Doctor Who Fan Fiction ❯ Dr Who – Martha and Ten The Inbetweens and Backstories ❯ Chapter Eleven ( Chapter 11 )

The Doctor walked into the console room carrying an ancient looking bow, and a quiver of arrows.

'What the hell are you going to do with those?' Martha asked him, raising an enquiring eyebrow. 'I didn't think you killed things.'

He gave her a puzzled frown, and then realised what she was talking about. 'Oh, these . . . no, these aren't to kill anything.'

He took an arrow out of the quiver, and showed her the tip, which looked like the sort of tracking beacon that she'd seen used on whales and sharks on those wildlife documentaries on TV.

'Single shot Vortex manipulator; I've set them for quiet little planets out in the sticks. Once it's deployed, `pop', it transports the body part to a different time and location, preventing the Starman from fully forming, and everyone can live happily ever after.' he finished.

Martha smiled at him. 'Brilliant! I've looked at the map, and I know where we've got to go, so what are we waiting for?'

He switched on his manic smile. 'Allonz-y,' he said, and they ran down the ramp to the doors.

The Doctor landed the TARDIS on Hampstead Heath, in the vain hope that the Starman would materialise there where it could be more easily dealt with.

No such luck! as the time to the pending migration got closer, so did the accuracy of the predictive scan, and it now appeared it was going to be near or in Hampstead Underground Station.

'We need a taxi to get there in time,' Martha told him, and he wasn't going to argue, this was her town, and he deferred to her greater knowledge. She flagged down a black taxi, and the driver gave them a suspicious look, what with the Doctor having a long bow over his back, and Martha carrying a quiver of arrows.

'Wimbledon Archery Club,' he said with a smile. 'Competition day today . . . bit of a grudge match with the Hampstead club, what with them thinking they're superior, with all that heath to shoot in.'

Martha stood in front of him and rolled her eyes. 'Take no notice; he's just having a laugh.'

They climbed into the taxi, and the driver set off for their destination, a short drive away. The taxi pulled up in Heath Street, a quiet, shop filled street that had a gentle incline. Martha paid the taxi fare, and they climbed out onto the street. The Doctor looked up the street, but Martha directed him down, towards the station, where the Starman migration would occur.

'Doctor . . . ? Doctor! Doctor!' A young, blonde woman ran out of a shop behind them.

'Hello. Sorry, bit of a rush . . . there's a sort of thing happening . . . fairly important we stop it,' he said pointing down the street where Martha was waiting impatiently.

'My God, it's you . . . It really is you . . . Oh, you don't remember me, do you?'

Martha walked back towards him. 'Doctor, we haven't got time for this, the migration's started.'

'Look, sorry, I've got a bit of a complex life. Things don't always happen to me in quite the right order. Gets a bit confusing at times, especially at weddings. I'm rubbish at weddings . . . especially my own,' he rambled on.

'Oh, my God, of course,' she said in realisation. 'You're a time traveller. It hasn't happened to you yet. None of it. It's still in your future.'

'What hasn't happened?' Suddenly, he knew there was something important about this woman, something that would affect his future, or his past, or both.

'Doctor, please, twenty minutes to red hatching,' Martha called to him. He had colour coded the eggs in order of seriousness, green was the tail hatching, which wasn't too much of a problem. The amber hatching was the lower torso, which the tail would attach to.

Next would be the red hatching, the upper torso, which would create a headless, terrible lizard, a dino-saur. The fourth and final hatching would be the head of the Starman, and Martha was a bit puzzled by the Doctor's choice of colour; mauve, wasn't it red for danger?

'It was me. Oh, for God's sake, it was me all along. You got it all from me,' she realised, as though a final part of a jigsaw had fallen into place.

'Got what?' he asked.

'Okay, listen,' she said, taking a deep breath. 'One day you're going to get stuck in 1969. Make sure you've got this with you.' She handed him a purple, plastic folder with paperwork inside. 'You're going to need it.'

'Doctor!' Martha shouted this time.

'Yeah, listen, listen, got to dash . . . Things happening . . . well, four things . . . well, four things and a lizard.'

'Okay . . . No worries. On you go. See you around some day.'

He sets off down the street, but then turns one final time. 'What was your name?'

'Sally Sparrow.'

