Doctor Who Panic Moon Ch 35

Author's Note: This is a sequel series to Amy, Captured. To get the full experience, please read through that one first.

So, here we are again, with what is definitely the most requested character addition in the series. One thing I will request, regarding this one, is that you all be patient: she's probably appearing in an unexpected way, but I'm not done revealing things about her yet. By the time we get to chapter forty (which is totally a thing that is happening) you'll know everything about her. Perhaps you might be disappointed with Clara's current depiction, but hold off on voicing that disappointment because believe me, that ain't all. I do listen to your comments and take them into account, especially after the last time I teased this particular introduction. You'll be pleased.

That aside, I do love hearing from you guys, so please do let me know what you think. This has been a long time coming for some of you. Have fun!

***************

The bar was... different, especially in terms of what the woman had come to expect from Selestene. Well dressed patrons milled about the floor, the majority of them human and disinterested in her entrance; she had become accustomed to faces turning to meet every opening door, in search of some possible entertainment incoming. Soothing, calm music piped in from concealed speakers, and arch, refined waitresses strode with purpose from table to table, their slave collars on display above deeply plunging necklines.

Her companion gently shouldered past her, his eyes scanning the room with stern concentration, from one end to the other, before he relaxed and beckoned over his shoulder without turning, ushering her properly into the bar. She rolled her eyes; the android always executed his duties so self-seriously, it got more than a little ridiculous, when the stakes were as low as they were right now. If the company hadn't enshrined the practice of sending a security detail with every outbound business deal into its standard policy, her companion wouldn't be here at all; this was hardly a dangerous place to be.

The android's vibrantly magenta hair did little to make his presence here less ridiculous.

Casting back into her memory, she simultaneously scanned the room for her contact, hoping to catch a face she had only seen in photographs in the crowd. Secretly she wished she had requested a copy of the man's picture, but then, this had been an impromptu job if ever there was one; the summons had only come in a few hours before, and had it not been for the... quality, of the merchandise that had been on offer, she had no doubt that the company would have dismissed the idea of a meeting entirely. Especially one in which one of their agents had been asked for by name.

Yes, that had been a troubling little tidbit of information, the fact that she had been requested personally. She certainly did not know the contact personally, nor had she even seen his face before today, and yet he had taken every effort to stress that it be her that comes, even intimating that the deal would not progress if the company sent anyone else. If she was being frank, she would say that the entire deal seemed absurd, like a prank being played on the company in general, and herself in particular.

Had the dealer not listed, in mouth-watering detail, the extra-terrestrial rarities and purpose-trained slaves he had to sell, she doubted the company would have reacted at all.

In time she saw him, seated between a pair of women at a booth at the far end of the bar, and it turned out that he had seen her first; his positioning offered him a full view of the bar, and she couldn't imagine that this was anything but deliberate. He regarded her with the solid, appraising gaze of one sizing up an opponent, which in some respect she was; it was her job here to get him to relinquish his product for the lowest possible price, after all.

Fleecing him completely would be the ideal conclusion...

'There,' She pointed, and her companion promptly set out ahead of her. He reached the table rather quickly and, with both hands planted, palms flat, on its surface, he set about scanning the immediate surrounds for signs of a trap. It was all very... intense; for all the artificial skin and lifelike human features, the android still had a rather limited mindset. The company hadn't needed a skilled raconteur, after all.

Traversing the room, winding her way past a loose grouping of people and waitresses, she made a point of examining the features of the three people she was here to meet in greater detail. The man who had made the call was as he appeared in his photo: dark hair and a vague suggestion of unkempt deshabille, currently wrapped around a hearty, exhausted looking scowl. The woman to his left was bog standard human stock, though certainly attractive enough to defy that label; blonde and busty, she sat back as though the tension of her partner was none of her concern, though the rise of her shoulders and the fidgeting of her fingers said otherwise. Concealing her unease, then.

