Donna transmatted over to the Draconian ship wearing a bulky orange spacesuit with a heavy helmet. She carried three large cases containing the portable shield modulator, the forcefield generator, and a power generator, all of which immediately floated up out of her suddenly too light arms and banged against the ceiling. The gravity on the ship had failed along with the rest of the life support, and she was now drifting in zero G.
It was dark, pitch black except for the areas lit up by her helmet lamp. Looking around, she found herself in what looked like it was probably once a fairly posh welcoming room. Now, however, every surface she could see – walls, floor, ceiling, computer panels, etc. – was coated in some sort of thick black grime.
She pushed gently off the floor to grab hold of the cases drifting in the middle of the room, and her movement stirred up a cloud of black dust that floated freely around the cabin in her wake.
Following the directions given to her earlier, she made her way to the ship's bridge and set the cases down, disturbing still more dust that stuck to her helmet faceplate. Arms finally free, she reach down to her waist and hit the comm. link button.
"Doctor!"
"I'm here. How is everything?"
"Dark and gritty. They could use a hoover in here. There's grime everywhere." She noticed a couple of shirt buttons floating in the grime, and then a plastic zipper wedged into a control panel. "Oh… Ohhhhhh…"
"Donna, what is it?"
She swallowed thickly. "I think I just realized what the grime is. There's buttons in it."
The Doctor made a sympathetic little humming noise. "It's probably all that's left of the organic remains on the ship. Clothes, food, bodies… little houseplants. Anything the radiation could break down in fifty years."
"That's disgusting," Donna grimaced. She bent down and plugged in the case with the power generator in it first, as they'd planned. Once the power was back on, she'd be able to attach the tiny slave circuit to the main bridge control panel and the crew on the Hindenburg would be able to take over the Draconian ship's computers, run a systems check, and see what was working and what else needed to be replaced.
The lights came on automatically a second after the power case had been plugged in, and Donna realized it wasn't going to be quite so easy. Her visor was smeared with black grime and she could hardly see.
"Doctor! I can't see a bloody thing in this mess!"
"That's all right, just get the slave circuit on the dashboard and we'll take over, and try to get the air filtered out for you."
Ten minutes later, the Doctor was able to give her good news.
"Well, the good news is, almost everything's working but the shields! The ship must have lost them when the plasma hit, and the radiation killed everyone inside. Then the ship fell into its current place in the planet's rings, and eventually ran out of power without anyone to keep it up. About half the rooms on the top deck are open to space right now via holes in the hull from space rocks and such, but that's easy enough to cover with the forcefield."
"What about this grime?"
"I'm going to open the bay doors remotely and turn all the atmospheric regulators on at full blast, blowing everything in the main cabins and halls out into space. You'll need to find a seat to buckle into."
"Okay, done. I'm ready when you are."
After clearing out and replacing all the air in the ship, they turned on the rest of life support and got the temperature controls and humidifiers online with no problems. Donna cleaned her visor enough to see roughly what she was doing, and, following instructions as they were relayed to her over the comms by the Doctor, got the forcefield and the Hindenburg's advanced shield modulator hooked up and running.
"What about the radiation?" she asked. "Is it safe, now?"
"It'll have soaked into everything in the ship," he explained, "but the shield's been upgraded to neutralize it. This might be exotic to the rest of the universe, but it was old hat to the Time Lords."
"Naturally."
Once the radiation shielding in the shipwreck was set up, the crewmen on the Hindenburg began evacuating passengers and injured crew via transmat in groups of ten at a time. The interior walls and surfaces of the Draconian ship were still morbidly grimy, but the air was clean and the muck was so settled, it wasn't going anywhere unless someone wiped it with a shoulder or a careless hand. The medical staff brought stack of table cloths from the dining hall to spread out over floors of the cleanest rooms so ill people could lie down. Donna, having been relieved by crewmen in the bridge, headed there as well to sit with the still unconscious Rose.
…
The Doctor came over to Lee's side from the computer terminal they'd casually dubbed the "shipwreck terminal" and checked the screens over his shoulder.
"Hullo, McAvoy! How's the shield holding up?" he asked.
Lee shook his head discouragingly. "I c-can keep the microbes off by aiming the sonic p-p-pulse wherever they get start t-to get too thick, but…"
The Doctor looked at him seriously. "What is it?"
Lee turned the screen to show him. The probe's re-modulation program designed to adapt to the ever varying plasma signatures and pressure on K'ribb-dees was struggling to keep up with the increased stresses put on it by their depth and length of time in the atmosphere.
"N-not designed to last this long," he said grimly.
"No, I can see that," the Doctor concurred. "Right. I'll get to work strengthening the program, see if I can't squeeze a little more time out of it. We've got about half the passengers evacuated already. Should be able to give them another ten or twenty minutes to get the rest off. You should get over there yourself, get off the ship as soon as you can."
"N-Nah," Lee shrugged. "I'll s-s-stay. Easier to manage shield mechanics with a s-second p-person on microbe d-d-detail."
The Doctor smiled at him.
They worked side by side in silence for a few minutes, and then Lee said, without looking up from his screen, "…S-she, uh… she called me g-gorgeous, you know."
The Doctor glanced at him out of the corner of his eye and noted the small, lopsided grin. "Oh, did she?" he responded airily, without stopping his work.
Lee didn't answer, just grinned at the viewscreen monitoring the radiation signatures around the ship and continued to recharge for the next sonic pulse.
…
On the shipwreck, Donna organized passengers and crew as they came over, directing those carrying the injured off the transmat platform and towards the improvised medical bays, and crewmen charged with the transport of prisoners to a mostly secure storage hold they'd located one deck down.
