Sword of Orion - Part 1

Part 1

This is the future; the Orion war continues with no end in sight, while the ion storm Protyon drifts to the fringes of the Garazone system. There, Captain Thinnes of the cargo loader Silver Jackal tricks a space patrol ship into leaving him and his associate Digly alone in a sector rich with unclaimed salvage. The Jackal soon locates the find of the century, an abandoned star destroyer which appears in perfect condition from the outside. Thinnes and Digly spacewalk over to check out their discovery, and a quick perusal suggests that it's in near-mint condition, apart from a foul stench in the atmosphere. But before they can conduct a more thorough investigation, something lurches out of the shadows and kills them both...

The Doctor has taken Charley to the bazaar on Garazone Central, one of the earliest artificial space habitats built by humanity. In this era, it's far from the central authorities, and one can find almost anything here—perhaps even a text which might explain what's wrong with Ramsay. When one of the bazaar's inhabitants makes a rather unwholesome suggestion to Charley, the Doctor takes the offended girl into a shop and bluffs the shopkeeper, Ike, into believing that they are Customs and Excise officials so they can browse in peace. He's pretty sure Ike won't push the matter; smuggling is rife in this sector, and the Doctor saw Ike leaving a merchant space corps ship earlier. However, Ike has been nervous ever since Thinnes and Digly disappeared, and he thus contacts his associate Grash to warn him that they've been rumbled. Grash dismisses his fears, and tells him that there's a bigger problem; Captain Obermann has been transferred off the Vanguard, and the new captain, Deeva Jansen, has brought forward the ship's disembarkation time.

Ike bolts from the shop without closing up, surprising the Doctor and worrying Charley. They know he's a smuggler, and he believes that they're government officials; perhaps he's gone to fetch some of his friends to give them a seeing-to. Or, worse, as the Doctor told Ike where he'd landed, perhaps they're going to loot or steal the TARDIS. The Doctor, realising that Charley has a point, picks up a book of ancient remedies for Ramsay, and sets off to hire a grav-pad and beat Ike back to the docking bays. The grav-pad shorts out mid-flight, dropping them unceremoniously at their destination, but even so they're too late; the Vanguard's new captain is in such a rush to leave that she's ordered her crewman Vol to load the supplies aboard without double-checking them. And thus the TARDIS is accidentally loaded aboard the Vanguard as well. The Doctor and Charley have less than ten minutes to find a way onto the ship before it leaves, taking the TARDIS with it...

Ike arrives with seconds to spare, and joins Vol and Captain Jansen on the bridge as the ship blasts out of spacedock. Jansen then returns to her cabin, while Vol and Ike settle in for the flight and wonder what's up with their new captain. Why the rush to leave? Why is she packing such a heavy-duty firearm? Jansen seems too bright and ambitious for this dirty job; perhaps she's been demoted after having a row with someone on the space corps executive. Whatever the case, she's not your average scrapship captain...

Thanks to the Doctor's sonic screwdriver, he and Charley get into the Vanguard's waste bays moments before the ship leaves Garazone Central. As they search for the cargo hold containing the TARDIS, the Doctor explains to Charley that this ship is rather like an interplanetary dustcart, roaming the areas between the distant space lanes and picking up the rubbish collecting there. Charley is offended by the poorly maintained service areas, but the Doctor is more puzzled by the fact that he can sense the vibrations of an interstellar drive being pushed to its limits. Where are they going in such a hurry? Just as they find the TARDIS, the engines suddenly cut out—quite a dangerous manoeuvre. The Doctor decides to get off this ship as quickly as possible, before the crew fly it to pieces.

Vol and Ike have cut power to the engines to prevent a collision with a massive, abandoned star destroyer, but the Vanguard was going too quickly when the proximity alarms went off, and even full reverse thrust isn't enough to stop their ship in time. Jansen orders them to re-initiate the hyperdrive and set it for a three-nanosecond reverse burst—another dangerous manoeuvre, but one which saves them. It doesn't do much good for the TARDIS, however. The Doctor has patched his own ship's scanner into the Vanguard's systems and spotted the star destroyer outside; realising that the ships are about to collide, he attempts to dematerialise, just as Deeva fires up the warp engines. The TARDIS is caught in the warp field, causing a surge of temporal feedback in its time core. The Doctor materialises immediately, and he and Charley are forced to abandon the TARDIS before the temporal feedback lashes out into the console room. Ramsay should be safe enough—the Time Vortex is his natural habitat, and the release of temporal energy might even be good for him—but the Doctor and Charley will be stuck outside the TARDIS until the energy has dissipated. As it happens, the TARDIS has materialised on board the star destroyer, and the Doctor decides to explore...

Deeva runs into a problem while trying to get her recon team over to the destroyer; she's met her match in the team leader, Grash. Standard operating procedure is for the scrapship to link to the abandoned vessel with a docking tube, but the destroyer's airlock is too large, and Grash refuses to spacewalk; it's not in his contract. Deeva is forced to resort to offering them all double bonuses, and the team members—Grash, Chev, and Kelsey—suit up and cross over to the destroyer. Deeva returns to the bridge, where she finds Ike hacking into her command terminals to learn more about the star destroyer. It's been spotted before, but no other scrapship was willing to take on a job of this size; but that's all he learns before a top-priority security block closes down the data. The only way for him to learn more about the destroyer is through the ship's secure terminal, and only Deeva has access to that.

The Doctor and Charley find what appears to be the destroyer's control room, but it's entirely bare, as if the missing crew took all of the soft furnishings with them when they left; if ever there were any. Hearing the distant sounds of the recon team boarding, the Doctor decides to return to the TARDIS and try to re-enter, but as he and Charley set off they hear another sound in the distance, like something howling. And the closer they get to the TARDIS, the louder it is. Kelsey also hears the sound; he, Grash and Chev have split up to explore, and Kelsey is the first to find something—the TARDIS. But as he calls Chev and Grash to have a look at his find, the thing that killed Digly and Thinnes attacks him as well...