The Long Way Down, Part 1a
Title: The Long Way Down, Part 1/5
Author: Llywela13
Show: Classic Doctor Who
Characters: Fourth Doctor, Sarah Jane Smith, Harry Sullivan
Rating: PG
Summary: Another false landing by the TARDIS sees the Doctor, Sarah and Harry stranded and separated on a strange, hostile world can they find their way back to the TARDIS and each other to make good their escape?
Disclaimer: The Doctor, his TARDIS and his companions belong to the BBC. I have borrowed them for this story and am making no profit from this.
Author's Note: This story is a sequel to and follows directly on from The Freedom of Lindos, but does not depend on knowledge of that story and can be read as standalone
The story is complete but will be posted in parts
Prologue
"Get the door, would you, Harry," the Doctor called, buffing at a spot on the TARDIS console with his sleeve and then patting it.
The door control was one of the few switches on that console Harry Sullivan dared touch, after the alarming outcome of his first encounter with the Doctor's remarkable time machine. He'd come a long way since then halfway around the universe and back, in fact but it was with hard-earned caution nonetheless that he flipped the switch, and was relieved to see the door opening as intended, which meant he'd chosen the right one.
This was the second attempt they'd made to return to UNIT in response to an urgent summons, and if Harry's time aboard the TARDIS had taught him anything it was that the Doctor's ability to control his remarkable time machine was a little on the erratic side, so he headed for the door hoping rather than expecting to see the reassuringly familiar sight of the lab back at HQ.
The door opened into space or height, rather and he caught hold of the frame to avoid stepping out onto nothing, looked down at a tremendous drop of many thousands of feet, dizzyingly far and crowded with traffic airborne traffic, zipping around at breath-taking speed. Looking up again, he blinked and jerked back as another of those flying cars zipped past, almost close enough to touch and then another, and another. The sky was full of them, zooming around in all directions and at all levels.
It was a city of some kind a city of skyscrapers, impossibly high, all glass and chrome, graceful and curved, busy and bustling with air traffic of all shapes and sizes, as far as the eye could see.
Not UNIT headquarters, then.
"Er, Doctor "
Part One
Sarah Jane Smith arrived in the console room just in time to hear the Doctor say, "Ah," in a pensive, chagrined tone.
"Well, that doesn't sound good," she remarked, amused. "Aren't we there yet?"
Standing over at the door, Harry turned and caught her eye. He had an expressive face, as a rule, and the expression it wore just now was a mixture of resignation and amusement. "Looks like we've missed the target again, I'm afraid, old thing."
"Again?" She shouldn't be surprised, turned quizzical eyes upon the Doctor, teasing, "Hey, I thought you said you were fixing the thingamajig."
"The navigational stabilisers I was. I have," he loftily defended.
"He's almost sure of it," Harry mischievously added, and Sarah had to grin at the Doctor's baleful glower. He didn't like to have his TARDIS steering prowess questioned or mocked, even when that questioning and mocking was completely justified.
"The balance is a little out, that's all," he said with a sniff, and managed to make it sound as if he'd always intended this as no more than a test run. "Just a matter of refinement, you know, easily resolved. Still, we may as well get our bearings, since we're here. Let's take a look, shall we?"
"Careful," Harry warned as they joined him at the door and a moment later Sarah saw why and caught hold of the door frame with a gasp because they were perched right at the edge of some kind of ledge, teetering over the most tremendous drop she'd ever seen.
"Oh, that's high." She wasn't fond of heights at the best of times, and this was so high the ground wasn't visible there were clouds down there, far below them! Harry solicitously took her elbow to steady her and she couldn't even feign a protest on principle, too busy maintaining her death grip on the doorframe so as not to wobble right off the ledge. She stared in wonder at glistening skyscrapers and the dizzying array of fast-moving air traffic that filled the space between them. "Where are we, Doctor?"
"I'm not entirely sure," the Doctor admitted with an expansive shrug and a thoughtful moue. "These intergalactic trading outposts all look very much the same, you know if you've seen one, you've seen them all."
Sarah looked at Harry and said, "It's an intergalactic trading outpost of some kind, then," with a roll of her eyes that made him grin it might go without saying for the Doctor and may not be as definitive an answer as he'd like to give, but it was useful information for them. "How high do you suppose we are?" she added, glancing downward with a shudder.
Another of those expansive shrugs the Doctor was so fond of, accompanied by a tug of the ear lobe and rub of the chin, which meant he was guessing and didn't want to say so. "Oh, a good two miles or so, I should imagine."
"Two miles?" Her head span again at the thought of it.
"At the very least." The Doctor peered appraisingly out at the breath-taking view. "No obvious landmarks check the rear view on the scanner, would you?"
As awe-inspiring as the cityscape was, Sarah was only too happy to step away from it and activate the viewscreen instead, for a rather safer view of whatever lay behind them. It flickered into life offering a wonderful view of a dull, metallic wall of some kind, slightly curved, with no identifying features whatsoever.
"Well, a fat lot of help that is," she snorted.
"Ah," said the Doctor, and he waggled his eyebrows at her with a cheery grin. "Back to the drawing board, then."
"I think I can see some kind of inscription around the way here a logo of some kind," Harry offered. The Doctor brightened.
"What does it say?"
"I can't quite make it out." Harry was leaning out through the open door at an alarming angle to peer around the side of the TARDIS and Sarah's head swam with vertigo just looking at him, hanging out over that drop.
"Hey, be careful," she called, because this was Harry, who could trip over his own feet for no good reason on a perfectly flat bit of ground, never mind over a two mile drop, and they were right on the edge.
"It's all right, there's just enough room here for a foot. It's only a step." He swung himself around as he spoke, using the tiniest of gaps between the TARDIS and the edge of the ledge as a foothold, and vanished from sight.
"Well?" The Doctor strode to the door and tried peering out and around himself, and Sarah hurried after him, deathly drop or no deathly drop.
"Well don't you go disappearing out there as well."
"Harry? What do you see?" the Doctor called.
"I say. What a remarkable place." Harry sounded impressed. "You can see for miles from up here. No way out, though."
"How do you mean?"
"Funny sort of wall back here," he replied, with typical Harry vagueness. "No doors. Jolly odd sort of place, I must say. We seem to have landed on some kind of platform, I suppose, just sort of sticking out and going nowhere. It's not very big."
"What about the logo, Harry anything to indicate where we are?"
"Er it says 'Vox-Leon orbital'," Harry began to read, but he got no further because that was when the platform beneath them tilted on its side.
