The TARDIS is hijacked through time

Martha's POV

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The Cloister Bell kept tolling in alarm, like the ship itself was counting down to something awful.

The Doctor slammed his palm onto a glowing panel. Static snapped through the air with a sound that was almost a scream, and a ring of Gallifreyan symbols flared above the console, burning and re-burning as if the TARDIS couldn’t decide which warning to show first.

His eyes flicked over the shifting script. Whatever he read made his face tighten.

“Oh, that’s not good,” he said quickly. “That’s very not good. That’s historical-level not good.”

Amy, braced against the railing, shot him a look. “Define ‘not good.’”

He didn’t take his eyes off the readouts. “We’re being yanked through the Time Vortex on a...on a tether. Like someone’s thrown a lasso around the TARDIS.”

Martha, steadying herself near the med-belt at her waist, frowned. “A tether? What kind?”

The Doctor swallowed, like he didn’t want to say it out loud. “One built out of language.”

“Language?” Martha echoed, getting a bad feeling at the implications of his outlandish words immediately.

He gestured sharply at the spiraling symbols. “Structured. Recursive. Self-feeding verse. Someone has effectively written a door with 4-dimensional technology, feed by energies from beyond our very universe and then shoved us through it.”

Amy blinked rapidly as she tried to process his words, then managed, even with the world shaking under her feet, to sound offended on the TARDIS’s behalf. “So…we’ve been poetry-napped by someone from a parallel universe?”

The Doctor pointed at her like she’d cracked it. “Exactly like poetry-napped!”

The ship lurched with vicious ****. The floor seemed to tilt. Martha slammed into the Doctor’s shoulder; Amy smacked the edge of the console and hissed through her teeth as she caught herself before she went down.

And then, just as suddenly, the tremors stopped.

The time rotor’s light flickered once, twice…and then snapped into a steady golden pulse, like a heartbeat **** back into rhythm.

The Cloister Bell went quiet, and everything held its breath.

The air hummed with leftover energy, prickling along Martha's arms. The central monitor stabilized, numbers and coordinates settling into place as if whatever had grabbed them had finally decided where to throw them.

The Doctor leaned in, squinted, and then froze.

“Oh,” he breathed. “Ooooooh…that could be a problem for our necks...”

Martha's stomach sank on instinct. “Where are we?”

He didn’t look away from the screen. “Whitehall Palace.”

“Right,” Amy said cautiously. “That’s…London, yeah?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, so that’s not so...”

“...in the year 1600,” he cut in.

A beat of silence as the number landed.

“…Ah,” Amy muttered.

Martha exhaled as memories if her past adventures with the Doctor resurfaced, back when he had a different face. “Tudor era.”

“Late Elizabethan,” the Doctor rattled off, words tumbling faster as the implications stacked up in Martha's mind yet again. “Near the end of her reign. Power hanging by a thread, succession questions, religious tension, plague scares, mass paranoia about sorcery...”

“Fantastic,” Amy muttered as he trailed off. “So just a nice quiet evening, then.”

"Less than you may think," Martha muttered back. "Last time the Doctor and I saw Queen Elizabeth I, she wanted to behead the Doctor for some reason."

"Seriously?" The redhead asked as she raised a widened eyebrow as she glanced at their beloved. "What did you do to offend her royal highness so much?"

"I still don't know, to be honest," The Doctor admitted with a shrug. "Whatever it was, it must have happened in the future of my own personal timeline but also in her past from before we met in 1599. Since that encounter though, I can't say I remember doing anything to warrant the **** penalty from the queen so it must still be ahead of me, whatever it was."

Amy suddenly chuckled. "Maybe she wanted to travel with us as part of your new breeding harem but you will end up telling her that she simply couldn't because of some fixed point in history complications that would cause. Hell hath no fury like a hot and bothered Virgin Queen scorned, after all!"

The Doctor stared at her for a long moment before he failed to suppress a bout of laughter. "Ah, Pond, you never brighten my mood even in the middle of unexpected danger. Never change, you wonderful woman."