The second prisoner transport group materialized in front of her as she waited.
"Well," she said, taking a breath. "Over this way, if you please. We've rigged up a sort of holding cell in the galley."
The Draconian princess wobbled to her feet from the floor, arms bound, and was immediately restrained by the hand of the crewman sent with her.
"I don't need you to tell me the way around my ship!" she snarled at Donna, and stomped past in the direction of the galley. Donna rolled her eyes and followed.
They stopped when the princess caught sight of the black stuff over all the cooking surfaces and slowed to a halt.
"What… what is that?" she asked, voice more subdued than normal.
Donna looked sideways at her, feeling a pang of pity.
"'S nothing. Probably just old bit of food that atomized when the radiation hit. Come on."
She stepped around the lizard woman gently and led the way towards storage. The princess didn't move, and just kept staring right through her at something across the room under the grime. Donna paused.
"You coming?"
The lizard woman's mouth moved silently for a second before her voice caught up. "That was… my nana's old…" she croaked out.
Donna followed her gaze to a tarnished metal pendant glued to the floor by a particularly thick pile of black grime.
"Do you want me to get it for you?" she asked hesitantly. "I mean, and clean it up a bit first." She wasn't sure they had running water yet, but she was fairly certain she'd seen the medics carry in a big box of sanitary wipes, and one of those would probably do some good.
The princess was silent for another moment, staring hopelessly at the pile of ash that she knew to be her grandmother.
"That… would be kind of you. Thank you."
Donna nodded and the woman closed her eyes. The guard put a gentle hand on her back and they continued moving again toward the makeshift brig.
…
Lee aimed the sonic pulse at another growing cluster of biomass picked up by the ship's sensors and triggered it. The radiation on the port side of the ship dissipated a little, but not as much as before. The pressure wasn't the only thing that was denser down here. The microbial life seemed to thrive in it. They were definitely running short on time.
"How many g-groups left to transport?" he asked the Doctor, who was busy creating and implementing new subroutines into the shield matrix every couple of minutes.
"Oh, only three or four now," came the reply. "But they'd better hurry. We're rapidly nearing the distance limit for the transmat, and there's nothing I can do once we're out of range. You should really go now."
"Can't. You s-still need me."
"Lee."
Lee looked up at the change of address. The Doctor was looking back at him in earnest.
"You won't get another chance," he said worriedly in a low voice.
Lee returned his gaze for a few moments, and then gave a half-smile and shrugged. "P-p-p-probe's gone. C-can't go back to Uni empty-handed, anyway."
The Doctor looked pained, like he still wanted to argue, but Lee intercepted him.
"I think… the m-microbes are releasing radiation as a d-d-d-defense strategy," he theorized aloud as he went back to monitoring the biomass outside and triggering the sonic dispersal pulse. "What d-do you think?"
The Doctor opened his mouth, closed it, sighed, and then turned back to his computer terminal. "Oh, I dunno. Doesn't seem like any predator native to planet could've evolved in this atmosphere and still be susceptible to radiation. And what's radiation to a rock or a big hunk of metal from the sky? I think it's something else. All these different types of radiation being passed back and forth, most of them unique to this planet in this point in time… The sensors show a different signature around us than they do over by that big patch of proto-algae – why is that, I'd like to know."
Lee blinked. "Food source. And we're a threat. So the r-radiation is a m-m-marker."
"Looks that way."
"They're c-communicating. Like a hive."
"Different radiation signature, different message. 'S not so different from ants or termites, actually, marking their trails with chemicals. And here we come, the foreign invader, squashing their little hill. So what do they do? Warn the troops. Amass the armies. Ignite the air."
"But the p-p-plasma bursts aren't strong enough to atomize metal or rock."
"Not yet, they aren't." The Doctor looked at him and gave a bleak little smile. "So far, we've been dealing with plasma in a state of local thermodynamic equilibrium. And since it's only getting hotter out there…"
Lee stared back at him and went to check the atmospheric readings. A gas giant only grew hotter and denser the deeper you entered it, eventually becoming so dense the gas changed to a state of liquid metallic hydrogen. While checking their current depth and temperature, something else caught his attention.
"The b-b-biomass readings below in the liquid s-surrounding the c-core… they're off the charts! They must have their c-colonies down there!"
The Doctor looked grim. "I'd say the odds of us making it that far before we're completely vaporized are slim to none."
Lee nodded and watched resolutely as the numbers on the viewscreen continue to climb.
"Well, g-good thing I stuck around then," he said. "You're g-g-gonna have your h-hands full." He looked back down at the biomass mass screen and touched a button, sending out another sonic pulse. The Doctor watched him with sad, knowing eyes and then turned back to the shield modulator to quickly throw up another layer of shielding.
"H-how much time until the t-t-transmat's out of r-range?" Lee asked after a minute.
"About fifteen seconds," answered the Doctor.
"Did the last group make it out?"
"They're going now."
Both men waited anxiously in silence. Finally, the ping that indicated a message had been received sounded from the main terminal, and the Doctor pulled it up.
"Last group received. We're the only two left on the ship."
And they had no way off.
…
I don't understand the composition of gas giants either, as I'm sure has already become abundantly, painfully apparent. Plasma, gas giants, and radiation! Actual science? Pssshhhhhhh, we need no reality here…
Annnnnd I just realized I forgot that they'd already be facing plasma just from their entry into the planet's atmosphere, even without the microbes, so I should probably go fix that. On the other hand, the plasma bursts from the microbes seem less impressive when they're just one type of plasma among many, so ehhhh – I'm gonna continue to conveniently "forget" that little detail for the sake of drama.