Fic: Solid Skies, Chapter 12
Title: Solid Skies
Author: Veldeia
Series: Sequel to Hollow World
Fandom: Doctor Who
Warnings: WIP
Characters/Pairings: 10th Doctor, Martha Jones, OCs. Gen.
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: If you've seen it on TV, it isn't mine.
Summary: After surviving one big cave, the Doctor, Martha and a caving team from the Sixties find themselves in even more trouble, from Plague to politics, on a planet full of caves.
12. Twelve Hours
There had to be something! It was getting late, and Martha was tired, but she wasn't going to stop until she found at least something that would help the Doctor somehow. After calling Khif, she had called T'ig. The old Khiandrian had been genuinely happy to hear from her, and devastated to hear about the Doctor. Apparently, there hadn't been anything about him on the news. Unfortunately, T'ig had had nothing to say on the subject of the Plague, nor contrast.
Martha was eyeing a list of news items and public conversations which had both the word Plague and the word contrast in them. They revealed absolutely nothing to her, and she was half asleep, when the AI suddenly announced there was an incoming call for Khel.
"Who's it from?" Martha asked, hoping that it might be the Doctor.
"Jess, daughter of Jem, calling from the Central Holding Facility," the AI replied.
A moment later, Khel appeared, accompanied by all three cavers. Martha stepped aside, and Khel sat down on the chair just as Jess's hologram emerged opposite her.
"How are things?" Jess asked. "Any news on the Doctor?"
"You haven't heard?" Martha said.
Jess glanced in her direction, obviously unable to actually see her. "No. I don't have a terminal of my own here, and the guards haven't told me a thing. What is it?"
"The Plague," Khel said simply.
"Oh. Oh, no," Jess said, wide-eyed. "Oh, dear. How?"
"The kidnappers took him to Nest Town," Khel replied.
"But it's going to be all right," Martha said quickly. "He'll cure it."
There was a short, rather uncomfortable silence. Martha could guess the others didn't quite share her optimism, but they were tactful enough not to say it aloud. Jess was obviously having a hard time trying to figure out how to take these news.
Brian changed the subject. "Are you all right?"
"I'm fine, darling. Just bored. I've got absolutely nothing to do until the trial continues tomorrow."
The trial! Martha had all but forgotten about that. Having to worry about it on top of everything else felt just plain unfair. "Can't it be postponed?" she asked.
"I doubt it. If he's got the Plague, I don't think the Fifteen will see any point in waiting, because they won't believe he can get better, no matter how long they wait. But I'll talk about it with Neir when I see her in the morning."
Jess only had twelve minutes for the call, and she spent a part of that alone with Brian. In the meantime, Martha tried asking Khel for help, but "contrast" didn't mean anything in particular to her, either.
Once Martha got back to work again, she decided to check the news coverage on them, just out of curiosity. To her amazement, she found only a vague mention of a "suspected kidnapping" at the Halls of Justice, and nothing more. There were lots of news about their unexpected arrival at the City of Lights, as well as the bombing of the surface train, and complete 3D recordings of the trial, but not a single word about the Doctor becoming the latest victim of the Plague. That had to count as dodgy. More than that, it screamed "conspiracy" at Martha.
Aside from that one discovery, Martha found nothing new, no matter how hard she looked. Khel finally persuaded Martha that she'd be more successful if she wasn't about to fall asleep all the time. Reluctantly, she joined the rest of the humans, who were already sleeping on mattresses in the living room.
She was woken up by Khel's son, who told her anxiously that she had a call, from a stranger! It wasn't quite the Doctor this time, either, but the young research assistant did have a message to her from him. The Doctor wanted to see her as soon as possible.
Martha found Khel in her study, working on a 3D model of a cave apartment. Without waking the other humans, they headed towards the NTPCRC as quickly as they could. There, they were greeted by the same research assistant who had called Martha. He would allow only Martha to see the Doctor, so Khel had to stay behind and wait with him.
It must've been about eight hours since Martha had last seen the Doctor, and during that time, things had clearly changed for the worse. He did look sick now, his skin almost the same colour as the crystal covering his right hand and foot. He was sitting by the force field, with his back against a wall, hugging his left knee close to his chest with his left arm, as if for warmth. Martha glanced at the computer screen in the wall, but the readings were displayed in an alien manner and in alien units, and didn't tell her much.
"How are you feeling?" she asked him.
"Oh, you know, a little plagued," he quipped. She noticed he was breathing shallowly, like someone who had broken ribs and was trying to avoid jarring them. "And cold," he added.