It was over in a blink, no time to grab onto anything, barely even time to scream. One moment Sarah was standing alongside the Doctor in the wide open TARDIS doorway, the next they were falling out through it and all she knew was terror. It was thousands of feet down to the ground below, so high she couldn't even feel how fast she was falling, bitterly cold air whipping through her hair and clothes and lungs, and then a sharp jerk almost pulled her shoulder out of its socket and she was hanging.
A whimper escaped.
"It's all right, it's all right, I've got you," a voice called from somewhere just above, deep and low and soothing. The Doctor.
He had hold of her wrist and she clutched desperately at his sleeve with fingers fast becoming painfully numb with cold, flailed frantically with her other arm for something, anything to hold onto.
"Stop struggling," he said, and that was easier said than done when blind panic was in control of all motor functions. "I'm going to swing you around, try to catch hold of the structure."
He began to swing before she'd processed the words, before she even knew what structure he meant. The whole universe had shrunk to a pinpoint and that pinpoint was the Doctor's grip on her wrist and the two mile drop beneath her feet; she couldn't even see what he'd found to hold onto, because that would mean looking and she couldn't. He swung her and her stomach lurched, her vision blurred, but then there was a structure and she grabbed onto it with frozen fingers. Another heart-stopping moment as he released her wrist, but she had something to hold on to now and a second hand meant a tighter grip. Flailing feet found footholds and the Doctor was still at her side, the warmth of his body pressed tight against hers, pushing her onward up the outer wall of whatever kind of structure this was. At last she found an opening and crawled through it and away from the edge, collapsed in a quivering heap of pounding heart and heaving lungs.
The shaking subsided. She lifted her head to see the Doctor perched on all fours in that high, wide opening that had allowed them access to this level, right at the edge of the ledge with a white-knuckle grip on it as he stared down at the deathly drop below.
An icy fist seemed to clutch at her heart, filling her with dread. "Doctor?"
"I can't see the TARDIS," he said, and it was very nearly the same light, nonchalant tone he'd used before, when they were standing in the TARDIS doorway discussing the view, only not, there was an edge to his voice now that she'd only rarely heard before, and his face was turned away from her.
The TARDIS wasn't the only thing missing.
Harry.
"What about Harry?" He'd been right alongside them and the whole platform had tilted, so if the TARDIS had fallen then Harry had also fallen and the frantic panic of free-fall had been one thing, but this was a whole new kind of terror because he wasn't here on this new level with them which meant he hadn't managed to save himself.
Suddenly Sarah was moving again, faster than she'd felt capable of only a moment ago. Scrambling back to the edge of the ledge, fear of heights or no fear of heights, she stared, aghast, at the whirl of air-cars zipping through the sky, above, around and below them, and the dizzying drop to the ground thousands of feet below, so very far it couldn't even be seen.
"Oh no. No."
"Sarah." The Doctor's voice was low, his hand resting gently at the small of her back, but comfort only made it worse made it real.
"God no." What became of a human body that fell two miles to the ground? She didn't know, but her mind, unbidden, conjured up images aplenty, each one more horrific than the last. Just a few minutes ago she and Harry had shared knowing grins over the Doctor's piloting eccentricities and now
She retched, coughing up bitter bile, and felt gentle hands smoothing her hair away from her face and patting her back until the nausea subsided.
"Come away from the edge, Sarah." The Doctor's voice was still very soft, still very gentle.
She allowed him to pull her back and slumped in a heap staring dully out at the air cars and skyscrapers that surrounded them, blurred now by unshed tears. She was shaking again, and it took a moment to realise that the Doctor had started to talk of course he had, it was his default reaction to stress of any kind.
" should have realised," he was saying, uncharacteristically subdued, "the topmost platforms are for exo-atmospheric orbital cruisers the landing rudders retract when they take off after re-fuelling, that's why we fell: landed on the rudder."
"We landed on a rudder?" Dashing at her eyes with the back of a hand, Sarah attempted to take an interest in what he was saying, in case it was important.
"Of an orbital cruiser, weren't you listening?" He sounded as flippant as if nothing had happened; you'd have to know him extremely well to catch the hollow undertone to his voice.
"No," she said, and stirred herself to look around at this refuge they'd found this wide, open platform that formed part of a much vaster structure, bounded by pillars that arched to a peak high above their heads, supporting another platform further up, like some kind of bizarre cross between an oil rig and a multi-storey car park, giant-sized. There was a functional, industrial look about the place: glossy metal floor and support struts, ductwork and pipes and machinery, glisteningly bright and shiny. What any of it was for she couldn't imagine. "So where are we?" she dully asked.
"Re-fuelling station," the Doctor replied, still in that too-light tone that rang hollowly in her ears. "We landed on a cruiser using the facilities at the upper deck; this is one of the intermediate levels."
"We're going to have to tell them, you know." She didn't even realise she was going to say it until the words were already out. "When we get back to Earth, we'll have to tell everyone the Brigadier. We'll have to tell him how we ran off with his medical officer and haven't brought him back."
Pushing back to his feet, the Doctor stuffed his hands in his pockets and turned away, his face hidden from her still. "That's a very defeatist attitude, Sarah," was all he said.
"Well, two miles is a very long way to fall, Doctor!" She scrambled upright, tears pricking at her eyes again. "And there's his family, as well oh, but I don't even know if he has any." And that realisation hit hard. "His mother's dead, he told me that once," she added. It was the only thing she knew for sure about Harry's family and home life; although he would happily chatter away on all manner of topics, he never really talked about anything personal, and it was too late now to ask.
Shock became anger, bubbling over in a sudden burst of fury.
"It's as if you don't even care." And she knew that wasn't true, however strangely detached the Doctor's alien reactions sometimes seemed, but still the words came tumbling out. "He was your friend too, and he wasn't even supposed to be here. You thought it was funny, didn't you, tricking him into the TARDIS, never mind asking him what he wanted, but the joke was over the moment we landed on Nerva Beacon instead of going straight back to UNIT!"
"Well, you know, he did give that helmic regulator quite a twist " the Doctor mildly defended.
"But it wasn't Harry's fault we fell from two miles in the sky all because we landed in the wrong place," she raged, and she couldn't stay still, couldn't settle, stormed away to nowhere, because there was nowhere to go on this flat, open space, high in the sky with the chill wind whistling through it.
She felt, rather than heard the Doctor following her, turned to see him shuffling awkwardly, hands stuffed into his pockets, his expression sombre.
He looked old, in fact, older than this vibrant new body of his had ever looked old and tired and drawn.
"Two miles is a long way, Sarah. A lot can happen in two miles. We won't give up hope just yet."
