Doctor Who Fan Fiction ❯ Dr Who – Martha and Ten The Inbetweens and Backstories ❯ Chapter Eighteen ( Chapter 18 )

[ T - Teen: Not suitable for readers under 13 ]

Leaving the Sick Building behind, the Doctor takes Martha for breakfast at Tiffany’s, but misses. This chapter includes scenes from Wetworld BY MARK MICHALOWSKI.

Non Anime: Doctor Who Fan Fiction | Genre(s): Sci-fi | Type: Continuation | Uploaded On: 03.14.2016 | Pages: 18 | Words: 7.2K | Visits: 357 | Status: Completed

The Doctor and his friends covered their ears. The noise was terrific. Martha felt as if her eardrums were going to explode. Every organ inside each of their bodies was vibrating fit to burst. The ground was quaking and shaking underneath them.

All around them bruited the horrendous, continuous noise of the biggest belch ever recorded. An almighty eructation was ripping out across the land. Martha was ducking down beside Solin Tiermann, the teenage son of Professor Ernest Tiermann who had owned the planet, and now lay dead with his cybernetic wife and the robots he had created.

She watched the Doctor striding about, laughing madly, hands clamped to his ears. Then she looked up at the horrendous underbelly of the Voracious Craw. The effect of their recording on the creature was astonishing. Its mouth had clamped shut, ending the tornadic feeding vortex.

The forest lay still beneath it. The vegetation that had started to lift away from the ground slumped back down into place. The Craw was simply hovering ineffectually as the sound waves echoed through the valley.

Martha hurried over to the Doctor and tugged on his coat sleeve. She tried to ask him what was happening, and why the Craw had stopped. But the noise was too fierce for them to say anything to each other.

She could only watch, with the Doctor, Solin and Barbara the vending machine, as the Voracious Craw gradually changed its mind. And changed its direction. It was backing up, rather slowly, with all the grace of a massive cruise liner doing a U-turn in the middle of a stormy ocean.

Still the noise rang out. Slowed down, altered, looped like that . . . their belches did sound horrific. Like the cries of some ancient, primeval beast . . .

Now the Doctor was springing up and down on his toes. He was jumping for joy and waving his hands in the air. Martha still couldn't hear what he was shouting. But one thing was plain. Something was happening that had never happened before.

The Voracious Craw was going. It was turning away and growing smaller as it slipped into the upper atmosphere. It was leaving Tiermann's World behind. Never before, in the history of this monstrous race, had one of the Voracious Craw left behind a meal unfinished . . .

Once he was quite sure that the Craw was going, the Doctor turned to hug his companions. And when she was crushed to him and he was yelling right down her ear, then Martha could at last hear what he was saying: `We did it! We sent it away! We saved the world, Martha! We saved the world again!'

They let Solin take one last look around the ruins of the only home he had ever known. It was called Dreamhome, a completely automated building, staffed by robots and controlled by a malign central computer called Domovoi. The Doctor and Martha were waiting for him by the TARDIS.

`So . . . the noise we were making,' Martha said. `It was just like the sound of an even bigger and even more Voracious Craw?'

`That's exactly how that creature heard it,' the Doctor nodded. He was still drinking pop. He had somehow acquired a taste for the sticky, sugary stuff and now Barbara's supply was almost depleted. Not that

Barbara was complaining. With not so many bottles clunking around inside her, she felt lighter, and freer than she had in years.

`And our Voracious Craw backed off and went away, because it thought that a bigger Craw had first dibs on the planet?'

`Hmmm,' the Doctor said. `They are a dreary bunch of witless bullies, I'm afraid. And they give in very easily, when someone bigger and stronger comes along. Like all bullies do. All we had to do was stand up to it.'

`We scared the hell out of it,' Martha laughed.

`That's another way of putting it,' the Doctor grinned. `Was that a medical diagnosis, Doctor Jones?'

`You bet your monstrous eructations on it, Doctor.'

He unlocked the TARDIS door for her. `Shall we tell the others it's time to go?'

She nodded towards Solin, who was still striding about thoughtfully in the blackened rubble. `It'll be hard for him.'

`He'll be OK. He's a resilient kid. And he'll fit right in on Spaceport Antelope Slash Nitelite. It's a real ragbag of displaced persons and interesting types. Quite a fascinating place, really. I reckon Barbara will enjoy it there, too. She's had far too sheltered a life. She'll look after Solin.'

They watched Barbara ambling up to the TARDIS, and Martha couldn't help seeing a similarity with the robot from the television series “Lost in Space”, where it would wave its arms about saying “warning Will Robinson”, although that robot didn't have a front vending compartment displaying a number of consumable items.

The robot had a spring in her step. She looked as elated as a vending machine ever could. `I'm ready, Doctor, Martha,' she said. `I've said my goodbyes. To Toaster, to everyone else.' She was referring to all the robots in the house that had perished.

