Entry Eleven - Kalab Ting (3)

I did, of course, realise what was happening to me. I'd been contaminated and now I was sick, mutating, dying, either one. I couldn't decide what was worse. I wanted to stay alive, sure, but I wanted to stay me. My brain was pretty much shut off to anything accept panic, but I started thinking that if this was it. If this was going to be when I died then perhaps I should say things that I hadn't said before. So I opened my mouth and started speaking, even though I couldn't hear anything. My vision was getting a little blurry but I could see the Doctor stop struggling to get past Monlie and her makeshift spear, she must have been stronger than she looked.

And I kept talking until I realised that Monlie was looking at me a bit pityingly and the Doctor shook his head. I stopped speaking, and shook my head. I had no idea what he was trying to tell me. Then he took the psychic paper out of his pocket and held it up for me to see, still standing a couple of meters away. With my blurred vision, constant coughing, and miserable pain it took me a moment to read it; "You're not speaking." There were no words coming out of my mouth. I couldn't hear. And now I couldn't speak. I felt tears start to cut paths through the dirt now caked on my cheeks.

I was then struck by a particularly bad coughing fit, that racked my body and fuzzed my mind further. I felt my head buck and then a terrible pain went shooting through my head and then everything was black.

I woke up in hospital. A very posh hospital that was all white and minimalist. I was hooked up to some sort of intravenous pink solution and it was all a bit off-putting until I realised I wasn't in any more pain. And I wasn't having trouble breathing. And the TARDIS was parked in the middle of the ward, and the Doctor was poking around the rest of the ward looking at the patients. I opened my mouth to speak and realised that I still couldn't hear, and therefore could probably not speak. I clanged a bit off my IV stand against the metal bit of my bed and was startled to see one of the nurses move round towards the side of the bed. I was even more startled to see that she was a cat sporting a habit. I was on bloody New Earth? I spun round and glared at the Doctor, who gave me this expression:


I opened my eyes wide and then nodded my head towards the cat nun that was fiddling with my IV and the Doctor sort of shuffled his feet a bit and shrugged. I held out my hand cause I would have preferred for him not to be across the room but he put his hand out and touched this sort of force field thingy and then dug the psychic paper out of his pocket and held it up, which said "Quarantine". I wrinkled my nose and shot another disparaging glance at the cat nun, and he frowned and the psychic paper said; "Sister Lelm" and then, "You're going to be okay". I was relieved.

We communicated through him telling me things via the psychic paper for a couple of hours. What had happened. The Doctor had convinced Molnie that he needed to transport me and that he needed to get everyone of her people off this planet before it destroyed itself and them with it. I had a particularly nasty cut on my leg and this, he inferred, was how I had gotten the virus without imbibing any of the food or water and how it had taken hold so quickly. The virus, it turned out, was real, and was a particularly nasty strand of something called Marwovies, that attacked the senses, shutting them down before working on internal organs and eventually turning them to jelly. It was a slow process of death and a particularly nasty virus to get rid off. All this had been deducted from the TARDIS sick bay, of course.

Molnie, he said, at this point was wandering all about the TARDIS fascinated. He didn't even let her off before he moved the TARDIS to the best hospital he could think of in this time, New Earth. Then they spun round the Shadow Proclamation, Molnie said her story and decisive action was taken against the Piroquay Corporation, shutting down their operations and convicting most of their top operatives of manslaughter for not evacuating the planet once their terraform had failed. This was Judoon justice, the Doctor said, and didn't seem to happy about it but I have never met a Judoon and didn't really know what that meant. He personally oversaw the evacuation of the Malinkings until Kalab Ting was officially closed down as unsafe for visitation. Those who were sick were brought to hospitals and those who weren't were taken to Shadow Proclamation refugee camps, which he assured me were nothing like the ones on Earth.

After a couple of hours, while he was explaining all this I heard a sort of buzzing an my ears which grew and grew until I could fully hear, I opened my mouth. "And how long were you gone from here?" I asked.

He looked very pleased that I could speak again and said, "About ten seconds."

It wasn't long after that when Sister Lelm unhooked my IV and smiled at me. "Your partner is very dedicated, he stayed here all the while you were sick. We could not even persuade him to use the proper parking accommodation," she said nodding towards the TARDIS.

I had to stiffle a laugh and nodded, "Yeah." She was so kind to me that it was hard to remember that she was part of a sisterhood who had thousands upon thousands of humans growing in the intensive care unit being pumped full of disease. But then she lowered the barrier and I jumped out of bed and the Doctor and I hugged something like this:


Later, when we were back on the TARDIS and he was spinning dials and walking around the console while I sat on the jumpseat with my feet propped up I asked, "Didn't it bother you, going back to New Earth. The Sisterhood were there, we obviously hadn't been yet, they still had their human farm downstairs."

He hesitated for a moment, his hand hovering over a lever, and then nodded, "Yeah, no I didn't like it."

"Then why?"

"Marwovies is incurable on fifty-seven systems, Rose," he said and then went back to tinkering. "And I didn't want any Rose flavoured jelly, I prefer banana. Now," he stood back up and looked at me, crossing his arms and leaning against the console, "what was it you were trying to say back in the cave? It looked awfully important."

I laughed at his swift topic change, but sort of understood why. But the time for saying things was over. Today I lived. So I reached over to the bin under the jumpseat where I found a board with a marker and scribbled a note.


He laughed, and I laughed and he said, "I think we could both do with one," and set the coordinates for Mebdinida where they've apparently the best cider this side of M87.

Until next time.