How long would it take to fall all the way to the ground from this height? Would it be over and too late already or could there somehow be even the slightest of chances still, if they could only manage to raise the alarm?
"They say that people who fall from great heights are dead before they hit the ground," she murmured under her breath, a sickening lurch in the pit of her stomach as she remembered that Thal guard on Skaro taunting her with those words, sneering that he didn't believe it himself. How many minutes had it been now? Too many, surely, and she turned on the Doctor again. "Do you really believe someone could survive a fall like that?"
"Well, we did," he observed with a shrug, and just like that her anger was gone, leaving behind a terrible ache, and she didn't want to have hope, not if it was only going to feel like this again at the end of it.
"I'm sorry," she quietly said. "I shouldn't have it's not your fault. And I know Harry didn't regret coming with us, he told me."
"I'm glad to hear it." The Doctor's voice was soft and sincere, and she'd never seen quite that look in his eye before she'd seen him frightened and hopeless and desperate, but this particular look was new; he'd never, she supposed, dropped a friend off a two mile height before.
"What are we going to do?" Stranded on a tower two miles in the air without the TARDIS was a bit of a pickle to be in, it only now occurred to her.
The Doctor looked around rather pensively, wrinkling his nose. "Well, we're not dead, so that's promising for a start I'm sure we'll think of something."
Sarah glanced back toward the edge of the platform and the terrible drop that lay beyond. "We have to get down from here find the TARDIS. But then "
But then what? If they found the TARDIS and left, it would mean admitting that they really had lost Harry, and as much as she hadn't wanted to hope, she suddenly knew that she wasn't ready for that.
The Doctor pulled his floppy felt hat out of a pocket and crammed it down over his unruly curls. "We won't leave this world until we've found Harry," he said, as serious as she'd ever known him, "One way or another."
dwdwdwdwdw
There was a voice.
There was a voice and there was pain.
Rather a lot of pain, actually: red-hot agony that spiked and stabbed through nerve endings and radiated through joints and limbs, disorienting and all-encompassing.
Awareness of anything beyond the pain came only gradually, fading in and out like a television signal in a storm, now a moment of clarity, now gone. Muscle spasms. Ragged breath hissing through clenched teeth. Contorted limbs sprawled across an uneven surface, sharp edges digging in as pinpricks of pain that were no more than a tiny part of the searing whole. The whine of an engine somewhere at hand, its groans competing with the howl of rushing wind. The bitter chill of the air and the acrid odour of oil mingled with the metallic scent of pooling blood that was sticky and damp and in too many places. What had happened?
What had happened?
Harry tried to lift his head, but a new pain shot down his spine at the attempt, white-hot and blinding. He lay still, gasping for breath, while the voice he'd been only dimly aware of slowly coalesced into words.
" thrusters non-functional, navigation out. Steering whoa! Close. Steering: just barely. Stop moving, Earth man. You're bleeding all over the deck."
The command was curt and the speaker sounded annoyed. Harry tried to reply and heard an inarticulate moan. Was that him?
"You'll have to wait while I try not to crash us." Competing with the whistle of the wind and whine of the engine, the voice sounded strained. "I don't have time for this you really couldn't have picked someone else's windshield to fall through?"
Windshield. Fall through.
A memory drifted into focus, the memory of a tremendous height and of falling and then hitting hard.
Harry tried to move, to get up, to see, and the pain that hit was a tidal wave, overwhelming every sense. He heard a terrible sound, a strangled, garbled howl, and was shocked to realise it had come from him, subsided once more, gasping and choking.
"I said stop moving. I'm busy and you've got broken bones." The whine of the engine grew louder, more ragged, and grunts of effort began to register. Then, "No good, we'll have to set down. Have to glide her down, hold tight "
Harry coughed, pain shuddering through his frame, and spat out a mouthful of blood.
He was a doctor. Even concussed and semi-conscious he could tell how serious this was.
"Stop moving, what are you doing?"
Dying, he wanted to say, but couldn't. The storm was back, a fuzz of white noise that drowned out every sense. He felt hands on him, heard the drone of a voice that no longer shaped words, the sound distant and dwindling.
Then nothing but the velvety blackness of oblivion, swallowing him whole.
dwdwdwdwdw
Attempting to flag down a passing air car as it made a brief stop to use the facilities was spectacularly unsuccessful.
"How unfriendly," said the Doctor, pouting, as it sped away without even acknowledging their presence, forcing them to dive aside to avoid being run over or flown over, as it were.
Watching the strangely-shaped vehicle zoom out and away, Sarah felt more despondent than ever, but the Doctor seemed undeterred.
"Oh well. This is a service station; there must be an attendant around somewhere. We'll start there. Onward and downward, eh, Sarah." He began to scout around, determinedly bold and confident trying just that bit too hard to act as if nothing terrible had happened at all.
Sarah trailed after him with a heavy heart, wishing she could muster even a fraction of his optimism and assurance. "It's onward and upward usually, isn't it?"
"Up? Why would we want to go up? Down, Sarah, down, we want to go down downward and onward, onward and downward. Ah, now this looks promising."
He'd found what looked to be the entrance to some kind of maintenance shaft. Of course. No matter where in the universe they travelled, from one planet and time to another, somehow they always ended up crawling through tunnels of some kind. It was the one constant of their travels well, that and danger, of course.
It opened at the touch of a button to reveal a wide vertical shaft, tubular in shape. Sarah peered inside and shuddered. It was a long way down and the sides were completely smooth. "Nothing to hold on to how are we supposed to climb down that?"
"Ah," said the Doctor, holding up a finger like a magician about to perform a particularly clever trick. He pressed some more buttons on the control panel set into the wall alongside the door, and then looked her in the eye and said, "You trust me, don't you, Sarah?"
"Of course." She sometimes wondered if she should, the amount of scrapes he led her into, but then he also always got her out of those scrapes again, and at the end of the day the universe was always a better place for it. She'd entered into this with her eyes wide open, knowing full well what it meant to set foot through the TARDIS door. No, there was no one in the universe she trusted more.
Harry had also trusted him, of course, and that was a painful thought, but the Doctor didn't give her time to dwell on it. He smiled and took her hand and said, "Jump," pulling her forward before she'd fully registered the word, and a second later her heart was in her mouth because she was off her feet and falling again.
Except that she wasn't falling.
It was the most peculiar sensation they seemed to be caught in a jet of warm air that supported their weight, floating them downward as gently as if they were feathers, until they found themselves hovering at the opening that would lead out onto the next level down and had only to take a step forward onto the platform there.
