A Question of Time
folder
1 through F › Doctor Who
Rating:
Adult +
Chapters:
25
Views:
6,226
Reviews:
2
Recommended:
0
Currently Reading:
0
Category:
1 through F › Doctor Who
Rating:
Adult +
Chapters:
25
Views:
6,226
Reviews:
2
Recommended:
0
Currently Reading:
0
Disclaimer:
I don't own Doctor Who and I am not making money off of this.
Chapter 10: We Burn As One
It was as close to an ordinary day as life on the TARDIS ever got…
The Master was somewhere in the depths of the TARDIS, searching for spare parts that the Doctor had forgotten about. Rachel was running around with him, while the Doctor and Jack were in the main control room, performing various small repairs to the ship. The most out of the ordinary thing was that Ianto Jones was nowhere to be found… he’d gone to stay with his family on Earth. Before the Doctor had dropped him off, Ianto had practically ordered the Time Lord to go on a “Family” adventure before they came back to pick him up…
Despite telling Ianto that they would, the TARDIS Family had yet to encounter anything and had decided to use the unexpected lull in action to clean up and repair… so that was what they were doing.
As the Doctor crawled out from under the control counsel, Rachel skipped into the room, a smile on her face and her Sonic-Laser screwdriver sticking out of a pocket of her jeans. Time had passed since their adventures with the Daleks in Manhattan, and Rachel was now just a few months shy of ten years old… and already she was nearly as good as Jack when it came to repairing the TARDIS and even with Jack when it came to helping the Doctor or the Master fly the ship.
The bright smile on Rachel’s face turned into a confused frown when the TARDIS’ computer screens flashed, showing off the fact that the ship had picked up a distress signal. Before either Rachel or the Doctor could see what they’d picked up, the TARDIS started to land, tossing itself around more then was usual… which was saying something.
The Master raced into the room as everyone grabbed a hold of something… and attempted to prepare for the insanity that was sure to follow the TARDIS’ landing.
That was how the TARDIS family had ended up in their current position… standing on a cargo ship that was exactly 42 minutes away from crashing into a Sun. The ship’s engines weren’t running… and the TARDIS was stuck in a ventilation room, unreachable because of the intense heat.
To add on to that, the backup engines were behind over thirty deadlocked sealed doors… which meant that Sonic Screwdriver and Laser Screwdriver couldn’t open them. The only way was to answer a randomly generated question… so Rachel had rushed off with a crew member named Riley Vashtee to try and get to the engines in time.
The Master and Jack were climbing over the mechanics of the ship, trying to fix the damage which had been done, while the Doctor was living up to his name by helping with a crew member named Korwin… who apparently had some kind of parasite inside him. The man had sabotaged the ship and was acting a wee bit crazy…
As I said, it was as close to an ordinary day as the Doctor and family ever got.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Rachel huffed and blew a lock of hair out of her eyes. She tried to ignore the sweat that was running down her body and looked back at Riley as the next question they had to answer popped up on the screen.
“313, 331, 367...what’s the next number in the sequence?” Riley looked at the screen in confusion for a second. “What?!?”
“379!” Rachel answered the question without even thinking.
“What?” Riley looked over at Rachel, who sighed in annoyance.
“It’s a sequence of happy primes, 379! Any number that reduces to one when you take the---” Rachel started to explain, only to be cut off by Riley entering the number in. Rachel smirked when the door opened.
“How did you know that?” Riley asked as they ran to the next door.
“It’s called Recreational Mathematics,” Rachel explained. “Guess they don’t teach it anymore… talk about dumbing down!”
“What?!” Riley blinked.
“I learned it when I was six,” Rachel replied as she pressed the clamp on the next door.
“Figured out what’s wrong with Korwin yet?” the Master asked, looking over his shoulder where the Doctor was now helping him and Jack while waiting for answers from a bioscan.
“No idea,” the Doctor sighed as he whipped out his sonic screwdriver to help fix the engines. “But his body seems to be changing---”
“Into what?” the Master asked, frowning.
Before the Doctor could go on, the Med Center started calling for help… the Doctor’s eyes went wide and he raced off, the Master and Jack staying behind to keep fiddling with the engines . The two were quickly coming to the realization that said engines were completely destroyed. Just as Jack was about to remark on this a scream sounded over the communications devices… It had come from the Med Center, where the Doctor was headed!