'Good to meet you, Sally Sparrow.'

An unshaven man walks down the street towards her, carrying a plastic carton of milk, and looking as though he's seen a ghost. Sally looks up at him, smiles, and holds his hand.

'Goodbye, Doctor.' They turn around and walk into the book and DVD shop. He watched them with a bemused look on his face; it was funny how sometimes things happened out of sequence.

Talking of things happening, he remembered why they had come to this street, and turned to run after Martha.

'Who was that then?' she asked him when he fell in step beside her. 'And what was that folder she gave you?'

'Absolutely no idea! A bit like Queen Liz . . . back there with Shakespeare.' He put the folder in his `larger on the inside' coat pocket. 'But whatever's in this folder sounds very important.'

'Aren't you going to look then?' she asked, as she turned the corner, grabbing his elbow to pull him to follow her into the purple bricked Hampstead Station.

'When the time's right,' is all he would say. 'Right then, so where's the tail and lower torso?'

He took out his sonic screwdriver and started scanning the concourse, grinning manically at commuters who were giving them weird looks, while Martha just smiled weakly and apologetically.

'Where is it then?' she whispered, smiling at a man in a smart suit, and carrying a briefcase.

The Doctor looked at the blue, holographic projection of the scan results that hovered above the end of his sonic device. 'Oh, no, no, no, no . . . we're at the entrance to an underground rail system, where's the worst place it could appear?'

Martha looked down at the floor, and then at the Doctor.

'Yep,' he said in resignation, and they headed for the stairway that led down to the lower levels. The Doctor was remembering his second incarnation, when he went down into Covent Garden Station and encountered the robotic Yeti, controlled by the Great Intelligence, what a hoot that had been.

There were people passing them, heading for the entrance, so he presumed that a train had just been and gone, that would mean that the platform would be empty while they located the parts of the Starman.

One hundred and ninety two feet below Hampstead, they walked along the purple and white tiled passages, until they came to a platform that had the name `Heath Street' in mosaic on the curved wall. The Doctor turned right and followed his sonic to the end of the platform. "Please don't let it be in the tunnels" he thought to himself, and breathed a sigh of relief when the readings indicated a metal service door in the wall.

He tried the handle, and of course, the door was locked, being for "staff only". A quick change of setting on the sonic, the lock clicked open, and he popped his head inside. By the light of the sonic, he could see an old style, metal light switch on the end of metal cable conduit. He flicked the switch, and a row of lights on the ceiling, in safety cages threw a dim light into the passageway.

He stepped into the passageway, and Martha followed, closing the door behind her. He put the sonic in his pocket, and took the longbow off his back.

'This is it then,' he said, taking one of the arrows out of the quiver. 'Stay alert, and get ready to keep me supplied with arrows.'

'Is it dangerous then, if it's still incomplete?' she asked him, searching the shadows ahead.

'Each body part can act independently. The tail can act like a whip, or like a python, and the hind legs on the lower torso have some nasty claws that can disembowel you. When the two parts converge, you've got a vicious alien to deal with.'

'Right, sorry I asked.'

They started moving down the passageway, the Doctor leading the way, with an arrow nocked and ready to shoot; Martha was at his elbow, looking past him. In the distance, she could make out a dark shape, which was roughly the size of a wardrobe lying on its side. He approached slowly, and gently tapped it with his foot, drawing the bow back, ready to shoot. The organic looking wardrobe rocked easily, and he realised it was empty; this was the tail or lower torso that had already hatched.

'Hmmm, I wonder where that's gone?' he asked out loud.

Martha didn't answer; instead, he heard a muffled gurgling noise and turned around to look at her. She was laying on the floor, with a massive snake wrapped around her body, the thin, tail end around her neck, strangling her.

'Martha!' He quickly put the bow down, and knelt beside her, trying to wrap the end of the snake like tail around his arm. Martha gave a weak gasp; her ribs were being crushed by the muscular coils around her body. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the sonic screwdriver, adjusting the setting and pushing it hard against the hard, scaly skin of the disembodied tail.

The pulse from the sonic caused the muscular tail to spasm, and like a spring, the coiled tail released its energy by straightening out, throwing Martha in one direction, and knocking the Doctor in another. He landed on his back, with the heavy tail pinning him to the floor. He wrapped his arms and legs around it, trying to prevent it from coiling around him when it recovered.