"Whew!" Sarah grabbed at the Doctor's arm as she wobbled across onto solid ground once more stepping off thin air like that felt very strange. Then she pulled away and smacked his arm. "Hey, a decent warning would be nice next time."
The Doctor grinned. "Anti-grav lift. Rather nifty, don't you think?"
"Well, that's one word for it!" Re-gathering her composure, she looked around at a platform almost identical to the one they'd just left. "All right, so what now find a telephone and dial 999?"
This platform was almost identical to the one they'd just left, but not quite. The Doctor pointed toward a structure across the way. "The attendant's hut, I presume. That might be a good place to begin, wouldn't you say?"
dwdwdwdwdw
Relief came slowly, awareness of it slower still.
The pain had gone, Harry only gradually realised, after an eternity floating in some inky distant haze. He'd also been moved, made comfortable on some kind of couch affair, away from the pools of blood and broken glass. The voice was still there though, a grumbling, disgruntled constant.
"Sarah?" Had he spoken the name aloud or merely thought it? It wasn't Sarah's voice he could hear, though or the Doctor, for that matter.
So who was it?
He opened his eyes to see some kind of instrument being brandished before them.
"...completely exhausted and these things are expensive, you know. What were you thinking, freefalling at such a height?"
Harry blinked, his sluggish brain struggling to process the question through scattered memories.
"Wasn't actually a plan," he mumbled, and was relieved to hear that the words definitely came out this time, his voice hoarse but audible. He tried an experimental flex of a hand, then a foot. Nothing, as if the injuries he distinctly remembered had never happened. "I say, that's remarkable. What did you do?"
The instrument was waved in his face again and behind it the owner of the voice came into focus for the first time: an alien being of some kind, female, tall and statuesque with indigo skin that was mottled like marble. Her head was bald but for a fringe of tentacles that ran from ear to ear along the base of her skull, her eyes were multi-faceted and iridescent, her nose strangely ridged and her teeth sharp and pointed, like a cat. The faint lines around her eyes and mouth would be an indication of maturity on a human, and she wore a kind of flight suit, a gun holstered at her hip. "I healed you, of course, and now the unit is exhausted," she grumbled. "And who will pay to replenish it?"
There wasn't a great deal Harry could say to that.
"Er, I'm very grateful," he stammered, sincere and rather dazed, unable to even begin to imagine how such miraculous medical technology might work.
She glowered. "Then you may express your gratitude by assisting me with repairs I'm late, I can't afford to waste any more time and the job will be swifter with two."
She strode away, leaving Harry to slowly push himself upright on legs that were still just a touch on the wobbly side, the lingering effect of miraculously healed trauma.
He looked around, trying to orient himself. This was the inside of one of the air cars he'd seen earlier, now stationary. It had a cockpit up front with a small and rather sparse but functional living space to the rear; it was to the cockpit that the alien woman had moved. He followed her, carefully lest his wobbly legs pack in on him, and saw for the first time the extensive damage caused by his crash through the windshield.
"Oh, I say "
That would explain her bad mood, then.
And the Doctor and Sarah definitely weren't here.
"Er, I don't suppose you noticed anything else falling, did you?" he ventured, looking askance at the blood splattered across the smashed central control panel and pooled here and there on the floor. As a doctor, he generally wasn't troubled by blood in the slightest, but when it was his own and there was this much of it, well the reminder of that excruciating pain was rather unsettling.
The alien woman was on her back beneath the battered control panel, peering up into the wiring with a small handheld light. "Such as?"
"A box," he anxiously elaborated. "A big blue box."
"This box belongs to you, does it?"
"My friends were in it." He sincerely hoped they still were, tried to pin down the memory of what exactly had happened. The floor had tilted, suddenly, to an acute angle, tipping him off; that much he did remember. He was almost sure he'd seen the TARDIS slide off as well, thought he might have heard Sarah scream but the memories were jumbled and indistinct, the after-effect of cranial trauma.
"No," said the alien woman. "No blue box. Come here and help me."
Harry looked at the mess of wires and controls.
"I'm not sure how much help I can be." He bent anyway to peer beneath the console, in an effort to show willing. She had, after all, saved his life and that after being severely inconvenienced.
"Dilly, Dilly, never here when you're needed," she sighed to herself. "Put your hand here, Earth man hold this in place while I solder."
"It's Harry." He placed his hand where she'd told him and watched with interest as she set to work on the repair. "Surgeon-Lieutenant Harry Sullivan, in fact. Er about the blue box."
"This box of yours again," she said with a snort. "What of it?"
"My friends are in it," he repeated, anxious at not knowing what had become of them, rattling around in the TARDIS as it fell. "They may be injured."
"The box may have collided with another vehicle and destroyed both, had you thought of that?"
He hadn't, and paled at the suggestion. The TARDIS was more or less indestructible, wasn't it? The Doctor had claimed as much, at any rate.
"Is there any way we could find out?" he worriedly asked.
"A serious collision would be reported on the citadel information channels," the brusque response came from beneath the console. "If we could access them, we might learn of any such news." The accusation was implicit in the woman's tone as she waved a hand at the damaged console above them. "But my priority is to get this heap moving again, and fast."
The soldering tool flicked off and she pushed out from under the console, pulled a toolbox toward her and selected a handful, held them out to him.
"Hold these for me."
She disappeared under the panel again. Clutching at the tools, Harry felt helpless.
"Look, I don't want to be any trouble, er " He didn't even know her name.
"Ren. You may call me Ren."
"Ren." Short and to the point, much like the woman herself. "I don't want to be any trouble, Ren, but, er " He followed as she shimmied around to another section of console and began work on that. "But I really must find my friends." Anything might have happened to them, dropping off the top of a building like that; made the blood run cold just to think about it. "Perhaps if you could give me an idea of where I might begin ?"
"No." Her reply was brusque and to the point. "I need your help with this and you owe me the debt."
"Of course," he hastily assured her, wondering just how great this debt might prove and how on Earth he was supposed to pay it when he hadn't a bean to his name and still less mechanical ability. "But, er perhaps when the ship is repaired, then if you'll just set me down and point me on my way "
"I don't have time! I'm already far behind schedule and my engagement cannot wait. So I am stuck with you and you are stuck with me."
Harry subsided, wondering what in the world he was going to do.
A sigh drifted out from beneath the console and Ren pushed back out, sat up and shook her head at him, wearing an expression of mingled frustration and resignation. "Perhaps afterward, when my business is complete there may be time enough then to search for this blue box and your friends. Will that do?"
It would to have to. "Thank you," said Harry, relieved.
