Starring at the business end of a ray shooting pistol pun from the future, Theodore and Lila see a disheveled man, wilder hair than Theodore, reddened eyes, darkened bags under his eyes, deprived of sleep, and wearing one of the crew's uniforms.
"We come in peace!" Lila tried telling him as she and Theodore helped each other up from the ground, before Theodore promptly pulled her behind him, his icy blue eyes narrowing on the man.
The man asks them, "How did you get here?"
Theodore replied instead with, "We can't spare time, if there's any of you left, we need to search you for bites, and get the hell out of here!"
Cockroaches.
Shaking his head, his oily hair stiffly moved, the man stated, "I have to get the others out!"
There are still survivors aboard the Ourang Medan and they're on borrowed time.
"Do you have a ship?" the disheveled man demanded to know if they had a ship, which Theodore satiated with a sharp, "Yes!"
On a technicality, the TARDIS's a ship, ergo, Theodore wasn't lying, and the man's delighted hearing this, before pulling on him and Lila to follow, it's not safe.
"Al, come in," Theodore reached out to him.
Al responded, "Aye-aye, captain, I hear you. I got off the phone, the other ships are ready to send this ship sky high!"
Theodore then tells him, "There are survivors and one's got us by gunpoint. I need you to hold them off while we resolve this, understood?"
Surprised Al goes, "So, that was what she meant when the blips went off!"
During the conversations, Al got the biometrics of the crew from the mothership, DNA linked and everything, the moment anyone pops up on the scanners, he'll know which person it is, doesn't to their ranks.
"Well, who is it?" Theodore asks him.
Al goes, "Commander Albert Fischer, third year aboard the Ourang Medan, had six years aboard the Milwaukee before he transferred."
When asked, Al told Theodore that no one else's appearing on the scanners except the commander. The mothership ensured the biometrics wouldn't accidentally pick up on a toothbrush, if there's anyone else alive, they would've popped up on his scanners.
All he see's the startlingly red dots in the engine room and they're not the crew.
"Does it tell you if a crew member's dead?" Theodore asks him and it took time before Al got back to him as Albert forced them through a doorway.
When he came back, Al responded with a thoughtful, "Well, normally it would, but due to it being cockroaches, I don't think there'd be much left to go off, she told me if I don't pick up on them. They're good as dead."
The mothership was very specific when they got this job, if there's anyone alive, they'll blip on his radars, if they don't, they're good as dead. Which, considering what they're facing, probably a mercy.
"So, there's about twenty-nine of the bastards in that engine room getting cozy," Al summed that the commander's the last of his crew.
Assuming, of course, he didn't get bit along the way.
Which, they don't know unless he explodes into a cloud of blood and abscess, since they can't get too close to him without risking getting shot.
Theodore's capable of taking a shot, but he wouldn't risk Lila's life, so there's other ways of getting information.
"Did they come into contact with you?" Theodore asks Albert as the commander forced him and Lila towards a carefully set up section of the converted armory.
Every crevice or vent's blocked off, to the point that it'll take a swarm to breach the armory.
"No, I fought them off. Damn bastards. They, ah, started avoiding my traps. I tried catching them in the vents with some sticky bombs, but they stopped going in the vents," Albert tells Theodore as he shut the doors behind them, preventing the cockroaches from swarming it.
In the converted armory, there's plenty of weapons, everything a crew needed to go against the cockroaches, but as Theodore and Lila looked around, they noticed an alarmingly number of weapons went unused.
Their silent eyes moved around the converted armory, noticing that…
There's nobody here.
Albert walked around, talking to unseen individuals, as if they're there, pointing towards Theodore and Lila, carrying on a one-sided conversation.
"Ah, Al, we have another problem," Theodore called out to Al.
Al responded with, "What's wrong, now?"
He heard Theodore, "Our commander flew over the Cuckoo Cluster!"
The stress of his crew mates dying in one of the most horrible things in existence had an enormous effect on Albert, that he's hallucinating his deceased crew mates, interacting with them.
"Well, you're strong enough. Just do what your ma taught you and knock him on his ass. Check him for bites. Drag him to safety if he wasn't bitten," Al suggested that Theodore use his natural strength on Albert, he can take the shot if needed, provided it didn't hit any major organ.
It's a good thought in theory, but Theodore reminded him, "I have Lila with me. And I'm aboard a ship with dangerous liquids, gases, oh my, that don't particularly like it when they're jolted by a phased plasma pistol with a 40-watt range."
Al immediately corrected him, "Actually, it's 15-watt range, modified per regulatory bodies discretion amid those concerns, but I see your point."
That said, they must do something before the cockroaches get ornery. They're still in the engine room, Al's keeping a close eye on them, and since they need hosts to propagate their species, they're only looking at the twenty-nine that Al counted.
However, if they catch a whiff there's another set of potential hosts, well, Theodore knows the stories.
"Well, if he can't be bargained with, knocked out, maybe you can play along with his mental break. If I come in there, he's going to start shooting, that's bad, but if you bring him to me. Maybe it'll be enough time to knock him out," Al suggested to Theodore that he and Lila go with the commander's delusions.
Using generated rifts to push them through's not going to end well, so is Al showing up in his blueness. So, they must convince Albert to go along with the plan of "bringing" the survivors to the TARDIS, it should be just enough time for Theodore to clock Albert's card out for him, and bring him aboard without issue.
