8 Months Later
If only Nyssa had grabbed a different suit.
She had been in such a hurry to get out of the research bunker with her equipment that she climbed into the first suit she could find. It was ill fitting, loose, and awkward but with the power fluctuations and lighting failures, Nyssa was just pleased to find one with a functioning air pack.
Nyssa was lying on her back on the 'Donut of Death.'
At least that was what the Doctor called it. Torus was a circular – technically, toroidal - planet the size of three M-class planets. Resting inside the center of the world was the gaping maw of a dimensional rift. Nyssa was on the surface of the world investigating an electromagnetic phenomenon that was decimating the indigenous life forms.
Nyssa flinched as another escape pod slammed into the ground, but the concussion wave was too far away to harm her. Frozen within the slick, gray mud, Nyssa could only watch as the pouch of steel and molybdenum splattered its contents across the surface of Torus. As the unspent fuel thrusters detonated, she tried to focus on the ensuing pyrotechnic display but her eyes kept skittering around, watching the bouncing globules of white, brown, and gray: freeze-dried bits of her friends that floated across her vision.
As Nyssa lay plastered to the muck, the research station Angelus above her burned bright, a wounded, fiery manta ray, floundering in its decaying orbit.
Nyssa had left the Doctor on the Angelus. Nyssa reasoned the Doctor would have managed to escape, that was assuming he wasn't the one who caused its destruction in the first place. When the TARDIS had broken apart so many months ago, herself, the Doctor and Turlough found themselves aboard the Angelus. No one knew what happened to Tegan.
All Nyssa could see now from her prone position now that the wreckage of the station had scattered through the atmosphere was the ever-shifting montage of auroras that lit up the sky of this sunless world: clouds of gaseous emissions that glowed and flared in random, sputtering fractal patterns. She stared at the purple sparking clouds, fascinated, and drifted into a silent, thoughtless reverie.
Shock, she rationalized. She was in shock. The Doctor was probably dead or wounded and she was lying here on her back in mud.
Hendrickson. The thought of her missing assistant pulled Nyssa's mind out of the sky and she looked around her. Where was Hendrickson?
She spied the marine lying three meters away. Saw the spire of rock sticking up through his suit. The dark stains that obscured his helmet.
Nyssa tried to move to help him... that was when she realized that what she was stuck in was not mud.She was stuck fast in some sort of cloudy gel that was smeared across the rock face. She had examined one of these gel traps before when she had first landed on this world: it was a primitive mechanism that a predator utilized to trap and tranquilize its prey. Indeed, her skin, lips, hair, and eyelids were already tingling with a biting numbness. Somehow the gel must have seeped through the fabric of her suit.
In her anesthetized hand, the data pack hummed and vibrated happily to itself, twinkling green lights; the re-sequencing she initialized before the Angelus broke orbit was complete. The device contained an electromagnetic gravitic pulse that Nyssa designed to stabilize the gravity fluctuations that were destroying the indigenous life forms on Torus. It was the reason for her fieldwork on this world, the three months she had spent away from the others. All she had to do was press a button.
Unfortunately she couldn't move a muscle. She could barely even blink. She could only stare straight ahead.
At the figure approaching her.
He was upside down, at least from her point of view. He was a man, mocha skin, hair tied back or tucked out of view. Human, probably. There hadn't been any other species on any of the stations. Nyssa couldn't be sure, but she thought she recognized the patch sewn onto his arm as one of the Alliance vessels. He quickly examined Hendrickson's twisted body before moving over to her.
Nyssa couldn't make out his eyes but she could see his lips moving inside his helmet, presumably speaking to someone on a radio or a subspace band. Or perhaps he was speaking to her. He proceeded to prod at the gel that entrapped her, but soon gave up. Instead, he pulled out some sort of medical scanning device.
There were far too many red lights flashing on that thing.
Suddenly anxious, Nyssa tried to regain control of her body, tried bending her arm, biting her tongue, clenching her stomach, crossing her toes... nothing. She couldn't even move her eyes.
The man put away the scanner and pried a flexi-pack off the thigh portion of his suit. He started withdrawing various objects from within.