On to Part 1b
Author: Llywela13
Show: Classic Doctor Who
Characters: Fourth Doctor, Sarah Jane Smith, Harry Sullivan
Rating: PG
Summary: Another false landing by the TARDIS sees the Doctor, Sarah and Harry stranded and separated on a strange, hostile world can they find their way back to the TARDIS and each other to make good their escape?
Disclaimer: The Doctor, his TARDIS and his companions belong to the BBC. I have borrowed them for this story and am making no profit from this.
Author's Note: This story is a sequel to and follows directly on from The Freedom of Lindos, but does not depend on knowledge of that story and can be read as standalone
The story is complete but will be posted in parts
Prologue
"Get the door, would you, Harry," the Doctor called, buffing at a spot on the TARDIS console with his sleeve and then patting it.
The door control was one of the few switches on that console Harry Sullivan dared touch, after the alarming outcome of his first encounter with the Doctor's remarkable time machine. He'd come a long way since then halfway around the universe and back, in fact but it was with hard-earned caution nonetheless that he flipped the switch, and was relieved to see the door opening as intended, which meant he'd chosen the right one.
This was the second attempt they'd made to return to UNIT in response to an urgent summons, and if Harry's time aboard the TARDIS had taught him anything it was that the Doctor's ability to control his remarkable time machine was a little on the erratic side, so he headed for the door hoping rather than expecting to see the reassuringly familiar sight of the lab back at HQ.
The door opened into space or height, rather and he caught hold of the frame to avoid stepping out onto nothing, looked down at a tremendous drop of many thousands of feet, dizzyingly far and crowded with traffic airborne traffic, zipping around at breath-taking speed. Looking up again, he blinked and jerked back as another of those flying cars zipped past, almost close enough to touch and then another, and another. The sky was full of them, zooming around in all directions and at all levels.
It was a city of some kind a city of skyscrapers, impossibly high, all glass and chrome, graceful and curved, busy and bustling with air traffic of all shapes and sizes, as far as the eye could see.
Not UNIT headquarters, then.
"Er, Doctor "
Part One
Sarah Jane Smith arrived in the console room just in time to hear the Doctor say, "Ah," in a pensive, chagrined tone.
"Well, that doesn't sound good," she remarked, amused. "Aren't we there yet?"
Standing over at the door, Harry turned and caught her eye. He had an expressive face, as a rule, and the expression it wore just now was a mixture of resignation and amusement. "Looks like we've missed the target again, I'm afraid, old thing."
"Again?" She shouldn't be surprised, turned quizzical eyes upon the Doctor, teasing, "Hey, I thought you said you were fixing the thingamajig."
"The navigational stabilisers I was. I have," he loftily defended.
"He's almost sure of it," Harry mischievously added, and Sarah had to grin at the Doctor's baleful glower. He didn't like to have his TARDIS steering prowess questioned or mocked, even when that questioning and mocking was completely justified.
"The balance is a little out, that's all," he said with a sniff, and managed to make it sound as if he'd always intended this as no more than a test run. "Just a matter of refinement, you know, easily resolved. Still, we may as well get our bearings, since we're here. Let's take a look, shall we?"
"Careful," Harry warned as they joined him at the door and a moment later Sarah saw why and caught hold of the door frame with a gasp because they were perched right at the edge of some kind of ledge, teetering over the most tremendous drop she'd ever seen.
"Oh, that's high." She wasn't fond of heights at the best of times, and this was so high the ground wasn't visible there were clouds down there, far below them! Harry solicitously took her elbow to steady her and she couldn't even feign a protest on principle, too busy maintaining her death grip on the doorframe so as not to wobble right off the ledge. She stared in wonder at glistening skyscrapers and the dizzying array of fast-moving air traffic that filled the space between them. "Where are we, Doctor?"
"I'm not entirely sure," the Doctor admitted with an expansive shrug and a thoughtful moue. "These intergalactic trading outposts all look very much the same, you know if you've seen one, you've seen them all."
Sarah looked at Harry and said, "It's an intergalactic trading outpost of some kind, then," with a roll of her eyes that made him grin it might go without saying for the Doctor and may not be as definitive an answer as he'd like to give, but it was useful information for them. "How high do you suppose we are?" she added, glancing downward with a shudder.
Another of those expansive shrugs the Doctor was so fond of, accompanied by a tug of the ear lobe and rub of the chin, which meant he was guessing and didn't want to say so. "Oh, a good two miles or so, I should imagine."
"Two miles?" Her head span again at the thought of it.
"At the very least." The Doctor peered appraisingly out at the breath-taking view. "No obvious landmarks check the rear view on the scanner, would you?"
As awe-inspiring as the cityscape was, Sarah was only too happy to step away from it and activate the viewscreen instead, for a rather safer view of whatever lay behind them. It flickered into life offering a wonderful view of a dull, metallic wall of some kind, slightly curved, with no identifying features whatsoever.
"Well, a fat lot of help that is," she snorted.
"Ah," said the Doctor, and he waggled his eyebrows at her with a cheery grin. "Back to the drawing board, then."
"I think I can see some kind of inscription around the way here a logo of some kind," Harry offered. The Doctor brightened.
"What does it say?"
"I can't quite make it out." Harry was leaning out through the open door at an alarming angle to peer around the side of the TARDIS and Sarah's head swam with vertigo just looking at him, hanging out over that drop.
"Hey, be careful," she called, because this was Harry, who could trip over his own feet for no good reason on a perfectly flat bit of ground, never mind over a two mile drop, and they were right on the edge.
"It's all right, there's just enough room here for a foot. It's only a step." He swung himself around as he spoke, using the tiniest of gaps between the TARDIS and the edge of the ledge as a foothold, and vanished from sight.
"Well?" The Doctor strode to the door and tried peering out and around himself, and Sarah hurried after him, deathly drop or no deathly drop.
"Well don't you go disappearing out there as well."
"Harry? What do you see?" the Doctor called.
"I say. What a remarkable place." Harry sounded impressed. "You can see for miles from up here. No way out, though."
"How do you mean?"
"Funny sort of wall back here," he replied, with typical Harry vagueness. "No doors. Jolly odd sort of place, I must say. We seem to have landed on some kind of platform, I suppose, just sort of sticking out and going nowhere. It's not very big."
"What about the logo, Harry anything to indicate where we are?"
"Er it says 'Vox-Leon orbital'," Harry began to read, but he got no further because that was when the platform beneath them tilted on its side.
