Fic: Solid Skies, Chapter 8
Jul. 7th, 2009 11:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
veldeiaTitle: Solid Skies
Author: Veldeia
Series: Sequel to Hollow World
Fandom: Doctor Who
Warnings: WIP
Characters/Pairings: 10th Doctor, Martha Jones, OCs. Gen.
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: If you've seen it on TV, it isn't mine.
Summary: After surviving one big cave, the Doctor, Martha and a caving team from the Sixties find themselves in even more trouble on a planet full of caves.
8. Unknown Location
Something was very much not right. Everyone seemed to be falling asleep. The Doctor felt woozy. There had to be something in the air, something insidious, invisible, odourless, and otherwise hard to notice. It was strange he hadn't spotted it earlier, since Time Lords were very sensitive to such things, but then again, so were Khiandrians. He could feel it now, playing havoc with his biochemistry. He tried to fight it off, but it was difficult, since he'd already inhaled a fair amount.
He staggered to his feet. Everyone else was unconscious, and they didn't react when he tried to rouse them. He made his way to the door, leaning on the walls and the backs of chairs, calling out for help. The door was locked, of course.
He heard a soft thud behind him, and turned around just in time to see a slim figure dressed in black from head to toes, wearing a gas mask, drop on the table through a hole in the ceiling. Another such figure was already standing on the floor next to the table, gun pointed at the Doctor. There was a zap, and he felt the familiar jolt of a Khiandrian stun gun, which sent him sprawled on the floor, face-down.
As soon as the Doctor had regained some control over his limbs again, he tried to get up, but a heavy weight landed on his back, pinning him down.
"This one's stubborn, isn't he?" a mocking soprano spoke up above him.
The weight disappeared, and he felt himself being hauled up from the floor. He tried to struggle, but his coordination was still off, his movements listless.
The dark figure hung him by the collar. She was so short that his knees still touched the ground, but she clearly had no problem at all holding his weight. She stared at him, masked face tilting from one side to the other. "What do you know. You hear that?" she said to her partner. "Double heartbeat. This is our boy."
"I wish we could take the whole bunch of them," the other masked figure, a man, spoke up. He was looking at Martha's motionless form. "The aliens, the traitors..."
"We have our orders," the woman declared.
"These contrast gigs -" the man began.
The woman hissed sharply. "Not here!"
By this time, the Doctor had gathered his wits somewhat, and opened his mouth to protest against this random assault, but he didn't get out as much as a squeak. The Khiandrian holding him swung a heavy fist at his face, and before he knew it, he was every bit as unconscious as everyone else.
**********
When Martha woke up, everyone was speaking in gibberish. There were several Khiandrians in the room, talking in animated voices, but their speech was a series of clicks and sneezes and melodious vowels that made no sense to her. Around the table, she saw the other humans stirring, all groggy and confused. The Doctor was nowhere in sight. She looked around, and could see, among guards and other unknown Khiandrians, an angry Jess, a serious Neir, and Jess's sister Khel, who looked very unhappy, but there was no sign of the Doctor at all.
"What's going on?" Martha asked.
The Khiandrians turned to stare at her, looking puzzled. Khel said something, but again, Martha couldn't understand one word of it.
"I don't get it," Jess said, in English. "We could understand each other just fine before. I didn't even think about it then - obviously, you don't know Khiandrian, and they don't know English. Why did we understand each other before? Why's it changed? As if this wasn't enough of a mess without that!"
"It's the Doctor," Martha said, with a sinking feeling. "The TARDIS was translating for us, somehow, and it works through him. What's happened to him? Where is he?"
"Damned if I knew!" Jess groaned. "He's gone. Someone drugged us and took him - but the guards refuse to believe that it was an attack, and not some sort of an alien ploy!"
A man in a guard's uniform addressed Jess, who scowled at him, but translated the words to the humans. "They're moving us to another, more secure room."
The secure room was a small one, with uneven walls of bare rock, and only a few stone benches for furniture. It could've been a cave chamber somewhere on Earth, and it felt more prison-like than anything Martha had seen so far. Neir wasn't allowed to stay with them anymore.
"Don't they have CCTV here? I mean, security cameras, or other surveillance equipment and such, so they could find out what really happened?" Martha asked Jess, leaning against the cold wall.
"Of course they do. This should be one of the most secure places on the planet. Whoever did this was somehow able to turn everything off - not to mention that they were able to introduce a gas of some sort into the room without anyone noticing. All in all, I think it's obvious they must've had an inside accomplice," Jess said.
