Doctor Who BBCN20 - The Pirate Loop Read online

  She reached a hand into the inside pocket of the Doctor’s jacket, helping herself to the slim leather wallet that he kept with his sonic screwdriver. He raised an eyebrow at her but otherwise didn’t seem to object; he liked it when she showed some initiative.

  Martha flicked the wallet open, paused to picture in her mind what she wanted it to show, and then brandished it at the men still lurking in the shadows.

  ‘There’s no need for any concern,’ she said, adopting the confident, reassuring tone that she’d learned from Mr Stoker. ‘We’re not here on an inspection. My assistant here –’ she nodded her head at the Doctor

  ’– just needs to familiarise himself with the ship’s workings as part of his training. We’ll just be a couple of minutes and then let you get back to your work.’ She smiled her most charming smile.

  The men in the Bermuda shorts and aprons turned to each other, said nothing yet seemed to confer.

  ‘That was good,’ said the Doctor quietly, taking the wallet of psychic 8

  paper from her and pocketing it carefully. Slowly, one of the men in aprons shuffled forward, glancing back to his friends, who all kept safely where they were. Martha’s heart went out to the poor bloke.

  She thought he might have been the one who had waved before.

  ‘That’s it,’ she told him. ‘Me and him, we’re really nothing to worry about. I’m Martha, he’s the Doctor. Who are –’

  The sentence died in her throat as the man in the leather apron stepped out into the light. He was tall and muscular, his eyes alive with fear and excitement. And he didn’t have a mouth.

  9

  Martharealisedshewasstaring,herownmouthhangingopen. The man in the leather apron and the garish Bermuda shorts stared back at her mutely. Below the man’s nose, where a mouth should have been, there was just a small, round hole, the same size as if it had been made by a hole-punch. His glistening black stubble didn’t divide into beard and moustache, but covered the lower part of his face evenly.

  ‘Right,’ she said, not sure what she would say next. ‘Right,’ she said again.

  ‘I think what my superior is trying to articulate,’ said the Doctor, nimbly taking charge, ‘is that we’re very keen not to disturb what you’re doing. We’ll just keep out of your way.’

  But the mouthless man raised his fist and-began gesturing wildly.

  Martha grabbed the Doctor’s arm to pull him back, worried he might get himself hit. The Doctor shrugged her off, and began to wave his own arm in a similarly emphatic manner.

  It was some rudimentary kind of sign language.

  ‘What’s he saying?’ she asked.

  The Doctor and the mouthless man continued to wave their arms at each other. ‘I think,’ said the Doctor, ‘he wants us to go that way.’

  He stopped waving, and pointed in the direction that the mouth less 11

  man was still indicating. The mouthless man nodded vigorously. ‘Yes, I think that’s what he wants.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Martha to the mouthless man. ‘But you can understand us, can’t you? You can’t speak but you understand English?’

  The mouthless man nodded, then looked back at his colleagues. In the shadows, they nodded too. ‘Oh,’ said the Doctor. ‘That’s a good point. So, whoever you answer to, whoever gives you orders, they can tell you what to do out loud.’

  Again the mouthless man nodded, and Martha felt a thrill of fear.

  It wasn’t that this was a new species of people who just weren’t born with mouths. Instead they were some kind of lower order of men, able to take instructions yet not to answer back. Either they’d been bred like this or they’d been operated on, but whatever it was they were clearly some kind of class of slaves.

  Martha could see in the Doctor’s eyes the same determination she felt burning hot inside herself. Whatever happened, they were going to help free these people.

  The mouth less man gestured again down the passageway, beckoning the Doctor and Martha to follow him. They continued up the alley between the huge machines. The mouthless man’s bare back showed strong shoulders and toned muscles, Martha noticed. His Bermuda shorts were all swirls of pink and blue.

  The alley emerged into a wide, open area, about the size of Martha’s tiny flat in London. The far wall was covered over with a bank of complex levers and controls. Not needing to be prompted by the mouthless man, the Doctor put on his glasses as he hurried over to inspect it.

