Chapter 3
"So you're awake at last," Tegan grumped, eying the young man with a bad case of bed-hair as he stumbled slowly into the console room. He looked blearily at her and tried to scrape his hair out of his eyes and into some sort of order. Instead he ended up frowning at the gauzy bandages on his burned hands as though seeing them for the first time. She winced and turned her face away as he picked at the edges of them.
"Jesus. Do you feel better for that?" she asked, disgusted. It was a man thing, she decided, like picking at scabs,
He said, "They're healing," in faintly wounded protest.
Somewhere in the TARDIS he had found clothes to replace the government-issue spook-suit that had been smouldering, and stinking of crisped flesh besides, when the Doctor had half-carried him back into the TARDIS some hours ago. Surprisingly to Tegan, he hadn't picked out another suit, but too-big jeans and a 'KISS' T-shirt from a tour she didn't recognise so assumed was from her future. And she'd thought he made the suit look scruffy.
"Right." She'd forgotten about the healing. All right for some. Of course, some didn't have alien technology threatening to make their brain dribble out of their ears either.
He shuffled around with his arms hugged to his chest, probably to prevent himself automatically reaching out to touch anything. She figured he was either sparing his hands or trying to avoid landing himself at the other end of the galaxy... and yeah, that was probably a good idea. She had a flash of the time she had tried to mess with the TARDIS herself, and cringed from the memory.
After a couple of minutes he'd worked his way back around to where she sat at the little table she'd brought into the console room to work on. After another few minutes of quietly irritating looming, he just beat her to a response (and he wouldn't have liked hers), asking, "What are you doing?"
She sighed and flopped back in her chair, scattering pieces, disgusted with the puzzle and the company alike - and the Doctor, too, for that matter, for sloping off and leaving her to look after robo-boy and the TARDIS, neither of which needed or wanted looking after anyhow, as far as she could tell. "It's some kind of wretched 3D puzzle from... somewhere beginning with an 'M'." She glared at the bits of it. "I should have settled for a crossword."
Jake's face had lit up, annoyingly, just as she could have predicted it would. "I like puzzles." He looked askance at her before sliding into the second chair when she responded with a weary shrug.
Tegan stayed sat back and watched him bow his scruffy head over the pieces. He worked at them with his fingertips, sliding them along the glittering spars where they ought to lock into place. "This looks like it should... no. Or maybe this could fit here, then... no. Oh, I see!" A moment later; "Well, maybe not."
She tried not to laugh - it was too cruel - but a snort escaped from her nonetheless, and she couldn't hide her smirk. "You've got no more idea about this thing than I do. Admit it!"
"Freely." Undisguised challenge in his voice where she'd expected evasion and bluster made her blink. "Everything here is from another world. Except you, I suppose. But the alienness, I guess it gets... less exciting and more wearing once the novelty wears off."
"You're telling me?" she scoffed. 'You who've been here all of five minutes' lurked under her voice. She heard it there and winced at herself. As reparation, she picked up one of the puzzle pieces and slid it into place somewhere that looked right. "I think they go like this. At least, it seems to be working so far." On all the pathetic dozen or so of the pieces that she'd managed to lock into place, out of upwards of a hundred.
"Ah." Comprehension flooded his face and he regained some of his earlier enthusiasm.
Noticing that crystallised her attention upon something she had noticed in all aspects of him, actually, since he'd come back injured. His stratospheric high in the face of everything new and alien, which had even failed to be dented by the technical problems at take-off, had finally gone. "So much for the combat-ready advance party," she'd said when the Doctor brought him back, mocking his earlier words, and that probably hadn't helped. But it hadn't been the catalyst either; the starry-eyed spark had been gone before that.
She doubted it was his injuries. He played them down, and from the way he spoke he'd healed from worse plenty of times. Maybe, she thought uncharitably, he was discovering that it wasn't as easy to play the superhero out here as it was on Earth.
Despite being fed up with the puzzle, she did persevere a bit longer, trying to help Jake out until he caught the hang of it. They'd placed about half the pieces by the time she stood up, kicking her chair back. "The annoying thing is that Adric or Nyssa or the Doctor would have finished this in about five minutes." She scowled. "You know what? I'm going out."
"Out?" Jake repeated in alarm. He stood, the puzzle forgotten.
"Yeah." She flopped a hand vaguely towards him. "You... you're okay here, and I need some air. I spent most of the last few days locked in a cell, thanks to your people, and one thing the TARDIS doesn't have is open skies." She paused for a double-take and added, "I don't think." With the TARDIS, you could never be sure.