"And why did they take him?" Martha went on. "What could they hope to gain? He only wanted to help everyone!"
"They're probably making a point, just like the people who attacked the train," Jess suggested.
"But why only him, then? Why not all of us? We're as alien as he is!"
"Maybe because he's different from the rest of you, and he's clearly given the impression that he's your leader. Maybe because he stood up for me in front of the Fifteen. I don't know, really," Jess said sullenly, and slumped to sit on one of the benches. "Honestly, I don't understand any of this any better than you do. When I left home, violent attacks like this were considered a thing of the distant past."
They must've been waiting for hours, Martha's worry growing steadily, when finally, the door was opened. "You've been summoned by the Fifteen. Come," the guard said, in plain English. Martha wasn't sure what that meant, but she decided she could at least be certain that the Doctor wasn't dead.
Even though she now understood the language, it took her a moment to actually grasp the meaning of the guard's words. She'd almost forgotten about the trial, and it felt like something that had happened a very long time ago. Still, the Great Chamber of Justice was just like it had been before, and Neir and the Fifteen were waiting for them.
One of the Fifteen rose to speak, a tall woman who hadn't spoken before. "The Fifteen have come to the conclusion that Jess, daughter of Jem, formerly of Chute Town, who asked to be held responsible for the possible crimes of her alien companions, will be granted her wish. Thus, no charges are pressed against the aliens Brian Ford, Grant Richardson, Joseph Stratton, Martha Jones, and the currently absent Doctor, regardless of their actual involvement in the events."
Currently absent - was that all the notice they took of what had happened? Martha thought, outraged.
A second juror stood up and went on. "Jess, daughter of Jem, formerly of Chute Town, is charged with serious violations of the Quarantine and Travel Laws both in 4358 and in 4381, as well as bringing a group of aliens to Khiandria on the 22nd cycle of the third season in 4381, in direct violation of the Emergency Law, thus trespassing on Khiandrian soil, and causing risk to all local life - an action which, under the current circumstances, the Fifteen consider an act of treason. The trial will recommence tomorrow, at the first tenth. The aliens' presence will be required as well, as they remain important witnesses."
A third juror stood up, and spread her arms ceremoniously. "What has been spoken and decided here today has been right, just and true. The Fifteen have nothing more to say."
Once the Fifteen had filed out of the room, the guards showed up to take the prisoners away - except that they found out they weren't prisoners anymore.
"We're only here for Jess, daughter of Jem," one of the guards announced. "The rest of you are free. Keep in mind that if you do anything illegal, she won't be able to protect you anymore."
"What about that attack, then? The Doctor getting kidnapped and all?" Martha asked incredulously. "I thought you suspected us for it."
"No, not anymore. We received a message from the Deep - they're a Dark extremist group. They announced that they've captured your friend. Took him where he belongs, that's what they said. Rest assured, we're doing our best to find him."
"But what're we supposed to do now? We hardly know anyone here, and half the city wants to lynch us, or kidnap us, or blast us to bits!" Grant complained.
"You should've thought about that before you came here and started breaking our laws," the guard said condescendingly.
Neir glared at the guard even more disdainfully, as if he were barely worthy of her attention at all. "Don't worry," she told the humans. "Khel is waiting for us in the entrance hall. You're not without friends here."
**********
When the Doctor woke up, he was entirely convinced that he was still on Earth, in Lechuguilla Cave, with a concussion. He was lying on a cold stone floor, feeling dizzy and a little queasy, with a terrible headache.
He opened his eyes, and blinked, and raised his hand to shield them from the dazzling white light all around him. Weird. By the time his eyes had adjusted, he'd come to realise that the headache was on the wrong side - and then, he remembered it wasn't a fall to a chasm but a sharp blow from a masked Khiandrian that had caused it.
The tunnel he was in was clearly another old petromite tunnel, round and maybe fifteen feet in diameter. It was entirely lifeless, and no wonder. The light pouring from the rows of lamps in the ceiling was so bright that no Khiandrian life form would stand it. The tunnel seemed to go on in both directions, but it curved so that he couldn't see very far. He'd obviously been kidnapped, but why had he been left alone? This didn't look like a cell. Where was he?
He got up. The surroundings spun a little, but the nausea was already abating. He followed the curving tunnel. Not far ahead of him, the lights came to a sudden stop, like a solid wall of darkness. He half expected it to feel solid, too - but before he had even reached it, he ran into an invisible barrier. A force field. He saw a control panel in the tunnel wall, but it was on the wrong side of the invisible barrier.
