To Be Astrid

Chapter 13 - Flesh and Stone

Flesh and Stone, part 1 -

When they landed after jumping Astrid stumbled slightly so the Doctor tightened his arm around hers. Everybody else had fallen and now started to get up.

"Up! Look up", the Doctor quickly instructed.

"Are you okay?", River asked Amy.

"What happened?", she only replied.

"We jumped."

"Jumped where?"

"Up. Up. Look up", the Doctor kept saying and now let go of Astrid's arm to quickly check up on everyone before sonicking the hatch below them.

"Where are we?", Amy insisted.

"Exactly where we were", River told her.

"No, we're not."

"Move your feet", the Doctor ushered her away from the hatch.

"Doctor, what am I looking at? Explain", she demanded.

"Oh, come on, Amy, think. The ship crashed with the power still on, yeah? So what else is still on?", he tried to get her to figure it out herself.

Astrid noticed that Amy would either not say it or she hadn't figured it out so she said, "Artificial gravity. We jumped and fell up. Shooting the gravity globe gave us an updraft."

The Doctor pointed at her in agreement, "And here we are."

"Doctor, the statues. They look more like Angels now", Octavian pointed out.

"They're feeding on the radiation from the wreckage, draining all the power from the ship, restoring themselves. Within an hour, they'll be an army."

The lights on the ship started to blast out. Astrid stepped closer to the Doctor, "Dad, they're taking out the lights."

"Look at them. Look at the Angels", he opened the hatch to find a corridor, "Into the ship, now. Quickly, all of you."

"How?", Amy asked.

He jumped through the hatch and then stood in the corridor, sort of sideways from their point of view. "Doctor!"

"It's just a corridor. The gravity orientates to the floor. Now, in here, all of you. Don't take your eyes off the Angels. Move, move move."

Everyone jumped in after him and ran past him when he closed the hatch back up. Octavian stopped next to him, "The Angels. Presumably they can jump up too?"

"They're here", the hatch was closed and the lights flickered, "Now, in the dark, we're finished. Run!"

The bulkhead at the other end of the corridor closed just in front of him.

"This whole place is a death trap", Octavian stated.

"No, it's a time bomb", the Doctor corrected him.

"Which is a death trap", Astrid added.

He shrugged in grudging agreement, "It's a death trap and a time bomb. And now it's a dead end. Nobody panic. Oh, just me then. What's through here?"

"Secondary flight deck", River told him while she opened another control panel and started working.

"Okay, so we've basically run up the inside of a chimney, yeah?", Amy was still coming to terms with artificial gravity, "So what if the gravity fails?"

"I've thought about that."

"And?"

"And we'll all plunge to our deaths. See? I've thought about it. The security protocols are still live. There's no way to override them. It's impossible", he turned to River when he noticed what she was trying to do.