Donna and Lee got the passengers from behind the bar out of the room and safely into the passenger cabin corridor. The sprinklers all around the ship had miraculously stopped spewing water, so it was finally possible to run and take refuge in the cabins.
The Draconian in the room, however, now had a hostage – one of the confused crewmen who had swallowed buckets of the stuff earlier and was now disoriented and groggy.
Donna stood from the makeshift barricade and held her hands up non-threateningly.
"Listen, you don't want to shoot him," she said, stepping carefully around several broken bits of dishes on the floor. "He's harmless. In fact, you've won now, so why don't you put the gun down and let him go, okay, lizard man?"
She slowly approached the alien, trying to speak soothingly. "I know you're confused," she began.
"I am not confused," the Draconian said, affronted. "I- I know everything that's going on. This is an attempted coup. I don't know what you outsiders are doing mixed up in it, but rest assured, justice will be swift." He pulled up his gun to point it at her, and she froze. "Tell me what Draconian you work for, or be executed on the spot."
Behind her, Lee shot up from the barricade in alarm and protest. "No!"
The Draconian turned the gun at Lee and shot him. The human stumbled backwards at the impact and hit the floor.
"Lee!" Donna shouted, then turned in outrage, stepped forward and smacked the gun out of the Draconian's hands. "Oh, I've had it with you!" she fumed. While he stared at her in shock, she picked up a full bottle of champagne from the deck and clobbered him in the head. The Draconian fell in a heap, and Donna leapt back over the debris in the room to check on Lee.
He was on his back on the floor, curling up with his hand over the right side of his chest in pain, but looked otherwise all right.
"Are you hurt?" Donna asked, kneeling next to him and prying his hand off the wound to check.
"Uh, yeah," he answered. He winced as she popped the top buttons on his shirt and pulled it open to take a look.
There was a nasty burn mark on his chest and the fabric hit by the upgraded stun-gun had melted, getting plastered to the burn in a red and white mess that smelled like chemical fiber smoke and human barbecue.
"Ugh, you're gonna need a doctor for that," Donna grimaced. "Or at least a once-over with a sonic screwdriver. Could be worse, though. Bet you won't even have a scar!" she said brightly, trying to cheer him up.
Lee, still in no small amount of pain, gave her a half-smile.
"Donna, give me the TARDIS key," said Shaun abruptly from the corridor. He'd run and hid once the hostage situation began, but now he was back. Apparently he hadn't gone far.
Donna narrowed her eyes and turned to look at him from the floor next to Lee.
"Why, so you can go and hide some more? Where the hell were you?"
"I was running for my life, which is what you should've been doing, too!"
"People were TRAPPED!" Donna over-enunciated like he was too stupid to understand otherwise. "They're all doped up on sprinkler water, and half of 'em don't even know their own names anymore! What was I supposed to do, just leave 'em?"
Shaun gave a little incredulous, exasperated laugh and threw up his arms. "Yes! YES! Saving people's not your job! You're a temp, Donna! You're a human!An' you're married to me! Is it so much to ask that you think about my safety a little for a change!? I'm only your bloody husband!"
Donna sneered at him. "I think you've been thinkin' of your safety enough for the both of us, sweetheart."
"Well, it's not like I've got a choice, have I? Someone's got to think of it! An' apparently I'm the only one who does think about safety! You know, I think you care more about that bloody alien Doctor, or this old pal of yours here, than you do about me!"
"Oh, don't be stupid!"
"Am I, though? Am I being stupid? 'Cos you've changed, Donna! Ever since that bloody Doctor showed up, you've been putting on airs! Trying to be all high and mighty, trying to fit in with this lot, these, these aliens and people from the future and other nonsense. 'Oh, me, I know all about these alien celebrities,'" he mocked, putting on a falsetto. "'Oh, of course I know how to use psychic paper! Oh, here's a random bloke from the 51st century, of course I know him, too!' Look at you, hanging all over him like you're best mates. I bet he doesn't know you from a walrus! You didn't even know if you had his name right when you scampered off after him like a puppy!"
"Of course I knew his bloody name!" Donna shouted. Shaun ignored her, on a roll.
"Do you even know this bint, mate?" he asked Lee sarcastically. "She something special? Queen of time and space, an' all? Didn't even know his job, did you, Donna? Well, can't blame you – the rate he gets words out, you ask a question, you'd be waiting til bloody Christmas for a proper answer. But oh, you're friends, aren't you? Met at a, what was it, a library, you said? What'd you do, follow him around like you did me? Bring him coffee? Pester him at his job where he couldn't get away, an' had to be polite? Did you share a special moment over a gossip rag once?"