It was over in a blink, no time to grab onto anything, barely even time to scream. One moment Sarah was standing alongside the Doctor in the wide open TARDIS doorway, the next they were falling out through it and all she knew was terror. It was thousands of feet down to the ground below, so high she couldn't even feel how fast she was falling, bitterly cold air whipping through her hair and clothes and lungs, and then a sharp jerk almost pulled her shoulder out of its socket and she was hanging.
A whimper escaped.
"It's all right, it's all right, I've got you," a voice called from somewhere just above, deep and low and soothing. The Doctor.
He had hold of her wrist and she clutched desperately at his sleeve with fingers fast becoming painfully numb with cold, flailed frantically with her other arm for something, anything to hold onto.
"Stop struggling," he said, and that was easier said than done when blind panic was in control of all motor functions. "I'm going to swing you around, try to catch hold of the structure."
He began to swing before she'd processed the words, before she even knew what structure he meant. The whole universe had shrunk to a pinpoint and that pinpoint was the Doctor's grip on her wrist and the two mile drop beneath her feet; she couldn't even see what he'd found to hold onto, because that would mean looking and she couldn't. He swung her and her stomach lurched, her vision blurred, but then there was a structure and she grabbed onto it with frozen fingers. Another heart-stopping moment as he released her wrist, but she had something to hold on to now and a second hand meant a tighter grip. Flailing feet found footholds and the Doctor was still at her side, the warmth of his body pressed tight against hers, pushing her onward up the outer wall of whatever kind of structure this was. At last she found an opening and crawled through it and away from the edge, collapsed in a quivering heap of pounding heart and heaving lungs.
The shaking subsided. She lifted her head to see the Doctor perched on all fours in that high, wide opening that had allowed them access to this level, right at the edge of the ledge with a white-knuckle grip on it as he stared down at the deathly drop below.
An icy fist seemed to clutch at her heart, filling her with dread. "Doctor?"
"I can't see the TARDIS," he said, and it was very nearly the same light, nonchalant tone he'd used before, when they were standing in the TARDIS doorway discussing the view, only not, there was an edge to his voice now that she'd only rarely heard before, and his face was turned away from her.
The TARDIS wasn't the only thing missing.
Harry.
"What about Harry?" He'd been right alongside them and the whole platform had tilted, so if the TARDIS had fallen then Harry had also fallen and the frantic panic of free-fall had been one thing, but this was a whole new kind of terror because he wasn't here on this new level with them which meant he hadn't managed to save himself.
Suddenly Sarah was moving again, faster than she'd felt capable of only a moment ago. Scrambling back to the edge of the ledge, fear of heights or no fear of heights, she stared, aghast, at the whirl of air-cars zipping through the sky, above, around and below them, and the dizzying drop to the ground thousands of feet below, so very far it couldn't even be seen.
"Oh no. No."
"Sarah." The Doctor's voice was low, his hand resting gently at the small of her back, but comfort only made it worse made it real.
"God no." What became of a human body that fell two miles to the ground? She didn't know, but her mind, unbidden, conjured up images aplenty, each one more horrific than the last. Just a few minutes ago she and Harry had shared knowing grins over the Doctor's piloting eccentricities and now
She retched, coughing up bitter bile, and felt gentle hands smoothing her hair away from her face and patting her back until the nausea subsided.
"Come away from the edge, Sarah." The Doctor's voice was still very soft, still very gentle.
She allowed him to pull her back and slumped in a heap staring dully out at the air cars and skyscrapers that surrounded them, blurred now by unshed tears. She was shaking again, and it took a moment to realise that the Doctor had started to talk of course he had, it was his default reaction to stress of any kind.
" should have realised," he was saying, uncharacteristically subdued, "the topmost platforms are for exo-atmospheric orbital cruisers the landing rudders retract when they take off after re-fuelling, that's why we fell: landed on the rudder."
"We landed on a rudder?" Dashing at her eyes with the back of a hand, Sarah attempted to take an interest in what he was saying, in case it was important.
"Of an orbital cruiser, weren't you listening?" He sounded as flippant as if nothing had happened; you'd have to know him extremely well to catch the hollow undertone to his voice.
"No," she said, and stirred herself to look around at this refuge they'd found this wide, open platform that formed part of a much vaster structure, bounded by pillars that arched to a peak high above their heads, supporting another platform further up, like some kind of bizarre cross between an oil rig and a multi-storey car park, giant-sized. There was a functional, industrial look about the place: glossy metal floor and support struts, ductwork and pipes and machinery, glisteningly bright and shiny. What any of it was for she couldn't imagine. "So where are we?" she dully asked.
"Re-fuelling station," the Doctor replied, still in that too-light tone that rang hollowly in her ears. "We landed on a cruiser using the facilities at the upper deck; this is one of the intermediate levels."
"We're going to have to tell them, you know." She didn't even realise she was going to say it until the words were already out. "When we get back to Earth, we'll have to tell everyone the Brigadier. We'll have to tell him how we ran off with his medical officer and haven't brought him back."
Pushing back to his feet, the Doctor stuffed his hands in his pockets and turned away, his face hidden from her still. "That's a very defeatist attitude, Sarah," was all he said.
"Well, two miles is a very long way to fall, Doctor!" She scrambled upright, tears pricking at her eyes again. "And there's his family, as well oh, but I don't even know if he has any." And that realisation hit hard. "His mother's dead, he told me that once," she added. It was the only thing she knew for sure about Harry's family and home life; although he would happily chatter away on all manner of topics, he never really talked about anything personal, and it was too late now to ask.
Shock became anger, bubbling over in a sudden burst of fury.
"It's as if you don't even care." And she knew that wasn't true, however strangely detached the Doctor's alien reactions sometimes seemed, but still the words came tumbling out. "He was your friend too, and he wasn't even supposed to be here. You thought it was funny, didn't you, tricking him into the TARDIS, never mind asking him what he wanted, but the joke was over the moment we landed on Nerva Beacon instead of going straight back to UNIT!"
"Well, you know, he did give that helmic regulator quite a twist " the Doctor mildly defended.
"But it wasn't Harry's fault we fell from two miles in the sky all because we landed in the wrong place," she raged, and she couldn't stay still, couldn't settle, stormed away to nowhere, because there was nowhere to go on this flat, open space, high in the sky with the chill wind whistling through it.
She felt, rather than heard the Doctor following her, turned to see him shuffling awkwardly, hands stuffed into his pockets, his expression sombre.
He looked old, in fact, older than this vibrant new body of his had ever looked old and tired and drawn.
"Two miles is a long way, Sarah. A lot can happen in two miles. We won't give up hope just yet."
