Once inside the peculiar spaceship Tad's eyes got big as dinner-plates, and he paced across the control room, just to make sure it really was as large as it is. Our golf bag fell to the floor with a resounding clatter, and a grenade rolled out, slowly revolving until it came to rest at the Doctor's feet. He put a long toe on it, bringing it to rest, and cocked an eyebrow at me.
'Just in case. Precautionary. Also makes a good paper-weight,' I tried.
He tapped the weapon forcefully and it rolled back into the golf-bag.
'The plan, John, is to gain access to Salamander without creating a big fuss. Covert and stealthy. Like mice!'
Tad draped the belts of ammunition he'd been carrying over a hatstand, pointing speechlessly at the door which led further into the TARDIS. Poor fella. TARDIS can be a bit much to take first time.
Actually he had been indicating another member of the crew, who smiled brightly at all three of us.
'Hello – Miss Smith?' said Tad.
Yes, it was Sarah Jane Smith – again. My temper began to rise, and I was impolite enough to point.
'I know you're not the real Sarah, and we left the old copy behind, so who the hell are you!' Another thought hit home. 'This isn't some sort of time-effect, is it, Doctor?'
'Ah,' said the Doctor. 'Gentlemen. May I introduce Winifred's offspring, Clara.'
Rutans, "as any exographer knows", reproduce by meta-mitosis after ingesting enough energy, splitting to create two where there was only one before. During her sojourn in the TARDIS, Winifred dined on enough energy to produce an offspring, whom she named Clara. Clara didn't have the experience or background of Winifred and so was able to imitate only a few characters, Sarah being one of the easiest to manage. When I took a few steps closer to Clara/Sara/whateva, she hissed at me and threw up her hands.
'Careful, John! This is an immature Rutan, new to human culture. Nowhere near as anthropomorphised as her parent, and liable to react aggressively.'
'This is very confusing,' commented Tad. Our British ways were corrupting him, since he managed to understate fantastically. The Doctor took pity on us, Tad frowning and me scowling.
'It is. Clara, come with me and we'll get you an acceptable body-template.'
Good. The TARDIS's time-rotor began to rise and fall with it's characteristic wheezy groaning, whilst the Doctor took Clara off into the depths of the machine.
'And don't touch anything!' he called back, pointing at me.
Neither of us knew how long the Time Lord was going to be, so I emptied the golf-bag and reassembled the Jimpy, loading an ammo belt. I toted the paratroop-version SLR, seeing that it had an automatic-fire selector. Tad hefted the Nitro Express, which he had rashly fired at the ranges, nearly dislocating his shoulder.
'We are expecting dinosaurs?' he asked.
'Sontarans. I joked about them being toad-men – bufo sapiens – but notice that the Doctor hasn't criticised or contradicted me? Maybe I guessed right.'
'More reptilian than toad, John – good grief! Are you planning on waging war!' exclaimed the Doctor, striding back into the control room and spotting our weapons neatly laid out on the floor.
'It's a found objet d'art display for the Tate,' I tried. Tad choked slightly at this blatant lie.
'Yes. Quite. Allow me to introduce Clara in her next guise.'
He swung the access door open and out stepped a tall, long-haired woman, strikingly good-looking and with cheekbones sharp enough to shave with. Complete unknown to me, but Tad perked up strangely.
'This particular fascia comes from the cover of a rare record I have. She is an avante-garde jazz musician,' said the Doctor patronisingly. 'Annette - '
'Peacock!' finished Tad. 'Yes, yes, I know her! Gary Peacock, synthesizers, jazz music.'
Belatedly, I recalled that he'd told Nick and I several weeks ago that he liked jazz music.
'Oh no!' groaned the Doctor. 'I picked someone so obscure nobody would recognise her!'
'Please!' said Tad, a twinkle in his eye. 'Do not ask Clara to alter on my behalf. I am quite comfortable with her looking this way.'
I'll bet he was! His wife, Agnieta, whose photograph I have seen, greatly resembled this Peacock woman. I don't know if the pash about Annette came first, or Annette reminded him of Agnieta.
'Can we get back to the plan about rescuing the Salamander?' I reminded everybody. 'Plan, rescue, escape.'
'Hopefully to include the spaceship crew as well,' added the Doctor. He unrolled a big blueprint on the TARDIS floor, using a grenade to hold down each corner. 'This is a schematic of the spaceship in question.'
'How big is the crew?' I asked, expecting three or four.
'Twenty four,' said the Doctor in an off-hand manner, stroking his upper lip and looking intently at the plans.
'And what are the dimensions of the space-vessel?' asked Tad, casting alternate glances at Clara-in-disguise and the blueprints.
'Oh, about a kilometre along the major axis, and about two hundred metres in diameter,' answered the Doctor. He looked up at the sudden silence and grinned. 'Bigger than you expected?'
Indeed. I anticipated something spindly and small, along the lines of the Apollo Lunar Lander, instead of a ship as big as a skyscraper.
'Here. This is the bulk storage monocoque, carrying capacity about twenty five million cubic tonnes when full. I anticipate that the Sontarans will have concealed themselves in here.'
The cylindrical bulk storage sections on the blueprint occupied an area between the engines at the stern and crew compartments at the front of the hull. A completely covered walkway ran directly through the middle of the storage sections, leading from engine room to bridge.
'This pyramid of compartments at the bow constitutes the bridge, medical unit, dormitory, recreation area, various stores and the communications suite. As you can see, the access tunnel passes axially through the middle.'
The Doctor tapped the medical unit.
'That's where they were holding Salamander last time.'
Great! We knew exactly where the prisoner was. Drop the TARDIS next to his bunk-bed, cut restraints, quick in, quick out.
The Doctor displayed hidden depths of telepathic intent and gave me a long hard look.
'But of course we need to rescue the crew, also. Otherwise the Sontarans will simply kill them once their prisoner has gone.'
Bloody Sontarans!
'And I don't want a brutal slaughter, either. The less bloodshed the better.'
Bloody Time Lords!
The Doctor gave a slight cough of embarassment, meaning he was about to mention something unpleasant. More unpleasant.
'I'm afraid we can't land inside the Seraphim before my previous rescue attempt. It will have to be afterwards, otherwise we risk a catastrophic interruption in causality.'
Whoopee, the news just got better. Afterwards, when the Sontarans would be expecting a renewed rescue attempt; afterwards, when they'd be patrolling in strength; afterwards, when they'd have all sorts of alarm systems set up. Great.
Tad asked another important question.
'How many of the toad-men are there?'
The Doctor mused and hummed a tune.
