Landing

It was dark, totally dark, and dusty, I was lying on a hard floor, and every muscle in my body ached like I'd done the most severe martial arts training session ever, I lifted my head and it span, I moaned without meaning to,

"Ah, you're awake." Said a voice off to my left, I twisted my head around, and it thumped warningly again, I felt a bit sick.

"Whe..?"

"The planet Ryanax, Delta Sigmoid cluster, Whirlpool galaxy." Said the cheerful voice, and I suddenly had the worst hangover ever,

"Whu.." I swallowed, gagged, gasped as my head swum, the air was still and dry, it tasted old,

"Wha?"

"I said," the cheerful voice reiterated, "the planet Ryanax, Delta Sigmoid cluster, Whirlpool galaxy."

"Wha' the fu did I drin las night?" The floor was rough, but cool, I rested my head on it. 'Cheerful' didn't comment, thankfully. Deciding I wasn't going to throw up, I turned my head in Cheerful's direction, huffing dust away from my mouth, "How?"

"I don't know."

Helpful. "Do I need to panic yet?"

There was a pause, and Cheerful said, "No, not yet." Cheerfully.

I pushed my face off the floor, "S'dark."

"On account of there being no photons of a wavelength detectable by the human eye present."

"Well, d'uh." I pushed myself into a sitting position, "You said human."

"I said what?"

"You said human, what are you?"

He didn't say anything, I started to feel about, "Why is this place dark?" This was starting to feel urgent.

"It's a prison." this time the voice sounded serious.

Fuck.

This was too weird, had I fallen through the Rift?

"What sort of prison?"

"The sort they lock people up in."

"And you are in for...?" I found a wall behind me and felt my way up it,

"The cell door control is just by your right hand."

"Why are you in here?"

"The Senaxi tried to steal my ship."

"This their prison?"

"Yep." I could tell he was grinning brightly and nodding his head.

"You need to press the first button at the top left, don't press the wrong button or a neural charge will go through your body. Its dangerous." He sounded serious, "the next button is the second down, third in from the left."

"Hope you got this right." I pressed it and nothing happened.

"Fifth down, third in." I counted down the surfaces,

"You can see, can't you?"

"Yes. Fourth down, second in."

"Infrared, or ultraviolet?" The button went click,

"Both, and electrical fields. Top left again."

"Handy." Something buzzed behind me and made me jump, but it was just the cell door lock, the cell door squeaked as it opened. Footsteps approached me, then a hand? gripped my arm.

"I can lead you out of here, but I can't operate the locks, my genetic fingerprint is on the prisoner database."

I put a hand on the hand on my arm, I felt fingers, usual number, normal shape, a large hand, I couldn't resist, I checked the arm, then the chest, it felt like a leather jacket, on a fairly tall bloke. I couldn't quite bring myself to touch his face, that felt like too much of an invasion. "You feel like a human."

"But I'm not." Oh well.

"Let's go."

I put my hand on his forearm and followed where he led, to the right, for about twenty paces through what sounded like a long narrow room, to the next keypad.

"Here." he took my hand off his arm and placed it at the edge of a keypad, "Top right."

"Third down, fourth in. Second down, fifth in. Third down, fifth in, top right again." A door slid aside in front of us, he took my hand and put it on his forearm, and we walked through another room that sounded like the first. We turned left, almost immediately there was another keypad. Which opened a door to another empty, dark, dusty room.

"You the only one here?"

"No, that's why we're going round the outside."

I stopped dead, "There are other prisoners here?" In this crypt-like place?

"Yes."

"Can we let them out?"

"They'd kill us."

"Can we let them out remotely?"

"You'd release killers?" I could tell he was looking right at me,

I am releasing a killer: me. "Do you stand by the judgement of the people who put 'em in here?"

"Fair point." He turned away, "We're going to have to go to the central control room, set it up from there."

"Any guards?"

"No." He grabbed my hand and we went back the way we'd come, and straight on, through another two doors, then left, through a door that wasn't locked by a key sequence that ended where it began. This room sounded squarer, and occupied by machinery, Cheerful dropped my hand and moved away, I could hear him moving around, "Ah, prisoner records, and control protocols." He strode back towards me, and a cool hand took mine. "I need your DNA again." He said cheerfully.

He led me between desks? and to a chair, he put a plastic cup in my hand, "Water, drink." It was surprisingly difficult to drink in the dark. Then he talked me through a button sequence, this one was longer. Then he had me scroll through the records.

"There are two prisoners here who probably won't kill if released."