Donna had had enough. She hauled herself to her feet and took a step toward him ominously. "We had kids together, alright?!" she spat out, practically breathing fire. "We were married!"
Shaun paused, caught off-guard. His expression changed from one of nasty mockery to confusion, then indignation. "What do you mean, married? No, hold on, what do you mean, kids?!"
Donna opened her mouth to snap some retort, then caught a glimpse of Lee lying propped up against the wall by her feet, staring at her like the breath had just been ripped from his lungs and she was standing there with his heart in her hands. She faltered.
"They weren't… proper kids, that is…" she backtracked, gaze torn between the angry tosser on her right and the injured bloke with the gleaming eyes at her feet. "I mean, they weren't real. 'S just… Oh, sod it." She focused on Shaun. "I told you I'd had bad luck with marriages. The first time I got married, I almost got fed to a giant spider, and then the second time, I really thought I was married only to find out it was all some kind of false reality, and a computer was messing with our heads. It wasn't real. The kids weren't real."
Shaun relaxed, crossed his arms, and sneered at her. "Oh, well that makes perfect sense. They weren't real. Well, I guess that explains that. And here I thought old Wilf was the nutty one," he scoffed.
Donna felt that burning anger flare up again. "Oi! Don't you sneer at me!" She stabbed a finger threateningly in his direction. "Don't you dare! You wouldn't know a thing about it! You wouldn't know virtual reality if it bit you in the arse! They felt bloody real!" she ended defensively, shocked to hear the rawness building in her voice. She glared down at the overturned tables to hide the fact that her vision was definitely NOT going swimmy suddenly. "They felt real," she muttered again.
From below, a hand reached up and took hers. She looked down at Lee in surprise.
"Ella and Josh," he said softly, clearly. "Never forgot."
Donna stared down at him incredulously through blurry eyes. So she wasn't the only one who had mourned them.
His gaze held hers, and as he looked at her, she started to wonder if maybe she hadn't been the only one left mourning a marriage, too. In fact, the more she looked at him, the more she suspected he might have been a little messed up by the whole affair. Maybe she'd got it all wrong. He didn't look like he thought it was computer brainwashing. He looked like he'd just found the love of his life again after two years of separation.
For the first time, it consciously occurred to Donna that she might have made a big mistake in marrying Shaun.
There was a huge crash and a rumble that Donna could feel through the floor, and the windows lit up with a flash like a nuclear bomb had gone off somewhere outside. The rumble faded, and in the sudden shocked silence that followed, they could hear an alarm going off somewhere in the depths of the employee only areas.
"What was that?" Donna asked in a hushed voice.
"P-p-plasma wave?" guessed Lee. That didn't sound good.
…
The Doctor and Rose ran through the corridors and up the stairs, collecting the crew members least affected by the Lethe Mnemosynate along the way. Once they had a decent number of crew persons who at least KNEW they were crew persons, they were able to send some of them back to pick up the duct-taped Draconians in the propulsion section and the others to round up all the passengers and other crew they could find and collect everyone in the dining hall.
The Doctor rushed into the hall towing a grinning, awestruck Rose by the hand and greeted Donna without breaking stride on the way to the employee-only computer terminal in the lectern on the dais.
"Hello, Donna, good to see you looking relatively dry. Watch Rose, will you?" he said, releasing Rose's hand and bounding up to the platform.
Donna opened her mouth in confusion but he was already at the computer typing out incomprehensible nonsense. She turned back to Rose, who had come to a standstill in the middle of the room and was staring with great interest and enthusiasm at the aliens and half-human hybrids trickling into the room after them.
Rose noticed Donna watching her and turned with a smile. "Aliens are real. This is so brilliant."
"And yoouuu're soaked," Donna noted dryly. "Well, isn't that wizard."
"Do I know you?" Rose asked curiously.
There was another bright flash outside, this time accompanied by a buzzing, crackling sound from all the electronics in the room.
"What was that!?" Shaun cried.
"That'd be the plasma bursts starting to hit us," was the Doctor's brisk, cheerful answer.
"It didn't feel so bad this time," Donna observed, making an effort to be positive. "Last time, I could feel the whole ship shake."
"Ah, that would've been the explosion in propulsion section. Blew out part of the hull. Decompressed the entire compartment. That's fine now."
"What!?"
They were interrupted by a group of four crewmen who came in carrying two duct-taped lizard people between them, whom they set on the floor by the dais.
"Thank you, boys. If you could just add that third one to the lot?" The Doctor pointed at the Draconian Donna had knocked out. "Excellent."