She was a little surprised to see that the coldness affected him this much. After all, she'd seen him survive minus two hundred degrees. Whatever the Plague did, it couldn't possibly cause anything even close to such an extreme temperature. "Isn't there anything you can do about that? Or any way I could help you? Emergency blankets or something?" she asked.
"Not really," he answered, his expression somewhere between a smile and a grimace. "It's a bit of a balancing act. Any attempts to compensate for the heat loss will only give the organism more energy and cause it to grow faster. On the other hand, if I just allowed my temperature to drop, to stop it from spreading, I'd start getting hypothermia symptoms."
"Couldn't you do that hibernation thing again?"
"It'd just be putting off the inevitable. Besides, I need to be conscious. There's work to do. I found out something." He got up, his face screwed up in pain as he moved, and turned to face the force field, fixing Martha's eyes with an intense look.
"Just how far has it spread?" Martha asked softly.
"That's really not important right now."
"Doctor, I need to know - it's spreading faster than you expected, isn't it? How long have you got?"
The Doctor sighed, opened the few top buttons of his shirt, and pulled the fabric aside, to reveal that the crystal covered half his chest now. "Don't know how long. Maybe ten hours, give or take a few."
"So, what you've found out - is it a cure?" she asked hopefully.
"No. I'm still working on that. It's..." He pulled a face. "I hate this. I really do, and I've got no absolutely concrete evidence, but, well, it very much seems that this Plague is neither alien to this world, nor natural."
"You mean... Someone made this thing?" Martha said, disbelieving and horrified. "Like a biological weapon, or something?"
"Yes. And most likely it was someone Khiandrian, because it's similar to Khiandrian life forms."
"Why do they say it's alien, then? And how come no one else has noticed this?"
"Because this place is more of a sham, a cover, than a real research centre. Who knows, some of the people here might have helped create this thing. That's why they didn't want me poking around. It's probably why I got attacked in the first place, too. I'd been asking around about the Plague, and they were worried I'd find out the truth."
"And it explains how the kidnappers were able to get you to Nest Town through the quarantine safeguards. It really does fit," Martha said, and frowned. "Hold on a second. Should we even be talking about this here?"
"We can talk. K'iem, the friendly young fellow who's guarding me, is on our side."
"All right. So. Um, did you know that the news about this entire incident, you and the Plague, it's been completely swept under the rug? Not one word of it in the Network. I doubt we'd have found out you're here if Khif hadn't told us!"
"Well, I didn't know that, but it doesn't surprise me in the least."
"It's a conspiracy," Martha stated. "A secret extremist group."
"Yup, a pretty classical secret society, by the looks of it - well hidden, with plenty of friends in high places."
"But why?" Martha asked, still having trouble grasping the idea that this terrible epidemic was something that had been caused deliberately.
"That, I still can't understand," the Doctor admitted. "But, I bet if we find out who did it, it'll be easier to figure out the motives. Darks hoping to cause an anti-alien panic? Brights wanting to make some point about petromites? Mad scientists planning on taking over the world? I'm absolutely certain that Gaer, the head of this place, is in on it, so that might be one place to start from. Did you find out anything about 'contrast'?"
Martha shook her head. "Nothing at all, and I really tried."
"Hm. I may have misheard it... I was just thinking it might well be the name of our Plague-creating secret society."
"Even if it is, does it really matter? I mean, this is all horrible, and no doubt it's very important, but what we really need to figure out is how to cure this thing. You won't be able to help anyone if we don't - you'll be dead in less than a day!"
"I can figure it out, no sweat," the Doctor promised. "Quite literally, too, since this blasted bug is eating it. Well, anyway. You have your job, I have mine, and you need to go before someone other than K'iem realises you're here." He took a step backwards, grimaced, and very nearly fell when he tried to put weight on his bad foot.
"But I could help you!"
"Martha, you'll be helping everyone on this planet if you can figure out who's behind this atrocity. That might help me, too. I can't believe anyone would be stupid enough to let loose something like this without the means to stop it."
"Okay," Martha said. The Doctor was right, of course. "But I'll be back soon."
**********
"My shift ends in half a tenth, and I know for sure that the girl who's taking over from me won't choose to be friends with you," K'iem told the Doctor soon after Martha had left.
"That calls for some special arrangements, then."
Together, the Doctor and K'iem were able to rig all the monitoring equipment in the room, from cameras and microphones to medical scanners, to show that the Doctor was resting on the bed all the time.