"We're in a spaceship," Jake protested. "A crashed spaceship. Nobody's been outside. We don't know what's out there!"
"We know the air's breathable. And the Doctor said the two of you passed an opening in the hull on your way back. So that's fine with me." She headed for the door, palming the spare key from the console.
"Wait--!" He was dashing back through the door that led into the TARDIS' maze of corridors.
"What for?" Tegan snapped.
"I need to find some shoes!"
"Who said you were invited along?" she protested, but he was out of sight. She leaned on the door and tapped her feet until he stumbled back wearing a pair of undeniably fluffy slippers. They were blue.
Her stare reddened his face. "Don't say anything. I couldn't find shoes that I could fit into, with the bandages."
"You don't have to come at all," Tegan said. Although she didn't say it too vehemently. The truth of the matter was that she'd made her decision hastily, knew it was probably foolish, and would feel safer with him along. Even if he was limping. Especially when she noticed that, as well as footwear, he'd come back with his gun. The bulge of the pistol was a bit obvious beneath his T-shirt.
The Doctor would certainly disapprove. But Tegan wasn't about to complain.
"The technology here is innovative rather than advanced. Likely why it's taken so long for someone to pick up that distress call - the TARDIS monitors communication channels through all known sub-space dimensions, and this technology's successfully incorporated hijacking a few of those for its function," the Doctor mused, prodding an exposed circuit board with his index finger - unwisely as it turned out. He shook his hand out and sucked his burned fingertip. Unconcerned, he craned his head up to Nyssa. "Innovative," he repeated. "Wouldn't you say?"
"I think that it's old." Nyssa wrinkled her nose as she lifted a partially decayed component in her fingers. "Old and useless. I can barely believe the defensive systems were in sufficient working shape to provide any threat, however 'innovative'." She tossed the component into a pile of the same. "Was it really so dangerous?"
"You've seen that young man fight." The Doctor spoke distractedly, and indistinctly around his finger, while he worked one-handed on the circuit board. His jacket was slung over a panel behind them, and he in rolled-up sleeves. There were dark, dusty marks on his pale clothes.
"I have." She stared intently at the back of his head. "I was surprised when you asked him to come with us."
"Really? I thought you seemed to be getting along rather well."
She could have been talking to herself, Nyssa saw, for the impact that this conversation was having on him. She sighed. "I do like him. I only said that I was surprised. Jake is a soldier. Fighting... violence... is his duty. Taking him away from his people - I don't believe that takes those things away from him."
He looked up at her again, but archly. "Duty? And that's all a person is, is it, Nyssa of Traken?"
She pressed her lips tight to rein in an angry response to the mention of her dead world. She had had to find other things than the duty of her old life. But that didn't mean that, in some way, they weren't still the same duties, helping the Doctor. Or that she didn't want to answer the Doctor's question 'yes'. "I've seen him fight," she said stubbornly, once she'd regained her control. "I've seen him kill." And bringing death hadn't been a pleasure for him, it was certain, but neither had it been unfamiliar. She had seen the acquaintance in his eyes.
"Well..." She thought he looked mildly disappointed for a moment, before he turned back to his work. "Let's say we give him a chance, eh, Nyssa? I've known a few military men who were decent enough chaps in the end, myself."
"Yes, Doctor," Nyssa said blandly, giving up. And in all honesty, she wasn't sure why it galled her, and was a little uncomfortable that it did. But it just... wasn't the way they did things. All of them, in the TARDIS, were people who believed in solutions of peace. Jake Foley's NSA most certainly had not. And even if the individual represented the best of them, as assuredly he did from what she had seen, she balked at the idea of having any representative of that organisation travelling with the TARDIS. Now he was here, and he was already fighting -- again.
"One thing for certain - I wouldn't want to tangle with that security system a second time." The Doctor's voice was a jolt. He'd followed her gaze to a scorched patch where the brownish dust had been blackened.
"An illusion, you said."
"A facsimile," he corrected. "Of a very dangerous foe... And I haven't seen anything here that looks like the relevant systems." He stood up briskly, and made a pointless attempt to dust himself off. "How are you doing over there?"
Nyssa realised that in their conversation she was neglecting her duty, and looked down quickly, running her eyes over the lifeless connections and circuits in the panel she'd earlier removed. "Nothing. These circuits are all dead - no, wait--" She slid her hand to the back of the cavity carefully, catching the Doctor's concerned start and halted warning out of the corner of her eye. But she knew what she was doing.
