Þæt Mānfolni
Rose
"I'd really rather not eat it, to be honest."
"You said you wanted my help…"
"Yeah, but…" Martha picked the anomalous object out of Itrux's long, green fingers, a circular something-or-other coated with a slimy substance. It did not look appetising. "I'm just confused about what it is."
"A short-range scanner," Itrux exclaimed.
"Why's it all gooey?" Rose asked. She and Emmett DeLacey lurked in the corner, observing and trying to stay out of Itrux's way, Emmett examining the severed hand he had stolen from the corpse (it smelled, and Rose kept trying to edge away from it.)
"It's glue," said Itrux, "It will stick to the inside of the digestive tract for the duration of the pregnancy, then the glue will lose its durability and it can be passed naturally."
"Can't you scan me from the outside?" Martha asked, still examining it. The glue was beginning to drip.
"This is the best method," Itrux leant close to Martha to implore her, "Trust me." Martha looked as though she was about to bite the bullet and swallow the unusual object, but at the last second her eyes flickered from holding Itrux's white, glowing gaze to meeting Rose's, across the room.
"What do you think?"
"I…" Rose was surprised, "You're the doctor." But that wasn't good enough, Martha wanted her to genuinely weigh-in. And, she realised shortly, it was her duty as potential, maybe godmother to do so. If that role was going to be hers then she had to show she was capable of it. "You should eat it. I trust her, and I trust that she knows she doesn't want either of us as her enemy, and… you need to put your mind at rest. Worrying so much can't be good for the embryo." She emphasised her use of Martha's preferred term for her unborn child. Martha nodded and looked at the object resting in the palm of her hand, then she threw caution to the wind and ate it. Dry swallowing the thing made her cough.
"What now?" Martha asked.
"We have to wait. Ten, fifteen minutes. Oh, but you should avoid consuming anything with too much sugar."
"For how long?"
"Until the baby is born," said Itrux.
"How much is too much, in your opinion? I don't think I have that much sugar," Martha said.
"You have Coco Pops every morning," Rose pointed out.
"Well, I'll… stop eating Coco Pops. For nine months. Eight months, even."
"It can damage the consistency of the glue, that's all," Itrux explained, leaving Martha's side for the time being, Martha remaining perched on the edge of the one bed in the small spaceship, "Could affect the legitimacy of the scan results if it doesn't attach properly, make you worry unnecessarily. I'm sure I have a specified dietary plan for a human of your age and stature in my records. Now, what of this artifact?" She picked up the mysterious device from her desk of other trinkets and materials where it lay. It was very small, silver, had a blinking light, could fit in the palm of Rose's hand. No larger than a tennis ball. Certainly though, it didn't belong in the period.
"I think it's some kind of war machine," Emmett said. Rose thought the Doctor might know what it was, but she couldn't mention the Doctor in Emmett's company.
"Could always be medicine gone wrong," said Rose, "You remember I said we have an undead friend who shoots lightning and can't survive without absorbing electricity after an encounter with your lost technology."
"Your friend…" Itrux began, setting the device back down, "Does she have a connection to spirits?"
"You could say that," said Martha, "They appear to her, drain her of energy."
"Interesting… I may be able to help. It would be against normal Zuarian rules, but Zuarian technology being misused in this way means we should go to extra lengths to support the victim." Itrux began rummaging around in a large drawer, in a spaceship full to the brim with drawers and boxes and containers, and from within she produced a lantern much like the one she had been carrying when they had met, only adorned slightly differently. "I'm afraid I can't stop them from appearing to her, but this should calm them when they do and stop it from being so damaging. She should be able to make it work, if she's so imbued with Zuarian energy." She held the alien lamp out to Rose.
"Well, thanks," said Rose, surprised, taking it, "I'm sure Esther will appreciate it." It was not presently glowing the characteristic shade of mint-green but was very interesting to look at now she had the chance to examine it closer. While it was silver in colour, Rose thought the alloy was unknown and had a strange, dark tint to it when it gleamed in the ship's interior lights. It was decorated carefully as well, crafted with the utmost care, and within it there was no visible light source. No candle wick, no bulb – it was very evident why people thought Itrux was a witch, with devices like this at her disposal.
"Now, then. Allow me to see this hand." Emmett gave her the blackened, rotting lump of flesh he had been carrying with him. Rose cringed away from it when it was held up, but Itrux was completely unfazed.
"Speaking of hands," Martha began, seemingly getting an idea about something as Itrux carried the severed thing over to one of her tables. After Rose saw her take out a very sharp and unusual knife, she looked away, not wanting to see whatever was going to happen next. "Say I know someone who had a severely broken thumb-"
"How severe?" asked Itrux.