He turned around and tried the other direction. There, too, he found a wall of darkness, but there was no force field blocking the passage. Beyond the sharp change in lighting, the tunnel went on unchanged. He soon noticed that it wasn't actually dark, just dim, with the usual green lights.
After some hundred feet of walking, he reached a big, round room with a khirindal. It seemed abandoned. There was something on the ground right in front of him, a pale little thing. He crouched to get a better look. It was a petromite, but it wasn't glowing. Instead, it had a strange, milky sheen. He bent even closer, and poked a finger at it.
He had barely even touched the petromite, when it crumbled to a pile of white crystal dust.
With a startled cry, the Doctor pulled back his hand and stumbled backwards. He finally realised what he'd been looking at, and he knew where he was. How come he had been so slow? It must've been the combined after effects of the poison gas, the stun gun, and the hard punch to his poor head.
He could only hope he was lucky, or immune. Preferably both.
He headed away from the khirindal, choosing a tunnel which seemed parallel to the first one. Like he had expected, he soon found a brightly lit area, intersected by a force field. He figured the lights were an extra precaution, while the force field was the actual, impenetrable safeguard separating the quarantine zone from the rest of the world.
He poked and prodded at the force field, first with his hands, then with the sonic screwdriver. It was no good. He needed to reach the controls, but he couldn't, with the force field between him and them. Of course, that was the way it had to be, to keep anyone from escaping. The people who had put these obstacles here had known what they were doing.
He realised his right forefinger felt a little strange, the finger he'd touched the crystallised petromite with. He looked at it under the bright lights.
On the tip of his finger was a tiny, glimmering speck, like a snowflake or a small chip of ice. It felt a little like melting ice, too, or maybe the opposite, like a point where the temperature had somehow dropped to subzero, his fingertip starting to freeze. The tiny crystal looked like it might come off easily, but of course, no matter how he tried to wipe it against his pant leg and the cave wall next to him, it wouldn't budge. He even tried a few different sonic settings on it, to no avail.
He stared at his finger, a chill running down his spine. He was neither lucky nor immune. He'd been marked by the Diamond Death.
9. Nest Town
Author: Veldeia
Series: Sequel to Hollow World
Fandom: Doctor Who
Warnings: WIP
Characters/Pairings: 10th Doctor, Martha Jones, OCs. Gen.
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: If you've seen it on TV, it isn't mine.
Summary: After surviving one big cave, the Doctor, Martha and a caving team from the Sixties find themselves in even more trouble on a planet full of caves.
8. Unknown Location
Something was very much not right. Everyone seemed to be falling asleep. The Doctor felt woozy. There had to be something in the air, something insidious, invisible, odourless, and otherwise hard to notice. It was strange he hadn't spotted it earlier, since Time Lords were very sensitive to such things, but then again, so were Khiandrians. He could feel it now, playing havoc with his biochemistry. He tried to fight it off, but it was difficult, since he'd already inhaled a fair amount.
He staggered to his feet. Everyone else was unconscious, and they didn't react when he tried to rouse them. He made his way to the door, leaning on the walls and the backs of chairs, calling out for help. The door was locked, of course.
He heard a soft thud behind him, and turned around just in time to see a slim figure dressed in black from head to toes, wearing a gas mask, drop on the table through a hole in the ceiling. Another such figure was already standing on the floor next to the table, gun pointed at the Doctor. There was a zap, and he felt the familiar jolt of a Khiandrian stun gun, which sent him sprawled on the floor, face-down.
As soon as the Doctor had regained some control over his limbs again, he tried to get up, but a heavy weight landed on his back, pinning him down.
"This one's stubborn, isn't he?" a mocking soprano spoke up above him.
The weight disappeared, and he felt himself being hauled up from the floor. He tried to struggle, but his coordination was still off, his movements listless.
The dark figure hung him by the collar. She was so short that his knees still touched the ground, but she clearly had no problem at all holding his weight. She stared at him, masked face tilting from one side to the other. "What do you know. You hear that?" she said to her partner. "Double heartbeat. This is our boy."
"I wish we could take the whole bunch of them," the other masked figure, a man, spoke up. He was looking at Martha's motionless form. "The aliens, the traitors..."
"We have our orders," the woman declared.
"These contrast gigs -" the man began.
