There was something sharp stabbing into her lower back, and when she sat up she found the rest of her body was aching and sore as well.

Rose rubbed her sticky eyes and looked up at the sky as thunder pealed overhead. Dark grey clouds dominated the skyline and didn’t seem to be moving. She knew a storm was about to break. The drizzle was getting heavier.

As her sight became clearer, she tugged her clothes away from her body. They were damp, and her skin felt clammy. She rubbed her arms and shivered.

Suddenly, Rose remembered the Doctor.

She jerked her head round. Pain shot up her back and she winced, grabbing the side of her neck. It felt like the whiplash injury she’d got that time when some plonker had ploughed right into the back of her boyfriend Mickey’s car.

Her ex-boyfriend, she reminded herself.

The Doctor was lying several yards away, his fingers interlocked and resting over his belly, his feet crossed. He looked quite serene.

“Doctor?” she whispered.

As she tried to move toward him, she found out what it was that had been sticking into her back. It was a length of metal piping. Initially she thought it had been pretty careless of whoever had dragged her out of the crashed ship to lay her down on a protruding pipe, but as she looked about her surroundings, she frowned.

She couldn’t see a single stretch of earth that wasn’t covered in some broken piping, or haphazardly discarded shards of metal, or bundles of coiled wire with bare filaments. It reminded her of junk-yards she’d seen in the East End, but there was nothing discernible here: no washing machines, no car parts, no refrigerators. It was more like a rubbish tip. A million different types of component had been dumped, and were now entangled like a giant bramble-bed of machinery.

It was like this as far as Rose could see. The landscape of this world rose and fell with peaks and troughs, but the mountains on this planet were made of machine parts, and the valleys showed just how deep it all went. She and the Doctor were in one such valley, and also a dune, which was perhaps thirty yards across but only half as deep. Seven mountainous heaps of scrap metal dominated the horizon.

As she started picking her way across the discarded pipes, Rose’s foot slipped between them. Pulling it free, she caught her first glimpse of the ground. It was about eight feet beneath them, below all the junk. The soil was black like soot. There was no sign of any plant life. There was no sign of any life at all.

Rose eventually reached the Doctor’s side.

“Doctor?” she whispered again.

He didn’t respond. He looked content. She shook him.

“I was in the middle of a bizarre dream,” he said. His eyes popped open and he was looking straight at her. “Why did you wake me?”

Rose sighed. “Are you okay, Doctor?”

He looked into the middle distance, frowning as he recalled, “I was in one of those supermarket things on your world, but I was blind. I couldn’t see a thing, but I knew I was in a supermarket. I’ve never had a dream like it in all my life.”

“I often have nightmares that I’m drowning.”

The Doctor sat up. “No, no, this wasn’t a nightmare; it was fascinating. Most dreams you have are like nocturnal hallucinations; it’s all about what you see. But in this dream, I couldn’t see anything; it was a dream about knowledge.”

She sighed again. “Well, it’s good to know there’s nothing wrong with you.”

He scowled, looking around. “Where are we?”

“I think we’re on the planet; we must have crashed. I haven’t seen anyone else.” She paused. “Doctor, how are we going to get back to the Tardis now?”

“Help me up.” He held out his left hand.

Leaning back, they used each other as a counter-balance to pull themselves to their feet. Rose found standing up on the uneven surface hard. Though the mountains of scrap in the distance looked compacted, the junk in their dune was prone to shifting and sliding about when they tried to move. Walking was almost impossible.

“Let’s get to the top of this rise,” the Doctor said, gesturing toward the rim of the dune with the hand he wasn’t using to support himself.

Carefully they picked their way up the side of the dune, which Rose thought was much like trying to climb a broken climbing frame; every time she found a place for her hands and feet, the junk would shift again and she’d lose it. The rain was falling heavier now, which made the metal slippery. Rose kept slipping.

“Doctor, wait up,” she called indignantly.

He reached the edge of the dune first. It was twenty feet off the ground - not that they could tell. The black earth was buried deep beneath. The pressure of so much more junk weighing down on itself made the upper surface more stable.

Rose was glad to discover this when she reached the Doctor.

“I’m surprised we survived,” he murmured.

