Doctor Who Forgotten Suns Chapter Thirteen

The situation was so… Surreal.

Zoe no longer found herself capable of feeling any fear as she, very carefully, removed another nasty looking projectile from Null’s scalp. In truth, he actually seemed like quite a nice person - once she had overcome the initial terror of finding herself being carried along like an injured bird - confined and immobilized.

All that Zoe could now readily recall of that horrific moment of awakening, the realisation that she was being clasped in a huge hand: was a fuzzy sensation of absolute helplessness. She had never really considered herself overly prone to panic, but her instant response to that unexpected claustrophobic experience had been totally involuntary.

She had screamed at the top of her lungs.

Then Zoe had felt herself being lifted up, away from what she could now see was the space pilot’s chest: to be confronted by the smooth, clear features of the giant’s face. She had absolutely no idea how she had come to be in this predicament. She stared with the fascinated paralysis of an animal trapped in a vehicles headlights, her voice silenced by shock. Had he been a more reasonable size, Zoe realized, she would have taken him as a human being without question. It was impossible to guess at his age, but his eyes - his beautiful eyes - looked so old… so sad. They were regarding her with a great deal of concern.

“Please don’t be scared,’ he had said, ‘I’m not going to hurt you, but you are a most unexpected puzzle to me. Who are you? What are you doing on my ship? Is the war over? Have you come to wake the memories?”

The barrage of questions had confused Zoe deeply, but his initial reassurances had allowed her to calm down somewhat. The trapped bird fluttering of her heart slowing down by degrees, she had squirmed slightly in his - she now realized - very gentle grip, trying to regain enough confidence to answer. It took a couple of tries before her throat co-operated.

“How… how did I get here? I don’t remember leaving my friend, Jamie!’ She paused, trying to isolate her last coherent thoughts. ‘We… we were talking about the Doctor - another friend - when suddenly there was a horrible face in front of me! It was covered in dancing colors… I couldn’t move! And now… here I am. Why are you holding me?’ Then she remembered her manners. ‘Oh! Sorry! My name is Zoe… what’s yours?”

“Call me Null,’ the giant had replied, regarding her quizzically, ‘I am the pilot of this craft, Zoe, and I really need to know where you have come from, how you got here, and why.’ He glanced behind himself and Zoe noticed small rivulets of blood just beginning to trickle down his neck. He looked back towards her thoughtfully, then offered, ‘There are other small creatures, unlike yourself, aboard as well. I will need to deal with them soon, but you are my priority for now. If you are uncomfortable being carried I can put you down - but I don’t see how you would keep up with me, and I am in a hurry.”

Null resumed walking after they had worked out a compromise.

Sitting in the sling that the pilot had made of his arm, and gripping onto the fabric of his suit, Zoe had promised to tell him what she could - if he would tell her how she came to be with him in the first place. The corridors they were traversing looked very different from this new perspective, and the lighting had come up fully. However, these were just peripheral details for Zoe, as Null told her of his encounter with an infestation of vermin - that he was now beginning to suspect might not have been vermin after all.

How she had been comatose when he ‘rescued’ her from them; how he had dealt with them and, disturbingly, that there appeared to be more of them elsewhere in the ship.

“But what about Jamie? Did you see him? Was he attacked by those things as well? And the Doctor! Did you see the Doctor?” Zoe had interrupted at this juncture, only to receive a slightly evasive answer from the giant. Jamie - if Jamie was a feisty little mad thing wearing a skirt - had been safe enough when last he had seen him. But the pilot had been more interested in Zoe, so had left him behind with the other creatures. He had only seen more of the small bipedal lizards, as he described them, beyond the door. Zoe could not recall seeing any lizards but, on reflection, she thought that there may have been something reptilian about the organic kaleidoscope of a face that she did remember.

She was worried about the Doctor and Jamie. Obviously these lizard-men were what the Doctor had approached after passing through that door - so why wasn’t he still with them? And Jamie? Was he safe with these new aliens - or were they just animals, as Null had first thought?

Despite her urgent protestations, Null had flatly refused to go back to rescue her friends, until he had a better idea of the situation. And so Zoe had recounted her tale for him: the Tardis’ malfunction, their arrival on the flight deck… some of the Doctor’s speculations and guesswork. Null had shown particular interest in her own adventures with the master control board: he had nodded to himself as if she had confirmed something for him. Zoe had found herself distracted by another thin trickle of blood that began to creep down his forehead.

