The TARDIS shook like a storm-tossed ship, which in a sense it was. Aranea caught Rose as she was almost thrown towards a railing which had not been fully padded with worn yellow foam sheets. As she steadied Rose, the young woman looked at her quizzically.
"How come you're not falling all over the place?" she asked.
"I've anchored myself to the platform," Aranea answered simply. As the TARDIS tilted precariously again, Aranea's skirt hem lifted off the ground enough for Rose to see what she meant; the half-human's feet were no longer there, but six long crystal claws gripped the grill of the platform. Rose blanched a little.
"Rose, the levers!" the Doctor shouted.
"I'm on it!"
Rose rushed forward and pulled down three levers on her side of the console. One kept popping upwards again, and she had to use both hands to hold it down. Aranea leaned forward and clasped her hand over Rose's, helping to keep the lever down.
"It's no good, the distortion's too strong!" Jack shouted over the roar of machinery, "We have to land now, or we'll end up thrown even further off-course!"
The Doctor looked at Jack sceptically for a moment, folding his arms. Aranea noticed that when he got distracted, the Doctor seemed immune to the pitching and yawing of the TARDIS.
He nodded and started pumping away.
"Brace for impact," Jack warned.
Ting!
Miraculously, no one fell down. Jack barely managed to stay on his feet by clinging to the console, and Rose had fallen back against Aranea, who seemed as steady as a pillar.
The Doctor was already standing in front of the display screen, frowning at it.
Rose dashed to the screen, eager to find out where they were.
"So how did we do?" Jack asked, once he was steady again.
"Not good. Still thousands of years early and nowhere close," the Doctor replied glumly.
"Any idea what that distortion was?" Jack opened his wrist computer and checked some data. All he got were some melancholy beeps.
"Could be any number of things," the Doctor cycled through different displays with such speed that it was only a chromatic blur to Rose, "Might be a passing storm, might be a permanent temporal distortion concentrated around the time period. No way of telling, considering how wild things are out there now."
"So we can't get to the signal?" Jack looked rather disappointed.
"There are methods around these types of disturbances," the Doctor replied, "Ever tried tacking a sailboat in a contrary wind?"
"Yeah," Jack nodded, "Just go in a zig-zag pattern till you get to your destination."
"That's what we're going to do."
0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0
They had to stop a second time when some of the TARDIS' circuits blew. The two men looked at the damage and declared it would be a good twelve hours' work to fix it all. Even with Aranea helping with the soldering and wiring, it was still hard going. Seven hours in, Jack declared a break.
"Break?" the Doctor grimaced, "And do wha'? Watch Coronation Street on the telly?"
"I don't know about you, Doctor, but we've been cooped up in the TARDIS for over two days now, being thrown around the console room like pinballs," Jack said emphatically, "I think we all deserve a break."
As the Doctor still looked pretty irked, the Captain decided to try a different approach.
"Come on, we've been on a strange planet for seven hours now," he said in a more congenial tone, "Don't you want to know where we are?"
That brought some grudging consideration on the part of the Doctor, and Jack knew he won when the Time Lord turned to look at Rose, who seemed close to bursting, but still tried to act casual.
"We won't have to go too far," she shrugged, "Just a stroll, take in the sights, get some fresh air…?"
"All right, "the Doctor conceded, "But we come back within two hours and fix the TARDIS. There's a distress signal to answer!"
Aranea watched the entire exchange from across the console room, a slight smile on her face. He looked different, but he was still the Doctor she remembered.
0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0
They were standing in the middle of a frozen ocean. Waves loomed above them, a hundred feet in the air, and everything was tinged in silver and black by the great white moon.
Jack and Rose were decked out in quilted jackets, scarves, caps and gloves; their breath misted heavily in the frigid air. The Doctor's only concession to the cold was a dark scarf that matched his jumper, which Rose had thrown around his neck before they emerged from the TARDIS.
Aranea wore her usual gown; her breath did not mist in the air.
The Doctor had been reluctant but indulgent when they were leaving the TARDIS, but once outside, he suddenly became brooding and grim. Any attempt to draw him into conversation failed, and he answered questions in a brusque manner.
Jack raised an inquisitive eyebrow at Rose, who could only shrug.
"How did everything get frozen so quickly, Doctor?" Rose asked, running her hand over a curving ice-wall, "Look, all the fishes are still trapped inside!"
The Iquoya knew the sun was failing; already two ships were ready, able to house two thousand people each. They were a meagre race; the womenfolk seldom had more than two children in their lifetimes. But the two ships could still only contain a tenth of their small population; more would be needed.
It was decided that the very old and the very young would go first, to take care of each other. Every able-bodied Iquoya left behind would work together to build more ships. They calculated that they could complete enough vessels before the land froze over entirely, killing their livestock and their crops.
A strange man came to them as they were completing the last three great ships; more than five thousand souls were still on the planet then. He told them that there would be no time to complete the ships, as a powerful device was going to enter their atmosphere and hasten the freezing process.
