The reception line felt like walking through a convention someone had thrown at the heat death of home.
Aliens of every shape and texture crowded Platform One. Some were shimmering, others floating, some wrapped in silk or suspended in tanks. Some looked like expensive horror costumes from a movie; some looked like things you'd find at the back of your fridge in your college years.
Rose stood between me and the Doctor, making that wide-eyed face you do when your brain is trying to take in too much.
"Don't stare," I murmured, mock-scolding her, like you'd do to a friend who doesn't know how to behave in public. "Smile and stare politely."
"I'm trying not to stare impolitely," she whispered back. "There's a difference."
The Doctor was in his element, striding ahead with his hands in his pockets, psychic paper ready. The steward, all blue skin and crisp uniform, was rattling off names like he was announcing bands at a festival.
"…the Moxx of Balhoon… the Face of Boe… the Adherents of the Repeated Meme…"
"Oh, that's not ominous at all," I muttered.
Rose elbowed me lightly. "You're the space expert. You're supposed to tell me when to panic."
"Oh, I will," I said. "You're currently at 'mildly concerned'."
"Good."
"I'll tell you when to upgrade to 'oh no' when something starts smoking."
We both chuckled at that.
We reached the front. The Doctor did the talking, flashing the psychic paper with a grin that could have powered half the station.
"Doctor," he said. "Plus ones. Me, her, and him." Thumb at himself, then Rose, then me.
The steward frowned at the paper, then at us.
"Doctor… and the Engineer," he read slowly. "Representing… 'our continued incompetence in matters of time travel, health and safety, and basic diplomacy'?"
The Doctor blinked. "Really?"
I cleared my throat. "It's accurate," I said. "Just not flattering."
The steward hesitated, then decided this wasn't his problem, stamped our existence as official, and waved us through.
***
The "gifts" ceremony went about as well as I remembered.
Species after species presented something symbolic. Spheres of gravity, samples of atmosphere, a jukebox. Things to prove they'd made the effort.
When it was the Doctor's turn, he stepped up with Rose at his side and drew in a deep breath.
"For my gift," he announced, "I give you… air from my lungs."
He breathed into a little device, handed it over with a flourish, and bowed.
The attendants looked baffled. A few guests clapped politely.
Rose leaned toward me.
"Is that… is that just him breathing?"
"Yep," I said.
"That's rubbish."
"Give it ten minutes," I said. "He'll make it poetic somehow."
My own turn came with considerably less drama. The steward gestured at me.
"And your gift?"
I considered, feeling the eyes of a half-dozen species on my face, and decided to offer what I do best.
"Diagnostics," I said. "Free of charge. One full structural scan of your station and heat shield, to ensure we all survive long enough to be bored."
There was a polite ripple of laughter from those with a sense of humour, and a confused hum from those without. The steward was clearly the latter and looked offended on behalf of his infrastructure.
"Our systems are fully compliant," he said stiffly.
"Of course they are," I replied. "That's why nothing ever goes wrong."
The Doctor gave me a sidelong look that said, You're enjoying this too much, and I gave him a look back that said, You invited me.
Before the steward could throw us out, the next guest arrived.
Or, more accurately, floated in.
The last human.
Lady Cassandra O'Brien dot Delta Seventeen. All skin, wires and vanity, stretched in a frame like something that had lost an argument with a trampoline.
"Moisturise me," she commanded.
The little attendants spritzed her. Rose gagged audibly.
"You're joking," she whispered. "That's a person?"
"Technically," I said.
Cassandra's speech unfolded much as I remembered: the self-congratulation, and the rest of her speech boiling down to a "I'm human, you're all aliens," with the subtlety of a freight train.
Honestly, if I hadn't already known she was behind the sabotage, I'd have suspected it based only on principle.
While she performed, I let my attention drift. Not away from her—that would be unfair; professional villains deserve a proper audience after all.
Her spiders were already moving.
Now that is how spiders should look. Not that weird CGI monstrosity the sho… khm. I should really stop comparing reality with a TV show.
Small, metallic, scuttling shapes in the vents and ducts. I could feel their little power signatures like faint itching at the edges of my new senses. They were too low-output for the station's basic security to notice.
But weren't too low for me.
I stopped thinking about them. I couldn't really do anything about them just yet. For now, it was the Doctor's scene.
***
It didn't take long for the shine to wear off for Rose.
By the time she'd had one uncomfortable conversation about money, class, and falling chips with the Moxx of Balhoon, and one even more uncomfortable conversation with Cassandra about what counted as "authentically human", she looked ready to either punch something or cry.
The Doctor didn't help by being… well. The Doctor. Cheerful, flippant, dodging anything that looked like a real feeling.
"You lot all died," he said at one point, very casually. "Hundreds of years before this. This is just a show."
Rose's face shuttered.
I stepped in, because if I didn't, someone was going to say something they regretted.
"Come on," I said. "Field trip. Engineer's tour, if you will."
She hesitated, then followed me away from the main hall, down a quieter corridor lined with small windows looking out at the swelling sun.
"Are you okay?" I asked.