“Null?” she asked, ‘Are you aware that your head is bleeding?” Apparently he wasn’t, as he had given her a puzzled look before smoothing his other hand over his bald scalp. He had looked very surprised to find a thin smear of red across his palm, when he examined it.

“Do you want me to take a look at it for you?” Zoe found herself offering. He thought about it for a moment, before stooping down towards the floor, allowing her to hop down to the deck.

“I thought I was just getting stung, like insect bites or something… you know?’ he explained. ‘They don’t really hurt much… now .’ He took a step back away from Zoe, before getting on his hands and knees, then lowering his face to the deck, saying, ‘It’s probably nothing to worry about, Zoe.”

Feeling rather touched by the trust that he was showing her, Zoe peered closely at the top of Null’s head, until she had located six or seven small perforations in the skin; just now beginning to bleed once more. In comparison to his huge skull, they looked like grains of grit in a scuffed kneecap, but Zoe concluded that they were more than just bites. “Well, it never hurts to check, Null!’ she exclaimed with forced cheer, ‘These look like wounds inflicted by a projectile weapon to me! They may not hurt you now, but they could become infected if not seen to, I’m sure.” The huge pilot rose back up to his knees, regarding Zoe thoughtfully as she continued, “Do you have any medical facilities? I’m not trained, but I can remove a splinter as well as the next girl!”

And so he had pointed to another hatch in the ceiling and suggested that she meet him beneath it. Null was there in a few strides. By the time Zoe had caught up, the pilot had already opened the hatch cover and checked that the way was clear. With a whoop of exhilaration, Zoe had found herself rising rapidly in Null’s steady hand, as he deposited her onto the next level. After repeating this procedure once more, a little further down a depressingly similar corridor to the previous one, Null had picked her up again and walked unhurriedly to a side door. Keying the lock with his other hand, he then carried her into the room thus revealed. It didn’t look much like any medical facility Zoe had ever seen. In fact it was mostly empty, but the pilot had seemed confidant.

Now Zoe wasn’t so sure.

Null was laying patiently on the floor, the Med-Kit he had retrieved from a wall set beside him, its contents strewn around so that she could reach them. Naturally enough, most of the actual equipment provided was far too large for Zoe to handle: but, with Null’s assistance, some fairly effective Zoe-scale digging implements had been fashioned. She was getting through the task pretty well. In fact, it wasn’t like removing splinters at all - or any other kind of invasive surgery, really.

Perhaps his skin was too thick for the lizard-thing’s weapons, but none of the projectiles had gone very deep. It was more like removing ticks, or perhaps just digging out other insect parasites. What did those Earth primates - long extinct by Zoe’s time - do? Ah, yes! Grooming!

As a child, Zoe had been fascinated whenever she saw those old restored vids, showing the long lost animals of her distant home planet. Particularly those furry bipedal creatures, so similar in appearance to actual people; that used ‘grooming’ to create bonds of friendship, or to reinforce social standing. It was proving to be quite an effective form of social bonding between herself and a certain giant space pilot, Zoe mused absently. She found herself flinching as the latest projectile finally came free; still not quite believing that, as Null claimed, it did not hurt him much.

“That’s nearly it, Null, only a couple more to go!’ Zoe exclaimed brightly, ‘could you roll your head to your right so I can reach them, please?” The pilot complied without comment, so Zoe decided to get some answers of her own as she set to work again. ‘You still haven’t told me what all that was about, you know, when we first, er… met. Something about a war, and memories? I’m afraid don’t remember any war.”

Null was quiet for a moment, then he said, “I don’t really know where to begin, Zoe. Everything is very confused, nothing is going to plan - I’m not even sure how long I was in temporal isolation before you woke me.”

“ I woke you?’ Zoe asked in surprise, then frowned, adding, ‘and what’s temporal isolation?”

“Ah, now there’s another question I can’t really answer! I’m just a soldier, not a scientist!’ Null sounded almost amused, Zoe thought, but also rather sad. ‘All I can say is that it is an experimental process which, as the name suggests, is intended to isolate… whatever the field contains, from the passage of time. This ship was converted to carry a precious cargo, contained within the Vault of Memories at its core. My crew and I were the guardians of the vault. There were six of us, but I’m the only one left.”

“Oh! I’m sorry to hear that, Null,’ Zoe said sadly as she dug away at his scalp, ‘what happened to them?”

