FIC: DW/Jake 2.0 - The Wreck of the Trimethian Star (4/?)
The silliness quotient of this story remains quite high. Heh.:)
TITLE: The Wreck of the Trimethian Star
AUTHOR: roseveare
RATING: PG-13
SUMMARY: With new companion Jake Foley on board, the TARDIS responds to a centuries-old distress call. But how much of an advantage are nanites where alien technology is involved?
NOTES: Written for the Doctor Who Choose-Your-Own-Companion crossover ficathon - the 5th Doctor with Tegan, Nyssa & Adric, and Jake 2.0's Jake Foley.
WARNINGS: Crackfic. I make no promises to avoid the obvious in dialogue, plotting, fights, bad jokes, gratuitous mentions of Australian beer, and quite possibly teh sex. You have been warned.
DISCLAIMER: Not mine, no profit, yadda, yadda, yadda.
Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Tegan was thankful when they closed in on the odd-angled houses of the settlement and shortly reached the most outlying of the buildings. She doubted robo-boy needed the refreshment as he claimed he did, walking carefully behind her on his damaged feet with his breathing regular and his face dry. She, on the other hand, was sweating like a pig, which made her feel undignified and annoyed.
The predominant design of the buildings gave a triangular profile, with one wall straight and the opposing one sloping to meet it, with no need for a distinct roof. Some were tall and thin, some low, others twisted and played tricks with angles. The sun glistened whitely off them. Whatever they were made of was smooth and not recognisably stone, with no visible joins anywhere. With the first building, they met a sweep of road paved with triangular slabs and a smooth, sharp gravel that locked underfoot and didn't really shift. Tegan figured they were right out in the provinces - this settlement wasn't large, nothing that could be called a city, maybe not even a town.
Jake caught up and fell in at her side, matching her steps. He seemed to be walking easier now. A native in brightly coloured clothes was coming down the road towards them, and Tegan felt a knot of anticipation in her gut. She hoped they were friendly. As he came closer, she could see that he looked essentially human, with skin a shade darker than Caucasian. He nodded to them and made a smooth, easy hand gesture as they passed. Jake returned the gesture clumsily with one bandaged hand, and apparently all was well.
"The natives are friendly," Jake murmured with wary relief.
"Nice to know," Tegan said, grinning. "We might not do too badly down here after all." She started swinging her jacket jauntily at the end of her arm as they marched onward down the road.
There was a drinking fountain in the town square. She yanked her arm from Jake's grasp and snapped a short-tempered response to his "Is that wise?" -- "Well, they're drinking it, aren't they?" She'd seen a woman lower her head to the fountain while they approached.
"Maybe I should try, first, in case--"
"Maybe you should wait your turn, robo-boy." She touched her lips to the water and took a long drink.
Jake did wait his turn and drink after her, though she still suspected him of only doing it for show. After he'd straightened and turned away he said, looking around the square and not at her. "Nanite-boy."
"Whatever." The shops lining the square had signs and canopies as bright as the clothes the people wore. Tegan could read them, thanks to the TARDIS, although 'translation' didn't always equate with 'understanding' and she was unsure what some of the shops were. Jake was staring at them in particular surprise. She anticipated his exclamation and cut him off as he opened his mouth - "You can read them. It's something to do with the TARDIS. Don't ask me anything further, because I don't know."
"No, I..." He frowned at her. "You can read them?"
"You can't?" She was taken aback. She stared at him, her jaw dropping. "Crikey. That could be a problem the Doctor didn't think of."
Of course, the Doctor had told Jake to keep his brain away from the TARDIS, and so must have programmed the TARDIS to keep its... whatever... away from Jake. He would have to work on that if Jake was going to be travelling with them any length of time.
"More fun," Jake said glumly.
She touched his arm in a bolstering gesture and he looked surprised. "I'm sure the Doc can sort it out... eventually." She mulled over the implication of that - back to the science convention and, like Jake said, more fun. Great.
