First of The Darkness In Men series and part of the Fifth Doctor Fiction collection
This story is set before Arc of Infinity, and features Robbie, a new human companion
I looked over the barren desert. "It's a desert, Doctor," I told him.
"Well..." he said, running a hand through his fine blond hair, "I suppose it is."
"It doesn't look very cheerful to me," I said. We were standing on top of a sand dune; for miles in the distance there was nothing but sand. Not even the faintest hint of on oasis or civilisation. I doubted that any halfway sentient species had ever set foot on this dust bowl. Even if they had, the sand would have long ago covered up any trace of their existence. There could have been whole cities buried beneath the sand. But, to be perfectly blunt, I wasn't in the mood. Heat always gives my migraines and migraines make me testy. The suns (two) were beating down on my neck and driving me insane. They hadn't moved at all since we got there. I just wanted to get back to the TARDIS and go somewhere calming.
The Doctor merely shrugged. "Did I say cheerful? I probably meant peaceful."
Nyssa walked up behind me and rested a hand on my shoulder. I turned to face her and she smiled.
"Or maybe the TARDIS is just malfunctioning again," she said, an elfin smile playing across her lips.
The Doctor cast her a wearying glance.
"You want to try again?" I asked him. "Maybe somewhere like Blackpool this time?"
"Oh, I don't know about that, Robbie," he said as we started back towards the TARDIS. "The poor dear has trouble getting to Blackpool."
"How about South Shields then? If we can hit around July time, the shows will be in full swing."
"And risk running into your family?" the Doctor stopped and turned towards me. "You know we can't do that. If such an occurrence..."
He stopped talking. Nyssa, who was walking ahead, said "Occurred?"
"Doctor?" I asked, worried. I followed his eye-line. Turning around, there was a city, floating in the sky.
"Oh crap," I said, seeing what looked like a bunch of very nasty looking aircraft speeding down toward us.
"Hello, I'm the Doctor and these are my friends Robbie and Nyssa."
The fighter pilot rammed the butt of his gun into the Doctor's chest and I had to fight the urge to smash the pilot's head into my fist.
The Doctor bent over and for a moment I thought he was going to be sick. Instead, however, he coughed once and rubbed at his stomach. Then he brought himself up to his full height, which wasn't that impressive, seeing as the guard was well over six-foot, and said, "I demand to see your superior officer."
It sounds lame now; it sounded lame then.
"I am the superior officer," the guard said. He removed his helmet, revealing a humanoid, but not human, face underneath. His skin was porous and obviously damp. His eyes were large, black and bulbous, like a frog and his skin was a greeny-grey colour. He didn't look well at all. But that's just me and my human standards.
"You are now prisoners of the Meart Empire," the big frog guy said.
Oh great, I muttered under my breath. I could feel a migraine coming along already.
***
"Lovely place," I said, sarcasm lacing my voice, as they threw us in a cell. Their entire floating city was designed to be swamp-like. The cell was one of the driest places in the city, or so said the leader of the Meart soldiers, who went by the name of Gien if the TARDIS telepathic circuits were working properly. But still, there was over six inches of slimy, algae-infested water sloshing around on the floor.
Nyssa had taken her shoes and socks off, and I had done the same. There was nothing worse than getting wrinkled feet from wearing wet socks. The Doctor didn't seem to be bothered, and was pacing up and down the cell, splashing yellow-green water everywhere.
"A desert planet... just like Aridius really... amphibian population... land dries up because of... because of...?" He was babbling.
"Pollution?" Nyssa suggested, settling down on a slab of rock that protruded from the wall.
"Leading to global warming?" I asked.
"Yes, yes, yes, Robbie, that could be it. So they build this city, build an eco-sphere round it so they have a perfectly self-contained world."
"I don't mean to sound like a complete idiot," I said, fully aware that against the scientific skills of both Nyssa and the Doctor, I was, "but what the hell is an eco-sphere?" The humidity in the city was helping slightly with my headache, but I was still quite ratty.
"Did you see the... well, for want of a better word, bubble over the city as they brought us in?"
"Yeah," I said.
"Well, that enables them to recycle the water and so forth. Also protects them for the outside elements, UV and so forth. Quite ingenious really," the Doctor had a small smile playing across his lips. "Presumably they built this floating city when conditions on the surface became too much for them, when all the water dried up..."