  Martha, knowing she’d make nothing of the controls herself but keen to at least look interested, headed over to a small, inset porthole to the left of all the switches. It must be some kind of inspection hatch for looking into the machine, she thought. She gazed in on a pale grey light that swirled gloopily beyond. Despite the clammy heat of the engine room she found her bare arms suddenly prickling with goose bumps. There was something scarily familiar about that grey light, but she couldn’t think what it could be.

  12

  She turned to the Doctor to ask him. His mouth hung open and there was a mixture of awe and horror in his eyes.

  ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ he said to her softly. ‘I really am.’ Martha felt her heart hammering in her chest. It was what he normally said when somebody they’d met got killed.

  ‘We’re too late?’ she said.

  The Doctor snapped out of his reverie to look at her. Again she saw the glimmer in his eyes, that quick and sly intelligence. ‘Too late?’ he said incredulously. ‘Nah. It’s just we’ve only been here five minutes and I already know what went wrong! Hate it when that happens.

  Well, not hate exactly. It bothers me. Brilliant word, “bothers”. Like

  “oblong”. People should use it more. Anyway, good puzzle should take an hour to solve at least. Well, with me slightly less. Like that cornfield maze on Milton Nine.’

  ‘You got lost in that for two days,’ said Martha.

  ‘Yeah!’ grinned the Doctor. ‘Wasn’t it brilliant? But this!’ He waved a hand dismissively at the bank of controls as he turned to the mouthless man. ‘Madness!’ He turned back to Martha. ‘You know what this is?’

  Martha scrutinised the levers, dials and switches. She was acutely aware of the mouthless man watching her, and his leather-aproned colleagues still there in the shadows, too. ‘Course,’ she said, lying through her teeth. ‘And it explains why the ship was never found, doesn’t it?’

  The Doctor gazed at her with the same utter bewilderment as that time she’d tried to explain about MySpace. Then his face lit up. ‘Of course!’ he said ‘Oh, you are brilliant, Martha Jones! Brilliant!’ He turned back to the controls and began to inspect the dials and readings with new-found glee.

  Keen to maintain the illusion of brilliance, Martha leant in close beside him to inspect the same dials and readings. The display showed complex swirls and flourishes instead of numbers she could read.

  ‘I think the TARDIS must have crashed quite hard,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t translate this for me.’

  13

  The Doctor looked at her over the top of his glasses. ‘Nah,’ he said.

  ‘They’re not numbers as you understand them. They’re expressions of atemporal mismatch. Kodicek Scale, I think.’ A thought struck him.

  ‘Are you sure you understand how this drive works?’

  She shrugged. ‘A bit.’

  ‘Right,’ said the Doctor. He stood up straight again, stepping away from the controls and stretching his long arms and back. He seemed about to address the mouthless man, then changed his mind and turned back to Martha. ‘What bit do you understand?’

  ‘Well,’ said Martha. ‘It drives the spaceship, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Aaaah,’ said the Doctor, wagging a finger at her. ‘But it’s not a spaceship, is it?’

  ‘Sorry. It drives the starship. You can be such a geek.’

  ‘Well,’ he huffed, pulling a sulky face. ‘These details are important.

  This drive here means it doesn’t travel t
hrough space.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘See?’ he said to the mouth less man. ‘She was really just winging it! Unbelievable these people. And you know what they did to the Dodo?’

  The mouthless man stared at him, either not getting the joke or too wary to show that he did.

  ‘Doctor,’ said Martha levelly. ‘Why don’t you tell us what this drive does.’

  ‘Yeah, good idea,’ he said. ‘What we’ve got here is really very clever.

  And a good century ahead of its time. They should be on plain old hyperspace wossnames. But this? It’s. . . it’s. . . ’ he twirled a hand in the air, as if it might help conjure the right word.

  ‘It’s brilliant?’ suggested Martha. Everything was brilliant with him.

  That’s why she’d found a starship called ‘Brilliant’ so funny in the first place.

  ‘Yeah,’ said the Doctor, nodding. ‘It’s that, too. Cuts out all the boring stuff of travelling between the stars. And there’s a lot of boring stuff out there. Billions and millions of miles of it. And empty, mostly, except for background radiation and lots of old TV. There’s not a lot to do on the journey to another star. You get old, you die and you 14

  just hope your great-great-great-great-great grandkids still remember how to fly the ship.’