"This is warm." It was the side of the cavity to which she referred. And it wasn't very warm, but it was enough to know that something adjoining had been active recently. She brushed the browned and dead lichen-like substance from her fingers, green and alive throughout the rest of the console's interior. She tapped the adjoining console. "This system has been operational."
He all but danced through the piles of their search's refuse to join her. "Oh, well done!" He slapped her shoulder rather enthusiastically, and since his hand was on her shoulder, she felt the change in him, felt him still. For a moment she thought there was another threat - perhaps that defences had become active again. But then he said, his voice worn down by familiar weariness, "Where's Adric?"
"I--" She turned, glancing quickly around. "I thought he was over there, by that... door." She heard her own voice go just as grim.
"Adric!" the Doctor yelled. Only echoes met him. "Now, come on Adric, don't be foolish!" His frustration was clear.
"He can't have heard," Nyssa said, hoping to save Adric at least some of the immanent ticking off. "We'll have to find him."
The Doctor huffed. "Well, it looks like that console will have to wait until later." With a roll of his eyes, he swiped his coat up from where it lay and swept towards the door.
Nyssa more sedately followed.
Adric was bored. The Doctor and Nyssa were arguing about boring things and, as usual, paying him no attention at all. The Doctor had asked him to lend his help with the algorithms to bypass the defence computer when they found it - or the main computer, if they found that first. But since they hadn't yet found either, there was Adric, with nothing to do but stand in the corner and not touch anything, which the Doctor had told him to do.
He didn't know what was up with Tegan and Nyssa sulking about the new fellow anyway. At least it wasn't another girl.
Besides, neither Tegan or Nyssa had ever seen fit to be decently impressed by his mathematical abilities or the fact he'd come to this universe from E-space. Of course, the human's knowledge of numbers was hopelessly primitive and a little rusty besides, but considering how busy the Doctor always seemed lately, Adric was grateful to have anyone express interest in working on equations together.
Kicking at the dirt layer on the floor, he leaned against the wall - and fell backwards through it, right onto his... dignity. He was so surprised he didn't make much of a sound, and the Doctor and Nyssa were so engrossed in their talk and their work that they didn't notice, because there was no exclamation from them and no rush to help him up.
All business as normal, then.
Grumbling, Adric clambered to his feet and gave the door a well-deserved glaring at until it occurred to him to turn around and investigate what he'd fallen into, instead. Knowing his luck it would probably be the sanitary facilities. It really would be typical if Nyssa and the Doctor got the computers, and he got the centuries-disused toilet.
But instead it seemed the door led off to another part of the ship, forward of the bridge. He picked up his torch from the floor and directed the beam down a workmanlike corridor, smaller than the others they'd come along on the way to the bridge and much rougher in its finish. It had a feel of being the underbelly of the ship. Adric felt a peculiar thrill run through him at the sight of the regular round ports running along the left hand side of the corridor.
He stepped up to the first, running his hand around the port. It was crisper, cleaner, and a good deal less stained and corroded than the rest of the ship. This section, he thought, didn't have a breach. The door had been sealed, but the seal must have decayed over the years. It had given way easily to the pressure when he leaned against it, but still protected the space within for much of the intervening time.
The next port in sequence was just the same. The third was empty, and so was the fourth. There was a ladder running up the right hand side of the corridor just after the fourth. It held his weight when he tested the lower rungs, and he cautiously climbed the rest of the way. The hatch was open at the top and he raised his head slowly through it to peer into the space above. Here the walls, and the ports, were angled, leaning in at 45 degrees. The space was bigger, stretching back to fill the area above the bridge, no mere corridor. There were controls and storage racks running down the centre.
"Adric!" A hand yanked on his leg. Not hard, but he was so surprised he lost his grip and fell. The Doctor half caught him and was half landed on by him. This time he did cry out.
"What did you do that for?" he asked the Doctor accusingly as he picked himself up off the floor -- again.
"I really don't know," the Doctor said, sounding extremely pained and earnest, also getting up and clutching his midriff, which Adric had landed on. Nyssa was laughing at them both.
"I thought I told you not to wander off," the Doctor said.
"You didn't," Adric complained. "--Well, you didn't. You told me to 'stay here and not touch anything'. Which I did - and didn't - until I fell through a door. I was just taking a look so I could tell you what I'd found."
