Gallifrey:
Sardon had often privately observed that Gallifreyans didn't like to be described as xenophobic, but one had to call a heliotrope a Patrexes. Most of the time they never had to think of themselves and their role in the Universe. The vote to withdraw and abstain had been a majority ruling. The motive had been to share the guilt in the damage they'd done to other lives.
Some houses protested, of course. Lungbarrow and Redloom had been the more vocal ones in that dark history, arguing that to pull back was to effectively avoid responsibility. Despite the impressive arguments, even the awe-inspiring support of The Other hadn't stopped that overwhelming fear.
Without the social interaction, things began to change and not for the better, the dissidents swore. They later descended to become Shobogans—Gallifreyans with questionable genetic lineage and self-avowed Outsiders living on the fringes of society.
We are out of practice, aren't we? The Grey Lord mused. Death has lost its sting. Achievement means less because the stakes are lower. Except outside our borders.
He watched the TSV with the others, observing with a growing discomfort the Doctor's struggles to save lives. Saving life was all well and good—but it was a hard thing to save lives that had no interest in saving yours.
The reaction to what they saw was again united. This time the emotion was a different sort of horror—a psychological one.
The Doctor went down in a flurry of screaming aliens whipped into a mob-like frenzy of fear.
They could do nothing but watch.
The stampede went on and on and on across the screen. There was no sign of the scruffy little fellow with the infuriating, wide-eyed wonder and ruffled hair and Tellurian rags. Sardon's hearts lurched in a rare glimpse of pity, recalling the regrettable moments when the tiny Renegade had stood up to his authority with all the unthinking innocence of a child, and the well-wrapped cunning of a seasoned fighter.
He was a terrible Time Lord but he always meant well and he didn't deserve to work so hard only to-
"There he is!" Milvo yelped in relief. The Arcalian pointed frantically.
Rising out of the tide of a swarm of hysterics was a powerful, dark-skinned alien. He was not very tall, but he dwarfed the little figure hanging limp in his gigantic arms.
Tokish was exhausted.
This was a new sensation. Normally he never tired physically in the lighter gravity.
But he'd been operating without proper sleep when the pinhole struck, and there had been no time to rest since that moment.
Ever since the ship caught the latest transmission, Captain had been silent and Engineer had been—for a word—insane with fury. The intelligence programs were not equipped to fully recognize its capacity for emotion without backups, and that software was part of the pinhole's collateral damage.
It was all a perfect storm, he realized. They were under attack but this wasn't like any attack covered in his training. Whoever these scofflaws were, they had cut in a single, swift stroke, deactivating the 'Sun's security systems.
Freighters were designed to defend themselves, but they were not meant to withstand concentrated attack.
Tokish had been caught up in the swarm of hysterics early on. It had been his hope to divert the fear that was pumping through the vulnerable psyches around him, but he was a Pereleccan and therefore insignificant despite his high intelligence and excellent technical skills. So he worked with the crowd, moving in their stream, and putting out his arms or stepping strategically to the side here and there, slowing them down as best as he could. A few of the other crewmen tried to do the same thing, but the fervor of the people had to spend itself out before they could stop them.
And then the lights started to flicker.
They had been in the middle of the deck, one of the safest places during an attack, and...
The lights blinkered. Half the corridor went out.
The people trapped inside the darkness paused only long enough to change direction and they stampeded back to the illuminated portions of the ship.
And they were all the way into the Third Deck when the lights went out again.
Again the mindless crowd responded. It was run to the lights or die, trampled by their loved ones.
The third time it happened, they had but one choice on where to go.
The very belly of the deepest part of the hold.
We're being herded like fish into a killing-tank.
The Pereleccan shivered. Tokish had no power or ability to break free from the crowd. He was strong but he was not as strong as a wave of five hundred crewmen plus their passengers.
Tokish easily found Phix. The tall Ancel'ak was staggering back and forth, using his long, willowy limbs in a vain effort to settle the others. His delicate form was terribly worsened from the mob: bruises mottled his pearl-colored skin into a dirty stain and he limped in pain.
"Tokish!" He saw his friend and crew-mate. "Thank the Nine Planets!"
"What's going on?" Tokish yelled in his own language, shifting the small form in his arms. The Doctor groaned, distracting him for a moment, but the little fellow went limp again, his green eyes closed. "Phix, what did you do?"
"Do? I d-don't know what-"
"I can hear Binary, Phix!" Tokish' dark face was twisted in agony. "What you did..!"
"We can still finish this!" Phix babbled. "It will be all right! We'll explain to the People of Heed the problems in communications. They'll take their property and go!"
