The Ishimura floated in the void above Aegis VII, a whalefall - defined by the scavengers crawling in its bones. The husk of a shattered moon was dragging it down, gravity slow but no less merciless.

Its corridors rang with screams and the roars of the monsters born of the Marker's silent song. The shrieking hum of pulse rifles, the deeper, atonal blasts of repurposed mining and engineering equipment. The howl of the risen dead.

It would go silent soon enough. All would join the Marker's cry, and be made whole.

And yet…

And yet.

Something disrupted the chorus. A new note. Something…alien.

VWOOOORP. VWOOOOOORP.

And in the depths of a dying leviathan, something appeared, shimmering into existence.

A blue box, like an old-fashioned phone booth.

—-

The Doctor was in his element - meaning, well, he was showing off. At least a little. Not that she was objecting, mind. Long, tall, and skinny needed a bit of a break…and honestly, so did she.

"Right!" the Time Lord said, grinning like mad as he slammed down one of the TARDIS's levers. "The planet Midnight! Whole place, made of diamonds, imagine that? Completely uninhabitable, but the place is so spectacular humanity just brought in great big domes to do their sightseeing from, made the thing a leisure world. Look but don't touch, but oh boy, the looking." He stepped back from the console, straightened his coat, and gestured widely at the door. "Go on, then!"

She smiled, and opened the door.

She took a deep breath. "A whole planet made of diamonds?"

"Yeah, isn't it…"

The Doctor's voice trailed off as he looked over her shoulder.

Outside the TARDIS's doors, a grungy hallway beckoned. Lights flickered fitfully. The color scheme was brown.

"String bean?" Donna said calmly.

"Yeah?"

"Is your little blue box allergic to going where it's told?"

The Doctor scratched his chin. "Eh, probably. Well, nothing for it - let's find out where we are, eh?" He took a step outside - and winced. "Ooh, that's a bit strong, isn't it?"

"What? Not exactly the best smelling, but better than those tunnels with the fish-clones."

"Oh, no, it's…electromagnetic, no, a telepathic signal. Big one, too - probably why we landed here to begin with." He fiddled with his sonic screwdriver for a moment, letting it warble, then licked the thing. "Like…copper and asphalt. Someone's playing some funky tunes. How do you humans manage without being able to feel it? One hell of a jolt, even Time Lords didn't have the brainpower to do this…"

"Pseudo-telepathic? Shouldn't we be worried, then? Something crawling into our brains?"

"Time Lord, and you're…you."

Donna raised an eyebrow.

"Yeah, alright, TARDIS telepathic field should keep you safe - you've still got the key on you, right?"

"Course I do."

"Then you should be alright. I did some poking around after the last mess with a telepathic background field to give us a bit more security, and this feels more like a general broadcast than most psychic wibbly-wobbly mental…stuff. C'mon. Let's go figure out what's making it!"

"I swear, if your box parked us in a sewer…"

"It was one time!"

Nonetheless, they set off. The place gave her the creeps, to be frank, but it wasn't near as bad as that mess on the Thames - at least not yet. Still looked like she'd be wanting a tetanus shot after all was said and done, though.

As they made their way down the dingy-looking hallway, stepping around crates and discarded tools, the Doctor kept nattering on.

"Now it really is fascinating. Way this field is tuned, it's almost not really telepathy at all, more like…radio. Like sending Morse code with a searchlight. Electrical signal manipulation, radiating out from somewhere on this…ship? Yeah, ship, don't you feel the engines?"

"You're enjoying this, aren't you?"

"I've never heard of anything like this! Remember that whole mess with Harold Saxon? He had Time Lord technology and he still needed a bunch of satellites to get a tenth of this."

"Yeah, well, what about the Ood? Didn't that big brain of theirs reach out across galaxies?"

"Yeah, it did - but that's a species thing. A hive mind, sort of - completely normal to have that kind of range, every member acts like a little amplifier for the carrier wave. No, this…this is new. Way it's pulsing out, it'd probably be able to make even artificial nerves twitch a bit. Hell, even dead ones."

"You're smiling. You're talking about some Frankenstein's monster situation and you're smiling," she shot back. "Isn't there anything that's a bit too creepy for you?"

"Hm…nah! Nine hundred years of wandering time and space, you've got to learn to enjoy new things. Still…seems a bit familiar. Wonder wh-"

There was a clatter from up ahead, where light spilled out from an open door. A shadow swiftly filled it - a man, walking towards the door, carrying something - a couple of pipes? - on his back.

"Oh hello," the Doctor began, striding forwards. "Sorry, we seem to have gotten a bit lost, could you-"

The smell hit them. The pungent, stomach-churning smell of rotting flesh.

Almost without thought, she picked up one of the tools lying around - a pipe wrench nearly as long as her arm. "Doctor?"

"Yeah, that's - oh."

The man staggered into view.

It wasn't a man.

Men didn't have jaws split in two.

Men didn't have great bone blades erupting from their arms.

Men didn't have their guts hanging from their open torsos.