The woman at his right was an entirely different matter. She wore a scowl just like the man, but ultimately seemed more bored than irritated, as though she had better things to do than be here, waiting. Highly obvious muscles sat unwound and relaxed on her frame, but with such obvious utility lurking within them; the android was here to guard her if anything happened, but this woman was the

real

danger here, she knew it instinctively. The woman's eyes only confirmed her suspicions; hard as they were, they were also mismatched, the strange coloration a strong hint as to her lineage.

The woman was a half-breed. Her capabilities and powers were unknown, and all bets were off.

'Mister Hackett?' She asked, as she arrived at the table. The man continued to regard her, but he nodded curtly and gestured to the seat opposite.

'That I am,' He said, his voice gruff. 'And I know who you are, obviously. Do take a seat, yes? We have business to discuss.'

The android nodded to her, opting to remain standing after so graciously giving her his permission to sit. She slid into the booth, eyeing the two other women before speaking.

'Aren't you going to introduce your associates? We shouldn't be entering into negotiations with me at such a disadvantage, surely.'

'Yes, I was just getting to that,' The dealer said, placing a hand on the shoulder of the blonde to his left. 'This is Mara, and on my other side is Ren. They're just here to observe, so pay them no mind, in the same way that I'll be ignoring your android there. And of course,

you

are Clara Oswin Oswald. It's nice to finally meet you.'

A cold chill went down Clara's spine; he had used her

name.

Not Oswin, the name she went by in public, the name on her employment records and identification and bank statements, but

Clara.

The name on her birth certificate, the one that her parents had given her.

The name that too many sets of parents had given her...

She blinked. Inklings like that one weren't uncommon for Clara, tiny thoughts that weren't her own, like silvery threads running through her mind. She'd had them all her life, little recollections of lives she had never lived, and in turn they had made her own life ring somewhat false to her, as though it were merely the most stable and persistent of all her mental visions.

Of course, those same visions had...

called

her to the Alaska, to her current job, and in a way, to this very meeting. If she hadn't heeded that first call to board that starliner when it landed at the spaceport in her home town, hadn't succumbed to the wanderlust that had characterized much of her family, she would never have come to be here, sitting before a stranger who knew her name.

Wondering why, exactly, that was.

'How is it that you know that, by the way?' She asked. 'We've never met before, yes? I don't remember you, at any rate. Where did you hear that name?'

'Oh, I know more than just that,' The man shrugged, and beside him the two women's expressions shifted slightly, hitching with temporary amusement at the words. 'Quite a bit more, in fact. Possibly even more than you do, though I'd need to investigate that further before I'd make a definite call.'

'When you called earlier you wanted to make a deal with my company,' Suddenly, Clara didn't want to spend any more time than she absolutely needed to here. Things had gotten... kinda creepy. 'You claimed to have possession of a whole laundry list of rare slave types that would sell very well on our cruise lines catering to more specialized fetishes. It was almost suspiciously comprehensive, come to think of it. Like you'd just taken a look at our corporate sources and composed a list of things it looked like we'd want.'

'Yes,' He nodded. One hand reached into his pocket and pulled out a device of silver metal, levelling it at the android before activating it. Clara's companion slumped forward without keeling over, his head bowed as the man continued, 'That's literally what I did, and that's also the lie I told you to get you here.'

Noticing the way she stared at her non-responsive bodyguard, Sander waved a hand dismissively, putting his little machine away.

'Oh, don't worry about him,' He said. 'I just turned him off for a bit. I do have things I want to discuss with you, Oswin, but not in front of prying eyes. This will not be the kind of business deal I promised to you, but I do promise that you'll find this worth your while.'

'Reactivate the robot,' Clara said coldly. 'If you aren't willing to negotiate the deal that was agreed upon prior, then we have nothing further to discuss. The ship we have docked here will remain in dock for a day longer, if you wish to reconsider and continue our

actual

business deal, then you have until that time to do so. Goodbye.'

He allowed her to stand and leave the booth before he spoke up, and when he did the words were small and soft, but with enough stopping power to lock Clara in place.

'If you board that ship again, you'll die.'

Clara felt herself clam up, the weird sort of shock at how this meeting had progressed jamming the words on her tongue. Eventually she managed to get out, 'Are you

threatening

me?'