A statue at the other side of the square caught her eye, and she headed over for a closer look, enchanted by the odd geometric beauty of it. She was aware of him trailing after her, dodging between some small carts powered by something that ran absolutely silently. She stopped before the statue, on the lowest tier of its surrounding platform.
"It's lovely." The white, shiny material used for the houses was woven amongst a sky-blue crystalline substance which seemed to hold its own inner glow. Like the rest of the native architecture, it seemed to be based on triangles. But in those abstract angles, she could see people, skies, starships. Then she shifted her head and they were just angles and lines again.
"Pythagoras would've loved it," Jake said, but she chose to ignore that. He didn't seem captivated - no art lover, then.
"There's an inscription." Tegan climbed the steps, which were really an ascending spiral around the sculpture, and hunched down in front of the plinth to read it.
Jake stared at it blankly. He cleared his throat and asked, "Can I have those, uh, square doubloons?"
"What? Why? They're useless."
"I want to try."
She shrugged and dug into her jacket for them, almost losing her balance on the step. She handed them over with a grimace
"Can you tell if any of these shops would sell beer?"
She laughed at the ridiculousness of the request and glanced around; pointed him towards a sign that apparently literally read as 'Pleasant Fermented Drinks'. "I don't know what you think you're going to buy with useless coins from a storekeeper whose language you don't even speak," she scoffed.
"You think?" He cocked his head at her innocently, then turned and jogged off across the angular paving. She was still laughing at him as he disappeared inside the shop. The natives paid him no more heed than they did her interest in the sculpture.
The sculpture. Tegan turned back to it now, trailing over the writing with her fingers. It was faded and almost obscured in places - the plinth was older, and the rest must have been renewed in the years between. She read, 'To the dead of two races'...
It was, she realised with a cold shiver through her brain that dulled her appreciation a little, a war memorial.
There were dates listed that meant nothing to her, and a few names - place names? There weren't enough of them to be individuals. She looked at the aged stone plinth, and wondered, and felt another chill.
She turned and addressed a green/yellow/blue clad man walking past. "Excuse me - do you mind if I ask a question?"
He sketched a gesture that she knew, thanks to the TARDIS, to be a permissive one. Ask.
"I'm new here and I wondered - how many years ago was the war, exactly?"
"The war? Nearly five hundred revolutions." He seemed surprised - that she didn't know, and that she was interested, she supposed, There was no reluctance in him to answer, no offence. The memorial statue was upkept as a matter of civic duty, likely, and no more than that. "The Trimethians were almost destroyed before they surrendered. History now." His gesture there was dismissive.
"And you've been at peace for a long time."
"Of course."
She was glad she'd read that vibe correctly. She gazed up at the memorial, then distractedly turned to thank the man, and found him already walking away. She shouted her thanks at his retreating back.
Tegan let the sculpture reclaim her attention. Sitting askew on the steps, staring up at its colours, it was easy to lose herself in its shifting geometric visions. Eventually a shadow fell over her. She blinked up at its source. Jake, smirking, with a green meshed net woven around a circle of small bottles swinging from his hand.
She gaped. "How did you do that?"
"I have had to get by in a few countries where I didn't speak the language on Earth," he said. He poked a finger into his own chest. "I am an international super-spy."
"But the coins were worthless!"
"I guess you never know what's worth something. Hey, lead could be a precious metal here, or a completely unknown substance. The guy in the shop seemed happy enough with the trade, anyway."
"Well - well done!" she said, astonished. "I guess you have your uses." She pinched his arm.
"Uh, thanks." He eyed her warily. "I guess we should be getting back, before they find out we're gone."
"It's probably too late for that already." She snorted. "Besides, it's not like I have to ask permission to go out." She frowned, and gave him a studying look. "I suppose you did, working for those people."
"Kinda. I mean, if I wanted to head out for more than a day or - anyway, it's not... I just don't want the others to worry."