Toaster was a sun bed that had helped the Doctor to defeat the Domovoi, only after it had been forced to kill the professor, destroying itself in the process.

`And the Domovoi?' the Doctor asked her.

`I think she's gone,' Barbara said, frowning. `I can't detect her anywhere in the remains of the Dreamhome. I think she's gone deep, deep underground.'

The Doctor stared at Barbara and nodded solemnly. For a second he allowed himself to wonder: what if she was lying? She had been connected to the Domovoi, after all. What if - even unbeknownst to Barbara herself - the Domovoi had secreted some small part of her malign intelligence inside the circuits of the vending robot? And what if she managed to get herself away from Tiermann's World? What if she managed to smuggle herself away, inside Barbara, and into the galaxy at large?

The Doctor waved the thought away. He was getting much too suspicious. Always thinking and expecting the worst. No, the Domovoi was gone. And it was time for them to leave, too.

`I think I'm ready, Doctor. To explore the universe,' Barbara said brightly.

The Doctor was watching as Solin turned his back on his wrecked and burning world. There was nothing left here for him now. The boy was turning and walking towards the TARDIS, ready to be swept away and taken into a different time and place.

The Doctor smiled at Barbara. `It's completely marvellous, exploring the universe,' he told her. `Everyone should try it. Eh, Martha?'

`Too right,' she said, and led the way into the ship. Martha was secretly glad that they were dropping off Barbara and Solin at that spaceport. They were all very nice and everything, but she was happiest when it was just her and the Doctor. Smith and Jones. At home in the universe.

Spaceport Antelope Slash Nitelite, reminded Martha of Mos Iesley Spaceport in Star Wars. It was a bustling, cosmopolitan collection of all manner of alien life forms.

She was standing at the door of the TARDIS with Barbara and Solin, while the Doctor messed with an illuminated panel on the wall opposite. When he returned, he put his sonic screwdriver back in his pocket and held out two plastic strips.

`There we are, these should give you a good start,' he said handing them to Barbara and Solin.

`What have you done?' Martha asked suspiciously. `Don't tell me you've robbed the bank?'

He looked insulted. `Of course not! I just hacked into Tiermann's account and transferred the funds onto these credit sticks. After all, Solin is his son and heir, and Barbara is now his legal guardian.'

`Oh yeah, that's right,' Martha said with a smile, and finally fulfilled one of Solin wishes. She kissed him, not on the lips as he'd dreamed of, but on the cheek. `Don't spend it all at once.'

`He won't,' Barbara said firmly, but with a hint of humour as well.

The Doctor clapped his hands together. `Who better than a vending machine to teach him the price of goods and the value of money? Come on Martha, time we were on our way.'

They said their goodbyes before stepping into the TARDIS and fading away from Spaceport Antelope Slash Nitelite.

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`So,' said Martha, folding her arms and leaning against the handrail that ran around the central console of the time machine. `Flying the TARDIS. What's all that about, then?'

Since her first journey with the Doctor, when he'd taken her to see Will Shakespeare in 1599, she'd been trying to get a straight answer from the Doctor on how the TARDIS worked and how it travelled through time.

“But how do you travel in time? What makes it go?” she'd asked him.

“Oh, let's take the fun and mystery out of everything. Martha, you don't want to know. It just does,” he'd told her.

From beneath her feet, muffled by the grating on which she stood and the weird-looking electronic tool held in his mouth, the Doctor said: `Mphhhpphh . . . mmm . . . mppppffhfhf.'

Martha nodded wisely. `That's all well and good,' she said. `But it doesn't really answer my question, does it?'

She dropped, cat-like, to her knees and pressed her face against the floor, squinting to see exactly what the Doctor was doing, down in the bowels of the TARDIS. `I said -'

`I heard what you said!' snapped back the Doctor, yanking the thing out of his mouth with a scowl. `But what you don't understand is -' And he shoved it back between his teeth and mphphphed a bit more, this time with added emphasis, until Martha shook her head exasperatedly and stood up.

She wandered around the console, covered with what looked like the contents of a particularly poor car boot sale. There were brass switches, a bicycle pump and something that looked like one of those paperweights with bubbles in it.

She was wondering exactly what any of these weird objects had to do with flying through time and space when she suddenly found the Doctor standing in front of her, sonic screwdriver in hand, his hair all ruffled and askew.

`Well?'

`Um . . . yeah,' replied Martha cagily, wondering what he was on about. `Probably.'

`Good!'

And he was off, racing past her, around to the other side of the console, where he grabbed the paperweight and gave it a delicate tweak. All around her, the subtle burblings and electronic grumblings of the TARDIS changed key ever so slightly, settling into something much more comfortable. Martha followed him, watching as he fiddled and faddled with the junk set into the console's luminous green surface.