Martha paused, strained to remember the details for a moment, "Right thumb, fracture in the proximal phalange and metacarpal, dislocated at the basilar joint. Dorsal dislocation. It was reset and put in a cast, but she's reckless, keeps hurting it more. And I've told her off for it a lot. A different doctor recommended we break it and reset it again, but she said she'd rather have it all deformed than go through that. And she's not, uh, completely human. Painkillers don't have nearly the same effect."
"If she won't let you reset it, put it back in a cast until she either learns to be careful or changes her mind. Strenuous activity with a severely damaged thumb could permanently impaired it."
"I've seen it," said Rose, "It's definitely permanently impaired."
"You don't have any magical, bone-healing salve?" Martha asked hopefully.
"I am not magical."
"Make sure you put this cast on her before the wedding," Rose advised, "I'd rather not see it in the pictures. It's all yellow and bruised." Martha rolled her eyes. Against her better judgement Rose spared a glance for Itrux and saw her carving into the skin on one of the hand's fingers like she was filleting a fish. But then she saw something else, too, and Itrux dropped the knife. "Did it just move?" Itrux backed away from the crowded desk and Emmett reached for the hilt of his sword, all of them fixed upon that severed hand.
Rose Tyler had a flashback in that moment – not a time vortex induced glimmer of knowledge, but a genuine memory which struck her out of nowhere – of the Ninth Doctor, the day after they had met, being attacked by the plastic, detached hand of an Auton invader. Only this situation was worse, because it wasn't plastic, it was part of a dead person's waterlogged body. And it launched itself across the room like a jumping spider.
Itrux evaded it and it landed on the floor, Rose shrieking in horror, Martha lifting her feet onto the bed, Emmett holding up his sword. He slashed downwards with the sword but was, as he had said so himself multiple times, not very good with a sword; the hand scuttled out of the way of the blade (which was wedged into the metal floor from that point onwards) and underneath one of Itrux's cabinets. It was like having a big spider in the room, if the spider was gigantic and a zombie. They waited with baited breath for it to reappear.
"…What do we do?" Emmett asked in a whisper, tugging at the sword to try and free it from the metal.
"I don't think it can hear you," Martha told him, "It hasn't got any ears."
"It hasn't got a blood supply, either, I don't want to make any sweeping generalisations before I have all the facts," he hissed back, finally succeeding at freeing his sword. He wrenched it with far too much momentum, however, and it swung through the air. Rose had to jump out of the way.
"What are you doing!?" she exclaimed, "You could have killed me!"
Martha shouted in panic, "The hand!"
It had scurried back out of its hiding spot and was dancing around Rose's feet, horrifying and with scraggy bits of rotten meat hanging from its gnarled bones – it reminded her of when the Eleventh Doctor had had gangrene briefly*, or once when a mouse had found its way into she and Tentoo's home. She had been terrified; she hated mice.
"Oh my god, kill it! KILL IT!" she shouted. Emmett swung his sword and again missed horribly, knocking more of Itrux's possessions to the floor.
"I'm sorry!"
"It's right there!" Martha pointed at Rose's feet.
And Rose, in all her wisdom, stepped on it.
It was a grotesque moment. Stepping on a spider was bad enough, the thing would end up mangled and secreting funny-coloured blood, but a human hand? A partially rotten human hand? She heard it both crunch and squelch at the same time, and it created a dark, goopy spatter on the floor like biting into a cherry tomato, covering Rose's shoe – which had already been filthy and soaked – with dead-person-mulch. The bones were crushed by the force she employed to destroy the thing; she doubted Itrux would be making a new charm out of the pulp she could scrape up from the floor.
"…Sorry," she said eventually, lifting her foot away. And yet one finger remained intact, just missing Rose's sole, and as soon as the shoe was moved it began to try and drag itself away like a wounded slug. "What the f-"
"Give me that thing," Martha implored Itrux, indicating the odd, blinking device they had recovered from the flooded cave. Itrux passed it over, panicking just as much as the rest of them were by this hand which refused to die, and Martha took the object and clamped her palms around it.
For a brief few seconds, Martha exuded an extreme heat, and used this to melt down and destroy the device, dropping it onto the floor as it dripped molten metal, soon to be fused to the base of the ship like a rock formation made from overflowing lava. Finally, the hand stopped twitching.
"…Do you think that means all the other zombies are dead, too?" Rose asked. Nobody answered. Emmett held out his sword at the finger and nudged it slightly, but it did nothing now.
"Now we have no way to find out what the object was," Emmett pointed out, nodding at the metal mess on the floor in front of Martha.
"Maybe that's for the best," Martha said, "Anything that can reanimate the dead and create zombies is too powerful for anybody to control." Rose suspected that was a minor dig at her for possessing ultimate control over life, death, and existence itself. Honestly, she thought, you bring Captain Jack back to life for all eternity one time and nobody lets you forget it. What did a girl have to do to prove she wasn't going to be reckless with the power afforded to her by the Bad Wolf?
