twenty

"Well, he's not doing too bad," Jack commented, pointing in the distance at a man. He was running, almost sprinting. It took the group a few seconds to see the group of people following him, torches and weapons in hand as they screamed and yelled 'human'.

"I'm not the only one who thinks that looks like a manhunt, right?" Nina told them, watching the group, perplexed.

"No. Come on," the Doctor said, grabbing her hand and running away towards the man. Nina yelped as he ran almost too fast for her to keep up.

"Jesus, have you forgotten how short these legs are?!" Nina yelled as they ran down some hill.

"I've missed this!" Jack yelled out laughing as he ran behind them.

They reached the man and The Doctor grabbed him, pushing him behind himself. Jack pulled out his gun out and aimed it at the not-people running towards them.

"You've got to be kidding me!" Nina exclaimed, exasperated. "Every time," she sighed.

"Don't you dare!" The Doctor yelled at him. Jack turned back and rolled his eyes at them, before aiming his gun to the air, putting an end to the whole affair. He shot up and the non-humans stopped in their tracks.

"What the hell are they?" Martha asked panicking.

"There's more of them, we've got to keep moving!"

"I've got a ship nearby. It's safe. It's not far, it's just over there," the Doctor told the man. They looked back to see that the definetly-not-humans blocking the way they came through.

"Or maybe not," Nina commented.

"We're close to the silo," the man told them. "If we get to the silo we're safe."

"Silo?" The Doctor asked his friends, stariting a vote. Was this the best time?

"Yes, please," Nina nodded.

"Silo," Jack agreed.

"Silo for me," Martha told him.

The five of them started to run to the silo, the scarry-almost-people following them close behind. After almost a minute of non-stop running, they arrived at a gated area with watchovers and guards.

"It's the futurekind, open the gate!" The man next to them yelled out to the gards.

"Show me your teeth!" The guard yelled at them.

"Show them your teeth!" He yelled at the four. All of them smiled awkwardly to show the man their teeth.

"Human, let them in!" The guard yelled out at the people inside. Soon enough, they opened a small breech in the gate, letting the five of them through. "Close, close!"

"Humans," the leader of the not-humans tribe sneered at them. "Humani. Make feast." Nina finally got a look at their teeth, their pointy, sharp teeth.

"Go back to where you came from!" One of the guards yelled out. They didn't move. "I said go back. Back!" He yelled, aiming his gun at the pointy-teeth-not-humans. Nina sighed in exasperation.

"Honestly, why do I even bother," she whined.

"Oh, don't tell him to put his gun down," Jack complained to the Doctor.

"He's not my responsability," the Doctor argued, making Jack scoff.

"And I am? That makes a change."

"Kind watch you. Kind hungry." Nina frowned. Was he... was he refereing to his kind as 'kind'... in the third person? Anyway, the leader signaled to the others of his tribe or whatever to retreat. They had no way of winning this, no way of entering the gates, and he knew that.

"Right, let's get you inside," the guard told them, walking away from gates. The five of them followed him close by.

"My name is Padrafet Shafekane," the man who brought them to the silo told the guard. "Please, just tell me. Can you take me to Utopia?" The man asked.

Nina and the Doctor shared a look. For some reason they felt something was wrong. The Doctor reached behind him and grabbed her hand, holding it tightly.

"Yes, sir. I can," the guard told the man.

♧♧♧

The five of them followed the guard into a tunnel carved into a mountain, what they called the silo. As they walked into a corridor, the Doctor started to argue with the guard. He wanted his TARDIS back, and the guard was telling him that it was too dsngerous to let anyone leave.

"It's a box, a big blue box. I'm sorry, but I really need it back. It's stuck out there," the Doctor explained. Nina, Martha and Jack were standing back, letting them talk.

"I'm sorry, but my family were heading for the silo. Did they get here? My mother is Kistane Shafekane. My brother is Beltone," Padra, the man that came with them, was trying to say.

"I'm sorry, but our computers are down," the guard, whose name was Atillo, told the man. "But you can check our paperwork. Creet! Passengers need help." A young boy, not older than 10, stuck his head around the corner.

"Right what do you need?" The little boy asked. Padra walked to him and they went over some paper work. The Doctor followed him to see the names of the people on this place.

"A blue box, you said," Atillo asked. Nina nodded.

"Big, tall, wooden," Nina told him. "Says 'police'. Can't miss it."

"We're driving out to the last water collection. I'll see what I can do," the guard told her. Nina smiled widely at him.

"Thank you so much, sir," Nina genuinely thanked him. The last thing she wanted now was to get stuck in a lost planet in the end of the universe.

"Your friend is a little rude, isn't he?" Atillo mumbled, giving a sideways look at the Doctor. Nina nodded.

"He can be, sometimes," Nina answered with a smile as Atillo left.

The five of them followed little Creet throught corridors, filled with people sitting on the ground, dirty. Nina could see the pity in Martha's eyes es they walked past them. Creet was yelling out for the Shafekane's, trying to find Prada's family.