No wonder, Tegan thought, that he'd jumped at a chance to explore the universe in an alien spacecraft. Maybe he wasn't as nuts as she'd thought. "Okay."
"Hang on." She halted her progress and looked back. He'd dropped to one knee and set the net of bottles aside to strip slippers and bandages off his feet. He pulled the slippers back on over barely-reddened skin. They were loose and flopped in ungainly fashion as he stood up, pulling the gauze from his hands. Underneath, his hands were still visibly burned, but the burns looked a week or two old, and not far from healed. He stopped with the bundle in his hand and cursed.
"Ha. Good luck recognising an alien dustbin," Tegan laughed. "You can't leave that in the street, I'm sure it must be a biohazard in some way or other. You'll have to carry it back to the TARDIS now. Here, I'll take the liquid refreshment." She plucked it from the floor without waiting for a response.
He balled up the gauze and shoved it into his jeans pocket. "If you're doing that 'cause you're hoping to drink it, sad to inform you that we've another puzzle to figure out when we get back - how to open the caps."
Tegan looked down at the neat circle of tops secured on the bottles by an unfathomable collection of tabs and black wire. "Oh, rabbits!"
***
Jake exchanged a worried glance with Tegan as they hesitated outside the partially open door. The collision of his headache with the irritated oratory floating from inside the TARDIS made him wince.
"Why people persistently fail to heed a simple, sensible piece of advice is quite beyond me. 'Stay here with the TARDIS.' 'Don't go wandering off on unknown planets and alien ships.' But what do I get? 'Out for a walk - back soon.'"
"Don't worry," Tegan hissed. "His bark's worse than his bite."
He eyed her dubiously. Over the course of the last few hours, she had turned into a tentative ally, something which he had not expected - but he knew the position could prove temporary. He watched as, far bolder than he, she pushed the door fully open and ventured inside, interrupting the weary diatribe with a "Hello, Doc" that didn't quite manage not to sound guilty.
The Doctor spun about, brandishing the yellow post-it note she'd left on the console. "A walk?" he repeated. Behind him, Adric was sliding the last few pieces into place on the alien puzzle with his attention rather deliberately focused upon his hands. Nyssa stood uncertainly with her arms folded, and looked as though she was contemplating the wisdom of intervening.
"For some air," Jake added. He felt awkward, on the one hand not wanting to hide behind Tegan's skirts and on the other very much aware that he was the stranger here, the guest. He did not want to seem ungrateful to the Doctor for letting him travel with them.
"I spent most of the last week in jail," Tegan supplemented, dangerously. There was a moment's exchange of equally stubborn accusation from both sides before she relented, reassuring the Doctor with a sigh, "We were all right, Doctor. Really." The net of bottles was held low against her thigh, half-covered by her draped jacket, and it seemed she'd forgotten them in the moment. But now she manouevred herself around the console room so that she kept the net out of the Doctor's sight, and once the console was between them she slipped it down underneath, where they could retrieve it later. "There's a bit of a town at the bottom of the mountain, and the people were friendly and everything."
"It was really interesting," Jake offered. His voice trailed off as he registered how intently the Doctor was eying his feet.
"My slippers," the alien said morosely.
Jake followed his gaze downwards. "Uh... sorry." The blue slippers were in a sad state after being used to climb down, and back up, a mountainside. "I--" He envisaged Tegan's reaction if he completed the statement 'I couldn't let her go alone' and stopped.
But the Doctor sighed and rubbed his forehead with his fingers, perhaps remembering why it must have been necessary for Jake to purloin his oversized fuzzy footwear in the first place. When he looked up again, Jake felt his eyes take in the new absence of bandaging, and his expression cleared somewhat. "Very well. I'm relieved to see you both back in one piece."
There was something about his tone that suggested they were only evading a severe ticking off because he was feeling very magnanimous indeed and they had been extremely lucky to avoid disaster. It had been impossible not to notice in his confrontation with the NSA that, for a guy who didn't look more than a few years Jake's senior, the Doctor had a remarkable ability to reduce grown men and women, NSA directors, generals and heavily armed soldiers to guilty twelve-year-olds.