"That's all very nice," I said, "but they still locked us up, yeah? Are we going to try and escape or something, or should I get used to having wet jeans bottoms?"
"Yes...I was wondering when you would come to that, very good...escape." The Doctor went over to the door and peered out. "Er, excuse me, Mr Guard."
"Jesus," I muttered to Nyssa, "I really hate it when he does this."
"The door's solid metal, electronic lock, even if the Doctor did have his sonic screwdriver still, it wouldn't do any good," Nyssa informed me.
Sometimes it really annoyed me that Nyssa had been travelling with the Doctor for so much longer than me. I still knew very little about him. I knew he had two hearts, does a thing called regeneration and that he's about eight hundred years old. I tell you, if I look as good as he does when I'm eight hundred, I'll count myself the luckiest man alive.
Of course, the Doctor's quite evasive when it comes to info. Nyssa, I know much more about. That said, when you're dating someone, even in a strange situation such as Nyssa and myself are in, travelling around the cosmos with this eight hundred year old guy who lives in a 60s police box, you get to know them a fair bit anyway.
The guard answered the door and I smacked him one in the face. The flesh was soft and slimy and there was a wet caving-in feeling before the guard fell, face down in the water, blood tainting the water.
"Robbie!" the Doctor said, his tone disappointed, "was there any need for that?"
I wiped the Meart's blood off my fist onto my jeans where it soaked into the black denim. It smelled foul. "Yeah," I told him. "Come on, let's see if we can't get to that air-car thingumy and get back to the TARDIS."
The Doctor looked down at the unconscious Meart, knelt down and patted his back. "Terribly sorry, old chap," he said, before leading the way out the cell.
Once out in the open air, I took Nyssa's hand and we edged our way down the side of the building. I looked up at the eco-sphere. It was tinted, presumably, as the Doctor had said, to stop ultraviolet rays and crap like that getting through. And presumably, it offered up some form of cloaking device, so that it could hide from it's enemies
The city itself was made mostly of metal, apparently the same alloy that had constructed our cell, but the buildings would have looked more at home being made out of wood. They were huts on metal legs to take the out of the water itself. The actual depth of the water seemed to vary in dept, but most of the huts were about two feet above the highest level. There were Meart children, their skin translucent, playing in the water. You could see the whiteness of their bones and the dark colours of their organs through their skin.
"Obviously they have allowed themselves to cultivate chloroplasts within their own bodies," the Doctor mused, observing the children.
For a city so dependent on water, electronic equipment seemed to be everywhere. I wondered if it ever short-circuited. For an amphibian race it seemed pretty stupid.
"Perhaps electricity doesn't effect them in the same way as it would us," the Doctor proposed.
Oh, yeah, and he's telepathic too. At least I think he is. Sometimes he seems to be picking up on what I think. Other times he can't. It's another of his habits that occasionally annoys me, like waking me up in the middle of the night proclaiming we've landed on a planet called Florana when in fact we've landed on Earth in a garden centre.
"I told you not to do that," I snapped.
"Halt!" boomed a gurgly voice. It was Gien.
"You have been escaping," Gien said.
"Well, that was the plan," I said, sarcastically. "You've scuppered it, though."
Gien produced what looked like a walking stick from his belt. It was three foot long with a grey metal tip. He gripped the handle and the tip began to glow. Two of his squad or whatever the Meart equivalent was, grabbed my arms and hefted my off the ground a little way so that I couldn't kick him. My feet merely flailed around in the water. He rammed the tip into my gut and suddenly it seemed as if my world was coming apart at the seams. A migraine split through my head and bile rose in my throat.
Muscles spasming, the guards dropped me into the fish tank water and I coughed my guts up. Nyssa knelt down next to me, water soaking into her velvet trousers. She rubbed a hand against my forehead.
"Are you okay?" she asked, steadying me as I rose, my guts still doing somersaults.
"I'll be fine," I managed to croak. I looked at Gien. He'd replaced the stick into his belt and was looking at me up and down, his big goggly eyes sticking so far out of his head they might as well have been on stalks. I just wanted to ram that stick down his throat.
