"Ouch," I grumbled taking a look at my hand. Fortunately I hadn't managed to slice it open on - whatever it was. Satisfied that I wasn't bleeding, I looked around for the sharp object. It wasn't really an object, rather it was a deep dent in the floor similar to the one I had created when I had removed the imbedded sphere. The dent (with its lovely sharp edges) was about an inch and a half in width and about two and three quarters inches in length.
"Doctor!" I called. "Come look at this."
I heard a clatter of metal components being dropped and the sound of converse shoes crunching across the warped floor.
"What'd you find?" he asked as he crawled under the console to take a look.
I pointed out the dent in the floor. "If you ask me," I said, "it looks like something was here when the ship was shot down and the floor melted around it. Since then someone must have removed it."
He pulled out a pair of glasses and examined the dent carefully. He nodded solemnly and then grinned: "Very observant, Elisabeth. But who would have found this before us?"
He went to turn around and too late I warned: "Watch your head!"
The Doctor banged his head on the underside of the console which knocked free a cloud of ash that fell all over the two of us. I heard a snicker from Jeni. The Doctor didn't pause as he brushed the ash out of his hair and hopped to his feet asking: "Jeni, who would have been in this area before now?"
I was still coughing as I slowly crawled out from underneath the console and got to my feet.
"Do you think that the dent might have been from the Superhacker?" I asked as I absently shoved the sphere in my pocket and began the chore of knocking the grey ash off of my clothing and hair.
He nodded.
In the meantime, Jeni was still mulling over who had been in and around her home since the spaceship had come down in February.
"Kris, my family, and me," said Jeni firmly.
"And would any of them have found the ship?" asked the Doctor.
"I don't know," Jeni whined.
"You're lying, Jeni."
It took me several seconds to even realize that I had spoken and several more to work out what I had said. I never accused Jeni of lying, not outright. Oh, I knew that she did and sometimes I'd even realize when she was doing it, but I never called her on it.
Before I could work out the exact reason I'd blurted that, Jeni protested: "No, I'm not!"
"You'd accuse your brother or Kris or both, normally," the words flowed out of my mouth without my consent or even understanding of how they'd come to be in my head in the first place. Nonetheless, the statement was the truth. "So why didn't you?"
"They're not smart enough to find this spaceship," Jeni retorted, rolling her eyes.
"But you are," I said not altogether sure of what had come over me, but confident that what I was saying was accurate.
"Liz!" she hissed and looked at me meaningfully.
I continued, unabated, with a rush of words that were as much of a surprise to me as to everyone hearing them: "You didn't just hear it come down did you? And even if you didn't see it, you worked it out. You found the ship months ago and you found the Superhacker with it. That's how you ended up in Physics! You're a genius when it comes to tampering with things until they work for you, so you used it to hack the school's computer network. You changed your classes!"
Jeni glared at me for a long time before she relented and admitted: "Oh, all right. I thought… well… you know…"
For my part, I did know. Jeni was a secretive person and would no sooner admit she had an alien device on her to anyone than a politician would give a straight answer to a controversial question.
The Doctor just looked very annoyed with Jeni.
"So, where is it?" he demanded.
She opened her mouth to speak and I saw that she was going to give him a hard time.
I walked up to her and for the first time in since we'd become friends, I was livid. I didn't let it slip into my voice and very calmly said, "Jeni, where is it?"
Her mouth snapped shut at the look on my face and she slipped her hand into her pocket to pull out her cell phone. She reluctantly handed it over to me and offhandedly muttered: "It looks like that now. It looked different when I found, but it still works as far as I can tell."
"Jeni, why in the world would you hide it?" I asked letting a little of my frustration leak into my voice.
She'd recovered from the shock of seeing my endless patience reach its end and gave me a glare: "The aliens back at the school drew guns on us. I didn't think it would be a good idea to dance up and down and say: 'Oh-oh I have it!' And we don't have the faintest idea who he is or what he wants except for what he claims. How are we to know that he won't use it to take over? He's a little too knowledgeable about all of this alien stuff. Hell, he has a spaceship! He claims to be a time traveler. You're a little naïve, Elisabeth, and you're very trusting, but are you sure you want to hand that over?"
I wanted to argue with Jeni, but most of what she said struck a chord with me. I was basing my judgment of the Doctor on what I'd read in a UFO book and, if truth be told, I had no good reason to do so. Other than the uncanny resemblance of the TARDIS to the time machine in the book and his adoption of the name 'the Doctor' the moment I'd guessed it, I didn't have any proof that he was who he said he was. Heck, if I believed the book he was a centuries old alien although I doubted that. After all, wouldn't he look a little less human, if he were? I didn't doubt that my first impression of the TARDIS was correct, that it was alien, but that didn't necessarily mean that the Doctor was alien. For all we knew, he could be working for some government or agency that had gotten hold of an alien ship and figured out how to use it. And if he was a time-traveller, like he had implied he was, he could be working for some group we'd never heard of, didn't even exist yet, and we couldn't even begin to guess at its aims in that case.
"Jeni has a point, Doctor," I said very slowly as I tried to stop my voice from shaking uncontrollably.
The Doctor frowned when he heard the fear permeating my words and looked at the tiny, harmless looking device I was still holding in my hands. "Well, then, that's easily remedied. Those aliens…"
A grin split his face as he gleefully shouted, "Oh! I knew I recognized that accent! It's obvious now: they're Aegypians. An entire race of scavengers, although they're probably not responsible for shooting down this Pician ship. Not much for taking the offensive, the Aegypians. But they make pretty good interstellar garbage collectors. I'm rambling again, aren't I?"
Jeni and I nodded.
"Anyway," he said, "if you're worried about it, why don't you keep an eye on that. Just don't lose it. Or let her have it back."
Jeni glanced at me hopefully. I glared at her. Although I understood her actions at the school, it didn't mean that I had forgiven her for getting me into this mess in the first place.
By the time I'd glanced back at the Doctor, he'd already moved onto the next thing. He had opened up the panel in the corridor and was messing with the wiring. He pulled out his screwdriver and used it to merge together a couple of wires that were obviously not meant to go together. I guessed he was in a hurry, because he didn't put it back in his pocket and instead held it between his teeth in the same manner that someone who is sewing would hold the extra pins.
"What are you doing?" I asked, not at all certain I really wanted to know the answer.
"I'm going to blow this ship up," he muttered through the screwdriver.
"What?" I shouted having already made up mind that this was the sort of answer I hadn't wanted to hear.
Jeni's eyes went wide. She loved explosions (especially when she caused them) but not when she was at risk from one.
"I can't just leave it to be reverse engineered. Trust me, that would not be a good thing. I suggest that you get out of here," the Doctor said. Something in his tone suggested that he was still annoyed with Jeni.
Jeni seemed to process that faster than I did, who was still working on 'blow the ship up'. She grabbed my arm and said urgently, "Come on."
"What about you?" I asked the Doctor.
"Oh, don't worry about me," he said dismissively. "I'll be fine."
"Come on!" Jeni yanked on my arm again.
I nodded once and started running. I wasn't much faster than Jeni, but somehow I managed to remember the way back to the hatch and beat her to the spot underneath it. I looked up and to my horror realized there was absolutely no way to climb up to it.
Author's Note: I've finally decided on a pattern to follow with updating. That is so long as school work doesn't get in the way... I'll update on Wednesdays and Fridays if I can.
Anyway, did anyone guess that Jeni had the "Superhacker" all along? I tried to hint at it. Or did I take you completely by surprise?