The Beast with a Billion Backs

Jenny

"Would you really have shot her?" the Doctor asked, breaking the unusual silence in Jenny's spaceship. He had never been inside it before, and kept prowling around and examining things with his very acute eye for detail, very blatantly trying to judge Oswin's handiwork. She suspected he was trying to find the tiniest fault imaginable so that he could feel like he had one-upped her, when he had never built a spaceship this ingenious from scratch. She was inputting some very specific space coordinates given to her by Kraz, the navigator, and debating telling Eleven to sit down or not. If he didn't sit down, he would fall over when they took off, and she thought that might be funny, but she couldn't tell if it was a little vindictive or not.

"Ashildr? Probably," Jenny confessed, "Not with that gun, though. With the revolver."

"Why switch guns? What's the point?"

"Plasma gun's too messy. The spray could vaporise her whole foot. But a revolver at close range like that aimed at an ankle would slide straight through the joint, tear apart all the ligaments and shatter the bones in one very small area. I would do that without feeling bad at all. She did stab and kill me. You know, I think you're sort of lucky."

"Lucky in what way?" he asked, coming to hover behind her chair, watching her input numbers she was sure he hadn't been paying attention to earlier like he was waiting to correct her on something. He always liked correcting her on things. She thought it must make him feel like he was teaching her something valuable, when really it was rarely anything but annoying.

"I'd love to regenerate because of radiation poisoning, or being heroic and absorbing the time vortex. It's less painful than getting impregnated by a facehugger and then torn to pieces, for one thing," she said bitterly. She still didn't like thinking about that particular regeneration. At least Clara had been there. Perhaps they hadn't talked to each other, or even paid much attention to one another at all, and maybe Jenny had been rather distracted by having acid burn through her eyes and hand, but… it was a small solace, retrospectively.

"Well maybe I would quite like not to change my face every time. Already dreading the next one when I'm going to shrink nine inches and grow a pair of…" he stopped, and Jenny turned in her seat to raise her eyebrows at him. "A pair of… you know. Hands."

"Hands?"

"Small, womanly hands. What can you do with hands like that? I bet she can't even open jars."

"Jars. Okay." She didn't believe for one second that he had originally been planning to say 'a pair of hands', but in covering up his foul mistake, at least he had shown he knew what he had been about to say was wrong. In his present company, at least. It was a very weird position for Jenny to be in listening to her father scrutinise her mother's anatomy as though she were under a very jealous and chauvinistic microscope.

"My point was that the grass is always greener," he said, sitting down. She was slightly disappointed that she wasn't going to see him fall over, as she began to flick switches to start up the engines and the thrusters.

"What does that mean?"

"It's an idiom, you know." She looked at him blankly. She did not know. "The grass is always greener in someone else's pasture. You can always find reasons to think someone else's life is better than your own."

"I wouldn't say our lives are so different. We're very similar. Even dating the same woman." She said that only as a sly, personal revenge for what he had said about her mother, though she was sure he didn't realise that was where it came from. He just cringed. "Brace for take-off."

"Brace? It the gravity not very good here? Is it a bumpy ride?"

"No, I was joking," said Jenny, "Very smooth. None of this thrashing about like on the TARDIS."

"Oi! That's your heritage. You might inherit her one day."

"And I'll be sure to repair the brakes when I do," she said.

He didn't even notice them take off, that was how smooth the ride was in her sleek flying saucer. Because of this he got quite the shock when there was a blue flash of light outside the windows and almost instantaneously they had warped – which on the outside produced a sound like a sonic boom when the ship materialised somewhere that wasn't a vacuum – to the sector of space they'd been advised to go to. Initially, they saw nothing except other distant stars, but visibility in space was always poor. Jenny squinted out of the large window to no avail, then sighed.

"Do you think maybe it's so huge it's completely blocking everything out of the window? Maybe we're incredibly close to it."

"Then why can I see the edge of the galaxy over there?" Jenny pointed.

"Camouflage. Or it's invisible."

"if it was invisible it wouldn't block everything."

