'Keegan?' the man asked suddenly, tightening his grip on my hand. 'You still there?'
'Yes, yes, I’m here,' I assured him, squeezing back. I stroked his cool fingers. 'Don’t worry, Doctor. I’m not leaving you.'
'That’s a relief.'
'You’ve had so many adventures,' I sighed. “I should like to see some of those places.'
'Well, it just so happens I have a ship, Keegan. What do you say you come with me--once we’re clear of this place, that is. Anywhere you’d like to go. My treat. How does that sound?'
That sounded wonderful! I’d dreamed of travelling off-world, however unlikely such an eventuality might be. Not someone born to the asteroid belt mining class. Oh, it had happened, I knew. My own aunt, my mother’s older sister, had left years ago, on an outbound Old Earth transport stopped over for repair, and never looked back. At least she never came back. We’d heard from her now and again, how she’d taken a husband on a faraway world and raised her children to become scientists and teachers and dancers, rather than miners or menial servants like so many generations of her family had since they had indentured themselves to the Faolchu Olc Corporation. Always indebted to someone else. Always looking after someone else’s children. Tidying up someone else’s home.
Sweeping up someone else’s dust. Well, not me. I was going to fly away. I was going to fly away with the Doctor, and I wanted to tell him so, but I was so tired that I lay down my head against his cool, tender hand, and slept.
'Who’s waiting up top for you, Keegan?' the Doctor asked me sometime later.
I blinked, alarmed that I had drifted off and left him alone in this awful place. That wouldn’t do at all.
'No one anymore,' I told him. Granddad had been the last of my family, and he was gone these three years. I missed him terribly. 'And you?'
'Me? No, no one waiting up for me,' he said, his voice trailing off. 'Not anymore. On my own. Knockin’ about. Tumbled about, to be honest.'
'Have you been to Earth?' I asked him suddenly. I knew it was unlikely. Earth was so very far away. Too far to reach in a lifetime. But it seemed to me that he was rather like Father Christmas, someone that existed outside of normal Time. And if he had his own ship, he was living well, somewhere in the colony.
'Earth?' he asked, sounding distracted again. 'That backwards little blue marble? Spent a lot of time there when I was--younger.'
'Oh, but you couldn’t have!' I cried, loving the delicious sense of absurdity, and quickly asked him, 'is it true that the sky is blue? And there are oceans of water? And on Christmas morning they serve forty types of marmalade?'
'Most of it,' the Doctor told me with a short laugh. 'Mind you I’ve not tasted forty flavours of marmalade, but I’d be willing to have a go. Shall we then? Is that where you’d like to go, Keegan? To see the Earth and sample Christmas marmalade?'
'Most of it,' the Doctor told me with a short laugh. 'Mind you I’ve not tasted forty flavours of marmalade, but I’d be willing to have a go. Shall we then? Is that where you’d like to go, Keegan? To see the Earth and sample Christmas marmalade?'
'Yes, please,' I told him, once more feeling the choking dust. More of the building had settled around us, creaking, groaning, pressing us deeper into long-abandoned mine shafts. We didn’t have much time. But I refused to trouble him. He was being so brave.
'Christmas on Earth it is, then,' the Doctor told me.
I wanted to tell him to rest. Save his breath. Save his strength. For all I loved the sound of his voice, I didn’t want it to be the last thing either of us ever heard.
'Keegan? Keegan, are you still there? They’ll have gotten the signal by now. Keegan…?'
I closed my eyes and whispered for him to rest. Perhaps he didn’t hear me.
The glaring lights of a rescue squad intruded on my dreams. I was imagining the ship the Doctor had told me about--beautiful and blue. I liked the idea of a blue space ship. The Earth’s sky was blue. The Doctor had confirmed it, and I was glad it was true. Not everything in the histories was. That’s what Granddad had always said. But he had shown me the holo-vids archived in the little museum that used to stand not far from where we were trapped. All that had been destroyed during the last mine drop.
'Here’s one,' a voice said, a man’s voice, but not the Doctor’s voice. Not that kind voice whispering to me from beneath the rubble, through the dust. 'She’s a 'belter, but at least they’ll have a pretty face to put on the vids in the morning.'
A face swam into view, covered by an oxygen mask. It made him sound muffled, almost like he wasn’t really there.
'Hello, missy. You’re lucky we found you this far down--and with the dome venting atmosphere at the rate it is. How’d you manage it? I didn’t know the old containment fields still worked in this sector.'
I blinked more dust from my eyes and coughed more grit from my aching lungs as they lifted me from the wreckage and began to make their way to safety. They would have uncovered the Doctor by now, I thought, and would be transporting him alongside me. Where was he?
'Wait,' I sputtered, pushing the oxygen mask they had strapped over my head to the side. 'Wait. Where’s the Doctor? He was trapped with me. I was holding his hand--'
'A Doctor? Down here? Don’t be a fool, girl. We’d have been notified of that. You were alone. Well, you were the only one alive.'
The oxygen pressed back over my dry lips as I was handed up, up, up out of the rubble, over the carnage of those who had not been so lucky. I tried to tell them again that they must go back, but no one was listening to me. Why should they? In the end I did not have the strength to argue and instead could only cry silent tears for the Doctor and his blue flying machine.
Keegan…
I drew a painful breath into raw lungs and opened my eyes. But I was alone in the sub-basement ward. The only ’belter to have been found at the mine drop site. Pretty enough for the holo-vids, but not pretty enough to afford a proper room in the infirmary.
'Keegan.' I heard my name again, clearer. Louder. “K-E-E-- I don’t know to spell it! Yes I’m sure that‘s the right name… all right, bel-Keegan if you’re so caught up in your ridiculous, petty distinctions. Of course I know her, why else would I be asking after her? Help me find her, or help me by getting out of my way!
'Oh, and one more thing. You’d best evacuate the colony, because this whole miserable little asteroid is splitting in two. I give it 6 hours, tops. Bye!'
I knew his voice, but the man striding purposefully toward me through the shadows of the empty ward was a stranger. Could this be the same man? This lean-faced visitor in an ill-fitting, dusty green frock coat from some bygone era of Old Earth. This was my Doctor? Granddad would have had a thing or two to say, but I couldn’t help but stare.
He glanced behind him.
'Were you expecting someone else?'
'No,' I said, struggling to sit, gazing into his bright blue eyes, searching his face for any sign of injury. 'You just… look different than I expected you to.'
He grinned at me and pulled a bent metal chair alongside the bed, ignoring the bleak room, the dim lights, the dust. At that moment I was his whole world, and I felt warm and safe. And free. Like I could breathe. Like I could fly.
'So tell me, what do I look like?'
'Don’t you know?'
'I’ve been distracted,' he told me, that cheerful tone he’d used while we were trapped together in the wreckage ringing through again. 'Had a bad day or two before I got here. Haven’t even changed my clothes.'
He twisted around in his chair to survey the room, his gaze passing over rows of empty beds. I wondered what he was hoping to find.
'It’ll wait, I suppose. At least I don’t need a haircut,' he said, running his fingers through his short, brown hair. 'You know, I’d only just got into town--dropped in, in more ways than one--had a building collapse around me, and met you trapped in the rubble--'
'I thought you were trapped,' I told him. 'I didn’t want to leave you--'
'I know you did. And I’m glad you didn’t. Tricky business keeping an old containment field like that running. They took their own sweet time answering my signal to come for you as well.'