"Did you sort out the ship's defences?" Tegan asked, snapping up the opportunity to change the subject.
"No," said the Doctor, some of his short temper returning. He cast a glare at Adric, who was still pretending to be oblivious.
"We've found the right systems," Nyssa elaborated keenly. "It shouldn't take much longer now. And Adric found something else interesting."
The Doctor's sour face didn't change, and Jake figured that a clue as to why he'd become so touchy about people wandering off. He supposed the captain of a ship was undeniably responsible for his crew's safety even if he wasn't the good-as guardian of half his young crew and if the 'ship' in question looked like a blue British phone booth.
"I want to tell them!" Adric spoke up, coming alive all of a sudden, and launched into an excited babble about warships and live bombs.
"Really?" Jake asked.
"Surely that's all the more reason we should be getting out of here!" Tegan exclaimed, alarmed. Her jaw dropped in horrified, late realisation. "Hang on - what about the town? All those people, they'd be right in the path if the mountainside was blown up, even if they weren't caught in the blast-- How much firepower is in this thing?"
"Don't be stupid," Adric said scornfully. "It's been here ages, and survived the original crash. Whatever their missiles are made with, it's stable. We're all perfectly safe."
"Now, now, Adric." The Doctor clasped a quelling hand to the boy's shoulder, cutting short the exchange of glares. "It's just possible this planet has been very lucky. Tegan's right - once we've made the computer's central defences safe we ought to inform the local authorities... Are you quite all right, Tegan? Tegan?"
Her expression had glazed over, but the Doctor's voice snapped her back to reality. "Oh, I -- I'm sorry. Doctor, I just thought of something."
Jake saw the snort gathering on Adric's face. But whatever comment was brewing, he hadn't chance to voice it before Tegan launched off her unfathomable question.
"--Doctor, do you think this ship could have been here for five hundred years?"
Go to Chapter 5
TITLE: The Wreck of the Trimethian Star
AUTHOR: roseveare
RATING: PG-13
SUMMARY: With new companion Jake Foley on board, the TARDIS responds to a centuries-old distress call. But how much of an advantage are nanites where alien technology is involved?
NOTES: Written for the Doctor Who Choose-Your-Own-Companion crossover ficathon - the 5th Doctor with Tegan, Nyssa & Adric, and Jake 2.0's Jake Foley.
WARNINGS: Crackfic. I make no promises to avoid the obvious in dialogue, plotting, fights, bad jokes, gratuitous mentions of Australian beer, and quite possibly teh sex. You have been warned.
DISCLAIMER: Not mine, no profit, yadda, yadda, yadda.
Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Tegan was thankful when they closed in on the odd-angled houses of the settlement and shortly reached the most outlying of the buildings. She doubted robo-boy needed the refreshment as he claimed he did, walking carefully behind her on his damaged feet with his breathing regular and his face dry. She, on the other hand, was sweating like a pig, which made her feel undignified and annoyed.
The predominant design of the buildings gave a triangular profile, with one wall straight and the opposing one sloping to meet it, with no need for a distinct roof. Some were tall and thin, some low, others twisted and played tricks with angles. The sun glistened whitely off them. Whatever they were made of was smooth and not recognisably stone, with no visible joins anywhere. With the first building, they met a sweep of road paved with triangular slabs and a smooth, sharp gravel that locked underfoot and didn't really shift. Tegan figured they were right out in the provinces - this settlement wasn't large, nothing that could be called a city, maybe not even a town.
Jake caught up and fell in at her side, matching her steps. He seemed to be walking easier now. A native in brightly coloured clothes was coming down the road towards them, and Tegan felt a knot of anticipation in her gut. She hoped they were friendly. As he came closer, she could see that he looked essentially human, with skin a shade darker than Caucasian. He nodded to them and made a smooth, easy hand gesture as they passed. Jake returned the gesture clumsily with one bandaged hand, and apparently all was well.