"No… that's a fair point…" Jenny shook her head at her father and found her phone in her pocket, then used an adapter cable she kept on the ship to plug the phone into the ship's mainframe, after which she opened the newly-installed app for Helix, courtesy of Adam and Oswin's joint intellectual escapades. It was much better than having to carry the large handset around.

"Helix, can you access the long-range scanners on this ship?"

"Affirmative, Major." She did not know who had programmed Helix to call her 'Major', but she was at this point beyond caring.

"Brilliant; would you kindly use them to scan all of Texoid System to find any giant lifeforms? Like, huge ones, big enough to block out the sun. Probably still in the vicinity of the sun," Jenny requested, then added, "Please."

"Please?" the Doctor questioned.

"What? I didn't say please once and Nios told me off. And it can't hurt to be polite to Helix."

"Scanning now, Major."

"Thanks, Helix," she said. The Doctor continued to look at her funny. "Shut up. I'm just trying to be nice."

"Very nice to the AIs and yet you threatened to kneecap a woman not an hour ago."

"She stabbed me! I was just doing what Clara would do if she was there. Clara would definitely have hurt her way worse than I did for giving me a black eye, which is still very painful, by the way." It was going red, and was almost certainly going to blossom into a very sour bruise before the day was over.

"Clara wouldn't hurt a fly."

"Clara would and did hurt the very same fly before for twisting my thumb. It was like something out of a film, she wasn't even in the house and I screamed and before I knew it she had Ashildr by the throat and picked her up off the ground, and she was like 'don't you dare touch Jenny.' Anyway, if Clara would never think about hurting anyone, why does your Clara have a huge scar on her left arm from getting electrocuted by Esther?"

"Why did she twist your thumb? The broken one? That's a horrible thing to do."

"I think she thought it was funny."

"I have detected an unknown lifeform, Major," Helix said.

"What can you tell us about it?"

"The creature is 2.1 kilometres in length and bears a biological resemblance to Earth invertebrates, possessing a bone exoskeleton I estimate to be ten times as hard as diamond covering every part of its body."

"Is two-thousand metres big enough to block out the sun?" Jenny asked the Doctor.

"Well, the moon is three-and-a-half thousand metres in diameter and that blocks the Solar System's significantly closer and larger sun during an eclipse," he said.

"It is currently positioned between a detected spacestation and the sun," Helix said, "It appears to be moving on a trajectory to take it deeper into this galaxy."

"It's leaving Lunis Terminal?"

"Affirmative, Major."

"Give me some coordinates for where we'd be able to get a visual on it."

"Please, Helix," the Doctor added smugly. A few minutes went by until Helix read out a very long series of numbers, which Jenny quickly programmed into the guidance system to plot a short course, which headed more or less towards the sun but arced around quite unusually. She assumed this was to avoid the enormous creature that was allegedly hiding in plain sight, and so she took the helm and flew the ship herself while following the holographic map of Texoid System which was projected in front of the window.

They finally came to an angle which allowed a gigantic, hulking silhouette to loom out of the darkness of space, with Jenny almost falling off-course because she was busy staring at such an enormous mass out there in the vacuum where things shouldn't be able to live. What was it? Eventually they surpassed it and could see Texoid the star itself, and the light from this illuminated at least one side of the monster. Not that seeing it helped much. It was still black and therefore tricky to make out properly, and the exoskeleton Helix had mentioned shone in the dark orange starlight. The Doctor stood up out of his seat and leant on the dashboard to look at it a bit closer.

"And we have to kill that, do we?" said Jenny, "That thing with an impenetrable exoskeleton?"

"…Helix, can you find any weaknesses or gaps in the armour at all?"

"Affirmative, Cummy Bum."

"…What?"

"Helix, don't call him that, he's the Doctor. Call him 'the Doctor.' I'm overriding Oswin's command, which I have the authority to do because this is my ship."

"Affirmative, Major. Correcting statement: Affirmative, The Doctor."

"…Good enough," Eleven mumbled, "What are the weaknesses?"

"Scanners detect two distinct gaps in the armour; one at the mouth and one at the rectum."

