Chapter 9
The Doctor, eyes closed, gently twisted the key in the lock of the final cabinet. It turned. His eyes opened wide, and his heart leapt. He pulled the handle slowly and the door swung outward. Inside was a cavernous, dimly lit room, at the centre of which stood a tall column emitting a green glow. He bolted inside, and the lights immediately brightened in welcome to reveal walls of pinkish-gold and a familiar-looking six-sided console. Dropping his rucksack on the metal grating by the console, he darted from point to point in the room, unable to keep still in his excitement.
"The round things!" he exclaimed, placing a hand on the circle motif that covered the high convex walls of the console room. A sharp gasp turned his attention to the doorway. Lieutenant Thompson stood on the ramp, mouth open and eyes darting around the room.
"What is it?" she breathed.
"I've got no idea," he said as he ran from the circles back to the console in the middle of the room. It still needed a monitor and a number of controls installed. He had some of the items he needed with him and figured he could scrounge up the rest eventually. "Or do you mean all this?" He waved a hand to gesture to the whole room.
"This isn't a file cabinet," Thompson whispered, still in shock. Her eyes followed the glowing Time Rotor up to the ceiling of the room, far taller than the filing cabinet exterior.
"Hardly. This is a TARDIS. Stands for Time and Relative Dimension in Space. And before you ask, yes, it is bigger on the inside. Everybody asks. Oh! I wonder if there's a wardrobe yet. I'm so tired of these normal pockets." He shoved his fists in his pockets for emphasis before removing them again to lay a hand on the console. "Been doing a bit of redecorating I see. What colour is this?"
Thompson stared. "Are you talking to the computer?"
"No, I'm talking to the TARDIS. She's sentient. Telepathic, even. Oh, rose gold. Very funny," he said drily to Thompson's confusion. "Speaking of Rose, we should really go and get her." The TARDIS made a noise that sounded like agreement.
"So this is a time machine?" Thompson asked, still looking like she might keel over any second from shock.
"And space. Why does everyone forget about space?"
"But why did you have to travel forty years to get your ship?"
"It takes a long time to grow a TARDIS. Forty years ago, she was just yea big." He held his thumb and forefinger apart to indicate. "But a very clever woman figured out how to send me to the future to bring it back fully-grown. So now if you don't mind, I have some work to do before I can head back."
Thompson straightened as the shock finally started to wear off. "I can't let you take this."
"Why not? It's my TARDIS. No one will ever miss one filing cabinet from that room. And I don't just mean because that room is a filthy mess. There's a perception filter that keeps you from noticing it."
"You can't just go running around with a time machine," she insisted.
The Doctor drew himself up to his full height and looked down at Lieutenant Thompson. "I most certainly can. That's what I've been doing for the better part of nine hundred years, more or less."
"Nine hundred?" Thompson asked. "Do people really live that long in the future?"
"Depends what you mean by people," he said airily.
"Humans," she clarified.
"Well, I did once meet a woman who was thousands of years old. She was hardly human anymore by then. Just a big flap of skin."
Thompson shuddered. "I still need to tell Captain Jones about this."
"You go do that," the Doctor agreed, sitting down on the jumpseat beside the console. "I'll wait here."
She narrowed her eyes. "In the time machine? You'll leave the second I step out that door."
The Doctor sighed. "It was worth a shot." He got down on the floor and began rummaging through the rucksack, pulling out a number of items Thompson didn't recognize. Once he seemed satisfied with the arrangement of parts on the floor, he lifted up a section of the metal grating below the console and climbed in.
"What are you doing?" Thompson demanded. She heard a high pitched hum and bent down to see a blue glow coming from something in front of the Doctor.
He answered without looking away from his work. "If you won't leave, I still have things to do. These temporal stabilisers won't install themselves. Well, not these ones, at any rate."
"What are you doing?" Thomson asked again.
This time the Doctor turned around to look at the U.N.I.T. officer. "You might want to get your hearing checked. Speaking of which, do you hear that?"
Thompson crossed her arms over her chest. "I'm not going to fall for your tricks."
"No, really. Someone's shouting." He ran past her to the door and pushed it open. They were suddenly assaulted by the sound of an alarm screeching, and the Doctor blanched in shock at the sight of Rose Tyler standing near the storeroom door carrying a gun nearly as big as she was.
"You!" she seethed as soon as she saw the Doctor's head peer out of what looked like a steel filing cabinet.
"What are you doing here?" The Doctor put his hands up placatingly as a furious Rose advanced on him. He walked slowly backwards up the ramp into the TARDIS, not that the distance would protect him from the cannon the blonde carried in her arms.
