AEM

"You're being quite stubborn, you know."

The TARDIS, as might be expected, didn't respond, merely giving another grinding bellow from somewhere inside its circuitry. The Doctor gave a little huff and began absent-mindedly pulling levers.

Levers, Ian thought uncomfortably, which spell the difference between us going home and us ending up on some God-forsaken planet with Daleks running amok.

"Doctor," began Ian Chesterton uncomfortably, "I really think we should be getting back to Coal Hill."

"Exactly," interjected Barbara Wright. "We'll be missed, eventually."

"You'll never be missed," said the Doctor from underneath the TARDIS console. "You're travelers of the fourth dimension now. We travel through time. I can take you back to right where I left you."

"You knew that," pointed out Susan, smiling. She usually supported her grandfather in these debates.

"Of course. How silly of me." Ian walked to a corner and leaned against the wall, thinking. It had been a few weeks in relative time since he and Barbara had been kidnapped. At least, that was how he thought of it. They'd been taken from Britain, in the nice and familiar 1960s, and were now being dragged around the universe by some madman in a somewhat unreliable box. First they'd been brought to the Stone Age. Then they were on another planet being chased by metal dustbins. Again and again the Doctor procrastinated when it came to actually bringing them home, instead deciding to take them to more and more exotic locations.

"Doctor," he began again. "When do you actually plan on taking us home?"

"Once you've seen the universe," replied the Doctor unhelpfully.

Ian and Barbara shared a look.

Excitedly, Susan walked past the bleakly colored wall roundels to where her grandfather worked. "And to which part of the universe are we heading to next?"

"Imperium Romanum," said the Doctor. "In Italia est. Anno Domini 200."

Susan looked delighted. Barbara sighed. "He's taking us to the Roman Empire," she mumbled irritably.

"Can't be any worse than the Aztecs," sighed Ian.

"Unless we get there during a Colosseum week," Barbara replied bitterly. "Or while Martians are invading."

"There is that," admitted Ian. "I'm just hoping that old codger remembers that we're actually going home at some point."

The TARDIS began grinding away again, making the sound they were steadily growing to associate with flying through space.

''Vworp. Vworp. Vworp.''

Upon the final vworp, the Doctor excitedly marched through the console room and to the door. "Out this door is the Roman Empire," he declared. "A force of military might which brought the entire European continent under dominion." Grandly, he flung the door open and motioned for them to step outside.

Ian stepped out as instructed. It didn't look much like Rome. There were miles of forests and prairies in his view, with a massive glacier far to the north.

And a herd of wool-covered mammoths grazing and trumpeting.

Barbara poked her head out as well and chuckled. Susan stepped outside, staring with those wide eyes of hers. "Fascinating!" she exclaimed. "I suppose these Romans raise these hairy animals as livestock?"

"What?" snapped the Doctor, rushing out the door. "What are you babbling about..."

He stopped short as he took in the sight of five woolly mammoths walking in a line towards the TARDIS. One reached a hairy trunk to him and snatched his hat off of his head.

"Unacceptable," he proclaimed, stepping back. "Most unacceptable behavior. I will not be treated in such a manner by some overgrown proboscid..."

He stopped short once again as he saw the amused faces of his crew.

"Did we fall short of our destination?" asked Ian, trying to keep an innocent expression on his face.

The Doctor only huffed.

Greymane decided to kill the man in front of him. The man was short and slightly stocky, with the big nose and auburn hair Greymane had come to associate with Neanderthal blood. He looked frightened, and would have run long before if it hadn't been for the bulky warrior holding him still.

"I am going to ask again," Greymane rasped. "What are you doing in these hills?"

"I was not hunting," the Neanderthal pleaded. "We were just passing through..."

"Liar," spat Greymane. The warriors behind him nodded in agreement. They stood on the side of a hill, overlooking a small patch of manes. In the far distance, a small herd of mammoths grazed. The Neanderthal had been taken not far from there.

Greymane fixed an old and wrinkled hand on his spear. "I am very old," he whispered. "I really don't think your fragile mind could understand how old I am. The things I've seen."

The Neanderthal's eyes widened, seeming confused.

Greymane motioned towards one of his warriors, who gave a curt nod and walked away. Greymane continued. "I understand when people are telling me lies. Or more specifically, in your case, not telling me the truth."

He stepped closer to the man, looming over him. "You weren't hunting. That much is correct. But neither were you simply 'passing through'. You had some plan in mind, eh?"

The Neanderthal closed his eyes, keeping his mouth firmly closed. "You are loyal to your cause," Greymane whispered. "I should find that admirable. But I do not." He forced himself to grin, a gesture of confidence for the benefit of his watching warriors. "You'll want your eyes open for this next part."

"Father!"

One of Greymane's most muscular warriors returned, clutching a struggling Neanderthal teenager by his shoulders. The lad was skinnier than his father, but had the nose and auburn hair that defined his lineage.

The father snapped his eyes open, looking horrified. "He's done nothing," he whispered.

"He was born," Greymane replied. "Arlok, slit the boy's throat."

