Doctor Who - Incarceration

Part Three - Righting Wrongs

Clara watched as the Doctor darted around the room like a possessed meerkat, running his hands along every surface and muttering: "Where is it? It must be here somewhere..."

"What do you mean: 'Let them all out'?" she asked. "We didn't do anything."

He turned and shot her an exasperated glare. "I used logical reasoning to force the Governor into shutting himself down. The Governor controls the prison, so if he shuts down then so does the prison. Now if you don't mind, I'm a little bit busy?" He resumed his frantic searching.

"What are you looking for? I could help."

The Doctor waved a finger at her. "Yes! Something to store something. My sonic screwdriver, to be precise. That sort of technology doesn't come along often, if ever. The Governor won't have just chucked it away into storage; he'd want to have a long hard look at it." He stood in the middle of the room and looked round, finger to his lips. "So we just need to ask ourselves: if we were a tyrannical, rules-obsessed robot, where would we hide our secret stuff?"

"How about there?" asked Clara, pointing at a small hatch behind where the Doctor was standing.

He grinned and then set to the hatch, exclaiming with joy as it sprang open and then turning with a grin, holding the sonic screwdriver aloft like a sacred lantern. "Now we're in business," he said, darting back to the panel beneath the screen and waving the screwdriver at its innards for a few seconds before peering back at the side of his instrument. "Yep, thought so. The TARDIS is down in the storage area."

"Is that near here?"

"Yes and no. Mostly no. Actually, wholly no--it's the other end of the prison. Given that there's four million people between us and there, you could say it's quite a way away. However, I have some good news."

"Which is?"

"I can teleport us across the prison so we're near there. Bad news, though, is that the storage area is shielded; we can't get closer than a kilometre. Really bad news is I need to fix the whole prisoners-being-free thing before we can go."

"But you have a plan, right?"

He grinned at her. "I always have a plan!"

"Wait a minute," said Clara. "Surely the TARDIS is more interesting than a little sonic screwdriver? If the Governor was so keen to examine that, surely a time travelling machine would be even more interesting?"

"Hey," he said, affronted. "The sonic is a very interesting thing, I'll have you know. Just because it's little doesn't mean it's not important; you should know that."

Clara opened her mouth and took a step toward him. "What do you mean by...?"

"Anyway," said the Doctor quickly, glancing at the electronics exposed within the hatch below the screen, "the TARDIS could be a lot more dangerous in the wrong hands than this little thing, so stands to reason that they'd want it securely locked up, rather than in here where any idiot could get their hands on it. Probably all sorts of protocols against allowing transportation devices within the body of the prison. Now, I need to get to work."

Clara watched as he busied himself with the sonic screwdriver, firstly pointing it at the exposed electronics below the screen and then at the Governor itself, removing a panel in the robot's chest and tinkering with the wires and circuit boards within. "There," he said. "I just need to press this button and it will create a blind spot in the Governor's sensors--and by extension all of the guards--in relation to us. We'll be invisible to them. Think of the Governor's brain like a water slide, with all of the information like water. I've basically connected a load of straws to take some of the water round the bits of the slide which relate to our identities so they won't see us. But in a sciency, computery sort of way."