eponymous_rose

Title: The Deepsky Atlas (3/?)
Author:

eponymous_rose
Word Count: 2521
Rating: PG-13
Genre: Adventure, Humour
Characters: Fourth Doctor, Harry Sullivan, Sarah Jane Smith

Summary: A lighthouse in the middle of a desert; a taciturn, impossible warrior; a missing river; three rather confused travellers. And, of course, the sky is falling.

Part One: Circinus
Part Two: Caelum

THE DEEPSKY ATLAS

CHAPTER THREE

I must be dead, Harry thought. All those aliens and robots and- and even that spot of rigorous medical training, and it'd been a particularly nasty windstorm that had done him in.

"Harry?" There was a gentle touch on his forehead, and Harry wondered what the Doctor could be doing in his afterlife, of all places. He'd rather got the impression that it was something of a humans-only affair, though that was very probably a weak assumption to make, all things considered.

He opened his eyes to see something white, wrinkled - paper, or parchment, perhaps, all crunched up to form-

"Jelly baby, Harry?" The bag before him shook, and Harry, deciding that this was a rum sort of afterlife, reached into it and pulled out an orange sweet. "There. Right as rain, you see? Nothing to worry about."

As he chewed the jelly baby, Harry's foggy mind finally began to come to grips with the idea that being dead could hardly be described as "all right" under even the very best of conditions. He could feel a faint sting over the general throbbing in his head, and brought a hand up to feel the scrape over his eyebrow. "I'm not dead, then," he hazarded, finally glancing over at the Doctor, who, despite the bloodstains on his shirt and his dishevelled appearance, was grinning ear to ear.

"Well," the Doctor said, leaning back in his chair and propping his feet up on Harry's bed, "that's a matter of opinion, isn't it?"

"Is it?"

"It is." The Doctor glanced into his paper bag critically, weighed the bag in his hand, and with a regretful sigh returned it to his pocket. "From a philosophical standpoint, anyway. Biologically speaking, though, you've just taken a bit of a knock on the head."

"Is that all?" Harry rubbed at the sore spot at the base of his skull and winced. "Felt like some sort of thunderclap hit me."

"For that," said a new voice, "I must apologize."

A man stepped out of the shadows at the foot of Harry's bed, tall and grizzled and dressed like some old-fashioned warrior, complete with a sword sheathed at his side that Harry was quite sure went beyond ornamental value. "I am Caelum," the man stated, dark and emotionless. "I am the Sculptor's Chisel."

The Doctor cleared his throat. "Well, he does seem to enjoy introducing himself that way, but he's really quite pleasant once you get to know him."

But suddenly Harry remembered the booming sound that had blasted over the shrieking of the storm, and the strangeness of a lighthouse of all things, smack-dab in the middle of an alien planet, and trying to tell-

He sat bolt upright. "Sarah!"

"Lie back, Harry." The Doctor hadn't shifted from his reclined position, but he gave Harry's leg a little kick when he didn't immediately obey. "Lie back." With a grimace at the pain rocketing through his head, Harry slumped back onto the hard bed. "She's fine," the Doctor added, "just a little dehydrated and exhausted. Caelum here's been providing for the both of you rather nicely; haven't you, Caelum?"

"I must apologize," Caelum said again, stiff and formal. "I thought that you were endangering the other, so I attempted to rectify the situation in as rapid and efficient a manner as possible."

Harry blinked, then remembered that, after Sarah had fallen, he'd been leaning over her. It must have looked like-

"Oh," he said. "So you brained me because you thought I'd attacked Sarah."

"Seems like an acceptable course of action," the Doctor said with a grin. Harry rolled his eyes.

And Caelum, in a sudden, swift motion, pulled his sword from its sheath and advanced on them. Startled, Harry jolted back to a sitting position, and there was a crash as the Doctor attempted to rise, got tangled up in his scarf, and promptly fell off his chair.

"My sword is yours," Caelum said, and it took Harry a moment to realise it wasn't any sort of threat, and yet another moment to work out that the sword in his face was being presented to him hilt-first.

"Take it, Harry," the Doctor hissed from the floor.

"Er," said Harry, and took the sword's hilt, nearly toppling out of bed when Caelum released it to him. "Never thought these bally things were so heavy," he muttered.

Caelum bent down over the foot of the bed. "If I were entitled to make any sort of request, it would be for a quick and painless death. The choice is yours."