The woman hissed sharply. "Not here!"
By this time, the Doctor had gathered his wits somewhat, and opened his mouth to protest against this random assault, but he didn't get out as much as a squeak. The Khiandrian holding him swung a heavy fist at his face, and before he knew it, he was every bit as unconscious as everyone else.
When Martha woke up, everyone was speaking in gibberish. There were several Khiandrians in the room, talking in animated voices, but their speech was a series of clicks and sneezes and melodious vowels that made no sense to her. Around the table, she saw the other humans stirring, all groggy and confused. The Doctor was nowhere in sight. She looked around, and could see, among guards and other unknown Khiandrians, an angry Jess, a serious Neir, and Jess's sister Khel, who looked very unhappy, but there was no sign of the Doctor at all.
"What's going on?" Martha asked.
The Khiandrians turned to stare at her, looking puzzled. Khel said something, but again, Martha couldn't understand one word of it.
"I don't get it," Jess said, in English. "We could understand each other just fine before. I didn't even think about it then - obviously, you don't know Khiandrian, and they don't know English. Why did we understand each other before? Why's it changed? As if this wasn't enough of a mess without that!"
"It's the Doctor," Martha said, with a sinking feeling. "The TARDIS was translating for us, somehow, and it works through him. What's happened to him? Where is he?"
"Damned if I knew!" Jess groaned. "He's gone. Someone drugged us and took him - but the guards refuse to believe that it was an attack, and not some sort of an alien ploy!"
A man in a guard's uniform addressed Jess, who scowled at him, but translated the words to the humans. "They're moving us to another, more secure room."
The secure room was a small one, with uneven walls of bare rock, and only a few stone benches for furniture. It could've been a cave chamber somewhere on Earth, and it felt more prison-like than anything Martha had seen so far. Neir wasn't allowed to stay with them anymore.
"Don't they have CCTV here? I mean, security cameras, or other surveillance equipment and such, so they could find out what really happened?" Martha asked Jess, leaning against the cold wall.
"Of course they do. This should be one of the most secure places on the planet. Whoever did this was somehow able to turn everything off - not to mention that they were able to introduce a gas of some sort into the room without anyone noticing. All in all, I think it's obvious they must've had an inside accomplice," Jess said.
"And why did they take him?" Martha went on. "What could they hope to gain? He only wanted to help everyone!"
"They're probably making a point, just like the people who attacked the train," Jess suggested.
"But why only him, then? Why not all of us? We're as alien as he is!"
"Maybe because he's different from the rest of you, and he's clearly given the impression that he's your leader. Maybe because he stood up for me in front of the Fifteen. I don't know, really," Jess said sullenly, and slumped to sit on one of the benches. "Honestly, I don't understand any of this any better than you do. When I left home, violent attacks like this were considered a thing of the distant past."
They must've been waiting for hours, Martha's worry growing steadily, when finally, the door was opened. "You've been summoned by the Fifteen. Come," the guard said, in plain English. Martha wasn't sure what that meant, but she decided she could at least be certain that the Doctor wasn't dead.
Even though she now understood the language, it took her a moment to actually grasp the meaning of the guard's words. She'd almost forgotten about the trial, and it felt like something that had happened a very long time ago. Still, the Great Chamber of Justice was just like it had been before, and Neir and the Fifteen were waiting for them.
One of the Fifteen rose to speak, a tall woman who hadn't spoken before. "The Fifteen have come to the conclusion that Jess, daughter of Jem, formerly of Chute Town, who asked to be held responsible for the possible crimes of her alien companions, will be granted her wish. Thus, no charges are pressed against the aliens Brian Ford, Grant Richardson, Joseph Stratton, Martha Jones, and the currently absent Doctor, regardless of their actual involvement in the events."
Currently absent - was that all the notice they took of what had happened? Martha thought, outraged.
A second juror stood up and went on. "Jess, daughter of Jem, formerly of Chute Town, is charged with serious violations of the Quarantine and Travel Laws both in 4358 and in 4381, as well as bringing a group of aliens to Khiandria on the 22nd cycle of the third season in 4381, in direct violation of the Emergency Law, thus trespassing on Khiandrian soil, and causing risk to all local life - an action which, under the current circumstances, the Fifteen consider an act of treason. The trial will recommence tomorrow, at the first tenth. The aliens' presence will be required as well, as they remain important witnesses."
A third juror stood up, and spread her arms ceremoniously. "What has been spoken and decided here today has been right, just and true. The Fifteen have nothing more to say."
