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.

Entry Ten - Kalab Ting (2)

I don't quite fancy being tied up and told I may be mutating. It's just... well I can't imagine anyone would like it really. I had rather hoped to get out of it myself, but things were not looking good with my new, red, best friend hovering over me and telling me I'd be required to stay here for a few weeks. But I still wasn't too concerned. The Doctor was still around somewhere and I knew he wouldn't just leave me fallen in a hole. He'd come find me. But I hate being rescued.

"Well, if I'm contaminated and may be mutating why are you here? Aren't you afraid you're going to get contaminated too?"

"I have been selected by the council," she said.

I raised my eyebrows, any other gesture was a bit beyond me at this point, "You have a council?"

She looked confused and vaguely insulted, "We have a society."

"Right yes, of course you do, didn't mean..." I trailed off, not quite knowing what to say anyway and knowing that whatever it was wasn't going to make a rit of difference.

I took this opportunity to look around. Well it was definitely some sort of cave. Like an Earth cave, but then again the topside didn't look all that different from Earth either.


"I'm called Rose," I finally said after a long time of silence, "what's your name?"

Her face sort of lit up and she said, "Like the flower! I have heard of them! I saw them in a book once, beautiful. We had flowers here once, my name is Monlie."

I asked her what had happened, and she told me. Kalab Ting was an uninhabitable planetary body made of nothing but rocks and dirt. It's orbit was far enough from it's suns that it was perpetual winter, but there was never any snow because there was no water. It could not sustain life. Until the Piroquay Corporation moved in. They specialised in some sort of newfangled technological terraforming. They created an atmospheric shell to simulate seasons, they created a water source by importing hydration and irrigation, they basically covered the entire planet in a sort of sod from the sound of it. And then it was habitable. Beautiful and pleasant.

It seemed a bit off to me, they still didn't have a natural water supply and surrounding a rock with grass doesn't mean that grass is getting nourishment. Apparently Piroquay intended to do this to thousands of planets in order to make more room for the expanding Human Empire. Or so said my dear friend, Monlie.

"So you weren't born here?"

"No no," she said, "I was born on Malinking, a beautiful planet. The grounds were red and the forests blue, I had trouble understanding the colours when I first came here."

"Why did you come here?"

"I was brought here, my whole family. Our planet was becoming more and more crowded when the humans moved in, so we were brought here."

I sat up, well, as best I could, which was not much, "You were relocated?" She nodded, "That's horrible. How long after you arrived did the virus come?"

She shrugged, and it seemed to me like she didn't want to answer. "About a month," she finally said, and I wondered how many people she'd lost. How many of her friends and family had died or been mutated or whatever, but it seemed clear to me by now that Piroquay had mucked it up.
It was about this time that I heard the familiar sounds of the TARDIS materialisation circuit and sighed a breath of relief. Monlie on the other hand jumped to her feet, grabbed her makeshift spear and stood there gaping at the police box that was now standing in front of her.

"'Bout time!" I called when the Doctor walked out of the TARDIS and stood there staring at Monlie with a bit of a shocked expression.

"You okay?" he asked me.

"Oh yeah, just fine, contaminated, mutating, tied up... nothing serious. Doctor, this is Monlie my friendly captor, don't worry she's just following orders we're getting on quite nicely, and Monlie, this is the Doctor."

He took a step forward but Monlie poked her spear at him and he stopped, raising his arms in surrender. I told him everything Monlie'd told me about the terraforming, the virus, and Piroquay.

"Of course!" he shouted, "Why didn't I see it before? It's so obvious, oh I am thick!"

I was still tied up by the way, "What? Something got mucked up, right?"

"Yeah, it's the terraforming, it's gone wrong. Terraforming is all well and good providing a stable environment, Kalab Ting didn't have that! They created it artificially! It's like, um.. Oh! Star Trek III!" I shook my head, never seen it. "Okay there's this planet and they terraform it with this Genesis thingamabobsis and it's all right as rain for a while but then it all starts collapsing. It's not really all that realisitic in the film, obviously, it is a film, the ground starts shaking and everything collapses, literally and these Klingons are doing their Klingon thing and-"

"Doctor, please can you just get to the point?" The ground really was cutting into my back at this point.

"Oh, yes, of course, point: This planet is collapsing, but it's doing so in a natural state of accelerated progression. It was made and now it's breaking. Like a transplant patient. It's rejecting the terraform. And the parasites living on it. Sorry," he said to Monlie, "that's you lot."

"But they're dying and they've got me all tied up and ho can they just be rejected? Where are they meant to go?" I asked and then coughed.

The Doctor got very pensive for a moment and I watched him trying to think of something, but then my throat felt like it was constricting, and I coughed again trying to get air through my windpipe, but couldn't quite manage. I wasn't choking or anything, but there definitely wasn't enough air coming through. If I'd been scared at all before, I was plain terrified now. And then it wasn't just my throat, it was my chest and my head. It sort of felt like I was going to explode. I realised I'd had my eyes closed and opened them. Monlie had taken a few steps back from me and was holding her spear in front of the Doctor who looked like he was trying to take a few steps forward. I could see his mouth moving, and he was saying my name, but I couldn't hear anything. Nothing. Not even the sounds of the cave.

More tomorrow.