Pirate Loop, The (11 page)

'Yeah?' said the Doctor. 'Well I'm the only one of us who hasn't been killed yet. Probably my turn. See ya!'

And he grabbed Martha's hand and moved quickly forwards.

Again the scrambled egg pressed close against her, threatening to hold her fast. But Martha held the Doctor's hand tightly, and in a moment they were out the far side.

The bridge was a long, grey room with a horseshoe of computers at its centre, each computer at the command of a different tall, athletic human. Their tight grey uniforms showed off fine, sculpted muscles.

'Hello,' said the Doctor cheerily. 'I'm the Doctor.

Still holding Martha's hand, he stepped forward into the room. And into an invisible wall of electricity. Martha didn't have time to scream as the energy tore through her. She just had time to feel the Doctor's hand burning up in hers, and then they were both gone.

'I've got my eyes shut,' she heard the Doctor say. 'Are you there yet?'

Martha opened her eyes. She was sat on the floor, her back against the cold and unyielding wall of scrambled egg, and facing the horseshoe of computers. The Doctor sat next to her, his eyes tightly closed. His suit was torn in places and blackened from where the invisible wall of electricity had cooked it. The skin around his nose and ears looked raw and pink and painful.

A thought struck Martha and she quickly lifted the hem of her vest top. The scar from the knife wound had gone.

'Yeah,' she said. 'I'm here.'

He opened his eyes and grinned at her. 'That was exciting,' he said, as if they'd just stepped off a rollercoaster.

'Yeah,' she said. 'But let's not make a habit of it.'

'Chicken,' he replied.

'Ahem,' said a new voice above them. Martha looked up to see a handsome bloke with a cool, handlebar moustache. He gazed sternly down at them from where he stood a couple of feet away, keeping the wall of killer electricity between them. His tight grey uniform only emphasised his impressive muscles.

'Urn,' said Martha. 'Hi.'

'You survived,' he said, sounding disappointed. His voice was warm and rich, like in an advert for coffee.

'Sorry about that,' said the Doctor easily. 'Don't know what we were thinking.'

The handsome man turned back to his handsome colleagues. 'Captain,' he called. 'They survived.' Yeah, OK, thought Martha, people coming back from the dead was unusual. But for all he looked lovely, his voice was a bit whinging.

Martha turned to the Doctor, hoping he'd know what to do. They were trapped between the cold scrambled egg and the invisible wall of electricity. The Doctor pulled a face at her and shrugged. They would just have to see what happened next.

The tall, well-toned captain came over, one of those lucky women whose bone structure meant she could be anywhere between thirty-five and sixty. Her long, sleek hair was heavily layered and helped emphasise her cheekbones. It reminded Martha of the 'Rachel' look, fashionable when she'd been at university. It also reminded her of the kind of rich students who had so much time to spend on styling their hair.

'They're human,' said the captain, with surprise and another coffee-selling voice. Closer now, Martha could see the fine worry lines etched into the skin around her steely, determined eyes. She looked fierce and brave as well as beautiful.

'And so are you,' said the Doctor. He turned to Martha. 'I just knew there'd be some of your lot somewhere round the place. Doing your thing, all being in space. Just look at you! You're brilliant.'

'Doctor,' said Martha sternly. 'Don't do that, it's embarrassing.'

'Don't do what?' said the Doctor.

'That. Talking down to the Homo sapiens.'

'Sorry,' he said. And then he grinned. 'Though really, you're Homo sapiens
sapiens.
There's a whole sub-species thing. And you've got this—' He noticed the way she was looking at him, arms folded, one eyebrow raised. 'Sorry,' he said. He turned his attention to the starship's captain. 'I was just saying to your mate,' he said, 'how we didn't mean to live through your clever wossname. Can only apologise, really.'

The captain scrutinised the Doctor as if he wriggled in a test tube. 'He speaks standard,' she said. 'Of a sort.'

'What should I do with them?' said the handsome man beside her, stroking his handlebar moustache.

'Oh,' said the Doctor to Martha, making a great show of ignoring the two fearsome people standing right in front of them. 'I imagine they'll want to interrogate us. Find out what we know.'

'We do know a lot,' agreed Martha.

'We do,' said the Doctor. 'The war, the pirates, the experimental drive and what's gone wrong with it...' He looked up at the captain and grinned.

The captain bit her bottom lip as she considered. 'We could run the wall of electricity closer to the door,' she said simply. 'Fry them again.'

'It's really not going to make any difference,' said the Doctor. 'We're very hardy. Like dandelions.'

'We could shoot them, sir,' the handsome man suggested to the captain. In fact, he was so good-looking with his eyes and moustache and twinkling smile that Martha didn't really mind too much about what he was suggesting. She supposed people were always going to be better looking in the future, just as she'd found Shakespeare a bit unwashed and smelly. Oh, she thought; perhaps this handsome bloke looked at her, a girl from the distant past, with the same kind of horror.

'Or you could say how helpful it is to have someone turn up who knows what's going on,' said the Doctor.

'What
is
going on?' the captain asked him. She didn't, Martha noted, try to use her beauty on him. Her good looks were a side issue to the job in hand. The captain expected to be taken seriously.

'Well,' said the Doctor. 'Why don't you let us out of this thing and then we can chat about it?'

The captain considered. 'I suppose they are human,' she said, as if humans had never done anything bad, ever.

'Captain?' asked the handsome man.

'Let them out,' the captain told the handsome man. 'But keep them covered.'