Harry, still struggling to hold the sword steady, opened his mouth to speak, closed it, and turned to look helplessly at the Doctor, who was sitting on the floor with a thoughtful expression. "I'm sorry?" Harry said at last.

Caelum didn't move, his head still bowed, as though waiting for the executioner's-

Harry blinked as realization struck, and, stunned, he dropped the sword onto the bed beside him. "I-I don't think that's necessary, old chap," he said, and Caelum's cold eyes flashed up briefly. Harry cleared his throat. "Ah. It's really nothing to- to worry about. I'm fine, Sarah's fine, the Doctor's fine, and all that." He reached out and awkwardly patted the man on the shoulder. "No hard feelings."

Caelum straightened, and inclined his head in a bow. "I am overcome with gratitude. My life is yours."

Harry cleared his throat again, not entirely sure how one was supposed to respond to that sort of thing. "Good-o," he said, and, with some effort, passed Caelum back his sword. "You keep that." The man sheathed the weapon, stoic and silent once more.

The Doctor, beaming, hopped to his feet. "Well, now that we've got that all sorted out, shall we look for Sarah? We left her in the other room," he added, "with firm instructions not to move about too much. I expect she's halfway to who-knows-where by now-"

"Hey! I resemble that remark," said Sarah from the corridor, poking her head into the room with a smirk that turned to a smile as she saw Harry. "Hullo, Harry! Feeling better?"

"Well," Harry started, then glanced over at Caelum, whose hand had started to drift to his sword - the warrior's expression didn't change, but Harry had the distinct impression that there was that odd sort of guilt in his eyes again. "Much better," he amended quickly. "Just spiffing."

Sarah herself looked well, if tired and a little bedraggled, and Harry found himself growing drowsy again in the warm room after the incongruous chill of the sandstorm outside, knowing they were all safe-

He shook himself awake and sat up straighter, wondering whether the lethargy was a sign of concussion or exhaustion or both. As though acting on some sort of signal, Caelum rose. "I shall prepare refreshments for your party," he said, and left the room.

"Phew," Harry said when the warrior's footfalls had echoed off down the corridor. "That was a bit awkward."

"The warrior classes of many cultures have the capacity for self-destruction in the face of dishonour, Harry," the Doctor said, slumping back in his chair, again propping his feet up on the bed. "Prevents mistakes being made twice, I suppose."

Sarah snorted, coming around to lean against the wall where Caelum had been standing. Harry felt a sudden urge to hop out of bed and offer her his seat, but he expected she wouldn't much appreciate the chivalry; besides, he was fairly certain that any sudden movements of the sort would end with his passing out again.

"But you know what's strange, Doctor?" she was saying. The Doctor opened his mouth, and Sarah hastily continued before he could cut in. "What's really strange, I mean. Beyond the fact that we're in a great whopping lighthouse in the middle of a desert. A freezing cold desert."

The Doctor shrugged and tipped his head back to stare at the ceiling. "I'm all ears, Sarah."

Sarah leaned close, whispering in a conspiratorial tone of voice. "I did do a bit of a recce when you and Caelum left, and I think we're the only ones in this whole place! Just us and this Sculptor's Chisel bloke."

"Hm," said the Doctor, still squinting up at the ceiling. Harry resisted the temptation to follow his gaze, determined not to feel any sillier than he already did.

"Well," Sarah said, crossing her arms. "I thought that was strange, anyway. Dust in all these rooms, only the odd bit of weaponry lying around the place. It's creepy."

Harry straightened as an idea struck him. "Can't we go back to the TARDIS, Doctor?" He waited for a reply, and when none was forthcoming, he glanced around the small room, looking for a window, without luck. "Surely the storm's passed us by. It should be safe-"

The Doctor sniffed, still staring up. "The storm's still going strong," he said. "Besides," he added, without tearing his eyes from the ceiling, and pulled from his pocket the chunk of circuitry and soldered metal he'd brought from the TARDIS, "we've got to get this properly calibrated."

Sarah was curiously darting glances at the ceiling now, so Harry didn't feel so bad about his own surreptitious peek; the ceiling looked ordinary enough, some sort of stone, solid. Ceiling-like. He and Sarah exchanged glances, and she took her turn to ask the next question: "But why can't we go back to the TARDIS after we've calibrated that- that thing?"

"It's a dual-modulation uncertainty circuit," the Doctor said, swinging his feet off the bed and standing, still peering up at the ceiling with rapt attention. "The temporal sensors, though, are still in perfect order. I know when we are, anyway."