Once the Fifteen had filed out of the room, the guards showed up to take the prisoners away - except that they found out they weren't prisoners anymore.
"We're only here for Jess, daughter of Jem," one of the guards announced. "The rest of you are free. Keep in mind that if you do anything illegal, she won't be able to protect you anymore."
"What about that attack, then? The Doctor getting kidnapped and all?" Martha asked incredulously. "I thought you suspected us for it."
"No, not anymore. We received a message from the Deep - they're a Dark extremist group. They announced that they've captured your friend. Took him where he belongs, that's what they said. Rest assured, we're doing our best to find him."
"But what're we supposed to do now? We hardly know anyone here, and half the city wants to lynch us, or kidnap us, or blast us to bits!" Grant complained.
"You should've thought about that before you came here and started breaking our laws," the guard said condescendingly.
Neir glared at the guard even more disdainfully, as if he were barely worthy of her attention at all. "Don't worry," she told the humans. "Khel is waiting for us in the entrance hall. You're not without friends here."
When the Doctor woke up, he was entirely convinced that he was still on Earth, in Lechuguilla Cave, with a concussion. He was lying on a cold stone floor, feeling dizzy and a little queasy, with a terrible headache.
He opened his eyes, and blinked, and raised his hand to shield them from the dazzling white light all around him. Weird. By the time his eyes had adjusted, he'd come to realise that the headache was on the wrong side - and then, he remembered it wasn't a fall to a chasm but a sharp blow from a masked Khiandrian that had caused it.
The tunnel he was in was clearly another old petromite tunnel, round and maybe fifteen feet in diameter. It was entirely lifeless, and no wonder. The light pouring from the rows of lamps in the ceiling was so bright that no Khiandrian life form would stand it. The tunnel seemed to go on in both directions, but it curved so that he couldn't see very far. He'd obviously been kidnapped, but why had he been left alone? This didn't look like a cell. Where was he?
He got up. The surroundings spun a little, but the nausea was already abating. He followed the curving tunnel. Not far ahead of him, the lights came to a sudden stop, like a solid wall of darkness. He half expected it to feel solid, too - but before he had even reached it, he ran into an invisible barrier. A force field. He saw a control panel in the tunnel wall, but it was on the wrong side of the invisible barrier.
He turned around and tried the other direction. There, too, he found a wall of darkness, but there was no force field blocking the passage. Beyond the sharp change in lighting, the tunnel went on unchanged. He soon noticed that it wasn't actually dark, just dim, with the usual green lights.
After some hundred feet of walking, he reached a big, round room with a khirindal. It seemed abandoned. There was something on the ground right in front of him, a pale little thing. He crouched to get a better look. It was a petromite, but it wasn't glowing. Instead, it had a strange, milky sheen. He bent even closer, and poked a finger at it.
He had barely even touched the petromite, when it crumbled to a pile of white crystal dust.
With a startled cry, the Doctor pulled back his hand and stumbled backwards. He finally realised what he'd been looking at, and he knew where he was. How come he had been so slow? It must've been the combined after effects of the poison gas, the stun gun, and the hard punch to his poor head.
He could only hope he was lucky, or immune. Preferably both.
He headed away from the khirindal, choosing a tunnel which seemed parallel to the first one. Like he had expected, he soon found a brightly lit area, intersected by a force field. He figured the lights were an extra precaution, while the force field was the actual, impenetrable safeguard separating the quarantine zone from the rest of the world.
He poked and prodded at the force field, first with his hands, then with the sonic screwdriver. It was no good. He needed to reach the controls, but he couldn't, with the force field between him and them. Of course, that was the way it had to be, to keep anyone from escaping. The people who had put these obstacles here had known what they were doing.
He realised his right forefinger felt a little strange, the finger he'd touched the crystallised petromite with. He looked at it under the bright lights.
On the tip of his finger was a tiny, glimmering speck, like a snowflake or a small chip of ice. It felt a little like melting ice, too, or maybe the opposite, like a point where the temperature had somehow dropped to subzero, his fingertip starting to freeze. The tiny crystal looked like it might come off easily, but of course, no matter how he tried to wipe it against his pant leg and the cave wall next to him, it wouldn't budge. He even tried a few different sonic settings on it, to no avail.
He stared at his finger, a chill running down his spine. He was neither lucky nor immune. He'd been marked by the Diamond Death.
9. Nest Town