"It's like a refugee camp," Martha pointed out.

"Well, it stinks," Jack remarked. Nina turned back to give him a wary look.

"Don't you see, though. The ripe old smell of humans!" The Doctor said energetically. "You survived!" Nina chuckled at his adorableness. He was so happy about the humans being able to survive up to the end of the universe.

"Oh, might have spent a million years evolving into clouds of gas. Add another million as downloads, but you always revert to the same basic shape," Nina granted. "The fundamental humans." She smiled. The Doctor smiled down at her and grabbed her hand.

"End of the universe and here you are. Indomitable! That's the word! Indomitable! Ha!" The Doctor exclaimed excitedly.

They managed to find Padra's family, and he left the group to stay with them. The Doctor was behaving like normal person, which was a weird thing for him to do, so Nina wasn't surprised when he arrived by a door and tried to sonic it open.

"Captain Jack Harkness," they heard Jack presenting himself to a pretty handsome man. Nina shook her head with a smirk on her face. "And who are you?" He asked.

"Stop it," the Doctor told him in a warning tone. Jack was about to add something else when the Doctor called out for them. "Nina, Jack, help me out with this." Jack sighed but walked over to the door. "Its half-deadlocked. See if you can overide the code." Nina gave him a look that said 'you underastimate me', and managed to open the door in about two seconds.

As soon as the door was open, the Doctor stepped out, and if it werent for Jack pulling him back by his coat, the Doctor would most likely have fallen to his death.

"I got you," Jack told him.

"Thanks."

"How did you cope without me?" Jack said sarcasticly. The three of them were standing by the doorway, and Nina was right behind them.

"Now that's what I call a rocket," Martha exclaimed, looking up. Now, that peeked Nina's interest. She jumped up behind them, trying to see said rocket, but she couldn't.

"They're not refugees, they're passengers," the Doctor said, realization all over his voice. Nina put one hand on his shoulder and the other on Jack's, pulling them down to try and jump higher than their heads to finally see the rocket. "What are you doing?" The Doctor asked.

"Friendly reminder that I am tiny, and you two are well over 6"," she said, annoyed that he even had to ask her. She was even more annoyed when he put on a look of confusion on his face. "I can't see anything, sweetheart," she said, sarcasm dripping from her voice. The Doctor laughed and pulled her in front if him, finally allowing her to see the giant spaceship in front of them.

"Huh," Nina nodded. "They did say they were going to Utopia," she remembered. "The perfect place."

"100 trillion years and it's the same old dream," the Doctor nodded. "Do you recognize the engines?" He asked, pointing down. Nina shook her head.

"Nope, but whatever it is, it's not rocket science," she told him.

"But it's hot, though," Jack commented. Nina saw the oportinity and she took it, again. It was the same joke she had done with the Doctor on that spaceship heading to the sun.

"Thank you very much," she said, winking at Jack. Jack laughed at her. Nina didn't see it, for she had her back turned to him, but the Doctor had a frown upon his face, a very jealous frown. Only Martha noticed it, sending her eyes to the ground.

"I like you, Nina," he said, smiling at her and stepping back form the doorway. The three others folllowed his lead and he closed the door back.

"But if the universe is falling apart, what does Utopia mean?" The Doctor wondered, placing his screwdriver back in his pocket. Soon enough, an older fellow walked up to them, asking who the Doctor was. "That's me," the Doctor said as Nina and Jack pointed to him.

"Oh, good! Good! Good!" The man yelled out excitedly. He seemed almost relieved to have him on board. He grabbed the Doctor's hand in his arm and started to pull him away. The Doctor was quick to grab Nina's hand and she was pulled over with them. Martha and Jack were following them close. "Good! Good! Good!" The man kept yelling out eagerly. The Doctor turned around and faced his group.

"It's good, apparently," the Doctor said to them, his eyebrows raised, perplexed. The man pulled them into some sort lab, and he started presenting everything to the Doctor, Nina listening closely. It was a foreign mechanism, and they had never seen anything like it. The man explained everything, and Nina understood the concept, but she had no idea how to make it harmomize with the other parts of the rocket.

"And all this feeds into the rocket?" The Doctor asked.

"Yeah, except without a stable footprint we'll never achieve escape velocity. If only we could harmonize the five impact patterns and unify them, well, we might yet make it," he spoke at an suprisinghigh speed. "What do you think, Doctor? Any ideas?"

The Doctor furrowed his brows as he looked at the machine, then looking back at Nina, asking her for an answer.

"Well, um.."

"Yeah, basically.."

"Sort of.."

"Not a clue," Nina told the man, her eyes apologetic.

"Nothing?" The man asked, disappointment clear on his voice.

"Sorry, we're not from around these parts," the Doctor apologised, reaching behind him to grab Nina's hand. "Never seen a system like this," he added. The old man shook his hand.

"No, no. It's my fault," he assured him. "There's been so little help."

They all turn toward Martha, in the sitting aread, as soon as they heard her gasp out loud.