7. The Long Game
"Takin' Rose n' Adam to the year 200,000," said the Doctor, poking his head into the TARDIS's wardrobe room.
"Pardon?" came Romana's voice from the far distance.
"I said," said the Doctor, raising his voice, "I'm takin' Rose n' Adam to the year 200,000."
"Pardon?"
"I SAID, I'M TAKIN' ROSE N' ADAM TO THE YEAR 200,000!" shouted the Doctor.
"Good heavens, Doctor, there's no need to shout," said Romana, popping out of the clothes rack next to him, a pair of red shoes in her hand.
"But I – you –" stammered the Doctor, looking from Romana beside him to the far reaches of the wardrobe room and back again.
Romana returned his look, with, the Doctor was to recollect later, the hint of a smirk in the corners of her mouth.
"Never mind," said the Doctor, and left.
Romana's smirk bloomed into a smile. "Good job, old girl," she said, running an appreciative hand down an exposed beam. "Now that he's out of the way, let's have a look at those relays, shall we?"
Thirty-eight minutes and twenty-six seconds later
Romana exited the TARDIS with a neatly categorized shopping list of parts in her left hand. True, she wasn't entirely sure whether she needed everything on this list, but the diagnostics she had run on the TARDIS strongly suggested that several major systems were on the verge of failure if preventive maintenance wasn't undertaken immediately.
She soniced open a nearby computer access panel and proceeded to remove the data relay.
A few hours later, lengths of refined ultonium-copper wire and a miscellany of other parts were stashed into the dimensionally transcendent box so kindly supplied by the TARDIS. Romana had also discovered that the station was inhabited by a giant space slug, but had decided to let the Doctor handle things on his own, just this once. She was just pulling the last crystal matrix unit from a set in a service corridor when she felt the very faint vibration of an explosion, many floors overhead. In fact, she'd guess it was, oh, three hundred and sixty-eight floors overhead, to be precise.
Time to get back to the TARDIS.
Seventeen hours, forty-two minutes and twelve seconds later
Later that night, the Doctor wandered the corridors of the TARDIS. It wasn't that it wasn't something that he often did, because it was, so there was certainly nothing unusual in it. And there was nothing unusual about checking out the status of the various rooms he came across in his travels. And he certainly wasn't looking for Romana, because there really was nothing he wanted to tell her about the events on Satellite Five. Such as, for instance, how absolutely fantastic Cathica had been. Or how Rose had asked exactly the right questions. Or how very, very, very, very stupid Adam had been. No, the Doctor reflected, he had nothing to say to Romana at all.
A door reappeared as the Doctor walked on, and inside the workroom Romana continued to solder parts together. She turned a relay over, wondering if it could be connected to the damper field procrastinator she had already constructed. Yes, if she linked this node to that module ... she could either fry an egg or modulate large energy fields, her choice. She shook her head, picking up the sonic screwdriver and another part, singing softly under her breath …
"Who's afraid of the big bad wolf?"