'Let's see – they'd need space-going transport, and enough troops to occupy and mount an ambush aboard the Seraphim – the spaceship. I'd guess a Valt-class destroyer. Thirty crew, about a hundred boarded troops and at least three or four fighter craft.'
This got better and better. Outnumbered thirty to one, with a requirement to rescue twenty four hostages as well as Salamander.
'How did the Sontarans capture Salamander? Could we take him away using the same method?' asked Tad, continuing his run of sensible questions.
'You hit the metaphorical nail on the head, Kapitan,' admitted the Doctor. 'My best guess, which they hinted at, was that they'd picked him up in a time-corridor, entirely at random.'
I knew a little about time-corridors, the poor cousin of time-travel. Whittaker and Butler had been using a crude version to import their dinosaurs into 1975 London. The Daleks had a more sophisticated model, and the Sontarans used them, too. Still, it seemed to be stretching coincidence a bit far. Didn't it?
'Not really,' explained the Doctor. 'There aren't that many artefacts drifting around in the vortex. Salamander, being a diffuse potentiality in the continuum, could have been encountered by anybody. I've kept an eye open for him during my travels, but obviously the Sontarans got to him first.' He sighed. Typical Doctor, feeling sorry for a hijacker. 'Neither of you have asked why I want to rescue him so badly, which is forebearance I appreciate.'
Tad and I both leaned in closer, not actually asking in so many words, just implying that we were asking.
'Naturally I feel partly responsible for his ejection into the space-time continuum.' He forestalled my sarcastic comment before it reached my lips. 'Nor is that all. More importantly, if Salamander is not rescued from the Sontarans, they will continue to play their "rescued Time Lord" trick. Who knows who will get fooled next time?'
Aha. A pre-emptive strike. This sounded more familiar to me. Before we got any further, the Doctor passed a small white cube to me. He was off to plan, plot and tinker in the depths of TARDIS.
'You need to know more about the Sontarans, both of you. Hold this in your hand and say "Sontaran" clearly to it.'
He could have made billions with a device like that, a small computerised 3D display unit activated by sound.
'Sontaran,' I enunciated into the cube.
'SONTARAN,' replied the device. 'PROJECTING.'
A life-size replica of a Sontaran appeared in the console room, scaring Clara silly. She hissed and spat, throwing her arms up. I walked through the three-dimensional projection, passing the cube to Tad, making the Sontaran shimmer and wobble.
Damn, this was risky! Rutans are able to kill with an electrical field they generate organically. Clara didn't have her mother's easy understanding of humans, nor the ability to comprehend English either, seemingly, which meant John might end up being cooked alive.
'Artificial. Pretend. Not real,' I stated, waving an arm through the Sontaran's ugly, brutal and toadish head. The image swam and wavered. Clara leaned in closer, looking intently, forgetting that she was scared. With a sudden dart of her eyes, she looked at me.
'Pretend. Not real. Image,' she said, in an artificial monotone, a strangely modulated sound. Then she waved her hand into the image, making it dance erratically. 'Pretend!' she crowed.
Yes, wonderful, we'd got that out of the way. The cube continued to send out images, accompanied by information.
Sontarans originally came from a high gravity world with an extremely dense atmosphere. Their bodyform tended to the squat and muscular, averaging one hundred and ninety kilogrammes. Eyesight not too brilliant, but their hearing was very good. Genetic manipulation had created several different phenotypes, most obviously those which had five digits instead of three. Different phenotypes had developed in accordance with different specialisations needed for the war against the Rutans – Medical, Military Assessment, Intelligence, etcetera. They came by the million, our toadies, cloned and raised to make huge armies for combat with the Rutans. Long past the need for primitive nuclear energy, they used terullium-based technology.
Another nasty little tweak the Sontarans had was their conditioning technology, with which they were able to programme people to obey them. Like hypnosis, but far more intense. The Seraphim crew had all been conditioned; not too heavily, according to the Doctor, or they wouldn't be able to function properly and operate the spaceship.
'How do we kill the toad-men?' asked Tad. Bright lad, good question.
"LETHAL FORCE APPLICATION," announced the cube. A series of white arrows appeared around our life-sized armoured Sontaran warrior, with labels attached. "Aural cavity" seemed to be what the toad-men had for ears, which were "vulnerable to penetrating attack". "Probic vent" was a valve on the rim of the helmet seal, which was "fatal if pierced" or "causes unconsciousness if struck hard". "Fontanelle" on the top of the head, if hit, would "cause immediate death due to brain haemorrhage".
The bare-headed Sontaran promptly exchanged it's naked bonce for a helmet, which removed the weaknesses named above. Or, if not removed totally, at least rendered them less applicable. But it would impair hearing and make their vision straight-ahead only. Believe me, there hasn't been an armour invented that allows the wearer to see and hear as well with it as without it.
'What weapons do they use?' I asked, professionally interested.
"WEAPONRY" declared the cube. "SPECIFY HAND-HELD, CREW-SERVED, VEHICLE-MOUNTED OR SPACE VESSEL ARMAMENT"
'Hand-held? Yes, make it hand-held.' With a hundred of the toadies running around, I wanted to know what we might be up against.
Sontarans used rheon weapons, that came as a wand, a pistol or a carbine. Instantly fatal to non-armoured organic life-forms massing less than three hundred kilos, at varying ranges up to a couple of hundred metres.
'Boning-up on our unpleasant opponents?' asked the Doctor, having returned from wherever he was plotting in the first place, carrying bits of equipment.
'Oh yes,' said Tad. 'And we do not like them.'
'One of them would make two of me, but only half as handsome.'
'What the cube doesn't say – thank you, I'll have it back now – what it doesn't say is that the Sontarans are very literal-minded. Typical humourless clones.'
His first order of business was to proof Tad against conditioning, with a Heath Robinson device consisting of a tiny spinning mirror lit with a small laser. The Pole only took ten minutes to get the anti-mind mashing treatment, against the thirty it took the Doctor to sort me out in Russia. Then again, he said I had all the suggestibility of a house-brick.
'Humour, you see, is a very useful human survival trait. A tremendous stress reliever. Instantly creates an esprit between individuals,' continued the Doctor whilst giving Tad the magic mirror treatment, muttering into the Kapitan's ear.
'Does that mean Nick and I are forging the bonds of brotherhood when we bicker amusingly?' I asked.
'I wonder! Lieutenant Munro and "forging" do seem to go together, to coin a phrase – humour, John, humour! There you go, Kapitan, all done.'
Tad blinked dopily a few times, before catching sight of Clara.
'Agnieta!' he blurted. 'Give Tad a kiss!'