"Is this amazing or what? She's not going to notice anything suspicious," K'iem said, delighted. "Usually, people really don't move around at all when the infection has spread this far. Hurts too much, I've heard."
"Yeah, it does," the Doctor admitted, and gritting his teeth, shuffled over to the computer.
He should have all the data he needed, now. All he needed to do was to figure out how to stop this thing. He skimmed the database to learn if the locals had actually done any proper research on curing the Plague. If this whole place was just a cover, the chances were there would be nothing at all, or that all the data would be fabricated.
What he found took him by surprise. They had been doing research, and it seemed entirely genuine. They had tried all sorts of things against the organism, from direct force to changes in environmental conditions - different forms of radiation, different lighting, different temperatures, sonic vibrations in different wavelengths - and found out that the organism was so tough that in all cases, the host would've been long dead before there was any effect on the Plague. Cutting the Phase I organism's air supply wouldn't help either. It would only leap to Phase II prematurely, and start feeding on living tissue. Ew.
After a while, he ran into files with extra safeguards. It actually took him some time to get past those. When he saw what was in them, he understood why.
It was the cure - only it wasn't a working one. It was, apparently, what the creators of the Plague had originally intended as the cure. A cure to a disease that was only harmful to petromites, according to the notes, which were dated half a year ago.
It seemed they had never meant to kill any people, only petromites. They hadn't let the Plague loose without a cure, either, but it had mutated in ways they hadn't expected, and now, they really had no cure. No way of stopping it. They could only keep it contained, and make sure that no one found out where it had come from. They were so intent on keeping that secret that they wouldn't even let him help.
The original cure was a pesticide, or rather, mouldicide sort of thing, a complicated chemical compound that would kill the Plague organism without harming the host, a synthetic counter-attack almost as clever as the Plague itself. As clever as it was, it would not be able to reverse any damage that the Plague had already done. If the organism had moved to Phase II, there would be no converting the crystallised tissue back to flesh and blood. That was simply not possible. Not that it mattered - at that stage, the host would be dead, and it would be too late, anyway.
Now, then. He stood up straight, and would've clapped his hands if that hadn't been both difficult and painful. At least this gave him something to start from. He could simply modify this old cure so it that would work against the current strain of the Plague. Of course, that was much easier said than done.
13. Eighteen Hours
Author: Veldeia
Series: Sequel to Hollow World
Fandom: Doctor Who
Warnings: WIP
Characters/Pairings: 10th Doctor, Martha Jones, OCs. Gen.
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: If you've seen it on TV, it isn't mine.
Summary: After surviving one big cave, the Doctor, Martha and a caving team from the Sixties find themselves in even more trouble, from Plague to politics, on a planet full of caves.
12. Twelve Hours
There had to be something! It was getting late, and Martha was tired, but she wasn't going to stop until she found at least something that would help the Doctor somehow. After calling Khif, she had called T'ig. The old Khiandrian had been genuinely happy to hear from her, and devastated to hear about the Doctor. Apparently, there hadn't been anything about him on the news. Unfortunately, T'ig had had nothing to say on the subject of the Plague, nor contrast.
Martha was eyeing a list of news items and public conversations which had both the word Plague and the word contrast in them. They revealed absolutely nothing to her, and she was half asleep, when the AI suddenly announced there was an incoming call for Khel.
"Who's it from?" Martha asked, hoping that it might be the Doctor.
"Jess, daughter of Jem, calling from the Central Holding Facility," the AI replied.
A moment later, Khel appeared, accompanied by all three cavers. Martha stepped aside, and Khel sat down on the chair just as Jess's hologram emerged opposite her.
"How are things?" Jess asked. "Any news on the Doctor?"
"You haven't heard?" Martha said.
Jess glanced in her direction, obviously unable to actually see her. "No. I don't have a terminal of my own here, and the guards haven't told me a thing. What is it?"
"The Plague," Khel said simply.
"Oh. Oh, no," Jess said, wide-eyed. "Oh, dear. How?"
"The kidnappers took him to Nest Town," Khel replied.
"But it's going to be all right," Martha said quickly. "He'll cure it."
There was a short, rather uncomfortable silence. Martha could guess the others didn't quite share her optimism, but they were tactful enough not to say it aloud. Jess was obviously having a hard time trying to figure out how to take these news.
Brian changed the subject. "Are you all right?"
"I'm fine, darling. Just bored. I've got absolutely nothing to do until the trial continues tomorrow."