"Only two?"

"I checked." He didn't sound cheerful. I looked toward where he stood, now I had to rely on his judgement. "Enter this sequence on the keypad.." It was long. "And now this one." He took my hand, pulled me up, "Right, this is timed, we need to get out of here." And he clapped my hand onto his forearm, and we wove through the desks back to the door, me trying not to hit myself on too many of them. We had to key out of the control centre again, then he led me at a jog back the way we came, through two keyed doors, a right turn, then through another door immediately. I was tapping in the code, when he grabbed my hand away from the pad, "No! That was the wrong key! This is very dangerous! You have to get it right." Very dangerous, eh? So does that neural charge kill me or just leave me dribbly? My hand started to shake as my heart accelerated. "You're shaking." He sounded perplexed, "This would be much easier if your hand was steady."

"You just told me a mistype is something I might not remember. It's the old fight, fright or flight reaction." I took my hand out of his, shook my arms, clenched my fists and concentrated on being angry about being in this place, not scared. I put my hand out in the direction of the keypad, "Where were we?" he caught my hand and put it gently on the keypad,

"Fifth row, fourth down." I clicked the button,

"Nice reactions there, by the way." I suppressed the urge to laugh, it was just relief, but I did grin,

"Third row, second down." he said seriously, "Concentrate." Which just made me angry again.

There were five more doors, I was having trouble concentrating by the end, I felt light-headed, and a bit spacey. I slapped myself lightly on the face, the last door was bound to be a long code. We came to an area that was noticeably warmer, and I lost count of the digits in the keypad code, I hunched doggedly over it, carefully recounting the key surfaces by feel, one twitch meant the wrong keypress- and neither of us would get out of here- except I didn't think I'd be in a condition to care...There was a thud and a grinding sound, and I was blinded as the door lifted, it was so bright, Cheerful grabbed my shoulders and hustled me into the light, which was blisteringly hot, I yelped and cowered away from it, covering my weeping eyes, "Come on, we have to go." I stumbled, as blinded in the light as I had been in the dark, he put an arm round my shoulders to guide me. The only sound was the crunching of our feet as we walked.

I began to be able to see, though my eyes still watered, he let go of me as my steps grew steadier, I looked at him, it still hurt to look at the blindingly white sky, but by shading my eyes I could see his face. He looked familiar, crew cut, big ears, bent nose, tough to miss. I guess. I looked around and there was nothing to see but the shining yellowish surface of the desert wobbling in the heat haze, and the squat, black trapezoid of the prison behind us. Water hadn't occurred to me. We were in big trouble.

"Don't spose we've got any water?" He shook his head,

"Can't take it out of the building, security measure." Curse me for a fool. "It's not that far." I looked at him sceptically. "Honestly!" he said, I suspected he was lying his face off, "We can do it, come on." He grabbed my hand and began pulling me along. I thought I might be following a madman into a desert, but I wasn't sure what else to do. It occurred to me that I was still running, had been since the Sontarans, from Jack, from weevils, from that flayed scorpion, I stopped dead, the scorpion that had a human face instead of mandibles, that had hissed and cursed, I heard the Doctor in my head call him a vain old man, and shout "You're a joke, Lazarus!" That scorpion was what Professor Lazarus had turned into after using the machine. The machine had been switched on but the light had blown outward, it had burned...

"I think," my legs gave way under me, I swallowed on a dry throat, "I think I may have been hit by something that could turn me into something nasty." The man had stopped and turned back to look at me, "A hypersonic genetic manipulator exploded- malfunctioned in some way- the beam hit me." My throat contracted, the last word was almost a sob -maybe it was better I was out here in the desert, "Th-the guy who went through it first turned into something...nasty- homicidal." I closed my eyes, hand over my mouth, I heard the man's footstep's approaching me. "If I change I may- will need stopping." I was terrified. A hand took my chin, forced my head up, and the alien peered intently into my face,

"I can't see any sign of genetic alteration yet, we should get to the TARDIS." He dropped my chin and strode off, after a few seconds I followed him.

Things were getting hazy, I couldn't swallow anymore, the alien? towed me along by one hand, everything ached, I couldn't keep my head up, so I tried to watch the ground I was walking on, abruptly I was overcome with a shiver, some part of me somewhere was afraid, but that was a long way off. I shuddered again, so hard I nearly lost my balance, then the stranger was hauling me off my knees back onto my feet. I could hear a voice yelling at me,

"Come on, Kate! Kate! Come one! Stand up!" He cursed, grabbed the woman's head, stared into the unfocused brain behind the unfocused eyes and said, "Kate! I need you to stand up." She struggled to her feet, hanging onto him, "I need you to walk." Leaning on his arm she began to stumble along, her skin temperature had risen appreciably and the moisture content of her breath had fallen, he was going to have to carry her soon.