Clara shrank back against the TARDIS wall, whilst I put a big paw on Tad's shoulder and restrained him. The Doctor snapped his fingers in front of the Pole's nose a few times, sighing.
'Oh!' exclaimed our comrade in arms, shaking himself, then catching sight of Clara a second time and swearing. This thirty seconds of desire, embarassment and anger was the most emotive I'd ever seen the taciturn Pole.
'After our touch of farce, can we get on with the rescue plan?' I asked again. 'We haven't really moved forward.'
'Oh but we have,' contradicted the Doctor. 'Tad is now mentally armoured against the Sontarans. Both he and you are informed about them and their capabilities. Clara – did you understand the cube's information?' Clara nodded. 'And so is Clara. Moreover, I have a paradigm for rescuing Salamander and the Seraphim's crew.'
Terrific! What could go wrong now? I had to wonder. Fate must have felt tempted.
'I am sorry about, er, propositioning you,' apologised Tad to Clara. 'I was confused.'
'Don't like you!' she replied, tossing her head back, then pointing at me. 'Like fat human!'
Honestly, it's the way my dress uniform hangs; I can't afford to have it remedially-tailored like Nick Munroe. He'd lose bladder control from laughter if he ever got to hear about this scene.
The Doctor's paradigm amounted to asking me how I would go about rescuing Salamander. I pored carefully over the Seraphim blueprint, looked at the weapons we had, included Clara in our plans and worked out an operation.
Firstly, access the interior of the spaceship via one of those enormous entrance bays. Made for ore loading, they could easily accommodate the TARDIS. Then we'd get onto the axial tunnel, working in two pairs. First pair leading, second pair watching the rear, and we'd go with all the firepower we could manage to stagger under, given how many Sontarans were facing us. Leave wired grenades behind to act as deterrents. Blow the power lines leading to the crew compartments, then make an assault on the medical unit, liberate Salamander, forcibly escort any crew members encountered back to the TARDIS. Leave a timed bomb in the crew compartments that destroyed the entire bridge after we'd left, and another in the cargo bay timed to go off after we'd left.
Bywords would be speed, maximum firepower given the disparity in numbers, and ruthless killing of Sontarans.
'Splendid!' chortled the Doctor, proceeding to ignore everything I'd suggested. 'What I want is to create a meteor strike, depressurisation, and loss of control on the bridge, without any of it actually happening.'
'Does "paradigm" mean "ignore John"?' I asked, with a touch of sulkiness. 'I mean.'
'Tut!' scolded the Doctor.
'Tut!' joined in Clara, pointing at me. Okay, criticism from the alien Blob Lady I could do without.
'You did your job perfectly, John,' continued the Doctor. 'Except that what you recommend is the exact opposite of what I intend to do. Your rational military mind will come up with solutions that the Sontarans would also, logically, come up with.'
Hey, no problem. John just loves to come up with rational military solutions. I wasn't so sure about being lumped in the same bucket as the toad-men.
'So I am aware of what to avoid,' finished the Doctor. 'What we need is a covert, insidious, thoroughly underhand and subtle method. Hence my operation.'
'Arranging a meteor strike that is not real – that is rather difficult,' commented Tad. 'Likewise, the human beings controlled by Sontarans may not be ready to relinquish control to yourself.'
We got an enigmatic wiggle of the eyebrows for that query and our pains.
'You two can put your skills with mayhem to constructive use.' He began to outline the plan, illustrating various points with a long piece of electronic ware that seemed to have been put together in a hurry, idly juggling another mysterious object that resembled a big silver golf-ball. The difficult part was going to be getting into the bridge, where the Doctor and I were convinced the Sontarans would be keeping watch. Not only that, there were bound to be other toadies wandering around on patrol, plus human crew conditioned to tattle to the toadies if they encountered any other rescue attempts. We did have an ace up one sleeve, however.
The first problem we had was landing the TARDIS. It wasn't silent, for one, and the Doctor needed to pilot it to a deserted room in the interior of the spaceship, very precisely. A stray Sontaran lurking nearby would scotch our plans before they got going.
Thus, the Doctor scanned the dark, empty room we landed in, and scanned it carefully. Two 360 degree sweeps. No enemy, no artefacts, no interest.
'Big empty box,' commented Clara. Not quite correct, but getting there, since we had landed in an empty "warehouse", four walls thirty feet high and not an item to be seen (her English wasn't very good yet, a fact we had to work around).
The TARDIS doors were opened and we all stepped out, gingerly. The apparent gravity was imparted by centripetal force, created by the crew compartments rotating around the axial tunnel.
Brrr! was my first response. Very cold, and pitch black – no, not quite, a tiny light set high on the ceiling cast a faint glow. After twenty seconds we acquired a little night vision, and split into pairs.
My second impression of the spaceship room was it's strange smell – a combination of staleness and chemicals, unsettling after the unobtrusive ambience of the TARDIS. A slight echo informed us that the room was empty, if we hadn't been paying attention to the scanner.
After waiting a good minute, Tad and I headed for one pair of doors set in the wall, opposite those that the Doctor and Carla were making for. Neither pair opened when pushed or pulled, until I noticed what looked like a control pad to one side of the doors, a slightly darker panel flush against the metal. Lock or lightswitch, must be one or the other.
Not finding any exit on his side of the empty storage space, the Doctor and Carla came back towards us, just as the door irised open without me touching the wall panel.
' - wish there were scanners in here!' muttered a man to himself, striding into the room. Catching sight of the two strangers approaching, and Tad off to his right, he stopped dead. He wore a baggy one-piece plastic overall, "2 TEC Arrhuis" stencilled on the back, which I could see from my vantage point off to his left and behind him.
'You again!' he gasped, his back lit up brightly by artificial lights in the corridor outside and his breath fuming in the cold of the chilly compartment. Okay, okay, so the Doctor wasn't a stranger to him.
'You don't have to warn the Sontarans,' said the Time Lord, quickly and quietly.
'I don't want to but I have to,' gritted the crewman, edging away from Tad, who looked coolly back at him. 'I must!' grated the intruder.
Shaking, he turned to run back, turning and accidentally running his chin onto my fist.
The Doctor gave me a cross look as he examined the unconscious crewman.
'What!' I hissed. 'He was going to raise the alarm.'
Deciding that the presence of a crewmember, even if unconscious, meant that the lights could go on, the Doctor pressed the wall panel twice. At the first push the door irised shut, and with the second a series of brilliant lights concealed in the ceiling came on.
'I could have paralysed him, instead of you rendering him practically comatose. Really, John!' he scolded.
John felt unwanted and unloved.
'Big punch!' enthused Clara. 'Good human John!'
John felt unwanted. The less said about the other the better. Tad looked from me to Clara and shook his head.