She folded her arms.
"No," she said. "I'm five billion years in the future, my planet's about to get cooked, everyone's treating it like it's some sort of… show, and that—" she jerked a thumb back in the direction of the hall "—that stretched tea towel is calling herself the last human. So, no. Not okay."
"Fair enough," I chuckled.
We walked in silence for a moment.
"For what it's worth," I said eventually, "this isn't the first time I've watched a planet die."
She stared at me.
"Yeah, that's very cheerful. You always know what to say," Rose told me in a deadpan voice.
"I mean back home," I clarified, chuckling at her sulking. "Where I was still fixing TARDISes. Solar flares. Resource collapse. Politicians. People ruined it themselves and blamed the weather. It was… slower than this, and somehow uglier."
"That's not helping." she said.
"My point is," I said, "this version? It's cleaner. Kinder, in a weird way. Earth had its time. People left, moved on, scattered. There are descendants all over the place down there—" I nodded toward the guests "—even if some of them look like cacti."
She snorted.
"So this isn't… disrespect?"
"Oh, it is," I said. "But not in the way you think. They're not insulting Earth. They're insulting each other. Status, hierarchy, who got the best seat for the last sunset."
"That does sound like us," she admitted.
We watched the planet turn for a few seconds.
"Okay," she said. "Okay. End of the world, then."
She squared her shoulders.
"Let's go see how wrong they all are about humans."
I grinned.
"Now you sound like him."
"Don't say that," she said. "One of him is enough."
We headed back.
***
The first explosion was small.
A little shudder under our feet. A flicker in the lights. A warning bleep from a console none of the stewards were quite fast enough to reach.
Then the second came, bigger and closer, and the station did that horrible thing where it pretends everything is fine while telling you through a hundred tiny details that nothing is.
The Doctor was already moving.
"Something's wrong with the shield," he snapped, eyes flicking across readouts. "It shouldn't be this hot on the inside, not yet."
I could feel it too, far below us: a key junction overloading, heat bleeding into places it had no business being.
At the same time, a smaller alarm pinged at the edge of my awareness. Spiders. Lots of them. Converging on a particular maintenance hub.
He went for the big problem. I went for the small ones.
"Doctor," I said, "you take the steward and Jabe, follow the heat trail. I'll go see what's eating your wiring."
"You sure?" Rose asked.
"Spiders and vents," I said. "That's my level."
The Doctor gave me a look that was half question, half warning.
"Don't get killed," he said.
"That's the plan," I replied. "You either."
Then we ran in opposite directions.
***
The maintenance hub looked exactly like the sort of place people would imagine it looked: lots of metal grilles, low lighting, and awkward access angles.
By the time I got there, three of the service staff were already inside, panicking over blank and flickering screens. A fourth lay on the floor with a scorch mark on his chest, unmoving.
"Out," I said, skidding to a halt in the doorway. "All of you. Now."
"We have to repair the filters," one protested. "The stewardship—"
"Is already on fire," I snapped. "You've got sabotage in your control systems. Those little robots in the ceiling?" I pointed towards the ceiling. "I believe they're not standard issue."
As if on cue, a spider dropped from a vent onto a panel and started skittering across it.
The staff screamed and bolted. Good.
I stepped in, shut the door behind them, and locked it.
"Okay," I said to nobody, rolling up my sleeves. "Come at me, you cheap murder-Roombas."
There were at least a dozen of them crawling around the room, pressing little legs into ports and connector points. Taken one at a time, they weren't much. All together, they were punching holes in the station's safeguards.
If this was a TV show or a novel, this would be the part where I'd whip out some magic tool like the sonic screwdriver, and, whipping it around, I'd deal with the problem effortlessly in one go. Unfortunately reality doesn't work like that.
Thanks to assimilate and my centuries of experience with machines I knew what to do. Every time one moved, I saw the system diagram adjust in my head: this circuit cut, that relay forced open, this feedback loop re-routed.
I grabbed the nearest fire extinguisher off the wall and laid a thick layer of foam across the nearest row of panels.
The spiders apparently didn't like that. Their limbs gummed up, and their little motors whined. Two of them sparked and died.
"Yeah, that's right," I said. "Welcome to risk assessment baby."
One jumped at my face. Well, tried to. I caught it in one hand, slammed it onto the floor, and stomped on it. Another tried to burrow into a junction box. But I yanked the cover off and rewired some wuick to access cables, so it got a face full of four hundred volts of a polite "No".
It was messy, improvised work, but it did what I needed: slowed them down.
But I couldn't stop them all. A few darted into deeper access points and vanished toward the shield controls.
By the time the last spider in the room twitched and went still under my boot, the worst of the sabotage at this level was contained. Heat levels dipped by a fraction—enough to buy us time.
I hit the intercom.
"Doctor?"
Static.
Figures.
Fine. Plan B.
I called up the station schematic, traced the main heat control trunk line, and marked the routes the remaining spiders had taken. They all led downward, toward the same place the Doctor had run with Jabe: the main shield maintenance corridor.
Then I ran.