He was using that melancholy tone which always filled Rose with a sense of dread, especially when he didn’t make eye contact and used it.

The Doctor was staring at the crashed ship. It was about eighty yards away; it had sounded nearer to Rose, instead the fire was larger than she’d imagined. There was a trough smashed through the junk for about half a kilometre behind the ship, getting deeper the closer it got to where the ship had come to rest. The nose of the ship was buried deep into a mound of scrap metal it had ploughed up in front of it; the fire was raging so fiercely that flames licked up through the junk on top.

“Look, there’s people down there!” Rose cried.

Through the thick black smoke seeping out of the wreck and hanging over the crash-site like a fog, she could see the soldiers running about.

“They’re not trying to put it out, are they?”

“Only if they’re trying to get themselves killed,” said the Doctor. “Come on.”

Then he grabbed her hand and started toward the ship.

Captain Hamilton couldn’t see a thing. The small flashlight mounted to the side of his helmet was usually powerful enough to light up a room. Inside the shuttle, the beam couldn’t penetrate further than a few inches in front of his face.

The thick black smoke was all consuming, all enveloping. It was a heavy, industrial smoke that sank and took a long time to dissipate. More and more of it was churning out through the ragged tears in the re-entry vehicle’s inner hull, flooding the cabin. The shuttle had coped pretty admirably with the crash-landing, Hamilton thought; no fatalities; but he knew the ship was well beyond saving.

Figures stumbled through the darkness ahead of him. For brief moments, their sooty faces were caught in the shallow beam from his flashlight.

Over the roar of the fire raging below, and the creaking and cracking of the hull warping under mounting pressures, Captain Hamilton still heard the clatter of munitions cases as his men fought to salvage what they could.

He caught one soldier who tripped as he passed, then gave him a supportive clap on the shoulder. The grunt was hauling two cases on one held breath.

Hamilton struggled through the fumes that gnawed at his throat and eyeballs until he reached one of the half-empty weapons lockers. There was a large case in the bottom that nobody had carried out yet; they weren’t under orders to, it was so heavy he didn’t expect any man to put himself at risk for it. Hamilton grabbed the straps with both hands, tugged it out of the locker, and with a straining gasp that filled his mouth with smoke, he hefted it onto his shoulders and started back.

The airlock doors had blown open to form an emergency exit, but the re-entry vehicle was dipping down toward the nose, so the captain was heaving the case uphill to get it out. The promise of fresh air gave him the requisite strength.

Captain Hamilton burst through the outer airlock door and toppled to his knees. A couple of soldiers took the large case off him. Another couple helped him back up. He shook them off. He staggered away from the shuttle; he needed a few gasps of clean air, then he would return. Leaning on his knees, he watched his men disappearing into the billowing black airlock. The smoke was thicker than when he’d gone in himself; the flames creeping up the side of the ship were now taller.

As he stood there, someone tapped him on the shoulder. The captain turned and saw it was the man in the black leather jacket, with the girl.

“You lot need to get away from that ship,” the wide-eyed man said. He had a rural English accent. “It’s going to go up at any second.”

Captain Hamilton narrowed his eyes, and unable to temper his simmering rage any longer, lifted his rifle and smashed it across the man’s jaw.

The Doctor staggered sideways. He had not been expecting that.

“Doctor!” Rose cried, grabbing his arm.

The Doctor stared at the soldier. “What did you do that for?”

“You’re both lucky I didn’t leave you to burn inside that ship,” the soldier said gruffly. “The only reason I had you taken out was because your bodies would have got in our way. But don’t go far; I’ll deal with you later.”

With that, he turned round and headed back toward the ship.

“Can’t you smell that ozone?” the Doctor shouted in that authoritative voice Rose so disliked. “Your reactor’s venting plasma.”

The soldier hesitated, and glanced back through the haze.

“Captain!” came a shout from the airlock.

Suddenly another man, a younger soldier, pulled himself out of the ship, and unlike the others he wasn’t carrying any weapons or ammunition cases.

“What is it, Sergeant?” the Doctor’s attacker said.

“There’s a plasma leak, sir; this thing’s gonna blow any minute!”

The Doctor took Rose’s hand. “Time to go.”

