Chapter Text
NCC-74705 (USS Bellerophon)
En route to intercept Dalek battlecruiser at Warp 9.975.
Cargo Bay Two
Stardate 65545.02
Coralie ran her hands against the hardened armor she grabbed from the ship's stores and fitted the commbadge on top of the chest portion. The small area where her rank insignia would have been visible was blank, in accordance with her wishes. Since the confrontation with Commander Blake in the turbolift, it was clear that this would be her last Starfleet mission, if she could help it.
She checked her tricorder once more, and then made sure the type-two phaser was fully charged with the trigger lock engaged to prevent accidental firing.
The Doctor exited the TARDIS and closed the door behind him. He looked Coralie up and down, then with a wry smirk, he asked her, "Did you forget anything?"
Coralie checked her equipment one more, taking the Doctor's flippant question seriously. "I don't think so, no." Off his grin, she swatted his arm playfully. "Oh, stop it."
"Couldn't help my..." His voice trailed off as a trio of footfalls approached them from the open cargo bay doors. "... self. Hello, there. Can we help you?"
Three people dressed in similar armor to Coralie's drew nearer to Coralie and the Doctor. One was an older human male wearing a non-comm's rank insignia and the other a Vulcan female wearing the lone gold pip of an ensign. Toshiko smiled sheepishly at Coralie and the Doctor as she shifted uncomfortably within her armor.
"Sirs," said the large male officer, "I'm Staff Sergeant Patrick Neville, from the ship's marine company, and this is Ensign T'Asa and Specialist Sato from Engineering. The captain has sent us down to augment your mission."
Coralie leaned and told the Doctor, sotto voce, "And likely to keep an eye and report back."
"Well, the more the merrier, I always say," the Doctor said without acknowledging her warning. "I presume you're all ready to go?"
Both ensigns replied with a succinct nod.
The Doctor turned around and opened the right-side door to the TARDIS. "Right, then. Follow me."
Coralie mentioned casually, "I think this should be interesting."
The Doctor looked back as he unlocked the TARDIS door and it swung inside. "What's that?"
"In Starfleet, there was a legend that officers and crew in support functions like security and engineering were often those amongst the first to die on away missions," she told him. "They used to be called 'redshirts.'"
Scanning the uniforms of those present, the Doctor nodded back toward them and noted, "But you're all wearing gold."
Coralie giggled. "The connotation of wearing a red shirt was thought to be too much, and so command's color switched with security. They used to wear gold, now they wear red. But no matter what color you wear, once a redshirt, always a redshirt."
"The Doctor and the Redshirts," he grinned. "I like the sound of that." He entered the TARDIS, leading the way inside for the others to follow.
As she stepped in, Coralie muttered, "Sounds like a rock band, to me."
Toshiko's eyes never seemed to close as she looked into the big blue box for the first time. Her jaw hung open, speechless at the sight before her.
"You may want to hang onto something," Coralie warned her as she braced herself atop a comfortable-looking couch nearby. "This thing has a tendency to treat you like a ping-pong ball in a violent storm."
The Doctor manipulated the controls, but they made very little sense to Toshiko. A hammer, and a few other bits of unrelated objects appeared on the circular console, as the Doctor moved to and fro to use some of them.
Toshiko stared at the Doctor's method of inputting command for only a few seconds, then snapped her head back at Coralie. With an incredulous expression, she asked, "Is that a bicycle pump?!"Toshiko got used to traveling through time much faster than the other two newcomers did. While the Vulcan and the marine staff sergeant were clutching at the rails for dear life, she made a game of trying to stay upright as though she were riding a surfboard. A few twists and turns through the time vortex left her normally upswept raven hair spilling out of its confines in ringlets that slide down her cheeks and swayed back and forth.
"That's the idea!" called the Doctor. He nodded in her direction with an approving grin. "It's supposed to be fun!"