"And what have you found?" asked Nyssa, puzzled by the excitable build-up in his tone, looking around the corridor and, in her naive way, seeing nothing. She got her question in before the Doctor had a chance to start berating him again, and Adric was grateful for that.
"Gun ports," Adric said. "Lots of gun ports. Some of them are still armed. And there's a storage rack up there still half-full of missiles. This was a warship. An enormous warship!"
"It's not what you might call accessible," Tegan griped, and added belligerently, "You could've told me."
"I wasn't exactly paying too much attention when we passed it before," Jake shot back, more aggressively than he'd intended because he was teetering on dodgy footing on a sheer mountainside wearing fluffy blue slippers and hampered by bandages on hands and feet, and the woman wasn't exactly helping him keep the concentration he needed to maintain his balance. She didn't react particularly to being snapped at, so he saved his apologies. He might need them later if her abrasiveness really pushed him to lose it. "Do you want to return to the TARDIS?"
"No," she said, with a short stubbornness that, frustrating as it was, was also easy to admire. She gamely clambered down another three feet of rock and grass. Her little mid-high heels weren't a lot more suited to the terrain than slippers.
It was an awfully long way down.
If he looked behind him and upwards, he could see the hole in the downed spaceship, not ten yards distant yet. It was already hard to make out the shape of the vessel amid the jutting, narrow-bedded rocks of the mountainside. The opening looked almost natural, a part of the mountain.
Below them the treacherous slope was rock strata covered by loose rock (shaken loose in the original crash?) covered by many years of packed dirt and thickly-growing vegetation in the crevices. It continued for at least another hundred yards. Below that, the slope eased a fraction, the angle lessened minimally, and an even layer of coarse grass interposed by the occasional rocky outcrop promised easier progress.
A long, long way further down, there were cultivated fields and the unfamiliarly shaped buildings of an alien settlement. Unknown herd animals dotted a few of the fields.
"It doesn't look very threatening," Tegan said, and he realised she'd paused to wait for him, and followed the direction of his gaze. "I'll bet you're game to explore your first alien city."
At the moment, he'd prefer to be back in the TARDIS letting his injuries heal, but he said, with a fixed sort of effort at a smile, "Sure." Her determination seemed to have set in and he doubted the truth would turn her around, or improve her opinion of him.
Not that he could blame her for that opinion, given her introduction to him and the NSA.
It was hard-going down the slopes, and the nanites' healing was causing a distracting sensation of pins and needles in his hands and feet, right when he needed them most. But his balance was sharp and his reflexes saved him a few times - and Tegan, once, though she only seemed to resent him the more for it.
Once on the gentler grass slope the going was easier, and became more so the further they progressed. The heat of the sun hit them as they passed out of the mountain's shadow, and Tegan took her purple uniform jacket off and carried it rolled up in her hand. Jake could see the sun around the mountain for the first time - bigger than Earth's with a faint bluish quality around the corona. Everything else they'd seen here hadn't been so far removed from Earth, but spotting a difference in something so basic set off a thrill of oddness in him again. An alien planet.
He could also see, looking back up the mountain, that the crashed spaceship was made invisible by the distance. He set the location of the opening in mind carefully to be sure of remembering how to get back.
A half hour later and half the distance covered to the settlement, Tegan's top shirt buttons were undone, her sleeves rolled up, and her jacket raised to shade her head and eyes. And he sensed she was resenting him all the more. The nanites regulated body temperature pretty well, among their other functions. It had been a bone of contention with Kyle, too, in both warmer and colder climates.
"Wish we'd brought a drink," she said, dragging her arm across her face. "I could murder a few tins of Fosters."
Jake wholeheartedly agreed. "Maybe we could fetch something back, if the natives have beer. Smuggle it aboard the TARDIS."
Tegan grinned back. "We'd have to smuggle it. The Doctor doesn't do alcohol."
Like he didn't do swearing, Jake thought, or guns. Somehow he hadn't expected real aliens to be so... 'G' rated. "Pity we don't have anything for money," he said, realising it with regret.
She unravelled her jacket to thrust a hand into a pocket, pulled out four or five flat metal squares, and grimaced. "Not unless they take Vandian doubloons."
"What are they made of?" Maybe silver would...
"Lead, I think." She poked at one with a fingernail, and returned them to her pocket. She swung the jacket over her shoulder and picked up her pace. "Come on. I'm parched. Maybe at least we can get some water for nothing."