Producing an ampoule of sal volataire, the Doctor cracked it under the nose of Aarhuis, who wrinkled his face, coughed and jerked upright, only to come eye-to-laser with the Doctor's little anti-hypnosis mirror on a stick. Clara sniffed interestedly at the acrid reek of the little glass capsule.
'Poo! Bad stink!' she said, waving a hand in front of her nose. How did she smell when her nose was merely a simulacrum?
'AH!' gasped Aarhuis the instant the laser ceased shining into his eyes. He rubbed both eyes with the back of his hand, looking a bit hammered.
'Don't worry, you're amongst friends,' explained the Doctor, giving a winning smile. Damn it, I wish I could reassure with a smile like that!
'Some friends,' winced the man, feeling the bruise on his chin. 'Hey!' He looked up at us all, smiling. 'Free! I'm free! I don't have to obey those - ' and he gave a long, forty-second century collection of impolite descriptions of the Sontarans.
'You recognised me from my previous visit. Well, I and my companions are here to rescue Salamander. Plus your crew, if at all possible.'
The idea, in brief, was to get the Sontarans to leave voluntarily. Not easy! We could have gotten a few crew away in the TARDIS, or the ship's lifecraft, but the Doctor wanted all of them rescued.
The crewman struggled upright from his sitting position, taking us all in. He spotted me and bounced over to give me a big hug.
'Hey, steady on, I'm British, we don't go in for that sort of thing,' I blurted, not expecting such a touchy-feely response.
'We need to get to the bridge unseen,' explained the Doctor, going over the first part of our plan.Aarhuis shook his head in furious denial.
'No! No, can't be done, and you'd die trying. There's at least five Sontarans on the bridge at any given moment. Not only that, they have guards on the major corridor intersections. About twenty in total. The intersections are monitored by camera from the bridge.'
His capture turned out to be a major stroke of luck for us, since he knew everything the Sontarans were doing. They were posted in corridors to watch for any Time Lord arrival, whilst he had been sent to check possible arrivals in out of the way rooms. Five of the toadies loitered on the bridge just in case other humans made conventional contact about the rescuee. The twenty four personnel of the Seraphim's crew had now declined to seventeen; the Sontarans having sent seven out of an airlock without their suits as un-necessary to maintain the baited spaceship. The Valt-class destroyer currently sat in the rear of the bulk cargo monocoque, where most of the Sontaran troops also remained, under orders to emerge only when the General Alarm was sounded.
'They sent my partner out of that airlock,' said Aarhuis, a touch of madness in his eyes. 'Anything I can do to get back at them, I will.'
'Join our toad-smashing team,' I lightly told him, risking a touch of greasy eyeball from the Doctor.
'Can you get to the bridge without arousing suspicion?' asked the Doctor. Aarhuis nodded, stroking his blond goatee in puzzlement. The Doctor passed over that long cobbled-together piece of electronic gear. 'Good. Hide this in your overalls. When you hear the alarm go off for a meteorite impact, press the button set into the end and be prepared for anything. Oh – what's the name of your captain?' No more details than that, just to ensure the crewman reacted with the proper degree of surprise.
'Meroon Fontenbloem.'
Before he left, Aarhuis let slip important information.
'The Sontaran officers have got specially-adapted electronic lenses in their helmets. One of them boasted that they can pick out a Rutan at five hundred metres. What do you think of that? What's a Rutan, anyway?'
We sent him on his way without enlightening him – too much information. Aarhuis reckoned on six or seven minutes travel to get onto the bridge. Eight minutes after he left us, Tad and I sneaked into the corridor outside our arrival point. Tad carried our M79, the grenade-firing gun that looked like a giant single-barrelled shotgun. Travelling clockwise brought us to another warehouse-sized room, revealed in all it's chilly dark echoing emptiness when the door irised open. Tad carefully measured his distance from the doorway and I closed the door, which irised shut around the M79 barrel.
I looked over my shoulder at the Doctor and Clara, who had also come into the corridor. The Doctor was ferreting around in a spaghetti-like bundle of wiring tugged from a wall conduit. He held up his big silver golf ball and nodded to us.
Tad pulled the trigger, recoil knocked the barrel free, the door irised shut just in time to avoid venting blast into the corridor as the M79's grenade blew a metre-wide hole in the opposite wall, which just so happened to be Seraphim's outer hull.
Instantly, klaxons began to squawk in the corridor, and the hidden lighting overhead abruptly changed to flashing red from cool white.
'HULL BREACH! HULL BREACH!' boomed a gigantic artificial voice. 'HULL BREACH! HULL BREACH!'
Aarhuis told us later that he'd heard and felt the wrenching impact of our sabotage, instantly understanding what "fake meteor strike" amounted to. Everyone else on the bridge looked surprised and alarmed, emotions which increased immensely when our de-conditioned technician pressed the stud of the Doctor's magic wand and everything electronic within fifty metres suddenly failed. A sphere of fifty metres diameter compromised the whole bridge.
Tad and I cautiously walked back to the Doctor, who slapped Clara on the back.
'Go and do your thing!' he ordered. Clara's outline shimmered into a green blur, rapidly resolving into a copy of Aarhuis. Not part of the original plan, but we had to improvise on the go.
'Okay!' beamed the copy of Aarhuis, setting off at a slow jog. Tad and I caught up with the Doctor.
'She's not going to run into any Sontaran officers, is she?' I asked.
'Officers do not stand sentry duty,' interrupted Tad. 'Officers will be standing on the bridge being important.' He caught my eye. 'But your concern is duly noted.'
Leaning closer to his silver golf ball, the Doctor spoke clearly and calmly into it.
'Attention please, attention please. This is Captain Fontenbloem speaking. Seraphim has been hit by a meteor strike, destroying her bridge and catastrophically breaching our hull. Self-sealing of cargo bays will start in sixty seconds. All hands stand by to abandon ship. I say again, all hands to abandon ship.'
This – this was one of our stickier moments. Nobody on the bridge could contradict us – as long as Aarhuis had used his magic electronic wand. Given that the hull had been breached, and the bridge destroyed, and that the bulk monocoque would start to seal in less than a minute, any Sontarans remaining in the crew compartments ought to get out of the Seraphim and head for their own vessel, lurking in the cargo bays. Those five toadies hanging around the bridge wouldn't know anything except a suspected impact and the loss of all power and systems. What would they do? The Doctor had to guess at that, taking my responses into account.
