OK Doc (p.5)
He turned and stumped back up to the console. Rose stumbled at his abrupt departure, feeling somewhat bereft. Typical. She followed him, scowling at his back, annoyed. But at least if she was annoyed she wasn't scared.
"What just happened back there anyway? I'm not usually that much of a coward, am I?"
He looked up in surprise. "A coward? You? Not likely." He bent over to fiddle with the scanner controls. "That was our old friend, Kokopelli."
"What, it's got a name now?" she asked in disbelief. She settled a hip against the Tardis console and watched as he hunched intently over the scanner screen. "Do you know all the monsters names?"
"No, just this one. Hah! Here we go then." He stepped back and crossed his arms with a satisfied air, studying the screen. Rose peered around and looked at it. It looked like a three dimensional representation of a tangle of tree branches, or a river system, but then it rotated sideways and she could see all those lines spread out into sheets, looking like someone's washing flapping wildly in the wind. Sheets and lines ran in spidery tendrils in all directions, some connecting, some petering out.
"I give up."
"That, is a map of all the silver ore in the area. And look at this," he tapped a palm-sized circular formation at the left of the screen. A perfect circle. Well, almost perfect, it had a bite taken out of the lower left corner. Smaller circles intersected the larger one at odd locations.
"It looks like your Gallifreyan writing." Rose said. She flicked a finger at the post-it note on the monitor.
The Doctor's eyebrows jumped up. He studied the note, then the circular formation on the screen. "You're right. It does a bit."
"So what's it say?"
He shook his head. "Nothing, it's just gibberish. But suggestive."
"Suggesting what?"
"I don't know. But it is something he's trying to protect. That missing bit corresponds to the mine gallery we were in." He pulled up a graphic of the town and overlaid it on the map. The entire town of Tombstone was no bigger than her thumb. The mine, also represented, was a bit larger leading off to one side, and she could see where the gallery fit into the niche in the circle. The main portion of the mine followed a larger seam that ran along beside the circle but wasn't part of it. She could see where the new mineshafts had been cut to give access to the circle.
"So I was right!" she said in jubilation. "They are mining his ship!"
"Rose," he said with a longsuffering sigh, "that is not a ship. It's not even solid. Look." He rotated the view so she could see the ring from side on. It wasn't just a ring. It had two swirling spirals rising above and below it, like two tornadoes meeting funnel to funnel. The spirals were made of spindly veins, almost invisible, with obviously tons of earth separating each strand.
"So that thing's built inside solid rock?"
"Not built the way you'd know it, not built and then buried there, it's part of the natural rock formation."
"So what's it for?"
"I don't know." He clapped his hands in love of a good mystery and headed for the door. "Let's go find out!"
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