Chapter Fourteen

Saul pulled one of the floor tiles away to reveal a small enclave beneath the pilot’s chair. On the console, the external censors showed a ship latching on to them with a temporal lock. They wouldn’t be able to move in time or space, and they hadn’t seen it coming fast enough to evade it. “Hide in here.”

Rom looked around at his brothers. “But they shouldn’t be able to get in here, should they?”

Handing the boy his squirming baby brother, Saul frowned. “How old is the Doctor’s TARDIS? How old is THIS TARDIS? A lot younger. Now get below the deck.”

Without a choice, Rom sat on the edge of the floor and slid beneath, his arms wrapped tightly around his younger brother. Something started chiming. It almost sounded like the cloister bell from back home, but it was much higher-pitched and closer. Which couldn’t be good, because whenever that happened at home, badness happened. “What’s that?” Branden asked as the man pushed him toward the hole.

Something slammed against the hatch of the ship, just as Saul put his hand on the blond boy’s head and shoved him down with his brothers, in the sea of wires and cabling. The lid clonked down over them. “You’re not here,” he whispered, closing his eyes.

He urged for Arten to keep his psychic presence to himself, and tried to quickly show the boys how to mask their energies. He didn’t know if the Time Agency had psychics on the payroll any more, but he didn’t want to find out the hard way.

It was a temporal disruptor that they were using on the door. He realised that when he heard the hum of a charge, then three deafening clicks as the disruptor tried to find the frequency and time differential used by the TARDIS locking system. This thing was a baby, and wouldn’t handle much in the way of interference.

Letting out a deep breath, he threw the baby blankets into the small living cab, closed the door, and tried to clear his mind, the way the psychic monks from Elonus Three had taught him when he was a boy. He hadn’t grown up around Time Lords, so he’d had to make due with whatever training his father could scrape together with what little funds they could gather. The training had served him very well ‘til this point in his life but he was suddenly starting to doubt it’s effectiveness against people who really meant it.

Doubt wasn’t a useful emotion, he reminded himself, trying to hide his thoughts. Doubt never accomplished anything.

Tugging his hood over his eyes, he readjusted the silver armband so that his rank in the thieves guild was facing outward. He was sure that also wasn’t traditional Time Lord training, but when he was fifteen, it was either join the guild or be killed by them. It had been a unique education, if nothing else. He’d learned how to beat a dead lock seal in under three minutes, which could be useful in a lot of circumstances.

“It’s you,” Rom said out loud, below deck. “It’s not you, but it’s you.”

The baby let out a moan that explained just how dissatisfied he was with the situation and reiterated his displeasure, mentally, for his lack of contact with the Doctor and his mother. The psychic soothing wouldn’t work too much longer on the boy and then they’d be in a lot more trouble.

Slamming his foot on the hatch, Saul made the whole floor shake. Thankfully, the boys fell silent.

There was another charge and three more clicks. There was nothing in his mind but…cereal. It seemed like as good of a thing to fill his mind with as anything else—benign and completely un-Time Lord related. That’s what the monks had taught him. A complete clearing of your conscience was achievable, but only at the highest levels of psychic awareness. Fixating upon something benign was what the rest of them had to work with.

He wondered if real Time Lords had this problem.

A hissing charge then three clicks. Then four clicks. Five clicks. A yaw, then…

The pressure released from the cabin and Saul wished he had a weapon of some kind. He’d never needed them before; he’d been told he was quite a talker. But he’d never had three little boys relying on him for their safety.

The hatch released and the light from the other ship nearly blinded him. He squinted, shielding his eyes with his hand, wondering what else he could have done.

This must have been how his dad had felt, always trying to keep him safe. And from the very thing now standing at his door.

XYZ

The Doctor had reached into all of the access hatches that Rose had opened, and had begun pulling cables in and out, testing various lines and splicing a few into each other. There was an old-fashioned wind-up alarm clock attached to one of the cables. Apparently it was regulating something or other and couldn’t be moved, which meant more wire-stripping.

Rose took that task upon herself. She wasn’t entirely sure what they were trying to get the ship to do, now that they were dead in the water. Sometimes it was better to just do and ask questions later.

Unfortunately, she thought, as she wrapped a wire stripper around a thick cable, it just gave her time to think and fume. “If it’s such a grossly, abhorrently bad idea, why did you give me what I wanted?”

“Because you wanted it,” the Doctor muttered without thinking, his legs sticking out of an access hatch. The sonic screwdriver hummed for a moment more, and then he climbed out. “Don’t you get everything you want?”

He said it with such honest simplicity that it caught Rose off guard, and she almost cut straight through the cable. Dropping the stripper, she bent down, trying not to look at him. She took her time, using the opportunity to gather her thoughts.

Glancing over to her, there was a look both vacant and surprised in his eyes—like he had no idea what she was on about, and that he probably wasn’t capable of mustering up the brain power to figure it out. “What? You don’t think I would?”

Standing up, Rose concentrated on the handle, which had been wrapped in day-glo pink tape, no doubt an addition from Violet’s time on board. “I don’t know. I just figure you always have huge reasons for things. Things I couldn’t comprehend.”