As we learnt later, Carla's little metamorphosis en route to the bridge worked marvels. In her Aarhuis disguise she'd slipped past two pairs of Sontaran sentries at corridor intersections, then changed into a Sontaran, a fatally-injured one, and crawled back to the last pair of sentries. After seeing a dying Sontaran crawling back from the direction of the bridge, gasping "Bridge - destroyed!" (the best her language skills could come up with) one of the sentries sent a message back to their own spaceship. Carla waited until they sent the message, then electrocuted both of them as they came to retrieve her body. A touch of ruthless, that Rutan lass.
Currently, this information was unknown to us. The Doctor, Tad and I moved from the corridor and back into our brightly-lit, if still extremely cold, warehouse. That giant, impossibly calm voice braying about hull breaches was still going.
'Hello?' said the control panel next to the door, making me jump in startlement. 'Hello? This Carla.'
Showing a more rapid recovery from fear than either of us humans, the Doctor tapped the panel three times.
'Hello Carla, this is the Doctor. What's going on at your end? We haven't seen anything here.'
Thanks to his telescope we could actually see out of the doorway without exposing ourselves; the door had irised shut on the brass barrel, leaving it projecting into the warehouse three feet above the ground, and out into the corridor about half an inch. Nobody passing would have noticed the lens in the dead centre of the door's iris unless they were looking for it. Nobody had passed by looking for it.
'Kill two more Sontaran. Other Sontarans run away, try to get home. More Sontaran maybe go for Slamander.'
She couldn't pronounce "Salamander" properly.
So – twenty Sontarans had now become sixteen. An undetermined number were fleeing, probably trying to get back to their Valt-class destroyer before the bulkhead doors in Seraphim's cargo section irised shut and trapped them on what they thought was a dying spaceship.
A small party of those fleeing Sontarans came rumbling down the corridor outside our vantage point, making the walls and floors shake – human design wasn't intended for baby elephants. Three of the toadies, according to Tad, who crouched on the floor and peered into the telescope.
Aaruis said that there were different routes via tunnels and accessways across the crew compartments, so the escaping Sontarans might very well avoid our corridor when getting back to their own vessel. Good, had been the Doctor's consensus. He wanted all the toad-men away from this part of the ship. Me, I'd have been happy getting rid of them by the application of lethal force, lots and lots of it.
Another lone baby elephant went thundering by.
'The diet starts tomorrow,' I muttered, shivering slightly from either cold or nervous anticipation.
'Ssst!' hissed the Doctor, having just nipped over to the TARDIS. He passed me a spade, my favourite close-in anti-personnel weapon. I had Captain Beresford's swish folding-stock FN slung over my back, but I chose to carry the spade. The Doc probably reasoned I was less likely to kill with the gardening tool than the gun, knowing him. Honestly, I've never met anyone more bothered about not killing the enemy who is trying to kill you.
'Watch it!' whispered Tad. Another Sontaran had come along, striding purposefully this time instead of running in thinly-disguised panic. 'Officer's flashing and epaulettes,' warned Tad.
This Sontaran stopped a mere pace after passing our door, stopping and stooping down.
'Damn! He has discovered the opened conduit!' whispered Tad. Behind me, the Doctor snapped his fingers in annoyance that a Sontaran officer would bother with such a trivial matter as a conduit leaking wires.
Before anyone could react, I hit the door control panel and stepped out when it irised silently open. The Sontaran was kneeling, inspecting the plastic cover panels that had been carefully opened, and the optical wiring that had been equally carefully teased out of the protective channels. His back was towards me, until I suddenly registered on his senses as filtered via the helmet sensors. He began to turn, rising up and moving clockwise to bring his pistol to bear.
Nowhere near quickly enough! Like I said, no armour ever worn gives the wearer the same freedom of the senses as does lack-of-armour. I gained a two-second advantage over him, thanks to that helmet.
That would be the probic vent, I thought, swinging the spade down with considerable force to wallop the thumb-sized unit sticking out from the Sontaran's helmet collar. Mr Officer grunted painfully and sprawled headlong on the corridor flooring, so I gave him another smack for good measure, and another one just for the road. My colleagues emerged from the warehouse in time to prevent a few more smacks of the spade. Tad darted across the corridor to scoop up the rheon pistol, tucking it into his belt.
I stuck the edge of my spade between the Sontaran's helmet and suit, wedging and twisting the blade like a penny, popping the helmet free. It skittered across the floor and bounced off the far wall.
'Really, John, you are incorrigible!' said the Doctor, telling me off. 'You could create mayhem with a salad spoon! He would have moved on,' and he indicated our prisoner.
'He would not!' I retorted, hotly. 'He was all set to discover us, the saboteurs.'
Tad coughed.
'Perhaps moving the body is more important?'
Mutually embarassed nods later, all three of us dragged the unconscious Sontaran from corridor to store-room. The stumpy little sod weighed an absolute ton. A sombre warning for me – avoid fisticuffs with them, they could without doubt soak up a lot more punishment than I could and deal it out more effectively.
'Now, how do we tie him up?' I asked. Rope wouldn't work, not strong enough. Piano wire was recommended amongst the old sweats in my regiment, except we didn't have any here. The Doctor pre-empted me, producing a small black device the size of a matchbox from a capacious pocket. He pressed it against the Sontaran officer's leather jackboot, producing a small, brightly-glowing blue blob.
'Lift his legs up, will you?' he asked. I hefted both beefy limbs clear of the floor, whilst the Doctor moved his hands like a stage magician around those legs, finally pressing his little black box against the original blue blob. Looking closer, I could see a fantastically thin blue wire encircling the leather boots.
'Spun sapphire,' explained the Doctor to the world at large. He repeated the process around toady's wrists. 'Unbreakable once the bond cools.'
'He looks a pretty desperate customer, and strong to boot,' I pointed out. 'They might break.'
The Doctor shook his head knowingly.
'Oh no. With microfilaments like that, his limbs would sever long before the wire broke.' Standing back, he looked proudly on his work of confinement. I also looked, with less pride and considerably more malice. Send seven people out of the airlock, eh?
'D'you think he'd thrash around if I kicked him awake? Much?'
I got a look from beneath a raised eyebrow. Well, I was only joking. Wasn't I?
Our friend Aarhuis proved how smart he was a few seconds after we captured our prisoner.'Doctor? I've managed to leave the bridge,' exclaimed the warehouse's door radio. 'The five Sontarans who were there – all officers – have gone to the medical suite to get Salamander.'
Moving very fast indeed for a man of his supposed centuries, the Doctor got to the communications panel and replied in two seconds flat.
'Get down here, Aarhuis, as quickly as possible! Just don't get caught by any stray Sontarans. I think we've got rid of all except those five you mentioned.'
'En route,' replied Aarhuis.
