The Twilight Zone
5
The grimy catwalks of the Platform crisscrossed all over the underside of Aegean-4, hanging down beneath the machinery and floatation devices, illuminated by gloomy spotlights and the holographic glow of the vending machines. It was much easier to see these structures in the Aegeans' luxury submarine. Rather than portholes and a thin sliver of window like a visor, having to depend on sensors and radar to navigate, the sub's nose was a large, transparent dome, through which everything ahead of them was visible. Pax and Blane were too inept to pilot their own vehicle, so the duty had apparently fallen to Kober, though he was clearly out of his depth. The Doctor had become a severe backseat driver, directing him to which controls he should u to gently pilot them towards the disturbance – guided by Zono on the radio – but eventually it got too finicky to get any closer.
"Just – just stop here," said the Doctor exasperatedly, "We'll walk the rest of the way." She could see the shadowy figures across the walkways that she thought must be the kids. It wasn't far.
"You keep in radio contact with the sub, you hear me?" Pax snapped, "You owe us the blueprints for these fancy bombs."
"You'll get your damn bombs," she dismissed him (they'd get the singularity bombs over her dead body.) She shook her head and traipsed through the stupidly large sub to get to the airlock. As she passed, Clara realised Blane was watching her and had been for a while.
"What?" she asked.
"I didn't notice it before, but the two of you are kind of hot. Y'know, for a pair of commies."
"Thanks," she said with all the sarcasm she could muster. The Doctor took her hand to pull her towards the airlock as well, and she went without a fuss.
"We'll be seeing a lot more of each other when we're in business together!" Blane called after them. Clara was exceptionally glad they were both lying through their teeth and that was never going to happen. She couldn't even summon the energy to fake smile at him as she closed the airlock behind them. It clanged and locked and they put their helmets back on, preparing to leave.
"Are there not more effective ways to build airlocks?" Clara asked.
"You want to just open the door and let the water flood in?" the Doctor quipped, fidgeting with the buttons on the exterior of the collar.
"Could've phased us straight through the wall."
"That sounds like a pointless risk – what if you're not as finessed as you think, and you let some water sneak through the cracks? You're the one who's always paranoid about me-"
"Is this a private line?" Clara cut her off before she could start talking about their personal lives. The Doctor stopped speaking.
"…It's not private, I can hear you," said Zono, "Is there a problem?"
"No problem. I just had a… near-death experience with a large body of water once. Years ago. That's all," the Doctor explained as vaguely as she possibly could.
"But you're a pirate."
"That's irony for you," she was still lying about her identity. The water level surpassed their eyes and finally, the exterior door unlocked itself, a light overhead blinking green. Clara pushed it open and they clambered out onto the catwalks.
Though they were closer to the surface and the pressure was nowhere near as intense, Clara found it much more unsettling to be up there than in Xetia far below – which was nothing more than a distant, twinkling nest through the dark water. The vast turbines and empty abyss of ocean played into a deep-seated fear she didn't know she had. But they still had to amble through the heavy water to reach Sostan and his friends.
"Don't come any closer, Corsair," Sostan's voice crackled through their radios as they approached. They could see the kids properly now, and the small bomb Sostan was holding in one of his tentacles.
"Okay," said the Doctor, pausing, "We'll stay right over here." Clara was already trying to think of a way she could get the bomb out of the way telekinetically, but even wrenching it away from him didn't seem foolproof; with so much added pressure from the sea, she wouldn't be able to move it faster than he could detonate (and she had to be physically touching something for the intangibility to apply.) "Listen to me. That bomb is incredibly dangerous. You won't just put Aegean-4 out of commission, you'll kill yourselves, you'll kill us, you'll probably ruin both cities if not the entirety of Xetos. Do you understand?"
"Do I understand? This is the kind of action that's required to make them listen," he gestured at the Aegeans' submarine, looming nearby and shining its floodlights onto the standoff. "They still won't talk to us directly! Hiding in there, sending you to do their dirty work – cowards!" he shouted, though he was right, the Aegeans couldn't hear him.
"And – why are you helping them?" Alexa, at his side, added, "Why are you on their side?"
"I'm on the side of everybody calming down and putting their weapons away," said the Doctor firmly, "We've been up there fixing your radio problem, which meant Zono was finally able to get in touch with us and tell us what you four were up to."
"And what are you going to do?" Sostan challenged, "Wrestle it out of my hand?"
"I just wanna talk, Sostan," she said, "That's all. Now, do you have any terms? Anything we can arrange for the Aegeans to give you? They can hear us, I'm sure they're willing to listen."
