[DOCTOR]
The TARDIS landed with a sound that still embarrassed him.
He heard it every time. That grinding, wheezing protest. Most pilots learned to smooth out the dematerialisation cycle within their first decade. He had been flying for centuries and it still sounded like something was dying inside the console room.
The Engineer would probably have a list of opinions about that by now.
But he pushed that thought away for now and stepped out.
London. He took a deep breath in. The city at night always smelled like a mixture of rain and exhaust. It always did. He had been to this city in a dozen different centuries and it always smelled like rain and exhaust. Well, in the modern times at least. He found it reassuring in a way he would never admit out loud to anyone.
Rose walked beside him.
She was quiet. She had been quiet since they dropped off the Engineer at the courtyard.
It didn't take somebody smart to see something was troubling her, but he didn't say anything about it.
He wasn't good at the part where he had to say the right thing.
***
Albion Hospital presented itself as calm. White walls. Straight lines. Signs pointing to places with clean, clinical names. It was designed to communicate order.
He had been to a lot of hospitals on a lot of planets. They all tried to do that. None of them succeeded though.
He walked through the main entrance. His brain catalogued things automatically. The lighting was too bright. The floor had a slight tackiness from cleaning fluid. A woman at the reception desk had been crying recently. A man in scrubs near the lift was angry about something but was hiding it with questionable success.
Humans were always trying to hide something, but it never really worked.
As they walked deeper, he had to flash the psychic paper twice, but no one looked too closely, and they could proceed without any interruptions or questioning.
Rose stayed close. She was watching the staff watch them, her face showing that she was doing some calculation. He knew that look. He sees humans do this every time they are at unfamiliar and new places. Figuring out what was normal here and what wasn't. As he sees it, she is quite good at it. At least better than she probably thinks.
The room they were looking for was very close by now.
He knew military presence would be there, so he was searching for any signs of their presence.
He could tell their destination was right around the corner just by hearing it. Boots marching on hard floor. Clipped conversations. Passing these soldiers after another flash of the psychic paper they entered the examination room.
The room inside was very quiet. Sort of like when no one wanted to ask the obvious question and instead pretended everything was fine and was desperately waiting for somebody else to do or say something.
His chest tightened because he recognized this type of silence from first hand experience. He had heard it during the war. That specific quiet where everyone in the room has agreed not to ask the question they're all thinking.
He pushed through the thoughts and looked around, searching for the thing they were here for.
There was a table in the middle of the room, covered with a big piece of white sheet, hiding the silhouette of a body underneath it.
He crossed the room and pulled the sheet back without asking.
He heard Rose gasp behind him.
He understood why. He understood immediately, and he wished he did not.
His face hardened immediately, even before he had fully processed what he was seeing.
It was a pig.
Not in a metaphorical way or a technical way. Nor was it a piece of technology that looked like one. No. An actual pig, a real animal, taken from somewhere ordinary and unremarkable, and brought here in the worst possible way.
Its body had been altered. The evidence of it was clear as day. Someone created a creature so monstrous that it defied life itself. They made it functional enough to sit in a pilot's seat. Made it confused enough to follow instructions it could probably not even fully understand.
Then they had put it in front of cameras. In front of the whole planet. They had turned it into spectacle, a prop for a performance.
He put the sheet back.
He was furious. He had rarely felt this angry, even during the war. However, the grief he felt was stronger.
This creature had been terrified. He knew that from the signs the body exhibited. Whatever it had experienced in its last hours had been beyond anything it had the capacity to understand or survive. It had not known what was happening to it. It had only known that it was afraid.
He didn't move from the spot, he was deep in his thoughts.
Rose was quiet beside him. It was understandable. She had just seen something that would likely stay with her forever.
"Who did this?" she asked.
"Someone who wanted attention elsewhere." His voice came out flat. He noticed that, but there wasn't anything he could do about it for now. "Someone needed the whole planet looking up in the skies and wonder about other things."
"Why?"
He looked at the body.
"Classic distraction play. Something really important is happening somewhere else," he said. "And they didn't want anyone looking at it."
He thought about it on the walk back through the white corridors.
So the ship crash in the Thames was staged. The Engineer hypothesized it and his own investigation confirmed it as well. But this... confirmed the scale of the intention behind it.
Whoever had done this had resources.
They had access to alien technology. They had access to this planet in ways that required investing a great deal of time and effort into the endeavor.
They were cruel and insane enough to do whatever that thing inside was to an innocent life, no matter how primitive it was.
He could not let that go.
He had seen a lot of cruelty over a very long life. He had learned to categorise it. Some cruelty came from desperation, and some came from belief. And there was cruelty that came from people who simply did not think of other living things as living things at all.
This third kind was the most dangerous.
Rose was keeping pace with him. She had not said much since the room. He glanced at her.
She looked pale. She also looked like she was thinking hard. He recognized that expression. He had seen it on her before. She was angry, and her anger was helping her focus. Good. It's a healthy principle.
Outside, he stopped on the pavement and looked up at the sky. London spread out around him.
Nine million people sleeping, eating, watching television, going about their lives and unaware of any of this. Not one of them knew what had just happened in that room. Not one of them knew what the ship in the Thames actually was, or what it was covering for.
Somewhere in this city, a heinous plan has probably been underway for a long time.
He felt uneasy. He did not like feeling uneasy. It meant there was more to this than he understood.
"So what now?" Rose asked.
He turned away from the sky.
"Now," he said, "we figure out what they didn't want us looking at."