Spacewives Oneshot

8

                       Excavation
  
                       regenderate

It started like so many things did: a call for help, etched into psychic paper.

I need you.

The Doctor looked at her fam, gathered around the console, and then back down at the paper.

I need you.

The handwriting was familiar, although the Doctor couldn’t quite place it. Still, the statement spoke for itself. It wasn’t a generic help message, it wasn’t a cry into the void; it was vague, but specific in its audience. You. The Doctor could only think of a few people who would know how to contact her that way.

“Right then,” she said to the others. Fortunately, they had just landed in Sheffield. “Can’t come round for tea today, I’m afraid, I’ve got some things to take care of. Be back here tomorrow?”

“’Course,” Ryan said.

And Ryan, Yaz, and Graham said their goodbyes and left the TARDIS, already making plans for tea. As soon as they were gone, the Doctor focused on her paper.

I need you.

The message had to be coming from somewhere. But psychic paper was tricky, and the Doctor tended to travel all over time and space— the connection could reach thousands of years into the future or the past, or it could come from a faraway star system, or it could be from another time traveler, and if that was the case there was no telling where they were now.

She scanned the paper with her sonic. The connection was there, beamed through the TARDIS into the paper.

So the TARDIS could track it.

The Doctor leapt into action. She slapped the psychic paper down onto the TARDIS console and, flinging levers and stabbing at buttons, managed to track the signal. As she watched the monitor splashed across the far wall, the psychic paper’s signal took the TARDIS and the Doctor to the furthest reaches of the galaxy, and the TARDIS landed on a tiny mining planet, flung out on a far-reaching arm of the Milky Way.

“Now, who could need me here?” the Doctor muttered to herself. She looked at the psychic paper again, but the message was gone. With a shrug, she pocketed it. She was never one to avoid a mystery.

She strode out of the TARDIS onto a rocky plain. She didn’t see anybody at all, much less someone who might have left a mysterious message on her psychic paper, but a trip wasn’t worth taking if there wasn’t a bit of an adventure involved, so she walked in a wide circle around the TARDIS, looking for any sign of a civilization while she scanned the area with her sonic. She couldn’t see anything, but the sonic detected traces of heat almost directly below her and some sort of electronic device a few yards away.

Brilliant.

She moved in the direction of the electronics. Their buzz led her to a flatter, paler patch of rock, and another scan revealed a hidden trapdoor. With help from the sonic, the Doctor kicked it in, revealing a hole in the ground; without another thought, she jumped in. Her feet hit hard concrete, and she straightened up and held out her sonic like a flashlight. She was at one end of a smooth stone passageway, and the orange glow of her sonic illuminated some of the path ahead, but she couldn’t see much more than a few feet in front of her— if she remembered properly, the heat signals she’d found before were just a bit further than that.

She stepped forward with caution. She still didn’t know who had sent her the message; it could be an old enemy, or it could be a friend. She still couldn’t place the handwriting, but that didn’t mean much— lots of those little instinctive memories didn’t make it through from regeneration to regeneration. Either way, this was an unfamiliar planet, and there was clearly some kind of danger, it was worth being a bit more careful than she might otherwise have been.