The monster screamed at them, and Donna did the first thing that came to mind - she threw the wrench in her hand, hard as she could.

It crunched as it slammed into the skull of the horrible thing, and stuck there as it snarled and flailed back - but it kept coming, even when it should've absolutely been dead.

"Okay, well…RUN!" the Doctor shouted.

Donna was far ahead of the spaceman, and already running for the TARDIS, when one of the hallway vents exploded outwards as another horrifying monster leapt out of it. It snarled at her as she skidded to a stop, raising taloned arms. The one following behind roared louder.

"DUCK!" a deeper voice shouted, and she dropped onto her back as a deep BOOM sounded and the monster that'd been chasing them went hurtling into the one in front of her, falling to the ground into a tangle of horrible sharp bits, writhing and screaming.

The Doctor grabbed her wrist and hauled her upright, as a big man in a armored suit stomped forwards, hefting a big yellow gun of some kind. The thing BOOMed again, knocking the monsters further back. "GO!" he shouted. "THROUGH THE DOOR!"

Well he didn't have to tell her twice - she booked it, the Doctor right behind her and Mr. Punch Gun half a step behind. The door slammed shut behind them, a blue hologram flickering to life before the armored guy shoved her forwards. "Keep moving, they'll be right on us, there's a safe room on the right," he snapped out.

"Oi! Watch those hands, or you'll get a spanner next!" she snapped back.

"Lady, I don't know who the fuck you are, but if you want to live -"

"I bloody well know!" she snarled as they ran to the door - the room behind it was some kind of tool room and a total mess, but she was hardly going to be picky. She crammed herself in amongst the shelving as the others piled in, and the door slammed shut behind them.

The armored man sagged against said door. "Okay," he said, suddenly sounding very, very tired. "Okay. Just…who the hell are you people?" He paused. "Actually…neither of you have RIGs. Heh. Ahehehehe…" The chuckling slowly turned into a high, strained laugh, until the man caught himself. "Ah…fuck. I've finally snapped. I'm fucking seeing things. Next it's gonna be some old-timey politician in a bowler hat. Fuck me."

"Oi! I'm not a daydream, boyo!" Donna snapped.

"Sure thing, grandma, you're just a random couple of historical reenactors who got lost. On a planet cracker. In a system where nobody else is supposed to be. Sure."

"Historical - what?" the Doctor asked. "You have big horrible knife monsters and you're complaining about how we're dressed?"

"There's not a single person alive these days who doesn't have a RIG, so you tell me. Wait, why am I even arguing? You're not even real."

"Oh, we're very real," the Doctor said. "Think about it. If we were some hallucination, you wouldn't even question it. Your brain would just…paper it over. You'd see…loved ones. Family. Familiar faces. Have you ever seen someone like us?"

"...no," the armored man reluctantly admitted.

"Right. Look. I'm the Doctor. This is Donna. We're…call us travellers. Our ship picked up the signal from something on board, homed in on it."

"And it did that…how, exactly? You'd have to use the flight deck to get here."

"Not that it's probably helping the whole 'are we really real' thing, but my ship's more like…what year is it?"

"What?"

"The year, I'm trying to remember if you people have teleportation grids yet."

"What, no? The hell are you talking about?"

"Right! Short version, and I wouldn't be telling you about this if you didn't need things to make sense, my ship goes through time and space and bends the rules. Looks like a little blue box, park it wherever I like. Make sense?"

"That's…impossible."

"Oh, says the man carrying a portable gravity projector, and what I'm pretty sure is a stasis unit that freezes localized timespace."

The armored man held up a finger, paused, then lowered it. "So, what," he said skeptically, "you've got a magic box that can take you anywhere?"

"It's more complicated than that, but sure."

The armored man stared at them both, the triple-layered visor slits of his helmet glaring blue, hiding everything. "Alright. Say I believe you, and I haven't gone crazy. This ship of yours, it's a way off this wreck?"

"Anywhere you want to go."

"Right. Okay." He held silent for a moment, wavering on his feet, then drew himself up. "Those two are probably gone by now, might be hunting other survivors, might've just scurried off into the vents. But there'll be more. There's a couple of spare uniforms and RIG units in the lockers there - they're armored, not much but better than nothing, and they're airtight. This wreck's got no engines and is tethered to a hunk of planet, we've got less than a day before it drifts into the asteroid field and only hours after that before it crashes. Either of you ever fire a gun before?"

"Not my style, no," the Doctor answered. Donna just shook her head. She was starting to feel at least a little out of her depth. Even that war on the unterraformed planet hadn't been that much of a problem.

"Well, get used to it. Left a couple modified plasma cutters here," the armored man snapped, striding over to the workbench. "They'll project targeting lasers, point and pull the trigger. These things don't stop for bullets, but cutting their arms and legs off works fine."

"Hold on," Donna said, holding out a hand. "Slow down, and tell me: the hell are they? And for that matter, who're you?"

"They used to be the crew. Now? Now they're dead things, and they want to kill you. And me? I'm Jacob Temple. Chief Engineer - or acting, at least. Welcome to the USG Ishimura."