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john_amend_all) wrote2021-05-14 10:20 am
Birthday Wishes
Many happy returns to thisbluespirit!
I have managed to write birthday fic, which may be UNIT dating fic, or it may be me breaking the rule about never AUing S&S. Or both. Or neither.
[~2700 words, Liz Shaw, John Hart { as in The Sea Devils, not Torchwood! } and others...]
As the harsh clang of the watch bell came to Liz Shaw's ears, she swept the telescope around the horizon one final time, replaced it on its stand, and clambered down from the crow's nest with practised skill. As she'd half expected, Captain Hart was waiting for her at the bottom of the ladder.
"Nothing?" he asked, the question clearly a matter of form.
"Nothing," Liz confirmed. If she had seen anything, they both knew she'd have shouted it out at once, after all. Inwardly, she suspected that he had an ulterior purpose for always being around when she finished a shift: some of the crewmen blamed their current predicament on her presence aboard, and without the Captain's restraining authority might have been tempted to rectify the matter themselves.
With a half-nod of acknowledgement, she climbed down the companion-way to the middle deck. In the gloom, the massive wooden box containing the Timepiece seemed for a moment to be hanging unsupported in midair; though, as Liz's eyes adapted to the dimmer light, it was plain that it was suspended on chains from the deck above. Having retrieved her journal, she began entering details in the appropriate columns. Date and local time. Weather. (Sky like an overripe lemon), she thought, as she wrote clear in the chart. Condition of sea: Calm (Looking positively viscous, in fact). Timepiece reading:
Liz's first glance at the dials on the Timepiece was purely a matter of form. In these conditions, with neither a breath of wind or a ripple on the ocean, the Timepiece was hardly facing a challenge. For the past weeks, it had ticked out the seconds, minutes, hours and days without so much as a hairsbreadth of deviation. Nonetheless, she was a scientist, the only one left on the ship now, and she wasn't going to cut corners.
She looked briefly at the dials, turned away, then turned sharply back as her mind registered what her eyes had seen. Her second, more searching look confirmed what she'd originally noticed.
The Timepiece had lost five seconds in the last eight hours.
Liz checked twice more before feeling confident enough in what she'd seen to write the appropriate entry in the journal. Then, she forced herself to wait for the ink to dry, replaced the journal in its waterproof case, and made sure the latter was tightly sealed. Maybe she might never return from this voyage — a contingency that was slowly becoming ever more prominent in her mind — but at least the journal might somehow find its way back to the Board of Longitude.
Having secured the journal, Liz turned back with the aim of giving the Timepiece a more detailed examination. It quickly became apparent, though, that there was little to be seen. If she was to examine the device's innards, she would require the services of the ship's carpenter. Even had she been on better terms with the man, it hardly seemed likely that Captain Hart would agree to spare his time. Absent that, all she could say was that there was no sign of external damage, or of the case being opened. And even if someone had opened the case, the possibility of them making a relatively minor change to the rate of the Timepiece was remote; as she recalled the Doctor saying, any such change required the entire device to be dismantled and reassembled, a procedure that would take the better part of a day.
She rested her head against the Timepiece, letting the sound of its ticking fill her consciousness. There didn't seem to be any irregularity, anything out of place that she could hear. If the clicks of the escapement were marginally further apart than they ought to have been, the difference wasn't enough for her to perceive. She closed her eyes...
Liz wasn't sure, later, if she'd actually dozed off or merely lost track of time — the latter explanation would definitely have earned her points for irony when she was in close proximity to one of the most accurate chronometers the world had yet seen. Whichever it was, she was jerked back to full awareness by the sounds overhead of running feet and hoarse shouting. Perhaps she had been asleep after all; the gloom of the middle deck had dimmed further, the bulk of the Timepiece now an indistinct shadowy mass. Nonetheless, it seemed that something was happening on deck, and she'd better know what it was.
Liz hurried up the companion-way, emerging not into daylight but into a green-tinted gloom. Overhead, the sky, so long clear from horizon to horizon, was a mass of off-grey cloud, slowly and dizzyingly rotating overhead.
"That's no nat'ral storm, Captain," a voice was saying. Liz recognised it as that of the ship's carpenter, of whom she'd just been thinking. Sam Seeley was one of the oldest and most superstitious members of the crew, and one of the most strenuous objectors to her presence on board. "Not a wave on the sea, or a breath of wind, so how's them clouds moving, eh?"
"I couldn't say, Sam." Captain Hart was clearly trying to damp down a possible panic among the crew, in the face of whatever this phenomenon was. He raised his voice, so the group standing around him — nearly the ship's entire crew — were sure to hear. "Make all hatches secure."