"The natives are friendly," Jake murmured with wary relief.
"Nice to know," Tegan said, grinning. "We might not do too badly down here after all." She started swinging her jacket jauntily at the end of her arm as they marched onward down the road.
There was a drinking fountain in the town square. She yanked her arm from Jake's grasp and snapped a short-tempered response to his "Is that wise?" -- "Well, they're drinking it, aren't they?" She'd seen a woman lower her head to the fountain while they approached.
"Maybe I should try, first, in case--"
"Maybe you should wait your turn, robo-boy." She touched her lips to the water and took a long drink.
Jake did wait his turn and drink after her, though she still suspected him of only doing it for show. After he'd straightened and turned away he said, looking around the square and not at her. "Nanite-boy."
"Whatever." The shops lining the square had signs and canopies as bright as the clothes the people wore. Tegan could read them, thanks to the TARDIS, although 'translation' didn't always equate with 'understanding' and she was unsure what some of the shops were. Jake was staring at them in particular surprise. She anticipated his exclamation and cut him off as he opened his mouth - "You can read them. It's something to do with the TARDIS. Don't ask me anything further, because I don't know."
"No, I..." He frowned at her. "You can read them?"
"You can't?" She was taken aback. She stared at him, her jaw dropping. "Crikey. That could be a problem the Doctor didn't think of."
Of course, the Doctor had told Jake to keep his brain away from the TARDIS, and so must have programmed the TARDIS to keep its... whatever... away from Jake. He would have to work on that if Jake was going to be travelling with them any length of time.
"More fun," Jake said glumly.
She touched his arm in a bolstering gesture and he looked surprised. "I'm sure the Doc can sort it out... eventually." She mulled over the implication of that - back to the science convention and, like Jake said, more fun. Great.
A statue at the other side of the square caught her eye, and she headed over for a closer look, enchanted by the odd geometric beauty of it. She was aware of him trailing after her, dodging between some small carts powered by something that ran absolutely silently. She stopped before the statue, on the lowest tier of its surrounding platform.
"It's lovely." The white, shiny material used for the houses was woven amongst a sky-blue crystalline substance which seemed to hold its own inner glow. Like the rest of the native architecture, it seemed to be based on triangles. But in those abstract angles, she could see people, skies, starships. Then she shifted her head and they were just angles and lines again.
"Pythagoras would've loved it," Jake said, but she chose to ignore that. He didn't seem captivated - no art lover, then.
"There's an inscription." Tegan climbed the steps, which were really an ascending spiral around the sculpture, and hunched down in front of the plinth to read it.
Jake stared at it blankly. He cleared his throat and asked, "Can I have those, uh, square doubloons?"
"What? Why? They're useless."
"I want to try."
She shrugged and dug into her jacket for them, almost losing her balance on the step. She handed them over with a grimace
"Can you tell if any of these shops would sell beer?"
She laughed at the ridiculousness of the request and glanced around; pointed him towards a sign that apparently literally read as 'Pleasant Fermented Drinks'. "I don't know what you think you're going to buy with useless coins from a storekeeper whose language you don't even speak," she scoffed.
"You think?" He cocked his head at her innocently, then turned and jogged off across the angular paving. She was still laughing at him as he disappeared inside the shop. The natives paid him no more heed than they did her interest in the sculpture.
The sculpture. Tegan turned back to it now, trailing over the writing with her fingers. It was faded and almost obscured in places - the plinth was older, and the rest must have been renewed in the years between. She read, 'To the dead of two races'...
It was, she realised with a cold shiver through her brain that dulled her appreciation a little, a war memorial.
There were dates listed that meant nothing to her, and a few names - place names? There weren't enough of them to be individuals. She looked at the aged stone plinth, and wondered, and felt another chill.