Coralie, for her part, just rode out the voyage on the small couch and let the TARDIS vibrate underneath. The Doctor moved to take the seat next to her and explained, "Daleks are very good at detecting TARDISes. They do battle with them so much that it's nothing simply just run a scan and find it. Once they do, we're going to have to locate their temporal stasis device and disable it in order to return."
"What do you mean?" asked Coralie, though everyone else in the control room now focused their attention on the Doctor.
"I mean that this little trip isn't without its risk, and while I'm happy to have you along, it was probably better for everyone if they just stayed on the ship," he said somberly. "In an encounter with the Daleks, they usually win."
"Back on Bellerophon," Coralie replied quickly, "you said in the mess hall that your people fought a war against them."
The Doctor leaned in, "That's right."
"And you said that it took all of your people to keep them in check."
"Yeah."
"So, I have to ask a question..." Her voice trailed off as she leaned in, to keep the others out of their conversation.
He leaned in as well, and waited for the rest.
"... when we went to go save the colony, you took us back in time. Why can't we go back in time to the point when the scientists punched the hole through to your side and prevent this from ever happening?"
The Doctor tilted his head. "You're very clever," he began. "But, a few seconds is a big difference than the distance you're asking me to travel. I cannot cross my own timeline."
"Is that a limitation of the TARDIS?"
"It's the law of the Time Lords."
Coralie took that in. "Good to know that your people take these kinds of things seriously. I take it that there those among your people who regulated this kind of travel?"
"Yes."
"And you were one of them?"
The Doctor's eyes drifted down toward the grating that made up the deck. "I was hardly one of them, Coralie. One of these days, I'll tell you about how I came to use this TARDIS."
"Long story, I gather?"
"Oh, yes. But a really good one." His head jerked back to look at the display screen that reached out on a swing arm from the control surface. "We've arrived."
As the TARDIS apparently landed, the vibration ceased entirely. The Doctor lept up from the couch and wandered over toward Toshiko. "Enjoy yourself, Specialist Sato?"
Toshiko giggled. "Definitely. Can we go again?"
"All in good time," he said. He reached for his long coat and with a bit of a flourish, put it on. He looked around at the gathered Starfleet personnel and asked, "Let's be off, eh?"
Staff Sergeant Neville insisted on being the first out of the door. He carried a compression rifle that he had slung over his shoulder. The lean marine used the TARDIS door frame to cover him before angling himself out to take a look at the immediate area. When he was satisfied that there was no one waiting for them to exit, he signaled with a quick hand gesture.
"What?" asked the Doctor, rather loudly.
Neville hissed. "Sir, please, keep your voice down."
"Staff Sergeant, let me assure you, if the Daleks knew we were here, they would make their presence known rather clearly. If there's one thing I could say about them, it's that subtlety is not one of their finer points." The Doctor pushed past him. "See? No one out here."
The rest of them filed out, with Coralie bringing up the rear. She opened her tricorder and began moving it around the corridor, which ended approximately five meters to their left, as the TARDIS was apparently at the end of the corridor near another possible chamber. All of this information came from the tricorder in Toshiko's hand as she moved it about.
The Doctor moved over to stand next to Coralie. "That device, there. What did you call it?"
She did not stop moving her arm in order to answer. "This is a tricorder."
"And what does it do, exactly?"
Toshiko responded before Coralie could. "It's a handheld sensing device. 'Tricorder' is kind of a legacy name, because it used to only provide geologic, meteorlogic, and biologic data. Three types of data recording... Tri-corder."
She handed the device to him for his inspection, which he accepted with the enthusiasm of a small boy on Christmas morning. Within seconds, he began pushing buttons and seeing how the small display changed to accommodate the new scan information. "One thing you can count on from the human race; they make very handy tools." The Doctor switched the screen off and on and nearly giggled as he handed it back to Toshiko.
Coralie moved back. "We're going to have to proceed down that way another ten meters, I think."
Neville double-checked his weapon and asked, "Sir, what about your... blue box? Is it safe to leave it unattended?"