John's mental maths left six toadies unaccounted for: Clara had killed four of them, we had one prisoner, four had passed our hidey-hole and five were off to lay paws on Salamander. Then again, Aarhuis hadn't been too exact in the total of toadies loitering around. There might be more.
Bring them on. I had my spade and FN.
'Where has Clara gotten to?' worried the Doctor, expressing concern in every fibre of his lanky body. 'She ought to be back here by now. Oh, I hope she hasn't gone off hunting Sontarans.'
Even I, headstrong and aggressive to a fault, blanched at hunting toadies in the Seraphim. Unknown territory, narrow corridors, no cover, an enemy with high-tech weapons better than our own and who outnumbered us; not the happy hunting ground.
'She wouldn't do that, would she, Doctor?'
'Well – well, she might, John. The Rutan race memories are hard to over-ride. I believe she reacted rather aggressively when that hologram of the Sontaran appeared?'
'Kind of. Er – yes, actually. As a matter of fact I took my life in my hands to reassure her that it was only an image.'
He stood by Tad, who crouched awkwardly at the telescope.
'Could you not tap your toes so? It is very distracting,' asked the Pole, proving this by being surprised when the door irised open to reveal Aarhuis.
'Fast work!' I commented.
'Came via the crawlways,' he explained. 'The Sontarans can't, not with a prisoner. They have to pass along this corridor to get to the axial tunnel, - but they might go clockwise and miss this section.'
Seeing a lack of understanding, he sketched the corridor layout in mid-air. The Sontarans were a level above us, but couldn't get to the all-important axial tunnel on that level – the suppressive field generated by that magic wand had sealed the entry doors shut. No, they needed to come down one of the ladderways that allowed manual access to this level from the one above, then move along the circular corridor and get to the axial tunnel on our level.
The Doctor checked his pocket-watch and Aarhuis looked between us all, dragging the magic electronic wand from beneath his overalls and returning it to the Time Lord.
'How long will this take? Power is still off on the bridge, we'll have life-support issues in half an hour and we're too near a gravity well to be comfortable.'
'Watch!' said the Doctor. He pressed the stud and all lighting around us died instantly. 'Another press,' he declared in the darkness, and the lights came back on instantly. Aarhuis looked impressed. 'All we have to do is wait a little longer and the Sontarans will be off the Seraphim. However, we do need to intercept the party with Salamander. He is, after all, the reason we risked our lives in the first place.'
Time was a-wasting. Giving Aarhuis a stern warning to remain in the stockroom, the three of us scuttled along to a set of big curved doors on the inner side of the corridor. "TUNNEL ACCESS" read the big green sign above them. This must be what those previous Sontarans were heading for when they went blundering past us before. The Doctor slammed his palm against the external control panel, darted inside across a floor (that would become a bulkhead if you were actually moving down the tunnel), found the control panel for the other matching pair of doors opposite us and gave it a right going-over with his sonic screwdriver. Sparks flew, the plastic of the panel bubbled and burst and within seconds an angry pounding could be heard on the other side, followed by basso voices swearing in Sontaran.
'Timely!' said Tad, in a low voice. Backing away, the Doctor put a finger to his lips. He tiptoed in comic style across the bulkhead/floor, leaning close to my ear when he got to the corridor again.
'They've got very good hearing. Be very quiet!'
There were no more ladderways for the Sontarans to use; they had to come to this pair of access doors to reach the tunnel and their escape route back to the cargo bays, though of course we didn't know which way they'd arrive – clockwise or anti-clockwise.
Tad and I went off in opposite directions, to get a little warning at least. In fact I heard them before they heard me, a ghastly blubbering noise being drowned out by loud curses in Sontaran, scuffling and shuffling. The inner curve of the corridor hid both of us from each other, so this aural warning was fortunate for me. I inched forward verrry slowly, peering around the curve of the plastic-clad walls, leading with my left eye.
At least five of the toad-men, one with his back to me, swearing at his fellow officers. Behind him, two Sontarans had been dragging a big, green, glowing globular object in a net. Clara minus disguise. So they had caught her, with their special anti-Rutan helmet lenses.
Behind that pair was another, frog-marching a flaccid figure in a black frock coat and check trousers – Salamander, the reason we were here.
'Get moving again!' snapped the leading Sontaran.
'It's heavy!' snapped one of the pair dragging the net. One of the net-draggers, keeping hold of it's grip on the webbing, produced a long, telescoping metal pole and jabbed at Clara, who shrieked and blubbered and jolted, sparks sizzling from her skin. No wonder they kept her in a net, and remained at a distance from her – she'd have fried them like eggs given half a chance, the way they were treating her.
I slowly backed away, tiptoing backwards.
Sontarans and Rutans were implacable foes. Why hadn't they killed her on the spot? She was dangerous, and hard to move, too, from what I could see and hear. No surprise we'd beaten them to the access doors.
'Gar! Why not just kill it and have done! We've still got the human double,' complained a Sontaran. Perhaps "Gar" was a Sontaran name, or another of their curses.
'I told you, this is the infected one. We can bargain - ' and distance plus the corridor curve stopped me hearing any more. I went backwards at speed, turning and windmilling my arms to the waiting Doctor and Tad.
'Five at least,' I mouthed. 'With Clara,' and I mimed a big ball.
The Doctor mouthed a mild swear word, then shrugged and thought rapidly, his eyes flicking left to right. Plan B, I thought – even if afterwards he said it was Plan F. He moved us backwards, away from the doors. We'd have the advantage of surprise, so I didn't know why he wanted us away from the access point. He brought our heads together, the better to listen covertly.
'Tad – you'll have one shot before the lights go out. John, do not use that rifle of yours – it will send ricochets everywhere and might very well kill us all.'
Which would be bad. Coming all this way and enduring all this hazard, only to off yourself – big no-no.
Our impromptu ambush began when the lead Sontaran cleared the corner by the doors and encountered Tad, who had squeezed himself up against the corridor's inner wall, arm extended, like a duellist. Perhaps Toady got a little complacent, having gotten to the doors without any interception. At any rate, Tad's purloined rheon pistol made a nasty, piercing buzz and toady's chest lit up like a minor sun, before he collapsed in a smokey heap. The Doctor swept his sonic screwdriver over the pair of Sontaran's dragging Clara. I stood behind him, yet even so the combined infra- and ultra-sonic attack made my vision swim, my teeth ache and my nose bleed. Both toad-men fell as if pole-axed, clutching their helmets.
My job began as the lights went out.
'Rapid fire!' snarled one of the Sontarans still upright.
'Shoot! Shoot, why don't you!' shouted another.