How long would it take to fall all the way to the ground from this height? Would it be over and too late already or could there somehow be even the slightest of chances still, if they could only manage to raise the alarm?
"They say that people who fall from great heights are dead before they hit the ground," she murmured under her breath, a sickening lurch in the pit of her stomach as she remembered that Thal guard on Skaro taunting her with those words, sneering that he didn't believe it himself. How many minutes had it been now? Too many, surely, and she turned on the Doctor again. "Do you really believe someone could survive a fall like that?"
"Well, we did," he observed with a shrug, and just like that her anger was gone, leaving behind a terrible ache, and she didn't want to have hope, not if it was only going to feel like this again at the end of it.
"I'm sorry," she quietly said. "I shouldn't have it's not your fault. And I know Harry didn't regret coming with us, he told me."
"I'm glad to hear it." The Doctor's voice was soft and sincere, and she'd never seen quite that look in his eye before she'd seen him frightened and hopeless and desperate, but this particular look was new; he'd never, she supposed, dropped a friend off a two mile height before.
"What are we going to do?" Stranded on a tower two miles in the air without the TARDIS was a bit of a pickle to be in, it only now occurred to her.
The Doctor looked around rather pensively, wrinkling his nose. "Well, we're not dead, so that's promising for a start I'm sure we'll think of something."
Sarah glanced back toward the edge of the platform and the terrible drop that lay beyond. "We have to get down from here find the TARDIS. But then "
But then what? If they found the TARDIS and left, it would mean admitting that they really had lost Harry, and as much as she hadn't wanted to hope, she suddenly knew that she wasn't ready for that.
The Doctor pulled his floppy felt hat out of a pocket and crammed it down over his unruly curls. "We won't leave this world until we've found Harry," he said, as serious as she'd ever known him, "One way or another."
dwdwdwdwdw
There was a voice.
There was a voice and there was pain.
Rather a lot of pain, actually: red-hot agony that spiked and stabbed through nerve endings and radiated through joints and limbs, disorienting and all-encompassing.
Awareness of anything beyond the pain came only gradually, fading in and out like a television signal in a storm, now a moment of clarity, now gone. Muscle spasms. Ragged breath hissing through clenched teeth. Contorted limbs sprawled across an uneven surface, sharp edges digging in as pinpricks of pain that were no more than a tiny part of the searing whole. The whine of an engine somewhere at hand, its groans competing with the howl of rushing wind. The bitter chill of the air and the acrid odour of oil mingled with the metallic scent of pooling blood that was sticky and damp and in too many places. What had happened?
What had happened?
Harry tried to lift his head, but a new pain shot down his spine at the attempt, white-hot and blinding. He lay still, gasping for breath, while the voice he'd been only dimly aware of slowly coalesced into words.
" thrusters non-functional, navigation out. Steering whoa! Close. Steering: just barely. Stop moving, Earth man. You're bleeding all over the deck."
The command was curt and the speaker sounded annoyed. Harry tried to reply and heard an inarticulate moan. Was that him?
"You'll have to wait while I try not to crash us." Competing with the whistle of the wind and whine of the engine, the voice sounded strained. "I don't have time for this you really couldn't have picked someone else's windshield to fall through?"
Windshield. Fall through.
A memory drifted into focus, the memory of a tremendous height and of falling and then hitting hard.
Harry tried to move, to get up, to see, and the pain that hit was a tidal wave, overwhelming every sense. He heard a terrible sound, a strangled, garbled howl, and was shocked to realise it had come from him, subsided once more, gasping and choking.
"I said stop moving. I'm busy and you've got broken bones." The whine of the engine grew louder, more ragged, and grunts of effort began to register. Then, "No good, we'll have to set down. Have to glide her down, hold tight "
Harry coughed, pain shuddering through his frame, and spat out a mouthful of blood.
He was a doctor. Even concussed and semi-conscious he could tell how serious this was.
"Stop moving, what are you doing?"
Dying, he wanted to say, but couldn't. The storm was back, a fuzz of white noise that drowned out every sense. He felt hands on him, heard the drone of a voice that no longer shaped words, the sound distant and dwindling.
Then nothing but the velvety blackness of oblivion, swallowing him whole.
dwdwdwdwdw
Attempting to flag down a passing air car as it made a brief stop to use the facilities was spectacularly unsuccessful.
"How unfriendly," said the Doctor, pouting, as it sped away without even acknowledging their presence, forcing them to dive aside to avoid being run over or flown over, as it were.
Watching the strangely-shaped vehicle zoom out and away, Sarah felt more despondent than ever, but the Doctor seemed undeterred.
"Oh well. This is a service station; there must be an attendant around somewhere. We'll start there. Onward and downward, eh, Sarah." He began to scout around, determinedly bold and confident trying just that bit too hard to act as if nothing terrible had happened at all.
Sarah trailed after him with a heavy heart, wishing she could muster even a fraction of his optimism and assurance. "It's onward and upward usually, isn't it?"
"Up? Why would we want to go up? Down, Sarah, down, we want to go down downward and onward, onward and downward. Ah, now this looks promising."
He'd found what looked to be the entrance to some kind of maintenance shaft. Of course. No matter where in the universe they travelled, from one planet and time to another, somehow they always ended up crawling through tunnels of some kind. It was the one constant of their travels well, that and danger, of course.
It opened at the touch of a button to reveal a wide vertical shaft, tubular in shape. Sarah peered inside and shuddered. It was a long way down and the sides were completely smooth. "Nothing to hold on to how are we supposed to climb down that?"
"Ah," said the Doctor, holding up a finger like a magician about to perform a particularly clever trick. He pressed some more buttons on the control panel set into the wall alongside the door, and then looked her in the eye and said, "You trust me, don't you, Sarah?"
"Of course." She sometimes wondered if she should, the amount of scrapes he led her into, but then he also always got her out of those scrapes again, and at the end of the day the universe was always a better place for it. She'd entered into this with her eyes wide open, knowing full well what it meant to set foot through the TARDIS door. No, there was no one in the universe she trusted more.
Harry had also trusted him, of course, and that was a painful thought, but the Doctor didn't give her time to dwell on it. He smiled and took her hand and said, "Jump," pulling her forward before she'd fully registered the word, and a second later her heart was in her mouth because she was off her feet and falling again.
Except that she wasn't falling.
It was the most peculiar sensation they seemed to be caught in a jet of warm air that supported their weight, floating them downward as gently as if they were feathers, until they found themselves hovering at the opening that would lead out onto the next level down and had only to take a step forward onto the platform there.