"No!" The Neanderthal father struggled against his captor. "Please..."

"I dislike torture," Greymane informed the man. "You had best tell me what I wish to know before I decide to get it over with."

Indecision raced through the prisoner's eyes. Finally, he seemed to decide that whatever secret he hid wasn't worth the price of silence.

"We heard a sound," he said finally.

"How very observant of you," said Greymane dryly. "Be more specific."

The Neanderthal closed his eyes. "There was a sound like the wind grinding. Like nothing we've ever heard before. We went there... and we saw the Polees."

Greymane cocked an eyebrow. "The what?"

"A chariot from heaven, piloted by an ancient wise man. It takes the form of a blue box with words no man can decipher emblazoned across its front."

A spear dropped to the ground with a slight thud. Greymane stood transfixed, staring at the man with wide eyes. "I hadn't believed your pitiful tribe had retained even legends of it," he hissed. Beads of sweat lined his forehead. This can't be true, he thought worriedly. ''This... was never supposed to happen. Not in my lifetime.''

Greymane ignored the screams of the two Neanderthals as he ordered their deaths. He stood with his back to both of them as he stared across the plain. True to the man's word, in the distance he could make out a blue speck intermingled with the mammoth herd.

"Summon the others," he commanded his warriors. "The Tribe of the Lion moves forward. Things are far worse than I had anticipated."

"It's really not that bad," said the Doctor defensively, still glaring at a mammoth which seemed to be showing his hat to the rest of the herd. "We're thirty thousand years off course, past tense. But there are worse places to be."

"Haven't we already been to the Stone Age?" Barbara asked with a smile. "We visited there, invented fire, you tried to kill a caveman with a rock?"

"First off, I wasn't going to kill him," snapped the Doctor impatiently. "I was asking for directions. And secondly, you're displaying quite a bit of that human arrogance. Just because you've been here before doesn't mean you've seen it. Take these shaggy lumps, for instance."

He snatched his hat from the mammoth's trunk and put it back onto his white-haired scalp. "See these, these are Mammuthus primigenius. We didn't see any of these gentlemen on our last trip, hmmm?"

"We certainly didn't," agreed Ian, still standing in the doorway. "But if it's all the same to you, I think I'll stay in here where I won't get squashed or eaten by wild beasts."

"Coward," teased Barbara.

"Again, it's really not that bad," said the Doctor testily. "The Ice Age isn't the worst place we could have ended up. As long as you keep your wits about, nothing can lay a claw on you."

"Oh?" asked Ian. "And what claws are likely to try, eh?"

The Doctor stared out towards the glacier. "Nothing that the prepared mind can't cope with. Mainly larger versions of what you have in your home time. Cave lions. Cave hyaenas. Cave bears. Fortunately most of them live in caves."

"I hadn't made the connection."

"If you're going to interupt, perhaps I'll stop talking and let the predators have their fill," the Doctor said with a glare. "They'll likely come out at night, so as long as we're in the TARDIS by sunset we'll be fine. The biggest worry will likely be Neanderthals."

Ian frowned. "Neanderthals? The stocky primitives?"

"Right," the Doctor said with a mischievious smile. "Neanderthals, yes. I've never encountered them, but the archaeological evidence all points towards their being savage cannibals. They died out because the ice thawed and the mammoths they hunted went extinct."

Ian glanced at a mammoth. "We should be fine, then," he grumbled sarcastically. "The Ice Age is sounding more enjoyable every second."

The Doctor gave a slightly satisfied smile. Ian suspected he enjoyed worrying them with tales of monsters lurking in the places he brought them too. But unfortunately, his tales were often true.

"Speaking of ice," Susan said with a shiver, "could we get our coats out from the TARDIS? There's a chill wind coming from the north."

"Yes," agreed the Doctor. "Ian, would you be a gentleman and bring coats for the ladies and a tired old man? It's only going to get colder from here."

That thief has brought back a particularly smart-mouthed group of strays, thought the TARDIS. She watched with an enhanced temporal sense and an external monitor, listening to their conversations. She was fond of doing that. She liked being part of their conversations, even if she couldn't speak. She didn't steal a Time Lord and fly away from Gallifrey just to sit in silence, after all.

The male one had gone inside of her, rummaging around her delicately sorted closets for clothes. For coats, to be specific. They were funny that way. It seemed like they were always running around rummaging for things. Looking for food so they didn't starve. Looking for water so they didn't dehydrate. Looking for warm clothes so they didn't freeze to death.

I wonder what they would do without me, she thought.

Now there was a thought. Without her, they couldn't travel. And she wouldn't have anyone to wisk around the universe, fixing her circuitry when things went wrong.

Not that the thief did a particularly good job with that. She knew for a fact that redirecting anchorial countermeasures to the chronosensitive slider scale was not going to repair the underlying synth mechanism tying them to the current location in omnispace. Silly thief.

Of course, he'd be finding out the problem in his solution pretty soon. She felt a circuit POP just as she slid away.

Ian heard a slight POP sound. In that moment, the pessimist inside him told him to expect the worst.