I jumped forward, easily able to spot Clara thanks to her native luminosity, grabbed the net that trapped her and heaved backwards, dancing over the corpse of our first victim. Clara weighed a surprising amount, and it took whole seconds to get her to safety.
'John! John!' came a bizarre, distorted voice from her green blobby self. There were scorch marks on her skin where the Sontaran cattle prod had been used. Thinking dark thoughts, I pulled out my boot knife and began to slice the webbing away.
'I'm trying not to cut you,' I warned her, not able to be careful in the poor light.
With a scratch, a hiss and the whiff of sulphur, the Doctor struck a match. Caught in a flickering orange glare and the wild shadows created, two Sontarans were approaching, having re-slung their useless weapons. A third hung back, clutching the lifeless-looking Salamander.
'Stop right there and exchange your hostage!' boomed the Doctor, sounding like he held all the cards.
'Exchange? For who?' asked the nearest Sontaran, still edging closer. If he carried on edging I'd see how effective that armour was at stopping FN rifle rounds, Doctor's warning or not.
'One of your fellow officers is our captive. Release Salamander to us and we'll release our prisoner.'
My attack on the webbing finally paid off; it slid in tatters off Clara, who abruptly glowed a brighter green, in a menacing pulse. Little black patches showed up against her skin where the electric prod had rested, easily a dozen.
The two Sontarans stopped approaching. Wise. We had our portable electric killer free, and they had no weapons effective at a distance.
'Gar!' spat the Sontaran. Ah, it was a curse, then. 'If he's careless enough to get caught, that's his problem. We're leaving, and if you try to stop us, we kill Salamander.'
He produced a Sontaran knife, a dagger with lots of holes in the tetrahedral blade that nevertheless looked as if it could do the business.
The Doctor's match guttered and died. In the interval it took him to strike another one, the two Sontarans had backed up to the access doors and were ready to open them. Pressing, then hitting the control panel didn't work, no matter how hard they thumped it.
'You! You did this!' snapped one of them.
'No, it was the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus,' I called back, just out of spite. The first speaker actually seemed to pause and think about this for a moment before his smarter and quicker colleague spoke up.
'You killed the bridge equipment,' accused the other. 'There is no meteor strike. We are not in danger.'
'Yes you are!' said the Doctor, with peculiar intensity. 'If you enter that tunnel you will both die!'
We got a couple of "Gar!"s for that, and the toad-men began to wedge open the doors by brute force, helped by their daggers.
'I implore you – do not open those doors! They are booby-trapped! You will be killed!' shouted the Doctor. 'We can still exchange hostages! It's not too late - '
Both Sontarans made rude finger gestures and backed into the doors, one of them beckoning the last one forward, before both of them shrieked briefly and were cut off in mid-shriek. The meaty sound of falling objects just inside the doorway came like a full stop. The three of us moved forward, and I could see into the tunnel, where the severed body parts of the Sontarans lay in a welter of gore. Inside the doorway on each side, at six inch separations, the bright blue blob of a sapphire filament bond could be seen. All my idea. Cheese-wire writ a thousand times more powerful.
'I did try to stop them,' said the Doctor, sounding sincerely upset.
That left our last lone Sontaran, who backed away from us, holding a dagger to the throat of Salamander. He had his dagger, I had my spade.
Whoops! Bit of a Mexican standoff, what?
The Doctor still felt that negotiations might still be possible. Honestly, hope can't spring more than eternally, can it? because if it can this was it at work.
'Look, your comrades are either dead or incapacitated. At this moment your Valt is preparing to depart and you'll be stranded. Time is of the essence! We don't seek to harm you, just to get our – to get our hostage back.'
This slow advance and retreat was accompanied by the flaring of matches as one died and another was lit, but the momentary falter in the Doctor's voice came not because of variations in lighting, but because we'd seen Aarhuis, barefoot, come sneaking up from behind to take the Sontaran in the rear.
'Just imagine,' continued the Doctor, speaking loudly. 'Anything that distracts you, anything at all, anything that might take you by surprise, anything that might take you by SURPRISE - '
Aarhuis finally got the hint, closed the distance and kicked the Sontaran in the behind. The Sontaran whirled around to meet this new threat, which put his probic vent within whacking distance of yours truly.
'I think three blows is a little excessive, John,' was the Doctor's response. With a silent scowl I thought that half a dozen would be about right, having planted a foot squarely on toady's helmet. 'Right! I'm off – Aarhuis, will you show me the quickest way to the bridge?' He popped the magic button on his electronic wand and the dead zone further down the corridor came back to life again.
Off they went, Aarhuis literally showing a clean pair of heels. Brave chap, those plastic floors were chilly.
Well, that left John and Tad in charge of the Sontaran remnants, and Salamander.
Salamander. The reason all this combination of farce and tragedy had taken place. He'd been propped up against the corridor wall, stunned into a stupor by drugs whilst in the medical suite. Looking at him up close, he really did resemble the Doctor's second incarnation. Or is it a regeneration? Mostly, anyway – the white hair was a major difference.
The Sontaran that Tad had shot lay concertinaed on the floor, a big black hole the size of a football in his chest. Vile gloppy internal organs were spilling out of the hole, along with vile gloppy Sontaran blood.
'Hole in one,' said Tad, looking between the dead alien and the rheon pistol. It was impossible to tell if he was joking or merely recounting events.
I flipped the helmets off the two Sontarans the Doctor had laid low. Clara, still in her native form, began to take an interest.
'Are they dead?' she asked, in her robotic falsetto.
I kicked both of them in the head, and they twitched. They did have bleeding from the ears, the poor dears. Spotting a short metal stick fallen next to one, I picked it up, and found that it telescoped out to a yard long. Clara hissed.
Hmm. Which end caused the high-amperage zap dance? I poked the nearest toad-man with one end.
Nothing.
Quick spin of stick, try again.
Result! A big burst of sparks flew from the Sontaran's armour, and he practically did a horizontal jitterbug from one side of the corridor to the other.
'The Doctor would object to that, you know,' remarked Tad. I gave him a pretty cold look, and he shrugged. 'Me, I'm not bothered.'
My conscience got stirred, anyway, and we used the Doctor's sapphire string to bind the captives.
'Are you alright?' I asked Clara. Not that I could tell, not being an expert on Rutan physiology, but she'd been pretty quiet.
'No, not well,' she burbled. 'Too much shocks.'
'The medical suite, perhaps?' suggested Tad.
There were others nearer at hand who might know better. I stalked back to the first Sontaran prisoner we'd taken, and found that he'd indeed regained consciousness, which was lucky for me and unfortunate in the extreme for him. Taking care to shut the door, in case the Doctor came back and objected to a little rigourous interrogation, I stood in front of the toad-man.