He caught her before she hit the ground , she hung in his arms, he put a hand on her forehead, and she moaned in relief, he lowered the temperature in his hand some more as it rested there, then he picked her up.

She moaned on the medbench, writhed, but the sweat on her forehead was testament to her rehydration. She'd been correct, her DNA was displaying signs of unravelling, he spun down a sample from his own epidermal cells, hooked it to seeker virus, and injected it into her blood stream to be carried around her body and stabilise her cells. He couldn't- daren't- do anything about the pain, what worked on human physiology really didn't work well on Galifreyan, and he didn't dare disturb the process, He kept a constant monitor on her as she spiked a fever, when a fit of choking woke her, he stepped quickly in and caught her head, looked into her eyes, and said, "Sleep."

I woke up in a white room, on a padded bench, I sat up, there were unfamiliar devices on cabinets and a display of variously changing lines on a screen, I coughed experimentally, one of the lines jumped. Well, I wasn't dead, dehydrated or re-evolved in any obvious way, I wished I knew if the vitals displayed were normal, I couldn't read the notation. I felt ok, which I hadn't expected so I decided I should be happy. I swung my legs off the bench, slipped down, when I moved away from the bench the display on the screen blanked, I moved back towards the bench to see if it would pick up my signals again- but it stayed blank. I was reflexively scared in this strange place- but on recent experiences I didn't think the big bloke with the ears meant me harm. Beyond the room was a darkened corridor, but not too dark to see, it went in both directions, I could see a completely ordinary looking panelled wooden door to my left, I could hear muted sounds coming from the left as well, too faint to identify, I went towards them. The light got brighter and I walked into a big, spotlit, orange, arched chamber with a jury-rigged polygonal console at the centre,

"Shit!" I know this place,

"The TARDIS actually." Said a cheerful voice from beneath the deck grating around the console, there'd been a drawing of him on the Blue Box website, I thought my brain might be going to melt,

"Who are you?" he flipped a short silver rod in his hand, pocketed it and climbed out from under the grill, he straightened up and gave me that unexpectedly wide grin,

"I'm the Doctor!" he said with a flourish, sketching a bow that looked all the more ridiculous coming from a bloke in black jeans, a leather jacket and a crew cut- anybody would think he was an actor or something..

"How many of you are there?" The smile dropped off his face, he whirled back to the console, standing stiffly, but he didn't answer, try again, "Is it just you here?"

"Yes." A curt nod, still facing away, doing something on the console,

"How many of you are called the Doctor?" He whirled around to face me,

"What?"

"There were drawings of at least five people with a ship.." I waved a hand around.."that's probably this one," he stared at me, "this is a blue box, isn't it?"

"How do you know that?"

"Website."

He didn't say anything, I rubbed my aching head, winced at a stab of pain, I was starting to feel fuzzy, the confusion made it worse, I felt a wave of nausea and my heart started to pound, I backed carefully up against the railing and tried to breathe through it, let the reactions pass, my hands started to shake,

"What's wrong with your sympathetic nervous system?"

I was startled into laughter because it was wonderful not to have to explain what the hell that was, "It was an accident," I said between gasps of laughter, my head ringing, "head injury- knocked everything out of whack."

"Oh. I can probably help tone down it's reactions, if it's been overstimulated, probably been in overdrive ever since- like a human histamine reaction to pollen tipping over into hayfever."

I couldn't stop myself saying, "No shit!" As I leaned hands on knees, then I added, "You can do that?"

He gave a big grin and nodded from where he leaned beside me on the railings, "Oh yes."

It occurred to me he wasn't human, "Have you done this before?"

"Yes." He nodded, happily,

"To humans?"

"Yes." He nodded,

"Did they notice?"

He shook his head, "Not always. I cured Agamemnon's hayfever, terrible it was, he kept sneezing all over Nessy, his wife." that made me laugh again, he grinned at me, "Give it a try?"

"How?"

"Like this." He put one bony hand on the side of my face, it was like being drowned in a swimming pool, blue, engulfing, I struggled helplessly, "Relax." said the swimming pool, from all around me, the water poured through the inside of my head, found everything: forgotten memories, buried memories, banal things, terrible things, shameful things, all the trivia of my life, and then it spat me out, gasping, onto the console room grating, I clutched my head, I felt like I'd been rolled in the ocean, he looked down at me from where he leaned with his arms folded on the railing, waiting for me to regain my equilibrium,

"Did you look at everything?"

