The QQS Ariades starliner glided silently through the void of space, bits of planetary jetsam colliding with her hull here and there, silent fireworks extinguished on her black, radioceramic coated plates. A ship of gentle curves and sweeping lines, Ariades slipped through galaxies like an interstellar wave; all gentle grace and sparkling peaks. The flagship of the Quorosi Alliance's world-state owned cruiselines, she was a ship for the rich and powerful, a shining example of luxury and excess. When Rose had first walked through the obsidian doors off the loading dock at Quoro, she was reminded of Pete's mansion.
Great pillars lined the main hall, drawing guests to enormous, curved staircases carved from something Rose could only describe as marbled coral. It was a stone the likes of which she had never encountered, soft cream with veins of gold and peach. Now in the dark, it glowed with a faint bioluminescense, a remainder of the living organism it had been.
The main hall of the ship was silent now, the rumble and fuss of the evening meal having drawn to a close. The lights had come down as the assembled guests turned their eyes to the staircases. From the back of the room, soft music began to play. So like violins to Rose's ear, but with an accent to their rich voices which betrayed that they were not of Earth. But still, the effect was the same.
Her own voice joined them as a spotlight from above blinked on, blinding her for a moment. The accents on her form-hugging, floor-length black gown sparkled in the light, bringing to mind the stars and galaxies that twinkled through the portholes.
Rose raised the back of her hand to the side of her face, the muscle memory of her well-practiced choreography taking over as she raised her voice in song, carrying her rich tone through the room. Her audience sat, enraptured by the woman who was alien to them. All pink and yellow. She sang of loss and heartbreak. Of dancing across the stars. The music reached triumphant crescendos and fell in cascading loss to near silence.
An hour of lyrical storytelling passed in moments for them. As she drew her final song, one of hope in the darkest times, to a close, the audience rose as one in cheers.
Rose bowed to the roomful of Quorosi and thanked them, a smile across her face. Thankful that she'd learned to hold her tears at bay.
Rose dropped onto the thin mattress of her bunk, toeing off her designer Marc Max stilettos as she did. She pulled her feet up beside her, rubbing her throbbing heels. Six weeks of this and she was still not used to moving about in impractical but, she had to admit, decidedly gorgeous shoes. Years of work as an alien liaison had accustomed her feet and calves to running about in trainers, not the shiny, blood red, five-inch high monstrosities she'd worn all evening.
For all the money the company put into her wardrobe, Rose was continually disappointed by the small cabin she and Tony had been assigned. Barely tall enough for her to stand – all five feet and four inches of her – with two small bunks, a small desk with many drawers, and a curtain partitioning off the closet. They shared a washroom with the rest of the entertainment staff.
Housing and food for herself and Tony were part of her remuneration. She'd joined the cruiseline several weeks prior, desperate for work when she and Tony had finally found their way to Marax 7, a port city on an A'ni'daren moon. They had been running for over a month, hopping from place to place on merchant ships and the occasional military transport. The credits Rose had been given by Captain AoRoHo had been exhausted by the time the two had reached the spaceport and Rose was starting to worry how much longer the supplies in her rucksack would hold out if she could not find some way to generate an income to support herself and Tony.
She'd been wandering the customs building, looking for any human-friendly species she might be able to negotiate transport with, when she'd seen an advert for a singer.
The Quorosi Cruiselines entertainment manager had loved her. She'd sung her best interpretation of Blackbird by The Beatles, and had brought the man to tears. She'd been offered the job on the spot, the manager telling her that the ship's headliner had met with a messy end after running up debts to the wrong people.
By day's end, Rose had found her and Tony ensconced in a small room on the tiny QQS Kelios, where they had lived until just last week. Rose's performance had generated some interest and the company felt she belonged on a more prestigious ship.