"We're not listening to a word those brats say," said Pax over the radio.
"They're listening right now, in fact," said the Doctor, ignoring him. The protestors and the Aegeans weren't using the same channel, only the Doctor and Clara could hear both sides of the conversation, serving as a bridge. "Tell me what you need."
"Why? What will you do? You're just another bureaucrat, trying to make everything neat and perfect, keeping up appearances."
"I promise you, I'm not a bureaucrat, and you can trust me, I'm…" she stopped, "I'm the Corsair…" She desperately wanted to reveal her true identity, that she was the real Doctor, the same Doctor who had saved Xetos from invaders years ago, but it was not the time. The Aegeans knew, but Clara wasn't convinced they were properly following what was going on.
"A pirate," said Aio, "Probably looking to profit just as much as the Aegeans."
"I'm not interested in money."
"Tell them we'll give them anything they want," said Blane.
"We're not giving them shit," said Pax.
"But we'll tell them we'll give them anything they want, then they'll put their bomb down, we can take it, and let the boys deal with them."
"The-? What are you talking about?" the Doctor asked them sharply.
"What are they saying?" Sostan shouted, "Are they threatening us!?"
"Nobody is threatening you!" said the Doctor quickly, even though that was what it sounded like they were doing. "Please, just tell us what you want. Aio?" she prompted, knowing Sostan was the most hot-headed and Aio seemed to be the most sensible, "Do you have any demands? Anything you want to get out of this situation?"
"We want them to stop poaching the sqwills," said Aio.
"Okay, that's great," said the Doctor, "Stop poaching the sqwills. Sure. I can get them to do that. They're basically just big filters – no glory in killing one of those. It's kind of like killing a cow."
"Fine, whatever," said Blane, "We'll just go off-world to a big game planet."
"Well don't – don't just go poach somewhere else!" the Doctor shouted at them, "Haven't you learned anything!?"
"Yeah, don't kill their stupid fish," said Pax.
"No! Don't poach at all! Don't kill, full stop!"
"What, you mean like you and the Rutan?" So maybe they were listening. A little bit, at least.
"That's – urgh!"
"I'll detonate this!" Sostan shouted, trying to put the attention back on himself.
"No," said the Doctor, "Don't, they said they'll stop. They're going to leave the sqwills alone. Now, that's what you want, right? So you can just put your bomb down and let me defuse it."
"What about the people in the city?" Nate interrupted, "They've killed more than just sqwills, they're responsible for so many deaths. My father died doing maintenance down here because they made him work too hard and got rid of all the doctors."
"They want you to stop flouting labour laws," said the Doctor.
"What!?" Pax exclaimed, "Everything we do here is by the book."
"Alright, we all know that's not true, so stop lying," she said, "I've talked to the doctors in the city, it wasn't hard, because there's only one, and until this afternoon she didn't even have a working hyperbaric chamber. Every single human who works down here on the Platform has decompression sickness, and they're taking this damn drug to cope with that, meaning they all have radiation poisoning too, and that's your fault."
"It's not our fault if they choose to take drugs," said Pax.
"Of course it's your fault! They're your employees!"
"We didn't make them take anything! Blame the people who make the drugs! You said they're coming from coral, or something – that means the fish people are providing them. You should be talking to them, not us, for creating a drug epidemic."
"Maybe we should kill all their fish, to teach them a lesson," said Blane.
"No! You're not listening to me!"
"I'll do it!" yelled Sostan, brandishing the bomb, "If they won't listen, I'll do it!"
"Stop, stop! You can come to an agreement if you would just calm down!"
"Please, Aio, you have to see that this isn't reasonable," said Zono. Only then did Clara spot a large group of xetians floating at the furthest edge of the Platform. The protestors were sandwiched with Clara and the Doctor ahead, the xetians behind, and the Aegeans in their submarine taking up the flank. It was a lot of pressure to be putting a bomb wielding teenager under. "If you just back down, we can resolve this calmly. The Aegeans are here now, they'll talk to us." Clara wasn't so sure about that, but they needed to get the bomb out of the equation.
"Nobody has to get hurt if you put the bomb down," said the Doctor firmly. She was slowly trying to approach, Clara staying by her side, but it wasn't clear how close she would be able to get before Sostan did something stupid.
"People have gotten hurt! My dad!" said Nate, "He's dead because of them and their decisions!"