As the men hurried to their work, the Captain, deliberately moving slowly, crossed the deck to join Liz.
"I've not seen weather like this in twenty years at sea," he said, looking up again at the swirling vortex of cloud. "Seeley's right: there couldn't be a hurricane nigh over our heads and us not feel a thing. You've not...?"
"It's outside my experience, I'm afraid," Liz said. She shivered, and found herself wishing she'd worn a greatcoat. "If the Doctor was here, maybe he'd have something to say."
"I'm sure he would. He was never short of a word or ten, was he?" By now the clouds covered the sky from horizon to horizon; distance was impossible to judge, but it felt as if a nebulous hand was slowly closing around the ship. "But then, he isn't here."
"I know. And things haven't been right since he— went."
"A very astute observation," a woman's voice said, behind them.
Hart spun round, his cutlass already half-drawn; Liz was scarcely slower. Though it was clearly impossible, there were two people, strangers, standing on the deck no more than four yards away. One must be the woman who had spoken: seemingly young, her dark skin unlined, but her curly hair already greyish-white. Her battered greatcoat and boots gave her the look of an experienced mariner. By contrast, the slender, red-headed man standing just behind her might have been a fop who had that moment stepped from a London coffee-house. He returned Liz's scrutiny with a slight bow, and what might have been a wink.
"Who the devil are you?" Hart demanded. "And what are you doing on my ship?"
"You don't know us?" The woman pulled an exaggerated grimace. "Time was when any sailor would know our names."
"But I often like it better when they don't," the man said. "It does get a little tedious, being told I don't look the way people imagined me."
The woman gave a brief, harsh laugh. "There's that. Anyway, we've no time to waste. Where is it?"
This question was clearly addressed to Hart and Liz. The former, one hand still on his cutlass, was equally clearly in no mood to answer.
"Whoever or whatever you are," he said, "I didn't give you permission to come aboard."
"We don't need it," the woman said. "And you'd do better to put that toy of yours away." She held up her hands, palms outward. "See? No weapons."
Hart slowly pushed his cutlass back into its sheath.
"Very sensible," the red-headed man said. "I've seen what happens when people try it the other way." From his waistcoat pocket, he extracted a quizzing-glass, and held it to his eye. "The source is one deck below us, I fancy."
"The source of what?" Liz said. She realised she might be pre-empting Hart's authority, but perhaps these two people wouldn't see her as so much of a threat. And there was definitely something one deck below them for which she felt the keenest responsibility: the Timepiece.
"Come with us and maybe you'll see," the woman said.
"Miss Shaw!" As the two strangers turned away, Liz felt Captain Hart's hand on her elbow, and heard his lowered voice in her ear. "I must caution you in the strongest possible terms: stay away from those two people!"
Liz turned toward him. "Why? What do you know about them? Or guess?"
"You hear stories, when you're at sea." Hart shrugged. "But they got aboard, while we're in a dead calm, out of sight of land, and none of us saw the ship they came in, or heard it. Now if you want to explain how they could do that and still be two normal human beings, tell me."
"I can't." Liz politely removed his hand from her arm. "But I've got to keep an eye on them. If they want the Timepiece—"
"If they do, what do you think you can do to stop them? But you won't be told, will you? No more than the Doctor could."
"Sadly not," Liz said, and headed down the companion-way in pursuit.
The main deck, when she reached it, was lit by a cold blue-white radiance that owed nothing to the light of sun or candle. In that dead, flat glare, the two strangers were, as Liz had half-expected, half-feared, making their own examination of the Timepiece.
"As expected," the man said. "This is where it's caught. And the ship. And its crew, all of them."
"'Caught,'" the woman repeated. "Can you release it? Or d'you want me..."
"Believe me, I'm well aware of your capabilities." The man pressed his hand against the front panel of the Timepiece. "But there shouldn't be any need for that sort of drastic action."
"Now just a moment!" Liz hurried forward. "Don't touch that."
The man turned toward her and examined her with his quizzing-glass. "Yours?" he asked.
"I... I suppose so. I look after it, now." Liz put a protective hand on the Timepiece's case. "The Doctor built it."
"Certainly a remarkable piece of ingenuity," the man said. "And remarkably inadvisable, too."
"How so?"
"Your friend the Doctor tried to trap Time in a machine," the woman said. She smiled, but it wasn't the sort of smile that reassured. "How would you react, if someone tried to trap you in a machine?"
"But Time isn't— it can't react like that."
She grimaced again. "You're lucky we got here before you all found out how wrong that is."
"Fortunately we did get here in time," the man said. "And if we're lucky, all I have to do is this..."
The Timepiece shuddered under Liz's hand, and its ticking fell silent.