“Can’t do anything more here!” the Master shouted, leading Jack down the halls to the med bay to discover that the Ship’s Nurse had been burned up. She’d turned into nothing more then a sooty imprint on the wall.
“What happened?!?” Jack asked as the two Time Lords looked over the data.
“Something’s taking over the man,” the Doctor explained. “He killed Abby… and now he’s roaming the ship.”
Jack froze at that information. “I’m going to go find Rachel,” he shouted over his shoulder as he ran in the direction Rachel had gone, while the Doctor and the Master tried to stop whatever it was that Korwin had become.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
“Area 17!” Rachel announced as she pressed the device to the door. Jack had joined up with them one door ago… she was still holding the clamp to the door, but now both Jack and Riley were looking over the questions.
“What did he say?” Rachel asked Jack, looking back at her ‘mom’. “We couldn’t hear what Korwin said.”
“He said ‘burn with me’,” Jack replied, his face deadly serious. He instantly shifted to look at the next question… but before he could answer it or even read the question out a door behind him opened, revealing what had once been human but was now just Ashton’s body that had been taken over by something.
Reacting on pure instinct and the desire to protect his daughter, Jack grabbed Rachel and pulled her into the nearest door while Riley ran back towards the rest of the crew, the Doctor and the Master.
Rachel and Jack found themselves in an escape pod, Rachel taking on the task of hacking the computer in order to keep the Thing in Ashton’s body from ejecting the pod… which would lead to them being sucked into the sun. Meanwhile Jack had managed to alert the Doctor and the Master to the danger they were in, so the two Time Lords were running as fast as they could, desperate to save their mate and their daughter. Neither Time Lord wanted to think about what would happen if they didn’t arrive in time.
Soon the Doctor and Master were staring at the Creature, trying to figure out a plan of action… when he punched his fist right through the controls of the doorway.. And over the intercom they could hear Rachel crying out that she couldn’t stop the jettison of the escape pod.
The Creature in Ashton’s body screamed in agony and ‘died’, the Time Lords didn’t stop to do more then a quick check to make sure that was the case. They raced to the window and stared out the small window at the escape pod…
An escape pod which was slowly floating away. Inside the ship they could see Jack and Rachel’s face, the tiny window cutting off everything else. The Doctor screamed in agony and the Master’s face twisted in rage. Seeing the horrified look on Rachel and Jack’s faces the Master’s mind yanked the controls away from his emotions.
“I need a spacesuit,” the Master suddenly said, causing the Doctor to shift to stare at his mate. “I can get them back.”
“How?” the Doctor practically whispered, trying not to sink into despair, but to figure out a way to help the Master get their mate and daughter back.
Meanwhile, inside the escape pod, Jack and Rachel were just sitting, staring at the tiny window. Jack was hugging his daughter tightly to his side, he knew that the Doctor and the Master would find a way to save them… even if it sounded impossible.
“I’ve never doubted them,” Jack whispered, kissing his daughter’s cheek before he looked back out the window. “And I never will.”
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
“I’ll open the Airlock, boost the magnetic lock and it will pull them back,” the Master explained, putting the space suit on as the Doctor watched. “You get the backup engines running.”
The Doctor nodded, leaning forward to quickly kiss his mate before running off to work on the locked doors as the Master stepped into the air lock.
Impact in 11:15, Heat Shields failing at 15 Percent.
The Doctor tried not to pay attention to the computer that was counting down to their doom. He tried not to think of the Master, currently hanging off the side of the ship, desperately trying to bring back Jack and Rachel’s pod… he tried just to focus on Riley, who was helping him with the doors.
The Master smirked in victory when he managed to pull back the escape pod, only to freeze when he found he couldn’t look away from the sun below them… “It’s alive,” he whispered, a shudder running through his body as he backed away from the approaching pod. At that moment the Master realized that the situation was much, much worse than he or the Doctor could have guessed.
As soon as the escape pod re-docked with the ship, Rachel was out and running toward her father. Jack followed his daughter, gasping in shock when he saw the Master lying on the ground, shaking as if he was having a seizure.
“Daddy M?” Rachel whispered, only to jump back when the Master turned, and intense white light could be seen coming from underneath his eyelids. Jack pulled Rachel against him as the Master spoke in a voice that was somehow his voice… but at the same time it wasn’t his voice at all.