Amy grinned at that. "I wouldn't dream of it, my love. Only you have the power and my consent to change my mind from now on, after all!"

While she herself was mildly amused by her sister's wife theory and their sweet moment, Martha couldn't help but bite her bottom lip as her mind latched onto the Doctor’s wording. "Built out of language..."

She frowned again, because she’d heard him say things like that before. But not often. Not lightly. And not unless the universe was doing something the Time Lord knew it wasn’t supposed to under normal circumstances.

Her eyes flicked to the readouts again, and then to the Doctor’s hands on the console. The way his fingers hovered like he didn’t quite trust what they might touch next as he analyzed what to do next. The ship had stopped shaking by that point, but Martha could still feel the after-vibration in her bones, like the echo of a shouted word.

“A tether made of language,” she repeated, more quietly this time. The bad feeling hardened into something sharper. “That’s…that wasn't just a metaphor, was it Doctor?”

Her beloved didn’t answer immediately. His gaze had gone distant in that way it sometimes did, like he was scanning around a thousand years of memory and picking out the one file he least wanted to open but the one that he felt fit their current circumstances best. Then his eyes snapped back to her, and she saw it there: recognition.

“No,” he said. “Not a metaphor.”

Martha swallowed. “Doctor…tell me that doesn’t mean what I think it means.”

He exhaled through his nose, a sound halfway between a sigh and a laugh that didn’t feel amused at all. “Depends what you think it means.”

“It means I am thinking about the Carrionites,” she said flatly.

Amy’s head turned between them, brow furrowing. “Carri-what?”

Martha kept her eyes on the Doctor. “The witches.”

That did it. The Doctor’s mouth tightened, and he nodded reluctantly.

“Yeah,” he admitted. “It sounds like their handiwork.”

Martha felt the old memory flare sharp and bright: candlelit theatre, words spilling off parchment like blood, voodoo dolls that actually worked at at triggering heart attacks, the air itself turning into a throat that tried to swallow the world. She remembered the taste of fear in her mouth during her first adventure with her Doctor to the past, and the way the legendary Time Lord, with different face but a similar mind, had looked at her like he wanted her to run and save herself while he stood in the middle of the unnatural, indoor storm anyway.

She **** herself to breathe again. “But that was 1599,” she remarked. “We trapped them!”

“We did,” the Doctor agreed, already moving.

He crossed the console room with quick, purposeful steps and knelt by one of the coral pillars near the lower walkways. There was a seam there that looked like part of the architecture until he pressed his palm to it and murmured something under his breath. The coral unfurled with a soft hiss, revealing a small storage recess lit from within by a faint bluish glow.

Martha’s heart climbed into her throat as she leaned closer.

Inside sat a crystal sphere the size of a grapefruit, clear as water, but deep inside it, shadows moved. Not reflections. Not tricks of light. Something alive, contained, and furious. For a moment the shape of three women’s face seemed to press against the inner surface, mouth open in a silent scream, pointing at them frantically with an oath of vengeance on their hate-filled eyes.

And then they dissolve back into swirling darkness.

Amy took a small step back without meaning to. “Oh.”

Martha didn’t blame her. She remembered the first time she’d seen it. The cold certainty that if that thing ever broke, they wouldn’t just try kill them. Rather, they would do their best rewrite them out of spite.

The Doctor stared at the sphere like a man looking at a loaded gun he’d forgotten was in the house.

“Still there,” he murmured. “Still locked.”

“How locked, exactly?” Martha asked, because her brain demanded specifics even when her instincts wanted to put more distance between herself and that fragile looking crystal ball.

He tapped the edge of the recess with his sonic screwdriver, and as his instrument beeped while scanning the bigger on the inside prison, thin Gallifreyan script flared briefly around the sphere...like a cage made of light. “Triple dimensional folding containment. Perception filter. Anti-phoneme dampening.” His eyes flicked to her. “Even if someone whispered poetry at it all day and then drop it from the top of Olympus Mons, the biggest mountain on the Sol system, it wouldn’t crack.”