As they turned round, the Doctor caught his attacker, the one who’d been called the captain, giving him a curious look and frowning.

“Nice meeting you,” the Doctor called.

Suddenly there was an explosion. A giant orange plume of fire rose up from the ship’s buried nose. The soldiers outside stopped, wary. There was another explosion, larger this time, then those inside came running out, coughing.

“Just a little bit faster,” the Doctor suggested.

Behind them, the captain hollered, “All right; let’s move!”

The Doctor and Rose had a twenty-yard head start. The Doctor reckoned the depression would afford them sufficient protection. Clearly the soldiers thought the same thing. When he glanced back, he found the soldiers were following, surprisingly nimble as they picked their way across the junk, even carrying all that equipment.

There was a third explosion. The Doctor felt the heat-blast through his coat, but Rose was only wearing a thin top. She yelped, and sped up.

They reached the depression where he and Rose had woken up, and climbed down a few feet. Rose kept climbing right to the bottom and covered her ears.

The Doctor waited just shy of the lip as the soldiers caught up and skidded into the pit with their crates and weapons. The captain and the sergeant who had confirmed what the Doctor had said about the reactor arrived last.

They were just in time. A few seconds later, as the soldiers flattened themselves against the sloping walls of the depression, the shuttle exploded. There was a millisecond-long flash of intense white light, then an ear-rending roar.

The Doctor ducked his head down. A wall of hot air swept over the top of the depression, lifting the lightest bits of junk and carrying with it bits of burning shrapnel. Rain was turned to steam fifty feet above their heads.

After about thirty seconds, it was all over. Bits of burning debris started to fall from the sky, but it was so wet in the depression the flames quickly fizzled out.

The black smoke had been blown away on the crest of the explosion, to be replaced by a misty white smog. It began to lift straight away.

The soldiers picked themselves up and the Doctor climbed down to the base of the depression, where Rose was still squatting, oblivious to it being over.

The Doctor pulled her hands away from her ears.

“Is it over, Doctor?” she asked.

“You missed all the excitement,” he told her.

The look of relief quickly vanished from her face, though. She was looking at something over his shoulder. “Doctor; look!”

The Doctor glanced round.

“Stand up,” the captain said. “Both of you.”

He was one of six soldiers who had their rifles trained on the Doctor and his young companion. The others were standing around the edge of the pit, encircling the Doctor and Rose. They were cradling their guns too, just in case.

“Do you mind?” the Doctor said, standing up.

“I want to know who you are, and who you’re working with,” the captain said in a low voice. “We’re in no shape to stage a tribunal down here, so this is your one and only chance to barter for your lives; I recommend you take it.”

The Doctor took a deep breath. “Well, I am the Doctor; and this is Rose; and I think before anything rash happens, we should sort out this misunderstanding.”

One of the soldiers twitched his rifle at Rose; she got up too.

“What misunderstanding is that?” asked the captain.

“I don’t know,” the Doctor admitted slowly. “I was hoping you could tell me.”

The captain exchanged incredulous looks with his men then cocked his head out of the depression. Half of the soldiers started carrying the equipment up.

Beside the Doctor, Rose grabbed his arm fearfully.

“Did the Syndicate put you up to this?” the captain asked.

The Doctor frowned. “Which syndicate are we talking about?”

The captain’s expression hardened. “You know that one chance I was talking about? I think you just missed it.” He turned and began climbing out of the pit.

“Shoot them,” he told the soldiers in the depression.

NOTES:
If this was one of the old-format TV stories, this would presumably be the cliffhanger at the end of the first episode, though whether this would end up being a four-parter or six-parter is yet to be seen. Of course, you could argue the re-entry vehicle crash was a better chapter ending, and that for a Cybermen story, you can't really end an 'episode' without seeing at least one. Actually, the next chapter will probably make a better cliffhanger, and that will probably be a full quarter of the way into the story, too. This chapter was mostly about establishing the world on which the rest of the story will take place, and introducing another key character, Captain Hamilton (named after Linda Hamilton, star of the first two "Terminator" movies). But is he really a baddie? Stay tuned.

The Doctor's dream about being blind in a supermarket is based on a memorable dream I had a while ago, whilst Rose's nightmare about drowning was the dream I had the night before writing this chapter.