Harry didn't need prompting to ask the next question. "When are we, then?"

The Doctor finally tore his glance from the ceiling to regard Harry with the familiarly disconcerting stare. "That's the problem," he said. "We're in the fiftieth century by your reckoning. There should be a booming city here, full of travellers. Not to mention Eridanus."

"Eridanus?" Harry said. His head was throbbing, and he wasn't sure how much of that was due to the crack on the noggin, and how much could be attributed to the Doctor's words.

"A massive river," the Doctor said. "More of a sea than anything, absolutely gigantic."

"Thus the lighthouse," Sarah added. "That makes sense. But what could have happened?"

The Doctor was staring up again, and Harry darted another glance in the same direction. Still just a ceiling. "Well," the Doctor said. "Time passed. Rolled right over this place. That mechanical sentry we saw-" He automatically brushed a hand over his bloodstained shoulder as he spoke. "-was very probably a relic from the period that followed the galactic marketplace of the fiftieth century, when Artlan the Destroyer took up residence and made this place his fortress. In one of the great wars, the length of the semimajor axis of this planet's orbit shifted slightly, enough for desertification to accelerate when it passed near its sun." He frowned thoughtfully. "I suppose this means it's now moving further from the sun, judging by the chilly weather out there."

"All right," Sarah said, and Harry could tell that she was getting fed up with the Doctor's wordy but ultimately useless answers. "The TARDIS has landed us off-course before! What makes you think we haven't just landed a couple hundred years later than you thought? And why can't we go back?"

"Judging by the state of things, we should be at a point in history where the planet became totally barren, devoid of life."

"So?" Sarah planted her hands on her hips.

"So," the Doctor said with a small smile, "what's this Caelum fellow doing here, then? Why is this lighthouse still standing when it looks like the rest of the city - the rest of the civilisation - has been utterly destroyed?" He leaned forward, his fascination with the ceiling temporarily forgotten. "The temporal sensors in the TARDIS must be working - I just checked them! We are unquestionably in the fiftieth century, but everything's gone wrong."

"All right, Doctor," said Harry, feeling he'd been silent long enough. "But what's that got to do with the price of turnips? It would be simple enough to just go back to the TARDIS and check-"

"We can't go back to the TARDIS," the Doctor snapped, then was silent again for a moment, chewing on his lower lip and - again! - staring up at the ceiling. "The only possible explanation for all these impossibilities is localised time distortions, time speeding up and slowing down around all these different places. This lighthouse must exist in a different time than the rest of the city, which has long since been destroyed." He ran a hand back through his hair, thoughtful. "That might even account for that rather nasty storm outside."

Sarah blinked. "So you think the TARDIS is vulnerable because of these- these distortions?"

"I don't just think it, Sarah," the Doctor said, and hopped up to stand on his chair, tapping at the ceiling. "It's patently obvious - the TARDIS attracts loose temporal energy. It would be disastrous to try and approach it in a place like this. Ah!" He sneezed as a little puff of dust trickled from the ceiling. "You know, I hadn't thought of that. The TARDIS must be bleeding some of the excess energy away from the existing temporal distortions, destroying the temporary equilibria that have cropped up-"

"Oh," said Harry. "I'm beginning to get a bad feeling about this."

The Doctor grinned. "Precisely, Harry." He jumped down from the chair, swinging his scarf over his shoulder, and another little shower of dust rained down on him. Harry regarded the ceiling with some trepidation. "Now," the Doctor said. "The ceiling in this room is discoloured in comparison to the corridor outside, and has been becoming more so since we started this conversation. I expect it's being accelerated through time. Judging by the general cohesiveness of the stones above us, I'd estimate we have about, oh-" He mimed glancing down at a watch. "-thirty seconds before the ceiling caves in."

Harry glanced at Sarah. Sarah glanced at Harry.

They ran.

"Oh," the Doctor said some five seconds later, when they'd all dashed into the corridor with the first parts of the stone ceiling tumbling into the room behind them. They turned to watch the ceiling cave in - Harry winced as a particularly large chunk of rock crushed the bed. True to the Doctor's word, the destruction seemed limited to within the room. "Well," the Doctor said when the cacophony had died down. "Twenty seconds isn't a terrible margin of error."

Sarah and Harry, gasping for breath and covered in dust, simply glared. "You couldn't have warned us earlier?" Sarah snapped.

The Doctor smiled winningly. "It's bracing, this sort of exercise. Good for the hearts. Come on! Let's go let Caelum know the sky's falling."