'Not at all. I'm merely observing what the future will be, but I won't have any hand in your death, when it happens,' Again that infuriating shrug, as though he was engaging in little more than small talk, 'Or didn't you even consider the idea that a man you don't know, but who knows you, could be time active?'

A time traveller!

'You're a time traveller?' She said, echoing the little voice in her head, with more than a little natural scepticism thrown in. Such a thing wasn't

unheard of

, in the whole of the galactic community, but it wasn't common; time active individuals were regarded with equal parts suspicion and reverence, when they opted to reveal themselves as time active at all. Being in the chronological closet, so to speak, seemed to be the norm for them, especially in the shadow of the Time Lords.

Time Lord!

'Maybe,' He evaded. 'But I have seen your future, Oswin. You board the Alaska, you die. It's just a fact. I can show you, if you like.'

'You can...

show me?

' Against her better judgment, Clara say back down.

'Time active surveillance isn't, you know,

hard

,' Sander produced a small hologram projector from his pocket and set it on the table between them. Running a finger around the ring switch that powered it, a soft blue glow painted itself across all the nearby surfaces, 'If you know what you're doing, and I do. It's one of the few things I do well, actually. If the time-tech community knew I could do it, I have little doubt they'd call me the best there is at it. You might say I have a personal stake in being that way.'

An insubstantial globe of light pulled itself together, starting from the projection aperture below, but quickly blooming to cover much of the empty space between their faces. Resolution quickly piled on, adding detail after detail until what floated above the table was no longer a sphere of light, but was a solid-looking image, instead.

It was an image of the Alaska's familiar hull, and it was crashing.

It took Clara a moment to recognize what she was looking at, in its totality. Space was devoid of characteristics in general, notoriously so, and thus the ship itself had little around it to position itself. Only the presence of the curving surface of a planet toward the bottom of the image told her that a crash was, in fact, what was happening. For a good thirty seconds, the Alaska descended- careened, Clara realized, based on the scale of the images she was seeing- toward the planet, a sleeted marble of grey cloud and white landscapes on the distance. It hit the atmosphere with a shudder, as air resistance began to tug at the hull, and when it did, the view changed.

With a rather unprofessional looking camera cut, suddenly the hologram showed a far more familiar view, that of the interior of Clara's own cabin. Coldness began to settle in her stomach in a dense ball, as the probability that what she was seeing was all fake dipped further; every detail of her room was perfect, every item in its place, even the

positioning

was spot on. Though red emergency lights daubed the room a dim crimson, Clara could even see her employee identification on the little fold out desk, the numbers and personal information on it matching precisely.

She hadn't brought it here. It had never left the ship, as per company policy, and none of these people had

ever

boarded the Alaska. As an entertainment manager, it was her job to know things like that, and the onboard biometric scanners logged every entry and disembarkation to aid her in her job. There was simply no way this footage could be doctored, not without the access to her quarters that they couldn't possibly have had.

She watched, almost spellbound, as a holographic representation of herself raced across the screen, gathering personal effects and important work-related documentation in a flurry of frightened movement. Stupid; the ship was crashing and she was trying to save trinkets rather than herself?

'Not that it matters,' Sander interjected, as the ship continued to tumble to the earth. 'But the escape pods won't be functioning. It really is the worst case scenario for a crash.'

'How did you get all this?' Clara breathed.

'Shh, you're going to miss the important part,' His eyes glittered through the translucent base of the hologram, glinting a cold blue in the glow.

With a jarring suddenness, the ship seemed to impact the planet, with a screech of tortured metal, filled with too many individual notes to properly separate, and backed by a number of voices rising in panic, far too many of them cutting off suddenly.

A horrible stillness reigned in the moments after, warning klaxons, audibly damaged, wailing their mechanical wails without response, as somewhere else in the ship things were still breaking, the sounds of the Alaska's ruin echoing up the halls. But nothing moved on the screen, nobody went to the aid of the stricken starliner; Clara was used to seeing her workplace bustling with activity, and its sudden desertion was shocking in its contrast.

