Chapter Fourteen
In a furious spattering of camera 14's thick glass lens, Yahlas dropped out of the cam and into the ship's main lines again, careening through the wires, a golden missile of death heading for the clicking sounds of Yahs's traitor feet against the floors of the Xja ship.
Yahs ran screaming through endless hallways, past the ruined mess hall door, hanging there only by its sliding interface, over a broken pile of nest material crates, scrambled over top of a loose pipe spitting cold mercury over a section of the ventilation wing's flooring tiles.
The man was possessed by the pirates. He had to stop him, had to kill Jack Harkness.
What he hadn't counted on, as he sped through the passageways rank with old Xja dust and mercury stains, was Yahlas slamming into him, full force, the Doctor's young body a battering ram in her able hands as she grabbed him with the full strength of a Time Lord, ripping at his mandibles, clawing at his carapace, her feet hooked around his double spine, her body still dripping silver from ejection wounds.
His back shot through with pain, and he became fog again, enveloping her golden hatred with bluish whitish tendrils of half-life, old and cold and bereft of the heat of real living.
"I have been a specter too long, Time Lord! You must listen to me! Your battle is not with me, it is with the pirates!"
Yahlas plunged the Doctor's hand, her hand, now, like a blade into his ephemeral misty form, the gold melting some of the blue, the blue burning some of the gold into acidic green smoke.
"You murdered your own kind, the Sleepers! You! I watched you outside on the hull, just now, attacking the Doctor! You trapped him in that camera and then murdered him, just like you stashed my body, within distance of the backup recording. You murdered me before I could reach it! Now die and rid this ship of your presence so I can return the Doctor's body to his…"
But a desperate, shaky voice came over the coms then, followed by a strange tonal sequence of banged out notes…
"Guhhhhh. Guuuuh!"
Bang-baaaaang-bang!
Bang-baaaaang-bang!
"It's a message!" Yahs clicked aloud, becoming reconstitute just long enough to scrape a white claw over the safety release on the nearby blast door, revealing the long-window view of an outside catwalk used for maintenance.
There, crumpled like a soggy croissant, a space suit hovered dirty and occupied, arms wrapped around the railings, clinging and shivering in the cold. Old eyes fluttered in the stained and frosty faceplate, old, and familiar. And alive, gloriously alive. Yahlas' eyes. But Yahlas was…. inside.
"What? Rassilon's Rod, you… were telling the truth? Oh. Well go out there and get him!"