The Doctor continued his mysterious business at the computer terminal, frowning in concentration. After another moment or two of typing busily, he looked up at Donna and the crewmen who had gathered round him as their new defacto leader of sorts.
"Well, I just ran some scans. Propulsion and steering are both completely fried from the blast damage, and while the ship's defenses are doing their job remarkably well – Shields holding steady even despite the plasma blasts! Impressive design, that! – our trajectory's been altered and we're heading into the planet with no way to stop it. We've got thrusters that'll allow us to do some very nice barrel rolls, but other than that, we're completely at the mercy of gravity for the time being."
Another rumble and flash ran through the ship. The growing crowd made little alarmed noises and clustered together in the middle of the hall.
"And again!" the Doctor chirped, waltzing back down the podium to join his friends on the floor. "This is going to get worse before it gets better. Well, until we make it better. Well, until we get off the ship. Or implode. We'll definitely eventually implode. These atmospheric gasses are just going to get denser the deeper we get."
Donna stared at him in dismay. "Can't we get everyone onto the TARDIS?"
The Doctor awkwardly scratched the back of his neck. "Yeahhhh there's a small problem with that. Take a look outside." He jerked his head towards the glass on the starboard side.
Donna and Shaun both followed his gesture with their eyes to the big scenic ballroom windows facing out away from the planet-side and into space, and were horrified to see a big blue box drifting around freely in the distance.
The ship listed sideways in a sudden uncontrolled descent toward the planet.
"Annnnd atmospheric entry has started!" the Doctor said, bouncing back up to the computer at the lectern. "I've got a plan! Don't panic! There's still a chance we can break free of the planet's gravity, just a chance! I'm going to put the ship into a spinning barrel roll, draw the remaining power from the ship's engines and integrate it with the lifepod ejection burners – burners? Pushers? Explosive thrusters? Ah, explosive thrusters. Very dangerous. Then I'm going to jettison the lifepods from the planet-side of the ship to add a little more velocity away from the planet, roll, and jettison the other side, and hopefully that will give us JUST enough momentum to break orbit."
He pulled out the sonic, turned it on and started whirling through the ship's automated safety protocols, dismantling and reinforcing them where necessary at breakneck speed, all the while rattling off explanations to the people around him.
"Right! So! There are only six lifepods, and they're quite huge. Not pods at all, really, more like life boats, or maybe life schooners, built to hold roughly 100 people each. Mass like that, the explosive thrusters are designed to give a pretty nice shove off the ship in the event of a disaster. Set them off in unison, one side at a time, and we should get a decent push away from the planet, might get us back into a somewhat stable orbit long enough for a rescue to reach us."
"Whoa, hold on a second!" Shaun protested. "You wanna jettison the lifepods?! That's suicide! How are we gonna get off the ship if it doesn't work? Why not just get into the lifepods and abandon ship?"
The Doctor waved the idea off impatiently. "We can't. The second round of lifepods would never make it out of orbit once we release the first. We've got at least 600 people on board. At most, half of these people could be saved in the three starboard pods, and the other half would die in the port pods, pushed too deep into the gas giant by the reactionary thrust from the first sendoff to escape the planet's gravity."
"But half of us could live!" Shaun insisted shrilly. "Better than everyone dying if your jettison plan doesn't work!"
The Doctor put the sonic down, leaned across the table at Shaun and pointed at the small group of people settling chairs around the tied up Draconians.
"Look, Temple, I do not have time to argue about this," he said through his teeth. "If you're not going to help, go over there and sit quietly."
Offended, Shaun looked around, but no one seemed inclined to back him up. Instead, they all just looked at the Doctor in terror and hope. Grumbling about cult leaders and being outnumbered, Shaun stumped over to the corner and plopped down sulkily in a seat.
"Donna!" the Doctor said, immediately switching back to the issue at hand, "I need you to get anyone wearing a medical staff uniform together and lead them to the infirmary. Collect all the Pentasodium Caesofine you can find, dilute it to a one-fifth solution in Tetracycline, and start passing it out to anyone who got soaked in the dining hall, most confused first. That'll relieve the symptoms from the sprinkler water."
Donna nodded and hurried away.
"Captain Manning!" the Doctor continued without a pause for breath. "I need everyone-and-I-do-mean-everyone on board gathered in this room for emergency procedures. I'm going to cut power to the rest of the ship in order to boost the remaining maneuvering thrusters to give us that extra bit of lift. The decks connected to the gaping hole in the hull around the propulsion deck will decompress again once the emergency forcefield is taken offline, so we can't leave any stragglers behind. Also, I need someone in the bridge to transfer all primary system controls here to this station. This is our new point of operations. Anyone else who's feeling relatively coherent, go with the captain and help with the search for hiding passengers and crew."