  ‘Sounds fun,’ said Martha.

  ‘Oh, you lot do it with your usual pig-headed determination to do anything that’s completely bonkers. Have I said how you’re my very favourite species? But, bit of thinking, and there are ways of cutting corners.’

  ‘Like the Time Vortex,’ said Martha, who had taken some elemen-tary lessons in how the TARDIS worked.

  ‘Well, yeah,’ the Doctor acknowledged. ‘But this lot haven’t got anywhere near that far yet. Which is just as well, ’cos I’d be duty-bound to stop ’em. What they’ve done here is to push against the surface on the outside of the Vortex. It’s tough stuff, so it resists and you sort of bounce back off it. And if you can get the angle right –not that you have angles as such in nine-dimensional space – you skip along it, bump-bump-bump. I suppose it’s not that graceful, now I come to think about it.’

  ‘So it’s like skimming a stone across the surface of a lake,’ said Martha.

  ‘Er, yeah,’ said the Doctor. ‘I wish I’d thought of putting it like that.

  Can we just pretend I did?’

  ‘Yeah, whatever you like,’ said Martha. ‘So how does this explain how the Brilliant disappeared?’

  ‘Well,’ said the Doctor. ‘While all the posh passengers are upstairs sipping cocktails, the ship is lurching across the surface of the space-time continuum like a stone skimming across a lake.’ He beamed.

  ‘That is a good analogy! And every time it presses itself into that surface, and just before it bounces back out. . . Well, it technically skips out of space and time. That’s what makes it move so quickly, it misses out most of the actual distance. To anyone looking at it in just four or five dimensions, it’s like it blinks out of existence.’ He tried to click his fingers to demonstrate, but couldn’t make them click. ‘You get the idea.’

  ‘Right,’ said Martha. ‘So the drive makes it flick in and out of reality, yeah?’

  15

  ‘Pretty much,’ said the Doctor. ‘Now you see me, now you don’t.

  Now you see me again, now you don’t again.’

  ‘So it didn’t blow up or fall into a black hole,’ said Martha. ‘It just got stuck somewhere nobody could see it.’

  ‘Oh, I’d have been able to see it,’ said the Doctor. ‘If I’d gone looking.’

  ‘Well you’ve got special powers, haven’t you, oh mighty Last of the Time Lords?’

  ‘Do I go on and on about that?’

  Martha fluttered her eyelashes, all innocence. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever heard you mention it.’

  That’s OK then. Still, it would have been a bit easier for everyone else to find it if they hadn’t kept this technology quiet. I mean, I didn’t know anything about this drive. Me!’

  ‘You said there’s about to be a big war, didn’t you?’ said Martha.

  ‘Maybe they wanted to keep it secret from their enemies.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said the Doctor, glancing round. Martha realised he didn’t want to say whatever it was he really thought while the mouth less man was still listening. But she had an idea herself; the starship’s rich passengers weren’t just on some wild pleasure cruise. While the rest of the galaxy was struggling not to have a war, this lot had built themselves a clever new way of escaping all the trouble.

  Like she and the Doctor would be doing, if they just left in the TARDIS now. She felt awful about that, with the mouthless man stood there. They would be leaving him to his doom.

  ‘Isn’t there anything we can do for them?’ she asked the Doctor quietly. They’re going to be lost for ever, aren’t they?’

  The Doctor took her hand. ‘You know how this works,’ he said kindly. ‘We can’t change anything. We have to be responsible. What happens has already happened.’

  ‘Yeah, I know,’ she said. ‘Still. . . ’

  ‘They also brought this on themselves,’ said the Doctor gently. ‘This drive is experimental. And they’ve got staff to run it who can’t even tell them when it goes wrong! Oh, that’s all very clever for keeping 16

  it secret, but it’s also pretty stupid.’ He turned to the mouthless man.

  ‘No offence.’