The Doctor pulled his sonic screwdriver from inside his left jacket pocket and pointed it at the TARDIS. The screwdriver emitted a high-pitch whine and the TARDIS shimmered from view.
Toshiko laughed. "A cloaking device?"
"Of a sorts, yeah," replied the Doctor. "I've sent the TARDIS one second out of sync with normal time. Even another Time Lord, let alone a Dalek, wouldn't be able to reach it without some rather large obstacles. A little trick I picked up recently."
Coralie smirked, but turned back around. She drew her phaser and checked it's status. Neville checked his charge once more, and even Toshiko managed to look at her weapon. Only T'Asa continued to monitor her tricorder.
The Doctor moved forward ahead of the marine, and tapped on the door control with his right hand.
Once the door slide open, Neville moved in first, covering both sides of the long corridor. "Clear," he determined, gesturing with his left hand in a "come on" motion.
Coralie strode next to the Doctor, who was moving nonchalantly down the right side of the corridor toward another door. Again, the Doctor tapped the door control and the door opened. But this time, there was a single Dalek waiting for them.
"INTRUDERS!" it wailed with its distorted voice. "EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE!"
On the second cry, Neville aimed and fired his compression rifle at the Dalek's armor; center-mass. There was no appreciable effect, as the rest of the away team hugged the walls to get out of the line of fire. Neville remained in view, never once releasing the trigger. The initial burst did nothing agains the Dalek's armor.
The gunstick fired, but the trajectory intersected the rifle's beam and it appeared to disappear within the focused energy.
Neville's other hand manipulated the setting on the rifle. The sound from the rifle moved up in frequency as he kicked it up almost all the way to the top of the rifle's maximum output.
Coralie adjusted her phaser up to setting sixteen and joined in with her fire. With their combined phaser fire, the Dalek's armor crumpled inward before the biological creature inside was exposed and vaporized in an instant.
Neville dropped his rifle as the beam emitter sparked once. The rifle's control circuitry exploded, along with the small dilithium crystal that channeled the beam. He grabbed his type-II phaser and readied it, while muttering, "First time I've seen that happen."
Toshiko dropped to the ground and examined the rifle closely. "You fractured the crystal beyond repair." She turned back toward Coralie and said, "It took the power of this rifle to get through their shield and their armor... I don't think we can replicate that kind of energy if we happen upon another one of them."
T'Asa moved to the armor and scanned it. "Specialist Sato," she said in a flat tone. "I don't believe that our encounter was entirely without merit. I believe this will provide us with a deeper understanding of their armor composition and power source."
"The weapon is a molecular disruptor of a kind I've not seen before," Toshiko added. "I don't think our body armor is going to protect us for very long, if at all."
The Vulcan ensign agreed with a nod. "Can we acquire a sample?"
Coralie put her hand on Toshiko's shoulder. "No time. There are three more Daleks approaching from the opposite direction. Now that we have their power signatures, I can track them a little easier."
Neville destroyed his rifle with his phaser, and then said, "Right then. We have completed our mission with the new information. Doctor, we should be returning to the ship, yeah?"
T'Asa replied, "We only have preliminary data, Staff Sergeant. We should try to acquire more information while we're here."
"Couldn't we transmit the data we have, so far?" he asked.
The Doctor noted, "I'd be concerned with the signal attracting unwanted attention."
"Toshiko and I will stay behind," Coralie decided. "Doctor, you should take the staff sergeant and the ensign back to the ship with you to get that data back to Commander Taurik, so they can start devising a plan of attack."
Neville jerked his head back toward Coralie. "Sir, with all due respect, if you're staying, then so am I."
The conversation distracted Coralie's attention from her tricorder, and the door leading in the other direction opened to admit three Daleks. Rather than screeching their displeasure, they fired without preamble. Neville turned to see them first, as he heard the door open. Although he was in full view, so was Toshiko as she stood in the distance between the team and the Daleks.
Before anyone could open their mouths to tell each other to take cover, the three Daleks turned toward Specialist Toshiko Sato and fired their gunsticks.