The crew did as they were told, and Donna came back with a group of people holding medicine bottles and makeshift solution jars. She started passing them out to eager hands, and once her arms were empty, she came back to stand in front of the lectern where the Doctor was busy on the computer terminal.
"Those most affected by the drug will get groggy as the antidote takes effect," he said to her without looking up from his work. "You'll need to clear some floor space for some of them to lie down."
"Yeah. Rose has just taken some and is making room now. Er, Doctor," she added and paused.
He glanced up to see her standing in front of the dais with concern on her face and a ruggedly handsome, totally unfamiliar bloke practically glued to her sleeve. He raised an eyebrow in query.
"This is Lee, Lee McAvoy," she said, jerking a thumb in the quiet chap's direction. "From the Library."
The Doctor raised both eyebrows almost to his hairline. "Oh."
Donna blinked and frowned at him. The Doctor waited expectantly.
"He can help," she added for clarity – unnecessarily, she thought. "He hasn't got any of that amnesia stuff on 'im."
Eyebrows still raised, the Doctor tilted his head toward Lee. "Er, good! Right, then. Yes. Get the unconscious and injured squared away over there. The amnesiacs who are still waiting for their turn with the antidote can help clear space in the meantime. There's some heavy lifting they'll need help with."
Lee nodded briskly and headed for the area in question. Donna narrowed her eyes at the Doctor and didn't follow. Instead, she settled into a glare with her arms crossed and her lips pursed.
Not wanting any of whatever that was about, the Doctor turned back to his work and made a great show of being really, really busy doing really, really important things. Donna wasn't fooled and marched up the stairs onto the stage next to him to give him a piece of her mind.
"All right, I saw that. What was with that 'oh' back there?"
"What 'oh'?" the Doctor asked, still working furiously on two additional terminals that had just been opened up to him from the bridge.
Donna pursed her lips and cocked her head to one side. "I said 'This is Lee from the library,' and you said 'oh.'"
"You gave me a fact. I acknowledged it. That's a very normal thing to do!"
"It wasn't that kind of 'oh'! It was an 'I found something juicy to gossip about later' kind of 'oh'."
The Doctor looked round from his work, face scrunched up in utter bafflement. "Something juicy—? Donna, I'm the lord of space and time, the last of a race of near-immortal hyper-advanced aliens that held the fate of the universe itself in their hands and played with history like it was a toy. You think I'm going to care whether you carry a torch around for your old brainwashed-by-a-supercomputer fake husband?"
Donna's eyes widened, suspicions confirmed. "Oi!" she huffed, affronted. "I'm not carrying a torch! How can you even think something like that? You were at my wedding!"
"I don't think anything!" the Doctor protested helplessly. "Honestly, Donna, we're falling into the atmosphere of a radioactive gas giant which is shooting plasma bursts at us and will implode the ship in about fifteen minutes if we don't do something about the pressure on the outer hull, and do you really think this is the time?"
Plasma hit the ship again and the shield alarms went off, flashing mauve lights and a high pitched alarm throughout the common space. The Doctor flew back to the console, running his fingers all over computer terminal, as the crew jogged back in from other places on ship, congregating the last of the lost people on this deck.
"I'm on it!" Doctor shouted. "Captain, get that alarm off. I'm boosting the shielding. I can configure a re-modulated beta wave to protect against the plasma bursts, but it'll only hold for one, maybe two more hits before it's useless again. The radiation signature in the nearby atmosphere changes right before a burst—"
"By a f-factor of XATM-092," finished Lee, hurrying back over from the makeshift med zone.
The Doctor glanced over at him, surprised. "That's right."
Lee nodded. "I'm a r-r-researcher. Exotic radiation. Been studying the p-p-plasma bursts. We've got a p, p, p, p, p…" He closed his eyes in frustration. "A p-p-probe on board, shielding automatically re-modulates every time we r-r-register the signature change. It's d-designed for this planet."
The Doctor stared at him intently. "Can you jerry-rig the probe's shield modulation metrics to feed directly into the ship's primary systems?"
"S-sure."
"Good man. Get up here." The Doctor bounded off the platform with the employee computer terminals and ran over to the public access ones while Lee climbed up to take his place. "I'm going to reconfigure the lifepods, drain all resources and fuel from the remaining maneuvering thrusters and transfer it to the pods to up their power output. With enough luck, they'll give us just enough force to propel us back up into a semi-permanent orbit and not blow us up in the process."