  The mouthless man nodded vigorously. ‘See?’ said the Doctor. He checked the controls again. ‘Yes, see? Our friend here has sent an alert up to the captain to tell him the drive has stalled. But there’s not been an answer, so presumably it hasn’t got through. But at least everyone knows their place! The lowest ranks literally can’t speak back to their superiors, and now that’s going to cost everyone their lives.’

  ‘It’s that bad?’ said Martha.

  ‘Any effort to engage the ship with the drive stalled like this and it’s likely to explode. It’s really just a matter of time.’

  ‘We have to do something!’

  The Doctor reached out for her hand, gazed deep into her eyes.

  ‘Martha, we can’t. Not when it changes history.’

  He gazed at her levelly with his dark and twinkling eyes. But Martha refused to look away; this was too important. She was a proper doctor, even if he wasn’t. She had a duty to stop and help.

  And sometimes the Doctor needed her to remind him when he was wrong.

  ‘All right,’ he said wearily. ‘We’ll pop upstairs. I’ll have a word with the captain. A few quick pointers and then we’ll let them get on their way.’

  Martha grinned. ‘Great!’ she said. ‘You know it’s the right thing to do.’

  ‘I’m not sure I do, but anyway.’ He turned to the mouthless man.

  ‘Sorry about all that yammering there,’ he said. ‘Just needed to parley a plan. Anyway, we’re going to get this sorted out for you. Which way to the exit?’

  The mouthless man again gestured wildly, using both arms this time. He seemed unable to make any noise at all, and the worst thing about it was his own frustration at not being understood.

  ‘Maybe if you just lead us,’ said Martha, trying to make it sound kind.

  The mouthless man nodded. They followed him back down the alleyway between the machines, and round past the TARDIS. Set into 17

  the wall was what looked like a shower – a person-sized booth with a glass door.

  ‘Ooh!’ said the Doctor, dashing over. ‘I’ve not seen these in years!

  One-way transmat up to the bridge.’ He turned back to the mouthless man. ‘Is it a bridge, or is it more of a cockpit?’ The mouthless man shrugged, unable to reply. ‘Oh, never mind,’ said the Doctor, turning back to the machine. ‘Martha, this is brilliant. You step inside, press the button, and ping! you’re in a booth just like it at the far end of the ship.’

  ‘It’s a teleporter, yeah?’ said Martha. ‘Like in Star Trek.’

 
‘Well, not exactly like Star Trek,’ said the Doctor, busy trying to get the door open. It wouldn’t budge. ‘For one thing, it’ll make a different noise. Anyway, this is just for getting upstairs without all that boring business of walking. It’s cheating, if you ask me.’

  ‘Not if you can’t get into it,’ said Martha.

  ‘It’s stuck!’ said the Doctor, turning to the mouthless man. ‘I wondered why you’d not just gone to see the captain yourself. Something must be coming through the other way. Something really, really slow.

  It’s like being on dial-up!’

  ‘When were you ever on dial-up?’ asked Martha.

  ‘I read about it,’ said the Doctor. ‘Well,’ he said to the mouthless man. ‘That way’s blocked for the moment. Probably with some movie about a cat on a skateboard. So we’ll go see your captain on Shanks’s pony.’

  The mouthless man stared dumbly at him.

  ‘He means,’ said Martha, ‘we’re going to have to walk. Why can’t you talk normally?’

  ‘What?’ said the Doctor. ‘And be just like everybody else?’

  The mouthless man led them back round the TARDIS and then off to one side. They followed a narrow passageway to a thickly reinforced door. A complicated sequence of different handles and locks allowed the mouthless man to open it.

  Martha had expected to see the plush fittings of a luxury ship. Yet the way was barred by a strange, pale skin of material, like a kind of 18

  fungus. It totally blocked the door. The mouthless man again gestured emphatically; it was this obstacle he’d tried to explain.

  ‘Somebody really doesn’t want us getting out of here,’ said the Doctor. ‘Cor, this is a bit unusual!’ He put his hand out and stroked the pale surface. ‘Feels like cold scrambled egg!’

  ‘Do you know what it is?’ asked Martha.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ said the Doctor. ‘Seen this before. The TARDIS can get clogged with the stuff.’

  ‘It’s some sort of time fungus, then?’