"I understand that," said the Doctor, "But detonating that bomb won't bring him back, and you'll kill far more people than those two idiots ever could." The Aegeans hurled abuse at her over the comms for that, but she ignored them. "Is this honestly what he would want, Nate?"
"The Doctor said that this was a good plan," said Sostan, raising the bomb even higher so everybody could see it clearly. "And she saved us before. This will make them listen to us."
"No."
"We'll be martyrs."
"And for what!?" she demanded, "What are you trying to save? You're not saving anything, you're just going to cause more pain!"
"The Doctor is the one who faced down the Rutan when they threatened us," said Sostan, "She's a war hero."
"She didn't have a choice!" argued the Doctor, "She tried to reason with them! They were going to destroy Pheran!"
"And she saved us, by sacrificing them."
"Believe you me, if you asked her, she'd tell you nothing brings her more shame than the moments in her life when she had to end a life, any life. And she wouldn't be caught with a bomb like that under any circumstance, not in the least caught trying to actually use it, to commit mass murder."
"It's not murder," said Sostan.
"Not yet. And it doesn't have to be, if you put the bomb down."
"The Doctor told us not to trust the Corsair," Alexa added, "How do we know you won't detonate it?"
"Well – why would I!?"
"She said the Corsair is famously unpredictable."
"Not that unpredictable…" she grumbled. The situation was removed from her hands, however; the Aegeans started shouting something unintelligible – Clara suspected it was only noises and cheers – as a troupe of well-armed divers steadily descended from above.
"I'll do it! You keep them away from us!" Sostan shouted.
The divers were wearing floatation devices to let them hover in the water alongside the submarine, aiming harpoons at Sostan and the other kids.
"You two morons are making everything worse!" said the Doctor.
"They'll just shoot him, and he'll drop the thing," said Pax.
"That's ridiculous!"
"I won't let them," said Clara quietly. They could still hear her over the radio, but she still wanted it to be clear she was speaking only to her wife. She didn't think she'd have as much luck trying to stop Sostan, though; she couldn't do much to stop him pushing the trigger on the bomb like she could blast a slow-moving harpoon out of the way.
"If they're pointing guns at me, I'll detonate it," Sostan threatened.
"Look, you've won, you kids have won," said the Doctor, "You've got them right where you want them and they're willing to listen to your demands."
"…Maybe she's right, Sostan," said Aio, "We didn't talk about this when we planned to come down here."
"I'm doing what needs to be done," he insisted.
"But not if we've already got them to listen to us. We've done it."
"That's right," said the Doctor, "You have. Just like the Doctor did with the Rutan, gave them a chance to talk – only you can take it. You don't have to make the mistakes they did." Miraculously, Clara thought Sostan might be about to put the bomb down, maybe roll it over to them and hope it didn't go barrelling off the edge of the catwalks.
"This is bullshit!" said Nate, "You can't back down now! We need to avenge everyone who's died at their hands!" Whether Sostan was going to submit or not, they didn't get to find out. Nate lunged at him to try and grab the bomb when an almighty explosion tore through the sea, sending shockwaves that knocked everybody off balance and even rocked the submarine.
But the protestors had all stopped moving, and the bomb was still intact.
The volcano at the heat of Xetia, far beneath them, had erupted, and the entire ocean was trembling. The mountain was spitting out orange bursts of lava which quickly turned into clouds of ash and steam, a grey plume worming its way to the surface. It was difficult to see exactly what was going on with all the dirt and debris, but it didn't bode well for the city built on the volcanic slopes or for the one floating above.
"Zono, what was that!?" the Doctor demanded, Clara grabbing hold of her arm in case she had to drag her out of danger very quickly.
"I don't… we haven't detected any activity," said Zono, "We would have known if there was going to be an eruption!"
"Why even build a town next to a volcano?" asked Clara.
"I mean, Hawaii and Italy seem to be doing okay with it," said the Doctor, going to lean over the edge of the Platform to get a look far below. The altercation with the bomb had been supplanted by the volcano. "But this doesn't look… hold on, is that-!?"
It was what Clara could only describe as a sea monster, a great mass of scales and legs and claws the size of a skyscraper, burrowing its way out of the reef. It was larger even than the giant squid that had once eaten her and a handful of their friends alive many years ago, the type of beast she thought only existed in mythological drawings or artistic renditions of fossils.
"No, no no no no… she couldn't have waited!?" the Doctor exclaimed. The monster writhed near the seafloor and let out a deep, rumbling roar that made the catwalks rattle. "Urgh! She must have pressed the accelerator to pump this thing out before I could stop her!" The Doctor didn't have a clue what, exactly, she was supposed to do about the thing.