Martha was on her hands and knees, coughing and gasping, rubbing her neck with one hand, when she saw the Doctor struggling with the snake-tail. She scrambled forwards, picking up the bow and arrow and aiming it in his direction.

'MARTHA, NO!' he shouted, if the arrow hit the tail, it would jump into another time and place, and take him with it, but it was too late. In slow motion, he saw the arrow fly towards him, and then . . . past him, over his head, and into the bipedal torso of the second part of the Starman that was standing over him, sharp talons ready to strike.

The passageway was filled with a blue light, as the torso vanished into the Vortex. The Doctor let go of the tail, and kicked it against the wall opposite with as much force as he could muster. Martha grabbed another arrow, put it in the bow as quickly as she could, and shot. There was another flash of blue light, as the tail followed the torso into the Vortex.

He turned to look at her and laughed. 'Hah, where did you learn to shoot a bow and arrow?'

'Wimbledon Archery Club,' she laughed. 'No, we had Nerf bow and arrows when we were kids, y'know, they fire foam arrows. Tish and Leo never stood a chance against me.'

'Well, I for one am glad they didn't.' He got to his feet and helped her up. 'Come on, let's find the other two parts, and send them off somewhere else.'

Further down the passageway, they found the second `egg case' that the lower torso had hatched from. They continued on and saw another of the `eggs'. This one definitely still had the body part in it, because they could hear it breaking out. The Doctor shot an arrow, and a blue flash told them that it had been dispatched into the Vortex.

'Just one more to go,' he said with a smile. 'I think you should have the honour.' He handed over the bow, and took the quiver from her.

They moved ahead several metres, and saw the last of the eggs. The Doctor scanned it to make sure that the body part was still inside, and nodded to Martha. 'It's the head . . . all yours.'

The bow creaked as she drew back the string, a satisfying `thrum', whistle, and thud as she released the arrow, and a blue flash of light as the last part of the multi-dimensional entity disappeared into the Vortex.

'Yes!' he said, pumping the air, and pulling her into a hug. 'Good shot Marion, Sherwood is once again safe from the Sheriff of Nottingham, time for a cup of tea.'

Laughing, they walked arm in arm, back to the platform, and on up to the street, where they caught the 603 to Hampstead Heath. After a short walk across the Heath, they reached the TARDIS and let themselves in.

'I'll put the kettle on,' Martha said as the Doctor threw his coat over the coral strut and moved towards the console monitor.

'Ooh, lovely idea.'

When she returned a few minutes later with mugs in hand, she found him on the jump seat with his feet up on the console, arms crossed, frowning at the monitor. He looked up at her and smiled as he accepted the beverage.

'Here's one for you. School history lesson, who was the first man to reach the North Pole?' he asked her out of the blue.

'Blimey, I don't know. Wasn't it Amundsen?' she said, sipping her tea.

'Amundsen? Y'know it comes to something when an alien has to tell a native about the history of their own planet. Roald Amundsen went to the South Pole ahead of Robert Scott. Penguins, not Polar bears.'

'Penguins?' she said in confusion. Sometimes it was difficult to keep up with his trains of thought.

'Penguins in the south, Polar bears in the north. Anyway, it was either Frederick Cook, accompanied by two Inuit men called Ahwelah and Etukishook, on April 21, 1908; or it was Robert Edwin Peary and his employee Matthew Henson and four Inuit men called Ootah, Seegloo, Egingway, and Ooqueah on April 6, 1909.'

'Hang on,' Martha started. 'That's two men and two different years.'

'Yeah, their claims are disputed, and I did say "was". It now appears it was the son of a French baker called Pierre Bruyère. And if that's not weird enough, it appears he did it in 1890 in a hydrogen balloon. And, for the icing on the weirdness cake, he had two associates with him, two doctors apparently . . . and unusually for that time, one of them was a woman.'

Martha raised her eyebrows in surprise, and then saw the look in his eyes. 'You don't think . . .'

'Doctor Jones, would you like to accompany me to the 1890 International Geographical Congress in London, where Bruyère declares his intention to fly to the North Pole?'

'That sounds like an invitation to a date with destiny. How could I refuse?'