Nyssa's curiosity was piqued, but she couldn't read the names on the packages- the hypo-syringes.
Nyssa decided to panic. Just a little. The sudden rush of fear raged through her mind, jumpstarting her thoughts. She felt the urge to kick, scream, and yell.
So this is what it must be like to be Tegan, Nyssa mentally giggled to herself.
That isn't very practical. Try something else.
She regained control, desperate to take great heaving breaths.
Nyssa focused on the man's upper lip. It was lightly peppered with gritty stubble and there was a tiny white circular scar nestled just above where the pink, blood-rich flesh of the lip slipped into the brown of his face. The lips themselves were cracked and peeling from the dry atmosphere of his hostile environmental suit.
Nyssa focused all of her attention on that white scar tissue. Focused and relaxed. Relaxed until she could make out the names printed in black on the floating medical packages that drifted before her gaze. She recognized the name and put the molecules together in her head analyzing the molecular structure. It was similar to what they used on Traken for stomach cramps.
But he was reaching for something else, putting away the other packages in his pack.
On her suit. He was reaching for something on her suit.
As he leaned across her, his badge passed in front of vision: SMEGLEWSKI. Smeglewski reached down and pulled out the slender tube on her suit that allowed the sealed entry of an injector needle in case of medical emergency in a vacuum.
Similar to what we used on Traken.
Nyssa felt her eyes attempt to widen in alarm. Surely his scanner had informed him that she wasn't human?
Smeglewski removed the syringe from its casing and slid it into her suit, snapping shut the vacuum seal. The syringe was now a permanent fixture of her suit. Her suit with the name U.S.S. Angulus emblazoned on it.
Nyssa suddenly realized that he had no idea she was from a lush, verdant world obliterated from the universe over three thousand years ago. To him, she was just another human survivor from the research station that had an abnormal heart rate and a rather bizarrely shaped liver.
I'm not human, Smeglewski! Nyssa mentally screamed at him. Look at your scanner again! Look again!
The torn syringe wrapper floated in front of her helmet and Nyssa could see the name of the chemical compound in written on the silver casing in blackened print.
Nyssa felt herself go numb all over. If that were possible. Even as the molecular structures combined in her mind, the images were chased round her mind by a frantic, panicked scramble of terrified thoughts.
He thinks I'm in shock.
I am in shock.
He's trying to speed up my heart rate.
He thinks I'm human.
He's trying to heal me.
He's going to KILL me!
A vision of the re-programmed biodata pack flashed into her head, still clutched tightly in her frozen fingers. It was meant to be triggered remotely, from a safe distance.
There's no other way.
She had to stop him.
It will kill him.
She could, just barely, move her thumb.
I mustn't.
If I don't do this I will die.
He will die.
It's my choice.
The Doctor needs me. Tegan needs me.
I need me.
She saw him reaching for the trigger of the hyposyringe.
Nyssa wanted to scream, but could find no breath.
Deep within her suit, inside a padded pocket, a small crystalline lump throbbed into life, seething with fierce white light. Throbbing with impatience.
Do it!
In a savage spasm, Nyssa's finger jabbed the dispatch key.
The biodata pack vented its payload.
Nyssa's soul screamed.
The resulting aurora that surrounded her was brighter than any of that in the sky.
Twenty-thousand volts seared outwards in a splash of white, dancing in the air and sparking off rocks and dirt. Mud and grit glowed its wake as the pulse traveled through the liquid-excited atmosphere and slammed into the man.
To Nyssa, isolated by the gel web, the edges of Smeglewski's body suddenly became crisp and sharp, frozen for a silent, glowing instant, before his body starting to tumble slowly, tiny wisps of smoke drifting from the seams of his suit.
Eventually, his body drifted so that their faceplates almost touched.
Nyssa had plenty of time to watch.
His eyes were green. A peculiar mottled sea green shot through with specks of brown.
It was a color Nyssa would never forget.
Unnoticed by Nyssa, the name patch on her suit was reflected in his faceplate. The letters, backwards in the reflection, read: 'HGUOLRUT'.