"I will go to see to the spirits," Itrux announced, drifting in that spectral way of hers towards the ladder back to the hut above. Rose examined the bottom of her shoe as Itrux left, cringing as the sludge dripped from the rubber onto the floor in front of her.
"Stupid sword," Emmett complained, "I asked for a mace, you know. Blindly hitting things I can do, but precision? With a sword? Just because I'm a marksman doesn't mean I can hack and slash with any real proficiency. I'm getting rid of her as soon as I go back to the Agency."
"Her?" Rose questioned. He frowned at her.
"You were the one who told me to name it Jenny."
"So, your sword… it's called Jenny?"
He shrugged, "I guess. It's a cute name. Did you get it from someone?"
"No, no," Rose lied, "But, uh, since we helped you today, and all… I've always wanted to learn how to swordfight."
"Have you?" Martha asked incredulously.
"Yes," Rose told her through gritted teeth, "I'm always telling you about that."
"Right, yeah," Martha, perplexed but no longer caring about deducing Rose's behaviour, "Constantly."
"Fine," he sighed, putting the sword back in its hilt and then lifting the strap from around his shoulders, handing the whole thing to Rose. Martha looked at her very disapprovingly.
"What? I'm not gonna stab anyone with it."
"You'd better not, because I'll have to sew them up again," Martha warned her. Rose shook her head and kept a tight hold on Jenny the Sword.
Emmett's vortex manipulator (which hadn't suffered quite as badly as Rose and Martha's phones had after being submerged in cave-water) beeped and he lifted it up to examine. Rose saw writing appear on its screen.
"Does that thing get text messages, too?" she asked.
Emmett didn't answer that question, but related what the message said, "They're letting me choose my next assignment."
"What are the choices?" Martha asked.
"Malfunctioning prosthetics and a dangerous plague in the 201st Century, or dismantle a suspected smuggling ring on Tungtrun in the Sixty-First Century. Well, considering Tungtrun is a desolate ice planet-"
"You should go there," Rose said as Emmett was going to inform his bosses at the Time Agency of his plans to deal with the prosthetic situation.
"To Tungtrun? Why?" he asked.
"Well – malfunctioning prosthetics and a plague? You've just been dealing with a rogue hand and some zombies. It'd get a bit boring, don't you think?" Rose said, "Should do something else. Smuggling ring. Might be able to get your hands on something a bit cooler than this sword." Emmett paused and thought about that.
"You know what? I'm sure the smuggling will be wrapped up quickly enough that I can just deal with the prosthetic thing afterwards," he shrugged, then commented wryly, "I'm trusting you on this Tungtrun thing."
"Yeah," said Rose, feeling hollow, "Yeah…" He was going to die on Tungtrun.
A noise from above, and Itrux was returning, carrying her own lamp, which Rose now realised was mug larger and more ornate than the spare one she had been given for Esther. Though, she couldn't rightly expect Itrux to just give up her main lamp, considering giving away the lamps in the first place was – as she had said – against usual Zuarian protocol. Rose had collected a fair few trinkets on her day out, she realised. And had meddled in more than a few lives. She now wondered if she had been brought there by the time vortex to ease Martha's mind about the baby, or to ensure that Emmett DeLacey was sent to his doom in order to play his vital role in Jenny's life.
"The ghosts are passing on. Peacefully. Destroying the device worked. I am in your debt," Itrux said to Martha mostly, "Enough time should have passed for the scan to work."
"God, I almost forgot," Martha said. Rose had forgotten, too. Itrux received a gadget, a small circular disc, and held this out to Martha. She took it. "What's this?"
"The surface is a button." Martha pressed it and there was a tiny click, at which point an image appeared, a hologram projected out of the surface of the disc. It was a hologram of a small blob, very small, so minuscule in fact that Rose had to step closer (nearly slipping on the shoe-slime) to get a proper look at it.
"Oh my god," Martha stared at it, "Is that…?"
"Looks like a popcorn kernel," Rose announced, squinting at it.
"It's the baby," Martha was awestruck.
"An adorable popcorn kernel."
"It's a live image," Itrux explained, "You'll be able to watch it grow. And the device won't interfere with your regular ultrasounds and scans. But, please, take something else." She handed Martha yet another odd device. "Your century's doctors-"
"I am a doctor from my century," Martha reminded her.
"It's a pager, you would call it. To summon me. I am desperately interested in what this child will become, and the best suited to help." Martha clicked the button again and the hologram of the tiny, undeveloped embryo disappeared.
"Thanks," Martha said, somewhat overwhelmed, "You can bet you'll hear from me again."
"You helped me, so I shall help you; I never break my word."
*chapter 315