'What damage will a Rutan suffer, if any, when they get attacked with one of these?' I snapped, waving the cattle-prod.
He sneered, which is an expression Sontaran faces are custom-made for.
'Sentimental human fool! As if I will divulge information to you!'
'You might want to consider my first point of logic.'
He wagged his tongue around (something Sontarans are prone to) and frowned.
'What point of logic?'
'This,' I replied, and gave him a good jolt with the jumpy-stick. He threshed and gurgled incautiously enough to have the sapphire wire bite into his clothing and the skin beneath. Dark blood began to soak his boots and gauntlets.
'You'll look great with no hands or feet,' I nonchalantly announced. 'And you might also want to consider my second point of logic.' I twirled the spade, before making a mock strike at his head.
'Very well!' he barked, cringing. 'Very well, very well. If "persuaded" often enough, a Rutan will suffer progressive degradation of their holistic electrical field. Invariably fatal if not treated quickly enough.'
Next question would have been "What is the treatment?", but he pre-empted me.
'Such a Rutan would need immersion in an electrical field in the terawatt range to recover.'
Without warning, a titanic shudder ran through the floor. I wondered if the Seraphim hadn't been hit by a genuine meteor strike, but there were no more warnings about hull breaches. Our first Sontaran prisoner slumped down even further against the wall, muttering quietly to himself.
Outside, Tad had gathered together a couple of rheon pistols and a rheon carbine from the dead and injured. The original one he used on the dead Sontaran was now secured on a lanyard, hanging round his neck. Having seen what the weapon did, he didn't want any accidental discharges.
Carla, whilst I was absent, had managed to regain her disguise as "Annette", apart from not being able to get a correct skin tone and also minus her clothes, which she'd been forced to discard when captured. Black burn marks still disfigured her skin, and she seemed paler and less greenly luminous than before.
One of Nick's sayings came and hit me on the back of the head: "green-skinned alien". Here I was looking at one, and a naked one at that.
'Here,' I said, offering my now creased and sweaty dress jacket, which was just big enough to cover her modesty.
'Thank you big John,' she trilled in her strange voice. 'Carla not well.' She sagged a little against me. 'This body not comfortable.'
I caught Tad's eye. He shook his head, then held up his hands.
'I will say nothing about this to Lieutenant Munroe.'
Good, because I found Carla more disturbing in her human disguise than as a giant green blob. Where would we obtain a terawatt electrical field? I'd heard of kilowatts and megawatts so presumably terawatts were the next magnitude upwards. A power station's output.
Thankfully, the Doctor appeared soon after, even if he did bring up short at the sight of a green-skinned Clara-Annette. Our accomplice Aarhuis was trailing the Doctor, and a small man with a tonsure, wearing a blue coverall with silver piping, followed Aarhuis.
'Not a good sign,' muttered the Doctor to himself, laying a hand on Carla's forehead.
'The Sontaran cattle-prod,' I explained. 'Our prisoner said it will break down her holistic energies, unless we get her to a terawatt electrical field.'
'Oh – this is Captain Fontenbloem. He came to thank you personally.' The small tonsured man in the blue suit saluted us all.
I extended the traditional hand, only for Fontenbloem to give me a hug and kiss on both cheeks. Very Continental. Well, his name sounded Continental - Dutch or Belgian. Tad got a similar treatment. Carla gave a limp handshake.
'I can't thank you enough – we'd all be dead if it weren't for you four. And if we weren't dead, we'd still be mentally enslaved to the Sontarans – those - ' and he gave a description even longer and more colourful than Aarhuis' original version. Still, it was nice to hear that some old twentieth century words weren't extinct.
'You ought to thank Aarhuis, too,' added Tad. 'Quick with both feet and wits.'
Fontenbloem pointed at the weapons Tad had collected.
'Would you let us have those? I think from now on we're going to need weapons for self-defence. The designers back on Philandros will need to examine and copy those things.' He heaved a heavy sigh. 'One of the things our ancestors wanted to avoid.'
Quite a step for him to take, inviting the serpent into the garden. More of an anti-serpent, when you stop to think about it. Then again, serpents hunt toads. Metaphor man, that's me.
Not only that, the seventeen human crew were down to fifteen, since the Sontarans had killed the two medical orderlies in the medical suite when they collected Salamander. No reason, they just strode in and shot the two men. Fontenbloem gritted his teeth when telling this nasty little coda.
At around this point, the Doctor was beginning to wrinkle his brow in concern. He might have given voice to whatever worried him, had the floorplates of the corridor not begun to vibrate gently.
'Warming-up for departure,' explained Aarhuis to Tad and I. 'Can't hang around with that Sontaran destroyer nearby.'
Captain Fontenbloem checked what looked like a wrist-computer.
'I'm afraid we have to head back to Philandros, Doctor Smith. We have a hull breach, and that Sontaran ship smashed one of the cargo bay doors apart when it left. Plus, our life-support isn't all it ought to be, after having a time-out.' He saw the Doctor about to apologise and waved a hand in dismissal. 'Don't bother apologising, I'd rather have half the ship blown apart than be intact and enslaved. Can I drop you anywhere on our flight-path?'
Slowly, the Doctor shook his head.
'No. No, thank you. We need to get down to the nearest planet very quickly. Could you give me co-ordinates for the nearest settled world?'
Fontenbloem printed off a strip from his wrist-computer and handed it over to the Doctor.
'I also intend to take Salamander.' That was a statement, not a request. Fontenbloem shrugged and nodded. He printed off a list of drugs the imposter had been dosed up with, for reference.
'Watch him when he wakes up. He screams non-stop.'
'You can keep the toad-men prisoners,' I blithely stated. 'And give them a few pokes from this if they get frisky,' handing over the telescopic cattle-prod.
Between Tad and I, we half-walked Clara and half-carried Salamander into the TARDIS, being seen off by the Captain and Aarhuis. Neither showed the slightest surprise at the big blue police box, so they must have seen it at the Doctor's previous rescue attempt.
I sat Clara down on the regency chair, where she drooped limply.
'Not well,' she said, surprisingly clearly.
'We're on our way to get you a terawatt rejuvenator,' I told her, looking at the Doctor. He was busy adjusting levers and dials on the central console, before tripping a switch and setting the central time rotor moving.
'We're not going home?' asked Tad. The time rotor wheezed to a stop. Short trip.
'No. That would take too long. Here we are, on Amalthea. John, get Clara outside quickly.'
Our green alien nearly fell off the chair when I shook her, so it was a fireman's hoist and double-time outside the TARDIS doors.