"That charge should have killed you," he said, the puzzlement clear in his voice.
"You, well, maybe I'm special," I said, breath still rattling in my lungs.
"Robbie is rather, er, unique," the Doctor said.
I looked at him with surprise etched all over my face. This was new. I had often wondered why the Doctor had let me travel with him; I wasn't exactly the ideal travelling companion. I was too prone to violence for one thing. The Doctor hated violence.
The Doctor turned to me and winked. Then he turned back to Gein.
"Robbie is not really humanoid, he's a bio-mechanical doomsday device called Weapon X."
Immediately it dawned on me that the Doctor had been reading my collection of X-Men comics. The bluff was clear.
"But...but..." Gein was clearly worried. Obviously the thought of having a doomsday device in his backyard wasn't too appealing. "But our scanners...they showed nothing but humanoid standard. Mammal. Lungs. Heart. Mainly composed of carbon."
I got up my best staring stance and glared at Gein. If he was capable of sweating, he would have been doing it. He broke the stare and looked at his two guards. "Go. Report to Coyd."
The two Meart hard men gave what I took to be a salute and splashed off in the opposite direction.
"You might be just what we want, Weapon X," Gein said to me.
The Doctor's face fell.
"Two hundred years ago, when our Great Mothers ruled," Gein explained, "we lived on the surface of this planet."
"What would the name of your planet be?" the Doctor interjected. After a moment he seemed to realise he'd interrupted and smiled apologetically.
"Olibast," Gein said. "In our native language it means 'Place Where The Shadows Fall'."
Smart TARDIS circuits, I thought. They knew when and where not to translate what was being said.
"Native language? Oh, I'm terribly sorry, I'm interjecting again. Please, go on with your story. I'll save any questions I have for later."
Gein looked at the Doctor with what looked like a mixture of contempt and admiration, but continued his story nevertheless. "We lived on the surface of the planet, we were one of only three races. There was the Meart, a race of flying lizards, the Soron, and humanoids, like you. We had existed for many years in peace, despite the fact that humanoid flesh is a great delicacy among our people from the Old Time, but then, the humans, one day, killed a Soron, so that he too could fly. Then, more and more of them killed Soron so they could fly. We feared we would be next, we feared that the men would come after us and kill us so they could swim, and breathe underwater."
"God the human race depresses me," I muttered under my breath.
"So," Gein continued, "we built this floating city and when we found out that the humans had killed every last of the Soron, we took a new, Meart only language, to exclude the humans from any affairs of ours they might get mixed up in."
The Doctor let out a soft "Ah."
"The humans raised the temperature of this planet so all the water rose up from the ground, and it was only by pure chance that we had stored a great deal in our city. We thought you were humans coming from the dark side to invade our city and kill us, which is why you were captured."
"How do you know we haven't brought..." Nyssa fumbled for the name, "Weapon X here to destroy your city?"
"If you had, wouldn't you have already done it?"
"You have a point," the Doctor said. "So, you say that the humans killed the Soron so they could fly themselves?"
"Yes," Gein said. I could have sworn I heard a trace of sorrow in his gurgly voice. "They were beautiful creatures. The men strapped them to their backs and launched themselves into the air."
The Doctor turned to face us. His face set. "Come on."
We followed him and Gein.
They had supplied a large air-car for us. Gein and the Meart pilot were sitting up front while the Doctor, Nyssa and myself were sitting in the back. The Doctor had found some fruit and was cautiously nibbling at it.
"Doctor, we all know that I am not some Marvel Comics doomsday device," I said. This was the first time we had had the chance to talk.
"Think about it Robbie," the Doctor said. "They say these humans made primitive gliders out of the Sorons. What does this tell you?"
I was about to make a wisecrack, but I saw his face was set in serious mode. His forehead was wrinkled and his eyes were boring into me.
"That they have a very low technology level?" I asked.
"Exactly!"
"But," Nyssa said, "that would mean that these humans evolved on this planet."
"Wait a minute, just wait a damn minute, why are you so sure these guys are like me? I mean, you both look human, but you're not. What's to say these guys aren't Trakenese or whatever?"
Nyssa's eyes flared with hope for a moment and I knew instantly that I had said the wrong thing. With Traken being destroyed, there were no more Traken people in the universe. Nyssa was the last.
