Chapter Ten
From the safety of the no.15 cam, Yahlas watched the no. 14 cam pan toward the no. 7 with disdain, her impulses crackling with fury.
"Yahs, you've really gone and made things difficult, but no matter," she mused, repositioning her own cam again so that she could see the 7th, "I will save the Doctor, this ship, and his little boyfriend. All from you."
Encoding a message in a mass of observational relay data from cam 15, she sent a warning to the Doctor in the no. 7 cam:
"Danger; (he) means to kill you. Been watching. Get out now."
The Doctor sent back,
"Which one? Are you sure you've got it right? This camera is about to come free of the hull, and there's something you should see here."
"Yes sir. Sure as anything. He is coming after you. Run, sir. Run! Forget my body. The no. 15 cam sent a release signal to the cam you're inhabiting- I just watched the bolts spin off their settings. You must leave it now, before it detaches completely!"
"Can't do that, Grasshopper," the Doctor sent, blinking the camera on and off.
"Idiot! I said he's watching you!"
The camera blinked again.
"I know."
Yahs watched from his own camera with a burgeoning interest. Surely Yahlas didn't believe the Doctor would fall for it? Yahlas had clearly attacked the no. 7 cam! It was there in the record!
He angled his cam toward the no. 15, bouncing the signal off and landing it squarely in the near-dead receptor of the 7th camera.
"Doctor, I know you saw her do it; you accessed the camera you're trapped in, yes? What did you see?"
The Doctor tapped out a signal of his own again, this time to answer both of them at once, but a suspicious static interference ate his words.
"You two need… calm down, don't duke it out… me. Just… listen! The pirates… let… captain… Sleepers all died! Yahs, you're…"
Just then, the no. 7 camera shivered, knocking the wire loose from the camera's sleek frame; the no. 7 cam flew away from the hull, whipping wildly but still attached, if only by grace of a dead woman's corpse in a thousand year old space suit.