The Pirate Loop (9 page)

'Well,' said Mrs Wingsworth. 'I never expected this!'

'Better than what you've got?' asked Martha.

'It's not the privation one minds,' sniffed Mrs
Wingsworth. 'It's the unfairness of it. Why should the captain have such luxury?'

'The captain's recreational area is prescribed by intergalactic law, Mrs Wingsworth,' said Gabriel. 'The regulations require that she does not spend more than thirty consecutive hours on duty, for the safety of the passengers.'

'Oh, I'm sure she's very deserving, dear,' said Mrs Wingsworth. It occurred to Martha she wouldn't normally have called a robot 'dear' – that this was her and the Doctor's influence. 'I just think we should all have the same.'

'It's funny there's no officers about, though, isn't it?' said the Doctor. 'They shouldn't all be on duty at once.'

'They fell off the ship when we came here,' said Archibald. 'Sorry.'

'Even so,' said the Doctor. 'There's no one here.'

'I believe, Mr Doctor,' said Gabriel, 'that many were called to the bridge at the first alarm.'

'Ah,' said the Doctor. 'How many people are there likely to be on the bridge?'

Gabriel considered. 'There are six officers on duty, Mr Doctor, including the captain. There are then twelve reserve officers of which seven are also on the bridge.'

'And why are they there?' asked the Doctor, though Martha suspected he already knew.

'I regret I am not at liberty—' began Gabriel.

'Oh come on,' said the Doctor. 'You know the safety of the passengers is at stake.'

Martha watched Gabriel struggling with his robot conscience. They are there in a protective capacity, Mr Doctor,' he said.

'They're there to fight anyone trying to get onto the bridge,' said the Doctor. 'What do you think of that, Mrs Wingsworth?'

'I think it's perfectly understandable, dear,' she said.

'Really?' said the Doctor. 'It doesn't seem very fair to me. Why aren't they out here, protecting the passengers? That's their first responsibility isn't it?'

'Oh,' said Mrs Wingsworth. 'I suppose they did rather leave us in the lurch.'

'We was expectin' to fight,' said Archie. 'But no one 'ere would fight us.'

Martha felt herself growing hot with anger. 'The crew left the passengers to die,' she said. In her mind the crew were already villains anyway: they had to be to employ the poor, mouthless men in the engine room.

'It does look that way,' said the Doctor. 'But let's not judge them until we've heard what they've got to say in response. Here we are.'

They had reached a huge double door at the end of the passageway. Gabriel went forward and, without having to press or say anything, did whatever he had to do. They heard the heavy locks untangling from deep within the doors. Gabriel stepped backwards and the doors swung slowly open at him.

'Oh,' said the Doctor, disappointed. 'Well, yes, I should have thought of that.'

The doorway was blocked by a wall of what looked like scrambled egg. Archibald reached out a hairy paw to prod the strange material. Even when he punched it, the scrambled egg did not yield.

'What are we going to do, dear?' asked Mrs Wingsworth.

'Oh, don't worry,' said Martha. 'The Doctor can get us through. Can't you?'

'Oh yeah,' said the Doctor. 'Nothing simpler. I'm just wondering if I should. It's like with the engine rooms, isn't it? We can get through it easy, we just can't come back out.'

'It's the only way,' Martha told him sternly.

The Doctor gazed at her for a moment. 'Yes,' he said, taking the sonic screwdriver from his inside pocket. 'Yes, I suppose it is.' He clicked the screwdriver to setting twenty-eight and aimed it at the scrambled egg.

Archibald and Mrs Wingsworth watched in wonder. 'What is that?' said Archibald.

'Well, it's just sound waves, really,' said the Doctor, busy at work. 'Vibrations you can aim. This scrambled egg stuff resonates at a certain frequency and that's why it seems solid. If I can change the frequency it all loosens up. And then we just walk through. Simple, really.'

'Yeah,' said Archibald.

'Did you understand that?' asked Martha.

'No,' said Archibald. Martha, despite what he had done to her before, laughed. Archibald grinned at her.

'See, dear?' said Mrs Wingsworth. 'He's rather a
darling once he can stop being such a rascal.'

'Yeah,' said Archibald.

'If you say so,' said Martha. Keen to change the subject, she turned to Gabriel. 'Don't suppose you can get us a drink while we're waiting, can you?'

'Certainly, Ms Martha,' said Gabriel. 'What would you like?'

'I'll have a cup of tea if one's being offered,' said the Doctor, still busy on the door.

'Is tea good?' Archibald asked him.

'Oh,' said the Doctor darkly. 'It's not for everybody. It can be quite dangerous.'

'I'll 'ave a cuppa tea,' Archibald told Gabriel.