"Beings are not property!" Tokish protested in a half-roar. "You're killing them!"
"They were dead when I went to collect them!" Phix shouted at the top of his lungs—thankfully still in the Pereleccan Vulgar Tongue as the ignorant crowd slowly milled back and forth in confusion. "I swear to you, Tok! I went to collect their properties for delivery and-" The ship trembled in digital pain. "They were dead in their cryochambers! The readings were all unresponsive!"
"That didn't mean you should falsify the readings!" Tokish exclaimed. The horror of what the computer was telling him hadn't completely soaked in. For now he was still hanging on to the legal ethics. "Just for a Cargo-bounty—Minyos Wept, Phix! How could you-?! It's Dead-theft!"
"I-"
"You found the Colonists frozen in cryostorage and sold their corpses! You sold the corpses! You...Put their things up for the reward and made us complicit with the ship's shares! Engineer is telling me everything!"
Phix shook his head wildly. "No, they were all dead! Computer systems failure! Everyone passed away in their sleep! Man, Woman, child! All Dead!"
"No technician is unqualified to make that assessment!" Tokish was openly crying.
Phix writhed. "I had no choice! The People of Heed were coming to Tithe my planet! If I didn't offer them something they wanted...they would-" He choked and clapped his hand over his mouth.
Tokish gasped. "What? How?!"
"The elders contracted them for labor and when it was over they demanded payment for all their people killed in the line of duty. There were hundreds! They've been demanding that the same number of our people give themselves up! I thought if—if-if-I offered them twice that number of people in cryostorage they'd take them and leave us alone!"
"Oh...Phix." Tokish' face crumpled. "They could have appealed to the Court of Nine Planets!"
"We couldn't-"
A fresh groan of pain took their attention. The Doctor was trying to wake up.
"Oh..." The Doctor ground his teeth. His head..!
Parts of his regeneration were lost to the lindos—thank Rassilon! But there remained an unfortunately vivid recollection of when his heart broke apart in mitosis, jostling aside and shifting his organs until his binary cardiovascular system was complete.
He'd often wondered by Time Lords, who were traditionally very much in love with the sound of their own words, kept to "it hurts" in describing this process.
It was because the phrase, 'It hurts' was the only way to describe what it felt like. It was either oversimplify...or fall into a valley of descriptive madness.
Right now his mind was going through an extremely painful process that was reminding him all too much about the dividing of his heart. Brains weren't supposed to feel, but his didn't know that! He clutched his fingers deep into his unruly hair and writhed, unaware anything else.
"Stop it!" He shrieked. "Stop it! Stop it!" Where was this coming from? Why was it happening? Was this mischief from the Players? Was Sardon right after all?
"Doctor..."
He opened his eyes through a gummy curtain of migraine. The Ancel'ak was peering over him, his pale face burning with worry.
"It's all right, sir." The alien soothed, and tried to calm him by smoothing his hair away from his brow. As usual, attempts to manipulate his hair met with failure. "We're here...we're here...don't worry..."
The Doctor blinked wearily, trying to wake up without looking as though he was really awake. If there was ever a good time for deception tactics, this was it.
"He's hearing something outside of our spectrum," Tokish told Phix. For now they had agreed to bury the quarrel. They felt some mutual guilt for welcoming the little fellow on to their ship-he didn't deserve to suffer anything after rescuing them.
"I think you're right, but between the two of us, we ought to be able to hear so-"
Heed. People of Heed. The Doctor latched on to the problem like a dying man for water.
"Concentrate!" He panted out loud. "One thing at a time! One thing!"
Phix had been dealing with the People of Heed, and for something corrupt if they didn't want to take their legal problems to the courts. The Court of Nine was the most respected legal body in the entire Third Zone...and beyond! Why was he afraid? Why was Tokish horrified?
Why did that sound familiar...and not in a good way?
There had to be something...
Exhausted, his eyes slipped shut.
"Ra-Om Ga-Om..."
Tokish glanced down, then stared at Phix in fresh worry. The little man's eyes were closed and his countenance was relaxed as if in deep sleep.
But he couldn't imaging anyone chanting in their sleep.
"Ra-Om...
"Ga-Om."
"What is he doing?" Phix mumbled.
The Doctor didn't respond if he heard.
He just kept chanting, his voice low and soft and musical.
"Ra-Om...
"Ga-Om."
The Ship guttered in a grinding wave of metal upon metal. Binary code filled the speakers.
Tokish went almost as pale as Phix, his broad face tilted up in sickened terror.
"What is it?" Phix whispered.
"They're coming." Tokish choked.
Two hours passed.