"…I shouldn't have asked that question," said the Doctor, going red.

"Uh-huh… Helix, can you scan the spacestation for human life signs?"

"Five life signs detected, Major."

"Do they have any kind of communication equipment you can patch me through to?"

"Affirmative, they are all equipped with headsets. Would you like me to make the connection now?"

"Yes, please, fast as you can." There was a pause, and then Jenny heard a dial tone coming through her phone. It rang about three times before there was a click and Helix declared she was connected. She picked up her phone and said into it, "Come in, Commander Skallagrim. Skallagrim, do you read me?"

"How did you connect to our headsets? This is supposed to be unhackable technology. Over," said Ashildr.

"Oh. Helix made short work of it."

"Who did?"

"Helix. An alien VI Oswin scavenged," Jenny explained, "We've got a visual on your creature. He's a big boy, that's for sure."

"Is that what you used to say to Captain Jack?" Ashildr quipped.

"Helix, initiate a feedback loop on their end," she said, then heard a crackling noise and Ashildr groan.

"Alright, I'm sorry. You don't have to be so touchy all the time."

"Yeah. Anyway. Your friend out here is twenty-one-hundred kilometres long and has an exoskeleton ten times as hard as diamond," Jenny said, "Which completely kills my plan of going and requesting the Alliance's help personally, since they'd listen to me and the Doctor together. I don't think any amount of firepower is going to hurt that thing."

"You're saying it's unkillable?"

"No. Dad found that it does have two weaknesses. Its mouth and its bum." Then she heard murmurs down the line questioning what she meant by 'dad', because it seemed like everybody was listening in their individual headsets now.

"She means the Doctor," Ashildr explained, "The Doctor is her father."

"Look, forget about that," said Jenny, "It's got an exoskeleton, that means that its all squishy underneath that armour, and there's two openings to get through the armour. If we can't kill it from the outside, then…"

"That's one of the stupidest ideas I've ever heard. How are you going to get inside it?"

"It must have a big mouth. Big enough for people to walk into it. And I've got a small ship."

"Honestly, I think it's the beginnings of a solid plan," the Doctor backed her up, "But how are you suggesting we kill it when we get in there?"

"Well… I haven't thought of that yet," said Jenny, "I was hoping somebody else might have a suggestion."

"It must have a heart," Ensa, their alien biology specialist, began to speak, "Almost all living creatures have hearts. All you have to do is stop that."

"So all we have to do is trick it into eating a million tons of bacon and the cholesterol intake might kill it for us," said the Doctor, "I think bacon overdose would be a good way to die, since we were discussing that."

"I could build a bomb," said Li, "Out of the parts of our ship. We were trying to fix it, but – you will take us home after this, won't you?"

"Yes, of course we will," said the Doctor.

"Then the faster-than-light drive could easily be wired to detonate."

"Detonating a warp drive is very risky," the Doctor pointed out, "It could cause all sorts of issues, anything from creating a tear in the time vortex to making a black hole."

"I don't think we're going to find anything else big enough to kill that thing," Jenny said, "Oswin would never in a million years build another bomb that huge, which means our only alternative is either rigging that FTL drive or going to the 1950s and carrying out a heist on a nuclear missile silo to steal a warhead. We've got the FTL drive here already and it'll definitely kill it if we plant it in the right place." He looked like he was still thinking about arguing with her.

"If only we hadn't destroyed the Singularity you found. This is exactly the kind of situation it would be useful in."

"And the Singularity would obviously not pose any risk to the delicate fabric of space and time, even though it's a device whose primary aim is to manipulate the fabric of space and time."

"…Alright. It's your call. Your responsibility."

"I'm fine with that, I wouldn't have suggested it if I wasn't."

"Are you two done?" Ashildr asked.

"Yes. You build the bomb and we'll come and pick it up and chase that thing down."

"Good plan, Major Young. I knew I was right to call you out here."

"Just remember that if anything happens to me, my girlfriend will literally hunt you down and tear you to pieces with her teeth. Is that clear, Ashildr?"

"Yep," she muttered grimly, "Loud and clear…"