Marco Finds the Key
by tallsunshine12
Chapter 1
"Malfunctioning again!"
"Brave heart, Turlough."
"None of that 'brave heart' stuff with me, Doctor."
Looking doggedly at the disruptive console, and wondering what could be the matter with it this time, the Doctor merely replied, "Brave heart always worked with Tegan."
Tegan, his young Australian companion, had just recently parted company with him and his Tardis.
"Yeah, it made her mad."
As the Tardis continued to display alerts and alarms, the Doctor, raising an eyebrow, said, "Buttons in havoc. The imp is at it again."
"What, Doctor?"
"Some tinkering here, some tightening there, and some fervent prayers to the powers that be, usually puts it right again. But this time prayers aren't working." He did not exactly know where the Tardis had taken him and Turlough.
"I'm not following you, Doctor?" When did he ever?
"If only I had a working spectrum spanner," the Doctor continued, looking at the broken spanner in his hand. He quietly, calmly, laid it down on the console. "It could tell me what's wrong with the Tardis."
"Where are we, Doctor? Are we lost again?"
Not for the first time, Turlough, who stared up at him, frowning, was fed up with his honored leader and his infernal space machine.
"Indeed," was the Doctor's cryptic reply. He moved around the control console and flipped some of the levers and pushed a few buttons, then bent to study the computer monitor. Where are we? "We're close to E-space, I believe."
E-space was a 'negative' space which had once been on the brink of collapse, endangering both universes. He'd been there once, barely got out, and would not choose to go there again.
The Tardis shuddered. The lights on the boards blinked. A whine filled the room, just like a ghost in an old horror movie. Again, the Doctor's puzzled brow went up.
Keeping the 'imp' out might be tricky, but running the Tardis was simple enough. To leap through space and even time, The Doctor merely programmed the coordinates of a destination, fiddled with a few knobs, and it was there that the Tardis would go, without ever truly 'flying.' Turlough could work some of the controls himself.
Problematically, as of now it had 'stalled' in space, nor would it time travel. Without a spectrum spanner, he could only guess at what was wrong with it. The oblong instrument 'peered' into the Tardis, analyzing it inside-out, but its cost was prohibitive. On their last visit to a tech-world, the Doctor, being a bit of a skimp, had not bought one to replace his.
Turlough had an idea why, why the Doctor had kept a broken version of a much needed tool. Not only did he believe he could fix it—with the right amount of luck—but he liked to keep an element of peril in all his doings. As high as a spring tide on earth, a reckless sense of adventure ran in him.
There were times when the Tardis and the Doctor just disagreed. Tegan had told Turlough, who joined the Tardis crew later, about how when she asked the Doctor to return her to Heathrow Airport, he had brought her to Heathrow indeed, only 300 years in the past!
No ticket queues. No starched uniforms, no buskers. Nothing but the original trees, their orange leaves hiding the grass amid the loneliness of the autumn woods. At least that's the way Turlough rewrote the incident in his mind.
He also recalled the Doctor's (frantic) search once for a power leak. That time, surprisingly, Tegan took his side. Even though the Tardis could have blown up in the nothingness of space, she argued that, "He must know what he's doing." But that claim had rung hollow in Turlough's more cynical ear.
The Tardis shook again. Smoke trailed thinly up from two of the panels on the console. The Doctor, still lamenting the broken spanner, maybe more than ever now, eyed the smoke. Turlough joined him again and watched him punch a few buttons, flip one or two levers, and then propel himself under the console to look there. Stripping off a panel, he fiddled with the wires leading to the disturbing boards.
Under his administrations, the Tardis seemed to groan, and then relax, even to sigh. Again, there was the quiet hum of the console, and Turlough himself relaxed. He laid one hand on it, and with the other, gripped his stomach.
"Is it all over, Doctor?"
"For the moment," said the Doctor affably, as he came up from the floor with an unsatisfied look on his face. At least the Tardis was working again. The time column rose up and down as it was supposed to.
Infuriated by the Doctor's attempt at being in a good humor, when he didn't understand what was wrong with his own machine, Turlough looked at him oddly, saying, "Why do I travel with you?"
::::::::::DW::::::::::DW::::::::::
The Tardis, ever one for continuity, was malfunctioning again.
They had leaped through space and time traveled, but the Tardis had stalled again in the same sector of space where they had fixed it the first time, as if it was a broken record, repeating itself.
As he ate his ham and cheese sandwich in the galley, Turlough felt an inexplicable throbbing of the ship. It whined again in that ghastly way. The Doctor left his vegan salad and fled to the console room, which was situated a few floors above the galley. The Tardis was huge on the inside, with scads of rooms and passages, though on the outside, it was just a small, blue, old-fashioned police call box from Earth.
Bolting up the long set of stairs—an elevator, there was not—the Doctor emerged into the console room, opposite the space-exit door. The whine grew louder; an earthquake-type rocking shook the Tardis.
"Good grief!" he said lowly. Struggling to maintain his balance, he staggered over to the console, perplexed, his lips set firmly, and his eyes narrowed in study.
Flipping some controls here and there, he became convinced that he would be lucky if the Tardis ever materialized or dematerialized again. It was enough that it moved through space and time even when it was in a good state of repair.
On the computer, he began scanning for a safe haven where he could land and work on his machine. And he found it. Not a planet, but a ship. By the wobbles and squeebles on the computer screen, it was a very old freighter. Where had it come from, and what was it doing in this far-flung sector of space, so close to E-space?