"Just make sure he isn't bitten. I do not want those things in me," Al insisted that Theodore ensure that Albert isn't bitten, not only because he's already dead and doesn't know it yet, but the thought of one of the cockroaches inside the TARDIS just makes Al squirm in disguise.
Familiar with the symptoms and the classic signs of someone bitten, Theodore studied Albert as he continued talking to the air, carrying on a conversation.
Outside the mental break, it doesn't appear that he's bitten, but there's only one way to be sure.
"Commander, we need to know for certain, have they wounded you in some way, anyone else?" Theodore asked Albert the question.
Turning his head, Albert stated he didn't let them get too close, but the others managed to escape in time.
Looking at him, Albert asks Theodore, "What the hell are they?"
Summing, Theodore informs Albert that they're ravenous insectoids that primary used mammal or reptilian hosts for their young.
Given that there's fleshy Daleks among the arsenal, Theodore would've expected them to be the hosts, but the experiments done to themselves and others probably made them unusable, somehow.
Lucky sods.
Of course, with this situation, because Albert's having a mental break, he wouldn't believe that one of the imaginary crew mates was the unwilling host to the cockroaches, even if Theodore and Lila knew the truth.
Hearing this description of the cockroaches, Albert shuddered as he tells the two that he never seen anything like it, before. He's no stranger to cockroaches, he battled invasive cockroaches before, but these were far different than the average cockroach one found on Earth, lethal, too.
"Did you have a recon mission to the planet the Ourang Medan's orbiting?" Lila asks the commander as he turned his head briefly, talking to someone "sitting" on the crate of ammunition, before he turned his head back to her.
Nodding, Albert tells her that the planet set off their scanners and they orbited the planet while the scanners ran the numbers, they showed there's valuable plutonium and other rare elements on it.
With the size of the ship, they were only going to take enough to show to the mothership what they found, come back again on a freighter.
"And… uh… who went down there to recon sites?" Lila gestures as she's trying to play the part, trying to keep the commander occupied while Theodore worked out a plan.
As Albert went around the converted armory, making short conversations with his "crew mates" he answers Lila's question, it was Pax.
In his head, Theodore heard Al telling him it was Lieutenant Otis Paxton, the victim.
"Just him?" Lila raised her brow at this.
Unusual that a ship would allow only one person to recon an unknown planet that they haven't properly gauged the risks of hostiles.
Albert shakes his head disapprovingly that Captain Bahaman wouldn't allow anyone else to go down into the planet. Said that until they knew for sure, he wanted to play it safe.
Suddenly, he raised his voice, arguing with the unseen Captain Bahaman about the risk assessments, only stopping once Theodore got his attention.
"Why not wait until the mothership sent reinforcements?" Theodore's curious why the captain didn't reach out to the mothership with the discovery of the planet, doing so would've helped with the assessments and collection of the rare elements.
Scratching the side of his oily face, Albert turned his head to the "captain" as he gestures to the unseen man to tell Theodore why he didn't tell the mothership.
In the converted armory, there's silence, and afterwards Albert waved at his captain, before telling Theodore, "Don't listen to him! He wanted the discovery for himself, if he called to the mothership, there's a required cut."
Had the Ourang Medan signaled the mothership, there's a required cut of the discovery, a sharp thirty percent, and rather than have the cut, Captain Bahaman wanted to grab what they could from the planet to ensure they get the full amount.
Ah, greed, a natural element to these adventures of theirs.
"How were you going to continuously harvest without the mothership catching on, what was the plan?" Lila pointed out the plan sounded incomprehensible.
The Ourang Medan wasn't a freighter they could've easily hid the extra materials mined from the planet. It's a surveyor ship. Only having enough room for the supplies needed for the duration of the trip.
Weapons included, as space pirates indeed exist in this universe, known to forcibly board unsuspecting ships. They don't make captives walk the plank; they just shoot them as target practices. And the unknown, which the Ourang Medan got a soured taste.
Watching a man carrying on a full-blown conversation between himself and an imaginary captain, Lila sees how Albert believed his captain's alive and well, that it'll be a miracle getting him off this ship without some force.
"You were just going to fob it to some guys on Annex and split the profits with them!" Albert shouted at an empty seat on top of a crate.
Seeing the display, Lila stealthily talked with Theodore with his telepathy.
"He's more cracked than Humpty Dumpy!" Lila commented on Albert's breakdown.
The massacre aboard the ship couldn't have happened more than a few hours, give or take, due to the eggs gestating, and cockroaches reaching adulthood within two hours. The first one from the late lieutenant probably got its spiny legs on a couple of unsuspecting crew mates and dragged them into the vents.
It's known to happen, going from the stories Theodore told her that was told by his parents when they encountered the insectoids.
"That'd explain why there's no blood everywhere outside quarantine," Lila winces.
Indeed, but there's another pragmatic reason for the cockroaches to drag their would-be hosts away to the corners of the ship.
When they explode out of their hosts, they'll simply eat what's left of them, morbid as it sounded, but it's a known quantity in nature, just that when it occurs to humans, it can draw out even more negative emotions.
Not that Theodore blamed them.
"How're we going to get him and his "crew" out of here?" Lila wondered how they're going to convince the lieutenant and the imagery crew to follow their plan of escape.