing a mouthful of dentition that would have worried a hungry tiger.
Not a herbivore then, Martha thought numbly.
"I'm Saurial, and these are some of my friends and family," the creature went on. "From BBFO. You might have heard of us?"
He stared, then shook his head. Saurial looked at Martha who simply shrugged, not really knowing what else to do.
"OK, fair enough. It was probably before your time. Anyway, down there under you is Metis, this is Ianthe, that's Vectura over there..." She pointed around the room at each individual as she named them.
"Hi."
"Yo."
"How's it going?"
"Nice to meet you."
"Have you even read the manual on this thing? Only from what I can see, I'd have to say..." One of the lizards kicked another one discreetly, making him stop talking. Saurial looked at him for a moment and he subsided.
"Sorry about that." Saurial looked around as one of the reptilian figures said something in a language that for some bizarre reason didn't get translated into anything Martha could understand. She glanced at the Doctor, seeing he was staring at the pair who were rapidly discussing something on the screen of some sort of computer the other lizard was holding and pointing at. Thirty seconds later, they apparently reached an agreement and the one with the computer went after the robot.
"Apologies, my cousin had to tell me something she found. Anyway, like I was saying, we're from BBFO. We detected your craft here had run into a major multiversal mana surge which as you probably know doesn't do the main power core any favors. It took a while to trace where you'd ended up, but we worked it out and thought we'd pop over and see if you needed help." Saurial smiled. "Even though this is an unauthorized copy of one of our earlier designs, it seemed polite. You Gallifreyans can be a pain in the ass but that doesn't mean you deserve to drift between universes in interdimensional space, helpless to find your way back to your own one."
Martha nudged the Doctor when he sighed heavily and gave him a smug grin, which even under the circumstances seemed like something that needed to be done.
"You guys don't get on with magic, so I'm not surprised things went wrong," Saurial continued conversationally, rolling the plans in her hand up and handing them to the one she'd referred to as Ianthe, who was almost Metis's twin except for the color. "And transuniversal travel by surfing mana surges is a pretty hardcore thing even for us." She grinned. "Good fun though. Not efficient, but a real rush."
One of the reptiles disappeared out the door, then stuck his head back in. "New displacement generator's here," he called.
"OK, send it in," Saurial said over her shoulder. "Clear a space, guys."
Without that much surprise, Martha heard the Doctor make a muffled choking noise as the largest arm she'd ever seen reached into the control room through the main door, which she was convinced wasn't large enough. Even so, it somehow fitted. She herself couldn't even make that much of a sound. In the vast scaled hand, large enough to pick up a good sized truck, was a metallic box about three meters on a side, which looked like a carton of milk in that immense grasp. The hand gently put it on the floor with a faint clang then withdrew.
While they were gaping, the lizards quickly opened it, revealing a piece of machinery that made the Doctor breathe out sharply. When she looked at him he was gazing at the thing practically in awe. She examined the machine, which looked almost organic and was clearly brand new, with a sense of unreality. Saurial and one of her people connected some test gear to it and fiddled around for a minute or so, then looked pleased.
"It checks out. Take it down to power room four and replace the bad one with it, please, guys."
Two of the lizards carefully picked the huge machine up and walked slowly away with it, not showing any difficulty handling what was definitely an immense load but looking like they didn't want to damage it. They also disappeared out of the room.
"I've got everything connected and ready," the one called Metis said from under them. "You can start the spin-up whenever you want."
"OK, thanks," Saurial smiled, producing some sort of communications device from somewhere and speaking into it in that weird language. She got a reply, said something else, then put it away. Moments later the thick cable that ran out the door started glowing faint green. Martha stared at it while Saurial looked pleased.
Glancing at the Doctor again she saw he had his eyes fixed on the cable and was visibly pale. That tended to worry her.
"Great, it's working," Metis called. "Four percent… five percent… Can we speed it up a little? This will take all day."
"I don't want to over stress anything," Saurial explained patiently. "This is a very old and delicate machine. We've got time. And it's only a little singularity, it won't take all that much energy."
"Fine, whatever, but I have a movie to watch tonight, you know."
"We'll have plenty of time to watch movies." Saurial shook her head indulgently, looking up at Martha and the Doctor in a way that screamed, 'Family. What can you do?' to the former.
"You say that but I remember last month..." Metis muttered quietly. She fell silent again. "Nine percent now."
"Good, let me know when it hits seventy-five, we can see if that's enough to bootstrap the main system," Saurial replied happily. She looked around as the lights brightened and some of the console indicators flickered a couple of times.
Martha turned around in time to see the Doctor slump back against the console, rubbing his hands over his eyes. "I have no idea what's going on," he mumbled almost inaudibly. "I hate it when that happens."
Unsure what else to do, she hesitantly patted his arm. Then went back to watching the lizards rush around doing god knows what.
Two hours later, Martha was sitting on the steps again watching as the Doctor had an argument with Saurial, waving his sonic screwdriver around vigorously. The lizard-woman was smiling a little, and seemed to have an answer for every one of his objections. Martha was beginning to suspect that the reptile had deliberately decided to make him concentrate on her so her colleagues could work uninterrupted.