“Stay away from me!” the Master’s body shook, as if part of him wanted to leap at his daughter. He seemed to be struggling against something, fighting to gain control. “The sun was alive! The Captain used it for cheap fuel--- they scooped out it’s heart! It‘s…” he screamed in pain. “It’s screaming! The closer we get… the stronger it will be! It will use me to kill… to kill everyone!”
Rachel dashed forward before Jack could stop her, quickly helping the Master to stand and pulling him towards the Med-Center. “We need to freeze him! Freeze the sun out of him!” she screamed and Jack ran to help her, the Master focusing all his energy on keeping the sun from taking over him.
“Below minus two hundred! Ten seconds!” the Master shouted as he was placed in the chamber. “Only ten seconds!”
Rachel struggled to block out her father’s cries as Jack held the Time Lord down. Rachel was programming the machine to freeze the Sun out of the Master, while the ship’s Captain watched in horror.
Just when Rachel was about to declare that it was working, the power for the Chamber died. “No!" she cried out as the Captain ran off to try and get the power back on… only to have the Master cry out for her to go.
“Tell the Doctor… tell him to dump the fuel--- give back what they took!” the Master screamed. Rachel nodded and kissed the Master’s cheek.
“I’ll be back,” she promised, before running off, leaving Jack with the possessed Time Lord.
The Doctor heard the footsteps but didn’t look up from the task at hand… he was on the last door and there was less then two minutes to go.
“We need to dump the fuel!” Rachel announced and the Doctor couldn’t contain a sigh of relief when he heard her voice, a relief which died when the communications system came to life.
“He’s lost control!” Jack’s voice called over the line as the Doctor and Rachel started to dump the sun particles in the fuel. “He can’t stop it anymore!”
“This should fix it!” Rachel cried out as the fuel dump was completed. For a few seconds there was no sound over the communication lines… and then Jack’s laugh could be heard.
“It worked!” Jack shouted. “He’s okay.”
Without hesitating, Rachel and the Doctor ran down the ship, quickly reaching Jack and the Master, Rachel throwing herself into the Master’s arms. “You scared me," she whispered in her father’s ear, causing the Master to hug her even tighter.
“Sorry about that,” he joked. “But now we can get back to the TARDIS and go somewhere nice and cold.”
Rachel smiled, but kept holding on to the Master.
TBC
The Master was somewhere in the depths of the TARDIS, searching for spare parts that the Doctor had forgotten about. Rachel was running around with him, while the Doctor and Jack were in the main control room, performing various small repairs to the ship. The most out of the ordinary thing was that Ianto Jones was nowhere to be found… he’d gone to stay with his family on Earth. Before the Doctor had dropped him off, Ianto had practically ordered the Time Lord to go on a “Family” adventure before they came back to pick him up…
Despite telling Ianto that they would, the TARDIS Family had yet to encounter anything and had decided to use the unexpected lull in action to clean up and repair… so that was what they were doing.
As the Doctor crawled out from under the control counsel, Rachel skipped into the room, a smile on her face and her Sonic-Laser screwdriver sticking out of a pocket of her jeans. Time had passed since their adventures with the Daleks in Manhattan, and Rachel was now just a few months shy of ten years old… and already she was nearly as good as Jack when it came to repairing the TARDIS and even with Jack when it came to helping the Doctor or the Master fly the ship.
The bright smile on Rachel’s face turned into a confused frown when the TARDIS’ computer screens flashed, showing off the fact that the ship had picked up a distress signal. Before either Rachel or the Doctor could see what they’d picked up, the TARDIS started to land, tossing itself around more then was usual… which was saying something.
The Master raced into the room as everyone grabbed a hold of something… and attempted to prepare for the insanity that was sure to follow the TARDIS’ landing.
That was how the TARDIS family had ended up in their current position… standing on a cargo ship that was exactly 42 minutes away from crashing into a Sun. The ship’s engines weren’t running… and the TARDIS was stuck in a ventilation room, unreachable because of the intense heat.
To add on to that, the backup engines were behind over thirty deadlocked sealed doors… which meant that Sonic Screwdriver and Laser Screwdriver couldn’t open them. The only way was to answer a randomly generated question… so Rachel had rushed off with a crew member named Riley Vashtee to try and get to the engines in time.