Two other handsome men in uniform hurried over with elegant, little guns, which they trained on the Doctor and Martha. The handsome man nodded to one of his well-toned colleagues working at the horseshoe of computers. The colleague, a beautiful brunette, operated some of the controls in front of her, but nothing much seemed to happen as far as Martha could tell. Still, the handsome man beckoned her forward.

'Come on,' he said. 'Move.'

With the guns pointing at her, Martha made to move forward but the Doctor grabbed her hand.

'I'll go first,' he said, and took a step through the space where the wall of electricity had been. Nothing happened to him. He looked himself up and down, just to be on the safe side, then looked back at Martha, smiling. 'Easy,' he said.

The bridge was more like an office than the control deck of a spaceship, thought Martha as she stepped forward. There was no big view screen or anything like that. Instead the handsome, uniformed people each had a place at the horseshoe of computers. Each individual computer screen was also projected onto the wall behind the person manning it, so everyone could see what everyone else was up to. For a moment Martha thought this meant they couldn't get away with skiving – there'd be no online shopping or Facebook when everyone else could look round at your screen. But then she realised that the captain need only stand in the gap of the horseshoe to see all the wall screens at once.

The Doctor was gazing at the wall screens, too, lapping up all the information. His eyes flicked from screen to screen, comparing the different sets of data. One screen showed a complex bar graph all in different colours, another, which held the Doctor's attention, showed some kind of blobby spaceship out in space. It looked, thought Martha, like a giant, spiky peach, the spikes all kinds of guns and space weaponry.

'That's beautiful!' enthused the Doctor.

'The pirate vessel?' asked the captain – like Martha, she thought it really ugly. A spherical pod jutting from the front of the peach seemed to be the badger pirates' bridge and living quarters, and two small bumps on either side of the peach looked like nippy little engines. From the back, there was what looked like a frozen plume of spray, hundreds of tiny droplets frozen in an instant. Martha realised with a start that each droplet was a boarding capsule, like the one that had brought Archibald, Dashiel and Jocelyn aboard.

'No,' laughed the Doctor. 'The stasis wave in between us and the ship. Seen a few of 'em in my time, of course. But that one's just a corker.'

The captain, the handsome man beside her and Martha all scrutinised the wall screen that showed the pirate ship.

'I can't see anything,' said Martha.

'No?' said the Doctor. 'Try these?' He handed her his glasses. She put them on, but everything was a blur.

'I think,' said Martha, handing him back the glasses, 'this is going to be one of those last-of-the-you-know-what things.'

'Nah,' said the Doctor. 'You just need to widen your perspective. Captain, you wanna set your screens to show Kodicek fluctuations of zero point one and bigger.'

The captain nodded to the slender brunette working at the horseshoe of computers, who worked one of the controls. There was a gasp from those watching the screens. Where the pirate ship and its plume of boarding vessels had looked frozen in time, now they could see it caught in the tendrils of a twinkling, pink-blue haze. The computers added lines through the haze, like the pattern iron filings made around a magnet.

'We're at the heart of it,' explained the Doctor, pointing out how the contours were packed more closely together nearer their own position. 'They're just on the periphery.' When no one responded he added, 'That just means the edge.'

'And it's atemporal mismatch?' asked the captain. It was funny, thought Martha, but there was something about the Doctor that people always trusted, especially those in authority. He had a way of talking to them at their level. No, it wasn't trust, she realised. They saw he could be useful, like he could do their homework for them.

'Yeah,' said the Doctor. 'At least, it's your computers' representation of it. You find yourself facing the stuff close up, it looks like cold scrambled egg. And feels a lot like it, too.'

'Suggestions?' the captain asked her crew, as if retaking charge. Martha could see the Doctor torn between butting in with the right answer and hearing what the humans had to say.

'Some kind of temporal leak,' suggested the brunette. 'A side effect of the drive.'

'Perhaps the pirate ship is just occupying the point of space-time we wanted to pass through,' said another.

'Or they've got some kind of repulsion device that negates the effects of the drive,' said someone else.

The captain considered these suggestions, then turned to the Doctor. 'I suppose you have your own ideas?' she asked.

'Oh yeah,' said the Doctor. 'But you were all doing so well!' And then he knotted his eyebrows together. 'I'm sorry, I don't know your name.'

'I'm Captain Georgina Wet-Eleven, Second Mid Dynasty.'

'Hello Captain Georgina,' said the Doctor, shaking her warmly by the hand. 'I'm the Doctor and this is my friend—'

'Thank you,' said Captain Georgina sourly. 'I got your names before.' She glanced quickly at Martha. Martha, not really sure what else to do, rolled her eyes, as if the Doctor was always like this. Which he was. But the gesture didn't seem to go down too well with the captain, who remained entirely stony faced. Martha felt a bit silly.

'I'm waiting, Doctor,' Captain Georgina said. 'You were going to explain what happened.'

'Oh yeah, that,' said the Doctor airily. 'Well let's start from first principles. You were flying along, minding your own business, and then these pirates attacked you.'

'Correct,' said Captain Georgina.

'Only,' said the Doctor, 'you've got this clever new drive you can use, so you give the order.'

'It hadn't been tested before,' said the captain. 'But in the circumstances it seemed the best thing to do.'

'Well, yeah,' said the Doctor. He leaned forward, speaking softly. 'You've got the safety of the passengers to think about, haven't you, captain?'

The captain snorted, wrinkling her nose at him prettily. 'What are you insinuating?' she said.