"You didn't come home."
"Oh." He backed into the console and stopped. "How long was I gone?"
Rose was so angry she hadn't yet noticed she had stepped inside the TARDIS—her eyes were focused solely on the Doctor. "Three days."
"Well, I just got here. I haven't had time to go home yet. And now you're here, so there's no point."
"This is confusing," Thompson commented from the sidelines. Rose turned on her, and Thompson involuntarily stepped back at the sight of the large weapon.
"Who's that?" Rose demanded, looking back at the Doctor.
"Lieutenant...what was it? Katie?"
"Catherine."
"Yes, that's right. Catherine Thompson of U.N.I.T., meet Rose Tyler. Apparently Torchwood doesn't own this facility anymore." He looked over at Rose, who was finally taking in her surroundings. The anger slowly melted off her face as her eyes roamed the inside of the TARDIS, and she let the cannon hang from its shoulder strap so she could run her hands gently across one of the rough coral struts.
"It's almost the same," Rose breathed. "A little newer. And a bit more pink."
"I think that's for you. I'm just glad it isn't leopard-print." He shuddered at the thought. Some of his previous regenerations had odd ideas about style.
Wide-eyed, Rose turned to face the Doctor. "You mean she still remembers me?"
"Of course. She was grown from a piece of the other TARDIS."
"But it's not a police box."
"No, the chameleon circuit works now. Blends in perfectly with her surroundings."
Lieutenant Thompson cleared her throat, having been forgotten during their conversation. "You still aren't leaving," she announced.
"There's nothing to stop me from leaving right now and just taking you with us." The Doctor started flipping switches, getting the TARDIS ready to dematerialise.
Thompson wavered for a moment and reluctantly drew her sidearm. "I'm sorry, Doctor, but I can't let you do that."
The Doctor paused his preparations to give Thompson a hard look. "You might be able to stop me, but I assure you, you can't stop Rose. Between you and me, I think she's pretty much unstoppable. And I really don't like having guns pointed at me. Now this ship was meant for a crew of six, so you can either help or you can get out."
Thompson looked from the Doctor to Rose with her much larger weapon and back again. The TARDIS made a brief but loud wheezing noise, and Thompson turned and ran down the ramp. The door slammed shut behind her.
"That's better. Now where to?"
Rose strapped her massive gun underneath the jumpseat before joining the Doctor at the console. "Just so you know, I'm still angry with you. But we should leave before someone starts shooting. I'd hate to scratch her."
"Forwards or backwards?" he asked, hoping to appease Rose for leaving her behind after promising he wouldn't do it again.
"We should go home first. My mum will kill both of us if we just swan off, and I don't have the superphone anymore."
"Right. I'll have to fix that." He started running around the console in his usual mad dance whilst Rose stayed at one station. The controls were different than the old TARDIS, so she had to wait for him to tell her what to do. The Doctor pulled a lever, and the time rotor started moving accompanied by the distinctive grating sound that only the TARDIS could make.
"So about four days after I left?"
Rose nodded. "But make sure it's days, not months or years."
The Doctor opened his mouth to protest, saw the look on Rose's face, and closed it again. "Right."
"Sometimes I don't know if it's you or if the TARDIS is just playing jokes on us," Rose commented as she pressed a hand to the console. The TARDIS' engines quieted and Rose ran for the door.
"Wait!" the Doctor shouted. "We're still in the Vortex. I have to install a temporal stabiliser, a monitor, inertial dampeners..." He continued, but Rose tuned out the barrage of necessary equipment.
"Was she not done growing yet?" Rose asked when he'd exhausted his list of requirements. "Or are you supposed to do something different for a brand-new TARDIS? Like a break-in period?"
The Doctor shook his head. "Should have taken twenty-five years at most to mature. We picked her up forty years later—Tosh made a rounding error in her calculations—"
"Fifteen years off? I've seen worse," she retorted with a pointed look in his direction.
The Doctor grimaced but continued. "Some parts just don't grow." He returned to his pile of parts on the floor and removed his sonic pen from his pocket. "I've never had a brand-new TARDIS. I've just had the one for hundreds of years, and she was already old." Something on the console sparked and the Doctor jumped back. "Oi! I wasn't calling you old."
"Yes, you were!" Rose laughed, momentarily forgetting she was supposed to be angry with him. "Have you looked around yet?"
He stopped and put the sonic pen back in his pocket. "I was waiting for you."
Rose held out her hand to him. "Then let's go take a look, yeah?"