The Master and Jack were climbing over the mechanics of the ship, trying to fix the damage which had been done, while the Doctor was living up to his name by helping with a crew member named Korwin… who apparently had some kind of parasite inside him. The man had sabotaged the ship and was acting a wee bit crazy…
As I said, it was as close to an ordinary day as the Doctor and family ever got.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Rachel huffed and blew a lock of hair out of her eyes. She tried to ignore the sweat that was running down her body and looked back at Riley as the next question they had to answer popped up on the screen.
“313, 331, 367...what’s the next number in the sequence?” Riley looked at the screen in confusion for a second. “What?!?”
“379!” Rachel answered the question without even thinking.
“What?” Riley looked over at Rachel, who sighed in annoyance.
“It’s a sequence of happy primes, 379! Any number that reduces to one when you take the---” Rachel started to explain, only to be cut off by Riley entering the number in. Rachel smirked when the door opened.
“How did you know that?” Riley asked as they ran to the next door.
“It’s called Recreational Mathematics,” Rachel explained. “Guess they don’t teach it anymore… talk about dumbing down!”
“What?!” Riley blinked.
“I learned it when I was six,” Rachel replied as she pressed the clamp on the next door.
“Figured out what’s wrong with Korwin yet?” the Master asked, looking over his shoulder where the Doctor was now helping him and Jack while waiting for answers from a bioscan.
“No idea,” the Doctor sighed as he whipped out his sonic screwdriver to help fix the engines. “But his body seems to be changing---”
“Into what?” the Master asked, frowning.
Before the Doctor could go on, the Med Center started calling for help… the Doctor’s eyes went wide and he raced off, the Master and Jack staying behind to keep fiddling with the engines . The two were quickly coming to the realization that said engines were completely destroyed. Just as Jack was about to remark on this a scream sounded over the communications devices… It had come from the Med Center, where the Doctor was headed!
“Can’t do anything more here!” the Master shouted, leading Jack down the halls to the med bay to discover that the Ship’s Nurse had been burned up. She’d turned into nothing more then a sooty imprint on the wall.
“What happened?!?” Jack asked as the two Time Lords looked over the data.
“Something’s taking over the man,” the Doctor explained. “He killed Abby… and now he’s roaming the ship.”
Jack froze at that information. “I’m going to go find Rachel,” he shouted over his shoulder as he ran in the direction Rachel had gone, while the Doctor and the Master tried to stop whatever it was that Korwin had become.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
“Area 17!” Rachel announced as she pressed the device to the door. Jack had joined up with them one door ago… she was still holding the clamp to the door, but now both Jack and Riley were looking over the questions.
“What did he say?” Rachel asked Jack, looking back at her ‘mom’. “We couldn’t hear what Korwin said.”
“He said ‘burn with me’,” Jack replied, his face deadly serious. He instantly shifted to look at the next question… but before he could answer it or even read the question out a door behind him opened, revealing what had once been human but was now just Ashton’s body that had been taken over by something.
Reacting on pure instinct and the desire to protect his daughter, Jack grabbed Rachel and pulled her into the nearest door while Riley ran back towards the rest of the crew, the Doctor and the Master.
Rachel and Jack found themselves in an escape pod, Rachel taking on the task of hacking the computer in order to keep the Thing in Ashton’s body from ejecting the pod… which would lead to them being sucked into the sun. Meanwhile Jack had managed to alert the Doctor and the Master to the danger they were in, so the two Time Lords were running as fast as they could, desperate to save their mate and their daughter. Neither Time Lord wanted to think about what would happen if they didn’t arrive in time.
Soon the Doctor and Master were staring at the Creature, trying to figure out a plan of action… when he punched his fist right through the controls of the doorway.. And over the intercom they could hear Rachel crying out that she couldn’t stop the jettison of the escape pod.
The Creature in Ashton’s body screamed in agony and ‘died’, the Time Lords didn’t stop to do more then a quick check to make sure that was the case. They raced to the window and stared out the small window at the escape pod…
An escape pod which was slowly floating away. Inside the ship they could see Jack and Rachel’s face, the tiny window cutting off everything else. The Doctor screamed in agony and the Master’s face twisted in rage. Seeing the horrified look on Rachel and Jack’s faces the Master’s mind yanked the controls away from his emotions.