Leaving behind their friends on the Kelios had been hard for her and Tony. They'd formed a close bond with some of the other non-Quorosi crewmembers. While the Quorosi had been welcoming and kind, as a people they viewed aliens largely as sources of entertainment, not fit for socializing with. There were two other humans on the Kelios, Marius and Marie, a brother and sister who had been abducted as children and raised as attractions by the galactic equivalent of a sideshow. They'd escaped the sideshow, but never felt like returning to Earth and so had chosen to travel the stars, a choice Rose completely understood.
Rose and Marie had developed an almost sisterly bond in the short three weeks they'd spent on the Kelios, and she felt the loss acutely now that the diminutive brunette was no longer around. Each night, she and Marie would sneak on to one of the observation decks to view the stars through the invisible shielding. It reminded Rose of sitting at the doors of the TARDIS, where the universe ran on forever in every direction. Marie would wax poetic about the places she and her brother had visited. Rose had urged her to write her stories down. The younger woman had been a captivating storyteller and Rose missed her stories.
Marius had usually watched Tony while Rose performed, and had served as a sort of father figure to the boy. As a member of the cooking staff, he finished work just before Rose performed and he would help Tony work through whatever academic work Rose had set him. They may not be able to return home, but Rose would not let her charge's education suffer. Particularly as the boy had every sign of being a proper genius. Rose had him doing work from books she'd picked up on their travels which were more complex than the physics texts she'd studied during her degree.
This evening, Tony was playing with one of the A'ni'daren boys from the cabin across from theirs. The child's mother played an instrument in the band whose name Rose couldn't pronounce. The boys would spend their evenings wandering around the crew areas of the ship and generally keeping out from underfoot. Tony was quick to befriend other children and Rose was glad for it. No matter where they went, the boy never seemed lonely. It was a pleasant change.
Rose felt like returning to her once nightly ritual of viewing the stars so, after removing and hanging up the shimmering gown that was worth far more than a year of her pay, she changed quickly into denims and a soft jumper she'd brought from home. Pulling trainers onto her aching feet, she left the small cabin and made her way to the observation deck that this ship provided for crewmembers. She didn't have to sneak around on this ship, and for that she was pleased.
Only having a vague idea of the route this ship took through the stars, she touched the small infopad on the side wall of the bubble-like observation deck and selected the option for an audio guide. The voice of the tours director – a computer program – surrounded her.
"….as you can see to the starboard side. In the port observatory, patrons will note a binary star system within a large constellation of seventeen stars. The planets of the binary system are the next stop on our itinerary and will involve the option of an off-ship excursion, tickets for which may be purchased at the Patron Experience counter. The uninhabited binary system, designated I7/echo/Q is characterized by seven planets. Three planets orbit the yellow star, one orbits the cooler red star, and two are in joint orbit around both. Held in perfect equilibrium between the gravitational fields of the two stars is a planet which has been a matter of significant curiosity to cosmologists – KB4, so designated because of the traditional A'ni'daren name for this this constellation, Kasterborous…"
The voice droned on, but Rose had stopped listening to the computer. Her eyes sought out the bright, two-starred system that seemed almost close enough to touch. She could not make out the planets in orbit and knew they must be positioned such that the light of their stars obscured any possibility of spotting the smaller planets. She imagined she could see, in the wide expanse of blackness between the stars, a still planet. Not subject to the whims of stars but firm in its own place in the universe. She squinted, trying to see it, but knew it was still too far for her human eyes to resolve it.
It felt like she hadn't breathed since she'd heard the computer say the system's name. It couldn't be… The planet had been ripped out of time and space and it shouldn't exist anywhere.
John had left her a book of notes, telling her he thought the planet still existed in this reality, though he'd never explained how it could. She had sought out the A'ni'daren systems after their escape from Earth, as he'd said she should, to see if he was right, but no one knew of an inhabited world that met her description. Over the last weeks, Rose's hope that John's belief in what he had found would bear out had faded, and she had felt despair building within her at the thought that all he had worked on in his final years would come to nought.
As the infopad brought up photos of the planets they would see the following day, her attention was drawn to the screen and she paused it on an image of one planet. A planet which could exist only if John was right, and she felt ashamed she had been so quick to lose faith in John's findings.