"Who!?" Zono demanded over the comms, her voice barely coming through busy shouting on all fronts.
"The Doctor!"
"What!?"
"But she's not the Doctor – I'm the Doctor! She's the Rani, and she's been digging up your fossils so she could raise whatever that thing is from the dead," the Doctor said. Distant, ant-like xetians were trying to flee the monster as it kicked itself up from the ground to head for the surface. "Apparently she couldn't wait for an hour for me to be done with your bomb threat to go and deal with her…"
"And?" Clara prompted desperately, "What do we do? It's coming up here, straight for us!"
And it was, with a gaping maw lined with teeth, six large, milky-white eyes glowing in the gloomy starlight, a body that was somewhere between a giant eel and a plesiosaur with slimy skin and strange flippers. It was a dinosaur alright.
"Maybe it's intelligent – we could reason with it," said the Doctor.
"Reason with it!?" Clara exclaimed. It roared again and Clara almost fell over from the force as it spread through the water. The Aegeans were erratically trying to swivel their submarine to get a better look at it, while both the divers and the protestors were caught between trying to run and standing their ground. The harpoons wouldn't make a dent. "Doctor!"
"Yes! Run away!"
"That's your plan!?"
"For the moment!" she said, backing away down the catwalk. At least the kids heeded their words, coming straight towards Clara and the Doctor to get away from the looming dinosaur as it made its approach. But it wasn't after them – instead, it turned its attention to the next largest object it could find: the luxury submarine. "Get out of the way, what are you doing!?" the Doctor shouted at the Aegeans, "Don't you know how to drive that thing!?" But they were arguing with each other. "Move! MOVE!"
The divers all scattered to the Platform and the bright, shining vending machines, right as the primordial monster reared its airbus-sized sized head, opened its jaws and dove for the submarine.
The sub was consumed in one fell swoop.
Over their radio, they heard violent screams and then a deafening shriek of feedback until the line was cut off completely.
Dead.
The monster dove back to the deep with its meal, but Clara wouldn't be surprised if it set its sights on the city itself next. It could definitely do a number on the propellers, but could it sink Aegean-4?
"We need to do something," said Clara, tugging at the Doctor's arm to tear her attention away from what they'd just witnessed. "Doctor."
"You're the Doctor?" Zono asked quickly. They could still see the xetians at the far end of the Platform as the monster slowly turned around to make a second attack. Clara thought she could see it chewing.
"I… yes, yes, sorry I'm – I'm the Doctor," she said, shaking herself out of her stupor, "And I…" She glanced at the protestors now sticking close to them. They did not have the stomach for the kind of mayhem they had been threatening to create just minutes ago. "I have an idea. Give me that." She held out her hand to take their bomb.
"What are you going to do with it?" asked Aio guardedly.
"What am I going to-!? What do you think I'm going to do with it!? Stop that thing!"
"Is that the best idea?" Clara interjected quickly, "You said a black hole could destroy the whole moon. If that's the case-"
"I'm not going to make a black hole," she said, snatching the bomb from Sostan when he did not make a move to stop her. She dug her sonic screwdriver out of the utility belt on her spacesuit and clumsily went about examining the device. "Black holes are unpredictable – the singularity is infinite, it could potentially keep going forever… but if I can just reverse the polarity, something the Rani doesn't understand thermodynamics enough to do – it was never her strongest subject when we were at school – then I might just be able to… ah-ha!" The monster bellowed and began swimming towards them again – maybe it was attracted to the flashing lights of all the advertisements? The shadow of Aegean-4 blotting out the distant sun?
"What?" Clara asked.
"If my calculations are right, this with be able to throw up a white hole capable of launching us into next week. Figuratively speaking."
"And what's a 'white hole', exactly?" asked Clara.
"Okay," said the Doctor, preparing to give her a physics lesson when they potentially only had seconds before the monster dragged its jaws across the enormous propeller blades powering the entire city. "Black holes pull stuff in so quickly that not even light can escape, right? You have to be travelling faster than light to get away from one."
"Right?" said Clara. Everybody else was listening, too.
"White holes do the opposite. They're infinitely repulsive. To get inside a white hole, you have to be travelling faster than the speed of light. But they're short-lived, they don't pull stuff in to keep themselves going. They spit out what little mass they have like that," she tried to click her fingers, but it didn't go so well since they were underwater, "Well, uh, quickly. It's a bigger, faster and potentially more controlled explosion than even a supernova, and we-"
The entire city rocked when the monster attacked the propeller as Clara predicted, tearing one of the whole blades away and mangling it in its ghastly mouth. Realising that the metal blade was not food, the thing belched it out in frustration and the blade began to plummet to the seafloor where it threatened to land on some innocent xetians below.