“I need a spacesuit,” the Master suddenly said, causing the Doctor to shift to stare at his mate. “I can get them back.”
“How?” the Doctor practically whispered, trying not to sink into despair, but to figure out a way to help the Master get their mate and daughter back.
Meanwhile, inside the escape pod, Jack and Rachel were just sitting, staring at the tiny window. Jack was hugging his daughter tightly to his side, he knew that the Doctor and the Master would find a way to save them… even if it sounded impossible.
“I’ve never doubted them,” Jack whispered, kissing his daughter’s cheek before he looked back out the window. “And I never will.”
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
“I’ll open the Airlock, boost the magnetic lock and it will pull them back,” the Master explained, putting the space suit on as the Doctor watched. “You get the backup engines running.”
The Doctor nodded, leaning forward to quickly kiss his mate before running off to work on the locked doors as the Master stepped into the air lock.
Impact in 11:15, Heat Shields failing at 15 Percent.
The Doctor tried not to pay attention to the computer that was counting down to their doom. He tried not to think of the Master, currently hanging off the side of the ship, desperately trying to bring back Jack and Rachel’s pod… he tried just to focus on Riley, who was helping him with the doors.
The Master smirked in victory when he managed to pull back the escape pod, only to freeze when he found he couldn’t look away from the sun below them… “It’s alive,” he whispered, a shudder running through his body as he backed away from the approaching pod. At that moment the Master realized that the situation was much, much worse than he or the Doctor could have guessed.
As soon as the escape pod re-docked with the ship, Rachel was out and running toward her father. Jack followed his daughter, gasping in shock when he saw the Master lying on the ground, shaking as if he was having a seizure.
“Daddy M?” Rachel whispered, only to jump back when the Master turned, and intense white light could be seen coming from underneath his eyelids. Jack pulled Rachel against him as the Master spoke in a voice that was somehow his voice… but at the same time it wasn’t his voice at all.
“Stay away from me!” the Master’s body shook, as if part of him wanted to leap at his daughter. He seemed to be struggling against something, fighting to gain control. “The sun was alive! The Captain used it for cheap fuel--- they scooped out it’s heart! It‘s…” he screamed in pain. “It’s screaming! The closer we get… the stronger it will be! It will use me to kill… to kill everyone!”
Rachel dashed forward before Jack could stop her, quickly helping the Master to stand and pulling him towards the Med-Center. “We need to freeze him! Freeze the sun out of him!” she screamed and Jack ran to help her, the Master focusing all his energy on keeping the sun from taking over him.
“Below minus two hundred! Ten seconds!” the Master shouted as he was placed in the chamber. “Only ten seconds!”
Rachel struggled to block out her father’s cries as Jack held the Time Lord down. Rachel was programming the machine to freeze the Sun out of the Master, while the ship’s Captain watched in horror.
Just when Rachel was about to declare that it was working, the power for the Chamber died. “No!" she cried out as the Captain ran off to try and get the power back on… only to have the Master cry out for her to go.
“Tell the Doctor… tell him to dump the fuel--- give back what they took!” the Master screamed. Rachel nodded and kissed the Master’s cheek.
“I’ll be back,” she promised, before running off, leaving Jack with the possessed Time Lord.
The Doctor heard the footsteps but didn’t look up from the task at hand… he was on the last door and there was less then two minutes to go.
“We need to dump the fuel!” Rachel announced and the Doctor couldn’t contain a sigh of relief when he heard her voice, a relief which died when the communications system came to life.
“He’s lost control!” Jack’s voice called over the line as the Doctor and Rachel started to dump the sun particles in the fuel. “He can’t stop it anymore!”
“This should fix it!” Rachel cried out as the fuel dump was completed. For a few seconds there was no sound over the communication lines… and then Jack’s laugh could be heard.
“It worked!” Jack shouted. “He’s okay.”
Without hesitating, Rachel and the Doctor ran down the ship, quickly reaching Jack and the Master, Rachel throwing herself into the Master’s arms. “You scared me," she whispered in her father’s ear, causing the Master to hug her even tighter.
“Sorry about that,” he joked. “But now we can get back to the TARDIS and go somewhere nice and cold.”
Rachel smiled, but kept holding on to the Master.
TBC