Excerpt: Mortal Coil. & Warning Notes. & The Invisibility Cloak.

Mortal Coil.

Amy turned to ask the Doctor a question about one of the machines that she was looking at. As she did so, she caught sight of his expression in the dim light from the oil lamp.
“What’s wrong Doctor?” she asked, her previous question going unasked.
“I think that whoever these people are, they’ve damaged their ship’s plasma drive as well as the daranium reactor.” He held up one of the parts that he had found. “This is the beginnings of the outtake feed valves for the main jets of a plasma drive. On it’s own, there are a couple of possible things that it could have been from, however, coupled with finding this,” at this he held up the other part for Amy’s inspection, “its purpose is unmistakable.” seeing Amy’s questioning face, he elaborated. “This is a part of the plasma injector. You would only ever be getting these two parts being worked on together if they were repairing a plasma drive.”
He placed the parts down on a nearby worktop before turning back to speak to his companion, looking troubled.
“We have a big problem now though. Because those parts,” he gestured at the plasma drive components, “won’t work!”
“They won’t? So the drive won’t be fixed then?”
“Oh, it’ll be fixed.” sighed the Doctor. “The problem is that it won’t STAY fixed. Plasma drives put out enormous amounts of energy and heat, and so naturally the parts that they are made of have to be specially designed to be able to cope with those conditions. They need to be built from some very specific materials otherwise they will fail catastrophically.
“They have to be aware of that though. I don’t understand what they are thinking? Even if these parts are the right shape, without being made of the correct materials they’re worse than useless.”
“When you say catastrophically…”
“I mean that they would most likely last just long enough for a ship to reach the thrust needed to attain escape velocity, and then they would break down. causing all of that energy to escape from the engines in a massive fireball, destroying the ship, anything underneath it, and everyone aboard. But more importantly, destroying the daranium reactor in a cataclysmic reaction. All that energy and radiation would be spread out through the whole area surrounding the explosion.”
“And so we get right back to the threat of radioactive death.” concluded Amy.
“Exactly.” Agreed the Doctor.