"I don't think we have long until it realises that we're all food!" said Clara, watching it twist in the water.
"We just have to get it to eat the bomb and it'll be torn to pieces," said the Doctor.
"And what if they're still alive in there?" asked Clara.
"Coo, I don't think that's the case – it's got a dozen rows of teeth. Did you see what it did to that propeller just now?" she said, "Somebody get me a harpoon gun – maybe we can shoot it when it goes past."
"No, someone should swim out there," said Sostan, then he puffed out his chest – as one of the Aegeans' divers, apparently also connected to their radios, came over to honour the Doctor's request for a gun – and declared, "I'll do it."
"You will not," said Clara firmly, doing her teacher-voice, "If anyone should go out there and stop that thing, it'll be me."
"What!? No!" said the Doctor, horrified. The diver put a harpoon into her hands and she suddenly didn't know what to do with it. "I'll do it. It's my mess. I should have warned everybody about the Rani sooner – I-"
"You'll do it like that time you were so sure you'd be able to sort out those alien sharks in Belfast?" Clara countered. The Doctor's words were caught in her throat.
"N-no. You're not… you're not-"
"Yes," Clara took the harpoon gun, "It's my birthday. No arguing with me on my birthday. Besides, I could just teleport, or phase-"
"You could let water into your suit and drown!" the Doctor reiterated her earlier point, "And you can't teleport at the drop of a hat! It barely works!"
"I'm the one with telekinesis, I can get out of the way fast enough. Now, tell me what your plan is for this harpoon gun, or it'll eat us before we can stop arguing." The Doctor did not want to send Clara quite literally into the jaws of death, but she was equally unwilling to offer up one of the teenaged protestors as a potential sacrifice for the greater good. Would Clara's nanogenes be able to save her if she was torn to shreds and unceremoniously dumped at the bottom of the sea? The pit in the Doctor's stomach told her they would not… "Sweetheart. The bomb. What do I do with it?"
The Doctor took a deep breath. "…Okay, uh… does anybody have any string? Or some tape?"
"We've got tape," said Alexa, "Our signs keep getting broken."
"Is it waterproof?"
"Of course it is," she said like this was a stupid question. She took a role of waterlogged black tape out of a pouch on her bulky diving suit and held it out to the Doctor, who wasn't too convinced by it. It definitely looked like it had absorbed no small amount of water. The monster wailed again.
It was not easy trying to sellotape a bomb the size of a grapefruit to the end of a harpoon gun while you were far underwater and wearing an annoying pair of gloves; thin and nimble as the gloves were, it was still a lot harder than trying to do the same thing on dry land with free hands. Clara was getting agitated and would have tapped her foot had the depth pressure allowed it. The dinosaur continued to writhe around and turned its attention to the surface again; something was clearly upsetting it.
"Do you think something's wrong with it?" asked Clara.
"I'd wager a whole lot," said the Doctor, wrapping tape around her bomb, "Who knows what she's done to it. Jurassic Park is basically her biography…"
"Didn't the Rani enslave an entire planet once?" asked Zono. She knew who the Corsair was, so why wouldn't she know who the Rani was as well?
"Yes, she did," said the Doctor, admiring her handiwork after she tore – with great difficulty – the tape off. "I think that's as good as it's gonna get…"
"Great," Clara took the harpoon from her, "And, how do I detonate the bomb?"
"You press the button. I put a delay on it. Twenty seconds. Any longer is unstable."
"So I point, press the button, then pull the trigger?"
"And get the hell out of the way."
"Sounds easy enough," she said, though she was putting on a brave face. The dinosaur was about to make its third assault on the underside of Aegean-4; if she was fast enough, she'd be able to head it off before it managed to do any more damage. But she wasn't very excited both by the prospect of going face-to-face with an abomination that made Predator X look like a puppy, or jumping off the Platform into the near-oblivion of an alien ocean. She tried to smile at the Doctor. "I'll be off, then?"
"I can't even kiss you goodbye," she said listlessly, lamenting the goldfish bowls on their heads. Clara took her hand and squeezed it.
"Then you'll just have to kiss me hello when I come back."
"I love you."