The trial! Martha had all but forgotten about that. Having to worry about it on top of everything else felt just plain unfair. "Can't it be postponed?" she asked.
"I doubt it. If he's got the Plague, I don't think the Fifteen will see any point in waiting, because they won't believe he can get better, no matter how long they wait. But I'll talk about it with Neir when I see her in the morning."
Jess only had twelve minutes for the call, and she spent a part of that alone with Brian. In the meantime, Martha tried asking Khel for help, but "contrast" didn't mean anything in particular to her, either.
Once Martha got back to work again, she decided to check the news coverage on them, just out of curiosity. To her amazement, she found only a vague mention of a "suspected kidnapping" at the Halls of Justice, and nothing more. There were lots of news about their unexpected arrival at the City of Lights, as well as the bombing of the surface train, and complete 3D recordings of the trial, but not a single word about the Doctor becoming the latest victim of the Plague. That had to count as dodgy. More than that, it screamed "conspiracy" at Martha.
Aside from that one discovery, Martha found nothing new, no matter how hard she looked. Khel finally persuaded Martha that she'd be more successful if she wasn't about to fall asleep all the time. Reluctantly, she joined the rest of the humans, who were already sleeping on mattresses in the living room.
She was woken up by Khel's son, who told her anxiously that she had a call, from a stranger! It wasn't quite the Doctor this time, either, but the young research assistant did have a message to her from him. The Doctor wanted to see her as soon as possible.
Martha found Khel in her study, working on a 3D model of a cave apartment. Without waking the other humans, they headed towards the NTPCRC as quickly as they could. There, they were greeted by the same research assistant who had called Martha. He would allow only Martha to see the Doctor, so Khel had to stay behind and wait with him.
It must've been about eight hours since Martha had last seen the Doctor, and during that time, things had clearly changed for the worse. He did look sick now, his skin almost the same colour as the crystal covering his right hand and foot. He was sitting by the force field, with his back against a wall, hugging his left knee close to his chest with his left arm, as if for warmth. Martha glanced at the computer screen in the wall, but the readings were displayed in an alien manner and in alien units, and didn't tell her much.
"How are you feeling?" she asked him.
"Oh, you know, a little plagued," he quipped. She noticed he was breathing shallowly, like someone who had broken ribs and was trying to avoid jarring them. "And cold," he added.
She was a little surprised to see that the coldness affected him this much. After all, she'd seen him survive minus two hundred degrees. Whatever the Plague did, it couldn't possibly cause anything even close to such an extreme temperature. "Isn't there anything you can do about that? Or any way I could help you? Emergency blankets or something?" she asked.
"Not really," he answered, his expression somewhere between a smile and a grimace. "It's a bit of a balancing act. Any attempts to compensate for the heat loss will only give the organism more energy and cause it to grow faster. On the other hand, if I just allowed my temperature to drop, to stop it from spreading, I'd start getting hypothermia symptoms."
"Couldn't you do that hibernation thing again?"
"It'd just be putting off the inevitable. Besides, I need to be conscious. There's work to do. I found out something." He got up, his face screwed up in pain as he moved, and turned to face the force field, fixing Martha's eyes with an intense look.
"Just how far has it spread?" Martha asked softly.
"That's really not important right now."
"Doctor, I need to know - it's spreading faster than you expected, isn't it? How long have you got?"
The Doctor sighed, opened the few top buttons of his shirt, and pulled the fabric aside, to reveal that the crystal covered half his chest now. "Don't know how long. Maybe ten hours, give or take a few."
"So, what you've found out - is it a cure?" she asked hopefully.
"No. I'm still working on that. It's..." He pulled a face. "I hate this. I really do, and I've got no absolutely concrete evidence, but, well, it very much seems that this Plague is neither alien to this world, nor natural."
"You mean... Someone made this thing?" Martha said, disbelieving and horrified. "Like a biological weapon, or something?"
"Yes. And most likely it was someone Khiandrian, because it's similar to Khiandrian life forms."
"Why do they say it's alien, then? And how come no one else has noticed this?"
"Because this place is more of a sham, a cover, than a real research centre. Who knows, some of the people here might have helped create this thing. That's why they didn't want me poking around. It's probably why I got attacked in the first place, too. I'd been asking around about the Plague, and they were worried I'd find out the truth."
"And it explains how the kidnappers were able to get you to Nest Town through the quarantine safeguards. It really does fit," Martha said, and frowned. "Hold on a second. Should we even be talking about this here?"
"We can talk. K'iem, the friendly young fellow who's guarding me, is on our side."