'And me,' said Martha. 'Just a bit of milk, no sugar.'

'Certainly, Ms Martha,' said Gabriel. And Mrs Wingsworth?'

A gin and tonic,' said Mrs Wingsworth. 'Well,' she added, seeing how Martha looked at her. 'I
am
on holiday.'

By the time Gabriel returned with the drinks, the Doctor was nearly finished with the wall of scrambled
egg.

'Ms Jocelyn,' Gabriel informed them, 'instructs me
to tell you that Mr Dashiel is awake but continues to
recuperate.'

'That's good,' said the Doctor, taking his tea from the
tray Gabriel proffered. Martha sipped her tea, the hot,
familiar flavour making her feel so much better. There
was something brilliant about being so far in the future
and still getting a dainty china cup of tea. However far into the past or future she went, she was constantly amazed how much people were just people, with the same worries and loves and things to eat. And that made it all the worse that Archibald had never had any of that. She looked over at him, where he was finding it difficult to get his cup of tea to fit round his long badger nose.

'Maybe you need a straw,' she said.

'Yeah,' said Archibald. He didn't seem to know what to make of the tea. Martha could see the wonder in his eyes at yet another, different flavour. She thought of all the things he would love to try for the first time: chips and chocolate and fruit and Sunday roasts. In a way she envied him.

'Right,' said the Doctor, prodding the soft scrambled egg with a finger. 'That's looking good.' He turned to Martha. 'Ladies first again?'

'No,' said Martha. 'We go through together this time.'

'OK,' said the Doctor. He turned to Archibald, Mrs Wingsworth and Gabriel. 'We'll just be a moment,' he told them. And then it should all be put right.'

'You mean, dear,' said Mrs Wingsworth appalled, 'you're leaving us behind?'

'Nah,' said the Doctor. 'This is going to be boring. But we need you here covering our backs.' Martha knew what he was really up to – keeping them safe from whatever dangers awaited. The crew, after all, were waiting to fight anyone coming through. 'Big responsibility that,' the Doctor went on. 'If you think you're up to it.'

'Of course we are!' said Mrs Wingsworth, so affronted she spilt some of her gin and tonic.

'Yeah,' agreed Archibald.'

'Mr Doctor,' said Gabriel. 'The crew may have instructions to shoot you if you enter the bridge without authority.'

'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.

'Me?' said the Doctor. 'Nothing. I wouldn't know how. Anyway, you stick the drive on as quick as you can – but not before one pirate capsule has already got here. And there's a whopping great bang and you're all stuck in this room. Yeah?'

'What makes you think that we're stuck in the room?' said Captain Georgina.

'Oh,' said the Doctor, glancing back at the wall of cold scrambled egg that blocked the door back out to the sleeping quarters. 'Er, have you tried the doors?'

The man with the moustache who had first accosted
them went over to the doors. He prodded then punched then shot at the wall of cold scrambled egg. It did not yield to him.

'We're trapped!' he said, with that same note of whinging that Martha had noticed before. He might look all handsome, she thought, but he'd drive you mad as a boyfriend.

'Phew,' said the Doctor. 'That could have been embarrassing.'

'What is this material?' asked Captain Georgina, her eyes narrowed with concern.

'Well,' said the Doctor.

'It stops you getting out the door,' said Martha.

The Doctor laughed. 'You and your technical explanations!' he said.

'I see,' said Captain Georgina. 'But that is hardly a problem. The transmat remains operational.' She indicated the booth in one corner of the room, the twin of the one Martha had seen all that time ago in the starship's engine rooms.

'Doctor!' she said, stopping herself from saying more, that now they could get back to the TARDIS. Captain Georgina didn't need to know such detail.

'Yes,' said the Doctor. 'Have you tried the transmat in the last day or so?' he asked the captain.

'I used it this morning,' said the handsome man with the moustache. 'I noted no discrepancies or errors.' He couldn't help, though, glancing down at himself just to check that he was all there. Martha shuddered at the
thought of what would happen if there was a problem when you were in the middle of transmatting yourself somewhere.

'Oh,' said the Doctor, looking confused. 'That's a bit of a surprise. I thought it wouldn't be working.'

But a thought had struck Martha. 'How long's it been since the pirates attacked?'

The pretty brunette checked the read-out on the screen in front of her. 'Four minutes and fourteen seconds,' she said.

The Doctor was grinning at Martha. 'Oh, that's brilliant,' he said to her. 'We're in a different pocket of time because of the wall of scrambled egg. So it's been hours and hours for the rest of the ship, and just four minutes . . . twenty-two seconds up here!'

'Which is why they haven't checked the doors or whether the transmat works,' said Martha.

'You're saying,' said Captain Georgina gravely, 'that we're sand-banked in time?'