Martha’s chest loosened by a fraction. “So the three are accounted for.”

“Indeed. Bloodtide, Doomfinger, Lilith,” the Doctor said in agreement, naming them like you might name cancers. “All still in their little snow globe.”

“Then how...” Martha began.

“How is someone doing Carrionite-level nonsense in 1600?” he finished for her. His gaze snapped back to the central monitor where the coordinates still glowed. “Excellent question, especially given that we landed on that year's Halloween, of all dates.”

Amy folded her arms, watching them both. “Okay. I’m going to interrupt the spooky moment of reminiscing for a second. I’ve met Daleks, Weeping Angels, sstar whales and Silurians, and…whatever those vampire alien fish ladies in Renaissance-era Venice were, but I have not met any ‘alien poetry witches.’”

Martha couldn’t help the small, rueful curve of her mouth. “Count yourself lucky.”

Amy’s eyes narrowed in a stubborn way, clearly deciding she wasn’t being left behind. “Catch me up. Now.”

The Doctor rubbed at his temple, like the words themselves were giving him a headache. “Right. Fine. Quick version. Carrionites are an ancient species. Old...like Dawn-of-the-universe old in a literal sort of way. They evolved in a fourteen-planet system,” he continued, pacing slowly as he talked, using movement to keep his thoughts from tangling. “And instead of building tools and then machines the way most species do as their civilization progresses, they developed…word-based science.”

Amy blinked at that. “Word-based science?”

“Sounds ridiculous until it tries to kill you,” Martha muttered.

The Doctor shot her a look that was half apology, half yes, exactly. “Their language isn’t just communication. It’s structure. An ancient code. A way of telling reality what shape to take if you know what you are doing.” He flicked a hand toward the still-humming air around the console. “But when you can write directly into reality instead of manufacturing it with the scientific method, the rules of physics can get…dangerously messy.”

Amy looked between them as she titled her head in surprise. “So…you are basically talking about magic.”

The Doctor hesitated. Martha watched him weigh the word like it tasted wrong. He rarely said it in all the time she had travelled with him the first time.

“Not quite,” he said carefully. “Not in the ‘wands and glitter’ sense. But...” He exhaled. “You want the deeper truth? Here it is: Carrionites are particularly dangerous because they aren’t limited the same way most beings are.”

Martha’s skin prickled again. “Back when I was in UNIT, the limited files and data their agents had gathered on them and and from their own past conversation with you that they recorded as intel for future reference claimed that this was because they draw power from somewhere...else,” she said slowly and saw Amy’s attention visibly sharpened.

The Doctor nodded, grateful she’d said it. “Yes. A kind of…background radiation. Not from this universe.”

Amy’s eyes widened. “A parallel universe?”

“Close enough,” the Doctor said. “A region of the multiverse where the laws of physics don’t behave the way they do here but rather in more chaotic, more…permissive ways. Call it magic if you want. Call it the Deep Darkness if you’re being poetic about it, as that is what the Eternals who allied with the ancient Time Lords to eventually banished them many millions of years ago called it,” He explained while his mouth twisted. “The Carrionites evolved on a planet near a weak point, like a wormhole, a bruise between universes and their biology adapted. They’re tuned to it. They can pull on those sorts of chaotic energies that do not exist naturally on our own universe.”

Martha felt Amy’s gaze turn to her, seeking confirmation.

“It’s about sums up what he told me back then,” Martha said quietly. “When we first fought them. Looking back, I guess that is part of the reason they felt…unnaturally wrong. Not like aliens that we otherwise share our corner of creation with. Rather some wild, untamed **** wearing alien skin.”

The Doctor nodded firmly. “And therein lies the problem. The most technologically advanced amongst the mortal civilizations in our universe like the Time Lords, the Daleks, or the Osirians...they are or at least were massive and usually ancient geopolitical superpowers of intergalactic proportions, sure. And as such, their technology can look like magic to anyone without enough mathematical understanding.” He tapped the console. “But at the end of the day, our sort of technology still obeys rules. Laws. Limits. And the Carrionites don’t respect those limits if they can feed their words enough energy.”