"All right. So. Um, did you know that the news about this entire incident, you and the Plague, it's been completely swept under the rug? Not one word of it in the Network. I doubt we'd have found out you're here if Khif hadn't told us!"
"Well, I didn't know that, but it doesn't surprise me in the least."
"It's a conspiracy," Martha stated. "A secret extremist group."
"Yup, a pretty classical secret society, by the looks of it - well hidden, with plenty of friends in high places."
"But why?" Martha asked, still having trouble grasping the idea that this terrible epidemic was something that had been caused deliberately.
"That, I still can't understand," the Doctor admitted. "But, I bet if we find out who did it, it'll be easier to figure out the motives. Darks hoping to cause an anti-alien panic? Brights wanting to make some point about petromites? Mad scientists planning on taking over the world? I'm absolutely certain that Gaer, the head of this place, is in on it, so that might be one place to start from. Did you find out anything about 'contrast'?"
Martha shook her head. "Nothing at all, and I really tried."
"Hm. I may have misheard it... I was just thinking it might well be the name of our Plague-creating secret society."
"Even if it is, does it really matter? I mean, this is all horrible, and no doubt it's very important, but what we really need to figure out is how to cure this thing. You won't be able to help anyone if we don't - you'll be dead in less than a day!"
"I can figure it out, no sweat," the Doctor promised. "Quite literally, too, since this blasted bug is eating it. Well, anyway. You have your job, I have mine, and you need to go before someone other than K'iem realises you're here." He took a step backwards, grimaced, and very nearly fell when he tried to put weight on his bad foot.
"But I could help you!"
"Martha, you'll be helping everyone on this planet if you can figure out who's behind this atrocity. That might help me, too. I can't believe anyone would be stupid enough to let loose something like this without the means to stop it."
"Okay," Martha said. The Doctor was right, of course. "But I'll be back soon."
**********
"My shift ends in half a tenth, and I know for sure that the girl who's taking over from me won't choose to be friends with you," K'iem told the Doctor soon after Martha had left.
"That calls for some special arrangements, then."
Together, the Doctor and K'iem were able to rig all the monitoring equipment in the room, from cameras and microphones to medical scanners, to show that the Doctor was resting on the bed all the time.
"Is this amazing or what? She's not going to notice anything suspicious," K'iem said, delighted. "Usually, people really don't move around at all when the infection has spread this far. Hurts too much, I've heard."
"Yeah, it does," the Doctor admitted, and gritting his teeth, shuffled over to the computer.
He should have all the data he needed, now. All he needed to do was to figure out how to stop this thing. He skimmed the database to learn if the locals had actually done any proper research on curing the Plague. If this whole place was just a cover, the chances were there would be nothing at all, or that all the data would be fabricated.
What he found took him by surprise. They had been doing research, and it seemed entirely genuine. They had tried all sorts of things against the organism, from direct force to changes in environmental conditions - different forms of radiation, different lighting, different temperatures, sonic vibrations in different wavelengths - and found out that the organism was so tough that in all cases, the host would've been long dead before there was any effect on the Plague. Cutting the Phase I organism's air supply wouldn't help either. It would only leap to Phase II prematurely, and start feeding on living tissue. Ew.
After a while, he ran into files with extra safeguards. It actually took him some time to get past those. When he saw what was in them, he understood why.
It was the cure - only it wasn't a working one. It was, apparently, what the creators of the Plague had originally intended as the cure. A cure to a disease that was only harmful to petromites, according to the notes, which were dated half a year ago.
It seemed they had never meant to kill any people, only petromites. They hadn't let the Plague loose without a cure, either, but it had mutated in ways they hadn't expected, and now, they really had no cure. No way of stopping it. They could only keep it contained, and make sure that no one found out where it had come from. They were so intent on keeping that secret that they wouldn't even let him help.
The original cure was a pesticide, or rather, mouldicide sort of thing, a complicated chemical compound that would kill the Plague organism without harming the host, a synthetic counter-attack almost as clever as the Plague itself. As clever as it was, it would not be able to reverse any damage that the Plague had already done. If the organism had moved to Phase II, there would be no converting the crystallised tissue back to flesh and blood. That was simply not possible. Not that it mattered - at that stage, the host would be dead, and it would be too late, anyway.
Now, then. He stood up straight, and would've clapped his hands if that hadn't been both difficult and painful. At least this gave him something to start from. He could simply modify this old cure so it that would work against the current strain of the Plague. Of course, that was much easier said than done.
13. Eighteen Hours