The mob had clustered into a huddled mass of meek submission. They wanted water and food and wound-dressing. Their fight was gone, and they were calling for lost friends and family—the surviving crew didn't have the heart to tell them those missing people were likely crushed to death under their feet in the panic.
Phix paced restlessly back and forth, his sensitive Ancel'ak nerves stretched to boiling point. He had decided to place himself before the Heed and argue for all the lives on the ship.
That it was dire and most likely hopeless was besides the point. His conscience was too heavy.
Tokish watched him, unable to give any word of comfort. Desperate men do desperate things, and Phix had been desperate indeed.
"I've got to try." Phix muttered.
"I'll stand with you." Tokish promised.
Phix trembled. "You may not want to do that." He swallowed hard. "If they're angry enough they'll..." He swallowed again. "They'll go for my people any way. Hunt us down like beasts and..." He couldn't finish. He looked away.
Overlooked (which was just how he liked it), the Doctor continued to lie unmoving upon the floor, his nonstop, soft chanting almost soothing in the monotony.
Padmasambhava's lessons on accessing his past were about to show value.
The mantras were designed to access one's past lives, but as a Time Lord, the Doctor suspected the distinction was a fine one. Buddhism had a lot of similarities with the spiritual science on Gallifrey. The older the Doctor grew, the more he was seeing parallels.
No matter what regeneration he wore, his brainwaves would (or should) remain the same. That meant the energy of his thoughts just needed to know where to go. That was the difficult part; a TARDIS-born Time Lord's brain was often like a TARDIS: unused or unneeded portions went to storage (and even jettisoned). And when one needed to find that particular memory-room...well...even the Doctor had been forced to take long, long, scenic walks inside the TARDIS until he finally came to his goal.
Memory accessed.
People of Heed.
Heed. Third Zone Regional Formal Language.
Ancel'ak Dialect.
Translation: Gum.
Gum. Translation:
Palate.
TARDIS translation:
Gome. Old English for Heed, attention.
People of Heed.
People of Gome.
Gum.
Gum. Translation: Palate.
The Doctor began to shake as the words flittered about his mind.
Gum.
Third Zone.
People: In the Ancel'ak language, male until proven otherwise.
People = Men.
Men of the Palate.
Andro: Man
Gum: Palate.
Androgum.
Androgum.
Androgum.
The hatch crashed open.
Phix stepped forward, his long arm outstretched in a placatory greeting.
Phix was naturally tall, and the only being standing. He took the stunning-beam from the invaders full in the chest, and being an Ancel'ak his hypersensitive nervous system instantly shut down from the shock.
Phix died, screaming once in a high-pitched wail that matched the lofty coils of smoke rising from his delicate body. It was long and loud and the Doctor wanted to clap his ears tight against the sound but he couldn't ignore the passing of a life for his own selfish comfort.
If Phix had not died from his higher physiology, he would have from the next wave: a clot of gas-grenades floated in on a drone program and collapsed into the air, releasing an odorless sedative. There were six other Ancel'ak in the Emergency Hold. They died without knowing it.
The Doctor shut down his respiratory bypass and watched helplessly as the three hundred lives around him collapsed into a passive state. They were alive and conscious but completely docile to the effects of the gas. There was no time to save any of them. He couldn't even save himself.
He could only hope to buy time.
Time was all a Time Lord really needed.
"Tokish." He rasped. "Tokish!"
The huge alien blinked, already sleepy from the gas, but his physiology was fighting it off. Gases, mostly toxic, were a natural hazard of his planet.
"Pretend you're quite stupid and do what they say. Pretend you're just a mindless drone and-" The doors were opening the rest of the way. "I'll try to get to you with a plan. But for now, stay with the people. But don't let the Androgums know you're intelligent!"
Tokish proved he was listening by nodding blankly instead of speaking.
The little Time Lord let his head drop back to the floor meekly. He controlled his breathing, shutting off his respiratory intake. He wasn't certain of the gaseous clouds' chemical composition, but he suspected it didn't matter. The sheer number of canisters suggested the vapour would be lighter than the nitrous-oxygen atmosphere, and dissipate quickly.
He waited quietly, hoping this improvisational technique would work.
Near him Phix' corpse stretched ghoulishly across the gleaming glasstic floor. Inches from the Doctor's face, his own was still etched with a mild expression of surprise.
"You fool." The Doctor whispered. He could barely speak.
"They would have never accepted your devil's deal." The Doctor risked a moment and blinked through a film of sweat as blurry shapes marched in, weapons drawn.
"Oh, you poor, poor fool." The Doctor said softly. "Androgums like their food fresh."