“I don’t know…

‘They were in a separate part of the ship - in fact, it was most of another ship connected to this one. It’s gone now.’ He paused as Zoe tugged out the latest projectile: she once more feared that she may have hurt him, but after a moment he continued as if nothing had happened. ‘What I don’t understand is… well, everything, I guess - if I’m to be honest. I have no way of knowing how much time has passed while I was in my chamber; it seems only a matter of moments to me. The ship appeared to be much as I had left it… until I discovered the loss of the Survival Pod, where the others had been. But if you know nothing of the war… Well… I must have travelled very far, both in time and distance.”

As Null trailed off into thought again, Zoe repeated her question about Null’s earlier comment. “What did you mean when you said that I woke you? I mean, was it me personally, or did the arrival of the Tardis set off some kind of alarm?” She was now working on the last wound in the giant’s scalp, but stopped to listen to his reply.

“Tell me,’ he asked first, ‘is this ‘Tardis’ a blue box?’ Zoe confirmed that she and her friends did, in fact, travel in a craft that fitted that description. ‘Ah… So it wasn’t Aristophanes who put it there after all. No. No… the Tardis had nothing to do with my revival, Zoe. I think that you initiated the sequence yourself, when you were clambering over my board. From your description, you must have activated the bio-scanner… and it recognized enough of a match to start the process.”

“But how is that possible?’ Zoe asked, frankly finding his assertion rather difficult to believe, ‘we are obviously not alike… we’re not even the same species! …Are we? Are you trying to tell me that you are a human… that you are from Earth?”

“Not at all, Zoe. I don’t even know what Urth is… Have you finished yet, Zoe?’

She jumped at the question, then returned to the task, complaining that he still hadn’t answered her own question.

Null continued. ‘As I told you before, Zoe, I am not a scientist, but I have been giving this some thought as you have tended to me. Your bio-trace is a close match to that stored in the recognition system, even closer than was allowed for, actually. I can only guess that the Progenitors - the ones who created my people - must have had some connection to your people in the distant past. That seems to be the only possible explanation, but I cannot account for your size. You are much smaller even than them.”

“Wait a minute. Did you just say that you were ‘created’? Oh! That’s the last one! Null, you can get up now!’ Zoe flung the projectile away, followed by her makeshift tool, gazing ruefully at her bloodied hands. Although Null’s wounds were very small, they had bled copiously. She suddenly realized that Null had not answered her, so tried again. ‘I mean, it didn’t sound like you were talking about a… a supreme being, or referring to a creation myth, or anything like that.”

“You are correct, Zoe,’ he replied eventually, ‘I am the end product of genetic experimentation and manipulation. My kind were created to fight in a war, each new batch larger than the previous one. I can remember when there were so very many of us…”

“But that doesn’t make any sense!’ Zoe protested, interrupting him indignantly, ‘ Why would anyone need to make giants? I’m sorry, Null, I don’t mean to be insensitive - but… Well, where I come from only animals have been known to grow to such a massive size. An intelligent species doesn’t need to be so big! In fact, I should have thought it would actually be a disadvantage in many ways. I mean, look at your ship! The resources that went into constructing it, the power it must use, I just can’t imagine it! …And what do you eat? How do you feed such a huge body?

‘Um… no offence.”

Whilst Zoe had been talking, Null had rolled over onto his stomach so that he could see her better. Now he regarded her placidly and, to her surprise, smiled at her. “None taken, Zoe, although I prefer not to discuss my dietary requirements for the moment. In fact, I think we have been here too long already.” He began rummaging amongst the scattered contents of the Med-Kit until he found what he was looking for. At his request, Zoe held out her soiled hands as he broke open a vial of water for her. She rubbed them together vigorously as he poured, cleaning away the blood, and smiled her thanks.

As Null used the remaining water on a cloth to scrub his head, Zoe dried her hands as best she could on her coveralls, then said. “I’m sorry, Null, you must think me terribly rude! I’m not really the one you should be talking to. The Doctor - the friend that I mentioned before - now, he would be able to come up with some helpful ideas, I’m sure!’ Null, by now back to his knees, began rubbing some kind of cream into his scalp. As he was looking at her thoughtfully, Zoe rushed on quickly. ‘If we go back to where you left Jamie, I expect we would find the Doctor nearby - he must have been with those lizard-people somewhere! I honestly think he could help you… at least, I know he would try!”

“Maybe so, Zoe, maybe so. I shall indeed have to deal with those creatures eventually, but…’ He held up a hand to forestall any protest, ‘not just yet. First there is something that I want to show you.” Null leant down again and placed his arm on the deck before her.

Resignedly, Zoe climbed back up and made herself as comfortable as she could, gripping tightly to his sleeve as he stood.