PRODIGALS
THIRTYSIX
Varna and John were hunched over one of Newhope's consoles and didn't see them beam in.
"Hello!" The Doctor announced cheerfully while he pulled on his jacket. He handed Jack his coat: he didn't need to be a Lord of Time to know what was going to happen next.
Both turned and looked up. Huge smiles broke out across their faces and Varna straightened up and raced towards him. She sang out, "You're all right?" and hesitated only a moment before enveloping him in her arms and wings.
The Doctor laughed out loud and did the best he could to hug her back – which was difficult with her wings encasing him. "I'm fine! Really! I'm sorry if I frightened you." He stepped back from Varna and looked at her closely, "I was probably tired to begin with, and the enormous difficulty involved in communicating with the fleets in that manner must've pushed me over the edge." He winked at Jack and added sheepishly, "I fell asleep. I've had a good nap and now I am quite well."
"Doctor," Jack interrupted as he helped him on with his coat, "what was going on between you and the TARDIS?"
"Ah, well, my ship and I have a sort of shared consciousness, Jack. I suspect you knew that already. It ebbs and flows, but she and I, and the Newhope, by the way, needed to join forces in order to communicate with all of the fleet ships' A.I.'s simultaneously – we had to explain things to them very quickly before they blew us out of the sky, so to speak."
"And what did you tell them?" Jack asked.
"Oh! Everything."
"Everything?!"
"Yes, we simply didn't have time to pick and choose, and we decided – well, actually I decided – that we had nothing to lose by being totally open." Here The Doctor paused for a moment, pinching the bridge of his nose and closing his eyes briefly before continuing. Jack wondered if he was perhaps still very tired, or if it was something else…
"It was a risk, I know. We had to trust that the ships' A.I.'s would not misuse all that information, and that they would accept it in the spirit in which it was offered and react accordingly, as we hoped. We, well, I, wasn't totally sure that there wasn't something nefarious going on, that there wasn't something intrinsically wrong with them. But both Newhope and the TARDIS believed they were rational, coherent, intact intelligences capable of making the right choice on behalf of their crews and the rest of the galaxy. If they hadn't been… well…" He glanced at Jack and then he turned his attention to John, "We had a fallback."
Jack leaned back slightly on the balls of his feet, crossed his arms over his chest and scrutinized John, "And?"
"And…" continued John, "the Newhope would've pushed out an all-points bioinformatic virus. Nothing could've stopped it. At superluminal speeds it would've instantly infected all the ships and, granted, we'd have been destroyed by the incoming missiles, but the fleets would have been obliterated as well by the virus." John smiled wanly, "Not a win-win scenario, but it would have been quite a show."
"A show we're never going to see!" the Time Lord half-shouted. "Now, tell me what's been happening since?"
Varna shimmered. "Peace has broken out! With the help of the Newhope we have been working with the ships' A.I.'s to come up with a plan for relocating their crews onto the appropriate repositioned worlds. Newhope has informed us that the displaced planets are quite safe; their orbits secure. Some of the worlds were heavily damaged in the fighting – the fleets' ships will be cannibalized, their parts used for building and reconstruction."
"There are a lot of dispossessed Maat and Oz children needing homes," John continued. "Their own worlds are long gone. Living aboard a spaceship is all they have ever known. Varna and I will work together to make sure they are placed properly and well cared for." He flashed Jack Harkness a smile and the Captain scowled back at him with narrowed eyes.
"John?" The irony did not escape Jack that the tone of his own voice sounded exactly like The Doctor's on those numerous occasions when the Time Lord felt it needful to admonish him.
Captain John Hart stood, opened his arms wide and bowed gracefully. "I am nothing but a gentleman, and an honorable one at that. There are no ulterior motives here, Jack, so don't bother to go looking for them." He smiled again, and Jack thought the man looked happier than he had ever seen him. Curious.
"Besides," John continued, "it may surprise you to learn it, but I like children, Jack. There is nowhere in the universe I'd rather be at this moment than here. This will be one job that I know I'll be happy doing."
"As will I," Varna added solemnly. "This is what we call Good Work."
"Ah! I can see I've been delegating… I like delegating, and this is Good Work indeed!" cheered The Doctor, smiling at what he perceived was a happy ending and a very bright future.