Looking around she could see they looked like they were nearly done. An hour ago more panels than she'd realized could be removed had been (she was fairly sure the Doctor had also been surprised at the number of things the lizards got into) but now they were mostly back in place. The glowing cable had been removed ten minutes ago, the Time Lord looking quietly relieved when it disappeared out the door. She was still uncertain what was actually out there, but had been put off going to look by the way the Doctor had done exactly that then come rapidly back appearing like he was trying to forget something he'd seen.
The robot man came back into the control room and moved to have a conversation with Metis, who appeared to be supervising the work while Saurial was otherwise engaged. He glanced at the Doctor, shook his head, then went out the main door.
"Look, I don't care if you believe me or not, Doctor," Saurial said patiently. "The fact is, we licensed this design to that Rassilon guy and he went and made a lot more copies of the thing than we agreed. And added that time travel system, which is just dangerous, along with a load of other unauthorized modifications. We warned him about that but he didn't really like listening to other people sometimes. Not to mention he was always late with the royalties, which is why we ended up canceling the contract."
The Doctor was staring again. He seemed… shocked was a word that was being overused, Martha mused, but it was one that fitted.
Saurial shrugged. "We had words. In the end we decided that entire universe was too much trouble and we stay out of it these days. Considering the number of people who seem to muck around with time there I'm honestly surprised it still exists, but the Multiverse sometimes lets certain reality strands get away with things most places end up regretting. Usually very briefly. We have no idea why, maybe it just finds the chaos entertaining."
"You're one to talk about chaos," Ianthe said as she walked past carrying some odd-looking piece of equipment. Saurial looked at her and grinned, getting a smirk back.
"Even so. Now, the point is that most places will drop on you like a block of neutronium from a great height if you start playing with time travel. So, no, I'm not going to let you poke around in another universe. We're pretty much done now and when everything's finished, we'll put you back where you came from." The lizard woman seemed amused by the Doctor's look of irritation. "You've got an entire universe to play with, Doctor, don't get greedy. You have a reputation and to be honest we don't need your brand of crazy following you someplace we value. We're more than capable of adding all the crazy we need ourselves, and a lot less people get hurt in the process with our sort."
"I hardly think that's entirely fair," the Time Lord said a little sullenly.
She tilted her head to the side and examined him. "Really? Time War ring a bell? Omega Arsenal? Your people ended up… not very nice. And they're still around, in a sense. I don't want to risk them turning up here, because then I'd have to do something I don't want to do again."
He'd gone pale again, Martha noticed, wondering exactly what the lizard was referring to. He clearly knew precisely what she meant.
"All done," the cat-woman Vectura announced, sliding out from under the main console and latching the last panel in place. She hopped to her feet and started manipulating the controls quickly and with the ease of familiarity. The central column, which had begun glowing again half an hour ago, moved up and down a few times completely silently, then stopped once more. The normal pervasive faint hum in the control room was back, sounding more even than it had done. "Everything's back to factory specification, we removed most of the jury-rigged controls, and remapped the system to allow operation by one person." She gave the console a pat, then turned to lean over the railing and talk directly to the Doctor, who was staring yet again. "The new manual is here," she added, holding up a thick book. "Make sure you read addendum 18-A, it's got important information about the user interface changes. And please, for the love of everything you value, clean the tachyon filters more than once a century, will you? They were a mess."
Hurdling the railing in one easy move, she landed on the deck almost silently and walked over to him, handing him the manual with a smile, glanced at Saurial, then left.
While the Doctor was looking after her with a bewildered expression, one that wasn't normal at all for him, but had become familiar to Martha in the last couple of days and very strongly in the last two hours or so, Saurial produced a clipboard and pen. On the board was a stack of paperwork. She flipped through it, making notes in a few places, wrote a couple of lines on another page, then turned to the last one. "Just sign here to acknowledge completion of the work, please," the lizard said pleasantly, holding the clipboard out.
The Time Lord turned back to gaze at her, then dropped his eyes to the clipboard. After a long moment he took it, then the pen she handed him. Scribbling something in the indicated position he gave the clipboard back. "Thanks. Here you go, this is your copy, this is the guarantee, and this is the document that shows the recommended service intervals for the new hardware. Everything should be fine now. You can keep the pen, I've got lots of them." She gave him a set of paperwork and made the rest of it go away. "Contact details are in the back of the manual if you need a field call-out, but I have to warn you that if we attend and find the problem isn't caused by a fault in our work there will be a charge."
Smiling, she manifested a fedora somehow, put it on her head, tipped it to him, then waved to Martha. The woman waved back, feeling rather like she'd been to a party and had slightly too much to drink. It was by now best just to roll with it, she thought.
"Nice to meet you both. Good luck," Saurial said. "We're just setting up for the return trip, it should be a lot easier than the outbound one. See you around, Doctor."
With a nod to them both she left, closing the door behind her. It locked with a quiet click, which aside from the omnipresent background sound of a perfectly working TARDIS was the only noise for some time.
A little while later a faint shiver rippled through the control room, making both occupants twitch slightly. A sensation of cold water running down the back of their necks came and went. Martha looked up at the viewscreen, which was now showing a scene of stars and a couple of distant galaxies.
Eventually, she stood up and descended the stairs, going over to the Doctor, who was looking between the papers in his hand, the main door, and the viewscreen.
"Now you know how most people feel when they meet you for the first time," she said, gently guiding him out of the control room. "Come on, let's get some food, then you can show me that planet you mentioned with all the plants that sing."
Wordlessly, but with a look on his face of deep confusion, he let her lead him away.