"There." He held out his hand to her. In his palm was the balance wheel, the heart of the Timepiece; staring at it, Liz felt as if her own heart had stopped. The harshly-lit deck blurred around her, and she could feel her suddenly limp hand sliding uselessly down the Timepiece's outer cabinet.
He was supporting her, she realised as the roaring in her ears faded. Holding her up with his free hand, while her world fell apart around her.
"I'm sorry," he said. "It had to be done."
"But it's not all that's got to be done, is it?" the woman's voice said.
"Quite possibly not." There was movement in the arm supporting her, and Liz found herself once more on the wrong end of the quizzing-glass. "There's a secondary entanglement, affecting..."
"Her."
"If you must put it so bluntly, then yes."
A sigh. "It was always a possibility. Put her down and I'll make it quick."
"If it's all the same to you, I think I'd prefer a slower approach." The quizzing-glass was withdrawn, and Liz felt delicate fingers close on her wrist. "It may be possible to do the necessary work nondestructively."
"Possible, I grant you, but it's hardly your area of expertise."
Liz swallowed. "Do I get a say in all this?" she managed.
The man turned his attention to her, but didn't answer her question. "Can you stand?" he asked instead.
It turned out that Liz could, though her head still felt as if it was grasped in an iron clamp.
"Here's what you need to know," the woman said. She wasn't smiling now, but speaking in deadly earnest. "All of you are trapped here. Have been for weeks. That's not an accident. This thing—" she thumped the case of the Timepiece; Liz found herself reflexively wincing. "This thing was behaving like..."
"An anchor," the man suggested.
"Not really, but call it that."
"So you killed it?" Liz said.
The man spread his hands. "I'm sorry."
"But it wasn't enough," the woman went on. "Not quite. There's still one thing holding this ship where it is. You."
Liz had expected the word, but it was no less pleasant for that. "So now you kill me too?"
"That's the quick and easy way," the man said. "My colleague speaks very highly of it. My preferred solution is perhaps a little more complicated—"
"He wants to take you with him," the woman cut in. "Getting you away from this ship solves the immediate problem. And then he can take his sweet time breaking whatever hold there still is on you."
"Really?" Liz tried to think through the proposition. "What if it doesn't work?" She looked at their faces. "Then I'm in the same place as I am now. And what if it does work? What happens to me then?"
"Now, that would be telling." This time, the man had undeniably winked at her. "But whatever may happen, it would be a lot more enjoyable for you than the alternative."
"Then you really aren't leaving me with much of a choice, are you?" She held out her hand to him. "I'll come with you."
He smiled approvingly. "I thought you showed signs of intelligence."
"I think you're showing signs of sentimentality," the woman said. "Let's be going, then."
Liz suffered herself to be led up the companion-way, taking a last look over her shoulder at the dead Timepiece as she went. Somehow, she felt, the Board of Longitude never were going to see her carefully-kept notes. On deck, things were as they'd been when she'd gone below; the ship was still surrounded by a globe of cloud, the air and sea as cool and motionless as ever.
Captain Hart stepped forward, but the woman spoke before he could.
"We'll be going now," she said. "Your colleague has agreed to join us."
"Miss Shaw!" It was clear that Hart did not approve of this idea in any way.
"I'm sorry, Captain," Liz said. "But I'm afraid it's necessary."
"And you choose to do this of your own free will?"
"It's a choice I made."
"Made under duress, no doubt." The cutlass was in Captain Hart's hand. "When you came on board this ship, Miss Shaw, I promised the Doctor I would protect you with my life. I see no reason to break that promise now."
"Don't—"
Before Liz could finish the sentence, Hart had swung his cutlass towards the man. The woman darted forward, reaching out as if to block the blade with her hand; there was a flash and a shower of sparks, and the shattered, half-melted remains of the cutlass fell to the deck.
"We don't want your life, Captain," the woman said. "Don't throw it away."
"Do as they say, Captain," Liz added. "It really is the only way."
The man held out his hand to her. "Ready?"
Liz took a deep breath. "I suppose so."
The woman took her other hand.
"Wait!" Captain Hart, shaken though he was, could still speak. "Just one thing. Won't you tell me who you are, at least?"
The woman shrugged. "Why not? If you haven't guessed already. Are you sure a sailor like you's never heard of Flint?"
"Or Silver?" the man added.
From Liz's point of view, Captain Hart's face receded to an infinite distance before she could hear his answer.
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The woman shrugged. "Why not? If you haven't guessed already. Are you sure a sailor like you's never heard of Flint?"
"Or Silver?" the man added.
Ha, well played also.
Anyway, thank you! I very much enjoyed it. ♥
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