The strange man was no believed at first, but he directed the astronomers to look to the skies. They found a small thing, barely more than a falling star, those rocks that entered the atmosphere and burnt to nothing. But they could see that as other falling stars came into contact with it, they would be covered in a thick coat of frost, and break to pieces.
There were underground bunkers that they took refuge in, which they lived in to escape the cold above. The strange man, the Doctor, told them it would not be enough. They would have to coat the doors of the bunkers in gold, or the doors would be frozen and they would all be trapped inside.
A thousand men undertook to do the gilding; all the rest, especially the womenfolk, who were as strong as the men, but far more precious for the fruits of their wombs, locked themselves into the bunkers.
The Chief Engineer, Two-Doves-in-Flight, asked the Doctor to go in; should the gilding not go as planned, they would need the Doctor to find a way out. Reluctantly the Doctor agreed.
"The sun dimmed," he answered shortly, "The global temperature dropped, so everything froze over."
"You've been here before, then?" Jack asked, interested. Was it grief that made the Doctor so moody?
"Yes."
"So what's the planet called?"
As they waited within the bunkers, the Chief Engineer's wife, Fox-by-the-River, showed the Doctor the communication room. From there, they could see, and talk to, all the thousand who were toiling outside. A hundred screens covered one wall, blinking from man to man, standing, crouching or stretched, welding thin leaves of gold to the massive bunker doors. There were twenty bunkers. Forty pairs of doors, each a hundred feet tall and three hundred feet wide.
As they watched tensely, Fox-by-the-River quietly told the Doctor of an old folk tale that predated the Iquoya's colonisation of this planet. Her grandmother had told her, when the Iquoya escaped from their enemies, fleeing across the stars, an old sage had warned them not to take the first good planet they came to, for there their children would wither and die in the womb, and men would weep for their unborn sons and their dying wives. Nor should they take the second planet, for their children would be few, and the menfolk would be taken from them in catastrophe, and the women would weep. Only the third planet they came to would guarantee the Iquoya safety for all time.
But Hawk-diving, their Great Chief, looked at the first planet verdant and warm, and his heart twisted to abandon it. When he saw the second planet they came to, and saw how exhausted his people were from the flight, he declared that they would settle here.
What did the sage say? The Doctor asked. Fox-by-the-River shrugged. He told Hawk-diving that he would not regret this decision, but his children's children would. In defiance of the sage, Hawk-diving said that he would name this planet Women Wept. It would be a false name, he said, for the fields were green, and the hunting plentiful. No woman would weep here for her lost man.
"It's called Women Wept," the Doctor said, staring down at an abysmal valley that plunged beyond the moonlight's ability to illuminate it.
"Why's that?" Rose was puzzled by the strange, sad name.
We cannot finish the doors in time, Two-doves-in-Flight reported, we are sealing the doors now. The Doctor called him insane; the thousand men would freeze in an instant once the device entered the atmosphere. Two-doves-in-Flight only smiled. Though a man of four and forty years, his cheeks were smooth as a child's. No Iquoya male had facial hair. He looked like a cherub as he smiled.
Take care of our womenfolk, Two-doves-in-Flight said. Goodbye. All the screens turned dark. The Doctor remembered that Fox-by-the-River had screamed her husband's name once, before falling silent.
They felt the impact of the device even within the bunkers. The air within, heated by great generators, grew cold in an instant. And the Doctor heard a wail rise outside the communication chamber, a wail echoed in the other nineteen bunkers. The women were lamenting their menfolk, lost outside. The women wept.
"Got to do with the shape of the continent," the Doctor answered, "It's curved like a lamenting woman."
"Wow, is it?" Jack's eyes opened wide in slight disbelief.
"Yeah," the Doctor whispered.
He looked around the bleak tableau, his eyes hidden in darkness. Rose felt a chill in her heart that had nothing to do with the cold air.
"Doctor?"
She touched his arm, and felt a slight tremor go through the Time Lord's body. He looked down at her and suddenly grinned, tilting his head back in an amused fashion.
"Right, you two go look around if you want," he said airily, "I'm going back to the nice warm TARDIS and have myself a cup of tea."
He sauntered off towards the TARDIS, then paused and turned around.
"Oh, and make sure you've got Aranea before coming back in, all right?"
With a cheerful nod, he went on his way.
"What was that about?" Jack asked, pushing his cap back to rub his forehead. Sometimes the Doctor's mercurial change in temper gave him a migraine.
"I'm just as confused as you are," Rose admitted, "Come on, let's go find Aranea and get back in there before he starts going barmy again."
"You mean that wasn't barmy enough?"
That earned Jack a punch to his ribs.
Aranea had watched the trio from a distance; there was something she had to do, and it was not convenient if they happened to look her way while she did it. As the Doctor's brooding caught the two humans' full attention, Aranea edged closer to the valley and jumped in. She disappeared into the darkness almost immediately.
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AN: This is an extra-long chapter cos I've got to be away for a week. Also adding an intermission after this. I've got a few intermissions that I'll sprinkle here and there, probably in between longer sequences like this one. It's not really an action one, is it? Oh dear.