"You felt that?" He seemed surprised,

"C-couldn't miss it." He frowned. After a moment he said,

"My people," there was a certain heaviness in his voice, "we can regenerate into a new body, a new personality." a new personaliteh, he's got a northern accent, his people can change body?

"The man I met in Torchwood was you?" The skinny guy with the bad hair and blue suit, I looked at the 6'5'' skinhead with the prominent ears and the attitude, "But not you yet?"

He considered me seriously for a moment, then nodded curtly.

"You're Torchwood, then." He said.

"No." I didn't want to talk about that.

"No?" He didn't look convinced,

"I wouldn't kill on command." I said softly,

"But you have killed, haven't you?" he said pointedly,

of course, the man had just looked in my head, I couldn't speak, or look at him, I'd done executions, and the way I felt good about it made me feel sick.

He walked back to the console and started tapping buttons on a screen, "Right," he said, "hang onto something!" The bright centre of console's column began to move up and down, and there was a whooshing noise like a serious asthmatic running up stairs, and the whole room began to shake, I could see an image of an orange sun with text in a curved, pointed alien script running along the bottom on the screen behind the Doctor's head, it was close enough to see solar prominences curling out from it's surface, the scene shifted to a planet, ringed with blue and white banded cloud all over,

"This is the Doctor, calling the Senaxi Praetoriat. According to Article 371 of the Shadow Proclamation piracy is prohibited on pain of confiscation of resources of the persons responsible. I am here to take possession of your resources- to whit: the planet Senax."

What?

There was the sound of laughter from the communicator grill on the console, and a two-tone voice hissed, "And what do you have to back this threat up, Timelord?"

"A medium sized solar flare that's going to reach 60,000 miles from the surface of your star, but.." he flicked some switches on the console in front of him, the edges of the screen in front of him flared red, "the coronal mass ejection it will trigger is going to reach 470 million miles from the surface. Your planet is currently at perihelion."

There was silence from the communicator,

"How big is their perihelion?" I asked,

"460 million miles."

The communicator sputtered, "We do not anticipate any effects from the solar flare, our scientists anticipate some pleasing upper atmosphere charged particle effects- a light show."

"The top 20,000 miles of your atmosphere are going to boil off, and then hard radiation will sterilise the planet's surface to within 20° of the poles." He was working on the ship's console again,

"How do you know this?"

"Close proximity scans." The Doctor pulled a lever on the console and the whole ship began to shudder, the crystalline mass in the central column lit up like the sun and the oscillation sped up, the wheezing, squeaking noise became deafening, "That's it!" Shouted the Doctor. I clamped my hands over my ears and tried to keep my feet, the floor began to buck under my feet like the whole ship was being buffeted- like it was in the way of a storm...

Gradually the ferocity of the storm began to subside, finally I was able to shout over the racket, "Did it work?"

He looked at me, he seemed pleased, distracted and mildly exhilarated all at once,

"Oh yes," he said, "it worked."

And he switched on a projection view of the gently rotating blue and white gas giant, it hovered about a metre away, I could see arcs of excited particles slewing away from the planet to either side- he'd shielded them.

The comm began sputtering with fragments of messages, multiple voices reporting or demanding, planetary communication traffic, the holographic screen switched back to a schematic of the star, the flare, the TARDIS's shield and the sheltering planet, the TARDIS pacing the planet in it's orbit about the blazing star.

It was several hours before the shuddering began to die away as the flare died, and the tone of the TARDIS's engines dropped, the jumble of voices on the comms had settled back into some semblance of organisation, finally the speaker said,

"Doctor, are you still there?"

"Yes."

"Is the flare over?"

"Yes."

"It's never been of this magnitude before- this is quite..unprecedented."

"Also uncommon, it won't happen again for some 100,000 Senaxi years."

"Doctor, if we could converse on this matter, we have many questions.."

"You tried to steal my ship, just remember, if I hadn't taken pity on you Senax would look like Ryanax right now. You owe me."

The communicator was silent.

"You know they'll probably try and kill you if you ever come back?" I said,

"Not everyone," the Doctor shot me a disgusted look, "is as ungrateful and barbaric as the human race."

"They probably will though, they owe you the planet."

The Doctor leaned on the console, "Yes," he sighed, "they probably will."