She actually gasped, when she saw herself rise back into frame.

'That's right, you survive the crash,' Sander said, as if taking his cue from her reaction. 'A handful of the crew do too, but it's otherwise as close to a complete population kill as it could be. Lucky for the company, I think, that you hadn't been carrying actual passengers at the time, only newly acquired stock. They won't even send a search vessel looking for you. I know, I've seen it.'

'But if I live through the crash, then-'

'Then you get to meet the occupants of the planet. The Alaska offers such a

safe

, sanitized view of other worlds, doesn't it? That's the appeal, the company's major selling point... but it's not a true depiction of the worlds beyond the viewing windows, not really.'

Perhaps he had timed his little speech to the events on the footage, because the moment he finished speaking, the metal sound of the ship in distress developed a voice.

Many

voices, in fact, raised in unison, a chorus of one word, grating through the Alaska, louder and louder.

'

Exterminate!

'

A sort of shared, genetic memory shudder went through Clara, from the back of her neck to the base of her spine.

Daleks

. The galaxy had felt their impact, even this far away from the Time War; word travelled, and when the occasional ship drifted by a planet in the sector, invariably devastating whatever life forms happened to inhabit it, the news filled the rest of the galactic community with dread. Even the sound of their voices was enough to make her uneasy.

It wasn't just her, either. Around the bar, heads had turned toward the sound, some dismissing it out of hand, while others watched on, entranced by this particular piece of horrific cosmic arcana. Clara shifted uncomfortably; this wasn't usually the way she liked to be the centre of attention.

Not watching the screen wasn't an option, however; eyestalked metal faces trundled into the room, into

her

room, though these looked... different. Their notoriously uniform appearance had been corrupted by myriad imperfections, scars across their carapaces or huge rents in their suits, the occasional dangling eyestalk or weapon port mangled beyond recognition. Even the Daleks that were functionally whole seemed off somehow, unsteady in their movements or incessantly bumping into walls.

'You don't get a good sense of time from this, as I've cut out a lot of dead footage from this recording,' Sander cut in here, his voice remarkably calm given what was happening. 'But by now several hours have passed. All the emergency doors had sealed along your section of the ship, where the mechanisms hadn't taken much of the impact and therefore been damaged. You were... lucky, in a sense, to have been at the rear of the Alaska, in that you weren't immediately killed or sealed inside the ruins of the ship, waiting for the Daleks to come for them. You had a chance to escape, though it wouldn't matter if you had. After all, the planet's air had gotten into the oxygen feedback system fairly quickly...'

Clara watched herself, cornered by a wall of broken metal and screeching cyborg aliens, far too many than could reasonably be needed for a single woman, but to Clara that only hinted at just how many Daleks had flooded into her ship, her home. The sight of so many of those weapon-stalks, the origins of such devices burned into her memory due to so much childhood footage of the Time War, pointed right at her, sent a shiver down her spine.

'Now, if this was any normal situation, if these were any normal Daleks, your chances of persisting beyond the next, oh, the next few seconds would be vanishingly small,' He wouldn't stop talking, even as the horrible footage rolled on. His voice seemed to entwine itself with the visuals, a taunting melody backed by the chorus of alien shrieks, 'But then, these aren't normal Daleks, and since you've been breathing the air, it's also not a normal situation. You see, the air on this particular planet is suffused with nanotechnology, beautiful little examples of micro-robotics, under any other circumstances, put to sinister use here. You breathe them in, and the Daleks can see your internal architecture with perfect clarity, and when they saw you, they saw something they

liked

, Clara Oswin Oswald.'

Another cut, and Clara watched herself being herded through snow, her Dalek captors hovering over the uneven ground, evidently unable to gain traction while land-bound. She was alone, singled out for reasons not readily apparent to her, and despite continued, loud commands to "

Proceed!

" it was clear she was having difficulty on the icy ground herself. It seemed as natural as anything that her captors didn't care about her difficulties in the slightest, merely commanding further progression whenever her- bare- feet slipped on the sodden, chilled ground.