The Doctor pulled out something that looked like a log house, but was really a mass of tiny transformers. He began unplugging various cables from it, his brow arching downward in concentration. “Maybe I just wanted…” He sighed. “Look. It doesn’t matter. You’re right, they’re here now. Haveta deal with it.”

But he’d said it in that way. That way that she was familiar with, because she’d used it so artfully herself in many-an-argument. The way by which he was only conceding a point to make her feel guilt of some kind. “You know, if you ever said what you were really thinking, I would probably just flat-out die from shock? How long have we been travelling together? How long have you NOT been saying what’s on your mind?”

The Doctor kept searching the ceiling. Like it held some sort of wisdom or answers. “A long time, Rose. Longer than with… anyone.” The last was said like he’d just realised it.

She blew her dark fringe out of her eyes. “That’s practically a promise of commitment from you, you know.”

Putting down the sonic screwdriver, he turned around, still holding the ugly and complicated device in his hand. “Do you remember what I said when Sarah Jane was with us?”

“That you have no idea what the cause of my morning sickness could possibly be?” It had come out just as snarky as she’d intended.

He turned a little red. It would have been amusing, the way his ears seemed to boil, if this weren’t such a critical juncture. “Could you try to be serious for a moment?” Rose would have said something about pots and kettles, but cleaning his brain matter off the walls of the console room would be tedious. “When our paths crossed the first time. Not during that whole slimy creature in the sewers incident. I said I wouldn’t just leave you anywhere. So there.”

What he was trying to say, she supposed, in his dense, Time Lord sort of way was that he wasn’t leaving her. She was stuck with him forever. There’d be no running off for her, because there was no neat and tidy divorce proceeding for people who made promises to one another while being hunted by aliens or in front of chip shops.

She ran a hand through her hair, just wondering how this was going to work out. “Fine. I won’t leave with the boys.” Not getting them back wasn’t an option. He was the Doctor and she was Rose Tyler, and she’d be damned if some rogue agency that wasn’t supposed to exist any more harmed her children. “How much longer ‘til we have control of the ship back?”

The Doctor looked at the completely un-worked-on bundle in his hand. “Oh, maybe about… eight days?”

XYZ

They were two big burly men with a zillion guns. Emphasis on the guns.

At least, that was all Saul could see. Each of them had two double-barrel pistols pointed right at his face. He was vaguely aware of the mass of humanity holding said guns.

Still standing over the heavy metal plate containing the boys, Saul raised his hands casually. The armband glinted in the light coming from the other ship. “You’ve got me.” He looked up at the men’s faces for the first time. There was something in their eyes that let him know he was going to have a tough time talking his way out of this one. Trickery was in order.

“I think you know what we’re here for,” one of them said, in some accent he couldn’t quite identify. They were just as much out of time as he was.

He took a step forward, as if there was nothing special about the spot he’d been standing on. “I don’t have the score from the Antiquities museum.”

One of the men moved forward, his close-cut coat swinging open as he searched for the switch to open the door to the rest of the ship.

The funny thing about his ship—it was exactly as big on the inside as it was on the outside. Exactly. Hopefully they wouldn’t figure out that the internal dimensions did not allow for shielding, wiring, or anything else that goes between an interior and exterior wall. The TARDIS was just learning how to be trans-dimensional. Most people didn’t notice. But he was suddenly very paranoid about it.

So he reached out with a carefree hand to slap the control that opened to the rest of the ship. It slid open, the glaring fluorescent lights poured through, and one of the men stepped inside.

They were too smart to both go. One remained at the entrance, gun trained on Saul’s head, while the other had a look around for little children. Or possibly… signs of little children.

He watched the man poke through the contents of the room, and he was instantly thankful the boys hadn’t brought much with them, and that the ship had chosen to conceal the few things they’d left out. He would thank the ship later. There was no telling what mental contact with the ship would do right now, or who it would alarm.

Saul let his arms droop a little, giving the appearance of some false sense of security. He knew better than to give these men that. But it did cause the man with the gun to lower it just a fraction. Another inch or two, and he’d be able to turn to the side, move himself out of the line of fire and disable his opponent. “I told you,” he said confidently. “I don’t have the money.”

“Shut up.” And the gun was back up at his face. Well, hadn’t he just read that wrong? “We know you spaced that out on the edge of the Tella galaxy. Seven thousand gold bars make a really effective asteroid field.”

Just the way Saul had intended it. The whole theft had just been an elaborate escape tactic. “So what do you want?”

Both guns were pointed at him in opposite directions. “The Time Lord children.”

“Sorry.” Saul shrugged. “You guys beat me there.” A small smile crept across his lips. “Which means someone beat YOU there.”

One of the men, the one with the short coat, had put the gun away. “Look at it this way. Without them, we still have you, pretty boy.”

Saul was preparing to launch into plausible deniability. They’d been chasing him and his dad for years. They didn’t actually have confirmation that he was who they were looking for. But they interrupted him before he could even get the words to form.

“And this ship. An unauthorised time ship. Which means we can do whatever we want to you.” The man folded his arms across his barrel chest and grinned. “But I wouldn’t try anything. We went for a little insurance before all this started.”

Swallowing, Saul took a step backward, so he was back on the plate where the boys were hidden.

“We have your dad.”

TBC…