She turned and addressed a green/yellow/blue clad man walking past. "Excuse me - do you mind if I ask a question?"
He sketched a gesture that she knew, thanks to the TARDIS, to be a permissive one. Ask.
"I'm new here and I wondered - how many years ago was the war, exactly?"
"The war? Nearly five hundred revolutions." He seemed surprised - that she didn't know, and that she was interested, she supposed, There was no reluctance in him to answer, no offence. The memorial statue was upkept as a matter of civic duty, likely, and no more than that. "The Trimethians were almost destroyed before they surrendered. History now." His gesture there was dismissive.
"And you've been at peace for a long time."
"Of course."
She was glad she'd read that vibe correctly. She gazed up at the memorial, then distractedly turned to thank the man, and found him already walking away. She shouted her thanks at his retreating back.
Tegan let the sculpture reclaim her attention. Sitting askew on the steps, staring up at its colours, it was easy to lose herself in its shifting geometric visions. Eventually a shadow fell over her. She blinked up at its source. Jake, smirking, with a green meshed net woven around a circle of small bottles swinging from his hand.
She gaped. "How did you do that?"
"I have had to get by in a few countries where I didn't speak the language on Earth," he said. He poked a finger into his own chest. "I am an international super-spy."
"But the coins were worthless!"
"I guess you never know what's worth something. Hey, lead could be a precious metal here, or a completely unknown substance. The guy in the shop seemed happy enough with the trade, anyway."
"Well - well done!" she said, astonished. "I guess you have your uses." She pinched his arm.
"Uh, thanks." He eyed her warily. "I guess we should be getting back, before they find out we're gone."
"It's probably too late for that already." She snorted. "Besides, it's not like I have to ask permission to go out." She frowned, and gave him a studying look. "I suppose you did, working for those people."
"Kinda. I mean, if I wanted to head out for more than a day or - anyway, it's not... I just don't want the others to worry."
No wonder, Tegan thought, that he'd jumped at a chance to explore the universe in an alien spacecraft. Maybe he wasn't as nuts as she'd thought. "Okay."
"Hang on." She halted her progress and looked back. He'd dropped to one knee and set the net of bottles aside to strip slippers and bandages off his feet. He pulled the slippers back on over barely-reddened skin. They were loose and flopped in ungainly fashion as he stood up, pulling the gauze from his hands. Underneath, his hands were still visibly burned, but the burns looked a week or two old, and not far from healed. He stopped with the bundle in his hand and cursed.
"Ha. Good luck recognising an alien dustbin," Tegan laughed. "You can't leave that in the street, I'm sure it must be a biohazard in some way or other. You'll have to carry it back to the TARDIS now. Here, I'll take the liquid refreshment." She plucked it from the floor without waiting for a response.
He balled up the gauze and shoved it into his jeans pocket. "If you're doing that 'cause you're hoping to drink it, sad to inform you that we've another puzzle to figure out when we get back - how to open the caps."
Tegan looked down at the neat circle of tops secured on the bottles by an unfathomable collection of tabs and black wire. "Oh, rabbits!"
***
Jake exchanged a worried glance with Tegan as they hesitated outside the partially open door. The collision of his headache with the irritated oratory floating from inside the TARDIS made him wince.
"Why people persistently fail to heed a simple, sensible piece of advice is quite beyond me. 'Stay here with the TARDIS.' 'Don't go wandering off on unknown planets and alien ships.' But what do I get? 'Out for a walk - back soon.'"
"Don't worry," Tegan hissed. "His bark's worse than his bite."
He eyed her dubiously. Over the course of the last few hours, she had turned into a tentative ally, something which he had not expected - but he knew the position could prove temporary. He watched as, far bolder than he, she pushed the door fully open and ventured inside, interrupting the weary diatribe with a "Hello, Doc" that didn't quite manage not to sound guilty.