`What I was saying before . . .' she ventured, watching his narrowed eyes.

`Yes,' he said, nodding firmly. `Croissants. For breakfast. Definitely. We'll pop over to Cannes and pick a -'

`Not the croissants,' she interrupted.

`No problem. Porridge is fine by me. Edinburgh - 1807. Fine vintage.'

`I'm not talking about breakfast.'

He jolted upright, as if he'd received an electric shock, and turned to her, eyes wide and manic. `You mean its lunchtime?' He glanced at his watch, frowned, shook it and then placed it to his ear. `Why didn't you tell me?' He rolled his eyes and slipped the sonic screwdriver into the breast pocket of his dark-brown suit. `I've been down there for hours.'

`You've been down there for fifteen minutes.'

He opened his mouth to say something, but quick as lightning Martha clamped her hand over it. `What I'm trying to tell you,' she said with slow and forced patience, taking her hand away. `What I've been trying to tell you for three days now, is that you ought to let me know how the TARDIS works - and if not how it actually works, how it operates. How you operate it.'

She ignored the muffled protestations and the wiggled eyebrows. `I mean - all I want is some basic lessons, yeah? Just “Press this button to get us out of danger; press this button to sound an alarm; press that button to get BBC Three.” That kind of thing.'

Martha folded her arms again and leaned back against the console, putting on her most reasonable voice. `Now that's not too much to ask, is it? And it would help you too - you wouldn't have to be hovering over this thing twenty-four seven.' She patted the console behind her.

The Doctor puckered up his lips thoughtfully, reached into his pocket, pulled out the sonic screwdriver and shoved it back in his mouth. `Mpfhphfhhff,' he said.

She reached out and pulled the device from him, extracting an indignant Ooof! along with it.

`You think I'm too thick, don't you!'

He just stared at her - actually, he just stared at the sonic screwdriver. Martha looked down at it, hanging between her fingertips, and pulled a face at the dribble on it before handing it gingerly back to him. She pointed at her own chest with her free hand.

`Medical student, remember?' she said. `A levels.'

The Doctor raised an eyebrow.

`Driving licence,' she added.

The other eyebrow joined the first one. `Martha, Martha, Martha,' he said patronisingly, making her instantly want to slap him. `Operating the TARDIS isn't about intelligence. It's not about pressing this button, then pulling that lever. It's much more difficult than that.' He reached out and stroked the curved, ceramic edge of the console. `It's about intuition and imagination; it's about feeling your way through the Time Vortex.'

`It's about kicking it when it doesn't work, is what it's about.'

He pulled a hurt little boy face.

`Don't start that,' she warned, a smile twitching the corner of her mouth upwards. `I've heard you, when you think I'm not around, stomping and banging the console.'

`Well there you go then!' he said triumphantly, as if that settled the matter. `It's about stomping and banging your way through the Time Vortex!'

He turned away, stowing the sonic screwdriver back in his pocket (after, Martha noted with a grimace, wiping it clean on the sleeve of his jacket again). `Intelligence is overrated, Martha - believe you me. I'd take an ounce of heart over a bucketful of brains any day.'

`Oooh!' mocked Martha. `Bet you're a whizz in the kitchen!'

The Doctor's eyes lit up again. `And talking about food . . . who's up for breakfast? All that talk of croissants is makin' me mighty hungry.' He stretched out his right hand. `And this here hand is a butterin' hand! How d'you fancy breakfast at Tiffany's?'

Martha's mouth dropped open. `Tiffany's? You mean the real Tiffany's? As in Breakfast at?'

`Where else?' the Doctor beamed back, looking extremely pleased with himself.

`Nice one!' said Martha, a huge grin on her face. `This is the kind of time and space travelling I signed up for! Although,' she added, `I'm beginning to suspect you've got a bit of a thing about New York, you know.'

And with that, she was gone.

`New York?'

The Doctor stood in the console room, watching Martha vanish in the direction of the TARDIS's wardrobe. A puzzled frown wrinkled his brow. New York? Why had Martha mentioned New York when he was taking her to Tiffany's near the Robot Regent's palace on Arkon?

`Must have misheard her,' he decided, tapping at the controls on the console and flicking a finger at what Martha would undoubtedly have thought was just a small, brass, one-eyed owl.

Blue-green light pulsed up and down the column at the centre of the console and a deep groaning filled the air, settling down as the TARDIS shouldered its way out of the Time Vortex into the real world. `Perfect,' the Doctor said to himself. `Textbook landing. Like to see Martha manage a landing as textbook perfect as that!'

`Ahhh . . .' said the Doctor out loud, somewhat surprised at quite how warm, wet and, well, swampy Arkon had become since his last visit. And slippery. Because as he stepped from the TARDIS, the sole of his foot skidded on a moss-covered root beneath him, and it was only by grabbing onto the TARDIS's doorframe that he managed to stop himself from ending up on the muddy ground.