An orange sky dotted with long clouds painted like streaks of flame arched over fields of dark red grass. Mountains rose up from scarlet plains, reaching towards the suns in the sky, rising above silver-leafed trees which grew, gnarled and ancient-looking, on crests of gently sloping foothills. Rose's breath caught in her throat – it looked exactly like he had described. Exactly like the echo of a memory of home she'd retained from when she'd looked into the heart of the TARDIS.
The Shining World of the Seven Systems.
It felt almost blasphemous to utter the word herself. To name this world which should not exist, and that she had dared not hope to find. But she looked from the image at her fingertips, beneath the cool class of the observatory infopad, to the dark space between two suns she had heard tell of years before.
She imagined she could see the burnt orange globe nestled between its life-giving stars, and she breathed its name into the cosmos. "Gallifrey."
It took Rose no time to get permission to accompany the patrons on the day excursion to Gallifrey – KB4, Rose corrected herself. It was uninhabited, which explained why no one she had asked was familiar with it, and she learned it had never been home to any society in this reality. There was a contingent of researchers who had been sent to tend some measurement equipment on the planet's surface. Rose's evening of reading informed her that KB4 was a Class 5 uninhabited planet with liquid water, temperate climate, minimal background radiation, and a nitrogen and oxygen based atmosphere. It was suitable for human and Quorosi life and, unlike the other six planets in the system, required no additional equipment to visit and so had been chosen by the cruiseline as the most profitable of the planets to host an excursion.
The following night was Rose's first night off since joining the entertainment crew of the Ariades and, as a headline singer, she was granted privileges many other crewmembers were not. Joining the customers on off-ship visits was a rare treat, but still occasionally permitted for her.
She walked quietly back to her room, her eyes cast down to the floor. She belched in greeting to the Araxi custodian she passed – one of many cultural quirks that came second-hand to her after her years liaising with various species on behalf of Earth – and pushed open the heavy door to her and Tony's cabin.
He had returned for the evening and was clean and dressed in his pajamas. The blonde boy sat in his bunk, the higher of the two, reading a paper on multidimensional physics which Rose had only barely been able to get through herself, despite having been awarded a doctorate in the discipline last summer.
"Alright Tony?" she asked by way of greeting, toeing off her trainers by the door. She walked over to his bunk and folded her forearms on the edge by his shoulder. She leaned over and gave him a brief kiss on his freckle-smattered cheek. The boy smiled without taking his eyes off the document full of complex formulae.
"Yeah. Mxtis and I just got back from the galley. Already took care of supper," he nodded to the small desk where a covered plate sat. "He told me he and his brother and mum are leaving the next time we make port." He looked at Rose at the last, his young eyes very sad. It wasn't the first time he'd had a friend leave since they'd started this nomadic life. She knew they needed somewhere stable before long.
She looked at him sadly and ran her fingers through his flaxen hair. "'M sorry, Tony. I know it's hard. For what it's worth, I don't think we'll be hanging 'round here much longer ourselves."
He lifted an eyebrow, "Oh?"
She hesitated a moment, unsure what to tell him, but decided on the truth. "We're going to a planet. The Doctor's planet – well, this universe's version of it, I think – tomorrow. There's no Time Lords here as far as I can tell, but according to John, this planet should be the perfect place to grow the TARDIS."
John and Rose had told Tony all about their years travelling together, all the dangers they'd faced and the daring escapes they had made, and the boy agreed with Rose's belief that the safest place they could be was not here, and, preferably, not here with their own TARDIS to live in. They'd been tracked down twice already and it seemed no matter how far they went, their enemies would find them. An uninhabited planet was probably their safest prospect for the time being.
Tony seemed to think about it for a moment, head cocked to the side. Rose watched as his eyes darted back and forth, apparently reading something in his mind. He did that a lot, and she knew it was his mental whiteboard – a trick of thinking he used to work through more complex matters. After a moment, he shrugged to himself, re-focused his vision and turned to Rose. "Okay, so what's the plan?"