The Doctor merely shook his head. "The translation is human, not humanoid, or Gallifreyan. The TARDIS knows what she's translating for us. These are humans. Homo sapiens. From the planet Earth in the Sol system."
"But, if that's right," I said, "how did they get here?"
"Some primitive timescoop experiment, like Concorde?" Nyssa asked.
The reference was lost on me.
"I don't think so. Could this be a parallel Earth?" the Doctor stood up, fumbled about in his pockets and brought out a yo-yo. He played with it.
"Do you really think this is the time?" I asked him.
"I'm testing the gravity. It's more than Earth by about point three of a gee," he said, replacing the yo-yo in his pocket and sitting back down.
"We have arrived at your craft," Gein's voice came through from the cockpit.
There was a slight bump as the air-car touched down.
"Anyway, these humans spoke an all-purpose language for Olibast, one that the Soron and the Meart spoke as well," the Doctor said.
The door opened onto the hot desert. Immediately sand blew into the craft and we stepped out. The TARDIS was standing there, sand having blown up against one side to knee level. The air-car's grapple came down, plucked the ship up and lifted it into the cargo hold.
"Careful! Careful!" fretted the Doctor. Once it was closed we headed back into the ship and took off. The Doctor led us into the cargo hold to check on the ship. It was fine.
"Doctor, you always say that the TARDIS is indestructible, so why do you worry about it so much?" Nyssa asked, brushing some sand out of the door handle.
"She," the Doctor corrected her absently. "It doesn't cost anything to care, Nyssa," he said, patting the ship's battered wooden shell. "We've been through a lot together." He fished the key out of his hat.
"What's the plan, Doctor?" I asked. "We're leaving?"
"Yes," the Doctor replied. He opened the door and stepped in. Nyssa, the shock apparent for all to see on her face, stepped though after him and I went in last, closing the door.
"You can't just leave, Doctor!" Nyssa protested.
"Nyssa," the Doctor said, his voice obviously laden down with remorse, "there are some things even I can not interfere with."
Opening the scanner, we saw the inside of the cargo hold. Gein was standing there, seeming to call for the Doctor and Weapon X. My lip reading had never been that good, but that made sense.
The Doctor seemed to be inputting some co-ordinates.
"No!" Nyssa cried as the TARDIS dematerialised.
***
I looked over the planet. Instead of being a barren desert, it was a lush, verdant forest. The air was hot and humid and it was beginning to give me a headache. Things that looked like pterodactyls were flying around, screeching. The Meart were lazing about in the swamps, the skin of the adults still a translucent grey.
"See," the Doctor was saying, "no humans."
"A veritable paradise," Nyssa said, apparently unaware of the irony of her statement.
"So, if there's no humans here now, how come there were then, you know, in the future." Jeez, time travel really does my head in with the tenses.
"Look," the Doctor said.
We followed his finger and saw a huge transport ploughing through the sky, black smoke and fire trailing after it.
"That ship contains five hundred people. All in stasis. Young children. The crash will awaken most of the pods. Being young children, they'll still be able to grasp the language used by the Meart and the Soron, the Meart will cannibalise the ship and use it as the basis for their technology; that's why they're so dependent on electricity, because that ship, the Mitchell, is. I had my suspicions when I heard the name of the planet, but I had to check by coming back here. After all, there's quite a few planets with the same name. The humans will, in time, be rediscovered by Earth, but only after a long and bloody war."
I turned away as the ship crashed into the ground, sending dirt flying and animals running for their lives. "I just have one question," I asked the Doctor as we walked back to the TARDIS, me holding Nyssa's hand and the Doctor fiddling with the key.
"What's that Robbie?"
"Why didn't the stick Electro-shock thing kill me like Gein thought it would? I mean, I know I'm not a doomsday device."
The Doctor looked at me. "I don't know. Perhaps the humans in stasis, which Gein would have used as his benchmark, had less resistance to the Electro-stick. Maybe you are special." His face broke into a slight smile. "Who knows?"
We walked into the console room and the Doctor started fiddling about with the controls.
"Can we go somewhere normal this time, Doctor?" Nyssa asked.
"A holiday?" the Doctor asked. "Why not. How about Blackpool?"