"Whew!" Sarah grabbed at the Doctor's arm as she wobbled across onto solid ground once more stepping off thin air like that felt very strange. Then she pulled away and smacked his arm. "Hey, a decent warning would be nice next time."
The Doctor grinned. "Anti-grav lift. Rather nifty, don't you think?"
"Well, that's one word for it!" Re-gathering her composure, she looked around at a platform almost identical to the one they'd just left. "All right, so what now find a telephone and dial 999?"
This platform was almost identical to the one they'd just left, but not quite. The Doctor pointed toward a structure across the way. "The attendant's hut, I presume. That might be a good place to begin, wouldn't you say?"
dwdwdwdwdw
Relief came slowly, awareness of it slower still.
The pain had gone, Harry only gradually realised, after an eternity floating in some inky distant haze. He'd also been moved, made comfortable on some kind of couch affair, away from the pools of blood and broken glass. The voice was still there though, a grumbling, disgruntled constant.
"Sarah?" Had he spoken the name aloud or merely thought it? It wasn't Sarah's voice he could hear, though or the Doctor, for that matter.
So who was it?
He opened his eyes to see some kind of instrument being brandished before them.
"...completely exhausted and these things are expensive, you know. What were you thinking, freefalling at such a height?"
Harry blinked, his sluggish brain struggling to process the question through scattered memories.
"Wasn't actually a plan," he mumbled, and was relieved to hear that the words definitely came out this time, his voice hoarse but audible. He tried an experimental flex of a hand, then a foot. Nothing, as if the injuries he distinctly remembered had never happened. "I say, that's remarkable. What did you do?"
The instrument was waved in his face again and behind it the owner of the voice came into focus for the first time: an alien being of some kind, female, tall and statuesque with indigo skin that was mottled like marble. Her head was bald but for a fringe of tentacles that ran from ear to ear along the base of her skull, her eyes were multi-faceted and iridescent, her nose strangely ridged and her teeth sharp and pointed, like a cat. The faint lines around her eyes and mouth would be an indication of maturity on a human, and she wore a kind of flight suit, a gun holstered at her hip. "I healed you, of course, and now the unit is exhausted," she grumbled. "And who will pay to replenish it?"
There wasn't a great deal Harry could say to that.
"Er, I'm very grateful," he stammered, sincere and rather dazed, unable to even begin to imagine how such miraculous medical technology might work.
She glowered. "Then you may express your gratitude by assisting me with repairs I'm late, I can't afford to waste any more time and the job will be swifter with two."
She strode away, leaving Harry to slowly push himself upright on legs that were still just a touch on the wobbly side, the lingering effect of miraculously healed trauma.
He looked around, trying to orient himself. This was the inside of one of the air cars he'd seen earlier, now stationary. It had a cockpit up front with a small and rather sparse but functional living space to the rear; it was to the cockpit that the alien woman had moved. He followed her, carefully lest his wobbly legs pack in on him, and saw for the first time the extensive damage caused by his crash through the windshield.
"Oh, I say "
That would explain her bad mood, then.
And the Doctor and Sarah definitely weren't here.
"Er, I don't suppose you noticed anything else falling, did you?" he ventured, looking askance at the blood splattered across the smashed central control panel and pooled here and there on the floor. As a doctor, he generally wasn't troubled by blood in the slightest, but when it was his own and there was this much of it, well the reminder of that excruciating pain was rather unsettling.
The alien woman was on her back beneath the battered control panel, peering up into the wiring with a small handheld light. "Such as?"
"A box," he anxiously elaborated. "A big blue box."
"This box belongs to you, does it?"
"My friends were in it." He sincerely hoped they still were, tried to pin down the memory of what exactly had happened. The floor had tilted, suddenly, to an acute angle, tipping him off; that much he did remember. He was almost sure he'd seen the TARDIS slide off as well, thought he might have heard Sarah scream but the memories were jumbled and indistinct, the after-effect of cranial trauma.
"No," said the alien woman. "No blue box. Come here and help me."
Harry looked at the mess of wires and controls.
"I'm not sure how much help I can be." He bent anyway to peer beneath the console, in an effort to show willing. She had, after all, saved his life and that after being severely inconvenienced.
"Dilly, Dilly, never here when you're needed," she sighed to herself. "Put your hand here, Earth man hold this in place while I solder."
"It's Harry." He placed his hand where she'd told him and watched with interest as she set to work on the repair. "Surgeon-Lieutenant Harry Sullivan, in fact. Er about the blue box."
"This box of yours again," she said with a snort. "What of it?"
"My friends are in it," he repeated, anxious at not knowing what had become of them, rattling around in the TARDIS as it fell. "They may be injured."
"The box may have collided with another vehicle and destroyed both, had you thought of that?"
He hadn't, and paled at the suggestion. The TARDIS was more or less indestructible, wasn't it? The Doctor had claimed as much, at any rate.
"Is there any way we could find out?" he worriedly asked.
"A serious collision would be reported on the citadel information channels," the brusque response came from beneath the console. "If we could access them, we might learn of any such news." The accusation was implicit in the woman's tone as she waved a hand at the damaged console above them. "But my priority is to get this heap moving again, and fast."
The soldering tool flicked off and she pushed out from under the console, pulled a toolbox toward her and selected a handful, held them out to him.
"Hold these for me."
She disappeared under the panel again. Clutching at the tools, Harry felt helpless.
"Look, I don't want to be any trouble, er " He didn't even know her name.
"Ren. You may call me Ren."
"Ren." Short and to the point, much like the woman herself. "I don't want to be any trouble, Ren, but, er " He followed as she shimmied around to another section of console and began work on that. "But I really must find my friends." Anything might have happened to them, dropping off the top of a building like that; made the blood run cold just to think about it. "Perhaps if you could give me an idea of where I might begin ?"
"No." Her reply was brusque and to the point. "I need your help with this and you owe me the debt."
"Of course," he hastily assured her, wondering just how great this debt might prove and how on Earth he was supposed to pay it when he hadn't a bean to his name and still less mechanical ability. "But, er perhaps when the ship is repaired, then if you'll just set me down and point me on my way "
"I don't have time! I'm already far behind schedule and my engagement cannot wait. So I am stuck with you and you are stuck with me."
Harry subsided, wondering what in the world he was going to do.
A sigh drifted out from beneath the console and Ren pushed back out, sat up and shook her head at him, wearing an expression of mingled frustration and resignation. "Perhaps afterward, when my business is complete there may be time enough then to search for this blue box and your friends. Will that do?"
It would to have to. "Thank you," said Harry, relieved.
On to Part 1b