Turlough came up to the control room and as the Tardis shook again, he reeled towards the Doctor, catching himself on the console just in time. Seeing him beginning the usual procedure to dematerialize, he paid close attention. No longer the idle youth berating the Doctor's handicapped performance with his old Type-40, he was now a studious, darkly serious space traveler.
He was ready now to trust the Doctor. In the most serious moments, he always felt he could. It was only in small issues that the Doctor did not seem to 'know' what he was doing.
"Where are we going?" Turlough asked, his senses all engaged.
"I have to find a place where I can work on the ship. It's serious." By a sudden jolt, the Doctor was almost flung off his feet. Turlough was, and landed hard on his side. He fought his way up again. "We're stuck in this time, Turlough, though we can move about in space," the Doctor told him.
"Where-?" began Turlough, but stopped as he saw the inside of the freighter through the viewscreen. They had landed. An airless old scowl, or one that could support their humanoid life?
It was all quiet, both inside and outside the Tardis, as both the Doctor and Turlough stared at the vessel which now carried them. It was to be their destiny until the Tardis malfunction could be fixed.
"Let's get right to work," the Doctor said. "We don't know how long we'll be welcome here," he added, with an ominous note in his voice. If there were people aboard the old-style freighter, it would not be long before the Tardis was found out. That might put 'paid' to their fixing it.
At least the rocking had stopped. Turlough stepped to the screen and wondered when the gaping horde would appear. The Doctor resisted worrying about it. Many times before, he had been treated like an enemy, at first, only to become a friend in the end.
And except for trespassing, he wasn't guilty of anything, but taking up 'space.'
Lying at the foot of the Tardis control console again, a mushroom-shaped object of which the Doctor was very proud, he suddenly barked for the broken spanner. Turlough knelt beside him to hand it over.
It had a gauge that read off Gallifreyan numbers and code letters. To use it, one had to 'dip' it into a broken unit and read the codes. A specialized computer of its own, it had a compact shape for easier handling.
"Find anything new, Doctor?" Turlough hadn't meant to be facetious, but a certain resignation had crept into his youthful voice.
"Just that some of these wires are burnt out. Luckily, I have some spare wiring. If only—I still can't get the spanner to work! It defies me." It didn't take a spectrum spanner to smell smoking wires, Turlough might have told him.
"Maybe it's got a soul, like the Tardis." He was joking, but the Doctor took it as insult to his capabilities.
"So you think the Tardis is willfully defying me, too?"
"Yeah, like the spectrum spanner."
"Quite like it, yes," the Doctor conceded, forgetting which side of the argument he was on.
"I feel like finishing my lunch."
Turlough was about to leave the room when the saw the first half-dozen sets of eyes through the viewscreen. The eyes belonged to a smattering of frightened and gesticulating humanoids. Five men in all. No wait, one female. A girl of about sixteen, and pretty enough to be a temple virgin, for that is what she seemed. She wore a short, plain robe, with trousers of the same light-colored cloth. Her hair was of a silky brown, and her eyes, lively and animated, were a bit fearful.
The men wore longer or shorter tunics. Some of them were old, and some not. Though none was as old as the Doctor, one man resembled him in build and height at his current age of thirty-three. He came forward, and touched the machine. One of the white-bearded men in a short tunic signaled for him to come away. Turlough could not hear any words spoken, but he could read a hand gesture.
The girl reached out and put a hand on the man's arm. Could she be a relative? There was a resemblance. She did not look up at him with a lover's eyes, and she was too young to be his sister. Then his own eye caught something else, coming their way down the corridor. More men, carrying pumps of some kind, connected to big jars.
He thought he should break into the Doctor's concentration for a moment.
"Doctor, those men out there are getting a bit too interested in our ship, for my liking."
"What men, Turlough? I don't see anybody." The Doctor was still under the console, trying to shake his spectrum spanner back into life. However beating it on his palm didn't work.
"Look out of the viewscreen, Doctor." No one could claim that Vislor Turlough was a patient man, and he certainly wasn't then as he waited for the Doctor to shift himself out from under the console. He raised his eyes and peered again at the view. "See those jars they're carrying? What d'you suppose could be in them?"
"Disinfectant, most likely, no need to worry. While they do that—" The Doctor moved back under the console again.
"Do what, Doctor?"
"Disinfect us .. while they do that, I'll just connect a few of these new wires together. Ah!"
"What happened!" Turlough shouted, torn between viewing the scene outside and the Doctor's outcry.
"I sent electric shock waves coursing through my dendrites, Turlough."
"What?"
"I burned myself."
"Well, try not to do that again, Doctor," Turlough said, returning the banter. "We ought to worry about the folks out there, not about a few burned-out wires. It will not make a pin's difference if they're replaced. The Tardis still won't function properly."
The Doctor leaned out from under the console, nodding to the people outside, though they could not see him, inside. "What can they do to us?" he asked, quite reasonably. "I mean, in here?"
"Well, for now, spray us. The whole ship."
Slipping back under the console, trying to twist the wires without getting another short, the Doctor said, brokenly, "Just—have—to—get—these wires—put back—together—again, Turlough."
Turlough maintained an agitated silence. The Doctor finished the job on the wires and slipped them back into the base of the console, then closed the panel and secured it. Exhausted, he rose and flipped a few switches. He frowned. Not what he had expected, Turlough guessed. The time column in the middle of the console started its old, upward climb, signifying that the Tardis was active again, but it wobbled as if its life was giving out.
Hoping to dematerialize again before the 'natives' struck, the Doctor added a few more buttons and a few levers to the stew. Not surprisingly, Turlough felt, a tiny puff of smoke was emitted from within the time column, which then sank down and did rise no more.