Season 13 - Chapter 5

 

 

Season 13 – Chapter 5

 

Doc!!

You always claimed these things are supposed to be difficult to fly! Hate to tell you, but Ravio is doing pretty well. She didn’t dither and panic and rush around the console pressing every button she could find. She just flicked a switch. She said it was labelled the ‘Fast Return Switch.’

            ‘Uh… are you sure about this..?’ I asked her, wondering what kind of place we might be flicking back to.

            She shrugged. She’s very cool and calm, is Ravio. ‘You want to find your Doctor, don’t you?’

            ‘Well, yes…’

            ‘And I reckon you’ve had quite enough of lock-down in Sheffield, haven’t you..?’

            ‘Gawd, yeah.’ But then a thought hits me. ‘But what about Ryan? He’s standing waiting outside your house. What’s he gonna do when it dematerialises?’

            ‘It already has,’ Ravio tells me. ‘We’re in flight.’

            I already knew it, really. My heart was hammering away in my chest because I could feel that this TARDIS was in flight. We had left the Earth and we had left 2020. And I was so glad, Doc. You’ve got no idea how glad.

           

*

 

Ravio went off to change into something more suitable for space adventures. She came back looking like something off of Mad Max, with her hair tied up in a bandana. I decided I’d stay just as I was. Gallifrey could take me or leave me, just as I was.

            That’s another thing. It was a quick journey. It really was a Fast Return Switch. Are you sure you’re piloting your own ship properly, Doc? This one really didn’t mess about…

            I didn’t even feel queasy as the floor gave a little lurch and Ravio said we were coming in to land.

            She put on the little portable telly to show us what was outside. It looked like fellas in red tights and helmets, holding guns.

            ‘Who are they, then?’ Ravio mused.

            I couldn’t make head nor tail of the instrument panels, of course. But that place out there didn’t look like the ruined remains of the city we’d seen on our last visit. I had a sudden inspiration: ‘I think we’re in a different time altogether…’

            ‘I think you’re right,’ Ravio said. ‘Shall we go out and say hello..?’

 

*

 

Turns out your folk aren’t all that keen on visitors from other planets, Doc.

            We were grabbed by those coppers in the bright red tights and flung straight into a cell. A few fellas in long flowing robes came to have a look at us. They peered into our eyes and scanned us with their machines. Tried to pin down our species and frowned at the mention of our world. And they were really perturbed that we’d been in possession of a TARDIS (which still looked like a Wimpy home, as it happened.)

            Ravio sat in the corner of our cell looking fed up.

            I actually felt quite excited. Getting banged up in a cell was nothing new to me. I tried to tell her – it’s always happening to us. ‘This is how trips with the Doctor always begin, more or less. Someone always ends up locked up.’

            She shook her head and sighed. ‘Do you ever think, Graham, that your precious Doctor was doing it all wrong..? That space adventures aren’t actually supposed to be like that..?’

            She might have had a point.

            But we didn’t have much time to think about it. One of the older guys who was in charge of this Time Lord city-in-the-past came to fetch us.

            ‘What is it with this place?’ I asked Ravio, as we got ushered out into the corridor. ‘It’s full of old guys floating about in evening gowns?’

            One of the guards hit me with his laser gun. The hawk-nosed old geezer who’d come for us acted like he hadn’t heard a word.

 

*

 

Well, it’s a bit later now and we’ve met the Madame President and we’ve been up in a fancy High Council Chamber, where everything is a kind of cross between Flash Gordon and 1970s Habitat. Quite impressed, really. The whole ceiling was like a viewing screen showing the night skies above the Capitol, and all the ships and rockets they were sending up to defend the planet.

            Oh, yeah. Because there’s something going off. Something dramatic and crazy. Of course there is. That Fast Bloomin’ Control Switch has zipped us straight into a time on Gallifrey when the place was facing its worst nightmare.

            That’s how Madame President put it, anyway.

            ‘I don’t know why you Earth people are here at this time,’ President Flavia thundered, up on her podium. She was in a golden evening gown. Dripping with jewellery. This massive headdress on that looked like it was giving her a migraine. ‘But I believe in synchronicity and providence. I believe you are here for a reason. Is by any chance that foolish Doctor involved?’

            Just as she said this a robot dog shot out of nowhere and started sniffing at us both. ‘Affirmative,’ he piped up, in a snooty little voice, before I could even say a word.

            ‘We came to help the Doctor,’ I tried to explain. I felt a bit out of my depth, looking up at all these people. They looked like the House of Lords, all disdainful and trimmed with ermine and that, looking down on me. Trying to explain Sheffield. Trying to explain what had gone on with the Cybermen and the Master.

            ‘Gallifrey faces a different threat today,’ President Flavia frowned. I don’t think she’d really been following a word I’d said. ‘Behold..!’

            Then she waved a glittering sleeve at the screen above us.

            And it showed us a picture of the scabbiest, shabbiest, most terrible-looking spaceship I’d ever seen. A proper kronky old rust bucket. I almost laughed. ‘What’s that supposed to be?’

            ‘Trans-temporal space pirates,’ the President said, looking worried.

            I was surprised then, because next to me, Ravio had reacted to the image of the old ship with shock. She jolted. She cried out. ‘It’s the ‘Charity Begins at Home..’!’ she gasped.

            ‘What’s that, then?’

            ‘There were legends… during the Cyber Wars… about the pirate crew of that ship,’ Ravio said. ‘They were wicked. They were ruthless. They were refugees from a hundred thousand different times and places, bonded together in mutual distrust and loathing… and they were set on exacting revenge upon a universe that had spurned and ridiculed them..!’

            We watched the image of that terrible old spaceship loom larger and larger over the Capitol’s dome. All the little rockets and stuff they’d sent up were dwarfed by it. They looked pathetic. Futile before its horrible mass.

‘Oh, great,’ I said. ‘Desperate pirates. And revenge!’

            ‘They want revenge upon everyone and everything,’ the Lady President shook her head. ‘One day their ghastly trailblazing was bound to lead them straight to our door… And now that day has come..!’

            One of the fellas in the gowns came hurrying over with a kind of scroll, which he pressed into the President’s hand.

            ‘It’s from the Captain of that dreadful ship,’ President Flavia announced. ‘She wants to talk with us. If we don’t let down the transduction barriers she warns that she’ll simply destroy them.’

            ‘Can she do that?’ asked one of the worried-looking old guys in the evening gowns.

            ‘Of course she can’t,’ said the president haughtily. She commanded her lackeys: ‘Tell this person that we won’t be lowering the transduction barriers for anyone. Let alone common criminals like her!’

All the old guys seemed cheered up by this, and they all started bustling about excitedly. Alarms were going off and people were giving out all kinds of instructions. Me and Ravio just stood there, forgotten in the middle of it all.

 We watched as President Flavia tore that delicate scroll into a hundred pieces and looked really furious. ‘Gallifrey won’t be dictated to by the likes of her! Tell the villainous Captain Melanie Bush that we are prepared to defend ourselves… to the death..!’