The air hit him like a huge, damp blanket. He stood there, one foot still inside the TARDIS, the other hovering a cautious six inches from the ground, and wondered what had gone wrong. Arkon should have been a prosperous, advanced, Earth-like world. Right about now, a hot, F-type star should have been beating down on him, and his senses should have been assailed by the smells, sounds and scents of technology run riot.

But, instead, all around him was a languid silence, punctuated by the occasional sound of splashing water. And the only smells were the fusty smells of swamp gas and damp. A green smell. He liked green smells - full of vim and vigour and vegetables.

`Ummm . . .' he added, looking out over the oily water that stretched away from the steeply sloping bank where the TARDIS had plonked itself. At the other side, a couple of hundred metres away, shaggy trees lowered their branches almost to the water, like a floppy fringe. And through the canopy of leaves above him, an orange-red sun blistered the purplish sky.

`This is just a teensy bit wrong,' he said to himself.

Ferreting around in the TARDIS's wardrobe for something ultra-glamand ultra-chic to wear to Tiffany's (think Audrey Hepburn, she reminded herself, think Hollywood glamour), she just knew that the Doctor would be standing in the console room, tapping his foot impatiently.

Well he could just wait. It wasn't often that a girl got to do sophistication when travelling with the Doctor. Jeans, her red leather jacket and stout boots had been the order of the day recently, and she wasn't passing up this chance to shine. She rooted around for a slinky frock and let out a triumphant `Yes!' when she found a lilac silk dress and some matching elbow-length gloves with pearl cuffs.

In seconds, she'd slipped into them and was twirling and preening in front of the mirror. The frock, it had to be said, was a wee bit tight on her. But if she breathed in - and didn't breathe out too much - it'd do. Shoes were a bit trickier, but she found a pair of silver strappy sandals that just about fitted.

`Knock 'em dead, girl!' she told herself as, with a final tweak of her hair, she bounded out of the wardrobe, ready for her disgustingly decadent breakfast. At Tiffany's.

The Doctor was tempted to assume that something had gone very wrong with Arkon's sun, and that it had caused a massive change in the planet's ecosystem, turning it from high-tech paradise to swamp world.

He was tempted to think that maybe the Arkonides had been messing with solar modifiers and had mutated their star into the orange ball that hung over him. Or that some attacking alien race had done the fiddling for them in an attempt to wipe the Arkonides out. In fact he was very tempted to think anything except the one thing that really seemed most likely.

He leaned back into the cool interior of the TARDIS. `Have you been messing with those controls again?' he shouted to Martha. But not quite loudly enough for her to hear. Because of course Martha hadn't been messing with the controls. And the Doctor knew it.

He shook his head ruefully and ventured his foot out onto the mossy tree root, snaggled and sprawled out of the bank like a deformed Twiglet.

`Must get those gyroceptors fixed,' he muttered.

Cautiously, he tested the root with his weight, and it held. The slipperiness was more of a problem: he had to hang on to the TARDIS's doorframe as he shifted his weight onto his outstretched foot. Carefully, he brought the other foot out and found a safe-ish place for it.

Finally, he leaned onto it. `There!' he beamed at his own cleverness. `Wasn't so difficult, was -'

With all the comedic grace of one of the Chuckle Brothers, the Doctor began to flail his hands around as his left foot started to slip and slide on the root. And as his other foot decided to join in the fun, he began windmilling his arms frantically, jacket flapping around him.

Seconds later, as he felt himself begin to fall, he instinctively grabbed for the open doorway to the TARDIS. Which was a big mistake. The TARDIS might have been a pretty solid, pretty hefty thing, despite its external dimensions. But it was as subject to the same forces of physics - and friction - as he was. And despite the fact that it had squashed the roots underneath it when it had landed, they were still very slippery roots.

It was, thought the Doctor ruefully as his time and space ship began to move, a bit like launching a battleship. Only without a bottle of champagne smashed against the side of it. With a creak and groan of roots and a deep squelch of mud, the TARDIS began to slide down the bank towards the water, and the Doctor again began to lose his balance. In fact, in accidentally pushing against the TARDIS, not only had he sent it down the natural runway that the roots provided, but he'd pushed himself in the opposite direction.

`Wellingtons!' was the only thing he managed to cry out to Martha as he landed flat on his back in a spray of muddy water. He lifted himself up on his elbows just in time to see his beloved TARDIS pause at the edge of the swamp before it tipped, almost as if it were waving him goodbye. And in majestic slow motion, the blue box keeled over.

There was an almighty splash, drenching the Doctor with warm, silty water, a brief gush of bubbles and a massive wave that spread out across the swamp. And then the TARDIS was gone.

`Wellingtons,' he repeated in a disbelieving whisper. `Don't forget your Wellingtons, Martha.'