"I love you, too," said Clara, letting go and climbing over the railings lining the catwalks. She'd never been more grateful for telekinesis, though she wasn't used to using it to keep herself from sinking underwater as she pushed herself off from the metal and into cold, empty space. Empty aside from the looming, cosmic horror.
"You're really the Doctor?" asked Zono.
"Yes."
"And is she really your wife?"
"Yes, she is." The Doctor was watching Clara float away with bated breath.
"So where's the real Corsair? Are they here as well?"
"No, they died, a long time ago now. Wish they were here – probably would've had a better way to kill that thing than…" She paused. "You doing okay, Coo?"
"Difficult to say," said Clara, who was trying – and failing – to think about how far she was steadily drifting from the Platform. "What about you?"
"I'm high and dry."
"Oh, shit…"
"What's wrong?"
"I think it's seen me." It turned its enormous head to face her, but it was difficult to tell whether it had spotted her because its eyes were quite small. Well, relative to the rest of it; it was still at least twice the size of a blue whale.
"Just… just be careful, don't…" But what could she say? 'Don't put yourself in danger'? 'Don't try to be a hero'? That was exactly what she had gone out there to do. The dinosaur roared as Clara continued on her course of interception, armed with nothing more than a pneumatic harpoon gun and a hokey IED. "This is a lot scarier than those trees…"
"It's just a big fish," said Clara.
"I don't know if you're brave or stupid."
"That's all part of the fun." The dinosaur roared again, emitting such great force that Clara – now directly in front of it, barely a hundred feet away – was knocked backwards, spinning in the water and struggling to regain her balance.
"Clara!?" the Doctor shouted, seeing this from the distance.
"I'm fine," said Clara, dizzy, still twirling in the water. She had just seconds to check that the harpoon was intact, the bomb in serious danger of falling off, before the dinosaur kicked its flippers and came shooting towards her at the speed of a moving train. She was dimly aware of the Doctor's continued shouting in her ear as the fiend opened its gaping mouth and Clara was greeted with dozens of rows of razor-sharp teeth.
She took the shot.
The gun jammed.
"What!? Shit, shit, fuck, fuck, sh-" She banged her hand on top of it and the spear shot forth directly into the demon's gullet right as its jaws were about to clamp around her.
With as much power as she could muster she shot herself backwards, dropping the gun now it had outlived its usefulness, feeling heat spread through the water from the sheer presence of the monster.
As the Doctor observed, both of her hearts stopped when for a devastating second it looked like Clara might not get away in time. She saw her just manage to dodge the monster's maw after dispatching the spear, and that was when the second earth-shaking explosion of the day happened. The white hole bomb worked just as the Doctor predicted: all the mass in the bomb's inner singularity was expelled at lightspeed, obliterating the dinosaur from the inside-out. It didn't stand a chance.
But the force from the detonation sent Clara, closest of all to the epicentre, careening into the depths as the water filled with primordial soup and bits of scrap metal and bone. The entire city rose and fell with the waves the explosion created, the Platform rattling around them.
"CLARA!" she shouted in horror, going to jump over the edge of the catwalks herself. But somebody grabbed her – Sostan.
"Stay here, I'll get her," he said quickly.
"What? No, she-"
"No time to argue with me now!" he said as he dove off the catwalks in the Doctor's place, the water still rippling around them. She watched him disappear into the gloomy undersea in Clara's wake. Letting the humanoid octopus go after Clara – who was not responding to the radio now – was the sensible thing to do, but the Doctor categorically could not wait there and see what happened. She had to do something, she couldn't lose Clara in the same gut-wrenching way Clara had once lost her, slipping beneath a stormy surf doomed never to reappear.
"Who has access to a submarine!?" she demanded over the comms.
"You should let Sostan-" Zono began.
"No! What if she cracked her helmet!? She'll need air, she might-" She heard a crackling cough through the speakers. "Clara!? Coo!? Please, tell me you're okay, Coo-Bear, I-"
"…And here you tell me I worry too much." The Doctor could have collapsed from the relief she felt, holding onto the railings.
"She's fine, I got her," said Sostan.
"Are you alright!?"
"Just a bit banged up… those bombs pack a punch."
"You scared me, Coo… for a minute I…"
"I'm fine. Given the circumstances."
"You should… let Sostan take you to the surface – take her to the surface," she added to Sostan directly, "To Persephone. She'll… I don't know, you might need a spell in the hyperbaric chamber…"
"What about you?" Clara asked.
"I've got some unfinished business in Xetia I need to attend to. It won't take long. I'll find you when it's all over."