Amy swallowed. “I see. And you’ve met them before.”

“In 1599, just a year before the time we have been taken to,” Martha said, the memory still tight in her throat. “With the other Doctor. Well, our Doctor, technically, just a different face now that he has regenerated since.”

She turned to the current one, to the Eleven incarnation of her beloved, and allowed her mind to walk down memory lane. “We went to the Globe Theatre and teamed up with Shakespeare. There was a new play and we ended up learning why it was lost to history. In part, because the Carrionites had a hand in its creation when they manipulated Will into writing what they needed to better channel their "word-based science" through his eloquent script.”

The Doctor picked up the thread seamlessly, voice quickening the way it always did when he got to the dangerous part. “Shakespeare’s grief for his son, it gave them a hook. Emotion makes words louder. So, they used him. They influenced the theatre itself, with its fourteen sides, like their star system. Built it like a resonance chamber. Acoustics matter when Carrionites employ their craft. Crowd energy matters. And on opening night, they planned to use the last lines of the play as a spell to open a portal.”

Amy stared. “A portal to that…Deep Darkness?”

“Exactly,” the Doctor said. “They wanted to drag their whole species out of exile and give Earth a ‘millennium of blood.’ Very catchy branding. But also very unpleasant, to put it mildly.”

“And you stopped them,” Amy asked, her tone hopeful.

“We did,” Martha confirmed. “With words. We closed it with clever words. William really was quite the wordsmith that day. Even if the Doctor and I gave him some ideas on that matter,” she added with a wistful smile.

The Doctor’s gaze flicked back to the crystal sphere in its recess. “And I trapped the three that made it through. Kept them contained. As far as I know, there were no longer any other active Carrionites that were unaccounted for anywhere in our universe. At least not according to the old Gallifreyan archives from the Last Great Time War that I checked ”

Amy pointed at the sphere, voice small despite her effort to sound brave. “Yet you still trapped the last known Carrionites in that.”

“In that,” the Doctor agreed.

Amy made a face. “So if those three are locked up and unable to affect anything beyond their prison with their "magical" powers…then who’s doing the poetry-napping now?”

Martha felt the question land like a stone. The Doctor’s expression darkened, probably with the same thought she’d had a moment ago. “That’s the bit I don’t like.”

He straightened, suddenly restless, and paced back toward the console. “Because if this is Carrionite work,” Martha agreed slowly, “and the last three we knew about are in your TARDIS…then either—”

“—Either there was an unknown fourth,” the Doctor finished, eyes narrowing. “Or someone’s copying their method somehow.”

Amy huffed. “Brilliant. So we’ve got Elizabethan London, mass paranoia about sorcery, and actual poetry witches with a grudge to match.”

The Doctor opened his mouth to respond...

...and the console chirped.

Once. Twice. Then that insistent beep-beep-beep-beep like something hammering at the door of the TARDIS’s mind.

Martha’s stomach dropped. “That sounds new.”

The Doctor’s face tightened again, all the joking scraped away. “That,” he said, “is someone forcing their way into the TARDIS's psychic circuits.”

Amy leaned forward, eyes bright with alarm. “So…someone is sending you a psychic voicemail?”

“Yeah,” the Doctor murmured. “And given everything we’ve just said…”

Martha watched the view screen begin to cloud with interference like ink in water, candlelight flickering at the edges as if the message was coming from a world lit by barely luminous flame.

Her pulse thudded hard once in her throat.

Because she realized what the doctor just left unsaid. Whatever was about to come through and whoever was brave and clever enough to shove a message into a hijacked TARDIS...was either trying to save them…

…or lure them into a trap.

And so, she waited with bated breath as the Doctor scanned the console with his sonic screwdriver and wondered where the other shoe would end up dropping.