The Doctor spun about, brandishing the yellow post-it note she'd left on the console. "A walk?" he repeated. Behind him, Adric was sliding the last few pieces into place on the alien puzzle with his attention rather deliberately focused upon his hands. Nyssa stood uncertainly with her arms folded, and looked as though she was contemplating the wisdom of intervening.
"For some air," Jake added. He felt awkward, on the one hand not wanting to hide behind Tegan's skirts and on the other very much aware that he was the stranger here, the guest. He did not want to seem ungrateful to the Doctor for letting him travel with them.
"I spent most of the last week in jail," Tegan supplemented, dangerously. There was a moment's exchange of equally stubborn accusation from both sides before she relented, reassuring the Doctor with a sigh, "We were all right, Doctor. Really." The net of bottles was held low against her thigh, half-covered by her draped jacket, and it seemed she'd forgotten them in the moment. But now she manouevred herself around the console room so that she kept the net out of the Doctor's sight, and once the console was between them she slipped it down underneath, where they could retrieve it later. "There's a bit of a town at the bottom of the mountain, and the people were friendly and everything."
"It was really interesting," Jake offered. His voice trailed off as he registered how intently the Doctor was eying his feet.
"My slippers," the alien said morosely.
Jake followed his gaze downwards. "Uh... sorry." The blue slippers were in a sad state after being used to climb down, and back up, a mountainside. "I--" He envisaged Tegan's reaction if he completed the statement 'I couldn't let her go alone' and stopped.
But the Doctor sighed and rubbed his forehead with his fingers, perhaps remembering why it must have been necessary for Jake to purloin his oversized fuzzy footwear in the first place. When he looked up again, Jake felt his eyes take in the new absence of bandaging, and his expression cleared somewhat. "Very well. I'm relieved to see you both back in one piece."
There was something about his tone that suggested they were only evading a severe ticking off because he was feeling very magnanimous indeed and they had been extremely lucky to avoid disaster. It had been impossible not to notice in his confrontation with the NSA that, for a guy who didn't look more than a few years Jake's senior, the Doctor had a remarkable ability to reduce grown men and women, NSA directors, generals and heavily armed soldiers to guilty twelve-year-olds.
"Did you sort out the ship's defences?" Tegan asked, snapping up the opportunity to change the subject.
"No," said the Doctor, some of his short temper returning. He cast a glare at Adric, who was still pretending to be oblivious.
"We've found the right systems," Nyssa elaborated keenly. "It shouldn't take much longer now. And Adric found something else interesting."
The Doctor's sour face didn't change, and Jake figured that a clue as to why he'd become so touchy about people wandering off. He supposed the captain of a ship was undeniably responsible for his crew's safety even if he wasn't the good-as guardian of half his young crew and if the 'ship' in question looked like a blue British phone booth.
"I want to tell them!" Adric spoke up, coming alive all of a sudden, and launched into an excited babble about warships and live bombs.
"Really?" Jake asked.
"Surely that's all the more reason we should be getting out of here!" Tegan exclaimed, alarmed. Her jaw dropped in horrified, late realisation. "Hang on - what about the town? All those people, they'd be right in the path if the mountainside was blown up, even if they weren't caught in the blast-- How much firepower is in this thing?"
"Don't be stupid," Adric said scornfully. "It's been here ages, and survived the original crash. Whatever their missiles are made with, it's stable. We're all perfectly safe."
"Now, now, Adric." The Doctor clasped a quelling hand to the boy's shoulder, cutting short the exchange of glares. "It's just possible this planet has been very lucky. Tegan's right - once we've made the computer's central defences safe we ought to inform the local authorities... Are you quite all right, Tegan? Tegan?"
Her expression had glazed over, but the Doctor's voice snapped her back to reality. "Oh, I -- I'm sorry. Doctor, I just thought of something."
Jake saw the snort gathering on Adric's face. But whatever comment was brewing, he hadn't chance to voice it before Tegan launched off her unfathomable question.
"--Doctor, do you think this ship could have been here for five hundred years?"
Go to Chapter 5